Once you get used to cable modem, dial up feels like going back to the old 300 Baud Hayes modem days. So I was highly perturbed when our local cable operator told me that @Home is going bankrupt as of November 30th and they will no longer offer their cable modem service. Fortunately, I may be one of the lucky ones - Charter appears to offer an alternative cable modem service I can switch to. However, I'm not sure what to do about all of the business email that I have coming to my @Home email address that will get bounced, and the new Charter cable modem (please let it be decent service!) only offers one IP per cable modem - so I suppose it's time to look for a router.

I wonder how many folks are going to lose cable modem service because of this? And what happened to @Home - what did they do wrong (financially?)

@Home merged with Excite, which was one of the massively overvalued dot-coms without a real product. That was the killer. (Remember when Yahoo was worth more than Disney?)

I got a Linksys router a few weeks ago and it's great. I got the model with wireless, so I can roam the house and yard with the 802.11b card in my laptop. It's great--the only hassle vs. dedicated IPs for all your computers is that you'll need to put your PC into the "DMZ" outside the firewall (a 30-second process) before playing an online game.

Ugh...any idea what this means for Comcast cable service? I'll have to do some digging. I was counting on Comcast@Home service this December. It had already been postponed once, now it could be longer or never?!

So much for the broadband revolution...

--Dave

Last I heard AT&T (which owns a large but minority portion of @Home -- 23% I believe) was already set up to buy the rest of @Home at pennies on the dollar from the bankruptcy court.

Several articles I read a couple of months ago when @Home's difficulties became apparent stated that it was unlikely that anyone would lose their cable internet services. AT&T and/or your local cable company will most likely keep things running. My cable company (Insight) has already added my internet billing to my regular cable TV bill. It used to be billed by @Home directly off my credit card.

Here's a quote I found from an Oct.1 news item regarding the bankruptcy:

"Excite@Home, the leading provider of broadband Internet access, said Friday that it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and sell its high-speed network to AT&T for $307 million in cash."

AT&T? Oh, that's great. Just great. I wonder if I can get DSL in this area?

AT&T isn't picking up _every_ section of @home.

Most of your local providors will simply pick up existing @home services and there will be very little transition problems (hopefully, but you may experience outages).

Most likely Charter or your local cable company will pick up what's left of @home and simply absorb your existing e-mail/ip/yada-yada.

Of course, this is all that I've read really, and I doubt it's 100% true. Hell, I doubt those companies really know how they'll work the merging yet.

There might be some glitches, but cable modem service will continue and will keep expanding - there is too much money at stake. For most subscribers, adding cable modem doubles the monthly bill, and the cable companies are aggressively pursuing those additional revenue streams. I'm still seeing companies doing total system rebuilds right now, despite the flagging economy.

That sale of @Home to AT&T may not go through, as it is being strongly contested by the debt holders. $307 million is probably far too low, and it was not an arms-length transaction. The shareholders are still screwed, but the debt holders might get a little more back.

Also, don't forget that AT&T is shopping its cable properties around, so they won't be AT&T Cable for long. Comcast is the most likely purchaser, and the price is going to be tens of billions of dollars. Comcast offered $45 billion in July, but with the drop in share prices, it will probably "only" be around $35 billion now. AT&T has 13.5 million subscribers, and cable systems sell for $2,500 to $3,000 a sub these days. More if they are upgraded systems that can do cable modems, digital cable, pay-per-view, and other revenue generating services.

"It's great--the only hassle vs. dedicated IPs for all your computers is that you'll need to put your PC into the "DMZ" outside the firewall (a 30-second process) before playing an online game."

Only true for HOSTING games not JOINING them. I join multiplayer games of all types, all the time, from behind ol' Linky.

I used to work at AT&T formerly mediaone... the problems werent with the cable modem subscriber numbers... they had a good number of people, and everymonth there was a backlist for installs going up to 6 months to wait for install in some areas! and when @home came thru (part of it in some areas) the numbers skyrocketed (not AOL 20 million numbers, but a good number)

The money was being lost on upkeep and the hope that telephony would add in some needed cash. @home and a lot of the other cable modem companies couldnt make a dime with the low subsription model (40 dollars a month) and the high bandwidth it demanded, iirc we were always in the red even when i left in 2000.

AT&T does not realy want to go into cable internet (they never gave much of a dime to the cs department i was in), they just want the equipment and the personnel to use as they see fit for prolly telephony ... they still see $ signs in the telephony industry i think... though it still is in its infancy.

Imo its best if cable modem went local to each area... previous to the big buyouts in the mid 90's of all the local cable tv companies.

Cable modem sucks more bandwidth than more people realize... its very expensive to keep up. one node (or town subdivision) iirc had the same amount of traffic that a whole metropolitan area had on dial up. All the backbone companies demanded big bucks for it....

anyway, cable modem isnt going away... it will be localized again to some degree and/or then again be bought out by a big company (AOL? Microsoft?). all imo....

etc

"the low subsription model (40 dollars a month)"

That's low? Would you spend more than that for cable internet in the current economy? I wouldn't. I currently split it with a roommate, so it's reasonable, but if it went up significantly I'd be scurrying back to dial-up land.

All the points in mtkafka's post add up to one thing. Broadband revolutions are a long way off. It simply costs too much money and there's a perception among the people who own the wires that it costs millions and millions of dollars to send bits over those wires.

I personally think bandwidth is way overvalued, but it's one of those things you'll never be able to break out of simply because the people who hold the keys will never let you find out just how inexpensive it is to upkeep those lines.

--Dave

>I join multiplayer games of all types, all the time, from behind ol' Linky.

Ditto. You shouldn't have to go outside your firewall for joining games, although I've heard of the occasional game that has problems through a router -- I haven't encountered one yet though.

>(40 dollars a month)" if it went up significantly I'd be scurrying back to dial-up land

A lot of people used to pay considerably more for ISDN, but high speed connections wouldn't have gotten as popular if the price was higher. US $40 is actually pretty high -- we can get either cable or ADSL here for about $25 U.S. It's great to have both as alternatives.

@home provided a terrible service, relative to its competitors, and like most companies affiliated with the cable industry, was horrible run. DSL killed @home in my market because it offered a much better service. If there was ever a company that deserved to go out of business, it was @home.

>I personally think bandwidth is way overvalued, but it's one of those things you'll never be able to break out of simply because the people who hold the keys will never let you find out just how inexpensive it is to upkeep those lines

Bandwidth companies are in freefall, so that may change (and has significantly already). Companies like Nortel have lost over 95% of their value over the past year.

Stefan

As for the cost of cable modem, $40 seems reasonable for me. I was paying for a second phone line and I was paying for the top tier ISP service from my non-cable ISP (i.e., I was paying for unlimted time access.) When I got cable modem, I was able to drop my second phone line and drop my ISP service down to a lower tier. I end up coming fairly close to break even with cable. And when it works, cable modem completely changes the way you live your computing life. Our local @Home service was spotty when it came up a couple of years or so ago - it seems as if it would go out for a day at least once a week. However, for the last year it's been good enough I've taken it for granted. The email had a problem about a year ago with undelivered mail, but that seems to have been fixed also. All in all, I would be happy to keep them. Now I'll be switching over to whatever Charter Pipeline offers - hopefully it will be at least as good as @Home was. I'd have to move if there was no cable modem service locally - when I'm in a hotel using dial-up, I feel as though something is broken.

Broadband revolutions are a long way off when you don't have it or can't get it. The numbers are going up significantly every year, so it's merely a matter of perspective. Just because it's not happening to you doesn't mean it's not happening.

Among the other reasons cited in this thread, part of what killed @Home was their own projections; they expected a much higher rate of subscriptions. Back in 1997, they projected on the order of 30 million subscribers to @Home by the end of 2000, which would have made them quite profitable.

What acually happened, of course, is that only about 8 million people in the US have broadband today, about 5.5 million of them with cable modems. Price does seem to be a major issue; I read somewhere recently that recent surveys have established $25 a month as the 'break' point for broadband access. So I'm not surprised Stefan notes that basic broadband is available for that price in his area. Not that @home recently announced a price rise to about $45 per month in most of it's service areas.

Also, AOL/TW recently signed new NDAs with AT&T to discuss a bid regarding the cable infrastructure. This is the 3rd time since 1999 this has happened, so who knows? When it was made public in September that AOL/TW was approaching AT&T, Microsoft immediately approached Comcast to try to keep those customers out of AOL's hands.

Looks like cable modem access has a wild ride ahead of it for 2002-2003.

The problem with @home, in reference to its service, was that it was a company trying to run like AOL. Cable modem is not dial up, they believed they could have the same support as AOL or Earthlink or whatever dial isp without much in costs... sadly they didnt know there shit... and they projected WAY over there heads. Servers from @home and AT&T went overboard alot as they jumped from Cisco to Motorola then back to Cisco. In estimates... they lost alot of money from this. Upgrading the digital cable lines for towns was expensive. Support for the lines and data technicians, constant shuffling of contractors... it all added up red. And though they were getting an amazing amount of installs per month (and still are), it could never equal the ease of popping in that AOL cdrom and giving them your cc #... installation was a big drain on cash... as was the idea that docsis (buy your own cable modem and connect) would solve the install problems (caused more headaches), and the constant switchovers, (in chicago from local cable providers (Jones/Continental to Mediaone to ATT to ATT/@home), slow growth and the recession... and competition from DSL and Sattelite AND dialup still beating them all... it never amounted up. I still think high speed access will be another 5 years before its at least profitable.

Anyway, even though cable modem has its problems... id still choose it over any other available connection, forty dollars is hard to beat in this area for its speed (at my friends house he stil can reach upwards of 200kb down and 60kb up on a busy node) compared to DSL or Satellite. Doesnt matter though since where i live dial up is the only option! dammit!

etc

Cable sucks plain and simple. Ours was great ... for a while. Then as they oversell the network it goes to hell. Then they cap your uploads and things get a little better until they oversell it even more. Then there is the issue of reliablity. Our cable would go down if you looked at it the wrong way. We came from two previous DSL providers with a downtime between them of maybe a few hours over a year and a half. Imagine my shock when our cable went down for 24 hours within the first few weeks of having it and right before we ditched it would go down at least once per night.

We switched to Verizon DSL and so far in the two weeks we have had it, it has been solid and fast. I think we will pay about $60 a month for it when it is all said and done for a 1.5/384 line.

Go back to dial up? Are you on crack? Have you actually even surfed with a modem much less tried to game after having had broadband? $40 a month is basically what you would pay for a phone line and isp service. Even with how crappy cable is it is still far better than dial up. Still if you have the choice I highly suggest DSL as it is the better managed technology.

I went from Verizon DSL *to* cable.

Verizon had constant problems with their mail servers for a couple of months--and when they'd fix them, they'd often set them so you couldn't use another domain in your return address. And I wasn't using my verizon.net account for email, so that was a total pain.

Switched to Adelphia and it's been much better. No dealing with dialing in, reliable SMTP server... At best, it's 5x faster than DSL. At its slowest, it's still 2x faster.

I realize this is dependent on your area. But here, at least, cable's a better choice.

I used to have DSL but had to switch to Cable when I moved to my new place. The DSL infrastructure just isn't there in Omaha yet (which is odd considering we have a population in excess of 500k). I prefer DSL, mainly for the security it offers, but I haven't had a problem with @home since we switched to it 8 months ago.

They limit our uploads to 15k, which helps with the speed and stability of the system as a whole. Kinda hurts if I want to host an 8 player game (I can't anymore), but for my usual DAoC, CS gameplay, it couldn't be better.

We got our "@Home is going bankrupt" letter about a month ago from Cox@Home. They gave us all kinds of assurances that they would continue to offer cable modem service and that we wouldn't see any disruption. Still, I think it may be time for me to call USWest again and see if they've spread their DSL to my neighborhood yet.

I'm curious if @Home could have made it on it's own. Excite was losing money hand over fist before it merged with @Home. No doubt it continued to hemorage cash long after the merger was completed.

>At best, it's 5x faster than DSL. At its slowest, it's still 2x faster

Cable can be faster for downloading, but from a practical standpoint, that additional speed has little utility. Even large files only take a couple of minutes to download in DSL -- shaving that by a minute isn't particularly useful, and not having to worry about shared bandwidth is nice -- DSL is generally a more stable, consistent connection, which is what you want for gaming.

Like you said, it all depends upon what services are available, and better, in your area -- both DSL and cable work great if you have a solid provider. I've heard DSL nightmare stories from U.S. providers, but it works great in Canada where it's available (and broadband is more common in Canada) because it's provided by Bell Canada, another monopoly but at least it's one that's well run. @home in my area went down for almost three weeks at once, on one occasion, which is just preposterous, and it was consistently going down for 24 hours or more. @home actually got sued, and lost, due to its service outages in my area. If you depend upon your connection for work, I'm not sure why anyone would have stayed with @home with those kind of problems, so I'm glad to see the company die.

Stefan

I have long since bought my own domain and setup email accounts there. That way I can change providers at will and never miss a beat (also a good reason for a router). I highly recommend it over the email 100 of your closest friends with your latest email address change messages I used to send and still get.

Also the cable being 5x faster than DSL is a myth in practice at least during prime time. Sure at 3am the cable will be faster but at 9pm at night the servers you are download from are so bogged down you never get anywhere near the full bandwidth it is capable of. I checked my FlashGet records for before and after cable and the DSL was faster in the first thing I downloaded than the last 10 things I had downloaded with the cable. Also I did side by side tests with the cable on a faster machine than the DSL (Athlon 1.4 vs. a Celery 450) and DSL reports ranked them pretty much the same at 3pm using their bandwidth test.

In some areas I am sure the cable is better than DSL but I would wager their are far more areas where DSL is better than the cable.

"Go back to dial up? Are you on crack? Have you actually even surfed with a modem much less tried to game after having had broadband?"

Methinks someone is overly attached to the Internet. It's not a life-or-death service for me. Dialup is annoying, but so is spending an extra $240 a year for a net connection (on top of the basic cable charges you have to pay in order to have cable internet).

It's about priorities. I won't judge yers if you don't judge mine!

Time is money. At least for me, so I gladly shell out the $240 a year extra and exchange it for the hours I save waiting on something to download or the pc to connect to the internet.

When I think about how much money I've saved downloading music with Limewire, it more than makes up for the extra $240 a year. :)

Truly though, I could never go back to 56k. With patches typically over 2 megs, demos clocking at over 60 megs, and games designed to throw as many packets at you as possible, I can't see losing my broadband as being a good thing.

It's like going from cable TV back to the big 4 networks. I'm too used to ESPN, HBO, Showtime, etc... to go back to Must See TV.

>In some areas I am sure the cable is better than DSL but I would wager their are far more areas where DSL is better than the cable.

Both are totally dependent upon where you live. I have ATT@Home and live right across the street from UC Berkeley; back in the heyday of Napster, our service was extremely slow because thousands of students were sucking up the bandwith. The day Napster was shut down, our service improved a great deal.

The speed of DSL is determined to a certain extent by the distance between your PC and the routing box. Here in Berkeley, the box is a few blocks away so DSL performs extremely well in our neighborhood. However, actually getting someone out to your house to install/service the damn thing is another matter, and that's why I haven't switched. (Although, with AT&T sending me "we're not going out of business" letters every day, I'm giving serious thought to jumping ship.)

I work in a few remote offices, and one of them only has dial-up access. That serves as my constant reminder that I will never go back to dial-up! Broadband availability was a deal-breaking search criteria when my wife and I were looking for a home. We ended up in a newly-built area that is wired for DSL and digital cable, so if my cable connection ever gets crappy, I'm right over to DSL. My job often puts me in conflict with PacBell, so I can't bear to buy DSL from them, but it is nice to have the option.

Speaking of extra cost, time being money, and differing priorities, I got so tired of waiting to download giant patches, mods, demos, and movies that I subscribed to Fileplanet. It is worth $7 a month to me to not have to search around for a good server, or wait in line, or get a "server busy" error message. So, with taxes, I'm now paying a little over $50 a month for broadband & priority download privileges. Throw in premium tier cable and HBO, and my cable/Internet bill is around $100. However, my entertainment budget really hasn't changed, as after kids, I never go to the movies or rent videos anymore, and eating out means a drive-through window.

The speed DOES make a difference. I use GetRight on downloads, and I very often get 300Kb/sec downloads, even during the evening. That's compared the cap of 80K on DSL. It make a noticeable difference on huge game demos, Linux distributions (hey, gotta do something with that old laptop :-), etc.

Plus I do most of my work during the day and late at night... The times when cable tends to show any slowdown at all (7 to 11), I'm usually not using it.

>The speed DOES make a difference. I use GetRight on downloads, and I very often get 300Kb/sec downloads, even during the evening. That's compared the cap of 80K on DSL

That may be a cap in your area on available DSL connections, but it's certainly not one in mine. Even at 100k/sec, which is pretty standard for DSL, you're downloading 6MB every minute. How big are the files you're downloading? Even the worst gaming patches or updates only take 10 minutes. I haven't used GetRight since I got DSL for that reason (even 30 MB files only take 5 minutes to download, so who needs to resume downloads?)

Unless you're downloading movies from pirating sites, that's plenty fast (and a lot of people do a lot worse than 300kb/sec on cable connections, especially since bandwidth access is often crippled in misguided attempts to make the shared bandwidth more tolerable).

Again, like I and other posters have stated previously, there's really no right or wrong answer -- you just have to evaluate the alternatives available in your area. There's crappy DSL providers and crappy cable providers -- in my area, DSL was a much better service than cable access, and the cable access offered by @home was so poor that it was the subject of successful litigation for service outages. But the download speed advantages suggested by Cable are not generally meaningful (unless the DSL offered in your area is crippled or non-standard).

Stefan

"That's compared the cap of 80K on DSL"

Eh? What cap are you speaking about?

My DSL service is rated for 365K downloads and 256K upstream. You make it sound as if there is some technical limit to the speed of your DSL line. If I wanted to pay QWest more, I could get even more speed, up to a T1 line.

The 80K cap is at the $35/month rate I was getting. I could get 384K downloads on DSL -- for $75 a month. That's compared to $39.95 standard fees for cable, or the $20 I'm paying.

(Thanks to a digital cable/cable modem combo deal that Adelphia offers, I'm essentially getting cable modem access for $20/month.)

Not to argue -- you guys are exactly right that it varies depending on where you are. Here, cable's the clear winner.

And no dealing with DUN/PPoE...

---

Quote:

back in the heyday of Napster, our service was extremely slow because thousands of students were sucking up the bandwith. The day Napster was shut down, our service improved a great deal.

---

"An extremely informal poll of students gave results that EECS majors went for DSL while non-EECS tend to go for cable."

Heh. This would be four guys sitting in a dorm, drinking beer?

I can't get DSL. Kinda bummed me out, at first, but I sure love my cable modem. I've only had it go down once, and the whole cable network (as in, TV and internet) was down then, and it was only for a little while. (Not sure how long -- we were going out, were gone for a few hours, and when we got back, it was fixed.)

Oddly, I haven't even gotten a letter from Cox about the bankruptcy. Hmmm...

But to those of you who COULD go back to dial-up...You're better than me. I couldn't live without broadband, now.

I think everyone covered the point of the difficulty of going back to dialup nicely so I will move on.

Dealing with PPPoE? The router handles it flawlessly, 2 minutes to setup then never worry about it again.

80k cap? I get 1.5MB downstream for $59 (could have gotten 768/128 for $39). I hit 1.77MB on my first download with it (oddly enough higher than it should allow maybe the PPP compression is kicking in?). I had hit up to 500k with my cable modem very late at night when it was first in my neighborhood. Lately before it was gone it was around 150k when it was actually working.

Oh for reference the cable cost around $47 a month including the modem rental fee as of their last price increase. These seemed to come every couple of months, it was $40 a month just 6-8 months ago.

USWest told me, when they first convinced me to go DSL, that the rating was just the promised number. It was quite possible to go over that number, especially during non-peak hours.

I started at 256/64 as my DSL and was still happy enough with it. It was costing me $35 a month ($20 for the DSL, $15 for the USWest internet account), which was only $16 over my 56k modem, so I went with it. Then QWest bought out USWest. I get a letter in the mail saying "We're upgrading all the DSL service in your area. Your new service will be 640/128 for your current pay rate". Happy day. Still, I was getting speeds in excess of 700k at times, but my uploads never breached the 128k line.

I'd still be with DSL if they provided it in my new neighborhood. Cable is a costing me $30 a month but I had to pay $275 for the cable modem (I hate renting electronics), so the DSL in the end would have been much cheaper to stay with.

My company provided me with a cable modem as part of the service. It was optional but cost nothing. Was your company charging enough to justify a $275 purchase?

Good thing for me seeing as how mine's been upgraded twice, free of charge.

>My DSL service is rated for 365K downloads and 256K upstream.

Denny's talking Kilobytes - big K. I think you're talking kilobits - little k. Denny's 80K cap was because he had a 640k DSL line.

If you're actually GETTING 365/256 kiloBYTES per second, that's pretty damn good. Even fast, and more expensive, 1.5 megabit DSL is 187.5 Kilobytes per second.

The rental cost for the modem was $20 a month. I figured as long as I stayed with Cox for over a year, I would be set.

Cox has a deal where if you buy the modem through them, they will upgrade it for free if it becomes incompatible with their system within 3 years.

They don't give you the latest and greatest as soon as it's released, but they at least promise that you'll never be kicked off the system due to a hardware problem.

Damn our cable modem was $100 to buy or $7 a month. $275 is like the setup costs I paid for my business class DSLs.

"Denny's talking Kilobytes - big K."

Really? I assumed he meant bits because he started off the convo talking about getting "300Kb/second" downloads with cable (for $20). But you're saying he comapred that number to 80KBytes with DSL(for $35)? Seems weird. I think the numbers make more sense if you assume bits throughout.

BTW, I always thought the diff was found in the letters that followed the K: Kbps (bits) vs. KB (bytes).

Heh. Maybe I'm wrong and my 56K modem actually goes much faster than I originally thought.

When I had Time Warner, the cable modem was included in the monthly charge, and they did upgrade it once when we had some connection problems. They also replaced all of the cable in our apartment and from the building to the street at the same time, as well as having two crews with cherry-pickers messing around with the nodes. I was surprised at their strong response, but they said others in the area were having the same problem. It worked like a dream after that, but they surely lost money on our account.

Now my cable is through STI, and they gave me the option of buying the modem for $160 or renting it for $10/month, but if I bought it they would waive the $100 install charge. The installer said 99% buy the modem with that offer. I heard that PacBell has a similar deal on the DSL install, so bully for competition.

You all suck. I can't get either DSL or cable where I live. Period. They won't even estimate when. Apparently, until the state forces Adelphia or Verizon to wire the uplands and small towns of Vermont, we will stay locked into dial-ups. Hell, I had to go to Dish Network to get any TV channels, as Adelphia won't offer digital cable or even the same basic cable as they offer ten miles away.

Dial ups do suck, badly. It's why I don't play online shooters, a genre I really enjoy. No one lets you play on a good server with a dial up, and I guess I can't blame 'em. It ain't too fun for anyone.

Just for reference, 300 kilobytes a second on cable is possible; I regularly get downloads in that range from Microsoft here in Seattle.

I was talking 80 kilobytes and 300 kilobytes... The "download" rate meter you get from Internet Explorer...

If it makes you feel any better, Mr. Mayer, I'm in the same fucking boat. I live right on the edge of the CITY TOO!

You guys will have to pardon me when I say broadband revolutions don't exist because when you live in an area with a gajillion wires running over your head and not a one of them will pipe in broadband bits, it's really hard to swallow that load of horseshit.

--Dave

"No one lets you play on a good server with a dial up, and I guess I can't blame 'em. It ain't too fun for anyone."

Not true everywhere - check out the public CoFR servers at www.cofr.net. We've got guys on dial-up who are quite good. Heck, we've got Aussie & Euro members who show up on US servers and play well. Click on the "Servers" link on the left side for the live server page (which should give you your ping to that server, too). The ones with "Public" in the title are not passworded. I don't think the Blacksheep server is either, and that's some darn fine playin' there.

I've been dragging my feet on going to DSL for awhile now, ironically because of all the horror stories about how long it takes to get set up. Now I'm wondering which I should go with, cable or DSL.

I've gotten two calls just today from Charter Pipeline trying to sell me cable internet--a $29.90 deal for 256/64, which sounds slow to me. Faster than dialup perhaps, and cheap (includes modem rental), but maybe too slow. I've been tooling around DSL reports trying to get an idea of which way to go, but it seems that for every reaction to a specific service there is an equal and opposite reaction to that same service.

Based on this thread it seems you guys lean more toward DSL than cable, although Supertanker seems to be in a holding pattern, or at least giving his cable a probationary period. My understanding so far with cable is that I won't really be able to network the machines in my house, and the laptop will have to remain dial-up. This doesn't sound right, but the sales rep who called me, while a nice guy, was a little short on answers (not a good sign).

I just want to be able to download stuff faster and finally play games over the Internet; right now I don't upload a great deal. Since you're sending information when you play a game, though, does the upload speed play into that? Will it make a difference which way I go, cable or DSL? I have a number of DSL options in addition to the cable offer. Any advice? For what I'll be doing which acronym should I persue (adsl, radsl, idsl, sdsl, lmnop)?

Thanks guys, yet again.

Amanpour

"You guys will have to pardon me when I say broadband revolutions don't exist because when you live in an area with a gajillion wires running over your head and not a one of them will pipe in broadband bits, it's really hard to swallow that load of horseshit."

Don't let facts like adoption rates get in the way of your whining. "I can't get broadband, so if I shut my eyes, it's not happening."

Here's a thought: move. Oh wait, broadband isn't quite that important, is it? So who cares? I have a modem and it's fine. I somehow manage. Big deal. But I'm not in denial that there's a whole lot of broadband out there.

Christien, I have a cable modem, and love it. I also have two computers permanently networked at my house, and frequently have up to four. We don't play online a lot with all four hooked up, so I don't have to worry 'bout IP conflicts or anything, but I've never had any trouble -- all four can access the internet, and I have never NOT been able to join an internet game when I'm playing alone. (Occasionally, someone will drop out of a LAN game we're playing, and join and internet game, and they've never had problems, either. But, we've never had more than one computer try to join a game at a time, so no promises there...)

I pay $39.95 a month, including a ten-dollar modem rental fee (which I intend to drop soon and buy the dang thing, but I've been saying that for a couple of months now...) -- and I'm seeing all kinds of numbers here, and honestly don't know which I have, but it's quite a bit faster than the connection I have at work, so I'm happy. I'll just say this -- any faster, and I'm not sure I'd notice a difference. 99.9% of the time, page views are basically instantaneous, and downloads are so fast that it doesn't matter if they were a tad faster -- I can still download 60MB game demos in 8-10 minutes. Kewl.

So, Christien, if you're wondering which do go with, I'll chime in a vote for cable -- assuming that your company will give you a good deal, and they're being smart about it. Most companies add new branches fast enough that your bandwidth doesn't suffer horribly, but if yours doesn't -- well, hopefully they (like mine) don't require a minimum contract.

"Here's a thought: move."

My yer an arrogant nerd-bitch.

That's the only kiind of nerd-bitch.

Denny: "I was talking 80 kilobytes and 300 kilobytes"

Wow, you're getting that kind of bandwidth for 20 bucks a month? I'd say it's a good deal, too. I'm paying a little more for a lot less... But it's still better than dial up.

Jason McCullough: "Just for reference, 300 kilobytes a second on cable is possible; I regularly get downloads in that range from Microsoft here in Seattle."

I don't get what you're saying here, Jason. You're saying you're using your home cable connection to download stuff from MS and you get 2400Kbits/sec? Does that mean when you surf the rest of the web you don't get that kind of connectivity? How much does it drop off, and is that something unique to cable? At least my seemingly paltry DSL speed is pretty consistant across the net.

"a $29.90 deal for 256/64"

I think I would be unhappy with this. The 256 number is up and the 64 is down? Down is the important one and here it's not much faster than dial up.

If it were me, I would make the decision based on speed and cost. Whoever can get you the most speed at the lowest price, is the one to go for. If you get a bunch of vendors all around the same speed and price, see if you can evaluate who's got the best customer service in your area and go with them. Also, when you're determining cost, remember to factor in additional costs/savings, like second phone lines and hardware.

My DSL enabled me to get rid of the second phone line I was using for dial up, a savings of like $30 a month. My router was free, but I had to hook it up myself (no big deal, they send you instructions and there's phone support). Best of all, I was able to get an ISP of my choice, rather then get locked into one associated with the folks who charge for the wire. With ISP and line charges, I'm spending ~$50 a month--about the same as I was spending on an extra phone line and a dial up ISP. But it's a heck of a lot faster, even at my relatively slow ~40 Kilobytes /sec.

Jeez, Denny I can't believe you get so much for so little. Why is that, do you think? DSL is the only option where I live, so maybe I'm not able to benefit from a bandwidth price war between cable and DSL vendors? Just a guess...

"a $29.90 deal for 256/64"

Charter Pipeline normally offers three tiers of speed - the one you're quoting is their lowest. (BTW - for whoever asked - the 256 is the download side.) The highest offered, for about $49.00, is quoted as 1.5M download, but they admit that they can't guarantee that number - they just guarantee that they won't cap it below that number.

I love my cable modem, I'm spoiled by the always on aspect and the speed. I haven't tried DSL, but as long as cable modem is offered (and the service stays as good as it has been) I have no incentive to change.

A story in our local Gannett paper this week indicated that telecom analysts are seeing broadband as a long term thing more than short term, and that's hurting tech stocks indirectly, because so much tech depends on widespread adoption of broadband. Apparently both the absolute numbers and delta on adoption are lower than expected--and according to this article, the majority of people who have access to broadband still don't subscribe.

So I don't know. It's obvious that in the long run broadband will be the norm, I think, but the time frame for that seems very debateable. Of course, among gamers, I imagine that the percentage of people who have access to broadband but choose not to get it approaches zero.

"Of course, among gamers, I imagine that the percentage of people who have access to broadband but choose not to get it approaches zero."

Exactly. The market they need to go for is Joe Friday and his wife. Convincing them that it's worth paying $40 a month for Cable instead of $22 a month for AOL isn't going to be easy. They know they can just fire up AOL, click that little mailbox icon, then click the "Marketplace" icon to do some shopping. They really don't care if it takes an extra 30 second for the picture of the dress on page 3 to show up.

It's easy to sell high speed to people who use it (like us), but selling broadband to the average Joe is like selling a Porsche to a housewife who just uses her stationwagon to go to the grocery store.

Until the pricing is on par with dial-up (which it probably never will be), DSL and Cable will be a niche market.

I get upwards of 600k/sec (from IE) on my cable modem, and that's at prime time. Maybe I'm the only person in my neighborhood that has it, but I'll take that any day over the 60k/sec I was getting on DSL.

And ATT@Home forgot to increase my rate from the $19.95/month promotion they offered me six months ago. Maybe that's why they went out of business.

We'll see what happens on the 30th. I'm hoping there will be only a small speedbump, but if the network goes down for the count I'll be forced back to DSL, which is ok, too. Anything but 28.8.

I have Cable Modem. After a year of ISDN (ugh. If you want a prime reason DSL rollout is slow and poorly done, it's because of the ISDN market, which the telcos are trying real hard not to lose because it's revenue with far less expense), I finally found that AT&T Broadband reached me. Only by the time I called them, my area had been sold/given control of to Comcast (which is one reason I laugh anytime AT&T tries to get the business world to buy that there's another party involved in the sale of it's Broadband assets). In any event, I get uncapped access (meaning theoretical 1.5M download, though you'll never see that. I've seen 750k at the best times) for $50 a month. I HAD to rent the modem, which sucked because AT&T had a package where you bought the modem and saved $10 a month. On a $200 modem, the break even point is under 2 years, so it's insane to rent.

I've had 0 downtime for the service since getting it (3-4 months now). I don't use any of the Comcast provided services (e-mail/web space), though I suppose it's there if I needed it.

I couldn't get DSL if I wanted to, but none of the packages offered in the area were on par anyway (you had to pay more then $50 to get ~700k down). So I give a hearty thumbs up to Cable modem.

"I get upwards of 600k/sec (from IE)"

This is sounding like a pretty common refrain and I'm begining to doubt its legitimacy. How accurate is the little do-dad that pops up from IE? What relationship does what that dialog says have to the actual amount of bandwidth provided by either cable or DSL provider? I just tried a downloading a few files here at work and got wildly different results.

"I get upwards of 600k/sec (from IE)"

"This is sounding like a pretty common refrain and I'm begining to doubt its legitimacy."

What he is seeing is 600 kilo-BITS(kb), not 600 kilo-BYTES(KB). 600 kilo-BYTES would equate to 4.8 mega-BITS (4800 kilo-BITS), which is more than three T-1 lines working together, and it just ain't gonna happen on a cable/DSL connection.

However, 600 kilo-BITS equals 75 kilo-BYTES, and isn't that unusual for either a cable or DSL connection.

I get 1024/256 kb from my Charter Pipeline connection. That equates roughly to 128 kilo-BYTE download (which is a minimum bandwidth, I've seen it zip up to near 200 kilo-BYTES on fast servers) and 32 kilo-BYTE upload (which is hard locked).

Maybe to clear up confustion we should all run to DSL Reports and do the speed tests and post those results. Then we'll all have a common frame of reference.

-Biyobi

Whatever it is, it's speedy. The pr0n flows in nice and fast now.

"What he is seeing is 600 kilo-BITS(kb), not 600 kilo-BYTES(KB)."

Whatever. He is saying his network connection is faster than mine so naturally I must defend the speed of my network connection. IS THAT SO WRONG??? Consider yourself rebuked Adam at Sierra, prOn mongerer that you are.

"I get 1024/256 kb from my Charter Pipeline connection. That equates roughly to 128 kilo-BYTE download (which is a minimum bandwidth, I've seen it zip up to near 200 kilo-BYTES on fast servers)"

But seriously, this is what I think the problem is. Someone connects to a fast server and sees high numbers from that little IE dialog (that measures in Bytes) and they assume they that they're actually getting that kind of connectivity all the time. This kind of measurment is especially inacurate with cable because it's shared bandwidth.

I have friends with cable modems in Denver (Qwest/USWEST) and believe it or not, they sometimes DO achieve download speeds of 600 kiloBYTES per second. And 300-400 kiloBYTES on a daily basis.

Of course their upstream is capped at the ass-like speed of roughly 10 kilobytes per second, so ... it's not all milk and honey.

There is always shared bandwidth though. Eventually the DSL gets tossed into the same stream as the cable modem. In the end, it all depends on how fast bits are being shot at you, not how many you can receive. You can have the fastest cable or DSL on Earth and it won't do you a bit of good if you're grabbing stuff from an overloaded site with only 50 KB/s capacity left on its T-1. That's why people are able to show such huge transfer speeds when connected to Microsoft or Sun to download patches: those companies have huge pipes and they'll shove bits at you as fast as you'll accept them.

But yeah, the cable modem in an oversold neighborhood is going to have a greater chance of being the source of a bottleneck on the user side than a DSL will. And the DSL has garunteed transfer rates as opposed to the cable modem which is basically "Yeah, well, it'll be faster than your modem".

In the end, it will depend 100% on where you live and what company you go through. Cox here in Omaha has more bandwidth than they need and I almost never get any slowdowns on my cable modem. On the same note, my old DSL through QWest was a little bit slower than the cable modem is now, but it was still damn speedy and reliable. Guess there are some advantages to living in the largest telemarketing city in the U.S.

"cable modem which is basically 'Yeah, well, it'll be faster than your modem'."

Bing!

Ah, yes, I see now. It's not like the cable companies can give a person a quantitive idea of how much bandwidth they'll actually get in their contract.

They didn't tell Denny, for instance, that he'd be getting 2.4 Mbits download speeds for $20. Denny just sees the little deal in IE telling him it's coming down at 300KB.

Which also answers why all you cable modem guys use bytes as a gauge for bandwidth.

bits are a lame, console way of expressing data size. Eight megabit cartridges anyone? Is your cable modem capable blast processing?

(jerky boys) BYTES, baby, BYTES! (/jerky boys)

"bits are a lame, console way of expressing data size"

uh, bits is the accepted standard for talking about connectivity (unless you have a cable modem and you want to quantify 'faster than yer modem').

I have no idea what you're talking about with consoles.

http://www.bssteph.net/discuss/consolesvpcs.htm

For what it's worth, I made the switch from @Home to Pipeline tonight with great trepidation, as my @Home account was uncapped for some reason and I was worried Pipeline would set my download speed to 1.5Mbps or slower. It turns out my fears were unfounded, at least for now, as the test scores received at dslreports.com showed:

Before (@Home account): 3007Kbps / 367.1KBps
After (Pipeline account): 2928Kbps / 357.4KBps

For the naysayers who think cable modems can't get very fast, I'm one of the lucky few who averages over 400KB per second on my Fileplanet downloads, and that's not a figure taken only from the little download box that pops up. You can time it with a stopwatch and see that 1MB is downloaded about every two seconds.

I'm not trying to brag (this is coming from a guy who was stuck on a 2KB per second dial-up line for five years and hated to even hear about broadband), I'm just saying that some lucky cable modem subscribers get extremely fast connections and aren't all confusing bits with bytes. Obviously nobody in my neighborhood is hooked up to it yet besides me.

Thanks for addressing my cable vs. DSL question guys. You're the best.

Amanpour