OFF TOPIC Question about DSL vs CABLE

My ISP (Earthlink) could not do a DSL for me as I am supposedly too far from the telco switch....so they "generously" suggested using their satellite link services. ONLY $129.95 a month. Sheesh, do I look like Rockefeller?????? No thanks, I am patient and will keep the

56K dial up for $21.95 a month.
Reply to
Steve Hoskins
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Check your modem for built-in compression. My modem is "only" 33K baud, but with compression on I connect to AOL at 115,600.

Jay Modeling the North Shore & North Western C&NW/CNS&M in 1940-1955 E-mail is now open snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

Reply to
JCunington

No way you will ever connect at >33K.

Compression might make some files transfer as if you had connected at a higher rate. That only works if the file is highly compressable. A lot of graphics files are already highly uncompressable. Many graphics files will actually expand in size when pushed through compression algorithms. They can't be compressed and the method adds some information to describe the compression ... which doesn't occur so your file ends up being a bit larger. Most graphics formats are just compression algorithms in disquise.

Paul

Reply to
Paul Newhouse

I've had cable for about a year and it's great. Reliability for the year has been perfect. We live in the Houston area and get Time Warner cable. Total cost / month with taxes and all is a bit under $50.

DSL is in our area and I know some folks that have it, cost is about the same and speed seems the same. The only difference for them was they had to buy the gear to hook up, TW will just let us use the access gear for free. So no money up front.

I'm a computer geek as well and will say that technically DSL is better but I think it comes down to service and the cable people have served me better than the phone people (Sprint) have. That made my decision for me. Overall you really can't tell the difference and I don't get very religious about it (like I do with database software).

Good luck Greg

Reply to
Greg Forestieri

I have had Cable Modem for almost 5 years. The cable company is Charter, and they do a pretty decent job, have only had 3 or 4 outages in the past 5 years. I get 1.5 MB download and 256 KB upload per the tech ref sheet. The is the maximum I can expect. When traffic is heavy(like on week-ends), it can be a lot less. Charter had two domains set up in Rochester, MN. One is 'Chartermi.net' and is the basic user plan. There is another domain(magnaspeed.net) that IBM and Mayo Clinic employees can use to go direct to the fiber and into their respective networks. I am on the later and I suspect I am getting better through-put. Anyway, I can download some files at speeds of 33KB up to

120KB/sec - very fast! Sure beats the 3-5KB/sec on a dialup connection.

IIRC, you are in the Atlanta area, and there are several cable modem/DSL option down there. I have been to Atlanta a lot and many of my customers have these setups. Here in Rochester, I could not get DSL as the switch is downtown and I am more than

17,000 feet away. Qwest had the DSL service and sold it over a year ago ago to MSN. A friend at work had DSL through Qwest. He had connection problems at first and they added a 'booster' at his drop. When MSN took over the service, he had to call them to setup the billing. They told him they did not support DSL in his area(he was up and running), and would not convert him over! He immediatly dropped them and went to the Charter cable modem connnection.

Jim Bernier

Froggy wrote:

Reply to
Jim Bernier

That why my realistic speeds reported by Netscape are in the 3.6KBytes/second region, irrespective of what AOL CLAIMS I connect at.

You're right about compression. Text files come VERY quickly. Graphics aren't much better at my higher speed than before I applied compression.

And those connection rates are under IDEAL conditions, which the real world seldom is.

Jay Modeling the North Shore & North Western C&NW/CNS&M in 1940-1955 E-mail is now open snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

Reply to
JCunington

Er, uh, what faith are you?

Reply to
E Litella

Reformed SQL.

Reply to
Corelane

The AOL CLAIM of 115k is the computer talking to the modem and not the modem talking to the host system. (AOL's error in AOL ver. 6.0 and possibly other versions.) Setting the computer to modem at the max and letting the modem operate at a lower speed assures the line and not the computer is the limiting factor in the communications.

Reply to
Raildavid

When I download large files, the 'progress' window shows my download speed as 4.85 kb/s on a 56k modem with the cable/interface link speed set to 115k. This is very nearly the theoretical maximum of a 56k modem set to 2 start bits, 8 data bits and 1 stop bit (=11 bits) per byte of data.

David.

Reply to
David F.

Another squealer! Don't construct your query correctly and you'll understand why I call it "SQUEAL" and not "SEQUEL", as in Ned Beatty's scene in Deliverance.

Jay Modeling the North Shore & North Western C&NW/CNS&M in 1940-1955 E-mail is now open snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

Reply to
JCunington

YUP! I'm connected to the cable modem:

# ifconfig tlp2 tlp2: flags=8843 mtu 1500 media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX full-duplex) status: active

The modem is not connected to the cable network anywhere near 100Mb/s. BUT, the cable modem is connected to my router at that speed ... big deal.

Paul

Reply to
Paul Newhouse

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