Slashdot Mirror
Can Cable Really Be Slower Than 56K?
Ralph Bearpark asks: "June's IEEE Software mag carries an article titled 'The Cable Modem Traffic Jam' that claims (amongst other things) that 'a 56K dial-up modem can at times be faster than a cable modem and access can be more reliable' due to neighborhood bandwidth hogs, billing system bottlenecks server overloads, and various other problems, many of which apparently also apply to xDSL."
"Now, I had been seriously considering upgrading to cable, but now I'm not so sure whether it will be worth the extra cash. What is your experience? Is broadband really slowing down?"
I'm working at a cable-modem connected computer which really does seem sometimes to lag behind good old 56K -- anyone out there have advice on avoiding The Great Slowdown?
There's also a difference between baud and BPS. Baud refers to the number of state shifts on a carrier line, while BPS refers to ... bits per second. The two are sometimes, but not always, equivalent.
56k modems are 5.6Kbps (well, 5.3Kbps here in the USA). I don't know what their baud rate is.
Huh, DSL can provide 45Mb if you use the right DSLAM and DSL bridge! It all depends on which DSL standard you are talking about. Many people are using ADSL, SDSL, or RADSL. But there are much faster standards too, such as VHDSL. You can range from 56Kb to 45Mb+.
Here in good old BC... we also have Shaw@home..which used to be Rogers@home... now reliability of the connection is decent (couple days a year hopefull), although the local ADSL is like .5h/year downtime....
The big problems with shaw et al. are a couple of things... their mail server gets an uptime of about 50%. It sucks... end of story. Not only that..but all @home connections have to bounce through ontario before they hit the net.... so... guy in BC wants to see a BC site... must send packet to ontario and back to BC... jeez...the federal government is like that.
Another pet peve about @home... tech support. I used to have them...so I know all about them... you spend hours waiting to get someone who doesn't know ANYTHING except that if they type "ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" it gives them things. ADSL I called and spoke to a guy who knew what he was talking about... and not only that...but when I called back..they routed me to the SAME GUY for continuity. (@home seems to think that if you explain it to 5 or 6 different people who have no clue...you might get it right).
I don't know how things are run in other areas...but here if you want cable... you call and bingo... you are off to the races... they never check how many people have it in that area or anything. ADSL you have to have the opening at the tel. co. for it... you CAN'T overload unless your network people are idiots.
Oh yeah... and @home here gives you 1 IP via DHCP...then they charge you more for additional IPs... and requires a separate cable outlet (unless you split it..which the cable company hates)... ADSL here gives you 2 IPs via DHCP, roaming access anywhere they have dialup access (BC, alberta, and some other areas), and it uses your regular phone line.
Cost for cable: $40 CDN/month + $10 CDN/month for cable outlet (roughly)
Cost for ADSL: $35 CDN/month.
oh yeah... that is $35 CDN/month for 1.5Mbps down, 512kbps up.
And when I had cable (in a neighbourhood where few had it)... I would only get ~50KBps on average.... I get the same via ADSL... but in a MUCH more populated area, for cheaper, for a more reliable service...hmmm... which one am I going to choose.
If my cable modem weren't being so fucking slow right now!
Apoogies to the other guy:
I have __________ (broadband tech) from _________ (company) and get _________ (speed) except between _________ (times) and/or from _______ (hosts). Therefore, _________ (broadband tech) is _______ (adjective) except for the tech support which is _______ (another adjective).
Seriously -- These posts say *nothing*. Broadband infrastructure varies wildly depending on the neighborhood, company, locale, local PUC, blah blah blah. Unless you are comparing the same company in the same zip code, your nice packaged conclusions don't merit the bits they are printed on.
fucking retard.
--
Do the math. It isn't too tough.
--
"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?"
Where do you all live where the internet connections are that bad for DSL/cable? Geographic locations, please. I'll know never to move there.
--
"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?"
Your post sounds a *lot* like my local DSL provider's aggressive advertising. "Bob was so tired of sharing his cable modem with the neighbourhood that he bought the whole neighbourhood". *Sad scene of a kid riding a tricycle down an empty sidewalk*
I really don't think the last mile is often a bottleneck for cable or DSL. I lived in the burbs for two years and was the *only* subscriber on my segment for much of that time. Now I'm in the city and sharing the segment with many others. No perceptible difference in speed.
YMMV, of course, but I really think the cable vs. DSL argument is a non-issue. It's the backoffice hardware and backbones that I'd be concerned about.
Absolutely not. That "proper infrastructure" is NOT all about the last mile to the home. I think most of the problem is well inside their routing facilities, where their backbones are hopelessly overloaded, and would provide poor bandwidth to users even if they all had private fibre lines. DSL providers are just as likely to have poor central routing and bandwidth as cable providers.
I'm not as much concerned with speed as with feature set and consistency. Reliable and consistent 416-Kbps symmetric DSL and routable IP address space---like a /27 or /26---would entice me away from my reliable and semi-consistent 2-Mbps CATV connection with only four (freaking!) IPs. But my connectivity needs aren't typical of your average Unreal freak, and unfortunately, the DSL market sucks and the cable providers aren't really in the biz market at the low end.
It's all rather frustrating.
Er, I had a point. Oh well.
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
Do the math!
300KB/s = 300 * 8 Kb/s = 2400 Kb/s = 2.4 Mb/s
That's way higer than typical "DSL speeds".
No problems with ADSL here in the UK. I just wish the prices would come down.
Well, other than the fact that BT like to turn you off for a few hours every week, without telling you, OR your ISP.
Probably the cleaner come in to do some vacuuming in the server farm and unplugging some equipment to plug in the vacuum cleaner.
Actually I've got a friend who's DSL routinely gets him 3-400KB/s off of high bandwidth servers (tucows and the like). Granted, I know people in other parts of the city (Dartmouth NS, Canada) who have less than stellar DSL coverage. Because of this uncertainty, and the fact that my cable modem might not perform quite that well but it's been working consistently for me for 4+ years so I'm happy.
You are speaking, kbits, he is speaking kbytes.
Apparently they have some agreement with Terayon to use all their stuff, but while the equipment they use for the nodes claim to handle so many connections, Shaw has noticed reliability drops from 100% once capacity passes 50%. Perhaps other cable companies don't bother doing QA testing and take the word of the sales department of the technology the use at face value.
In any event, infrastructure-wise they certainly seem to have their shit together, at least here. I've been happy with their service. Tier-1 support in Calgary are handled by a bunch of morons, but that's okay because they're supposed to deal with lesser morons. For our business contact we go right to the local tech manager and we always get very prompt and competent responses. (Which is good, because it saves me from giving the Tier 1 guys the usual "Look, I've forgotten more than the Tier 2 guys know, so please pass me up to someone who can make decisions.")
I'd certainly recommend Shaw cable to anyone in Canada.
Jason.
If you have a sucky carrier for any type of broadband, your speeds can be very low.
If you have a good carrier for any type of broadband, your speeds can be very high.
Now, as the article discusses, there are more things the cable company has to keep track of to keep your speed high than with DSL. OTOH, you can get much higher top speeds with cable modems than with DSL. On the lioptonline group (for people with Cablevision's Optimum Online cable modem service) we have people complaining when their local transfer rates dip to 300KB/s... which is higher than the top speed of any consumer DSL I've seen.
So what you need to do is talk to other people with the provider you're considering. See how their speeds have been, and whether the provider seems responsive. See if there are any mailing lists you can check out to see if people are unsatisfied. Check out both DSL and cable modems to see which are better in your area.
For me, when things have been working, I've never dipped to DSL speeds, let alone a 56Kb modem. And when things stop working, the cable company comes out and fixes it (although sometimes it takes a while to figure out what's wrong).
The problem with your argument is: DSL is shared also.
Instead of everyone in the neighborhood sharing a 30-45Mbit local loop, all your traffic is aggregated at the head end (the telco office) then multiplexed and shot out a single connection.
Cable: The load is on the local loop.
DSL: The load is on the network gateway/peering point.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Cable: The neighborhood shares the local loop (usually 30-45Mbits).
DSL: Traffic is multiplexed at the head end (telco office) and the aggregate is pushed through another, higher bandwidth connection (depends on the provider).
Cable: The load is on the local loop.
DSL: The load is on the head-end/peering point.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Oh and we would "loose sync" multiple times a day.
The weird thing is, that we had the exactl same cable modem even at our old apartment, and the thing flew! (Comcast@Home, in Gaithersburg, MD) Anyway, we dumped comcast@home after over two months of frustration and no solution or even a hint of what might be going on and now have speakeasy 384 sdsl, it's over twice as expensive, ($109/mo) but it's a dream.
---
Cable modems can't be slower than 56k! It is impossible for them to drop below 60k, otherwise the bomb on them will explode and blow Ted, Neo, and all of the passengers into little pieces.
Posted from the wireless couch.
read it again, he says,"he's never gotten 56k on a modem" which is normal as the federal limit is 53k and most folks rarely exceed 48k.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I think you are talking about the DSLAM (DSL Access Multiplexer) - this is similar to the network access server (NAS) used in dial Internet infrastructure, except that it's an ATM switch and normally has no IP functionality.
It's true that the DSLAM can be overloaded, in the same way that any link or node in an ADSL or cable network can be overloaded. And of course the upstream link(s) from the DSL/Cable network to that provider's ISP(s) can also be overloaded. However, this is fairly unlikely - now that there is some experience with running DSL/Cable networks it's fairly easy to dimension them. The only caveat is that if all users are running high-demand web servers or streaming media downloads the whole time, the network could be overloaded - this is why access providers have terms of service that enable them to do something about this.
I am pretty sure that no one supports service level agreements for home DSL or Cable connections. With an SLA you would be guaranteed X bits/s at a minimum, or be due money back, or parhaps X bits/s 95% of the time, etc etc. Better service promises would cost more money. Currently phone and cable companies make some effort to maintain connections and speed but are under little obligation to meet exact specifications.
The only reason for slowdown (besides weather related things) is over subscription. With Cable since it is a directly shared medium it is easy, with DSL it is less likely, but DSL connections are often concentrated together with your neighbors, and certainly eventually you need to talk to the rest of the internet and that is shared so there is always a bottleneck. Check dslreports.com for cable and DSL reviews in your area. If you can't deal with some slow downs run a wire to everyone in the world you want to talk to, then you will be all set. (which is sort of what the plain old telephone system was, but is becoming less and less so every day)
Yeah but Shaw is probably one of the best Cable providers around -- they don't use home.net, for example...
Thats not possible. Look how much thicker a coax cable is than a phone line. The bandwidth is tons higher.
That has to be the dumbest statement I've read on /. in a good while. By your scale, I could run 14 gauge lamp cord and get even better bandwidth because it's "much thicker"
If bullshit was gold, Slashdot would be Fort Knox..
Trolling is a art,
Depends heavily on your area. I go through Cox@Home in San Diego, and I'm so far pretty satisfied with the speeds. Downloads normally run about 300-400K/sec ( nominal downstream speed is about 3 megabits ). There's occasional dips to 100-200K/sec, but they don't last. The really bad speeds, down in the 20-40K/sec range, are usually associated with specific sites and I think indicate either network problems outside @Home's network or bandwidth or server problems at the site I'm accessing.
Other areas served by Cox seem to have different results. Some are as good as me, some are horrible. So far, though, the worst rates I've seen are still somewhat better than the max rate of a 56k modem, and I never got 56k on a modem.
We had a cable modem service called Chello, run by a Dutch ISP apparently. They were dumb enough to offer unlimited downloads and consequently a few people attempted to make copies of the entire Internet. Well, perhaps just the pr0n and warez, but you get the picture.
So, their business model which was based (as best I can tell) on a T1 and a colossal cache was quickly reduced to rubble and download speeds allegedly dropped to the 56K kind of arena. Lots of pissed off people = no more chello.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I'm fairly sure there aren't many users on my local loop - I'm always seeing the max allowed upload speed and often get the max or close to it while downloading. My parents, who have more users on their node, see lower speeds, but not 56K-modem speeds.
I have cox@home in Santa Barbara, CA, and I have never seen any speed problems. I heard all of the horror stories about cable modem companies and bandwidth problems, but I have never seen any. Maybe my results are atypical. I get a capped upload speed of about 32kBytes/sec and an average download speed of 150kBytes/sec I have seen downloads up to 400kBytes/sec. The service has gone out twice in a year for about 10-15 minutes each time. The price $45/month with cable modem rental. All in all I am very happy with the service. What makes me the happiest though was the ease of install. That is the major difference between cable and dsl in my mind. With Cable you are dealing with 1 company. This makes a huge difference. I called the cable company on a Monday it was installed as promised on that Thursday. As counterpoint, My girlfriend had DSL installed and it took literally 6 weeks to get it installed (coordinating the dsl people and the telephone people was a nightmare, they both pointed the finger at each other about whose fault it was). Her DSL experience is probably atypical but the average DSL user seems to have more install headaches than the average cable user. Just my 2 cents.
---
--
Vote Socialist or quit whining!
Help us build a better map!
I certainly can't complain. I consistantly measure at 2-3Mbps on my download stream. I've never seen it go below 1Mpbs that was due to anything but the remote site being slow/jammed.
Of course, with a 56k modem, you don't have to worry too much about local (or remote) traffic conditions. You're too slow to stress anyone.
Try that DSLREPORT site. Very handy.
hey i'm not too good at math but:
700*8/(10*60) = 9.33 megabits/sec.
if you are getting 9.3mb/sec you could setup a nice web hosting/colocation business in your house. you should really consider this as an additional source of income. a t1 is 1.5mb/s so you are effectively getting 6 t1's through you cable modem. i'm plugged into internet 2 here at school and i cannot even get that kinda speed!
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
I was pulling down a Flash animation at over 100K off my @Home connection - of course, where I live (northern outskirts of Phoenix, AZ) I can't get DSL, but then again, no one in my "neighborhood" has a computer besides me, so no one else is ever on, it seems.
Generally, I get well over 70K most days...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Informative? I guess that means fiber optic cable should have the smallest bandwidth since it's the thinnest?
Get real. Moderators, blast this thread down.
No, the modem can't go over 56kbps, but you have to remember that this is raw bandwidth. The data gets compressed before going on the wire, so if you're transfering data that's highly compressible (like a text file), you'll see higher effective throughput.
That's not (entirely) true. The FCC only limits the maximum power level on the line. This limits the number of PCM codes that are available for the modem to use. For X2, the proprietary 56k protocol developed by 3Com (or was it still USRobotics?) before V90 was adopted, it meant that it could not go above 53kbps. V90 on the other hand, is able to connect at 56kbps and stay within the limit, although it's obviously much harder than if the limit wasn't there. So, while highly unlikely, it is possible to connect at 56kbps with V90 in the US.
I personally connect at 49,333 every time, on a local loop that is more than 17kfeet long.
It really depends on your neighborhood and the time of day.
I can't speak to neighborhood, but in my experience (Time Warner cable modem, Akron OH area) time of day is a definite factor. There seems to be a "rush hour" around 4-6pm (kids getting home from school, people getting home from work), and Sunday afternoons can be brutal.
In the wee small hours of the morning I can get 400kB(yte)/second web downloads on a fast site. At the worst of rush hour I usually don't fall below 60kB/s... and that still makes a dialup connection look pretty sick.
Yeah, I expect it to get worse, but I figure I've got a while before the ol' US Robotics starts looking good again.
XDSL, or more properly, xDSL, is a generic term for Digital Subscriber Line technology. It includes ADSL and SDSL, and all the other DSL variants.
I suspect you probably have something called DSL Lite, a splitter-less variant of ADSL that's being pushed for lower cost.
Like many people have pointed out already, it's the carrier, not the last mile technology, that is the current bottleneck. It shouldn't really matter if you go with cable or dsl.
Yeah, I have been following BS's deployment schedule for a while now. DSL was deployed to our CO last fall, however my neighborhood suffers from some undisclosed facilities issue that prevents me from getting service in my home. Supposedly they're working to correct the problem. Some friends one block down the street have DSL and are much happier with the service than they were with Charter. They use Telocity because they heard that BS sucks.
Until very recently, my cable modem service provider (Charter) had a couple thousand customers sharing a single T1 on the head that services my home. In the evenings, the service was completely unuseable (below 20kbps). Charter credited my account for several months to make up for my inconvenience. While waiting for it to be resolved, I frequently used an AT&T dial up account. They've recently installed a T3 to service our head,and the speed issues have largely gone away. Unfortunately, I'm still dealing with frequent service interruptions that leave me off the net for hours at a time.
Charter was obviously only concerned about getting a couple thousand paying customers lined up, and could care less that their infrastructure was incapable of handling the load. If only Bellsouth would get off of their dead asses and get the infrastructure in place for dsl to my home.
Any network access can be oversold...cable or DSL. I have a friend who had GTE DSL and his ping time was over 500ms to his first hop at his ISP. I've had friends with saturated cable connections.
It all comes down to your ISP and/or telco not overselling the connection. My RoadRunner cable modem is as fast today as when it was installed, and we were one of the first few in our area to get it. So good service is out there!
Most of these posts are nicely redundant and all, but I thought I'd pipe in for a moment here...
Cable modems, phone modems and DSL all share lines, but in different ways. The phone-line modem connection is your own... at least all the way to ISP modem bank. DSL is about the same, I think, though connections may get joined in between... I'm not really certain. Cable modems use (or at least previously used... some may have altered the system) a token-ring network to link together a region. What this ends up meaning is that if your cable company is actually paying any attention to the amount of traffic, the only time you'll feel any sort of slowdown is if the number of users on your ring goes up significantly (percentage-wise, that is). And that slowdown should last for anywhere between a few hours to a week at which point the number of tokens being passed will increase on the ring and you'll be back to your old speeds.
The possibility of Cable dipping below dial-up speeds exists, but is so compeletly unlikely that it might as well not be a possibility. Of course, some cable companies might be worse than others... Thus far Road-Runner hasn't given me any problems in any location I've used it (Syracuse NY, Albany NY and San Diego CA).
Research into the local companies never hurts, though... There are always a few aberrations.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
You haven't seen these problems yet, so you assume they don't exist. I have. They do. I've experienced both bandwith and latency problems, but the latency problems have been the most irritating to me because I play a lot of quake (poorly...). Sometimes I can get sub-100 ping times for hundreds of different servers -- others, I can't find a single sub-800, and 999 lag spikes mid game are no fun.
Cable can't be used in a business environment, because you can't get business support or a static IP. Period.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I'm from Canada and here my cable connection is fast all the time.
The problem with companies like @Home and Charter is that they are too focused on expanding their customer base than actually maintaining a proper infrastructure. I hear stories every day from people who's cable access is unusable at 5 PM and fire up the 56K on their phone line to check their mail. Another case for DSL, perhaps?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Actually, the *theoretical* best of a 56K modem isn't 5.6KB/s. 56 means 56Kbits. In theory, it can do 7KB/sec (KiloBYTES).
However, the FCC won't let it go faster then 53Kbs. Even then, you'll be lucky to connect at 48Kbs (6Kb/sec) on older phone lines.
Incidentally, I've *never* seen my cable modem (Optimum Online, south west CT) drop below 160Kbs. For sites with decent bandwidth, I generally get upwards of 3.2Mb/s
It really depends on your neighborhood and the time of day. The problem with cable modems is everyone in the neighborhood shares the same line. You have peek times when everybody and there uncle gets on and uses there connection, and if a lot of people in your neighborhood have cable modems, this can and does cause a bottle neck which results in slower sspeeds. How slow? That depends. Theoretically, it is possible to be slower than 56k because you don't have a dedicated line as with dial ups and dsl services.
If you live in NYC, you might see this more often, but if you live in the country, you might not see this that much.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
When Optus@home first came out I thought the broadband market here was finally getting somewhere but I was going to wait until ADSL came out. Telstra also claimed to be coming about with a new plan to compete with Optus, but as I expected this was a load of bullshit.
But I got sick of waiting so I contacted Cable and Wireless Optus (C&WO) to inquire about Optus@home. They got back to me a week later to say that they couldn't install to my house because there is more than one dwelling on one block. After hours of phonecalls and the fact that they installed it to one of my neighbours in the same block of townhouses they agreed to install it but then the land lord had changed her mind.
At this stage, Telstra's Cable was capped at 400kbit/sec, compared to C&WO Optus@Home cable capped at 3-4Mbps for downloads. When Telstra ADSL came out they increased this cap to 512kbit/sec and I decided that this still wasn't worth it.
Finally in late November 2000 I got an email from Primus offering me ADSL for $115 a month at 1.5Mbps with no download limit. I was a bit weary about using them from a reliability point of view but I figured that anything would be better than dialup which wasn't 100% reliable anyway. So I got it and they are about the only provider without a cap so far. Unfortunatly they don't seem to be offering the same deal anymore to new subscribers. It has had it's outages as well, but we got the first 3 months for free to comphensate for that.b
AussiePenguin
Melbourne, Australia
ICQ 19255837
Jeremy
Melbourne, Australia
Jabber Australia
A recent thread on a local sysadmin mailing list has talked about not only Tems of Service, but what's actually implemented. One local DSL provider is accused of blocking outbound TCP port 25. No SMTP from your box, except to theior official mail relay. Is that in the Terms of Service? Allegedly not. Bottom line: some ISPs are committed to full/open access, while othetr have TOS or de facto policies that limit you. Good providers? In the US, Speakeasy for DSL is very highly regarded.
56k can be better? Pure fearmongering. Ask them for statistics, actual measured instances of this slowness. Then push them on their data gathering methodology. It's bunk.
Any half-decent broadband, in addition to higher (downstream) speeds, will give you much better first-hop latency, which can make a big difference for some activities/applications. POTS+modems suck.
What does the provider do if the broadband circuit is down? My cable provider used to provide dialup PPP access for when the cable plant was screwed up (not that the cable connection has given much trouble at all). Now they apparently don't. And with the "free" ISPs kaput, even rebooting into Windows, I don't have any network access if the cable plant chokes. That sucks.
I've used and worked for several cable modem ISP's. RoadRunner, @Home, Adelphia Powerlink, and I find that on the slowest days, they are still faster then 56k. Maybe not by much, but faster none the less. The main problems I had was frequent disconnects. With Powerlink, I used to lose synch regularly, for sometimes hours at a time. Thats the frustrating part. With a dialup, if your connection slows or drops all together, you just dial back in and hope to connect to a diffrent modem. With Cable, if you lose connection, you cant do much besides unplug your modem and plug it back it. If you dont get synch badck, oh well, wait. Same goes for DSL, but I've noticed that DSL is a lot more stable then cable overall. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that you KNOW the bandwidth of your DSL, and it's harder to overload then with cable. From what I've seen, cable companies basically add on customers till the lines drop, then get more lines. Rinse, repeat.
----------------------------------
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
I've got Shaw@home in Canada (Edmonton), and I've seen both sides of the bandwidth fence.
When I first got the cable modem two years ago, I think I was the first one on my block to get it. I got speeds up to 1.2MB/sec in real world transfers (Hotline). As more users got on, the speed dropped to a more reasonable 180k-220k/sec.
Then for a while the speed slowly degraded to a miserable 8k-10k/sec for about 3 weeks. Everyone must have complained hard because speeds jumped back up then to about 200k/sec.
From what I've seen here, cable is generally faster than aDSL but DSL speeds are more consistent.
So check with your neighbours and other customers of whoever you're getting the service from first. If there are tons of complaints on their forums I wouldn't take a chance with them. Of course, YMMV.
Other options include getting a burner at work (assuming work has a decent connection) and downloading large needed files there.
:)
Not necessarily. One of the last places I worked the Corperate NOC watched bandwidth usage closely. When the techroom started downloading movies in DIVX, about a week later every single person in our location from management down got flamed for our bandwidth usage.
Too bad they're in chapter 11 now... Guess there might have been a reason for it.
Oh, BTW, it was an ISP as well.
EveryDNS. Use it. It works.
AC's need not reply
Welcome to the 2Wire Bandwidth Meter. This meter will determine your maximum throughput to our Web site.
Status:
Test completed...
Bandwidth = 9251.7 Kbps
Let's see your 56k modem get those kind of numbers!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Depending how large a cable company defines a neighboorhood, how about a 3000 person dormitory complex. It was great working for those bastards anyways though, received a job ticket for slow/no service, went to the users apt, hung out for 15 minutes waiting for the service to step off of peak and billed for 1 hour, the user got their connection and I got paid.
Read my plan to save the Bengals
Can it: theoretically, yes. Is it: no. Seriously... I have cable at my parents house (ADSL here), and while I usually average between 50 - 65 K/s on the DSL, and 50 - 100 on cable... I've _never_ seen a website that wasn't slashdotted (or running off another 56K) download slower than about 15 K/sec. Same goes for FTP. It's true that broadband often transfers the bottleneck further upstream... but that just proves that having a bunch of pseudo-T1-capable line accessing a T1 is not a viable long term option
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
I don't think it is all that widespread. Can it be slow? Sure, no doubt about it. As the quip goes, the first thing you notice when you get broadband service is how slow the rest of the Internet is. Last night www.furnitureporn.com, among other sites, seemed pretty poky. But at work - which is a hell of a lot better wired than my apartment is! - things can often be surprisingly slow too. I wouldn't be too quick to pin things on cable.
Assuming 600Kbyte/s,
600kbyte/s * 8bits/1byte = 4800kbit/s
4800kbit/s * 1m/1024k = 4.6875mbit/s
In theory, it could happen.
--
I think the fact that you've experienced a greater than 50% cut in your bandwidth demonstrates that this can be a problem. If they don't add capacity at the same rate that they add users, then your performance will suffer. 150 kB/s is still excellent, but if they keep adding users and don't upgrade, your bandwidth will suffer even more.
True, but I think the point is that the level of service hasn't dropeed below my expectations and I believe that the company (TimeWarner) has been responsible in keeping up with demand...
That seems to be what it all boils down to. This isn't a problem specific to cable modems, its a problem inherent in any kind of hierarchical networking scheme - you're always limited by the smallest link in the chain. And if the provider is responsible, then there aren't any problems.
I could just as easily claim that OC-3 links can be slower than 56k modems.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Is this really a widespread problem? Myself and several friends all use cable modems in the San Diego area (both Time Warner and Cox) and I don't think I've ever heard any complaints. Incidentally, I've been using it for a year and a half now and I think I've only had one short ( 1 hr. ) service interruption and the only drop in speed came about a year ago - I originally could get 400kB/s (yes, that's kilobytes) on ftp while now I can only get 150 or so...
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Imminent death of broadband!
Film at eleven.
Sigh.
--Just the place for a snark!
Well, we just pulled out of Telstra Bigpond because we had noticed a decrease in speed.
... and then they put a hard limit of 3GB on the amount of traffic per billing period.. all round badness.
Also, it should be noted that they did cap the speed to 45kb/s
A good site for any Australian boradband user, or potential user to check out is Whirlpool
Michelle
----
Michelle
----
Be true, regret not, and let your star shine forth!
I use optimum online, which is the cablevision cable ISP. I can easily get speeds of 300-500 kiloBYTES persecond (about 2400-4000kilobits persecond) compare that with 56k, and i think you see the point. i suppose it all matters where you live though, and whether you're cable company throttles down your internet speed, which mine doesn't.
A cable-based network is similar to a shared ethernet. Multiple shared segments (that is users coming to the same headend device) used to be called NAN (neighborhood area network), don't know how it's called now. In any case, if overprovisioned, you effective speed may become very low and in a worst case practically come to the standstill, again, just like on shared ethernet.
I have had cable for a year now. I live in South Dakota. I've had no problems with the speed whatsoever. I get anywhere from 50 - 400 k/s usually in the 200's. It's fast as hell.
You're nothing; like me.
In Saskatchewan, Sask Tel (the government-owned telephone company) provides a superb DSL service for $42 per month (about US$30 or thereabouts, I guess).
I live in a town of 5000 people, and we have had Sask Tel DSL service available here for almost a year now. Plus there is a "wireless" microwave-dish ISP available (though I hear they are not as reliable as Sask Tel).
But still, $42 Canadian per month for unlimited DSL service is a damn good deal by anyone's standard. And did I mention that also includes the rent on a DSL modem?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
My high school did the same thing, maybe more than 500 though. There are 5 computers in each classroom minimum, then there are the actually computing classrooms, and the office, all on one T1.
I remember the early days though, when the teachers had just gotten the computers and didn't even know how to set them up, so I volunteered then spent time downloading mp3s at outrageous speeds from the dial up I was used to. Then the horror, oh the horror. Once they all got set up, I don't know what was slowing it down so much, but you couldn't get more than a K/s out of anyone during peak time, which was near the end of class when the teachers ran out of stuff to say. Maybe 3K/s if you did it while they were talking, but it was so atrocious, I wept.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
The problem is not with dialup modems or even cablemodems for that matter - it's with the terminology.
For gods sakes, a "56k modem" CAN NOT do 56KB/s. At its *theoretical* best it can do 5.6KB/s and practically speaking you will be lucky to hit 5. Dialup users only *wish* that a 56k modem could do 50+KB/s.
"56k modem" means "56,000 baud modem".
If your cablemodem is consistantly dropping below 5K/s then run, don't walk, to the nearest phone and call your cable co up because obviously you have severe technical issues.
The whole issue is confusing because companies will flip between Mb/MB/Kb/KB depending on which sounds most impressive in that particular ad.
- Toby
We all know that this varies from provider to provider as well as location. I can tell you that between 5pm and 10pm my cable modem would _not_ work at ALL. So, technically, yes. At those times my 56k modem was faster than my cable connection.
One thing I know for sure...I have Charter Cable and I am supposed to get 512K down and 128K up. Off peak, I get it. Peak (say 6PM EST to 9PM) I only get about 300 - 400K. Slower than a 56K dial-up? Never.
This is about like saying "Yeah but sometimes a Porsche is slower than my Hyundai...like if it breaks down. Yeah. Then my Hyundai is faster than a Porsche 911. Of course, the only problem is my Hyundai breaks down more often than the Porsche."
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
Last year I went from having killer Mediaone/AT&T Broadband to this Second rate Crap from Charter Cable. I Used to get my whole 1.5 down and 300 Up all the time when I was with Mediaone/AT&T(Once or twice I had to complain that things seemed slow and pull out my paper works saying that it was supposed to reach those speeds, it was always fixed within hours, usually after my IP changed so we know what happened there). Charters system only states that it will achive "up to" 512...UP? down? 256 each way? I don't know they don't say. I complained initially that I wasn't even getting near 512 on Charter they were quite unsym(pathatic). I wanted to replace things with DSL, but I am too far from the CO, and I live in verizon land so it probably wouldn't have helped anyway. I asked Charter for a second Cable modem they weren't having any of that. Worse recently they appear to have blocked port 53, so my DNS server became unreachable, and took my domain down for several days. Broadband in general needs to have more people in the game.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I'm sure that while his upsteam is sending more packets, the flood of http GET requests pouring through his downstream connection slows things down a bit.
Heh. Well, my download is 1.2Mbps, from a Nortel DSL modem. With PPPoE (yuck!) overhead, I've capped out at 1Mbps. But not with GET requests...
My upload speed is allegedly 320kbps - that's how my ISP advertises it - but I know it's capped out at 15kbps. With PPPoE overhead, I usually cap out at about 13kbps. About 3 times the upload of a 56k modem, but not stellar.
Now that the dust has cleared, and going through my server logs, I see that from 5:PM to 7:PM EST, I was averaging over 30 requests per minute, but topped out at over 250 requests per minute for about 15 minutes.
It seems that Bobo attempted to crush my webserver.
That was fun. Can we do it again sometime? :)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Can you download a video stream and watch it in faster motion than you can see it on your TV... all coming in via the same line. -Anonymous Coward != Unanimous Cowherd
Busy aligning my non-linear thoughts.
From the same ISP, cable will, in reality, almost always be faster. Saturation is saturation, it only takes longer with 56k modems than it does with cable or xDSL.
Ameritech in the Chicagoland area for instance, has God-awful DSL. Many sites won't come up at all, others have horrific ping times. Using their dialup is no better however. In this case I think they have a f*cked up router or firewall somewhere, and not saturation, (they refuse to admit there is a problem any way you slice it) but the situation would be the same if it were saturation.
My point? Well I guess I'm just saying its the quality of the isp you really need to worry about, more than the type of connection. I'd rather have crappy cable modem service than 56k service myself, but I used to work for a dialup isp back in the day, so I'm pretty good at getting crappy dialups working. Good cable over crappy DSL any day of the week...but good DSL still beats good cable.
Kinda makes you miss your dorm... a 10baseT hookup streight from a partial T3. Ahhh the good times.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
Sifl&Olly? Where where where? Sorry to be a dork and post offtopic, but where have you found those online? I miss those guys.
Those were some pretty good actors.. I wonder if those socks ever got any more work..
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
What you have to remember is that the exchange in the local area of the DSL provider puts in a multiplexer to add digital information to the lines for DSL subscribers....now, while it's true that this equipment is wonderful, it's not bulletproof - if the equipment is overloaded (yes, it's possible that they're running an ATM switch at 100% utilization and it's not functioning 100% anymore, or that their multiplexer is under too much load to function 100%). So, yes, in the case of DSL, it's 100% possible that in some areas and at some telcos, the QOS (quality of service) isn't always 100%.
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
Go to gnutella ...
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Sure, the wire in some cases is there, but everyone knew about the bottlenecks.
XDSL (what I have) seems to be better; I don't have the "every one in the 'hood sharing one connection" problem. Given the choice between dial up and Cable, I stuck with dial up until XDSL became available (our town was built 10 yrs ago with fibre optic, I think they had to retro-fit us with copper or something).
Have you thought about getting cable, but maintaining a dial up back up? Or can you sweat it out until XDSL is available?
Other options include getting a burner at work (assuming work has a decent connection) and downloading large needed files there.
-Mynn the Museless
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
I can say that @home is a pretty mediocre ISP. Their aim seems to be to get more customers to sign up than to split our overcrowded node. Since they raised their rates to $45 up from $39, I've seen service go steadily downhill.
Their 128K upstream cap is very annoying too.
The worst part of it all is that they're the only high-speed option in my neighborhood. I live within 6000 feet of a Qwest DSL station, but for some reason service isn't available here.
But then, what can you expect from a company that posts this slogan on their home page?
"@home - So good, it's like Feng Shui for your computer!"
The biggest problem I've had with it is thunderstorms - cable goes down, Internet goes down. Today, for example (as I listen to the thunder roll outside), I've had a couple of small outages that lasted just long enough for me to notice them and start trying to ping my way upstream. On the TV, this manifests itself as a barely noticeable flicker once in a while. On the computer, it's more obvious, because lots of little applications suddenly report that they don't have a connection.
However, once I start getting packets back, I fire up a bandwidth meter and find I'm getting ~700K again, so I'm happy. I just don't do any bandwidth-intensive work or anything requiring constant connectivity when there's lightning outside, which would probably be good policy for any home user.
Comparing that to the hell of AOL that I vacated a month ago for Charter, I'd say it's a good deal (though AOL has cranked up my shipments of free coasters recently).
All in all, Charter's been good to me, and the tech who delivered my modem and installed the line explained that (in my area, at least) they're working to relieve some of the more egregious infrastructure problems.
Hey Trep, wtf is going on with EFnet? I can't even get to the website to grab a recent list of servers to try to connect to.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
This is true by definition (cable is shared access, thus, it is theoritically possible), but the likelyhood of it getting that bad is pretty low. I used to have cable access (then I moved), and sometimes the packet loss was so bad, that playing quake was worse than on a 56k. My download speeds and www page load times were still top notch, but the packet loss made playing games just terrible. It turned out to be a router problem, but of course, I don't know what it really was, since the guy I talked to wasn't sure what a router actually did.
Most providers have QoS (quality of service) statements that specify that it won't get as bad as [fill in the blank] or they will add capacity or fix the problem. For Time Warner/Road Runner (in Memphis, Tn, anyway), it was that it wouldn't get worse than ISDN. But the catch is, how long do you have to live with that crappy service before the fix it?
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
Cox Cable overbuilds their network and uses premium circuits, with a faster maintenance rebuild schedule than most. I found that dial-up was also better (GTE circuit) down there in Santa Barbara too - could get 40K consistent in Santa Barbara and 24K in most places in Seattle.
As I understand it, Cox has fewer oversubscribes, and part of the problems that other people talk about are due to oversubscribed cable segments using oversubscribed fat pipes. Apparently Cox doesn't do that.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
that is the only time i can download my pr0n on cable in a reasonable amount of time
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
Re: Can Cable Really be Slower Than 56K? Can I get an amen from all Optel subscribers in the house?
What is music when you despise all sound?
When the requested page was in the cache, things went faster. As a side note the cable modem's neighborhood has the highest per capita income in Michigan, maybe this was an incentive to keep problems low.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Well, you just have to do what my school do: stick 500 student's rooms and 300 teacher's offices behind a single T1 pipe. Yeah and it's an engineering school.
Nobox: Only simple products.
Thanks for clarifying that. People toss around 'xDSL' like its another variant aside from aDSL and sDSL..
Personally, I have aDSL and my downstream is great (I can download from most fast sites at 200k/sec). My upstream, however, is capped right around 13k/sec (i mean kbytes) which I find annoying. Still, I'm happy because its cheap and it very rarely goes down.
(i have a pacbell line and service from sonic.net)
___
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Before making a decision on any broadband provider, do yourself a favor and visit http://www.dslreports.com . And, after signing up with a provider, return the favor and report your experience there as well.
;-).
Oh...and should you happen to choose SpeakEasy (one of the highest rated ones), do me a favor and tell them pjwal referred you so I can get a free month
I live out in the middle of nowhere, and the people who live around me are the kind not to have computers. I don't get too many slow downs, and the service is excellent. When I lived in the 'burbs tho, the connection dropped occasionally (sic) and it was slow at peak hours.. Guess it all depends where you live and how many people use their cable near you.
My name is Mister Black and I am a bandwidth hog. I'm sorry, it's all my fault. I must apologize for the slowdown. I use my cable modem to download all the porn, mp3s, futurama and sifl&olly episodes I can. It's going to get much, much worse before it ever gets better because I'm not going to stop.
Mister Black
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
So how do you avoid paying for a cable modem, then 6 months later it becomes slower than 56K? Well, first, see if they put any sort of meaningful service guarantee in their contract. (If so, let us know. I want to invest in that company, if they look likely to actually meet their commitments!) Or see if you can call one of their executives and ask about segment size. Quite likely the response will be "Segments???" Avoid that company, unless you think it's going to be quite a while before they hook up too many modems.
The other thing that can go wrong, and it affects _everything_, is that the server the cable, DSL, or whatever goes through is too slow for the traffic, or the connection out from there is not wide enough. This would cause slowdowns even if you had your own direct fiber-optic cable to the server. Companies that allow bottlenecks to develop here are just plain irresponsible. What did you expect when you signed a contract that said you were responsible for paying them, and they were responsible for nothing at all?
If I use so much capacity that I impact the performance of others, it is not a comment on my telecom morals, it's evidence of the underprovisioning of the infrastructure of the provider. It's well known that many cable providers often sign up far too many users for the headend/switching/upstream-pipe plant they have. Service was good during their ramp-up when their user-count was within spec, but expansion without investment killed quality. The real reason much of the population likes cable modem over dialup is not only the speed diff (when there), but (he says cynically) that they skip going through the dialup ritual and get to be ON ALL THE TIME. (Esp. Instant Msging junkies).
Time Warner's Roadrunner claims only to be using a small fraction of their network capabilities at each neighborhood's center, leaving the rest dark to be turned on for when more bandwidth capacity is necessary in each neighborhood. Now, that could just be PR but there's probably at least some truth behind it.
Here in Kansas City, if you've tweaked your modem right, you can easily get about 1950 kbps down/360 kbps up (advertised 2000 down 384 up), whereas basic DSL from SWBell for the same price is UP TO 1400 kbps down/384 up, but minimum 384 down/128 up, a noticeable difference. I have noticed little to no slowdown in my area. A friend of mine who lives in a neighborhood that has had roadrunner longer and also is wealthier (most likely with a higher percentage of broadband users) says he's noticed some slowdown at peak hours (primetime normally), but he still connects at well over 1000 kbps even then, whereas many people with DSL are getting nowhere near that.
I used to be a major proponent for DSL before I had cable and learned some of the facts. Now in the end, as about 50 of these posts already mentioned, good DSL is better than bad cable and vice versa, but I just don't see DSL as capable of taking the lead from cable, just for these issues. Cable installation are simpler and take less time. Also, DSL companies are known for their lack of support and for having major problems with installations and the like. Just go to dslreports and look at top rated providers. Cable almost always beats DSL because DSL is just way more complex, period.
This summer I am getting much faster speeds on my cable modem than on the campus of my school, which has several T1's feeding it. One of the reasons for this may be because I am on the outer limites of my city and therefore I don't think my node has very many people (I can get around 250-500 KB a sec). I did have one outage for around 5 hours (I use Time Warner) but that's been it. If you're thinking to switching to cable, a lot of providers in my area waive the installation fee and first month's charge if you set it up yourself.
$45 per U Colocation Special
Eventually I switched over to cable (Time Warner Cable / Road Runner) and was getting considerably faster access ... according to the Road Runner page, I was seeing 1.5m+.
Overall, I have no complaints!! The service goes down infrequently ... in fact, it's on-par with the DSL service I had. It's also $10/month cheaper.
I'm told other locales aren't so lucky. My friend lives in the San Jose area and he fully verified that sometimes a cable modem can lag behind a 56K dial-up connection. Man, I'd hate to live there!!
Anyway, I suspect YMMV ... go with what works best in your area. Me? I've yet to see any significant slowdown in my area ... Orange County, CA.
This gets down to the basics of the contracts that we have to sign to get access to this service.
They make a lot of promises in advertising, but write all sorts of legalese crap into their contracts that disallows them from actually having to do much of anything while simultaneously restricting what you can and cannot do with the alleged bandwidth you are supposedly paying for.
Packets: Sent = 144, Received = 143, Lost = 1 (0% loss
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 10ms, Maximum = 1252ms, Average = 183ms
This adds up to being killed a lot in Unreal Tourneyment.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
If you're looking into cable service, there are a few things you can do:
- Talk to other people who are using the service, and see what they think.
- Look at your neighbors. If there are a lot of computer users, then local traffic will be higher and you will have a slower connection.
- See how many units your local node serves. Be especially careful if it serves an apartment complex or some other sort of high-density housing.
- Look at the age/quality of the cable itself. I know that it's not supposed to make any difference, but I live in an older part of my subdivision, while a co-worker lives in the newer part. He consistently gets higher bandwidth, though we share the same node.
You may also want to consider DSL if it's cheaply available in your area. You don't have to deal as much with things like congestion, but you have to be fairly close to the provider.Now I still haven't figured out what Troll exactly is, but I am damn sure you are it!!!
You could have at least #include "sarcasm.h", in which case this would have passed as a lame joke.
Remember, when you are downloading MP3's, you are downloading communism!!!
badness 10000
Even plain old V22 (1200bps) is 4 symbols (2 bits) at 600 baud - in that case just four phase shifts (0, 90, 180 & 270). You have to drop down to 600 or even 300 bps before 1 bit = 1 baud.
Meanwhile (so some Google research has just told me), 14k4 is 64 symbols (6 bits) at 2400 baud, and 28k8 is no less than 512 symbols (9 bits) at 3200 baud!!You can't increase the baud rate much past that without exceeding the bandwidth of the telephone line.
Meanwhile, after 28k8/33k6 we get into 56K territory, which is a completely different ballgame, and I'm not going there today. :-)
"baud" does NOT mean "bits per second", it is a measure of the number of state transitions per second on the line - not the same thing, as each state can encode multiple bits.
> and practically speaking you will be lucky to hit 5
For what it's worth, I consistently get a 50,666bps connection...
Agreed about the general misuse of kB/s vs. kb/s etc., though.
The main problem is oversubscription. When I got my DSL line, I had really good performance at first. Then the company got aquired by another company that got aquired by another company that got aqcuired by a huge national ISP.
Each time, my "hops" to the backbone increased (by the time I left them, I was 9 hops and an average of 70ms before I even hit the backbone!), and my throughput plummetted.
One day my throughput dropped to ~ 1 K/sec, much slower than my modem used to provide. I contacted the ISP and once I finally got up to someone who knew something, I found out that the national ISP had brought a new bank of modems on line between me and their main office. They planned to get me up to 128kbps (twice 56k speeds) in 6-8 weeks.
I found another ISP and have not had any problems since.
Sure, cable is really slow at peak times. If you're like me, and download everything at 4am, it's not a problem. :)
Repeal the DMCA!
Modem access, just like cable access all are filtered through switches and then fed through routers. The *only* difference is that cable modems have these hubs for each neighborhood, which is a Good Thing(tm) because it has many pipes all filtering down into the main router rather than just dialup-switch-router where the single switch can be overloaded, whereas cable networks wont unless the neighborhood somehow eats over a gigabit of data at the same time (Not likely!). Stories like these are just urban legends and people really have no idea wtf they're on about .. "I heard cable is bad because too many people can slow it down!" .. Yeah, well, its the same for ANY ISP mr brainiac, difference being Cable has it laid out 10 times better. I get insane transfers from my cable modem and download an entire Data/Audio CD binary in just under 10 minutes (700MB). It is never slow, and is always up.
In all that time, my average incoming bandwidth has remained between 1.5 and 3 megabits. My outgoing bandwidth has been a relatively constant 384kbit.
As with anything else, a well maintained cable modem network works. I'm sure there are still people out there in copper-land who can't get better than 26kbit, because of noise on copper lines.
Oversubscription will lead to poor service, and poor service will lead to customer attrition. In this case, I am confident that customer feedback will correct the deficiencies in companies that are providing poor service.
"Don't worry about the problems you have in mathematics, I assure you mine are much greater." - Einstein c.1919
I have cable in wi, and they had some problems early on, but lately have been pretty good about it. I usually see 60-70k on a good day and 30k on a bad day. Sure beats my 56k line, and good luck getting DSL around here.