Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics, isn’t that the expression?
IF you look at the graph, they are indicating the performance for downloading 1MB. Well, doh, a 3Mb line or a 6Mb line is going to make virtually no change in downloading 1Mb.
But if you are downloading more than 1Mb (iTunes, streaming audio, youtube, windows updates, etc.) you are going to see a huge improvement if you have cable over DSL.
Does not the caveat still hold about cable that it is shared? Thus, if there is a lot of traffic, the data transmission rate decreases.
Your DSL is also shared - just most people don’t realise. You have 2Mbps (or whatever they offer) from your house to your telephone exchange and then the line upstream from there is shared. So you can still be limited depending on how much adoption there is in your area.
Having said that, it does all depend on your providers - I have 8Mbps DSL so no advantage to me to get cable. I should have just left it at you will see a significant improvement at the higher throughputs.
Your DSL is also shared - just most people don’t realise.
Aah, verry interesting. This I had not seen.
Let me ask another question. For people that watch events such as online race coverage on Ironmanlive for instance, what minimal speed is necessary to make that a reasonable activity. I.e., does it require more than 768 kbps to see a reasonably continuous signal (both image and sound)?
Clearly, faster is better, but if one is getting true 768 performance (always the fly in the ointment), is that speed sufficient?
Parkito - what most people don’t realize is that we’re not talking about speed -we’re talking about something called “bandwidth”. It is true that bandwidth can *translate *into speed, but it’s not always the case. The “speeds” you always see are really bandwidths, meaning, how MUCH information can be transferred at the same time. 8mbps means I can receive 8 megabits per second across the wire. If I’m the only user, I get all 8 megabits, every second. But if there are 8 people, essentially each person has a maximum of 1mbps.
Consider this analogy:
Internet bandwidth is like lanes on a highway. The more lanes you have, the more cars (and bigger cars) you can drive there (MP3, movies, streaming video, etc). Imagine the current road/highway system. More lanes = more traffic. A Ferrari will travel the same speed on a single lane road by itself as it would on an 8-lane superhighway by itself. So if all there will ever be is one Ferrari, there is no need to add more lanes as it would be a waste of money. However, throw a few cars in the way and the Ferrari has to slow down on the single lane road. It needs more lanes to get back to it’s top speed. On the multi-lane road, it can still go fast. The more traffic that is added to the multi-lane highway, the slower each car has to travel because there simply isn’t enough room for every car to go as fast as it wants to.
I have been trying to find explanations of what are the technical differences between a 768 kbps and say 1.5 or 3 Mbps connection, as they both come over the same telephone line, but with no success so far.
Your explanation would imply that the provider has added more “channels” (freeway lanes) with some kind of hardware at the source end. Since DSL uses the high frequency spectrum of the phone lines, with voice communications using the low end, this supposedly could be done then by either splitting the upper end frequencies finer, or adding “channels” onto either end of the current high frequency region. Or, possibly, doing both manipulations. Yes?
Without making it more complicated, it’s a little of both. There are different methods/protocols for accomplishing high-speeds. The popular “T1” which I think most people have heard of is split into channels, 24 channels of 64k each. Businesses can also use partial T1 or more than 24 channels, just depends on what you want to pay for and how much they need.
DSL (there are different types of DSL also) can split the line into different frequencies, and there are also methods that have multiple “channels” of frequencies. It’s not exactly the same as the channels on a T1, but generally speaking the same concept. DSL also has other limitations, primarily distance from your house to the phone companies central office.
The bottom line is just visualize your internet connection as a highway - the bigger the number, the more *lanes *you have. And if more lanes won’t help you, you don’t need them.
That’s far more information than anything I have found online so far. Thanks very much.
Now, the question what kind of speed is appropriate for today, besides the “always faster is better”. Companies are starting to advertise in the 20-30 Mbps range, but you pay an arm and a leg for it. On the otherhand, whatever speed I sign up for, I suspect I will be well under the rated value due to our location (relative to the central office, or whatever junction box thingy they have going these days to rectify the 17,500 foot business). I guess the acid test is, what do I need to watch the Ironmanlive, Slowtwitch slowjam, and TdF online coverages without cringing?
1.5MBps line should work fine for most applications. The other side of the issue is that most servers will not let you hog up their bandwidth either. So a fast line for 99% of the web sites will limit how much bandwidth you can use. So even though you have a fast line capable of fast downloads, depending on where web site, you will still be limited.
I saw a discussion about “caps” from one of the google hits. Some providers are implementing download volume limits. Supposedly, it affects less than 1% of their customers. I don’t think I’ll be in that boat.
I can tell you I have DSL 1.2Mb/s Download 310kbps upload. That is from a speed test. I watched Ironmanlive without any problems other than the ones everyone else had but those were not my speed related.
parkito, you’re digging way too deep into this than you need to. I would suspect that a 512kb or higher connection would give you appropriate quality for IronmanLive, or other streamed video. The quality isn’t that great to begin with so anything you might lose you wouldn’t even notice. I have a 15mb down / 2mb up connection so I’m not a good person to ask - it’s been a few years since I had a slower connection.
And for future use, quite frankly if you have one PC, you won’t need anything much faster than 1.5mb. As a previous poster said, most of the time your bottleneck will be the server you’re connecting to, not your own connection.
