Sunday April 24, 2005

Star Wars Revelations @ 202 KBps!!

Today I learned from the Hardwarezone forums that my ISP (which I will always refer to as SCV but is now owned by StarHub) has upgraded our upstream bandwidth from 128 kbps to 256 kbps (kilobits per second). Which in KB terms, is from 16 KBps to 32 KBps (KiloBytes per second). Which is a doubling in speed. That'll be real helpful for, umm, "power users" (see the tanker on the top right of the picture above? lol). And it was only just about a few weeks back that they upgraded the downstream bandwidth from 1500 kbps to 2000 kbps, and, also for free, i.e. no changes to our bills.

Cool. I power-cycled the cable modem, a fancy term for saying that I turned off the power, sat on my butt and waited for a minute or so before turning it on again so that it will update itself with the latest set of operating parameters. To be sure, I did a DHCP release/renew for my trusty LinkSys router as well. FTP'ed over to my post1.org domain account, and sure enough, the test file was being sent out at 29 KBps. Not 100% but close enough - have to allow for some overhead losses, eh. Far better than the 14-15 KBps max last time.

And then I just received word, via news.com, of this fan-made movie called Star Wars: Revelations. I suspected that the fastest way to get it would be via BitTorrent, and sure enough, there's a BT mirror.

Here's what I got, the free, not-for-profit, homegrown, fan-made movie downloading at up to 202 KBps :

The entire download completed in 37 minutes. Can I say wow? Wow!! I'm off to watch the movie now!!

(2005-04-24 00:25:19 SGT) [Tech] Permalink Comments [4]

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