Famine => Feast - Advice needed

[Sagar]

Now I seem to have gone from Famine (no broadband access) to Feast (working cable AND DSL).

Last week the cable guy finally showed when we were home and went through our entire system, replacing components and tweaking signal levels, and now our cable is working flawlessly. He did this the day AFTER I gave up and ordered DSL.

DSL showed up yesterday. I installed it and the danged thing actually works! *boggle* I had strong doubts since the best dial-up connection we can get is 26K.

So... which do I keep?

Ran some speed tests yesterday:

Cable: 6-7 pm 1400/400
10 pm 1400/400
6 AM 1400/400

DSL 1250/200

The numbers have been rounded a bit.

This shows, as I suspected, that my cable line is NOT congested during peak times.

Other info: My cable is with Roadrunner and I've not gotten a single junk e-mail in 2+ years.
My DSL is with Bellsouth and I had 20 junk e-mails when I turned the thing on for the first time
Make $1,000,000 having sex with a teenage pigeon in your own home!!!!

*sigh*

I'm thinking at this point that I will keep both for about a week and try playing EQ / NWN and surfing and see which performs better.

Oh.. another thing. The speed tests, when going through the router, gave 400/300 for cable and 400/200 for DSL. Is this normal or do I need to tune my router a bit?

[Shiz]

I voted for cable since Roadrunner was great when I had it. It was also cheaper.

[Drax]

So, Shiz, are you voting for roadrunner instead of pigeon?

I'm so confused... :roll:

[Greebo]

I voted for pigeons. I like pr0n.

Thing about cable is it will dilute over time as more people in your area get it. As long as you have the DSL wiring, you can (hopefully) change ISPs to a different provider with better filtering, and be assured your pipeline won't get narrower over time.

[Raveneye]

Greebs is right, you can be assured that over time your DSL speed will remain constant, perhaps even increase if they upgrade the equipment on their end.

With cable, you are at the mercy of the popularity in your area. As more people jump on the pipe, bandwidth decreases.

To boost your DSL throughput go to http://www.dslreports.com and run the speed tests there. Follow their directions to maximize your connection speed.

I've had DSL for three years and I love it. It hasn't gone out since the early days (I was one of the first in my area to get it) and it's been speedy, reliable and junkmail free the whole time.

[Sagar]

Raveneye, who do you have DSL service with?

I'm thinking I need to get a garbage email name to get away from E-Mail spam.

Oh.. and I used the speed tests at dslreports.com to get the speed numbers :)

[attriel]

I don't know who he (raveneye always reads female in my head, sorry :p) had, but I had Speakeasy in atlanta (and now all this is running on a different speakeasy connection :) )

There were occasional outages, but usually that was some wayward squirrel munching on an important line or something :) Oh, and one time we were out for 3 days. Turns out our IDSL modem went kaplooie :( Up here they had us routing through new york, and we were getting bad speeds (800/400 on a 1100/1100 line) so I complained, and they moved us to a baltimore route, and now we're getting 1040/950 or so, when I test (dslreports free test sites are west coast, so i'm willing to accept some degradation since it's routing across the freakin' continent)

I've heard a bunch of mixed reports on bellsouth & earthlink. mostly it seems to be based on which person (complete or partial moron) you speak to and what imbecile they send to fix things. But that's pretty standard these days I think.

[Raveneye]

Is Attriel calling me a girl?

I have Cincinnati Bell, a Broadwing sub-company, as my DSL provider. They call their service Zoomtown, and I've had it pretty much hassle free for almost 4 years now. It came with the connection, a free Cisco Router, and up to 8 email addresses (only one of which I use). I've never recived any spam mail to that email address, even from Cincy Bell / Broadwing themselves.

[Gordium7]

I am curious about the apparent difference in connection throughput: with router vs. without.

What specific router are you using?

Has anyone else seen this problem, and if so, what can be done to fix and/or improve upon the situation?

Since I am about to take the plunge into cable modems, routers/firewalls, etc. inquiring minds want to know.... ;)

[Sagar]

I have a D-link AirPlus Wireless Network router.

The tests are with the desktops plugged into the ethernet ports, not using the wireless signal.

I haven't broken open the manual yet, though (its Adobe on CD) so I don't know if there are settings I need to work with.