Running half-fast on dialup today ...

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This morning I woke up to a non-working DSL connection, then it took a couple of hours to dig out and install a modem and get connected through my ISP's dialup service made available as a "backup".

AuntBlabby: Wanna race?! If you do, lemme know and I will go into Win98 and we can see how long it takes each of us to do a couple of posts here!

I had a bizarre problem recently. I have dial-up access anyway due to living in the middle of nowhere. But there were times when that dropped speed even slower - sometimes down to 1/10 or even less of normal dial up speed! It took several weeks before I pinned the problem down to the modem which was slowly failing. It turned out that as the modem got warm and there was more traffic passing through it, the more it slowed down! I normally expect devices such as this to work or completely fail and not go into a state somewhere in between. A new modem fixed the problem anyway. In the mean time I was cursing my ISP for seemingly throttling my already slow connection. It was only when I got an account with a second ISP and discovered the problem still existed that made me look for other causes.

What shape are your phone lines in? DSL is VERY nit-picky about line quality. I would call your phone company to do a few line tests.

TallyMan: I never had a modem heat up and slow down, but I have often had trouble picking fast ones out of the pile!

nthach: Old equipment and lines have been a problem here in this area for a long time, and the line coming from the pole to my house is likely as old as the house ... circa 1960 ... but a technician came out a few weeks ago and checked things over and said I have one of the best connections available! Overall, the service is good, and the DSL problem this morning actually covered some portion of the state.

Fibre and 3G.. Nothing's gonna bring me down

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Retro - Cool! I wish I had Dial-Up as a backup. This year we've been having sporadic cable outages that have been frustrating when I need to get stuff done.

Cable/iPhone

If the iPhone isn't good enough (it always is...)......then I would just run to Panera Bread or Starbucks.
I don't want to go back to the dial-up days.
I remember being yelled at for tying up the phone lines when I was a kid.

If I lived in a rural area that had no dsl/cable I would go satellite. I had satellite before cable/DSL was in our area. It isn't bad... I'm not a gamer so latency isn't an issue.... they have a throttle though.... I only hit it a few times but I'm not a huge downloader anyways....

Before wifi was widely available at hotels I used Budget Dialup....they were cheap and reliable...you paid one price per year and use your hours whenever....

As far as high-speed internet via landline goes, both AT&T and Comcast are decently reliable - but hybrid fiber-coax networks like Comcast/Cox/Cablevision/Time Warner can go down on occasion and you're sharing bandwidth with people on your HFC "node" - the group of houses that is connected via plain old coax to your cable company's fiber to coax equipment(usually found in a big gray box or with your cable company's name on it). However, DOCSIS - cable internet has BIG capacity thanks to their digital modulation scheme - each QAM on a cable system is good for nearly 40Mbits.

DSL is slower, U-Verse/ADSL2 is capable of hitting 50Mbps but AT&T caps it to 24-36Mbps. but unless you have a internet only U-Verse plan, you'll only see up to 18Mbps of that since 1/2 of that bandwidth is dedicated to TV. Plain old DSL is capable of hitting 6Mbps.

I only recommend Siemens/Efficient, Motorola/Netopia and 2Wire modems on DSL, and Motorola ONLY for cable.