What are you doing Apple TV?

Those who regularly follow the blog will realise that my local cabinet will soon allow FTTC connections, only seven years after the local exchange was upgraded. When we moved house five years ago, we took our internet service provider with us and kept the legacy account. Five years ago we expected to be upgraded to FTTC with a year or two…

This legacy account actually has a bandwidth limit of 120Gb per month, which considering my average ADSL internet speed is 1Mb/s is (usually) more than plenty. Most months we are lucky to hit 60GB. As a result I have never upgraded the legacy ISP account.

As we finally approach the possibility of having a fibre connection, I was checking what kinds of fibre accounts were available, I took the opportunity to check my bandwidth usage and was surprised to see how much bandwidth we had been using. We were using 4-6GB per day (which if you do the math, you will realise would take us over the monthly limit, as especially it is a thirty one day month).

After checking a few things and doing an overnight test, it would appear that the Apple TV was the culprit.

Apple TV

Not sure what it was doing (as it was supposed to be on standby) but I am guessing it was attempting to update itself or downloading one of its (rather nice) screensaver.

Reflecting another culprit could be the Wii U. Well let’s see what happens with the Apple TV turned off. OF course once we have upgraded to FTTC we will have unlimited bandwidth, so I won’t need to worry. Which will be soon…. I hope.

Need more bandwidth…

My 2Mb ADSL is just not sufficient for my needs, it just ain’t fast enough!

Basically I seem to be able to do one thing and one thing only. As soon as  I try to do more than one thing everything grinds to a halt.

For example I was uploading a 20MB video file and at the same time watching Doctor Who on BBC iPlayer and both slow down… Same happens when downloading video from the iTunes Store or other bandwidth intensive activities.

Alas I can’t upgrade my bandwidth as I am too far from the exchange.

It is  worse during peak times when everyone else if using their internet.

No real solution, so I will just have to whinge and moan.