I recently moved and had no choice but to get cable, as I was just too far away from an Exchange to get ADSL. I feared that would mean I’d have a disastrous connection, because last time I had cable it was average speeds at best.
But in fact, it’s been zippy fast, faster than my last ADSL connection was. I have had a couple of minor connectivity problems, but they are rare, and probably less frequent than the hiccups in my ADSL.
So even though the company I’m getting it through are out of touch with the reality of what consumers expect from the internet, they have at least provided me with the fastest connection I could hope for.
The OP doesn’t say where he is, but if you have the option of getting Verizon FIOS, I highly recommend it.
I switched from Comcast cable to FIOS a couple of years ago, and except for some early problems getting the right television package set up, I’ve been very happy with the FIOS Internet/video/phone package. The Internet is faster – 15 Mbps – and I get more TV channels, all for about $50 less per month than I was paying Comcast.
Really? I was downloading a 150 MB file last night and getting 1.2 - 1.4 MB/sec, which would put me in th 9-12 Mbps range. I have Comcast Cable. I routinely get over a megabyte per second on connections that aren’t slowed down due to bandwidth restrictions/traffic on the sender’s side.
That is true. I hate Verizon as a company mainly because of ALL of their support sucks no matter what you are asking about but I could not resist the quality of their product. A technician has to run a dedicated line into your house which can take 1 - 3 hours to install but you won’t notice much of anything. After that, phone, cable TV, and an extremely fast internet connection are all bundled for a really cheap price when you compare it to other options. After it is set up, there isn’t a firm upper limit on what you could upgrade to or even what you might be able to get for free later. I max out the scores on internet speed test sites these days at least for downloads.
I’ve had both DSL and cable. I’m currently using cable and I am very happy with it. I’m using a router/modem that has five ethernet connections as well as a wireless broadcast. I have two computers connected via ethernet cable and two via wireless. I also have an analogue telephone adapter (for VoIP) connected via ethernet cable.
(What follows refers to Australian conditions and may not apply to the US.)
When I was using DSL I would get dropouts many times a day. This was because the copper wires here in this part of Brisbane are old and the connections are unstable. While I am not very far from the exchange (less that three kilometers) the attenuation on my telephone line is very high. In addition, the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is very low. To get the best DSL service you need high SNR and low attenuation, the opposite to what I experience.
With cable I have not experienced a single dropout in the eighteen months I’ve had it. This is important as we use VoIP to speak to my daughter in London and son in Melbourne on a daily basis. I need a stable connection. With cable I get a solid 10Mbps connection which could be upgraded to 20 Mbps at more cost to me. There is also an intention to play around with DOCSIS 3.0 which has a potential to raise speeds significantly for cable connections only.
In Australia the consumer has to rationalise the use of broadband to access the WWW. It is costly for the consumer here. The rationale used by ISPs is that Australia has to pay for infrastructure to connect to the rest of the world (undersea cable and the like) and that’s expensive because of our isolation. But, as an example, I pay $60.00 per month for a 10 Mbps connection and I have a quota of 12 GB per month. By US standards, that’s expensive. By my standards, it needs justification because of the expense.
Please note that we pay for both speed and quota. Higher speed and higher quota is increasingly expensive. Also note that the difference in pricing for DSL plans and cable plans for the same or similar speeds and quota is insignificant.
So, in advice to the OP, if you are looking for a more stable connection and if you believe that the US will move to pricing plans like Australia plans, I would look at cable mainly because there is more flexibility for the consumer.
>eta: or do you mean that only one phone jack in the house was able to handle DSL traffic? If so I would be surprised by that.
Yes, its pretty common. The idea here is that all the wiring in your house acts like an big antenna collecting noise and putting onto your DSL channel. So installers just run the dsl pair from the outside, into your closet, and into one jack, thus minimizing interference. This is especially important for those who live far from the CO.
>DSL is an obsolete technology. It won’t get any faster and the pipe won’t get any bigger.
AT&T is rolling out VDSL right now under the trade name Uverse. Its good for 52mbps, which is impressive. No need to run fiber. DSL2+ is big outside the US and can deliver 24mbps. I think DSL will be here in one form or another for a long time.
So you use TV commercials rather than science for knowledge? Cable is not fiber based. it is coax cable - RG-6 - the same stuff we used for ham radio in 1960. It has limited bandwidth, copper wire, and is not fiber optic.
DSL is more than sufficient for everyone but the biggest data consumers. And it is those massive data consumers that cable companies have been quietly dropping.
If you need bandwidth, then fiber optics (ie FIOS) is required. In many offices, the 8 Mb provided by DSL is more than sufficient. But then they are not running multiple video conferences.
Your connections were not slow? Well try becoming a major data consumer to learn how quickly some cable companies will ask you to leave - so that others will suffer no slowdown.
Meanwhile. slowdowns on some cable networks (which are copper based) have caused the FCC to question their service. If the cable company’s phone service is reliable, then Skype and other users of phone service on the internet must be just as reliable. Why has the FCC responded to so many complains about cable company bandwidth problems causing diminished Skype service? Because cable company internet is not as reliable as the internet channels they reserve for their own phone service.
What we are discussing here are the future problems - why cable companies are taking bandwidth away from some TV channels to upgrade their internet service (did you notice how some local channels got dropped?), and why the FCC has stepped in to avert these current and ‘maybe get worse in the future’ problems.
Most DSL users have more than enough bandwidth at 1.7 and 4 Mb. DSL is also available at 8 Mb. FIOS is what people use if bandwidth was really a problem - which it almost never is for anyone. More often, data bottlenecks reside at the server.
For most people, the best service is the one that is reliable – bandwidth being a number too often hyped, current not a problem for most everyone, and just not really that significant. But then some people also want a 300 hp car just to prove a bigger penis. Far more important (and difficult) is reliability.
Meanwhile, the OP did not ask about that. The OP asked about “the terminology and accompanying devices that come with cable internet”. Those devices were compared to DSL - which also used radio waves on copper wire - a different type of copper wire.
The Charter cable that goes by my house is 100% fiber. The connection from the fiber to my house is coax. I get 20Mb/sec download speeds, verified by tests. We (the local tech council) have been looking at FTTH (Fiber To The Home) systems for years as the newest gold standard, but none have yet been installed here.
The curbside facility is buried in a large, plastic, orange pipe with other fiber bundles and there is enough empty space in the pipe to thread enough more cheap fiber to increase capacity a giga-zillion times.
Quite true, if you can get it in the first place (see below).
Not all companies and not in all areas. I checked with Charter before subscribing and was told that they have no cap on data transfer amounts for residential accounts. It’s not unusual for me to use 30GB/month, and in 2 years at that rate, Charter has never complained and AFAIK, not deliberately slowed me down, even tho I’m sure I stand out in my neighborhood of grannies reading their grandkid’s email once a week.
I’m considering future applications – hi-def video on demand, just for starters.
Commercial accounts are priced differently from residential ones. They are expected to be more data intensive and are priced accordingly.
Not in my area. Our local PEG (Public/Education/Government) offerings used to be a single channel until about a year ago, when 15 more were added and the geographic coverage increased maybe 20 times. True, they “banned” the PEG channels to the 980-999 range, which requires a digital TV, but they are carried by all packages, including the $20/month minimal basic one.
DSL suffers greatly by the speed decrease vs. distance from the CO. More than a mile or two, the speed drops too much for most modern uses. In my part of the country, this eliminates 90% of the county area from DSL service according to AT&T’s figures.
>The Charter cable that goes by my house is 100% fiber. The connection from the fiber to my house is coax.
Thats what U-verse is. Fiber to the DSLAM and then the last mile taken by VDSL. Youre exactly in the same situation, but your last mile is coax.
There’s nothing wrong VDSL and even DSL2+ for last mile solutions.
>I’m considering future applications – hi-def video on demand, just for starters.
Uverse’s bandwidth is split between IPTV and internet. So 20mbps for TV and 20mbps for internet. It does HD.
>DSL suffers greatly by the speed decrease vs. distance from the CO.
This is the situations where cable and fiber shine, but VDSL does a better job at maintaining speeds at far distances from the CO than traditional DSL.
>s. I checked with Charter before subscribing and was told that they have no cap on data transfer amounts for residential accounts.
HorseloverFat, you’ve been a Doper for a long time. How about learning to use the quote function to make your posts easier to read?
Thanks for the link. I don’t recall a notice directly from Charter about that, and even if they have imposed those limits already, they are way above my estimated use. And if they are above mine, most people won’t have a problem.
The reason my usage is so much greater than most residential customers is I post 1-hr, medium-quality video WMV files several times a week and download similar, but even bigger files from other sites that are made into DVDs for local public broadcast.
Isn’t that the way the entire telecommunications industry is going, to fiber backbones if not FTTH?
I popped in to say much the same thing. We didn’t have a cable outlet in the room the computer lives in, so we opted to have the cable modem near one of the TVs, with a wireless router, and we bought a USB wi-fi received for the computer.
This was wonky and ultimately we had an electrician put a cable outlet in the room with the computer, and then moved the wi-fi router in that room.
That worked reasonably well, though we had the occasional connectivity problem with the wi-fi - 15 feet away and no signal. We also periodically had to reset everything (unplug the cable modem and the router) to get them to talk to each other. And ultimately we had to replace the wireless router as it had simply quit working, even if we direct-connected to it.
This was one of the reasons we ultimately switched to FIOS, and that’s been pretty bulletproof. The difference between FIOS and DSL, as far as wiring goes, is that FIOS actually uses the cable outlets for internet, rather than the phone outlets. So we have the same logistical problems (but the FIOS wireless router has been pretty bulletproof).
If you switch to Internet from your cable provider, you care about the following:
What is the cost and is there a bundled cost (e.g.) that includes TV and/or phone service.
How long is that teaser intro deal good for? And how long is the commitment to any contract? What is the startup cost?
How fast is your guaranteed download speed for that cost?
How fast is your guaranteed upload speed for that cost?
What equipment is included and what is the rental fee for it.
Note that most people want to end up with a small box that has some ethernet cable ports (RJ45 jacks for plugging in wired things) and also provides wireless signal throughout your home.
What is needed for that are the following pieces:
A cable modem (not really a modem, but ignore the technicality)
A router (the thing that has the ethernet ports for wired connections), and
A wireless Access Point that distributes signal to the house wirelessly. This can be either “g” or “n.” “N” is faster and more importantly has a better range. It won’t help much unless you are using an “n” connection on the computer receiving the wireless signal.
You can usually rent all of these pieces from the cable company or you can buy them yourself. They are also sold as combination devices. For instance you might have a single box that is a cable modem (it will have a cable connection on it) and is also a router.
There is also a common device, often referred to as a “wireless cable gateway” or similar, that has a place to plug in the cable connection for incoming internet, ports to plug in other computers, and distributes a wireless signal to the house.
Usually you can buy your own devices. In the past some internet providers didn’t like you to have your own devices. They even sometimes wanted you to pay for every device you connected that has its own address (IP address). I don’t think this is true any longer; routers you buy get their one main address from the cable company and create more addresses on your side for use by you even though the cable company side only sees the main address of the cable modem.
In my own opinion the actual brand of device probably doesn’t make much difference, and common brands such as Linksys, Belkin and DLink are all just fine. There may be a small compatibility advantage, especially with N wireless, to having the same device broadcast the signal as receive it.
This is a lot of stuff and I have tried to way oversimplify because I can’t tell where your knowledge level is. Forgive me if it’s too rudimentary.
Your post was great! As was everyone else’s. Thanks for all the input and do feel free to keep any and all debates going. The more information contained in this thread the better.
And Chief, if you feel like writing a second post at the intermediate stage, please do so. You have basics covered, now it’s time to level up, so to speak.
Better service is fiber direct to the house. Doing conversion in the field creates complications such a backup power units, security from those units, and other problems. The better system is fiber from the CO to the house. Power in the secure CO and power only in the house. All other amplifiers and support equipment adds cost, reduced reliability, and limits future bandwidth. Unlike copper, data that a fiber can carry only increases each year.
The better system is passive - not active as required anywhere coax is used.
You described two systems. Which is better? The more conventional is fiber to some distribution point. Then a coax connection from that distribution box or structure to various subscribers. FTTH is your other described system - fiber completely to the house - no coax distribution. Any system that converts fiber to coax then connects to the house via coax required special equipment, power backup, and security systems. More complex - also called an active system. Verizon’s FIOS is fiber to the house - a passive system - a direct connection from the CO to every subscriber.
