

How 20 mbps Internet can be slower than 8 mbps - old-gregg
http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/verizon-fios-versus-comcast

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theantidote
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.

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lallysingh
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

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kmt
Did you mean 4.2.2.1 - 4.2.2.6?

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lallysingh
YES. Sorry about that.

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andreyf
_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?

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old-gregg
"It's all TCP/IP", really?

[http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-
video-...](http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-lie/)

~~~
ramchip
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.

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old-gregg
You don't have any TV needs because you don't watch anything in real time
[which is how TV is different from, let's say, DVD rentals]. Sports
programming is a big part of it.

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sounddust
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.

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amohr
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.

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sh1mmer
Summary: For most internet use Verizon's 8bmps connection with low latency was
better than FiOS' high latency 20mbps connection.

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nuclear_eclipse
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.

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dattaway
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.

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biohacker42
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.

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jonknee
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.

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electromagnetic
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.

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e40
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.

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prakash
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.

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known
[http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=955999&cid=2490...](http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=955999&cid=24909591)

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jdbeast00
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.

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hs
what _really_ kills the speed is packet drop

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

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drm237
only if it's your neighbors...

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

