On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, Pedro Cevallos wrote:
quoted 7 lines I've been going insane downloading MP3s from napster
> I've been going insane downloading MP3s from napster
> (http://www.napster.com/) and I'm realizing that I need a faster connection.
> Could somebody please advise me on the best options out there? I keep
> hearing about cable modem and using Direct TV to use the net and all sorts
> of stuff. Can somebody point me in the right direction? Prices? Benefits
> vs Drawbacks? Etc...
>
Here's my breakdown (and I'm posting to IDM because this is relevant to a
lot of people) in my rough order of desirability:
1. DSL: Pros: Best guaranteed throughput -- it's like connecting your
machine via Ethernet directly into the Internet 'cloud.' Cons: It
is, depending on your phone company, moderately to very expensive.
They also frequently meter your transfers, so if you set up an FTP
site and for some reason 500 people hammer it for a week, you could
have a huge bill.
DSL also has limited availability, as it depends on the distance
from your house to the nearest switching center. And keep in mind
that you're buying a service from the phone company -- they haven't
figured out how to make a payphone make change yet.
2. Cable Modem: Pros: Good average throughput, excellent occasional
throughput. Fairly wide availability, and very affordable. The
$40 I pay is about the same as I was paying for a second phone line
and ISP account. Cons: Your machines are essentially on a LAN with
everyone else in your neighborhood. If you share bandwidth with a bunch
of 14 year-olds trying to fill a 20 gig disk with MP3 files, you will
be running at about 14.4 modem speed a lot of the time.
ATT@Home has a 128kbit/sec upload limitation. Luckily they
program this into NVRAM on the modem they give you -- if you hard-reset
the modem and clear their custom code, there's no upload data throttling.
Right now free installation with a free modem is almost universally
available from ATT@Home; what they don't tell you is that you usually
get basic cable TV service over the same wire if you don't already
subscribe.
3. Analogue modem Pros: Cheap, many options for ISPs Cons: Comparatively
slow. I will say this, if you travel, there are some ISPs with
excellent coverage vis a vis local access numbers.
4. ISDN: Pros: I can't really think of any ;-) Cons: Once again you're
at the mercy of your local BOC. The only thing a phone company does
right is give you an analog dial tone -- every other service they offer
sucks nun's cunts. Oh, and you have to buy a special expensive modem,
service is metered by the minute, and the maximum throughput is barely
double a 56K analogue modem.
5. Satelite services (DirectPC, etc). All cons: requires analog phone
line and modem, screwy setup that may never work, and they stop working
in foggy conditions. Basically a setup like the old data-over-ham-radio
network, only with worse technical support.
I have a Cable modem from ATT@Home right now, and have 3 computers
set up with their own IPs. After some initial problems with the modem losing
sync, and a retarded billing problem, it's been up and running 24/7 for
a few months with no problems. In general I get better throughput than
we get at work on a fractional T1 connection.
Keep in mind that the data rate at which a high speed connection can
theoretically operate, and the data rate any given connection can support
are two completely different things. It's more the exception than the
rule that you get anything approaching the max throughput of the connection.
The main difference I notice with the cable modem is that interactive
throughput (i.e. running pine on a unix box) doesn't suffer when you're
downloading files; a 56K modem with a download running doesn't have any
bandwidth to spare.
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