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250GB Bandwidth by Comcast
Astara:
--- Quote from: Klocknov on August 16, 2010, 12:05:46 AM ---Wow I wouldn't of ever considered Santa Cruz as back water, though I guess it is because of the family I have living down there tends to have money and I wouldn't figure them to live backwater areas. And be glad you get 2mb I am lucky to get 1mb where I am at with an advertised burst of 4mb, if I moved 30 minutes away I could get it though...
--- End quote ---
I'll be "glad" when internet speeds in the US are in the top 5. Japan, top European countries, Korea, and others beat the pants off of us. The govnm gave something like 200-300 billion several years ago to AT&T to upgrade line speeds. It went into maintenance and was never seen again. Meanwhile their stockholders took home record returns.
I'm WAY fedup with all of the telcablecos -- they take and take, and don't upgrade -- things are supposed to drop in cost with time, Comcast has been one of the worst offenders for taking more money and providing worse service over the past 10 years they've served my area. Basic cable went from $17->$48 while channels offered dropped. Now if you want digital service, it's another $50 on top of that, with tax it'll be over $100/month just for basic [digital]** cable. That's obscene. Have they upgraded my line for that? Nope. It's the same line it's been since I moved in over a decade ago. Line speeds have not increased in this area for at *least* 5-7. I'm getting slower uploads and about 2-3x faster downloads than I did _10_ years ago! So I'm not even CLOSE to glad about dung I'm eating for 'service'.
**-- I shouldn't have to even notate this, since non-digital service isn't available anywhere in the US, EXCEPT on cable, where it is used as a low-cost leader so cable companies can be seen to comply with local requirements that they provide affordable service --- except that now, it's *substandard* service. >:(
Klocknov:
Up where I am everything is fucking digital, so be glad you can at least get channels without paying a company so you can watch TV.
Astara:
--- Quote from: Klocknov on August 16, 2010, 01:57:45 AM ---Up where I am everything is fucking digital, so be glad you can at least get channels without paying a company so you can watch TV.
--- End quote ---
What part of $48/month for an analog downgrade of a digital signal did you equate to not paying a company?
Santa Cruz is separated by a mountain range from Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Last time I checked, I couldn't receive signals even for all of the major networks over the air here. So I would be glad if I could get channels without paying a company, but I'm not, so I'm not. and it only emphasizes how much more comcast sucks for all types of service. They are not an ISP -- they are an ISP wannabe. When I asked them about email service for my domain, they wanted to put me on Microsoft Exchange and set me up with a copy of Outlook! That's their business support! They can't even handle 'sendmail'. When it comes to network communications, they really have no clue about anything. That's what I tried to hint at
earlier when I said that if I had a problem with line speed, they sent out someone to check the *cable's* signal strength.
That's like a telco-DSL provider checking that the wires are hooked up -- it does nothing to check IP throughput. A ping test is completely inadequate for such measurements.
Klocknov:
--- Quote from: Astara on August 16, 2010, 03:11:02 AM ---
--- Quote from: Klocknov on August 16, 2010, 01:57:45 AM ---Up where I am everything is fucking digital, so be glad you can at least get channels without paying a company so you can watch TV.
--- End quote ---
What part of $48/month for an analog downgrade of a digital signal did you equate to not paying a company?
Santa Cruz is separated by a mountain range from Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Last time I checked, I couldn't receive signals even for all of the major networks over the air here. So I would be glad if I could get channels without paying a company, but I'm not, so I'm not. and it only emphasizes how much more comcast sucks for all types of service. They are not an ISP -- they are an ISP wannabe. When I asked them about email service for my domain, they wanted to put me on Microsoft Exchange and set me up with a copy of Outlook! That's their business support! They can't even handle 'sendmail'. When it comes to network communications, they really have no clue about anything. That's what I tried to hint at
earlier when I said that if I had a problem with line speed, they sent out someone to check the *cable's* signal strength.
That's like a telco-DSL provider checking that the wires are hooked up -- it does nothing to check IP throughput. A ping test is completely inadequate for such measurements.
--- End quote ---
Ahh I misunderstood you earlier. Yeah when techs come around I play dumb and ask a lot of questions about their equipment XD. We have a couple good techs up here thankfully and the last time I got one of them that do my area. Past that yeah I know how to do an IP check throughput better then half of them... though I haven't had a server computer for awhile to run the tests...
Astara:
--- Quote from: Klocknov on August 16, 2010, 03:32:18 AM ---.... Past that yeah I know how to do an IP check throughput better then half of them... though I haven't had a server computer for awhile to run the tests...
--- End quote ---
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FWIW, you don't need a server computer to test internet speeds. Today, even a desktop system can handle the I/O of
a Gigabit LAN, especially if it's a modern LAN card with TCP send/receive offloading. A Gb is 'only' the speed of a 'single' hard disk drive -- 125MB/s. I doubt classic hard disk drives will get much faster before flash-drive systems come up in speed and reliability and down in price to make them a more attractive option. Much of the work in getting the most out of hardware comes from tuning the software. Makes a night & day difference between using 'default settings' and tuned settings.
I've found that that network buffer and window settings for current OS's are between 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than they should be for optimal throughput on a Gigabit LAN. Tuning software for the hardware would easily let a P-II chip drive a 100Mb LAN and ISP speeds are no where near that. Even WinXP on a 8 year old laptop can outpace those speeds.
Sometimes, it's just a matter of finding the right network card. Depending on the card, you can see 3-9x speed differences for the same spec'd LAN speed. As an example of software tuning making huge differences -- using something like the $10 plugin CoreAVC decoder for video, dropped my CPU usage by a factor of 10, because, besides more optimal algorithms that don't waste as many CPU cycles, they can also use my video hardware to accelerate video decoding (what a novel concept! Doi! :o)
Meanwhile, ISP LAN speeds sit back at what was state of the art in school labs in the late 70's. Telecoms haven't been so much interested in doing technology research as in doing market research to find more ways to extract more money from less. Why bother investing in tech, when you can oversell your network capacity, then charge customers for every little bit of increase to fix it?
I write too much. :P
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