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Cable Sprints, DSL Trudges, Free ISPs Pant
Aarthek writes: "A new report is showing how people are signing on to the internet. Notice that the growth according to this report shows that DSL has had less than 2% growth in the first quarter of 2001. Where Cable is showing a 18% growth. The full report can be found here." This certainly matches my experience with DSL vs. cable, but for various reasons you're probably familiar with, DSL can be a better way to connect -- if it's available in your area, and you have a solvent provider, and you're near enough to a CO, and they'll squeeze you in an installation time, and your house wiring is up to it.
If you've got a TV tuner (either separately or one of the ATI All-In-Wonder cards), you can split your cable and plug one end into the modem and one into your TV card. Voila! High speed internet access and the ability to watch TV at the same time!
You may be told by your cable provide that this won't work because "they're not the same kind of signal". Trust me, it does (at least where I live). :) I've actually got mine split twice - regular TV, modem, TV Tuner.
My opinion of DSL died with Northpoint. To imagine 100,000 users being left out in the cold literally overnight is unfathomable. If AT&T would buy the physical plant but doesn't see enough vitality in the medium to purchase the user base as well then something is sorely wrong. Covad and Rhythms most likely have less than 6 months to live. Who does that leave us with? ILECs. But wait, there's a catch! That nice 384k SDSL line I had from Northpoint that was rock solid at 17700 feet from the CO? Gone. Woops.. Ameritech only supports ADSL up to 12000 feet so I can't get it. Covad? 15000 feet. Cable modem? Available in the surrounding area but my apartment building isn't wired... they have a multiuser DirecTV system and a wireless cable system called Popvision. So where does that leave me? Back to good old reliable ISDN for now until I can move next year. Then I swear to god I'm camping out in a house a stone's throw from a DSL wired CO and within the cable modem availability area. I will get a cable modem, and at least one DSL line and an ISDN backup. No more screwing around.. my life is too involved with the Internet to be left high and dry anymore.
...in that many cable providers absolutely forbid one from running servers.
That kind of arrangement would be death on wheels for my side business, mainly because I'm self-hosted. As it is, I could use more than the eight-static (five usable) IP block I've got, but I don't like the thought of leasing another block (pricey).
I've had Qwest DSL for nearly two years now, 512D/272U, and it's gone out on me all of twice in that entire time. First was a CO outage, and the other was when some construction morons in the neighborhood drove a fencepost through an underground cable. Took three days to get that fixed, and it knocked out a lot more than my line.
DSL lets me do things that would turn most cable companies white as a sheet: Run my own primary/secondary DNS, mail, web, and FTP boxes. Self-hosting is also a Good Thing because you can sub-host as many domains as you want without begging your ISP to do it.
Granted, not everyone needs to do this. However, if (God forbid) Qwest should decide they want to stop providing DSL, I sure as heck hope there's someone around to pick up the slack...
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"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?"
Sounds suspiciously like ethernet being used a little longer than it should to me ;]
Really it is what you can get. Money cannot buy speed. Cable is faster then DSL and after you factor in all the costs often cheaper, so long as you don't need peak hour connectivity. Satalite is really quick, (latency is a big issue) and only slightly more then the others. Dial-up is slow, and second most expenseive if you have a dedicated line. ISDN is slow (faster then dial up, but only if you pay double ISP charges for 128k), and most expensive.
Where I live ISDN is the fastest I can get without dealing with latency. My boss pays for the line though, I couldn't afford it on my own. I'm thinking about satalite, because ISDN isn't fast enough.
something like half the country (US) cannot get either cable modem or DSL.
As a side note, A friend of mine just got cable service, and was having fun browsing the neighborhood's Windows shares. That's one part of cable service that I'm missing, I guess.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Yeah, and not just at the ISP uplink level, what do you think the CO (where your DSL line goes to) is connected to the ISP with? A T1. Sometimes better.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
I'm in the process of moving to a new apartment right now, and I've been setting up utilities. Phone and power went like a breeze. The customer service reps (with whom I was able to speak to nearly immediately) took down my name, address, social security number, asked me for a date of activation, and then thanked me and hung up.
That was easy. The local cable modem company (RR) is that easy, too; I called to ask how long an installation took and the rep seemed surprised that I didn't want an install in the next couple of days. This is service, people.
I decided to go with DSL, instead, because there was *one* ISP doing business in town that I could get a static IP from for a reasonable price (Southwestern Bell will give me five static IPs for $80/mo, or one dynamic for $40/mo, but nothing in between - does this make any sense?)
I'm paying the cost not in money, but in time. A month without broadband will be a long time; if it weren't for the compelling feature set and the fact that I know I'll be stuck with whatever I'm getting now for a year, I'd be jumping ship to cable in a heartbeat.
Why on earth does DSL take so long to set up? Is there an order backlog a mile long? Does the phone company introduce some sort of mandatory delay into the process?
You forgot one: DSL usually has a better feature set. For instance, with SDSL (now non-existent) and ISDN (expensive in Cincinnati), I was able to get real Internet address space (a /27). With cable, I have to pay through the nose to get addresses, and they can't/won't assign me a portion of their address space, so I have to NAT the too-few addresses I do get.
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
As a former @Home user, I hated having bandwidth drop to modem speeds in the evening
Yeah...and DSL may or may not be better depending on a provider. At night, when my cable goes to hell, I can still get to hsacorp's web pages at blinding speeds - even after dumping cache, etc...
The problem is not from the homes to the company, but from the company onto the general net. There is only so much a T1 or T3 can handle. Same problem with DSL - if there were the same amount of users coming in via DSL and out a T1 as on a cable modem, I doubt there would seem to be a difference between the two at that point.
Mostly depends on how customer service oriented your provider is.
As does DSL, usually. Here in the UK, you can choose between a 20:1 and a 50:1 contention ratio for ADSL, depending on how much you want to pay. If you're really lucky (and have sufficiently deep pockets), you might be in an area where you can get SDSL, which isn't shared with other users, but it's so rare as to be effectively non-existent at the moment. Where ADSL wins over cable is that you're guaranteed a maximum contention ratio. As I understand it, a cable modem line over here will be shared with as many other users as the cable company can sign up. Also, cable providers tend to place all sort of restrictions on the type of traffic they'll allow, which is fine for Joe Public, but sucks for the rest of us...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Terms of service and connection authentication as well as several other things vary on the whole for Roadrunner based on your location. As far as I can tell, the Roadrunner trademark is a franchise sold to cable companies who set the actual policies. There's tons of information on Roadrunner requiring a "sign-on" that I don't have to do. I, on the other hand deal with the MAC address authentication DHCP. I believe some of the Roadrunner franchises use a phoneline for upstream bandwidth. Bottom line: Roadrunner policies, performance and quality of service are totally tied to region and completely distinct.
LetterJ
Head Geek
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
The good news is that it was not given away irrevocably, and we can change the law regarding broadcast licenses and start collecting some of the revenue we are due from this resource. Broadcast licenses should be a limited term lease or a revenue-sharing license.
I wrote parts of this stuff
I have a similar situation - pretty close to my USW/Qwest CO, 512k up/down. I've had one outage due to USW/Quest in the 1 year+ that I've had the service. The outage lasted for about a day, as I can recall.
However, a friend of mine went with a Northpoint/CLEC-style DSL provider and they've since gone TU. His DSL has been off for a month while people blame other people. Of course, for the six months he DID have it he didn't pay anything for it. :)
In the end, the biggest things that matter to me are these, in this order: reliability, competition and speed.
The only provider of cable is AT&T. They have no competition and their service agreement shows it. Since they have no competition in the internet-via-cable market, they have no real incentive to be reliable and they have no real incentive to make sure it's as fast as it's marketed to be. All of these have been shown to be true at one time or another.
DSL, on the other hand, is more expensive and is not as fast (on paper). However, if Qwest pisses me off, or if my ISP pisses me off ...I can leave and go to some other DSL provider. Thus, theoretically, DSL providers will provide better service while shaking out the crappy providers. So far, it seems to be working.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
I'm taking that into account, but only to a point (plus over-simplifying for discussion purposes). Though it's not exactly a linear curve, there still is a rapid increase in costs that does not exist in the broadcast model. The other thing to consider in calculating infrastructure costs is that it's not quite a matter of replacing the phone banks with a PRI - you need hardware to support it, and you need to make capital expenditures that, if you're running on an upgrade treadmill, never really do pay for themselves. I assume in my earlier post that the cost savings are $3/user-month from 10K subs to 100K subs, but unless that makes you profitable it doesn't matter.
The calculations that free ISP providers made figured they would grow to critical mass and that the subscribers would be worth a whole lot more to advertisers than they really were. The problem was that the more they grew, the more they lost. Although the fixed costs do diminish somewhat (in the central infrastructure portion) on a per-user basis as your userbase grows, the local loop/special modem/truck roll costs in the DSL business stay just as expensive for one as they do for one million. Which is why the only free ISP's that are hanging on by a thread are Juno and NetZero (Bluelight.com doesn't count - KMart just took it on to avoid Christmastime disaster when Spinway died) - the dial-up costs do scale better than the DSL costs could. There are profitable ISP's out there - lots of them. But they all charge for their services, even the "bare-bones" $9/month ISPs with no tech support, no personal web hosting, and outsourced Usenet. You can deliver dial-up ISP service pretty darned cheaply, but not cheaply enough to give it away. And forget about giving away DSL service - I mean, that's like giving away cable TV service in terms of costs.
It's just such a shaky economic model to begin with that I'm surprised it even got funded - despite the "we'll fund anything, no questions asked" attitude of the last few years. In the end, TANSTAAFL.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The only problem with the Free ISP model was that all the companies that offered it were based on the fantasies of crack-addled minds. That's the only possible explanation. I mean, just because people are accustomed to Free Stuff On The Internet, it does not mean that the Internet itself can be free. One reason that broadcast TV works as a free access model is that there is no need to build out infrastructure to connect each subscriber (unlike the ISP business). Cable TV, OTOH, charges a premium to access each home, because they need...
Infrastructure!
Just like the free ISP's did. What a coincidence! Something like a TV or radio benefits from the Network Effect (or Metcalfe's Law) because the broadcasting to the first TV costs millions of dollars (for the studios, transmitters, etc.), but it costs $0 per set after that. The more sets, the more money the broadcaster makes.
In the ISP business, though, it costs money to support each subscriber - in technical support, fixed wiring costs, phone/modem server costs (for dial-up networks), wholesale DSL costs (for folks like WinFire), and bandwidth. These costs don't magically get cheaper with size - they continue to grow. If you lose $5 per subscriber-month, then you lose $50,000 per month with 10K subscribers, and assuming (generously) that you can reduce your expenses by $3 per subsciber-month at 100,000 subscribers, you're still losing $200,000 per month at that level. It doesn't make sense now, and it didn't make sense then, either.
My local paper (the Boston Globe) has a consumer column that runs on Sundays. A few weeks ago it spotlighted the demise of free ISP's, and featured quotes from several customers of defunct free ISP's who "felt screwed". I tell you, I never laughed so hard reading anything other than comics in a newspaper.
After I recovered my breath, I then wrote a reasoned response to the consumer advocate and explained Economics 101 (which, unfortunately, I think most self-styled consumer advocates either skipped or flunked). Essentially, you can't sell a dollar for 90 cents and make it up in volume. Not surprisingly, I did not hear back directly from him, though he did cite my letter briefly in a follow-up column a few weeks later.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
yeah, blazing fast downloads... *MOST* people are interested in that. DSL you get about 80k/s (768/128k here) but cable (even when you are in the new moon ;) you still get decent speeds, 150+)
.02
DSL you have to deal w/pain in the ass providors (Verizon). Sure I get 80k/s, but when I cannot telnet anywhere b/c the ping response is soooo bad (1000+) I might as well be on 56k I would at least be able to get my work done.
I don't believe that telcos are doing anything to try and stop their customers from going to Cable. I personally believe that they don't want DSL. It is apparantly a hassle for them to appease the customer. They don't care if your connection is shitty, as long as they get their $32.50/mo. Your payment doesn't cover what they need to pay for their costs...
They oversell bandwith like crazy (even daisychain two shelves per T1 rather than one).
I am waiting for my contract w/Verizon to run out, and hopefully by then TW RR will be in the area here (supposedly sometime this summer) and I will be happier w/that.
Just my worthless
I don't get my ISP services from Verizon. Just the line.. I get two IP addresses from a local freenet that offers DSL services.. They weren't overly happy giving us the two IP's, but they did.
Verizon has VERY poor customer service. That's how they are ruining DSL. They seem to feel that it is ok for you to have 1000+ms ping replies, and they also seem to feel it is ok to let this continue for several months w/o any work being done.
I would rather the cable. At least there would be *some* periods during the day that there would be decent service. w/Verizon DSL there are no peak, off-peak times. I have poor ping responses at all hours/all days...
Been on Pac-Bell as a static IP for about 2 years. My download run to max of 800kbs, but upload never exceeds 120 kbs, regardlesss of the fact that I should get 384 :( The line is UP 95% of the time though, which is a good thing since Pac-Bells customer service is the worst in the FREE WORLD.) I looked into cable in this area but my friends on it have worse expiernces. I hate PAC-Bell but I am not leaving my dependable if slightly slow connect for a cable system (ie astound) that can't stay up for more than 2 days running. Granted astound or seren is new to the neighborhood but have friend on astound service, phone, cable, and internet who can't even make a phone call during peak hours.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
In my experience, the real bottleneck bandwidth-wise is almost never the last hop in a cable modem. (The cable company's own connection to the internet is often the limiting factor, but if they have two uplinks some sites may be slow while others aren't). If not, the limit's how busy the server you're talking to is, or some other bottleneck in an intermediate hop. Even at peak activity I've never seen a download from an otherwise fast site drop below about 140 kilobytes (not bits, bytes) per second. Average is 250-350, and theoretical peak (never seen it) is 500. I've never seen kernel.org drop below 200k/sec.
Now trying to use a cable modem as a server is ludicrous; upstream bandwidth is only about 20k/second. I uploaded 1.6 gigs to work once, it took a day and change. DSL is a MUCH better solution for servers, in theory anyway. (My own experience with it involves a lot of 15 second signal dropouts which aren't acceptable in a real server. But for a hobbyist starting out, who can't afford anything like server side hosting and needs "surfing" access anyway...)
Determining whether big evil cable corporations are worse than big evil phone companies is an open question, of course. :)
Rob
Yeah, same here. I got Verizon DSL in October 1999. I use a local ISP for the Internet part, so I pay a bit more than your typical Verizon customer: $34.95 to Verizon, and $64.95 to my ISP.
:-(
I called Verizon on a Monday to have it set up, the guy came by on Wednesday, did a little wiring in the house. I hooked up the modem, got three lights. He said, "Have fun," and left. Real quick, real easy, practically painless.
My ISP had already been in touch with Verizon, so all I had to do on my end was configure my gateway and my machines on my LAN, and I was surfing the net.
As for reliability, my system only went down one weekend in December 1999. Verizon changed something on my phone service and didn't inform my ISP who claimed that the changed required that they reset something on their end. Being the whiz that I am, I've never needed tech support beyond that, other than just getting my IP settings from my ISP.
Having multiple machines and running a www server, etc. were the main reasons I chose DSL over cable. Also, I don't think cable was available in my neighborhood until the summer of 2000, so I would have had to wait for quite a while before cable arrived. (We had cable television for ages, just not cable internet.)
Here in Lexington, KY many neighborhoods are like that. You can get cable, but you can't get DSL, or you can get DSL but you can't get cable. A handful of areas still can't get either.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
that's my problem. I run a bunch of servers on my cable modem, and @home kinda actively hunts you down if you do that.
I post links to stuff here
speak of the devil. they just did it about an hour ago. all of the services on my linux box have gone missing from the net. what a wonderful thing to look forward to when I go home.
---
I post links to stuff here
I have a cable modem, I'm waiting for my DSL to arrive. for 4 months I've been waiting for my DSL to arrive. I would have never switched from my cable modem, but my ISP is selling off it's cable modem business to @home, and I hear they don't play nice with linux, so I'd be SOL. I just hope I get the DSL before @Home starts port scanning me.
I post links to stuff here
Cable providers are such pains about running services on your computer at home. They absolutely want you to be a passive consumer of information, no matter what.
I have a /29 from my ISP, and run various low bandwidth services (including being a primary DNS server for several domains) from my computer at home. I could never do that reliably with a cable modem.
My actual available bandwidth is more reliable as well. Especially if I go through my ISPs squid proxy for most stuff. The squid proxy is connected to the net at 45 MBps and the higher peak rates can smooth out network bumps to make my transfer rate a smooth 65k/sec. I wish they were more vocal about their squid proxy because then there'd be a better chance that stuff I want would be in it, and I wouldn't have to fetch from the Internet at large at all.
Of course, having a good ISP is a must. I wouldn't ever use QWorst as my ISP. I've been extremely pleased with VISI.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Granted excite has made cablemodems in general un-likeable due to their stupid tactics and no clue how to run a service oriented business. (Excite people, the customer is always right and you must make them happy, even when they are idiots!) but DSL is worse. Telcos are notorious for having the worst customer service in the communications industry. (next to cellular, those people are just jerks) The telco's infrastructure is from 1920, and they barely maintain it. Cable infrastructure is less than 5 years old where cablemodems are available and the only problems other than excite, is explosive growth that is catching the local cables offices off-guard. (4 t-3's for my town should have been enough, they ordered another 3 t-3's to help fulfil demand)
but it also has another problem. Why the hell does cablemodem service go all the way to denver or wherever your service company is before hitting the net? when I hit the cable headend, I should ride a T3 to the nearest POP (university or backbone provider) instead of shoveling it 1/2 way across the country just so some over-controlling freak can control what comes in or out.
cablemodem service can kick the butt of anything else offered, if it was ran properly.
and Excite is not about to allow that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have DSL through Verizon (formerly GTE), and I called December 26th 1999. Day after Christmas, week before Y2K. Guy came and installed me January 7th, 2000, at the promised time. DSL worked within the hour. 768kbs down, 128kbs up. My connection has been up, able to pull 90-92KB/s, for 16 months today. Granted, I am a block from the CO, and my apartment complex was built in 1993... but still, I love my connection. No downtime... my ISP (local company) lost outside DNS a couple of time for about 90 minutes, but I could still get my email and such, so my connection has never been down as far as I know.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Just curious, how's the latency on that?
"It's Brazilian"
Adelphia in philly is great. My parents have an adelphia cable modem that averages between 100 and 300 KBps. Some sites, like sunsite or ftp.funet.fi would give consistent speeds of around 700 KBps. It was great downloading the kernel source in about 20 seconds.
-matt
The sales dork isn't in policy and enforcement, besides, he was probably selling dishwashers the week before so what does he know?
Even if he was in the know, just what constitutes "hogging" cable's superior bandwidth, anyway? I think statements like that get down to brass tacks about what cable can and can't do, and what its superior bandwidth is vulnerable to.
The shared-neighborhood bandwidth thing will be cable's chief bugaboo until they come up with some neat trick to rate-limit connections. It'll provide a convenient excuse for CATV people to not deliver on a decent two-way IP network and instead deliver an interactive-infoentertainment package instead.
Some reasons why DSL is better than cable: competition between vendors
You understate the value of this, IMHO. The competition between vendors means that there's product differentiation -- ISPs have to do something to make themselves stand out, and one thing mine does is allow me to do whatever I want with my connection -- run servers, connect my home LAN, and so on.
Every SA I've ever seen from a cable company comes down to the fact that they want you downloading HTTP content and anything that remotely resembles anything other than the computer equivilent of watching TV is expressly forbidden.
I also think the idea that cable is a better basic infrastructure is flawed. One reason the cable companies are so paranoid about services is that their infrastructure limitations often limit the amount of bandwidth they can apply to specific geographic regions; you share bandwidth up to whatever point they've determined constitutes a LAN. My understanding is that in most "phase I" internet setups this is a pretty large area, and heavy usage can pretty dramatically impact performance.
DSL's private bandwidth is some advantage; I'm not on the same broadcast domain as the other people in my neighborhood! I don't get a bunch of BS traffic I don't need.
Statics are good AND bad.
Yes, they mean that your IP address doesn't change so little jerks with too much time on their hands or a bone to pick can come after you again and again... but you can run a server off of a static, can't really do that too well off of a dynamic.
-Laz
Sucks to be in the middle of the Silicon Valley (San Jose, tech central) and be out of range of ANY form of high speed connection. I can't get DSL in my area because I'm too far from the CO... I can't get Cable in my area because I'm not on a block that has CModems enabled. The "iDSL" option that I've received (hybrid from what I understand, ISDN/DSL mixture) was absolutely wonderful (only went down ONCE) until my ISP got bought, then Northpoint went under. Bah.
-Laz
I meant kiloBYTES, not kiloBITS (kB vs kb)!
-- Cheers!
I have cable and I usually get around 50kB/s (according to Lynx). Not bad.
-- Cheers!
Part of the point, I think, is not to argue the technologies, but the products that are available at a certain cost. Where I live, the costs of cable vs DSL are about the same, but the overall throughput on the cablemodem is higher.
The cable company is always tuning the system, so while we do experience slowdowns, they rarely last for more than a day, and we're back up to our normal speed quickly.
We also have a gateway/router setup, with five computers (soon to be 7) on our network, all being used in the evenings, again without noticable slowdowns in gameplay or web access, etc.
It is certainly true that cable has a serious growth limitation, and that when DSL providers start offering higher speeds at lower prices, many of us using cable will switch. But for now, this is the most cost-effective system available.
And, unlike what another poster said, we've got pretty much whatever access we desire -- I read my email from work via my home linux machine, frex.
So, for us, cable is much better.
It's an interesting paradox: people want it, but all too many can't get it, especially with the implosion of DSL providers. Those of us still up and running on Covad's network get worried, seeing stockholder/bondholder efforts to preserve THEIR equity, CO de-activations, and general nervousness about the service in general.
Yet cable, with its' shared bandwidth, is growing like crazy. As a former @Home user, I hated having bandwidth drop to modem speeds in the evening. But if it's all you can get, what other choice is there ?? (And no, the new StarBand service does NOT support Linux, nor do they claim to ever intend to support "minor operating systems". . . I asked, and was shocked....)
You had ones?!? All we had were zeros. Sometimes we couldn't even get those and had to use the letter 'O'. (Apologies to Scott Adams)
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Actually, this argument is (at least partially) a red herring itself. The very fact you mention (Cable is shared the entire way, while DSL starts sharing at the phone company) makes it much more difficult to upgrade a cable pipe when it does start getting impacted. For DSL, it's a lot easier to upgrade the outgoing pipe and possibly the routing equipment - without having to do a lot of work out of the POP.
---- Magic is real, unless declared integer - Wiz Zumwalt
Cable hookups just work; when my DSL install had extremely slow uploads the provider blamed everything from the sunspot cycle to water in the conduits, when the real problem actually was my modem firmware. It seems to me that DSL is cool when it works, but when it doesn't expect lots of frustration. Given the choice between the two for a non-technical user who wouldn't want to put in time on the phone I would reccomend cable any day for its turnkey operation..
Cable is also available here, but (1) i don't watch television and (2) you can't get a static IP.
The (non-tech) people I talk to who have a choice seem to see it pretty much as a wash. They see the technical advantages of DSL but don't really think they'll see a difference (right or wrong). Pricing is the same either way.
So in the end, they seem to choose based upon which monopoly they hate the most -- the telco or the cable co. Kind of like voting for President.
Of course it's really a matter of one's local providers, but in my experience DSL has been the lesser of two evils...so far.
A few years back I subscribed to one of the first cable modem services. $40/month got you a 10 Mbps symmetrical connection (not a typo), fixed IP address, and a simple policy with regard to running servers: they won't provide tech support for this, but as long as the content is legal, knock yourself out. Service was phenomenal...was up and running three days after ordering, and outages were few and far between (perhaps 1 hour every 3-4 months).
This was too good to be true. Literally.
First, after about a year, the upload bandwidth was capped at 128 Kbps. So servers got real slow.
Then the server policy was changed. Legal content or not, servers were no longer allowed. I continued to run one anyway (not like a huge pr0n site or anything...just a portfolio and resume'), but knew it was just a matter of time before they'd throw a fit about that.
Then came the end of static IPs. Of course these change only infrequently under DHCP, but it's still a f--kwith, and it was largely just the principle of the thing, how the services offered kept eroding like this.
Over the course of all this (about four years) quality of service gradually declined, and costs went up. By the time I canceled, outages...sometimes big ones...were occurring every week or two. And now there's talk of a 20% rate hike.
Recently switched to DSL. Yes, it took forever to get installed. And yeah, bandwidth is limited to 386K down/128K up. But their server policy is sweet and simple and identical to what the cable provider originally promised: fixed IP, run any server you like as long as the content is legal. Uptime has been okayish...certainly better than cable was at the end, but not the amazing months-between-outages of the early-on cable service. Regardless...with a server policy like that, and the price, I'm keeping it.
Call me bitter, but I figure it's only a matter of time before they pull the same stunts as the cable people, picking away services one by one. Fortunately, there's a whole assortment of DSL providers to choose from, and if this one turns to The Dark Side, there's a good chance another will pick up the slack.
A third option has popped up here which looks interesting: Sprint Broadband, 10 Mbps symmetrical, comparable pricing, and wireless to boot. Looks really intriguing, but having just switched to DSL, I didn't want to dick around with it yet. I'd be curious to hear impressions from anyone who has the service...what's their policy with servers and IPs? How's the uptime?
Seems like you can't have your cake and eat it too. I can run my server now, but I do miss that cable bandwidth. If I had money pouring out my butt, I'd get *two* broadband services for speed and redundancy. Nexlan makes a somewhat affordable load-balancing router for this sort of thing...others will surely follow.
...know why broadband providers (mostly cable, from what I understand) don't want anyone running servers?
The provide you with bandwidth - most of the time an ungodly amount "down", and a piddly 128/256 up (256 if you are real lucky on cable). Anyhow, even this paltry amount up would be good enough for basic server tasks, things that would be nice from a personal standpoint (in my case, I want to set up a bookmark list serving system for my personal use).
However, they won't allow it by their AUP! Why? Why is it like this? What is the difference between a server, and me actually sitting there, and for whatever manner, actually using up the full "up" bandwidth? I mean, I know physically it can't be done, not without some automatic process (which is a no-no, because it looks like a server) - but say it could be done. Why not just say you can have unlimited down, but only 14.4K up, because we only need it for mouse clicks anyhow?
I can understand the broadband providers not wanting people to set up warez/pr0n/mp3/you-name-it-quasi-legal/illegal wares site - but what about those of us who want to use it to better our overall access (like my bookmark server example - but it extends to other things like VPN use, etc)?
Don't tell me to go ahead and try it - I have heard that argument before, and also anecdotal stories of "I'm doing it, no probs, go for it!" - I am certain you can do it, just be hush about it, run on a funky "high" port, and don't consume bandwidth, and things will be generally fine.
I just want to know what they are so paranoid about - or why they won't let us pay a little extra to get that functionality (and when I mean a little extra, I mean a little extra - not the TON extra for "business" class service - which is the same a residential, just better phone service, should you need it, and maybe a higher "up" speed, but not enough to justify the insane prices)?
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Is my ISP. I run Suse 7.1 at home. While they don't support linux, they don't object to it. The only thing to be aware (or beware) of is that you have to put the '-h hostname' command in your dhcp client startup. I've had great results with them. No downtime and good speeds on the download. I don't run a server, so upload speed isn't an issue. The install was great. The installer came when they said he would, only took about 1/2 hour.
Best Slashdot Co
Some reasons why DSL is better than cable:
Some reasons why Cable is better than DSL:
Some false reasons whey DSL is better than cable:
For a more eloquant summary of the differences see: Simson Garfinkle's excellent review. It's a bit dated (Sept 1999) but it's still does a good job of cutting through much of the rhetoric.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
But this was my point in my original query. Your logic here is that since you are having bandwidth problems, and because you are using cable, that the source of your problems must be cable's shared bandwidth. That's not a very convincing argument, in my opinion.
your cable company might be a good provider
They seem to be so far (knocking on wood :)).
I think the issue is that some cable companies won't support Linux, so you need to have a Windoze machine for them to install into. You can configure Linux after they leave. FWIW, I run both Windows and Linux systems in my house, all connected through a home gateway (router) to a cable modem. The local cable company techs know about and they not only don't care that I do all this, they've even shown interest in how I set it all up.
As far as running Apache goes, I tried that and I discovered that my cable company blocks port 80. I ran Apache on port 88 for awhile, and had no problems. I only served up a few pages per day though. I'm sure they would have complained had I used a noticable amount of bandwidth.
Several posts have mentioned the "problem" of shared bandwidth when using a cable Internet connection. I'm skeptical about how real this problem is. It seems to me that the only issue is how soon sharing occurs as you move away from your house. With cable, I share bandwidth with all neighbors on the same node (there are multiple "nodes" in my town). With DSL, I have a dedicated line four blocks to the phone company, but certainly from that point onwards my neighbors and I must all share the same set of T1 lines, or whatever type of line the phone company uses to get Internet in the first place. It seems to me that this "sharing" issue is really a red-herring. If it's really a problem, I'd love to see a sound technical explanation of why that is so.
Out here on the east coast of the United States the market is monopolized by Verizon who owns the lines other companies have to use in order to provide DSL services.
Problem with this, Verizon offers DSL services at the same time so it seems according to most (as well as common sense) that Verizon would be reluctant to lease lines to provide the service at a fast pace (if even they do without giving them the runaround).
What happens when you call Verizon for DSL services is horrendous, you're often told you would have to wait upteen weeks or months before they can get to you, or it turns out they haven't wired your neighborhood yet.
Well logically cable is almost in every single neighborhood so its easier for people to just call up their cable companies and have it added on to their bills without hassle. No waits, etc.
Doesn't mean cable is better than DSL could just mean DSL isn't available in an area, or people just don't want to wait too long for it to be installed.
Want Root?
My DSL provider, @link Networks, just went belly up. I have(had) SDSL 512k/512k and 32 IP addresses. All for $159.00/month. My service basically never went down. The people at Nortel Networks are, from what I can garner from various sources, in complete control of @link. Just this morning I subscribed to Charter Cable for 384k/128k with 5 IP addresses. The price? $159.00/month. It totally sucks that I have to degrade my service in order to pay the same price, but, that's life in America these days.
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
I've switched between Cable and DSL numerous times (4x), and in my experience, it totally depends on where you are; ie, location from CO and how many people you're sharing the Cable loop with. I suspect that in the end, Cable is easier for the providers to scale since more often than not I've ended up finding Cable is the best choice in most of the numerous locations in Toronto that I've lived.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Young upstart ingrates. You've no idea how good you've got it.
I just called @home to request that my service be transferred from my apartment to the house I'm moving into. Their customer service is swift. They said that within 30 minutes of making the transfer request the service would be turned off at my old place. Then I could make an appointment to have the service installed at the new place. Furthermore he wouldn't even let me hear the list of avaliable appointment times before he would cut off my service. Pigfuckers.
________________________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
In the Nashville, TN area, DSL isn't doing too bad.
There are several different providers, but Bellsouth is the most popular. Telocity is also in the area and seems to be doing well.
Most of the people around here I know who have DSL switched to it when it became available, and they were using a cable modem. They're all happier with DSL.
Another interesting irony is that in some places around here, Intermedia isn't even signing more people up for Cable, as it appears as if they may be having problems keeping up with increased demand. So, for some people going with DSL is the only option even if they did prefer Cable.
Also, most of the people I know with DSL get 1.5/256 connections, so you won't hear any of them complaining about speed.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
the BS about dsl not being shared is phone company propaganda. do you really think they don't over subscribe users? *every* internet connection shares bandwidth somewhere along the line. the only difference is with dsl it's a hop or two further upstream.
I don't think that is true... I've used several different NICs on my cablemodem with no problems.
The higher, the fewer.
My roommate wanted to get DSL run to the house and was told by the folks at BellSouth that it would be "no problem". They sent him a modem and he tried for a couple of days to get it up and running. They sent out a technician to check the phone lines (which checked out ok) both inside and outside the house. After about a week they told him that the house was right on the edge of the 15k limit (or whatever the magic distance is).. so we went with a cable modem instead. I hate being a customer of the evil AOL-Time Warner megacorp, but I have been surprisingly pleased with the service in this area- eastern edge of Memphis. Outages are rare.. I think it's only been out once over the past year. In the old neighborhood, outages were a weekly thing.
So what's the point of this post... ummm.. I guess that the phone companies should make an effort to improve their infrastructure if they want the number of DSL subscribers to increase.
I met These Guys (http://www.plusten.com for the goat wary) at the Colorado Linux Info Quest. They're offering a microwave service for the Denver and surrounding area. They seemed to think they could push 4 megabits my way if I wanted to drop the cash for the service, and they don't have to bend over and take it from the telcos like the DSL providers do.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I can just picture the massive amount of DSL vs Cable posts that are gonna hit /. in the next few minutes. Let's not ignore the internet-TV family of services that's going to make AOL users look like internet guru's. So far, the different flavors of internet-TV haven't taken off, and satelite is too damned laggy to pay the big bux for. What I'm concerned about is that the main players in the internet-TV market are Microsoft and AOL, neither of which can be trusted to stick to any form of standards, creating extensions to html, restricting the use of the service to further their own agenda. I hope that if internet-TV based services do hit the net in a big way, that we have the presence of mind to step back and insist on net-wide open standards.
Look here, angry old man, your time has come and gone. On the internet, patience isn't a virtue, it's a potentially fatal mistake. The old internet is to be respected, but not to such a religious extent that we still need to live it even now -- do you start your fires from scratch to appreciate human civilization too?
I'm in MA, and go through Verizon, 640K up and 256K down, $39.95 a month, my only complaint is that they use PPPoE, but Roaring Penguin takes care of that nicely. Tech support isn't the brightest, but I really don't care considering that they wouldn't know a linux box if I LARTed them with it.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Some DSL competition still exists.
Check ispmenu for comparison of DSL services still available at any particular address. [/plug] It also compares dialups.
You can also get 5Mbit down if you pay twice the price. (Price for the above btw is $25/month)
it's in my head
I have almost the exact same setup as you, 2 blocks from the CO, Verizon DSL,and for the same amount of time (I'll assume you ment october of 2000). Although you havn't had any problems yet be prepared for a tech support headache if you ever do. Verizon has about 90% idiots in the tech department. I'm generally happy with my service, although would KILL for a static IP address. Verizon seems to have the odd idea in this area (South east PA) that if you want to switch DSL providers you can't. A few of my friends have tried to switch, when they canceled thier accounts with verizon they placed a "hold" on all thier lines for 6 months. No other DSL providor could access the lines because Verizon is the local Company here, they controll the wires. There is another provider here that offeres static IPs for the same price as Verizon, I would love to switch but I'm affraid of getting cut off from my bandwidth.\ =\=\=\=\=\=\
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Thank you. I'm getting kind of tired of all this DSL-bashing. My service has been great for the past year...1.5M/384k, 4 static IPs, freedom to run any and all services. (XO/Covad) I'll never switch to cable unless they can beat that.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
I think the best part about DSL is that none of the ISPs can figure out how to turn off the service. (execpt Northpoint, but that was a bit drastic)
I've had DSL since Fall of '98 and I've switched ISPs twice. For kicks, I checked my first connection and it still works. I has a static IP and it hasn't been reallocatted. If I could just find some ISPs that would let me run BGP, I'll be set.
Up here in Canada, we have it so much better. DSL is cheap -- really cheap. I paid $40/month (US$25) for ADSL. This is with PPPoE. If you pay a bit more, or go with dsl.ca instead of the local monopoly, you can get static IPs and stuff. As well, Bell has a deal with our university where students get 10% off DSL.
My install in September took four days. Four days! When I was with Telocity in San Francisco, it took 87 days. I am not exaggerating.
In fall 1999, when DSL first came to our area, Bell screwed up our order three times and it took us six weeks. (Most people got theirs in two.) I was very upset then, but service was great once it arrived.
Right now, I have Rogers@Home. They are as flaky as a two-dollar pastry. We were down two or three times over the weekend.
Paul
I've had DSL for a couple months now, and have ZERO problems with anything... heck, the connection serves 3 PCs on a switched LAN (with IP maquerading on the gateway), and it has continuted to work without a hitch since day one!
;-)
True, we had to wait a few weeks for them to get our *free* DSL modem in, it was well worth the wait. The installation took all of 30 minutes, and setting up the rest of the network was cake.
Of course, we have a few things in our favor... Our house is only a few blocks from the CO, and the house was already wired for it (they actually did this when we got our phone installed!).
We get a consistant 256Kbps downstream, and around 192Kbps upstream, which is quite speedy, and the latencies are nominal. I finally got to join the ranks of the LPB's!
The funniest thing is that when we moved in last summer, we asked our phone and cable companies when we could expect to see broadband. The phone company said probably not till Q3 2001, and the cable company said Q1 2001. Guess what, DSL has been here for months, and cable has yet to make an appearance (which is just as well, since I here @home sucks).
Anyone else have a positive experience with DSL?
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Aside from the fact that no one on the tech support line at PacBell knows what the IP addresses on their DNS servers are, it went great (since, duh, their automatic configuration software is Windows and Mac only). 1.5 mbps is about what I usually top out at downstream, haven't really stressed the upstream yet. Of course, that means that generally speaking the bottleneck is not on my end, so I don't use that much very often.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Why? Simple reason: the earliest installation date for my DSL service would be 60 days from my move-in date! 60 days without broadband - and I work from home 1/2 time. So, I called AT&T Broadband and asked how long it would take to get cable modem access: 6 days from order date (and only that long because I called Wednesday before Thanksgiving!).
Now that I have cable I won't be going back to DSL for any reason. Cable's latency and bandwidth blows the doors off DSL for the same price. Sure, cable is shared - but my neighboors are mostly retirees...
Anyway, I can't believe I put up with DSL as long as I did (when I said I was happy with DSL, it was because ignorance is bliss). Thank goodness for the incredible installation delay! (BTW, I had my cable modem 2 days before I had my local telephone service enabled. Now, that's service!)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Unfortunately, distance is not the only factor. I live in the Denver Tech Center, a place where one should be able to hold a cable out of the window and get internet access, but it is not the case. AT&T doesn't provide cable modem to the area, and despite being less than one block from a Qwest building and living in brand new apartments (I have lived here a year and I am the first in this particular unit), the phone lines are not up to par as far as carrying DSL signal. I found this out after almost three months of U S West (before they were Qwest) telling me that I could get DSL. The type of phone cable and the type of switching box will make a huge difference in the ability to get DSL, even if you are well within the range of the telco.
Presently in my area, a 256k DSL connection costs a bit less than a cable connection monthly, and a 768k connection costs slightly more. Cable of course has a wider range, but is becoming significantly busier lately. Shared bandwith, I'm sure, will soon become an issue. DSL, having dedicated bandwidth will never lag because of the ISP's userload, whereas cable will suffer during peak hours. That will soon become a major issue in my area and probably many others. Costs are still uncontrolled at the moment, simply because there is no competition among providers (I'm sure this is the case in other areas, also). Once there is, cable may become the better option, on account of more bandwidth to go around, and at a lower cost, but right now I'm sticking with DSL.
If you look at how many accounts on DSL were dropped because of DSL companies going under that alone could explain the difference in growth between the two technologies.
An interesting upside to cable might be the "all services through one pipe" philosophy that AT&T is going with. For a fixed fee in select areas you can get cable TV, cable internet and phone service (over the cable line) including long distance. If that goes wide spread it could change things drastically in favor of cable.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Not many people mention it, because it's only been deployed a few months to >15 cities so far, but I've been very happy with my wireless broadband access. Mine's provided by Sprint Broadband. It's dedicated bandwidth (unlike cable), and installation was painless (unlike DSL). Download performance for me varies between 500 kpbs to 1.3 kbps, but I've seen bursts that a lot higher. On the other hand, it was faster for me when I first had it installed, and slower in the past month or so. I suspect that it's because the tower is servicing more people. It's not affected by rain or snow, not that I've been able to detect.
Now the downside is, it requires a line-of-sight to the tower, which isn't as bad as it sounds. I'm 25-30 miles from the tower, and I definitely can't see it, so it doesn't have to be visible. I can't get cable or DSL out where I am, by the way. This is probably not so good for people who live in densely wooded places, but it works great in Denver.
Installation was painless. I set up and appointment over the web, the guy showed up (with five minutes left in his two-hour arrival window, but okay, still within the window) mounted a transceiver on the roof, ran some cabling, hooked up the modem, and was done in two hours.
I've had excellent experience with my DSL connection, but it certainly bears out the reports from other users here. I'm two blocks from the switching station, my apartment wiring was fine for the connection, and I did the install myself. Ameritech is my provider: two other DSL services here couldn't compete (duh, Ameritech owns the DSLAMs they had to lease) and went belly-up after only a few months in business. I don't know why those providers thought Ameritech would somehow play fair with their lease pricing, but I felt that the writing was on the wall, and sure enough, they failed. Ameritech charges $40 per month for a 24/7 connection (dynamic IP though), and I've had very few problems with my connection. And btw, much more information on the whole cable/DSL issue can be found at http://www.dslreports.com. So that's my two drachmas...
First of since when is system security the cable operators job? You are connecting to the internet you should understand what that involves and how to address the security issues that arise from connecting to a public network. Second don't say cable modems are a bad technology just because your cable operator doesn't have the people, time, or money to design a network that can handle the traffic that their customers genterate. When 10BaseT doesn't work in the building anymore you upgrade to 100, when that bogs down you install switches, when that starts having issues you go Gigabit at the core... but none of that will work if you don't layout the infastructure in a way that works. Cable modem networks are no different. You have to monitor your taffic and address the areas that need it.
Shared bandwidth is a myth. Everyone on the internet shares bandwidth. What do you think the DSLAM at the CO does with all those DSL connections? It multiplexes them on to a single 100BaseT connection most likely. Right there your sharing bandwidth. The problem is not bandwidth sharing it is network design and monitoring.
That was in November, and I've yet to have a significant outage. I'm paying $60/Mo for a static IP, the ISP's blessing for any legal activity I want to host, and 280-640kbs with 128 minimum garanteed. I consistently get 350-500kbs (down), as measured by a couple of different raw bandwidth monitors. I only get 128kbs up, but for the 10(?) people a week that hit my web-server, that's no problem. The price is about $10 more than I would pay for comparable service from USWest, but I've never had to mess with them, which is worth it to me. Besides, they couldn't make it happen, and Speakeasy could.
So this leaves me with just a few questions:
1) What did the USWest tech do?
2) What did Speakeasy say to USWest to get them to do whatever they did?
3) Why did USWest tell me their copper couldn't be made to work, when clearly it could? In other words, why didn't they want my money when I wanted to give it to them?
4) Have others found that their experience is better when using a 3rd party ISP than when using the ILEC for the ISP?
Oh yeah, installation and modem were free after rebate, and my first month was free, so I had been surfing at high speed for a month+ before I ever paid them a nickle. I don't normally plug a company or product this enthusiastically, but I gotta give credit where credit is due. I would recommend Speakeasy if their service is available in your area. I swear I have no relationship to them besides being a satisfied customer.
I have a coworker who has been running a similar setup for a couple years, and neither of us have ever had any complaints or threats from Comcast. I have it on pretty high authority that they will not crack down on anyone for running a server unless they start disrupting the network.
Besides, If I wanted to run a "serious" web server, I wouldn't do it on a cable or DSL line anyway. Co-location gives you a lot more bandwidth for the money, and puts your server at least one hop closer to the backbone. The package I'm looking at gives me 4U of rack space, 10/100 Ethernet connected to multiple T-3's, UPS protection, 5 static IP's, and 2GB/mo of bandwidth, all for $200/mo. Can't beat it with a stick.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Since then I've had no problems with the service.
I'd definately recommend them if you live within their coverage area.
Case of what is following what people think. People hear of DSL companies falling right and left and don't want to sign up for it, thus causing the gain to be smaller and causing more companies to fail...
Cable does not have that particular problem. Cable DOES, however, require that you share bandwidth with your neighbour and that will cause people to get fed up and look at DSL for a change.
Should even out in a couple years.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Fight Spammers!
But, dealing with AT&T and Road Runner is also a pain in the posterior. Not only do they require the MAC address of each NIC, but when you mention Linux, their response is "We don't support Linux." Of course, I responded, "Did I ask for a linux command?". I set up a Win2K machine, their first response was, "remove TCP/IP and reinstall." When I asked what that would do, they didn't know, but said they were sure it would fix the problem. I asked if they would bet $1,000, but they would not put their money where their mouth is.
The question may not be the technology, but the compentcy of their support people.
Fight Spammers!
I have a connection almost like yours, and I live across the street from the phone company here in Sweden. But I can see there is a problem in the countryside, for which the options are severly limited. What does everybody think, will satellite ever be cheap/fast enough?
Smuffe
OK, a me-too post.
Verizon DSL (768/128), Fidelity Networks ISP:
2 weeks from order to up-and-running. 80KBps+ downloads, sub 100ms ping times most everywhere. Multiple static IPs (thanks fidnet!). Don't give a damn about hosting services on the line.
the no
Here in Rochester, NY, the two big competitiors are Cable (Time Warner, Road Runner), and DSL (Lightning Link, Frontier [Global Crossing]). Time Warner's cable used to advertise being the fastest... until they capped their bandwidth at 2 Mb/sec. Now Frontier has upped their maximum DSL speed to 3 Mb/sec (Of course, dependent on distance from CO), and are advertising themselves as the fastest in Rochester.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
As a user who's been on all sides of the fence, I can see why cable use is growing so rapidly. When I was using DSL all I had was problems. It wasn't connection problems as much as service problems. When I called for service, both of the ISPs that I had really had no clue what was going on most of the time. They'd end up blaming it on the last-mile provider, who in turn would blame it on the ISP and then the loop begins. The fact that there are usually 3 parties involved just gives more room for confusion.
With cable, however, I've had none of these problems (mainly because they have no one else to blame the troubles on). If I called support to see what was going on with the network they always had an answer and the service was back up within hours instead of days like my dsl.
When I first decided to get dsl for broadband I thought it'd be good because I had heard that ping times would be better and I'd get a constant download speed. I was really wrong. I'm getting faster downloads, faster uploads and faster pings on my cable than I ever got on my dsl. Now that I've got cable I'll never be going back to dsl.
And Then...
Whoops... I meant October 2000 (not 2001 as stated). Rumors of my owning of a time machine are greatly exaggerated.
-- null
I signed up with Verizon DSL (768 down/128 up) in October 2001. In about 25 days I had a working connection, and to date I would estimate the downtime as virtually zero (maybe an hour or two in 6 months). My connection speeds are usually in the 700 - 800 kbps range during the day, going up as high as 870 kbps during off-peak hours. Upload speeds are consistently in the 130 kbps range. Packet loss is zero. Latency is decent enough that I can play (and serve) UT games without problems. I couldn't be happier.
But you must consider that my apartment is on one side of the block, and on the other side is the CO. Distance means a lot with DSL, and (if the houses weren't there) an athetically inclined person could throw a baseball from my window and hit the CO.
Also, I am using a local ISP with great bandwidth. I pay a little bit more than if I had gone with Verizon as my ISP, but I welcome the chance to support the few remaining independent ISPs.
So that is my experience (a great one!). When people are knocking DSL, remember that not everyone has had a bad time with it.
-- null
DSL in many areas is a myth- an unsubstantiated rumour.
My co-op here was trying to get DSL- he signed up with Verizon, had them schedule the appt., asked at the time of the appt. to be sure they'd be able to install it- they came out, took one look-see and said that they couldn't install DSL there.
He signed up for cable. The best part is, after scheduling the appt., after being lied to about the availability, Verizon continues to bill him!
DSL would be a great, fast method of connecting, if more than 2% of the people who want fast access could use it. I'm well aware that cable's performance degrades as more users clog the pipes, but for now it's good.
I'm betting that the next big advance will occur right before cable gets so bogged down that I can't stand it any longer.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
When I first moved to San Franicsco, about 14 months ago, I wanted DSL ASAP. I called many different providers. After confirming that I was, in fact, close enough to get it, I settled on Pac Bell. After six weeks, the guy on the other end said "Look buddy, we can get it to you, we just don't know when. I'd advise you to try someone else." I definetly appreciated the honesty. I finally went on the "I'll pay whomever gets it in first" routine. At least I felt that three or four companies were competing for my business. Finally Telocity got me up and running at 1.5Mbps in about three months.
About two weeks ago I moved into Silicon Valley proper (San Jose). I once again called Pac Bell (gotta love combined phone&DSL billing). Pac Bell told me that times had changed and it would be installed in two weeks. I just laughed.
It was up and running 13 days after I ordered it. It's fast. Not sure how fast, but seems a lot quicker than Telocity. Possibly less congestion on the backbone?
At any rate, with all the 'gotchas' out there and horror stories with ISP's, I'd just thought I'd share two pretty good experiences I've had in the last 15 months. I've never tried cable modems, but why should I (assuming I'm always DSL capable)? The shared bandwidth aspect is a joke, we're ALL sharing bandwidth at some point. So, assuming availability, what's the reason to choose cable? Stability? Price? I find it hard to believe it's performance. Anyone want to comment?
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
How expensive is it to get your line hooked up in the US? In Switzerland, it's about $700 per endpoint (which is really expensive in my humble opinion), whereas the monthly fee for a 4 kilometer line comeas at a little more than $100 (which on the other hand is a good price for 2mb full duplex).
What kind of modems do you use? Right know I'm using pairs of Ascom Colt SOHOs for bridging ethernet networks at 2mb.
Remo
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
I have DSL and love it, but here's a quote about the above from ZDNet:
"So-called fiber connections have long been viewed as the next step in broadband because they provide Internet access speeds beyond what is available through cable or DSL connections, or business-grade T1 or T3 lines. The new speeds would range from 10 megabits per second to 100mbps--or 200 to 2,000 times faster than a dial-up modem." Awwyeahhh. Now that would be smokin.
~sabine
"I thought you were a guy." "Most guys do."
I've got ADSL and it is really nice. Static IP, 0.5/2.8 Mbit for about $25 a month. And it is very stable... But I guess everything but optical fibre is just an intermediate solution?
If it wasn't for all this bloat everywhere on the net, then we could all use a respectable browser such as Lynx or gopher.
-vax computer, vi, lynx. 'nuf said
My purely subjective, annecdotal opinion is that our Baby Bell, now part of the truly evil empire of SBC, may wake up in a year or two to find its market share dropping significantly.
I have DSL service from those bozos, and bozos is what they are. Some of the bugs have been masked over the last year, but my packets still hop all over creation within their network, and the simplest of emails are still rejected, sometimes silently, by their for-sh_t servers.
Even if cable is sometimes slower and less secure, I am tempted to go with it, once it gets to me or I move into an active area, just to avoid giving my money to SBC. (And isn't great that while $40 was enough last year, now they want $50 for the same service?)
A lot of people I know feel the same way. If the Baby Bells don't completely squash competition, they're going to find that out some day. They've done an awful lot to piss off an awful lot of people -- a lot of that not internet-related, to boot. Us customers can have long memories.
(But, then, I guess those cable bleeps have been pretty bad, too. Sigh.)
That is the biggest reason DSL is losing. The phone companies in their glee to prevent people from sharing their networks with competitors are causing people to give up because of the time it takes for them to approve a line.
.COM side of Bellsouth who would not get off their arses to provision my line. My neighbor, who went with BellSouth.net? Same problem, guess one BS division can't talk to another. I won't even get into the service problems they cause but blame on my ISP (turned out there was a short at the box - but that was only after 3 modems on my side and 5 on-site service calls by my ISP - until we proved it wasn't the hardware at my house)
4 weeks of my wait for my DSL was because of the
I absolutely refuse to deal with Media One (now AT&T - unless AT&T promises to fire EVERY SINGLE person they got with MO).
I'll keep my DSL thank you, just someone needs to bitch slap the phone companies into actually trying to be customer friendly. They are so used to "we are the only solution for your dial tone" that they treat the new era the same way...
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I may have missed out on some technical discussions, but I've had @home for about 16 months, and I've had no problems with Linux. I was even running apache for a while. What limitations are you worried about?
Evil is the money of root.
It doesn't really depend on which is better, it depends on which service it there to serve people when demand hits critical mass: history is littered with media and formats which were beat by inferior competitors.
If you can remember 1985, that was the year when everyone in the USA who didn't own a VCR bought one- and VHS was the better deal at the time, and so beta's fate was sealed. Early adopters who did their research and chose beta were out of luck.
I've got DSL at home, subcontracted through the university which employs me, and it's great. But the number of folks who'd be impressed by having a fixed IP is proportional to those who'd notice the better image betamax provided. Video professionals still use beta.
Palm vs. CE is at that juncture right now. CE is utter crap as far as I can tell, but I'm amazed at how many people love their Start menu, even if it clutters up the tiny screen and makes information eight taps away rather than two.
Eat Up Martha
bendy
Right. Unless of course, there is a Victorias Secret live webcast that half the worls is watching at the same time.
That's the exact reason that averaged bandwidth based services (such as cable, and small ISPs') cause such grief for users. It's not the 1% of the time that you want video that causes the problem, it's when your wants coinside with 90% of the other subscribers. Thus peak hour!
That's also the reason why most who have heard of ethernet have also heard of switches (vs. hubs). I guess the ultimate Nirvana is not more bandwidth all the time necessarily, but bandwidth on demand! (For both the users and the hosting site)
On a different note, I guess for anything approaching a 2 GB upload, you would be better of overnight mailing them on CD's (or driving them over to the office)!! Now that's funny!
yes, the new economy will come and crush you!
:)
heh heh heh
Timing is everything. I recently moved back to the big city, very much against my wishes. The one plus to the move, I thought, was that I'd be able to get DSL.
After moving in, I discovered that there is _no_ form of broadband that services my house. No DSL, no cable modem, and I don't have a clear view of the right part of the sky for one of those sattelite link-ups.
That's why for several years now I always make sure that I do have broadband available before I move. When checking out apartments, I always ask the rental agent if broadband is available. Then I find out who the cable and telco providers are and then contact them to be sure. Granted, you could still end up getting doinked on the DSL deal if they don't know for sure if it is available in your area, but it's better to at least try and find out. Some people thought I was crazy, but it's worth it to make sure.
Those who are on shared networks and turn on the "file-sharing" option, will be hacked into.
The same thing will happen with DSL as well. The only difference is that the person who hacks you on cable will be the punk kid down the street as opposed to the punk kid on hte other end of the country.
Those who are on shared networks and turn on the "file-sharing" option, will be hacked into. As for the problem of shared bandwidth, its real and its a problem in Buffalo. Adelphia cannot handle all the problems that they are having with shared bandwidth. Slow download speeds and broken connections have caused a massive frustration here and many have sent complaints to the attorney general of the state. Its quite real, your cable company might be a good provider, but come to Buffalo and get Adelphia, you'll see how real this problem is!
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
It took me 1 week short of two years to get DSL here. I lost count of how many ISPs cancelled my order because they couldn't get PacBell to provision my line. The provisioning took 8 months, then I had to deal with PacBell's installers not showing up for appointments. In the meantime they had their telemarketers call me about PacBell DSL through PacBell Internet. They also sent a lot of ads in for their DSL service in the mail. I am sure they would have emailed me the ads, but their email servers never work so that wasn't possible. Anyway, I finally got DSL installed a week after cable modem service was introduced in my neighbourhood. I guess the competition gave 'em some motivation to make an extra $20 a month from my ISP rather than lose it to the cable company. I wouldn't have signed up for cable access here anyway. They can people for running gaming servers.
One of the primary reasons that we are faced with a bandwidth issue is that the best answer from a technological perspective, DSL, is hampered by the fact that the old telephone infrastructure is still largely built on the monopolistic Bell system. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 does little to encourage infrastructure investment by the old Bells. Sure, they have to provide a hookup at their exchange office, but the law does not, and cannot, require that they build new exchange capabilities only to turn it over to a competitive communications company, even if it provides a profit. The baby Bells likewise have little incentive to invest in the needed infrastructure themselves because the competitive communications companies will end up out-marketing them for customers anyway. And they end up using the new Bell equipment to boot! The current problem is not much unlike what faced the population at the turn of the century when we wired the country for telephones. Local demand created small companies that installed the wires on a neighborhood/town/city basis and Ma Bell hooked them all up for a fee. In many cases, Ma Bell bought/purchased/outmanuevered the locals which eventually led to the breakup. But we got wired. The biggest difference now is our increased mobility. We move around too much to want to bother with a bottom-up communications solution. Why put in the effort to form a new company for your town or county that will do the wiring for you when you are probably going to get transferred anyway. I see the current situation as fairly hopeless for the 45% or so that will never be able real bandwidth without latency problems--people out in the sticks or small towns. For the rest of us, it will take a long time for the baby bells to work things out in a tit-for-tat investment process. I'm thinking ten years at a minimum for universal DSL availability for the urban and densely populated suburban areas.
Timing is everything. I recently moved back to the big city, very much against my wishes. The one plus to the move, I thought, was that I'd be able to get DSL.
After moving in, I discovered that there is _no_ form of broadband that services my house. No DSL, no cable modem, and I don't have a clear view of the right part of the sky for one of those sattelite link-ups.
I persisted, though, and after six months of searching, finally found an approximation of broadband: iDSL (for $100/mo!), from Northpoint. I wrestled with whether I wanted to pay that much for 128kps, and finally decided to do it. The day I was going to call to order the hookup was the exact same day Northpoint announced bankruptcy, and they cut off all their existing customers!
Yup, timing is everything. My pessimistic side say "it figures". My optimistic side say "Wow, a day earlier, and you would have been taken for all that up-front money! Lucky you!"
I live in New Jersey. I've had cable (Comcast @Home) for about 5 years this summer. I haven't had any problems with it until this past january, but they seem to be clearing up (although @Home never admitted any problems.. heh). In any case, I tried to look for alternatives. 1) DSL 2) ISDN 3) something like frame relay? DSL is not available in my area and Verizon has no plans to implement it. I asked then about the ISDN service and they want like $300/mo for an unlimited ISDN line (not including Long Distance!).. and then you can imagine a frame connection @ 128k running about the same amount. Although cable has been good to me (minus the 192k upstream cap problem), there are *no* alternatives in the same price range in this area... and it sucks because I dont exactly live in the sticks.
Why do companies still insist in raping people with such technologies as ISDN and frame relay? These are two alternatives that are available in most areas that do not share the same speeds as DSL or cable, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to make these technologies more affordable to consumers who demand speeds a little better than 56k and aren't in an area where cable or DSL is available.
I think you need to flash your brain's firmware.
It all seems very typical for me:
DSL is a very new technology, although it has been around, it requires a lot of infrastructural improvements and therefore will be less quickly integrated into the telecom system. This is especially the case where I live (NL). In most places, cable is already available everywhere, whereas DSL is only available in most urban areas.
But alas, that's just where cable already has taken the largest market share, since all you techies are already online 24/7. DSL doesn't improve your bandwith or speed, so why switch?
It will probably take quite a while before DSL can compete with cable, say two/three years or so, but I guess in the end DSL will become a much better way of connecting to the net, and once the infrastructure is open to DSL for everyone, it has the possibility to outgrow cable. Let's just wait for that.
In Vegas the local DSL provider (Sprint) offers a 384d by 128u connection for $40, while the cable provider (COX)gives you 1500d by 128u for the same price.
perl -e s++=END;++y(;-P)}s?C++=;
Sorry to burst the High Speed Bubble, but are any of these media viable in the long run? From what is getting loaded on the pipe now (business data, streaming video, massive multimedia, and intense gaming), is there really any future for the pipe limitations of broadband cable, dsl, satellite, radio etc.... Just a couple of questions 1. When everyone in your town has cable at 19.95/mo, will you get a significantly higher pipe than DUN? 2. When you travel more than a mile from a CO, will you get less bandwith, and during peak hours, will DSL suffice for most apps? Now? 10 yrs from now? 3. Will Ka and Ku band satellites be sufficient for the great high bw entertainment revo. that is supposedly occuring and satellite being the 'wave of the future? Will people pay for high latency and 10,000 users per sat module? Do LEO sats bridge the latency gap 4. When IP version 6 comes out of the wood work and everyone's house is doing igrp or rip or ospf updates, and you are turning on your vcr from Bora Bora to download the latest x-file movie from TiVO, will the internet come to a grinding 56kbps halt? 5. Have any viable solutions, beside dsl, cable sat, and radio, which have proven their limitations tragically, available? Is the only solution a pure fiber network running through every home and every community a fddi ring? How will we pay for this? With an internet tax? Will this kill e-commerce? Do we want e-commerce to live? Do we want the gov to regulate a media that is world wide and relatively free? We are all planning for an internet revolution. However, WE HAVE NO PIPE! WE HAVE LIMITED BANDWITH! CABLE, SAT, DSL, RADIO JUST WON'T CUT IT 10 YRS FROM NOW. DO WE HAVE A SOLUTION? (and please don't say pneumatic tubes....)
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
Its all in peoples experience and opinions. Out here in the west coast its cable all the way. Cheaper Monthly, Faster speeds, same day install time. Or take DSL which $10 more per month, 1 month install, slower capped speeds. Would be nice if people new all the ridiculous requirements of DSL to make it such a good product which less than 15% of the people can even qualify to get. Los Angeles for exampled, I think we are upto 30+ Million people now. You have to be within 1 mile of the CO to get DSL, how many COs do we need to give everyone decent speed or qualify them. And most of the people in LA can't even afford $40/mo let alone car insurance. Over rated, over hyped, overly ridiculous. blah.