Who's Got Cable Internet, and What's It Like?

In My Humble Opinion
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      • I got cable internet set up a couple days ago. It’s nice, at 2 AM it’s great (the dial-up gets 4.5-5.5KB/sec, the cable gets about 10X that speed), but I notice that it suffers many of the same problems as the dial-up modem:
        -This site (SDMB) still loads slow or [often] not at all during lunchtime/breaktimes/prime time, just like with the dial-up modem. Other sites load slow, but they do load.
        -The cable line normally gets 45 to 55Kb/sec, but many servers don’t deliver that fast, especially during high-traffic times.
        -During prime time on weekday evenings (around 7-8 PM), the cable modem has completely failed to respond both nights so far. The dial-up modem is slow, but it does get online. Sometimes when the response times are slow, it improves if I reboot the PC, but that’s only a guess: there’s no way I know of to tell me exactly what’s going on in the cable connection, except if pages load or not. With the dial-up modem, I can just open addiotinal pages in new tabs (Mozilla1.1) and when any page loads, I know from the tab’s title. With the cable connection, when it’s not responding, nothing loads at all.
  • The static IP address/security becomes an issue: I have the last free version of ZoneAlarm (my PC won’t boot with the newest one installed). Is this still good enough? ZoneAlarm used to go off every now and then when I only had the dialup modem to use, but so far (over two days of a few hours time each), ZoneAlarm has been silent… No applications have server rights, and only IE6, Windows and Mozilla1.1 have local and net access enabled. In Win98SE, the only network protocols installed/enabled are “Client for MS Networks”, the hardware modem and ethernet card, and TCP/IP on the modem and ethernet cards…
  • There’s a tech support site by the service provider, but I haven’t been able to get in yet because they haven’t set up my account there, so I haven’t yet been able to get the official responses. Is all this to be expected? - DougC
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Ok - here goes… :stuck_out_tongue:

I have Optus@home cable here in Australia. It’s damn fine, thanks! Depending on which site I download from I can get close to the bandwidth limit (400K/s).

What you’re complaining about is caused by a number of things… so let’s start with the first: the maximum bandwidth you’ll get will always be limited by the slowest node in the path between you and the site you’re downloading from. Ideally, the slowest point would be YOU, giving you the maximum possible download speed - but the truth is it’s often caused by some node in the path… and that’s really out of your hands. Sometimes the site you’re visiting (the straight dope is, I think, a good example) is overloaded… and well, basically you’re stuffed.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the cable segment you’re on is shared by other users - and if they’re all a bunch of file-sucking leeches your transfer speeds may suffer as a result.

The other thing is that your ISP may, simply put, suck.

OK - the other matter of your static IP address; Zone Alarm 2.6.4 (I think that’s the second-last version) is pretty good and will do all you want. If you’re concerned that it’s not properly installed/configured, try the tests available at http://www.grc.com/ or http://www.pcflank.com/ - these will scan the most commonly-used ports. Zone Alarm should whinge when these sites check you out. If it doesn’t (or doesn’t put anything in its alerts or logfiles) you need to reconfigure it.

If you want to try out other firewalls, there are firewalls-a-plenty at http://www.tucows.com/

Hope this helps. You haven’t said whether you have file & print sharing enabled on the cable connection; if you do, you should disable it as it gives access to your machine over the net via NetBIOS (ideally your ISP would block those ports, but who knows???).

Hope this gives you something to work with. I’d give you more, but I’m coming down with flu and my brain is not working at full bandwidth (har har).

Max

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I think what typically happens is that cable subscribers (and I’m one of them) share their bandwidth with a small group of people. Kinda like party lines. You may be in a group with lots of heavy users. Which might be worth complaining about.

Or you may just not be visting the right sites to take advantage. I’m not surprised that you have trouble with this site. It’s not us, it’s them. Generally when I’m waiting for a thread to open up I can surf other sites, watch movie streams at 300Kps. And then it will time out. But that’s the price we pay for this cummunity.

I think the fastest I ever got my modem up to was about 1.2Mps. But the area I live in filled with lot of retirees and people over 70 so I’m fairly certain my group are low usage. So it’s typically not my connection that limits my speed but the internet itself which can be quite slow at times.

I get fairly constant ZA warnings ( I probably have the same one you have) but then I keep everything but my browser and e-mail on ? so I know what wants to connect and when. I click no a lot.

Have you tried those bandwidth testers? I tried 3 and got quite different results. One gave me 100kps, one gave me 500kps and the last gave me 1.5mps.

Good luck (Maxxie beat me! :()

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      • File and print sharing is turned off, and the firewall tester at GRC comes up blank.
  • By the by, when we ue the term “K” or “Kb”, are we speaking of Kilobits or kilobytes? -The download manager in Mo reads in kilobytes (I thinks…), and that’s where I’m seeing teh ~50KB figure, so that would be about right (50 kbytes=~400Kbits)… - DougC
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I’m by no means technologically inclined, but something just doesn’t sound right about your service. You said that sometimes it just won’t get you online, but that ought not be a problem. The way our cable modem was explained to me, we don’t have to GET online; we’re always there. It’s like having cable tv in that you don’t have to start up the cable system every time you turn on the set; it just runs all the time whether you’re using it or not. Your system may be set up differently, you may have a different type of cable modem, you may have a faulty modem, you may just have a really crappy service. Call your cable company and ask them what’s going on.

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Just yesterday I got my cable internet access changed to a different access port due to slow periods. Before I would average about 100 to 150k access speed, which was much faster than any dialup, to an average of around 350k. As far as this site being slow, it depends on the number of visitors. At my work we have T1 internet connections, that fastest of the fast, and most days I cannot get on this board because of traffic during my lunch break. It all has to do with the number of lines available to the server hosting this board.

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I have cable, and I’m always online, as CrazyCatLady explained. All I have to do is click on my browser. I have no idea why your browser wouldn’t load up when you clicked on it.

The SDMB is always slow, as previously explained, but most other sites are quicker.

Peak usage times are going to be slower, depending on how many other people share the connection. Our cable company has declared that there are only going to be so many users per connection so that everyone will have a quick connection, regardless of how many people are connected in the area.

I was able to get tech support the moment my cable got connected. That is something I would complain about.

I have found that SDMB aside, my connection is really fast, and I would never go back to a dial-up connection.

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I have RoadRunner. It is fast as hell and simply rocks.

Dialup sucks hard.

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I had it and gave it up. Got 30 days free trial.

Bottom line, only the RARE thing is faster, like downloads (I do maybe one a month, and it does just fine in background as I browse)
The other thing is news footage, but that’s so tedius, choppy and worthless compared to the nightly news that it’s not watchable.

There was no way I could justifiy keeping it.

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DougC, try www.dslreports.com for a line speed test. I think it’s under utilities or tools section or something. They have two different servers to test from, so one of them should give you good speed. That’ll let you know how much you can expect at max. Anything slower would be the site or something else in between.

I’ve seen speeds up to 300 kilobytes/sec with my cable modem, though on average it stays around 90-120. Your 50 figure sounds low. That’s what you would expect from DSL service.

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Oh yeah… and dialup is wack.

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I concur about checking out dslreport, specifically http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks

There’s some TCP/IP registry values that can REALLY make a huge difference on Windows machines. Check it out.

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      • Okay, I don’t know WTF Mozilla is telling me. The DSLReports says 368 Kb down/89Kb up.
  • 'Nuther question, possibly access-related: Real player don’t hardly work no more. I have the free version 8, and now I see they want your credit card info to get the newest “free” player. Which is a crock of shit, I’m not doing that. -But what I usually get now when I try to view any Realplayer file is a message saying that Realplayer 8 Basic can’t connect to this-or-that, can’t connect to anything at all. Even the on-line help doesn’t connect, and Real’s homepage only asks you for money. Realplayer doesn’t work with either Mozilla 1.1 or IE6 now (IE used to all the time) and I have tried manually setting Realplayer as a helper application in Mozilla. Only Realplayer files that I know have been up a long time will play anymore. Winamp and Windows Media Player both continue to function as normal, with no adjustments to the connection configs. Did Real make their newer files incompatible with the old players? - DougC
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Is version 8 of Realplayer the same as RealOne? Because that is the latest version, and the basic version of that is free. You only have to pay for the enhanced version.

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      • Okay, I are a little stupid, I missed the link to the free player… -and (this is a bit early) it appears… -that… -it actually didn’t reset all the media file preferences!!!

:open_mouth:

-I mean, I went through the advanced setup and un-checked them all, but I kinda expected it to do that anyway, like the last couple versions did… - DougC

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I have a cable modem and my line speed result was 1425kbps. Can’t imagine having to go back to a dial up!

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There are also habits you can change to make better use of that bandwidth. Try to abandon the practice of just clicking on a webpage link. You’ll end up sitting there staring into space waiting for the site to load.

Instead, always (well almost always) left-click on the link. You’ll see a small menu open up with several options. One of those is to open the link in a new window. Click that instead.

While the new page loads, you can go back to reading the rest of whatever you were reading. When it’s ready, switch windows and read it. For a site like the SDMB, where there are probably lots of links wou’ll want to follow, this is a tremendous time-saver.

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We have it at our company, works fine compared to dial-up.

One thing I’ve noticed (and was going to post it to “About this message board”:

The SDMB pages load MUCH faster with VERY FEW “can’t find server messages” when accessed via AOL’s server as opposed to Internet explorer via our Cablevision NY provider.

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We have the same problem as the OP after heavy (snow or thunder) storms, no one can access the internet because of problems the provider has. Fortunately it doesn’t happen that often, and it sure beats the heck out of dial-up.

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aramis - the OP has Mozilla, and I can tell you that he’s likely doing one better than opening a new window - he’s openning a new tab :slight_smile: All in the same window, layered one on the other, and all with a single click (mine is middle-click). Who needs multiple browser windows anymore? :slight_smile: