Low signal? Stop. Smart management of the connection, cuts off bad connections. Image © XiXiDu

Well for the pat few days I haven’t updated, though there is a reason for it. Firstly I haven’t been on the internet very much for a few days so there wouldn’t have been very much to talk about and secondly, when I have managed to get onto the net, my broadband hasn’t been able to hold up the connection very well.

As far as I can figure there’s a reason for this, too. The signal that I’ve been exposed to for the past few days has been very limited, below 10% in most cases, because of this it’s likely that there will be a lot of data being lost in transmission and therefore the broadband, being smart, figures that there’s no point in trying to maintain a connection where pieces of data are going to be lost – no connection is better than a faulty connection.

On a technical note for people who are interested, when I was in a Skype call the other day, I brought up the technical call info. When I’m exposed to a low connection or to packet loss, Skype starts working in TCP mode, meaning it verifies that the data being sent is being sent correctly – it stays in this mode until a good, healthy connection is established, then switches to UDP. Sounds a bit funny, but it makes sense. If Skype can establish that there’s a good connection in place, there’s no need to verify that all data is being sent and received, if there’s a bad connection, it’s probably a better idea to try and make sure that the data being sent is being received – thus boost all around call quality.

Today is my last day of the experiment until the 7th September, when I’ll be trying the broadband for two weeks, instead of just one. I’ll post up a full report on the week’s experiment tomorrow.