ADSL? New hardware? .. Decisions decisons

[old.Delboy]

Give a shit. Cable will be 1024/256 soon enough, for a very nominal increase in subsciption. Wish I could say the same for DSL



I'd heard this from some cable users as well. But seeing as NTL and Telewest said they would have their networks upgraded by summer for the current crop of users and beyond. What's the effect of suddenly giving everyone double the bandwith up and downstream?

Back to square one basically. Doubtful if they will suddenly roll it out to everyone and have their network crumble on them. And not for a small price either.

 

[old.Delboy]

Embattle, here's an excerpt straight from NTL's FAQ.

Will the 512kbps connection be assigned to each customer, or will it be shared between other users in the local area?

The 512kbps download rate is the limit assigned to individual modems. Customers share much greater bandwidth over their local area. Like all Internet access there is some overbooking i.e. if everyone attempts to download at maximum rate at one time the performance degrades.


No great surprises there. Like I say for ADSL Read:Contention Ratio. U want a greater possibility of oversubscribtion on your ADSL, go for BTO.

Like I said b4, Cable's the better value for money option. With either technology, u put up with some things. It aint perfect.

But a hell of a lot better than being on a 56kmodem or home highway for a year!

 

[Speccy]

Originally posted by Perplex


...Apart from being foeced to use USB

Nope. 4 port ethernet hub on my adsl. 13 non-nat ip addresses too

 

[old.Reverend Flatus]

USB? No problem.

 

[Embattle]

Having bigger connections is not a problem with CM as the pipes are a lot bigger most the way and they can lay more Fibre Optic cable fairly easily compared to ADSL which requires BT to do the work and we all know how slow they're at do any thing.

That quote you pulled applies to ADSL as well:

ISPreview
Be aware that Cable Modems are like UK ADSL, shared bandwidth, in high usage areas you could end up with a very slow connection.

Yes both are better than modems and ISDN and I've used both and will never go back

There are two main benefits:

1. Its cheaper
2. Its not BT

 

[old.Delboy]

Having bigger connections is not a problem with CM as the pipes are a lot bigger most the way and they can lay more Fibre Optic cable fairly easily compared to ADSL

Wasnt so much that, it was the Internet Providers capacity on their network to deal with the doubling of bandwith.

 

[Will]

Don't remind me... When Telewest launched unlimited access... what a nightmare. Luckily they got their shit together, and it's pretty rock solid now, imo.

 

[old.mid_gen]

just got Kingston ADSL installed this morning, tis on Kingston's private network so BT don't come into the deal *anywhere*, the line check showed 560 downstream, 300 upstream. Pretty good if ya ask me.

Pings in cs are around the 70 mark, but there are 4 of us sharing it. Need to tweak me settings a lil to improve that.

But hey, for £40 a month I can leech @ 25k/sec, *and* have 4 people play cs with a decent connection.

Does it for me baby

 

[]SK[]

25k a sec????
I get 70k max

Never heard of 560/300
Sure you dont mean 512/128?

Halflife only takes up about 3k a sec if that. So 25k is pretty lame :/

 

[Perplex]

I think he means that cos the connection is shared, effectively 25k of it is on average

And also, 512kbits doesn't mean you download at 51.2Kb a sec - it means you download at 64Kb a sec

Same as NTL cablemodems are capped to 600Kbits, meaning we can download at 75Kb

 

[old.mid_gen]

I ran a line check with the modem's software, I'm getting a RL 560k down, 297k up.

The limit is just on the modem, the Kingston ADSL trial was 8Mbit/sec, but obviously they can't roll it out at that speed

The 25k/sec I said was an acceptable download rate *while* 3-4 people are playing CS at the same time, I get anywhere from 50-70k on a good FTP.