Shaw Reprised

It’s been nearly five months since I made the switch from Telus 5 Mbps DSL internet to Shaw Broadband 50 internet, resulting in a performance difference by an order of magnitude. Initially, for the first while, the performance was only really noticeable for applications that could immediately recognise the new connection strength, such as Steam. However, as of late, the new internet has revealed its true powers and has consistently performed beyond expectations.

• In a benchmarking test using an exceedingly well-seeded torrent, Shaw Broadband 50 will reach speeds of 5 MB/s without any issue and has a theoretical maximum of 6 MB/s. Owing to overhead, the remainder of the bandwidth is dedicated to running essential functions, accounting for why Shaw 50 will not reach the upper limit of 7 MB/s.

Let’s do a thought experiment using the assumptions from the table below. A while back, I was able to get the internet capacity that most K-On! fans have. I’ve supplied their connection performance here, and will use it to form the basis of the calculations.

The average KyoAni fan’s internet	The Infinite Zenith’s Internet

The K-on! Movie is said to have a runtime of 110 minutes. Assuming the encoders use the .mkv container for the H.264 codec and FLAC audio, the movie will roughly be 2.2 to 2.8 GB in 720p. At a steady 2.5 MB/s, it will take roughly 20 minutes to download. Even at a comparatively “slower” 1.0 MB/s, a download is expected to be completed in no more than 48 minutes. This performance can be attained without placing a significant load on the network: another user on the network can (empirically!) watch HD YouTube videos as per usual without experiencing any lag. On a 15 Mbps network, download speeds of around 1 MB/s can hypothetically be attained, although this will practically be the network’s entire capacity.

Shaw 50 Broadband

The new broadband modem arrived today, and with it, comes superior upload and download performance. The Shaw Broadband 50 plan offers up to 50 Mbps download and 3 Mbps uploads. It is in the 94th percentile for internet speeds; only six percent of all the internet in Canada surpasses it, and chances are, those are owned by large organisations with large amounts of traffic flowing through their networks.

• This is my network on a bad day. This is probably your network on a good day. Otaku have nothing on the power of this network: when your internet is moving data downstream at 50 Mbps and upstream at 3 Mbps, there are no survivors.

Such a powerful system has the potential to rapidly upload new content to my websites and YouTube, host game and TeamSpeak servers, have lag-free online video conversations and play online games with virtually zero lag. On a practical side of things, it is capable of 3 MB/s downloads no problem (I think the upper limit is around 7 MB/s, although I have yet to encounter anything that will push it that far), and will upload at the same speed as the download speed from my previous ISP. By comparison, my previous ISP provided a maximum download speed of 5 Mbps (roughly the average for USA). South Korea averages around 20.4 Mbps download, while Japan averages 15.8 Mbps.