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3 Megabit Cable Modems, Anyone?
joelav22 writes: "I've got to move to San Francisco! RCN has upgraded current customers to 3 megabits of bandwith for no extra charge. In the days of all the bandwith chopping and caps, this is definitely a welcome trend. I hope ATT and Comcast can take a hint."
You can probably get away with things like that if you use transparent proxies to do web page caching, and so on. Or traffic shaping to make individual connections a little slower.
Call me suspicious, but I bet they have all sorts of tricks to keep the actual usage past their network down.
Sorry for being cynical, but...
Why should I even care for 3 Mbit cable modems if sometimes my provider can even sustain a 500k connection?
3Mb would imply a complete restructure on most cable providers and I doubt that they would invest that kind of money.
Long live TUX!
That is nice. I like being a whore.
at that rate of download I'll run out of things to download.
I noticed that no mention was made of upload speeds. How much do you want to bet they're capped at 128Kbps...
Torg, come out of the spaceship. Nothing can stop Torg.
But isnt bandwith... not free?
Maybe something slipped past me.
First bandwith = free
Then bandwith = $$$
Now... ?
What is causing these changes?
Ah ha! Smoke and mirrors my good friend!
http://www.angryburrito.com/ The best, completely unfinished software review site ever.
The article isn't much clear about the actual speed: it is 3 megabytes per second (usually written MBps) or 3 megabit per second (Mbps, as they wrote)? I believe that usually connection speed is measured in Mbps (bits, not bytes), but they may have different habits...
Way to go, RCN! And take this, ATT, Comcast ;)
The inaccuracy was free of charge. It's only free for customers paying the Gold and Platinum ResiLink packages. For all other bundles, there is a price increase between $10 to $25 for the 3Mbits service.
I'm trying not to be cynical about any tricks that they may try to pull, whilst the marketing boys yell from the rooftops about the speed. Looking on the face of it, this is such a good push in the right direction. Now only if a supplier in Australia would step forward with a decent plan so that we can stop being raped by Telstra's 3Gb limit and crappy reliability. (Note: I have gone back to dial-up)
?
That is an excellent point. I wonder how they even came up with 3 MBit measurement in this case? It's not like people want to access the ISPs servers all the time anyway.
After ATT bought out our local cable company almost 2 years ago, they had canceled the imminent plans to upgrade my neighborhood. Now 18 months later, they finally got around to competing the job. Having a true 2-way broadband connection is so sweet, I can live with that for a long time to come. By the time they get back around to us again, fixed wireless will likely be the standard.
Phoenix
Shouldn't that be "3 Megabits per second" not megabytes?? 3Mbps (megabits-per-second) equates to theoretical maximum of 384 Kilobytes a second download, not 3 megabytes..doesn't it? :-)
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
1. Give Away Bandwith
2. ???
3. Profit
http://www.angryburrito.com/ The best, completely unfinished software review site ever.
What's the upstream capacity?
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
PS. No matter how much tweaking I do in Windows I alway get a better throughput on my Linux partitions. I've tested this with multiple *nix/win* operating systems, configs, and computers and am still looking for more information on why.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
But it leaves you with a tough choice:
Incidentally, I'm in the first category, but I'm beginning to feel like I've been pretty stupid. Sure, I understand that "all you can eat" is just marketing blurb, and that the fees charged for retail flat rate services don't cover the ISP costs of using them to their full capacity. But why would the majority of customers understand or accept that? They're sold as always on, flat rate, all you can eat. A typical user (i.e. Joe Windows) would expect to be able to use them as such, which is why all of these schemes are doomed from the get go, and are just short term marketing schemes to attract customers (1. Burn money to attract customers away from other company's profitable schemes, 2. ..., 3. Profit!).
And so I'm inclined to say go for it, and leech like you've never leeched before. I know that's unsustainable, but the first sin is being committed by ISP's allowing their marketing droids to sell services as being all-you-can-eat, when that's just not true. Perhaps when they offer services based on an actual sustainable model them then we could consider supporting them. But as long as they're selling services that we know aren't going to work, purely to attract customers in the short term, then there's little point in being the only guy on the block trying to play by the spirit of the rules, because the letter of rules are going to change in the mid term anyway.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I have RCN at home (zip : 94401, San Mateo, CA - aka San Francisco Bay area). They give me the combo package with phone + cable TV + broadband.
:-)
:-)
/LinuxLover
The most impressed part gotta be their broadband. here are some stats
- mozilla dowload speed : 324 kB/s ( ~= 2.5 Mbps!!)
- people dowload from me on Limewire around 120 KB/s ( ~= 1Mbps)
Now that is just leaps better compared to any DSL or cable here. Eat that AT & Pacbell
My new found obsession is Furthur (furthernet.com). And right now people are downloading from me @ 50KB/s. A buddy of mine is also on Furthur, but his upstream is capped at 15KB/s (~= 128 kbps). I told him about RCN and he is *seriously* thinking about moving to a place where he can get RCN
So people, please, if you are San Francisco Bay area give these guys a try. I have nothing but good things to say about RCN.
IF you need further info see my website or drop me an email.
My cable provider (Telewest) in Edinburgh recently had us all upgrading to 1Mbit/sec download with 256kbit/sec upload.
The cost of this is £39/month I think (it's on my girlfriends bill!). They also went and dropped to 512kbit/sec bandwidth to £25/month.
The prices may be wrong, but the bandwidth isn't.
I know we're way behind Europe and the rest of the World in rolling out broadband, but hopefully moves like this will force BT to speed up the DSL roll-out.
P.S. That's the Edinburgh in Scotland that hardly even 1 in 100,000 Americans can pronounce properly!
Kind of like Prisoners' Dilemma, except that in the end you know no matter what happens the cable company is going to jack up the rates. So yeah, just wget the Internet now and check it out from your hard drives later when the rates go up.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I've had DSL from Telefonica in Spain now for about a year. The prices are similar to those you quote.
;-)
There seems to be loads of competition here to provide DSL and cable services. Six different comms companies have laid fibre in the street I'm in (including BT, funnily enough). Thankfully the city council was organised enough to get them all to do it at the same time.
P.S. For any American's reading, Spain is in Europe
If you already going to move, why not move to Sweden? :-)
I've been using (among 50000 other households) Bredbandsbolaget for 2 years now. True 10Mbit transfer both upload and download. For this great service I pay just 225 SKR/month (approx. US$25). And _no_; I'm not resident of a Campus or something like that. Cable modems are just dull and slow.. ;-)
How rude. I bet you only talk to people like that when you're on your computer.
I've got 100 megs of fiber running into my house, uncapped bandwith, for 65 bucks a month. Life is good when you have broadband...
It's really nice to hear that bandwidth in the USA is increasing... at least in San Fran.
It's SAD that I'm writing this from Tokorozawa, Japan via my 8Mb ADSL (3500yen/month ~= $30) that I've had for 6 months (My modem currently says 6.2Mb down, .842Mb up - I don't negotiate at max, but I'll take it)!!! SAD! I guess that article the other day was right - Japan really DOES get all the cool stuff first...
WAY FIRST! My sister-in-law, who lives about 10 minutes from me, can't get ADSL due to fiber in the middle. That's OK. She can get 2Mb Cable (again, about $30/month) or 100Mb FIBER ($90/month)! FIBER I SAY!
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
I'm in Quebec and both major providers (Bell for ADSL and Videotron for cable) have created new "extreme" plans.
Videotron's gives you 4mbit downstream and 640k upstream, with a cap of 10 gigs per month for each direction. All that for a hefty 60$. Bell has a similar plan, working at 3mbit / 640k, same caps, although they end up charging 70$ per month or so.
These plans are the result of the previous "caps" of 6 gigs / 1 gig which P2P downloaders were going over by orders of magnitude and were paying through the nose. One of my friend ended up paying 215$ for a single month because his upload/download were at 20 gigs each.
I guess these caps and prices may end up moderating file sharing.
I have a RoadRunner, through Time Warner, and have been very happy with the speed and reliability of the service. Each "area" operates very independantly, so service and "culture" is not the same at all TWC offices.
I have previously talked with head of the technical team for the local division on a professional level, and his comments were quite interesting. For instance, the no NAT clause in the contract. They know people have more than one machine behind an IP, but really don't care. They won't do anything about he user unless they suspect bandwidth reselling. The no NAT clause makes it easier for them to drop the user since manytimes it is hard to prove the reselling end of things. Our local time warner office has their own (at the time a talked to him this was the big game) Quake II server. They are very gamer friendly, and realize that is why many of their customers want the service.
I know people here love to bash cable modem providers, but up until now I have absolutely no complaints against mine. I take the back, the retards can't get tv/internet on one bill, I get two bills from them at different times of the month, with different due dates. That sucks.
Anyway, not all providers are bad.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
"I hope ATT and Comcast can take a hint."
I think you meant "I hope ATT and Comcast can take a check," because you aren't getting anything for free from those two price-gouging bastards...
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I'm sure it's really megaBITS per second, otherwise the company would surely have promoted it as 24 megaBITS per second if the speed really was 3 megaBYTES per second (so they could use the larger number). You don't generally see 1.5 megabits per second promoted as 187.5 kilobytes per second. But this does show how reporters are still subject to making technical errors, which I suspect is due to their lack of knowledge of technical details. At least they got the case of Mbps correct.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Telstra upped the bandwidth to 10Mbit/s about half a year ago but this was a while after they introduced a 3GB limit, after which you have to pay 13c/MB(AUD). You can get popular files off their server at 500KB+/s which aren't included in usage though. From anywhere else the monthly allowance just gets eaten up too quickly. I have also got up to 800KB/s off a local edu site. I'm pretty sure they just took off restrictions rather than changing infrastructure.
I was on AT@Home for a year and a half before moving (which happened to be right before @Home died). At one time I could grab 5mbit/sec and sometimes a little more... those were the days...
By the time I moved, I was still getting up to 3mbit/sec. Now I'm on 512kbit fixed wireless at twice the cost, ouch.
What's the news?.... I live in Carroll County Maryland. My provider is Adelphia... I've had 3Mbps down and 256 Kbps up since I got it. While I seldom really hit those speeds, I get close on most occasions. I don't remember ever being as slow as 1.5 Mbps down and they consistently provide well over 200 kbps up
speed test results
I reject your reality
Good old NTT is offering 100Mbs fiber to za home. (if you live in Tokyo, pay the $250 install fee etc) For about ~$70 a month... with providers available for another $20 or less, no bandwidth restrictions. My question would be how long can THAT last.
The US gov should help fund laying fiber everywhere and rebuilding infra. Like with interstate highways, railroads and stuff.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
Suddenly my 10 Mbps downstream/~256 kbps upstream cable modem connection (about $40/month) started to feel like antique. Well, actually it is, since it has been available in Finland since 1997 or so... :-)
And _no_; I'm not a resident of a Campus or something like that.
although that may be lovely news to achieve 3Mb/sec connections -- i still say cable companies should model themselves off of optonline.net's backbone.. granted it's 120K/sec upstream capped now.. but downstream still peaks around 900K/sec.. -- *drools on himself* optonline = NY/CT/NJ area.
I live in Northern NJ, and subscribe to Cablevision. I have their "Optimum Online" service, which is advertised as "100 times faster than modem". Although they won't tell you an official speed ANYWHERE, I have checked my speed with several different bandwidth testors and I get 3Mb down and 1Mb up on a routine basis. Of course, during peak hours, I get nowhere near that, but hey, its the internet, you can' expect it to be all for you.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
I can download with 425 KB/s any time a day, for EUR 45,- a month. My upload is 128 kbit.
@Home has some slight disadvantages though:
- Unreliable mailservers
- Unreliable newsservers
- Expensive helpdesk
- Connection seems to drop for a minute several times a day
I simply took another account with a quality dialup provider for mail and news, and I'm a happy personThis is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
In the NY/NJ/CT tri-state area, we have Optimum Online, a service from which I've often obtained speeds up to 7, 8 Mbits/s.
The upload speed isn't too shabby either, I've sustained uploads at around 1.5 to 2 Mbits/s for periods of more than 1 hour at a time, according to my MRTG graph.
From my experience, RCN is one of the worst cable companies in existance. They are the ONLY cable provider servicing my area (and the surrounding towns for 30ish miles)
In a recent survey, 85% of those who answered said they were dissatisfied with RCN, and would switch if another provider existed.
When I subscribed to their cable TV service, the broadcasts were fuzzy, we had an extremely limited channel selection (no digital service either), and it was more expensive than satelitte, which is what I now subscribe to. In addition, RCN kept bugging me for several months to resubscribe, refused to cancel service, and finally slammed me with a bil for $500 for a decoder needed to view premium channels - the decoder was given to us free when we subscribed 10 years earlier, and worked for only one year.
Their cable modems have been reported to be even worse. I don't subscribe, but have heard horror stories. Subscribers are given old first-gen modems - their service is supposedly painfully slow, and is only a 1-way connection, requiring a dial-up connection on the upstream side. RCN has promised to invest about 75 million into our area to improve their service - this was several years ago, and they have failed to take any action since making the promise.
Of course, the SF customers seem to like them. I live on the east coast in a small town on the brink between suburbia and the rural areas - it's quite different here.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Oddly, they didn't advertise this service at all and I only found out about it after calling them and asking if they had such a service.
Charter seems to be fast and reliable. The only real problem I have with them is that their customer service stinks. They're available 24/7 to not give any meaningful answers to your questions.
It costs $100/month, but it is an option. From the page:
Speeds Up to 3.5Mbps/384Kpbs
IP Addresses 5 Persistent IP Addresses with 6 month lease life
Price $95/month
All that download speed is great, but RCN also happens to block port 80 on all their cable modems. Not only that, but they do it in such a way that if someone tries to connect to your port 80, their connection just hangs forever. Anyway, they stifle the most interesting and useful feature of the Internet, that of empowering individual users to publish their own information. With RCN, you're out of luck unless you want to be stuck with static pages on their server under some URL specified by them - which, by the way, they have the power to change at any time, confusing any users of your site (see the recent domain changes of AT if you don't think this really happens).
A company called Everest has already been offering 3M in Kansas City...
http://www.everestkc.com
Well being a current, and happy, RCN cable Modem customer, their uplaod speed with the standard package is 768Kbps. And I can say back up their claim that you do indeed get these upload speeds. Their network is far less stressed than ATT and I have only had 2 short outages in the 3 years I've had them. I aonly hope this 3Mbps Modem comes to Boston soon!
I've got to move to San Francisco!
Before you make such a spur-of-the-moment, life-changing decision, maybe you'd like to consider that the $50 a month for phat bandwidth will be a drop on the bucket next to your mortgage, and it might be a little hard to get hooked up in your cardboard box.
"Starter homes" in the Bay Area are now close to $500,000... and a lot of those "need work."
Just though I'd let you know!
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
I'm a subscriber of the previous @Home service offered in Canada, now run by Rogers Cable. After @Home went belly up Rogers salvaged what was originally their own network before @Home moved into Canada.
We've just got capped down to 18KB/s (144kbps) upstream from 48KB/s (384kbps) upstream. Downstream has been sliced in the same ratio as well. To add insult to injury our monthly bills have increased 5 bucks on top of it. It's not going to stop there, they're talking about raising it another 5 bucks again!
Their reasoning for this, I was actually told by a tech support guy is, "why should we beat the competition 3 fold for the same price?". I wonder what RCN's motive to beat their competition is. Perhaps it starts with the fact that they _have_ competition.
--
- Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Here in the Toronto area, I'm able to download at a total speed of about 300kbytes/second if i want to.. (Of course, the site must be fast enough to feed that much data). I haven't given it a full stress test, but two transfers at 175k/sec at the same time is definately more than 3 megabits/second on the downstream.
This is the Rogers "Hi Speed" service in Toronto. We were formerly with @home, but since the breakup Rogers has put in place their own infrastructure.
I do get single transfers of 300k/sec+ the odd time..
my parents just got with the 21st century and got a cable modem from Optimum Online. i dunno what their deal is with bandwidth, but i peaked at 905.7K/sec last night, which works out to a little over 7Mbit download with the modem setup exactly as OOL told us to - no tricks. i don't know what's going on, but i can't complain.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Optimum Online in Connecticut caps theirs at 10 outbound. I've downloaded stuff at upwards of 700KB/second.
This must be a slow news day.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I have been getting 3Mbps since I had cable installed about a year ago through Cox (formerly Cox@home). The reliability is pretty good, even though will go out for about 30-60 minutes about once a month and that's always bothersome.
I now get 3 Megabits/sec download (being a cable modem, it, of course, varies, but I'm actually slightly over this sometimes -- I once got 3333kbps). I could understand download speed changing a lot, but what I don't get is my upload -- it's capped at 128 kbps, and I've never reached it. Sometimes in speed tests, I'm below 56kbps, other times I'm near 128 kbps. The download, though, is almost always consistent.
I do want to mention that... a.) Adelphia is now in bankruptcy, but continuing to operate; b.) Their customer support is a wee bit lacking. I'm sure there are some very knowledgable people there, but I tend to get the totally clueless ones. Teaching a computer tech what traceroute is and how you use it is painful. (And if anyone gets Adelphia, I suggest you run your own nameserver. That's a frequent cause of failure -- it arbitrarily goes down from time to time, while my connection stays up.)
Not too significant, but I might as well mention it: Their AUP strictly forbids running any sort of server. (They explicitly name any sort of server you could possibly think of, but also mention that the list is not all-inclusive.) However, I have a server running Apache and ssh hanging out on the web, and occasionally even use it; no one has ever said anything to me. I'm guessing it's the usual "We don't really care, but if Slashdot moves out of Exodus and onto your cable modem, we're going to kick you off," which is certainly understandable.
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suwain_2
Living in the NY Metro area, we prob wont see this for a few years. And when we do, it probably will jack up the rates considerably because all corporations are under the assumption that NY metro customers have money coming out the wazoo. I lived in Albany for 2 years and I had premium cable, sans adult channels, and paid around $60 a month... thats including digital cable with about all the HBO's, Cinemax, Showtime, Starz, and Encore channels. If I were to get that same package on Long Island, it would cost me well over $100/month.
100% Insightful
I'm on Cox's network paying $49.95 and I get between 3-5Mbps on a regular basis.
Why would a cable modem provider have caps on their service at all? It seems to me that if the service isn't busy then somebody gets great service. If the service is busy than everybody shares whatever bandwidth is available.
What would motivate an ISP to prevent their users from using all the bandwidth that they can provide? Why would they try to keep the service only partially utilized?
Vanguard
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Nice... Contrast that to Ontario, where Rogers has dropped their speed from 3 to 1.5, without even making an announcement...
This is in response to someone who said it was not possible for 3Mbps down and would require a revamp of the cable network. This is false as far as ATT goes. I was able to successfully uncap my Motorola SB4100 and get 5Mbps down and 1Mbps up. Although I would not suggest it because I leanred my lesson the hard way and my cable modem has now been cancelled so I'm paying big price now for SDSL.
hmm... having an increased amount of bandwidth would certainly take us one step closer to having the necessary infrastructure for Video-on-Demand.
Any time I have to power cycle a piece of equipment 3 times per day so that it will perform correctly, I put it in the ass-munching category. I'd take consistant, reliable service out of my current service over 3 megabits worth of powercycling.
They need to catch a hint allright...that it's not okay for them to provide crap service because they have a monopoly. This is why I am moving to DSL (yipee!)
Cool news.
Before the excite thing went down, I was getting 550K/sec down from at in the chicago suburbs.
For the first few weeks after excite went out, I, like everyone else on at, was capped at 1.5.
However, they seem to have removed the cap at least somewhat..I normally get anywhere from 250 - 350K/sec on really fast sites. It seems they wanted to do this quietly, but I sure don't mind!
In the days of all the bandwith chopping and caps, this is definitely a welcome trend. I hope ATT and Comcast can take a hint.
Actually I have comcast and when the installer was putting it in I mentioned to my roommate that it was 1.5mb. The installer said it was actually 3mb. I guess they only gaurentee 1.5 and in some areas already have 3mb. Oh, and I am pretty sure it is NOT 1.5mb since I have gotten some transfers at 200KBPS+.
I get about 2.2mbps on roadrunner in florida.
If the cheap line gives people all the bw in the world, nobody is going to buy the expensive one.(Compare to CPU's) If they can reach both the hi and low end markets with the same equipment(just diffirent terms of service) they can make more money. And yes, in theory capping the line is not going to save them bw. Because if someone loads a page or file, it's the same amount of data, regardles of how long it takes. And with several users that just means that the time windows(of when download occurs) are going to everlap more. So for them the same bw is neede anyway.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Sanders! What's going on?
It's MegaModem. She's gone from suck to blow
Thosa' mafia guys sure knows how to getta whadda they want, ehh? Yeah.
Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.
Back when we had a semi local cable company things were groovin'. Now, they were bought by Charter, and after a year or so they reduced everyones service to about 1.8 Mbit. So, I used to be able to down load at a combined 285 k bytes a sec or so, and now only 185 k bytes a second or so.
Now, if they would raise my send from the measly 256 to 512 all would be forgiven.
Juln
It suprises me sometimes how far behind the US is in broadband compared to its northern neighbor.
I got my 4Mbit cable modem around the same release time as Quakeworld in 1996. I had it hooked up to a 100MHZ 486.
I said goodbye to compuserve that year, and have had the same ISP ever since (except for change of ownership)
Move north!
As usual, I'm going to piss off half the world here, but oh well...
I remember the halcyon days of my youth (i.e. two months ago) when I had internet access via Shaw cable. It was only 2.5 megabits, they said, but I'd hit speeds of up to 5.2 (and my stepfather, using his G4, had hit 5.6), repeatedly, reliably, and sustainably. It was very nice. Most of my large downloads (large because then I had time to see how fast they were going) would go at around 380-420KBps, but I hit 520 very often, and, yes, 600KBps and above on several occasions.
So if you want cheap bandwidth, move to San Fran, for sure. Or, move to Canada, and pay $40/mo for almost twice the download (which is the same package they've been offering for years, so it's not going away). Oh, and the routes rock too. 7ms and 5 hops to ftp.ca.debian.org when it was still around. Le sigh.
--Dan
What ftpd daemon are/were you using? ProFTPD can limit the number of connections per host (I set my limit to 2 so people could use a bwoser to see what's on the server & an FTP client to do the download).
And they rule! Whenever we drive by RCN trucks we yell "RCN RULES!"... I think we just kinda scare them though...
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I don't really get it. Here in Louisiana, with Cox, before the @Home crash/burn/switchover, I was uncapped (down) and several times pulled over 500 kb/sec, steady, for several hours. Yes that's right and I'm not making it up. This was with a multisource downloading program. now, since the switchover from @Home, I'm capped at 300kb/sec down. The price has always been $35/mo.
U/L has always been capped at 30 kb/sec up, but I'm not running a server, so it doesn't bother me. So what's the big deal?
Perhaps one of the reasons it works here is that this state is uh... one of the "less technologically advanced" (ha ha ha ha heee hee hee ha ha), and there might not be that many folks in my neighborhood that even know what broadband is or could understand the concept if I explained it to them -- which leaves all the b/w for me!
I talked to a ATT guy last week to transfer my cable internet from my Roseville apt to my new address in Lilydale and he mentioned they are planning on rolling out 3Mbps downstream service soon. The bad part is it will run $90 monthly instead of the $45-50 it is now. He didn't think there would be an associated upstream bump either.
It occurs to me that perhaps one of the biggest problems for rapid deployment of broadband services in the US is that our population centers are, for the most part, very spread out. As a broadband provider, you have to run a hell of a lot more cable, repeaters, etc, to connect the same number of customers as you might in a more densely populated area. I know this is definitely true of Japan, though I don't know how the population is spread out in Sweeden.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Before capping bandwidth and hideously oversubscribing Time Warner provided me with a 5 Mbps cable modem connection in the Tampa Bay area, as measured from downloading a RedHat ISO image from a university FTP server. Those were the days... In any event, cable modem technology supports a lot higher speeds than what users are currently getting.
In the NYC Area, Cablevisions Optimum Online has been providing 10, yes, TEN megabit downlink speeds and one megabit uplink speeds. I can download from my computer at work (Rutgers University) at over 1,000 Kilo*BYTES* a second. Suck it, RCN. CABLEVISION RULES.
You know, I used to have 3 Mbit bandwidth when it was still AT@home.
After they dropped @home, it was cut down to 1.5. Other than being slightly annoyed that I'm paying the same amount for less bandwidth, I don't really miss it.
I can still stream any video I want at the highest settings. Sure, it takes me a little longer to download the latest Redhat distribution or whatever, but usually I don't even get the full 1.5 out of that anyway!
A little more upload speed would be nice so I could stream my mp3s to work with mod_mp3 without having to use lame to cut down the bitrates so far. But mostly 128K is fine for home use, and it's certainly a LOT faster than a dialup connection gives.
We're still not DOCSIS, and we only go up to like 1 Mb/sec max these days (even with @Home before it died). During peak hours, maybe 10KB/sec! Type in 91745 for http://www.dslreports.com/archive/adelphia.net (ignore the first few fastest speeds because they are not from City of Industry) and cringe :(.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I live in NYC and I have the same deal, only I pay more because I dont have a premium cable tv package. For $50/m i get around 6mbit down and 900kbit up. I'm fine with the downstream, but it would be nice if my upstream was a bit higher. Most of the areas around where I live dont support optonline, so I'm one of the lucky ones.
"In the days of all the bandwith chopping and caps, this is definitely a welcome trend" I'm very curious as to why optonline provides such high speeds and no limits with all these other companies over the US going crazy with limiting bandwidth usage, capping speeds, and even going as far as monitoring transfers. I'd hate to see the day when optopnline joins the trend.
In Louisiana when cox broke away from excite@home they gave us a 3mbps downstream and upgraded our crappy 150kbps upstream to 340kbps. Still crappy upload but better.
Could the ISP has found a way to limit the bandwidh at a higher level?
Most of the bottleneck is NOT in the local system, but at the border and regional routers.
If they did find a way to limit it at the regional level and not the modem itself this would exaplin this move...
Cap the modem at 3mb for local transfers and network games within the region.
Allow local users to access p2p connections from the regional network at 3mbs
use a cache [I am very much pro cacheing, BUT only when it is optional]
If using a cache server, then make access to it unrestricted by the measures above.
--
Time is on my side
i feel your pain. with att@home i used to get over a megaBYTE a second to a few major unniversities. thats 8megabit/s, so i was sad when im now capped at 1.5megabit/s.
Yes, downloading shit that you don't want is stupid. I am outraged by trolls like you who consider getting content you want,"leaching", and throwing BS like "unsutainable" around. Loosers who set up ftp robots to download massive quantities of mass produced junk like Britany Spears, Warez, Movies that can be had at the local video store for $3 piss me off. Why downoad software that you will never freaking use, especially cracked backdoored M$ based crap that will burn you? Cable companies who find themselves taxed by such "hoggs" should be able to figure things out and cut the line. Don't confuse the issue and tell people to set up robots to get things they don't want, simply because others are doing it. That would be stupid and it would flood the world with useless trafic.
What most cable companies are doing is tax everyone in a ruinious attempt to make more money. The only cable service here is through Cox. I don't recomend it to the average user as is costs far too much for what they want to get out of the web and they push windblows. See how it works? Both approaches go to zero.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I am moving to Japan -- Saitama prefecture as well (Kumagaya most likely -- wait, is kumagaya in Gunma pref?) -- any advice on getting connected over there? which company to call, what kind to hoop to jump through, etc.
thanks in advance.
if i(we) get modded off-topic, you can write to
qiling *at* charlie _dot_ cns +dot+ iit ^dot^ edu
My life in the land of the rising sun.
no wonder there are SO MANY japanese porn sites...
and speaking of which... it's like 6AM over there, on a saturday... i know that 8Mb DSL is nice and all -- but browsing at 6AM on a saturday just seem a litte... i dunno... overkill
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I live in Boulder, CO and get @HOME. My connection ranges from 1 Mb to 5 Mb. Yes I have seen 5 Mb sustained connections on my Cable modem. It is never a single connection, but when you have several downloads all going 100+ kB a second it adds up real quick. I haven't even done anything illegal. Of course, the highest I have seen on my windows partition is 1 Mb.
I hear all of this complaining but I have never seen any of the problems that everyone seems to talk about. When Excite@Home went under I was down for all of 2 days, then it went back up no problems.
Maybe I am just lucky.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
I doubt we will ever see this; it's all due to economics.
The reason is, the extremely high cost of upstream bandwidth (from an endpoint to the backbone) is what subsidizes the cost of the network. Consumers of bandwidth (end users) get downstream bandwidth for cheap, but are only paying maybe 10% of the cost of that bandwidth. The remaining 90% is paid by the entity serving the content.
It seems both fair and unfair; fair in that those who usually serve content (corporations) can afford the high bills, those who normally receive it (individuals) cannot... But on the other hand it is unfair because it limits what an individual can do when it comes to serving content. Websites go down all the time because they become "too popular".
Perhaps when bandwidth gets cheaper, this situation will improve... But for now, count on sub-500Kbps upstream bandwidth for the vast majority of inexpensive connections.
One solution that could improve things would be better implementations of fair queueing on consumer cable modem and DSL equipment. Right now, a "high speed" DSL/cable connection can hit latencies of over one second during uploads due to the output queue at the throttle-point being full of packets waiting to be transmitted; with a proper weighted fair-queue implementation, the delay can drop into the sub 100ms range.
Additionally, providers can be less anal about folks running servers. Their upstream is already capped; they might as well allow users to do whatever they want with that slow upstream.
I sometimes manage 3.2 Mbit with Adelphia (west PA). I suspect I could get even better speeds if I wasn't at the end of the line (rural area). The catch is that I'm limited to a paltry 2.5GB per month. I don't know if they enforce it, but it does annoy me every month.
The ocean parts and the meteors come down
Laid out in amber, baby.
Go figure. Korea and Japan have residential lines of 1.5 MB to 8 MB (the latter is most popular due to negligible cost differentials).
-S.
As I said, I don't repeat myself.
Anyone in the San Fan Bay area heard of Astound Broadband. I know they will provide a 3Mb down 256Kb up cable modem at like 64.95 before package discounts that are possible if you get phone and cable service through them. I am using their service out of the Saint Cloud Minnesota area and absolutley love it.
Yeah well... The Japanese economy is sad. Your future is uncertain; you are likely to be unemployed. The Japanese cost of living makes San Francisco look cheap (even New York) - $30 is probably a far greater percentage of your disposable income than mine. And judging on the last time there was an earthquake, your government acted completely defunct. Taxes are high and Japan is going through a cultural crisis. And most Japanese work on Saturday - but get less done (your GDP is lower ($36,200 USA vs. Japan $24,900) and we work 5 days a week). Your country lends money to countries who get better economic ratings than you. Japan's Economy: Now Rated Below Botswana Monday, July 8, 2002.
You know, there is a lot more to life than DSL. Unlike Japan, we have a *huge* country and a gigantic and fascinatingly well working infrastructure (in part due to Japanese Americans, Japanese engineering and equipment, credit is most certainly due).
You know, there are central offices here in the US that are 100s of miles from certain customers. In Japan, there is barely a square mile left that is undeveloped, so suffice to say, it should be rather easy to implement high speed internet cheaply. And speaking on environments, your fishermen are repeatedly caught killing near-extinct whale species, kill seals for their penises which are considered a delicacy, and have no renewable resources left on your Island of Japan. Looks like Nabunaga's ambition went a tad too far.
Think. The USA is not a poster child for how things should be run, but socialist tendencies (like DIRT! CHEAP! INTERNET! FOR! EVERYONE!) seem to far further from the ideal we all try to work towards.
US/Japan infrastructure:
US Telephones 194 million (1997) / Japan Telephones - 60.381 million (1997)
US Telephones cellular: 69.209 million (1998) / Japan Telephones - cellular: 63.88 million (2000)
US Radio stations: AM 4,762, FM 5,542 (1998) / Japan Radio stations: AM 190, FM 88 (1999)
US Highways: total: 6,370,031 km / Japan Highways: total: 1,152,207 km
US Waterways: 41,009 km / Japan Waterways: 1,770 km
US Airports - with paved runways: total: 5,174 / Japan Airports - with paved runways: total: 142
US Internet Service Providers (ISPs): 7,800 (2000 est.) / Japan ISPS 73 (2000)
US INTERNET USERS Internet users: 148 million (2000) / JAPAN INTERNET USERS Internet users: 27.06 million (2000)
So, I think the US has a slight idea about infrastructure, and how to provide every opportunity to do well for yourself and your business.. And most of the figures, even when divided by 2.1 or so to account for the population discrepancy, well, leaves Japan in the dust.
US Population: 278,058,881 (July 2001 est.) / Japan Population: 126,771,662 (July 2001 est.)
Go check out more interesting country facts here.
Quotes:
Japan's Ledger
By comparison, Japan's ledger sheet is not so simple or impressive. Japan's $4.2 trillion economy may be slowly shrugging off its third recession in a decade, but there are still fundamental issues.
Japan's total debt to GDP is triple the American level. That is the highest any major industrialized country has faced in the last half century.
Japan's economy shrunk by 1.3 percent last year. Meanwhile, the average age has crept up to 41, the highest in the world.
Japan has $5 trillion in primary government debt, $3.7 trillion of which is bonds.
Japanese companies continue to eliminate jobs, helping push the unemployment rate to a near-record 5.4 percent in May. With their jobs in jeopardy, Japanese are spending less on cars, homes and other expensive items.
Thirteen percent of Japan's general expenditures go to social security payments and a whopping 20 percent to debt service.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.