[Tfug] why not cable?

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 11:46:04PM -0700, Brian Masur wrote:
>
>Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm probably right for everyone I've lived in 
>USA.  Cable is better than DSL short of being free.
>
>Interested in seeing your responses!
>Brian

For me, it really comes down to money.  If I could get DSL where I am right
now, I would do it in a second despite the fact that it will likely be slower
than the cable service that I have now.  I'm just a poor college student and
would welcome the lower bill.

But, I'm currently living in a house that's about 110 years old.  The
electrical is from Edison's electric company and the phone connection in the
basement is from, you guessed it, Bell Telephone.  This stuff is *old*.  And
it doesn't work... though if it did my DSL speeds would probably be awful.
I'm just renting an apartment in the house, though, so I can't do anything
about that anyway.

So I've got 6 Mbps cable service from Comcast.  And it's pricey, too (by my
standards).  It's $65/mo for the service I receive.  But... if you also sign
up for basic cable TV service (that's just the local channels) then you get
$10 off your bill for a total of $55/mo.  The best explanation I have heard
for this is that Comcast wants you to be a "cable TV subscriber" at all
costs.  This inflates their subscriber base and so they can charge advertisers
more.  I don't know if this is the real reason, though.

The advantages of having Comcast here are no blocked ports.  I run my own
personal servers so I like that a lot.  The TOS forbids all that, of course,
but I use so little bandwidth of the common server ports I doubt they'll bug
me about it.  The downlink speed of 6Mbps is also very nice and doesn't seem
to degrade at all even after the flood of students come back in the Fall.
Latency has also been very good.  Remote SSH is just like a local connection,
and my VoIP link seems perfectly fine.

The downside, as others have mentioned, is the abyssmal uplink speed of 384
Kbps.  Just terrible.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, UMass Amherst student
                        Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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