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| Author |
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richard
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DSL or Road Runner?
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May 23 04:36 UTC 2002 |
This is for those of you with high speed modems. For a while now Ive had
Road Runner, via Time Warner cable, and while its good when it works,
there have been occasional signal problems. The cable folks say they
don't promise uninterrupted service and when its busy, at peak periods,
this can happen. Also mail has once in a while been slow to arrive. I
can send mail simulatenously to an alternate email address (like grex) and
to my road runner email and it will arrive at the alternate location first
often.
So anyway while I mostly like Road Runner, Ive had frustrations with it.
So today I get a call from Verizon notifying that my phone line is dsl
ready now (too Verizon longer than Time Warner to get up and running in my
neighborhood) Im thinking of switching to DSL. The price is about the
same and as the Verizon rep told me, the cable modem is like a shared or
party line, as my every so often signal problems indicate, whereas the dsl
will be over my phone line. The deal is they send me the DSL modem and I
can try DSL for free for 30 days, during which time I can send it back and
cancel it at no charge if I dont like it.
What Im wondering, is which do you guys prefer? DSL or Road Runner? Is
there really a difference?
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| 40 responses total. |
bdh3
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response 1 of 40:
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May 23 04:56 UTC 2002 |
Actually, if I could get both I would because DSL is not 100%
reliable either (SBC/Ameritech is gonna be the ultimate hardware
vendor no matter who's name is on the service). The DSL is a
'shared' line too, its just not shared locally and so you do
tend to get a more constant (although likely lower) bandwidth
to the point of the first router. After that DSL and cable
are probably similar as they are both equally bound by upstream
constraints. As for DSL being more 'private', that will depend
on who is actually configuring the router. So far of the few
times I have scanned my immediate 'neighborhood' - Class C - I
have had no problem seeing other hosts on the block, ie my
fellow DSL subscribers. As I log all traffic I notice
a lot of scans and have noted number of them from all over
SBC/Ameritech so I suspect it is that way system wide.
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scott
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response 2 of 40:
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May 23 13:00 UTC 2002 |
It's not a technology issue. It's a company issue. Ask around and compare
customer service horror stories, basically. :(
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gull
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response 3 of 40:
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May 23 13:33 UTC 2002 |
My SBC/Ameritech DSL has been very reliable. It seems to be potluck; if you
happen to have good phone lines, DSL works great, if you don't it can be a
struggle to get them to fix things.
Currently Comcast's TV picture to me isn't even very good, so I just laugh
when they try to sell me Internet service or local phone service.
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oval
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response 4 of 40:
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May 23 14:19 UTC 2002 |
i did the verizon dsl plan once and got tied into a year contract while my
bandwidth decreased drastically.
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flem
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response 5 of 40:
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May 23 17:02 UTC 2002 |
I had Ameritech DSL for a year, and it was reasonable. There were occasional
service problems, and I wasn't overly happy with their tech support, but it
sure beat using a modem. When I moved, DSL wasn't available in my new
location, so I went with what was then MediaOne's (now ComCast) cable modem.
I've been much happier with it. The outages are fewer and shorter, and the
service is consistently faster. ymmv.
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jazz
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response 6 of 40:
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May 23 17:36 UTC 2002 |
The salesman's line that DSL isn't a shared medium is a bit deceptive,
for two reasons.
The first is that, while cable modems operate on a shared medium, the
medium isn't shared like ethernet or most other broadcast media are; under
the DOCSIS standard, which most providers are using, you time-share with other
modems, and your full time-share is generally around 1500 kilobits out of 20
or 30 megabits. So yes, you're sharing, but you're sharing often twice as
much out of a much larger pool than the salesman's line would lead you to
believe.
The second is that, with both media, you're only talking about the
first leg of the journey "up" to the internet, either to the DSLAM for DSL
or to the CMTS for a cable modem. That's not where contention is going to
occur; it's at all of the other legs of the journey, *all* of which are
shared by every user in your region, and many of which are a much more limited
resource than DSL or cable modem bandwidth. So you're avoiding contention
at a place where avoiding contention really isn't important.
The only significant drawback to a cable modem being a shared medium
is when someone else's cable modem starts behaving abnormally, but in
practical terms, an outage is an outage, and you need to look at how many
outages a service provider has compared to another service provider.
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gull
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response 7 of 40:
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May 23 19:04 UTC 2002 |
I shied away from cable modems partly because I knew about all the
problems Michigan Tech had with them in the Daniel Heights apartments.
One person with a bad splitter or a dirty connection or a poorly-made
cable connection to their stereo would bring everyone's modem on the
entire block to its knees. This happened on almost a weekly basis. I
gather the technology has improved since then, though I still get the
impression that Comcast customers are having to reset their modems on a
regular basis. I almost never have to touch my DSL modem.
Comcast also seems to be much more vigilant about stopping people from
running servers on their system, and I like running a web server. ;)
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jazz
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response 8 of 40:
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May 23 22:08 UTC 2002 |
That's only a problem in an academic environment, really, since that
apartment provided it's own local cable delivery to all of the apartments.
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janc
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response 9 of 40:
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May 25 16:59 UTC 2002 |
We just changed from Comcast Cable to Earthlink DSL (Covad).
Initially getting the cable working was a snap. We ordered a DSL a month
before moving into the new house. Tested it a week before moving in, called
them, nothing happened. After we moved in we started calling more
persitantly, got bounced from Earthlink to Ameritech to Covad and back again.
Lots of technicians visited. A week later it was working.
Our DSL service hangs regularly. Too much to be acceptable. We've been
annoying Earthlink about this. They want us to set up a single windows
machine with their software plugged into the net so they can figure things
out. We normally use a Lynksys hub with miscellaneous Windows, Linux, and
Mac machines on the local network. That's OK with them, but their tech
support doesn't cope amazingly well with it. We're told that DSL reliability
issues can be worked out, if you keep harrassing the service provider about
it.
Comcast is a pack of idiots. Besides the thing where they changed everyone's
email addresses on short notice, and put up really, really bad proxy servers,
they now seem to be instituting new usage fees. This is an entertainment
company, not a utility provider. Earthlink at least understands what their
customers expect from them, though they don't necessarily deliver.
So, as far as I can tell, both options suck.
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gull
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response 10 of 40:
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May 25 21:03 UTC 2002 |
The thing is, they still suck significantly less than regular dialin service.
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gelinas
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response 11 of 40:
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May 26 03:27 UTC 2002 |
(The FCC agrees with ComCast: Internet access is entertainment, not a
utility.)
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janc
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response 12 of 40:
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May 26 13:19 UTC 2002 |
Not for me.
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scott
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response 13 of 40:
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May 26 14:27 UTC 2002 |
Jan, you're a business user. Therefore you need to pay exorbitant "business"
rates. I dunno why, that's just what always seems to happen.
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jmsaul
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response 14 of 40:
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May 26 15:06 UTC 2002 |
I think it's maybe more accurate to say that the FCC doesn't, at this stage,
understand the distinction well enough.
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keesan
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response 15 of 40:
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May 26 15:53 UTC 2002 |
Why did you choose Earthlink rather than one of the smaller competitors? I
had a terrible time even getting through to tech support at Earthlink and it
took them several months to determine that my e-mail was not working because
they had changed my address at some point and told me it had not changed.
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scott
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response 16 of 40:
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May 26 16:45 UTC 2002 |
I'm presently moving the bulk of my email from my current ISP to an
independant POP3 account set up by a cousin (sort of an extended family deal).
However, I'm still quite leery about moving to anything beyond the same
dial-up account I've had for the last 5+ years, after seeing the continuing
bad customer-service stories about DSL or cable service.
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jmsaul
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response 17 of 40:
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May 26 18:31 UTC 2002 |
Re #15: One possible reason is that the smaller competitors keep going under
or getting bought out by bigger ones.
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oval
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response 18 of 40:
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May 26 19:27 UTC 2002 |
16, right. s'why i'm back to using slowass dialup. i use a small, well-run
isp based here, and technically for the price of dialup and 2 shell accounts
i could *supposedly* have dsl. based on experience, i'd rather stick to at
least something reliable with great support. plus they have picnics in
central park.
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scg
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response 19 of 40:
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May 26 22:57 UTC 2002 |
I tried DSL from a couple of small companies, and got tired of having to keep
getting new DSL lines installed when the old provider went out of business.
I'm now using PacBell (SBC), and it's working great. SBC/PacBell tends to
be a lot better than SBC/Ameritech at just about everything, though, so my
recommendation of PacBell wouldn't necessarily be a recommendation of
Ameritech.
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gull
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response 20 of 40:
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May 28 15:21 UTC 2002 |
Re #14: Some people would argue the worst thing that could happen would
be for the FCC to start regulating Internet access.
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janc
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response 21 of 40:
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May 29 17:06 UTC 2002 |
We chose Earthlink because Valerie liked the help she got from them
when she had dial-up service from them, once long ago.
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bdh3
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response 22 of 40:
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May 30 03:58 UTC 2002 |
Thats the COS ones aren't they? (just think of the wonderful
activities your money is funding)
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janc
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response 23 of 40:
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May 30 12:27 UTC 2002 |
What is COS?
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bdh3
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response 24 of 40:
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May 31 05:46 UTC 2002 |
Sorry. "Church of Scientology"
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