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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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
Yeah but Shaw is probably one of the best Cable providers around -- they don't use home.net, for example...
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 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
Should be k and not K (I only wish)...
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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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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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
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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/
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
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.
The question was "Is broadband really slowing down?"
ADSL is broadband.
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.
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
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!"
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)
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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
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).
I've seen that comercial! You're CANADIAN!!!!
Pick me up a double leg plate at the swiss chalet would you?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
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.
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."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.