Damn you Virgin Media

I'm unreasonably happy this weekend. We had made the right choice to skip the first and last Maelstroms this year. We still have memories of waking up in snow last year. Instead we are looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend of chilling.

After a bit of tweaking we finally got my radio link working (weird routing through the CISCO). Suddenly we are able to stream iPlayer again something that has been next to impossible on Virgin's ADSL link. Luckily as I happen to write the NMS for the radio link so I can actually see what heavy strain iPlayer puts on the link. It turns out not very much, an actual video stream demands less than 2Mb/s while running. According to the router status the physical link is nearly 6Mbs so I can only assume this is due to downstream congestion and/or bandwidth shaping. Considering the amount I've shelled out to Virgin over the last few months I consider it a bit of a rip-off. I am supposedly a couple of rungs up on the allowed download limits which makes no real difference if I can't physically pull that amount through a squeezed data pipe.

Interestingly the data rate for CoD4:MW2 is only around 40Kb/s which includes the voice chat data. I could play OK on the ADSL link but the radio link does improve the ping times by around 40ms which is nice.