Download speeds from manufacturers’ web sites
Why do manufacturers have crappy download speeds for firmware, drivers, and utilities on their web sites? QNAP and Synology, two companies whose products I’ve reviewed lately, have downright abysmal speeds (both are approximately 10 kB/s) and limit number of connections from a single IP to two.
I remember that Realtek used to be like this, too, but I’ve not used a Realtek device in a while. However, my Foxconn motherboard has a Realtek HD audio chipset on it, and my shiny, new wireless card has a Realtek chipset. I don’t recall experiencing the slowness on Realtek’s servers when I got those drivers.
How can companies expect to serve users efficiently and deliver the customer service expected from a technology-related company if it takes four hours to download a 53 MB firmware file and a 20 MB utility?
For $20 per month, these companies could set up a VPS in the states (maybe with my host, colo4jax) on a 10 MB connection with nothing running but Apache or lighttpd to serve up files. Hell, put a decent FTPd on there instead and updates would be effortless. For another $20, they could have two of them and even torrent the updates with web seeds for ensured availability!
It’s very difficult to respect technology companies that don’t go the extra mile to speed up things like this.
