Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Published on October 8, 2009 By Draginol In Personal Computing

Someday, someone is going to do a round up of digital distribution platforms and get around to comparing one very important feature: How FAST they download.

That’s one of Impulse’s biggest advantages. It’s got crazy fast download speeds whether you’re in North America or Australia or Germany or wherever.

Here’s a little video I took from my relatively humble home Comcast cable setup.


Comments (Page 1)
2 Pages1 2 
on Oct 08, 2009

Yep, Impulse is smokin' fast!  On my Comcast connection, I average anywhere from 800KB/sec to 1.5MB/sec.   

on Oct 08, 2009

Can't help but notice that your Impulse shows to be connected to a private server. Do the public servers have the same download speed that can be seen here when under a load?

on Oct 08, 2009

They do. This is an accurate video.

on Oct 08, 2009

CarGuy1
Can't help but notice that your Impulse shows to be connected to a private server. Do the public servers have the same download speed that can be seen here when under a load?

Well, considering how fast my DL speed are(Reply #1), I'd say yes.  Though you have to take into account your areas network capabilities.

on Oct 08, 2009

What I primarily notice with Impulse is how glacial patch downloads are in comparison to a full game archive. When I install a game from scratch I get a steady 10 Megabytes per second, allowing me to download a big game in a couple of minutes, which is as it should be.

However, whenever a patch is released, the download speed is about 200 KB/sec, a mere 2% of the full game download speed. While I understand the reason for this behaviour, only the full game archives are mirrored to the fast servers, it does result in the rather odd effect that if a patch is large, it is faster to reinstall the game than to patch it. Now, most patches are not that large, so it generally isn't a problem, but it still one of the less impressive parts of the Impulse download experience.

 

on Oct 08, 2009

I still remember waiting six hours to download Doom demo over my 300B/s modem (2400bps) in 1993.

My connection today is about 55000 times faster at around 2MB/s. What took a whole day, would take about one second today.

Technology sure moves fast!

on Oct 08, 2009

Now if only my connection speed could keep up with Impulse...

 

on Oct 08, 2009

Kitkun
Now if only my connection speed could keep up with Impulse...

 

Heh, yeah. I think Charter woudl demand rights to all my children and not just the first born if I requested a speed boost.

on Oct 08, 2009

I'd love to see someonedo a comparison. I know I get th absolute fastest DL speeds from Impulse (generally around 1.2 to 1.5 MB/s). Some of those other 'services' are pathetically slow.

on Oct 08, 2009

In terms of comparison (I have 6Mbps DSL at home which I measure out at about 4.5Mbps regularly)

 

Impulse will regularly break 500 KBps.

Direct2Drive will generally just beat 300KBps but is very up and down (anywhere from 150-350KBps over a few minutes time).

Steam will also just beat 300KBps but is consistent.

 

Speed is one of the factors that I like about Impulse, but the other key point is that Impuse does a nice job installing the product in a reasonable-to-find location (i.e. the way the DVD installer generally does it).  D2D does too, but Steam installs everything in the hard to find steam install location which makes installing mods, etc a big pain.

on Oct 08, 2009

Now if only my connection speed could keep up with Impulse...

Same here.... average d/l speeds around 150 - 160kbs on a 1500 connection.  I did have a faster DSL2 connection, but it was $20.00 a month more and downloads were not a lot faster, if at all in some cases... possibly due to ISP server and/or area restrictions, so I cut back to save money on sonething I wasn't actually seeing the benefit of.

I am switching ISP's in Feb 2010... to a 6Mbps connection for 30 bucks less than I'm paying now.  Hopefully then I'll see the blistering speeds others here are seeing.

on Oct 08, 2009

Were about to go to 50 Mbs... look forward to impulse keepin up !

on Oct 08, 2009

Impulse does NOW.  But it didn't always.  It behaved VERY throttled until recently.  Kudos to Stardock for opening the server/ISP spigot.  8)

on Oct 08, 2009

    I use impulse too.   I am in the process of downing loading two games  CoH and each one has 8GB and ave 30KB/sec. I started two days ago and at this rate it will be two more days so a total of 96 hours (4 days) at 1.04167% an hour.

 It must also be where you live too?

on Oct 08, 2009

Download Speed: 2881 kbps (360.1 KB/sec transfer rate) that is about what i get anytime i run a speed test on my connection and what it should top out at according to what I pay for but anytime I'm downloading through Impulse I notice it showing download speeds usually between 450KB/sec and 500KB/sec.

So yeah Impulse. 

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