istop.com

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 10:55:02AM -0500, Fraser Campbell wrote:
> Those "sharing" commercials from a few years back were almost as annoying as 
> the current Microsoft Office commercials of today.  The Internet _IS_ shared, 
> get over it ;-)

What made the adds silly a few years ago was that rogers offered 3Mbit
max while bell offered 1Mbit max. 

> Is it really relevant whether the sharing begins in a Bell owned box that 
> might be up to 4km from your house versus in a Rogers box that's within 50 
> metres of your house?  I don't think it matters.

If the line is good, it does not matter.

> What matters is whether the provider of that "last mile" has enough Bandwidth 
> available between their box in your neighborhood and the ISP,  after that 
> what matters is whether your ISP has enough bandwidth to the Internet.

Some cable comapnies have too many users on one segment.  AT least DSL
doesn't suffer directly from that problem, DSL only needs capacity
upgrades on equipment at the central office.

> My understanding (please correct me if I am wrong) is that cable has the 
> capacity for 30Mb, no generally available DSL technology has that capacity 
> though eventually who knows.

Each cable modem is limited to 3Mbit, so if there is 10 simultanous
users on a segment, at least the segment is ok. If there is 200, you
have a problem.

> Does anyone know the actual technology that Bell uses to get DSL traffic from 
> a local CO to the ISP?  What technology do cable providers use?

I suspect the ISPs have a large OC3 or similar size pipe to bell to
handle traffic for their clients.  Or maybe they use ATM or something.

> I've had both cable and DSL, cable (in the past) for me was way better.  These 
> days I get the same bandwidth from istop that Rogers was giving me over 2 
> years ago.  As long as istop (or other low cost alternates) exist I doubt 
> I'll go back to cable.

I dislike the authentication required mail server rogers runs, I hate
that it often goes down (in some areas at least), I think they charge
too much.

DSL (at least from some providers) to me is a much better deal, and they
seem to offer betteer up and down stream speeds.  PPPoE is a bit
annoying but manageable, and if willing to pay for it, can be avoided.

Lennart Sorensen
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