ADSL vs cable
Posted on January 31, 2002 @ 15:47 in General
Whee! I just picked up my new ADSL modem. They installed a new phoneline last week and next week that line should get switched to my ADSL provider so that I can start using it. From that point on the ADSL provider will route my connection to my university and the university is offering me a very nice price for internet access over their first class networks. I'm looking forward to seeing the difference between that connection and my current cable-modem internet access.
For a long time there was no alternative to a trusty dial-up modem, unless you either paid for a leased line or you had access at work. If you have flat-rate local calls, like they have in large parts of the US, logging in for extended periods of time is not that costly. But if you, like me, live in a country where you are charged per minute, even for local calls, logging in for extended periods of time can become rather costly, rather quickly. During 1996-1997 I usually had phone bills hovering around 200 euro (that's something like $175 US) _per month_.
Since the first half of 1998 (I forgot when exactly) I've been blessed with flat-fee, high-speed cable-modem internet access. It was a rather mixed blessing though, because the cablecom was and is pretty much clueless about all this newfangled technology they're suddenly dealing with. As long as it worked, it pretty much worked alright, but if you had a problem, there just was no way of getting them to understand what the problem was. This comes down to a really horrible management, hiring the absolute worst helpdesk people ever, who didn't even get a chance to get better at their job because they just didn't have a place or person in the organisation to turn to. So these helpdesk people were about as frustrated as you were and would actually call you names and hang up on you if you called in, trying to report problems... of which they had their fair share. Anyway, the cablecom was the only company offering flat-fee internet access and how crappy the service got, it still beat paying 5-6 times as much for dial-up access. During the past 2 years most of the serious problems have slowly disappeared, leaving me a fast connection at home during the daytime, but during the late afternoon and especially in the evenings the connection slows considerably.
It's a strange phenomenon, because if you download a big file you can still achieve high download speeds, but 'real-time' connections like watching a streamed video or even a telnet connection (which is _really_ low bandwidth) is a rather choppy/halting experience. The video is really jerky and low grade, because the computer just can't seem to pull a steady stream down and even when telnetting to a remote UNIX box, you get to type 5-12 characters, and then you're waiting for a damn long time for the echo of that box to resume again. During daytime no problems with either application. I moved house about 6 months ago within the same city and taking the cable-modem connection with me to the new place. My current local loop is a different one than the one I was hooked up to before, but they both have the same problems, so I can't say for sure it's a problem with congestion of the local loop or whether the problems lie somewhat further down the ISP's line.
Anyway, next week I'll see what the quality of the ADSL hookup is, and having experienced the university network from behind my desk at work for over a year now, I'm hoping for the best. I'm actually downgrading with regard to the maximum advertised throughput. Cable offered me a maximum download speed of 150 kilobytes/second and 12.8 kilobytes/second upstream. I chose the cheapest ADSL version, which is 50 kilobytes/second downstream and 12.8 kilobytes/second upstream. I don't need that download speed anyways. I need a reliable, low-latency, always-on connection and the cable connection especially failed in the low-latency department, especially during the evenings. I just don't want to sit around, waiting for minutes on end before a DNS lookup will resolve, only to get a crappy, unusable telnet connection to a UNIX box that's physically not even halfway across town.
Next project... when everything's up and running: find an old box, put it on my LAN as a fileserver with VPN capability, rig my computer at work so that I can securely and encrypted mount a directory on my box at home, and that way I should be able to finally keep all my work in one location. I'm just fed up with putting stuff on floppies or e-mail attachments to myself.
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