They do not regulate, per se, but since late last year the FCC's Open Internet rules were established. It is too early to know if they have, or will improve competition.Originally Posted by koh303
They do not regulate, per se, but since late last year the FCC's Open Internet rules were established. It is too early to know if they have, or will improve competition.
Slow upload is really hard on image uploading users, both still and video.
A point to be made for our WISP provider, is they completely installed their own infrastructure and used no existing wiring owned by AT&T or Comcast, which were our only wired providers. Their products and infrastructure still exist undisturbed. I know because I have been watching and inspecting every part of the WISP install. Direct TV still has 13 ugly satellite dishes on our roof and I expect some units here will continue to use all 3 prior providers.
Below is a snapshot of today's speeds. I don't necessarily believe speed tests are at all accurate or indicative of actual file transfer, but I have never seen this type of speed anywhere. Our WISP claims the Microwave Transceiver provides 1 Gigabyte to the building in a pencil sized beam. They are linking building to building from center city Fiber, despite the fact that a Fiber Optic cable runs right by my building along the abandoned railroad tracks.
To get max speeds I needed to upgrade to Gigabit switches and a new WIFI AP.
Interesting that almost immediately upon switching on free Lobby public WIFI, people on the Bloomingdale Trail were accessing our building's website, which is linked below in my signature. The least connected guy here, Roberto Lopez, noticed this new public interaction when a user showed him his own art on a phone 1 day after we went live.
Speed test by moe.randy, on Flickr
Tin Can
If speedtest.net is to be believed, I get about 40 Mbps down and about 11 Mbps up from Comcast—not great but not terrible either. Service has been OK; there are occasional outages, but they aren’t frequent enough to be a serious problem. It’s pricey, but on my part of the Peninsula, AT&T’s DSL is only good for about 768 kbps, and that’s running interleaved.
There is no substitute for cubic inches ...Combined with a fast computer, SSD and all the RAM that fits, the Internet is now flowing like we always wanted. For now.
My currently contract (Verizon FIOS) set the limits at 25/25. The company offers plans in this area all the way to 500 Mb/s. If they would offer less speed for less money I would take it. Why?
Most of us use the Internet via applications using TCP as the IP protocol and, as any other using ACKs packets, it is sensitive to caps in performance, depending on the window size and latency. And that does not include other real life parameter involved, including shared topology, channel congestion, packet loss, etc. In the case of "over the air" channel, it's even worse, due to all kind of interference, radio or weather related.
So you should not be surprised for seeing only 50 Mbps to LA, even if the local company offers you 10 Gbs. In the case of 4K streaming, I use it via Netflix and 15 Mbs is enough for the Ultra HD in the best quality mode.
Our condo contracts with Comcast for a group rate. Service level is defined (note not guaranteed) at 20mbps down and 6 up. Testing a week ago, I was getting 30-35 down and about 7 up. One neighbor pays extra for Comcast's upgraded service says he gets about 175 down and 20 up.
But I've had poor performance with Netflix and Skype - poorer than 20 mbps download would suggest. I recently moved my cable modem so that my TV and skype box will be hard wired. I left town soon after so have not had an opportunity to test.
Throttling? Don't know. Do speed tests get the fast lane to make things look better? Again, don't know. And in a condo building, there's a lot of wi-fi signals floating around to cause conflict. But I'm more concerned with net neutrality than pure speed.
Does the cable for the HDTV get the same speeds as those to my computer? Is there a way to check it? I'm going to get a 4K UHDTV soon and was wondering if I'll be able to watch 4K movies?
Flickr Home Page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alanklein2000/albums
At the risk of making this more confusing, pray tell how one separates ACK from the TCP protocol? Are providers messing with terms for marketing reasons?
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TCP/IP sends packets as and when required but requires an acknowledgement from the receiver to say the packet has got there. It doesn't have to have packet 7 arrive before packet 8, but if an acknowledgement is not received within a timeout period then it is sent again. This guarantees, as far as possible, that all the data sent arrives, and it's put back in the right order at the receiver. There are complicated algorithms that decide what the timeout period should be based on past transmission times and the measured time before the ACKs get back, which gives the maximum throughput.
UDP just throws packets out and hopes that the various links and routing options between the sender and receiver are working; in this congested world that's by no means guaranteed, but for protocols that can accommodate missing packets and particularly where timing is important over completeness (e.g. audio or video) it can be more useful than TCP.
If a cow eats your cable though, all bets are off.
For comparison, I get around 30Mb/8Mb here in the UK for about US$50 a month because I'm too tight to pay for higher rates - I believe my provider goes up to in excess of 200Mb.
Neil
Well, depending where are you getting the 4K from. As I said, 15 Mb/s should be more than enough for the 4K content if you getting it from Netflix or YouTube. But not much is available at the moment, especially in Netflix.
Based on the speeds posted, you should fine.
The biggest problem with cable is that for many years the providers shared it with most of your neighbors, which could overload the segment and increase packet loss at peak time. Sure, in the middle of the day you should be OK, but at night the end user apps will spend extra time and bandwidth in retries that could become easy the bulk of the traffic. I am the speed is not the same 9:00 AM and 9:00 PM.
The good news is that many cable providers are increasing network capacity and installing better technology in the last mile, as a response to the fierce competition coming from other technologies (satellite, fiber, wireless, etc.). The bad news is many locations around the US have only one cable operator so not pressure to upgrade the systems.
Then streaming services arrived, i.e. Netflix, etc. What a headache for the providers! That consumes a considerable amount of bandwidth, and worse, the customers are spending less time watching cable channels. The reaction was to start using throttling. The provider could sell you 150 Mb/s but your are lucky if you get half of that at night.
Regarding the 4K TV. If you are "into color", check the Samsung SUHD JS700D. I found one for sale in BJs for around $900. Netflix is one of the apps inside the TV and is WiFi ready.
BTW, I use once in a while a little dongle called Wi-Spy. It's just a WiFi tuner functioning as a spectrum analyzer that allows you to check the use of the WiFi frequencies in your location. Pretty handy to set you WiFi router to work in the channel with the lowest use. I purchased it for less than $100 long time ago (I think it sells for a little more nowadays).
Did a test and download was 0.21 and upload was 0.25. How does that compare? We are the last people on the line 9 miles out of the nearest town.(600pop)
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