Due to the sudden explosion of you console junkies in my local Area my ADSL has been reduced from 2 meg to about 380k in the evenings.
My ISP are working on the problem, and we may one day have 8Meg broadband, but 380k is slower than the OOOOLD 512k that was common for beginning broadband.
Some people tell me that ‘contention’ (local heavy use effecting bandwidth) doesn’t have much of an effect. But the guy at the ISP reckons this is usually true, but loads and loads of new users have popped up with these consoles connecting to the internet.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, if it’s truly online gaming that’s using all that bandwidth, then the ISP can fix things by installing more capacity in their network. Bandwidth requirements of online games are relatively predictable and stable.
It’s P2P that causes real headaches for the ISPs – they can install as much capacity as they like, and the P2P applications will just keep increasing their bandwidth usage until the network is saturated again.
I’m not on cable. I’m on ADSL, which uses the telephone infrastructure (sp?)
Normally, if I am within a certain distance from the nearest exchange (six miles I believe) I can expect to get the full 2 meg. And up until 2008 I was doing.
I thought the big selling point of DSL was it wasn’t affected by your neighbors’ usage the way cable is. That’s like cutting off your phone service because your neighbors are using their phones. What up with that?
I’ve always had bad experiences with DSL. Cable isn’t perfect, but I’ve never noticed a degradation in speed because of my neighbors. The service goes down occasionally, but while it’s up, it’s up at full speed.
I’ve used Comcast for years. No, I’m not one of their fans. But they’re better than DSL.
I did the ADSL thing for a long time because of this theory. My connection was down at least once a month and I never got the speed I was supposed to get. Meanwhile, everyone I knew was on cable and loved it.
So I dumped my ADSL for cable and guess what? Never been down once, always been as fast as I ever needed, no problems whatsoever. And I’m in a neighborhood that loves their internet, judging by the fact that I can detect no less than five wireless networks besides my own.
To put it simply, with cable you and your neightbours all share a single connection with your cable provider’s network. That shared connection is the bottleneck.
With DSL, you have a direct connection with your provider’s network. The network is the bottleneck.
So with cable if your neighbours are using a lot of bandwidth you notice problems. With DSL, a lot more people in the surrounding area having to be using a lot of bandwidth before you notice problems.
There are no guarantees on the Internet – it’s always best-effort service.
I’m having trouble composing a response to that statement without collapsing into a fit of laughter. If that statement were true, I must be surrounded by the last remaining Puritan colony.
Damnit! That just makes me jones for it even more. I’m in south Florida, the east coast at that (the popular side) and according to the availability map, FiOS is available in freaking Tampa?! Fuck Tampa! Fuck the west coast of Florida and their speedy download performance.
