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AT&T Caps Bandwidth On Former @Home Users
graznar writes: "It seems that AT&T users have been limited to 1.5 megabits of bandwidth. According to AT&T (after calling and waiting for 30 minutes), the service my friend was originally on went bankrupt (@home maybe?) so they were transferred to an alternate network. AT&T claims they will be getting this back up to speed soon. What I would like to know is if this is a nation wide problem, or if this is just in California where he lives?" More generally, I wonder what type of experiences -- good or bad -- the people who've just gone through a forcible @home weaning are experiencing.
like we really have to ask?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Then suddenly it got slower. And stayed slower. Finally, we confronted TWRR, and they admitted that they'd capped us at 2 Mbit/s down and 384 Kbit/s up. Well, at least they finally admitted it.
In any event, 1.5 Mbit/s down isn't too bad. Did they put a upstream cap on too? If so, what's it set at? Didn't @Home have a 128 Kbit/s cap on upstream?
AT&T made its users aware that there would be a cap at 1.5MB -- there's a FAQ on their Website that says as much and (much more disturbing) they've made clear they plan to charge for speed in the future. How that's affected by the merger, who knows...
This is a non-issue, people on AT&T @Home are already aware of it if they've paid attention. It might suck, but it's not unreasonable.
Is this really a limit? After two years with a cable modem (first Rogers, then Rogers@Home, then Shaw@Home, then Shaw), I never saw transfer rates of over 1.5Mbps. I generally considered myself lucky if I got half of that.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
this is OLD news. AT&T has been capping their bandwidth for a month now.
AT&T has been providing quality service for all your needs
When I signed up for Comcast@Home, I signed up for 1500 kilobits/s down, 128 kilobits/s up. And that's pretty much what I get, depending a bit on the network itself. Now if my contract said 1.5 Megabytes/sec, then I'd certainly have issues.
The can't really provide a T1's worth of downloads to each customer for $50/month.
Wow... sucks to be me... now I only have 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth. Wait, I've never seen anything faster than that on this network (AT&T, Chicago area). I'm also assuming that means download speed... I've never seen upload that fast. So what's the big deal about download being limited to 1.5 Mbps?
Quite frankly, however, this isn't that big a deal (even if it was possible to get better speeds) as long as AT&T doesn't start doing nasty things like blocking incoming or outgoing ports or start rotating the IP address (like I've heard some cable providers do). For $50/month, I exect at least a little service from the ISP...
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
I'm in Richmond, VA, and my cable access provider is Comcast@Home. Our network has not been purchased by AT&T, however my speed has dropped (only slightly) since @Home went down. Comcast has been rolling commercials like nothing happened around here: deals if you subscribe to digital cable and cable modem access together.
I must hand it to Comcast. They've kept the network up with no outages that I'm aware of. They're not as fast as other cable access companies (my avg. speed is ~400kbps), but they have had killer uptimes while I've been on.
I wouldn't get to worried about AT&T limiting your bandwidth anyway. You have to expect something in a time of adjustment. If this becomes prolonged practice, then I might start bitchin', but sometimes you just need to let the industry figure itself out.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
There were a lot of threads about this back when slashdot was covering the changeover. But anyway, yes, the 1.5 mbit limit is across the board for AT&T customers, AFAIK. I am limited here in Sunnyvale, California. But while the limitation is noticable (no more insanely fast KaZaA downloads), the switch to AT&T's backbone was so fast (about 3 days, I think) that I really can't complain. Their service has been good. So I'm fairly happy with AT&T, although I would look at better deals.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
For lots of useful information and experiences from ATTBI users, see the ATTBI forum on DSLReports.
i used to have a static ip when i was with @home. They sent a letter to me a few months ago asking if i wanted to keep my static ip or switch to DHCP. I wanted to keep static because i was too lazy to change my linux router. They allowed this, but when they switched over to AT&T they switched me to DHCP. I did not want this, and now AT&T forces me to have a dynamic ip
The big problem were the absolutely shitty AT&T nameservers which were also rigged to hijack whatever name you were trying to resolve at random moments and direct you to the attbi.com help page.
Thank god for OpenNIC.
Other than that, service has been reliable, though it is true that downloads are now limited to 1.5Mbps instead of ~8Mbps I was getting before.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I've been noticing for weeks now an ability to shut your whole connection off [only briefly enough] if they don't want you doing something.
:(]
I've only had this happen to me doing these things:
* Kazaa [one port, easy to detect]
* Gnutella [any client, only using 6346 port!]
* WinMX [anytime I connect to an opennap server]
* USENET [not all groups, but a general 'backup' of anything in the alt.binaries.* tree. No more playboy pics for me
* Uploading [When uploading to a private FTP... expect to get booted]
I thought this was a windows issue since I have just moved and as a consequence started a new account with new hardware. Since the move, I've gotten my boxen up and they get disconnected using even SCP! [if it takes more than one hour]
So I can't SSH to my boxen because what? There is no excuse for this. I can see the blocking of P2P systems since TimeWarner DOES own all the content people are trying to share.
The problem is they don't actually watch what you do. They figure, port 1214... Kazaa, shut him down. But when is the line drawn for LEGITIMATE USE?
I can't connect to my own PC for private toying around? I can't download a distro? I guess I can't even install over FTP?
Just when I was loving 'Broadband' and it's perks. You know, constant updates to anything. Even if it is for your slash.applett....
Get your Unix fortune now!
I'm in Seattle. I'm capped at 1.5 mbps also. Have been since the switch. Complained to CS for the record, but obviously they could do nothing for me.
More annoying is the change in the way they handle DHCP. @Home used to assign each user a unique name that would be associated with a DNS entry for the IP address given to the machine by the DHCP. The result is that I could always find my machine through name resolution, regardless of my changing DHCP lease (they also gave static IPs if you wanted, but it wasn't necessary if you could resolve your name to an IP address). Now the Powers That Be at ATT have had the utter lack of foresight to assign dynamic names to the DHCP clients, which are in fact simply the TCP/IP address with slashes. For example if your IP address is
192.54.75.213
Then your name resolves to
192-54-75-213.client.attbi.com
I suggested to a tech to tell anyone who would listen that they should be using MAC IDs, but once again he had the obligatory complete lack of power that goes hand in hand with phone tech support, so he did nothing.
I think the key will be to not pay them for services, since they are not giving me the service I expect. They have avenues for diminished payment due to support failure. As far as I'm concerned, my service has been down since the switch.
-Rothfuss
Well, as my warez kiddie neighbor's son found out last week, they are capping uploads to 10MB/day and downloads to 150MB/day. After that point, their filters drop about 25% of your packets and the connection is pretty much useless until midnight.
Since I am a responsible internet user who does not try to download gigabytes of stuff that I don't want to be 1337, I am getting more than my money's worth (especially that 20Mbps burst rate). And Time Warner is making a special effort to punish the jerks who just leech all day and waste bandwidth. The result? The network has been extremely responsive, and reliable to boot.
I will be sticking with TW for the forseeable future because this is one company that has finally figured out how to provide excellent cable modem service.
Bill
@home made a fatal flaw by trying to offer more than they could offer. 10Mbps access speeds. Having basically a T3 for every customer to the internet is business suicide and was purely moronic for them to ever have offered. (Example, they' failed.)
T-1 speeds are plenty fast enough, I just want the latency to drop. I dare anyone (other than in Chicago) to get a T-1 for 5 times the price they pay for a cable modem.. Ok I can already hear the "well I can run a server, bla bla waaaah,waaaah. Yes you can on a Real T-1 and you are paying through the budd mercilessly for it. A T-1 is from $700 - $1500 a month USD and this gives you nothing but a wire from A to B no net access at all. you need to pay another $400 - $800 a month for that. So you're paying $1100 to $2300 USD a month for a T-1 line... 1.5Mbps (MAX, you usually get much less) and the right to run servers, porn sites, warez sites. whatever...
You have a residental cable modem, you pay $40.0 - $60.00 a month for T-1 like speeds for download so you get the net effect that the guy being mercilessly raped by the phone company and ISP does for a miniscule fraction.
and now we bitch about it. Good grief, Us americans are a bunch of snotty spoiled brats. No wonder the rest of the world cant stand us.
I agree, that most of us signed up under the old advertising which promise things that were never possible, and we knew it. and now we are looking for a reason to complain about it... Just like how we get pissed when the police start enforcing the traffic laws on our stretch of highway to work. we are minorly inconvienced and that pisses us off.
My question? what are your alternatives? DSL isnt as fast as 1.5Mbps (some are but it's rare, very rare) sattelite? please dont mention that, I dont need to laugh that hard.. can we say 3sec ping times at the minimum? What have any of you done to create any free alternatives? 802.11b freenets are super easy to create and cost peanuts to build the hardware. (Granted you will never get your precious 10Mbps back. never ever unless you buy your own T-3)
It is about time that people quit whining and start acting. every one of the problems we face today can be solved without billions of dollars, and special laws or lawyers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't have any question that this is a good move. First of all, 1.5mb is hardly a strict cap ( I have never pulled that much on Cox@home). @home's big mistake (well, one of them) was to give unlimited bandwith - so those who downloaded gigs of warez every month payed just as much as my gradmother who checked her email once a week.
If you're an average user, this won't effect you. I do lots of downloading, so speed is important to me. But the fact of the matter is I've never seen download speeds over 375 kbps on my @Home cable line. The other reason it won't effect the average user is most users just surf, and when you surf the bottleneck is almost always the web site's server. There is no realistic difference between 5 mbps and 375 kbps when surfing normal sites. And even places with large images/video, 375 kbps is really VERY fast. The only people negitivly effected by this are those who were running ISO mirrors and the like.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Yes, it's true, and it's national. I don't like it, but I'm no longer complaining. Yes, I used to be able to get ~400,000 bytes/sec.. but I can see how selling a $3000/mo connection for $45/mo might be a cause for bankrupcy.
Same thing has happined with the local telco/isp (a rural telco co-op) in my hometown. Because the rather small city has two switchhouses, almost everyone within city limits could get a flavor of 2.1 Mbps SDSL. For $39 per month, no less. The telco tried hard to keep up with the bandwidth usage, but after their second T3 plus an OC3, they gave up and capped thruput to 1 Mbps for everyone on the $39 rate. Static IPs are now an additional $5 per IP and multiple computers per DSL "modem" are no longer supported (but they do continue to work). Still, $44 per month for 1Mbps SDSL with a static IP is a hell of a deal. Yet, folks continue to moan that they're no longer getting the world for $39.
The upload limit has been 12,800 bytes/s for the last year. (I'm using bytes, because nobody seems to understand the diff between KB, Kb, Mbps, MB, etc).
I hear you. Folks around town confuse them as well, and some will even toss MHz into the mix. Yikes!
I can see the blocking of P2P systems since TimeWarner DOES own all the content people are trying to share. The problem is they don't actually watch what you do. They figure, port 1214... Kazaa, shut him down. But when is the line drawn for LEGITIMATE USE?
<sarcasm>AOL Time Warner Inc. defines "legitimate use" as HTTP GET and POST requests on port 80 to web sites operated by AOL Time Warner Inc.</sarcasm>
Will I retire or break 10K?
I signed up with @home/ATT as soon as it was available in my area (Silicon Valley), and that was almost 2 years ago. Here's what the progression has been in my bandwidth:
Date............Download.....Upload
Mar 2000.....4.5 Mb.........1.5 Mb
Sept 2000....4.5 Mb.........128 Kb
Dec 20001....1.5 Mb.........128 Kb
But I'm still paying the same price! If this continues, soon I'll be better off with IDSL, the only DSL service offered in my area.
The future isn't what it used to be.
Overall, it sucks pretty bad and it hasn't gotten any better in the past few weeks. If you have a choice between DSL & cable modem, I highly recommend DSL.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
I have/had @Home through ComCast. I sometimes spiked at 2Mbps, but 1.5Mbps was pretty much the average top speed I got. What I'd like to see is an increase in uplink speed. Doubt I'll see it, but that's what I care more about. I'm stuck with a lousy 50kbps uplink which sucks since I have 3 computers at home, 1 at work, and I use them all from work or home.
Honestly, it's hard to find sites where I can download faster than 200kbps anyway, so a more than 1.5Mbps wouldn't do me much good anyway.
So, basically, you're complaining that for fifty dollars a month, you're *only* getting download speeds of a T1, which still go for a hell of a lot more?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Which brings me to my second point... bandwidth doesn't come cheap, y'know. Exactly what were you expecting for $35-$40 a month??!? In my area anyhow, the cable ISP I work for is EASILY the cheapest per meg per month on the download side. The alternatives are DSL, which usually only offers up to 1Mb download, and that's if you're damn close to their equipment, and it's around $120-$130 a month for that download speed, once you include your ISP fees. There's always a T1, but is anyone really up for $700 a month for the same download speed as a single cable modem? Cable modems are THE best "value" (much as I hate that word) for heavy downloaders available, but we still have to make money, too. You're not charged by the meg for your downloads, but WE ARE. If everyone ran uncapped, all the time, we'd probably pull an @Home too, and go bankrupt.
If you want something to bitch about, bitch about the ACL's that don't allow personal web servers, or the lack of the option for a static IP. Now there, you've got my sympathy. But as for the speed? Think of the uncapped speeds you got for years as a gift, not an expectation.
The Free desktop that Just Works
I really feel for them.
AT&T limiting to 1.5 Mbit incoming should be plenty for a home user. If you need a T3 or higher of incoming bandwidth, you have a more serious porn addiction and should seek help.
As for outbound, 256K, I'd wager. I was just about to put MRTG on my firewall machine and toss some files out to Exodus to see how I perform outbound.
I'm an AT&T customer, formerly MediaOne in NH, for the record, and off of fast sites, MS Downloads, or our servers at Exodus, I can push 1.8/2.0 Mbit coming down, but I wouldn't complain about only getting 1.5.
I see one maggot, it all gets thrown away -- My Fiancee
I'm trying really *really* hard to feel your pain, but here in auckland, NZ the fastest we can get at flat rate is 128k DSL. Anyone want to email me some bandwidth? (you can attach *anything* to a Eudora email :)
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
I worked at an ISP this summer and talked a lot with a guy who used to work at the local cable ISP. He said that through experimentation, the cable company found that an upstream cap of 64kbps/128kbps limits the user to a downstream of 512kbps/1Mbps, because the user's system cannot send ACKs fast enough to keep the stream coming any faster. So even if you don't have an explicit downstream cap, an upstream cap approximately caps downstream at eight times that.
The software is supposed to be a VNC-Type program that helps Service Reps service computers. Basically I see this as a way for them to not only monitor, but have their way with your system. Along with this software also comes a real annoying Internet Explorer with Charter MSN crap everywhere, diabling network shares, and reformating TCP/IP to their network. Basically everything you can do yourself, but they won't tell you because they want you to install their software.
The whole thing stinks and the company is hiding behind lawyers and PR reps to try and get the whole situation worked out. Basically they released a new service, and the MadLUG guys were on them in 2 days when they noticed weird activity.
Moral of the story ... don't screw with geeks ... we'll find you ... we know who you are :-)
SuperDuG
Haven't noticed a huge speed difference though
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
DNS stopped responding every other day for me.
I finally said "screw it" and used Verizon's DNS servers. I haven't had any problems since.
The DNS servers are
4.2.2.1
4.2.2.2
Nice, simple, and easy to remember.
Everything went really smoothly. No dropped service except for a few hours, but I'm not entirely sure that wasn't just some random glitch completely unrelated to all the goings on. I think the only thing changing in my service is my email address, from @home.com to @home.net
:) pretty good speed all the time.
And I've been happy with the service just when it's operating as normal. I think part of it is not many people in my neighborhood are on cable
No sig for you.
A T1 is technically 1.533Mbps.
Actually... it is 1.544 Mbps. 24 8 bit channels = 192 + 1 framing bit times 8000 frames per second = 1544000 bits per second. The 1 framing bit per 193 bits drops the usable rate to 1536000 bits per second.
Everything you ever wanted to know about T1 but were afraid to ask.
forth ?love if honk then
I have my uplink capped at 15k/sec. It NEVER goes above that, it always maxes out at a crappy 15k. My service used to be fast, but I never get above 50k/sec. download and 15k/sec upload. Anyone else have this problem? (My service used to be AT&T @Home, then CableOne bought the service and speed went to hell, but reliably increased.)
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
I'm on Comcast@Home in Philadelphia. According to a letter I received from Comcast, as part of the impending switchover to Comcast High-Speed Internet, I need to have my current 3 year-old cable modem replaced. I have to schedule an appointment for someone to come out and do this, though it is nothing more than unhooking the old cable modem, and replacing the new one, and probably changing from my beloved static IP to DHCP. So I'll have to waste a vacation day waiting for a tech who's probably less qualified than I am, to come out and do something I could do myself if they'd let me.
I put up with upload speed caps. I put up with @Home shutting down their IRC server because they were too incompetent to maintain it and keep assholes from abusing it. I put up with them restricting the Usenet groups I can read. I put up with some majorly spotty mail services. And now, Comcast states they have no plans to run their own Usenet servers once they are out from under the @Home umbrella. AT&T, who Comcast plans to merge with, is tightening the leash in other ways.
I have to ask myself, what the fuck am I paying for? Crappy mail, throttled speeds, no Usenet and no ISP-run IRC?
I've been pondering switching over to DSL, where I'll get 2 static IPs from SpeakEasy, and can do everything that I'm doing now and more, but without having to worry about Comcast putting their boot to my throat at some point for violating their sacred ToS. I'll run my own Goddamned mail server, web server, and DNS, and it'll be a hell of a sight more reliable than the ones I paid someone else to run.
So, Comcast, Excite@Home, and AT&T, thanks for helping me decide that I can find a better ISP than any of you.
~Philly
3mpbs is not a "gift" if its in the contract, butthead.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
oh my god! the they are SO evil, you are getting a decent connection for to the internet for like $30 dollars more than cable. Oh you should just switch from them and use that wonderful 56K modem, oh that cost $15 dollars a month for an extra phone line, oh it also cost another $15-20 dollars a month for a decent ISP. Oh you are so getting ripped off by those evil Charter people! I feel SO sorry for you!
(btw if your ping times are worse than 56K (generally above 400 for most modern games with many clients) I apologize for all previous statements )
Happily sucking down some Linux ISOs at 273 KB/sec, as reported by both my download manager and interface stats of my Netscreen firewall.
W00t!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
HMMM - so how do you know that the $65 includes the cable cost? My attbi account has a distinct cable and internet connection fee. They are separate!
Further, the cost has gone up in the last year and the service has gotten much worst with the demise of @home. My email account got smoked. My download bandwidth has been cut in half. I had no service for around a week.. So how can the movement to attbi be a good thing?
I'll be turning in my modem Monday and going to direct TV dsl!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
I am not brilliant enough at Linux to help you, but it seems that AT&T have done something on their network that causes non standard Windows default MTU, MSS, RWIN and TTL settings to be severely dimished in service. I had tweaked mine for @Home speed, but since moving over to AT&T Broadband, I saw a progression to worse and worse service. Once I switched it back to its defaults, I started getting high speed access again.
The Windows settings I currently have are:
- MTU is 1500
- MSS is set to 0
- RWIN is set to 0
- TTL is set to 0
. I don't know how that directly applies to Linux or where to change it, but maybe some brilliant hacker can help.I tried setting it back after reading something on AT&T's site.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Let me get this straight, you pay $40 or so a month for your cable access, right? Boo freaking hoo, poor you, only T-1 speeds. How'd you like to pay for that T-1 to the tune of over $1000/mo?
The unsig!
I think the point is that speeds are relative, and if i was getting 4mb/s before, i can reasonably be unhappy when it gets capped at 1.5, and often is way slower. On top of the bandwidth problem, the dns servers seem to be really unreliable. I routinely get 'unknown host' errors when trying to go to frequently visited sites like google or slashdot. As somebody else mentioned, the news servers sometimes don't work, and lastly, sometimes I get 'dhcp server unreachable' for hours.
In short, AT&T has really managed to f&%k up what previously was a pretty awesome service. That's my experience in SF bay area.
I remember quite clearly that the contract I had with AT&T @Home didn't say a damn thing about bandwidth. Why don't you scan in a copy of your agreement and post it on a web page, with the parts that have been violated underlined.
(What I'm saying is, I don't believe your claim that the terms of your agreement have been violated.)
I presume that your ISP is using the G.Lite implementation of ADSL which dictates 1.5 Mbps downstream and 512Kbps upstream
Check these slides out for more info
Description of G.Lite
http://www.ieee-occs.org/dsl_lite/sld009.htm
Diagram
http://www.ieee-occs.org/dsl_lite/sld010.htm"
And contrary to what someone said earlier, some of us DO understand the difference between Mbps and KBps, etc, etc. It's all standard networking/ telecom terminology.
I work on satellite IP, and you can get 500ms-700ms ping times with a good system.
Its still more latency than you want with games or even ssh, but for web-surfing its fine. With the added bandwidth (right now I can go 4.5 mbit to a single remote, downstream) you dont even notice the latency.
Next, they send a CD with all kinds of ominous warnings about how if I didn't run it by a certain date to install their new software, my access would be interrupted. I wasn't sure what software was necessary, since I currently use no special software, but I decided to go ahead anyway. Big mistake. It tried to update my email account to my new aol-luser account name and update the mail servers. But, I have both Outlook and outlook express (No comments that I should just use linux, I use multiple OSes, including windows thanks). So it didn't bother to ask, added the account to outlook express, even though I use outlook for mail.
Next, it completely fucked my browser over. It added a ton of bookmarks, it added a ton of links, and it changed my homepage to comcast's website. That was easy enough to reverse, but then it pulled an X10 on me: The little spinny icon that is animated when a page is loading was changed to comcast's logo. And they added "provided by comcast" to the name of the program that goes on the titlebar. I am dreading having to figure out which registry keys I will need to edit to change that back. At least it didn't change the icons for any file types like X10 does.
But overall I'm pissed. I can handle having my email address change, and having to change service. But did they really think that those email addresses were acceptable? A lot of people are going to want them changed (which is probably why their phone has been busy for 3 solid days). The rest will deal with it, but be pissed nonetheless. And I most certainely did not ask for them to fuck with my programs and settings. There is nothing more enraging than to have a program change your customized settings on things without so much as asking.
And did I mention the new support tool they isntalled? When I complained about my email address I discovered that it was sending all kinds of info to them about my system. Now this makes sense to help diagnose problems, but it was sending configurations, what programs were running, system info, and about a half dozen other categories of stuff. This is extremely intrusive and it is only vaguely alluded to.
When I got my cable modem, all they did was get my ethernet card's MAC address, plug in the cable modem, and active that MAC address at their headquarters. Now they think they have free access to my computer. I'm not pleased, but as usual there is no alternative for me to comcast.
>Well, as my warez kiddie neighbor's son found out last week, they are capping uploads to 10MB/day and downloads to 150MB/day. After that point, their filters drop about 25% of your packets and the connection is pretty much useless until midnight.
Oh yeah, that strategy is a real winner.
Read that newsgroup, or search on deja for "leaky bucket" on the various direcpc newsgroups and enjoy how absolutely pathetic that solution really is.
If my provider did that to me I'd drop them so fast I'd ask for the other half of the day back. That and I'd avoid buying anything their company touches, ever. For the rest of my life. Period.
If I get internet I expect it to be at least reliable to the point that the provider doesn't purposely cause my connection to fail. Yuck!
>I will be sticking with TW for the forseeable future because this is one company that has finally figured out how to provide excellent cable modem service.
If alt.satellite.direcpc has anything to say, you may as well stick with them. Once all their real users drop off (you know, the ones that reccomend the service to the light users so the internet company can make more money) the speed will be ultra snappy.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Or is this just a sneaky underhanded way to make people buy the more expensive business plans just to run a teeny little bit of server apps?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Tell more about this 4Gb limit. I'm fairly sure I break that the first week of the month. So far, no signs of being limited...
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I'm sorry. Maybe I didn't hear that correctly. Are you implying that the rate was so tremendously greater than that.. so much that you're going to actually MISS the reduction in bandwidth?
Sorry. I might be overreacting here, but the fact of the matter is, you're still getting quite a nice chunk of bandwidth for a small fraction of what it would cost if you were to get the same speed T1 line. 1.5mbps is a CD each hour. Even if you're into somewhat less than legitimate file trasfering, you're still fighting the upstream caps of everyone else, so how critical is this anyways.
Ok.. I'm going to stop ranting now. Have a nice day.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
The telco's stopped reliance on non packet switched networks.
First off you gotta understand how most of the telco copper is utilized. Whenever you make a phone call, the copper between you and the person on the other end is built on the spot. It connects your line, to the Central office, then the CO looks for some free copper to connect to the CO that is servicing the person recieving your call. To quote the book Nerds2.0.1 "It's like if you were taking a trip from LA to D.C., and just for your car alone you took up all the lanes until you finished your trip"
Now i'm pretty sure calls do hit a packet based network somewhere along the way, like on sprints fiber optic long distance network, but i'll get to that in a minute.
So locally, you have all this potential bandwidth that could be saved if we were all using IP phones and such. Unfortunately the equipment to upgrade this network still costs an arm and a leg (i.e. cable or dsl modems) So standard POTS service is still around for 1 good reason, the price of manufacturing the equipment hasn't become cheap enough for the cost to come from either the consumer or AT&T. Give fab technology a few years to catch up because eventually all telco's will need to force an upgrade to save on costs.
Back to the major backbone providers. As with any major telco they have extremely overpaid executives with salaries that would make a MLB player envy. Thats problem #1. Problem #2 is they are slow to adopt things like Internet2 and IPV6 because of the "prohibitivly high costs of upgrading" Well maybe if they didn't have 14 guys getting paid 10 million a year they could afford to have us "peons" perform the upgrades and do the support for the transition.
Change scares these people, but without change there is no progress, and without progress well, I can't really tell you the value of progress but sitting here in my centrally heated home with indoor plumbing and a computer is a helluva lot better than hunting animals with spears or foraging some bushes for berries. I think I'll go microwave me a burrito right now.
When I explain to people who ask that my DSL connection costs me about $200/month, they
look at me funny. (That's $109 to the ISP,
80-something to the telco, a voice line is included in that of course, with a pretty good
voice mail system).
Now, every time I hear about how cable users
are being screwed, I look at my 1.5 rate (both
directions), my static netblock, my own primary
dns server, and my http box, and I just laugh.
Of course, I'm typing this on the 49k modem line at my family's farmhouse since I'm on holiday,
trying to be grateful that we even have a PHONE out here, and that it isn't a PARTY LINE. It wasn't very long ago at all that you couldn't get
a private line, much less a data line.
Heck, I'm grateful that I don't have to haul water from a well. That wasn't very long ago either!
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I've got a few friends that used to NEVER see over 768.... but now they're seeing nearly 1.5 quite often. At least in this area, the "power users" (kids sucking down gigs of porn constantly, gnutella, etc..) are no longer soaking up all of the bandwidth. It's being shared. In a fairly nice way.
the only people that i know of that are complaining are the same folks that think getting 6mbit down for $40/mo is too expensive.. and they wanted it cheaper.
Come on, people. Be realistic here...
I used DocsDiag - a Java DOCSIS SNMP query applet on my iBook, a partial report is below. This is given to my modem from a DOCSIS cable headend. Note, the TFTP path shows the configuration which ATT gives me - indicating 1.5M upstream, 300k downstream with 3 MAC addresses allowed.
QoS max upstream bandwidth = 300000 bps /DOCSIS/1500x300st-3
QoS max downstream bandwidth = 1500000 bps
Configuration filename =
Performance on ATT/MediaOne/RR's network has been quite acceptable - both peak and non-peak hours., with the exception of last Christmas when they announced cable Internet access and oversold it. They acquired additional capacity in late February and things have been fine since then.
Reliability, however is another story with ATT, as their customer service is quite brain-dead. I had an outage for almost 6 days and they wouldn't roll a truck to replace my fried USR CMX because of the @Home switchover. Lame asses. Never really had a problem with them until then.
Happy holidays.
-Pat
When I first got my cable modem about a year ago, I had roughly 4 megabits coming down, and 128k upstream PER IP Address.
The way this worked was that I'd pay an extra $5 a month per IP address, and the computer that went on it got a seperate download/upload stream. I loved this because I could do file xfers on one computer, and play Quake on the other without the ping times being affected.
However, since @Home went down things changed a bit. I have 3 computers on my network, 2 of them had IP addresses I was paying for. Now the 3rd one suddenly has an internet connection. (I found this out when Media Player suddenly asked me if I wanted to update.. yah right.)
So now all the computers on my network have an IP address, but the cost of that is all 3 of them share the 128k upstream. This is a bit of a pain because VNC doesn't work so well across them. Guess I'll have to set up a router if I want that to work, I was hoping to avoid doing that.
Anyway, I don't know if AT&T is going to continue charging me the $5 a month or not. I realy wish it'd go back to the way it was. The 1.5 megabit cap doesn't bother me for now, but the upstream limit is really bugging me.
Some might wonder why I don't just switch to DSL. I'll tell you why. I live very close to where I work, so I'd likely have the same DSL provider. My company pays a great deal of money per month to get a dedicated DSL line that is supposed to be up all the time. And why not? They have their web server and mailserver and so on running on it.
One day the DSL line went down. And you know what happend? The DSL provider pointed to the phone company, the phone company pointed to the ISP, and the ISP pointed to the DSL provider again. We were down for 7 (seven) days. 7 DAYS!!! In the times of dot-bombs, you do NOT want your webserver down for 7 days.
So I decided to stay with AT&T. If my internet connection goes down, I have one phone number to call. I just hope they get their act together.
"Derp de derp."
No, we were spoiled. We were sold y, and received x for quite a while. Economic downturn and the logisticals requre that we now receive only what they originally promised, not more as we've become accustomed.
On a side note... AT&T has been contemplating these very events for over 4 months now. They've had a very long time to set up for this. attbi's network is seperate and wholly new(afaik) from AT&T's WorldNet service. This should leave plenty of bandwidth for us all, seeing as they almost assuredly left some room for growth.
I'm thankful that AT&T was so forward-thinking in this entire ordeal. Had they not been so insightful, we(AT&T users) might all be up shit creek now.
Moderators: If you have to look up any of the terms I've used, don't moderate me. You're probably confused. Read the Moderator Guidlines before doing anything drastic.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I'm getting 175Kb/sec while downloading OpenOffice.
IIRC I got 430Kb/sec while downloading a build last time, but admittedly that was a LONG time ago.
oh well, compared to dialup......
Comcast around here has the quickest speeds I have ever seen. I get 600k/sec downloads, they don't cap it what so ever. My friend in Michigan, used to get 450k/sec downloads. Either way, I hope they don't go capping my line. Not sure if I am affected, or its the other way around. I am tired, and shouldn't be writting this. Oh well, still intresting for me to note the d/l speeds. Oh, and I get 300k/sec upstream, which is pretty amazing :)
until (succeed) try { again(); }
That ain't right... at times I've gotten 5Mb downstream (that's ~650KBps). Yes, that means over a meg every 2 seconds.
My friend, who got a cable modem a year before me (that would be around 1998 for him) used to get 1+Mb uploads all the time.
And this was on the TCI/ATT/@home cable network in the Bay Area, which later was capped to 128Kb upstream, and now 1.5Mb downstream. It sooooo sucks.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
When I set up a linux gateway to be used on @home's network, I also couldn't DHCP through linux. I'm not sure if it is even needed anymore, as ATTBI seems to allow any damn hostname you want, but with @home I had to specify a hostname when DHCPing:
'dhcpcd -h C123456-A eth0' did the trick for me. Without that, I'd always time out.
Of course, you must replace that hostname with whatever is assigned to you.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The way to calculate this is based on having to send one upstream TCP ACK for every downstream TCP data packet. Assuming a 1500 byte MTU (i.e. packet size = max) for the downstream packets, and a 40 byte TCP/IP ACK packet, you end up with the key ratio being 37.5 - if your upstream is >= 37.5 times faster than your downstream, TCP download sessions are limited to 37.5 * the upstream bandwidth, because you need 1/37.5 times the downstream bandwidth just to send the TCP ACKs fast enough to keep up.
So a 128 Kbps upstream limits you to at most 4.8 Mbps downstream, not 1 Mbps (latter would hold only if your MTU was 320 bytes). And if you are doing anything else in the upstream direction, you'll end up reducing download speed further.
For a canned Linux QoS/shaping setup that will work for most broadband connections, and solve the upstream ACK issue, see the Linux 2.4 Advanced Routing HOWTO. For the truly geeky, there are potential solutions to the asymmetric bandwidth issue - do a Google search for TCP ACK filtering, sender adaptation and ACK reconstruction. However, these all involve modified TCP stacks on sender and receiver, so you'd have to use some sort of proxy located upstream of the constrained link, or get the servers of the world to modify their TCP stacks...
I know a t-3 is 45 Mbps. but you cant buy a 10Mbps pipe so you have to buy the next step which is cheaper than 10 T-1's and the equipment to multiplex them. also for the many of you whining about the prices I quote. thoseare real world prices from my last round with the telcos and ISP AT&T was the cheapest for the T-1's (I have 5 of them, 4 go to sattelite offices 1 to the net) and net access. yes we sign multi year contracts, but the companies legal department is really good at breaking them when we want to, so I have to shop T-1 and Net access prices yearly. (management likes to tourment me as we changed all the T-1 circuts from MCI to AT&T last year... oh yeah I loved working 17 hour days for 3 days in a row to switch all offices over to the new circuits.)
again I issue my challenge... Get a T-1 in your house with Net access for 5 times the cost of your Cable modem. it cant be done.
Also I manage a Heughes sattelite link to corperate. No "shared" bandwidth like drect PC and I get on a really good day 700ms pings, most of the time we get 3-4 second pings. and corperate went with this to get decent bandwidth and it was cheaper than a T-1 from here to Colorado. (we move about 3gb of video daily and usually only during the hours from 4-7pm.. some spill off to later happens often. I am glad we dont have to move more video like that than we already do.) but I still hate the sattelite link. (espically during snowstorms and heavy rain.. and I get a call from the NOC wanting me to fix the link... Ahem, ok I'll stop it from snowing/raining.... why cant they look at the weather chanel before they call us?
Oh well..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have att in Chicago here, and I had been judging my speed based on what I considered a local fast debian mirror (~500 kpbs). Someone recommended bandwidthplace to get a better measurement. I've tried this at different times of the day, and the best I ever get is 1.2Mbps
There are a couple other sites I've found that do a test like this, and they give similar results.
here's a site that links to a whole bunch:
http://home.cfl.rr.com/eaa/Bandwidth.htm
NO.. actually, most @home sales just say 'lightning fast'.. nowhere does it give any 'actual' bandwidth.
First... A T1 Is 1.544Mbps full-duplex.
Cable is not, as you said.
A T3 is 45Mbps, or 28 T1's. (44.376Mbps)
And even the rates you specify cannot realistically be supported.. not if people actually start USING the bandwidth they bought. If everyone were to max out their bandwidth, the network would grind to a halt.... and these companies will further restrict what you can use. Remember... what they can offer is entirely based on how people use it as much as it is their network capacity.
C'mon... 20,000 people with 1Mbps? That's 20Gbps... or 2 OC-192's... that's some serious, serious bandwidth.
1544000 bps is *exactly* 1.544 Mbps.
When you deal in bits, you deal in K=1000. Always. Especially with regards to data transmission rates.
A kilobit is 1000 bits, just like a kilogram is 1000 grams. A megabit is 1000 kilobits. Etc.
K=1024 is used always to refer to memory, and usually to refer to storage, and always in bytes, not bits. It's the exception to the rule.
The 1.5mbps cap bothers me because the service continues to get worse, but the price stays the same. I'm now paying the same amount of money for a dynamic IP, with slower speeds, and continued outages. Our area has had severe problems with outages since August - the cable modem loses signal and resets itself every 5 minutes. Despite repeated calls, emails, and chats to complain AT&T, they continue to not deal with the problem, they continue to charge us full price for the service, and it continues to get worse.
The 1.5mbps cap is just another straw on the camel's back.
forced my local cablemodem ISP out of business. With the original, I got 512K both directions. Not wanting to be a comcast customer, nor have my service interrupted while they figured out how to change the infrastructure, I stayed with my old ISP who now offers DSL instead. Unfortunately, being governed by sprint, I am now paying the same amount, but being capped outbound at 128K. I still get 512 down, however. I haven't had the chance to test my servers much yet, but it seems to be OK. I hate that I'm paying the same amount for less bandwidth though.
My service has always been capped at 1.5M down, 30M up. (Or so they claim. In practice, I get about 100kbps down, and 15kbps up... sometimes more on the down, but never more on the up. Dishonest bastards.)
:) )
On top of that, the price is probably more than anyone is used to - 40$/month. Granted, they don't monitor the network worth jack, so I can do whatever I want with that connection, and run all my systems behind it. (Like most geeks don't, right?
I honestly can't see what people would do with that much downward bandwidth. I could definately use an extra 10kbps up, simply due to the fact that I share the bandwidth with my brother as well, but also because I tend to upload a substantial amount to various servers as well. I'd happily take a 25-40kbps downward bandwidth cut if I could have an extra 10kbps up.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
216.148.227.68 has been having some huge problems with resolving hosts. It seems to be able to resolve for about 20 min's then it crashes
I've seen that too. The weird thing is that nslookup apparently continues to work, but no applications can do lookups. Surprising, restarting the TCP/IP stack (I'm on Mac OS X) often seems to solve it for another 20 minutes. Weird.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas