I didn’t think this was really worthy of GQ despite being a question per se.
For all the US dopers and for that matter anyone form a country other than little old New Zealand. I want to know how much you pay for broadband net access. In new zealand we get the corperate cockshaft from the ONE yes that is right one provider of ADSL internet.
I mean seriously upwards of $65 a month for 15Gb of traffic at 128kbps. And that is as cheap as it gets. (bear in mind that is $NZ, roughly 0.55 US cents to a NZ dollar)
I’d like a comparison between these (extortionate) prices and all you foriegn types.
I’m paying about $43 (U.S.) a month for cable Internet access (plus $3 a month to rent the modem), which gives me a connection up in the 1.5mbps range (it’s tough to measure actual speed, since that depends upon the load on the server that’s coughing up the material, the amount of traffic on the 'net, etc.).
There’s no specified limit on how much traffic I’m allowed per month, but they clearly don’t want you setting up your business website on that connection, and generating a huge load. Basically, it’s unlimited until they scream “Enough, already!” and cut you off.
I spend $45 US a month for unlimited traffic. I think upstream is 128kbs, but downstream is at least 3Mbps, maybe up to 5. My best downloads are usually something like 3 or 4 hundred bps.
When I used to use P2P applications, I’d have many simultaneous downloads, each with many sources, and that’s the only time I’d see my link being used in the megabit-per-sec range.
Wow! What kind of connection is that?! A T1 line maxes out at, I believe, 1.5Mbps, and the average home DSL or cable connection is only in the 640kbps to 1.5Mbps range. A T3 connection, at something approaching 45Mbps, would be faster, but I don’t know of any connection that would give you 3-5Mbps downstream.
For a speed test, check out http://www.toast.net/performance. It’s not very precise, and the results may be influenced by a lot of other variables, but it should give you at least some idea of what kind of speed you’re actually getting. fixed link (moved period outside URL tag) - ub
If I wanted to deal with Rogers Cable, I could get 3 Mb/s downstream, 256kb/s upstream (I think) over cable for CAD 65.00 per month. Bell Telephone offers DSL at 1 Mb/s downstream for around CAD 45.00 per month… but they don’t serve my building. And there’re 7 or 8 apartments in the building who’s snap it up if it was offered. You can get wireless DSL for about the same price from Look.ca—but you have to be line-of-sight to the CN Tower or one of their retransmitters–and I’m not.
There’s a high-profile condo development downtown where every apartment has 100 megabit per second access. No idea of the price though. I’m seriously jealous.
I think there are regional variations or, more likely, differences between urban and rural areas. In Los Angeles, where I live, I pay $39/month for what maxes out at 84 kbytes/sec download (I’m not sure whether people are reporting bits or bytes per second). Some relatives of mine in the boonies of Illinois pay a little less than $100/month for their DSL.
It isn’t all good. It goes goes through stretches where it’s unreliable and does down a lot. Also, they block some ports on the incoming side, so I can’t run an FTP server (but maybe a lot of ISPs do that).
And since it’s getting to be too much a risk to use P2P, there’s very little that happens over a couple hundred kbps. It’s only when there’s a lot of files with a lot of sources downloading that I ever approach anything higher, and that doesn’t happen with other apps.
Still, it’s good to know I pretty much cannot overload my downstream link.
Coincidentally, I just got an email today that says “we will be increasing the speeds available to our Power Link high-speed internet customers to up to 3 megabytes-per-second downloads and up to 256 kilobytes-per-second uploads”
(Power Link is was Adelphia calls its cable modem service).
Note that it says megabytes and not bits. If I had not been sure that I’d already seen 5 megabits, I would have thought this was a typo, and they meant bits.
I suppose it’s still possible that it’s a typo, and either I’m mis-remembering or my speed that time was a fluke. But if this is true, then I’ll be getting 24 megabits per sec !
And there’re 7 or 8 apartments in the building who’s snap it up if it was offered. You can get wireless DSL for about the same price from Look.ca—but you have to be line-of-sight to the CN Tower or one of their retransmitters–and I’m not.