internet connections in the US

A quick thought on bandwidth - you may think it doesn't matter how fast your connection is (unless you have dial-up). But yesterday and today I tried to share some photos from the wedding with a friend in the UK. Both of us were tech savvy enough to know that we could easily stick all the photos we took in a zip file. But as it turns out, a zip file of wedding photos for me was 180MB and for him was 220MB. So I used my super-duper internet connection to upload the photos to my server, and to download his:

222313030 bytes received in 14:41 (246.26 KB/s)
184947463 bytes sent in 1:01:03 (49.30 KB/s)

That's 15 minutes, and one hour, respectively. And because of the length of time it took, the server on the far end disconnected me a couple of times. This is a real problem in the US - sharing photos is not rocket science that only a few people do - it's one of the meat and potatoes applications of the internet.

David, It's obvious your upload speed is ridiculous in comparison to your download speed. Most broadband suppliers don't even mention this and only advertise their download speeds (ie maximum possible). If you're running ADSL or SDSL there should be a possibility to increase your upload speed, at a price, with your ISP. With cable or satellite it tends to be much more limited. Here, in my hood, they're just starting fibre optic connections with truly bidirectional 100 mbps... I'm drooling and waiting very impatiently... As regards photo transfer: transferring one huge compressed file (ZIP) is slower and more prone to timeouts than sending a bunch of individual files. The best and most optimised route for this sort of thing is still the photo sharing sites which have upload/download transfer systems prepared for this sort of thing. I transfer a couple of gigabytes a month via Flickr. It works fine... but every now and then my ISPs see this peak in traffic coming from one location and send me a letter. Apparently "unlimited traffic" has a different meaning in French {vbg}. Enjoy!

"If you're running ADSL or SDSL there should be a possibility to increase your upload speed, at a price, with your ISP."

Hahahahahaha!

We have the highest tier uplink/downlink available in our area. That's what's so funny about it - this is the best they... well, not can do,but will do.