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Cable vs. DSL, Explained
Alan Shutko writes "Simson Garfinkel has a great article on Salon which explains the relative merits and disadvantages of cable modems and DSL. This should quiet the cable/DSL wars seen occasionally. " Very good overview of the difference between cable and DSL, cutting through the hype of the various companies.
I would argue that the security problems one is likely to face from one's neighbors pale in comparison to those one faces from the world at large. Either way leaving one's computer connected to the Internet without a firewall is begging for trouble.
This is irrelevant for this comparison - these hazards are the same for all technologies and he was discussing the additional local problems. In another article a few days ago, the same author said that he uses Secure BSD instead of Linux because it is much more secure. He is obviously aware of the issues.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
I have mediaone (Portsmouth, NH) and since I got it, it has only improved! When they installed it, I averaged about 30kps downloads and pings of 60ms, since then it has gone to 60-150kps downloads and pings of 30ms. Their techsupport does suck tho. At one point, I was offline for a week because a windstorm had somehow damaged my node, and it took like 3 calls to idiot tech support people who said "I see no reports of network problems in your area". Finaly through their e-mail support I got them to run a test specificaly on my connection, and they discoverd the problem for themselves. Other then that one period of downtime, the service has been great.
A consultant here at my office has done this. The throughput seems to be very good (low latency too!). The speed he currently gets is about 1.3Mbits/sec at a distance of 25 miles.
The default settings for the Cisco675 is a CLEAR passoword for both modes, telnet enabled.
What does this mean?
USWest coustomers (that are forced to use PPP): Get your router IP, pick a random IP on the same subnet, telnet to that router. No password. Type "en" to go into "superuser" mode (again, no password). Type "show running". About half way through this report it shows CLEARTEXT username and PASSWORD for their USWest.net account. Use this to read that person's e-mail. Oh, did I mention that THIS IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY!!! --sigh--
USWest customers: change your passwords on your routers. I have e-mailed this "issue" to many people and the only response I have seen has been "Thanks, we posted that on the newsgroup a month ago". FYI - I have never read the USWest info newsgroups, who actually has?
A
PS - Quick fix: set both Cisco675 passwords (not both to the same thing) and set the telnet port to something other then 23.
6. Customers are strictly prohibited from running server-based applications on Residential Road Runner accounts. This would include, without limitation to the running of HTTP Web servers, FTP servers, Gaming servers, SMTP and POP Mail servers, Domain Name Servers, Chat servers, etc.
If you use RR in Tampa, you can't. I have a friend though, that I think runs a FTP server off his machine, or did for a little while for MP3's.
I would agree. Up till this point I had not bothered to research the cable modem that totalweb uses. While its only uses single des, I happen to love my cable modem. There was a serious period of regular outages not long after I got the service while they were upgrading thier backbone but otherwise it's been great. I remember seeing 150k/sec back when 2.2.10 kernel came out on the download. I even did a screencap to show my roomie when he got home. I am however lucky in the fact that I ALSO qualify for xDSL from bellsouth which is allowing several ISP's in the area to use thier lines. flashcom.com has full t1 speed sdsl for around 300 a month. Hella better than our last burstable bill at the office from uunet at several grand. ;)
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I currently am subscribed to mw.mediaone.net in the Detroit area, and I'm very happy with the service and overall throughput. The 2 other subscribers I know have also experienced very few problems as well.
But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
PacBell seems to have their act together in the SF Bay area.
However, you also ought to consider LMI.net; they use Covad as their CLEC. Installation is $300 (with rebate), including modem, and it's $60/month for 384/128K and $75/month for 768/384K. My DSL line was installed about three weeks after I signed up, and I've had basically no problems. You get a separate line (unlike PacBell), static IP address, servers are OK, and so far their service has been good. I also prefer going with smaller companies rather than PacBell.
LMI.net is at www.lmi.net
Also, check out www.getspeed.com to check out what's available and an estimate of how far you are from the Central Office.
Tony
It turned out that some twit was scanning the IP range, since a usenet search turned up virtually the same logs from someone else.
Now I don't mind someone casually looking for a web/ftp server or something, but this clown had tried a buffer overflow on NFS or something, so I went after him. One of his connection attempts showed a login name: rolex@(some IP). I tried the same trick: I finger'ed rolex@a.b.n.m, where n and m varied from 1 to 254 or something like that. Sure enough, I found him on a few occasions. Turned out he was running RedHat and several services himself, so I figured he was some ignorant script kid. I checked his ISP's TOS and his behavior appeared to be in violation, so I reported him to them. I never heard from him (or the ISP) again.
He was saying that Bell Atlantic uses the same pair of wires for DSL and Voice. The DSL ends up interefering with the voice signal without the microfilters.
Most likely your DSL and voice run on two seperate sets of wires.. That's how mine is running.
In smaller towns and in the boonies,...
And it's not even just that. I live in Shakopee, a suburb of Minneapolis, and we can't get cable modems or DSL here. In fact, because of the way the phone stuff is set up in our neighborhood, I rarely get a higher connection rate than 26400, and never higher than 28800. I have been on a list with US West for about 6 months now (they've been saying that it will be available Real Soon Now (tm) for even longer than that), and have been hearing rumors about cable modem service for a little while, but nothing has happened yet.
As soon as it does, though, I'm there. It's been too long with a slow connection. *g*
-JEV
ahhhh shit....gotta preview next time....at least the link is valid ;)
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
PacBell seems to have their act together in the SF Bay area.
However, you also ought to consider LMI.net; they use Covad as their CLEC. Installation is $300 (with rebate), including modem, and it's $60/month for 384/128K and $75/month for 768/384K. My DSL line was installed about three weeks after I signed up, and I've had basically no problems. You get a separate line (unlike PacBell), static IP address, servers are OK, and so far their service has been good. BTW, they use FreeBSD for their own servers. Backup dialup is extra, as are extra IP addresses, but you can use NAT. I also prefer going with smaller companies rather than PacBell.
LMI.net is at www.lmi.net
Also, check out www.getspeed.com to check out what's available and an estimate of how far you are from the Central Office.
Tony
I can finally get DSL in my area via Sympatico. Unfortunately, they are in the process of switching from DHCP to PPPoverE, a really lame-ass 'protocol' for configuring the DSL modems (tell me, who honestly finds DHCP difficult to use??)
They do have a page for Linux (complete with PPPoverE clients for Linux), but they aren't very efficient. There are kernel patches for the 2.3.X series of kernels for PPPoverE which increases the performance drastically, however.
At any rate, I think we'll all be seeing more of PPPoverE. It's a stupid 'standard' designed for idiots...if they are calling your DSL modem a 'plug n play' modem, chances are they are using PPPoverE. Even though it works with linux, it's still a dumb idea.
Contrast this to Rogers, who won't even wire up my building for cable modems. I took a great amount of pleasure telling the Roger's @home rep at the mall that I was taking my business elsewhere...
OK, so /.-ers like to complain and kvetch as a general rule -- but I just wanted to say that I've been spectacularly happy with my @Home cable modem connection.
I had DSL previously from 2 providers, and @Home is half the price for 5X the performance. Yeah, they don't give you T-1 upstream rates, but it's not supposed to be a T-1 for $40/month! The support I've experienced has been very good, too. Though you need to recognize that @Home is sold through your local cable company (so your mileage may vary). When I've gotten past them to talk to @Home, the people have been quite sharp.
Sign me in as a cable modem happy-camper. From friends I know in the area, @Home/cable modem is outselling DSL about 9:1.
-krak
Is there cheap high speed data service in the Salt Lake City area? Are there any people clued enough there?
I use PacBell DSL here in California. Although at first I had a lot of problems with PacBell, they have managed to substantially improve their uptime and service quality. I can routinely download at 150 KBytes (1.5 Mbits) per second. Even when the network is heavily loaded, I can usualy get better than 60 or 70Kbytes.
I pay about $50 including the PacBell ISP, which I find is adequette. The service is very no frills, and I can serve DNS and mail locally, although I've chosen to use a different machine for doing these.
I think PacBell specifically, and other baby bells in generall, will figure the service part of this sooner than later. With a lot of new machines from major vendors coming with DSL modems, DSL will have a much better chance of becoming popular.
Also, I don't know what the guy is talking about with noise on the voice line, and having to use a bunch of filters around the house. Here they installed a single filter outside, and the voice line works just fine.
The Slashdot crowd remains one of the most technically-savvy discussion groups around, and this seems like an opportune time to ask since the discussion centers around high-speed connectivity.
Does anyone have experience with DSL in the Silicon Valley area? Some of the providers I've looked at have been:
Do any of you know of any web sites which have customer reviews of DSL in this area? Do any of you have personal experience with these (or other) ISPs? (I'm curious how well they are connected, and how well they tolerate those of us who use a real operating system.)
The cable modem does the filtering. And therefore the filter will keep those 'bad things' from getting out onto the network.
That's silly...Your phone lines are just older, and above ground. I've got buried lines, so neither is likely to go out. Phone companies are burying thier lines as quickly as possible. It's in thier own best interest.
I am living with friends in Minneapolis -- when they moved there in December 1998, USWest wouldn't offer DSL because they were only wiring homes, not apartments, then the story changed a few months later, when they said that there was some problem with the lines in that area, and DSL wouldn't be possible. When I moved there a month ago, I tried ssigning them up, at which point they said that we were good up to 512KBps! Upon further research, we learned that the apartment is less than four blocks away from the CO.
Cable isn't even an option in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN -- it's fast, but only one way service that requires a dialup connection. DSL and leased lines are the only two *true* dedicated connections.
We have gotten great bandwidth out of the 256k access, often hitting 30KB/s between the two systems using that connection, but upon "dialing in" this past weekend (USWest uses PPP), we got no answer -- If anything, USWest is overselling ports, though their backbone *in general* does leave something to be desired, compared to MR.net. I don't think they're even multihomed -- everything on USWest's backbone in Minnesota seems to get routed straight to MCI in Chicago.
---------------------------------------------
As far as cable vs. DSL, I have brought up the point before -- DSL offers a choice. You can get service from the baby Bell, or at least one CLEC in most areas, and then choose one of a dozen different ISP's, depending on the package/service you want. Speed _is not_ everything...
--
--
E2 IN2 IE?
I've been extremely impressed by MediaOne's attitude about Linux, running servers, and LANs. All are officially unsupported, but explicitly allowed. In fact, MediaOne even hosts private newsgroups for Linux users, people who want to connect their home LANs, etc. I was very impressed by that.
@Home, on the other hand, specifically disallows these, and most of the DSL ISP's disallow them unless you pay extra for "business service."
In addition, this notion that cable modems get overloaded on the local loop is mostly urban legend. Yes, it's possible, but only if the ISP/cable company lets it happen. M1 advertizes specifies a maximum number of customers on a single loop, and they periodically renumber to maintain it. In the Boston area, all of the slowdowns are upstream of MediaOne; I've never seen any delay that could be attributed to the theoretical local loop overload.
Speed isn't always as good as I want, and the service interruptions, while brief, are too frequent. But I have to say that MediaOne is a much hipper ISP than I expected them to be.
My associate recently installed a cable modem in her home and was shocked to find that 'Network Neighborhood' was, literally, her neighborhood! She could see the desktops of all her connected neighbors. This seems like an enormous oversight on the part of cable modem companies...
Geez. How is that Microsoft takes credit for inventing the Internet, yet it is the cable company's fault the security in Windows isn't worth a rat's rear-end? I mean, really. This is like buying a car with no door locks, and then complaining to the highway department when it gets stolen.
For the record: The problem here is that in many cases, when you install a network card, Windows loads the "File & Print Sharing for Windows" (SMB) service by default. Because SMB is brain-damaged and depends on broadcast packets at the datalink layer, this is not a problem over a modem link. Put any "real" network connection on the machine, though, and your entire subnet can see your machine, and in many cases, read the entire hard drive! (MS's SMB server creates "hidden shares" for each disk drive by default as well.)
For that matter, why do so many UNIX/Linux distributions ship with every service on Earth installed and running by default?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I've had RR in both Tampa, FL and Austin, TX. Tampa wasn't bad, but I lived in an upscale apartment in a high tech neighborhood- everyone had cable modems. There was a definite, noticeable slowdown from about 3pm to midnight.
Pings would creep up to the unacceptable level, and when anough people complained (it seemed), they would split the load and pings would return to normal.
I was in the 'beta test' period, and I know how good it could be- it's now being bogged and throttled from both ends. Bad routing through Cable & Worthless (cw.net) meant 20-30% packet loss at times. At other times, it was blazingly fast (the highest I ever downloaded a file was from their 'speed test' server at 320k/s).
Austin, being the 'Silicon Hills', is another area that has an oversaturated market. Just last night, I tried to get in a friendly game of TFC, but pings were in the 160-180 range. (They normally run about 80-100).
Overall, the service has been decent at best- I'd trade speed for greater reliability in a heartbeat. And it's not quite as cheap as the cable companies like to proclaim, either. RR charges $15/month for additional IPs, and prohibits routing through a linux box, or even wingate / sygate / etc. (At least it's in their terms of service). So for my three computers, the total is $85. Which is $5 less than the cost of 384k/12k ADSL from Jump.net with 5 static ips and no restrictions on what you can and can't run (other than programs that compromise network security).
First off, let me say that I use DSL (from US West), and wouldn't trade it for anything. A couple things to remember about cable modems: The cable companies tend to be VERY clueless about non-Windows OS's. Good luck getting them to even install service on a Linux box. Or a home network. Or anything but a single Windows machine. US West, on the other hand, gave me the option (which I took) of installing the modem myself. They just sent me the router. It's not brain surgery. Plug router into phone line. Plug router into hub. Plug router into wall outlet.
:)
The second thing, is about choice. I can chose any ISP I want. I found one that gave me a few static IP addresses, has a very liberal AUP (no warez), and costs $20 a month! Add this to the fact that US West hasn't turned on the bandwidth caps yet
Presumably you meant "Bell Atlantic DSL"; Garfinkel lives in Massachusetts, where Bell Atlantic is the local phone company. One reader of his wrote in from the Bay Area, but mainly spoke of bandwidth problems with cable modems out here (although, from what I can see, the biggest bandwidth problem with cable modems out here is that they have no bandwidth whatsoever to most of the Bay Area - TCI/@Home are only offering it in some areas so far).
So far, Pac Bell's service seems to have worked well for me; they're not my ISP (because, when I asked them about DSL, they gave me some line about being too far from the central office and about them lacking the facilities to provide it, and said it'd be available some time next year; when I called Flashcom, they somehow managed to get Pac Bell to get me a DSL pipe, which Pacific Bell Internet was unable to do), so I can't speak for that part of their service, but the pipe seems to stay up and to give me a pipe that's varied between 200Kbits/s and 1.5Mbits/s, with, I think, typically something between 300Kbits/s and 600Kbits/s, from their "384Kbits/s to 1.5Mbits/s in, 128Kbits/s out" service.
But, yes, Your Mileage May Vary depending on who your ISP is and who your cable company/DSL service provider (local exchange carrier, whatever) is. Garfinkel did mention that, in his article, saying, for example, about security:
on the last page (and saying similar things about DSL providers), and saying, although perhaps less directly, the same thing about speed on the previous page:All I can say is I love my cable modem... It took only an hour to download RH6 the other day. Now the cable company on the other hand is LOST... I ususally have to call them up and explain to them what the problem with thier system is...
Last year their DHCP server when down, and all "tech" support could say was "What's DHCP"
Bottom line, don't expect ISP quality customer support, but it's worth it for the bandwidth
Cheers
Squirrel
---- Proudly marching to the beat of a different kettle of fish.
Sounds rough. Road Runner didn't mind very much. I called them when I was installing Linux the first time, and asked about my NIC settings, which they told me. But they didn't have any software for it, and the guy told me they didn't support Linux at all. He did tell me about a newsgroup for roadrunner Linux users, roadrunner.help.linux, and that's where I got my login program.
While we are ranting on about cable vs dsl and general isp problems I thought I would bring to the attention of everyone this little gem, http://808hi.com/56k/x2-tcr.htm Seems older netserver modules in 3Com total control racks can lose over 60% of UDP packets making online games like quake3 impossible and giving it the name "quake lag" bug. 3 Com's letter of response was basically that they can't fix it and you must upgrade all your equipement to the newer HiperARC modules. Well I happen to be stuck with a isp that has mostly netserve modules and as I result I can't play quake1 or quake3test unless I use a old 28.8 dial in on another service which is slow at best but at least does not stall out 10 seconds after connectining to any quake server. Someone who used to work for another network equipement maker said 3com is full of it and this problem could be fixed with a firmware patch espically since I told him tcp stuff works fine and moves along quite nicely. Well I figured I would bring this to the attention of the slashdot readers and get them to slashdot effect 3com into fixing this or at least make some isp startups think twice about what model equipement they buy. In the meantime my shopping for a new isp continues at least till cable in available. jason.salopek@usa.net
Also, since my addresses are subnetted (/29), I can have a static IP block, and no one can sniff it, since they aren't on my subnet!
That, and my technically literate ISP doesn't care what I do with my line. They are a classic "no-frills" ISP. For $22.95/mo plus $32.50 for the line (768/128), I get a port on a Cisco router, an e-mail box and access to a news server (oh, and 10M of web space that I'll never use). Beyond that, what I do, from my machines, even including running a Linux box full-time doing light hosting things (light hosting solely because I don't pay for a high-cap ADSL line) is fine with them. They don't care if I host domains (named...not virtual hosting, as my poor 486 won't take that) or whatever.
He obviously haven't tried US West's DSL service, which is tremendous
Exactly. I've never had much good to say about US West, but their DSL has been excellent.
I didn't want to go with Comcast's cable service because of their "no servers" rule, and I'm too far (just barely) from the switch for an ADSL line. The SDSL is pricy ($130-something/mo), but once I get my stuff together I figure I can do some el-cheapo web hosting and co-location (for low-traffic folks who need a static ip) and make some of it back.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Is it true that I can't setup a web server on
my PC if I use a cable modem? I would only let
a few people use it.
If it's connected 24/7, I want to be able to talk
to my house from anywhere.
This could open up lots of new uses for the PC.
If we are away during the weekend, I'd like to
be able to control my VCR from another town.
Or anything else in the house.
I had either a cable modem or adsl :(
Which Garfinkel indicates at the end of the article:
I'm not sure if anyone else noticed this -- but he seemed to only quote the experiences he has had with a limited range of companies. While he admits this it still seems like he's caught up on the experiences he's had with only a few companies. Currently, I run a small network off of a 1.5/384 DSL. I pay $60/month and that includes a block of IP's (8,6 usable). The premiere cable service around here is @Home which seems very lacking. I've had people tell me that during peak hours they're bandwidth cuts down to only twice that of a dialup modem, and they pay twice as much as a standard dialup account (~$40-$50). I don't use PBi (Pacific Bell Internet) because they're government regulated and also extremely lacking in the technical department, but I do use their lines. The routing is done through a Southern CA company called Orconet. I have never had any downtime while using Orconet, ever. My latency times are typically 15ms. I have no microfilters on my phone, and I don't ever hear any static on my lines. I'm not saying DSL is better than cable -- but this article seemed slightly lobsided because this guy got stuck with a poor DSL carrier. If anybody is still debating whether to go with cable or DSL -- don't listen to much this article has to say. Most of it is so isolated to the region that unless you are in Boston it's not much good. $0.02 deposited.
-= Making the world a better place =-
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Also, some companies have gone so far as to refuse to install a cable modem for anyone not running Windows or MacOS on their machines. Last year, it even had to specifically be Win95 or 98 for one company in the Boston area -- they wouldn't even "install" their precious cable modem on an NT box!
Bandwidth concerns aside, if you want to do more than just consume data from other sites, cable modems (and especially their parent companies) are less than friendly.
"But always she's the spectre of uncertainty I first endured, then faded, then embraced..."
What I am more concerned about is security. With dial-up connections at least you were a moving target - the IP changed and you weren't connected for a long period of time.
Now you have a static IP or a dynamic (DHCP) one that stays the same for long periods of time. All of a sudden you have thousands of computers sitting there wide open and vulnerable to attack
Actually, I've found that it makes people a lot more "polite." If you're on a dial-up link, you don't care if your IP gets banned for whatever you do, you can just redial and get a new one. Knowing you'll always have the same ip, while taking away some of your "privacy" also takes away some of the attitude of doing something you wouldn't normally do just cause you can do it anonymously. (For related examples, see "Slashdot, Posting on").
I hardly see how a static IP is a security risk -- unless you make someone mad at you and they specifically target your ip, and you can't hide from them by redialing. Otherwise, you're just as vulnerable in a block of dial-up IPs for people randomly scanning.
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
The majority of consumers out there are going to sign up with whomever gets to their doors first with high speed access.
They are not going to give a rat's ass about any specs.
So it pisses me off that the government is trying to regulate this process.
A lot of people are putting the cart before the horse here... the main problem is that we simply do not have this available to consumers yet! Instead of worrying (right now) about the possibility of one high speed medium getting too popular, let these companies compete for my attention and get to me as fast as possible!
My Experience with Broadband...
...right....
The problem with broadband internet is Availability! I live in Bergen County, NJ... 20 minutes from manhatten. Suburbia, USA. Why isn't there a DSL or cable service here!?!?
I called cablevision about 2 years ago, and upon asking about internet services, the lady replied "No Sir, you can't watch our programs over the internet"....right.....
Cablevision is REALLY far behind on this one...ugh. Its only avaible in a spec of Connecticut. BUT! then I read that cable is all DHCP..doe! And I quickly realized that Cable would explode once in arrived (they havent even released a press release or anything... no plans)... so I would get stuck with a fractured connection. And they too have a no-serving policy. So over to (at the time) that new thing called ADSL...
Call up Bell (atlantic)... " O yea, that should arrive any day now(TM)"
I was pumping the availability script with local phone numbers to see who had access -- turns out my (non-techy) friend who lives less then half a mile "as the crow flies" away, is in the circle... DAMNIT!
So here Im sitting, with a sub-400$ linux system and 3 Macs, and Appletalk network (with the linux box running netatalk), and an Epson printer... Waiting -- no wait... DIEING for broadband. I've even read up on IP masq. so I'll be ready.
/nutt
It turns out that he was talking about ISDN vs. cable, not DSL, but I think the point still holds.
From The Dilbert Future, by Scott Adams:
Cable companies have what appears to be a huge technical advantage--a big coaxial cable into your house that can carry far more information than a phone line with ISDN service. Most pundits argue that this advantage will be enough for the cable companies to trounce ISDN in the market of the future. This argument misses one important fact:
Cable companies are staffed with people who couldn't get jobs at telephone companies. (p. 45)
Thank you, Scott, for summing it up quite simply.
All in all, I prefer the dedicated bandwidth I get with a DSL connection. They do tend to be a bit pricy though - I get 384/128 (usually runs faster than that) for $49.95/month. It would cost me $179.95/month to go to a 1.5/384 connection - ouch! But as long as people are falling all over themselves to pay these prices, there won't be much downward pressure.
irc bots are packet magnets
I think you are confusing who is giving you service.
Flashcom is a CLEC, which means they have equipment inside the central office that provides the dsl conn to you. It is their equipment you are using to get to the internet. It is their DS3/OC3/OC12 that you ride out the back end of their equipment to get to the internet.
The only thing that pacbell gives you is 2 wires from the CO to your house. They connect those wires to Flashcom's DSLAM inside the CO.
When I said Pacbell sucks, I was refering to their DSL service. Not their ability to provide copper to Flashcom. Pacbell does do DSL (unless they are still testing) service also, but maybe not in your area.
-=rubberband=-
SSSNET, a the lame local cable ISP, here SUCKS. $40 will only get you 128k up/down and ports below 1024 are filtered (incoming). ... not to mention they are total idiots who will threaten to sue you if you say they suck. Quit fucking around with people and do something right ya bastards! I'll take dialup any day over this vile horseshit!
ALthought DSL should be improving in speed in the next few years (10Mbit range) it is still based on copper wiring. Copper wiring that is not well-kept or really good quality I might add...
I don't know how they do it in most areas, but where I live (near Earthlink HQ) my cable modem is directly connected to a fiber network. What does that mean? Upgradablility! When fiber becomes affordable to mere mortals, the cable groups already have the network. No copper wires can compare to that stuff.
Also is the added fact that I don't own the cable box itself, and thus don't need to pay for it when it needs to be replaced or upgraded or whatever...
My 2 cents.
(Or is it just 1 1/2?)
-Curt
Downloads are fast. Very few servers max out my connection (I've > 150kbytes/sec--yes, that's kBYTES). There's very little latency (I haven't quaked above 50ms since I had the damn thing installed).
My only complaint is that I only get 128k upstream bandwidth, so running X apps on my home machine at work is a little frustrating.
I have a very good example for you:
What about the Minidisc vs DCC some years ago?
THAT certainly created consumer confusion, because nobody wants to invest in a technology that will be beaten 2 or 3 years later.
And what about the VHS vs Betamax vs 2000?
Those are good examples that show that you can't make such broad generalizations like "Choice is *always* good". Instead you should say "Choice is very good most of the time".
But when a technoligy is still in it's first stages of development, and or it hasn't reased enough interest, choice can stop people from jumping into that particular technology bandwagon, and thus can eventually kill an otherwise nice technology.
Just my two cents...
Cheers,
Angel
I have to take issue with the idea that either Cable modems or xDSL can participate in "A high-speed battle for digital dominance." Nothing could be further from the truth. These techniques for reusing wire strung in the 1940s qualify as low-speed Band-Aids at best. You surely are not going to be able to offer streaming video over this; the best you can do is yet more web browsing at higher speeds than a v.90 modem. Yawn. At least it will improve downloads.
Consider that many people are wiring their houses with 100BaseT, a technology developed in the 1980s that is a couple of orders of magnitude faster. What is needed is not more ways to reuse ancient infrastructure, but new infrastructure. We need to junk the twisted pair copper phone lines and replace them with fiber optical cable to the home (the fabled and feared "last mile"). We could then run IP over DWDM (that is, Internet Protocol over Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) over the fiber, and actually have high-speed digital communications. Until then, movies-on-demand and other ideas are just pipe dreams.
Well, I don't use their LAME service either, but SSSNET makes Mediaone look like a day at the beach! 128k up/down and all ports below 1024 are FILTERED for incoming connections! Who needs this garbage? SSSNET needs to be flushed back down the shitter they crawled out of!
in this area. Here we have this just wonderful LAME ISP CALLED SUPERNET/SSSNET. THEY SUCK. 128k up/down for $40 a month and all ports below 1024 are filtered. The courts need to force cable companies to open their networks as punishment if nothing else... hell I think these people should be thrown in the goddamned slammer with a convicted male rapist! These idiots need to be punished for even thinking of doing something like this not to mention it'd give people a CHOICE. Screw SSSNET, they can burn in hell.
Huh, their website here they specifically say:
Can I use Road Runner with multiple computers in my home?
Sure. We will install the MediaOne Road Runner connection to one computer and after
the installation, you are free to connect that computer to an existing home LAN (Local
Area Network). Please note that MediaOne will not support or install home LANs (see our
customer service agreement on this site for specific details regarding home LAN usage).
Yah, I got DSL in Fort Collins (CO) through US Worst, but fortunately, remembered all the past hassles with phone service, and choose a local ISP as opposed to the US Worst ISP. Three roomates and I share the line via a proxy server, and get consistently fast connections, and we're each chipping in 20 bucks a month for our share... (30 to us west, 30 to the ISP. (ISP Charges more for Static IP and for extra email addresses...))
than any of these idiotic cable companies for much less than what they pay. I would too, but without a doubt the city wouldn't like that. I could damn near network the fucking city on just the cable that gets shitcanned at scrap yards by wasteful industry... and as for equipment.. well those same companies religously shitcan this as well! I think non-profit networking industry is in order to overthrow these greedy fucks! Who would need a to pay a provider ridiculous amounts of cash for a pathetic, slow, and harshly restricted "service" if such a thing existed? Surely there is enough junk equipment in the world to make this a possibility for the most part in most small towns.
I agree with the thrust of this post, but I don't see why "price" and "quality of service" are relegated to the realm of the mundane.
These might not be as technically challenging, but there certainly are a lot of logistics that go into making these things attractive.
With price, there are a lot of tradeoffs which obviously have to take place. How quickly will the company recoup its investment? Will they charge tending toward metered or unmetered? (Most things are somewhere in the middle, viewed broadly) Will they charge for service and separately for needed hardware, or lump them all into a monthly cost? Etc -- lots of variables, and no single package of them will satisfy everyone.
And with quality of service, same thing. Do you hire lots of tech-support people and charge a commensurate amount extra on the bill? Or charge less, and offer less service? (Etc, etc.)
As mochaone points out, "The companies that build relationships with their customers will retain them." Look at the (even dysfunctional) relationship approach that AOL has with people
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The reality of hacking peoples home computers really complicates the whole legal issue. When does it become a crime?
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Is checking if someone has any globally shared SMB volumes hacking them? Or does it depend on whether they wanted me to find them or not? And how am I supposed to know that?
If it is legal for me to check, can someone get charged with piracy for not disabling Windows Filesharing for the network card connected to the cable/adsl adapter? If that is just considered an accident, then what about me leaving mp3 as the password on the mp3 account of my firewall computer (which also happens to be my mp3 player)?
"Oops, it seemed so convenient, and I sure the lights were always blinking, but aren't they supposed to??"
Or the opposite:
"This man hacked my machine by connecting and trying common passwords!" (mp3:mp3)
It seems a big issue that if our regimes intend to keep prosecuting based on these actions, they at least put down laws regarding what is what - that are not based on conjectures about both accused and victims intents...
-
Sure, security's a big issue with cable, but com21 (www.com21.com) makes a cable modem that features an everything-but-speaks-Shakespere firewall server ....
"He who questions training trains himself at asking questions." - The Sphinx, Mystery Men (1999)
Hmm. So where exactly does Covad, say - who provide service to Flashcom, as per this item on Flashcom's site, which says
fit into this picture?
The impression I had was that my phone signal was split into voice and DSL portions at the CO, with the DSL portion going into Pac Bell's ATM network, running over that network to Flashcom, as per the comment
at the end of this Pac Bell page. Flashcom then routes my packets to sites elsewhere on the Internet and routes packets from those sites to me.
Pac Bell has provided Internet service (which I view as "routing packets to and from sites on the Internet, and possibly providing other services such as DNS lookup, mail service, netnews service, and the like"), and some amount of support for DSL for other ISPs, for several months now. They also , as far as I know, allow CLECs such as Covad into their COs as well.
You guys realize you might as well give the IP address with that much information. hashing out digits on the host part of your IP only leaves 256 possible IPS.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
Just for informational purposes im quickly going to run thru the major methods of getting a DSL connection. I imagine the same applies for cable.
:)
:P)
When you power up your DSL modem the first thing that happens after the power on test is it attempts to sync with a line card in the captive office. Depending on what kind of system you are on this could be at anywhere from 100kbps to 9Mbps and down. Typically up tends to be significantly less then down (usually in the 320kbps to 1.5Mbit range) but it does not have to be.
There are several encapsulation methods used to get packets over the DSL wire all of them revolving around ATM.
The end to end connection typically looks something like this:
PC --Ethernet-> Modem --DSL-> LineCard --ATM-> ATM Switch/Router --Whatever-> Internet
From there it your data can bounce around the net
being re-encapsulated until it eventually becomes ethernet again.
Typical encapsulation methods over DSL are:
RFC 1483 Ethernet over ATM (most common)
RFC 1577 Classical IP over ATM
RFC 2364 PPP over ATM
1483 encapsulation involves setting up a bridge group on your router. A bridge group is essentially a software hub that sucks in packets from multiple connections and forwards them along to wherever they need to go.
If you have a setup like this, when you look in your arp cache you should only ever see the (fictional) MAC address of your bridge group.
(and your modems MAC assuming its not a dumb bridge either)
1577 isnt used much in the real world as it requires more effort to setup and maintain.
2364 is becoming more prevalant, especially a nasty variant called PPP over Ethernet which is like a combo of PPP over ATM and 1483 bridging.
Just so you can see all the work thats going on
here are the quick protocol stacks for the data encapsulation methods before the data ever hits the phone wire. (pretty complicated
1483: TCP/IP->802.3->RFC 1483->AAL5/ATM->ADSL
1577: TCP/IP->AAL5/ATM->ADSL
2364: TCP/IP->PPP->RFC 2364->AAL5/ATM->ADSL
PPP over Ethernet: TCP/IP->PPPOE->802.3->RFC 1483->AAL5/ATM->ADSL
Anyhow, hope this was useful.
Oh yes, one last note about speeds. While most DSL available today sits in the 1Mbit range or so
within a year or so high speed DSL will start to roll out offering equal or better bandwidth compared to cable (i.e up to full 10Mbit down and 1.5Mbit+ up)
Enjoy the competition, its good for you the end user.
-N
For $49 bux a month, or whatever you pay...you will get about the level of a 56k modem in areas saturated with cable modems (Pleasonton, Livermore, Antioch, etc) It is economics, not technology that determines performance of ISPs over time.
With DSL, you can switch providers if they suck...I have already done so 3 times (no fee) and I am happy for the time being with Concentric.
Enjoy your empty cable while it lasts.
IT would be better to turn one of your computers as a router
Not where I live. My router doesn't have to do NAT, since I get real-world IPs. I've got USWest DSL, near Seattle, and I get several dynamic IPs, and they are real IP addresses, not Private NATted addresses. Everything works like I'm a real host on the Internet, for all of my machines. The service is an absolute dream now - real bridging, no NAT, no firewall, just beautiful fast (above advertised speed) service for $50 total cost. I shudder to think that USWest would ever, ever change their policy, but thankfully I can switch to another ISP if I ever have to (Unlike cable!)
that's the point of a sys-admin though. they exist for the very reason that they know (or learn) the things that the every-day joe-shmoe user's don't have to (or don't want to). there is _no_ way in hell that I could adequately explain to my father the inherent risk in network neighborhood. and if his hard-dirve gets hosed once ( or hell, even some cheesy, non-essential file) than some one damn well better be able to explain to him why he had been expected to know these things. if someone at the cable company wants to come out and sit down w/ my dadm and explain how everything works, and why this is a bad idea, and that's a security risk, there's nothing we can do about that, etc. etc., then cool, they're taking responsibility for the service (and risks) they are providing. but until then, cable is _not_ the way to go.
-Peter
The article referenced was really poor. Major problems with this article: - Writer uses personal experience with two providers to make generalizations about what to expect from the two technologies. His experiences with MediaOne Cable Modem (CM) and Bell Altantic DSL (ADSL, but the writer never tells you that) in no way reflects on what you will get with other Cable Modem or DSL providers. In fact, given Media One's greater experience with CM than virtually any other provider of that service, it's likely that you will not see as stable or high performance results from other CM providers such as RCN, Cablevision, etc. Likewise, given Bell Atlantic's inexperience with DSL and Internetworking, it's likely that they will give worse performance than other DSL providers. - Writer talks of bandwidth and latency results without discussing his testing methods. It's possible, and I suspect likely, that some of the writer's poor results may have been due to his own incompetence. It's misleading to bring up such points without providing proof that the tests where done fairly. For instance, results could easily be skewed for one service or the other by simply running the two tests at different times of the day. - Writer makes no indication of the differences between DSL offerings, a necessity for any article which claims to "Explain" Cable vs. DSL. Annoyances: - RISC vs. CISC as an example of where an inferior technology won over a supperior one is poor. Firstly, it's only true in the context of PCs. If you count total processor sales, RISC based chips have greater market share. Two, the CISC chips which currenlty have the larger market share of PC systems borrowed heavily from RISC technology. Lastly, the battle is hardly over, if we are all running PowerPC or Alpha bases systems on our desktops five years from now will the writer still claim CISC won the battle? At what point does the writer believe the battle ended? - Jim Collins
I've got an Adelphia Powerlink (Two-way) here at my house, and I've got one installed at my office. I can't say that I've been exceptionally pleased with their tech-support availability, but overall I've had not serious issues with them. At work we run a mail server and a webserver off the modem, and it also keeps the other 10 PCs in the office connected to the Internet through IPNat on our OpenBSD firewall. They've never made an issue out of it, even when they saw our setup while they were installing. As long as you don't suck the hell out of their bandwith, it doesn't bother them.
A little off the main topic, but I think this is good information. If you are using a Cisco 675 router, update your ROM to CBOS 2.2 (you may have to "find" this on the net somewhere), then, when port mapping, skip the inside IP information (example: 10.0.0.2 6970 udp) that will open up port 6970 udp on the machine with the IP 10.0.0.2. To open all ports, just type 10.0.0.2 udp, that will open all udp ports (probably not the best idea). Now when your dynamic IP changes, you don't have to do anything. Plus, while I could never get starcraft to work with the old ROM, 2.2 does it perfectly :)
If what you say is true..... then I still don't care.
It's never an argument about the technology, always about the providers
The technology is not relevant to the consumer -- only to the implementer. As an implementer yourself, your perspective is different from that of the consumer, and you're not seeing the same issues that we're seeing.
In my area, DSL is out of my budget ($100 per month for 128kbit, to $500 per month(!!) for 768kbit). And Adelphia hasn't quite got around to offering their PowerLink service in my area -- but from a quick glance at their FAQ I don't want these people anywhere near my computers when they're ready. (Yes, that's computers you evil bastards.)
OK... for full disclosure, I do tier 2 support here at @home.
I think there is a bit of misinformation going around, and I'd like to clarify some of it (not all of this pertains to cable modems in general... mostly just to @home).
First of all... the shared bandwidth issue. With cable service, the slowest link is not going to be your node. Each cable channel is able to handle approx. 32mbit of traffic. Not enough? Open up another 6 mhz channel on the cable spectrum and you have double the bandwidth. Clearly this is not much of an issue on the node wide basis. Typically the slowdowns are backbone saturation (we have a private dual oc-48 backbone now) and saturation at the public NAP's. The latter is a bit more of a problem -- but when we are able to document slowness it gets taken care of.
As far as speeds slowing down during primetime, this is typically due to RF problems. Modems are pretty fickle about the signal they can use... if they are on the threshold of the signal when the lines cool down at night and contract you can be edged over into unacceptable rf levels. It's a pain the ass to call tech support but when you have that kind of problem it can always be dealt with.
The upstream rate cap at 128kbps is comparable to what you'd experience on a similarly priced DSL connection (at least with pac bell here in CA, I'm not familiar with the price plans of any of the other telcos). This is probably the most major dissapointment as far as cable goes -- and a major deterrent to the powers users.
As far as the no servers policy, it is almost completeley unenforced. As far as I know if you stick to less than 500MBps a day nobody is going to hassle you.
So a lot of the major complaints about cable are pretty inacurate, or at least exagurated. I'm not able to make a reccomendation as to whether you'd be served better by cable or DSL. I think for a power user you'd probably get pretty similar experiences from either one.
I had this idea a while ago for a perl script that would search a subnet for shared drives, then if there was no password set it would mount the share and do an ls -R of all the files and save them in a list. Then later I could go through and grep for mpeg, mp3, asf, or whatever. Kind of like mining the internet for data, eh?
My mistake.
I was under the impression that Flashcom was the CLEC here. According to your post, and from what I can understand, Flashcom is probably reselling Covad's services. Covad is the CLEC, not Flashcom.
As far as Pacbell's ATM net, they are probably referring to their own DSL service offering, which does not have anything to do with Covad, or Flashcom.
As far as I know (and I am assuming this based on Rhythm's network, which is similar to Covad's), Covad rents a cage in the CO that they install DSLAMS, switches, routers and whatnot into. Then they bring all their traffic from that location into a area office which connects to their backbone to go to where ever it needs to go. The only thing Pacbell does for them is hook copper to their equipment. Pacbell's DSL service uses Pacbell's DSLAMs, switches and routers to provide service and has nothing to do with Covad. (unless Covad sells to Pacbell, which I don't think is the case)
As far as the signal splitting into voice and data, that is unknown to me, I know how to do this, but we do not do that in our network. They probably use a pots splitter, which essentially a high pass/low pass filter, which divides up the voice freqs and the DSL freqs and send them to the 5ess or whatever and the DSLAM, respectively. Which DSLAM (Pacbell's or Covad's or Rhythms' or ours hopefully some day) depends on who sends you your bill, and or who send them their bill.
-=rubberband=-
this is more likely an isp issue on their router
Is there any website that lists and cable and
ADSL providers per state or county?
If not, it should really be done. It would be
nice if users could send real statistics about the
speed of their connection, or, why not, distribute
some kind of soft that monitors speed from time
to time and sends the info to the website.
Anyone interested in building something like that?
-- Slef
Hmm... Same thing happened to me.... Only I was told that there was no way that Linux would work with the cable modem.... Crack I tell you. These people are getting free crack!
Last one in jail is a fascist.
Not specifically, no, they can't detect it.
:) if they're checking for open gateways.
:)
However, ip-masq by default changes the port of all outgoing requests the 60000+ range. If they're looking for this specifically, there's a chance they could nail you. (I'm not sure how to change this myself, but I know it's possible)
You'll have to be careful to keep your ruleset to only route packets from your internal network (which is a good idea anyways
Of course, you don't want to call them about questions with ipmasq, but that should be blatently obvious to all but the clueless.
Having had both ADSL and cable modems in Calgary, I would recommend a cable modem. Cable Modem Pros: - when it is fast, it is very fast (8mbs to Microsoft) - cheaper than ADSL monthly + setup - month-to-month payment Cable Modem Cons: - slows down during peak hours (BUT so does ADSL as the whole internet is busy) - connection is dropped perhaps once every few days ADSL Pros: - reliable, constant connection ADSL Cons: - dealing with Telus + Cadvision - cost - 12 months paid in advance
I don't know if anyone else out there has experienced similar frustration, but I live in New Haven, CT (which, last time I checked is a major metropolitan area) and have been unable to find a single provider of high-speed residential internet access.
Anyone know of a decent resource I should be looking at or (better yet) a New Haven broadband ISP?
Thanks...
Can your IM do this?
BA is using a static IP assignment scheme, just don't mention alternative OSes. Do the self install route and they will send you a 3Com card and color menu pictures telling you how to install in a windows 95 box. Smile, nod and keep saying, uhuh... while you type ifconfig insted of rebooting.
When there is a real trouble the second tier guys will love you. (what does your tcpdump give you?) But the front line will say, you can't do that.
This is just a silly test. Please ignore.
(If it works, this comment should be rated +1 Insightful)
That article will just throw more gas on the fire. I will speak from the pulpit of a shnoob installing ADSL for the company bashed in the article, Bell Atlantic. ADSL access is speed is actually faster than cable modems will ever see. The problem is that Bell Atlantic Internet Service ( a wholy owned non-regulated subsiduary ) which picks up the pipe and connects it to ICONnet, an internet backbone provider, well... sucks. I often have the pleasant task of talking to irate customers who are related to those that lead, or are in fact those that lead, and connecting them to a test server to show them 6 Megabit download speeds. But as one such victim has poignantly stated, "great... now put metalab on it." I really don't see a single standard winning in the long run, except for IP and ethernet cards. Right now make a price and availability decision. In the Wash/Met area the cable monopoly geographic regions determine which areas have Cable Modem access. Comcast , yes - Jones - NO. ADSL from Bell Atlantic is available in terms of what CO you served out of and how far you are from it, as well as where how implementation schedule is going. I could get either where I live , I am going with ADSL because it is free for me. If it was out of my wallet I would go with....coughcough.
One guy I saw posting to triangle.online-access had a dot sig that said, "The good news is there's finally competition in the high speed access market. The bad news is it's between the Phone company and the Cable company."
@Home (from TCI, now AT&T) came and installed my cable modem service about two months ago. Other than when it was down for two weeks (node problems) it's been great. I was running a beta of Windows 2000 at the time, and knew they wouldn't have a clue about what to do, so I told them I had Windows 98 and told the tech who installed it to stay away from my computer. He let me sign a thing waiving his service (called a self-install in their lingo) and I just told him:
:) ) and I've gotten downloads at up to 90K/second, yes, like a little under a tenth of a meg a second. Not too shabby in my book, as you can have a hard time getting that kind of speed out of most internet sites anyhow.
"I want a cat 5 wire to this point, plug in your laptop to make sure it works, and I'll take it from there"
I installed my own 3com NIC in my computer (not their generic brand) and was netsurfing in no time. I've already set up a hub, and run cat5 to my two roomies computers, it's working great. BUT, they limit you to only having only 3 IP addresses, and they cost $4.95 a month for those extra two. Solution? Sygate! I don't know that they actually have any OS requirements, but if you tell them Windows 98, they don't actually have to touch your machine, and the guy who came and installed mine had been a cable guy that they sent to class for 3 days to make him an internet guy. He knew how to run basic things (ping, winipcfg, etc.) but seemed rather clueless as to how it actually worked.
My landlord, who lives in the other half of the duplex, and I are going to wire the whole house for cat5, with jacks in every room, then install a second NIC in my machine and run Sygate to do NAT so we can break the 3 IP limit. Yes, I know I could do this with Linux, but I run Windows most of the time at home because I do a lot of videoconferencing with friends around the globe, not to mention Unreal Tournament. I also don't really feel like dropping the $$$ to build another box for routing, and I'd like my machine to still have a "real" IP address.
Oh, and it's fast, my node is shared with only 5 other people (not counting my roomies who are women and don't use much bandwidth
--
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
My understanding from several sources outside of Time-Warner (I'm a RoadRunner subscriber) is that, while early cable modem installations were "sniffable", the more recent ones (last year+) use triple-DES b/w the cable modem and the hub. So except for the very determined attacker, the data is quite safe. Donnie
This article is flawed at best.
...That's about it. Buisness users [who know what they are doing], however, generally, don't tolerate stuff like this. ...If you want a solid, guaranteed, routed [not bridged crap] solution, I would recommend finding a _local_ provider who is offering buisness SDSL. This is, of course, generally a bit more expensive, but, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for.
... minus about 400k :)
As far as downtime and poor connectivity is concerned, this is generally something that you're always going to have to deal with when you're using a residential cable modem or xDSL line, because the providers know that they can get away with it. They generally make a practice of grossly overselling bandwidth.
Residential users get pissed off when any of the aforementioned things occur.
Personally, I am a satisfied user of 1.1mbit buisness-grade SDSL. It's like getting a T1 for 1/3 of the price
It really does depend on where you are, and who your providers are. If my local cable company had the 600Mbps cap ('where cable is king'?) that they mention in the article (which I'm not sure about, myself, because my cable company don't give specs, just vague claims, supposedly in the interest of keeping it non-techie), my DSL would be faster than cable, and dedicated.
Additionally -- and maybe I'm just being anal now -- I did notice some odd discrepancies, and outright misunderstandings. For one, sure I share my bandwidth with everyone else on the net, but when we get out there, we're talking T3's and fibre-optic links and whatnot. I don't think you can really feasibly say, for example, that a 56k modem's relatively low speed (compared to ADSL et al) is due to everyone else using the Internet. :) Plus, I noticed that at one point, they say that some cable modems aren't like hubs, but rather, "like 'bridges' or 'switches'" (a good use of the terms). Yet later on, they say that the Bell Atlantic DSL modem 'is configured as a "bridge"', and somehow this means that they don't filter, leaving 253 people open to attack each other.
While I know that many high-tech columnists aren't the heavy techie/geek type and thusly might overlook some of these things, and how it may have been hard for them to find one willing to do the article, I do think that they should at least have someone knowledgeable look the column over before it went out. Heck, I bet many of these things could be caught by your average meticulous proofreader. Peer scrutiny, especially in such fields as journalism and whatnot, is always a bonus. :)
Correct (although in my case, they're using the ILEC, Pac Bell, rather than any CLEC).
As far as I know, they're not just reselling Covad's services, though; I don't think Covad is doing the routing for them, I have the impression Covad just moves data from some ILEC's CO to Flashcom's routers.
They're referring, as far as I know, to the pipe they provide between a subscriber and their ATM net, and to the ATM services they're providing to ISPs including but not limited to Pacific Bell Internet. See, for example, this diagram on Pac Bell's site, which shows the line to the CO, the DSLAM in the CO, and the ATM network - they run a PVC over that network to the ISP, or to a corporate LAN if the DSL circuit is being used for telecommuting to work rather than connecting to an ISP.
For CLECs, the picture is probably the same, except that the DSLAM belongs to the CLEC and is in the cage they rent from the ILEC, and, presumably, so does the ATM network - this page on Rhythms' Web site seems to imply that they have their own ATM network, independent of any ILEC's network.
Yes, there's a splitter at my demarcation point, which sends stuff up to 4KHz, presumably, along one wire, into which my Plain Old Telephones plug, and stuff above 4KHz along another wire, into which my DSL box plugs. There's also a device at the CO that does the same; that's presumably the "Mux" in the aforementioned diagram on Pac Bell's Web site.
Pac Bell puts a USD 39.95 item on my phone bill for DSL, so it's presumably their DSLAM. (I presume Flashcom will send me a USD 10.00 bill one of these days; they may offer "first month free", but it's been more than a month - I should call them to find out what the story is, as I don't want to have my Internet service cut off for non-payment of a bill that I never got in the first place....)
Haha, I had three computers sitting out with a blinking network hub in between when the Mediaone cable guy came to install. I told him to hook up my crappy P200 (other boxes are PII and PIII with all sorts of nice stuff attached) to the modem. Odd that there were 2 NICS on that P200 ;) He explained Mediaone's policy of one modem per computer and that it couldn't be networked, but he didn't give a damn. I unhooked the CAT5 to the P200 as not to technically violate the TOS agreement.
But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
I'm in the Detroit area to and I love MediaOne. I run a quake2 and quake3 server on my box and even with players on both servers I can still listen to shoutcast and surf the web with no significant delay.
That had to be one of those most worthless article I've ever read on DSL vs. Cable. I'm sorry, but I was expecting more. Maybe something about the latency, or an average pool-size for cable subscribers. Nothing, the first 3 pages seemed like an add for the guy's cable provider. Pointless, I didn't pick up a bit of information out of that. At least the guy could of done was get some more pricing on the two services. For one, I work at an ISP and we offer ADSL for pretty low rates. (768k down/128kup for 17$) and GTE doesn't charge too much for monthly (32.50 for above mentioned). So I guess, in the end, I expected more information from that 4 pages then the writer was ready to offer. Oh well, maybe next time.
That article will just throw more gas on the fire. I will speak from the pulpit of a shnoob installing ADSL for the company bashed in the article, Bell Atlantic. ADSL access is speed is actually faster than cable modems will ever see. The problem is that Bell Atlantic Internet Service ( a wholy owned non-regulated subsiduary ) which picks up the pipe and connects it to ICONnet, an internet backbone provider, well... sucks. I often have the pleasant task of talking to irate customers who are related to those that lead, or are in fact those that lead, and connecting them to a test server to show them 6 Megabit download speeds. But as one such victim has poignantly stated, "great... now put metalab on it." I really don't see a single standard winning in the long run, except for IP and ethernet cards. Right now make a price and availability decision. In the Wash/Met area the cable monopoly geographic regions determine which areas have Cable Modem access. Comcast , yes - Jones - NO. ADSL from Bell Atlantic is available in terms of what CO you served out of and how far you are from it, as well as where how implementation schedule is going. I could get either where I live , I am going with ADSL because it is free for me. If it was out of my wallet I would go with....cough cable modem cough. Keep in mind that this is the glorious days of youth of broadband access. Soon the services will be improved, heh, with all sorts of cracker brained ideas to improve ,snicker, throughput and conserve bandwidths and IP ranges. That is web cacheing, NAT and RFC non routable IP ranges. Not to mention PPP over ethernet shims, and encrypted vlans , all of which will hurt the power users of the world or anyone off the beaten Win2000 track. Get your static, real address now while you still can. Improvements will follow to simplify things for the masses.
I'd just like to confirm how good the service seems to be around here. And, they've been pretty receptive about Linux, which is quite a difference from regular telephone ISP. Perhaps things are better now, but I could never figure out how to get all those "chap secrets" working for PPP... DHCP is so much easier.
I won't say they support Linux, because they say they don't. The good thing is that, instead of meaning Linux is prohibited, they just mean, don't ask us for help. They even set up a local newsgroup for Linux users.
This even goes so far as being smart enough not to prohibit Linux just because it can be used for serious network abuse (web proxy, mail gateway, etc. etc.). They recognize that Windows has problems too, and have set up a machine which runs around doing its own port scans to look for abuse. I don't know what happens when they detect it, because my system has never been a problem (up 24/7).
I have had service problems occasionally, but that seems to have been because of a slowly failing cable modem. Since I was leasing one of theirs, they did replace it when it finally failed. Funny thing was the service guy who came was the same one who installed it originally. Was nice to see that kind of continuity.
Also, the people on phone support are a bit lame, as I've found on most phone support lines. Think about it: if they were as smart as you think you are, would they be doing that job? You had better hope not, for your own sake. The best advice for dealing with them is to only call them after you've diagnosed the problem and determined it to be outside your computer. And then, run everything they say through a Windows->Linux translator.
All in all, I think the folks running the system here have done an excellent job emplacing a system that people have been using constantly, and enhancing it as they go along. In spite of the reputation cable companies have for having poor service, I would be hard pressed to switch to a different kind of service. I just hope that the merger deal with AT&T doesn't change this.
Ack. I meant 600Kbps, not Mbps. Yes, proofreading is a bonus. :> (But at least I wasn't writing a column.) :)
yeah right. I had cable until 3 months ago when I just switched over to using my companies SMDS connection and not having a computer at home at all.
My cable modem never got more than 10kpbs during he last month I used it, and was down around 20% of the time anyway. If I had at least had some access all of the time, I'd have put up with the horrible bandwidth, but if I can't have even that, then I say screw it.
I'm hoping for sDSL soon, but the company I'm trying to get it from (flashcom) is taking it's sweet time, and never gets back to me even though I have called there at least 4 times. And I'm getting the $400/mo top of the line service... I'd hate to think how fast they'd respond if I were getting the 40-50/mo service...
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
I got to give credit though to HTC, they try their best at giving us the best service they possibly can. Never had any problems with them. They do offer cable modem service of their own, since they are THE phone co., cable co. and everything else co. in Horry County. They only offer it to their cable subscribers though, and you still have to upload data through the phone, from what I understand. They dont offer their cable service in my area, we get Time Warner instead. Now TW has gone around and put in fiber all over the place in the last 6 months, and are offering 120+ channels instead of the 36 they used to have, so it makes me wonder if they wont offer cable modem service soon. Couldnt get on that train either, I have a satellite now, but im not gonna pay those outrages fees for that DirectPC crap. Besides I don'[t think that works with us since we got one of the old fashioned 12 foot satellite dishes.
Anyways, sorry for ranting, but this is something thats been bothering me for awhile now and I just want to get it off my chest.
-- Word of the day: Percussive maintenance is the fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it wo
I'm a gaming prOn king. I want whichever is available in my area first.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Nope. it's on delux. call them up. I got the same thing (24 on) and it was like this. Seesh man..
I'd like to point out that the web site is incorrect (as the orginal poster pointed out). The info on the web site does not tally up with what you get. Their info is about 9 months out of date. BTW. Call uswest for more info.
I am using uswest as an ISP and for my DSL line. (see my email address?) Yes, when I got my modem I had to connect to it (using a serial line at first) and set it up for ppp mode. What it does is it sets up my username and password in the nvram of the modem, and when it is first turned on (it is always on though, but whenever it needs to reconnect) it uses that name and password to authenticate on the network, then uses DHCP. On my side of the network I am a 10.0.0.x, and I connected a hub so I could potentially have hundreds of computers in my house on the internet, I think. The modem gives out the 10.0.0.x to local machines using DHCP on the local network. The modem uses NAT (network address translation) so my IP address (which changes) is different to the outside world. If you try to telnet to me you will actually get my modem, (which has a password of course, and I think I have WAN telnets disabled anyway). This works fine for email and web stuff. Unfortunately I cannot:
run a web server
accept files in ICQ
connect to a lot of IRC servers because the identd can't get through to me
It's due to that stupid NAT. Uswest said I had to subscribe to their home office offering to get dedicated IPs without NAT. I'm not sure how much it is but I bet it isn't free.
Ummm, I don't think there's quite that fine of a control in place (yet?). Yes, the fact that a theoritical QOS is possible with both cable and Xdsl does mean the the big mean company can control your speed, the QOS is usually determined at the time the interface box is provisioned, not on the fly (at least, that's the deal with cable).
Now, if someone were to hack a way to make modems provision on the fly and get different QOS scripts on the fly, and make them provision in a few miliseconds, it can be possible.
BTW: I have a cablemodem from AT&T@home and we don't have any upstream cap (yet)."Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Unless you live near the ocean... I used to live on a barrier island in Florida (basically, an overgrown sandbar right next to the Atlantic), and the phone lines for our local area were buried many decades ago. With the water table in the area being as high as it was, the lines got noisy any time there was a serious rainstorm. Before I moved away, they were busily stringing overhead lines to replace/supplement the existing buried ones. Buried lines may stay good longer, but they're more expensive to replace when they do go. It's a tradeoff; and of course if you don't live in an area with a water table five feet below ground level (which is the vast majority), buried lines may be the superior option.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
The moral of this story is that just as always, you need to do your own research so that you don't get burned.
Indeed.. and if you can't find anything, move to a place where you can.
Case in point: As far as I know (though I certainly could be _very_mistaken.. either way, there's nothing I can do about it now, b/c the bill-paying people in my house certainly won't go for it), all I have/can have is dial-up modem access in my area. Well, no, I likely could buy a T1 line or ISDN.. but I don't think we have cable or DSL access where I live. It's a teensy county; I don't even live in town, and people there hardly know what the internet is. There's only one ISP in my county, so far as I've found... it's pathetic! And don't even think of using any of the evil ISP-giants.... those darned people who make you dial long-distance numbers to subscribe to their service, only after you've installed their crappy disk full of bloated software.. ha!
So, you see.. it's pathetic, no? I'm not that worried though, b/c most of the time, I'm here at school.. nevertheless, it's sad for those at home to have dial-up access, which we all know is slower than frozen molasses going uphill.. especially if you're trying to download anything.
(my $0.02 worth)
Insert mind here.
There are different kinds of DSL. G.Lite uses
the same wire pair as the phones, with a filter
at each phone to reduce the interference.
Regular (old-style?) ADSL uses a splitter at
the enterance to the residence, and then separate
wires inside. This works much better, but is
more costly to install.
I'd like to mention here, I still have and pay for the always on service. But at least in the Denver area they're still changing all their DSL to the PPP form instead of bridged, though the always-on customers the ppp is just not disconnected (Well that's the theory anyway, I've already had problems with it, blah!). Also things like NAT and the ip switching are controlled by your ISP, not wether your bridged or PPP (I'm a commercial account, with my own subnet of static ip's, and not on US West as an ISP).
I have to say, I highly recommend my ISP, Dimensional Communications, but US West seems to just be getting even worse.
Actually I live in Albuquerque New Mexico and I am expecting DSL service in about 1 month. My friend and I have signed up with JATO communications (JATOCOM.COM i think). I will be using IHighway for the ISP and he is using LoboNet. It is still exspensive ($140 for 192k) but about the same as ISDN I have now (that $80 jumps up to about 120 w/taxes and ISP). My friend is first on the list and the equipment is just about installed...
The cable modem they give you is much closer to a router than a modem. They can program it remotely to do a number of things, on of which is to block access to certian ports, and to accept connections to its own ports. It probably even does NAT and a few other router-ish and bridge-ish things...
-Adam
"So, like, does that mean that if we put everyone on the world on Australia, we'd shift the earths center of gravity enough to sink australia, and give Greenland more land?"
Just discovered a flaw in my own reasoning: 5 (b) ...or to connect the Cable modem to any server... I guess that means if you're running a server on your machine, and you connect a cable modem to it, you just connected the cable modem to a server, thus violating TOS. I just spent the last couple hours trying to get a working server going and couln't access it from a separate machine (box 1 on cable modem, box 2 dialing up to regular ISP via POTS.) Even running the personal web servers that come with MacOS and win98 didn't work, so it's not a configuration error on my part-- those things run totally on autopilot. Maybe I could run the server on a port other than :80, since they might just be blocking that, but if they're trying that hard, I don't wanna &*(#* with them. Sorry all for the misinformation!
I also got DSL through Bell Atlantic. I've mentioned it here before. Basically, their phone guy was nervous, but didn't make a fuss. He just told me they don't officially support Linux, but if I wanted to use it anyway, ok. I have a static IP, although it doens't seem like that's guaranteed to remain in the future. The only complaint I have is that when I moved down the street, they charged me another hundred bucks "connection fee" even though I was using the same phone number and connecting to the same goddamn exchange. Their techs had even switched over the DSL service, and the "customer service" people didn't know it. Total comedy of errors, that netted me about a dozen phone calls. But the service worked perfectly the whole time, so it was more like entertainment for me than a real problem.
----
We all take pink lemonade for granted.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
The author of the artice is right when he says that the better technology won't win. It also really depends where you live - where I am you can get 1Mbps ADSL and cable modems for $40/month.
What I am more concerned about is security. With dial-up connections at least you were a moving target - the IP changed and you weren't connected for a long period of time.
Now you have a static IP or a dynamic (DHCP) one that stays the same for long periods of time. All of a sudden you have thousands of computers sitting there wide open and vulnerable to attack.
Watch for it - as more people get high-speed access, this will become a much bigger issue. Windows and even the default installs on most Linux distros are not ready to be connected full-time to the internet.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Just run a sniffer for a couple minutes and see what it picks up, you shouldn't see anything except ARP messages (and traffic to/from your machine). If there is nothing to sniff, your ISP shouldn't have a problem with it (not that they could find out about it, sniffers are generally not detectable).
Thanks for verifying what I posted elsewhere. I have the Motorola CyberSurfer (sp?), and I've verified that they use DES (triple-DES if I understand correctly) b/w the modem and the router.
Whether you have xDSL or Cable modem, in the end the real bottleneck is whether or not your provider is overselling its bandwidth or not.
Hi, this is slightly off topic, but Im sure someone can answer me this. I use TCA for my cable modem (they are nazis) and they spefically say you cannot run proxy servers. When I signed up, I asked the man if I could run IP Masq on my Linux box so my Mac could use the cable modem too....Well, he laughed at me (!) and said he would be more than happy to cancel my account if I did. Needless to say, I wanted to slap him, but thats besides the point.....I have come to /. to beseech an answer:
Is it possible to detect Ip Masq?
Im sure they could enter my room and see it (fat chance id let them in!), but is there a way where they could say "Hey, hes running NAT, lets get him@#!@!" over the net?
I will be forever indebted if you can answer me!
Having experienced both systems I have lots of good and bad things to say about both. Most of the good things come from the bandwidth (cable is faster except in the early evening when everyone is on the system). Most of the bad things come from how the system is maintained. Personally, I think it's an awesome deal either way you slice it.
Of course, I only have to pay $40 CDN/mo for my service.:) (about $30 US)
What really matters, tho', is how well the service is run. Frequent service outages and short message timeouts in the Usenet archives can drive one batty. And beyond the high bandwidth, that's what is most important. IMHO of course.
J:)
Oh well, no point in steering now.
Presumably the cable modem is smart enough to do limited port blocking or packet filtering and has the ability to be reprogrammed remotely by the cable company. Since it handles the ethernet to cable connection it would have to be where any local loop filtering takes place.
Here in the lower mainland of BC, i've had experiences with two cable installations, and my own ADSL line.
Rogers@HOME in Coquitlam sucked. Very, very badly. Speed varied from tolerable to pathetic.
Then there was the install in a Vancouver suburb. My understanding was that it was a very old install, and quite possibly preceded @HOME's presense[sp] in BC. That one seemed to perform okay.
Then there's my ADSL, Provided by BCTel. [ Or is it TELUS now? ] They've got a java speedtester up at http://speedtest.mybc.com, which obviously is on the same network I am, and maxes out my ADSL modem at about 2.5Mbps down, though it doesen't give an up figure. I'm fairly sure this thing is configured as an Ethernet bridge, and computers on the customer side pull down configuration information by DHCP.
Anyone know how the DSL/ISP thingie works up here in BC? I don't/can't login to their login server, I just get a blank page. My machine is assigned [my-ether-address].bconnected.net. I know other people manage to log in, because I ocaisionally see people as what they're supposed to be, userid.isp.bconnected.net.
I have several severe annoyances trying to make my network work without manual intervention when it's attached to the modem. ARP problems. I'm considering posting it to ask-slashdot, just to see if it's worthy!. I've got a workaround, but it's really something of a kludge.
For people considering it, the service is fairly good, though it does get spotty sometimes, especially late night sunday for some reason. The ARP problems i'm having shouldn't affect you if you MASQ/nat the connection, they should only come into play if you wanna plug an entire network into it.
"Binaries may die but source code lives forever"
-- Unknown
SkyHawk
Andrew Fremantle
Time Warner is clueless, generally. They will point you at the software to run the idiot login scheme they use, then try to pretend they never heard of Linux/FreeBSD. As long as they leave me alone... And the D/L speeds from the newserver - 100's of Mb of Mp3 in an evening.
Cable Modem with @HOME is completely garbage. The upload cap of 15k/sec doesn't do it for me .. neither does the fact that you can only get high speeds at 4 in the morning. Forget about Cable and DSL .. can someone pipe a 45mbit T3 stright into my Cerebral Cortex?
I moved to Cambridge in February (a move based almost solely on the availability of bandwidth...I'm such a loser. ;-) ), and immediately signed up for MediaOne cable modem service. They installed it, the guy didn't mind me hooking up my Linux box, and I was connected at really decent speeds. I never noticed much slow down -- well, occasionally a slight slow-down around 5-6 pm -- but never dipped below, say, ISDN speeds.
Well, in June, I got a flyer in the mail from BellAtlantic saying that DSL service was available in my neighborhood, and I wasn't all that interested until I saw they offered 7.1 Mbps speeds. After wiping up the drool, I called them up and signed up for BA DSL service. They came, they installed, they left. The guy even checked the line, and I saw with my own eyes that the bandwidth was hovering around 6.5 Mbps (not the advertised 7.1 -- but I wasn't complaining!)
Cut to me, setting it up on my system. First of all, the domain name they assign you (unlike the nice myname.ne.mediaone.net that MediaOne assigns you) turns out to be something like: adsl-192-168-288-112.more.crap.even.more.crap.bell atlantic.net. Disgusting -- having to type that everytime. And the whole point of having a host/domain name is lost when they put the actual IP address in the host name. *sigh*
That not withstanding, I forged ahead. At least, I thought, I'd have blazing 6.5 Mbps speeds! Well, it turns out that the only time I ever got anywhere NEAR that speed was when I was on the phone with their tech support, and they asked me to download a test file from one of their servers, a mere 3 hops away. Of course I'm going to get decent speeds if I'm going straight to one of your servers and downloading! But anywhere else, I was lucky to even get T-1 speeds.
Why? Because BA.net's network topology was designed by monkeys. OK, maybe not, but it certainly felt that way. Not only did it route traffic through 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0 addresses, it took 11 hops just to get out of BA.net's subnet! And then, apparently, BA.net has never heard of private peering, so all their traffic dumps into public exchanges located in Nome, Alaska (ok, so it was NJ) but any traffic that I wanted routed was almost certainly sent through the Garden State, even if that traffic was to MIT or BBN.
Ping times, needless to say, were dismal: at least 2-3 times slower than what I was experiencing with MediaOne. It's a good thing I never cancelled my MediaOne -- after a week of wrestling with them and their tech support, I unplugged the DSL modem (anyone want to buy one cheap? ;-) ) and plugged the cable modem back in.
So now, not only am I getting better performance from my network connection, I pay less than half of what I was paying with BA.net. How do these DSL providers expect to stay in business with prices like that?
Anyway, just wanted to echo Garfinkel's comments. If you didn't believe him, maybe you'll believe me, though I have no idea why you'd trust me over a respected journalist. ;-)
--jeddz
But this is not so. I have been able to open ports 22, 80 and 21 for my various serices. But, everytime they change your ip. You have to telnet into your router and change the NAT tables.
This is true if you're using an old version of the CBOS. If you get v2.2.0 then you can set wildcards. Meaning, open whatever ports you want, and when you IP changes, the ports on the router change with it. Very cool. Also, if you want added security, DISABLE TELNET. It's very simple and that way people can't log into your router and screw with it. I actually like the PPP mode now that CBOS 2.2.0 is out. Everything works perfectly.
Who are you kidding, Hemos? I think we both been on slashdot.org long enough to know this is just wishful thinking. :-)
Later
Hasdi
Have you tried (one of you) un/re-subscribing and/or requesting to be put on a different VLAN?
Playing quake with friends near and far is about the only reason I can see for having high bwidth access in the first place!
**>>BELCH
But your story reminded me of a similar experience with MediaOne. Yeah!
--jeddz
Cable modems are no more or less secure then dsl. Most head ends have the ability to block peer to peer communications, and encrypt data coming and going to the cable modems. Most people's fears about cable modems are driven by there ignorance and mis-information.
:-). Simiarly, you can't spoof IPs because the ISP router doesn't route that IP to your connection. Data gets mixed together at the ISP and you have no access to that point of the network, therefore you have no access to my data.
I want security, not hacks and obfuscation.
Blocking peer-to-peer communications is stupid. What if I want to play Quake with my neighbour? I gotta go through an off-net proxy??
I prefer DSL over cable for the simple reason that security IS significantly higher. You're on the same segment with cable. Yeah you encrypt stuff based on MAC and all these goofy little half-assed attempts at security but when it comes right down to it, "they" have access to your data if you're on the same segment. The hardware security is very simplistic because they can't afford to put decent processors on the network termination units cause that costs money, so you end up with XOR-style encryption or something just as hackable. Remember they have access to your MAC address and the encrypted data, exactly what the head units have to decrypt the data.
Not so with DSL. Done right (at the ISP end) packets between me and yahoo.com don't hit your wire. You can't turn the ISP's routers in to relays (at least not when I admin them
No US West has NOT done this to all of it's customers. The service you describe above is a "lower" priced solution for people that do not need an ALWAYS ON connection.
It's called MegaBit 256 Select..
The always on service is still available.
I personally received a letter from US West advertising this "PPP" style solution at about 1/2 the price of the regular ALWAYS ON service.
Ex-Nt-User
Actually, the phone guys are just as screwed up as the cable guys. They just have the advantage of being around for 100+ years to get everything put into an easy, well defined process that (almost) no one could screw up. We are getting a DS-3 line installed, and the phone people had no clue as to why the alarms were not working. It turns out they didn't have something in the CO turned on. Spent about 3 hours troubleshooting. Also, many of those phone guys are x-cable guys.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Choice creates customer confusion is marketing FUD. In the traditional provider relationship, the provider wants the advantage in the balance of information. They can use this advantage to control the customer.
I wish we could come up with networking schemes which would cut these guys off at the knees. I'm thinking of that ISP in Tucson AZ who bypassed the telco - Gain Communications...?
In almost all of these articles I've seen, people drop little hints that the cable service Americans get is very much substandard to what I'm getting.
For example, instead of 368kbps, 512kpbs or anything of the sort, I get a full 10Mbps link. Actually, the modem goes to 30Mbps, but I only have a 10BaseT NIC. Each trunk link carries ~1200Mbps in channels 1, 14, 18 and 88-120 (which have been dedicated for Internet access). The best part is, my cable company limits the usage to 50 modems per trunk line (before they split the line), so I'm getting a dedicated 2.4Mbps even at the busiest times. That's better than most of the ADSL I've seen.
Security has never been an issue - I don't know how they do it, but the issues that I've seen raised just don't apply. SMB doesn't work unless you tunnel it to an IP over TCP/IP, just like you'd have to for any other Internet host. The only ways to get to my neighbor's machine is are standard Internet connections (telnet, FTP, etc). Of course, my local network works fine.
The best part, to me, is COST. This author mentioned USD$51.50. I'm paying $34.96, and since a Canadian dollar is worth ~USD$0.60, that'd be USD$21.50, which is what most people pay for 56k dialup.
I think I'm going to call my cable company and thank them now.
The author really should have pointed out that pricing, availability, and expected speeds very VASTLY from city to city. MediaOne is the local cable provider where I live (St. paul). But the lines here aren't bi-directional, so if you get one, you need a modem for upstream. Thats an absurd speed for what you're paying, and it wastes another phone line. So I took the lesser of two evils and got a DSL line from uswest. 512 kbit, for a little under 100 a month with static IP's. Not a fantastic deal compared to some of the people I know around the country and Canada, but it still beats the hell of of my old 56k.
The security info that was given was interesting, but beyond that any discussion on this topic is worthless without knowing EXACTLY what is available in you area.
I haven't checked in the last couple weeks but the 'bell' fee's you list are VERY significant in Austin and bump total cost per month to more than it costs on the local RR network. I have a RR cable modem here for a grand total of something like $56 a month (including tax's) and on fast sites pull at 200kbytes. I've heard rumors of 400k to 600k from people around where I work. Every few months I call the local DSL providers and add up all the costs and compare the theoretical throughput to what I'm getting right now with RR. They have yet to win my business although i'm itching to get out from under the Time Warner 'no servers' clause even though I am running a HTTP server against AUP and haven't heard from them.
On a side note I am no longer dissatisfied with the RR network failures as they seem to have mostly been fixed. I have had the same IP for about 3 months now.
Varies by ISP. My ISP gives stern warnings about not running "anytype of server". They don't do any filtering or the obvious port scanning to se who is running what. I've read that using lots up bandwidth going up is worse than the same amount going down, and this is one of the reasons they don't want servers run (also they would like to charge extra for higher service levels including servers...) Still, I run ftp and am currently ssh'ed to my home machine :-)
The bridged and PPP are forms of internet accounts given by an ISP using Uswest as your backbone. So it's the ISP that gives them not Uswest. USwest's own ISP is no longer giving bridged mode. Instead they are doing PPP. For "Security" reasons. ehehe..
I have a graph up online that'll show you what I mean. If you have any questions, e-mail me and I can give you the raw data, and some other statistics. I live up in Minnesota.. and some of my friends have also expressed dissapointment in the QoS that mediaone offers up here. I'm paying $40/mo to get substandard service during prime time - my plain old analog modem (USR 56k) to a conventional ISP is actually better after about 18:00.
I've been wanting to put together a report for the Public Utilities Commissioner (PUC) for awhile, but after contacting their office they didn't even seem to understand what I was complaining about. :( I'm out of options up here for high speed access - xDSL is available in my area (US West - keep up the good work - nothing but rave reviews) but I'm too far away to get it.
Mediaone - are you listening? How about giving us some guaranteed QoS, or giving us more on-the-wire bandwidth?
--
Have you tried any advanced network tools? How about microsfot (ahem) netmeeting? or any other audio visual tool (I bet they wont work). Or have you tried playing any new games on the net? other than quake? Have you tried any game networks? (I mean real game networks).
Recently, USWEST decided to change all it's DSL customer accounts to a new PPP-DSL based connection. This means you would have to enter a username and password in your router (aka dsl-modem). There are certain disadvantages to this new services.
.. and all the fun).
:)
When your router is in PPP-DSL mode, the DHCP server assigns an IP directly to the router. From there you have to use NAT to pierce open ports for your own NIC. People most effected by this would be gamers and those who wish to use advanced forms of internet communcation (voice/video chat, file sharing and so on).
USWEST ISP web site claims that they are giving a full internet service. But this is not so. I have been able to open ports 22, 80 and 21 for my various serices. But, everytime they change your ip. You have to telnet into your router and change the NAT tables. This gets worse if you reboot your router (since the nat is deleted off). After 2 weeks of this, I changed over to startnet, here in Tucson, which didnt put restrictions such as this (but did firewall off lower ports).
So, if your getting DSL through USWEST, dont pick them as your ISP. Check the other ISP's in your area that offer DSL with USWEST as their backbone. And ask them if they are providing PPP-DSL or Bridged mode DSL. (in which case the IP is given directly to your NIC
Most users who get DSL are powerusers and demand more from their DSL service. I was alarmed by these restrictions that USWEST was putting for DSL users. Also it went to the point that I had to use a normal modem to play quake
--
It depends on the modem. Lan City and Com21 proprietary modems are wide open. However the Docsis/Open Cable modems are (at least) bridge devices and can be configured to block ports. The really good docsis modems are routers (cisco) and do NAT. One of the cisco models will even support ppptp. for more info, check out the public access area of http://www.cablemodem.com, Baseline privacy document (.pdf file).
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
...like all highspeed access is in New Zealand. :(
... no VoIP for us consumers) who charge more.
:) now if only they had better Cable TV.
Still, at least our cable company is smart enough to get a real ISP to do the internet stuff for them, and if you're a business you get to choose ISPs.
Compare this to our monopoly telco (except in Wellington where our cable company has actually laid real copper
But us cable people get STATIC IPs! much better than the poor ADSL people on DHCP with NATting ADSL modems.
And this same cable company reduces prices if you sign up for more services
Don
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I have cable service here in NZ, but checking stuff out before I bought it I've seen that it was far far better than the ADSL service offered by the rival Telecom.
My cable provider (Saturn) uses Com21 cable gear, checking out their site COM21 uses DES encryption, and checking out with a friend of mine who's already a customer, all Samba broadcasts are blocked. They don't use DHCP, and have no worries about you running servers etc.
Checking out the policies and config of your highspeed provider is always the key. If it was the other way around with the services, then I would have gone with ADSL.
Both technologies are excellent, and my cable service could have gone with ADSL but they didn't (all new phone network and all) that has to say something.
If the history of technology is any guide, however, it's unlikely that the battle between cable modems and DSL will be won on technical merits...Ultimately, this battle will be won and lost on mundane issues like price and quality of service.
Truer words have never been written.
Broadband is beginning to take off and speaking as someone who makes his living from using the resources on the internet, it's about time!
For most rational people the value of downloading Netscape in 5 or 10 minutes will be secondary to the relationship your broadband carrier establishes with you as a customer. How do they respond to problems? How flexible are they with with regard to how you use your broadband? Are they knowledgable about the product?
Most of these questions will be answered based on where you live and what your previous relationships are with these broadband carriers. Have you been satisfied with your current cable service? Is your telcomm responsive to your phone line problems.
I have had serious problems with my cable company (Cablevision). From their unresponsiveness to someone illegally billing their services to my account (had to get my my congressman on them) to their inability to offer a la carte programming (in process of going to satellite programming). As a result, I decided to go with DSL. I couldn't be happier with the service. I am paying $10 a month more than comparable cable service and haven't had one problem. I've found my provider (Bell Atlantic) to be very helpful and responsive.
This obviously isn't rocket science. The companies that build relationships with their customers will retain them. Even in the face of a supposedly superior product. While the article was topical and timely, I think the penultimate paragraph could have been fleshed out a bit to emphasize this more clearly.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
For the record (and possibly losing my access over this..), I would like everybody to know that I have run Linux on the mediaone network since last September. I have only had one problem since then - and that was due to buggy firmware on the modem. If anybody has problems with their cablemodem displaying high-ascii garbage in the text fields.. Click on this link, which will reset your SB1200 cablemodem to factory defaults. Simply removing the garbage and re-entering the data will not fix it.
Caveat emptor people...
--
5 (b) Subscriber will not resell the Service, or any portion thereof, or otherwise charge others to use the Service, or any portion thereof. The Service is for personal use only, and Subscriber agrees not to use the Service for operation as an Internet Service Provider, to host web sites for other parties or for any other business enterprise [emphasis added] or to connect the Cable modem to any server or to any computer outside of the Subscriber's premises.
sounds good to me. :-) I don't have a static IP, but I'll soon set it up to give/get files to/from work, run my camshot server for 1-way videoconferencing/security, etc. nice to know that they won't kill me for setting up http for friends & family.
Level 1 tech support is always useless. These are the people who are paid 8 bucks an hour to say "It's plugged in? Well, I'm stumped."
This is going to be a big deal. I imagine people will learn pretty quickly, though. They'll have to. :)
On the Cable Modem side, I _LOVE_ mine, I get 200-300K/second downloads all the time. I get 50 meg files in a minute or two. AND the company filters NetBIOS so the file-sharing issue is a no-brainer. Though, this messes up VPN support.
He really missed the mark on security. Who gives a shit if your neighbor shows up in network neighborhood? The risk is that any a-hole on your loop can put his system in promiscuous mode and read ANYTHING you send in clear text. This would include passwords on pages without encrypted connections, and every line of text to and from a telnet (including username and password).
I know that you are at some risk in any case, but I would prefer not to intentionally broadcast my IP packets through my neighbor's house.
As far as bandwidth goes, I think it is pretty short sighted for him to pooh-pooh the fact that you are sharing your bandwidth. This falls in line with other clever statements I have heard in the past like "you will never fill up a 10 MB hard disk" or "Why would you need more than one meg of RAM?" Granted, at this moment most cable modems are faster, but they are increasing in popularity. I'd rather not share a 700 kb connection 500 monkeys running web TV. I'll take a 400 kb dedicated connection to an ISP on a high speed backbone over a direct connection to a 700 kb backbone any day.
I suppose there is the possibility that there will be something "better" by the time the cable loops start getting really bogged down, and I may be the one being short sighted, but I don't think this is going to be the case.
-Peter
Way to obfuscate the shared line issue...among other points.
Security? If you don't know what you're doing get a Mac.
r@m
In my area, DSL is out of my budget ($100 per month for 128kbit, to $500 per month(!!) for 768kbit).
Slight correction: the $100 buys me 192 kbits/s, and the $500 (actually $505.95) gets me only 704 kbits/s.
lor.net DSL
Well, at the request that this not turn into austin.internet, that's why one has to do research into what's best in the area. The name of the game is researching options, and Roadrunner is certainly one of them.
It's clear the author has no idea how DSL is sold or how Covad fits into this picture.
The short form of how DSL is sold is that you get service in two pieces. First, you get a physical connection to your phone companies local central office (CO). From there you are connected to your ISP via an Ethernet bridge running over ATM. You ISP then provides you the second half of DSL service, some sort of network connection (I'll refer to it as an internet connection since that's normal, but it could just as well be a private network that only runs IPX.) In general the physical connection is provided by your local phone company. You internet connection could be provided by you phone company or another appropriatly equiped ISP.
Where Covad fits into this picture is that they provide the physical connection. That is, they act as a replacement for the local phone company. They lease copper pairs and rack space from the local phone company and then provide their own signal over those lines. An intresting feature of Covad's service is that they provide dedicated access all the way from your end of the pipe to the ISP of your choice if you're willing to pay for it (most DSL service uses a somewhat oversubscribed link from the CO to the ISP.) They also provice Service Level Agreements just like if you were buying a traditional T1 or leased line. This is an excelent feature if you're job depends on having working internet access as mine does (I telecommute from Seattle to Los Angeles) since it gives them some significant economic incentive to keep your lines up.
Personaly, I think Coved is a great thing for consumers as they provide competition at the phone company. I was impressed by the Covad installer, unlike all the idiots from USWEST I've delt with, he knew what he was doing. He basicaly ripped out and reinstalled all the work the USWEST installer did because he though it was sub-par. (It was, they installed a low-mositure, indoor punchdown block outside my apartment so the cheap steel contacts could corrode and kill my signal. ;-[)
-- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
Cable Co-op's operation is buggy as hell, and the tech support sucks.
DSL is far more reliable in this area.
This is for Cox@Home in Las Vegas. So they warn you that script kiddies may h4x0r your box, but will permit your server.
With EVERY OTHER cablemodem provider I've seen. Non SAY they allow servers. Many don't care, but it's officially prohibited in the TOS. This is an unacceptable arrangement. I love Cox Cable. Many of their techs are even Linux hacks. Kewl!
I looked at the covad thing. Since US West will not hook me up, and I see no signs of change with that, Covad was my only DSL choice.
But their prices are ridiculous. They have a one year commitment, a HUGE signup free(500 bucks), and 100 dolllar penalties for canceling within a year, 100 dollar penalty for upgrading/downgrading your service. its utterly riduclous for a regular consumer.
I have DSL service in Santa Barbara, CA through my local ISP (Silicon Beach - very good) and GTE (local telco - very bad)... It's great! I love it. I get 768/128 on what is called the "Bronze Plus" plan...
:-(
GTE also implementes the VLAN setup that the article describes. Both my friend and I were very early subscribers to the service and ended up on the same VLAN... I cannot exchange packets with him because of the way they have limited the packets and subnetted the network... You know what that mean... NO QUAKE!!!!
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
All a cracker needs to do is to keep checking these IP addresses. As soon as it gets a response from one of them, you're toast.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
I've got them as my dial-up ISP now and have found that they go through some of the worst internet backbone I have ever seen (Alternet and BBN Planet.) If they can ever manage to get DSL out to my area, I plan to shop around for a good ISP.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well before I beat the bushes "with I work for one of the nations largest ISPs".
I sell DSL in a southern state. We use Bells circuts and we supply the bandwidth. We do not give a damn what os you run. I have Win 98, Linux, and Free-Bsd. We also will support BSD flavors as we run it in house.
The caveat is we get someone who instalted Red- Hat from the handy dandy little CD who calls and wants heavy Linux support. "Ok are guys coming installing that network card and then configuring my linux box too". No way.
1. Network card is your problem to buy and install. WE do not want anyone in our boxes and we do not want the liability to be in yours. Bell, insists that they install the nic. Many stories of inept techs blowing motherboards.
2. Although many of us use some flavor of Unix we do not get into the support realm. BUT most Unix users never need any help. Just the Linux newbies who refuse to buy a Unix for Idiots book.
One note is that Bell in our area rents bandwidth from UUNET. We have our own fiber and the DSL users are om a DS3.
One of the things that my company recquires is that salespeople have a technical background for the occasional user that has a technical question.
frizzo
My experience with MediaOne around here has been
extremely positive. The techies have all been
Linux-friendly, and the QoS is consistently fast.
My point is this: YMMV. When getting information,
ask around locally. Ignore my anecdotal evidence
if you're outside Route 128.
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
Here Road Runner (cable) definitely rules...I don't believe we have DSL available, but it doesn't really matter since the cable modem service is what I would rate as excellent. They do have some minimum support for Linux (no tech support, but they do have links on their website to linux-compatible clients, and even support masquerading), and they will give you a second or third ip for 2.95 a month...the entire service is $40 a month or $30 if you subscribe to cable. For that you get VERY nice download speeds (comparable to the fiber optic at my school during late hours) although the upload leaves a lot to be desired. Basically it means you can't host much of a server, but oh well...I was never really interested in doing this from my house anyway, I prefer to keep my box locked up tight, especially in light of cable security concerns. Surprisingly they seem to have no problem giving you a static ip as long as you refresh it often...I turned my computer off over vacation once and found that my ip had changed...could be a coincidence but I doubt it. Overall I might consider switching to DSL if it became available, but on the other hand I'm glad I have a somewhat good cable service...from what I've heard the service in Manhattan, NY (RCN) blows goats...14.4 upload...blech!
-W.W.
If I stand on my roof, I can SEE the MAEWest building. There is a spool of dark fiber hanging
on the telephone pole in my back yard from PacBell's abandoned fiber-to-the-house project.
Cable modem service is not availble. PacBell says I'm too far for DSL. Covad says I'm close enough, but the line quaility is soo bad they
can't deploy.
I'm stuck with dial up that won't go past 40K.
I can't believe that I live in Silicon Valley,
where more internet traffic passes than anywhere
else in the freeking world, home of more computer
companies than any other area, and I can't get
decent internet connectivity.
No matter HOW bad any DSL or Cable service is,
Nothing compares to not being able to get it at all.
I've recently upgraded my commercial site to a 192Kbps SDSL connection in Maryland. I wanted to used Bell Atlantic for this but found them less than friendly on two points. First, the were averse to giving me fixed IP addresses and second, when I told them I was running FreeBSD, they basically just said sorry and hung up the phone. I then went to Erols and they gave me exactly what I wanted, fixed IP addresses, DNS hosting, etc. all part of the installation. It seems to me I read something about a guy going through this with Bell Atlantic or another company on /. sometime ago. I'm wondering how much business Bell Atlantic is going to lose because of their Windows-centric approach? I think that most of the DSL activity in this area is in the business arena still and probably a lot of those people are going to want to connect the DSL modem to a Linux or FreeBSD box. If Bell Atlantic is trying to take market share from Comcast, it seems to me it would be in their best interest to be more accomodating to the needs of their customers.
Frank W. Miller
hack that!
With Time-Warner RoadRunner in San Diego, service is variable with location. My subnet has only about eighty subscribers and is located in a largely lower middle class area. Most people work during the day and access is almost absolute during those hours. It can slow a little at night between seven and ten. Security is non-existent. There is no firewall, filtering or any other means of protection. For their part, T-W does warn about this. I have an old P133 set up with OpenBSD as a dual-homed firewall with NAT and have no problem. There are others in San Diego who have reported attacks. I understand T-W's position on the security issue. If they had a firewall, someone would always be pestering them to make some oddball protocol work. They would have to determine what port(s) it uses, open them and be subject to suit if the machine was then attacked through the port(s).
In the end, money-wise, cable is a better bet - it's just cheaper and easier to implement. Plus it has a history. Almost every xDSL service warns that it's providing semi-tested technology, and that there are risks.
But, you need to start looking at the specifics of reality. Cable companies are local monopolies, and that brings with it the generic problems of noncompetitiveness. xDSL service is a semi-monopoly when you think about it, 'cus even though there are various ISPs that may serve your area, they generally can only use one telephne provider (GTE in my case). So here, while you may luck out in finding a good ISP, the weakest part of the chain may just be the phone company, in which case you're back to the same place that cable users are.
[personal opinion]I'm very happy with my ADSL connection...$100/month is a bit steep, but 384 reliably up/down, $2 for additional static IP's, and freedom to do commercial business/run servers are very lucatrive IMO.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
I thought the telco and cable deregulation was supposed to foster CHOICE and COMPETITION.
Here in Tyngsboro, Massachusettes our local cable monopoly is Continental Cablevision. *Every* town that borders my own is served by Media One, who has no plasns to ever offer work with CC and service in this town. I thought the whole point of the legistlation was competition was no longer "outlawed" and anyone can offer service anywhere? Or are the cable companies voluntarily avoiding each other's turf to prevent price wars?
I also live 1 mile from the phone exchange... plenty close enough for good DSL, but it's not offered. They just offer me ISDN which I don't want.
It just blows my mind that people are getting bandwidth in Okedokey, EBF and I'm just 30 minutes outside of from Boston and no one considers this a market. My cable company is based out of New York and Connecticut, where they offer cable.
If the company that serves you cable is an island among the "big boys" like Media One or @home, you're totally screwed. I built a Linux-based LAN with a dedicated 56k connection, but without cable I can't enjoy Quake 3 dammit. Give me universal service OR doors-wide-open competition, PLEASE.
I even looked at T1 service which has come down A LOT, but it's still way too expensive to justify because not just anyone can string up copper...
>:-
Slashdot bug: a left-angle bracket from the angry face got parsed out.
I noticed others sharing their experiences with XXXX provider, so here's mine:
My brother uses MediaOne, and I do as well (since I'm a freeloader at his house, I'm just masqing through his computer). The service is quick, when it works (important to note because one week last month it didn't for 3 or 4 days).
Something I do like about MediaOne is that nowhere on the acceptable usage list did I notice a "no server" policy (though I didn't look hard)...so I can run a web server, oh, but I'm not allowed to run an IRC bot, make sense?
So I looked at xDSL. The ADSL offerings out here were too dumbed down -- no domain hosting, either no static IPs or hefty charges for an IP or two, etc, etc, etc. After some research I eventually chose SDSL, and after some false starts (improperly wired DSL jack, defective router) it's now up and running nicely, running everything I need. And the ISP seems to be on the ball, too.
Oh, and using Bell Atlantic as a test case is not advisable...
Five years from now, I'll probably be using something else. That's just how it goes...
I still think Scott Adams had it right in one of his Dilbert books:
Telephone companies and DSL will beat out Cable companies and cable modems for one simple reason: All of the people that were too incompenent for even the local telco work at the cable company.
(I will post the exact quote and book when I get home).
MS already packages a mini web server with Windows now. In the future, I fully expect MS to include other server applets, such as ftp (or their proprietary equivalent which they'll invent). If the MASSES have this software, they'll start using it in spite of the TOS they never read. This will FORCE telcos/cablecos to yield to public demand and start allowing servers explicitly.
People often complain that they don't like sharing their bandwidth with bazillions of people. With cable modems, you ARE sharing your bandwidth, but not with as many people as you think. Cable modems work on a HFC (Hybrid-Fiber Coax) network. The key word here is Fiber. Signal is pumped out to your house on different laser-nodes (all glass) to certain points in different neighborhoods where it becomes coax. The number of people on each coax segment is planned out before the deployment. This means that if there are 100 or so people on your segment, the bandwith available is optimal for sharing with those 100 people. Just because 800 people are seen in "network neighborhood" or are found while running a sniffer, doesn't mean that you are sharing the bandwith with them. A majority of them are probably on your laser node, and not all on the coax line you are sharing. If you purchase a 100Mb/sec connection. You are NOT splitting that bandwith up with the people on your segment. The cable routers push data out enough, that you will be sharing some 300Mb/sec with the people on your node. This is predetermined so that once all the expected number of people sign on, you have the 100Mb/sec (usually a little under) connection you want. I never get less than 900K/sec from my modem. =) So as you see, a dedicated line is not as important here. Also, in case anyone was wondering, cable modems encrypt all data between themselves and the cable routers. These encryption keys change periodically also. So security isn't a biggie.
I currently subscribe to @Home ... and have been wrestling with the Cable modem/DSL dilemma for a while. For most of what I do at home, cable is great - except for the rather frequent outages! I get the impression that @Home (at least here in Calgary, via Shaw/Rogers Cable) is oversubscribed, and they do not have enough support in place. Can anyone else confirm/deny this?
... but they are *pricey*. Until my cable performance degenerates until a point where it isn't worth keeping it, or I really need to set up a server at home, I probably won't switch. (Of course, I am hoping DSL prices will drop a little by that time!)
There are a couple of options if I want to go DSL
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
My feelings is anyone who is ready for 24/7 access is ready to learn about network security. If you need that kind of access for internet use then its your responsibility to ensure the integrity of your own home network. Even though there has not been much news about linux systems being hacked it will become more common particularly to RedHat users that use default installations. Maybe because they don't know any better and they wanted to be "cool" with their other buddies to say "Look at me I'm running Linux". I'm not paranoid about the government and stuff like that, but with the new chips like Pentium III with Big Brother inside. I feel more intruded upon by marketing companies using this information to follow consumer spending. So for me I've tighted my linux firewall, and don't have an Intel Pentium III, and have not relied on the cable company for service since I know already they are useless since all they support are windows and mac installs. Again anyone ready for that kind of connection is ready to learn about network security and protecting their data.
For me, the biggest issue is whether or not I can switch providers if mine doesn't provide a good level of service. For me, that means DSL, because I'm not forced to deal with USWest's ISP. I get static IPs, an ISP that really knows their stuff, and tons of bandwidth. And if my provider ever pisses me off, I'm gone.
Can you do that with cable modems?
314-15-9265
I plan on not even having cable service to my house when I move! Cable service has left a bad taste in my mouth for years. Satellite and DSL for me.
Inexpensive SDSL too.... $49.95 a month and servers are allowed. 1GB upload per month free, each additional $20. Unlimited downloads though. One IP (additional IP's being offered is being considered). Max is 1.024 MBps up and back if you are within 1.7 miles.
Only rule: can't resell the bandwidth. Run any services! Real good FAQ and it even addresses web hosting, and registering a domain with your IP.
If you're in the Chicago area, seriously look into this at this website. The only downside is that the bandwidth decreases the furhter you are from the phone company's CO.
No phone company either like Ameritech (Amerisuck) is involved other than at the Central Office.
However the DSL line is only for DSL... not able to be shared with the voice line.
-m
It's simple. With cable modems, you're on a shared lan. With DSL, you have a dedicated line with dedicated bandwidth, but the first thing they do is to connect all those lines together into a common shared trunk!
What, did you think you were really getting your own personal 400kb connection to the internet? Who cares at what point it gets shared, the bandwidth is always shared eventually.
The solution to congestion in both cases is pretty similar. For DSL, the company gets more trunks, or a fatter trunk. For Cable, you split the LAN into two segments.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
The relative merits of DSL vs. cable modem really all rests on whether or not the network built to hold those technologies can provide the type of service. He mentions that his DSL service goes through San Jose and Chicago and New York before getting back to Boston. That's just a crappy network for that person. It hurts performance and if the lines between any of those routers get cut or saturated, you're screwed. The same can be true of cable modem service. Luckily, most cable companies operate their systems locally, so your network infrastructure is going to be local. DSL, especially in the case of national providers, may not have their infrastructure local.
I had DSL in Austin through Texas.Net this summer. Texas.Net is a regional Texas provider with massive amounts of money invested in their network, their machines, and their connections. They're ahead of their bandwidth curve, which means they have the bandwidth to support the maximum throughput possible. Thus, with DSL in Austin, local sites were pulling in at a 100K (that's kilobytes, not bits) per second, and up near the theoretical limit (150K/sec) for sites local to Texas.Net's network. BTW, if you're in Texas and want to check out this service, residential DSL service (low-speed: 1.5Mbps) is $19.95/mo plus the Bell fees. Contrary to this, my friend at MIT, who was on a shared MediaOne cable line split among an entire housing unit, never got above 60K downloading things from MIT. Routing and infrastructure take their tolls.
The key to finding the best technology is research. Concentric was probably not the best choice for DSL for a Boston-area business. You've got to ask about the network, check what their routing is like, and find out about competitors. The best place to do this is on the newsgroups for the area. While the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty crappy, you can piece together a pretty accurate description of what is good by asking the question and then sifting through the ashes.
Personally, I think DSL is better as it is guaranteed bandwidth (provided the external 'Net connections can support it), but maybe not in your area. If you find many, many stories in your area like this article, you'll be ready to make an informed decision. But don't make it based just on thisarticle.
Cable modems are no more or less secure then dsl. Most head ends have the ability to block peer to peer communications, and encrypt data coming and going to the cable modems. Most people's fears about cable modems are driven by there ignorance and mis-information.
--Hired Net Grunt
I work for an DSL provider in Wisconsin. I see these arguments all the time. I rarely try to argue anymore.
The reason for this is because when you see a cable vs DSL argument on the irc, in newsgroups, or even in person, the people arguing are almost always arguing about the cable modem service in THEIR AREA vs DSL service in THEIR AREA. It's never an argument about the technology, always about the providers. They always talk about bandwidth on adsl or sdsl being less, but this is probably a function of the provider throttling it down. Everyone talks about security on cable, but this is all relative as adsl or sdsl can be just as lax if not implemented properly. It's almost an apples and oranges argument.
This Salon article is no different. He is comparing PacBell dsl (which sucks) to MediaOne's cable service. This is not representative of the technologies involved and frankly makes me a little upset.
Hopefully someone (maybe me) can find a good link to post that compares technologies, not services.
Or maybe someone who really is involved with cable technology can write a article here on cable technology, and I or someone else would be happy to reply with a similar paper on DSL technologies.
-=Ex-manager of Wrestlers=-
I've had ADSL for quite a bit now and been more than happy with it. But now... oh my. For $159 a month I can get 1.5m-6m/384k. Yes thats right 1.5m dedicated in and 384k out for a measly 160 a month. The downside? One IP address. But I can deal with NAT'ed traffic for that. Its kinda weird to be downloading at 40 and 50k a second and watching streaming anime off the net at the same time... all the while serving a shoutcast station.
F /...
Well weird for me because I was at a startup ISP in the early 90s who "KICKED ASS" because of our dedicated 56k pipe to the net.
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
I personally don't think much of these security issues. Granted, if you're on a dialup your IP# does change, normally. However, many a dialup user also sit on IRC, ICQ, Aol Instant Messanger, Yahoo, you name it. Many of these services will give out the ip# of the user. Futhermore, many ISPs have fingerable POPs, shell accounts, mail servers will tell you the name of the sending user. The point is that you really can't hide on the internet. I've written trivial programs to try these methods, find out when the user is online, and brute force their netbios fileshares.
I think its foolish to depend on, or expect, any plain text internet traffic to be secure. I don't care what kind of connection you have, but you simply can't be sure that no way along your path that there is no one packet sniffing. But in regards to sniffing security, most of these cable modems do a pretty good job of filtering packets not intended for you. It would take a pretty capable person to modify the hardware such that they could see. Now sure, eventually you might see modchips or whatever which allow people to send and recieve whatever they want. But there are many kinds of cable modems out there, and it still wouldn't be that trivial to install it. This is a significant barrier. Otherwise, most of these cable modem companies have some pretty competent security people. Its not so likely that their servers are going to get hacked. Compare this to using one of these small time dialup ISPs, many of them are hacked and sniffed repeatedly. Not to mention line tapping. If someone of means really wants to target you, they can easily just tap your POTS line. Its not that complex, and its virtually impossible to detect if properly done.
While the full time high speed connectivity might increase your exposure, I think that you're better off putting a little effort into security on such a connection--than being on a classic dialup and not concerning yourself with it (as most do now).
I can't even use xDSL or cable modems because there isn't anyone who offers it down here in New Mexico. U.S. West says they plan to put in DSL someday, but there's no date or anything. It is possible to use a cable modem, but you have to live within 3 miles of NM TechNet (*and* they charge an arm and a leg for it). ISDN is available, but it's $70/mo, and I really don't feel like paying $70/mo for ISDN. (Plus $140 installation.) So, I'm stuck using 56k. Bleh. I would be happy for anything better. (Of course, there's plenty of bandwidth at work. :)
See also Bob Metcalfe's column ("Digital Subscriber Lies") in Infoworld this week.
BTW, I have ADSL myself and several of my friends have cable.
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
I hate it when someone talks about choice creating customer confusion. Why does everyone say that? Show me one example where choice brings customer confusion? Is the customer confused when they have 4 dozen different types of cereal to choose from? Are they confused when they have a choice of 40 resteraunts to eat at?
Choice is *always* good. Choice creates innovation. It creates cheaper prices. It creates diversity in product. Customers are greatly benefitted by choice.
Customers won't be "confused" because each solution is good enough. The are benefits to using either one. So they'll be hyped both and then buy the one that looks the best to them. No problems...
-Brent--
I'm amazed at the differences in price and service level that exist across the country. For the record, i'm paying $49/month for 1.5MBit/128K service here in San Francisco. Only once since March have i had a service interruption, and PacBell's automated trouble line indicated they already knew about it; it was fixed within two hours of my noticing it.
Cable modems aren't available here, so i can't compare to them. But such variables as price, ISP quality, download and upload speed, and so forth seem to be highly regional, so being partisan about Cable vs. xDSL seems pointless, since the particulars vary so much from place to place.
And what's this jazz the article mentions about "microfilters" on all the phones? I never got those that i know of, but haven't noticed any noise on my phone line. Hmmm...
But i do love having broadband service, and the article is quite correct in how such service changes the way you use the resources of the Web. The computer becomes much more of an information appliance. Plus, being a LPB (Low Ping Bastard) when playing Team Fortress Classic online is a joy to behold. Plus web radio suddenly sounds better than AM radio.
mahlen (TFC name "SpeldRong")
Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.
--John Barrymore's dying words
Whichever technology gets to my house first, wins my money. At first I said I'd wait for the next gen of DSL (a SW Bell employee was telling me about it, since I live only like 2k feet beyond the current DSL range) because @Home customer service SUCKS. They advertised a roll out of cable modems in my area for Aug 1st. Then Aug 23rd. Then TBD. Now it's "we're not telling". I explained, very patiently, that my contract with my ISP was coming up and I needed just a wild guess at when cable would be out so I could choose a monthly or yearly contract. They didn't even read the message, they just sent back the exact same "we're not telling" sort of response. Identical to the other one they sent me.
So I contact SW Bell and get the exact same runaround from them. Except their site won't even give you an email address to contact them with customer service questions!
So I've realized that customer service with either company will suck, so I'm just going to give my money to the first company which finally does get out here...
From the posts here, it's obvious that people have good and bad experiences using both Cable and DSL.
I've had very good service using MediaOne cable in the Boston area. It's been fast, reliable, and they are largely agnostic about platforms/servers/home networks. Obviously some of the folks in Minnesota have seen the opposite.
On the DSL side, some of the customers are happy, and some are not. Big surprise.
People need to remember they are buying a service, not a technology. Both cable and DSL have technical issues that can be addressed, but it's up to the company providing it to you. The theoretical performance of the technology is irrelevant if it's being implemented by buffoons. Here in Boston, M1 seems to have done its homework, while Bell Atlantic still has work to do (and isn't very price competitive either). YMMV.
The description why cable modems are cool (page 2) applies equally well to DSL. In fact, take the first few paragraphs, replace cable with DSL and you have a perfectly good and valid piece of writing.
To say that a DSL line is shared with the phone service is a lame excuse. The phone line bandwidth is so tiny compared to the total frequency range of the line DSL uses, that it's not even an issue, certainly nothing even close to the amount of sharing going on on cable lines.
In the same paragraph saying that cable is the king of bandwidth and that the writer gets 7 mb/s is the statement that the modem is limited to 600 kb/s. So which is it?
And then the dismissal of the issue of line sharing (page 3). If you get 600kb/s on a cable modem, and that's enough to satisy you, then DSL will do fine as well. I routinely get 600kb/s on DSL and I'm near the bottom of the serviceability scale for DSL.
Then you have the upload speeds. How can standard cable service even compete with the ul caps?
And prices for DSL are coming down fast these days, at least over here (Calgary, Canada). You can get a 768kb/s line for some $50/month (Canadian!, that's like 5 cents US), which almost matches cable service prices.
I will admit, that from reading warious posts around /. and other forums, DSL service (as in people service) sucks; this gives a lot of advantage to cable service. But the article is not a well balanced article on cable vs DSL; rather it's cable vs 'something I've never really tried just heard about and I hate it and I think cable is oh so cool' article.
So lets keep things in perspective; this article does cut through some of the hype about cable, but merely mentions DSL in passing as some other internet technology.
Ugh, it's too early for this...
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Here in the glorious Cincinnati,OH (hey, it could be worse!) area the local REBOC has been really pushing it's "Zoomtown" service. For $40 a month, you get the 3XX/7XX K (I can't recall the exact #s right now) ADSL, w/free hardware (Lan card, Cisco 675 router & 3 microfilters).
I've had some slight problems with them (I moved once and it took them 4 days to work out what was wrong at my new location), but now I get a new IP address about once a day, it's been up straight for about a week, and they don't mind Linux, although they wouldn't touch it for the install. I had to do the linux net config myself (gee, can anyone say ifconfig?)
I even got to turn down the telemarketer from the local cable company last night. That alone is probably worth the $40/month, esp. since the local provider is @home, who, IIRC, still has the limited 128K upstream (any corrections?). That, and they have a stated policy against servers. You serve and @home drops you and fines you.
Another thing to note, though, is that I've got a 4 IP subnet of the 10.XXX.XXX.XXX variety. All Zoomtown subscribers get a unique IP in the 10 class A space. I can use this to get to other subscribers and, if it's enabled, use window's file sharing inside zoomtown. Same disadvantage that the people with the cable modems are talking about, but it doesn't much worry me. People should be using passwords and packet filters, anyway.
The only other annoying thing is that they've blocked port 23 at their routers, but it encouraged me to install SSH anyway, so that was probably a good thing. Other than that, I run FTP, HTTP, SSH, SSH2 and a bundle of other services they don't seem to have any problem with.
Enough Babble.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
They are just an unimformed behmoth. As far as Mediaone western region goes, at least they have news groups for linux in medione's customer site. The key to any customer desk never ask once ask twice especially with technical issues. There is so much information not all of the reps are fully informed. I know in working from previous work as supervisor for a technical help desk. Guarantee that if you go higher eventually you will hit someone that will say its ok. I wouldn't worry they couldn't tell a tcp/ip packet from a linux system or windows system anyways.
while it's true that in an ideal world, xDSL would be more secure than cable, in practice it still often not. Reason being that the DSL companies are often still fairly incompetent and end up bridging traffic instead of routing it. end result -- a lot like cable. Other people in your subnet end up seeing your traffic. With any luck this will change in the near future, but for now... don't count of the fact that your xDSL-connected PC is as safe as you think it is.
My local cable (used to be TCI...) has had modems since before @Home existed. I can use the local ISP service or @Home. I choose the local service. IMO, Congress should require cable companies to open the system to other ISPs
He gets good service via cable, so he assumes everyone will. Blech. .5mbps during the day, close to 1mbps at night.
Time Warner here in Jackson, MS sucks big. They don't even _have_ road runner in yet. (gee... wasn't it supposed to be this year? That's what they've said the past two years.) whereas, Bellsouth, despite their anti-linux party line, has Outstanding customer service. My ADSL gets
That being said, I have to agree this article should have been an OpEd piece or something. It shouldn't have been posted as fact, Hemos.
'Nuff said. My cable service has never been interrupted. Unlike my phone lines that alwats go out in storms or when they go staticy.
I subscribe ot Cincinnati Bell's ADSL service, which has been down about 20% of the time. They refuse to give me a static IP, and I have to "login" to the service through a Javascript-enabled browser (not lynx). This means that IU have to launch XFree86 just to connect to the internet, atleast I get my own NAT.
But the connection seems to drop for no reason (the "modem" has to retrain and connect), in the middle of downloads, and my line quality is great! For a solid week I got a "busy signal" on the DSL connection (the "modem" is actually a Cisco 675 router and I can telnet to it to check on things). They block incoming connections to the telnet port so I have to change that on my machine so that I can use it from work.
Their intranet page is shockwave-enhanced and has _no_ content in the shockwave that is remotely usable, but I have to set it as my home page so that I can log in to the service.
I signed a 12-month contract, and once it's up, I'm going with RoadRunner (from Time-Warner Cable). One good thing though-- last month they doubled the Base speed to 768Kb, and took $5 off the bill at the same time. Gotta like that...
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
"The people working at cable companies couldn't get jobs at phone companies," or something like that.
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
this should read: it's-just-better-than-isdn
people always seem to confuse 'then' and 'than'.
I've had a cablemodem through Time Warner (Rochester, NY) for two years now.
/residential/ service! It's 100 times better than your dialup connection for no more than twice the price. Stop whining!
I don't need any support on my Linux box, the bandwidth is more than adequate (better than some T1 I've used), and the downtime since I've been subscribed can be measured in mere hours (only one incident comes to mind).
All for ~$50/month.
Complaints about "shared" bandwidth are unwarranted. Not only is "dedicated" bandwidth a myth, but this is
DSL is overpriced and (from what I've heard) fraught with service problems. I have no reason to believe the ultra-arrogant phonopolies will fare any better with it than they did with ISDN.
--
#19845
The article is crap unless you're in Boston. It's basically a bitch fest about the guy's area and NOT a good article about the merits of one vs. the other. It comes down to where you are and the quality and cost of the services available to you.
That being said, if you're a gamer and you don't want packet loss, you probably don't want cable, and if you want to download lots of pr0n you probably want cable. But it comes down to how good/bad each is in your area.
AT+T
Cable modems are broadband devices. They use two channels: one for sending and one for receiving. It's possible for the cable company to allocate many pairs of channels on the same cable: in other words, do frequency division multiplexing.
So you are not necessarily on the same LAN with everyone else who is on the same wire as you, and the cable does not necessarily have to be split into segments.
The question is, what does it take for a given cable company to start allocating more channels? I suspect that they just cram as many users onto the same pair of channels as they can, and won't allocate any more until enough people complain.
While the actual performance of my ADSL connection has been outstanding, I REALLY want another provider (cable or DSL, I really don't care) to come into the area to help drive the prices down... at the moment the monthly charge is $60 for 256/64, or $100 for 384/384 (and the phone co. charges an additional $30-50). To top that off, the phone co. charges $339 for the installation (fortunately, I came in during the introductory "no installation charge" phase). OUCH!
---
not plane, nor bird, nor even frog...
Here in Tempe, AZ you are lucky if you can get either one. Cox cable and Uswest made an agreement under the table not to compete with each other. They are both rolling out their respective services in my area, but neither of them is being aggressive about it. It will cost both of them a lot of money to install the infrastructure needed to deliver the service. By not competing they can each do it at a comfortable pace and not have to worry about the other getting there first and therefore getting the customers. This is all fine and dandy for them, but not for us. Not to mention the fact that its a violation of multiple laws.
Arguing about DSL verses Cable verses Speedchoice verses whatever is about as intelligent as arguing about the color of your underwear. Its not like anyone else but you has any reason to care how much bandwidth you have or don't have, or how picky your ISP is about what you do with your connection. People tend to argue and brag about the stupidest of things when it comes to computers. I'll let everyone in on a little secret. It's nice to have a fast CPU, or a fast internet connection. A 12 speed burner is nice too. A 50 gig 10k rpm ultra-wide scsi hard drive would be great to have. But none of these things mean jack shit. Having these things doesn't make you smarter or somehow superior to someone who doesn't. They don't make your dick any bigger or teach you how to use it. So grow up just a little bit please. If you've got to compete computer wise, do it based on what you can do with your system. By that I mean what you can create with it, whether it be code or art or whatever. Because that is what truly matters if anything does. Which sounds better, "Check out my new CGI script, its a national debt counter. Put it up on your site and users will get to see the ever climbing value of our national dept." Or "Na na na na na na, I've got a K7 and a T1 and YOU don't!! Na na na na na na!" See what I mean?
I would just like to say that at least in the Northern Virginia Area, Media General cable blows big time... their RoadRunner service sucked and it seemed to be down whenever I needed to use it. Speed was good however when it worked... Now I have an SDSL connection and my own Flowpoint Router two hops from AboveNet's 18.2 gigabit backbone... This connection absolutely rocks! It runs me $80 for 192 kbps, but I plan to go to 384 kbps for $100 mtm. I also get two static ip addresses, and my provider, capu.net (which has a 100 megabit uplink to above.net), can give me a full Class C for a small charge. Frankly, this connection is much better than cable any day! I also get the same router many businesses get for DSL rather than that crappy modem... Just my two Cents... :) - shellx
With a statement like that I can only conclude that you are using MediaOne. I won't detail my entire HORRENDOUS encounter with their tech people when my hostname stopped resolving...but lets just say it was 7 transfers later ( 2 of which were sent to the Cable TV section of the company and 1 to sales ) before I found a level 3 tech who knew what a hostname was AND understood that they were mystically connected to DNS servers. I second....Speed is good, service sucks ass.
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
From what I've seen, broadband mileage varies greatly depending on the area. For example, here in Seattle, we've got US West and GTE (depending on the area you live in) offering DSL. I use US West, I know people with GTE. Both DSL offerings are excellent. And I pay ~$50 a month for my service (726/256). (I get to chose ISP's to boot). I know several people who have TCI @Home and have had nothing but trouble. Apparently TCI hasn't prepared well enough for the large increase in customers and they keep running out of bandwidth. TCI in general has also been notoriously unreliable here. (The WA state utilities commision has actually fined them several times.)
So the moral is: check with people in your area first. Until the dust settles, there is no way of knowing what your best bet is without checking locally.
the guy who wrote the article made some really good points, but frankly he looks out for the big company more than the little cable modem user. This is something that people should be very careful about. For instance a company can control the speeds at which data is sent to your computer. This could potentially allow companies like M$ to pay the ISP to allow M$ ads to download at an optimal speed, but every other ad out there download at a normal speed. If this was taken to the extreme M$ could pay money to allow IE 5.X to download fast, and Linux to download slow. Now i know i am being a little paranoid here, but when companies start making decisions which restrict the user i get scared, and so should you. The example i give from the article is the authors thoughts on the closure of a certain port unless you contact the company specifically and have them change it. If this is taken to the extreme bad things could be in store for us cable-modem users.
sorry for the paranoia, but we should always be weary of unjust threats.
I just got Mediaone Roadrunner installed in a boston suburb, and the performance/reliability has been spectacular so far. My only complaint is the following conversation I had with a salesperson:
Him: Hello, sir. Will you be connecting mediaone from a windows machine
or a mac?
Me: Actually, I was planning on setting up a Linux server and using IP
masquerading.
Him: (pause). Umm, sir...we don't support anything except Windows and
Macintosh.
Me: I know. I'm going to set it up myself.
Him: Would you please hold?
Me: sure.
Him (4 minutes later): Sir, we only support Macintosh, Windows 95, 98, and
NT 4-point-O.
Me: I understand that. I won't be needing support. I'll do the software
installation myself. I'll just need you to wire it up to the modem.
Him: Our technician needs to install the software on a computer while he's
there, though.
Me: Why?
Him: Because that's mediaone policy.
Me: Why?
Him: Sir, please hold again.
Me: ok.
Him (3 minutes this time): Sir, we need to send a technician out there to
wire the system, and provision your computer.
Me: What do you mean "provision the computer"?
Him: The technician needs to do that.
Me: you just told me that...what does it mean?
Him: I don't know. I'm not a technician.
Me (with HEAVY sarcasm): Really? You don't say? Ok...answer me this
question: Why does a technician need to come out, and do an installation
that I'm going to wipe out as soon as he leaves?
Him: because he needs to get the emac address.
Me: What's that?
Him: The address of your computer.
Me: Then it's a hardware thing. You can get it in Linux.
Him: Our technicians don't support Linux.
Me: I know that. I'm going to do the networking.
Him:Sir, the installation, with the fiber optics, is alot more involved
than you think.
Me (giving up): Fine. The machine will be windows 98.
Him: How much RAM do you have?
Me: 64 megs.
Him: Ok, and what's the processor speed?
Me (thinking i'll just put windows on the machine that will eventually be
the Linux server): 90
Him (another pause): uhhh...excuse me? It needs to be a pentium system.
Me: I know that. It's a pentium 90.
Him: We need at least 166 Mhz.
Me: No you don't. I read the system requirements, and it says it
requires a pentium, and a 166 is recommended.
Him: Sir, we can't send anyone out if you have less than a 166.
Me: Fine. It will be an AMD K6-2 400.
Him: It needs to be a pentium, sir.
Me: Don't worry about it, it's the same thing.
Him: Is it a pentium-class processor, sir?
Me: yes
Him: and do you have an ethernet card, sir?
Me: seeing as i am networking the systems myself once the technician
leaves, yes I have the cards.
Him: thank you very much sir. We'll have someone there to do the survey
on Wednesday.
When the guy came to install it, I started the same conversation with him. His response was basically "Do whatever you want, once I'm gone." I said "ok", and got my linux box going. If there are people out there who need help with Roadrunner for Linux, I'd recommend http://www.vortech.net/rrlinux.
Juiced? Or Not?
About customer support: a month ago we had a bad storm that put our service down for about a week. That was very bad (except that I have a T1 at work), but they did give everyone a 1 month credit for the outage. Seems that the storm destroyed a bunch of equipment.
Another issue could be access to some sites that depend on reverse DNS. It took a couple of weeks to get them to put my IP in correctly so that I could D/L 128-bit software from MS/Netscape.
Anyone else have good/bad experiences with HSA?
Brian Milby
milby@milby7.com
Not that I am any different, but I must admit, Slashdotters (and any linux zealots for that matter) can argue over anything!! The bottom line is (and most people agree), is that cable will most often beat DSL in uncongested areas.
:) !!!!! We can argue this matter well into next week, next month if that is what its gonna take!!
... or their social lives ... or even their parents, if that is what it is going to take!! We must win the argument at all costs!!!
.. what the hell .. It is fun, inspiring, and arguing with slashdotters is fun as Ph*&k!!
But will this stop us slashdotters from vigourously arguing this matter?? HELL NO
And not only will we argue, we will zealously defend our choice to the death!! We will close our minds, opening it up only to those who agree with our opinions (which we will refer to now as FACTS, because 'opinion' often connotates that their is not complete truth in what we say).
Our counterpoints will include a rash of flames, not only to argue their semi-valid point, but to belittle our opponents as well!! We will call upon our meanest of slurs to throw back at them, resorting to making off-the-topic comments about their intelligence level
I hope you take this post in good humor, that is what it is meant for. There is some truth in it, and I think we can all see it. I claim to be no different than this, because I often see myself doing the same. But
for the most part, random drops in download/upload speeds are due to the fact that you are not on an independent line. when you sign up for DSL, you need to find out one important thing first, if the line is shared or not. pac bell and a few others run one line per area. with circumstances like that, every person along your route, signed up for DSL, will be sharing a limited amount of bandwidth.
if you are looking towards DSL as an option, look towards a company like Covad, which gives independent lines. the initial cost is more, but the overall value is there.
-junk
ps-anything i've said incorrectly can be attributed to my mother. she works at flowpoint and has no technical knowledge at all, but she can spout this shit out like it's nothin'
Although this was an interesting article, it was replete with factual errors:
DSL service is inherently more secure than using a cable modem because DSL provides a dedicated connection over your existing telephone line. A cable modem is more susceptible to hackers since it operates on a shared system, much like an old-fashioned party line
He used this in a context which was somewhat ambiguous. This was presented as an example of "noisy ammunition for their PR battle", but he never explicity stated whether he felt this was true or not. I would argue that the security problems one is likely to face from one's neighbors pale in comparison to those one faces from the world at large. Either way leaving one's computer connected to the Internet without a firewall is begging for trouble.
I can download Netscape Communicator 4.5-- which resides on a server in San Jose -- in less than 4 minutes.
I wonder if he checked the IP address he was downloading from... If Netscape's "tdns" system was working properly, the IP he got was for the East Coast Netscape colocation facility in Pennsauken, N.J. rather than Mountain View.
The company is fundamentally a West Coast ISP with delusions of grandeur. Specifically, Concentric doesn't actually have any employees in Boston. Instead, it contracts with a company called Covad to do all the grunt work.
I'm not certain, but I believe that Concentric uses Covad "to do all the grunt work" even on the West Coast.
The sleek "RISC" microprocessors from companies like Sun Microsystems and MIPS lost out to Intel's technologically inferior Pentium chips. Ultimately, this battle will be won and lost on mundane issues like price and quality of service.
I guess he missed the whole evolution of Merced from HP's PA-RISC chip.
Despite these problems, it was definately a thought-provoking article. I'm looking forward to the discussion here on Slashdot-- I bet that it provides better information than the original article!
--
Has anyone successfully run high-bandwidth servers on DSL or cable lines? In my area, commercial DSL lines run about $370/month for a 768k/768k line (which includes an IP subnet). I'm thiking of using such an account to get started, at least until I can afford a real line (ie, DS-1). Yeah, I know that co-location would probably be better off, but I can't find any good local colos, and besides the DSL line is cheaper.