A discussion about album upload times (specifically the length of them) last week reminded me of a good post Danny wrote on the Junction a while back, about internet connection speeds, pricing and plans. While we do everything we can at our end to optimise the FTP process, ultimately (album) upload speed is determined by your internet provider, so it pays to understand exactly what you're getting for your money. Here's Danny's post – Nigel Warning: contains math and abbreviations From time to time I'm asked for advice about internet connection speeds and pricing plans, so here goes... Most internet packages are lame (especially in New Zealand: but our internet service providers (ISPs) learned their tricks from your ISPs, so we're not alone). Most internet packages assume you're a consumer … but you're not a consumer, you're a producer (so you need upload speed, not just download speed). Here's what's lame. Most ISPs show their speed (how quickly you can download and/or upload information) in kilobits (kb), not kilobytes (kB) (or megabits instead of megabytes) simply to make the numbers look bigger. To convert kilobytes to kilobits, you multiply by 8... 128 kilobits per second sounds better than 16 Kilobytes per second, doesn't it? How to calculate typical upload times Suppose you need to upload a 5MB (megabyte) jpg to your lab. 5MB = 5120KB 5120KB (size of your file) / 16 KB per second (upload speed) = 320 seconds So 5 minutes 20 seconds is your absolute best case scenario. Unfortunately though, that's theoretical (another example of loose standards). In my experience it's realistic to expect 50% of maximum capacity, so I would double the time, which means: • 10 minutes to upload that 5MB jpg • 16 hours to upload a print order of 100 jpegs • 48 hours to upload a 1.5 gigabyte album order! That's asking for trouble. Disconnections, hibernation, and flakey wireless connections all add to the time ... and explain why we spent so much time building "resume" functions into Photojunction – so you don't need to start again! I used 128 Kbps upload speed as my example because it's the speed you're promised when you buy the $39.95/month "most popular" plan from NZ's most popular ISP. Something else to bear in mind: upload and download speeds are not the same: ISPs routinely cap upload speeds. 128Kbps uploading may be OK for (some) consumers, but it's useless to a producer like you. I want to encourage you to evaluate your internet package and do your own sums. Consider how long things should take to upload, or download for that matter. Cheers, Danny PS: Here's a site where you can test your own speeds (and do your own upload time calculations). Note, it gives the results honestly, in kilobytes, not kilobits! ~ Article originally published on The Junction