Trying out DSL

[THOR]

Well I have cable right now but I notice it is seeming to get slower and slower especially at peak hours. So Verizon is sending me DSL to try for a month free. So I will try it out and keep whatever is faster since the prices are comparable.

Any ideas or suggestions for testing it out? Anything to watch out for with DSL. Any ideas comments or suggestions are appreciated.

[GeniX]

yeah cable gets quite slow when there are lots of people on your segment. dsl on the other hand is switched at your phone exchange, and sent thru to your isp... well doesnt have to be, but thats one way of doing it.

thus, unlike cable whose core architecture is putting lots of users on one segment, dsl is rather a like a link straight to the isp. ofcourse on their end, they will probably just dump you in some user pool - but at least its flexible enough to improve performance or change the way they route your traffic. cables' major problem is the architecture - once a segment has been laid down, it tends to be long term and so if a segment gets unexpectedly busy, without forking out LOTS of dosh, an isp doesnt have much they can do.

if your dsl doesnt work out as good, try dsl from another isp before giving up.

(ofcourse all this info is from my limited understanding. feel free to correct me)

[THOR]

Thank you sir ;)

[THOR]

If my GF and the kids didn't use the damm phone so much I would just have a cell too. They are letting us try out the DSL for a month free so unless I notice a big improvement I will be sending it back ;)

[Drybasement]

Originally posted by thoots
In my area, I'm getting 1.5 megabit service for about $45 per month.

I have cable modem service also. !.5 megabit bandwidth. Also got digital cable TV with a gazillion channels and roughly 30 channels of music. It's a packaged deal all for $99 a month. That's not to bad IMO. The service has been wonderful so far.

[Wardsweb]

I started with DSL last winter. Then came spring and the temperatures went up attenuating the phone lines. Next thing you know I have no signal, I'm too far out. Gee, I wasn't too far out the week before. Anyway, swithced to cable and been rockin-n-rollin ever since. Bought a Linksys cable router and networked all my computers.

Granted DSL is quaranteed bandwidth, but cable still kicks butt over a 56K dialup. With three people on at once, it's still the shit. Next, it's on to satellite. A friend of mine just got it and it's the baddest ass thing you ever witnessed.

[GeniX]

Well I hold DSL in high regard because:
1) Its cost is very comparable to cable on a monthly basis here in NZ!
2) I have to buy a DSL modem, whereas cable is rentable
3) As said - if a cable segment becomes overloaded, its costs lots to fix but DSL bandwidth problems can be fixed by changing routes on the ISP side (provided they are not running out of bandwidth)
4) DSL pings are better (well here in NZ anyways) and I, as an online gamer, appreciate a good ping time.
5) Here in NZ cable is not available everywhere, and if something on the segment goes wrong - one sometimes waits a while for it to be fixed.
6) DSL runs over a phone line and so is more widely available - although it does go down when the phone line goes down, my experience says phone lines get fixed much quicker!

Yes if you can get both cable and DSL, then perhaps number 5 does not apply. I did not realise cost differences were so much in the US, so maybe 1 and 2 do not apply to you yanks!

One last thing - thoots says the whole internet is shared bandwidth. This is ofcourse very true. But if one were to download things off microsoft, mp3.com, many of the major file download places, the bandwidth that THOSE places have across the internet is quite extreme. Some of us may have good connections at work, and I know I can get 200k/s or more at work, but only get 15k/sec at home.

Many places can give the transfer rates, but only if you are able to take it.

[Walt]

The DSL ISP's here in Australia have been unreliable up until now - poor bandwidth, slow service, questionable response time for support issues ... cable on the other hand is widely available and until the download caps were introduced, were very cost effective (I have a 3 Gb plan which costs me AUD $80 p/mth - about USD $46 p/mth - I get download speeds around 25-150 kbs depending on the state of my node).

It works for me, and I would never go back to dial-up now.

But if DSL became more reliable and cheaper than cable then ...

I also think GeniX makes some valid points above ...

[THOR]

Well about the fastest I have ever Dl'ed sumthin is between 300 and 400 kbs but that is really rare, I am lucky most times if i can dl in the 20 and 30 kbs range. When it gets hot out it gets slower last they came out to try to boost my signal because of it. All of my ping times at servers I play at have gone up too.

[grumpy]

Sounds like you need a T1 or maybe you can spring for a T3 line. Then you can blast all the games you want night or day :uzi:

[ProAc_Fan]

I have cable service and routinely get dloads in the 300-400k/s range. If you want to test your speed just type in Leak Test in google and run a bandwidth test on their website. The last time I checked it was greater than 1,000k/s.BTW my computer guru has both at home( DSL and cable) and tells me the cable is much faster than the DSL.

Mike

[Don]

Cable isps like road runner have not expanded their bandwidth (added on) in eons yet they continue to advertise the hell out of their "high speed interent access". That statment in itself is total bullcrap. High speed internet service ...yeah, right!

I've talked candidly with a few honest techs who have been to my home to "fix" a rediculously slow roadrunner internet connection. It's not something they can fix. They need to add more bandwidth and stop adding 100's or 1000's of new customers daily.

Thor - I went through what you are now and switched to verizon dsl. It's AWESOME compared to roadrunner! When you get it installed and working properly (which is easy) you'll never go back to cable isp.

I've filed a complaint with the NYS consumer protection board against time warner raod runner. I was paying $42/month for a year and usually getting a slower connection than if I was using a 56k modem! They asked me to come back and I laughed! So far they've refunded $100 to my account but I'm not going to let them off until I get way more than that.

Screw the lying road runner people.

[Wardsweb]

I just ran a speed test from CNET's site for my Time/Warner RoadRunner cable and got a 1149.3 kbps reading. I guess because I live in an older neighborhood not many of the senior citizens are heavy into computers. It seldom slows here, maybe I'm just lucky. I do know my DSL blew chunks but then we've already been through that one.

[Don]

Originally posted by thoots
Guys,


My second beef has to do with the damn telephone line -- heck, I don't even use the telephone line coming into my home anymore. I live in an older area of town, and dial-up Internet service was an unmitigated disaster -- line noise making it difficult to keep connected, line noise getting me disconnected, line noise making it difficult to keep a download going -- just AWFUL. Or, consider the "lucky" folks in "new" areas, that had neighborhood switching configurations that never let them get above 33.6 on their 56K modems. No, let me tell you, the last thing on the planet Earth I ever want to do is get "data" through the telephone lines! :p:

Oh, and given the poor service and the ever-increasing rates, I ditched the "wired phone" altogether, and use a cell phone as my only phone. Damn, it was satisfying to "fire" my local and long-distance telephone companies! :D:

Anyway, I figure I'll be sticking with cable for a long, long time! :D:


Thoots I get "torqued" when people trash a service they've never tried. You've decided dsl is no good for anyone because you live in an old area that had/has noisy phone lines and couldn't stay connected on a dial up years ago?

Give it a try for a month. You can run it on one computer in the house and run cable isp on another. Then do an honest comparison. You'll be surprised.

The thing with cable isp is that it gets slower and slower and slower over a period of time as they add 1000's of new customers to the service. The user generally doesn't notice the slow down because it is so gradual. If the service suddenly sped up to what it was when you 1st signed up you'd probably be amazed.

[Walt]

Probably insulting everyone's intelligence here, but indulge me ...

I just wanted to make sure we were all talking about the same thing ...

Most often your connection/modem is described in kbps (=kilo bits per sec). e.g. dial-up modems are at 56 kbps, or slower at 33.3 kbps.

However when dowloading material our browsers etc describe download speeds in kBps (= kilo bytes per sec).

There are 8 bits to a byte, so ...

On those speed tests I get connection speeds of up to 700 kbps, which on a download would translate to 87 KBps.

However rarely do I actually ever get that on a download - usually the traffic is busy, there is a holdup at one of the routers, or something such-like, and the best I have ever got from memory is soemthing like 30 kBps (which equates to a connection speed of 240 kbps.

That's all correct, right Tom?

The moral?

You might not be getting what you think you're getting ...

[Walt]

Tom,

I wasn't taking a shot at you ... we're all friends here, and in fact I regard you as one of the deepest reservoirs of knowledge around this site. :)

My plan is:

1. uncapped download speeds, although reality is probably around 150 kbps on average (range say 8-240 kbps)

2. capped upstream to 128 kbps

3. 3 Gb cap on downloaded per month - some site exemptions

4. Costs AUD $87.95 per month (=USD $49.95)

It's about the best available around here, and it's still lightyears ahead of dial-up, but compared to some of you guys, its pretty average I would say.

[GeniX]

Important thing to remember is that you hardly ever get near your 'maximum'. The reason for this is that ISP's always oversell their bandwidth to pay for it.

With more price competition, this situation is getting worse and worse. The only times you can hope to reach your maximum is when you're on a cable segment with few users (compared to the number of users theyve made provision for), or dial in on the off-peak hours.

Everything here in NZ is capped. My cable is 128kbit up and down with a 10gb cap. I dont think there is a home connection on offer which is has not got BOTH CAPS - download speed, download size.

over 100k/sec is now unheard of here for home connections. A couple years ago, an ISP here brought out satellite connections (modem outgoing, satdish for incoming) and for a while people could grab even 200+k/sec. The service is now capped at something like 70k/sec and I have yet to find someone on the new capped service ACTUALLY getting more than 20 - 30k/sec.

I dont see what you yanks are whining about. If you get 200k/sec on your DSL, and 400k/sec on your cable... both are stupidly fast. As an avid online gamer, a big factor for me is ping time.

I would gladly have half the transfer speeds for half the ping time!

[THOR]

Well like I've said I've seen a drastic slowdown in my dl's and my ping times. I have DSL in the house now and will hook it up this week end and see whats faster. Thoots I dl'd that program and then I went to winamp and dl'ed a skin, winamp stuff has always dl'd wicked fast for me, and right now analog X says:

Incoming

current avrg max
414B 732B 116KB

I will test again later.

[grumpy]

I just ran a few speed tests and I consistantly pulled in 1100 KB.
Yeah sometimes I slow down to 5-700 but that not all that common. I have tried to get DSL a few times but i am 28,000 Linear feet away and that too dam far. I have been told even when the technology does get out as far asI am it will be slow as sh*t anyway casue the further you are down the line the slower your Bandwidth. Ameritech runs the DSL by me and they have three levels 300 Kb, 500 Kb, 1000 KB. Even the 300Kb cost Alot more than I pay now. I suppose the only benifit to DSL in my case is a slightly faster upload speed. Even with comcasts crappy service I have to say that I cant beat them for what I pay. I still can pull 1500-1900 KB on good nights. I tried to get true DSL not that crappy through the phone line stuff but I will be damned if I am gonna pay that kinda money for the Dish and their service is really exspensive here in Michigan.

Dave

[Don]

ISP speed is all about ping times. How fast can your provider go out to the internet, get the info you want and bring it back to you? That's what it's all about ...

I had road runner cable service for almost a year untilthey would finally send a tech out here with a laptop to test the ping times. Not only were the the times incredibly slow it even timed out on numerous occassions. Up until the ping time tests they had me convinced the slowness was MY fault, my computers fault or just a "slow node". One rep even went as far as to blame the slowness on some router in boston. They had me do every test and clean every nook and cranny of my computer and still insisted they were not at fault. :puke:

Then the techs came and vindicated me. Now I'm getting my money back through the proper channels.

I've had both services in my home at the same time. I evaluated each service and went with the better deal IMO. I'm paying $39/month for dsl. I absolutely would not recommend a cable isp in the east ...especially time warner roadrunner. Their customer service is not very good and their "high speed internet access" usually isn't high speed.

[Wardsweb]

Hey thoots - help an old man out here. I ran the speed test this morning from CNET and got 1385.4 kbps. I installed AnalogX NetStat Live and it shows incoming max 240.5KB.

Then I ran a test from Bandwidthplace.com ( which has a great results page ) it showed a raw data of 2356709.46 bits per second / 2.4 megabits per second /287.7 kilobytes per second. NetStat now shows a max of 316.4KB

So, what does all this mean? I've got good service and should shut up and not worry about this DSL/cable quandry? :confused:

[grumpy]

Ward

I dont know much about these crazy puters but I know you got kick a*s speeds. Hell thats fast then a T1 line.

Dave

[THOR]

no way T1 lines are in the gigabyte speed thats why its around $1500 a month for a T1 line.

Cable or DSL all depends on your location and the providers, from some cable is the way to go and for others DSL is the way to go I am gonna find out which it is for me, especially since Verizon was nice enough to let me try for free :D

[Don]

down is 730 and up is 82

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtests/730550;81599;f905d2a873d9123310a9f7e2ac88d826;2.0; www.dslreports.com/1025286072

[grumpy]

T1, T2, T3 lines
"A high-speed network link that transmits data at 1.5 Mbps... The T1 designation refers to the signalling speed rather than the medium of the network (copper, fiber). The European equivilent is E1, which transmits 2 Mbps of data. A T2 is a bundle of four T1s giving 6Mbps, used mainly by cellular phone companies. A T3 is faster than either a T1 or T2 line, transmitting data at 45 Mbps."-

I found T1's for 361.00 a month. Still cant compete with my cable which cosistantly Dl's at over a meg for 40 bucks

[THOR]

The guy who owns my clans server pays $1500 a month for a T1 in GA.

[THOR]

Mbps is Megabytes per second that is 1 million bytes, I serioulsy doubt you are getting DL's of 1meg, I think you mean 1.1 kpbs

[THOR]

Well I finally hooked up DSL today. Before I hooked it up I used the analog x proggie I got from thoots and went to my usual websites and then dled some winamp skins and then I went and checked the pings on 3 server I play counterstrike at.

This is what I had with cable:

Avg. Max
478B 93.6KB

Server 1

ping 164

Server 2

ping 162

Server 3

ping 118

With DSL

Avg. Max
8.5KB 94.7KB

Server 1

67

Server 2

46

Server 3

82


Well first impressions DSL is faster by how much I don't know I will use it a couple days and see. Be interesting to see if there is a slowdown between 5pm - 11pm like happens with cable nightly.

Also I will have to decide if the extra speed is worth the $10 extra per month? Also I have the deal with cable where I get digital cable with all the movie channels and cable internet for $99, how much will they charge me kust for all my channels and cable TV without the internet?

Well first things first any ideas on how to test this to see if it is significantly faster or what?

[ckelly]

I have cable and am quite happy with it. We get cable TV and internet for around $65 a month.

As for speed, I have noticed it slows down around 10pm- midnight, but nothing awful.

Chris

[Don]

hey thor you should not get any slow downs now. You speed will stay almost exactly the same all the time. That the nice thing about dsl.

In my case sometimes my cable speeds blew away the dsl's speed but the majority of the time dsl was faster. The important peak hours you'll notice no slow downs! ya hoo --

You could be paying $39.99 instead of $49.99 for the exact same dsl service. Here's how I mistakenly did that ...I had a couple computer settings wrong when I did the DSL self install so the speeds were really slow and erratic. I called verizon help line and told them I wanted to cancel their service because it is too much slower than road runner. They do not want to lose a customer! They would rather get a little less of your money than none of it. They immediately offered me a $10/month price cut off the original $49.99 fee. I didn't even have to ask! I agreed and then the customer service person went through my settings one by one and helped me optimize them for faster speeds.

It worked perfectly after we were done changing things around!

They'll run you through an ISP speed test and when it shows to be within exceptable DSL speeds they may tell you that's the best speed they can offer. If they don't offer the discount mention to them you're considering going back to RR!

[grumpy]

Don

Thats funny I just did the same thing with my Cable TV. I Pissed casue the 12 month special price they gave me ran out and my bill jumped big time. I call them and said knock my cable down to the basic shannel. They were like WHY ! I said NFW am I paying that much to watch TV ! They said that they couldnt cancel it and that someone from the local office would call me back. I was the WTF ! so this guy calls me back and is all apologetic saying that he can give me the same price I had. I said just cancel the CRAP !
then hes like well ummm sir...How about I give you the silver package (includes HBO and Encore and a few others) again and give you the introductory price. I said HOW MUCH. He said the same price as Basic......:) :uzi: SO I got my premium channels for the price of basic cable. What the Moral..Aint no moral I am a JEW and proud of it :D

Dave

[THOR]

I don't have RR I have Adelphia :puke: but I already planned on trying to get Verizon to match cables price of 39.95. Right now the DSL deal is 1 month free, then 2 months at 29.95 then 4+ months it goes up to 49.95. We'll see how much faster it is before I make a commitment ;)

[Don]

I'm not jewish but I do believe in getting my moneys worth.

time warner cable was getting about $90 each month of my money for TV and internet service.

Now they only get $7 / month. :uzi: :smsex:

[GeniX]

I would pay the extra if I were you!

Check it - similar download speeds (oooaarr!) , AND you move from having a modem ping on the cs servers to having a sub-100 ping (which means you become an LPB online... Low Ping Bastard)

Just play a few more online games, and you'll feel what a 160ms to 60ms ping does!!

[THOR]

See when I first got cable I had sub 100 pings but as time has gone on its gotten worse, I remember I found a nice server that had good fellas playing CS on it and my ping was 60. I made it my home and played there exclusively and was asked to join the clan and got admin privs, then one day a few months later I got on an my ping is 90 and it has just gone up from there, server 1 is our match server and I used to ping like 50, now with cable 164, I have gained over 100 in less than a year.

The way things stand now unless I get the DSL price down and cable don't screw me in the price of keeping all my channels and not the net from them I will prolly have to return it and go with cable for now, until I get a full time job, then it would be coming back. But who knows we'll see.

[THOR]

Well I gotta say DSL is wayyyyy faster and more reliable for me. Sometimes I check the ping on a server in Gamespy and it says 160 ping but after I connect to it I have 50 ping, I played on a server with 30 ping yesterday :eek: Also no slowdowns during peak hours.

Also doesn't stop working during hot days and bad weather.

I also might know why cable has been bad lately, my ISP and cable company Adelphia just filed for bankruptcy. I guess they must not be able to keep everything updated and upgraded and running smooth if they can't even pay their bills!

[Don]

thats it DSL all the way!