internet

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File Sharing With Customers

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Overview Our goal is to efficiently send files to customers.  The challenge has been to send these large files in a timely manner.

We upgraded our internet from Shaw's 5/50 to Telus' 20/100Mbps in order to send files faster to our customers.

We tried sending a 1GB file using DropBox and Paul's LicketyLink (Amazon backend) and they both show speeds of about 1.4Mbps.  Google Drive showed about 17Mbps.  When I checked the route trace it show 3 hops for Drive and about 13 or 14 for the other two.

Now we have a Synology NAS set up and we just tried the file sharing using a 1.56GB video file.

Hans had some trouble with Chrome and Edge hanging and got it to work with Firefox....took more than 1 hour.  Han's download speed with Shaw is 7Mbps.  Assuming 1 hour for Hans...his speed was less than 3.5Mpbs (and this was during a busy internet time...afternoon).

Doug also tried the same file and downloaded it in about 15 minutes using Chrome.  Doug has Telus and 25Mbps download.  Assuming 15 minutes, Doug's speed was about 14Mbps.

Conclusion

We will now start using the NAS file sharing capability to send files to our customers.

How

Log into the NAS.  Browse to the file you want to share  on U or R.  Right click the file and select the share option at the bottom of the list.  Place a password on the file, leave the default of valid for 1 week, and capture the link.  Past the link into an email to the customer.

Download or Upload Speed Calculator

Here's a cool download or upload speed calculator that can quickly calculate how much time it takes to upload a certain sized file: http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/downloadcalculator.php

Our Internet Stats

Our current (Nov 2012) internet speeds (according to http://www.speedtest.net/)  are:

Upload: 2.94Mbps

Download: 48.61Mbps

Current speeds July 23, 2105 at 11:36am (I am running a large upload to dropbox currenly that may be affecting the results of the upload speed):

Upload: 2.51Mbps

Download: 57.95Mbps

With these speeds a 1GB file would take:

1 hour to upload.

3 minutes to download.

Our Place in the Growth of the Internet

I was reading a lengthy article on the Google blog about the importance of their existance in rapid expansion of the internet, and this paragraph stuck out to me as how we fit into their picture:

Systems that facilitate high-quality content creation and editing are crucial for the Internet's continued growth, because without them we will all sink in a cesspool of drivel. We need to make it easier for the experts, journalists, and editors that we actually trust to publish their work under an authorship model that is authenticated and extensible, and then to monetize in a meaningful way. We need to make it easier for a user who sees one piece by an expert he likes to search through that expert's entire body of work. Then our users will be able to benefit from the best of both worlds: thoughtful and spontaneous, long form and short, of the ages and in the moment.

// http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/from-height-of-this-place.html