The Internet Myth: Connection Quality and Speed (Europe vs US) *spawn*

[BRiT]

Cox Communication is cable provider, with 50mbit/10mbit (boosted to 63/15) stream has a very soft cap of 300GB a month. The higher tier of 150mbit/20mbit stream has very soft cap of 400GB. I've routinely exceeded the soft cap with nothing happening afterwards. Also, there has to be something wrong with how they record data as last month in a single day I pulled down 70GB but only 13GB was listed for that day and 2GB the next. Supposedly they count your download and upload streams in total bandwidth caps.

The caps used to be 200GB and 250GB about 2 years ago, but bumped to 250 and 300 about 1 year ago and finally bumped to the 300 and 400GB in February 2013.

In my city, suburb of Cleveland, there is no alternative other than super slow AT&T DSL. Other burbs have Time Warner. They have similar soft caps. Some even say there is no cap for TimeWarner, but I bet they never read their AUP (Acceptable Usage Policy).

 

[bkilian]

Cox Communication is cable provider, with 50mbit/10mbit stream has a very soft cap of 300GB a month. The higher tier of 150mbit/50mbit stream has very soft cap of 400GB. I've routinely exceeded the soft cap with nothing happening afterwards. Also, there has to be something wrong with how they record data as last month in a single day I pulled down 70GB but only 13GB was listed for that day and 2GB the next. Supposedly they count your download and upload streams in total bandwidth caps.

The caps used to be 200GB and 250GB about 2 years ago, but bumped to 250 and 300 about 1 year ago and finally bumped to the 300 and 400GB in February 2013.

In my city, suburb of Cleveland, there is no alternative other than super slow AT&T DSL. Other burbs have Time Warner. They have similar soft caps. Some even say there is no cap for TimeWarner, but I bet they never read their AUP (Acceptable Usage Policy).

They might be doing it the smart way, and only counting traffic that leaves their network. If you're torrenting, or downloading from co-located servers (like what Netflix is now organizing), then most of the traffic stays in heir network, and doesn't really cost them anything. In South Africa, some systems have two caps, a local cap, and an international cap, with the local cap being higher, of course.

 

[mrcorbo]

Optimum (Cablevision) in Southwest Connecticut on the Boost + tier gives me 60 down 10 up with no caps. I'm actually quite happy with the service given the lack of competition in the area with (much slower) AT&T DSL being the only other alternative.

 

[joker454]

You can't argue against personal experience.

Sure you can, especially on a business thread when it gets used to make a point. If Europe not having reliable internet is used to make a point (frequently used here) or USA being far behind Europe for internet is used to make a point (also frequently used here) then one just has to look at the data to see how true that is. Turn out it's not true at all, so one's personal experience has no relevance in the grand scheme of things.

 

[ninzel]

Internets caps are standard here in Canada but they have been getting better. Still very pricy
though.

 

[BoardBonobo]

For comparison this is the connection I'm on... And this is a good day! This is the about the average for this entire area.

 

[Strange]

For comparison this is the connection I'm on... And this is a good day! This is the about the average for this entire area.

less than 50 miles and 90 ping? That sucks big time.
You might want to check if there's anything wrong with your line.

 

[dagamer]

For comparison this is the connection I'm on... And this is a good day! This is the about the average for this entire area.

Dear god, if I got home internet speeds like that, I would punch a wall with a fist of range.

Here is mine (Comcast Blast! tier, 2rd fastest out of 3, 105Mbps also available for $99/month):

 

[deathindustrial]

Here is mine (Comcast Blast! tier, 2rd fastest out of 3, 105Mbps also available for $99/month):

Houston = backbone. Not all of us are that lucky . . .

 

[Strange]

My current connection

 

[Gubbi]

For comparison this is the connection I'm on... And this is a good day! This is the about the average for this entire area.

The speedtest says slower than 89% of GB, so 90% of Britain, including you, have an internet connection fast enough for MS' cloud based initiatives (>1.5Mbps).

Cheers

 

[BoardBonobo]

The speedtest says slower than 89% of GB, so 90% of Britain, including you, have an internet connection fast enough for MS' cloud based initiatives (>1.5Mbps).

Cheers

True, but the problem with Speedtest is that it's not accurately reflecting the rural picture, especially in the UK. The majority of data gathered comes from large Cities and Towns which are on fibre and all sorts. The 'majority' of people live in rural areas. And my connection is pretty good at the moment.

For instance here is todays connection:

And the line is as clear as a bell!!

FYI, it'snot uncommon for the Upload speed to exceed the Download speed sometimes.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Speedtest has a self-selecting population ("I've just got a new BB connection. Let's see how fast it is!") so isn't indicative of the true state of the internet. You need independent reports like the Akamai one.

Furthermore it doesn't show connection issues. Round a friend's last night streaming a movie, and he had trouble connecting to the internet for a good 10 minutes, but then download speed was excellent. That was Virgin Fibreoptics on their provided router. He's always had connection issues. I used to have connection issues on BB over telephone cables with some pages not loading (eg. DeviantArt and Goggle image search) on PC, but loading on tablet. Turns out that was a router issue - new router, problems gone.

Dodgy internet connections can be caused by all sorts of things. People's personal experiences each contribute to an evaluation but of course are never conclusive on their own, and joker's only having a rant, not really presenting an actually argument that warrants lots of speeds tests. The original discussion was internet TV and the value, and wco81 mentioned the cost of TV. Joker used that as a launch platform to revisit his anger over the loss of a service/feature he valued, and took the thread down an avenue that's been visited many times before but I guess he felt people hadn't yet said how much internet they have/haven't got enough and we could do with another round of the same old arguments.

I'll spin this off. If people really haven't got anything better to do with their lives than regurgitate the same opinions and arguments, and just want to post the same old information again, I guess that's their prerogative.

 

[ninzel]

heres mine



That is for $60 with cap of 80 gb. From Rogers which is probably the biggest in Canada or Bell.

 

[BoardBonobo]

Joker used that as a launch platform to revisit his anger over the loss of a service/feature he valued, and took the thread down an avenue that's been visited many times before but I guess he felt people hadn't yet said how much internet they have/haven't got enough and we could do with another round of the same old arguments.

I don't see that he had anything to worry about. This is MS we're talking about, as soon as they have enough people locked in and too heavily invested in the platform to back out, they'll just bring all the DRM back. Good and bad.

 

[BRiT]

Here's my result on the 2nd top tier going from suburb of Cleveland to Chicago and New York:





As I said before, I've had some form of network connection since the late 80's. Since that time, I can only count on one hand the number of times I could not connect to the internet, where one of them being the major Eastern US Power Grid failure of 2003.

 

[warb]

For comparison this is the connection I'm on... And this is a good day! This is the about the average for this entire area.

Is there virgin media cable coverage in your area? They have some good deals, + phone, and their cheap package is ~30Mb/s with no limits.

 

[Grall]

*Cough cough*
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2821836575

Edit: how do you guys get those nice images...?

(testing...)


Oh... It worked.
Btw, this is to some weird danish test server, during prime time. I've clocked this thing at 193Mbit/s previously, during off-peak hours. Steam downloads also max out at around 22MB/s. Pretty nice actually! I love this ISP, it isn't cheap, but it's FAST. A bit unsure about reliability tho, I had my connection knocked out by thunder for most of an entire afternoon/evening only a couple months after signing on with them, and some time later the connection went down for some undetermined reason for a shorter while.

My previous ISP, where I was on ADSL, was rock solid reliability-wise. Almost never had any issues at all (that weren't due to the age of the ancient copper twisted pair phone network, that is.)

 

[Davros]

So I am just curious and have a question to our fellow US-B3Ders: is this really common? Do you have bandwidth caps for you high speed internet? To be honest, I can't really believe it.

Believe 10gb a month

out of interest with a 16mb connection how long would it take to download 10gb

 

[Gubbi]

True, but the problem with Speedtest is that it's not accurately reflecting the rural picture, especially in the UK. The majority of data gathered comes from large Cities and Towns which are on fibre and all sorts. The 'majority' of people live in rural areas. And my connection is pretty good at the moment.

For instance here is todays connection:

And the line is as clear as a bell!!

FYI, it'snot uncommon for the Upload speed to exceed the Download speed sometimes.

Hey, I feel your pain. I haven't had that slow internet since 1999.

My point was: While you suffer (horribly), 88% of Britain are in less pain and have more bandwidth than what MS mandated for the cloud based features.

IMO, 90% makes it fair for MS to use a 1.5Mbps bandwidth requirement as a premise for next gen experiences.

Cheers