Curious ?

[QveenEnvie]

I found something that said increasing the bandwidth of second life can cost more own your wifi  provider bill is that true ? 

Also will increasing the bandwidth stop lag I’m having extreme lag problems any advice ?

[Callum Meriman]

4 hours ago, QveenEnvie said:

I found something that said increasing the bandwidth of second life can cost more own your wifi  provider bill is that true ? 

Also will increasing the bandwidth stop lag I’m having extreme lag problems any advice ?

The bandwidth slider is a "less-is-more" setting. The lower it is, the better SL runs. For most people between 800 to 1500 is likely the sweet spot.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

If your service has a data limit and you use more than your allowance, then yeah, you will quite likely end up with a higher bill.

SL is very download intense anderen requires a stable connection. Something about your WiFi connection might be wrong / too weak.

Either way, increasing your bandwith will rather slow you down in general - and especially in case of a wireless connection. Less is actually more recommendable.

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, QveenEnvie said:

any advice ?

perhaps try posting your questions next time in the relevant forum sections, you'll get more answers and less polluting the forum with scattered subjects.

[Fionalein]

The bandwidth tells your viewer what rate to expect and at what rate to request stuff... if your bandwidth is less it will loose and reorder stuff that comes in too fast ... do a bandwidth test and deduct 10 to 20% for good measure (there will always be packages loss in WiFi unless you have no neighbours at all - and even then) and set your SL bandwidth limit slider to that found value.

Edited July 20, 2018 by Fionalein

[Rolig Loon]

The setting is the Maximum Bandwidth that your viewer will demand for handling standard SL functions, not including extras like voice and streaming media, which are not managed by the viewer.  Setting your Maximum Bandwidth setting too high can result in throttling the bandwidth available for those extra functions, so that they stutter or cut out completely.  If you have a lot of available bandwidth -- as you might if you are on a fiber optic connection in a large metropolitan area -- then this is not likely to be a major concern.  However, if you are on wifi with a small local ISP, you could have much less available bandwidth, or your bandwidth could be more more variable.  This is why the general advice is to set your Maximum Bandwidth no higher than about 75% of your available download bandwidth.  In practice, that means setting it at 1000 to 1500 , especially since SL rarely requires much more bandwidth anyway. 

[Klytyna]

6 hours ago, QveenEnvie said:

Also will increasing the bandwidth stop lag

Increasing the viewer bandwidth setting will do NOTHING to fix "lag".

26 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

The bandwidth tells your viewer what rate to expect and at what rate to request stuff.

Totally wrong...

The viewer bandwidth setting controls HANDSHAKING between client and sim server, it has NOTHING to do with the rate at which content is delivered by the Content Delivery Network (CDN), setting the viewer bandwidth too high basically causes your viewer to spend so much time idly chatting with the server, that it's too busy to do useful stuff like rezzing meshes and textures.

Less is MORE!

500-1000 is a good range, don't set it too low, like 50, or the server will forget you are logged in and log you out, but the idea that you set it to 10% less than your internet bandwidth is just... WRONG.
 

[Nalates Urriah]

We have lots of different opinions...

The Max Bandwidth setting is in general being depreciated by the Lab.

The setting is a bit of information the viewer sends to the region server. The server uses it to determine how much UDP data is sent. The UDProtocol is used less and less by the SL viewer-server. More and more information is sent via HTTP. So, the setting is having less and less impact.

Whether higher or lower is better depends on your connection a bit but more on the region server and whether it is lagging or not. So, finding your best setting can depend on the region you are in. Obviously that makes it a challenge.

At this point about the only data traveling between servers and viewers is update information... where the avatar is standing, turning, direction, speed, and when stuff in world changes.

You can press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-U to see the things that are getting/generating update information. Max Bandwidth and Lost Packets are strongly related to how those things behave. Deeper in the viewer stats are ack-noack stats that provide a bit more information on how things are working... or not.

The Max Band @ 1500 is a value the Firestorm team determined empirically. A combination of developer experience and FS Support problem solving contributed to their decision/recommendation. They suggest this as the maximum value for this setting.