Cable

Is cable worth the extra there charging for it? Right now I've got ADSL (from Virgin) and it's not very good. In the morning its fine but through out the day it gets slower and slower which gets quite annoying. (don’t bother trying to fix that, I've tried everything I can at my end) Is cable that much more faster and reliable than ADSL, I've noticed that quite a lot of people use it and its looking quite attractive. Any help of insight would be appreciated.

 

Depends on the ISP. I have Virgin cable... don't get it from them, mate.

 

I was thinking of Virgin, is it really that bad.

 

Well I'm on 2Mb (and I can actually download at 220KB/sec so it's OK in that respect), but once I've downloaded more than 300MB in a day, I get capped to 1Mb. Upload is always limited to 7KB/sec. Customer service is non existent, and they keep sending letters saying we use more bandwidth than we should (this is a ****ing 'unlimited' package!). Oh, and there's an outage at ~2AM most Saturday mornings. And we lost our connection last night from 9:30PM to roughly 3AM. This sort of outage happens at least once most months.

If I was in charge, I'd swap to Be or someone in an instant, but my parents don't really care about this kind of crap, only that we get internet, home phone and a contract mobile for £30/month.

 

Well, I like cable alot better then DSL. About a month ago I had SBC Yahoo DSL, it was horrible, frequent disconnects, I would go for days in a row running at 256kbps when I pay for 1.5mbps, it was just absolute junk. I recently switched to a local cable companies cable internet, and it's much better. I constantly get my 1.5mbps connection, I have little to no trouble with downtime, it's at least 100% better. Really this may be the companies, but I thought I'd share it anyways.

 

another vote for not going virgin. We get capped, the line times out, modem has to be reset, they cancelled my direct debit without telling me, they swapped me to online billing (at my request) but wont give me a username for it... etc etc...

RwD

 

I'm with Virgin cable @ Uni too and it's for most of the time ok I guess, can get 400kb/sec download 40kb/sec upload. However reliability is shocking as the other guys said, get capped to the most horrific of speeds (such as 6kb/sec). This is almost always the case at 6pm on the dot and lasts till about 1-2am. I've had a much better experience with ADSL (only used Nildram) and although had the odd d/c it's been generally very fast and reliable. So I guess it's more the case of the provider than the technology and ofc personal experiences?

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/10/virgin_media_throttling_update/

 

No, you don't peak (4PM-midnight) hours only.

I must be lucky then as I've been with NTL/VM for over 10 years & CS has always been OK when I've needed it - a bit drawn out sometimes but it gets there.
So, what are you using all that bandwidth for?

Going by my friends' & family's experience of ADSL I'll stick to cable thanks.

 

Parents have been on Virgin / NTL cable for years and we have never had a problem. Speeds always good never been capped etc.

 

I've never had issues with Virgins throttling, 5Mb isn't a tiny throttle, it still gives ample speed for gaming.

 

Your question raises further questions.
Per se Cable is no better than DSL. Those are simply networking technologies.
You complain about speed dropping at what seems like the time when other customers go online. This is a question of your ISP running with sub-par capacity. High quality ISPs (at least in my country) know the importance of capacity and make sure that even at peaks there is no more than 90% usage. Most even expand x-points capacity as soon as the 50% mark is hit by peaks.
So what this means is your question is probably about getting the promised capacity from your ISP.
As I don't know the rules and regulations of your country I can't tell you what you may demand or not. But I will encourage you to check your current and eventually future ISPs websites for promises regarding bandwidth.

Now: You should keep in mind that when using DSL the network overhead eats into bandwidth, meaning that a 2mbit/s does not equal you getting 2mbit/s (or 250 KB/s) transfers but rather about 80-90% throughput when looking at it in Windows. This is normal and should not cause worry.
When using cable I'm afraid I don't remember the (general) entire network flow, but I would expect at least a 5% overhead for just TCP alone.

Anyhows: Grab the phone and ask your ISP to please boost capacity for the DSL central you're on and tell them you'll be gone otherwise.

Also: When you say that speeds drop make sure you test against multiple sources (with no p2p or other downloading/uploading in the background) to see whether you can actually gain your speed from some servers or it indeed is your ISP. As a matter a fact this should be step #1 BEFORE calling and complaining to your ISP

 

So does Cable suffer as much as as the copper wires do when other people (in other houses) go online, does the speed drop as much.
Right now on speedtest.net Im getting 105 KB/S Down and 269 KB/S Up to London which is about 50 Miles away.

 

Neither suffer. It's a question of bandwidth allocated to the central by your ISP.

The only thing that affects the speeds of these techs is noise. Where I suspect DSL is easier affected by distance, but I'm not sure. And noise is always there. It isn't changing by the amount of users.

To explain these two technologies so that you understand why the amount of users should absolutely not affect network performance if the central has sufficient bandwidth:
Every customer (cable or dsl) has his/her own line of wire all the way to the nearest central. Here all the lines are plugged separately into a "switch". From this "switch" there is a fiber optic (hopefully, otherwise their HW is heavily dated ) connection to your ISPs backbone.
This scenario you can compare to installing a switch in your home and connecting X computers to use this one connection to go online. Now if you have a 20mbit dsl and just 1 of your connected computers is downloading a file at 10mb/s (that's bit not BYTE) there's approx. 10 mbit going unused.
If you then promise all your other family members that they can always download at 20mbit you should consider yourself a liar.

BUT here's the magic part: If you scale this up and out you will realize that 300 20mbit customers never reach consumption of anything near 6gbit. More likely it will be in the neighborhood of 600mbit at high peaks. Then there's no reason for you to rent or lease or even buy a backbone of 6gbit (as this gets extremely expensive when you scale this further and have say 5000 homes on a single central).
Instead you monitor network consumption and once the peaks reach a defined amount of the capacity you expand it.

So: In fact an ISP can sell 5000 2mbit lines while not being able to actually support 5000x20 mbit on their central/backbone. Clever eigh?!

The sad part then is when you're a customer at a company that doesn't give a hoot about peak time congestion. Which in my opinion is valid reason to terminate any contract as even the simplest demographic consideration will tell you that when everybody comes home from work, have eaten and put the children to sleep, they want to get online.

But as I mentioned earlier: Check, check, check and check again against multiple servers in different places before you suspect the central of running low on capacity. Ask people in your neighborhood using same ISP if they experience the same pattern. Most of times the customer shoots at the ISP because they don't have their facts right. Other times there may be a problem with the ISPs monitoring of the central.
I used to work in the pro helpdesk at one of Denmarks largest ISPs where I found a bug with the delivered backbone capacity during peak hours after noticing a recurrence in calls from users connected to a certain central. BUT most of the people calling in complaining over speed simply didn't check on enough source servers and a lot had no idea of keeping their winblows clean from malware.
My point being that the fault may lay at the ISP but statistics prove it incredibly rare ;-)

 

1. is cable actually available to you in your property (no point wondering if it's better if it isn't available)?
2. imo you are more likely to get nearer to the suggested package speed on cable than on ADSL but yes, cable can have similar contention issues (no. of users sharing same bandwidth) as ADSL.

To give you an idea though (& it's outside peak hours now so not strictly comparable) I'm getting 18000kb/s down & 718kb/s up atm via speedtest.net on VM's 20Mb cable package.

 

Yes, I can get cable in my area. Thanks for the help everyone, especially OleJ. I'll have A talk to people with the same ISP and see if they have the same problem. Right now I understand the contention ration is 20:1 where I live.

 

Well my mate is on 20meg Virgin/NTL. and when they (Theres 3 of them) go over 1gig a day they get put down to 10meg.
lol its stupid.

 

holy crap! they're actually making the throttling even worse!

I recently upgraded the package from 4mb to 10mb. just because the 4mb,when throttled (miniscule 128k upload), made the connection unusable for anything that uses much upload bandwidth.

but now the 10mb upload is going to be changed from 256k to a mere 192k when throtted, and upload throttling will be much easier to trigger with this new system

If it wasn't for the fact our phoneline is awfull and can't stably run ADSL above 2.5MB, i'd be cancelling Virgin by now. Bring back telewest, it was orders of magnitude better before virgin took over and broke it

 

It's only for the top 3% of uploaders and downloaders, unless you really think you'll fit in that band then you'll be fine

 

The state of broadband in the UK is terrible. I am with Demon over ADSL and the customer service is abysmal. I have had ADSL in the two properties I lived in one was a flat and everyone who wanted internet had to have ADSL and I now live in a house where most people have cable. In the flat I had a 8 meg connection but could only get 3.5 meg at off peak times due to distance from exchange. Furthermore during peak times, it was awfull, everything crawled browsing at times became impossible. In my house i get a max download speed of about 6.5 which I am very pleased with. At peak times I do notice a slow down but not as much as before. As for upload throttling (no comment). Wanted to move to virgin but hearing about the terrible cap limit I am glad I stuck with Demon.