[Audio-Me]

I think Time Warner really sucks. They overcharge and their service isn't all that great. I just want the standard national/cable channels, HBO and the music channels. RoadRunner is a joke, but it's the only practical option in my area.

Does anyone have Prexar DSL?
Anyone have wireless internet service?

 

[roll-man]

DSL from PacBell (phone co.) going through a Linksys router. 4 machines going at once around the house. We are located 175 yards from the C.O. (half a block away)....very fast. Best part is my employer pays for it and I get to work from home 4 days per week!

 

[disturbed]

I have a godlike 56K modem...average download rates go from 1k to max I have seen 5K/sec

Beat that

 

[Audio-Me]

When I was on dialup (long time ago), I had a Lucent hardware modem and had constant transfers of 5.3kb/sec download and 3.2kb/sec upload using Earthlink ISP.

 

[fredpb]

I had a nice single dialup line at 44kbps connections. I am on the net alot so I installed a second line. For computer only.

GUESS WHAT?

The line won't go any faster than 24kbps!!!!!!! It costs $25 bucks a month (plus $20 internet) for frigging 24kbps!!!!

Now they have started working on adding dsl on this new line (not available on first line, so I have to shell out extra $25 a month). They said "it will be completed 7 Feb". Now they are pushing it out again to 13 Feb. Grrrrr.

Cable company has been promising cable modems for over a year with no delivery.

I would get a satellite connection but I am on the bottom floor of a big condo and nothing RF gets in, not even FM radio or cellphones.

Grrrrr!!!! And you wonder my my posts are nasty???

 

[CaptBubba]

Quote:

Anyone have wireless internet service?

Yes. My school (where I am right now) uses a wireless connection (www.rocketlauncher.com). I must say I am impressed, I would have thought is would suffer packetloss, high pings, or slow down during storms, but I wa wrong. I never get and dropped packets, my pings are consistantly in the 50ms area and the thing stays that way even when it is a whiteout outside. Wireless has promise at least....

It is avalible at up to 100Mb/sec, but we only get 20 because that's what we can afford.

I feel your pain, fredpb, my internet line at home maxes at 28.8, but if it rains it drops to 9600! The line has been struck by lightning so many times it has burnt though the insulation of the wires and they short when they get wet, and bellsouth (or whatever it is called this week) refuses to replace it, even though one of their operators thought I was on a cell phone when i called them. I have browsed head-fi at 9600, I think I'm addicted.

 

[Blighty]

Quote:

Originally posted by Dusty Chalk Where's "28.8"? How many of you remember when we measured things in "baud"?

I had a 1200baud internal modem in the first system I purchased(XT Turbo I believe, twice as fast as 4.77mhz systems at the time). I absolutely dreaded loading up pages on BBSs that used ANSI graphics

My current connect is cable from Rogers which is not too bad. While max. upstream is locked at a lousy 50 kilobytes/sec, downstream bandwidth can often achieve better than 500 kilobytes per second (multiple open transfers, as they usually cap per open file transfer limits on most websites).

 

[Tes]

I have ADSL from Pacific Bell 1.5Mbps/128kbps. But the problem is if I am uploading something at 128kbps my download bandwidth drops to something like 256kbps.

Do you cable users have the same problem?

My school also has wireless internet access but the bandwidth is usually maxed out because so many people are using it. On a good day I have seen friends get about 2Mbps down 2Mbps up using the wireless cards on their laptops. But if I use a computer in one of the labs with an Ethernet connection I can get about 10Mbps.

 

[Ctn]

Yeah that's expected since downloading needs some upstream bandwidth as well esp when you have concurrent downloads as well as uploads. Amen to Flashget

 

[Ctn]

Dont ne of you guys in the states have uncapped downstream on cable??

What bliss

 

[Russ Arcuri]

Quote:

Originally posted by Ctn Dont ne of you guys in the states have uncapped downstream on cable??

None of the cable providers in this area offer this. Honestly, though, I've never felt the 640/80 connection I have was inadequate. Pages load up about as close to instantaneously as possible. Other than super-large file downloads, my DSL connection feels just as quick as the OC-3 we have at work. Head-fi is certainly no faster at work than at home.

 

[Ctn]

Quote:

Originally posted by Russ Arcuri None of the cable providers in this area offer this. Honestly, though, I've never felt the 640/80 connection I have was inadequate. Pages load up about as close to instantaneously as possible. Other than super-large file downloads, my DSL connection feels just as quick as the OC-3 we have at work. Head-fi is certainly no faster at work than at home.

Aww

I see the massive speed gains when I download a huge file with something like Flashget. I've gotten max at abit over 1 meg/sec. That's like a full cd a tad over a min

.

 

[stuartr]

Russia is another story. It is not so much the equipment as the phonelines. I am lucky, as I live in a city where the phonelines are relatively new. That is 1950s. There are phone cables laid in 1905 that are still in use in St. Petersburg. My internet connection here is accomplished via internet cards that have a certain amount of hours. (10, 20, 50, or 100). When I was living in the dorm here, I had tone dialing, but I only got 26k. Now I am in an apartment with only pulse dialing, but I usually get around 46k. Go figure. Either way, it sucks. I miss the cable modem at home. I live in a small town, and the download speeds were incredible. I don't know exactly, but 4-5 mb files would take less than a minute. Here they take at least 30 minutes....

 

[Mike Walker]

Russ Arcuri says the latency is "terrible" on satellite. Not for what I use the internet for! I wanted broadband for the "multimedia experience"...streaming audio and video. And (my) satellite is SO damn good at that it's scary. STABLE for hours on end, I can listen to even longform (2 hours plus) radio programs with NO pauses for re-buffering. I watch ENTIRE MOVIES from Like Television (www.liketelevision.com), and there are NEVER re-buffering pauses (at a constant throughput of 300kbps or more...for HOURS!) For that kind of stability (which after all is what's required for multimedia to actually work online), I'll take a little latency.

How much latency is a "little"? I'm guessing around one second between when I click on a link, and when it (the page) begins to load. On Head-Fi when I click on a link at first nothing happens, then a little over a second later BANG the entire next page loads almost instantly. I can live with that! My local rural telephone cooperative DOES now offer dsl. It's about 70 dollars a month for poorer performance than I get now for only 20 dollars per month (in addition to my regular aol bill, about 42 bucks a month all together). I think I'll stick with satellite, at least for a while. Cable access is just becoming available here (and I suppose I should consider myself lucky to have THIS MUCH CHOICE in the middle of nowhere. Honestly guys, most of my neighbors are cows!).

Unless you're a gamer, or for some other reason require as close to zero latency as possible, particularly if you are interested in the multimedia content online, satellite (through "AOL Plus") is an EXCELLENT, rock steady option. And I say this in spite of the fact that I enjoy "beating up" on AOL as much as everyone else!

 

[Ctn]

Sat does have really bad latency since it uses a dial up modem to upload, so latency is the time it takes for your modem to send requests till you get it on your sat dish

which is pretty long compared to cable/dsl/etc...