On the matter of DSL

[jhetley]

Do any of the assembled sages have experience with the functional difference between 3 Mbps and 768 Kbps service to the person sitting in front of the screen? I don't anticipate a great appetite for streaming video here, or other really intensive surfing stuff, and ten bucks a month difference adds up.

Also, we're dealing with longish runs of cheap phone wiring to reach the household computer center, and I wonder how fast our antiquated infrastructure will propagate those bits and bytes.

Comments

[slithytove.livejournal.com]

For routine web surfing, email, and so forth, there will be no great difference.

I use Bittorrent quite a lot. I went from a 768 Kbps connection to 1.5 Mbps a while back, and I've been happy with the improvement. But if you don't use P2P services much, you'll probably be just as happy with 768 Kbps.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

We switched to Verizon DSL from the local cable service a few months ago. It's been spotty. The phone lines are old by our house, and that has meant that we frequently lose the connection. It comes back in a few minutes, but it makes for a low level annoyance. When we had cable, the losses of connectivity were much fewer, though of far longer duration. Verizon keeps saying that they're rewiring the neighborhood with fiber optic line sometime real soon now. I'm not so patiently waiting.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

These will be Verizon wires, whoever we choose as a "provider." At least the public wiring is relatively new -- they didn't have much choice, after the Great Ice Storm took out a bunch of Alex Bell's personal work. Still copper, I believe, rather than fiber.

The antiquities referred to in our infrastructure are internal to the house. Some of that stuff still shows fabric insulation.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

The really big difference is the leap between dial-up and DSL, but I'd go for the faster speed if you can afford it . . . you'd be surprised how fond you can become of streaming video once it actually streams instead of jerking along. (Movie trailers, for example -- with broadband, you can get them on-line, and not just in the theatre. Or live news video. Lots of stuff.)

[kightp.livejournal.com]

The phone company here upgraded my DSL (free!) a while back, and the only place I really notice the difference is when playing Diablo, long-distance, with my sweetie. At which point the faster speed is nice, because it cuts down on the lag.

[romsfuulynn.livejournal.com]

For ordinary surfing, not a lot of difference, but for me it's one of those things like a microwave that once you have it, it really makes a difference. For the internal phone line runs, test and see if you are getting the speed you pay for. If not, a reel of cable costs ten bucks and wiring the jack takes ten minutes.

Second the Bittorrent stuff. I use it to timeshift shows I *really* don't want to miss, but it was a use that never would have occured to me.