Suspiciously Slow Uploading?

One of the most common causes of frustration when uploading video is just that: uploading video. It can be so slow! And sometimes, it can seem painfully slow. While there are many factors involved with the speed of upload, here's some helpful information about connection speeds and nomenclature, starting with some definitions:

Bits vs Bytes
Bits and bytes are both used to measure amounts of data. However, "bits" and "bytes" are two distinctly different terms. The most important difference is:

1 byte = 8 bits (like how 1 foot is equal to 12 inches). Therefore, 1 byte is 8 times larger than 1 bit.

Nomenclature
To distinguish between bits and bytes, the computer world uses different abbreviations:

Lower case "b" = bits
Upper case "B" = bytes

"Kilobits per second" can also be abbreviated in several different ways: kbps, kbit/sec, or kb/s. So, when you see a speed of 512 kbps (kilobits per second) this is actually equal to 64 kBps (kilobytes per second). Using our math from before, 1 bit is equal to 8 bytes. And 64 x 8 = 512. Make sense?

For the nitty gritty on nomenclature, please check out this Wikipedia article.

Now, what's the actual speed of your connection?

Your broadband provider will usually list your connection speeds, something like "10 megabits downstream and 512 kilobits upstream." It's important to keep in mind that these are maximum speeds, similar to how the speedometer in your car may go past 100mph, but that doesn't mean you're going to drive that fast.

Here's how you can test the actual speeds of your connection:

1. Go to Speedtest.net
2. Click on the New York, NY pyramid (as this is where our servers are located)
3. Click "Begin Test"
4. You'll get your results

Keep in mind that your results will be perfect-world maximum speeds, and will probably be less than your service providers' quoted speeds.

Uploading videos
Under real world conditions, you'll unfortunately never be able to upload or download at your maximum speeds for a variety of reasons--other traffic from your ISP, geographical distace to the website you're using, or the limitations of your own computer hardware.

Realistically you'll probably see speeds around 1/4 to 1/2 the speed of your above bandwidth test. For example, if your upload speed was 784kbps, you'll likely see speeds of 200 to 400kbps uploading to websites. This is equal to 25 to 50 kB/sec. (Remember that 8 bits equals 1 byte!).

We hope this helps! Now, if you're curious about why downloading videos seems so much faster than uploading videos, this blog post should help.