Regarding Internet speeds and WiFi, and with apologies to those of you who are IT experts (and those who prefer to talk about cycling rather than technology)...
I'm not sure how much data flows up to bkool (your speed, cadence, heart rate, etc.) compared to how much comes down from them (other riders positions) and how much is pre-downloaded so it can continue if the connection breaks (gradient changes). If I still had mine setup I could monitor the traffic flow in both directions, does anyone else have a decent router (e.g. Draytek Vigor) with traffic monitoring?
With normal broadband the upload is a bit rubbish (<1 Mbps) but download can be acceptable (c. 8-16 Mbps). Fibre is much better, with 10 or 20 Mbps upload and up to 40 or 80 Mbps download. Cable can be a bit better, but all these are contended, i.e. shared with other users as they over sell the exchanges bandwidth by up to 20 to 1, as people rarely use the bandwidth continuously.
Netflix or iPlayer streaming a Full HD (1080p) program uses around 3 GBytes per hour, so around 0.5 Mbits per second (Mbps) download, so shouldn't affect most decent broadbands connections too badly. Gaming could be worse, I guess.
If you can get an Ethernet cable all the way to your computer that is by far the best option, as it can be a dedicated (switched) 1 Gbps connection.
Failing that, using powerline adapters to use the mains and Ethernet wires to complete the link will give around 100-400 Mbps (AV200 to AV1200) but the powerline bit is shared between all devices using it, if you have multiple powerline adapters and/or multiple devices using them.
WiFi can be as slow as 11 (b) or 54 (g) Mbps, but more recent wireless n or the latest ac are rated at 130 Mbps or higher, depending on channel width, number of aerials at both ends, etc. so should be at least as fast as your broadband. However, real throughput (after protocol overheads) will be lower, speeds fall away with distance and intervening obstacles such as walls and again it is shared between all devices using the wireless network (SSID). Any wireless extenders will only slow things down further, as can neighbours WiFi if they are close enough and overlap channels.
So try to use an Ethernet wire or powerline adapter if you can, but some devices like tablets and phones may have to use WiFi. In this case it can help to use a dedicated wireless access point and/or powerline adapter to create a separate wifi hotspot (use a different SSID and keep the encryption key secret) so you have the whole bandwidth to yourself and the hot spot is in the same room as your device. This should make your connection much more robust!
One last point; bandwidth is not the only concern, as latency can also affect the performance. This is the time for data to start flowing at one end and first reach the other end, and possibly return a reply (round trip time). Even with high bandwidth, latency can be low, e.g. a very wide but very long pipe will carry a lot of water, but it will take ages for the water to get from one end to the other. You can get an idea of latency by looking at the ping time, which should be around 10-20 ms.
Cheers,
Geoff
