How 20 mbps Internet can be slower than 8 mbps

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/verizon-fios-versus-comcast

by old-gregg • 17 years ago

42 37 17 years ago

philip.greenspun.com

sh1mmer• 17 years ago

Summary: For most internet use Verizon's 8bmps connection with low latency was better than FiOS' high latency 20mbps connection.

nuclear_eclipse• 17 years ago

Correction: it seems the fault of the Fios ActionTec router's DNS resolution, not necessarily the Fios service itself. I would be rather interested to see latency statistics gathered, comparing the use of the default router's DNS with direct OpenDNS usage.

eb• 17 years ago

It's 8Mbps from Comcast, not Verizon.

dattaway• 17 years ago

Latency on my cablemodem has always been abou 60ms until I negotiated my monthly bill with TW/RR that I just purchased AT&T dsl. I found it fascinating after several years of 60ms ping times, my cable latency dropped to 20ms to match the dsl service. Didn't ask for that. How odd. Name lookup latency improved by many times also.

It pays to negotiate. Service just might improve.

prakash• 17 years ago

re. dns, he could run something like djbdns locally on his machine and that could connect to opendns.

the other thing he could do is increase the mtu size, from the std 1440 to 2x-5x of that.

theantidote• 17 years ago

Does the author realize that the actiontec router can be disabled and used just like a cable modem? That's what I do at home and use a WRT54G instead. I also use opendns instead of Verizon's DNS servers. Latency is pretty low for me.

lallysingh2• 17 years ago

OpenDNS is nice, but they give you their crap redirects instead of a proper failure message.

Consider the Level 3 dns servers: 4.1.1.1 - 4.1.1.6

kmt• 17 years ago

Did you mean 4.2.2.1 - 4.2.2.6?

alnayyir3• 17 years ago

I actually have cable and am considering getting a symmetric 20/20 FioS connection from Verizon and I was thinking the same damn thing the whole article.

1. Switch to different nameservers. 2. Don't use the fucking actiontec as a router.

All that remains is his complaints about slowly degrading performance, and assuming that's true, my experiences with cable modems are seriously not any better.

I've given up on ever having a reliable connection at home.

jdbeast00• 17 years ago

i too have suffered the pain of the actiontec router from verizon fios. i placed it behind another router as people advise. since the internet speed is much slower than ethernet, I figured the extra hop isn't going to kill me, but it does add some tiny amount of latency i suppose.

amohr• 17 years ago

What was much more shocking than the main point of the article was the statement "Comcast promised 768 kbps up and 8 Mbits down. That's what they delivered, more or less reliably for several years. It seemed quite fast except when I was uploading 12 MB camera RAW files to a server. "

I have had Comcast for about 6 years off and on (I keep moving, and they keep devouring local service providers) and have had problems with pretty much every tier of our interaction. We're supposed to have 10 Mbps and get maybe half that on a good day. When I call to ask them about it, they claim that their equipment just can't handle the loads of the area. They also have difficulty accepting that that is not my fault.

On simple matters of installing a new router - customer service is a crapshoot at best. Anything beyond that, be prepared to be "transferred to a technical service representative"... often times more than once.

It's not all bad though, we did get showtime for free about nine months longer than we were supposed to, karma, I guess.

hs• 17 years ago

what really kills the speed is packet drop

a 1 gbps wireless will be slower than old pots service on heavy rainy day

drm237• 17 years ago

only if it's your neighbors...

aaronblohowiak• 17 years ago

I believe the OP is talking about stationary wireless, as used in rural areas.

andreyf2• 17 years ago

Many of my friends in their 20s and 30s have dropped their cable TV subscriptions

Never had one, never wanted one. Watching shows in just one room, wired to a wall, switching between groups called "channels", interrupted by commercials... isn't that all legacy from the time these things were grouped by-frequency, channeled straight onto your screen?

How do people put up with such crap when it's all TCP/IP now?

eru• 17 years ago

Tradition.

alecco• 17 years ago

Advertisement programmed brains.

ars• 17 years ago

"TCP/IP" can't actually deliver TV to everyone in the US, it only works because a minority of people are using it. We'd need a lot more capacity if everyone was going to watch that way.

Maybe multicast plus local caching could handle it.

old-gregg2• 17 years ago

"It's all TCP/IP", really?

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-...

ramchip• 17 years ago

That's for a TV company. As a consumer, I find Bittorrent perfect for all my TV needs - I don't even own a TV set -, but then I only watch japanese stuff so YMMV.

andreyf2• 17 years ago

Hulu and bittorrent are, which is where I watch "TV".

derefr• 17 years ago

There are two factors.

First, here's an analogous question: why do people still listen to the radio when you can download entire discographies at the click of a button? The answer is the trait that radio and podcasts share--the DJ.

A DJ is, for the purpose of this comment, someone sitting there on the other end of the line, sharing music with you and thinking carefully about what to play next to maximize your enjoyment, and sometimes offering commentary in-between. People like DJs. A DJ, on a station you like, is like a friend of yours--at minimum, immersed in the same culture as you, whether by physical proximity or by interest--who can tell you about all the new and great music they've been listening to, except that that's their whole job, so A: they're really very good at it, and B: you can ignore them sometimes when you don't like what they're saying without upsetting them. The station, in some ways, is the DJ.

Television stations are their programming. Even if the commentary isn't there (though wouldn't it be interesting if it was? a station with a live impressario, critically evaluating the progress of a show on the breaks while the advertisements rolled in a sidebar?), the playlist-y-ness is there, which is what's important. Playlistyness is what's making it hard to win the Netflix prize: there's something a DJ knows about their audience that lets them recommend certain otherwise-controversial choices, that the Netflix algorithms and the iTunes Genius and so on just can't manage. (In my opinion, it's likely the ability to take a real, human stance on a divisive piece of media that actually pushes the division in one direction or another, and that's something machines will never be able to do, at least until some time after they get suffrage.)

Now, the second factor: why do some people like Internet radio and not podcasts? Internet radio is live and source-ubiquitous. Live in that, like radio and television, things can happen on the stream as they happen in reality: there can be news reports, interviews, call-in shows, and so on. Clothes can malfunction. This feels real.

Some television shows are live, obviously. Beyond that, the programming choices usually don't feel live, but the ads do--whatever ads air are always part of a corporation's newest marketing strategy, which is, if they're doing their job, 100% pure current-and-targeted pop-culture. Thus, you can look at an advertisement (in any content-digest medium, such as a magazine) and immediately feel immersed in the culture and time which created it, which, if it's the present, makes it feel more "live." (Magazine ads, though, are designed to culture-decay more gracefully precisely because magazines lay about in places like waiting rooms for so long. You don't want to disturb people by immersing them in a foreign (or even just old) "live", so you back off on the feeling a bit.)

Source-ubiquity is just the concept that, when you turn on your TV and I turn on my TV, they have the same things available (unlike, say, your iPod and my iPod), and more importantly, we can find the same thing at the same time (assuming we live in the same timezone), regardless of our intention to do that. Couples can watch TV together over the telephone, without it occurring to them that they're doing so. The important part is that this doesn't require any special synchronization--you don't have to say "1, 2, 3, press play", or get a group over for football; you only have to turn on your sets and flip around a bit. Your friends (who you assumably share interests with) will anneal to the same channel as you, and then be fed the same program.

"Every household in America was listening to the president's inaugural address" is a powerful statement: everyone, sitting around in their houses, was in one virtual place at the same time. I can't imagine any event that would cause everyone on (or even a large chunk of) the Internet to go to the same site at the same time; the nearest we have here are Alternate Reality Games, where planned "events" (such as characters appearing in chatrooms, or websites being altered) happen as parts of a continuing story.

"The Evening News" is the purest form of source-ubiquity: the idea of "the News" is that there are a certain number of facts that you can rely on other people to be statistically likely to be aware of, because they are "news"; they are news because they were put into a source-ubiquitous medium at a time when a lot of people were watching. You watch the News to find out not what's important to your own life (if you've important news, someone you actally know will tell you soon enough), but what's important to the "live"--the current culture, weighted inversely proportionally to the square of time. (You can picture journalists riding a moving "live" hyperbola like a wave if you like.)

Now a digression, that I'll justify in a moment: pop culture in general, but celebrity culture in particular, are important, because they give people some way to relate to strangers who might be very foreign to them. Celebrity evolved out of our desire to continue to gossip about things as we moved out of farmland and into dense cities, where the stranger on the corner won't know your neighbours. They will know about which movie star had what rapper's baby, and so you talk about that--and so you read about that. Entertainment Tonight is, if you can imagine it, an existential battlefront in the war against meaninglessness in the face of population explosion.

"Live", together with source-ubiquity, encourage celebrity. You can talk to the stranger on the corner about what you saw "at seven last night," and they'll know what you mean. You can gossip about fictional characters as if they were real people, precisely because you know that everyone around you gets the same cable package.

Television is integral to our culture today. If we truly do abandon it, not individually but as a culture, we'll need to create something that works like it within our new, peer-to-peer reality, or we'll lose all these benefits. "Web communities" are a step towards source-ubiquity. Podcasts are playlist-y. And the main benefit of "Web 2.0" was, I think, to make most of the web feel "live." However, I think there are very few sites or applications, currently, that capture all three benefits the way television and radio do. That's definitely a market opportunity, though probably not just yet ;)

> Watching shows in just one room, wired to a wall

Those are legacy, though. Let's hope those go away in the redesign.

dcurtis• 17 years ago

That is probably the most intelligently written description of why Hulu will not destroy broadcast television I have read. Why do so many people not understand the attention-grabbing quality of "liveness" with broadcast television?

When will broadcast television be streamed over the internet into my computer/phone/tv? That is the question.

sounddust• 17 years ago

No matter what type of broadband line they're connected to, Actiontec modems have always sucked; what's more important is that FIOS is finally rolling out to a decent portion of the population. A firmware upgrade (or new brand of modem) will hopefully follow soon.

Now it just has to drop to a reasonable price. $160 (or even Comcast's $99 triple play) is a testament to how badly the telecom industry is broken in the US.

In France, DSL(22mbps up/1.5 down) + HD Cable TV + a landline with unlimited calls to 70 countries is $27/month including all taxes and fees.

biohacker422• 17 years ago

The Verizon fios phone service also dies if the electricity goes out.

Old fashioned land lines often continue to work when the power is out.

jonknee• 17 years ago

Only if the power goes out for an extended time, there is a battery backup. Not that it's a big deal, home phones are dying off rapidly.

electromagnetic3• 17 years ago

Wired home phones, which do survive without the power, are extinct. I think we have 1 in the house and no one is exactly sure where. It'd be less effort to rip the computer out of the UPS and plug the cordless' station in.

Zev• 17 years ago

The Verizon fios phone service also dies if the electricity goes out.

Only if the power is out for > 8 hours or so. If you're without electricity that long, phone service might not be the biggest thing to consider (food that may go bad, for example is more important)

biohacker422• 17 years ago

Tell me all about it, while I remember the most recent north east ice storm.

e40• 17 years ago

I've had a similar experience with AT&T Business ADSL. For years I had problems with my router just hanging and needing a reboot (Cayman 3456). Early on, I wrote a script to ping the router just on the other side of mine, and to reboot the router when it noticed a connectivity drop for more than a minute.

So, a few weeks ago I just got fed up. After a while on the phone, I was lucky to get a local tech. She told me to get a modem (not router) at Best Buy and do the routing on my Linux box. I did and I haven't had one connection problem since. 6 years of pain, and it was the router all along, which had been replaced (then SBC) with the same model.

known• 17 years ago

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=955999&cid=2490...

How 20 mbps Internet can be slower than 8 mbps

Related Stories