Internets

A general question for the folks with here with a home internet connection. How do people get their internet? I get mine via DSL, but that wont last long since the apartment I'm moving into doesnt have internet service by default. What do people find to be the fastest internet? I know some of my friends get faster speeds on cable, and some get faster than that with DSL. What do people here use/recommend?

I've had a very comcastic experience with a company who shall not be named, though they charge a bit much for it. WoW offered a similar service (internet/phone package) for a slightly cheaper rate and their upstream was adjustable (though the default 64k/s uploads always worked fine for me). Unfortunately, when I last moved, I was just across the street from their service range so I had to find a new service. They're still trying to bill me for a modem they said they'd pick up but never did.

Patrick Pineda said:

Internets

I am full of them.

Up until last week, I was stealing wifi from an open network somewhere in my apartment complex. I could only get the signal from my bedroom, so I set up an old Pentium 2 with a wireless card to forward the connection to the network in my living room. I was using Ubuntu server edition and iptables to masquerade, so there was basically no load on the computer and, thus, no latency. Unfortunately, the router seems to have disappeared. I used aircrack to break the wep encryption on another nearby network, but my conscience (and fear of legal repercussions) kept me from using it.

I also set up my Razr to connect to Verizon the sneaky way and get free DUN. Instead of using expensive data transmission, it only uses regular minutes, which I have plenty of, and nights and weekends are unlimited. Unfortunately, this is really slow because I use the 1x network instead of EVDO. There is a potential for getting caught (although it is much less on the 1x network), so I only connect for a few minutes at the most each day just to check email or for emergencies.

TL:DR, I'm a cheapskate college student who doesn't like to pay for internet.

@exp:Ubuntu sounds like a great OS...I've been tempted to use it.I've also been wondering if AT&T offers the same service as Verizon offered.I've been tempted to see if I can turn my cell into a wireless modem,I get a pretty good signal despite me being in the middle of nowhere.

My Internets get sent to me through a series of tubes.

A free 100 mb connection offered by university and a cheap cable connection for the few blocked websites/applications.

Haloless0320 said:

I've also been wondering if AT&T offers the same service as Verizon offered.I've been tempted to see if I can turn my cell into a wireless modem,I get a pretty good signal despite me being in the middle of nowhere.

Just to clarify, the way I'm doing it is not offered by Verizon. They do offer a tethering service, but it is quite expensive. Additionally, the method I'm using requires modifications to the phone's internal settings which can only be achieved using Motorola and Qualcomm developer software that is not publicly available and can seriously mess up your phone if you're not careful. For some reason, further changes are required to the filesystem if you want to tether using linux instead of Windows. I also replaced the crippled Verizon OS with the Alltel one, but that's not necessary for free DUN and is significantly more difficult.

I have mine sent thru fiber optics by a company formerly known as Starpower. The latter company that came out of it is s POS, but that's a whole different convo for a different time

ADSL, but when one of the local ISPs gets their heads out of their collective ass and start expanding their fiberoptic lines it's 50Mbps full screaming duplex baby!

Parents' DSL at the moment; in a few weeks, me and two roommates will likely get our own DSL connection.

And speaking of internets, I win them.

DSL.

Comcast. It's the only way to get internet, for the low, low price of $60 a month.

/dies

Optimum Online

ADSL. It's cheaper than Wireless (the only broadband alternative in my neighbourhood) and easier to share. Wish I was closer to the exchange. :(

Cable.

Danarchy said:

Comcast. It's the only way to get internet, for the low, low price of $60 a month.

Yeah, that's my only legitimate option as well other than DSL, and since I don't have a home phone line, I can't go the latter route. Well, I suppose I could set up a home phone line, but that combined with DSL would be just as expensive. Campus is a quick bike ride away, though, so that's where the majority of my internets come from. I may resubscribe to Comcast once my wife and I figure out our finances. Both of us are going to school full time and won't be working more than 10 or 15 hours a week. Hooray for a butt-ton of loans.

I have the most slow-ass DSL in the world. It has died twice in the last 30 minutes.

Internets. O RLY? YA RLY!

I have cable internet, where I live we have two choices here as far as cable goes, and I don't think either of them offer DSL. I get pretty decent speeds, pages load when I click on them and I've had download rates over 1mb. I like cable, but I've never had the option of trying dsl so I don't have an opinion of it, however I have heard that dsl is generally slower than cable.

I switched to ADSL 1024/384 kbps a couple of years ago, now silently upgraded to 8192/512 kbps.

Before that, I used dial up, and still have an emergency dial=up number and modem handy.

Also, having to live away from home for a few months, I got myself a "wireless DSL" (ADSM) module from Wind, it works at DSL speeds (typically 128-1024 kbps) and you can literally use it nearly anywhere. You just have to be careful with the download volume. However it easily beats Internet Cafes for things that take longer times rather than download volume (compares to the 1.5 Eur/hour at the cafe, the 30 Eur/month are a blessing!)

Creaphis said:

And speaking of internets, I win them.

I instead, like John Romero (or Eric Bauman?) , I'm about to make t3h 1nt3rn3t my b1tch. Suck 1t |)0\/\/|\|. Yeah, I'm 1337.

I've got ADSL at home, pretty decent. Bellsouth 2WIRE modem. Plays Second Life fairly well, and I can destroy people on Painkiller in Germany from my US connection with around 10 or 20 ms.

2MB DSL that comes through a parallel landline that doesn't belong to the telcos at any point, but to the ISP (I can use it for phone calls too). The good thing about it is the soft cap, sometimes I can get it to work at 5MB during late-night/weekends, presumably from reduced load at my concentration node. Costs about u$s40.

@Zaldron: That's awesome. Cox Communications, my previous ISP, used to sell routers and modems that were manufactured to not work properly and they had some outrageously stupid hard caps (like at one point the connection for me and two others was limited to 1GB of downloads a month).

It's meant for businesses and cybercafes, it's hardly cheap where I live (but not outrageous, considering the ineptitude of 'popular' telco-backed ISPs here).

SDSL Speakeasy because of the amount of silly computers required to have internets with a hardware firewall. If it werent for the firewall I'd be using ADSL.

I'm going to college internet next week though, and hell that's gonna be a bouncy ride.

You know, I've never really understood sync and async DSL quite properly. What kind of speeds do you get in online games, BlackFish?

Fisk said:

You know, I've never really understood sync and async DSL quite properly. What kind of speeds do you get in online games, BlackFish?

ADSL stands for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, as opposed to Symmetric (or plain) DSL.

In a nutshell, in ADSL you get different upload/download speeds, with the download speed exceeding the upload speed by a large ratio (can be as small as 3:1, but can even go upwards to 24:1, e.g. 512/192, 1024/256 .... 8M/512K etc.

Which is what made DSL affordable for the masses, in the first place. Symmetrical DSL is mostly needed for businesses that are going to run WAN/VPNs on it, as an alternative to leased lines and T1 connections.

As for the ping times you get (and which reflect themselves in games), the best I ever achieved was 50 ms for local servers, with no cap on the worst-end performance (which really depends where you are connecting too, quality of your router etc.). Let's say an average would be like 120-150 ms which is marginal for FPS games unless they are using some sort of lag compensation. E.g. Battlefield 1942 is playable, while ZDaemon is not (I got ridicolously high ping times and had to actually lead my aim to get a close-quarters SSG kill. Fun, huh?)

Ah, then I guess I have ADSL. I had no idea what those acronyms represented, to be honest.

Maes said:

had to actually lead my aim

I've always had to do that to a minor extent. I thought that was standard.

SDSL is fine but as Maes said it's better for the business environment. Game wise, ping is the same as other connections.

to save money on those gosh darned monthly connection plans i just decided one time to downloady the entire internets onto my hard drive so now its all right there i don't need to worry my pretty little head about adsl and cable and connection speeds and all those things its just so much more convenient right there on my HD i can surf for free forever.

take that big phone companies ;)