I’m not sure where this question belongs, so Mods feel free to move it the more appropriate forum.
Ok, so I’m thinking about getting internet from home since I plan on working from home more often (especially since work is going to pay for it). I used to work from home at my friend’s place, but since he’s a consultant, he left town for a while. I was looking at various plans and I see there are various speeds. I know that a higher number obviously equals faster, but how fast is fast?
Download speeds (since I won’t be uploading too much) and cost.
2.0 Mbps for Verizon – $20/month (DSL I think)
3.0 Mbps for Earthlink $45/month (cable)
5.0 Mbps (I’m assuming) for Comcast – $60/month (cable); I think I saw 6.0 for the same price (Speakeasy?)
I plan on dowloading documents (usually .pdf, standard encryption) from servers located in San Franciso and London (5 - 50 MB files), and working from those servers. But, like I said, I shouldn’t be working off the servers or uploading to it too much. SF is at least a 5 hour plane ride for me. My company will pay for $20 (or is it $25)/month for the service. I plan on playing poker on-line, and using the connection for my XBOX live, downloading movies and music (mostly movies). Overall, I plan on being connected at least 8 hours/day.
To do all this, can I get by with a 2.0 connection? Does it make sense to splurge on a faster connection? The speed test here at work range from 984 kbps to 2.0 Mbps. I notice that I’m slow when posting to the SDMB as well as other sites, but I think it may be those servers and not necessarily my computer or connection speed.
For the poker, 2.0 Mbps is fine. For the movies, I guess faster is better, but is there any gain if you have a 5.0 Mbps connection and the computer you are downloading from only has a 1.0 Mbps connection?
I had DSL for about two years, and while at 256 Kbps it was plenty fast for poker, it wasn’t always the most reliable connection. It was far better than dial up, but I’d probably still get disconnected during about 35% of my sessions. The DSL modem took about long enough to reconnect that I’d use the all-in feature while playing poker. Not good. I’ve never used cable so I can’t say anything about it, but I’d ask around and see if it’s a more reliable connection than DSL.
The fastest connection I ever got out of my VDSL was when downloading Illustrator CS directly from Adobe. It was Saturday and early morning here, night in the US and I got the whole friggin file in 3 minutes. I just stared at the screen. That’s the only time I’ve actually felt that the 8MB dl was seriously kicking ass.
I pay €40 for my service, but for me, ity wasn’t a question of splurging, since a 2 MB down cost about €30 and the diff is so small, I might as well have the best DSL available, especially since it came with a static IP, which means I can run an FTP server (a FTP server?) from home. However, I find that I seldom get connections that would warrant anything beyond 2 MB.
Well, back home my Comcast is at 4mb/s, and I think I may be in one of the areas where it’s recently bumped up to 5 or 6. But unless the computer you’re talking to isn’t throttled somehow, or you’re doing a lot of parallel downloading, I don’t know how much increase you’ll see.
I’m currently limited to 1mb/s with cable, and that’s the most the company offers. They offer 256kb/s and 512 though! But for most surfing, it’s perfectly fine and it definitely is “high speed” compared to dialup or ISDN. Most of the bottleneck I ever experience isn’t limited to the connection speed but rather the number of Bittorrent peers I can ever seem to connect to!
Hmmm…so, from the responses that I see so far is that I won’t be able to see any real difference in performance once I go past 2.0 Mbps. Is cable more dependable than DSL?
Head over to dslreports.com and you can find reviews from real live users of your prospective ISP.
There is a point at which you’ll be able to say “Woohoo, that site must be plugged right into the backbone!” and “Yech! Are they on an old ISDN line?” and I’d say 2meg is right about that point. If you’re going to graphics-intense sites, or frequently moving big files, you will appreciate higher speed.
Just for example, a 50 meg file will take nearly five minutes to download on a 2 meg line, or a bit under a minute and a half on a 6 meg line. Uploading is going to hurt, though - upload speeds are usually around one-eighth the download, so that 50 meg file will take around 35 minutes to upload on a 2 meg line, assuming it’s 384k up. (commonly referred to as 2.0/384 or 2000/384)
The one thing to remember about connection speed is that it is calculated in Mega Bits (Mb or mb) not Mega Bytes (MB). Files that you download are Mega Bytes but when they are downloaded it is usually displayed as Kilobytes (KB).
So if you have a file that is 100 Mega Bytes (MB) in size it is actually 838 Mega Bits (Mb) or 102400 Kilobytes (KB).
On average in the US cable/dsl offer 4 Mega Bit downloads. A 4Mb line should DL 1MB every ~2 seconds. Logically anything above the average speed would be considered “fast”.
If you were to get the full 4Mb on a download it would be displayed as downloading at 4000KB.
It would take a 9Mb line to download 1MB every second.
Now while we can say that anything over 4Mb in the US is good it is not the case in some other countries. For example in Japan they have 40Mb lines for the same price that we pay for our 4Mb lines. That is nearly 5MB of data every second.
In the next 6 months to a year we should start to see the bandwidth increase. Cable providers wills tart to offer 8Mb lines and possibly up to 15Mb lines. The same with DSL.
