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Starke Von Oben

I hate dial-up!

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...still stuck with it. My part of the village is the only house that can't get it. Every other house can, apart from ours. I checked the map and it seems that my house lands right on the spot where the exchange stops - how fucking typical is that? I'd probably do more with it than most of the people who have access to it anyway. Occasionally someone forgets to protect their connection and my computer picks it up, but most of the time it's back to the sodding drudgery of 56k.

Who else is still in the stone age?

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I was in the stone age all the way up until a couple years ago, but mostly because we couldn't really afford a higher speed connection.

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fraggle said:

It sure is nice being able to download stuff at 700kB/sec.


if you can find a mirror that dosent limit your download rate.

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Ultraboy94 said:

if you can find a mirror that dosent limit your download rate.


BitTorrent works well. Other than downloading stuff with though, having such a fast download speed isn't terribly useful. It's not like Google, or any other site, will load faster with it.

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I had dial-up until late 2006, but I didn't consider it stone-age: the first "contract free" dial-up deals had appeared only by then, and I had a discounted access via my uni's landline (and still do). DSL was still expensive, but at a certain point the monthly phone fees exceeded the minimum DSL fee, so I performed the next logical step.

In practice, if you mostly view text/html content, dial-up is not so bad: text gets compressed further, so the effective speed may be higher than 50 kbits/sec. You can ever play some online games with it, depending on how ping-tolerant they are (BF1942 servers at least had a ping tolerance of up to 300 ms).

Sure enough, things get ugly as soon as you try viewing a youtube video...

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Starke Von Oben said:

...still stuck with it. My part of the village is the only house that can't get it. Every other house can, apart from ours. I checked the map and it seems that my house lands right on the spot where the exchange stops - how fucking typical is that? I'd probably do more with it than most of the people who have access to it anyway. Occasionally someone forgets to protect their connection and my computer picks it up, but most of the time it's back to the sodding drudgery of 56k.

Who else is still in the stone age?


That sounds very similar to my experience a few years back and it used to drive me insane. I could literally walk to a house with good broadband in less time than it would take me to DL a medium sized WAD. For some reason, someone in their infinite wisdom decided that it was a good idea to connect my village to a 'phone exchange 7 miles away, despite the fact that the houses just outside the village were connected to one much closer.

Eventually, they changed the policy from "you're too far away, we won't even try" to "if it works, you can have it". So, with a bit of rewiring to my house to hang on to an incredibly weak signal, and weeks of arguing with the phone company, I was able to get the slowest type of broadband connection possible. It is slow and sometimes drops out but it is still one hell of a lot better then dialup.

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In any case, it's better than nothing. One of the first things I did on my new laptop was setting up the built-in modem with a bunch of "free internet" dial up numbers. You never know when you might need them ;-)

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I have Qwest DSL. Most of the time its no better than dial up. We'd have cable, but theres no lines laid out in this area so we're fucked.

There's talk about a state wide plan to lay down fiber optic lines in the next couple years though, so we're like to get that ASAP.

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Bucket said:

What is 'dial-up'? Is that like smoke signals?

No - that's using a 300 baud modem to leech files from local BBS's. Dial-up internet is more like having to share a clapped-out car with your sister.

Maes said:

In any case, it's better than nothing.

But not by much - given the trend towards graphics-intensive websites with embedded multimedia.

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Why don't you get mobile internet if you can't get a regular set up?

In Sweden 3g internet isn't really more expensive than Cable or ADSL.

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fraggle said:

It sure is nice being able to download stuff at 700kB/sec.


I set up a 200 MB torrent earlier today. I went to make lunch, came back, and it was done. :D

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GreyGhost said:

But not by much - given the trend towards graphics-intensive websites with embedded multimedia.


Works great for sites like forums and wikis (which make up 90% of my surfing anyway) and even many browser-based games, though. If a page is filled with annoying graphics and "embedded multimedia", then it's quite probably on my black list to begin with.

Such pages existed already in 1998-1999, and they just didn't cut it even back then. They were shitty practice then, just as they are shitty practice now.

One of the reasons pages don't load with lightning speed even if you load part of the data locally, is that there's a lot of data pulled from different servers on your average webpage, and part of the contents is generated either functionally by Javascript or on-demand by a remote server that has to process millions of other requests. Pages that have a load dependency on some ads server and fail to render if that craps out are particularly bad -_-

My point is that a well-designed page will load acceptably even with a 56K connection (assuming you get an actual speed > 40 kbps with no reconnections or speed re-negotiation delays, which can result in up to 30 seconds of nothing between loading). A badly designed one on the other hand will be slow even if you load most of its apparently "heavy" elements locally.

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kristus said:

3g internet...

...is a scam for a lot of people, at least here. It's marketed as "having a fast broadband everywhere", and most people who fall for that are the gullible tech-noobs who want to have broadband on their summer cottage, which is always in the middle of nowhere, maybe even on an isolated little island far far away from the nearest town. And then the customers get pissed off because they thought they were buying broadband and what they got was something much worse than dial-up. It also doesn't help that 3g internet is actually marketed with such summer cottage imagery.

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kristus said:

Why don't you get mobile internet if you can't get a regular set up?


I had to use one such solution (nominal 7.2 Mbps ADSM, with practical maximum around 1.5 Mbps, average around 300-400 Kbps). It generally worked OK, and I could even use torrents and youtube with it, but I had to be careful not to exceed the monthly quota of 5 GB (both upload and download counted towards the limit), so I surfed with a net meter. It was worth it over a cyber cafe though, especially for time-intensive rather than volume-intensive usage.

A typical surfing day would be 100-120 MB on average, and of course not surfing for a couple of days generated "savings". Max I ever downloaded was 864 in a single day (there also was a limit of 1 GB/day). Of course, when possible, I tried to conserve my own bandwidth by performing large downloads either at cyber cafes or army's internet.

kristus said:

In Sweden 3g internet isn't really more expensive than Cable or ADSL.


This means that you either have very cheap mobile internet, or very expensive Cable/ADSL. My current ADSL plan is 22.5 Eur/8 Mbps with no limits, by comparison 7.2 Mbps ADSM is 30 Eur/month for a 5 GB plan, 50-60 Eur/month for unlimited (but the 1 GB limit per day still applies). Granted, if you don't warez stuff all day, it may be much more convenient to just go with wireless, even with the 5 GB plan. You save all the rewiring applications and hassle.

Jodwin said:

Coverage issues


These can be a hindrance, indeed. I was sort of lucky because in the borderline town I was sent to serve, due to the high presence of military personnel, the telcos had got the message and had unusually good 3G coverage. In comparison, my hometown had a weaker signal despite being bigger and far from the border. In any case, 3G broadband should be able to fall back to EDGE speeds (64 kbps), and if everything fails, to GSM speed (9600 baud), in which case you really start thinking of dial-up in a new light.

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Once you get past coverage, the issue with 3G is not the throughput but the latency. Even with our carrier-grade connections at work 150-250ms is an accepted minimum, up to a max of 800-1500ms.

Carmack found this to be an issue with iPhone Doom, which is why multiplayer is bluetooth-only. Mobile gaming at best is currently restricted to turn-based games like Chess or Cestos.

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Maes said:

My point is that a well-designed page will load acceptably even with a 56K connection



Too bad that 'well-designed' and corporate moronism don't work well together. The idiots always demand that the crap is there to make the page a pain to navigate and use

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Enjay said:

Eventually, they changed the policy from "you're too far away, we won't even try" to "if it works, you can have it". So, with a bit of rewiring to my house to hang on to an incredibly weak signal, and weeks of arguing with the phone company, I was able to get the slowest type of broadband connection possible. It is slow and sometimes drops out but it is still one hell of a lot better then dialup.


The only broadband access we can have is broadband anytime, which can only be assessed in my brother's room. But even then it's a pain in the arse. The laptop has to be placed in the most awkward part of the room, and still it's dependant on the weather (like dial up).

Last night I was just two seconds away from getting microsoft.net framework for doombuilder 2 on my brother's connection and then the weather changed - 2 seconds was all I needed! The connection wouldn't come back all night, so I screamed to the heavens as my girlfriend laughed at my expense.

I looked a proper twat.

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Maes said:

This means that you either have very cheap mobile internet, or very expensive Cable/ADSL. My current ADSL plan is 22.5 Eur/8 Mbps with no limits, by comparison 7.2 Mbps ADSM is 30 Eur/month for a 5 GB plan, 50-60 Eur/month for unlimited (but the 1 GB limit per day still applies). Granted, if you don't warez stuff all day, it may be much more convenient to just go with wireless, even with the 5 GB plan. You save all the rewiring applications and hassle.


Well prices vary greatly depending on what you choose to get. But roughly. (I'll just take one provider here too because there's too many of them to cover them all)

Stationary Broadband cost between 99 sek (0.5mbs) - 399 sek (25-50mbs) (no download limits)
Mobile 3g Broadband cost between 99 sek - 300 sek (Up to 10mbs or alternatively 16mbs if you're in stockholm). And from what I could find on limits. After 20gb a month the speed is locked at 200kbs.

Exchange rate.
10 sek is about the same as 1€

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kristus said:

It sure is nice being able to download stuff at 2.5mB/sec.

Yeah, I was waiting for someone to say that :-)

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Starke Von Oben said:

so I screamed to the heavens as my girlfriend laughed at my expense.

I looked a proper twat.


Heh, my mate had a similar Internet drop-out when he was trying to get something very important done. He told me that he lay down on the floor and kicked his heels, screaming in anger as his girlfriend stood by and laughed.

He is single now.

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GreyGhost said:

But not by much - given the trend towards graphics-intensive websites with embedded multimedia.


Like Flash.

in b4 enjay rant about sites that use flash :v

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I'm on a 15 Mb/s cable connection and I still rant about sites overusing Flash. In addition to waiting for simple pages to load, I have to put up with crappy navigation and accessibility because some "designer" thinks the look of the thing is more important than it just working.

I've used GoToAssist with people over dial-up. It's scary how well that can work in some cases.

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