Re: Can nm provide connection speed ?

["Patryk Zawadzki" <patrys pld-linux org>]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 2:58 AM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 00:06 +0100, thibaut bethune wrote:
>> Some softwares requires to know what is the user connection speed to
>> deliver the best experience.
>>
>> For instance, Totem has a YouTube plugin that allows the user to
>> browse YouTube videos. YouTube website provides different resolutions.
>> The choice of a larger or smallest resolution depends on user
>> connection speed. At present time, Totem allow the user to set its
>> connection speed to get the best resolution. It could be much smarter
>> if the system could "guess" what is the current connection speed and
>> automatically set the best resolution (see
>> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=521536#c13 )
>>
>> Is there a way to know what is the current connection speed with nm ?
> NM can tell you the connection speed of the local link, but that's
> almost never what you want, because your local link is always going to
> be faster than whatever pipes are between you and the provider.  So
> basically, no.
>
> You'd need other pieces of code that would test-download from the
> content server to quickly determine the speed, and you'd also need to
> dynamically adjust the speed during playback because the quick
> speed-check at the start may well be either best-case or worst-case.

While this is true I think we should add a place somewhere to specify
such information (ideally in NM as it varies between connections) so
the user is not forced to reconfigure half of his desktop when moving
from office 802.11N to roaming GPRS.

Maybe something like

"This is the first time you connect to <Network Name>.

Some applications need to know the speed of the connection to offer
you the best experience.

Please specify the speed: [ Try to detect automatically | ↓ ].

[x] I am charged for using this connection so try to minimize the
background traffic."

This way we could make both Totem and PackageKit happy (the former
needs bandwidth to optimize streaming, the latter doesn't want to pull
updates on GPRS and needs bandwidth to throttle the background
downloads).

-- 
Patryk Zawadzki