How Important is Your Internet Connection?
09.25.06 - 01:17pm
In an unfortunate series of events last night my connection to the digital world was severed when the sky decided to fall upon Atlanta. Atlanta is known for its torrential downpours and yesterday was just another day another storm. What I didn’t know at the time was that when the storm moved along to hammer South Carolina it also took my Internet connection with it or more specifically destroyed the cable box outside my apartment. So there I am, 9pm on a Sunday, Physics 2 test in 12 hours, all my practice tests are online, what do I do? The same thing every other Internet dependent Tech student does, fixes himself a drink and sighs in recognition of a long night ahead.
The only benefit that came from this encounter with the unconnected kind was the fact that I was forced to read my physics 2 book which was the primary reason for my rather successful battle with that test earlier today. Once the stress had subsided I began thinking of how much I value my Internet connection and how much it is worth to me. How about yourself, how much do you value that copper line feeding your digital hunger? I myself am an Internet junkie, a few hours without checking my email and I begin to get the jitters, a few more hours and I go into Internet withdrawal. Over the last 3 years I have savored the sweet speed of Georgia Tech’s ultrawide connection however moving off campus has put a crimp in my Internet connection. Within the United States it takes lots of money to purchase a connection to rival what I had on campus which is most unfortunate. My campus connection would peak at over 30mbits download and around 1mbit upload while standard Cable tends to run around 6mbit download and a weak 384kbit upload.
For most consumers the upload could be below 200kbit and they would be content so long as their YouTube videos managed to download faster than they watched them. I, however live in a house with two of the largest bandwidth monsters in the world, Paul Stamatiou and myself. In particular we thrive on large amounts of upload and we celebrate when we actually achieve uploads of 320+kbit on our line. Now I am approaching the point of this little blurb, Internet quality and connection speeds. Notice how I mentioned only 320kbit rather than the 384kbit of upload that we are paying for. This bugs me in the fact that the ISP market constantly oversells their products, what would you do if your car was only 83% complete or your food was cooked only 83% prepared? Now perhaps I wouldn’t complain so much if my upload speed was a few mbits however it is rated at only 384 kbits so I notice when I am getting only 83% or 60% or lately under 50% of the service I am purchasing. While I am strapped for time right now I’d love to research why the broadband market still lingers so far behind the speeds that service the backbone of the Internet. I’m not asking for a 100mbit or gigabit line, I would simply like something around 5mbit download and 5mbit upload. Is the infrastructure so terribly developed that they must cap the upload for fear or bringing the network to a halt?
What do you guys think about this, what would you like to see from your ISP? Would you rather see community wi-fi access points? Faster wired connections? Larger download or upload speeds? Let’s hear what you guys have to say, it makes for a rather boring conversation if I’m the only one talking here. Now it is time for another one of those drinks and a 3 hour lab to finish the day off. The drinks in question happen to be coffee to thick it resembles crude oil for those that were curious.
I’m pretty content with my download rate. It averages between 3.5 and 5mbits. There are certainly faster connections, but I’m pretty happy with mine. I can get big files quick enough, and giant files with a little patience. Websites are pretty much instant loads, unless there’s either a ton of graphics or other heavy weight content.
My main gripe with my ISP is the upload speed. I think it’s capped at 45kb/sec. With files ballooning in size, uploading a bigger file almost feels like I’m using dialup again.
I’d break my wants down into this, which is prioritized:
1. Faster uploads. Much faster, please.
2. Consistently low pings for all of us gamer geeks.
3. Faster downloads.
By the way, in regards to the first part of your post, I feel your pain. I’ve got so much of my ’stuff’ tied up in the internet - like a lot of my communication with friends - that losing my connection just really, really sucks.
You are getting exacally what you bought. The 384kbps that you are quoted includes all packet headers as well, not only the data throughput. Depending on the packet length (As it’s variable) the data block in an IP packet it between 65% and 96% of the total length, meaning your 320kbps is exacally what you bought.
At the moment it would seem that I’m paying ~$35 CAN (with our cable package) for a 5mbps (we’re supposed to be paying for a “lite” package, which is about 250kbps, but they can’t get it right), and I’m getting a measly 238kbps download and 120kbps upload (http://www.filehive.com/files/0925/Picture-3.png). I’ve never really known anything faster though… 30mbps would be a freaking dream come true.
Good point in regards to the flexible sizes of the data block however 3 weeks ago Paul and I performed a speed test with a router in Atlanta, here were the results. http://www.flickr.com/photos/pauls/235712844/ . Often our connection hits upload and download speeds similar to the numbers shown above. The only times our speeds are “comcastic fast” are around noon when the neighborhood is at work.
I\’ve had a few mornings with no connection and they were hellish. When you want it and it\’s not there, you practically die. Of course, worse things can happen.
As far as specs are concerned, here\’s what I got from my ISP\’s site: download at 20 Mbps, upload at 512 Kbps. Max upload 5GB and max download 30 GB per month. I think that\’s rather sweet – at least, I\’m not complaining. When it\’s there…
I am completely addicted to my internet. I recently went a week without internet and would have gone completely insane if I wasn’t stuck working 40 hours that week in front of a computer.
Who is your ISP. I have Comcast and with my most recent move I discovered that they offered an 8mbit down, 768kbit up option which is perfect for my needs. I sometimes even see download speeds reaching 10mbit. You should look into that. It’s only $10/mo more for me and completely worth it. Lots of people complain about the cost of internet these days but really for me I’d pay a good 150/mo if I had to because really the only service I really find enjoyment in is my internet.
Cheers to the addiction.
We tried to get their “gamer” line which is the 8mbit/768kbit line however it wasn’t offered in our neighborhood. Stammy and I were joking about buying a T1 line yesterday… that would be intense. Cheers indeed to the addiction.
A 20mbit download would be perfect for some people but I hate how your upload is so severly capped. Looks like I’ll have to make some phone calls and read up to find out why uploads are capped, is there a technical or business reason?
One business reason is to force people to stop hosting their own materials and to force them to upgrade to a business plan if they really need the upload. Another is that not everyone needs the high upload so ISPs set the general cap lower to save having to set up more expensive or more routers at exchanges to handle the load.
I live in Germany and the prices for high speeds are reasonable in my opinion.
I have a 6Mbit down (max 720K/s) and 600kps up (max. 72K/s) and only pay 50€ this is about 63USD.
I could also have an 16Mbit down and 1Mbit up for 15€ more, but I don’t see the benefits of having such an high-speed connection for my own.
We also have cable internet in Germany with up to 20Mbit down and 2Mbit up for about 100€ but this is only considerable when there are many computers in the house, because I don’t think I would max out this connection.
I haven’t had any big issues with my ISP so I’m really satisfied with it.
Greetings
I suppose I just don’t know enough about large capacity networking but I can imagine the routers becoming chokepoints if they don’t support a high enough throughput. I was hoping that it was going to be a structural issue and not a business model problem but the idea of everyone hosting their own stuff would pose a large problem to ISPs. I guess I just don’t see what would be wrong with higherspeed connections as I believe most users tend to use their connection in bursts. I’d rather see 100Mbit connections with download/upload caps. Maybe I should just go live in a central datacenter.