Cable Internet

The upgrade to the faster plan is cheap however for your average user is pretty much pointless. It's like having a Ferrari and driving down the interstate, the car can go 200mph but the road won't allow it. The cheap plan has speeds above and beyond what your average server is going to provide. The fastest download of a large file from this site I've seen was about 1000KB/s which is roughly 10000kbps. Unless you're downloading massive amounts of files and data from very fast servers the faster speed is really irrelevant. A typical site on the internet is not going to have the speeds this site has. Most that I have come across you''ll be able to get file in the 300 to 600KB/s speed.

Your browser which actually take more time to render the page than it takes to receive the data. It takes about .1 to .2 seconds for the script to execute on the server (this BTW will be getting faster shortly ). You'll have another tenth or two of millisecond to download the page itself and that can increse depending on the amount of images but its not that much. Then maybe a half a second to render the page. Overall any page on average should be viewable in about a second. For a site like this a faster download time becomes useless because you have bottle necks elsewhere specifically the time it takes the browser to render the page.

Lastly video is the one thing that requires a lot of bandwidth, however the streams being provided by servers are pretty low compared to your overall speed. A typical "HD" stream from a server is going to be about 2000-3000kbps which is well below the max speed of a the cheap plan. Speeds like that for video are rare and usually on pay to view sites. On free sites like youtube they are in the 250kbps to 500kbps second range. Your average youtube video is 250kbps. If you're on a faster DSL connection and getting glitches in the speed of the video chances are its on youtube's end not yours.

Thanks for the info, Richard. In light of that, I'll stay where I am for a while and see how it goes.

Second what The Mayor says.
Unless you download big files often the speed, it is mostly fluff.
Most sites limit the speed so their server does not get hammered or their bandwidth bill spike to the stratosphere!
With cable you are not the slowest/weakest link in the chain anymore.
When you need it upgrade, it will not make web viewing any faster now.

Wood'nCoal wrote:One of my friends who lives abt. 45 miles east of here got Cable Internet/phone/television today as well, from Cablevision. He did the speed test and came up a lot faster then I did. I may upgrade to the next tier.

I have the highest tier that Comcast has but it's more based on the amount of things that I have running. It's a little faster but my concern was running a few devices at the same time and not having one effect the other, like two computers running and playing COD4 and then having the phone ring. To me it's worth the extra couple of bucks a month just to know that nothing is going to interfere with each other. So now my video games and downloading of porn wont effect my wife talking on the phone as she's working on her computer.

So now my video games and downloading of porn wont effect my wife talking on the phone as she's working on her computer.

I don't play any video games, with DSL things did slow down when 2 people were on-line, esp. with the porn downloads.

Games are just exchanging very small amounts of data and unless you're hosting the game they have very little impact on a cable connection. I used to be able to hook up on 8 player games with Quake2 on 56k providing there was a decent host. Back then even a slow cable connection was enough to host. Not sure if the games have improved or gotten worse for bandwidth needs. The certainly need more instructions exchanged but the technology has improved.

With the games it is all about latency.
If you have bad ping times you get 'fragged' before you can react to someone who has lower latency.

Richard S. wrote:Not sure if the games have improved or gotten worse for bandwidth needs. The certainly need more instructions exchanged but the technology has improved.

I know in COD3 a lot of smoke from a bunch of people at once would bog down the game play. With COD4 it's not an issue at all, I don't know if it's becuase of the better internet connections or better servers or just the game engine that they used to make the game or a combination of it all, but game play is a lot better then it used to be.

High speed cable,DSL You folks dont know just how lucky you are. If you dont live in the village in my area (where all you can get is cable) All you have is Hughes Net ..which most say is terrible and cost is $400.00 or a cell service data connection which is like a miracle compared to dial up but not really fast either unless you have a strong signal or buy amps and antennas to boost it .If a cable co has an exclusive they should be required to service the whole area not just the spots they want.
Wireless is the way to go . Check out Sprint Aircard $60 a month but cheap if you only have dial up.
Anyone know of any new ways connect ?

Become a WISP.
One of my customers just dropped $7k to run in cable...
They used to have Hughes commercial account and that sucked wind.