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Dump Broadband, Dig Out Your Modem!
wilstephens writes: "Found this article on CNet about the latest trend of people dumping broadband in favour of their modems. Cheaper, and more reliable service, apparently! 'Katy Ling, a software consultant who had her home wired for high-speed Internet access last year, did what many technology analysts said would never happen: She bailed out of broadband...'"
She did it cause she is broke so what. If I had no job and had to cut back that is one place I would look at too
was running this as a story as well, basically most of their users came to the conclusion that the general populous would "sell their grandmas" before returning to a modem. Non-techies don't want to wait for their information, this is the only thing that brought them to the 'net. at least I _hope_ it wasn't for the ads...
________________________________________________
I've got a flock available to rent at good rates for this if you really want to push low-tech a bit further. :)
I could tolerate the net at 56k. Plus, the phone lines in my area are so noisy that you'd hardly ever get 4800 baud on them.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
I'm seriously considering going back to telephone modem. I'm using cable modem here, and the service seems to go down every other day and be no faster than 100Kbps. Before that I had DSL and that worked like a charm, but there's none to be had around my new house.
When broadband first came to my area, it was cable modems to a small section of town... only a few people had the access. This year the local cable company was working on doing the whole town, but excite@home stopped taking new customers, so that'll kill new cable access. DSL has been spotty with all the companies going out of business and there's a long wait when you call for them to set up the service (Ameritech). I called and they said they would be there in 4 weeks. 8 weeks later they still hadn't installed it. I cancelled it.
Long Live Dial up!!!!!!!
She obviously didn't know how to download stuff from Usenet. An ISP with a good feed and retention on alt.binaries.multimedia.* is enough to make DSL worth dropping cable TV for. And having a fixed IP so you can SSH back home is nice, too.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
And frankly, I don't know anyone else that would, either. I supect the Author's sole anecdotel example is also their neighbor. There isn't a story here.
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
Please, how many people on /. would dump cable or Xdsl for a modem again? This is just stupid. Why are people bitching about reliability, I have DSL with 3 different telco's 3 ISPs in two states, and cable modem now and interruptions are extremely rare. Much more rare than how often my modem's used to drop carrier on me. People just need something to complain about this is pathetic.
It still amazes me the # of users of my websites that still use modems. We are now planning to install mod_gzip for Apache to help modem users download our larger pages faster. It didn't seem worth it at first with folks moving to broadband, but we still found many of our users listing 'modem' as their primary access method when they register. Plus it'll reduce our bandwidth demand for users who have broadband - they'll get larger files faster too. Yeah, it adds overhead on teh server CPU, but for us its worth it since we have headroom to spare.
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If was using DSL mostly to commute and I left my job and had less cash laying around, I'd probably cancel the DSL too.
We must be lucky where I live. I have had DSL for over 2 years now, and I have had almost no problems (well, one modem did die). Almost 100% uptime, on the DSL line and with the ISP (Open World Inc.) Course, now that I've said this, I'll probably get home and find it dead. Some basic info on where my DSL is coming from: Lexington, KY. DSL line provider: Verizon DSL service: 768 down, 256 up ISP: Open World Inc www.stdio.com
I've got a cable modem, and every night when the traffic starts to get high, service totally stops. This isn't too bad, because I live close enough to campus to run to a computer lab when I really need to, but it's annoying nonetheless. The solution: we called the cable company to complain about their horrible service, and they credited our bill for the month's worth of broadband. I won't argue with free broadband, even if it doesn't work from 6-12pm most nights.
If you're having trouble with your broadband service, try complaining. The worst that could happen is you'll have to leave a message, but you might be surprised what happens.
with all the unguarded wireless networks around the cities of the US, there's almost no need to pay for access anymore. just get a burly antenna ($70-ish) and move it around until you get a signal. it's free, and free is a good deal!
I mean, they also said a few things along the lines of "experts who have just as little evidence as us predict a downturn, etc.,etc.". Whatever.
Come on, give it up, that's
I've been hearing quite a lot about this in Australia too. (Remember that place of beautiful beaches, Internet censorship and technophobe politicians? ;).
With the largest of the two main cable companies recently introducing a 3GB cap on data transfer as well as being plagued with downtime and network problems, customers have realised that they can download more on their old dialup accounts and have been ditching cable at a phenomenal rate.
I guess once again it relates to the fact that businesses just want to use the Internet to make money, whereas the people actually using Internet want to use it for porn. I mean 'infotainment'.
Taffyd.
So those of us stuck in the 56K dark ages are really on the leading edge?
..."While many ISPs remain publicly adamant that broadband subscribers are rock-steady, some say privately that signs of cancellations are emerging. The impact is noticeable in the San Francisco Bay Area, where thousands of high-tech employees have lost their jobs."
And a paragraph or so later... "So far, cancellations haven't shown up in macro-level statistics such as earnings reports."
Hmm. So people who have lost their jos are trimming back on expenses in a tough job market? I'm not sure where the headlines are justified here. A bunch of laid-off workers representing a blip on the radar isn't exactly a trend that I'd bet my shirt on.
Slow news day in the tech market, I guess.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
.. heard.
Why in God's name would you want to go back to a modem when most sites out there will crawl at modem speeds? I don't know who all these people are having problems with broadband, because I certainly don't know any of them. I have a feeling this is a case of more brainless "consultants" who in reality have NO real technical knowledge being unable to make even the simplest things work.
I think this is pure BS. I'd give up the net before going back to 56k modem. I was a lan party maniac until I got broadband, now I lan from home.
I have the net at work to surf, with out the sub 75 ping my sdsl gives me I'd just do without.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Free Mac Mini
I think the main question (at least for me) is not how *fast* my connection is, but how much i have to pay. Here in Europe we don't usually have flat rates and have to pay about 1 us cent for every minute of online time. For browsing the web it doesn't really matter whether all those pages build up really quickly or rather slowly because I'll always need more time to read the stuff than I need to download it. Considering big downloads a faster connection is better, because it saves time and thereby money. But if I could get a flat rate like it is usual in North America I probably wouldn't care if my download takes a couple of hours or so. That's what a second phone line (or ISDN) is for. Just my 2p..
well i guess [in the UK] oftel have done a lot of people a HUGE favour by not making BT get off its arse and give us a decent broadband product.... we were all better off with modems all along!
Hmmmmm.... Or was broadband service deliberateley fscked so that more ppl would stay on/return to dialup, thus meaning providers could still get the same revenue [i'm paying £25/month for 100 hours unmetered anytime. I'm on an NTL line.], but only pay out for a fraction of the backbone bandwidth, and use cheaper equipment...
Gee i wonder....
Ali
www.ali-d.abel.co.uk
With a dialup modem I used to get a lot more done around the house. I could go get coffee while waiting for pages to load, or do some cleaning. And I got a real sense of well-being when I left my machine on all night to download a 100MB game demo and it actually worked!
With the telco mergers of GTE/Bell/etc into Verizon, Verizon has completely screwed up their DSL circuit offerings and availability, made it extremely difficult to get DSL service with a third-party ISP, and has actually STOPPED adding DSL customers to known CO's which have more than ample equipment to handle more customers.
:)
Cable modem service is of such poor quality in most locations that it really IS better to go back to dialup.
That's another reason as to why people have been (forced to) dump broadband.
Then again, Verizon's also terrible about keeping decent line quality, so even dialup is unreliable. anyways, enough ranting. If you want good service, get a T1.
I've grown so accustomed to highspeed access that broadband is almost a "necessity" for me; I'd consider cutting the stream of crap on cable television before I'd dump my cable modem.
That said, I can imagine that for many users, high speed access is a frivolity. Let's face it: you need a high speed connection mainly for gaming, porn, and overwrought sites with lots of graphics.
You could probably get by with a regular modem (and, hell, a text browser), if you actually wanted the Internet just for information.
it is a problem of providers cutting corners.
Now I guess it is cheaper, but lets look at my example. I have RoadRunner. Now that cost about 40 dollars a month. If I had a dialup service that would be about 15-20 dollars a month for a decent one. (I'm not even gonna go into the free ones, they just suck) Considering that a cable modem can be more then 10 times faster then a 56k modem, I think its a good buy. And if you have an extra phone line dedicated to the modem... well now its about the same price. Oh well just my 2 cents.
All your base, are Segmentation fault, dumping core...
Only an idiot would dump their cable/dsl connection to go back to 56k and lower.
Look, if you want broadband to work, you need a company focussed on their customers, with a manageable customer base and no plans for massive expansion. Videotron, in Quebec, Canada, provides reliable, inexpensive cable internet to one province, and one province only, with a possible market of around 5 milions people. They have kept their operation small, their staff trained, and decided not to expand into other provinces. In this way, they are able to maintain a high level of service. Your mileage may vary, but I have only had 2 down days of service, living in 2 large metropolitan regions of Quebec, in 2 years.
This is in direct contrast to Bell Canada, who's attempt service all of Canada has led to an incrdibly bad DSL service and Rogers cable modem service collapsing under the immense wieght of their customers.
The moral: Don't bite off more than you can chew. Canada may not be as competitive, but there are lessons to be learned from staying in business long enough to make money off the customers you already have.
- If This Peace Is Fictious, I Shall Destroy It
Those who can face unreliable service, high prices, and shamefully bad customer service and support.
And its getting worse. Most of the start-ups that may have created competition in this market have gone under, leaving the cable and telephone monopolies in charge.
I don't know if the solution is more or less regulation and/or public involvement, but in the current atmosphere, things are going to suck for a very long time.
It seems that broadband has become a better solution for small towns. I know of people switching away fro broadband in big cities because of instability and lack of service but in small towns (such as mine) people are more than happy with their broadband access and service/reliability is better than in most big cities.
K.D. Lang bailed out on her "broad" band? oh crap, now what will the girls listen to?
har har....
...due to the dot-bomb!!
:-)
""I used it regularly in the beginning and then the use started rapidly declining, so I got rid of it," Ling said. "It was easier justifying a recreational DSL line when there was a lot of money around to burn.""
Obviously...
For those of us who earn money in a stable work environment, broadband is fine.
I would get rid of HBO before getting rid of the cable modem
I have a cable modem in Louisiana and I have had _0_ downtime since it was installed 8 months ago. It is a very necessary part of my job. I live an hour away from work and when something goes wrong, I do not have to drive up there to fix it since I have had broadband.
Perhaps I am just lucky, but my experience has been great!
The truth is, most people don't need that much bandwidth(which is irrelevant in many cases because of limits put on broadband in many areas), people don't care if their computer is connected 24/7, and a lot of people just use their computers for sending E-mail and chatting. Broadband is nice, but why would people stick with something expensive and elabourate when a cheap and easy solution exists? Broadband is great for people who use computers for games, or downloads, or even for developers, but when all you are doing is checking your E-mail and chatting, 56k is more than enough -- especially for half the cost.
It's been a long time.
Ah... looks like modems will become "fashionable". Soon a 56k modem will be obscenely expensive...
Five years ago, those of us who knew the Mysteries of the Web Host were preparing for a mass conversion of people to the Ways of the Net. We were telling people (and ourselves) that Faster Is The Future(tm), More Is Better(tm), and Wait'll You See What We Have In Store For You(tm).
:)
Then, most of those morons signed up for the Great Satans of AOL and MSN.
Seriously, though, this is hardly a shock. Firstly, modems have relatively minimal drain on bandwidth resources, and since there are infinitely more providers of modemic service than fatpipe, it's easier to conect (provided you have either a mom-n-pop shop or a few numbers to call).
Fatpipe is also expensive. Cable modems are somewhere near $40 a month for unreliable party-line bandwidth; DSL is more cash for less hash; and satellite two-way has bad lag (so would you after a 100k mile trip per packet).
In this economic dounturn, more people are looking to save money, and this is one easy way to do it. (Most people surf the web to find a few relatively important sites to them and then maybe putz around for other items of interest.)
I mean, $15/mo $40.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
I managed to convince my (at the time) employer to cover the cost of DSL (Bell South FastAccess in NC). They had been paying $80/mo for my ISDN connection into the corperate switch and DSL only cost about $50/mo.
I quit and started working for a VoIP startup who promised to cover the DSL costs but it never materialized. I'm still on DSL and my wife and I talk about it on every budget review (quarterly at least) But it survives.
It's not so much the connection speed, which is nice. It's the "always on" aspect. The computer gets turned on during the day some time and stays on. When you need to check on something (news, weather, movies...) you just sit down and hit the URL. No dialup, no waiting, just info.
Going back to dialup would be awful.
I've had similar experiences as the people mentioned in the article. I guess I've somewhat "grown out" of the need to be wired 24/7. I use high-speed at work. At home I want to do other things then sit in front of my computer like I do all day. Because of that, a 56K connection to slurp down email is fine. Dial in, start downloading the mail locally, make dinner, read it after dinner. For any big files, I burn a CD on my machine at work. I can't justify spending $50 bucks a month just for convience or to be elite. Broadband was cool in school, now there really isn't anything interesting to do with it that justifies the cost (well outside of network games).
I've never had any stability issues with any of the services I've used (Verizon DSL and @Home cable), but they charge WAY to much.
It would be worth it if they had a 128K up and down static IP for like $20 a month, then I would do it. As it is, it isn't.
I read this article yesterday, and found it long on anecdotes, short on facts. Sure, I'd probably dump my DSL if I lost my job and didn't have the money to pay for it, but high speed access has really been integrated into our daily routine. We can get current weather reports, snow conditions, etc. much faster than through any other source.
It's also great for other things. The other week we were on vacation, set the VCR to record "Buffy", but it didn't take. Hop on Kazaa, found the episode, downloaded it in 45 minutes (172 MB), watched it, deleted it. Voila! Time shifting. We wouldn't have had that backup without broadband.
The one part of the article I agree with, is the fact that providers have started to raise prices, but that's generally only for new customers. I still pay 40 bucks a month, which is quite worth it.
I'm Peggy.
Once I actually found a reliable provider who could install it I have never had a problem with broadband.
I first got a cable modem about two years ago via RCN. Recently I moved to a new place which is not wired for RCN, so I switched to SBC (Ameritech) DSL. Surprisingly I really have had no major problems with the speed or reliability of their services (though I do take issue with the price).
I did have problems getting DSL service from a few providers, the standard DSL Hell - but they are both now in bakruptcy proceedings or already bankrupt - so go figure.
To go back to a regular modem is just unthinkable for me. Maybe my experience is atypical because I live in a large and competitive urban broadband market.
-josh
After that time I got those 2MBp/s download speeds over my cable modem, there was no way that I was going back.
I reguarly get 300KBp/s per file transfer from fileplanet.com, and even faster tranfers from other sites.
Being able to download a 5meg Shockwave Flash file in the time that it takes a companies logo to fade onto the screen also helps.
Alot.
Ping times under 100ms are also great. So is that nice west coast backbone that @Home has for its users.
I originaly started out with TCI@Home then AT&T bought them up. Now I have AT&T Internet Access, Cable Television, and Cell Phone service.
And you know what? I am being treated great. The few times that I have had to call text support were great, hell, the tech guy and me were swapping anti-MS jokes back and forth. The uptime is incredible, especialy after AT&T took over from TCI, and I have not had a service interuption for, God, almost a year now! The few service interuptions that I did have in 1q01 all lasted less then 10 minutes except for one that had was 30 minutes. After that there has not been a single problem for ages now.
Hell, when my power went out my UPS kicked in and I was still able to surf the internet. Cable Modem service was still up. Now _THAT_ is what I call robust service.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Broadband was almost like a "trend". Average people that browse the web maybe 1 hour a week and get their email everyday do not need their broadband; and, due to economic times, they'd rather go for a cheap alternative.
People that napster all day, play games all the time, are online a lot for something other than browsing and chatting will keep their broadband.
Its a sign of a trend, or of the economic times...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I ordered digital cable tv, phone, and internet from the same (nameless) provider. It took two weeks, even though all the cables and hookups were already installed in the house. When they showed up, they said, "whoops - your phone didn't get put in the DB, so I'll hook it up now and all you have to do is call to activate. They shouldn't have to come out here again." After 2 hours on the phone trying to convince them to just activate it, they said, "Sorry, we have to send out another technician, and that will take another week."
"Can't you just try activating it from there and see if that works?" I begged.
"No."
So another week without phone service went by. The technician came and, guess what, it was already all hooked up. All he had to do was call some special number to have it activated.
Then, when I got home that evening, I went to check my email and guess what? My broadband Internet connection was gone. I called tech support again (and waited in the easy-listening queue) only to be told (after reboots and wire reconnecting) that they'd have to send out another technician, and that they didn't have any spots open until TWO WEEKS LATER.
I wanted to tell them to shove their connection and cancel all my services. I wanted nothing more. But I don't dare do it -- I live in a "low" aread where cell phone service is bad, TV reception is bad, and DSL isn't offered, plus I bought my own cable modem.
They know I'm stuck with them, no matter how crappy their service / prices are. Short of disconnecting myself from the world and going back to 56k, I'm there.
With Northpoint and Rhythms going under and Covad on the brink there isn't much left to choose from for xDSL.
That's what happens when you compete against the phone companies. The phone company should lay the line and not provide the service, then you wouldn't be directly competing against your provider.
We dropped our Broadband and switched to T1.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Hey, if you don't need it, you don't need it. But technology analyst without broadband access is like a stock analyst without a portfolio. And my cable modem keeps chugging along like a champ. The only problems I had were solved with a simple call to customer service. I should have called two weeks earlier since in a day's times my issue was completely resolved (and has not cropped up since). You just don't want to play UT, Quake, or Wolfenstein on a 56k, nor is downloading MP3's and p0rn as fun. Reliability is something to strive for. And if you are not getting it please do discontinue service to send the message that that is unacceptable. But don't come up with this false belief that 56k is an acceptable alternative to broadband. Busy signals and dropped connections are par for the course on 56k as well.
1. Companies dump employees... ...
...
2. Laid off employees cut spending
3. Companies lose sales, so they dump employees
4. Goto 2.
Where does it end? I can't think of a better system, but sometimes Capitalism sucks.
I could perfectly live with it if it were not for the phone bill (In Belgium we pay about 1.5$ an hour during night).
/. and E2. In fact, if I gave my 800 kbps ADSL modem to E2 and used my old modem for myself, I'd probably give myself and other noders a significant speedup.
I can download anything i want from work (university) and at home I do little but
"Particularly since Sept. 11, a lot of people are deciding which bills to cut out," said a spokesperson for one major California-based ISP, who asked not to be named. "People are freaked out."
This is laughably a non sequitur. Just what do people have to fear from their DSL line due to Sep. 11? Maybe, maybe, I'd see it as a result of the declining (according to the MS-CNBC-SI folks) economy, but to think that the first (or second, or hundredth) thing that people thought about after Terror Attacked Us, and then we declared War On Terror, was "Jesus Dianne! If they could do that to the World Trade Center with planes, just think of what they could do to us with.. with DSL!" This Unnamed Source is a damn retard, but its certainly not uncommon these days for companies to blame all of their short-sighted decisions on Sep. 11.
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
I guess I'm one of the few that has actually had really, really good luck with broadband. I've got Verizon's DSL and it's reliability has been great, and they haven't raised prices like I thought they would. Unless they jack the price up or it starts dying all the time I'm sticking with it.
I have seen many people complain about their cable service; seems like they are never on AT&T though. My experience with AT&T has been nothing short of miraculous. They installed it the day after I ordered it off the web. I get 1M-3M throughput and a near perfect uptime. I used to work at a major software firm and AT&T's reliability is much higher than the internal corporate service I got.
These people will all go back.
I've got DSL here, from Qwest but with a different, local ISP. The actual DSL has been down, hmm, maybe a day, all told, in three years. Our ISP's had problems, sure, but during those problems even the phone modem couldn't get through.
:( Might have something to do with other residents here trying to jack cable for free alla damn time :( I chose not to have a "party line" with every other idjit in the block, and one reason I haven't moved is because moving might mean no more DSL :(
Yeah, I know, not all DSL users are happy. Me, I'm very pleased. It's VERY fast, and VERY reliable. They even hooked it up fairly fast, too.
A neighbor has a cable-modem system, and his goes out frequently
I wouldn't sell my Grandma.........but I might lease her.
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
And the value in 'broadband' is not the speed really. We've heard many times now, it's the instant availability stupid. People hate to have to wait (through busy signals potentially) to get online witha modem to check their mail. They like to have ICQ/AIM running all the time to see when their friends are online and to chat. It's all about convinience.
Besides, the article is full of contradictions, for example take this bit:
[ISPs] are looking for high-speed subscriptions' profit margins to bolster their bottom line...
and later:
So which one is it? I work for an ISP that does DSL, and let me tell you, there are no margins on DSL. It can easily take a 2-3 years to start making money on a DSL client. Hosting (and dialup to a certain extent) and bandwidth reselling is where the margins are.
And as a later paragraph puts it, high-speed subscribers would "rather sell their grandmothers" than go back to a pokey dial-up connection. It'll be hard for anyone to convert back to a dialup connection.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Here in Montucky where I live we have been waiting for years and years to get some decent broadband here. And now I'm excited that I don't have to wait anymore. I have the real deal! My freaky modem!! Yahoo!
believing the big bang requires a certain amount of supernatural faith
With all the porno I download (not to mention Linux ISO's) I could NEVER go back to a Modem :)
Snoozer.
It is the age old story. You can buy a car, but the manufacturer determines the quality of your experience. Consumer beware!
Cable or DSL or Modem, it's all one. Your quality of experience will depend upon the quality of your supplier.
In my area, my cable has been up and with the same IP without interruption for almost one year now.
On the otherhand, I still use my modem for one account that has a certain utility. However, since I live in a VERY rural setting, the telephone service is absolute . . .
Not bragging, just pointing out that quality varies. In modem connects and in broadband.
If consumers vote with their dollars and make sure that they are signing a contract that is favourable to them and not the provider, then things will get better. No-one is going to stand up for your rights except you. So get too it!
Later . . . . . . WebBug
The article mentioned that broadband access prices jumped by $5 to $10. That's just one more reason it's good to live in Canada, I guess - The CRTC (Like the FCC in the U.S.) capped broadband prices years ago.
--
Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
The technology is awesome, the business plans suck.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
First off, broadband is only available in urban and suburban areas in the US. Those of us who live in the country don't have any other options.
Secondly, 56K is fine for most things at home. Even if you're working at home, Terminal Services or Telnet work fine over dialup. Even basic streaming radio sounds good enough over a dialup connection.
Thirdly, most of us have broadband at work, so if there's something big we need to dl (like a full Linux distribution), we can do that at work.
Fourth, it's expensive! $50/month plus a few hundred for the equipment? No thank you. It's just not worth it.
So, I'm not planning to get broadband at home any time soon.
How strange. Up here in Canada, where Ma Bell still has a sanctioned and legally-enforced local-service monopoly, ADSL is more popular than the Beatles. Simply put, there *is* no reliability problem -- my service has worked perfectly since the day I installed it (although there *was* a one-month waiting list, IIRC.) Cable-internet is popular too, but generally more expensive (on the order of 17%) and slower to boot. Many of my friends have it, even the nontechnicals. It's the new 'cable' -- a somewhat-premium service that everyone desires.
;)
Price is $40CD/mo. , which is $30US.
Perhaps (and as a linux zealot I say this reluctantly) there's a place for limited (and legally enforced) monopolies in *some* markets (just not the OS market no thank you bob
- undoware.ca
Katy finally downloaded enough pr0n to last for the rest of her life?
She also used it to rent movies from Kozmo, buy airline tickets and check movie show times. But when she left her job, she decided that she couldn't justify the $50 monthly DSL fee.
Well, of course you don't need broadband. Ugh. Maybe you check your stocks as well? Wow.
In my case, though, downloading 20G of p0rn of usenet each week - well, I need my broadband.
Come on, folks, is there really a loss of interest in broadband access?? I couldn't live without my DSL connection, and on the *two* occasions in which it was down, I went bonkers! (The latter occurance, I'll add, was remedied by my ISP in less than half an hour)
I can't even stand being on a slow server, or at peak times at my university. Speed is important, especially for research, because time is an asset.
Sure, some people don't see the benefit of broadband, but did they really see it in the beginning? To them it was merely a novelty, OR their lifestyle has changed since, and they don't need it anymore.
This is not the case for the public as a whole, and as prices lower, demand will rise even further, and we'll never understand why there was ever any doubt. In fact, I don't understand NOW why there's any doubt that broadband is "where it's at".
No way. Broadband is here to stay.
I can understand someone ditching broadband if they only had one computer hanging on the connection - and if they have access to a fast connection somewhere (like the office) - and their connection was unreliable (like mine is).
But at my house, there's three of us in the family all sharing the same pipe. We got the broadband connection so I could load slashdot pages, the spousal unit could shop and browse and the daughter chat and play at the same time.
Before that there was too much shouting about other people hogging the bandwidth... Grin. So we put up with the timeouts and the waits to pull an IP from the DHCP server... and dream of the day when we go to 2-way.
It's going to be hard to convince me and other home LAN users to give up our broadband connections.
In illa quae ultra sunt
For people with a short attention span, the article takes a long time just to say:
Economy bad. People out of work. Luxury spending allegedly curtailed.
As a techie and a frequent kernel leecher, I want broadband, and I'm prepared to pay for it. But a lot of people out there hardly use their computers when they are at home, and then they might just find that it's just not worth it. Modem is ok for reading mail if you don't get a lot. Just like the latest P9 blabla 6THz, people don't really need this, they just think they do because of M$ bloat (both in mails and in CPU drainage) ;(
BUT, this is only because all the expected services for broadband haven't arrived yet. If TV-on-demand or whatever and other cool services started showing up, then maybe more people would be prepared to use this stuff.
I'm not a gamer, and my PII 450 is good enough today, so why shouldn't it be tomorrow as well? Maybe ISDN is good enough for most people today.
Since my cell phone service is so spotty and expensive, I'm going back to wandering around until I find a pay phone! So much more reliable, no dropped calls, no locale issues, and all for $1!
On an average day, I can get much higher throughput than even the T1 we have wired at work. I have a saved page from a speed test I did a while ago, where it showed my outgoing and incoming to be much higher than a typical T1 line.
:)
Couple that with the digital cable package that comes with it, I get 200 channels of high-quality (the picture/sound, not the programming -- stupid FOX) television, and fast-as-a-mofo internet for $100 CAD (that's like $25 USD, right?) per month. Not bad
-Mike
I really can't see that happening in the real world, unless of course your ISP has a 50% average uptime. i've had many HS ISPs, and even with even the worse of them, i would bitch and moan when it was down, but never would consider dialup. now i am forced to be on dialup because of my new location, and i can't understand anyone who would *choose* this..
Ok maybe if you're a tight-wad, and you use the internet maybe 2 or 3 times a week to check your mail, it wouldn't be a big deal, but i personally can't stand clicking on my inbox, and then having enough time to go make a coffee before i get to the next page. And with so many people on HS internet these days, i find the majority of sites are loaded with graphics and the like which make them almost impossible to view on dialup.
And forget about downloading the new Mandrake release iso or something, not on dialup, unless you have a few days of spare time to kill...
I can understand some people being "fine" with dialup, not seeing the need for speed, so to say. but that is akin to my father being "fine" with his pentium 166.. its all a matter of perspective; if you don't know better, then dialup is good enough for you.
i dont know, but in my oppinion, anyone who would choose dialup after tasting the speed of 1 megabit or more of bandwith, is the same type of person who probly has a few whips and chains in the bedroom, cause they like pain.
NT
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
Sure my DSL isn't the best, but it beats the hell out of a modem. I can get a constant minimum of 400kbps which ain't too shabby considering it's split with my roommate. Sure it's a hassle to reboot when the connection drops (discontinued 3Com DSL modem with driver issues) but it is not worth going back to dialup, especially when there are two web-heads in the house.
Well, I just got my DSL at home (alright, sure, I sit in front of the 'net at work too) but I'm not about to dump it in favor of a modem again--I live with three other people and that means that if anyone is using the net(and I didn't have a linux modem, so I couldn't share it)no one could get phone calls(except on their cellphones). Basically, broadband is far, far, far, far, far better than modem and anyone who says otherwise is a huge complete jackass. Now sure, some people are dumping it; some people didn't get hooked at an internet2 college either.
I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but the reports of broadband's demise are much exaggerated.
One day I missed the bus to work, so I rode my bike.
I didn't hear anything on the radio about the new riding your bike because you missed the bus trend.
there's more than one way to do me.
This isn't surprising if you are not mission critical
Where I live, I waited for broadband for two years. During that two years, I've seen download caps, bandwidth restrictions, disallowing of multiple IP addresses as well as privacy intruding features of ISPs RIAA and the federal govt. People who actively seed back doors if you actually UTILIZE the bandwidth that you pay for. Plus the qos stinks. nothing out there is worth it. Sure you may be able to vid-conference, but with whom? Watch movies over the web? Not until the entertainment industry pulls out of their litigation. I only surf a total of about 10 websites. And I need broadband for this?
I always said that anyone is a fool to pay for dialup. not I extend that. Anyone is a fool to pay for internet service. Broadband is useless in any applicable sense these days, and dialup is not a premium. Maybe this whole lousy ISP dynamic will collapse and be replaced by community networks. That would be golden, and something that I would pay for. Instead of paying corporations to tell me how much and what I should download and what I should use my property for.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
Maybe your users select "modem" with the thought that if they select higher bandwidth, you'll force-feed them a more graphics/flash-heavy site, and they don't want that?
Or maybe they think cable modem == modem?
If I had a dollar for every website form I filled out truthfully, I'd be a very poor man.
So if you are paying $20/mo for dialup and the DSL/Cable modem is $50/mo and is flaky, then you might bail on the DSL and just use the dialup ISP you have to pay for anyways.
I don't know much about if DSL/cable providers have some dialup services bundled to solve the "away from home ISP" problem, but it seems like something that would be an issue.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
> Cheaper, and more reliable service, apparently!
NOT for me! NO WAY! Even with QWest, I've only had a few periods of interrupted service, never longer than an evening. I will NEVER go back to a connection slower than 128k with the fun busy signal joy.
Even out in a rural area in Minnesota, I've seen this happening for about the last month. Nothing major, but a customer here, a customer there, maybe 2 for a month, dropping High Speed to return to dialup.
Reasons I've heard so far 'too expensive', or 'expense did not justify the speed' and what not. Let's face it, this isn't cable. We've got DSL out here, and people are paying for it. NOt cheap, it's under the control of the local telco's, and if I were not an employee getting major discounts, I probably would not get DSL.
For the average home user, what advantages does DSL or other high speed alternatives give them? Faster downloads? Everyone likes that, but it's where most of the 'benefits' end. Most of the folks who have DSL out here don't know enough to understand how to save files into particular places, let alone how to watch streaming videos.
So what do the people who's kids talked them into getting DSL get, after their kid leaves? Not a lot, if they don't really know how to use their computer, or if all they do is browse CNN/stock sites, and do email. What's the point in paing that much more per month, just to do email? Not a lot, I'd say...
It does make sense. Until ISP's don't gauge prices, it won't matter. Sad thing is, we aren't even gauging prices. We're making a little money now, but we had to pay to have a lot more range then any city DSL company, with fewer subscribers.
...if people would learn how to make a damn web site speedy. /. at home because there damn ad system stalls the whole load.
I no longer view
Not to mention the site that have 1/2 a meg or more index page, sheesh.
Anybody who designs a site for a wide range of consumer customers(as opposed to business cutomers) that doesn't design the index page as a basic, small page that allows the consumer to choose between a high band width page and a smaller low bandwidth page, should be fired and ceramoniously stripped of there editors. I had DSL for a year, then cable for a year, and I gaurantee you if I could get them for a reasonable price, I'd do it again.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Is that the people there to serve are incompetent. Just yesterday I called asking where to FTP to for my web space, since that info was never given to me. The guy on the other end of the phone said "Uhhhh.... FTP? You lost me."
When it was installed, the dude who set up my computer was a complete moron. I have AT&T Cable, BTW. Of course, they wouldn't allow me to do it myself, so this dude takes my case apart, and boots up my computer. Before I can say anything he puts the PCI NIC in while the machine is on. HE said "They saw you shouldn't do this, but its okay." Then he was surprised when Windows did not auto-detect it.
[FromTheMorning]
I expect that the same people are also cutting back on their cable TV subscriptions.
in favour of their modems. Cheaper, and more reliable service, apparently!
1) Cheaper. I don't think so. With dial-up, you'll still have to pay for an extra phone line if you want to talk. My cable modem is bundled into my cable package. I don't need an extra phone line, and with the same cable setup I had before I got a cable modem, I'm paying the same price. For me, the cable modem is free. For others, it'll still be the same cost if they want the convenience of using a phone while on the net.
2) More Reliable. I very rarely have problems from my cable modem. I know plenty of people who have problems with their dialup. Not only that, but if I'm transferring huge files, I don't have to worry about being suddenly disconnected in an all day transfer. Again, cable wins out.
...pry my cable modem from my cold dead hands.
I'm happy with AT&T Cable service, thinking back to what I started with (2400 baud) and ended with in dial up (56k) I'll never go back!
... I didn't do it because I wanted to, I did it because I could no longer longer afford it due to various changes in my life (married, baby, house, etc.) I'm hoping to be back to broadband (probably DSL this time) sometime in the near future. My experience with cable-modem was overall positive, especially in retrospect. In the early days it was a nightmare in terms of reliability, but they got much, much better. It's not even funny how much I want broadband again. No, it isn't as fast as they say, but it is still pretty fast even in the worst case and it isn't anywhere near as slow as a 56k modem. Oh, and man do I hate dialing in....
--- What?
if this really does turn out to be a major trend, a positive side effect would be a lot more consideration for low bandwidth users. Sites may return to being trimmer, more text-oriented. You know, like the original vision Tim Berners-Lee had for the web!
It's hardly an original point, but it's worth mentioning in the context of this story. Most of the useful information I get from the web is text.
E.g., slashdot, virtua fighter websites, drudgereport, etc.
The main exception to this is probably mapquest. The rest of my browsing is work research and/or entertainment. My point is that very often 90% of the data I download is extraneous images and other content (e.g., ads, decorations, other blah...) that I pay zero attention to. (BTW, I have T3 at work and DSL at home).
On a dial-up connection (and I used to use one, from *Australia*) this is really annoying. With broadband it's not so bad -- but what could be better than surfing a more text-based web with broadband? There wouldn't _be_ download time as such -- the amount of time it takes to d/l a pageful of text is trivial compared to the time it takes to find ther server, and (often) for the server to retrieve/generate the page.
So in some ways a mass defection back to modems would be a healthy thing for the web.
grib.
maybe
I can't seem to put my finger on it, oh wait. It's the complete lack of evidance that broadband defectors are on the rise.
The article says "Broadband defectors on the rise" yet only cites on person who was using DSL to telecommute and after losing her job, without the cash for the connection there wasn't much point in keeping it. Hey, if I got canned and bills were stacking up, the first thing to go would be my cable modem too. That's just silly.
They claim that a lot of people are dropping broadband, but then relate it to the loss of jobs in the high-tech sector. Hello! The high-tech sector is probably the primary user of this and yes, again, if you lost your job could you justify spending $40-$50/mo on an internet connection vs. paying the rent and putting food on the table. Talk about stating the obvious.
Even then, most of the ISPs they talked to said that growth was slow or subscriptions were rock steady. So where's this image of digital rats deserting the ship? The final blow came when they shifted the article towards @Home and Napster, trying to blame them for the downshift in broadband dwindling. @Home screwed up because they grew too fast and too large for their own good. Any company will suffer that. Napster, well, that's another story but again, it has nothing to do with broadband. They say there's no "killer app" for broadband. What the hell is that? You have a browser, an email and maybe and ftp client. What more do you need? What do you expect out of bandwidth?
Short of it is that I don't see any defectors in broadband subscriptions and like Kurt Rahn, an EarthLink spokesman said, high-speed subscribers would "rather sell their grandmothers" than go back to any modem solution.
liB
I could NEVER justify going back to a modem.
I would never willingly go back to dialup. We are house shopping right now and have eliminated whole neighborhoods from consideration because there's no broadband service.
Both our computers (my G4 & her Compaq) shipped with internal modems and neither has ever been used even once.
But then we have OUTSTANDING cable service (comcast@home in Sarasota). In 3 years of service I don't think our total downtime would add up to 24 hours.
that article is tripe. *I* sure as hell will never go back to that dmn slowdem if I can possibly help it... I dont want to spend 5 days downloading a disc image, or 45 minutes grabbing a single mp3, with almost no bandwidth left over for reloading slashdot.
You'll get my broadband when you pry it from my cold dead nics !
Time travel is possible. We are quickly heading for 1984.
There's no debating that at the current time, broadband is a luxury like cable TV or long distance telephone calls. These are the luxuries that you'll probably hang onto until you've already cut back on eating out and movies and other easy to eliminate budget items.
I would imagine just as many people are dumping $50/month cel phone plans as are dumping $50/month DSL plans. If you have less income, or none, its not like you can't survive without the 3000-minute cel plan or unlimited broadband. These are people with serious budget problems (an unfortunately large population).
I doubt folks are going to be dumping broadband (or cel phone, or Cable) unless they have something specific they need that $50 for (like food or rent).
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
i'm not goin back to my modem, no way!
but i do keep paying BT a fortune everytime i move house (i rent) and have to pay off yet another years contract cos i can't take it with me and i never stop somewhere for a that long. [and bt just announced a loss too, despite making a fortune from me...]. lucky work pays for my line at the moment really.
personal view: fast access is great but too expensive and too much of a hassle and this is holding people back. i'm sure if they just networked the country, it would pay for itself soon enough.
One consultant changes jobs and decides DSL isn't worth it-- fine, she can go back to the stone age if she wants. I sorta wonder what she does with her pc anyways....
Let me just say that they'll get my broadband over my cold dead body.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
It's amusing that people get really upset if cable TV goes out, but tolerate data outages.
I used to work in the Cable Modem industry, back when it was "New Technology(tm)". The biggest selling point that I noticed for the tech savvy was the speed. (Obviously.) However, the tech savvy market is smaller than you think. So the real highest selling point was the cost vs benefit. For example:
_Dialup Model_
56k ISP: $20+/mo
2nd Phone line: $20+/mo
waiting 10 minutes/MB: pain in the ass
_Cable Modem Model_
Modem Rental: $10/mo or less
Connection Fees: $30-$40/mo
waiting 30 seconds/MB: less pain in the ass
The point is, for the same price, or even $10 more, people could have the same non-voice-line-interrupting service, and even get some extra speed out of the deal. People that had the more expensive ISPs (AOL comes to mind) were even more prone to make the switch, since they would actually be saving money by switching. (We provided @Home at the time, which provided content so people used to AOL wouldn't feel too out of place.)
... maybe I'd dump DSL. First though, I'd look at smashing my television into small pieces. Most people never consider the electrical cost of operating a 29+ inch television, 4.5 hours a day(the reported average). That would save probably around 20 bucks a month(at current SF electrical prices). Then again, I enjoy thinking for myself, and not having other peoples thoughts force fed to me. So I guess if you enjoy that sort of thing, you'll go for it.
I had DSL before I moved, and it was great. Only down about 3 hours total over the course of two years (I kid you not).
Where I'm living right now has horrible dial-up, so there's no way I'd ever go back to a 56K modem. I'm lovin' my DSL setup right now.
I know lots of people who have cable modems back home and in my new area who experience all kinds of problems. I think cable internet service is giving broadband a bad name.
Earthink is so proud of their DSL service...too bad their customers aren't as proud. I am always having issues with my DSL link (Earthlink). A lot of times I'll log in but won't be able to get out of their network for long periods of time. I love the speed, hate the hassel.
as with everything it comes down to value vs cost. I spend most of my waking time at work where I have net access, so by the time I get home I read mail and that sabout it. when I first heard about high speed connections I had grand dreams of running my own web service, and doign all this stuff. but the reality of it is it's not worth $50 a month, for something I used essentially, less than 1 hour a day. that equates to $2 an hour to check my e-mail and down load the latest movie reviews. I figure I will switch when the pricing is around $30 an hour.
My estimate for the average price of unlimited 56k dialup access is probably around $20/month. (AOL is $23!) Add to that another $17/month for a second phone line, and you are paying $3 less for about 6.5 times less bandwidth. (Assuming you get 3Mb/s with your cable. I have many times with Time Warner Cable, and average a decent 1Mb/s the rest of the time.)
Even if we include the install fee for cable (which is often free if you get it at the right time.) of $100, minus the cost of a good modem for a fair comparison ($30).
If you use the service for 2 years, that's about an extra $2 per month, so it's only $5 additional per month for cable. Btw, dial-up is not more reliable, just a hell of a lot easier for someone unfamiliar with computers to set up. Especially since most computers people buy with Windows on them, come with a modem, and all they have to do is a click a button to get connected....
What?
1. Unreliable connections experienced on Cable. (frequent disconnects)
2. Connection speeds lower then modem speed when connecting to server hosted on modem bandwidth.
3. Cable does not play my favorite song on connecting.
4. Cable security is low. (People can actually hack in my computer without having to wait)
- Cable is haunted by big nasty ghosts
Dump your broadband! Use MODEM!
>>> Sprint Broadband Direct (Phoenix)
>>> Their tech support is weak, they were at my house countless times replacing components. And service still failed ping of their first router about 10% of the time. (later
- I
discovered problem probably was my LAN)>>> Upload speeds = 2400 modem (wireless broadband)
>>> Sales staff blatantly lies (see 1.b)
>>> Customer service staff blatantly lies ("Satisfaction is guaranteed." But try to get satisfaction or your money back.
- NOT
)>>> Business customers get priority on shared bandwidth, especially at night when THEY do backups and I do surfing.
>>> 4-day outages occur every three months or so, usually over weekends when THEY do major maintenance and I want to surf.
Bye-bye broadband. Thank GOD for AOL reliability.
I was a Telocity DSL customer in Atlanta in Summer 2000. I was very happy with it, getting 1300Kbps SUSTAINED for distro downloads. Almost always up. Hughes DirectTV bought Telocity and the slide began. DNS servers going out. Mail servers going out. Changing mail server names without telling anyone. Changing DNS addresses without telling anyone. An FTP server for personal Web content that you couldn't get into and eventually, once you could, you couldn't cd to anywhere.
Finally at the end of September the DSL carrier disappeared. I called tech support nearly every day for two weeks, each time having to start over with "what are your lights doing?" questions. Tier 2 people, when you could finally get to them after an hour or so of waiting, were equally unable to actually do anything. No relationship with Bellsouth (last-mile carrier) seemed to exist. Over a month later, still nothing. Oh, I eventually called back a bit over a week ago to see if they even cared anymore, and I talked to a tier 1 supervisor who sounded all concerned and chagrined...then nothing but a message on the answering machine from someone I'd never talked to before...useless. I since signed up for AT&T Broadband. Their customer service seems only a bit better so far, but it's nice when you can at least connect and use the web chat client for tech spt. The tech who came out was able to work with me pretty well (I use a Coyote Linux masqing firewall and a mixture of Win and Lin machines in behind, hanging off two Fast Ethernet switches) but because I had already bought a modem (3com) and called tech spt to get it registered, I was already working but I needed some assistance with the creaky house cabling and e-mai lsetup (which is screwed up because they were tranisitioning to new servers). I only get 20-50kB/s (bytes, not bits) when I ftp ISOs from the Georgia Tech mirrors, but I really don't know where the bottleneck is - I know the firewall (16MB 486/DX33, Local Bus machine with two ISA NICs) can go faster. I've had some outages but now that I've been rewired I've been OK the last couple of days. A big FY to Bellsouth, who refused my attempts to follow up with them about the ticket from DirectTV - I guess they don't go out of their way to help competing ISPs who lease their copper. I did not go with Bellsouth DSL primarily because I don't want them to profit from screwing DirectTV over and me by extension.
Ok, I am sick of the broadband bashing. I use Road Runner and I have NO problems with it. I split the connection with the D-Link DI-704 and then split from taht and have wireless networking and like 5 PCs running on RR at the same time. My DL rates are around 200kps and I think that is great. I know DSL sucks, and most people are seeing this, so get cable it works. For people who cant get RR... sorry, move to a city that does.
My first rant.... Just my opinions on this.
CS majors, we are the geeks that run it all. Without us things die.
If I was out of work I'd cut the cable, cable modem, Netflix membership, sell my motorcycles, and anything else to keep food on the table (and keep the table). The article states the painfully obvious. Broadband comes out of discresionary spending and when you need to save money, dropping down to regular dial-up is a viable option to many people.
So long as I have disposable income, however, the extra $20/month to have a cable modem as opposed to a traditional dial-up is worth more, than say, my weekly trip to the arcade.
A better (real) story would be about people who aren't worried about their jobs or the economy dropping broadband because they see no value in it.
I've had some sort of full-time connection to the Net for about 8 years now, starting with a nailed-up 33.6 modem (with a router on my end), moving through ISDN, DSL, and finally cable today. Over all those years, I was only down for about 3 days between the Northpoint shutdown and when the AT&T tech showed up at my house with the cable modem (I spent the weekend in between rewiring the house). I couldn't conceive of life without a full-time fast connection.
With it, I provide e-mail to myself and some friends, web service, and a fast connection that lets anybody anywhere in the house plug in and run fast. There's an Airport base station too, with a hacked-in antenna, to allow use around the immediate neighborhood. Through it all, prices have steadily fallen (from $79/month plus phone line charges of about $45 for the V.34 to $50/month for the cable modem), performance has improved, and I couldn't imagine going back to the dark old days of dial-up. When I travel, I try to stay at hotels with broadband (a lot of Marriotts have it), and only occasionally are forced to use a modem. It's painful.
As a result, there are a lot of things I'd part with before I'd give up my connection. I'd chop out regular cable TV, ditch the OmniSky service (which is pretty darned cool, though), toss the cell phone, and stop collecting comic books before I dumped broadband. Easy.
When you get used to the convenience of having an always-on connection, very few people are going to give that up - though they may not be as dependent on it as I am. The only real people I see as being likely to churn out are people with serious cash flow problems (where the $50/month may be the difference between food and no food), and maybe folks who have had service problems to the point where they say "screw it, this isn't worth the money".
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
--the trend moving from broadband to modem--we can all play DOOM like we all did back in [19]96 or Quake without the worries of LPBs.
I haven't taken the plunge yet, but everyone I know who's gone for dsl has gone through several weeks of hell getting it installed and properly configured. Most were able to get it solid after about 3 weeks. Some never did. These are mostly end users, but some were geeks.
Everyone I've known who got a cable modem had few if any problems, but seldom saw the bandwidth they'd been promised. Might be fast, just wasn't as fast as it should be.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
Seeing as how I would have to pay AOHell $21.95 for a lousy 56Kbps at best, why in the world would I ever go back to dial-up? To save $8 a month? Not only would I have to be out of work, I would have to be out of my mind...
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
I never did broadband at home in the first place for the reasons this person dropped it. We also don't do any premium packages from Dish Network (though we opt for the $5/mo local programming because the "reception" is so much better).
The $40/mo difference in ISP access plus another $40/mo difference from premium cable/satellite services adds up to almost $900/yr.
That's a LOT of 1.5" thick ribeyes (sorry, PETA).
Mark
This is really a transition time for computer communication/web/distributed computing. People haven't really figured out what the web is good for, and companies haven't really figured out how to use it.
As the kids that are around ten years old today grow into adulthood -- kids that can't imagine life without computers, the net, and web -- these are the kids who'll first really see how it will all integrate into their lives.
Broadband will be part of it. I have no idea how it'll look, but it'll be there. My suspicion is that we'll have a single cable that handles all communications -- TV, Phone, Computers, new stuff -- and that things will become more and more networked within a home. Maybe not -- but I'm not worried about broadband in the long run.
Might worry about losing my current DSL connection though...
Sean.
When I first made an inquiry with PacBell about getting DSL service, they told me I was too far out. So I contacted Covad, and lo and behold, they hooked me up. I had service through Fastpoint Communications. It was awesome. I had true, always-on static IP, blazing-fast DSL.
But Fastpoint had a difficult time getting DSL subscribers, due largely to the fact that PacBell was able to jam marketing messages down the throats of phone customers, not to mention TV ads, magazine articles, and the like. Of course, the fact that most PacBell customers were having installation nightmares was beside the point.
I actually had one friend who spent six months trying to get connected through PacBell. FIVE home visits later, they finally got it working. Another friend actually had to contact the California VP of Sales for PacBell in order to get some action on his stalled installation. Talk about a bait and switch tactic.
In any case, Fastpoint went belly-up. So Covad passed me on to Earthlink. Whatever problems Earthlink is having seem to be self-created. Their phone support people are truly awesome - great attitude, very helpful. But it took a while for my service to get started, and I was actually DSL-less for two months. Once it started working, I was moderately satisfied with my new PPPoE (yech!) connection, but not as happy as I'd been before with Fastpoint.
Then I wanted to add a second phone number to my apartment. I had to switch to PacBell for my DSL because since they own the voice line, the only way to get a true DSL Internet and voice on the same line setup is if you use PacBell!
So now I am using PacBell, with an annoying PPPoE, dynamic IP setup. I've just put in an order to convert over to static IP, which means I'll now pay $70/mo., and I'll have five IP addresses, when all I really need is one, perhaps two.
I work from home, so fast, reliable Internet access is key for me. I use PacBell because I basically have no other choice. They submarined the competition, played every stall tactic in the book, and now they're a local monopoly.
Will there be any action on this at the state or federal level? With the current economic and political climate, that's highly unlikely. To me, the subversion of competition in broadband was the real tragedy of the dot-bomb crash. I don't give a crap about pets.com, but we all lost out on a great opportunity when the Baby Bells subverted true competition.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Broadband will take off when it is cheaper to have broadband for a month than pay for a dialup bill... We need mass take-up for broadband to really take off, and that means making it a cost effective option for occasional users who currently enjoy their hour online each month for at most a few pence. Maybe the answer to this is to start charging by the MB for transfers? I suppose that would mean people would need to run a secure OS too to avoid extortionate bills:-)
earthlink DSL in Manhattan was a bit rocky at first (due solely to that damned Verizon) and was rocky again for a week or so after that problem we had here due to some vile, evil, damned-to-burn-eternally-in-hell terrorists... but go back to dialup? give me a break! reliable? disconnects were always frequent using dialup. all in all, DSL has been WORLDS better... and, i'd not live ANYWHERE that did not have broadband.
The article seem to be more they can afford it as opposed to they can do better with modems. Actually my Roadrunner is cheaper than my dialup.
RR: $45,
ISP: $27 for 2nd phone plus $25 for ISP.
I can get 7 bottles of mountain dew for that, so who needs food.
I'm ready to give up on broadband myself. After years of living in the boonies and having broadband unavailable to me (only to be offered shortly after I moved to a large city) I still can't get it. Stalling and incompetience from Ameritech and Covad put off my DSL line for weeks. Now that my line is provisioned one delay after another (supposedly many glitches in their fulfillment system) has kept my ISP-to-be (Earthlink) from sending me my DSL modem. Meanwhile a friend up the street was up and running in 8 days and has a lot of problems and downtime.
I'm so used to my 56k link I'm probably better off sticking with it, at least it works!
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
I am dumping my cable modem only because I have found that someone else in my apartment building has an open wireless access point with a DHCP server and a fat pipe to the Internet. I plan to piggy-back on their connection and save me $40/month I pay to AT&T@Home. Under normal circumstances I would not consider it seriously, but my job situtation is very unreliable. They could let us go any day now. My wife and I have totally gone in savings mode. Heck we even turned off our land line phone, to save money. We do have cell phones, so it made that decision a little easier.
If I had to give up one or the other: cable modem or netflix? Tough choice.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
While I was considering getting broadband, I saw the price go from $25 a month to $30, to $40 and now to $50 dollars a month in my area. All the providers did it. Even my friends who already signed contracts and had service saw their costs rise. The contract fixed the length of the term, not the price so they were able to jack up the prices on their subscriber base. People who thought that their service would be $30 a month, are now looking at $50 a month and there is no added value to the service. The only way you escape is if you paid up front.
Until the corps can get their business practices under control, I will stay with dialup and use my company's internet connection for downloading those NetBSD ISOs. At home I only check email and do a little browsing, so the slowness is tolerable. Fastness certianly is not worth $50, especially when they advertise "50 times faster than dialup" and deliver 3-4 times as fast.
BTW, my dialup does the same thing (random price increases), but they are fewer and farther between and also only a dollar or two.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I was getting idsl through Megapath and then Northpoint (or was it covad?) went out of business and they switched me to Rythmes in the nick of time. Of course Rythems went out of business like 40 days later. It took about 2 monthes for my DSL to finally stop working.
Now that all the competing DSL companies are out of business I can only turn to the PacBell monopoly which nicely told me to suck it up. Gotta love the free market (hey, if you pay off enough gov't officials like the airlines you can be bailed out even if your market deserved a correction long ago). Yes, I am a little bitter.
Modems really aren't that bad. Ok, who am I kidding? My Counter-strike rating is dropping like a rock.
I had a cable modem from Charter in the MI area, and some days dialup was quicker. Mainly becuase there are poor lines in the area.
I now have Comcast @home in the NJ area, I seriously get over 600k/sec on downloads. Most of the time I get ~400k/sec downloads. Upstream, I have gotten 200k/sec. Which, IMO, its pretty damn impresive.
I have had cable modems in the past that where pretty bad, unrealiable, slow, high packet loss, etc. So, for those areas, dropping broadband for dialup makes sense. But, I can't see what the big deal is. My uncle was plagued with cable modem problems durring his first 2 months, after which they re-ran all the lines in his house, and to the tap. From there, everything was great. Its been over 2 years since then, and has had zero problems.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Although I think this article is sensationalist - there is no mass exodus from broadband; quite the opposite in fact - I have to comment on the "reliability" of 56k modems.
What percentage of the time did you really get a 56k connection? I rarely ever saw anything above 33.6 - and only then when the lines weren't busy or down.
I've used modems in about 6 different locations around the country; out of these, only 1 place yielded a connection speed greater than 50k. On average, I've experienced connection speeds of 24k. Then factor in the extra packet latencies from having such a narrower pipeline to the ISP, and download speeds will never actually reach 24k, not even close. Then count all the extra bloat that Web pages have nowadays, which are designed for broadband connections for the most part, which is enough to make a normal person go insane and jump out the window.
No sir-reee... I ain't dumping my broadband for nuttin'.
The kinds of people who end up dumping broadband fall into two categories.
1) "I cant find anything useful to do with it!"
2) "Oh, help me, my broadband service has been a nightmare!"
Both of which are fairly stupid conclusions. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean its not there--There are plenty of things on the net for which broadband is perfectly suited for. Here, i'll give you a real world example: I stopped watching TV news about a month and a half ago. Now, I just pull in feed via DSL from CNN and ABC News. I don't find much sense in 24 hour nonstop anthrax coverage, so I omit that crap from my feed. Tipped over vending machines have killed more people in the past 10 years than Anthrax has killed in the past 50 years. I'm surprised the nightly news isn't giving you stooges hourly vending machine updates.
Anyway, onto the second category. Broadband service providers by in large don't have their acts together, but thats not the technology's fault. Its the fault of the people handling it. We as Americans are far too impatient with such things. We just want to plug it in and see it go, and no form of broadband works that way. People who complain about broadband service are the same people who complain that their tires get dirty from off-roading. Wait until the damn road is paved, then travel on it.
For the record, i've had DSL for the past two years or so. I never had a problem with the technology end of it -- But I have had a problem with the human end of it. Namely, inept technical support, and billing, which is to be expected whenever theres a big rush to do anything.
Getting rid of broadband is like saying we should get rid of cars because they cost more to maintain than bicycles. No thanks.
Cheers, and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running,
Bowie J. Poag
My unfortunate friends who have jumped on the bandwagon have started to "discover" some of the unwanted features of having a big broadband provider (I can't bring myself to call them an ISP)
/.ed on occasion and the provider apparently doesn't allow you to actually USE the bandwidth you buy for certain unauthorized purposes. My dialup ISP could care less as long as I don't hog the lines with keep alive scripts.
One guy had to take down his web server because it was getting
Another anecdote I'll share, a buddy of mine sent a zip file of digital pics he took at my wedding. Of the dozen or so people who he sent it to, only ME and my little ISP got the file. Everyone else was apparently 'limited' to receiving up to 2MB per email and were not even warned that they didn't get the message !!!
Some 'service' - sounds more like another AOL to me, I think I'll keep my little ISP forever !
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
I've said it here before, it is great to live in Tacoma. You see, our city power utility built a city wide fiber optic network to enable communications between elements of the power grid, but when they designed the system they did it the smart way. They realized from the start that the most expensive part of buildin a network is laying the cable itself. So they layed a lot of fiber. The plan from the start was to build a city owned digital cable system and to provide high speed internet access to the public. So now I've got a FO cable running down the alley behind my house that the city owns, and that several competing ISPs can use to sell me high speed internet access, my old ISP being one of them. I get a fairly consistant 1.5Mbps and a very reliable connection. I've been with them for six months now without any down time. And all that for a total charge of $26.95 a month.
-- Bob Honan I stand by the truth, which is why I never stand by Republicans.
I don't have a phone line at my house!
I decided that instead of paying $25-28 a month for a landline, I'd ditch it in favor of a cell phone, which costs me about $40 a month including long distance.
Cable modem is $40 and cable service $30... so I'm saving cash on the stupid phone line in favor of the added features & convience of a cell.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The first factor was simple economics.
My family has been on cable for a little over a year now, since it first became available in our neighborhood. My selling point to my wife was that we were paying the $19.95 monthly usage cap every month on the phone bill, largely because of computer use, and we were paying $17.95 every month for ISP subscription. Add that up and we're a few bucks shy of $39.95, which was the cable fee. By acting early, we got installation and the first month free. Counting just that free first month against the extra expense of cable, we're still better than cost parity with phone+ISP.
The second factor was phone availability. We had constant contention between phone and computer on the line. I didn't mention this in my original sales pitch to my wife, but it quickly came out.
I never mentioned performance at all. I waited for her to tell me about how fast things suddenly became.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I just got my DSL this week, I've been waiting a long time for the chance to ditch my 56.6k modem. and damnit I love it. how much I will love it when the service starts acting flaky I dont know yet
This has come up before, but it's really bizarre how you have to pay so much for broadband, and yet get so little.
I complain about service sometimes, but I haven't had an outage for months, and the one that I did have was pretty brief. I pay $40.00CDN a month, and I don't know a single person - not one! - that still uses dialup. Even people that don't really need it have it. A friend of mine in Didsbury, Alberta (try looking it up on a map. I dare you.) is getting cable access soon. You can even get cable in Hicksville, Alberta. Geesh.
Meanwhile, you folks have shitty service, at bad prices, and it's actually worth it for you to go back to dialup? What's the world coming to when the (ostensibly) most technologically advanced nation can't even get decent internet access to its citizens?
I'm paying $46 for @home. If I had to pay for the second phoneline ($20), and an ISP (a REAL NON advertising ISP) at $20 a month, that's $6 for always on gobs of bandwidth...
...and I do have GOBS of bandwidth. Of course, now that I've said that, it'll crap out. But I've had it for more than a year with only one real failure. - And THAT was the October blizzard last year that sumped 22 odd inches of snow!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
She was paying $50 US a month for residential-level DSL service?
I don't blame her for cancelling it!
If you're paying anywhere NEAR that much for residential DSL, somebody is ripping you off somewhere along the line.
You shouldn't be paying more than $35 US unless you're using corporate level DSL, or have a static IP and are renting the DSL modem...
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
Yeah, I dropped my dsl line back in October. My carrier got bought out by RealConnect and at the end of my one year contract I was notified that my 49.95 128K IDSL line would be *slightly* going up to $169.95!
What really annoyed me was the letter itself. Okay, I can understand if costs go up. But (a) there was no apology in the letter and (b)I was given 7 days to make up my mind on continuing the contract.
So I call up RealConnect and mildly explain my position, which is that you are trying to gouge me with an insanely high price. They in turn blamed Network Access Solutions for ratcheting up the residential rates to match business class. NAS is the only provider to the local switch, so after some research, I figured I was pretty much hosed.
Needless to say I do my big downloads from work and at home I say, "Welcome to NetZero!"
Postscript: After one month plus at 28.8K (my phone lines are &@#'d up buts thats another story) I don't knotice it that much. When I'm online my phone calls are forwarded to my cell, and I can't download ISO's, MP3's, or mulimedia, but who cares? I can easily do without that junk. Email, ebay, online shopping, messaging, you can do 90% of your stuff with a dog slow connection.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
Good point made here...although Canada has it's share of bad ISPs (Bell), there are many broadband providers that are global pioneers in the business and provide very reliable service.
In my observations in Alberta (Edmonton and Calgary) broadband has generally been reliable and brodband adoption continues to increase despite the economic downturn. Videotron was introducing cable broadband service in Alberta (Edmonton) and Quebec as early as late 1996, and their cuustomers seems quite satisfied apart from the wait times when service is required.
In Calgary, Shaw cable has weathered the growing pains without TOO much difficulty, and service continues to improve. Shaw was wise enough to cut ties with @home when their difficulties affected Shaw's quality of service. This month, Shaw is pulling the plug on at-home completely and moving all their customers to Shaw's own infrastructure, which has been in tested for a few months now in parallel with @home. Perfect timing considering the complete mess @home is in right now.
I myself use DSL to brovde my internet needs. I work from home and run servers so I opted for TELUS-Cadvision "Basic Business" service. It provides me with 7168 (down)/1024 (up) kbps (although typical d/l is more like 2048), I get an 8-ip static subnet on which I can run servers or whatever else, free dial-up access, 1 year free DNS hosting and a lot of other goodies, all for approx. US$65 per month. "Home" or "starter" DSL or residential cable typically costs little more than US$25 per month.
No only is it cheap, it is reliable...in 2 full years of service, I've had less than 1 hour without internet access. It took a few weeks before I got it installed, but they got it dome the day they said it would be done when I first applied for the service. Tech support is quite good too---they don't even hang up on me when I tell them I run Linux!
That's my US$0.0125...have a nice day!
I think folks have forgotten what dialup was all about. Tying up your phone line all evening, fighting for a modem, putting your ear to the speaker so you could hear the good dong dong sound vs the crappy ding ding of a 28.8 connection training up. Then right in the middle of a download, bang someone picks up the phone and you hear the shout "Opps! Sorry." A modem makes downloads over 35megs highly unlikely. I like pulling down the latest version of SLACKWARE cause I'm bored and want to give it a try. Then if I want to see a new logo I pull down 600mb of SUSE. New demo for ID Software... no problem. I want to rebuild my box cause it doesn't feel cherry, i'll just download everything again. And if your a windows user your gonna have to pull down alot of patches.
These are the same people that think Vinyl LP's sound better than CD's... pfffffttt...
Hey, I'm dumping my WiFi LAN here in favor of an assyncronous 9600 baud serial line system. MUCH more reliable.
Come on!!
In my own experience: I've had Mediaone/Roadrunner/AT&Broadband since May of 1995--I was the second installation in my town of about 56,000 people.
I've had probably 1 time where I was down more than a day (it was and that wasn't the cable company. It was because some jack*ss down the street decided to run NT Server with DCHP Server, which eventually messed up the whole town...
They've since protected against such knuckleheadness.
I love my Broadband, my wife loves and the kids love it...
People are dumping electricity for candles. Running water for wells. Plumbing for outhouses.
If anyone who has broadband and has a use for their computer being online then why be so retro. But man -- if this is such a big trend then maybe those "Free ISP's" with the big business plans can give it another go no?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
From July 2000 to September 2001, I enjoyed a moderate speed SDSL line from Rhythms Netconnections and a variety of ISPs as they failed, got bought and consolidated. I have been on the waiting lists for ADSL from Qwest and cable modem service from AT&T for several years each. Neither are available in my area, although they seem to be available in every other Denver suburb but mine.
In September my Rhythms line died and I have been trying to switch to another provider ever since. Not a damn thing is available for under $100 a month. These days, I share a 26.6k dialup line with my wife. Even casual web surfing is an extreme pain.
Fuck the broadband companies who whine about people leaving. I didn't leave you, you left me!!!
- Necron69
Up here in Canada, ... there *is* no reliability problem
Umm.. WHAT?!?!?!?!?!
You're LUCKY, that's all.
I'm in Alberta, last month, Telus (the telco for the whole province) had a major fiasco with their DHCP servers, which caused the entire province to be down for three weeks!
If you don't call THAT a "reliability problem" then you must define "reliability" differently than everybody else.
Right now, I am looking at a Big Brother screen that shows one of our links to be down - and it has been for the past half hour.
I think there is a problem plaguing American broadband. Here is my math calculation for justification of broadband:
$19.95(dialup) + $25(atleast, for extra phone line due to high usage) = $44.95/month
DSL cost:
$39.95($34.95 if you own modem...I do) gets you 512k up and 1.5mb down.
Nucleus(where I choose, they have NO limits on usage) $44.95 ($39.95 with modem) 640k up and 1.5mb.
Yes Cable here sucks(IMHO) but DSL NEVER goes down. And as my handy math formula shows...it's cheaper to go with DSL vs another phone line(I'm ALWAYS ONLINE).
I've seen rate posting and speed postings for American DSL...they are outrageous. I think the telephony infrastructure is in dire need of an upgrade.
...My 2 cents.
Ok so a couple of people are doing it....but to call it a trend? Wouldn't that require a little bit more like about 15% of the broadband subscribers to switch back to modem?
If you were only getting 100Kbps connections, then well...I can see your point it's just slightly double the modem connect...in effect an ISDN line. Which is still faster. However paying $50 a month for that line isn't worth it for that.
Personally Speakeasy kicks ass! I've had them for more than a year now and it's been great! 1.5Mbps down / 768 Kbps up still rocks. You kill me in order to get me to cancel my DSl line and go back the archaic modems.
Obviously these "defectors" haven't mastered hitscan weapons yet...
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
*Digs out his old commodore 128 and 1200 baud modem* Ack, this thing? No thanks, I can't even get ANSI support on BBS's.
ASCII streams at 1200 baud != good.
It is hard to believe. Cable is pretty reliable. I have a hard enough time using cable after getting used to a t1 for three years.
But the snafu you're witnessing is due largely to our devotion to competition and the corporate tendency towards greed. It'll probably take the government to straighten things out so it can flourish enough to become a common service.
On that note...
Isn't broadband in Canada government subsidized? I forget where I heard that, but if it is, then Canada really is in the same boat with the difference of having our mistakes to learn from before doing their own broadband.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
I pay $39.95 CDN (or $24.75 USD) for 1.5Mb DSL here in Canada, where it gets mighty cold in the winter, after some hard thinking, I've realized that I'd drop cable, and heat, before you get me to drop high speed internet. Go back to a modem? Not if I can help it.
Honestly, I belive that DSL is at least as reliable as modem access. I have had DSL for past three years with two different companies. Except for the time that it took to switch companies, I have had no system outages and few critical slowdowns. My friends have cable and they report no significant problems. When I had a modem, I had weekly outages, and often could not quickly get online in the evening. The only issue we have around here is that people far outside the city center cannot get reliable broadband, which is the same problem with other utilities and services. That is just a price that is paid to live in a place where there are only a few people per acre.
I suspect that people are just feeling the expense of broadband and romanticizing the modem. I, for one, do not miss the band old days before affordable broadband.
Just a test to see if this gets posted.
Sometimes I prepare an elaborate message only to see it rejected -- after previewing, editing, etc. -- just because of technical trouble (things like "we cannot validate your IP" or the like).
The woman in this article is obviously clinically insane. The idea of going back to a modem connection is crazy talk. Once you get broadband, there is no going back. I would sell my soul to the devil (Bill Gates) and my first-born child and my internal organs before cutting broadband out of my budget. The very idea is preposterous!
Salsa Shark. We're gonna need a bigger boat.
All you people with your GUI interfaces and your word processors and your stupid graphical internet browsers, it's about time you wised up.
I've said all along you don't need anything more than a command line. You don't need a word processor when you've got VI. Who needs Netscape, Lynx works great. All this stuff is a bunch of unnecessary crap.
Why, back in my day I used a 300 baud modem and I was damn greatful. Even today my 1200 baud modem is more than enough for most people.
Kids today! They're just a bunch of spoon fed babies. Broadband is for pansies. Real men get more work done at 1200 baud. When I was going to school I had to walk. Ten miles. Through the snow. Uphill. Both ways!!!!
Cable was a WAY cheaper alternative here on LI compared to using an old modem, and the service is great. Then again, optonline cable is probably the best cable service avaliable. It's the best choice if you live on Long Island. The only time you'll see me going back to pokey old 56K is during times of desperation, which never happens since my service is spectacular.
Your numbers are a bit exaggerated. For my dialup:
56k ISP: $13/mo
2nd Phone line: 0
Download time/Mb: ~6 minutes
Time to connect: ~10 seconds (wvdial is great)
Busy signals: Never.
ISP downtime/problems: 0
Plus, my ISP (hevanet.com), whom we've been with for over 7 years, runs BSD, so they provide a shell-login, and have always been Unix-friendly. From what I read here on Slashdot, lots of the broadband companies seem to go out of their way to make life difficult for non-MS users.
...to spite your face, much? How is dial-up more reliable than just about *any* broadband service? There are too many variables for me to believe that. Some brands of modems don't like to talk to each other, your phone lines might suck, etc.
I also agree with the other poster who said two disillusioned luddites does not a trend make. This person reminds me of the overbearing Mommy who called my university's help desk and said if her baby didn't have internet by THAT NIGHT they were pulling him from the university! Boo effin hoo...did her cable modem drop her while she was downloading some pr0n, so she said "fuck you then, I'm going back to 56k and you CAN'T STOP ME!"
What a bunch of weeners.
There's only two songs in me, and I just wrote the third. --TMBG
and i find it extremely reliable, thankyouverymuch!
A couple years ago, I got cable modem service when it became available in my area. It was nice and fast, but like an old British sports car, it was out of commission about half the time, usually when I wanted to use it the most: the weekends. The customer service was horrible and it got to the point that my wife's AOL service was more reliable. Speed is great, but I want the ability to check my email whenever I want and if it's down when I want to use it, it's worthless. So, I went back to dialup. Sure, not being able to download the current iso in an hour or so kinda sucked, but I got over it. I have DSL now and I've only had a couple minor glitches and they were usually during the weekdays during business hours, so it wasn't that bad. It's much better than the cable modem service that I had.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
The article states and several people around here argue that dial-up access costs > $20 a month. While that might be true if you go with one of the big-boys like Earthlink, there are lots of smaller cheaper alternatives.
I get perfectly good service (almost no busy signals) from a small local ISP that charges me $99 a year. That comes to just over $8 a month which is less than 1/5 of what broadband access would cost me.
If you are a heavy music-trader/online-game-player/whatever then sure, pay for the broadband. But for those of us who just use email, check websites, and watch our bank statements, its a no-brainer decision.
"Particularly since Sept. 11, a lot of people are deciding which bills to cut out," said a spokesperson for one major California-based ISP, who asked not to be named. "People are freaked out."
It makes me laugh.
I suppose that the fact that the:
- tech support ques are longer than they used to be
- service is less reliable than it used to be
- billing system is completely fucked up
has nothing to do with it.
It's ~$45 for broadband in the states and it was ~$40 before the price hike.
I pay $40, however that's Canadian.
I work for an isp. In the end, we make more money off a dial-up customer than we do off a dsl customer. To compete with the lecs we have to keep the profit margin on dsl down to a bare minimum. Combine that with the pipe that is necessary to get all the dsl customer's to our router and we end up with a very small profit margin.
If all of our dsl customers went back to dial, we would actually be making more money.
:q!
My cable was so unreliable that I now have a cable modem AND DSL, joined together with a neato router from nexland (ISBPro 800 Turbo). I program out of my basement and I cannot afford to be without a reliable connection.
With the latest round of mergers, it is understandable that broadband services started to decay. Small customer-oriented companies were striving to provide good service to all their customers until they were bought by giant monsters, who do not even have the decency to resolve customer complaints.
An obvious example of this is MindSpring who was bought by Earthlink. The result: http://www.earthlinksucks.com.
Unfortunately, I am a victim of this myself. On a smaller scale, Videotron, the cable company in Quebec, Canada, was bought by Quebecor, a huge media conglomerate who owns almost every newspaper they can find. Now, I am stuck for about two months paying for a high-speed cable connection on which I have a hard time squeezing a mere 5 Kilobytes per second from it. DSL is not available where I live, and I heard similar horror stories from my friends on DSL.
What is the point of paying for a service that does not live up to its expectations? I'm sorry EarthLink, Videotron, AOL, and alll the others, but if you want to keep your customers, you must make them happy, otherwise leave the small guys alone!!!
I am an AT&T Broadband customer and am very satisified. Very little down time (much less than PacBell/GTE/Verizon DSL I've experienced). Fast connections. Good tech support (once you get past the 1000th level of voice prompts from the I-wanted-to-be-a-Top-40s-announcer male voice).
Even for a wireless I prefer broadband. Love that Richochet - want it back.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
My crappy PacBell DSL dies every time I start up a large download. It does not come back up until after a full restart, and since the connection is dead, Windows freezes when trying to disconnect. The Linux support sucks... an alpha utility from Alcatel, and I have to install several kernel patches that only work against 2.4.2. I've been trying to get a gateway together, but the fscking dsl modem is "usb ethernet". Who ever heard of that? My gateway hardware is so old that it doesn't even have a PCI bus, much less usb ports. Maybe cable broadband is the way to go? Anyone have experience with AT&T broadband?
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
> Tipped over vending machines have killed more people in the past 10 years than Anthrax has killed in the past 50 years.
No one has been deliberately trying to infect people with anthrax for the past 50 years, so they are hardly relevent to the current situation. It's pretty obvious how to avoid being killed by a vending machine (don't tip large heavy objects towards yourself). It's not so obvious how to avoid anthrax. I can believe the US media have overreacted (it's a major story here in the UK, but not saturation coverage), but it isn't really in the same league as coke machines.
> we should get rid of cars because they cost more to maintain than bicycles
No, we should avoid making the huge number of car journeys that could easily be made by bike because it costs less, pollutes less, and kills fewer people. Which doesn't carry over to broadband vs. modem.
rant
Well, I can't get DSL or cable internet access at my apartment. I'm happy with my trusty 128k ISDN. It's kinda expensive, not as fast as I would like, but rarely goes down.
.... or at least a small portion of it.
If I was down to my last penny, I'm not sure if I would go back to analog. I remember slow connections, line noise, busy signals, etc. and besides, 56k (actually 38k +/- 5k) will definitely make EQ suck donkey balls!
Now if I can only talk my ISP into letting me have static IP's, I could rule the world! MUAHAHAHAHA!
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
Wow.... everybody here seems to have cable television. Back when I was searching for a broadband provider, I was disheartened to find that you had to have cable television in order to have cable broadband.... $50 a month for net access + $20 for the bare minimum tv plan = $70. What's worse is that all the channels I'd get in that plan I already get with my dinky antenna. All my friends have 200+ channels, and guess what and there's nothing on:) I chose DSL and it works great. You couldn't pay me to use my modem again.
Like eagles on pogo-sticks! -- Glottis
Only $20 a month more than dial-up, a free internal modem and no more than 15 minutes of down time in the past 4 months with my new Qwest DSL service - I could'nt be happier!!!
My connection stays up typically for 9 to 12 days before I 'have' to reboot - the problem though is with MS Windows 2000 and my 450MB temporary internet files directory. When that directory is full I get very peculiar errors, web site errors, IE crashes, etc. But a reboot later, my 640KB download speeds return to normal.
My wife and I are listening to streaming broadband radio from Frankfurt, Germany and occasionally watching German music video stations Viva, Onyx, and MTV Europe - I don't want to give that up, broadband really is wonderful.
But I do understand that as most Americans are relishing in their self hate and pessimism that they seemingly cannot recover from following September 11, that they are trying to find yet more ways of making their lives miserable - complain about everything - you whiners are U.S. traitors and might consider fleeing to Afgahnistan instead of dragging other citizens down with your malaize and negative rhetoric.
Tired of cry babies
Swiss company called Ascom has a commercially available broadband solution that uses electricity infrastructure to deliver up to 3mb/s speeds to residential and business users. Uses the house's wiring to create a lan. Interesting company but a badly laid out site. http://www.ascom.com/apps/WebObjects/ecore.woa/de/ showNode/siteNodeID_19618_contentID_-1_languageID_ 1.html
I go hungry everday. There is a stack of bills unpaid. And yet I don't drop the cable modem. I would drop my telephone line and use my cell (which I also have to keep because of work) if I had to. No, massive internet surfing can make me forget about the pains in my stomach.
The dingo ate my sig.
Try free long distance voice, to anyone that also has broadband... oh wait, that would cannibalize their phone service markets.
Try being able to create your own content, and host it yourself, making the internet a richer place, even more compelling to buy broadband for. Oh wait, that would cannibalize their media markets. And they'd also have to quit locking down ports 1024... very bad.
Well, there is always one killer app. That's right, high speed marketing (spamming?). With broadband, they can shove banner adds and popups down your throat OVER 20 TIMES FASTER THAN A MODEM*. Sounds like a double whammy, cause after all, everyone knows that I only buy stuff after they suggest them to me, with the brilliant and enlightening product descriptions. Hopefully broadband ISP's realize this, before high speed internet is scuttled.
* Based on average 56k modem download speeds.
There are LOTS of people who have made similar choices
Same problem here as with the article... evidence please?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
*EVERY* time a Cablevision van pulls out of my driveway, with an original intent of seeing someone other than myself (in the 4 unit apartment), they've managed to break my cable modem.
EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Then it takes 4-7 days to schedule a tech to come back out and fix the problem they just created.
gotta love those monopolies, esp. when I live about 3 feet outside the DSL radius.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
Anybody who screws with my cable connection DIES.
Perhaps now we'll finally see the introduction of v.92 modems, with faster upload times and more reliable connections. And could someone tell me what's going on with the 53k limit placed on 56k modems?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
You can pry my cable modem off my cold, dead fingers.
And no, I don't pay for mine. My employer pays for it, but I am so addicted to it that I would gladly pay it out of my own pocket.
If I get laid off I'll just kill my digital cable subscription, that's $75/month right off the bat.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
I have considered dumping my cable modem too, and here's why (and they're not your given reasons):
1. It's spendy. I could use the $46/month on something else. And it's going up. They're going to keep jacking prices until a considerable number of people drop off, then they might back down a bit. But if no one drops off, they'll just keep raising it.
2. You don't *really* need it. I use my cable modem extensively, and about 50% of what I do could be accomplished with dialup. Well what about the other 50% you ask? Most of that is stuff I don't need to do. Downloading various types of multimedia, game demos, etc. are not things that I require professionally or otherwise; I could live without them. I can also live without internet newscasts, etc. I don't need those either. I can read the AP or Reuters off of Yahoo! instead.
That about sums it up. I haven't had any hassles at all compared to a lot of the horror stories I've heard, but most of those seem related to DSL issues (which is apparently the real quality culprit most of the time).
BTW - Getting rid of cars would severely cripple our economy. By comparison, very few people would notice if broadband went away.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
The always-on argument also invalidates the cost argument for dialup. To even have half the uptime people associate with broadband, you can spend $30-$35/month easily (large number of hours, extra phone line), which is only about a $10 difference from broadband.
Wrong. I currently use Juno (cost $0) on my normal phone line (cost $0). Up until August I had a DSL connection (cost $45). That is a $45 difference. How many people do you really know that have a phoneline that they exclusively use for the internet? That is a marketing literature fabrication designed to make a broadband appear cheaper.
You are missing the entire point of the article. People are cancelling their broadband connections because the whiz-bang! effect has worn off. The average consumer has no need for large bandwidth because he gets bored with it.
When I had DSL, I downloaded about 50-60 CD's off of napster. Then I ran out of music that I wanted to download. I don't play video games, but even if I did, I would probably use a playstation. I had no more use for my internet connection other than checking my e-mail.
The fact is, broadband access at home is currently little more than a toy. And toys get tiresome. If I need to do research or use the internet for some other reason, I can use my T1 at work. Besides, I sit in front of a computer for 8 hours day. The last thing I want to do when I get home is sit in front of a computer.
For every person getting rid of their cable modem or DSL adapter and going back to 56k, there are 20 people who will be staying with their broadband.
I, for one, am thrilled with my broadband service. I have cable through Charter Communications (owned by Paul Allen) and their service has been outstanding. I actually get 1.5mbps (even during peak times), the latency is typically very good (and when it gets bad it usually lasts for a week, then they address the problem) and every service outtage was due to a physical cable problem somewhere, not a network issue.
I think this is the story with most broadband users, it's just that the horror stories are the ones in the press, and the happy people don't feel the need to brag about how good their service is.
I don't live in a major metropolitan area. Broadband just came to my town earlier this year, but there was too much demand, a long waiting list, and only certain geographical areas had service. Then with @home in trouble, they stopped signing up new customers. So there was only a brief respite from modem use for some people.
> You're paying about 2-3 times as much for a cable/dsl line as for dialup
I've got a problem with that statement. That may be somewhat accurate for comparing dial-up with DSL service, but not for cable modem service.
Cable doesn't cost as much as most DSL installations, and what 'DSL' are you talking about, anyway? There are versions that range from $40 to over $200 per month. Most cable connections are between $35 and $50 a month (mine is $40).
So, many people with modems have a second line just for the computer. Take the cost of a dial-up ISP and the cost of the phoneline, and you're very near or the same as the cost of most cable modem hookups, cuz the line & ISP are included in one (unlike many DSL configurations).
I was an early adopter of cable modem service here in Seattle over 3 years ago, and I've had VASTLY superior service over any dial-up ISP I ever had, and the huge speed increase I've gotten is a major bonus (and quite addicting).
The problem with saying that 'broadband' service is 'less reliable' than dial-up is that there are lots of broadband providers out there, just like dial-up. And just like dial-up, some are reliable, and some are not. For me, in my area of Seattle, broadband via cable has been many many times more reliable, and ridiculously-faster than dial-up ever was.
I'm just sayin'...
Here's further coverage of the situation, from the same site. I really hate the fact that we @Home users are being used as pawns in negotiations in bankruptcy court. It ain't fair. I finally get my broadband back after over a year's drought, when I basically had to get rid of the DSL connection due to lack of funds, and this happens.
Maybe this might be a solution...Aerie Networks, the folks who bought Metricom for a pittance, is looking to involve local governments in basically providing their service as an utility. Last time I checked, cable TV is a utility and regulated as such. Maybe local governments with constituents directly affected by the @Home financial debacle should step up to the plate here.
I get greater-than-T1 speed from this connection. It's fun. It's a pleasure to not be sucking the Internet through a 45.5Kbps straw. I pray that this pleasure will not be short-lived.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Turn off the "load images" option. That seems to be 90% of the volume of a website out there.
'nuff said.
I've had high speed access at home for 7 years now, and there's no way I'd go back to a modem!
You must watch "blockbusters" then. I watch obscure foriegn/ art house films and anime. it's the only game in town no matter how it sucks. of the 4 I have at the moment only 1 (sopranos 2nd season) is likely to be in BB, and maybe not even that.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Unfortunately I have to lose my DSL and go back to a normal modem again. I'm moving to a rural area in Indiana and there is no cable, no DSL, and Sprint wireless broadband appears to be cacking - they are no longer looking for new users.
I LOVE my DSL. Fast, reliable, painless...I really do not look forward to conflicting phonelines - busy signals to those calling in, errant pickups of the phone to make a phonecall only to hear the squeal of a modem, the curse from downstairs because the connection was trashed.
I hate the idea of going back to this that I am seriously considering giving a shot to the "roll your own DSL" projects previously mentioned on slashdot. Sorry, but once you go to a good DSL, you NEVER want to go back.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
That aside, I have two points to make... One, people will miss their broadband connections with the next wave of microsoft bourne email virus's and Two, you haven't lived until you've used links or lynx with broadband for surfing! Let's face it. Most people just surf & send mail.
chao
This is not going to happen here in sunny Helsinki. Last year my modem connection was costing me about 600 Finnish Marks per month in telephone time. Now my cable connection is only 275 FIM per month. We don't have a line to the house anymore. Everyone has mobile.
DSL, however, is bits from the CO to the client. No intervening modulation/demodulation steps. It requires REALLY clean phone lines to work right, from the CO to the internal wiring in the home. My experience with DSL (Flashcom with Verizon as the Last Mile provider) showed just how bad of an effect dirty wiring can have on your DSL experience. I got only HALF of the theoretical 768Kbps downstream bandwidth I was supposed to get. My prime suspect is the '50s-vintage copper in my home. Bleah!
Even with this weird-ass system that my cable company uses, I can get better than T1 speeds in the morning. Even at 10 at night, in the middle of peak usage, I get better than the 384Kbps I used to get from DSL.
Mama don't take my broadband away...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
It's hard enough managing the basics of living being an unemployed geek. Who has money for toys? As soon as I find a new job and catch up on some bills I'll be back to broadband. A normal modem is hell after being used to broadband at home and the huge pipes at work.
:P
If they want to save their business maybe they could talk the govt into giving the actual unemployed some of those billions their bailing companies out with. Would help those of us who have already used up our unemployment and still haven't found new jobs.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Do any of you people ever upload anything? That, to me, is the single best advantage of a DSL connection. And I do video chat with people, a 225k real media stream is not broadcast quality, it is close enough. For a sunday morning chat with my mom.
The poor upload speeds are what is holding back wide spread adoption of "broadband".
I started out a few years back with 384 SDSL and switch about a month ago to 1500/384 ADSL. The floating IP is a minor problem, easly worked around. At $89 (us) a month I figure it's a steal.
With out a fast net connection I'm not sure I would bother to have a box at home.
When you convert the money, the price is exorbitant compared to, say, Canada. Right now, if I lived in a area where the service was available, I could get DSL for CAD$20/month for 6 months and CAD$40/month after that. The modem would be another $CAD10/month.
And the prices I'm quoting are the worst case scenario which is of course Bell Canada. Going with other local ISPs, I could get DSL for about CAD$35/mo including modem rental.
So what am I saying? The service in the US is just too dang expensive and if people are leaving it [the service], I'm not suprised.
I did exactly that.
They've been raising DSL prices. Thats something that should never really happen in a capitalistic market (oh yeah, the phone companies have all the other DSL companies by the balls). Its easy to charge 50 bucks a month for service *alone* when you're the only broadband game in town.
Higher prices = less users.
Also, its much easier to get modem access to the internet for free, as opposed to $25 a month a few years ago.
for all you folks with bad broadband connections. I truly do. Out here (Columbus, OH area), I've had RoadRunner through TW for half a year, and the only major interruption was a dead cable modem, and when I called tech support, I just told them I'd done all the standard stuff, checked with other pc's, network adapters, etc., and they sent a tech out the next morning. Also, we're out in the boonies, and there's almost noone on my node, so my download speed is pretty much only limited by the site I'm downloading from.
My cable modem service might go out once or twice a month for a couple hours, but it is FAR less annoying than disconnects, dialup wait speeds, and all the crap I had to deal with at 56k.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
when they pry it from my cold dead hands. :)
To the average person, for the price... Broadband just isn't THAT broad. If we could get more like 50k/s Upstream and Downstream all the time, people would be more than happy.
Hell, half the time my ethernet connection in my dorm room performs not much above crappy DSL or a modem, and Joe Sixpack is inclined to blame that on the CONNECTION, not on the sites they visit/traffic.
Its pretty much the same with any tech product.. unless they can see a marked improvement they choose the cheaper thing.
Take some examples of things where average people noticed no marked improvement in the more expensive item.
-Crappy printers vs Nice Printers
-Deer Hunter vs Good computer games
-Store bought compaq vs well designed computer
-56k Modem vs broadband (becuases broadband just doesnt work as they were advertised)
...then think of things where there WAS a marked noticeable improvement to Mr. Average User
-CDs over Floppy disks
-Comfy keyboards
-AOL over other ISP (Ease is a HUGE feature to Mr. Avg User)
and so on.
CD's, Comfy Keyboards and AOL (post dialup crunch) all work well, all of the time. Yes, AOL works fine for Mr. Email and Web Surf. He does not want to ftp, or IRC or deal with protocols whatsoever.
Broadband just didnt work ALL the time.. and when Mr. User knows there is an alternative, he will change.
Mr. User doesnt know there is an alterantive to windows, sorry. (maybe mac)
He wouldn't buy a microwave that only SOMETIMES cooked much faster than an oven when an oven was already built into his house.
Such is broadband.
A dail up with a good provider can be around $9.95 a month. That's $119.40 a month, for e-mail, websurfing, uploading new webpages to your site, and downloading some source code.....
I like to play Counter Strike (Half-Life) over the internet. Therefore I have a broadband (cable) connection. This costs me around $45.00 a month.... Extra $10.00 in that number because I rented the $300.00 modem instead of buying it. My reasoning... New technology will be available soon!
That comes to a whopping $540.00 a year. Over 5 years now.... You could save $2,103.00
Now how many of us here can just run around and blow $2,103.00!!!!!
I'm eventually going to dump the broadband if the prices do not come down. I like the idea of always online. But the idea of having my work pay for my high speed access and me using a zip drive to transfer files home is looking better and better every day when you look at those numbers.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
With all the threats of Government regulations on the Internet, I'm going stop using PPP. Instead, I'm going to break out HDB UUCP, and encrypt to my hearts content.
How was that overrated?
It's the blatant truth. The fact that Northpoint and Rhythms died proves how bad their business plan sucked.
I experienced this firsthand. We were a Northpoint client (through Savvis) and had a 208k SDSL line for half the price of a 128k ISDN line. It was rock solid as far as stability and the speed was great with no alternatives available.
Other SDSL providers wouldn't even bother to work with us because our distance was so far.
Again, I say the technology rocked and the business plans suck. What sucks more than that is the fact that all SDSL providers are competing against the phone company that they depend on to provide the lines.
If I had a product that everyone wanted and you could only get it from me and I allowed other companies to resell it but I charged less and slowed down shipments to my resellers. People are going to go directly through me to get it and put my resellers right out of business.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
and it's portable, too. You can't take your cable modem out of town and use it in an El Cheapo motel room!
My MediaOne cable modem was horrible. For the 3 months I had it, it was literally down more often than it was up. I spent more time on dialup than on cable during those months, and I'm glad I didn't cancel my dialup ISP in anticipation!
When it was working, the speed was as advertised. No complaints there.
Then MediaOne took it upon themselves to portscan my machine. They found FTP open, which I'd set up the previous day so I could get to some files from a friend's house. Anonymous access was disabled, I made sure of that. They then proceeded to try standard guest and visitor logins, which of course didn't work. Then MediaOne (this is all in my logs, coming from their machines!) started guessing common words, one of which worked. Well duh, I hadn't exactly locked the box down like Fort Knox. I just wanted to set myself up a little remote file dump! So MediaOne gets in, notices I have some MP3s on my drive, and proceeds to yank the plug.
I get a nice letter in the mail a week later, saying I've been terminated for violating the service agreement. Because they hacked _my_ machine. The RIAA has like-minded friends already if they plan to move in this direction.
Needless to say, I've been on a POTS line with a v.90 modem ever since. The account goes with me when I travel, it's never down for more than 5 minutes at a time, and in the extremely rare event that my favorite POP is busy, there are two more within my local calling area. Cable just can't offer that reliability or portability.
Not that phone lines are perfect! The Ameritech bozo who installed my line "buried" it so poorly that it got hit by a lawn mower. The resulting splices in the line keep me down to about 33.6 most days, slower if it rains, but it always gets me to my mail, at least.
I'll never go back to dialup. Ever.
Why?
Simple, both my wife and I use it to connect to each of our corporate intra-nets using VPN. And if you want to do any real work, NFS mounts, Windows junk, remote compiling - anything - you really have to have enough speed to make it worthwhile.
It's not different for non-technical people either. If you use accounting programs, inventory tracking, anything else using a client-server model, broadband speeds are the only way to go for any real work at home.
I know this guy who takes the Bus and doesn't drive a car!!! What a moron.
Just cause some out of work chick got rid of her broadband doesn't mean that other people will. Some people choose not to use certain technological advances. So what?!?
http://www.1053.org -=We use big words=-
When I made the switch from dial-up to cable, the choice was an easy one. The only reluctancy i had was having to wait around for the guy to show up and drop off the modem (i chose a free self-install, but for some reason, you can't pick a modem up yourself). The reason was, I use the net enough that I had unlimited access ($20 CDN/month), and a 2nd phone line ($22 CDN/month). Add this up, and you get $42 CDN per month. A full $2.05 more than Rogers (major Canadian cable/media company) charges for their @Home service. That's enough for a medium coke and fries once a month from your fast food place of choice. Since then, my service has been down a total of 3 times, only once for more than an hour (which was because some hick cut some fibre). Obviously there are many people who shouldn't get broadband, but they probably shouldn't have bought it in the first place.
My other sig is funny!
I have DSL here as well as dialup, and I'm sorry to say I'm using the dialup more. The problem is that my DSL is from AOL, which is about as bad an ISP as you'll find. Sure, download speeds are great, around 600K most of the time. However, surfing the web is slug-slow, because of AOL's crappy DNS and proxy servers, their buggy software, and the horrible USB modem they supply. I can actually surf the web faster, and much more reliably, from my Earthlink dialup account- on a phone line that never gives me more than 33K. Most of my surfing is purely informational. I don't visit graphics-rich pages much. So quick DNS resolution, and a short path to the server is what matters- not line speed.
You'd never know my AOL was broadband unless you were downloading a big file. So that's what I use it for. The rest of the time, I surf from my dialup account.
I used to have Pacbell DSL at my old place. It was great most of the time- for me. The line itself never went down, and gave me a solid 12-1300K. My connection was only dropped a few times over the course of a year, and probably only because the modem got hot and lost sync. Pacbell had pretty good web service, pretty good non-binary news service (I don't really care about binary newsgroups). However, their mail service was so slow and unreliable, it was unusable. I didn't care because I have other mail accounts, but the average user would be really screwed on this one.
Still, the difference between Earthlink and Pacbell ISPs is night and day. I have a couple of friends with Earthlink DSL, which is over Pacbell's lines. Their service absolutely blows away what I was getting with Pacbell.
I live in Los Angeles. Earhlink DSL is great here, Pacbell DSL is OK, and from what I hear, cable service is great too. Major cities have dozens of huge internet backbones running through them. ISPs have many competitors, all scrapping to provide the best service, in order to win the biggest share of the millions of potential customers.
But it's not like that everywhere. I have family in Blacksburg, VA, home of Virginia Tech, and much-hyped Blacksburg Electronic Village. Part of the town is wired for ethernet, in some other areas you can get DSL, and the cable company provides high speed service. Unfortunatly, the backbone through the area is so weak, that no matter how fast your connection is, everything frequently slows to a crawl. The cable service is so bad at certain times of day, every day, that it's practically unusable. If you log on at 3am, you might get 3Mbit, but at 3pm, you're lucky to be able to read your email. The system is overloaded with tens of thousands of VTech students trading MP3s and whatnot, and the company who provides the service simply doesn't give a shit. Where else can people go? DSL service is exremely limited and expensive, so there's no competition. The neato Bevnet ethernet service is limited to a few parts of town- some student apartment buildings, and some offices. OTOH, you can rent an office with T1-like ethernet for less than what the line alone would cost in California.
Pity the folks in Myrtle Beach, SC, which is probably the fastest growing city in the country, including Las Vegas. Most of them can't get broadband at all. Cable is "coming." Phone companies have said outright that they're not even interested in providing DSL. Unfortunately, the phone lines suck too. Even when the cable companies finally get things going, it's likely they'll skimp at the ISP end, the local loops and servers will be really overloaded, and service will suck. On top of that, the backbones into the area probably suck anyway, like they do in the rest of the Southeast.
Getting back to my point, broadband isn't always worth the money. There are many other aspects to it than just a fast connection from you to your ISP, and these things are lacking as often as not. Buyer beware.
Hell, I do that all the time on surveys. I do it for bandwidth, processor, memory and any other spec that costs me money personally.
;)
I think it actually works.. there's very few new games out that my Pentium II 350 machine can't run, and there's absolutely nothing my AMD 1.2Ghz can't run. I won't be telling them about that machine on surveys though.
You know, I would rather they spend the time on performance instead of adding yet another great cut-scene that costs $1 million to produce and you only ever see once. I just help them keep their priorities straight.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
If she did it because "her phoneline modem is more stable", then she is a complete fool. If she did it because "her phoneline modem is reliable and/or faster" then she is even more a fool, but if it was financial, or the cable was really that horrible in her particular area, then kudos, she is now paying less. You can tell me anything you want, my cable is more reliable, faster and all around better in every field more than my phoneline connections, even on 56.6K with true speeds ever were and ever could have dreamt of being.
when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Back when I was a wee hacker, I had static addresses from my isp so that I could host my own domain. It was pretty damn sweet to get my email from my own server. Then I got DSL when it first came out in my area and like any self-respecting sysadmin, I got a subnet as well for my growing farm of boxen. Moral of the story: You'll get my Cisco 675 when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of it. I hang out at a friends place once in a while and he only has 56k. I finally had to stop ssh'ing in to check my mail when I was there because it's so DAMN slow.
I said it when I first got my DSL way back when and i'll say it again; I will NEVER go back to dialup by choice. ever.
Reasons dialup is better than broadband:
:-) (And if I lose my job, I'll need that extra $50/month anyway!)
1)No installation problems; no need to set up a firewall; etc.
2)No unrecoverable outages (unless the entire national network goes down). My current service is quite reliable, unlike the broadband some friends have.
3)No strange usage/port/upload/download restrictions. I can run a LAN, or a Linux box, and access or send whatever I want.
4)Cheaper. I use my cell as my 2nd (voice) line, and I wouldn't want to cancel it even if I got broadband. (YMMV of course)
5)Cheap bandwidth at work
dont kid yourself
EQ sucks donkey balls no matter what connection you use
The author of this article is nuts. For most of those people who have high-speed access at work, including myself, I find dialup a useless novelty. When I was without DSL this summer I decided not to bother going back out, buying a modem and dealing with the slow downloads. Luckily the ISP industry has a HUMONGUS potential market: recent college graduates! The vast majority of them have been spoiled with 4 years on the fat pipe, and are hungry for more.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Well, this seems true to me!
Over the past 2 weeks or so, I've barely been able to use RR because of DHCP server problems.
While I wouldn't consider dropping RR, I am considering paying for a full time dialup isp, or finding a replacement for RR.
Anybody know of a broadband servive in Houston, Texas for $40 a month?
Location: Mt. Xinu
My problems with cable and DSL ISPs have never been the price, unfortunately I expect that will always be high. But if their margins are slim maybe they should raise the price and provide quality timely service. It has been my experience that it takes over a month for any service/install request to be addressed and often the service quality is poor. I would pay up to $200 a month for a stable fast 10+Mbps connection with no upload cap that has good support and service. But will that ever happen? No. Not because its too expensive but because companies are simply not intelligent or organized enough to make that happen. When businesses get professional they might be able to meet my requirements. Until then I'll deal with anything I can get.
While don't get me wrong, the speed of my cable modem is great, the reason that I like broadband is the fact that there are no drivers to worry about, no ppp to configure, no thing, just plain ole ethernet, supported by every OS under the sun. I can just let it set itself up using DHCP from my linksys and all is good. The seelign point of broadband for me and probably others is its ease of setup and operation, in addition to the lack of connect time wait.
Well, I can tell you here in rural Minnesota that cable and DSL is not an option.
After moving from the cities and cable modems, 56k is just fine with me to @ 8.95/month its even better. I don't stream media or game. Pages load just fine.
People can set a modem to disconnect with an incoming call. A second line is not necessary for dialup or the added expense.
If you still want non-dialup access from rural MN, then go to here: http://www.wirelessinitiative.net/
$20 for 256k
$27 for 256k rural
Some of the hardware they use is here:
www.orinocowireless.com
At $50+ for most dsl/cable connections it isn't worth it just to get pr0n faster or watch some grainy little video feed.
/. to load no matter what I was using. That's why browsers have stop buttons. :)
Hell, I wouldn't wait for all 500+ comments on
I talk to my friends in Europe and they have some exceleent broadaband in areas over there.
In Sweden they have 10Mb for around $20.
Belgium is loaded with excellent broadband service for cable and dsl. Germany has dsl. They are also getting the Powerline super high speed internet connection going in Germany and Scandinavia. There prices are cheaper for high speed internet than the U.S. I pay $40 for 8Mb,640k ADSL in Korea. While I still pay $40 1Mb,128k in the U.S. We need to get competition in our broadband in the U.S. They are too monopolistic in their prices. One hikes their price and the rest follow suit. My ISP sent me an email saying they were do to the others were. We may I hate to say need government regulation back in some things. I rather they work it out before the government needs to intervene. I only had one problem with my DSL where it was out for 16hours the rest it has been up the whole time.
How bout in Australia, where Telstra has the most coverage for ADSL and cable, and Optus only has minor coverage in 3 major cities. Optus is priced pretty well and stable as hell, but Telstra... well, crappo network. Also their pricing has just changed for residential users, Check out these prices for ADSL users.
Residential Only
Freedom Standard^^ $94.50 $78.00 3GB 256/64 18.90 cents per MB up to 5 GB and 17.50 cents per MB after 5 GB##
Freedom Deluxe $105.50 $89.00 3GB 512/128
5GB Residential $241.45 $224.95 5GB 1500/256 17.50 cents per additional MB
10GB Residential $446.45 $429.95 10GB 1500/256
These prices come in Dec 1st, and I know a hell of a lot of people who are dumping broadband to return to dialup
On the other hand, you have fingers
I live in the middle of stinking nowhere, I get 26k dialup.. my only other "option" is 64k ISDN from Qwest for some crazy $115 a month..
If you can GET DSL/Cable, darnit, GET IT.. if you don't trade houses with me.. It just angers me beyond the point of understanding.
I feel like a little kid at the Zoo watching the monkeys in the cages play with their new playstation2's while I play with my socks I got for christmas..
DSL "is bits"? Just how do you think those bits move across that line? Try putting a speaker across the terminals sometime and tell me what's going on there. Your local provider's choice of modulation might not be audible, but some of them certainly are! Those z-blockers and POTS splitters are just lowpass filters.
Beware blanket statements!
Another disappointment was the instant availability benefit, which I was foolish to expect in the first place, of DSL and cable modems because At home I turn off my computer off when not in use for long periods. The power up cycle and PPPoE connection make for roughly the same time the is about the same as with dial-ups.
The things I did like where: being able to use my phone line while connected, see high bit-rate video and most of all downloading new software at 1.2Mbps.
And what the heck is that server they tried to install on my system? (with a
I was using Qwest as my DSL provider and my ISP. Well...they were just doing that little deal where their ISP customers were being switched over to MSN. So I wasn't that crazy about that. I considered finding a different ISP and keeping the DSL, but I didn't for two reasons.
1. Thought it would be good to spend a bit more time offline.
2. Qwest's service sucked.
To give you an example of 2, here's how it went when I called Qwest to cancel my service.
First person: Wants to go over all my personal info to make sure it's up to date. We do so. He says he'll transfer me to the folks who can cancel my DSL.
Second person: I get a paragraph of Spanish before I can make it clear that speaking in English works much better for me... Turns out the first guy transferred me to the wrong person. This is the Spanish Repair line. I get transferred.
Third person: Says she cancelled my ISP service, but not my DSL service. Says she'll transfer me to appropriate dept, but she disconnects me instead.
Fourth person: I call back. I can barely understand this person through her Ebonics. She transfers me without telling me that's what she's doing.
Fifth person: He tells me that it doesn't make sense that the third person cancelled my ISP service. He's supposed to do that. He finally (I think) takes care of everything.
The thing is, this wasn't too bad considering how some of my other calls have gone. Anyway, now I'm on a dirt cheap intro sale for dial-up with a company that's actually local. As opposed to doing anything with my Qwest account, I actually did all the sign-up stuff online.
-- dR.fuZZo
In my area of SF SBC-Bell, said to me on the phone and I quote:
Me:I understand you are having a signal problem, and i'm paying 60/month for this service?
Technical Rep John: Yes sir, but your not realy suposed to be getting even that your technically outside the loop distance
Me:I was inside it when I agreed to 100 setup fee
Technical Rep John:...
Me:and I am not getting $60 worth of service
Technical Rep John:Oops.
Now if we had REAL service for the REAL internet and REASONABLE prices not:$100 not $60 MABIE $15
but the us's implimentation of fast internet is retarted.
with the draconian restrictions placed on broadband here in australia, ie download limits and volume charging, it has reached the stage where you can actually download more in a month over dial-in than you can over cable. telstra has a 3gig cap. optus has the vague netstats thingy. i guess they're both pushing the quicker, but not more angle.
sure, it would take one hell of a lot of patience to download that much on a modem....
...Consider V.92, the new-ish 56Kbps modem standard that introduces internet call waiting in hardware, quicker dials, and faster upstream. Next time I switch ISPs (and there's always a next time...), I'm going for one that supports V.92.
Kind of changes the economics if you assume you MUST have a second line for dialup...
he dropped @Home cable because it was capped so badly that he actually got faster service with AOL. So he simply switched. Money wasn't the deciding factor. It was simply that the cable service was so horrible that it wasn't worth the aggravation of trying to get the knothead techs to fix it.
If it doesn't look bad, one of the last things to go is DSL. I love the speed, Qwest has actually been rather reliable for me, and I get the functionality of a second phone line for pretty much the same cost of one + an ISP.
Yeah, the MSN transition sucks royally, but I also realize almost everyone with broadband access is going to be stuck with either AOL, Earthlink or MSN as their ISP... :-(
See: this link
Perfect for users who demand secure, fast, reliable connections with cross-platform capability, the U.S. Robotics V.Everything 56K Analog Corporate Modem helps your business succeed-every hour of the day, every day of the week."
Rock steady, and fast.
You can't go wrong.
I've had one for years...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
If the code red problem was primarily caused by home users on broadband, then why did it go away so quietly? You know 90% of the people out there couldn't possibly have downloaded the patch or turned off the personal web server that came with front page 98.
Back when BellSouth were the first to bring ADSL into our area, we had an average of 8 Mbps with spikes up to 12 at certain times of the day, served by DHCP for about $40/month. Now it's PPPoE at 1.5 Mbps at best for a little more money. And you can't see why I'm considering saying "to hell with it" and forsake them for a modem? Especially when it's a heck of a lot easier to change providers with a modem?
I cannot do business long term without it.
I have PacBell (SBC) internet - and it's been WONDERFUL. Their servers are horrible, crashing at least weakly, but I have my own mail server, news server, DNS server, web proxy, etc.
I have had less than 24 hours of line downtime in 2 years, and that for me is all that matters.
I'm working remotely over a modem, and it's HORRIBLE. 200+ ms ping times, latency, and everytime the modem has to renegotiate the connection my IP changes and I have to close all my ssh sessions and re-login.
AUGH!
For me, it's not only something I wouldn't give up, it's a hard requirement for me to work.
-Ben
My household has four people, each with their own computer, sharing the cable modem through the local Ethernet and household server (Linux box doing NAT, as well as sharing the printer, scanner, etc). The server's connection out used to be dial-on-demand with a 56K modem, and with more than one user it became intolerably slow. We would probably drop the second phone line, cable TV, and trips to BlockBuster before we dropped the cable modem.
But we're probably not real typical...
ahem... some of us are still stuck at 56k. articles like this just tick me off. its not easy living in a poor city. no one wants to sell to you.
-
I got a cable modem from Charter in Eastern Tennessee almost 2 years ago now. I came from an 128k ISDN line, and once being on a cable that clocked 3mbit, I can't there's anything I'd except now.
The cool thing about Charter was that I called them up and asked for service, and told them I didn't want the installation of a NIC or anything. I simply went by their office and got the modem, and hooked everything up. (I even requested the type of modem I wanted! GI, not the RCA crud.)
I'm extremely happy with them. They've had some growing pains, but I've never had any signifigant down time and speeds have almost always been above 2 mbits.
"liberty and justice for all those who can afford it"
I get my DSL from TELUS here in Edmonton, Alberta and seldom have problems. I just have the el-cheapo home version for $40 canadain per month. which is probably about $25US. I get 5 email addresses, 2 static IP's, free dial-up if I ever go out of town. I've had this for 1.5 years now and have had maybe 2 days of troubled access. No complaints, speed is usually around 350-500Kbps down and around 100-150Kbps up. Sure beats my modem everyday of the week!
The sad truth about eithernet protocol is
that it is notoriously non-deterministic.
What that means to those who don't know
anything about broadband transport methods is
that the more users on an eithernet, the worse
that it works.
ATM used over DSL would be the best
kind of scheme of doing transport over a
veryhigh bandwidth system. However, this
product advertised by the Tellco industry
for so long doesn't work as advertised.
And so we are stuck. When you have a dialup phone
you are pretty much given that band width as yours to use. With eithernet you get less bandwidth as more users come on line. So, at a certain point, the success of the marketing of broadband internet leads to the failure of broadband internet as a high bandwidth connection for the user in the home.
There are other ways to do data transport that aren't eithernet or ATM. These are not being promoted by the industry. Why? Probably because
it would free us all to do Point to Point connections with high bandwidth. There is no way for the telco industry to bill you for that. . .
Hey, the switch industry is a cool bussiness to be in
when there are jobs.
Which there are not now.
Oh, well.
No job, no money for broadband.
when you pry it from cold dead hands....
I couldn't believe this ...but I recently wrote an exec sum on a company who's primary technology was best used in conjunction with dial-up access -
94% of worldwide internet access subscribers are via dialup - and it'll still be well in the majority by 2003 or so. Amazing when in the 'dork bubble' here in the valley eveyone I know is on broadband. That statistic is from Gartner, but alot of houses publish similar stuff.
...and you wonder why e-commerce failed. Who would shop on amazon when it takes forver to load and times out..
The person who gave up broadband probably got that "You have reached the end of the Internet" web page and took it seriously.
As long as your ISP has dialup as a backup, even if it isn't entirely reliable, it beats dialup by a huge margin.
It isn't just the speed. Its "always on" nature is a qualitative difference from dialup.
It's fast enough to do streaming audio. At last, I can listen to Dr. Demento again.
It's fast enough that I can feed it into a router that does NAT and the whole family can web browse, do email, video chat, and stream audio.
Only when it's working, of course, but that's most of the time. When it isn't, and if I really need to do something on line, I can still dial up.
I had 384/128 ADSL for five months at the beginning of the year. Then it "went away" due to some Pac Bell actions that I'm still fuming about. Just last week, Earthlink was finally able to hook me back up (I guess Pac Bell put a repeater in my neighborhood?) and the measured speed, according to dslreports.com, is 1.2M/312.
I will not willingly go without broadband again.
seems to me that people cutting off DSL because they're worried about paying the bills (heat, light, food, etc) is a whole lot different than cutting off the service because it's unreliable.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
DSL I like. GTE was a cool company. But Verizon sucks ass.
Lately, they can't keep PTR records in place for their mail servers, and my mail is getting refused.
Apparently they're also careless enough to get blacklisted for running an open relay.
Don't even bother trying to contact tech support. I've called or emailed them 4 times so far, and they still don't seem to understand what is going on. Morons.
I've used Telstra Bigpond cable internet for some time, and I must say it's extremely reliable. ... Also very fast.
However, Now telstra are introducing a 3GB cap per month on your usage. Any additional data is charged at 25c per meg (or there abouts).
I'm on a modem now, because cable isn't avaliable in this area.
I download around 4gb per month on DIALUP.
Why pay twice as much for half the service??
when one is a non-conformist that is just like all the other non-conformist... they are just another flavor of conformist.
nt
The article is really about people going from baseband back to broadband. For some reason everyone has this misconception that broadband = fast connection (cable or DSL). The truth of the matter is that broadband simply means an analog connection, nothing more. A dial-up modem is broadband technology. Meanwhile, baseband simply means a digital connection. So, cable modems and DSL with a digital connection to the internet is not broadband at all, rather it is baseband. When will the companies who advertise high speed internet access do their homework and research terms before they use them?
I make my money by being internet savvy. 200$ would save me 600$ worth of time. But I live in the styx... Actually been thinking of relocating just so I can get cable modem, 4 computers and start a buisness selling computers + internet contract work...
Stop throwing out cable modem, buy more, so maybe I'll get connected way out here in Pennsylvania.
God spoke to me
I did it too (got rid of my home phone). Between Sprint PCS and AT&T Broadband, an analog line is irrelevant to me. The best part is, no telephone solicitors!
At the broadband company I work for, for the first time ever after 5-6 years of existence, we raised the prices on it (of course alot of the spoiled rotten customers had to call in and complain). It went from $24.95/mo to $27.50/mo.
Let's break this down here, $27.50/mo for the internet service itself, people are paying almost that for AOL. Granted, if you dont want to buy a modem it would cost $10/mo for rental, and if you didn't subscribe to our cable television, we would transport the signal for another $10/mo.
Think about, even if you were renting the modem and refused to pay for cable tv your cost is $47.50/mo before tax. That is roughly the cost of a DSL connection that is slower and has a contractual obligation.
Fuck Ajit Pai
Henceforth, the cable modem plan I am on (for now) - "Freedom Plan" - will contain the following provisos come December
Price - US$35.
Monthly allowable download - 3 Gigabytes.
Maximum download speed - 32 KiloBYTES per second.
Maximum upload speed - 8 KiloBYES per second.
But what happens if you go over your limit? No problem, you only have to pay 9 cents per MB up to 5 GB and 8.5 cents per MB after 5 GB. Wow, sounds appealing!
If this plan is not free enough for you, and you're tired of staring at wads of cash, then by all means take the 10GB plan!
Only US$200 per month but they remove the bandwidth caps.
For more information on these great plans, take a look here ->
http://users.bigpond.net.au/move/pricing/cable.h tm
With cable like this, dialup seems liberating !
BTW, to all Australians who read this and are considering voting for the incumbant Liberal party on this Saturday's election, please ponder over the philosophies of senator Richard Alston, minister for IT and communications. "They rolled out broadband in South Korea, and the kids used it to play games. My kids don't need any more help in this department". Ahh, there you have it, vision for the nation.
This month I am moving to a different residence.
I called PacBell to have my phone and DSL moved to the new address. PacBell informed me that if I wanted to keep my static IP address my rate would
change from $39/mo to $64/mo.
Their DSL was never that good to start with so I'm
going to just dump the DSL and go back to a modem.
I was under the impression that DSL modems converted digital information from your machine to high frequency analog signal on the phone line. Is that not modulation?
Go back to your cruddy dial-up! More bandwidth for me! :D
You can have my cable modem when you bring me a faster one, or when you pry it from my cold dead hands! NO WAY would I trade this back for a modem. I need a net connection too much. Here's the reasons why:
ALWAYS ON! (Big one with me)
NEVER as slow as a modem (I do agree that Road Runner is sometimes overloaded because of overselling, but it doesn't happen much anymore).
RELIABLE (Um, modem more reliable then a Cable/DSL connection? GET REAL!)
Time saving (I save time not waiting for the modem to dial up....you use the net differently then when you had a dialup....anytime you have a question that you don't have an answer, just hop on the browser and do a search)
Doesn't tie up a phone line
I don't understand these people who have constant problems with Road Runner. The only way I could see they have a beef is if they LIVED on the thing and I understand some geeks do. When our downtime occurs, it's usually at night and usually restored by morning. So if my connection were to die now, I would go to bed! By 5 am, it's back up. Reliability is MARKEDLY better on a cable modem of that I have no doubt. I bet the ones that DO have problems probably are one of the following:
Live in the boonies, Live in a old part of a city
or they live in a town where the net was just discovered (some towns probably never heard of it much until recently). If you live where most of us do, you probably won't have a problem. Case in point, I have a co-worker who lives in the sticks. His modem goes down every sunday. I live in the Columbus, OH metro area.....probably every other house in my neighborhood has RR. We get great service. Pity for those who live in the sticks, but that's the nature of this beast. Best to go with a dish when they start going two way.
Gorkman
becuase? ... a fake cable modem?
unrealiable? Does that mean that it is not real?
My service is cheap. ($45 Cdn. including monthly DSL modem rental; no up/download limits)
My service is FAST! (I've never had even slight slowdowns which weren't remote server issues)
My service is reliable. (In five months, there hasn't been a single interruption that I'm aware of)
My service has great tech support (while they don't officially support linux, the installer told me, "Just call our support line--we all run it at home." Then he gave me a sheet with proper linux setup instructions)
My service has great server support (their news servers are legendary, locally)
My service is friendly. (See above)
I love my DSL which is through a local reseller of telco service. I spend 8hr/day on big computers with fast connections at work, and I can't imagine anything more I'd want in an ISP.
Live in Alberta? Get Nucleus. Tell 'em cbigam sent ya.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Badly-performing broadband is faster than great-performing modems.
But, one thing I've been thinking about. With all this talk about Carnivore, and the FBI tapping the internet, etc, modems may come back in the name of privacy. You could actually create your own small 'internet' using modems. Or, dial directly into your friends/colleagues computer in order to do real time chat, or transferring private files, etc...Just a thought
I've had telocity(directv) DSL for about 6 months now and I've had no problems with it...I ordered it and it was completely up and running within 2 weeks...Since I got it, it has gotten faster. My connection speed has gone from ~600Kbps to ~900Kbps, for no apparent reason (and at no additional charge). I've got a static IP, I've got speed (that seems to be getting faster all the time) and I've got 0 downtime...so, what is all this I'm hearing about people having problems with DSL?
I can find no reason to ever go back to using a modem...Maybe it's just me, but I'd forgo food on the table for broadband...The net is so much more useable with broadband...those without it are missing so much...and those who'd drop it because they think the net doesn't have enough to offer to justify the cost, missed something somewhere.
Frag 'em all...
I will give up my broadband when I get a girlfriend.
My cable modem is not worried....
Unless all you do is check email, I don't recomend modems!! I used to go on BBS's on my Ultra fast 2400 bps modem :), but nowadays, to download say the latest version of OpenBSD, or the ISO for Redhat...GOOD LUCK with the Modem!!! You have to be nuts!!!
My sister has a dial up connection...she just uses email...damn, I hope that the lady doesn't say in the article that she only uses internet for email...Ooops, ah well...I'm too lazy to read the damn article...too late now...
submit
I only want one telephone line. If I ordered a second phone number the telco would just multiplex it on the same wire as my first phone number. The consequences of that manouever (DAML) for the line noise usually cuts the download speed of a 56k modem in HALF. That's just not bearable.
DSL frees my phoneline for normal calls while I am online, which was nearly round the clock already when I suffered with 56k "service".
Large software downloads that would take all night to complete now take 10 minutes to half an hour. I never wait now to be connected. Most web pages load like they're part of my local filesystem or already stored in browser cache. Big pages load with tolerable quickness, usually, instead of provoking me to slap my monitor. 1.5mbs down/ 256 kbps up for $49/mo compared to a second line plus 56k unlimited access plans that limit you to 300 hours is no comparison at all
Really people should not whine about this kind of service and shake their fingers at the RBOCs and say "You have to make this less expensive before people will buy into it" I hear this from time to time and I wonder how cheap do they think it can be made and how far out do they think telcos can defer breaking evern on DSL service expansion. It's already a bargain at the price compared to the dialup alternative.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
Lucky me that doesnt live in US. :)
I always love to tell people what I pay for my internet lines
Why do I got two lines? I use alot of bandwidth, have many computers.
Bonet ADSL: 2.5 Mbit down, 760 Kbit up, real static IP.
250 SEK/$20 per month
Telia ADSL: 512 Kbit down, 700 Kbit, DHCP (almost static, never changes)
325 SEK/$33 per month
Yes, they have MORE upstream than downstream. The worlds only ISP that
have that? U got a 50% chance to get 700 Kbit in upstream instead of
512 kbit if u get Telia ADSL.
All ports are open, servers allowed (but not commercial servers).
Other ISPs in Sweden:
Chello: 512 Kbit/128 Kbit: $25 per month
Bredbandsbolaget (translation: Broadband company):
10 Mbit (old installs): $20 per month
100 Mbit (new installs): $20 per month
(no, im not kidding! Ethernet rules!)
Telenordia: 512 Kbit/128 Kbit: $33 per month
Misc other ISPs: $20-$35 per month
You'll get my cable modem when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands....
I realize that some parts of the country have problems with cable, but where I live it's blazingly fast and *always* up. There isn't a chance on god's green earth I'd give it up and go back to slow modems, busy signals, unexpected dropouts, and regular winter service outages due to downed lines.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
In my little area of Canada, we have no DSL available, and a small cable provider, who caps their speeds to 45kb/s down, 15kb/s up (not just me, but everyone). They charge $50/m and their reliability isn't the best either. But they do have a local monopoly on broadband.
I have a fairly big local calling area, so there's actually a lot of competition in the dialup market. After a year of cable, I went back with a group that costs $20/m for unlimited use, with no busy signals, and 52-53kbps connections.
I say, while we're bringing out our modems, let's :)
get back on those BBSs!
The only problem is, it looks like they made this story out of thin air. :)
I could write a story like this claiming that condom use is on a decline.
I'd find one guy that claims that he just doesn't see the point anymore.
Then I'd call trojan and naturalamb and any other prophalactic company
I could and bug the heck out of their PR department. The ones that didn't
hang up on me, or swear at me, I'd quote. If someone said something really
stupid like "I'd rather sell my Grandma than give up using condoms" I'd
make sure to print that. I'd also write the story in such a way that the
fact that I've presented no hard data to support my claim of decreased
condom use isn't immediately obvious.
The problem with stories like this are people believe this crap.
A story like this will make john q. bandwidth actually think about getting
rid of his high speed connection. He'll worry that he'll be the only guy
on his block still using it. I wouldn't be surprised if someone paid to have
this story written (ok, I'd be a little surprised). When I see something
like this, the first thing on my mind is who benefits if this is true.
Sometimes the answer is not what you initially think it is.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
I'd love to have a cheap and slow (e.g., 64K) connection where I could stay on line 24h a day. What bothers me the most is the need to connect each time I want to verify an email or visit an URL when I'm in a dial up.
You sure have a market for this out of USA. Remember that out of the USA, you have to pay your telecom company for the time you use your phone in local calls. Here in Brazil we have to connect, download the emails, disconect, reply all, select the URLs you want to visit, connect, visit each URL and have your email sent, disconnect, read everything, connect, follow some links, disconnect,...
The page may download faster with mod_gzip, buy the the latency to compress and download it all before visualizing may be greater than the time needded to see a good amount of it.
If the user can start to interact with your page before it is fully downloaded, the perceived download time and user experience can be better.
So I ask: what's the best configuration of mod_gzip. What's the page size that's (compression time + download all compressed page) < (download 50% of page)?
BTW, I installed mod_gzip in my server. One fantastic thing is to also turn on mod_negociation. If you have static pages, you can leave them already gziped in your HD that Apache will serve it as is. It's a win-win-win-win!!! You save space in your server, you spend less bandwith, the page downloads faster, and your server don't spend processing power compressing it!
What were you saying? ;-)
Ok, I hear you all going nuts about how your :). My
.8 seconds more for DNS res :P. Ahhh... if
broadband connection sucks for DNS res. or what
ever else. I have to tell you that you are nuts.
This is coming from someone that hasn't had the
experience of broadband, except for the 2.5 RL
friends I actually have that have it
friends that have it also complain about down time
and whatever else. But are you people not doing
the math here??? Lets see.... most of the people
I know with cable get average of 30kb sec. I get
at most 5... and they are down maybe for average
of 4 hours or so a week.... even though they are
down that much, they still get more online than I
just because of the speed difference. I just
can't understand why we just can't be happy...
instead of going wow look at the tech involved or
whatever else, you get angry because it takes a
whole
I could only afford to pay for crappy broadband.
L8r
I get paid to solve problems, most of the time that involves sitting around waiting for someone to break somthing :)
:)
Besides staying current on technology requires effort
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
My company and one of its clients each came in yesterday morning to find their connections to the outside world gone. They both use the local cable monopoly's high speed service. They separately called in to inquire about the status and in each case was told, "Everything's fine here, it must be on your end." When a coworker of mine called back to inform them one of our clients was down too, the rep actually hung up on him.
We'll be springing for a T1 through a different carrier in the near future; our business is too dependent on the net to be subject to such a lack of support and accountability. We've made a similar recommendation to the client.
That said, I use a cable modem at home and usually have no trouble with it. I'm still just as glad I live in an area with multiple high speed providers. Things look completely different now than when I first got the line in 1997.
Personally, I don't see how it would ever happen with me, at least not at this point in my life, but for those less technically inclined, or less technlogy-oriented, I can see it. I'm talking about people that check their mail, surf the web, maybe even play some 'online games' - of the Solitaire or Chess variety at Yahoo! Games and other such locations. If it wasn't for the fools that put excessive graphics + ads + flash animation on many pages nowadays, I'd be mostly fine with dialup, if it weren't for my Counter-Strike needs. I can handle being connected for 10 hours a day (during the late hours of night/early hours of morning) while stuff downloads. I used to do it. And, as I did before, I could open all the articles on slashdot (and similar sites) and read the one I'm reading, while those pages load.
I can certainly say I'd save a lot of time if I were to not be 'online' all the time. All my personal projects would get done more quickly, I'd spend more time doing things that I enjoy (not that I don't enjoy chatting w/ friends or talking on IRC... but enough is enough.)
For all rational arguements and logicality, I can fully understand people wanting to ditch 'broadband' due to lack of reliability and price alone, with social implications aside. Were I to go back to dialup, I certainly would find myself getting out more. I think that's a good thing. If I'm working with computers all day long, I really need to get out in the evenings. My psychological stability and offspring depend on it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers