Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: 68DevilM on November 11, 2004, 11:09:34 AM
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first, my wife wants to swap from road runner to DSL, but im a little in doubt about what it will do to my game play!
anyone know wich one is better?
second question is, since patch two the ground in the game looks really fuzzy, im gonna try to update to the new ati drivers but last week when i updated, i kept getting timed out when connecting ah. is anyone else experiancing this problem?
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Hey 68 dvl, rdrunner is ok i had it for awhile, lil too expensive switched to grandecom.com, different cable provider no problems at all, oh by the way i live in Texas, dont know if they hve grande elsewhere
:)
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DSL is always iffy. There are so many factors that determine if dsl connection is good for you. It may be good for you but suck for someone down the street.
There are many factors such as the distance you have from your place to the closest switching box for your telephone company, the quality of your wires in your house and many others.
I would recommend going to
http://www.dslreports.com
and finding reviews on the dsl company and check in their forums to see if someone in your area has posted anything about your dsl company.
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If it aint broke, why fix it? Your asking for trouble... chances are you'll find it.
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Does your wife know dsl (in most popular flavors) is slower?
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yeah DSL tons slower, and almost the same price....
yeah they might have an intorductory price for 3 months or something, but after right back up to the higher prices.
not to mention the price of the new hardware, installition, so on.
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I have 3Meg Dsl with bellsouth fer 39.99 just as fast if not faster than cable :D
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On average, DSL will have lower transfer speeds and higher latency than cable. Latency is just as important as transfer speed.
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DSL tends to have lower bandwidth than cable, but lower latency.
DSL is better for games whereas Cable is better if you like downloading large files frequently.
DSL is also more stable and reliable than Cable.
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Originally posted by Karnak
DSL tends to have lower bandwidth than cable, but lower latency.
DSL is better for games whereas Cable is better if you like downloading large files frequently.
DSL is also more stable and reliable than Cable.
Assuming a "normal" condition you are mistaken on most accounts. I have had everything you can imagine over the years and what I said above is accurate. BTW, don't even think of satelite... its worse than 56k in most cases.
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Originally posted by rabbidrabbit
Assuming a "normal" condition you are mistaken on most accounts. I have had everything you can imagine over the years and what I said above is accurate. BTW, don't even think of satelite... its worse than 56k in most cases.
My experience and reading both disagree with you in regards to Cable/DSL.
As to satalite, you are very correct, that is not for gaming.
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I used SBC comunications DSL and after about 3 months, I payed the early term. fee and told them to stick it.
Bandwith about 1/2 of what I was/am getting on a cable modem. All around horrible tech support, and my d/l speeds were TERRIBLY slow.
Don't go DSL.
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Originally posted by rabbidrabbit
Assuming a "normal" condition you are mistaken on most accounts. I have had everything you can imagine over the years and what I said above is accurate. BTW, don't even think of satelite... its worse than 56k in most cases.
Mosty I agree on the sat. issue, but you have to realize there are different types. The basic sat. high speed internet hookup has broadband speed downloads, but uploads thorugh the phone line. They do have true broadband sat. connections that have high speed both ways but weather can really affect your data transfer rates. You also typically have to buy the equipment and it costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 bucks. Plus the monthly fee is nearly twice what cable is (or it was when I looked into it 2 years ago).
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DSL is being phased out. Definetly not the future. She's making a wrong decision. Stay with cable.
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Originally posted by SunKing
DSL is being phased out. Definetly not the future. She's making a wrong decision. Stay with cable.
Where have you read this?
It certainly isn't being phased out in the Bay Area.
Cable sucks. Other people leach off your bandwidth. You get frequent outages. Your ping times are worse.
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Originally posted by Karnak
Where have you read this?
It certainly isn't being phased out in the Bay Area.
Cable sucks. Other people leach off your bandwidth. You get frequent outages. Your ping times are worse.
Working for a local ISP I hear that information from many sources while trouble shooting dsl outages ect. PACBELL, O1 communtications and other ISPs for example. I'm not gonna argue with you.
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I have a static IP on DSL....and have only one issue...the hops are shared with long distance and somtimes the LD wins out on the bandwidth. With cable you only have one pipe and everyone on that pipe shares the bandwidth. And with VOIP you will be sharing that bandwidth also.
DSL is much more secure and faster than any cable. and as someone mentioned above you have different speed choices, from 512k to 3 meg. Per subscriber....the baloney with cable is you share what ever they are advertising...so if they say they provide 1.5 meg you could get that rate if you were the only one on-line. odds are you aren't the only one on line and you have a dynamic IP which is shared.
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wow, alot to say about dsl!
i think the best quote is "if it aint broke dont fix it"
ive never had any problems with cable so i think im gonna stick with it.
dsl just sounds to scary, not to mention that if i cancle road runner and dont like dsl, time warner will charge me installation fees to get road runner back.
thanks for all the input;)
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DSL or even ISDN (which I would far prefer if I had to choose one for gaming) are great, but not everyone can get them. Range is very limited for DSL, and if you arent in the right area ISDN is outrageous. The cable setup may be sucky when you have lots of people on your pipe, but it just plain reaches more people. Plus with the flaky phone system here, the relatively solid cable connections just make sense. Everyone has their preference, and its going to vary based on where you are.
I have to agree, "if it aint broke, dont fix it."
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I Currently have DSL , but in the small town I live in it took a long time to get it , I am happy with it because it is a nice jump from Dial up , but for the first 8 months till my phone company got a server near me I paid $60.oo a month , and that was not for the 1 GIG transfer rate but the 756 , now I pay $40.oo a month .
I understand that Cable will be avail in mid 2005 and I Will be switching to Cable , Faster Downloads plus I can Jiggle my Cable to warp when someone is on my 6 :lol
Cable has faster transfer rates and yes if it isnt broke why fix it .
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DSL has a faster transfer rate...a world record was just achived by transfering 840 gigs of data 10,157 miles at a rate of 4.23 gigs a second over the internet backbone. This was a gigE connection.
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Here in Vegas Cox Cable offers 5mb down for 50 bucks a month. No dsl here even comes close. Also, they allocate MUCH more than 5mb of bandwidth to each neigborhood hub. I frequently see more than 600kbits/sec download which is faster than i pay for.
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Originally posted by StarOfAfrica2
Mosty I agree on the sat. issue, but you have to realize there are different types. The basic sat. high speed internet hookup has broadband speed downloads, but uploads thorugh the phone line. They do have true broadband sat. connections that have high speed both ways but weather can really affect your data transfer rates. You also typically have to buy the equipment and it costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 bucks. Plus the monthly fee is nearly twice what cable is (or it was when I looked into it 2 years ago).
the big issue you most seem to be missing is latency. The reason satelite is far worse than advertised is that at best you can can is 500 MS delay. That means for every object there is a half second delay between the time you request it and the time it comes. This is a major problem if you pull a web page with 40 or so objects. For this reason, 56k with a latency of ~200MS will pull many pages faster than a 1 MB satelite connection.
The comparison between cable and DSL is similar. At best, with few exceptions, the technology will not beat a 200 MS delay due to line restrictions while cable will frequently do under 40 MS. The difference is noticable when compared side by side.
There are other issues such as static IP's if you are web hosting and oversubscription of the ISP. But they are not relevant to the technology per se.
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I don't know where you are getting that latency information rabbid, but stop reading it. It's wrong.
There is no one answer to the question about which is better between Cable or DSL. First of all DSL is an all encompassing family of communications technologies. There are about 35 different types of DSL today.
So, if you do not know which type you are discussing, you will invariably butt heads.
As a general network technology, most forms of DSL are better than Cable, in terms of consistency. By the way, download speeds mean diddly. Most Cable ISP's run transparent caching servers, so you cannot gauge the actual performance of thier network with any degree of certainty. However, the last mile (your connection) is a minor matter in the overall Internet connection scheme.
How your ISP has implemented the network is more important as it pertains to the quality of the service. It is due to this, which cause many different types of reports about which is best.
Basically, you are looking at a regional issue. In some areas of the country, DSL will be better, in other areas of the country Cable will be better. There is no one answer, simply due to the last mile being a small part of what makes one better than the other.
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Originally posted by rabbidrabbit
the big issue you most seem to be missing is latency. The reason satelite is far worse than advertised is that at best you can can is 500 MS delay. That means for every object there is a half second delay between the time you request it and the time it comes. This is a major problem if you pull a web page with 40 or so objects. For this reason, 56k with a latency of ~200MS will pull many pages faster than a 1 MB satelite connection.
The comparison between cable and DSL is similar. At best, with few exceptions, the technology will not beat a 200 MS delay due to line restrictions while cable will frequently do under 40 MS. The difference is noticable when compared side by side.
There are other issues such as static IP's if you are web hosting and oversubscription of the ISP. But they are not relevant to the technology per se.
Stands to reason. I didnt mention it because I just plain didnt know what latency was like on a sat broadband connection. I researched it enough to know I preferred staying with dialup at the time. I didnt like the fact that DISH was advertising the heck outta their "broadband" capability, and what they were really advertising was the download/phone upload deal. Which is fine for people who just want to surf porn sites or let their kids do their homework. They totally misrepresented it as being something it was not, and when I confronted them with it I basically got the "can you get cable? no. can you get DSL? no. call us when you are ready to hook up" treatment.
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Generally agreed Skuzzy but I'm not sure about your arguement for DSL. In my experience there are technical limitations to DSL that makes gettting latency under 200MS difficult whereas the Cable conections I have had over the last 12 years have done much better. Often I would get pings under 50 MS to major hops. You are entirely right in saying how the particular ISP implements and subscribes the technology as well as peering points is just if not more important.
Can you show me a implementation of DSL that can get sub 50 MS pings to yahoo for example?
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Ever tried an OC192? Yep, it is in the DSL family. Again, it all depends on what form of DSL we are talking about.
Besides, Cable suffers from packet retries due to collisions on the local node. So measuring latencies is very difficult. They will be all over the place for Cable due to the collision problem.
Now, if you are the only one on the node, then you got a good deal, but probable doing business with an ISP that is not going to be around very long either.
Also note, you are talking about ping times. Those have nothing to do with the electrical interface. Ping times are not effected by the choice of DSL or Cable.
They are effected by the number of hops you have to traverse over the Internet more than anything else.
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
Ever tried an OC192? Yep, it is in the DSL family. Again, it all depends on what form of DSL we are talking about.
>> You have OC 192 to your house? We are talking consumer products on this thread. Comparign apples to oranges will not be much help.
Besides, Cable suffers from packet retries due to collisions on the local node.
"So measuring latencies is very difficult. They will be all over the place for Cable due to the collision problem."
>> collisions result in retry events, these packet kills will knock up the ping times because the sender will not get a response and resend. There are a number of utilities out there including the simple -n command to help determine a longer term average. The standard deviation of your results will give you a pretty good idea of the number of collisions. In my experience with RESIDENTIAL DSL , the standard deviation is higher than a properly functioning cable node.
Now, if you are the only one on the node, then you got a good deal, but probable doing business with an ISP that is not going to be around very long either.
>> I'm not the only one on my Comcast node and see consistent polling to my webserver from the web monitor. My parents are on a Node that was probably in existence since the time I signed them up for it 12 years ago. They experience slow downs during peak hours. As we agreed before, the ISP issues are more important than the technology.
Also note, you are talking about ping times. Those have nothing to do with the electrical interface. Ping times are not effected by the choice of DSL or Cable.
They are effected by the number of hops you have to traverse over the Internet more than anything else.
This is not really correct. Each additional hop you make incurs a few MS switching delay but that is often the least of your worries. Network load, peering points on the border gateway routers, choice of technology all apply to lesser degrees. My very high ping times over satelite and medium high ping times over DSL and faster Cable ping times disagree with your arguement. Can anyone show me a sub 100 MS ping to yahoo off a residential DSL connection? Unless the technology has be changed then I doubt you will see much better than 200 MS or so.
In my book they are roughly the same utility for residential customers. If your cable ISP sucks, try DSL. Almost certainly, both are much better than dial up or satelite but switching back and forth between DSL and cable usually has little benefit though Cable tends to edge out DSL in the ideal for most residential customers. Whether your ISP is anythign close to ideal is another issue entirely.
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I do tech support for a major cable co , and i have to say that packet loss is a very common thing. all you cable guys try running pingplotter for an hour or so and see how often a packet drops. It might not be apparent in a 5 minute session, but it is a common thing
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You will see packet loss on any product. Granted, the worse the product (satelite for example) the higher the loss rate and standard deviation. That loss can come from many locations along the pipe. Not intending to be personal ...
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My 512 dsl pings my buddys machine in germany @ 42ms.... I live in the midwest
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Originally posted by rabbidrabbit
Can anyone show me a sub 100 MS ping to yahoo off a residential DSL connection? Unless the technology has be changed then I doubt you will see much better than 200 MS or so.
on some kind of dsl:
ping yahoo.com
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 159.079/162.569/178.864/5.794 ms
This of course is above 100 ms, because it includes ~ 100 ms for the hop cross-atlantic.
last mile is
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 58.536/61.067/63.564/1.649 ms
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Originally posted by koda76
My 512 dsl pings my buddys machine in germany @ 42ms.... I live in the midwest
At the speed of light cross atlantic is about 30 ms. So this number seems to be a bit low ;)
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Skuzzy is the winner to this debate!
:D
Although,
He may want to rethink the ping concept of his too....
"Also note, you are talking about ping times. Those have nothing to do with the electrical interface. Ping times are not effected by the choice of DSL or Cable.
They are effected by the number of hops you have to traverse over the Internet more than anything else."
-Skuzzy
Ummmm,.....Skuzzy, I'm sure you know how ping works, but I think your wording was wrong on that post.:)
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I'm a long time dsl user.
While I have notices some changes in latency over the last 4 years.
I'm still conncecting in the 110 to 130 range. Not as good as the low 80's I used to get but then the internet is a much BIGGER place than it was 4 years ago.
As for the cable guys, come back here 4 years from now. Tell me you have the same blistering speed & lack of latency you have now.
Cable is notorious for being great at first. But then as people join & the pipe fills up it starts slipping.
Like skuzzy said, it VARYS greatly according to the region your in, and your distance from a phone hub.
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I am not all that up on this DSL / cable stuff but I have subscribed to both, Roadrunner in NC where I lived out in the country I got around a 1.4 meg DL 700or so upload
here in Florida I am on bellsouth DSL, I have 3meg DL 384 UL, but most times lately am getting download speeds of 376+KB a sec and can usually download a 90+meg file in under 5 or 6 minutes....
my ping in the game averages 40 to 80 depending on the time of day.
back on cable when I lived in Nc my ping in game averaged around 160 to 190
so I just have numbers to reference between the 2
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Originally posted by Kermit de frog
Skuzzy is the winner to this debate!
:D
I wasn't aware we were all competing... I never had the pleasure of a DSL line beating 200 MS avg pings but it seems there are a few at least who are doing so. I assume they must be rather close to the CO. The short answer is to go with what gives you the best price vs. performance. As we can see from this thread, residential service can vary significantly by a number of variables. As I said earlier, for most folks DSL and Cable are roughly equal. In my experience cable has tended to beat out DSL but that is my experience.
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Originally posted by Kermit de frog
Skuzzy is the winner to this debate!
:D
Although,
He may want to rethink the ping concept of his too....
"Also note, you are talking about ping times. Those have nothing to do with the electrical interface. Ping times are not effected by the choice of DSL or Cable.
They are effected by the number of hops you have to traverse over the Internet more than anything else."
-Skuzzy
Ummmm,.....Skuzzy, I'm sure you know how ping works, but I think your wording was wrong on that post.:)
Actually, I should have expanded on it. The reason I stated it in that manner was due to rabbid wanting to talk about ICMP latency times. ICMP packets could care less what they are traveling on. The packets are so small (in a standard ping utilization) that the last mile is but a drop in the bucket when traversing the many routers you will to the destination.
Rabbid, just for your edification, I am on DSL, at home, and my ping times to Yahoo are 32ms. I get 28ms to the AH servers in St. Louis. My DSL is only a 768/128Kb/s connection. That is right now, but if I run it tonight, during US prime time, the times will double. Simply due to the Internet routers being far busier, even though my connection is still the same. And cable users will suffer the same swings in the ping times, regardless of the speed of thier connection.
The hops/routers add more than a few milliseconds. The time is not fixed and based on how loaed the routers/switches are, and how the ISP's in charge of those routers have adjusted priorities for the ICMP packets.
The physical distance to traverse is also a factor, but not as much as the number of hops incurred. Your last mile will suffer the least impact, but all bets are off after the first router/switch has been incurred.
Bottomline: You cannot state which medium is best based on Ping times to any given destination. That is but a small portion of the overall picture. The main qualifier should be the ISP and its network layout as it is going to determine the overall quality of the connection (which also takes into account speed, as well as latencies).
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:aok ...<
> Skuzzy!
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DSL speeds mainly depend on your line quality & distance from your telco central office. Lots of other little variables go with it, all the way down to the quality of the wires in your phone jacks. I lived the nightmare of tech supporting it when it first rolled out.
Cable is similar, distance, line quality, and dozens of other little variables, up to and including how many splitters you have in your house.
Basically, you want whatever is best for your location. One is not superior to the other in every instance. At my house, I get 8mb down / 3 up on my cable line. My neighbor is lucky to pull 3mb on his DSL line. In my parents neighborhood, the cable is horrible. At best it was pulling 3mb down, while DSL, being so close to their central office, pulls absolutely ridiculous speeds.
And Skuzzy is dead on with the pings. For those that don't already know, if you want to see where exactly you're connection to whatever is getting latency at, or dropping packets, use "tracert " or "traceroute " depending on what OS you're running. That will tell you where your data has to route through to get where it's going. You may be sitting right next to a Cisco Catalyst switch, with a gigabit port, hooked to an oc192 link... but if the route your're on is having problems, you're still going to have crappy pings.
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I'm on earthlink DSL, have been for a couple years now. I always get ping times in the 40's to 50's to the AH server. Thats all that really matters to me :)
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i get 60-90 with road runner
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This is giving me a squealing headache.... must simplify it...does having lower ping make it easier to hit La7's in sharp angle shot?....Or is STEADY, tho higher ping, better? %$%$ La7's..hate em....
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Rumors say, that lower ping times make you lose head on crashs.
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Im dialup with a somewhat slow machine (900 mhz Duron)...usually have ping of 200 + or - 10ms, at one point I lost 11 HO's in a row....I avoid em like plague now;
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Originally posted by BigR
Here in Vegas Cox Cable offers 5mb down for 50 bucks a month. No dsl here even comes close. Also, they allocate MUCH more than 5mb of bandwidth to each neigborhood hub. I frequently see more than 600kbits/sec download which is faster than i pay for.
If you have cox cable TV all you need is the digital phone line.
In my area they offer the "Cox Combo Pakage" If you subcribe to all 3 services cable is 29.95 for 5000/512 connect. For 10 bucks you can keep your phone #. The best part is 3 services all in 1 bill for about 90-100 a month :) .
Check it Out ,
Fin
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so what is the general feeling with this post?
what is better? cable of dsl?
from what ive read from this post alone it seems it is up to where you live will determine what better service you will recieve.
anyone know how eastern north carolina fairs?
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With the DSL connection I'm using as i type this (from my parents house) I get 103ms to yahoo.com and that is including a trip across the pond.
At home I got cable, which I, although faster, think performs a bit more unstable and generally with higher latency than the DSL. But the difference isn't big though, and could just as easily be because of local conditions (It's through two different companies)
OTOH if I wanted DSL with my cable's speed it would cost quite a bit more and I've come to love the 4x(+) download speed.
If the price/bandwidth was the same I would pick DSL simply based on my own experience.
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I have a 6mb down 608kbp up SBC DSL connection. My ping times to the AH areana's are about 60ms I have 8 computers behind a router and that behind a 5100b modem in bridged mode. I don't have any problems as far as support goes I work for SBCIS STS and My wife works for SBC ASI. I have worked on 4 of the 5 broadband techs (microwave, dsl, cable and fiber the only one I haven't done yet is sat) From what I know the best is direct fiber then fiber to the curb these survices are very very limited in availabilaty. dsl and cable are the next best on these depends on available and what survice is like where you live. for me DSL (sbc) rocks and cable blows (charter - best ive gotten was 750 kbps down by 128 up and it was very intermitant). then microwave and lastly sat with sat your probably better off with dail up or isdn. I wount talk about support becuase I'm rather biased However NO ISP is going to support your 3rd party router, your wireless lan, or is going to fix your spywared virused and/or winsock pooched computer.
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Of course the latest DSL available is 6mb/s, up from the old 3mb/s.
Available here, still deciding on whether to pay the extra $10 for it.
My current DSL is 1.5/768 and I get ping times to yahoo of around 32ms.
DSL or cable, check http://www.dslreports.com see whats best in your area.
I went for DSL because I wanted a static IP.
Rumour is our neighbourhood may soon be getting a 1gb fibre connection real soon.
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Originally posted by Kev367th
Of course the latest DSL available is 6mb/s, up from the old 3mb/s.
Available here, still deciding on whether to pay the extra $10 for it.
My current DSL is 1.5/768 and I get ping times to yahoo of around 32ms.
DSL or cable, check http://www.dslreports.com see whats best in your area.
I went for DSL because I wanted a static IP.
Rumour is our neighbourhood may soon be getting a 1gb fibre connection real soon.
Fastest Fiber connection I've seen is 10mb/10mb in sacramento by surewest (used to work there as a field support contractor) it has the capabilaty to goto 100mbps/100mbps funny thing is when you connect for the first time or after you boot up and some one on the service is using the same computer name windows will give you a warning "Computer name already exist on network" I think fiber has more security issues then cable it's realitively new so there are still some wrinkles to be ironed out.
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that error message didn't show up because you were using fiber optic cabling.
More like network settings on you ISP's end.
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Originally posted by Kermit de frog
that error message didn't show up because you were using fiber optic cabling.
More like network settings on you ISP's end.
It's becuase the fiber network is exactly that a network. if they opened up the ports for file and print sharing you would see all the other custoemrs computers networks shared files and printers. 8)
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Originally posted by Mayhem
It's becuase the fiber network is exactly that a network. if they opened up the ports for file and print sharing you would see all the other custoemrs computers networks shared files and printers. 8)
Yup, Mayhem's right. They are allowing the ports for netbios (ip file/print sharing in XP) through their routers. Bad thing, very bad thing! Cable companies do this also. Never turn on File and Print Sharing unless you have some kind of firewall device on your system.
You should also either put a good password (mixed case letters and numbers) on your administrators account or disable it.
Cable/DSL? As stated it's all a matter of what works the best in your area. I've had both and liked them both. BellSouth p1$$ed me off when I moved so I dumped them. Would probably still be a customer if they hadn't. Now I have cable and don't see any real difference.
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Mayhem is right about why that is happening. But you made it appear as though by "using fiber optics", sharing was enabled.
Just, like i said before, it was a network setting on the ISP's end.:D