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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!
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.
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.
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.
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
What's wrong with a 3Gb per month limit? That's like about 100Mb per day. The difference between that and the paltry amount you'll get on dial-up is probably quite worth paying for!
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.
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.. ;-)
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 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.
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
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..
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 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
No gnome syndrome here...
Makes sense to me. Either that, or they're buying into the same thing worldcom did - the Internet will be high-speed always-on access to everyone, so plan ahead!
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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
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!)
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).
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.
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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.
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).
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 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