Dwight Silverman posted an article about Speedtest.net yesterday, and the new look they have to their internet connection speed test. Pretty nice looking service. My test with Road Runner shows pretty good bandwidth in both directions.
This reminded of something I had been meaning to test. The other day I received a phone call from my mom, we use Vonage, and she said it was breaking up…could not hear me. I thought for a second and realized I had Jungle Disk running a backup of some recent pictures to my S3 account. I went upstairs and canceled the upload. Sure enough, the phone quality improved. I run my backups using the most recent version of Jungle Disk that lets me map a drive. I use SyncBack to control the backup, and it works well. I have crossed the threshold and now pay more than a dollar a month for my S3, but it is a great way to backup. However, my bandwidth does take a pretty serious hit when the Jungle Disk upload is running. I ran my backup this morning manually, and ran the speed test again at the same time. Upload speed dropped by almost a third. This is a pretty big downside, especially for a Vonage user. Maybe I need more speed on the upload side.
Tags: vonage, speed test, amazon s3, syncback