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Cable or Dial Up

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Do you still use dial up.
1. Yes - It is fine for me. 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
2. Yes - It is horrible 8%  8%  [ 3 ]
3. No - I feel the need for speed. 53%  53%  [ 21 ]
4. No - but I would be fine with dial up. 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
5. No - Only because I watch Youtube and Flash games 3%  3%  [ 1 ]
6. No - Only because I download lots of big files. 8%  8%  [ 3 ]
7. No - I like to watch videos intended for audiences over the age of 18. 5%  5%  [ 2 ]
8. No - I am committed to the P2P community. 5%  5%  [ 2 ]
9. What is the Internet? 3%  3%  [ 1 ]
10. 42 13%  13%  [ 5 ]
11. No - The number 69 is a special Interest. 5%  5%  [ 2 ]
Total votes : 40

auntblabby
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03 May 2012, 1:18 am

i miss the gool ol' days when a true 56k [actually 53kb/s] modem connection [fiber optic infrastructure] was plenty fast for the way the web used to be without all these fat videos and resource-sucking applets running in the background.



MyFutureSelfnMe
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03 May 2012, 10:47 am

I was honestly never satisfied with 56k, even circa 1995.



slave
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03 May 2012, 3:29 pm

TallyMan wrote:
Here in rural France it is a case of dial-up or buying a satellite dish; the dish option being way too expensive. The company Orange (formerly France telecom) has a virtual monopoly on communications here and don't invest in rural areas. As a consequence I'm stuck with dial-up. The connection speed is often as low as 20k, this is what you'd find in a third world African village in the middle of nowhere. The insulation is crumbling and falling off the telephone wires. The wires themselves are hanging off the poles here and there and in some cases the poles themselves are leaning over ready to topple onto the ground. Welcome to third-world France!


WOW!
You have my sincere sympathy.
HSI should be a human right.



auntblabby
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04 May 2012, 4:22 am

slave wrote:
TallyMan wrote:
Here in rural France it is a case of dial-up or buying a satellite dish; the dish option being way too expensive. The company Orange (formerly France telecom) has a virtual monopoly on communications here and don't invest in rural areas. As a consequence I'm stuck with dial-up. The connection speed is often as low as 20k, this is what you'd find in a third world African village in the middle of nowhere. The insulation is crumbling and falling off the telephone wires. The wires themselves are hanging off the poles here and there and in some cases the poles themselves are leaning over ready to topple onto the ground. Welcome to third-world France!


WOW!
You have my sincere sympathy.
HSI should be a human right.

in rural parts of america, all the phone companies can guarantee is 9600 baud. that is barely even enough for dial-up with any kind of GUI, but it was adequate back in the days of command-line OS and bulletin boards.



MyFutureSelfnMe
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04 May 2012, 6:50 pm

I'm not aware of any US locations that can only achieve 9600 baud, but like I said there are some places where a T1 is the only option. You just have to spring for it.



auntblabby
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04 May 2012, 6:58 pm

MyFutureSelfnMe wrote:
I'm not aware of any US locations that can only achieve 9600 baud, but like I said there are some places where a T1 is the only option. You just have to spring for it.

where i live in the wilds of mason county, washington, there are large patches of old copper-wired telephone service with dial-up the only option.



MyFutureSelfnMe
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05 May 2012, 3:05 pm

56k should work on even older copper shouldn't it?



auntblabby
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06 May 2012, 7:20 pm

MyFutureSelfnMe wrote:
56k should work on even older copper shouldn't it?

nope. my local telecom told me [back a decade or so when they hadn't upgraded their cabling to fiberoptic] that with all-copper wiring, they couldn't guarantee anything above 9600 baud. i averaged roughly 23 kb/s over my dial-up [with a "56k" modem] because we still had crackly old copper phone lines in my part of the county, i was over 10 miles outside of the nearest major city [tacoma], and there were no large business concerns out where i lived to spur development of fiberoptic infrastructure. thanks to wally world, though, we got the upgrades and so a lite form of dsl became available.



CosmicRuss
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06 May 2012, 7:53 pm

My 6.8Mb line was recently upgraded so I now can d/load at 15Mb.

My upload was 340kbps but now roughly 1Mbps so I can share files quicker. :P


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06 May 2012, 7:56 pm

I do not use dial up to me it is too slow I use cable.



Kinme
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29 Jul 2012, 9:19 am

Dial-up was a curse. I hated every second of using it when we couldn't afford cable internet. :evil:



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30 Jul 2012, 12:25 am

Image

Welcome! You got mail!



MyFutureSelfnMe
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30 Jul 2012, 1:27 pm

auntblabby wrote:
MyFutureSelfnMe wrote:
56k should work on even older copper shouldn't it?

nope. my local telecom told me [back a decade or so when they hadn't upgraded their cabling to fiberoptic] that with all-copper wiring, they couldn't guarantee anything above 9600 baud. i averaged roughly 23 kb/s over my dial-up [with a "56k" modem] because we still had crackly old copper phone lines in my part of the county, i was over 10 miles outside of the nearest major city [tacoma], and there were no large business concerns out where i lived to spur development of fiberoptic infrastructure. thanks to wally world, though, we got the upgrades and so a lite form of dsl became available.


I've spent time in a lot of places, including the mountainous regions of central Mexico, and I have yet to see a place where dialup is all that could be achieved. You could use a microwave transmitter to span the 10 miles to Tacoma (I think). T1 should have also been possible. Moot now anyway, since this is in the past for you :)



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30 Jul 2012, 2:58 pm

Modern webpages are image and video heavy, even forums like this have a bunch of images all over. Dial up is not practical anymore if anything else can be gotten at a reasonable price. Hence, my family has cable internet. We used to have DSL, but a company called FrontierNet bought the AT&T service in my area, and they now have frequent outages, and friends of mine who use them say that they occasionally try to charge a double bill. The other local ISP, TC3Net, is plagued by even more outages than Frontier. Comcast is simply the best choice here.



BlueMax
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30 Jul 2012, 8:22 pm

I could stand being on 1Mbit, but I have 50Mbit and every station my cable company offers because I work for 'em and get a deep discount. ;)



MyFutureSelfnMe
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30 Jul 2012, 9:47 pm

largosan wrote:
Modern webpages are image and video heavy, even forums like this have a bunch of images all over. Dial up is not practical anymore if anything else can be gotten at a reasonable price. Hence, my family has cable internet. We used to have DSL, but a company called FrontierNet bought the AT&T service in my area, and they now have frequent outages, and friends of mine who use them say that they occasionally try to charge a double bill. The other local ISP, TC3Net, is plagued by even more outages than Frontier. Comcast is simply the best choice here.


I don't think DSL is going to survive much longer. In NYC the options are fiber optic or DOCSIS 3 cable, and both are 50+ mbps. Well, those or Verizon 4G, which is actually pretty good if you don't need to download full length movies or anything. I think 4G mobile is around 30mbps? The Verizon caps are a few GB a month.