StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Just curious: how many people here are still on dial-up? And if so, is broadband available in your region, but you don't subscribe for some reason? Also feel free to mention what sort of connection you have, and what bandwidth caps if any are placed on your service.

I use Verizon DSL at home. 3M down, 768K up. No bandwidth caps.

I use ADSL, but this is Australia so it's capped at 512kb/s. Oh yeah.

Oh and 20Gb a month. Fucking Americans and their compeditive markets!

I have Comcast at home. 6M down, 768K up, with no caps. For downloads, the Comcast "booster" software they employ will give me over 8M down (and I've seen it hit 10M a few times).

At work we've got a shitty Verizon DSL line, 3M/768k, but its synchronous (IIRC), so if someone's using all the upload, you're not downloading shit (and we've had this happen before with VPN, because somebody at another office just had to have a 2GB file, effectively killing our connection for a day and a half - here's a hit, call us up and ask us to overnight a DVD - IT'LL GET THERE FASTER!). Oh, and that happened the day both "IT guys" (two software engineers that got stuck with IT duty) were on travel!

So far looks like I'm the only poor bastard on dial-up.
Thankfully I have an easy-going boss and the work DSL line to use!

Verizon DSL for me. I'm fairly luck to have that, actually; most of the people in my area can't get anything faster than dial-up for a myriad of technical reasons (I live in a rural, mountainous nowhere).

I had dialup until maybe August. Now I'm on a broadband landline.

*dances happy dance*

15/2 Verizon fibre-optic service, uncapped. The usual inbound ports are blocked since this is the residential service.

Noble Ire wrote:Verizon DSL for me. I'm fairly luck to have that, actually; most of the people in my area can't get anything faster than dial-up for a myriad of technical reasons (I live in a rural, mountainous nowhere).

Not even satellite internet or ISDN (granted, ISDN service in the US is increasingly rare)?

Arrow wrote:At work we've got a shitty Verizon DSL line, 3M/768k, but its synchronous (IIRC), so if someone's using all the upload, you're not downloading shit (and we've had this happen before with VPN, because somebody at another office just had to have a 2GB file, effectively killing our connection for a day and a half - here's a hit, call us up and ask us to overnight a DVD - IT'LL GET THERE FASTER!). Oh, and that happened the day both "IT guys" (two software engineers that got stuck with IT duty) were on travel!

You have an assymetric connection - but what might be screwing up your performance is that big uploads are essentially blocking out any other requests from going outbound. You may have to implement QOS policies to resolve this (I had similar issues with BitTorrent clogging up the pipes, as it were, until I had my router enforce QOS).

Stark wrote:I use ADSL, but this is Australia so it's capped at 512kb/s. Oh yeah.

Oh and 20Gb a month. Fucking Americans and their compeditive markets!

If you hate us, you should see Hong Kong, Tokyo or Seoul - 100 megabit symmetric fibre to the home for cheap. The best residential US service is 50/5 around NYC and that costs US$90/mo.

EDIT: Verizon actually has more bandwidth than they know what to do with with their fibre-optic service but the majority of it is reserved for video use, so while each household may have in excess off 100 megabits down, you aren't going to get all that for ze Interweb.

At home I use cable. At school...well, I go to an engineering school, so I'll give you all one guess.

Cable internet about 3M down, 384k up, no bandwidth cap which I know of, if there is one we haven't hit it yet.

I have a DSL without bandwidth cap. Don´t know how fast.

Why is the ISDN option comedy? I had one of those until september 2006.

phongn wrote:You have an assymetric connection - but what might be screwing up your performance is that big uploads are essentially blocking out any other requests from going outbound. You may have to implement QOS policies to resolve this (I had similar issues with BitTorrent clogging up the pipes, as it were, until I had my router enforce QOS).

Figures I had it backwards. I believe a QoS policy is implemented, but its set up to let the VPNs grab what they need; for a long time, my office was the central office, with three other offices VPN into our network to get to the records and email they needed. Obviously, you're going to have problems with that set up, such as when one office needs lot of files, or Verizon drops the connection, or your company president gets it in his head that the Exchange server needs to be rebooted and just pulls plug...

Thankfully, we've started to outsource a lot of that, especially the email.

Comcast.

Belgacom Skynet ADSL: 39,90€ per months 5mbps download; 168kbps upload; 10gb/months 5€ per 5gigas after...

ADSL. According to a speed test at dslreports.com, I'm getting 3829/630 Kbps, and, thankfully, no download caps. For now.

(On the flip side, each of my last two jobs, as well as the one I'll be starting on Monday, have had only dial-up access. In the case of my last job there was no option -- it was dial-up, ISDN (ick) or satellite. In the case of the prior one, that was six years ago, when high-speed internet was just a wet dream for most. My upcoming place of employment just doesn't need it. Thankfully, it's only going to last about four months.)

Dial up is a 56k modem right? So how is it more ick than ISDN?

salm wrote:Dial up is a 56k modem right? So how is it more ick than ISDN?

ISDN use the equivalent of two lines IIR: the speed where between 112k and 128k; it was t3h sh1t in 1997-1998

here at home I use cable. Don't remember the speed though.

I have a request. Soon I'll be moving to Painesville, Ohio. The town is located in Lake County. Eventually what I want to do is get cable internet since DSL is not available at my wife's place. The problem is trying to find the prices for cable internet. Many of the sites I go to won't show the prices amd so far I've only found pricing from ATT and Verizon. I am having trouble finding pricing from Time Warner\Comcast\Adelphia\Roadrunner. Help please?

Also, would I be limited to getting broadband from the phone company or can I get it from any company?

salm wrote:Dial up is a 56k modem right? So how is it more ick than ISDN?

It's an unattractive alternative. We would have had to pay through the nose for not much of a performance increase.

By the way: about a dozen computers shared that dial-up access. Good times.

Mobius wrote:ISDN use the equivalent of two lines IIR: the speed where between 112k and 128k; it was t3h sh1t in 1997-1998

112k or 128k depending on a few factors (internal TAs typically were 128k while external TAs were usually limited by serial ports to 112k)

It's always a hoot coming across some ancient rant from Scott Adams (writes Dilbert) telling us how ISDN is going to be the shit because the cable companies would never get their act together.

phongn wrote:EDIT: Verizon actually has more bandwidth than they know what to do with with their fibre-optic service but the majority of it is reserved for video use, so while each household may have in excess off 100 megabits down, you aren't going to get all that for ze Interweb.

Man, why not? There should be an option for "I don't watch TV, please send me MAXIMUM INTERNET".

Although to be fair, eventually having more and more downstream just becomes increasingly a waste because not many folks can send stuff to you that fast.

The usual inbound ports are blocked since this is the residential service.

Now, why do they do that for FIOS but not for the DSL service? Because I have no problems whatsoever running an HTTP or FTP server.

Uraniun235 wrote:It's always a hoot coming across some ancient rant from Scott Adams (writes Dilbert) telling us how ISDN is going to be the shit because the cable companies would never get their act together.

Well, the cable companies were a basket case in the 1990s, especially after AT&T's acquisition and then divestiture of them. The Baby Bells had their eyes on the ball - but DSL snuck up and clobbered ISDN on the telco side (idiotic pricing schemes also helped kill ISDN).

phongn wrote:EDIT: Verizon actually has more bandwidth than they know what to do with with their fibre-optic service but the majority of it is reserved for video use, so while each household may have in excess off 100 megabits down, you aren't going to get all that for ze Interweb.

Man, why not? There should be an option for "I don't watch TV, please send me MAXIMUM INTERNET".

Verizon has allocated certain wavelengths for video service so that's not really feasable. In addition, Verizon is using a 32:1 split network so they have to be careful with QoS requirements for those who will be using IPTV.

Now, why do they do that for FIOS but not for the DSL service? Because I have no problems whatsoever running an HTTP or FTP server.

When you have 2-5 megabits of upstream bandwidth running a commerical server becomes a real possibility ... not so much on a 768 up DSL connection.

Unlimited bandwidth cable with Time Warner at fourty dollars a month. We were supposed to switch to Verizon DSL but it seemed it only fucked up the phone line or some thingamajig.

Stark wrote:I use ADSL, but this is Telstra so it's capped at 512kb/s. Oh yeah.

Fixed.

Internode
Optus

On university lan in Fredericton, but speed test was performed using an ISP in Halifax. This isn't the typical result, since it is 1 in the morning. Also, there is a packet prioritizer that can really lag out things like online games if no one asks that they up the priority on them. That's why I can get pings under 100ms in CS:S, but for Guild Wars, it's over a second and a half.

Iskon Internet DSL, but since they lease the line from HT, which is nearly completely owned by Deutche Telekom, the line is the standard DT DSL configuration 2mbit down/192kbit up. On the bright side, by paying just a little bit extra, I get it uncapped, and they really don't give a shit how much I fill up the pipes after that (had some months with more then 100GB of traffic).

On my faculty, the speeds are absurd. Depending on how many people are in the so-called "Laptop lane" clogging up the WiFi resources, you get anywhere from dial up speeds to saturating the WiFi connection since the faculty is one hop from the main connection out of the country ie fattest pipe available. Of course, the downside is that all the usual stuff (any P2P) is banned, and this being the Computing Faculty, the bans are competently administered on the transparent proxy. Its still possible to go through a bunch of contortions to get stuff working, but people's Internet privileges have been revoked for that before, so its mostly good for HTTP - but for that, its more common to max out the server on the other side then the bandwidth on this side being a problem.