Question about internet speeds?

[DalesCarpentry]

I am switching from my Zoom 500 (witch is broadband) to Verizon high speed. The verizion conection uses a phone jack but is not dial up. Will this conection be as fast as my current broadband conection? According to the them I will still be able to stream videos. I just can't understand how it can be high speed if it uses a phone jack. I have not installed all this stuff yet and hope I did not make a mistake here. I am pretty spoiled by my current broadband conection. I could never go back to dial up. Most times everything loads quickly and I enjoy watching videos from all over the internet. Dale

[rparsons934]

I am not a internet whiz by any means. but I did work for sprint for a few years. so we learned about the compitition. I would say they are correct that you should be able to stream vids. might take a while longer to buffer however. as for the rest I would think your broadband would be faster.

[DalesCarpentry]

I just went to both of their sites and I think Verizon is a little slower than my current conection. I hope not to much slower. Here is what I have now.

ZOOM 500 is even faster, up to 5 Mb/s download, 512 Kb/s send

All I can find on what I am switching is it says 53 times faster than dial up. Dale

[Graybeard]

Fer a fellow short on funds you sure are doing a lot of switching to things requiring up front payments of farely hefty sums. Not that is any of my business of course. 

What it sounds to me like you are doing is going to DSL from broadband air. From what little I know I suspect you'll notice a sharp drop in speed BUT there are two speeds of DSL and if you are able to get the faster of them perhaps not. If you get the slower DSL then a drop in performance should be very noticeable.

Still even with my most of the time slow satellite connection I can watch vids from most sites but some I have to give awhile to buffer then restart them to watch them without constant stops and jittery performance.

If you are a heavy user of internet video moving to slower performance isn't likely to make you a happy camper.

[GRIMJIM]

I have a dsl and it gets glitchy when streaming video.

I just ran a throughput test and it says:

download- 1.186 mbps
upload-325.70kbps

I am looking to get cable internet and get rid of my land line.

[DalesCarpentry]

Fer a fellow short on funds you sure are doing a lot of switching to things requiring up front payments of farely hefty sums. Not that is any of my business of course. 

What it sounds to me like you are doing is going to DSL from broadband air. From what little I know I suspect you'll notice a sharp drop in speed BUT there are two speeds of DSL and if you are able to get the faster of them perhaps not. If you get the slower DSL then a drop in performance should be very noticeable.

Still even with my most of the time slow satellite connection I can watch vids from most sites but some I have to give awhile to buffer then restart them to watch them without constant stops and jittery performance.

If you are a heavy user of internet video moving to slower performance isn't likely to make you a happy camper.

GB. None of what we have done has cost any up front money and we are saving pretty close to $50.00 a month. That is the omly reason we switched was to save a few bucks. I am afraid you might be right about the speeds I will be getting. You are right if I have problems watching video I will not be a happy camper. Dale

[Graybeard]

I hope you are right on that no upfront cost Dale but when I bought Direct TV there was a HUGE up front cost. Same when I got Hudghe.net internet service. Now Dish I know at times offers free equipment but never knew Direct TV did.

[JerryKo]

Dale, sounds like you got the 3Meg service.  Dial up is a max of 56000 or called 56K so 53 times that =2968000 or 2.968Meg or loosely termed 3Meg.  Depending on how close you are to the Central office and the telephone line conditions will determine your actual sppeds though.  They sell 3 and 5 meg service but can't garantee that.  And the reason it can use phone lines is because it uses much higher frequency to pass the "data" part as it does the "voice" part.  If you listen on an "unfiltered" line you will hear a low volumn High pitch"white noise" which is actually the data comminucating between your modem and the modem located in the Central Office.  The Central Office in Scottdale is located at 400 Pittsburgh Street.  The distance is determined by the way the cable feeds, not as the crow flys. Although I rarely see crows flying in straight lines. ::)The max distance we push DSL is 3miles from the central office, but can now go farther by using remote equipment, but I'll not get into that here.  So it is basically 3 miles from our equipment.  However there is a negative effect the farther downstream you are.  So 3meg at 3miles will not be 3meg and in some instances it works better to get 768K service if you are that far from the equipment.  Funny part is it is not offered where I live yet so I have 3meg service from Atlantic Broadband.  I can stream vidio, but it does take awhile to load(buffer), depending on the quality of the video.  When I switched from 5meg to 3meg to save $20 I didn't really notice it that much, only in the first few weeks, and then we got used to it.

Just trying to clarify.

Jerry

[JerryKo]

I hope you are right on that no upfront cost Dale but when I bought Direct TV there was a HUGE up front cost. Same when I got Hudghe.net internet service. Now Dish I know at times offers free equipment but never knew Direct TV did.

New customers usually can find up to 4 room installs for free as long as they subscribe.  They lock you in for 2yrs.  Kind of like free cell phones as long as you subscribe to the service.

I have hade Direct TV for over 4ys now.  Twice I had to clean sticky snow from the receiver, and on occasion it will go out temp with "VERY" heavy rain or white out conditions.  Summer foliage can downgrade the reception as well.  I have been satisfied though.  I have cable internet as stated above and it goes out way more often than my sat tv.

[quickdtoo]

Here's a resource for comparing your service to other high speed services, in Tools you'll find speed test sites to make the actual comparisons to others using the same service.

Tim

http://www.dslreports.com/

[DalesCarpentry]

I hope you are right on that no upfront cost Dale but when I bought Direct TV there was a HUGE up front cost. Same when I got Hudghe.net internet service. Now Dish I know at times offers free equipment but never knew Direct TV did.

New customers usually can find up to 4 room installs for free as long as they subscribe.  They lock you in for 2yrs.  Kind of like free cell phones as long as you subscribe to the service.

I have hade Direct TV for over 4ys now.  Twice I had to clean sticky snow from the receiver, and on occasion it will go out temp with "VERY" heavy rain or white out conditions.  Summer foliage can downgrade the reception as well.  I have been satisfied though.  I have cable internet as stated above and it goes out way more often than my sat tv.

That is exactly the package we got. WE got 4 rooms and 4 receivers. This weeked I will have to put a splitter in on the living room tv so my wife can watch tv in the kitchen because that is our fith tv. Oh and I am less than 3/4 of a mile from 400 Pittsburgh. St. Dale

[leesecw]

Ive worked both phone and cable. With both, the distance you are from the fiber node and how many people are active in that node will determine your speed at any time.  With cable there is not as much signal loss as the coax passes signal much better than a phone line. if you get DSL they plug you into the local call box into the fiber. From there you are still using the Phone line running to your house resulting in a greater loss than coax.  DSL is not as fast as cable but less expensive. Adding any kind of splitter to add your extra tv will cut your signal strength to both lines along with if you use substandard cable and fittings will increase the noise level on your ALL YOUR LINES IN THE HOUSE  for your internet and tv causing a slower loss in speed. This is called ingress. When we encountered substandard cable in a house and bad fittings causing what we called leakage that fed back into the internet and video, we shut them off until they rectified the problem. This was called CLI or community leakage index.  This was required by the ferderal communications commission

[leesecw]

Also dale if you look at the splitter {Two Way}you purchased you will see usually a loss figure of 3.5 DB for each port. The more ports on the splitter will result in a greater loss. The more you lower the loss of your signal compared to the whats called the noise floor the more problems you will have. That is how much you will be splitting the signal in loss.  If you are close to a strong signal source be it TV, cell phone, CB or Ham the weaker signal will result in more interference and more ingress

[DalesCarpentry]

Ive worked both phone and cable. With both, the distance you are from the fiber node and how many people are active in that node will determine your speed at any time.  With cable there is not as much signal loss as the coax passes signal much better than a phone line. if you get DSL they plug you into the local call box into the fiber. From there you are still using the Phone line running to your house resulting in a greater loss than coax.  DSL is not as fast as cable but less expensive. Adding any kind of splitter to add your extra tv will cut your signal strength to both lines along with if you use substandard cable and fittings will increase the noise level on your ALL YOUR LINES IN THE HOUSE  for your internet and tv causing a slower loss in speed. This is called ingress. When we encountered substandard cable in a house and bad fittings causing what we called leakage that fed back into the internet and video, we shut them off until they rectified the problem. This was called CLI or community leakage index.  This was required by the ferderal communications commission

Thanks. I will take my chances. I have split many cable things from time to time through out my life with no loss of signal. Dale

[JerryKo]

Not true about cable being faster than dsl.  Able to push it further in coax, but there are ways around everything.  The reason cable is NOT faster than DSL (common misconception by cable companies) is everyone in that area is sharing the bandwidth within that coax. SO if all your neighbors are on the internet and downloading at the same time your speeds are going to be alot slower than  max and if you are the only one on then of course you will be faster.  DSL gives you ALL YOUR BANDWIDTH all the time because you are using YOUR phone line, and not everyones in the community. It is a single pipe per DSL subscriber from your home to the central office or other remote equipment. 

Dale it is ok to use the splitter as you mentioned as long as you are splitting once the coax comes OUT of the DirecTV box and then to the tvs.  You will just be watching the same channel on both TV's.  My mother has that setup and it works fine.  Thats how all tv's in a house USED to be hooked up before the advent of DIGITAL cable and Sat receivers.  The old way did degrade the sig if too many splitters and tvs were used, but they also sold amps that could be used to boost the signal Before putting it thru the splitters, which made the signal stronger before the split and then passed the sig and all was good.

[Graybeard]

I don't understand your logic here Jerry. Perhaps they do things differently there than here.

Down here there is a common line running from the central office down the highway in front of my house. I have a line that comes off that one (two actually but only one is in use these days) and my neighbor has one. There is not a separate line for me or the neighbor past the pole up at the highway on our phone lines.

Same for cable. They have a fiber optic line running down the highway and then off it comes a single line coming down to the pole between us and the neighbor and when they eventually get us hooked up we'll both split off that one cable. We'll be the only two hooked to it.

From my view of things here I don't see where we're anymore on a multiple use line phone wise than cable wise or vice versa. Around here phone lines are hard wire and cable is fiber optic cable line.

[leesecw]

Both systems use fiber optic greybeard. Ive been in communications for 30+ years. Its a long way from when I first started. It depends on how they feed to your house. Phone uses a paired wire hookup, cable uses a coaxial wire. Im not sure how far you are from the cable fiber but they have to run a coax feeder line back to your neck of the woods from an active device in the fiber and then run a drop wire to your house. Depending on how far your house is off the fiber we sometimes ran hard line feeder to the yard of the house  and then ran the dropwire from there. Nowadays both setups are going to face stiff competition not from satellite but from wi-fi tv and internet off cell towers.

[Graybeard]

Cell phone reception here is almost nonexistent no matter what brand. Phone lines here are perhaps 30 years old with no updates. Don't think they are using fiber optics to get it to me. They have told me they are not and have no plans to update to it.

The pole the cable will come off of to me is right at 500' from the main trunk line at the highway and from what I understand about a 1/4 mile from their hub.

[JerryKo]

If you pick up your phone and do not hear your neighbor talking than you are on a single PAIR (tip and ring) made up of two wires that go from your house to the central office.  From your house to the pole is called a drop. but once the drop goes into the" main" line there may be from 50 to thousands of "pairs" which have the ability to feed each individual home.  If your cable is +30 yrs old it is probably copper and not fiber, and this is how it works.  Home that have fiber and are getting FIOS and superspeed internet using that fiber is a lot different, but still have almost an individual line to there house.  Thses are the homes that are using the fiber for phone, internet, and HD digital TV.

Hope this helps.

Jerry

[Graybeard]

I sure claim no expert status on such matters and in fact am about as dumb as dirt about them. I do know there sure are a LOT of folks up and down this highway using that phone line out there and yeah we're all private not party lines. The line doesn't look large enough to have that many pairs of lines but I'll defer to your knowledge on that cuz as I say I have no clue.

From what the cable folks tell me they are using fiber optics out here and yes I will be getting high speed internet up to 8 megs if I wish (3, 5 and 8 are offered), TV service and phone all from them on the same line. I have no clue if that drop from out at the highway and then from the pole to my house is fiber optic or wire. Such things are above my technical level.

I just know that I've been on satellite since moving here in '94 and it is a piss poor way to do things here. How it works elsewhere I dunno but here it's barely better than dial up and at times worse. I did try dial up here and on these old phone lines it too was pretty awful.

[JerryKo]

Im not knocking cable at all, just trying to clear up.  The pairs can be as small as 26gauge wire and can pack a 50pair smaller than a roll of quarters.  Not sure if you ever saw cat5(network) wire, but you know how small the cable is and it has I think at least 4 pairs in it.

From the main fiber to your house my or may not be fiber.  If they mount a large POWERED box somewhere on or in your house it is probable a fiber drop.  The "light " from the fiber will have to be broken down into smaller packets and split up to deliver voice to your phone, internet to your computer, and video to your tv.

I think from the problems you have experienced tho, you are going to love your cable hookup.  Good luck, and let us know how it all goes.

Jerry

[leesecw]

Ive been in cable 30 plus years. It wont be fiber to your house. The only place they would run fiber to  what we used to call a V modem would be a huge number cruncher like EDS or a large manufacturing facility of that sort . You will have depending how far away the tap is, a drop wire of RG6  RG7 or if you over 250 feet away possibly RG 11. The interdiction box will be wired to your old phone interface for your  PH connection . The wires to your tv's and catv modem will be coax.

[DalesCarpentry]

Ive been in cable 30 plus years. It wont be fiber to your house. The only place they would run fiber to  what we used to call a V modem would be a huge number cruncher like EDS or a large manufacturing facility of that sort . You will have depending how far away the tap is, a drop wire of RG6  RG7 or if you over 250 feet away possibly RG 11. The interdiction box will be wired to your old phone interface for your  PH connection . The wires to your tv's and catv modem will be coax.

You guys are in that field and lost me a long time back. If you want to know how to build a house from the ground up I can give my 2 cents worth there. LOL. Dale

[Cheesehead]

In my neck of the woods, the local telephone company offers dsl, on twisted pair copper wire, at download speeds of 256k, 512k, 750k, 1.5 meg, 3 meg, 6 meg, and 10 meg.  The local phone company also has 100% fiber networks in certain areas. That means fiber optic cable to the house. We also have a second competitive phone company in town as well as the cable tv company offering high speed, not to mention wireless companies offering internet. And of course, satallite is available everywhere. So many options.

Cheese

[leesecw]

You have twisted pair running to your house not fiber. The phone company plugs you into the fiber interface at an active device down the road usually called a call box by us older fellers. With cable the trunk lines are run straight out of the node  {communications laser or flamethrower as we call them} then to  a series of amps called line extenders that run the feeder lines that have taps cut into them at numbered sizes in loss value depending on where you are in the cascade. Those are what we attach the drop lines {Coax} that run to the house

[Cheesehead]

The local phone company does have fiber cable to the HOUSE. They call it "fiber to the premisise" or FTTP. They offer 20 meg service. I am sure of this.

Cheese

[JerryKo]

Nope, nowadays we can run fiber to the premise. Its called FTTP.  The drops are actually fiber to the large powered box attached to your house and it is split there.  The larger black "cable" on the far left is the fiber "drop" that comes from the main line to your house, and inside the ONT (optical network terminal) that signal is broken down as I stated before.  Blazing fast too!  Just only avail in lager cities now, but growing everyday.

[JerryKo]

Opps CH,...but thanks.

[JerryKo]

Dale we may have lost you, but let us know how it is working.  Only you can give us the before and after shot!  Let us know.

Jerry

[leesecw]

sheesh I stand correected. 5 years out of the business and everything changes. You guys are making me feel old already. i ddnt retire, i went out for knee operations and while I was gone they were nice enough to elininate my job. Working for jerks never changes