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A Study on Regional DSL and Cable Speeds?
antarctican asks: "I'm curious about the typical speed DSL and Cable users get. I see references in various /. articles to speeds such as 128k for DSL connections, to me that seems discustingly slow. Here in British Columbia, Canada a speed of 2-4Mbps for a DSL line (ranging from ~$40-100/month) is the norm, and is easily available in all the major centres. Why are American cable and DSL speeds so low, and where is this artificial limit coming from? It's obviously not the technology!" I don't know that American DSL is necessarily slower than that or not. Your location will greatly affect the kind of broadband access that you can posess, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some American markets which are as fast, if not faster than 4Mbps. How fast are DSL and Cable lines in your area? Maybe someone can use this information to update the broadband availability charts that are available at various places on the 'net.
America's high speed roll-out is slower than Canada because we have a lot of companies who throttle technology advances for marketing purposes.
The longer we pay $50/month for 128k, the more money they make. AOL will be selling them for $19.95 a month soon enough and then everyone will have high speed access. Horray.
Sigh... i guess now isn't a good time to post this :) but being from the area that had the first hybrid cable network, i feel that i must. :P
I get 1.5mbit down/1.5mbit up for 39$ a month (canadian) i've had cable modem now for 4 years and it's been availble in my area for 5+ years.
The price actually used to be 49$ a month, but they dropped it to 39$ for anyone who was a subscriber of cable tv as well.
I'm in the Boston area and I get 640 DL, 128 UL from Verizon for $40/month. In real use, I get ~60kB (or 480kb) of DL speed quite reliably. But their mail servers are often overloaded.
I first tried to get DSL with a static IP from Speakeasy and other Covad based providers, but after a long string of hassles and missed appointments, I gave up and went with the self-install kit from Verizon. It took a few months for Verizon to process my order thanks to them putting a new buggy order system in place right before the strike. All together, it took me 6 months to get DSL after moving.
At my previous address (Wilmington, MA) I had cable modem service from MediaOne. I loved it. I got 160kB download even during peak hours - so my DL speed was a non-issue compared to the load on the server I was accessing and the internet. I got comparable UL speed too on the few occasions I uploaded large files. But that was pre-Napster so who knows if they've capped it since then. And I never had a service interruption or had trouble with their mail servers. Finally, I had a service tech at my apartment to verify the connection only 1 week after ordering it.
I would have stuck with cable in a heartbeat except the cable company at my new address doesn't do digital.
average speed is zero.
They (Adelphia) were saying this back when they were Cablevision of Loudoun back in late '98, early '99, but they were saying that it'll be symmetric by the end of '99. BS. They're all freaking liers.
I'm in Fairfax, VA. I'm not very far from the CO at all. My problem is that I've got fiber between my house and the CO. Apparently, it's prohibitivly expensive to do DSL over fiber (according to the Verizon tech who did the line check), so I'm stuck with either IDSL or cable. I'm not really happy with 144Kbps, but it's better than dialup and I can get static IPs with it. I'd probably go with cable if I didn't need the static IP addresses.
Kind of ironic that fiber's supposed to be "the way of the future" but because of its presense, I'm stuck with bandwidth of the past...
-sig
My DSL here started out somewhere in the 150 k/s range. Since I have a cool small mom-and-pop ISP, I talked to the owner and got him to have the telco uncap my DSL line. I now get 650 k/s at no extra charge. Moral: small ISPs rule.
--
see shy jo
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
My cable modem, on the other hand, varies (probably because of the host on the other end) between 150 and 700KBytes/second. ftp4.us.kernel.org usually gives me 700K/second, which is awesome for kernel updates. The cable modem is through Optimum Online (in Connecticut), and the DSL is through SNET (for the physical line) and CyberZone (awesome ISP) for the connection itself.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Does this have something to do with the metric system again? :)
Whenever you sign up for broadband service, do what I do. Ask for the whole picture.
You see, sometimes companies like phone companies and cable companies aren't always so straight with you. Sometimes they'll bend the truth about their availability statistics or even have hidden charges. You don't want to find out about this stuff after you've already signed up, because by then, they've roped you in already with that big connection fee they didn't focus your attention on. And then you're screwed.
So do what I do: ask them for the "premium" service. You see, companies like phone companies and cable companies often have a second service they won't tell you about unless you ask. They keep it under the table and wait for those special customers to show up who ask for it. You might be just such a customer, but you probably don't even know it.
You see, things like true high-speed access can't just be given out to anybody who walks in off the street. You have to be willing to pay for it, but more importantly, you have to be willing to do what's necessary to get it. Do you think just anyone can ask for 1.2 petabyte/s connectivity and get it? Do you think it's that easy?
No, you have to be willing to sleep with the right people and maybe even kill for that kind of connectivity. You have to take drastic steps and show them you're not just one of them, no sir. You're one of us. You're ready to play with the big boys. You hate your mother, don't you? You think it's funny to laugh at others who aren't like you, don't you? You think you're so superior, but let me tell you, you're nothing. You're just a slashbot.
And that's why these statistics aren't meaningful unless they come from the field. And that's why articles like this are so important; benchmarks from companies can tell you something, but they can't tell you what you really want to know: the truth.
I have DSL from SBC, it costs ~$40/month. I suffer with PPPoE. For ~$20 more a month (anecdotal evidence, salt to taste), I could get DHCP and way better website/email service from jump.net. If I had a better job or a roommate to split the cost with, it'd be worth it, but since it's only my wife and I, I can live with it for the time being. If I could get DSL speed and io.com as my ISP for that price, it'd be worth the money, but io is now wisely waiting out the DSL storm.
SBC has been mostly clueless, but on the whole decent as an ISP (considering I don't rely on them for email, web hosting, or anything but an IP address and a line). If I had the money, I would consider upgrading to their small business class service, and get the 5 static IPs. When I need hosting that's important enough not to impose on a friend's linux box, I'll probably go to io.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
I live on the border of Sunnyvale and Cupertino... I can walk to Apple's RnD building, and a huge HP complex just across the street. I live 18,000 feet from the switching station, and am paying $114 a month for 144 SDSL.
At school, I lived in Berkeley, very close to the switching station, and the best we could do was 768/384 for $80 a month. PacBell is cheaper, but it's PacBell, so I try to avoid them. And their coverage is considerably worse than Covad or others. As far as I know, nothing is offered over 1.5 Mbps around here.
I prefer DSL to cable as I can get multiple IPs very easily, and access my computers from work or a friend's house, or wherever.
I don't really understand why I live in the lap of computer technology and I can't get a decent net connection... even my 56k modem connects at 28.8 from my house. Bleah.
-David
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
What is it with Ottawa that means it gets better broadband choices than elsewhere in Ontario?
I've tried both Rogers@Home (cable) and Sympatico HSE (ADSL). Both approximately the same price (circa Cdn$40). Cable was supposed to be something like 3mbs\320kbs, and the DSL is 960\120kbs. Guess what? On average the DSL is faster! The cable speeds were up and down (fast at 4am, slow the rest of the time) with bad packet loss and dreadful routing. IMHO, their network smacked of over-subscription... if they lowered the bandwidth offered, I think their service and average speeds would improve. I happily get about 100kB/s downloads 24/7 with the DSL... it's great. The upload speeds sucks though: 100kB/s downstream uses 20% of my upstream bandwidth (presumably TCP acks?). It's a very effective way of stopping servers as any significant upstream activity really bites into downstream throughput.
I've been using PPPoE for 1.5 years. I've grown to like it.
1) PPPoE client software has become a lot more mature now. Roaring Penguin for Linux is great.... and it does PPPoE relay if you need to connect another machine from behind a Linux based router. RASPPPOE for Windows is also pretty good.
2) I like being able to easily change my IP. With DHCP, I found I would release and then renew, and get the same IP back. This rarely happens with PPPoE. Being able to disconnect is great if your IP is getting unwelcome attention (Quake 3 server still broadcasting at you after you crashed; DoS attack; port scans).
3) PPPoE allows you to connect to multiple ISPs. This means I can use the internet like normal, but somebody else in the house can also get a high speed connection straight into the university (yes, the same could be done with VPNs).
4) Cable pissed me off making me change my damn computer name to some crap combination of letters and numbers for their DHCP authentication!
5) dyndns.org works really well with dynamic IPs. So who cares if you have PPPoE?
6) Now that I have a Netgear RT314, all my computers use DHCP and are configured as *I* see fit. The router supports both PPPoE and DHCP, so I can use it with any of the services around. I could have achieved the same with a Linux router, but I didn't have a spare machine, and besides the router is kind of nice: it sits on a shelf and I don't think about it. PPPoE isn't an issue anymore. I'm not even aware of it!
7) OSes are now comping with builtin PPPoE support (Linux, WinXP, Mac OS X), so it becomes more transparent and irrelevant.
As for the ISPs liking it. The biggest thing I've heard is that it fits with their current dialup model. As I understand it, PPPoE involves a VPN from the CO to their dial up server, so presumably it also allows them to centralise things and keep the costs down. Perhaps.
There are several different ways that it can implemented. With my current service, the modem has no real presence as far as the network is concerned. With PPPoE, my computer (well, router) gets the IP address. Where I lived before, the DSL service used a Cisco 675 modem, and with that ISP the modem got the IP. The modem was actually a fully fledged router. To run servers, one had telnet into the modem and configure the relevant ports and protocols for forwarding (network address translation). Perhaps your modem is really a router with NAT capabilities. Check your manual, or do a search for the make and model on the internet. One benefit of your setup is that the modem acts as a natural firewall. If you can telnet into it, ensure that you change your password (my previous ISP didn't tell their customers to do this and left them open to crackers.)
No, no it won't. You'll just annoy whatever tech you get ahold of that day. I know this from experience, as I've been on BOTH ends of the phone.
In Australia we have only 2 possible cable providers, and they are both capped. ADSL is also capped, but it is only being offered by one provider. This is provided for about $75AUD/month (about $36USD at the moment, but it was more like $50USD a few months ago).
I'm not sure of ADSL, but the cap on my cable is 512k (it was lower, but it was recently raised. I believe it was to make them more competitive). Ironically, this cap is not a huge deal because the majority of content is from overseas, and the bottlenecks are rarely in the cable. It's annoying when I'm accessing a local mirror though.
I believe the justification for the cap is because localities all share bandwidth on the cable. You don't want a few individuals sucking up all the bandwidth. This hasn't been an issue though, since cable and ADSL are not really marketed at all in Australia, so nobody I know seems to know about them (unless they are technically oriented).
Oh boy you bet that Boston wiring is often bad.
I once lived in an apartment in Cleveland Circle. One roommate had a line of her own (using the spare pair - Bell Atlantic was lazy) and the other roommate and I shared the main line. One day the main line cuts out, though the second line was still live. We eventually determined that the people downstairs had been renovating their apartment, and cut through just enough of the wire by accident to kill one pair and not the other. When we finally got BA to come out, they just put on a set of multiplexers and didn't even consider running an intact cable to replace or augment the one that was known to be damaged.
Between that and Cablevision, I didn't even bother wishing for a high speed line.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
We pay for guaranteed 384Kbps. We seem to get around 1Mbit, though, most of the time.
I wish I had a DSL option at my house.
Rogers is really really fast, but it goes down all the time. For the past two weeks the number of times it's gone down (from a few minutes to a few hours, sometimes all day) per day has been around 2. The first week after getting it installed (only a couple of months ago) it was down over 4 of the 7 days. Very frustrating. Any other ISP with those kinds of uptimes would be out of business in a flash! I'd settle for half the speed just to get decent uptimes in connection.
As it is, I have to keep an analog modem hooked-up to dial to an ISP when Rogers goes down.
I used to think the terrible stories were from rare incidents. Now I know first hand. But I don't have a choice. I am Roger's whore.
Why not go to cable modem? 'Cause I've seen how well our local cable company (Time Warner) doesn't do television, which they've been at for years. Their technical expertise seems centered around breaking compatibility with older equipment in order to increase their converter box and remote control rental fees. And that's with televisions, where there are actually fairly stable standards (not great, but stable). Imagine what they could do along those lines with computer stuff.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
1. Time-Warner cable doesn't get any more of our money.
2. Doesn't tie up the phone.
3. Should let me connect to the same ISP and not have to change e-mail addresses (again).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Believe it or not, the issue of units naming for bits and bytes has been addressed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Though the unit names are not officially part of SI (Systeme Internationale), and the chosen names are unfamiliar, they make a good starting point.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Datapoints: PacBell service to my home in San Francisco reliably runs at 1.5 mpbs for $40/month. PacBell DSL to my former workplace routinely ran at 4 mbps for $200/month. Concentric DSL at my current workplace runs at a very bursty 100 kbps-ish.
I get static IP, 768k/128k. Problem is Verizon is too fucking cheap to pay for more bandwith so we get 1000+ms pings to our gateway. Turns out (after hours and hours of lying on the phone from the tech support people) that they are daisychaining the racks at the DSLAM in the office downtown and too may people are on a single T1.
;-) If only I lived in MI instead of OH, I would just run ethernet across the border.
It took 2 months 2 weeks to get a tech out here to test that w/a laptop... I told them for those 2 months and 2 weeks what the problem was but I didn't know what I was talking about...
Today (3 months 1 week) I called again and finally got the word that they are adding more T1's to the DSLAM (whether or not this is true I have no idea) and supposedly our ping replies will improve...
My suggestion to those people out there that can get cable or DSL w/a providor other than Verizon -- do so.. If you have Verizon, do NOT get DSL through them (and if you are like us and you have to, make sure you call them daily and record extensions and names of the people you talk to). Get really fucking pissed off when they won't tell you what you know is right and eventually something will get done.
The US's DSL situation sucks b/c the bandwith is more expensive than the revenues from the DSL service. DOWN W/CANADA
I am a DSP software applications-type person at a certain large DSP vendor. While I don't work in the broadband access group, I still get to occasionally implement the crazy algorithms that deal with the reflections, noise, and other crap that DSL has to put up with.
So, no, I'm not a phony. (And BTW, I believe SDSL and ADSL and all the other xDSL family connection types have to put up with the same annoyances unless you get fresh copper laid just for you. If you get a "dry pair" that's already in the ground, you still may have stubs, wire-gauge differences and distance-related signal attenuation to contend with. Thankfully, you do still miss out on repeaters (which I forgot in my post above), loading coils, and voice-band filters.))
BTW, I also wouldn't be surprised if telcos in the US just have crappier infrastructure overall than our Canadian neighbors. Partly because (in some areas) the infrastructure is as old as the hills and hard to get to to replace it all, and partly because the telcos (and big business in general) are in bed with the US Gov't. :-P Other contries have decent communication infrastructure, why not us?
I've noticed that the US has a tendency to not embrace new technology as quickly, as long as businesses can still milk $$ out of the current technology. Fun, fun... I suspect it's that sort of thinking that's left the US with a rotting, aging, non-DSL-friendly POTS network, little ISDN to speak of, and a country that 1/2 to 1 full step back from most of the world in deployed wireless technology. Whoo hoo!
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
There are several factors that come into play:
Changes in wire type/gauge. Every time you change gauge in wire, you potentially have an impedance mismatch which can cause reflections on the line. These reflections cause certain frequencies (well above human hearing range, but smack-dab in the middle of the DSL frequency range) to be attenuated or altogether canceled out.
Related to this are stubs. Often times, a single line pair leaving a junction box is spliced somewhere along the way and actually goes to two destinations -- one live, one not. This could happen for a variety of reasons, typically due to changes in service at residences near each other. Each stub also causes reflections (worse than those reflections caused by changes in wire gauge), and so this too frustrates DSL service.
Line filters. Strictly speaking, line filters aren't necessary until well down the line, where your voice-band data is converted to digital, or is analog-multiplexed with other signals on a line. To reduce crosstalk and noise (apparently), most POTS lines have line filters closer to the home so only voiceband energy is on the line. These kill DSL dead, as you noted.
Loading coils. On some longer runs out there, loading coils are on the lines to help even out the response curve of the line in the voice band, in part by absorbing reflections. These totally screw up the frequency bands outside the voice band though.
And finally, from what I recall, upper frequences attenuate fairly sharply with distance on unshielded copper, and so the further away you get, the fewer usable frequencies you have to play with.
So, yes, there are a lot of problems as you go from the CO to the end terminal. Some of these problems are in the last mile (changes in wire gauge, stubs) and some are along the way (loading coils).
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Well, they limited my uptsteam to 15k/s in Maryland, but the downstream is still good. But the fastest I've seen is 1.2M/s. On average I can get about 300k/s when doing multiple files. I have friends with dsl and they tend to get the same speeds when downloading but they have me on uploading. I'd be happy if I could spit out 50k/s.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
Hmm, wierd, I'm on Shaw in Edmonton, Alberta, and I get ~500-600kB/sec down and around 200k/sec up. (Yeah, k Bytes, not bits).
My *NEW* place is 700 feet from the CO, and they claim I can get a 7.1m/768k line to that...Ill let ya know monday...
-=Bob
Here, in Portland, OR, I am currently getting an upload speed of 272 and download speed from 256-512, and the company, Qwest, says as high as 640.
There is the service where you agree to only be on for 2 hours and then they can kick you off for 5 minutes, which costs $19.95/month. Or you can pay $10 more per month and have the service available all the time, and get an external dsl modem instead.
Calgary, AB, Canada. Cable provided by Shaw Cable ("Shaw @home")
Down: per node, three 10 Mbps channels, which your modem is put on randomly. You share the channel with a number of others. Practical speed: more like 5 Mbps max.
Up: Two 768 kbps channels. Old modems only can use one, whereas newer can use both at once. Also shared.
It's a pretty good system -- peering is NOT through @home, unlike the other @home affiliates.
They split up the nodes here pretty quick when they get packed.
I did hear recently that you can get dsl even if you have a saturn phone line. I hadn't been told otherwise, but I assumed it wouldn't be possible.
The service still comes from Telecom, but at least they're co-operating =)
In New Zealand, we have 'Jetstream' which is our main telco's adsl service. Afaik, the speed ranges between a flatrate 128kbps service and 8Mbps downstream.
The traffic prices in $NZ are here.
In B.C., Telus has the last-mile monopoly. Telus shall be your local telephone provider and you shall have no other local telephone provider before Telus. I believe this is a government-ordained monopoly, and that they keep fairly tight reigns on the telco. We have gotten local calls free for as long as I can remember, although they do seem to like to play with the cost of basic service. Long distance can be from any provider; you get two bills unless you stick with Telus for LD. You can also DSL service from companies other than Telus, but it is Telus that actually provides the DSL ports at the exchange/central office/whatever.
Then there is cable. We only have one cable provider here; used to be Rogers but they did a customer swap with Shaw so we get Shaw out here in BC now. You can only get cable TV or cable internet by going through Shaw.
Boston? Try AT&T Broadband Cable. I've had fantastic performance - in the 1.5 Mbit range - even faster downloading from the evil empire.
I'd complain if I were you. That's pathetic.
Where in Boston can you get this service? I'm in the South End and I've never heard of it. Are you actually in the city or just outside of it? The city of Boston has a totally different cable system than the surrounding areas, and our system is *really* bad.
The city of Boston does not offer this service as far as I know. If you are in Boston and you have it, let me know how you got it, please!
Bottom line: if someone is only getting 128kbit DSL it's probably because they're using IDSL (DSL over ISDN) because they live outside the ADSL distance limitations.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
In the Cleveland metro area, I am purchasing (for the last 15 months, anyways) 768kbs down/128kbs up DSL plus ISP (mail, news, webspace) for about $60 a month. I pay my phone company (Verizon) for the DSL connection and a separate ISP for the IP and server access/account. I've had zero downtime in 15 months, and I run a Linux box, Mac and PC via NAT on the single IP they gave me. 7 days between my order and the installation, worked from day 1.
My co-worker has a different phone (Ameritech) and internet provider and he gets 608kbs down/128kbs up for $49.99 a month including ISP fees, all through one company (BigNet - seem to be a fly by night provider). He spent 8 weeks between the telco and ISP getting a line repaired, modem installed, and service activated.
Just my experience...
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
In the Cleveland metro area, I am purchasing (for the last 15 months, anyways) 768kbs down/128kbs up DSL plus ISP (mail, news, webspace) for about $60 a month. I pay my phone company (Verizon) for the DSL connection and a separate ISP for the IP and server access/account. I've had zero downtime in 15 months, and I run a Linux box, Mac and PC via NAT on the single IP they gave me. 7 days between my order and the installation, worked from day 1.
My co-worker has a different phone (Ameritech) and internet provider and he gets 608kbs down/128kbs up for $49.99 a month including ISP fees, all through one company (BigNet - seem to be a fly by night provider). He spent 8 weeks between the telco and ISP getting a line repaired, modem installed, and service activated.
Just my experience...
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Not to be pedantic, but shouldn't that be 5Mb/1Mb?
It's kind of important in this thread; one means bits, the other means Bytes (Factor of 8 difference).
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
I live Haverford. For:
a) You could setup a Linux box to run ipmasquerading (NAT). Or you could buy one of those new NAT cable modem router/hub-type things from linksys, dlink, and others.
b) Yes, it'll probably involve one of these service people to install a cable outlet on the third floor. Or you could keep the cable on the 1st floor or basement and have someone run CAT5 cabling for you. (Or go wireless--though that will slow you down a bit and might not work too well, depending on your house)
c) Mine is static and so are all of the ones with comcast @ home from what I've seen. I've had my same IP for 3 years now. No propreitary junk, very easy to setup in Linux or whatever.
Dont have much time to get into the details now though, maybe some other time.
Well I've had comcast @ home, out of philly, for the past 3 years now and mines basically always been blazing fast in the downstream. I still regularly pull 500kilobyte/s downloads. Sometimes I run simultaneous transfers and pull at least 1 megabyte/s. In other words, your friends aren't too far off the mark. I also get killer pings in Quake, Counter-Strike, etc. In CS I average 15-30 ms to my preferred servers. That being said, the upstream is pretty weak. It tops out at about 50kilobyte/s (these days) and when I do, it absolutely kills my downstream capacity and pings.
As for the relative worth of cable versus DSL, that depends largely on the two providers. That being said, it's been my experience, empirically speaking, that cable tends to be faster than DSL. Although it is true, from a technical standpoint, that cable modems "share bandwidth", this is only unique in that it does it at the headend. In other words, you're sharing bandwidth with people in your immediate neighborhood. However, DSL also shares bandwidth in numerous places, but especially once you start approaching the fiber/upstream. This is where it can really get expensive, and most ISPs tend to oversubscribe these by a very large ratio. Many DSL users do, in fact, get absolutely crappy bandwidth because of this. @home, on the other hand, has truely superb routing, even if they can't run a mail server if their life depended on it.
The economics just aren't there for fast DSL, typically, at a mere ~40 dollars a month, unlike cable modem through a large provider like @home. If you're willing to pay a hefty fee for DSL, you can probably get a truely fast connection, but it's unlikely you'll get an honest to god faster DSL connection (especially with Verizon) than comcast@home for a mere 40 dollars a month. Especially since the even the quoted rates for DSL at any reasonable price is a mere fraction of what I and so many others regularly pull with cable from @home (and a couple others).
Is that those are CANADIAN mbps, worth about 60% of USAn mbps. So the ADJUSTED numbers are 2-4mbps Canadian, 1.2-2.4mbps USAn, which sounds just about right.
Peace,
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Here, with Optimum Online cable, I max out at about 3.2 Mbps, but more realistic speeds are about 1.5-2 Mbps. I'll deal ;)
Mark Prindle, the most underappreciated genius on the web.
Yes, it's artificial. There are many different specs on DSL. First, see the following link:
http://www.efficient.com/tlc/dsltypes.html
What Americans are normally sold is G.Lite. Its a consumer-grade DSL. It is artificially limited, speed-wise. The max speed is 1.5Mbps, but I've seen this advertised as 1.1 and 768 Mbps. This might be marketing, but is more likely the ratings given to the DSL providers by the equipment vendors.
HDSL is quite interesting. It allows for a reliable, consistent 1.54 Mbps both ways, cheaper than Traditional T1's. At this time, more than half of the T1's being sold are HDSL. The Line cards convert the signal back to Tip and Ring for Transmit and Receive at the customer's Dmarc.
In any case, as far as I know, the limitation doesn't provide an increase in reliability. The G.Lite limitation cuts down on the number of frequency channels being used. It does not push the copper wire its hardest. This was probably done to keep the consumer market from choosing ADSL as an alternative to a T1.
rhadc
I've been very pleased with my DSL service. I live in St. Louis, MO and receive my DSL service and ISP from Southwestern Bell. In the 4 or 5 months I've had the service, I've had only one or two periods of time where I encountered problems, and even those times were very short in duration. I typically get the speed that was advertised--1.5 Mb/s download. Almost always the limiting factor is the upload speed of the server I'm connecting to.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
Location: Lorain, OH (USA)
Local telco: CenturyTel
DSL ISP: CenturyTel
Price: $40/month (USD) for residential service with 2-year commitment
Speed: 512/256 kbps
Reliability: fairly good
Cable however, isn't fast anywhere. ;) I live in an area of Ottawa near downtown and there are five buildings in the same place. Most of the connectivity in these buildings is through @Home. I was an @Home customer for a while and got tired of paying $40.00/mo. for 20K/sec on a good day. I have DSL through Magma Communications now and I get 120K/sec. consistently. *shrugs*
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
Here in Toronto, cable (Rogers/Shaw) peaks around 2-3.5 Mbits/sec... DSL here is generally half that, from my experience. A friend of mine has had lots of problems with slow speeds (peaking at ~25 kB/s), and there is extremely noticible interference on his phone line while he is connected.
Also, he's had the bell connection program crash several times, and it often displays debug messages randomly.
In Tallahassee FL I am getting 100 to 460 Kbytes/s down, and 50 to 150 Kbytes/s up.
Life's like that
Sympatico, which is the major provider of residential DSL in Canada, offers a 1Mbit service, which is ~128 kilobyte/sec. The service costs ~$40 per month, apart from any promotions. I am unaware of any company offering a better deal in BC, or anywhere else in Canada.
This despite being the home of AOL and PSINet, and one county over from Network Solutions, MCI Worldcom...
The cable company won't be more specific than to say "We plan to have bidirectional cable modem service for the whole county by the end of 2003." Which doesn't say much, considering that the east end of the county has 95% of the population, and the west end is just a bunch of horse farms. Obviously the east end will get done first, and i'd like to know when that will happen.
Nobody will say anything about when DSL is coming.
So unless you want to pay business rates, you have no high-speed internet options.
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Time (US east) Test Results..
2001-03-28 18:43:01 Speed test 3055/827 kbps
2001-03-28 18:42:03 Speed test 2073/606 kbps
2001-03-27 22:40:07 Line quality 10% loss latency 41.7ms View..
2001-03-27 12:38:03 Line quality 5% loss latency 46.0ms View..
2001-03-26 23:47:07 Line quality 10% loss latency 41.5ms View..
2001-03-26 21:57:51 Speed test 3051/902 kbps
2001-03-26 22:37:02 Line quality 30% loss latency 44.2ms View..
2001-03-24 13:47:11 Speed test 2978/803 kbps
2001-03-24 01:32:47 Speed test 2986/887 kbps
2001-03-23 11:46:26 Line quality 10% loss latency 45.7ms View..
2001-03-23 04:01:49 Speed test 3076/934 kbps
2001-03-22 23:52:44 Speed test 3010/821 kbps
2001-03-22 12:08:32 Line quality 10% loss latency 47.4ms View..
2001-03-22 11:44:28 Speed test 2232/790 kbps
2001-03-20 01:36:47 Line quality 0% loss latency 43.9ms View..
2001-03-20 00:27:16 Speed test 3051/713 kbps
2001-03-19 21:17:58 Speed test 956/859 kbps
2001-03-19 11:04:52 Speed test 2104/808 kbps
2001-03-19 02:40:02 Speed test 2942/859 kbps
I have decent download speeds but terrible PL and latency. These are from last night:
Ping statistics for 209.73.44.138:
Packets: Sent = 9554, Received = 8003, Lost = 1551 (16% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 134ms, Maximum = 299ms, Average = 136ms
-----
Tracing route to quake3server.doublespace.com [209.73.44.138]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 10 ms 9 ms 21 ms secret!
2 31 ms 8 ms 9 ms router-32-57.nycap.rr.com [24.29.32.57]
3 15 ms 9 ms 37 ms router-33-23.nycap.rr.com [24.29.33.23]
4 16 ms 15 ms 17 ms router-33-18.nycap.rr.com [24.29.33.18]
5 10 ms 11 ms 11 ms 24.218.189.126
6 18 ms 18 ms 18 ms 24.218.190.157
7 19 ms 19 ms 20 ms bsgsr01-srp4.rr.com [24.218.189.169]
8 28 ms 31 ms 27 ms 24.218.190.246
9 32 ms 38 ms 35 ms 24.218.190.194
10 164 ms 186 ms 154 ms mae-east-atm-oc12.above.net [198.32.187.18]
11 165 ms 149 ms 149 ms core4-core1-oc48.iad1.above.net [208.185.0.138]
12 162 ms 169 ms 154 ms lga1-iad1-oc192-2.lga1.above.net [208.184.233.62]
13 150 ms 155 ms 162 ms main2-core1-oc48.lga1.above.net [216.200.127.193]
14 173 ms 186 ms 197 ms 208.184.36.229.dti.net [208.184.36.229]
15 160 ms 211 ms 154 ms quake3server.doublespace.com [209.73.44.138]
Trace complete.
-----
Ping statistics for 63.73.156.13:
Packets: Sent = 11072, Received = 9962, Lost = 1110 (10% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 32ms, Maximum = 1520ms, Average = 45ms
-----
Tracing route to 63.73.156.13 over a maximum of 30 hops
1 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms secret!
2 9 ms 8 ms 8 ms router-32-57.nycap.rr.com [24.29.32.57]
3 9 ms 9 ms 10 ms router-33-23.nycap.rr.com [24.29.33.23]
4 13 ms 9 ms 9 ms router-33-18.nycap.rr.com [24.29.33.18]
5 11 ms 9 ms 14 ms 24.218.189.126
6 26 ms 19 ms 31 ms 24.218.190.157
7 20 ms 23 ms 22 ms bsgsr01-srp4.rr.com [24.218.189.169]
8 36 ms 25 ms 61 ms 24.218.190.246
9 34 ms 34 ms 32 ms 24.218.190.194
10 37 ms 36 ms 35 ms 251.ATM1-0-0.BR2.TCO1.ALTER.NET [137.39.92.41]
11 47 ms 36 ms 37 ms 0.so-3-1-0.XL2.DCA6.ALTER.NET [152.63.38.122]
12 36 ms 41 ms 38 ms 0.so-7-0-0.XR2.DCA6.ALTER.NET [152.63.38.90]
13 42 ms 46 ms 37 ms 284.at-5-1-0.XR2.TCO1.ALTER.NET [152.63.33.66]
14 41 ms 64 ms 40 ms 192.ATM11-0-0.GW2.DCA3.ALTER.NET [146.188.163.181]
15 42 ms 43 ms 39 ms appnet-gw.customer.ALTER.NET [157.130.21.98]
16 44 ms 42 ms 41 ms 63.73.156.13
Trace complete.
And just to be on the safe side, here's one from just now:
Ping statistics for 209.73.44.138:
Packets: Sent = 208, Received = 174, Lost = 34 (16% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 145ms, Maximum = 204ms, Average = 129ms
Some more stuff of mine: DSLR Line Quality test, my RR review.
I've been bitching to RR since December about this but they don't seem to care. Since I got RR to play Q3A, the 3 Mbit download speed doesn't really help me much. The massive PL and ping jumps on any backbone provider (similar results on servers routed through exodus) make this connection nearly useless for me. I can't get DSL in my area either. Oh well. Anyway you should keep in mind that there's more to a connection than download speeds. I'd give anything to have a 20 ping. I even considered paying $129/month for 192k SDSL. A friend who has (er, had) NP DSL in MD pings 7 EVERYWHERE. 3 Hops to exodus. I can only dream.
__________________________________________________ ___
rooooar
Actually I'm getting better at 768/768 with one static ip from telocity at just 50 a month and no contract. $10 more a month gets me 4 static ips but I don't need that. FWIW, this is in hyde park.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
I live in Columbia, Missouri, which is at the high point of one of the largest geek concentration gradients you'll ever see (the university is here, but outside of town you're talking about 80 miles of crops in every direction). Unfortunately, the total number of geeks is not so high that we have chronic bandwidth shortages by Boston area standards, but, whenever the issue comes up on the Mizzou Linux Users Group mailing list, the eventual verdict is that cable modems provide much higher potential bandwidth (e.g., up to 3500kbps), but are much more likely to experience unscheduled down time, at least so far.
Before @Home started throttling upload bandwidth, there were more frequent bandwidth issues apparently due to the presence of many servers that aren't technically allowed by @Home but which were tolerated.
With taxes and other dorkiness, the second 12 months of @Home is like $41.96 in our market; I haven't tried to get a better rate from them by threatening to hop onto DSL...yet. :-) In part because DSL is no cheaper at its cheapest, yet has
no bandwidth advantage at all.
Babar
Hope this doesn't sound like a commercial, but I am totally happy with my provider.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the company Novus Telecom by now, maybe I am the only slashdot reader with service from them.
They are a new company in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have not been able to find out much technical information about them as I would like, although I did talk to one of the techs briefly and he said that their entire operations was being run on Linux.
They only service high tech condo buildings and a company or two (they are still very small), I was lucky enough to have them in my building, where each condo is pre-wired with fiber and actually has an accesible BIX panel behind a wall cover.
I don't know who funds them, but I was told (by the tech) that they run their own lines, thus they don't have to answer to any of the monopolies such as the local cable company or telephone company. I have also been told that running to my particular condo building is it's own OC3 line, which is obviously overkill, but I am assuming they have larger plans in the future for my building, which is connected to a fancy new movie theater (perhaps films transmitted over a network, dunno).
Nevertheless, I get amazing transfer rates at the low rate of $40 Canadian a month, and excellent 24/7 service, plus they don't limit the number of IP's you have (dynamic), and their TOS is quiet lax in what you want to do with the service, and they don't care how many computers you have hooked up to a single account.
They also provide a full package of cable with a movie channel, also very cheap, and voice over IP long distance service (both of which I have).
The only bad part is they don't service many places, so I can't hook my friends up with them, but it gives them a reason to be jelious when they come over :)
Check em out at www.novustelecom.com
I'm pretty fly for a white guy
Not sure if my first post made it through, so here we go again.
Novus Telecom (www.novustelecom.com) is a new and very small company in Vancouver, British Columbia. They currently only service a few high tech condo buildings and maybe a business or two. They run all their own line, so they don't have to answer to the local cable or telephone monopolies, and their entire setup is run on Linux.
p>They also provide cable over fiber and voice over IP LD, both of which I have through them and get for a very cheap package deal.
I get up to 10 Mbs, their TOS is very non limiting, they don't care how many computers you have on your connection, nor do they limit the amount of IPs you have (within reason I assume). My internet access only costs me $40 and the speed is amazing, far faster than ADSL (around 8-15 times faster according to them).
I was also informed by one of the techs for the company that my particular condo (which is pre-wired with fiber to each unit) has it's own private OC3 line, which is obviously overkill, however I assume they have future plans for it, either that or they were expecting a lot more heavy bandwidth users. My condo building is connected to a fancy new movie theater (no digital projector yet though), however it's not inconcievable that with an OC3, they could be planning to transmit feature films over a network.
I'm pretty fly for a white guy
Here in NJ, on Cablevision I get 5 MB/s down and 1 MB/s up, if I can find a server that will provide the service. I pay $29.95/mo for this.
The real limits I see are due to the fact that there are really not very many places on the internet that will dish out the bits at these rates.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
192k SDSL costs $150/mo. 640k ADSL costs $40/mo ($20 transport + $20 ISP) 1MB ADSL costs $169/mo ($99 transport + $70 ISP)
In Calgary - Alberta - Canada:
Average download speed: 140 Kbytes/sec
Average upload speed: 55 Kbytets/sec
Two static IPs
Various other stuff I never use (email, webspace)
Port blocked on all ports 130 for incoming connections. (no port 80 webserver or port 25 smtp)
$29.95 + $5.00 for second IP == $35.00 / Month
I've got 512 down 128 up into my house, for about $US 40/month and unlimited (wihtin reason) download.
There's an option for 1.5 down 512 up but it's a business plan, and has a 500mb limit (read: 2hrs downloading). I'd happily pay the extra for the 1.5, but not with a download limit, that's just not cricket at all. Listening telstra?
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Personally, my connection is as such. I have a 384k SDSL line from Covad. On this line I typically get about 36k/sec upload and download.
That said, I'd just like to complain about how SLOW it seems. Bandwidth is like an extremely addictive drug - and once you have some, you always seem to want more.
Some adsl providers also impose caps downstream and don't offer higher than 1.5mbit service, mainly because it's too much trouble.
If you're a big business (*cough*cough*ameritech/sbc), the best way to make money with the least trouble is to make an aritifically small dsl radius, cap the lines at something way below the DMT standard (cap it at oh, 1.5mbit or so), so it's essentially impossible to have any signal problems, thus no need to spend money troubleshooting connections. They wanted something canned and easy (that's the ameritech way) and a small-radius low-bandwidth connection is the best way to do it. That's why you don't see a lot of places selling 6mbit dsl.
I think the upstream cap is rediculous too, i wish we could do something over ladc like hdsl, which we could do reliably if ameritech gave us a cir above 9600baud on ladc...
Not quite. I get just under 1.5M down (128k up) for $39.95 per month here in San Diego, and my dsl speeds are consistent. I have friends in Montreal who get dsl that averages 1Mbps down only.
There are sites that show the max, average and min of dsl providers across the continent. (I believe dslreports is one, speedguide another)
Apparently our feathered BC friend let his nationalism get the better of his ignorance. Nex
But even if you nominally have service in your area, that may not help... Apparently, during times when copper prices have been high BT (or the GPO as it was at the time) went around using steel wiring. So if you're unlucky, you may be within a stone's throw of an exchange and still not have high enough line quality for DSL.
Anyway, BT are capable of screwing up even the best situation. A friend got an installation date from BT for ADSL. They ran a line test beforehand and it passed. Hooray! Installation day arrived, and the bloke hooked up the cable modem and it didn't work. It seemed that someone had done some work between the line test and the installation date itself which buggered up the ability of the line to carry DSL. Can they fix it? Is the Pope a Shi'ite Muslim?
I am extremely glad that I have not had to deal with BT since dumping their phone service for cable years ago, but I am even more glad that I will not have to fight with that hopeless bunch to get DSL installed since I don't live there anymore. Maybe they'll have figured out the difference between customers and experimental test subjects by the time I get back, but I doubt it.
--
Dunx
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
when ever I see that. As for my DSL speeds, my plan through verison is rated at 640 down 90 up. I have seen some big download speeds (600 ish), but I find I'm most often waiting for the server I'm pulling data off of. VA's ftp server is often really slow. I think that's one part of broadband that doesn't get much ink. If broadband becomes global (or just nation wide in the US), big sites will find they need more bandwidth just to keep up. What good is 640k download speeds if I can only get 8k from my fav kernel mirror?
Anchorage Cable Speeds through GCI is 256k and costs $39.99 a month. You can double it to 512k for $10 more.
This is does not include basic cable which is $17/
Where I am moving to in mat-su Cable isn't available and they have the following price break down:
Speed Internet + Express DSL = Price*
128kbps $29.95 + $35.95 = $65.90
256kbps $59.90 + $35.95 = $95.85
384kbps $89.95 + $35.95 = $125.80
512kbps $119.80 + $35.95 = $146.75
768kbps $179.80 + $35.95 = $215.65
*A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer.*
Cable:
3 Megabits/s down, 128k up (consistent)
DSL (TDS Metrocom):
768k/768k, at my location, actual is 707k symmetric.
Cost for Cable: $40/mo.
Cost for DSL: $150/mo.
Cable is a residential line, DSL is a business line.
In Vancouver, BC Canada:
Cable modem with Shaw@Home.
5Meg down.
4 Meg up.
I routinely have people retrieving mp3s from me on napster at nearly 400kB/sec.
No, thats KILO-BYTES PER SECOND, not bits.
As far as I know I have the fastest cable modem in the world.
Note, 400 kB/sec up/down is over twice as fast as a T1.
Yes indeed, life is good.
You know it. But not everywhere in the lower mainland gets this kind of service. I'm in kerrisdale, so few subscribers (few power subscribers) means less contention on the actual shared cable, plus we seem to have very short connections to downtown/everywhere else. 15-20 ms to UBC today.
;-)
But go to north van, and its nasty, you can barely get 50kB/sec down.
I hear though that the new shaw backbone is excellent, people in maple ridge are being switched and its much better, plus another friend got switched and its better.
It appears shaw really is doing something right... that 'big pipe' - OC48 probably helps alot
$39.95 a month for 1.5 megabit down, 128 kilobit up, with one computer connected.
$4.95 for each additional computer.
add $10 if you don't have premium cable TV.
OR
up to eight computers at 512/128 for $39.95.
add $10 if you don't have premium cable TV.
Canada uses microwave links for longdistance across Canada for years, it has been replaced by fiber.
Our phone system is significantly better (Signal to Noise ratio; I remember hearing people complain theycouldn't get reliable 14,400 connections parts of the U.S. ~10 years ago) than a significant amount of the U.S. and the best easily competes with the best in the U.S.
We have high-speed net access in population areas U.S. companies wouldn't generally even consider doing it for.
The 4kHz is the reason normal modems won't go above 33k6 (56k6 requires 1 digital end on the connection). Since DSL has a higher speed than normal modems, I suppose the connections don't go throught the 4kHz filter but are multiplexed at a much higher frequency.
0x or or snor perron?!
It takes a Canadian to find this funny I guess. I haven't laughed so hard at a post on /. in a LONG time. It's so funny when someone in the US makes fun of us, they just HAVE to be doing it in jest. It's too funny.
And if you are blessed with the CBC, tune in on Sunday at 9pm EST to see a one hour special of "Talking With Americans." You'll piss yourself.
DataSquid.net, a little about me.
I've been able to get about 300 K BYTES per second out of the thing. Practically, though, most web sites I connect to only serve at about 50 K bytes. But even then I can initiate 5 or 6 connections to different servers all getting about 50 k each. I'm talking about big file transfers here... for viewing web pages, you don't really need any more than 50 K bytes/s. $45/month.
Two ways in which the transmission time and length affect bandwidth (in very vague terms. I don't have the exact specifics off the top of my head.)
One, the transmission protocol may use collision detection, which requires that a transmitting station detect that another station is transmitting at the same time it is and both stations stop transmitting the now hopelessly garbled messages. The higher the transmission speed (higher bandwidth), the less time for a signal to propagate across to all the stations. The 250 ft limit on the Ethernet 100Mbps protocol is limited because the electrical signal cannot travel much further than that in 1/100,000,000 of a second.
Second, a signal gets distorted the further you send it over a wire. A signal which you might send with clearly defined edges (like a set of stairs) becomes rounded and flat (like sine waves) the further it gets transmitted. This makes it hard to tell whether that rise/drop in signal is meant for one bit or two or more. The faster your transmission rate, the less distortion/attenuation you can afford.
I'm sure there are lots of other reasons which I've forgotten. Suffice to say, wire length will always affect the speed you can transmit at. There are other tricks to speed this up, like putting in repeaters that interpret, clean up and retransmit a clean signal, but you obviously can't put that between a telephone office and your home.
I see references in various /. articles to speeds such as 128k for DSL connections, to me that seems discustingly slow. Here in British Columbia, Canada a speed of 2-4Mbps for a DSL line (ranging from ~$40-100/month) is the norm, and is easily available in all the major centres
I believe you're confusing 128KBytes per second with 128Kbits per second. Big difference. 128KBps is 128*8 = 1 Mbps, which isn't THAT far off from the Canadian numbers. Note that a T1 is 1.5Mbps
DSL speeds are physically limited by the length of the wiring from your home to the DSL provider's modem. The further away you are, the longer it takes for the signal to propagate and the greater the signal degradation. Using Ethernet cabling as an example (I don't have DSL numbers handy) if you used 10Mbps Ethernet, you could have 2,500 feet between the computers linked together. If you boosted the speed to 100Mbps, your computers could then only be 250 ft apart.
I live in the Boston, USA area and regularly get 1.5Mbps from both cable and DSL. It is possible to get higher DSL speeds (up to a theoretical 7Mbps) if you pay more and are conveniently located very close to a box.
However, most companies here advertise 1.5Mbps because that is the speed they can get to most consumers. It makes for much easier billing and logistics (you know, those non-technical limitations.) If you want higher speeds, be prepared to pay through the nose for it.
DSL at my House is up to 1.5Mbps/128Kbps. That is my bandwidth No one else on the line. Cable does have higher capacity overall but that bandwidth is shared with you, your tv, your neighbors computer and tv and so on. This means that sometimes cable users report ungodly speeds (5-10Mbps) but that's rare and dependant on their neighbors tv viewing habits.
Most cable companies prohibit servers of any type (Comcast @home won't install the equipment if they see a "server" OS). SouthWestern Bell DSL does not have this. They say that you can host websites on any of their DSL packages, but that the $80 one with 5 static ip's makes it easier.
I did however have the cable company call me telling me that cable was 39 times faster than my existing DSL.... My math adds that too.. 58.5 Mbps. I laughed and hung up.
I myself have Videotron (cable-modem), I live in Verdun, suburb of Montreal (soon to be merged with the big city).
with it the fastest I saw (on a linux box) was a download of 350 kiloBytes/sec (quite satisfactory)
(My windows could not transfer more then 200K for some reasons). I'm talking bytes and not bits. The measurement are made with FTPing big file...
BUT
the upload rate is locked at 14 kiloBytes/sec at all time so you can't put any kind of useful server to it.
The performance was the same when I live downtown Montreal.
Ofc. you can get as high as 2048, but only downstream, so if you plan to run your own highload local server farm, you need a real leased line.
:)
But the ADSL is cool, complete with a Cisco router which me as a customer can configure as I see fit.
-H
Well, I don't have a cablemodem but I have the same u/d-load speeds. In a while we are going to get 3 MByte (yes, I know that is awesome) per second... Guaranteed :-)
/. rates. It seems limited to about 30kB/s. Those 500k pages take ages... But any local iso download takes about 20 minutes.
What I really hate is
Can't beat glassfiber access from the Uni...
nosig today
Back before Qwest bought USwest here in Utah, they actually refered to the cisco 675 as a router for a while. then it became a "modem". I think that's just so the unwashed masses won't wonder what a router is. I guess in a sense it actually is a sort of modem as well.
Offtopic - Aside from filtering capabilities, CBOS is the bomb . . . much quiter than the 486 I used to use, and much smaller.
this sig is deprecated
disclaimer- I'm not saying that you didn't get that speed from a true origin server, especially if you were using ftp.
that said I think that AT&T has the best setup in town by strategic caching. Just about any http object that you get REALLY fast is coming from a transparent caching proxy somwhere closer to you than you might imagine. Do a traceroute to see where the stops are between you and your data and you'll find a couple of gateways in between.
AT&T doesn't hide this from anyone. If you read the @home site they'll tell you that they use these. It actually saves everyone involved a lot of dough 'cause they check cache freshness if the cache ttl is expired just like you're supposed to, but they save buckets of money on bandwidth.
Anyway my point was that those incredible data rates are *many* times just local caches surging through an unimpeded AT&T network.
this sig is deprecated
Not quite true. ADSL, and all DSL is based around ATM (Your DSL modem is an Ethernet over ATM bridge). ATM has a couple of nifty features, including the ability to guarantee a minimum amount of bandwidth to a given connection.
This means that an ISP could have 100Mbit of bandwidth from the aggregation point to their uplink and sell 100 people 4Mbit links, with 1 MBit guaranteed.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
In my area (mid Wisconsin) there are two companies I could get service from. One provides DSL with quoted speeds of 128k both up and down *cough* *shit* *cough*. The other company offers two downstream speeds for their cable modem access. One is 512k down and the other is 768k down, both having 128k upstreams. I havn't had it long enought to max out the speeds (last I tried I couldn't find the kernel mirror on ftp.cs.wisc.edu which should max my bandwidth).
..my 2 cents
I am totally with you. When I started looking for broadband a year ago, the choices were very few. All the cable modems are available in all other parts of country, but not SV.
I have At&T digital cable in Daly City. But AT&T still doesn't have internet over cable here. Mind you, population density in Daly CIty is high so that is not an issue.
two things that turns me off about SV
- high living cost
- lack of 'decent' broadband access.
Kind of ironic, we live in the 'hub' of internet, and our home access sucks that badly.
I guess it is to do with the infrastructure. Most of the work here in California (and US) were done after WWII (using military personal just lying around after war). So it is pretty old, and can not support anything more than plain old voice. ON the contrary, 'new cities' use more advanced media for phone/cable lines and they can sustain the growth. Not to mention the competition and clue-lessness of major players (pacbell, AT&T) is not helping either...
</rant>
LinuxLover
The bandwidths you talk about are largely unattainable in Britain.
In fact, a "survey" or "report" or whatever reported in the infamous Register suggests that Britain has the lowest-bandwidth, highest priced broadband on the entire planet. The report (pay US$395 to pass 'go') is here.
I can buy a 512Kb/128Kb connection from British Telecom for as little as £50 a month. Plus £200 connection. With 40:1 contention. Oh, I have to run Windows 98 to do it. Or, I can pay £200 a month for 1Mb down, 128KB up at 20:1 contention, and run as many machines off it as I want. Installation is a bit more (£400 I think). Oh, and those bandwidths aren't 'committed bandwidths'. And they change your IP every 2 hours. I can always go to a supplier other than BT. But they have to charge more, because those are the prices that BT charge other suppliers, as well.
I am angry. I work with telecomms companies. One if them (in Europe) is giving *guaranteed* 1Mb down, 256 Kb up, 24*7, home access at 8:1 contention for the equivalent of £18 a month.
Do you ever wonder why UK people are so *fucking* furious?
On the bright side, BT has a market capitalisation of £28 billion, and debts of £30 billion. Way to go, Sir Peter and Sir Ian. (Chairman and CEO)
I love monopolies. Or I will when I get one.
One thing I discovered recently is that, with cable modem service, your bandwidth can be affected significantly by the modem device you use. I had a Motorola CyberSurfer (the big white model) for two years, and never saw anything above 200kbps. In fact, I rarely hit over 180kbps. However, in July of last year my Motorola unit died and Cox replaced it with a Toshiba unit. Since then, my upstream has averaged in the 900-1200kbps range, and downstream regularly hits >2Mbps on fast servers.
That being the case, I'd say that in the San Diego market at least, the bandwidth availability is quite good, but variances in equipment can play a significant role in your measured throughput. This may or may not hold true with DSL, however I doubt it - different technologies.
Do I look stupid to you?
My point (right or wrong) was that the bandwidth of copper wire is not the limiting factor.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Heheh, no problem. I'm glad you took my flame so lightheartedly. :-)
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Is it really true that the last mile of copper wire is the bandwidth bottleneck? I always thought that was a myth, and the problem was the 4kHz filter the phone guys put on voice lines so they can multiplex several calls on one wire.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I live in the OKC metro area (Norman, actually). I have a cable modem. I gets me 2Mbps for $44.95 a month.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I subscribe to the Optus@Home service in Australia. Optus@Home are an Australian joint venture between Optus (owned by Cable & Wireless, though there's news of SingTel purchasing them), and Excite@Home (who I believe are responsible for the @Home cable Internet service in North America, though from what I understand, a lot of their network is run by franchise partners in different regions).
:)
Australian Universities are all (I believe, certainly the major ones are) connected to the Internet through Optus, most of them using ATM. This means that connections from my Optus@Home service to Australian Universities are generally as fast as I'm likely to get, except for perhaps my local hub's proxy server - giving a pretty good indication of the true maximum speed of the service.
Connecting to mirror.aarnet.edu.au (hosted at University of Queensland I believe), I can download, using FTP (no proxying, and a better protocol than http to do speed testing) at around 400KB/sec (that's kilobytes, not kilobits). I'd guess that realistically gives me around 4Mb/sec - not bad at all.
I've actually had 600MB/sec http downloads from the Optus@Home proxy server - but that's rather rare, and it's not a good indication of the service's speed, as it's internal, and doesn't take into account my service's connection to the Internet itself (which is often a bottleneck for Internet Access Providers).
Optus@Home is one of two cable Internet services available in Australia - the other is run by Telstra, who are Australias national, partly-government owned Telecommunications company/carrier. Telstra offer two kinds of accounts - an "unlimited download" account, which is speed capped (I'm not aware of what speed this service is capped at) and an uncapped service, for which you pay per megabyte once you have downloaded over 200MB (it could be 500MB, but for some reason 200MB sticks in my head). The unlimited download account is quite slow compared to Optus' cable service, but from all reports the pay-per-megabyte service is just as fast, if not faster.
Telstra also initially rolled their cable network out using a proprietry system, forcing people to buy their particular cable modem (a modified Motorola CyberSurfer I believe), though they are now in the process of converting it to the DOCSIS standard - all new connections are now DOCSIS. Optus@Home used DOCSIS from the start.
ADSL in Australia is in it's infancy - Telstra and a company called iPrimus are the only ones (so far) offering line rental and Internet connectivity - iPrimus recently pulled their unlimited data plan (well, they no longer offer it to new customers, anyone who signed up on that plan still has unlimited data), I don't know much about the Telstra plans. I believe though that 2 different speed connections - the fastest of which is 1.5mb/sec download.
Our geographical location (away from the US) and expensive telecommunications and Internet charges (Australian Internet access providers, including Telstra and Optus, still get charged per megabyte for data coming from overseas) means that the uptake of broadband in Australia is slow. But we are getting there.
This sounds like the South Park movie part 2
No, Canada now permits local telephone competition, so Telus' monopoly is historic rather than de jure. But due to the economics (e.g., residential service from Telus is priced below the cost of raw wire from them to a competitor), it's very hard for a competitor to sell residential service profitably. Unless it's the CATV, who's already there.
Before I start ... please note the parallel to "distribution" of internet access:
...
... you can't be
... pick one, and
... do you think we should
... boom, overcharging ... to the tune of
What "free market" are you talking about WRT to the California power prices?
It's a lovely story:
power company builds power lines
and power generation facilities
new power generator wants to sell
power to people for less money but
_cannot_ get government approval to
build more power lines
old power company notices this and
jacks up prices because they realize
they have a monopoly on distribution
people get pissed, and in their generally
asinine way demand that "something be done"
CA Government: Ok, let's do something
now all you power companies can either be
generators or distributors
both anymore.
Power Companies: Fuck off.
CA Government: We're serious
sell off all the stuff you don't need for
whichever role you choose.
Power Companies: Dude, if we _have_ to sell
then we can't charge reasonable prices.
Government: Whatever
run for higher political offices?
Power Companies: Lets make a deal, let's lock
in a contract to keep charging those suckers
these exorbitant prices for the next ten
years, and we'll agree to sell off our stuff.
Government: Fine, sounds splendid.
Oh, BTW, we want a bigger piece of the action,
so we're going to set up a committee that you
need to get approval from in order to buy
power to resell.
Power Companies: For fuck's sake.
A while later suppliers notice that the distributors have NOWHERE TO GO to get power
except for the ones that get approved by the PUC
$6,000,000,000 before people notice. In the meantime, the power companies are locked
into the rates that they demanded and are steadily going bankrupt.
To make things more interesting, parent companies (global) of the CA power companies are refusing to give
back the money that they sucked out when they sold off their power generating supplies. They instead
demand to be released from their respective contracts.
Which they got.
Free market? Deregulation? It's all bullshit.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
I guess we're pretty lucky down here in the Netherlands then. Okay, so ADSL and cable are both 512/64 async. At least about whole country can get cable, and a big part can get ADSL too.
:-(
Too bad service and quality of the connections are really bad. Around about 8pm it's just plain impossible to use SSH (or even use the www). Downloads go at around 0.3 kilobyte per second, if the connection is there anyway. If you really want some decent speeds you'll have to get up pretty early or stay up really late. Guess what, people wake me up when the call me on the phone at 2pm.
Another thing, my ISP decided to supply everybody with a new modem (the old one was a 4Mbit Zenith) so they could offer 'better quality'. What they did is limit the downstram to 64Kbit and block all TCP ports below 1024. Bye bye local mail server...
I guess we're not that lucky after all
Why it seems everything these days is so cool in Canada?
/>+
<thinking
Oh, yes! Because of the North Pole!
I have telocity here in Milwaukee. I'm about half a mile from our switching station and I consistently get a good connection ~650-800 kbps down, 200-300 up. (It was billed as 768/384)
Generally, I've been rather impressed with my telocity service. They had one system-wide hiccup when I first got it (nov or dec last 2000) and I didn't have service for a day or two, but other than that Telocity has been rock solid.
Offtopic: I also just finally got a debian box working with it. I have a pentium 100 with ipchains running. It works wonderfully for both my desktop and my laptop computer.
Wow, someone from my town on slashdot. Since you don't have an email or web addy handy, I have to reply here (feel free to reply here or to my email.) I've told my parents in Philly (Chestnut Hill) to hold off on getting broadband until I could find some reliable data on it. My biggest concerns with cable are a) learning how to set up a little network to get multiple (2 or 3) computers on one connection, and b) since our computers are on the 3rd floor and our TV's are on the 1st and basement, it'll probably entail some Comcast guys in a cherry picker on my Dad's prize lawn. Is it a static IP or a DHCP/PPP/proprietary deal?
----
"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
grep -ri 'should work'
Right. This is exactly the conclusion that Garfinkle was pointing out and exactly the reason that I linked to him, since he described it much more clearly than I could.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Now I don't claim to know that DSL is slow. I have no idea, I've never had it at my house. But cable ain't slow. My cable modem provider has put a 12MB file for download at their central site. This download is directly at the other end of the cable infrastructure, so downloading this file is a good test of the cable infrastructure. Armed with linux (as the only OS in my household thank you very much) I set up a cron job to download this file every 30 minutes and report the results.
During the first 21 months or so, I got between 600 and 700 kBytes/s (i.e. 4.8 - 5.6 Mbits/s). Then at about 21 months, roadrunner installed a bandwidth cap, and since then I've gotten between 240 kBytes/s (1.9 Mbits/s) and 260 kBytes/s (2.0 Mbits/s).
After almost 30 months of continuous testing, I have NEVER seen the alleged slow downs that are supposed to come because the cable infrastructure is shared. And it isn't for lack of subscribers in my neighborhood! There are 4 people that I know have it on my culdesac alone!
Now, of course, it's a whole different ball of wax when I try to go to the Internet in general. There I get wildly fluctuating speed variations. (As you would expect) But across the cable infrastructure, I can floor it whenever I want, at any time of day.
My conclusion? I don't know if DSL is slow or not but what Simson Garfinkle said in his salon article is 100% on the money.
And the stuff that the DSL providers tell you about speed is just hogwash. And I'm pretty sure that all the stuff that they tell you about security is also crap.. although I can't really prove that it's crap.
The only thing that I don't like about cable modem is the lack of competition. I wish there was someone else out there other than roadrunner. Cuz they suck. Their mail server is slow, their response to problems is terrible. I'd love to be able to threaten them with switching to another provider. But hey, what's a monopoly if you don't get to stick it to someone!
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
I live in Boulder, CO and have seen drastic differences between ADSL and Cable connections.
Although ADSL has the capability of 4+ Megabit connections, Qwest Communications limits ones max speed depending on how much money you spend a month. $40-month will get you 640k, 6 months ago it was 256k (ATT@Home started offering Cable service 6 months ago). In order to get 1M you need to spend ~$100 a month.
These prices also assume that you choose "Deluxe" service and have a free DNS server. The "Deluxe" service allows one to stay online indefinately, whereas the regular service kicks you off if the number or regular service members goes up and you have been online for a while. When you get bumped during regular service you must waite at least 5 minutes before reconnecting. Also, if you aren't a student using the University service then you have to pay for a DNS server to handle your account, which costs roughly another $18 per month. Therefore, for 640k speeds then expect to pay ~$58 per month.
The cable modem I now have averages download speeds of ~1M, I have seen speeds of no lower than 640k download but as high as 3M. Upload speeds are currently capped at 128k. Due to the competition ATT informed me that if I were to see noticeable degredation of speed during peak hours to contact them and they would alliviate the problem. According to the technicion, when ATT put in the new infastructure they allowed for easy branching of the cable cells to allow for growth. I pay $40 per month, no extra charge for a DNS hookup or having to choose "Deluxe" service.
Qwest is having their lunch taken by ATT right now. I have not heard a single complaint from Bouder users about ATT@Home, whereas the number of people who are discontent with their ADSL service seems to grow monthly. I suspect that in order to compete with ATT that Qwest will bump up the speeds of the basic connection again. I must say, competition can be great when it exists.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Here's a rundown of recent results from the http://www.dslreports.com/ speed test service for my Cox@Home connection in Phoenix, AZ. There's a block of really bad times in there where something was really screwy and tons of packets were being dropped. Other than that it's been pretty good.
There's an East Coast server, a Louisiana server, and a West Coast server that the tests are ran against. Unfortunately which server you chose isn't recorded in the log. Times are EST and I'm in MST so adjust accordingly.
2001-03-31 00:10:48 Speed test 2810/285 kbps
2001-03-30 09:23:50 Speed test 1471/298 kbps
2001-03-30 09:22:21 Speed test 2603/285 kbps
2001-03-30 01:39:56 Speed test 1674/239 kbps
2001-03-29 23:23:40 Line quality 0% loss latency 77.2ms View..
2001-03-29 22:55:39 Speed test 216/259 kbps
2001-03-29 22:48:18 Speed test 739/242 kbps
2001-03-29 22:46:57 Speed test 667/250 kbps
2001-03-29 09:49:37 Speed test 2446/286 kbps
2001-03-29 02:56:01 Speed test 958/327 kbps
2001-03-29 02:55:46 Speed test 1798/277 kbps
2001-03-28 03:28:33 Speed test 2524/284 kbps
2001-03-28 03:17:44 Speed test 2746/285 kbps
2001-03-28 03:09:49 Speed test 3018/285 kbps
2001-03-27 02:31:32 Speed test 2394/285 kbps
2001-03-27 02:18:42 Speed test 2446/287 kbps
2001-03-27 02:45:29 Line quality 0% loss latency 77.6ms View..
2001-03-27 01:54:07 Speed test 2398/285 kbps
2001-03-26 02:18:36 Speed test 2328/286 kbps
2001-03-26 01:47:40 Speed test 2473/285 kbps
2001-03-26 00:35:48 Speed test 2377/286 kbps
2001-03-26 00:34:43 Speed test 1990/285 kbps
I just ran a quick test from Munising, MI using DSLreports, and it came back with 611 kbps down and 247 kbps up.
In my experience, unless your ISP artificially throttles back your available bandwidth, most people will find cable to be significantly faster than DSL
See this link for more details...
"What is not generally well-known is that the upstream cap can also affect the downstream speed -- if the upstream is saturated by uploading (e.g., sending a large PowerPoint file to the boss, or running a Napster or other public service), the downstream will drop to about the same speed. This is due to a weakness in the basic TCP Internet protocol, not Cable or DSL per se, and not the service provider.
Cable Internet is more vulnerable to this problem than DSL. Unlike DSL, where each subscriber has a dedicated connection to the head-end (DSLAM), the Cable Internet upstream path to the head-end (CMTS) is shared by all subscribers on a given cable segment. If that upstream gets saturated, which might be caused by only a relatively few subscribers, downstream speeds take a big drop for all subscribers on that segment."
If Canada gets DSL at 2mbps for $40 a month, I'd say US DSL *is* slower. The fastest DSL speeds in the US are 1.5mbps for $39, which is available in the MidWest. In my area (Northern VA) the fastest available DSL speeds are 640k for $50. There is 1.5mbps service from Earthlink for $40, but that is burstable and rarely reaches that. The 640k DSL is also from a crappy provider, so for all intents and purposes, the most reasonable DSL solution is 416K or 768K SDSL (love that dedicated bandwidth!) for $50-$70 a month.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
My cable (TimeWarner RoadRunner) is ~1.5Mbps for $55/month
Milwaukee Wisconsin Metro Area
XeoMage
I'm pretty familiar with the broadband situation in both Ontario and Oregon.
The bad thing about Ontario is that there's usually only one plan from each provider that is available unless you want to pay more than quintiple prices for the same connection. The good thing is that broadband is dirt cheap.
There used to be two major cable providers in Ontario (Rogers and Cogeco) with Cogeco offering 128kbits/sec upload and 8mbits/sec download. Recently Cogeco upgraded to be on par with Rogers and offers 400kbits/sec upload. I've never had Cogeco myself, but my parents are quite happy with it.
I found Rogers to be really fast. A lot of people complain that they don't get good speeds, but legitimate complaints are rare. With a bit of tweaking, I've gotten every cable modem I've run across to run at 4mbits per second or faster in a sustained transfer. My brother gets 8mbits/sec ALL THE TIME.
Sympatico is a different story. Don't waste your money people. Sympatico is the dsl monopoly up in Ontario. They offer 128kbits/sec upload and 640kbits download. Sure you'll get these speeds, but cable is just faster and cheaper.
I found service outages to be the same for both of them, once every two weeks on average, for an hour or so.
Finally, Rogers used to never change ip addresses on people, but that's recently changed and now it is dynamic (just like Sympatico).
The situation in Oregon is quite different. Cable from AT&T is about the same speed as Rogers when it comes to download, but uploads are capped to 128kbit/sec. I haven't had it myself, so I don't know what service outtages are like, nor do I know if they offer static ip even as an option.
I am quite happy with my ADSL package from QWest. My house is close enough to the switching station that I can get the full 7.1megabit package, but that's a bit too expensive for my taste. I have 960kbit/sec download and 816kbits/sec upload, and I use it to the fullest. I have QOS guarantees since for that kind of bandwidth you have to get the professional package. In the two months I've had this, I've never had a service outtage. I've been disconnected three times, but always while I was at my computer and I could just reconnect again. The downside is that QWest charges 15/month for static ip. Not worth it. You'll also need a router or a dsl modem, but there's a deal going on practically all the time that gives you the modem for free and also a free month or two. The setup I have with dynamic IP costs 120USD/month (Prices for Ontario were given in Canadian pesos).
The salesperson for the DSL was a bit of a twit and mischarged me, but the problems got resolved after a few back and forth e-mails. Remember that the price you pay for the DSL service does NOT INCLUDE ISP CHARGES. These are extra. Don't let the sales-rep trick you into getting the router because "you need it if you want more than one computer connected to the internet". Grit your teeth and lie. The router is probably a good idea if you're living there permanently, but it's just so much scrap if I were to take it back to Canada.
There are other solutions than DSL and cable obviously, but some of these are prohibitively expensive. Cisco offered wireless for a while in Toronto (they still might), you can get OC3 and above from your local tier 1 provider, but only if you're immortal.
1 Mbps down
128 Kbps up
I routinely get these rates.
Thats not true.
All the versions of @home ( Rogers/Shaw/Cogeco etc ) are not capped like that. Sympatico DSL and the resold versions offered by other independent isps are not.
Perhaps there are some isolated examples of this sort of arrangement, but the norm is unlimited transfers per month.
San Diego Road Runner is about the same. 2.5 Mbps down and 250k up, with no guarantee.
- I like pudding.
However, in terms of regulation, I think that DSL has been friendlier to the subscribers in terms of allowing VPNs and allowing you to run your own servers. A lot of cable broadband providers have really started to crack down on this.
I think speed is only half the issue that is being faced here. It's always nice to pull down a file at speeds over the 1Mbps mark, but with all the rules and regulations, what's the point of having all that bandwidth if you can't use it the way you want?
I'd rather keep my slow 640kbps/90kbps DSL line and be left alone, instead of having an ultra-fast cable modem connection where I can't VPN, can't run a server, and can't have a static IP.
I can get up to 48 Kbps sometimes here in Central IL - smokin!
Don't forget that broadband is nothing but wishful thinking if you don't live near large metropolitan areas. So forums like this just irk me.
I don't wanna hear about how "disgustingly slow" you think 128 Kbps is.
128K+ is a shitload of pipe to those of us who will probably not see that (affordably) for a long time -
so appreciate it already dammit.
Is madness a syptom of genius or vice-versa?
Speed:
As measured through zdnet (http://msn.zdnet.com/partners/msn/bandwidth/spee
I use Shaw@Home in Calgary, AB (Canada). Speeds really vary, usually when I'm downloading pretty big (> 80MB) stuff I get between 2Mbps and 3Mbps. But a lot of the time, downloading smaller things (like looking at screenshots) I get closer to 30KBps (kilobytes, not bits). But I know it varies tremendously by area in Calgary too. In some of the more affluent areas of the city, especially those where the majority of households have children, cable can be a lot slower, although people I know who've used it in those areas say Shaw keeps up by adding more and more servers to the higher demand areas.
:) and all the DSL deals in Calgary for the same price have a theoretical down limit of 1mbps, and a lot of them seem to have bandwidth limitations as well, although my friends tell me they're very generous and you'd almost certainly never use it all up (it's somethin on the order of 50GB/month, you'd have to download like two isos/day).
We have DSL in Calgary, too, of course, but personally I think it's a pretty bad deal. Cable is $40/month (Canuck bucks too
Calgary has some of the cheapest Internet access in the world, though. I mean you can get a 256kbps DSL line for $20/month, which is nice if you're not a hardcore gamer but just like some fast surfin'. 56K can be had for free, of course, but non-free (and less annoying) 56K can be had for $5/month, no kidding. It's probably because Calgary's such a new city (130 years old, but almost all of the residential areas have been built in the last 50 years) and the communication infrastructure is consequently very good.
Anyway, perhaps this is redundant, I took a quick skim through the posts and hadn't seen anything about Calgary, so I thought I'd letcha know...
"Caffeine is not an option. Caffeine is a way of life."
will be my Northpoint line any minute now..
The low speed that people are using could be down to their distance from the exchange.
:) ).
Here in Australia, the only speed conenctions you can rent from Telstra are 256kb, 512kb or 1.5Mb. They don't offer anything higher probably because they can't guarantee the service (or their too dman lazy
Another reason could be the connections that DSL providers have to the outside world. For the number of users / modems they have, their outside connections may be too slow for higher speeds. Faster connections for them may be prohibitively expensive too. Reducing the connection speed they sell to end users avoids having to explain to people why they can only ever seem to get 15kB per sec. on a 512kb line.
I've finally managed to get a cable connection in the UK. I had to move house to get it though.
My service provider is NTL and the speed is artifically capped at 512kbp/s download and 128kbp/s upload. The hardware supports up to about 36Mbps however.
My average download rate is 70K/s from Europe and about 30K/s from the US.
Cost is £40 a month including the cable modem rental.
Not great, but it's a far cry from a 56k dial-up.
On the plus side, the cable modem has both USB and UTP connections, with an on-board DHCP server and HTTP remote configuration server built in. Unlike the ADSL service in the UK, which for the £40 a month package, only supports USB & Win98, I can use the cable modem from any OS with a normal network card.
--- I'm sure using a computer was fun back in the 80's. *sigh*
all of us out there with 0kb DSL bring the US average down a lot. Its a little frustrating going from 56kb to 0, but in the end, you get to tell your buddies how K-Rad you are that you have DSL.
Seriously though, I'm stuck in dialup hell, 30 miles from the nearest person with cable or DSL.
:(
SpamapS -- Undernet #Linuxhelp
I know Verizon offers higher DSL speeds, but it costs more. 4.48 to 7Mbps will cost you $189 a month, while 1.6Mbps will cost $100 a month. I think it might have to do with the number of customers. I don't know how populated that area of Canada is, but I would suspect that that might be a reason.
Also, it have to do with the type of DSL offered. Around here most of, if not all of, the DSL providers are providing ADSL.
On the other hand, American companies could just be greedier! We always seem to charge more for more.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
I get 640kbps down / 256kbps up here in salt lake with qwest. Speeds can go into the Mb range if you are willing to pay for it.
The european Telco's pushed for an addition to the DSL standard to enable using normal DSL speeds over ISDN (since ISDN is so widespread in Europe). Maybe american DSL providers don't use it, but it surely is possible.
I don't live in Boston, but I use AT&T Broadband just across the river in Cambridge and I'm very happy with it. Downstream bandwidth is usually over 1Mbit and upstream is around 300k.
SBC *does* offer 6Mbps DSL. However, expect to pay an arm and a leg for it, as this is supposedly a business-class connection. Even with this connection, though, your upstream is limited to 384kbps. This really doesn't make sense, IMO. A business-class connection really should be SDSL, or ADSL going the other way; one would think that the upstream performance is just as important as the downstream performance.
--
Yup, you're a big one all right.
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
You can go with the local PhoneCo (Ameritech, now owned by SBC), and get 768k/128k residential, for $40 a month, with tolerable reliability. It's still half the top speed of a cable modem, which costs the same in these parts.
For a 1.5M/256k business connection, they want $100 a month. And if the reliability is no better than the residential version, it's not worth it.
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
I have Roadrunner cable access in Huntington Beach, CA, and I typicaly get 3000kbps, usualy no less than 2000, and the times that I've tested the speed and made note of it, its never been lower than 1000. Seems usualy the only time things come accross slow is when the source isn't spitting it out fast enough, and not because of my connection...
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
So if it's the case that there's a better environment in which more companies can provide the service, it only makes sense that they would compete in terms of higher datarate at lower prices. For example, here in Mishawaka, Indiana (near South Bend (think Notre Dame)) I have a 768/384 DSL connection through Vectris which is based in Austin, TX (and is also going out of business). Supposedly one can get DSL through a local ISP but only if you've got GTE as your long distance carrier, for some odd reason.
With only two ISPs providing service in the area, it only makes sense that Vectris can get away with charging me $80/mo for my connection. There just isn't the supply to meet the demand.
- Jonathan
In Southfield Mediaone gives great cable access. Even at peak access times download speeds of 1.2Mbps can be expected. When usage is lowest, like at three in the morning reading slashdot, I have been able to get upwards of 4Mbps. Reliability can be an issue if it rains, but what can you do. Anyway comparing US bandwith to european makes no sense. Cities and internet access are setup quite differently in some parts of the world.
"Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble."
On the fringes of the city limits, the quote I was given (when it becomes available) is 128kbs upload, 384kbs download.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
I got it right after it was first offered here (Minneapolis), and I got 640K right away. I have yet to hear of anyone (in this area, anyway) that currently is running at a speed other than 640. There was a batch of folks that were wired at 512 for a while but USWest/Qwest upped them all to 640 a while back. I'm talking about the actual line rate here, not download speed: the result of "show interface wan0" on the Cisco DSL "modem" (router).
And yes, of course that's just the line charge, but if you start including ISP fees you have to consider the differences in ISPs (many won't let you run web/ftp/mail servers, for example), some have router rate limiting, some let you pay more to allow pegging the link all day long.
--
314-15-9265
http://www.qwest.com/dsl/learn/pricing.html
The first three are all sold as "256K" connections, but in reality all are 640 down, 272. And the $20 one is Windows-only. So the (monthly) pricing basically goes:
--
314-15-9265
currently in SF, my home DSL is rated at 160kbps for $69/mo throught Megapath (via NorthPoint in the past, but soon to be through some other vendor as NP is
out of business).
There is a good, short explanation of what factors limit DSL speed. I know that I can increase the DSL speed to my home to a max of 1.1Mbps, but the rate was a bit more than I wanted to spend. I have not seen anyone locally providing the theoretical max of 7Mbps mentioned in the above article. The only people with that level of throughput to their homes (that I know of) are using cable modems.
I get ~700kps both up and down from Darwin Networks in Seattle. The bad news is they charge double for a static IP.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Out here, Comcast delivers cable internet to some places in the city. I'm out of range, so I'm still on a plain old dialup, but a few of my friends have reported speeds up to 8Mbps. (That's bits per second.) This shocked and amazed me, becuase I've heard that cable internet is only like $20-30 per month on top of your regular cable bill. Much cheapter than DSL for certain. Can anyone verify this?
In the early days, I've also heard a lot of rumour about how cable internet was basically shared bandwidth with the rest of the neighborhood. ie- If the kid down the street starts downloading massive warez, your connection is pretty much hosed for the night. Can anyone verify this either?
In many instances (AFAIK) in the US, the provider is imposing artificial caps on rates, particularly upstream. The idea as I understand it is to limit the subscribers' ability to host websites and ftp servers off their DSL or cable connection. @Home was lambasted for this last year (see here for more info), especially after a configuration error at the head-end capped downstream rates!
You can find an international cable modem ISP FAQ with service comparisons here if you're looking for more information. It's dated December, 2000, so take it with a grain of salt.
-drin
Here in Northern Virginia, Verizon controls the last mile. The rule is, if Verizon doesn't offer it as a service, then other ISP's can't either. Verizon doesn't run DSL if you are too far from the central office, so the ISP can't either.
It pisses me off.
http://packetnexus.com
I use AT&T@Home and they recommend using VPN if you need to use smb file sharing. Not sure what you're smoking....it probably depends on the ISP.
ÕÕ
Here in the SF Bay Area at least, DSL is basically an indirect connection to the ATM backbone, so your quoted transfer rate is also the QoS level of your ATM channel. My quoted rate is 384/128, but in fact I typically get 1.5Mbps downlink (never more than 128 up though, probably to keep businesses from hosting their web sites on consumer oriented DSL.)
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
Maybe you should try a little research before shooting your mouth off not that anyone's particularly interested in the opinion of some AC who's probably not even old enough to have pubic hair yet.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
For DSL areas where this is not the case, you can get up to the megabit range, depending on the distance from your central office. Most ISPs I've seen offer 256K both ways with non-static IPs for $40 a month. You want static IPs so you can run servers, it'll cost you more.
From what I've seen of cable, you usually get around 1.5 mbit downstream with a pretty weak upstream.
I've seen wireless providers start to spring up with speeds ranging anywhere from 64 kbits/sec to 3 mbits/sec. Most of them seem to have a pretty odious set of service terms.
Most solutions not involving static IPs seem to run around $40 a month.
FWIW, when I worked at MCI a few years back, we'd lease you out a T1 line for $1600 a month PLUS Local Loop Charges (Which in some cases would cost you more than the line itself.) Oh and if you weren't a business, they didn't want to talk to you at all, even if you could afford the line.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Using @Home (Midcontinent) in Rapid City, SD, I get 10Mbps down and 128kbps up. Routinely get 400 - 450 KBps download speeds from select sites.
main(i){putchar(177663314>>6*(i-1)&63|!!(i<5)<<6)&&main(++i);}
here in the boondocks of Kenosha, WI. Equi-distant (almost) between Chicago and Milwaukee I can get max DSL speeds of 7mbps down, 1mbps up. The technical "limit" on the lines right now. The cost? 300$/month from a wonderful company called DSLi.
I personally think that alot of the reasons you cant get more then 768kbps or what have you is that
A. DSL companies don't want to have to support speeds above that because
2. There's a TOS in most cases which states that they have to keep those speeds as their part of the bargain
C. They dont have the infrastructure necessary to support high speeds, especially if 10,000 people ordered 7mb connections.
And
D. There isnt a large enough demand. There really isnt.
The majority of John Q. Public is MORE then happy with a 768kb connection, or a 1.5mb connection, and cant justify having anymore. So you end up with few companies offering that speed in the US and offering it for a high price. Mind you, 300$/month for a 7mb/1mb DSL connect is a hell of a lot less then my friend who pays 800$/month for a frac t1, its still alot of cash for Inet service. And if they dont have a specific reason for it (I.E. Web server, FTP Server, Porn site, etc, etc) Then they dont want to pay that much.
Not to mention that althoug theres alot of fiber lying around, there isnt enough to support a massive infrastructure of 7mb connections without ferrying in major backbones and what not. I just got lucky as we have alot of fiber running through the Michigan/Indiana/Illinois/Wisconsin lake area, so they CAN offer these speeds here.
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Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
The Canadian speeds are metric. And in Canadian dollars too. So when you compare it to the units of measurement used in the U.S., it's about the same.
Yes. But is this really a performance guarantee? The typical end user doesn't care (directly) about the CIR (committed information rate) on a mythical circuit they will never see, as they do not know an ATM cell from a tuna fish sandwich. You might also think that they care about the portion of total uplink throughput they are getting; again, they do, but not directly. IMHO, in reality, they care only about throughput to hosts they transfer data to; something that the ISP has virtually unlimited ability to pass the buck about.
That's what I was getting at. In Canada there has been less time for viable competition to emerge; telcos have better market positions. So, in their infinite(ly small) capitalist wisdom, they feel more confident about long-term equipment amortization. Thus, higher data rates, low prices.
>The reason you have good comm systems in Canada
>(regarded as the *best* phone system on the
>planet) is because we owned and regulated the
>infrastructure. Decisions were based on the needs
>of that infrastructure for the purpose of
>providing communications services - nothing else.
>Not marketing. Not 'Market Conditions'. Not
>'accounting'. Sure the system was tempered by a
>financial-check, but basically the system was
>built with one thing in mind, and that was
>designed by engineers; not F'ing MBAs.
Heh... Bell's bungling of 1mbit downstream DSL tarifs (and the related rollout of pppoe clients and access concentrators, apparently to vertically maximize their chunk of all such DSL service, which there are CRTC hearings scheduled about) suggest that the engineering-led development is long gone. =)
>When you open up and sell the networks to
>capitalists you will see that quarterly profits
>will make decisions on 'equipment purchasing
>decisions'. Listen to American's horror stories
>about *their* telephone systems and learn what
>the capitalists provide with regards to this
>essential public infrastructure.
I'm not going to get into an argument about what should be considered "essential". (But, hint: DSL isn't it. =)
>De-regulating Public Services and Infrastructure
>is the *worst* thing Canada has done to itself in
>the last 10 years. Its fucking sad that ottawa >has sold us out.
Okay... I have many examples on both sides of the coin.
>De-regulating Public Services and Infrastructure
>is the *worst* thing Canada has done to itself in
>the last 10 years.
I have many examples on both sides of the coin...
>Its fucking sad that ottawa has sold us out.
As I said.
>Capitalists should not be involved in providing
>Cable Television, [...]
What do you mean by "capitalists"? Does really matter, in the area of cable/satellite TV, for example, where services and prices are so highly regulated anyway? (And, for obvious reasons, they at least need to be involved. I want more than one channel, thank you. =)
>The whole idea is disgusting.
Ah, so you're dismissing it out of hand. You wouldn't happen to be a card carrying member of, say, the Marxist-Leninist Party? =)
>moral reality [?]
That's a new one... Perhaps you can try explaining what you are asking using expressions I can find in a dictionary.
>essential infrastrucutre
Again: Oh, no! I can't watch my Wheel of Fortune! I'm going to shrivel up and die! =) [Power, gas, and water seem a bit more essential].
>What is the benefit to citizens?
The usual. Incentive to improve service and lower costs leads to improved service and lower costs.
Huh? "minimums"? Obviously you don't mean that the rates are guaranteed after the CO... And the min speed would also the max speed between you and the CO, since there isn't any line sharing. Are you talking about the lowest negotiable connection rate provided by a rate-adaptive protocol between you and the CO? Having to drop to 384k with any modern DSL protocol would mean that your area must have some insanely long loop lengths... Are average loop lengths higher in the US or something?
I have a feeling that the more recent deregulation of local telecomms in Canada could have a positive influence on telcos' equipment purchasing decisions. However, I can't see demand for connections being much higher per capita in Canada than in the US, and areas of equivalent population density still have higher DSL costs in the US than in Canada.
Here in Waterloo, ON, Canada (University town, high level of CSers in the area) I pay CA$40/month for ~1mbit down, 128kbit up ADSL. During the summer, at home in Yellowknife, NT, Canada (Population 17000 town in the middle of nowhere with a primarily mineral-resource-based economy -- and relatively high average income), I pay CA$60/month for 2.5mbit down, 800kbit up ADSL. In both areas, the local telco high-speed internet connectivity competes at least against competitively priced cable company offerings. (Although, in Yellowknife, the local cable company is a subsidiary of the phone company...)
I average 8Mbps on my cable modem. I occasionally hit 10, which is my max because of the ethernet interface on the modem. Theoretically, I could get upto 35, but I'd need a properly designed modem ;)
---GEEK CODE---
Ver: 3.12
GCS/S d- s++: a-- C++++ UBCL+++ P+ L++
W+++ PS+ Y+ R+ b+++ h+(++) r++ y+
In the UK a pitiful number of users have broadband access. The lucky ones get 512kb/s async access.
In the UK our contention ratios are really bad too. Typically on a 512Kbps ADSL line there is a contention ratio of 50:1. AFAIK in the US this figure would be closer to 3:1 (?).
The monthly cost of 512Kbps ADSL is around £40 (roughly US$57 ). You can't get static IPs with the "residential" product either, you have to pay a lot more for the "business" product if you want static IP.
This is all thanks to BT, the telco that has a monopoly on all the hardware. They are supposed to be losing their monopoly this summer (fingers crossed), hopefully we'll see some competition then and some more realistic prices/bandwidth/contention ratios (and static IPs!)
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Moderator's essentials
are youi crazy my cable upstream is 128k wich blows @home capped it there, but I get a nice 2.4mbps downstream so I am happy:)
"ADSL get 1.5MBits/sec max"? What planet do you come from? ADSL depends mainly on the length of copper between you and the exchange (CO) which houses the DSLAM. Here in new zealand 2MBits/s is considered the minimum acceptable speed. If you are in an area a long distance from the exchange and you get less than 2Mbit/s and you still want ADSL you have to sign a disclaimer stating that you accept the quality of service will be marginal. At my place i get 6.4MBits/s, i think the best possible scenario is around 8-9MBits/s If you want to use the full speed available at your house then you have to signup to a plan where the traffic is charged for. e.g 600Mb/s per month and 20cents per Mb for every Mb over 600. Alternatively for $NZ29.95 (approx US$15) you get the speed capped at the exchange to 128Kbits/s and have no traffic charges. These charges are just for ADSL service from the local telco, on top of that you pay an ISP to connect you to the internet and pay NZ$20-30/month for that.
Keep in mind that average speeds are judged by download rates and therefore could be affected by
This is the fastest service the twin cities offers for residential DSL for $50/mo without a boost to $80/mo, and that group only does DHCP. DSL rates go much faster, but prices scale as well. I also think it's absurd that some companies charge $100+ for 128kbps DSL
Keep in mind that average speeds are judged by download speeds and therefore could be affected by rates at the sending end and bottlenecks over the internet.
Proof-reading. It's a good thing :)
Its nice to know we have companies that think we dont mind paying $40 a month for cable and dsl, when the speeds are only 128k to whatever they may be. Here, we are buying the term cable and dsl, since advertisers know how to market it as that and that the average user doesnt really know anything about it except that cable and dsl "are in" and modems are "out". The common internet user, probably notices it is faster, but does not realize just how fast. PrOn downloaders, do realize this lust for bandwidth as well as the LPBs in Counterstrike. Damnit, i want to stream pron live at 1600X1200 res so i can ser her kidneys.
who told Canadians they could use our cuss words?
Qwest==faggot
sopwath
You are all so happy to live in a country with reasonable internet connections. We here in medieval germany have to deal with ex-monopolist Telekom, who "offer" DSL with 768 kBit/s downstream and 128kBit/s upstream. I ordered this last year in September, and still don't have it. Last time I heard about there were 500.000 germans waiting for T-DSL.
Fortunetaly I live in Hamburg, where a local company HanseNet now offers a "broadband-smile" DSL line with 2MBit/s down and 192kBit/s upstream. I really hope they will give it to me soon...
This sig is stolen from someone who had a much better idea than I had.
Lets face it, the telcos here in the states do such a poor job at upgrading and maintaining their infrastructure, that they are well behind a lot of others in the world. They would rather try to sell me call waiting, caller-id, or any of the other marginally exciting technologies, than try to fix the antiquated systems they have. Why ? They don't have to do any work, and recieve an income to boot.
In my area, I had tried for 4 years to get the local telco to get some sort of high speed access to my residence (I was down to begging for ISDN), no way. They had no future plans to make even ISDN happen. Last year cable access came to town, and I kissed the telco goodbye (and removed the second line), and have never regretted it. Still a year later, the local telco can not get high speed access to the residences in town. I guess they do not want that business ?
Now they continally call me about wanting me to buy this lame service or that lame addon. No way ! I finallly had to ask them to take me off their call list. What a shame. They don't get it, do they.
Now we have the wireless fiasco. Visiting Hong Kong a couple of years ago, I was amazed that everyone had a cell phone. They were everywhere. In the airport, I could hear all kinds of tones, bells, etc. going off from all the cell phones. Wow, I thought, this place is crazy about cell phones. I asked around and found out that it is acutally cheaper to have a cell phone than to have a desk phone in Hong Kong. Now is that a novel idea ! I wish the US telcos would just price the cell access the same as the wall phones.
All comments are my own (Unless I am having a out-of-body experience).
I think that this has something to do with the exchange rates...
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
Even in the larger cities, DSL availability is extremely limited. I live within 20 miles of Dallas, yet DSL is not available, nor will it be for a long time to come because we're serviced by a "remote CO" -- basically a small building that doesn't have the room for DSL equipment. You have to live with what you can get.
But to my real point. As i said, i have had this cable isp for over year now (closing on to 2) and while most of the time i get decent speed while downloading stuff, all pings are horrible. I have never and i do mean never seen steady ping under 100ms except to the next hop in my traceroute to the world. No matter if the site im pinging is in Finland, or Sweden or States, pings can vary from 80-2000ms. Thou most usually its around 130-300ms. And the frigin packet loss. 10-35%. Man, try writing code thu ssh with packet loss of 30% and ping around 500 and you see how things are with cable connections (atleast in Finland & with HTV) (And yes, there is nothing wrong in cabling, all have been tested with good equipment)
As a comparisement, all finnish isp that support DSL service have much better reputation (infact, im going to work in one) and people have made websites out of their own experience with they have turned down their cable and ordered dsl lines. Here's some "downtime" statistics pages of people who use HTV cable line. First, Second and third one
For a bit of amusement, i must say that people are starting to act like those "cable subscribers" in that Pasific Bell DSL commercial (check out adcritic for laughs, and sorry, no linux there, its in *quicktime*). Well, when i first saw it, it made me laugh too but now, its so so real.
--
yush
MediaOne/AT&T Road Runner in the Boston area is very good. I've seen consistent 1.7 Mbps transfers down and 300k/s up. Hardly ever drops out.
No restrictions on servers, either.
There are a fair number of ADSL vendors here, plus the local cable company. Sure, it's colder and the taxes are higher, but we have more high speed options AND the beer is better!
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
The DSL set-up by Bell Canada is quite bad the maximum bandwidth is regulated so you can only get around 128k/sec.
The cable service by Videotron is a nice smooth 2MEG/sec for $30 Canadian.
I'm from South Mississippi. I'd like to think I'm one of the brighter ones (I can count to twenty without taking my shoes off.)
In my hometownof Biloxi, there are two options for broadband. The cable company offers service (560kb downstream / 128kb upstream @ $50/month) and BellSouth just recently rolled out it's own choppy DSL (1.5 Mbit downstream / 128 kbit upstream @ $50/month). While neither have absolutely outstanding upstream rates, the DSL does provide the downstream rate as advertised. I've never used the cable, but I have friends who say it has brief outages. The DSL disconnects randomly. Suffice to say, it's mediocre down here in the Land of Cotton.
1.5/384k, 4 static IPs, $90/month in the Chicago suburbs. Downtime has been almost non-existent.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Mine isn't capped for total usage... and it's fast too!
I think some of the discrepencies are from bit vs. byte rates... and all good /.ers know that there are 8 bits to the byte. I think european numbers are to the bit, while US numbers are to the byte... food for thought.
AF-Design, web development.
i am dieing with a sudo 1.5 conection to here yu get 2-4 (i realy realy hate u)
> See here for details.
/. vs Kuro5hin and ... ~. wins? what a great plug for Smokedot! Hoorah for the little guy!
It's
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I have friends that get 7mbps in boston. Your maximum speed relys on what service you have, how much you pay, and (mostly) how close you are to your service's routing station.
I've seen DSL get as fast as 7mbps while cable modems get as fast as a T1 (or in some cases, slightly faster - I have a friend who beta-tested it years ago).
The real difference is that Cable modems are variable speeds, a lot like a shared T1, while DSL is guaranteed throughput at the speed you pay for. If you pay for 128kbps, you get it (anything slower is the other side's fault). There are different types of DSL as well, differing on max speed and upstream (server) speed. DSLreports.com has a good review of DSL speeds, stating "A T1 has long been the favourite line to host a corporate server on, and the top SDSL speed is the same as a T1, and the top ADSL speeds are a lot faster than T1"
Slashdot had an article a while ago that pointed at a good dsl vs cable overview at salon.com.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I also am in the Charleston, SC area. I have DSL. My dad has Cable, and I have a neighbor that has cable. They both get about the same transfer rates that I get. It all depends on traffic and the such. I've gotten better rates than they on some DLs and vice verca. What cable supplier do you have? They both have Comcast. I have Bellsouth DSL. -Sam
In the Twin Cities, MN, your only DSL choices really are Covad or Qwest (unless you wanna go cable via AT&T).
The qwest package called Deluxe which gives you 640k down/256k up for $29.95/month + ISP costs. Which is interesting because their basic DSL service offers 640k down/256k up for only $19.95/month + ISP costs. The comparison is here:
http://www.qwest.com/dsl/learn/256compare.html
Rumor around town is they increased everyone to this because they couldn't control it. But I am not really sure. This all happened around the time of the USWest and Qwest merger. I am not sure what Covad offers.
---------------
-- sed s/liberty/profit/g US.Constitution
I was a lucky one, I'm less than a mile from a CO and only had to wait 1 month for the connection. I have friends who live in the suburbs who have waited as long as six months. Some were told flat out DSL would not be available in their area any time soon.
---------------
-- sed s/liberty/profit/g US.Constitution
In my area in Chicagoland (NW burbs), we get 3mbps down and 128k up. Of course, neither is guaranteed. Average bandwidth is like 900/100, but latency is poor lateley.
I have Optimum Online cable access here, and my speeds typically run (on long downloads, like MP3s, videos, and ISO images) from 20K/sec to 250K/sec, and as high as 350K/sec. So far, we've only had one outage (that I've noticed) in over 6 months, and that one was no more than an hour or two long.
--- Remove all references to mud-dwelling quadrupeds to email me.
Speed:
Up: 128kbps
Down: 768kbps
Line Type: DSL
Service Provider: Velocitus (Formerly RICA.net)
-------------------------
Stupid people suck.
"Life is too serious to be taken seriously." - Mike Leanard
Here in Laguna Canyon there aren't as many people on the node, so I see download speeds as fast as 500kps on my cable connection. People just over the hill in Aliso Viejo get much less bandwidth as there are more accounts on those nodes.
Unfortunately, I rarely get anything over 50kps when I'm pushing out.
The cheapest services in the Seattle area (~$40) are 768k down/128k up.
You can probably get slower, but you won't pay any less AFAIK.
2mb/s official speed on my system in Prince George (that's a little under 300 kilobytes/second) I could up it to 5-7 mb/s if I were willing to pay more than the minimum $40/month...
AFAIK this is a fairly normal speed in British Columbia anyways. Coworker in Fort Nelson's apparently somewhere around that too but I can't confirm that
I will say I get -much- better connections to Canadian sites than I do to US sites... Sometimes to the extent that if a canadian mirror doesn't exist I go to asia or europe (I suspect this is due to where the bridges are). Oh, sorry about the really broken english and lack of sense but I'm rather incoherent right now from programming overload. Hope it makes sense *g*.
I've worked for an ISP that provided cable modem (CM) service, and I have used both cable modems and DSL. It does depend on the provider, yes, but there are also other factors to consider.
With cable modems, the speed also depends on where the concentrators for your segment of cable are (that includes how many others are using the service, and how much bandwidth is available to your segment), and any sources of line noise or other problems.
With DSL, the distance to the CO (central office) affects your speed (the further from the CO, the lower your speed will be), as does the quality of the lines between you and the CO (in your walls, building, between your building and the CO, and the lines and equipment in the CO, plus any sources of line noise and the like).
Another factor, but one you may not have considered, is the bandwidth of your provider out to the rest of the Internet. If you have 4Mbps to your location, but the provider only has a 1.544Mbps T-1 out to the rest of the 'Net, then your game of Q3 with your buddies from work/school who are also on that provider may be great, but you will likely see a slow download from SourceForge or your favorite p0rn site at peak usage times. (Over-subscribing bandwidth would not be surprising-before such high-speed services, it was not uncommon for providers to subscribe users sometimes to the rate of 10 to 15 per available modem line, because on average you won't use your capacity to anywhere close to 100% most of the time.)
Providers may also limit the bandwidth of uploads to discourage the running of servers from their networks. Many of them may consider the ability to run a web or mail server a billable service to be offered to commercial customers, and thus may offer higher speeds or additional addressing in their packages aimed to their business clients. (It would not seem to be very prudent of them to offer partial T-1 access at several hundred dollars per month and turn around and offer T-1 speed DSL/CM service for $50 per month when the customer can get a box to do NAT and put their entire office on that DSL/CM connection for an initial few hundred dollars or less, now would it?)
Since they are also the ones to catch the brunt of (calls / emails / other complaints) about (SPAM / illegal materials / hack attempts / etc.) that appear to originate from their network, even if they have no control over such, limiting such things by limiting the ability to run servers can sound like a reasonable step.
Not attempting to justify anything, just pointing out a few things to consider.
I just got a 1.5mbps/256kbps DSL installed to my apartment with a 768kbps/768kbsp SDSL on its way for hosting purposes!
Im happy and im far enough away from any major city (southwest of Atlanta) that it took a while to get stuff rolling here
Jeremy
That was about five months ago with Telocity as the DSL reseller. We switched to Road Runner because there were days when we couldn't even check our mail the connection was so bad. But, the IP was static and they were flexible. We were within 1000 feet of the Ameritech (SBC) junction. Service declined rapidly after we signed up and other jumped on the bandwagon. Road runner is a bit more consistant. It still seems to get a little slow during peak hours. We've seen close to 2Mbps. But, when the power goes out in our neighborhood, they kindly rotate our IP for us. It's a pain.
~It might look like I'm doing nothing, but at the cellular level I'm really quite busy
I've been working for one of the largest networking company right now, in precisely a position to comment.
The situation with DSL speeds and prices is related to a number of things, including:
- the provider's bandwidth allocation policy and/or DSL packages
- the provider's competition in a particular area
- the network infrastructure
- your last mile infrastructure
- what your needs are
- what else you subscribe to from the provider (e.g. long distance, cellular, cable TV)
Generally, the US and Canadian DSL landscape are identical. You can get slow speed DSL in the range of 684 Kbits/second downstream and 128K upstream, or if you're lucky enough to live near a Verizon Central Office, you can get their Premium DSL, which clocks in at 7.1 Mbits/second downstream, and somewhere in the 1.7 Mbits/second upstream. Now the only problem is - Verizon are assholes, and are getting sued by customers and competitors alike. They're the largest RBOC (Regional Bell Operating Company) in the US, with more fiber and local loops than any other RBOC, and they know it. They're a massive bureaucracy.
Then, there are two physical factors - your distance to your DSL provider's central office, and the quality of the copper wiring in your apartment or home. Truth be told, you can purchase the fastest DSL available, but if the infrastructure and/or distance are poor, you can end up with bandwidth much lower than a guy paying for much cheaper DSL.
All in all, the DSL landscape is relatively the same - you're limited by a variety of factors and there isn't a lot you can do about it, short of either moving or paying for your entire last-mile infrastructure to be upgraded to new copper or coaxial or fiber.
On the horizon, we can all look forward to two technologies in the 3 to 5 year timeframe that will alleviate things a bit:
VDSL - this is just DSL with new, better DSL modems and a provider that has planted fiber in the network further to the edge, like into your neighborhood.
1st generation VDSL downstream speeds will be up to 13 Mbits/second average, upstream will be 1.6 Mbits. Then VDSL version 2 will deliver 26 Mbits/second downstream. VDSL version 3 will deliver 53 Mbits/second downstream.
The second technology to watch for is optical Ethernet. Various groups are currently working on making Ethernet as robust as Sonet, and companies like Yipes are offering Ethernet service by the Megabit. Eventually, the network in your metro area may be identical to the network in your office, and the long-haul DWDM highways doing little more than serving as fat Ethernet pipes.
Anyhow, T3 = 45 Megabits/second, costs roughly $3000 a month as per my latest figures. Yipes sells 100 Megabits/second Optical Ethernet bandwidth for $1000 a month, so over 2x the bandwidth for 1/3rd the price.
Eventually, Ethernet will probably migrate to residential applications as well, most likely multi-tenant units first (read: apartments, condos).
This rollout is contingent largely on one thing - competition. ILECs and CLECs are in competition with each other, and with other startups, and with fixed wireless MMDS and LMDS providers, and now with WON (wireless optical networks) providers, and lastly with the pervasive cable cos.
However, in some areas the ILEC is... the ILEC. The incumbent, with little to no competition. With these folks getting their margins on voice and data squeezed like crazy, they are not going to start planting down Fiber to the curb or fiber to the MTU when it's going for $250,000+ dollars per mile and they need to lay down multiple miles of the stuff.
So the short explanation for the DSL situation - your access to DSL is, for the most part, the product of the competition for the money you shell out in voice and data services.
In Canada, Rogers and Shaw have been pretty aggressive with their @Home Cable rollout, so therefore the ILECs and CLECs have been forced to either respond, or watch their customers migrate away. That translates directly into: faster DSL speeds and more aggressive pricing.
In the US, there are still towns where the only game in town, short of you shelling out 6 to 7 figures, is to take whatever your ILEC offers. That may very well be dialup for all I know, in some of the smaller tier cities.
In the long run - if 3G wireless providers are smart and the rollout is quick (highly unlikely given the massive prices paid for spectrum, and other issues), you may end up getting your broadband from your cellular provider.
Hope that explains or helps, in some part. Too lengthy... sorry.
Here's some URLs for anyone interested. Sorry about not using HTML.
d sl .htm
Yipes - the Ethernet service provider. 100 Mbit/second for $1000 a month... nice. Mind you, they're a startup, and probably bound to go bankrupt if their peers are any indication.
http://www.yipes.com/
Enkido - 100 Mbit not fast enough for you? How about your own personal OC-768 connection? Trouble is - there isn't a single company or use on the planet requiring 40 Gigabit/second speeds.
http://www.enkido.com/
Light Reading - the best news site on the Internet for optical networking, IMO:
http://www.lightreading.com/
Verizon - the bastards offering 7.1 Mbit/second and getting sued by many, many parties:
http://www.bellatlantic.com/smallbiz/prodserv/i
Of course, Verizon's service varies wildly with the area in which you live, so be sure to navigate to their homepage and start from there> Products and Services > (Home or Small Biz) > Choose state, etc...
Techweb - good general tech industry website, some optical and wireless announcements:
http://www.techweb.com/
Silicon Strategies - good site for silicon-related info, especially chips like MPUs, RAM, and companies involved with them. Also wireless and optical announcements here as well:
http://www.siliconstrategies.com
Enjoy!
For goodness sakes, please someone either answer this or mod this up!
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
My cable provider (www.quick-time.ch) has a flat rate offer with 256kbps up and down for CHF 59/month = $33. Installation was quick, the cable modems used are from Terayon, and I haven't had a single failure in 4 months.
--bb
Karma: none (due to not believing in reincarnation)
Not True.
I have a cable modem (Cox Cable Phoenix, AZ...uses @Home) that has a minimum 1.5Mbps down, 256kbps up.
I use it to connect from work with ssh and sftp and routinely get transfer rates in the 3-4Mbps range down and 600-800kbps up. And that's for $30/month plus $15/month modem rental!
The DSL in this area (frow USWest now Qwest...an absolutely shitty company!) is 256kpbs down and (I think) 128kpbs up, for a little bit more.
Here, in Czech Republic (no it's not in Africa, it's next to Germany ... yes, Germany is in mid-europe), tehere is NO DSL, only one company is making Cable network (slow, many users). For $80/month you can get 28.8 analog link form 'Czech Telecom' (which is company which was monopolized by law until 1.1.2001) ... and it's only wires. So there is only one high-speed (for UK people low-speed) solution and that is wireless. Sad. I have that 28.8 leased line and i would be like for even 128kps at $100/month.
People who like this sort of sig will find this the sort of sig they like.
I was watching a program the other night about a small town way out in the middle of nowhere in the Nebraska panhandle. The town decided that they needed to keep up with technology because they were so remote. They put in fiber everywhere to within 3 miles of everyone in the county. There are farmers out their with fast DSL connections. I just got my cable installed a couple weeks ago in the 3rd largest town in NE so I didn't cry about it.
I have DSL through Ameritech, which is in some way monopolistically aligned with SBC to give me DSL (dis)service. Although they are morons and accidentally shut off my DSL line because I "didn't call back to schedule my final install date" (the installation was completed in November), they had previously limited my service to 768kbps downstream and 384kbps up. The limiters don't actually work all that well; I have seen speeds as high as 1.1mbps, and though that is nowhere near what it would be without limiters, it is still higher than the supposed 768kbps maximum. If you can avoid it, though, don't deal with Ameritech.
See jetstream for details. It's offered by our monopoly telco, Telecom. They only say 2Mbps+ most of the way through the site, but if you poke around you can get a graph showing installed speeds They offer 2 plans, the Jetstart plan (which I personally use) has unlimited traffic, but is speed limited to 128kbps. However, I can connect to the "jetstreamgames" realm and get full noise ADSL, which for me is 8Mbps down, 800kbps up. Within the realm is mainly game servers but it does have a couple of ftp servers as well. I did have a ftp log (can't find at the mo')showing an average of 430KBps on a download of a 28M file. That is, it came down the line in about a minute. ;-)
So, who immigrating
The upstream for the local DSL provider, /24 as our
securespeed.net, **is** the cable company,
Time Warner/Road Runner. FWIW, a traceroute
shows their gateway on same
Road Runner box (just a consumer account) running
over exactly the same path. My understanding is
that they charge **more** than RoadRunner. Of
course they also promise their users will never
catch a virus, either. What was that line
about underestimating the American public?
Best I can tell, DSL operators make Cable Cos
look **good**.
The difference is clear here in Tampa Bay. Verizon's DSL customers are constantly complaining about unreliable connections, and even those who have reliable connections are not thrilled with the speed. It seems equivalent to ISDN.
I just got Time Warner cable access last night and I am very impressed. At peak, I got 4Mbits (512Kbytes/second)! I averaged 230KBytes/second on most downloads. My friends with Time Warner here in they Bay and in Orlando have had the same experience. I haven't heard anybody complain about it.
In the UK a pitiful number of users have broadband access. The lucky ones get 512kb/s async access. The rest are stuck with modem access that's supposed to give 56kb/s but often provides just 33.6.
Essentially, we have two offerings (though you have to be lucky to get either!):
The Register had a good story on how the uk and europe trailed the US and Canada.....
I'm connected to Cable via NTL and am very happy. Sure, the 2mb/s link at work is nice - but 512kb/s is plenty for SSH ;)
"Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that Mary said, the Feds were sure to know."
We just got DSL in our store, in Cary, North Carolina (10 minutes from Raleigh) and are unimpressed with our speed. The CO is 13000ft away from us (about 1 driving mile) and we are only getting 140K downstream. I haven't clocked the uploads yet. We really don't do that much uploading, even email.
It's surprising because the street our building is on was constructed fairly recently. The street and building are only 3 years old, and is the next street over from the CO.
BTI gave us a courtesy call yesterday, and when we relayed the speed to them they weren't surprised, and didn't offer any advice or assistance.
At this point, I think it's time to drag out the contract and see if we have anything specified. I didn't personally order the service (my boss did) so I'm unsure what we are in fact paying for. But 140K? That seems very unlikely to be our max.
I've had cable (Ottawa, ON) for about a year and a half now. When it works, the speeds have been pretty good most of the time.
However, at the end of this month I'm going to switch to DSL, because I can no longer tolerate the poor quality of service that Rogers@home is providing. I'm talking three-minute outages every couple of hours, ping times to the gateway (first hop) that are sometimes upwards of 2 seconds, etc. Enough is enough.
The DSL provider I'm going with is a small company who guarantees certain minimal performance, and whose owner I can page 24 hours a day if need be. Their terms of service don't prohibit any kind of usage (run a server, serve porn, whatever).
For me, I'll be happy enough with 128Kbps or whatever I happen to get, because I'll finally be able to rely on my connection again -- getting out when surfing at home, and getting into my LAN when I'm on the road.
A reliable service with techs who know what they're doing is, in my mind, WELL worth a small trade-off in transfer capacity.
-ben
myselfmusic
QWest (formerly known as US Worst), Denver, 512 kbps down (nominal), usually 40-50kBps actual (not too rare to see it go up to full 64 kbytes, especially with multiple connections). 30$ mont (20$ for cheesy 'modem-like' semi-dial-up) plus ISP (which need not be QWest... a definite plus over cable options here).
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Here in Windsor Ontario @home once had a 15K/sec upload cap, but through the grace of god, it was upped to 45-50K/sec out of nowhere a few months ago. Well thats at least what gkrellm is reporting when people are stealing mp3s through my napster port. Fastest download I can get is about 220K/sec through ftp.mozilla.org. Both are more than enough for me.
"those of us in cow country who are in the know..."
:)
Wow! Did you know my cable service has been just fine without any problems for quite a few months now ? Probably not
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(Isn't that from the Simpsons?)
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I live in the same province as the Ask Slashdot question comes from. Telus almost never goes down, almost never is pig slow, and almost never jerks you around.
The only real problem is it's so popular the damn unionized workers can't get their fat asses in gear to install more lines.
Hope that helps. HAND. :)
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"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
You failed to mention that after factoring in the current exchange rate the speeds are about the same. Metric bits also skew the results.
one better than mcleodeight
What do you mean low? I can pull downstream 2MegaBYTES per second. That is not low, that is kick butt fast. Hell, for $40 a month it is also a damn sweet deal!
One reason for the lower speed limits on many connections is that the connections are installed in large urban area's all at once, as opposed to the piece meal system that Canada and Europe have going. When a single TelCo is passing through it the bandwidth of three of four major metropolitan cities, you HAVE to limit the bandwidth. Granted, their are multiple telco branches, but the telco itself is still paying for things by the byte/bit/whatever.
I live on top of the NW Gigapop (can damn nearly throw stones at it) so I am a BIT biased here, heh, my speeds tend to kick the shit out of anything that most people in the U.S. normaly get. I am also lucky, AT&T COMPLEATLY owns my city, and it turns out that who ever is in charge of running this place seems to be doing a damn fine job of it. Outages are almost nil, service is great, and the people actualy know what they are doing. That, and dispite the monopolistic status of AT&T in this area, they are keeping prices rock bottom low.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Hell we don't even know what that is out here except by our fone line connections.
I recently got ADSL through Southwestern Bell in the Austin, TX, area, and I'm getting 384K down/128K up for $40/month. I'm relatively far out from the CO, though, at 14,300+ feet. Normally, I get around 35K/sec download times, unless I use something like Download Accelerator. Then I get anywhere from 80K/sec to 125K/sec. It certainly seems like there is some sort of speek cap on my service, though. When I'm downloading large files, it doesn't seem like I'm getting a constant stream. The activity lights aren't as solid as I would expect. I dunno. I wouldnt' be surprised if SBC was limiting the speeds.
----
Wyntermute, resident psychopath
"Remember that you're unique - just like everyone else!"
If ever there was a need for a standard, surely /. has just proven it. mbits, KBps, kBps, kbps, MBps. How can you know what someone means? Are you measuring from MSN's bandwidth page or from a file ftp?
There are so many units being thrown around, how does anyone know what anyone else is talking about?
I live North-East from the Washington Square, and can't get DSL either. But at least the dialup is usually 49,333.
Are you sure your modem and computer are OK?
I had some experience when a modem was giving between 32K and 38K until I put it into different box where it started working significantly faster, up to aforementioned 49,333.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I also know people who recieve DSL service from (SW)Bell and Mindspring. I don't know the numbers, but overall I've heard that Mindspring DSL is at least 3x faster than SWB.... I think mindspring caps off at about 1.5Mbps though...
I've had cable in houston for over a year now (courtesy of TW/AOL), and I've been getting downstream speeds of 2Mbps+, and upload speeds of 384-512Kbps.
I also know people who recieve DSL service from (SW)Bell and Mindspring. I don't know the numbers, but overall I've heard that Mindspring DSL is at least 3x faster than SWB.... I think mindspring caps off at about 1.5Mbps though...
DSL reports says my connections rocks and I agree.
Check out the times Optimum online is posting.
I'll move when it starts to suck
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This
Can you say "Baby Bell"? The masses are pacified with their little dial-up connections so they don't even want to hear are arguments for DSL. Hell, the phone companies can barely provide reliable plain telephone service. Don't believe me? Look at Ameritech. Ask anyone in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan or Ohio(me).
the deacon...that's all you need to know for now
I regularly get between 500kbps and 4000kbps on our @home cable. (south west washington area).
Daniel
2.5 Mbps download, 768 Kbps upload is what I have here in Montreal, Canada from UUNet.. err WorldCom.
It's very reliable and I'm generally working on top speed depending on the speed of the other site.
Matt
Don't take life so seriously; it isn't permanent.
I pay $30 to the telco & $20 to the isp for 640k down/272 up
as always, the biggest cap comes from the originating server and bottlenecks between. Recently, I have seen a couple downloads that were exceptionally healthy comeing over my roadrunner cable modem-- just over 240 KBps, or 1.9Mbps. woo hoo!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Were you able to get a static IP and run servers from the 7.1 Mbit down/680Kbit up DSL line?
I'd trade downstream for upstream in a second. Cox@home Mesa AZ 40 bucks a month after cablemodem rental fee. Supposedley 3.3mb down & 256k up Maximum Speeds Obtained - 1200k down, 96k up Average During Peak Hours - 100-300k down, 29k up Off Peak Hours - 300-700k down, 37k up Uptime is 99.9%, better than our T1 lines at work.
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
In my area, Wilmington, NC, It is not uncommon for me to get speeds between 1-2 Mbps. I am also only about 4 kilometers from a CO. I seem to remember reading an article in Scientific American about the future of Broadband (October 1999), it of course had an article concerning DSL. It mentioned something about a then emerging, global standard called G.Lite. G.Lite limits the data rates to 1.5 Mbps downstream and 0.5 Mbps upstream. By limiting the speeds it allows for about 70% of American households to reliably experience the same results. It also lowers costs and power consumption. It may be that G.Lite or a form of it has been adopted by a majority of the providers of DSL in America.
I had always thought that the upper limit of current DSL technology was about 7Mb/second. Here, my local company (Qwest) has up to 7.1Mb. The price here does seem a bit higher here than what he was quoting up there, it breaks down like this: 256 - 640K variable $29.95 640Kbps $60 960Kbps $70 1.2Mbps $80 4.4Mbps $150 7.1Mbps $250
"The only source of knowledge is experience" -A. Einstein
And on the other side of the country, where I live (CT), we have the opposite experiences as you west coasters. Our DSL service is 1.5Mbps-384kbps downstream and 128kbps upstream, however, where I live, cable hands down trashes our dsl...
I still don't know what my cable provider is thinking, letting their users have uncapped downstream and 1Mbps upstream. I can get 800k/s during peak hours and consistently upload at 120k/s...
I am the technical geek for an ISP. We provide broadband service to our customers via DSL and Wireless. While we have no problems providing a 11mb/s pipe to a customer, filling that pipe gets really expensive really fast, on the order of $10,000 per month. In order for us to recover just the bandwidth cost if we charged $30/month would be over 300 customers. This comes out to be a 24x7 average of 36.6kb/s per customer.
Fortunately, most customers don't average that much, but all it takes is a couple customers running napster to suck down $10k worth of bandwidth, and they are paying $60 for it.
So, maybe to get back to the point, most broadband ISP's have to implement some sort of rate control in order to prevent a couple of customers from taking everyone else's bandwidth. We have in the past done some controls where the customer could suck down x megabytes at a high rate, and then they had a 56k cooling off period before they could continue.
The moral of this is that before you go looking for the cheap ISP which is charging you $19.95 for 7mb/s of bandwidth, remember that it doesn't take many bad users to financially kill the ISP.
Here in UT, you can get up to 1 mbit upload and 7 mbits download, as long as your line qualifies. Their qualification system is a little horky, they always "qualify" you lower than you can really handle, maybe that's to cover their butts. First, they told me that my line only qualified for 768, then only for 512k. I told them to put me at a full, symmetric megabit, and it works just hunky-dorey.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Fuck you and have a nice day
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
You must realize that DSL only exists between your home and the CO building in the area.
This distance is going to be under 20,000 feet.
aDSL is technically capable of 9mbit down and not far from that up.
One issue is the more DSL lines out of the same CO, the more interfearance it causes each.
But this is minor compared to your other problems outside of that first 20,000 feet.
In the CO building the DSL terminates into a DSLAM which will generally be connected to an ATM network connecting all of that providers DSLAMS in all the COs they service.
Generally these ATM networks are composed of DS3s (45mbit) or OC3s (155Mbit)
Assuming a single OC3 to a DSLAM, your limited to 100 customers before you begin to over subscribe.
On top of this, your IsP must be interconnected into this ATM network as well (Generally with a T1 at 1.54mbit or a T3/DS3 at 45mbit) from the ATM switch in the CO, to the ISP.
If an ISP only has 1.54mbit or even 45mbit, that interconnect can oversubscribe Very quickly.
On top of this, the ISP if smaller will have a number of T1's or fractional T3's.
Most ISPs will get lines to different ISPs.
This is for redundency so if an upstream has issues, the ISP doent notice.
If an ISP has 3 T1s, each to a different uplink, that does not mean you can get 4.5mbit. That means you can get at most 1.5mbit per connection (and even then only for 3 connections)
So assuming your measuring speed to your ISP from your location, there are many many factors there alone to slow the DSL connection down.
on top of this, generally the ISPs mail/web/dns/etc servers are in their NOC, which is not connected directly to your POPs router, and thus there is even more slow down as the trafic has to traverse the internets connections.
Any one of the above links can be over congested and it would appear that your connection is very slow.
This isn't going to be a "bitch about how slow we get it here" post, because I use modem connects regularly (try getting broadband out in Fall City, living in basically undeveloped forest) and they don't even hit 56k.. 24.6 on a good day.
I get 256/784 on my ADSL, but my problem with it is that doesn't seem to be right. I've done some testing and found that in reality, it's more like a shared 784k - if you're using about 15kb upload bandwidth, you can't get more than 30 down. Isn't broadband supposed to have the ability to use basically all the upload bandwidth and still have blazing fast downloads? Yes, I'm aware of the nature of TCP/IP needing a packet for an ACK, but that can't be large enough to cause a huge performance hit..
I just ordered "Buisiness DSL" (aDSL) from pacbell, which is 6mbit/384k, and starts you off with 32IP addresses, all for just $328 a month. A rip-off? You bet! It's the IP's that are the killer: 6mbit non-business (5 ip's) costs $178 a month. I am guessing they just want me to upgrade to a full T1 ($1500 here) if I really need the IP's. But can we all say "mad-phat lan parties" together? I sure can ;-)
As for the speeds, my current 1.5 residential dsl gets pretty decent rates: around 150k pretty consistantly. As for support, PBI is pretty good about getting things done. I have heard a bunch of install and outage problems with PBI, but for me the ride thusfar has been quite smooth.
Out!
-AntiCodon
Have any of you guys noticed when downloading sLinux from the NSA, you get CRAZY speeds? I got 175k for the first time from them, and have repeatedly as well. I guess they figured out that they could use their intimidation to get the multipul OC192's for cheap.
I think that's what I read. Anyway, you don't want Shaw Cable's @Home. It is quite unreliable.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
On the east coast of the USA, in New Jersey, speeds are around 3Mb/s, right on the button. It seems to max out at that speed (but I'm not complaining).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Be careful on the typos, though. Switching a couple of letters around will get you something else indeed.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Get enough folks together, and you could have a sweet setup.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I live in Boston too, and I share your pain with regard to getting high speed access. I signed up for Flashcom when I first moved into my apartment near the Fens, because they were the only ones who would arrange to have a "dry" line run from the CO to my apartment just for DSL service. My POTS circuit wouldn't qualify, probably because the wiring is 50 years old or there are repeaters or fiber somewhere along the route.
Of course, Flashcom's actual service is a complete and utter joke, and I'm just happy that they went belly-up and cut me loose from my contract 8 months early. Now I use Speakeasy DSL. They cost the same, but I get multiple static IPs, and they're a lot more friendly to power users.
Still, the fastest residential-type high speed access you can get around here is 1.5 megabits over a cable modem. And of course that's subject to availability (ie you can get it almost anywhere in the state other than Boston - WTF?!), and to line sharing issues. Still, if I could get a cable modem, I would. They're only $40/month for typically 600 - 800kbit speed, sometimes higher. I pay $50 for a pokey 384kbit link. Booooo!
Just for kicks, check out http://www.bb2w.com.
-- Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
I've used Comcast@home for two years and was upload capped at 16kbps. When I saw my neighbours getting upload speeds of around 100kbps I did some checking, and it turns out that most of the caps are in the modem themselves. I bought a new 3com modem and (although it took over a month to set up, @Home's support stinks) now I'm upload capped at 128; still crappy, but a lot faster. Downstream is better too. Pludo
Check out the following website. http://www.dslreports.com Good information provided by DSL users...
I guess I drank tooo much. the numbers are
640 nominal 608 real.
sorry
-- look, cheese ahoy!
Title says it all. plus they are very professional and understand unix. They charge 49 including static IP.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
I live just outside of Grand Rapids Michigan, and was able to get DSL because my CO is across the street from my apartment complex. (I think that would be a selling point for these apartments) But I usually get about 700 kbps up/down and max out just over 800 kbps.
Wow cheap bandwidth! Drug testing employees is illegal! Beer is stronger!!!
so what if its cold 93% of the year? The +'s outweigh the -'s!
Imagine a market where there is one product with many companies selling that product, but there are no competiting products.
In some markets, the companies selling the product will compete with each other in such a way as to both lower the price for the consumer and to actually provide a better product for that price. Let's call this place, Wonderland.
Now, there's another market, let's call it, You-Get-Shafted-Land, the companies do not compete on price/value. There are a number of reasons for this:
1. The company/companies sell the only product -- the product itself has no competition, thus you have to buy that one product. The companies realize this and end up following the leader... whoever is the largest company sets their price and everyone else more or less uses that price. Thus, the consumer has a lot of choice of manufacturers/providers, but they are not realizing true "market" prices.
2. One company controls the infrastructure. A local telephone company can charge their competitors (who must use their lines) just enough to keep themselves competitive.
This is the problem with DSL (at least in San Francisco): The DSL providers don't have much competition from cable providers, thus the price/value of DSL has not changed in two years. When I signed up for DSL over two years ago, I signed up for year, fully expecting to be paying "too much" at the end of that term, because prices dropped through the floor while my year contract was in place. Prices actually went up (well, value went down); eg: I got a static IP for free, now they cost extra. Prices did not go down because the DSL providers know everyone wants it (that's fine) but they know that there is no alternative. Why try to undercut your competitor when you can make money selling at their rate? If people want T1 speeds on their DSL (assuming their line supports it), they'd better be ready to pay through the nose for it. I should mention, though, that it is cheaper than frame relay, although far less reliable. I have PacBell DSL, and there is no reason for me to switch to another provider... they all cost more for less service.
Right now, companies would rather charge a lot of money for broadband access, while the market is still relatively young (despite the technology being relatively old in comparison). When DSL starts to get into every home, then the value will increase: economies of scale should kick in. In the meantime, expect companies to charge too much for the current services...
Think of it this way: If you are willing to pay $40 a month for a service (say, 384kbit down/128 kbit up with a dynamic IP), why would they ever offer you T1 speeds for the same price (assuming they could)? Remember, think as the producer, not as the consumer. The question is not "What is best for the consumer?" it is, "How do I make the most profit." And there's nothing wrong with that.
My problem with "modern" DSL is the use of PPPoE and software DSL modems. Why can't we just use bridged connections? The routers are the same, you can still get a DHCP address over it... And software DSL modems are not compatible... WinModems, anyone? Sure, they work on Linux now, but what about other OSes? Why not use existing standards that work, rather than making up your own?
It always varies by the telco, ISP, and location. In San Diego, PacBell offers up to 8 Mbps downstream with 1 Mbps upstream, with 2 phone lines (unique numbers) and 200 minutes of free local toll calls for about $119 per month (that includes all charges for the phone, not counting long distance and taxes). In northern CA (north of Sacramento), PacBell offers 384/128 Kbps for 40 dollars a month, with upgrades to 512/384 for about $150 per month.
Though I can't vouch for the actual speeds in San Diego, in NorCal the real rates are about 200-250 KBps downstream and 10-15 KBps upstream. That's kilobytes. Watch your capital letters, kids.
At home, I have 1.5mb down/384k up (COVAD/LMI) for ~ USD80/mo.
At work, I have 1.5mb down/128k up (PacBell/PacBell) for ~ USD40/mo.
I'm happy to pay the extra USD40/mo for my home connection, because its so much more reliable.
Uh, it's ham. It's been scientifically proven that bacon doesn't exist.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Gotta say, though, quality of service varies dramatically by neighborhood. There are lots of RR users who swear by it; and many who swear at it.
--
C'mon, baby, kiss The King.
Sounds more like ISDN
In Autralia my brother has had download rates of 3.8Mb/s for FTP from Optus cable. I can't comment on ASDL yet.
Admittedly that was from an Optus cache of the aarnet archives but it's still a good indication of the top limit. (He was downloading a RedHat distro about 3 hours after it had been uploaded to the aarnet site).
His download tests from his city office to his home office were about 2Mb/s for FTP which I thought was a good test since his city office (being small) was unlikely to be cached by Optus (at least the first time).
I think his average to site OS particularly the USA is a bit under 200Kb/s which is due to the limited bandwidth between Australia and the USA.
I can't comment on Telstra's actual bandwidth but their figures are probably hard to guage because they have so many different plans where they try and limit the bandwidth one way or the other. i.e. All the practices you can expect from a company that basically has a monopoly.
Cable isn't even offered here, but DSL is. The cheapest package at 30 USD is 768k/128k which isn't horribly bad. They have just recently got to this area. They say the average will be 300-500k/s, but I highly doubt that. Anyhow, it will be better than dialup. Also, if you're on a 10baseT network, the fastest you can do is ~1.2mbs or something like that. That's what I am on at school, and I can max it out, too bad it's not full duplex.
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GeekWares - Buy and Download Today!
. . .
. . .
You should enjoy the anticipation while you've got it. My DSL hook, thru Verizon (aka "very soon") averages somewhere around the abyssimal 128k cited by the poster. Reason? Verizon has 3 levels of "consumer" service, based on the old GTE formula. "Bronze" service runs $60/mo., and gets you the aforementioned suck-suck-suckety performance. Moving up to "Silver" costs you around $100/mo (and none of these price figures includes the ISP fee, typically $15). Not sure what performance is like on Silver - too much of a cheap bastard. For those consumers out there who light cigars with $100 bills wrapped around rods of purest plutonium, there is "Gold" service, which I'm told exceeds the speed of light. If I remember correctly, this service is upwards of $200/month. So the scheme looks pretty obvious to me - give the bandwidth to those who willingly pay $200/mo. to get their e-mail real fast, and fsck the poor suckers who thought they were getting some kind of bandwidth nirvana with DSL (like me). It's quicker than 56k, but not sufficiently quicker to make it worth my while or my money.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
DSL in Alberta, Canada is typically $35 to $100 per month--and yes, this IS in Canadian dollars (think $22 to $65 per month in US$). If the CO is in your back yard, you can get 4-7 megabits/sec download speed, but more realistically you can expect about 2 Mbps. Upload is about 1 Mbps (and seems to work at that speed as advertised).
My DSL service in Calgary is about $100/month. I subcribe to the "basic business" service, which is maximum 7 Mps/1 Mbps, and includes a fixed 8 IP subnet (one network, one broadcast, one modem/gateway and 5 to use as I please--I only really needed 1 FIXED IP but they didn't give out 1 fixed IP at a time) and no restrictions on running servers (it is specifically advertised as an allowed feature).
I've heard that Alberta is arguably the most advanced juristiction in North America with respect to connectivity (or right up there--it's a very subjective statement). It may be due to the large presence of tech companies like Nortel and soon Motorola. The petroleum industry might also be a big factor in driving the technology (with its SCADA and instrumentation requirements). Other than Alberta, the Ottawa area would probably be comparably connected, as would Vancouver since these areas have a large high-tech economic presence. Anyone from these areas care to comment on the quality and price of their high-bandwidth service?
In canada, the two fat cable providers (Rogers and Videotron) are typically rather fast, it's their support staff that's slow. I frequently get 350KB/sec (bytes, not bits) and in many cases it's even faster than the T1 at my workplace (for the same data, mind you). The downside is that I have only 128kbit upload (fsck!!!) and the tech support people really need a cluestick shoved up their collective asses. But otherwise it's pretty decent for 40$ CDN including taxes (which is about 25$ U.S. by now). Lots of people switch over to cable from dialup because it's cheaper when you factor in the cost of the extra phone line. The government is even paying part of the bill for homes with children, which means more ignorant fools posting meept on /. ah well, can't have everything.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I am in the 'burbs of Philly, where the local Cable Monopoly is Comcast. They have capped uploads at 64K, and downloads, while not bad, are no where near as good as the numbers iA am seeing here. I'm guessing it's traffic and load-sharing, since I live in an area that has a lot of cable modems.
A neighbor upstaird has Earthlink DSL, and can get 1.2MB down / 128K up for $50/Month, and up to 6 IPs. There are some good deals on DSL around, but multiple IPs with those deals are hard to find...
For some freak reason we just started getting bandwidth through the roof (compared to what we were used to). We used to get 300kbytes/s down - 50 kbytes/s up now we get 400-500 kbytes/s down - 350 kbytes/s up Only problem. Reliability sucks. Been down since Friday now. Yuck
I can attest to both Cable and DSL in the Charlotte area -- I have both. Roadrunner Cable = 3mbps downstream, 384kbps upstream Telocity DSL = 1.5mbps downstream, 256kbps upstream Cable = Have reached speeds in excess of 300KBPS downstream, but only 40KBPS upstream. DSL = Have reached speeds in excess of 150KBPS downstream, but only 25KBPS upstream. This is for residential use -- business DSL is not available to me (for some unknown reason) -- I'd love to have 1mbps both up/down stream.. but alas, I'm stuck with crappy upstream rates.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
the unbeliever
aim:dasubergeek99
yahoo!:blackrose91
ICQ:1741281
$39.99 for ADSL 640kbps down, 90kpbs up
$114.95 for ADSL 1.6Mbps down, 90kbps up
$204.95 for ADSL 7.1Mbps down, 680kbps up
No option for SDSL.
Yes, Verizon is a Monopoly, I wish there was some CHOICE!!! 90kpbs up unless you fork out $205 a month!
Why do providers usually use PPPoE for DSL connections? The system cable modem users usually get is DHCP, which works a lot nicer. You plug in your cable modem, they talk, and it brings up a live line to you house. Then you plug in your computer, it goes, "ah an IP address and a domain name server, how nice!" But this damn PPPoE thing, you have to dial in, then your modem actually gets your IP and it gives the computer 10.0.0.x. then if you masquerade you are under two psudo ip's. What is the advantage of doing PPPoE? It seems it makes it more difficult for both ends.
The main thing is the money, as always. One can get a good donwstream connection, and decent upstream with ADSL. To get the real speed, one needs to get SDSL which is significantly more money. Also, whereas ADSL doesn't guarantee the bitrate or uptime, SDSL is guaranteed (to an extent).
Of course, I happen to have the benefit of living in Santa Clara County, CA.
karma is for the weak >)
Cable modems are a shared medium; your connection is shared between yourself and your next 9 neighbors (or something like that). I have no neighbors who have a cable modem, so i have it all to myself. if your dad and neighbor have a few neighbors who all use it, then speed should go down.
i'm paying for about 1 meg of speed, and if i had 9 neighbors, and we all used it at the same time, then we would still all be getting 1 meg of a 10 meg connection. but i'f i'm the only one on-line, then there is no technical reason why i shouldn't get the full bandwidth.
i hope that (1) this helps and (2) i'm not way off base :)
t14m4t
67.5% Slashdot Pure I guess I need to work on that....
I have been watching my download rates for no other reason than to see how fast I'm paying for. what I've noticed is this:
.
I have peaked at about 950 kBps (that's in bytes; in bits, it's ~7.6 Mbps).
.
Now, I don't consider myself an expert, but nearly maxing out my 10 Mbps NIC does not seem slow. especially since I'm only paying for 1 Mbps....
Admitedly, the biggest weakness in this claim is the method used to test the speed. What I did was install gkrellm, and just watch to see what was the biggest number I could get. I turned out that while I was downloading the glibc source, it hit 958 kilobytes per second, and this is the largest number I have seen.
However, it is normal for me to see download rates in the range of 600-700 kilobyte per second.
t14m4t
67.5% Slashdot Pure I guess I need to work on that....
DSL uses the old copper lines that your phone uses. Unless you're house was rebuilt/rewired/or rephoned (?) you probably have old lines, which can slow down speeds. Another thing is that you have to be within a 18,000 foot radius to the central dsl office/cirquit.
As for cable on the other hand, distance does not matter and it's running on the same fiber optic wire's as you're cable TV runs off of. Much faster and reliable.
I am a very happy cable broadband subscriber and the rumors the DSL companys were spreading about cable and the whole myth behind sharing your connection with your neighborhood and speed is complete BS. In my house alone, I have our cable split 4 different ways (3 tv's and my computer) and I'm still getting download speeds of the *promised* 768Kbs (about 90kilobytes a second....even with the T.V.'s on (I did a test)
One more thang to add about cable internet access, I called them on a Tuesday and I was up and running on the followin Wednseday. Compare that to the 2-8 week turnaround time of most DSL companies.
"We came, we saw, we KICKED ITS ASS"
--Ghostbusters
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
1.5 megabits per second down max, 384 guaranteed 384 megabits per second up max, 128 guaranteed ~100 megaBYTES per second down actual ~10 megaBYTES persecond up actual SF bay US +5 static ip's $80/month
This information is available from http://www.dslreports.com. It has bandwidth information based on provider provided by actual users, but a wealth of other information including installation experiences and tips about network achitechture. Very cool, check it out.
-Matt
In Canada, our version of the FCC, has some sort of regulatory power over internet access. (This is what I HEARD - I am not speaking this as fact) But this is why: Cable Internet = $40Cdn w/ Cable TV service or $50 w/o DSL Internet = $40Cdn w/ long-distance plan from local telco (who runs the DSL service) or $50 w/o I've seen varying prices on the DSL side of things. But my cable internet access is with Cogeco@home, and I get about 2Mb downstream, 360Kb upstream (for those who get confused: 250KB/s downloading, and 45KB/s uploading) 250KB/s is not necessary from all websites, but I can get combined rates of 250KB/s easily - through multiple downloads on napster. My friend who's on DSL through Sympatico gets 1Mb downstream(or 125KB/s), and 112Kb upstream(or 14KB/s). This to me seems rather pathetic, especially since he pays the same amount as I do. I have heard every argument, that DSL is more secure, Cable is faster, DSL gives you lower ping in games, ... I'm willing to take the risk and go w/ cable :-) SPEED says it all.
I've never heard of such DSL speeds here in Boston, certainly, and my best guess is that the telephone architecture (especially the wiring in houses) is on the average so old (fabric-covered wires instead of twisted-pair) that higher speeds are impossible *in some cases*, so they can't very well offer higher speeds if some of their customers can't take advantage of it. Covad is having enough trouble already, and they certainly don't want the extra hassle of higher speeds.
The other thing, and the more major issue, is *price*. 4 Mbps for $40-$100? And that's probably *CANADIAN* dollars, too. Jebus. I feel ripped-off now.
--nick
What was the article about? It was taking too long to load the page on my new DSL line.
My cable modem downstream connection is about 3Mbps. Comcast@Home just enacted an upload cap of 128Kbps in the Savannah, Georgia area. IM pleased with the download speed at 3mbps, but the upload speed is horrible. Sending large emails at 16KB/sec is painfully slow.
Where 'bonding' doesn't lead to group hugs! >> The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
Maybe I want slower DSL speeds so I can savor each packet. Have you ever thought of that, Gordon?
Of course not, you were too busy with your socialized medicine and quasi non-violent prime-time tv programming to think of it.
Perhaps you should consider an alternative explanation: your DSL speeds are just as slow (or slower) than they are in the US of A, but special software makes you think your throughput numbers are better. It's all a clever rouse by the CIA to keep you Kanuks up there where we can keep a good eye on you.
Think it won't work? Somebody convinced you that round ham was "back bacon." I rest my case.
-- Sincerely,
A descent, upstanding American
American speeds are artificial - pay more and you receive more. In NYC i have had DSL from Flashcom and Telocity. I currently pay $49 for 400kbs from telocity. When I had Flashcom i paid $39 for the same level of service. Due to my apartment location i have the option of obtaining the top DSL speeds from my provider, but I would have to pay hundreds to receive 4mb dsl. That speed is considered "commercial" in a country that thinks AOL dial-ups are the norm.
Also don't neglect latency and reliability (how many hours of downtime per month average where downtime is the inability to talk to approximately half the Internet).
P.S. I get 640kbits/sec down and 272kbits/sec up on my Qwest DSL. Connectivity is excellent, often better than my T3 at work.
I'm looking into moving to the southern Idaho/Boise area, and have contacted a few apartments about the possibilities of cable and/or DSL connections.
:)
Two places told me they offer broadband through a company called Tsunami Broadband... is this DSL, cable, or is it something else? Has anyone else tried this service? A lady at one apartment mentioned something about antennas... what the hell is this thing??!!
thanks....
In Canada, we just call it ham cold cuts. Bon appetit!
P.S. My DSL speed here in Montreal by Sympatico.ca is 1.3Mbps
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
roadrunner in Maine (one of the first two rr.com systems in the US) pretty much kicks a$$, IMHO. They spec the service as 8Mbits/sec downstream and 2Mbits/sec upstream. The various "speed test" websites never seem to give me any useable info, so I'll cite more realistic references.. from ftp.netscape.com I normally get anywhere from 3 to 6 Mbits/sec... consistantly. Upstream speeds are equally acceptable, regularly in the 1.5Mbit/sec range.. occasionally hitting 2.5 to 3Mbit/sec. The cost is $35.00 and includes 5 dynamic IP's which seldom change (I've got 3 IP's that haven't changed in over a year). Now if only their customer support was as impressive as the performance.
chown -R us
For $30 a month, I get guaranteed 3mbps download (it's never dropped below 4, though), and guaranteed 1mbps upload. This is on cable mind you - the service is Optimum Online (optonline.net), and I believe it's available in New York and Connecticut. I love downloading RedHat iso's in 6 minutes.
This space intentionally left blank.
Two words: Baby Bells. Verizon, SBC, and Qwest are all responsible for the operations at the central offices. Their competitors depend on their circuits. Therefore, it's only natural to start yanking plugs out of DSLAMs, tweak the DSLAMs to run much slower, or mess around with the competitor's routing. It's human nature; what would Linus Torvalds do if he had Bill Gates on a choke collar?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
All I know is I pay 92.77/month for 1500down/384up, and I love the service. It's through Covad, with an ISP which I absolutely am in love with (speakeasy.net), but the local phone service is Verizon. Dunno, though, because I live in a historic area built fewer than 100 years ago; thus my guess is that the phone wiring is pretty antiquated, and yet I still get 1.5Mbps. What's going on?
Aciel
aciel@speakeasy.net
Do the taxpayers subsidize part of the telco/internet infrastructure in Canada? That might explain the higher bandwidth/cost ratio.
Here in the US I was lucky to get a 128upload/728download connection on DSL for $60/month in my area. I've paid more for less in the past. And from what I read, the vendors are barely making money on these connections here in the US as it is.
If the economics are accurate, the Canadian taxpayer must be eating something up North.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Here in Alabama, most places don't have a choice when it comes to telcos. We don't have to worry about slow DSL because we can't get it in most areas. Bellsouth can't even spell DSL....
--If you don't test it, it won't work. Guaranteed.
300KB/s down
Usually pretty consistant. I get the best speeds on the movie trailors from apple.com's movie trailor page.
45KB/s up
The upstream seems to be capped in the modem. It will actually send at over 100KB/s for the first 2 seconds or so but then the router (modem) kicks in and caps the upstream bandwidth. I suppose this is for page requests and the like.
Or maybe it's the Metric System? : )
On Cable in Athens, GA, I get 2600kbps (2.6mbps) download.
BR> Jose Desiato
Lead Programmer of PiNet
In Canada, I had cable and ADSL (one after the other). Around 1-1.5 Mbps for $40+ CDN a month.
In the US, I tried to get ADSL. No go. Too far away from the CO. Sure I could have 144/144 Kbps IDSL for $125 US a month, but no thanks, too much $$$.
Cable is a no go as well because the whole AT&T cable infrastructure in the San Jose area is about 500 years old and they won't be able to provide the service for between 1 to 5 years from now. But, mind you, I do have digital cable.
This is Silicon Valley, hi-tech mecca of the world - why can't I get high speed Internet access at home???
What did I do? I finally broke down this week and picked up a Ricochet 128 Kbps wireless modem from Fry's. I'm getting 'tween 70-100 Kbps and the best part is I can slap it to my laptop and take it around with me.
There is no 'new' economy, there was no 'new' economy - there is just economy 101 and everyone has to play by its rules - me
3 Mbps Cable - $40.00 CAN, maybe $25 - $30.00 American 2 Mbps DSL - $40.00 CAN, actual speeds tend to be about the same as 3 Mbps and much better ping times. 3Mbps DSL - $100.00 CAN, maybe $60 - $70 American - The best service available here, but of course, it's a bit pricey. Uploads are 384 Kbps I think for the cable and the slow DSL, and 640 Kbps for the fast DSL.
I'm on Shaw Cable's cable modem service, and the most I can hope for when downloading is around a quarter of your worst speeds. Uploading, I get maybe 20k/s. (And yes: that's disgustingly slow)
Karma: Chameleon (Mostly affected by the 1980s)
Here in germany, there is only one big dsl service for consumers. It is called T-DSL and is capped at 768/128. They say it is capped in that way because they could run this configuration over nearly every line in a city in germany and so they do not need to send a technican to meassure the line parameters. There DSL service is cheap ($30 for all, modem+isp). But I think it is very bad that there is only one widely aviable dsl service here. If you want faster speeds you must get a leased line or an dsl service for businesses. If you do not need more than 768/128, you get it cheap, but if you want a bit more you pay a big deal more.
Jan
I have Coz at Home cable modem service. I get about 250 to 400K with my modem. But it varies widely. I agree with other posters that the speed of DSL is affected by the fact that in some area's phone lines are older than in others and are not able to carry higher speeds on them.
I'm not closed-minded, your just wrong!
Well, as much as I like DSL, the service I get is crap. I got basic DSL from PacBell. My connection is various from anywhere at 20k/ps to 120k/ps. The reason the service is crap is because, I went and got the Cayman DSL Router, so I can have all 4 computers on my network on the DSL, but with the constant disconnections from pacbell (every couple of hours) staying connected to servers is a pain at times. I have tried calling PacBell several times, but they are better at bullshitting you, than actually trying to help with the problem. I get discuraged when a field tech comes out and tells me that I am "not that far from the main box" and then the phone idiots (customer *cough* service) and I tell them of my problems and they tell me that I am "pretty far away from the main box" There are times when my DSL is great, and there are times when I have problems uploading a simple html file. Anybody elce have Pac Bell horror stories?
- Ray "AudioCra-Z" Grens Jr.
Cable is *soo* much faster; a friend of mine was getting 2mbits/sec from Microsoft.com of all places, and I've seen faster.
DSL around here is just slow.
But that's what you're going to see; local usage patterns, load on the local network and the internet, and the time of day affect things a lot.
Therefore, I'd expect Canada to be faster just based on the "local network" thing...
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
LaSalle, Ontario (Windsor's prettier neighbor) gets similar rates, but without the nightly outages.
Anecdotally, my pals in crowded, cable-modem loving Windsor have a much poorer 'net quality of life than those of us in cow country who are in the know...
I guess we're not pals. ;)
Seriously, though, what part of Windsor do you live in? Olde Walkerville and East Windsor seem to have very congested @home service, while mine is reliable day-in and day-out.
The reason is that the strength of the DSL signal decreases linearly as you move away from a CO (the telephone company - or some box on a telephone line which boosts the signal). If you test a DSL modem and get a graphical display of the signal-to-noise ratio plot, and have the modem plugged into a line simulator, you can actually see this happening in real-time. It's pretty cool. If the line distance is greater than 2-3 miles, it's kind've iffy about the quality of the signal you will receive, and how constant it will be.
The DSL signal is transmitted on higher-frequency bandwidth channels than normal voice communication, because you can get higher compression that way. The downside of that is random noise on the line anywhere along the path can make your average connection speed vary pretty wildly. And in the US this is especially true, because in some parts of the country, DSL signals are being broadcast on lines 50-100 years old. I don't know why it's better in Canada. Maybe in the urban areas they have a better infrastructure to work with than we do in the states.
Sadly, DSL is not even available in my neighborhood, so the cable monopoly looks great compared to the local phone monopoly. Did I mention the wireless cable/Internet alternative is going bankrupt and overbilled an unknown number of customer's credit cards? Pretty pathetic service options for a city of 2.5 million people.
I've had cable modem (AT&T@Home) and ADSL (USWorst, now Qwisp (or was that Qwest)). My brother's the manager for installs at Cox Cable in Santa Barbara, and he's got Cox@Home.
Cox doesn't have line caps in SBA (or didn't last time we talked), so they can actually deliver 4Mbps fairly well, and a lot of the places they wire are willing to pay for premium cable access (movie stars, etc.). But AT&T@Home has line caps and I think it's something like 128K but depends on where you are.
DSL's been pretty good - I used to get 720K down and 128K up, even though I paid for 256K at my old place in Ballard. In Fremont, which is easier to be wired in, I pay for 256K and I get about 512K down and 128K up. And it's not the 20:1 service they sell in the boonies, it's single access DSL, so it's consistent.
The latency on the WinNT boxen they use for mail servers is pretty bad though. And their DHCP seem to be the same.
But, and this is my point, you need to join the bands of infonaughts and rebel against high speed access. If you have high speeds, people expect you to actually check your email once a day, but when you have 19.6k, they expect you to check your email once a week at most.
Throw off your shackles, America! Rebel against the Microsoftian "Always On" Thought Police! Remember our slogan: 56K or Fight!
Throw your PDAs in the Sound and your laptops to the ground! Drop your beepers in the river!
Disconnect, disinfect, and drop offline!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Obviously the cost is radically lower in CA than US. I can get 1M at my home, but not for less than $120/month. At my old place I could get up to 7M if I wanted, but there was no way I could afford it AND rent!
this is getting old and so are you
blog
I have MindSpring Max (EarthLink DSL) 1500/384 Mbps (down/up). Reality is around 1250/300 Mbps.
Where's the fun in downloading that latest 100Mb game demo in 5 minutes? Where's the anticipation?! Choose life, choose dial up.
I have DSL both at work and at home, provided by Pacbell.
At work we have the 'enhanced' business DSL with advertized speed of 1.5 to 6Mbps download and 384K upload speed, and measured download is always between 2 and 4 Mbps. This costs about $200/month and we get 5 static IP's.
At home the advertized speed is 384K to 1.5M down and 128K up. For months it was working fine (even though I never got above 350K downloads, turned out the line was capped to 384K max), until christmas last year when the speed started dropping in the evenings. In February this year I couldn't get more than 3K some evenings, and I was not the only one having this problem. Pacbell has apparently become aware of this problem and says that they are working on it; my connection was fixed and I even managed to get the 384K cap removed. I now get around 1.2M download speeds consistently, and I think it's definetly worth the $40/month cost (even though their tech support is really, really bad).
Consistently 1.5mbps down from the reliable servers, 256kbps up. Definitely hitting an artificial cap. $40 with their monopoly-bundled phone options. DNS appears to be a value-added service (i.e., theirs never works).
I wonder what it would take to get residential SDSL at like 2mbps with a static IP from BellSouth. (Hmm, probably a major celestial event.)
The ILEC is to blame for American DSL's slow speed. (as well as lengthy installation, frequent outages, etc... But that's another story)
They provide dry copper to the competition (i.e. Covad) for slightly less than they charge retail for complete (albeit pathetic) DSL. Covad tacks on (not enough) for their own profit, to which the ISP then adds (not enough) margin.
DSL ISP's are struggling to provide what they currently do and still profit. Providing more bandwidth for the same money will never happen until the ILEC's reduce their charges. (won't happen)
The ILEC's can provide more for less, but why would they? They currently have the Lion's share of DSL circuits, and will certainly outlast all the competing (failing) DLEC's (dot bombs).
There's so much more to this subject. It's such a sad example of the problem with monopolies.
But to the point of the original question:
The cost per Mbps of American DSL is most heavily influenced by the tarrifs imposed by the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier. And it's not because it costs them the most. It's not because they add the most or any value. They charge that much because they can. Afterall, it's their copper.
The DSL war between the Bell's and the ISP's was over before it ever started. The rules of engagement (the Telecom Reform Act of 1996) heavily favored the Bell's. The courageous ISP's fought hard, and suffered heavy casualties. The Bell's survived mostly unscathed.
For those ISP's still fighting the war, the phrase "Dead man walking" comes to mind.
I have Cox @home cable internet service, 2-4 Mbps downstream, 128 kbps upstream. I understand that the cable office pumps out the signal at around 2 GHz at several kilowatts (aided by pole mounted amplifiers) to all cable modems at once, and the cable modems pluck down only the info addressed to it. But the upstream signal is less than half that at around 900 MHz, because so many cable modems are returning signals to the cable office at the same time at wall-wart strength (read: feeble) power output. Is this the way it works or is the limiting factor more complicated?
Here in Brazil, speed limitation is commonplace. The local ISP, which provides service for a few other towns (summing up, some 5 million inhabitants), has a 34 Mbps Internet link (as I've heard, American ISPs have multiple-T3 lines.)
They've just started providing ADSL service. Under optimal conditions, they measured up to 9 Mbps downstream, but only offer service plans up to 2 Mbps (that means they artifically cap bandwidth according to each user's service plan). All bandwidth figures quoted are downstream only, upstream ratio is half of that. Prices are ca. US$ 40 for 256 kbps, and US$ 170 for 512 kbps. These are home-user service plans, which means you're leased an IP (using DHCP) for 1 hour, then it gets changed. If you want fixed IPs and hosting privileges, you'll pay US$ 600 for 256 kbps, US$ 1,200 for 512 kbps, US$ 2,200 for 1 Mbps and US$ 4,100 for 2 Mbps.
There are times when I just wish I lived in the US. Cheaper hardware, faster connections...
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
I rarely exceed 350K download, and of course upload is capped at 128K. There is also some kind of cap on Usenet downloads. As an added bonus, I have excessive latency and packet loss.
On bad days, the latency and packet loss combine with the overall bandwidth shortage, resulting in overall throughput that is worse than dialup. Cost is about $40/month.
The only thing they have not found a way to water-down or cripple is the fact that the IP addresses are static. That would require knowledge of DHCP, and these folks have their hands full with SMTP.
I lost interest after about the third "I get great" "I get trash" uploads / downloads etc.
Two wrongs may not make a right, but three
It seems that a study of cable and DSL speeds just in Kansas City would be warranted. I have RR cable through Time Warner, which is the leading cable service provider in town, and I get an avg. of 2.2mbps down, 384k up. Max download is about 2.6mbps, slowest I've seen is around 1.7mbps. My girlfriend has RR, too, in another part of town and gets around 1.1mbps down on avg., slowest downstream speed being about 800kbps and max of about 1.4mbps. I have another friend who lives a block and a half from her who gets up to 4.5mbps down, always 384k up, (no matter where you are it seems). DSL downstream also varies widely, but only due to distance from CO factors, of course...regardless, residential DSL customers in town have seen 2mbps downloads, always with the 128kbps upstream.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Across the border, we pretty much have for the consumer DSL grades ranging up to 1.5Mbps, although I have seen a few that cap at 2.0Mbps. I'm guessing that the phone company (Ameritech) is very interested in limiting people because their network just plain can't handle this stuff. In the area I'm in, the maximum limit is 144k DSL which just seems awful (and the only providers will give it up for $100+/mo).. Cable however, I range anywhere from 200kbit/sec to 5mbit/sec, depending on time of day. Sometimes, 4am I can hit speeds with another cable user of close to 10mbit/sec. In fact, I've downloaded files off N*pster faster at 4am than I have off my own 100mbit/sec ethernet LAN. (no node running windows on my LAN ever sees > 8mb/sec between computers on the LAN)
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I live in Patterson CA USA I get a rate of 348kbps down and 128kbps up
Blame Canada!
When my pipe is runnin' dry
I'll look up North and now know why!
I'm on Shaw@home in Western Canada and to a local ISP I get 0.5-1Mbps upload speed. Download speed from the net in general is about 0.5Mbps but from good sites (download.com, sun.com) 2-4Mbps is common.
The thing to remember with @home-using cable companies is that it all depends how they tie to the internet. Many cable companies use the @home "backbone" (10.x.y.z addresses in your traceroutes) which is quite slow. Shaw ties into the Group Telecom (formerly Shaw FibreLink) fibre backbone... wicked-fast.
When my town switched from the @home backbone to the GT backbone data rates shot up and ping times dropped overnight.
F1_Fan.
I get a fairly consistent 200k/sec downstream rate, although it's rare to see a server that'll pump that much data to me. At my previous residence in the same city, I got 230k. Service is pretty reliable, and I see almost no variation in bandwidth throughout the day/week/whatever. The POP3 is a bit spotty, but it works. Upstream sucks, but on the bright side my IP only changes every few days, and I can sometimes keep it for a week or two.
Where I work we were among the first in the city to get DSL, and speeds are comprable, although just a bit slower with a 180k/sec download being the maximum observed. Our mail there comes from a M$ Exchange server... I put a rabbit ear TV antenna on my monitor, and it seemed to help. I now often get email from the outside world the same day it's sent!
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
128K sounds good for DSL, but the upload is a lot worse for cable.
Seeka
David,
I also live in "THE Valley" and I agree, we are presently being screwed. I have been looking around, and all I can say is that a lot of bandwidth will soon be available to and from SOMEONE. Have you noticed the road work down the middle of El Camino? If you will look carefully, you will see clusters of 4 manholes spaced about every 1000 feet as you go north from Santa Clara toward Mountain View on El Camino. There is a group of companies that were each going to dig up and repave the same streets so they could put in fibre ducts. It turns out that in many places, the same streets would have been dug up and repaved eight times. When these companies learned of each other's plans, they decided to work as a group so they would dig up the streets only once. This is a real Win-Win. First, they split the cost of the digging, etc. many ways, so each pays only a small fraction of the total project cost, and they disrupt traffic less as well. This reduced the hostility they received from the general public during commute times.
In my area, the same folks are now installing their fibre ducts (again in groups of 4 or more, with each duct color coded to identify whose it is) in residential areas. I expect we will soon see fibre cables being pulled into those ducts, and equipment installed in the vaults beneath the manholes.
This will provide a huge increase in the available bandwidth for a lot of people. We are talking fibre cables to within a few hundred feet of your home or business here. I expect this will provide speeds presently considered astronomical of 100 Megabits per second, or more. If the potential price/performance competition is real, I predict the speed "caps" we now see will soon be removed in both the DSL and CATV systems and their prices will have to drop drastically because there will be little reason to pay the kinds of prices we are now paying for DSL or CATV lines that will be very slow by comparison to these new fibre based systems. Watch for this in the coming months.
Beside these new systems, there already is a fibre to the curb system that was built and installed in San Jose, Santa Clara, and Campbell by Pac Bell BEFORE they were bought by Southwest Bell (SBC). This system was designed to turned on in phases. The first phase was a very good looking CATV system, but later on this same system was designed to deliver "Video Dial Tone" to every home with 6 Mhz bandwidth for each direction per "circuit." And that is just the video portion. The data channels Pac Bell planned were also symmetrical and very fast. This system uses pairs of 1/2 inch CATV cable (one for out-bound signals with the other for in-bound signals, each cable no longer than 1250 feet with a single 5 Mhz to 1 Ghz amplifier in each cable located at the 600 foot point.) These cables fanned out in up to 6 directions from each green box. The boxes are roughly the size of a large refrigerator/freezer on its side, and contains the termination hardware for all the fibres (there are several coming to each of these boxes), a set of large gell-cell batteries to provide 90 volts DC power down all of those CATV cables, a natural gas driven alternator, and a 240 volt AC to 90 volt DC converter. This box with its batteries and dual sources of utility power was designed to emulate a CO to your residential telephone, and will provide four hours of telephone service with NO outside power at all. However, if either natural gas or electricity is available, the "node" can run indefinitely.
There also was eventually going to be a small box on the side of your house to convert the cable signals (with the 90 volt DC power in them from the main cable running across the back of your yard) into a voice circuit for your telephone. But this box on the side of your house was also designed to provide you with much more, if you wanted it, because it had several available slots, with only one slot required for your Plain Old Telephone Service.
Look around. These are generally a large green box with an electric utility meter mounted on the side near the top and an air intake just below the meter. At the moment, this entire system is dormant because SBC pulled the plug on it right after they bought Pac Bell. But I just cannot believe such a system, with so much hardware already in place, will be dormant much longer. This system was designed to have a lot of potential and a lot of the hardware for it is already in place and tested. I think that if SBC cannot figure out what to do with it, someone else soon will.
An analog gray hair frantically clinging to the trailing edge of technology.
What the hell does 384K mean??? I mean, seriously. Try using the full abbreviation. Is it 384 KBps or 384 Kbps? There is a difference, by a factor of eight.
An analogue 56K modem is 56Kbits per second (in theory). A lot of cable and DSL modem providers advertise in KBytes per second. Some in Mbits per second. Ignorant users all too often think that it's MBytes because they simply see an Mb abbreviation and don't realize that an upper-case B is a Byte and a lower-case b is a bit.
As you can tell, this annoys the living shit out of me because even the other technical people that I work with don't seem to be able to tell the difference. You'd think in a forum about "News for Nerds" someone would get it.
Anyway...
When Windows reports my download speeds it tells me in KBps. I regularly use 300-400 KBps of bandwidth on downloads (usually limited by the server that I connect to). If I'm not mistaken, this roughly amounts to 2.4-3.2 Mbits per second. Upload is a bit harder to track. Just know that it's considerably slower. I've probably never seen more than 56 KBps outgoing on my system.
This is on Time Warner's RoadRunner service in Columbus, Ohio. Actually I live on the very outskirts of a Columbus suburb surrounded by cornfields, so my neighborhood utilization is probably lower than most. I hear a lot of complaints from people who live in the downtown and OSU campus area that RoadRunner is too slow so they had to switch to DSL. But it varies by neighborhood, and DT/Campus is pretty densely populated with tech-savvy people.
my roommate and i get 640kbps for about $40/mnth the isp we just switched from was actually charging us for thru-put i couldn't believe it. we were allowed 1 gig/mnth we used 54. oops. the amount of thru-put costs them nothing right? before we moved into the city however we were getting 1mbps for $40 and unlimited thru-put.
newbie has been railed by intel*[MS]*
btw it's my belief that the artificial limit comes from the fact that these providers specialize in CUSTOMER SERVICE! listen to george carlin's cd "you are all diseased"
"whoever coined the phrase 'let the buyer beware' must have been bleeding from the rectum"
newbie has been railed by intel*[MS]*
i'm in hopatcong NJ sussex county
i get about 1Mbit/s
-----
Kenny Sabarese
Left Ear Music
AIM: kfs27
irc.openprojects.net #windowmaker
Kenny Sabarese
www.kennysabarese.com
eom
I can't get DSL in my neighborhood, not because my system is too old but because it is too new. My phone company (Qwest) seems to have ditched copper altogether and instead has run fiber directly to the neighborhoods. However, this locks me out of DSL - no copper, no data. Until my phone company puts DSL modules in my neighborhood's switchbox (which should happen in about 2078), I can't get DSL. However, fortunatelly, my cable company has run fiber directly to my neighborhood recently, so I have @home. Usually I get between 100 and 300 kbytes/sec.
At least my neighborhood's wiring isn't f****d up like it is in every other nation on the planet. Ahhh... the beauty of the semi-rural community.
Its long due for such a chart to come out...
I'll tell you, Adelphia's powerlink, you're paying 40 bucks a month for a 100 kb/sec connection
When's that T3 comin?
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
In Cleveland, if you're looking to relocate, you've got many choices. I have Ameritech DSL that gives me 760K down/240 up for $40/month. There's a little trick though. Aparently there is a little problem with their equipment that allows me to do multiple downloads at 760K each. I've hit 3M before, and the biggest download so far has been Corel Linux (600MB) in <40 mins. Of course I'm also about to move just outside the city, where Adelphia (the local cable company) tells me that they can give me cable access at 3M/sec down and 500K/sec up for $40/month. It seems, after reading some of these posts, that Cleveland is pretty damn wired in comparison.
I never knew how bad the real state of affairs in broadband was. Amazing! I couldn't live without my DSL.
$man microsoft
Crowded elevator smell different to midget. -Chinese Proverb
Cox@home says 3Mbps down and 256k up.
In Newport News, I was getting my full 3mbps down and was actually getting about 1.2Mbps up (seriously). I have since moved to a neighboring town and am getting (usually) my full 3mbps down and my capped 256kbps up.
Latency was a problem for a couple weeks where my gateway was pinging at 300+ after about 5:00pm. I bitched them out quite a bit and everything seems to be working fine now. Whether this is from them actually adding more bandwidth or from the Napster freaks calming down, I don't know....
$40 a month, rated 640 kbits down 90 kbits up...
Dslreports.com Speed test results...
Los Angeles: 465 down 79 up
SJC (??) California: 464 down 76 up
Dslreports New York speed test server is not available right now...
I would complain to Verizon to get something closer to my rated download speed but from what I've read I should consider myself lucky that it is both working and going faster than a 56k....
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I don't think that international organizations should try and redefine kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte just because Hard Drive companies lower the values as a marketing ploy.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Oh the horror stories I've witnessed in the LA, California area. A DSL installation taking 2 months is not out of the norm. Don't EVER order DSL from the phone company, but don't be surprised if your ISP goes out of business. Speeds vary depending upon your distance from the CO and if you're too far...you're just plum out of luck as far as DSL. And the damn commitment contracts they make you sign...I actually had an ISP tell me that I would still be obligated to pay them if I moved before the commitment was up and they didn't provide service to my new home!
Needless to say...it took Adelphia forever to get the two way cable lines in my area, so I signed up with Rythms . They are simply THE BEST ISP...they actually encourage and provide information for running mp3 and game servers, while other ISP's consider that abuse of the service.
Check them out if you're know anyone looking for an ISP...and tell them username = pjwal referred you so I can get a free month!
My buddy gets 2Mb/s down on his Time Warner cable modem in Huntington Beach. Adelphia finally has Powerlink available in Manhattan Beach and I'll be getting it this Sat side by side w/ my DSL. Anyone know if Powerlink caps uploads?
yup yup.
;)
although our downloads are pretty good...
good thing my server is low traffic
There are several reasons behind the price / availability of DSL/cable. In major metropolitan areas - particualarly those w/ a pre-exsisting IT industry (not installed since '95)1.5Mb - 2Mb Cable / DSL connections are available for around $40 per month.
,DSL modems, & backbone upgrades are initially installed the first few customers soak up the initial higher cost (excluding beta testers). Who remembers when it was $40 - $50 for a SLIP connection?
;)
For smaller more rural areas - in small cities/towns there are several reasons why broadband is more pricey & speeds are slower.
Margins are low: The availability of low cost broadband - particualarly DSL - is based on how many potential users are in the area. For ISP's w/ fewer than 5,000 potential customers offering DSL as a service seems rather expensive.
Distance form the CO varies available speeds - in rural areas clients are usually greater distances from the CO (CLEC - AKA Central Office) This greatly reduces the amount of speed that can be guaranteed by the ISP(see signal attenuation).
Initial startup costs - when a network - the BRAS
Cable modems are easier to run over exsisting cable networks - sometimes offering higher speeds than DSL - but it is shared bandwidth.
Many ISPs do not have a large enough back bone to cater to thier 56k clients & add broadband clients as well.
The US phone grid is an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE. There are 100's of ISP's with no redunant backbones or even redundant connections to other CLECS in the area. The traditional switched network (dial up & 56k) - be it analog or digital - is becoming overloaded & there are some areas in the US where you can't dial 911 at 6PM because everyone is on AOL checking thier e-mail.
Basically broadband is in its infacy - satilite & microwave have too high of a latancy to be useful - although better than nothing, but don't bother w/ Q3 or UT. And our (the US) phone grid sucks. Telcos are scrambling not only to upgrade their voice carriers but their tcp/ip networks as well & remain competitive. It's going to be quite a while before cost efficient broadband reaches the majority of US households. And some rural areas will never see cable/DSL technologies.
Well there's my two cents. maybe this time I'll be modded higher than 0. Doubt it
Move 'zig'!
Dude - you ever try RR's internal transfer - try running an FTP on your box & DL a file from another computer also on RR (not ont the same LAN). You'll see speeds of 800KB+. And that's on the capped WAN.
Move 'zig'!
Southwestern Bell also has the "extended" plan, which allows you to get up to 6Mbs/sec downstream depending on your distance from the central office, but still only 384Kbs/sec up. When the technician installed my dsl he said I could probably get about 3.5 Mbs/sec down, but I can't justify the $120/mo when I get t-1 download speeds and don't serve for $40/mos.
I have no complaints about my transfer rate, because I hardly ever transfer very much. The problem I have is connecting to sites in the first place. I'm told that the delay in connecting is due to the server having to resolve my dynamic IP address each time I choose a different URL. Also, something prevents my playing "Alpha Centauri" over the Internet. AT&T informs me that I am being serviced from another city, a few miles away, instead of the sub-station located 100 meters from my apartment, and that there is nothing I can do about it. So, even when I request access to a site, my usual DSL speed is 0.0 kbps.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I can generally get about 1.5mbit/sec downloads and 500K uploads. Of course, in the middle of the day, this tends to drop a little, but nothing too extreme.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I get 1.5 mbps max on my DSL. My downloads usuall go around 700K/s when i download from fast servers....but oftne times download speeds are limited by the upload speed of the server you are downloading from, not just by your DSL provider. That may be why the DSL may average about 128k...b/c many servers will only upload to you at that speed.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."
I've used both Rogers@Home, CGO@Home and Bell Sympatico HSE Edition. A quick rundown:
Bell: Totally sucked. However, I'm pretty far from the CO. What I didn't like was the excessive downtime and AccessMangler (Bell's PPPoE client). Some people swear by it. Those people are also right nextdoor to the local CO.
CGO@Home: Initally, they sucked too. Their connection before they got @Home was WAAAAY over subscribed and their support was terrible. Once they got into bed with the @Home people, things started to look up, but they pulled a bait and switch on their customers. It was ~2KBits/s down and 500KBits/s out with LANCity modems, but then came the Samsung modems and the 128KBit upload caps. They have since been removed ( 1 year later ). Now, they are a decent provider, but I don't live in their area anymore.
Rogers@Home: Aside from their outages (2 fibre cuts in the past month.. 6 days of total downtime) they are pretty fast. Anything on the @Home network is obviously fast, and speed at night is generally decent. The on paper speed of Rogers is 3Mbps down and 500Kbps out (speed in bits/s).
However, you need to keep a couple of things in mind when you compare these two types of connectivity. Aside from cable's bad rep for neighbourhood over crouding, it is generally faster on paper. What it REALLY boils down to is how fat their pipe is that connects their network to the rest of the world, and who they peer with in other areas. Rogers@Home peers with pretty much all of Toronto through Torix, so getting to TUCows is SCREAMING fast anytime of day or night. @Home must also peer with Microsoft's provider as I get very fast speeds when I need to get the latest service patch for my couple of NT Boxen. However, they do NOT peer with CRL (supplier of FreeBSD's bandwidth) and its generally slow most of the time.
Generally, the people with the biggest pipes and the fattest peering arrangements win.
Brad
When I submitted that comment my query was on the value people were getting for their dollar. Not "how far you are from the CO and the speed you get". Just from talking to American friends it seems our plans up here are better, and I'm wondering why. Maybe because the CRTC regulates such things....
Which is kinda funny, the American "free market" screws out the consumers. In the same way the "free market" has let California power prices now skyrocket, this free market is letting you all be screwed by your telephone and cable providors.
My plan currently is $65 for 4Mbps down and 640k up, and 5 IPs. For $40 I can get 2.5Mbps down, 512k up and 2 IPs. Why are the plan so bad down there? And "the network can't handle it" isn't an excuse, why aren't they upgrading the networks? We can obviously handle it. I usually run into no bottlenecks until I reach the server at the far end of the connection.
Anyhow... maybe it's just the exchange rate... 4Mbps up here in 256k down there. =)
antarctican at trams dot ca
Canada got into the whole telecommunications game late, and so the entire country is strung with much newer Fiberoptics, rather than the USA's crappy copper. You probably have a fiberloop down the street. (oh yeah, I get 1.5Mbps)
___ alwaysBETA.com - Hey, you've got nothing better to do.
in silicon valley i pay approx. US$90 per month for 1Mbps downstream and 384Kbps upstream. i've tested the upstream and it is actually often higher than that, but the provider (speakeasy) doesn't make any guarantees.
/. at least %)
over here in budapest, it's a bit more expensive for that much DSL bandwidth, but the entry point is still quite cheap, and there's some fierce competition between the telco monopoy (whose monopoly expires soon) and two cable modem companies. a friend of mine uses one cable outfit and another, the other; one says everything screams and is great, the other has clocked his downstream at 20KBps (bytes not bits) but he's still not complaining, since it's always on and about US$40/mo, and local telephone time is metered here.
i on the other hand can't get DSL or cable, even though i live very near the center of town... and even though there is a cable TV building three blocks away and a telephone exchange two blocks away. apparently the general demographic of my neighborhood doesn't support the investment just yet...
i hear they're laying a lot of fiberoptic over in romania....
comin' through at 45.2Kbps, i can still read
This Like That - fun with words!
This is just yet another example of the "vast right wing conspiracy" that has this country by the bollocks. They don't want you downloading your porn at 4 Mbit because that would slow down their porn. They don't want you sending your spam at 4 Mbit because that would slow down their spam. How can *we* get decent network access when everyone else is listening to Dr. Laura on streaming audio? It's time we stood up for what's right, er, well, I mean left. Free broadband for all. Routed we stand. Subnetted we fall. Wooo wooao whoo hhoo WHAAAACoooOOOOOOOOO!!!! ...sniff...sniff...
God bless us all. I mean, thank Gaia.
My Telocity account is currently at: 416000b up 137949b down The down is low for what I've seen. It's 11:46 pm and traffic is probably high $49 a month. Including, importantly to me, a static IP. I'll pay more for that. Telocity DNS goes down pretty frequently, an hour or two 1-2 times a week. But at least I still have DSL. And if you're in Chicago and want DSL and think Ameritheft will have it running in 2-4-6 weeks, revise said estimates. Regardless of your provider, Ameritheft still needs to "bless" the box. Be prepared to chill with your Playstation while Quake sits on your desk for about six weeks. At least.
Service Provider: @Home
Cable Provider: Rogers
Max Download Speed: 3Mbps
Max Upload Speed: 512kbps
Price: $39.95 (CDN)
an American and a Canadian?
A: Ask them this question.
--Blair
Well out here we have a 2 megabit capped cable line. I live in an on-campus apartment here at RIT and we dont have access to the network. All the apartments in this complex have a cable modem. And I still consistently get over 200KB downloads even during peak times, and bandwidth tests up in the 500 - 600K range. Roadrunner Im very happy with... Adelphia Powerlink back home in Buffalo is another story (it sucks ... last time i was home my bandwidth tested at 70K for an entire day) ... yes I said I got 70K on Powerlink.
From the mind of a mad man
My DSL connection is of the Fiber Optic type which means I have a network cable running from a box on the corner outside my house into my PC, but everything from the box on is fiber optic, but my DSL is still limited to 1.5Mbit Down and 256 KBit Up, when I asked the technician why my speeds were like this he told me it was an artifical cap imposed by the phone company becuase they were not allowed to sell anything faster to residential customers. Probably because they would be stepping on the shoes of companies selling T1 and faster lines. I can only imagine what kind of speeds I could get if they removed the cap!
I get 250k/s downstream, 45k/s upstream. From what I've heard, that's quite low. I talked to their techies about the upload cap, and they said that it uses asynchronous connections. Whatever!
-
Gangis M. Khan
Unofficial Chrono Trigger 2 project
http://www.uct2.net
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steve Wright
Here in Edmonotn, Alberta, Canada, I have a 10Megabit / 768Kilobit cable connection, for only $40 CDN per month (probably going to change soon, my cable company just got bought out by an @Home partner).
As for transfer speeds, I can normally sustain 50KB/s (that's Bytes) upstream, and I have managed close to 980KB/s downstream (going through my firewall, an AMD 486/80 running linux).
My only complaint about my ISP is: If you exceed their "Transfer allowances", you get charged extra (not too bad, 10GB down, 1 GB up per month).
---
William
These are my personal opinions, not those of my employer.
For $40/per month I get 1.5mb/s cable. Sure the speeds are not constent, however I would rather have speeds anywhere from 400kb/s to 1,500kb/s with a free modem, and the ISP is included. Then having to pay that price for 300kb/s or so all the time, plus you have to find a ISP, and most places make you buy a modem seperate. Not to mention most people end up waiting months to get their DSL installed, I waited just 3 days.
Yes, there are people who get fast DSL cheap and installed in an hour, and people who get slow cable expansive and installed in six months and have to buy a modem. The things I said simply apply in most cases.
-
AIM: dpete455
Yahoo!: dpete455
Jabber: dpete455@jabber.org
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
The latency here varies but for game playing I'm generally around 110 ping...kinda crappy I think for a broadband connection. But, they do limit upload speeds here to only 128Kb/s, so that adds to the suckage.
Downloads and page loads are quite fast as my particular neighborhood isn't saturated yet. Although speeds typically drop during 6p-10p as the girl next door with the same service overloads on Napster downloads. Have peaked out at 400KB/s during big downloads, which equates to roughly 3Mb/s...and oddly enough, my best times are during the midday rush.
Funny thing during the installation. The service guy is finishing everything up and the last check box says something like, 'show user fast download speed'. So he goes to some site that downloads a few things and reports your speed. Well, it was only a few small files and very small graphic files spanning only a few seconds. The page comes back showing a download of around 600KB/s or around 4.8Mb/s (which is possible in burst speeds since the pipe can in theory pass up to 10Mb/s). Well a graphic comes up showing a relation to other speeds. It goes something like 14.4 modem, 28.8, 56k, 128k, T1 and then...T3! It flashes a big message, 'your connection is better than a T3 connection!' I fell over laughing my ass off. The service guy doesn't get it, why don't I like my T3 connection? I just shake my head and *pray* that the web page people made a typo and dont really think that a T3 classification is just taking a T1 and multiplying by 3 (their logic is T1=1.5Mb/s therefore 4.5Mbs=T3 WRONG! T3 classification is approximately 45Mb/s...something which if correct would be quite awesome) I can just imagine there are tons of my neighbors going "gee honey, we got ourselves a T3 connection, we're really cool!"
- A non-productive mind is with absolutely zero balance.
Most @home users have the 16k cap, however older less populated regions usually have around a 80 k cap. The newer your cable is sometimes effects the cap also, the cable system in my county has just been upgraded to the two-way cable (one-way (dialup) cable has been avaible for at least 2 years now) and I have gotten speeds of 160 k\sec upload before... however, I don't know how long my joy ride is going to last until they cap me.
In Vancouver, BC Canada
ADSL with 2.5 Mbit download, 640 Kbit upload. Static IP address. $80.00 CDN = $55.00 US
Works great. For a bit more a month they can give me 4.0 Mbit download.
ipv6 is my vpn
Just as big a difference comes with ISP services. For example, most of Covads ISPs are not Tucson based, and tend to be slow and unreliable. Often you have to go all the way to Denver, LA or even New York before getting to the net. Basically, since they are all geared to the residential user, they tend to be a bit more lax. That isn't to say I haven't heard some good esperience, but the general tone with them is negative. Qwest gets much higher marks from most people. Most Qwest ISPs are Tucson based and tend to give better performance and serivce. Of course there are some that are bad (like Dakotacom) but many, like Qwest themselves are very good. I personally have a Qwest account and like it very much. They offer flexable deals anywhere from around $37/month for a 256k line that isn't always on up to around $500/month for a 7mb/1mb bussiness class line. Personally I went with one of thier 640/256k lines with bussiness class service and static IPs. All in all it costs me about $75/month but it's worth it to me. All the features I want, great uptime and I always get my full speed.
So, the point of my rant here is don't try to compare DSL just on merit of it's cost. If someone is offering DSL in the 4mb rang for $40/month, well serive is going to suffer in other areas. Bandwidth isn't cheap. Generally performance suffers during peak times with those kind of services as well as them not allowing you to run servers/etc. A deal like Qwest's will cost you more, but you get what you pay for.
So, as to the capping issue. Well, I think it's necessary for good DSL services to work. IF you give everyone uncapped DSL for cheap, well then you aren't going to be able to afford the upstream to back it up, hence their performance won't be up to its potential. However, if you cap all the speeds to match the price, then you can afford to give people everything they pay for. Which is better for a given person is a matter of choice. IF you're a casual user, probably one of the low cost, uncapped type deals is better. You will get great speeds at off times and a good rate. However, if you need a really reliable line and need to be gaurenteed you'll have your full bandwidth whenever you want it, you are probably going to have to go with someone more expensive.
The only thing I really don't agree with is line capping, which everyone including Qwest does (that I know of). At a given line price Qwest will only give you so much bandwidth. Well, this is silly, a 7mb line really doesn't cost them any more than a 256k line. What costs more is the bandwidth. Personally, I think the lines ought ot be flat rate (ie $40/month for a line up to whatever speed oyu lines support) and then the ISP fee increase in porportion to how much bandwidth you want them to give oyu. As it stands both go up. It's $30 for Qwest's basic always on 640k line, but $150 for a 4mb/1mb line. Both come over the same copper, they just charge more for the second.
I live just outside of Boston and have 7.1Mbps downstream and 640k upstream DSL service at home.
I also wanted multiple static IP's (regular routed IP - none of this PPPOE crap).
The price tag??? Just over $300.00 a month!!!
As far as the speed is concerned, I will admit that I can literally throw rocks at the CO, and most people around Boston can't get 7.1Mbps. I could, however, get 1.5Mbs in Back Bay (part of Boston), and I was paying about $100.00.
I suspect that the reason for the "artificial" (if they are indeed artificial) bandwidth restrictions in the US might be that the phone companies don't want everyone with T1's to switch to DSL. (This could also explain the pricing). I have two T1 lines into my office from different providers, which are costing me over $4000.00/month (total). If the phone companies around here offered real fast DSL (both up and downstream) for a decent price, everyone (myself included) would immediately switch. The phone companies don't want to throw away that cash!
I am with Telstra Bigpond Cable. On an open account I have had 400+kBytes/second downloads, on a restricted speed/unlimited downloads plan I pay to have 512Kbits/sec and get that sort of speed out of good sites without any real restriction on quantity. (no servers allowed on this plan). Last night I had 8 simultanious downloads happening at 7-8 kBytes/sec each, from an Apple FTP site.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I have @Home from AT&T. I get amazingly fast downloads, usually between 250 Kps to 300Kps. During nonpeak hours I get well over that. Yea, my upstream is limited to 128Kps, but I usually don't do any upstreaming. Though the fastest I have everseen was 550Kps when dowloading something from palm.com. The service is $40 a month and I got around AT&T trying to charge me for additional IP addresses. I tried to go with FreeDSL. I signed up in Aug 2000 and it is still 'coming soon'.
Rogers@Home promises ~3Mbits asynchronously divided into a 50KB/s upstream and ~300-350KB/s downstream.
;)
Downloads easily match T1 speeds, depending on the network location of the other host... plus, one of my friends has a screenshot of one day where he was downloading something like 12 files files at 150KB/s each... so, it seemed pretty impressive in aggregate
There's a lot of bollocks about "cable modem capping" over here... that the modem itself is somehow preventing full utilisation of bandwidth... (i.e. more upstream...)
I still think regulations should be put into place preventing DSL and Cable providers from asynrchonously provisioning bandwidth -- their AUPs prevent servers and other things from running off what is otherwise just as fast as a T1 line... and, if the technology were fully applied much much faster... (what was that I heard? 52Mbits?)
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
I have a fantastic DSL provider. My service gets 640Kbs upload and up to 3Mbs download. When I run tests at places like dslreports I see close to 2Mbs download and the full 640Kbs upload all the time. I also get two fixed IP addresses and a bunch of other useless stuff including 5 hrs monthly of dial up. (I was a dial up customer of theirs and NEVER got a busy signal.) It's a little pricey at $150 Cdn but it is considered a business service.
You can see what they offer here. SaskTel
I know several people who switched to cable when it arrived here and only lasted a couple of months before switching back. The cable had better download rates (than the basic DSL) but was regularly down (0 Kbs up or down).
The actual ADSL connection is up to 6 Mbps downstream and 384 kbps upstream depending on line conditions. However, at the $40 price range, SNET caps your bandwidth to 1.5 Mbps downstream and 128 kbps upstream. They allow multiple simultaneous PPPoE streams (over the same or different DSL connection) and the service includes a regular dialup account with 5 email boxes.
SNET also offers two other pricing plans for xDSL (that I'm aware of). For $80/month you get exactly the same services as the $40 plan with the addition of a static IP address (I'm not sure about the multiple PPPoE streams with this account). They also offer a higher bandwidth option for, I believe, $120/month. This removes the bandwidth caps from your connection (allowing up to 6 Mbps down/384 kbps up) and gives you a static IP. As far as I know, SNET does not currently offer SDSL.
I've had the $80/month plan for just over a year, and I have been very pleased by the service. My phone line is clean and relatively short, so it supports the full 6 Mbps downstream and 384 kbps upstream. Of coarse I'm capped, so I don't see any more than 1.5 Mbps down (183 kBytes/sec) and 128 kbps up (15.6 kBytes/sec), but I usually don't see much less either.
I usually get about 150 kBytes/sec downloads (www, ftp, etc.) from most sites (sometimes more, sometimes less). I'd be willing to bet that it's not my connection slowing me down in most cases. SNET is now owned by SBC Communications which I believe is based in Texas (and actually provides the DSL service). Often, when I do a traceroute, and I'm trying to connect to a machine that is relatively local, the route goes down to New York, then Texas, bounces around the mid-west a bit and finally starts heading back towards CT. Even with the poor route, the connection seems to be OK.
The two things I'm not happy about are PPPoE and the 128kbps upstream cap. I've talked with 3rd level SNET xDSL support and they confirmed my suspicion that there is no technological reason to use PPPoE. Apparently, the reason is that SBC Communications "says so". Well, at least, their upper management wants certain types of reporting which was only achievable by using PPPoE. This is supposedly changing and maybe someday they will offer strait IP over DSL with DHCP for IP address assignment and authentication (the way it ought to be).
I experienced at least one problem that wouldn't have effected me if it weren't for PPPoE. My friends with dynamic IPs report all kinds of trouble with PPPoE.
As for my upstream woes, 128kbps is just not enough to serve anything to anyone except a single modem user, with out it being frustratingly slow. I could go for the high priced option, except 384 kbps isn't enough either, so why should I pay 50% more for something that isn't really any better (at least for upstream).
I need SDSL! 1 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream would be enough for me. I could live with a little less downstream bandwidth if I only had more upstream.
I'm in Boise, Idaho and use @HOME for my cable modem. I have a 4 Mbps connection and download between 400 and 500 KB/s. The cost is $40 per month.
"A will is the minimum requirement for jumping out of an airplane, but a parachute is recommended."
Most canadian providers cap total usage instead. For example Telus caps at 5GB down, 1GB up for the $40 canadian per month cost. I remember hearing that there is a government regulation about high speed inet consumer prices.
In checking DSL Reports.com, I have found some fast DSL speeds available, such as 2Mbps, but I haven't seen anything as fast as 4Mbps. (almost)Anything that fast(2Mbps) in America costs several hundred dollars a month. Of course there is also the matter of actualSpeed supposedSpeed. That would be very much the case with cable. Though I don't have it, cable seems to be a "This is the speed you will get if everyone else is not using it" set-up, they sell that speed to people, but what really matters is the speed you will get when people are using it. The total sum of all the speeds that people were promised is more than the total network segment speed. The low traffic time speeds are extremly fast, while the high traffic times can be extremly slow. This is what I have heard, but it may be incorrect.
I get 1 meg here in Aurora.
The main advantage in canada is due to the fact it is so cold there. At those extreme temperatures, copper wire will actually superconduct, making it less susceptible to noise and higher frequency attenuation. This is a good thing since there are *only* 4 CO's in the entire country. Some copper runs go for thousands of miles!! And you thought the US PSTN was bad ...
I work for an outsource company that does technical support for Pacific Bell DSL, and I think this applies to any Southwestern Bell DSL. (the ASI/SBC/Swbell conglomerate) At PacBell, the current 'normal' bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps down and 384 Kbps up. However, depending on the phone line conditions, they sometimes have to cap the line to 768/384 or even 384/128. This is usually done for people who are near the edge of the 17,500 ft range or have bridge taps/load coils on their line. I think there are plans to offer higher bandwidth (at a higher price) to those whose phone lines can support it, but I'm very low on the totem pole and don't know any specifics. I understand the G.Lite standard for DSL calls for a 1.5 bitrate, don't know whether Pacbell uses that or not...
you are limited to 15k/sec upload.. it is horrible horrible horrible, but still the same price as an ISP/seperate phoneline (its $40) so I can't complain.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
15k/sec.. 15k/sec! It sucks
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I clicked on that site's link to the bandwidth chart for @home, have a look yourself. Very "helpful" indeed.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Acutal clocked down has been as low as 266.5kbps and as high as 2mbps+.
Actual up has been.. sufficient...
Realize that speed tests are also somewhat OS specific. The same speed test on a W98 box is much worse... on 2000 or Linux very close.
Its amazing that even on an intellegent forum such as /. ignorance and raw stupidity such as that evidenced by the above post exists. "Anonymous Coward" indeed.
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
I am the only guy who didn't know that Northpoint is going away ?
I have ADSL from a Florida ISP ( Durocom, formerly MPINet ). I have a measly 144kbps downstream but it still beats dial-up. I prefer to imagine that I am a long way from the Central Office rather than that I am being ripped off.
It's all moot now - since my ISP uses the Northpoint infrastructure. Northpoint has announced that it is going out of business and my ISP has pulled all mention of DSL from its website.
When I called Tech Support because of a temporary outage yesterday, they transferred me to Customer Service who were supposedly going to give me some bad news. Of course all I got was 20 minutes of music on hold before I hung up.
I have to imagine that many others will be affected by this.
In Little Rock, Ar ADSL through SWBell is marketed at minimum 384dwn/128up at $39.95/mo, you can also get SWBell internet for an additional $10.00 per month, the whole deal, local phone service and phone options included, ends up being about $70.00 per month, which isn't bad (especially considering that the actual speeds end up being about 1.5-3.0 mbps dwn and 384/512 up. The one exception being NNTP which is throttled to a symmetrical 128K.
70 miles west in Russellville AR (centurytel country) there is no DSL available and cox-internet.com provides hideous cable service, I recently tested a friends "premium service" cox_cable fed box which was slower than dual channel ISDN (only a little, roughly the same as dual 56K modems) and costs $30/month + $15/month for modem rental. Centurytel promises a DSL rollout in the area in 3rd quarter 2001.
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds. Robert Nesta Marley
I get about 9Mbit/sec. Im about 1-2 Km from the exchange. Use a Nokia ADSL/router. The uplink is not even close to that.
:(
This is in Dunedin, New Zealand, problem is we are charged $0.18/meg (about $0.10 us) which renders the speed relatively unusable for anything other than webpages and email
I have the cheapest dsl I cna get 35.99/month I get a lowest speed of 394kbps and I have had a burst of well over 1.2MBPS I have looked into a more expensive dsl and I can buy one of up to 6 mbps I can not afford that it is well over 380 dollars a month plus I have to lease their router (per contract) and buy a new dsl modem. The problem with speeds in the us is that we are now laying the rest of the fiber back bone. Fiber is almost to my curb, but I am lucky I have a friend who is close enough geographically but the phones in there area have not had upgraded lines.
2048 down, 640 up
used to be limited to 5GB per month but back in november they went to unlimited
$40 Canadian per month
I've used two different DSL providers in the Dallas area. I've used SWBell's service, and the throuput rates were awesome. They advertised rates of 1.5 down and 128 up. In the 9 months I had the service, I averaged 600-900 kbps, and peaked at 4 mbsp. I lived north of Dallas for a while, were I used GTE's service for 9 months or so. We paid outragous money for 384 down/128 up. The average througput was between 150-250 kbps.
You see the reason we dont have those 4Mbit speeds here in the us is becuase the NSA reservs all the bandwidth to help download europe's financial information and foward it to wall street so we can make a profit. :)
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If you live in an area where Qwest/UsWest got off their collective asses and upgraded the phone lines...
About two years ago, a company called Airswitch (now Switchpoint) started installing what they call NANs (Neighborhood Area Networks) here in Springville (about 60 miles south of Salt Lake City) and other towns around Provo. It originally cost us $40/month for a 10 Mbps connection with a public IP.
/.ers out there with some good broadband.
Recently they upgraded the Springville and American Fork NANs to 100 Mbps (yes, fast ethernet), but they reconfigured the NAN so everyone has a local IP. To get a public IP now, it's an additional $50/month (grr!). They are now charging an additional $100 if you have more than 500 meg per day on average go through their internet gateway in any seven day period. It also costs $8/month for each entry in their DNS and the fees are just piling up. It's a really nice service, but I think they're finding out that they can't be competitive with DSL and ISDN with such an expensive infrastructure.
At any rate, Switchpoint has decided to start selling franchises so they don't have to pay the cost of installing all the fiber, etc. NANs for Denver, Dallas, Portland and Las Vegas are currently being designed for rollout. Hopefully they won't go under before they can expand some more and at least provide all you
We've got serveral 384k/6MBit 'commercial' DSL lines from SNET (a la SBC). We get about 4.5MB peak out of each one but we're only paying 120 bux for each so what do we care. We've bonded/balanced them on the downstream using some software from Vicomsoft. We're paying less than 500 bux a month for a 12MBit downstream pipe. :)
We've also got a SDSL line from xo rated at 1MBit which has been quite good (so far) though we've only had it a week. We pay 350 bux or so for that.
In all it's far cheaper than dragging some fiber out for my needs. It'd be nice if the telco could keep their end up for more than a few weeks at a time though.
For @10 months we were unrestricted. Max seen download speed was 650-750KByte/s. Max seen download from another @home user in town, on a different node, was a SHADE over 1.1MBYTE/second. I was thrilled. Now with more users, I see 350-400kbytes down when the sending side has the bandwidth, occasionally will push it to 500-550kbyte, so I'm thrilled. BUT: Now we can only upload at 128kbit. If it was 256kpbs or 512kbps I'd be happy, as video conferencing with the family before the U/L cap I was sending 640x480 at 33fps. No outages yet. Had one billing problem so I was down one day. Installers sucked. This is 39$/month, soon to be $29/month when they let us own our own modems. Prepay for a year drops a few more $$$ off that. Give me back a DECENT upload speed and I'm in heaven!
NOSOUPFORYOU!
I get a consistent 1400 kbps download & ~200 kbps upload via a 1.5Mbit/256K DSL... and I am a Dan Marino-esqe bomb from the CO. :-)
-CraigJames "All I need is a little TLC: Thorazine, Lithium, & Compazine"
the reason that US gets lower speeds than canada (generally) is that most of canada is wired with fiber. just look on the end of every block in a city and you'll see a grey box. that would be where the fiber cables meet. anywho, just my thought on it