Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

nredman · Oct 6, 2006, 03:30 PM

Hey Guys

I currently have high speed cable internet with Charter Communications - it's up to 3mb for 37.95 a month, I was thinking of maybe switching to Qwest DSL which offers 3-5mb for 36.99 - they also have 1.5mb for 31.99 - i was wondering would i even be able to tell a huge difference between all these speeds. and does anyone have any experience with Qwest DSL? i see they have MSN hooked into their packages. do i have to use msn crap?thanks for any input guys

Frugle · Oct 6, 2006, 03:40 PM

how fast are you acatually going? Speakeasy - Speed Test

it depends on the population around you. with cable, the more people online (in your neighborhood) the slower it goes.. do a lot of people imediately around you have charter? if so, at peak hours you will be running really slow.

DSL doesn't have the same problems (or at least as badly) .

In my neighborhood, cable is much faster, others may find DSL faster.

do you really feel like you need more speed?

And no, I don't think you'll have to use MSN ( don't see why yyou would have to)

nredman · Oct 6, 2006, 03:52 PM

2845 down 352 up - right now i am in an apartment - its not like my current provider is bad but i have heard a lot of people have had problems with them and since we are moving into a house i thought maybe we could change.

ghporter · Oct 6, 2006, 05:41 PM

Five dollars will make less difference than the potential loss of HALF your download bandwidth. And if you're getting nearly 3Mbps download now, the nearly 1.5Mbps will be noticable. I guarantee it. That's what-one fancy coffee at Starbucks a month? Drink plain brewed coffee a couple of times a month and consider it a "sacrifice" well made.

nredman · Oct 6, 2006, 05:59 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

Five dollars will make less difference than the potential loss of HALF your download bandwidth. And if you're getting nearly 3Mbps download now, the nearly 1.5Mbps will be noticable. I guarantee it. That's what-one fancy coffee at Starbucks a month? Drink plain brewed coffee a couple of times a month and consider it a "sacrifice" well made.

good point

westrock · Oct 9, 2006, 04:03 PM

Originally Posted by Frugle

how fast are you acatually going? Speakeasy - Speed Test

I just did that webpage and it showed exactly how misleading the ISP's are. It said my download was right around 2.8Mb (megabits) and upload was around 280Kb (kilobits). Which isn't far from what my cable company advertises (I think its 3mb down and 384 up). But notice thats megabits which you have to divide by 8 to get bytes which is what were used to. So with those speeds my normal speed is 400KB down and 30KB up.

Originally I had the the cheaper 1.5Mb connection and it was OK, but the catch was that the upload was limited to about 20KB, so when I got into bittorrenting it would eat up a good deal of that so surfing the web or running the Xbox would suffer real bad or just not work. I also noticed alot of lag on the Xbox with the 1.5Mb connection then when I previously had the introductory 3Mb connection. So I went back to the 3Mb connection. I think the connection is actually like a 6Mb or something, as I have seen number around 500-600KB when connecting to big name servers like Microsoft, or Apple. And one time on Comcast (I have Charter now) I hit 1.3MB per second...download a 100MB file in like 2 minutes!

The upload speed is what really kills me, I wish they wouldn't lopside it so much.

nredman · Oct 11, 2006, 09:51 AM

what about upload speeds? do they help your overall speed - if you connect to the websites faster shouldnt your overall speed be better?

dimmer · Oct 11, 2006, 02:28 PM

A query: back in the analog cable days, yes, cable sucked. But digital cable should be much more one on one, with less of that crap? Yes? No? I mean, I'll miss watching my neighbors porn habits vie EtherPEG, but that aside...

ghporter · Oct 11, 2006, 08:47 PM

Cable still has issues. It all depends on how the provider has the network physically built up, and how it's configured electronically. There are still places where everyone's download bandwidth goes to poo every evening because the system isn't properly configured, but in newer-built areas that's less common. Isolation is much better than it used to be too; being "too personal" with your neighbors is probably not going to be a problem.