Rising Cost of Ultra High Speed Internet Service

[stephen waldron]

  Just got my bill for June from AT&T.  $75 dollars for Ultra High Speed Service with 100 mbps transfer rate.  What's even more disturbing is a story I read that said AT&T will be quadrupling their fee over the next four years in a series of rate increases.  $300 dollars a month for the internet !  You gotta be kidding me.
   Before you suggest I shop around for another service, I already have.  AT&T has cornered the market on Ultra High Speed Service.  The best I could do was 6 mbps for $34 dollars a month. 
   The question is, Do I need the 100 mbps transfer rate for Aces High to run properly ?  Are there others out there getting by with 6 mbps and a more expensive modem ?  Can a more expensive modem increase the transfer rate beyond what a service provides ?  You tell me.  So far I have encountered no problem with frozen frame rates, warping or discoes.  If I dramatically reduce my transfer rate to 6 mbps will these be some of the consequences ? 

[BaldEagl]

Many here play on dial-up.  Probably about 5mb/sec transfer rates.  The only thing that matters is a solid connection without packet loss.

[GrimCH]

100 mbps   Must be nice.

I had 768k, then 1.5 mbps and now 3 mbps with ATT. No ping time differences with any of those three, pings varys between 40-60 ms.

Paying $25 a month now.

[The Fugitive]

unless your downloading huge files all the time, why would you want all that? Faster isn't better. Stable is all you need.

[Fulmar]

unless your downloading huge files all the time, why would you want all that? Faster isn't better. Stable is all you need.

I used to get 5mb from Charter (when it was their fastest) but at nearly $60 in our area it wasn't worth it.  So I went to 3mb ATT at $30.  Yeah my downloads are slower, but my ping is actually a little better.  That $30 difference is an extra 1/2 tank of gas or an upgraded Dish Network Tier.

God I hate Charter.

[stephen waldron]

  Clearly I don't need the "Ultra High Speed" rate to run Aces High.  That's a relief.  No way I'm paying over $100 dollars a month for the internet.  The main reason I got the "Ultra" service was to download games from the internet back in the late 90's.  It was only about $35 dollars a month then, and regular service was around $10 dollars a month.
  But since then, many of the game download sites have been shut down.  And game companies stopped producing good strategy turn based wargames ten years ago, switching to the first person shooter genre, (which I don't particularly care for). 
  So I'm paying way too much for a service I don't even use anymore ?  Time to make a change.  I'll give the 6 mbps rate a try.  Thanks for the input.   

[1701E]

Even with a decent speed and not the most stable AH works fine.  I have satellite (yes i know it's got terrible ping) and i lose 1-2 packets, yet i rarely warp.  Would be nice to have something stable but this works .

[Getback]

If it gets that expensive I will just go with dial up and probably end my days of on-line gaming. However, lets trust the free market. If they get over priced some one will under cut them big time. Also they will get a lot of pressure from on-line retailers.

[Tigger29]

OKOK listen up.

you DO NOT need 100mbps internet.. PERIOD.

I have 10mb, and it's still much faster than I really need.

People play AH with dial up with no problems... let's put this in perspective:

Dialup.. under ideal conditions is about 56k.  1mb is about 1000kb.  Realistically you get 20-25k out of dialup.

This means that 6mb is about 240 times faster than dialup!  (100 would be about 4000 times faster!)

With most online games, latency is the key, not the speed.  Latency is how long it takes a packet of data to travel from your computer to whatever server you're connected to.  Regardless of speed, just about any DSL/CABLE technology is going to have a very low latency (probably 5 to 6 times less than dialup).

The only time you really benefit by having super high speeds is if you do a lot of large downloads at a time.  Even when downloading, you're still capped at the speed of the server that is sending you data.

Lets say you have 100mb internet.  The website you're downloading from runs off of a 20mb server.  At best you'll only get a 20mb download speed (most likely even less if several people are downloading from them at once).

Save your money, drop down to the 6mb service.  Most likely you won't even notice the difference.

Just like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, an internet connection is only as fast as it's slowest connection...

[715]

My cable ISP charges over $60/month for 8Mbps down / 0.5Mbps up.  I get those speeds at 3AM.  During prime time I might get those speeds, or I might get over 50% packet loss and upload speeds as low as 14kbps*.  The cable is over subscribed.  The "free market" gives me a choice of this, dialup, or nothing, nothing, and the ever popular nothing.

*I never actually upload anything, except AH packets, but that's the kind of speed dslreports.com will show when other cable customers in my area are probably running their P2P.

[stephen waldron]

  Just wanted to post this, in the event someone else reads this thread.  You were absolutely right.  I downgraded my internet service this morning to 6 mbps at $17.95 a month.  My ping numbers actually increased just as you said they would and Aces High runs perfectly fine.  ThankYou again for the assistance.

[Wingnutt]

AT&T doesent offer 100Mbit internet for residental that Im aware of.

fastest ive seen is
AT&T High Speed Internet Elite
is 6.0/768

[Getback]

AT&T doesent offer 100Mbit internet for residental that Im aware of.

fastest ive seen is
AT&T High Speed Internet Elite
is 6.0/768

That's incredible. I checked my AT&T internet and it's 4.83 mbps with 768 upload.
I think I'm paying $35 per month. I haven't checked the ping status since the upgrade though. More than anything I really wanted the upload speed. I wanted the enemy to know they are dead sooner. 

Of course I may be all wet in my theory.