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Questions about ISPs and such
ThumbtackJ
Member UncommonPosts: 669
I live in a fairly small rural town. The only internet I can get here (aside from Dish) is through a local Cable company that uses Roadrunner. It's not bad if all you do is browse the web, watch youtube and what not. But it's only ~5mb/s, with a peak DL rate of ~650KB/s. So downloading, Netflixing, and online gaming at the same time is pretty much horrible. I'd move, but I sort of like the quiet here, and I also can't justify buying a new house and moving everything just for better internet.
My questions are:
Why does my net seem to be crap (disconnects, slower speeds, etc) on days with bad weather? Is it the lines? Coincidence? Maybe they've just been having troubles. I don't know. It sucks though.
Is Dish/Satelite Internet any good? I heard that they have bandwith caps, and that your net goes down easily in rainy/snowy/high wind weather.
Comments
take the cable, because any strong rain or anything blocking the signal(even clouds if is that really dark ones) make it useless, cable is always better and more stable.
also please when you are playing and want zero lag you should never download things just play things, if you so want to downaload things leave it downloading when you are at work or sleeping, pretty much I leave my pc on 24H a day 7 days of week, only in rare cases I turn it off, and let all my download needs to when i'm far from it. and I have a 1MB net
I say get the cable onee check if you pay a monthly fee flat and if have any limit you can use and check anything in the contracts for it
* looks at those internet speeds... then looks at his internet speed of around 120KB/s peak download speeds using Venezuela's fastest ISP and fastest residential plan.....
Excuse me while I go to the corner a little while and wheep..
(at least I still have gas at 12 cents a galon, though)..
What can men do against such reckless hate?
I also do not have enough cable internet speed, its only 30 MB/s.
On the issue you are experiencing it is most likely the cables in your house or your modem. When were the cable lines in your home put in? When did you purchase your cable modem?
On the actual lines if the house is old, the cable running to the modem will most likely need to be replaced. Also on weather issues, it could be a grounding issue. There is alot that goes into a cable signal, and if the cable is not up to snuff in everyway you will notice it in internet speeds.
Your better off than a lot of people, including myself. You just have to prioritize your traffic; a router with QOS can help some, but it won't be a miracle.
As for the weather, it could be an interconnection box somewhere floods out when it rains - I had this happen on a DSL line once, it was the box outside the apartment was broken and it grounded out the telephone lines - telephone still worked fine but DSL signal went to crap. Could be something similar with your cable service. Cable ~shouldn't~ vary with the weather, but if you are in a rural area, they could have above-ground lines going on power poles, interconnection boxes out in fields, etc. and there isn't going to be a lot you can do about that.
Satellite service has gotten a lot better lately, but still has a lot of drawbacks. It will always vary with the weather, particularly snow and heavy cloud cover, and can vary with the seasons (leaves on trees in particular if you aren't careful with dish placement). There will always be high latency - which can kill a lot of online games (particular shooters) - on the order of 800-1500ms+ is normal for a satellite connection. And yes, there are bandwidth caps, they vary widely depending on the plan you purchase. The cheapest plan will have a pretty low cap - usually around 5-10G, which one round of Microsoft updates and a couple of Netflix videos and your already over the cap for the month, at which point you speed gets cut to around dialup speeds until the cap resets for the next month.
If you can at all avoid satellite, I would do so; but many rural areas don't have any other options.
What is QOS?
And yeah that's exactly what we have. So perhaps that's what's up. I did talk to one of their workers, and supposedly they had a meeting talking about adding a 10mb/s option, but nothing is official yet.
QoS stands for Quality of Service. Settings on the router can ensure certain types of traffic gain priority over others. There are many ways of doing this, from a technical standpoint, but typical devices only support one or two methods. Typical home routers often have no QoS settings. Refer to the manual or provide a router model number if you want more information.
If your ISP is only now looking at offering 10Mb/s download speeds, my guess is you live far from major uban areas. Suburbs are the best place to live, in my opinion. You get all the major services and just enough peace and quiet if you find the right place.
Traditionally, it was a landline phone connection for the upload for satellite internet. I would guess they still do that, but I've abandoned following that technology since the early 2000s.
Newer satellites have went up semi-recently (last couple of years). These have narrow-beam transponders, and the home-mounted dish can actually broadcast back up to the satellite.
They get respectable speeds - upwards of 15MB/sec down and 3MB/sec up, for not needing a physical line at all. That's probably half of what the OP's current cable connection is at max speed.
The main problem (aside from the data caps) is that the latency remains high - it has to be beamed all the way up to the satellite, then bounced back down to the ground to a relay station before it finally gets onto the internet, and that's something like a 44,600 mile round trip - even at the speed of light it's going to take some time.
The secondary problem being the weather/direct Line of Sight - if anything blocks your direct path to the satellite (snow, heavy cloud cover, trees, etc) your going to have service interruptions. Minorly, events such as major solar flares can also affect your connection (seriously).