Internet service cost and speed
WDS
What are you paying for internet service?
What kind of service is it?
What speeds are you supposed to get and what are you actually seeing?
I live in a rural area literally at the end of the line for the phone
lines and there is no cable service. We have DSL at 3Mb and are usually
actually seeing 3Mb for (gulp) $59.95 a month. They also have 10 Mb
service for $69.95 and some slower ones for less but the fastest service
won't work where we live.
Jules
> Seeing Brian's post made me wonder:
>
> What are you paying for internet service?
Around $100/month, incl. phone and TV (n bazillion grainy channels of
mostly shit, but that's modern TV for you :-)
> What kind of service is it?
Cable - 4.5Mbps down, 1.5 up
> What speeds are you supposed to get and what are you actually seeing?
As above, and seems to hold steady at that number. I don't have stats for
how much we download, but I've never seen it drop significantly so I
don't think they have any throttling in place (I've got three .iso CD
images to download sometime soon, so maybe I'll shout if it goes horribly
wrong after that :)
> I live in a rural area literally at the end of the line for the phone
> lines and there is no cable service. We have DSL at 3Mb and are usually
> actually seeing 3Mb for (gulp) $59.95 a month. They also have 10 Mb
> service for $69.95 and some slower ones for less but the fastest service
> won't work where we live.
Hmm, ours was 1.5meg upstream before, but they upgraded to all-fiber a few
months back (and re-did the house, it's all Cat5 from the outside box
now). Router and phone system went onto a UPS at the same time (for
911 reasons - not sure if it's a government-mandated thing or
just something the ISP's chosen to do).
Since the change it's certainly more reliable - with the old setup the
'net connection used to drop out once in a while and need the router
rebooting (although curiously it was only web access that would die -
SMTP, FTP, DNS etc. would , phone, TV (n bazillion grainy channels of
mostly shit, but that's modern TV for you :-)
all keep going, so I suspect a router firmware
bug). We're about 8 miles out of town, so the 4.5Meg (and phone and TV)
seems pretty reasonable for the price.
cheers
Jules
catpandaddy
"Jules" <jules.rich...@remove.this.gmail.com> wrote in message
news:pan.2009.11.19....@remove.this.gmail.com...
> On Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:22:54 -0600, WDS wrote:
>
>> Seeing Brian's post made me wonder:
>>
>> What are you paying for internet service?
>
> Around $100/month, incl. phone and TV (n bazillion grainy channels of
Grainy? May I ask if you are using the digital converter box or just
running the cable straight into the set, there is a big difference between
the two.
Thomas T. Veldhouse
> Seeing Brian's post made me wonder:
>
> What are you paying for internet service?
DOCSIS 3.0 22/5 service. I see boosts to 32Mbps typically (although I have
seen up to 62Mbps on occassion ... probably during some kind of maintenance).
> What kind of service is it?
DOCSIS 3.0 ... latest standard bonding four channels down and only a single
channel up (I think Comcast can't wait too long before they are going to have
to bond two channels for the upstream).
> What speeds are you supposed to get and what are you actually seeing?
I answered the question above mostly. I get sustained 22Mbps down [with
multiple connections] and I get sustained 5Mbps up [sometimes with a single
connection and sometimes with multiple connections ... depends on the site].
I also see a powerboost upload greater than 14Mbps.
>
> I live in a rural area literally at the end of the line for the phone
> lines and there is no cable service. We have DSL at 3Mb and are usually
> actually seeing 3Mb for (gulp) $59.95 a month. They also have 10 Mb
> service for $69.95 and some slower ones for less but the fastest service
> won't work where we live.
I pay $62.95 for service, own my own modem and that is with a $10 discount due
to have cable TV.
A question that you didn't ask is:
Do you download more when you have a faster download pipe? How about upload?
My answer to both questions is no. But I love the fact that VPN is much
smoother, downloads are faster so I don't wait around and Netflix is
particularily happy on my TiVo and uploading pictures for printing is simply a
treat to what I dealt with just a year or so ago when 768Kbps was the upload
speed on the 8Mbps tier (DOCSIS 2.0).
In short, I pay the extra $10 or so per month to get lower latency [due to
have more channels that are much less congested than is the case with DOCSIS
1.1/2.0 which uses just one channel] and a lot less time waiting around for
large downloads (ever notice that video driver downloads are well over 100MB
these days?).
--
Thomas T. Veldhouse
Religion is a crutch, but that's okay... humanity is a cripple.
Jules
>> Around $100/month, incl. phone and TV (n bazillion grainy channels of
>
> Grainy? May I ask if you are using the digital converter box or just
> running the cable straight into the set, there is a big difference between
> the two.
Yeah, it's a box between the Cat5 and the set. It'll definitely be less
than optimal I know, but I suspect that at least part of the problem is
they're just sending so many channels into the homes that they have to
compress the hell out of them all to do it. It's not only grainy either,
but I see distinct banding between colors (like you get if you take a JPEG
image and reduce the number of colors in it) - and that's definitely not
the TV but has to be down to the box or the feed. Reminds me of a
bad-quality youtube video :-)
Oh, in a moment of boredom I was looking at flat-screen LCD TVs
in the store yesterday - I could see compression artifacts clearly on all
of them (particularly obvious on things like news channels, where there
were solid blocks of color behind the captions etc.). I don't know where
that comes from (the feed or the TV), but it sure doesn't make me want to
buy a new TV...
Technology, meh!
Mark Olson
> Yeah, it's a box between the Cat5 and the set. It'll definitely be less
> than optimal I know, but I suspect that at least part of the problem is
> they're just sending so many channels into the homes that they have to
> compress the hell out of them all to do it. It's not only grainy either,
> but I see distinct banding between colors (like you get if you take a JPEG
> image and reduce the number of colors in it) - and that's definitely not
> the TV but has to be down to the box or the feed. Reminds me of a
> bad-quality youtube video :-)
>
> Oh, in a moment of boredom I was looking at flat-screen LCD TVs
> in the store yesterday - I could see compression artifacts clearly on all
> of them (particularly obvious on things like news channels, where there
> were solid blocks of color behind the captions etc.). I don't know where
> that comes from (the feed or the TV), but it sure doesn't make me want to
> buy a new TV...
Unless the store was getting their signal from a terrestrial normal
broadcast band antenna (very unlikely) their transmission channel is
also compressed. Satellite and cable both do it. Of course ATSC over
the air broadcasts have a lot of compression inherent in their signals
to make them fit into a 6 MHz wide channel in the first place but I
really really doubt that digital cable and satellite use a whole 6 MHz
worth of bandwidth for any one channel, the temptation to compress a
little bit more and fit more channels into the same bandwidth, and
hence be able to offer more channels and sell more ads is overwhelming.
John A. Weeks III
WDS <Bi...@seurer.net> wrote:
Well, you don't have to live in the sticks to get robbed. I just
opened my Frontier bill. It is $60.11 per month for 3.09-MB down
and 300-KB up. And that is after what they claim is a $43 per
month incentive discount. I guess you can charge like that when
you have a government sponsored monopoly.
-john-
--
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