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hellorhih2o
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I've had cable for the past 5 years but it's not available (yet) at my new address. How bad is DSL? I've heard horror stories left and right, but for those of you who have it, what's the verdict?
How bad is DSL?
- Thread starter hellorhih2o
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hellorhih2o
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Tiervexx said:
dial-up? what's that? you speak in code...?
hellorhih2o
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djufo said:
sorry to let you down but 150 kbps is 150,000 bps, not 1,500,000 bps (which is what cable usually is...).
k means kilo (unless you party a tad too often) and kilo means 1,000. Ya know?
The bandwidth sharing aspect is way overblown. Everyone on the block would have to d/l fullblast at the same time for you to notice a difference. It depends on how large of an area they allocate x amount of bandwidth to and how many customers are in that area.
Also the quality of the network depends on the ISP, whether it's dialup, dsl or cable. In my area cable happens to be much faster. I paid $55/mo for Verizon 768/128 dsl. I never acually got over 640kbs and the service went down about once every 6 weeks for anywhere from 1/2 hour to 20 hours. Now I pay Cox cable $40/mo and get up 3Mbs downloads late at night. Even when the service does slow down it's still AT LEAST twice as fast as DSL was.
I wouldn't wish Verizon on my boss, who I can't stand, but it still beats dialup.
Also the quality of the network depends on the ISP, whether it's dialup, dsl or cable. In my area cable happens to be much faster. I paid $55/mo for Verizon 768/128 dsl. I never acually got over 640kbs and the service went down about once every 6 weeks for anywhere from 1/2 hour to 20 hours. Now I pay Cox cable $40/mo and get up 3Mbs downloads late at night. Even when the service does slow down it's still AT LEAST twice as fast as DSL was.
I wouldn't wish Verizon on my boss, who I can't stand, but it still beats dialup.
Americans pay about $40 a month for well less than 1 megabit per second. Koreans pay $25 a month for 6 to 8 megabits per second. In addition, for only slightly higher prices, Koreans already have 1 million very high-speed digital subscriber lines running at 13 to 20 megabits per second, and deployment of some 2 million new links of 50 megabits per second is planned for the next 12 months.
While the United States has supplied a meager form of broadband to some 20 million households (around 20 percent of the U.S. total), Korea has connected real multimegabit pipes to nearly 11 million households (73 percent of the Korean total). Koreans now run a third of their economy through the Net. They perform 70 percent of their stock trades and close to half of all banking transactions online, and they place and fill retail orders for everything from groceries to furniture. With broadband to the majority of homes and cell phones, the dotcom dream has triumphed in Korea.
While the United States has supplied a meager form of broadband to some 20 million households (around 20 percent of the U.S. total), Korea has connected real multimegabit pipes to nearly 11 million households (73 percent of the Korean total). Koreans now run a third of their economy through the Net. They perform 70 percent of their stock trades and close to half of all banking transactions online, and they place and fill retail orders for everything from groceries to furniture. With broadband to the majority of homes and cell phones, the dotcom dream has triumphed in Korea.
hellorhih2o
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Dial_tone said:
I know about Korean pipes (I've been there a number of times) but I'M NOT MOVING TO KOREA! For the Love of God...
hellorhih2o
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manny78 said:
which provider do you have?
DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) is a technology for bringing high-bandwidth information to homes and small businesses over ordinary copper telephone lines. xDSL refers to different variations of DSL, such as ADSL, HDSL, and RADSL. Assuming your home or small business is close enough to a telephone company central office that offers DSL service, you may be able to receive data at rates up to 6.1 megabits (millions of bits) per second (of a theoretical 8.448 megabits per second), enabling continuous transmission of motion video, audio, and even 3-D effects. More typically, individual connections will provide from 1.544 Mbps to 512 Kbps downstream and about 128 Kbps upstream.
simple. The further you are from the CO, the worse your latency is going to be. Your up/downstream capability also dimishes with increased distance from the CO. DSL varies by carrier... From my experiences, cable has ALWAYS been better. DSL is more expensive and slower. Remember that unless you're going to get godlike latency, there is no reason to go dsl over cable. As for it being worth more than 56k.. yes. Get rid of dial up stat.
also when they say kbs they mean kilobit... not kilobyte. remember there are 8 bits in a byte of data and as a result you must divide the number they give you by 8 to get your real kbyte download speed. I.E. 56kbit/s = 7kbyte /sec. That's just ridiculous. Get some 1500/128 dsl or a cable line. Adios.
also when they say kbs they mean kilobit... not kilobyte. remember there are 8 bits in a byte of data and as a result you must divide the number they give you by 8 to get your real kbyte download speed. I.E. 56kbit/s = 7kbyte /sec. That's just ridiculous. Get some 1500/128 dsl or a cable line. Adios.
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hellorhih2o
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does anyone know if there's a way to find out where CO's are located in a city? Are there any online resources?
hellorhih2o
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ZKaudio said:
so another question. if i can chose between AT&T and Verizon (for example), I still think they're both using the same CO, right? If so, isn't it better to go with the company that actually owns the CO? No?
well you can actually get dsl through companies other than the one who owns the line. I used to have dsl extreme (AWESOME PRICING/SPEED) but they ran it through verizon's lines. Just read up online on user reviews and see what you can do pricewise.
great site: http://www.dslreports.com/
great site: http://www.dslreports.com/
hellorhih2o
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ZKaudio said:
Kick ass! ZKaudio, I can't give you karma right now (must have given it to you recently) but as soon as I can, you'll get a flood of it...
hellorhih2o
New member
ZKaudio said:
that site really kicks ass. I has a CO distance calculator (you can basically plug in any street address in the US and find out where the nearest CO is). Turns out that the nearest CO is 5736 feet from my new place (so 1,912 yards or almost exactly one mile if my math is right).
Good, bad, ugly?
nikolai_bolkov
New member
reliability is key...DSL is very reliable...try Earthlink
the slight speed difference between cable and DSL...who's going to be pushing 1.5 mbit TO you anyway??
the slight speed difference between cable and DSL...who's going to be pushing 1.5 mbit TO you anyway??
I download alot of Unix/Linux install CD's as ISO images. The longer a d/l takes the more likely you are to get disconnected from the site before it's done. Plus, cable gives me enough bandwidth to listen to Internet radio at 128Kbs, surf the web and still have plenty of firepower to d/l software.
I downloaded Solaris images from Sun Microsystems at 16Mbs one day. Of course I was doing it from Exodus (a webhosting facility) but it was mighty cool to watch.
I downloaded Solaris images from Sun Microsystems at 16Mbs one day. Of course I was doing it from Exodus (a webhosting facility) but it was mighty cool to watch.
DJ_UFO
Banned
hellorhih2o said:
No bro..that is if you talk about Kilobytes....I'm talking about Kilobits. In case you don't know, 1Byte = 8Bits.
Example: WIth a standard modem you can get a fil at a max speed of 5,6kbps. WIth my service i get 150kbps.
If we talk about Kilobytes, the standard modem gets 5.600 and the DSL 150.000. But talking about Kilobits, the modem gets 56.700 (as the companies claim) and the DSL 1.500.000.
hellorhih2o
New member
djufo said:
ok, sorry to pick on ya (especially when you're trying to help) but that makes no sense at all. here's from your original post:
Your using bps (bits per second) as the base in both cases. The "b" in the "bps" does not mean "bit" in one case and "byte" (=8 bits) in the other. It's always "bit", no matter if you're adding "K" (1,000), "M" (1,000,000) or "G" (1,000,000,000). It's just the good ol' metric system
kbps never means "Kilo bytes per second".
If you don't believe me, here's a quote from compnetworking.about.com (http://compnetworking.about.com/library/glossary/bldef-kbps.htm):
So if you really want to find out how many bytes you get per second, here's what you'd have to do (using your example):
150 kbps = 150 kilo bits per second = 150,000 bits per second = 18,750 bytes per second (150,000/8).
Now, if you're really getting 1,500 kbps (and not 150 kbps), that corresponds to 1,500,000/8 = 187,500 bytes per second.
Sorry, but 150 kbps is just not 1,500,000 bps ... Sorry...
(and for all of you who want to nit-pick and say that you don't always get a byte out of 8 bits in the networking worlds and that "k" means 1,000 when it's in front of "bps" but 1,024 when it's in front of "byte", you're right, but please, please, please, don't get into this or this will take forever to explain...)
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