dsl 6meg?

[skinnyjoint]

Recently I have moved and we only have 1 cable internet provider, mediacomm. They suck balls basically and the connection is slow, intermitent and especially during peak hrs about all i can do is surf. Latecny in games sucks, and ping/tracert to any game server or webserver will bring back times of 220+ms.

They keep blowing me off saying there is nothing wrong, and its outside there network.... well this is bs, i have been with insight, cox, and roadrunner never had problems.

DSL is offering 6 down on there best line, i thought a phone line could only handle like 1.5 down? will i see 6 down really through dsl? will my connection be better etc? any reccomendations

 

[the_taker]

i used to work for a DSL ISP, and I can shed a little light on this. The speed that you pay for, you get (also taking into account things like copper pair distance, EMI, copper gauge, outside temp, age of cable, etc)
but there is no limitation of copper pairs in general to 1.5Mbps.

They will confirm for you the speed that you are getting to their DSLAM as something around or maybe a little less than your provisioned (the speed you pay for) rate. What they won't ever tell you is that their backbone between the DSLAM may not be high enough to provide full bandwidth for each of their customers on the DSLAM.

What I mean is, your connection to the DSLAM is dedicated bandwidth, but the connection from DSLAM to uplink is shared. I would suggest that you try to get the best speed you are willing to pay for, and ask them your ACTUAL speed versus the provisioned speed. They need to cover themselves against litigation so they won't be able to tell you the bandwidth is shared.

BTW, speedwise, ADSL will go up to approximately 8Mbps down / 1-2Mbps up under ideal conditions. ADSL 2/2+ can get up to about 25Mbps down / 2Mbps up under ideal conditions.

i would suggest trying to setup a continuous ping (using something that can actually log the replies more than just the past few minutes) and see if you get any drops of significant time. Maybe try multiple pings, 1 to your internal router if you have it, 2 to your DSL router, 3 to any pingable IP's at your ISP (not all ISP's have pingable servers or routers for obvious reasons) 4 to the hostname of a public website, like google or apple.com and 5 a ping response to the IP address that the google/apple ping resolves to (to also watch for any DNS related issues)

Happy hunting! (the needle in the network stack that is)