Internet Connection query

[williamp]

Hi everyone,

call me a 29th century guy, but I have yet to get broadband. At times my Internet is really slow, and often freezes.

When I double click to see the connection speed, "sent"

this is huge- almost half that of the recieved.

My question is this' what is "sent", and can I turn it of so that I can only recieve (and therefore be quicker).

Any ideas??

[ErnestM]

Doesn't work like that. Basically, your computer must send requests to the web server before it will send anything back to you. Otherwise, how would it know what to send?

I highly recommend some type of broadband...

ErnestM

[Prince_Charming]

Well I'm accessing Pistonheads from my parents house over Xmas on a modem, and after 30 minutes or so have received about 900kbytes and sent out 90kbytes. Sounds like there is definitely something slowing you up - are you sure you weren't e-mailing or something? Do you use peer-to-peer software like Kazaa?

[Pelo]

Having just upgraded to a new PC (Pentium 100 - Duron 1300:O) and ADSL internet, I could not possibly recommend it higher. Dial Up is the equivalent of a Morris Marina, whereas ADSL is probably a Chimaera (hmm T3=Speed 12???)

[shadowninja]

Pelo said: Having just upgraded to a new PC (Pentium 100 - Duron 1300:O) and ADSL internet, I could not possibly recommend it higher. Dial Up is the equivalent of a Morris Marina, whereas ADSL is probably a Chimaera (hmm T3=Speed 12???)

and from what i hear about the same sort of reliability

i'm sticking with dial up cos it's very reliable. everyone i know with broadband has had days of downtime.

[maranellouk]

Now a question for those who travel often. What do you do for internet connection on the road? I hate having to use AOL dial up in a hotel as the bills are huge due to the constant loss of connection.

Anyone have a solution?

[hut49]

I now book just those hotels that offer high speed internet access from the room. Just hook up to the ethernet connection on your laptop (using the cable they supply) and surf to hearts content for around 10$ a day. In some places it's free - but generally in those more expensive hotels where they just roll it up into the room price.

Sometimes this isn't possible so I use the AT&T Global Network Client which is a corporate dial-up subscrption that costs around $5 an hour (plus the costs of a local call to an AT&T node).

Hutch

[maranellouk]

Cheers Hutch,

For the U.S I keep an AOL account and change access dialing numbers to the state I'm in. In London and NY I have cable/broadband so I'm always happy when I get home. In Hong Kong relatives own a internet coompany so it's freebies for me

[jvaughan]

Pelo said: Having just upgraded to a new PC (Pentium 100 - Duron 1300:O) and ADSL internet, I could not possibly recommend it higher. Dial Up is the equivalent of a Morris Marina, whereas ADSL is probably a Chimaera (hmm T3=Speed 12???)

Not really so. It all depends on what you are connecting to and teh response you recieve.

Remember it doesnt matter what speed you connect to the internet at .. there will always be a bottleneck. this will limit the speed of your download (be it web, file Tx etc)
Some web servers have a user limit .. that is if they allow 200 connections and you are no. 201, then you will get a timeout, or a retry .. thsi will seem like a slow connection to you.
To use cars ... a TVR on an autobahn .. great ... but a TVR in a built up area with other traffic on the road ... crap.
Broardband is fast, but it is all in retrospect.
V90 (dialup) can also be fast if there is a very low traffic volume on a network too.
Other differences are compression, and available bandwidth (200 Megs on a moden is dyre .. on xDSL its quite quick ... but xSL is 10x faster

[JonRB]

I used Pipex Dial-up for many years and recently upgraded to their ADSL offering. Part of the deal is that I can keep my dial-up account for a nominal monthly fee.

I've had about 2 days downtime (cumulative) in the 7 months I have had ADSL, and have simply reverted to dial-up for the rare times the service has been unavailable. I certainly haven't had days at a time of unavailability although acknowledge that some have.

I can't see any reason not to have ADSL if a) it is available to you, b) you can afford it and c) you need the bandwidth. Saying dial-up is more reliable is a bit weak really, as it isn't. However, if you are perfectly happy with the bandwidth of dial-up then that's fine, but I would venture that both ADSL and dial-up, like I have, is the best of both worlds.

As a sidenote, with the usage patterns that Cosmic and I have, ADSL has actually saved us money compared to the phone bills we incurred with dialup, and since we have an ADSL router we can now both use the internet at the same time under ADSL which we could not with dial-up.

Hope this has given food for thought!

Regards
Jon

>> Edited by JonRB on Thursday 26th December 16:14

[Toffer]

I work in broadband and although they have not been getting great press lately...check and see if you have access to a cable company before signing up for ADSL. NTL and TELEWEST offer true broadband access over a coaxial connection to your home and will provide a EURODOCSIS modem to hook you up...awesome! You will never use anything else!
Personally, I have ISDN at home but only use 64K most of the time and believe it or not, this will even support NETMEETING!

[dern]

and from what i hear about the same sort of reliability

i'm sticking with dial up cos it's very reliable. everyone i know with broadband has had days of downtime.

I don't know who you heard that from but I've been connected with ADSL at home for over a year and can report that I've had no downtime whatsoever.

Regards,

Mark

[Size Nine Elm]

Had broadband from home for nearly 2 years with no downtime.

And just moved to a no-ADSL area, and boy, you don't know what you've got till it's gone.

Typing this at 300 baud on a dialup teletype...

[jodypress]

i agree with toffer, have had blueyonder cable broadband for over a year and have had the odd time it has been down, but very good tech support and great speed. adsl generally sucks in comparison because they cannot guarantee the amount of users, so speeds can be slower than a modem.

[chimburt]

make sure you have the latest drivers/bios setup. a mate popped round recently and up graded mine for me - the difference was night and day. now i'm using a laptop i blaggged from work ( 'cos the desktop modem got fritsed in thunderstorms! ) and that seems better again!
all over the same phone line. if you don't have someone savvy to hand, get yerself down to the local computer shop and just buy a new one for a about a tenner and it should be fully upto date. bang the bugger in and spark up the driver disc ( cancel the windows stuff if it comes in at startup ) and you'll be onto a winner. also go to windows update site if you haven't done it already, but get the modem sorted first!
i'm not buying broadband until someone gives a decent deal. i'm prepared to pay another fiver, but that's it.

[wedg1e]

One thing to be aware of (not necesarily applicable here, but I'm sure there are some reading this thread who may not have come across the grief I had) - NTL does not suppport 56KFlex modems. A 56K on V90/92 is OK, just not Flex. I have a Zoom external modem that I'm forced to poke some codes into to make it run at 33K, which of course means it's slower still. Apparently an internal 56K V92 is about 9 quid at the computer fairs: after the amount of upgrading I've been doing lately, I guess a trip to the Riverside stadium for the next fair is on the cards!


Ian

[squirrelz]

If you do get ADSL then get a router rather than a USB or PCI 'modem'. Far, far better and many less problems.

If anyone you know is getting poor download speeds on ADSL then it's highly likely that they need to adjust their MTU setting to 1458 - BT have got some crap equipment that fragments packets larger than this and this causes much slowness and poor reliability.

I've had a few outages with ADSL (Force9/PlusNet) but then I had a few outages with Demon dialup.

Check out www.adslguide.org.uk/ for all the latest news and information on ADSL.