Going Cable Modem

[Mark Prouty]

Even with the SlipStreem accelerator, the dial-up connection in painfully slow accessing this site. I'm going cable modem Friday and wireless router. I'm getting a laptop and should be able to using it anywhere in the house with a wireless router.

[Dimitri-2000X-Tampa]

Oh, you will definitely like that a lot better When I renovated my house about 5 years ago, I ran cat5 Ethernet cable all over the place...but I still didn't have enough freedom so I put in wireless as well about 1.5 yrs ago. Now I can take my laptop anywhere and everywhere. There are still a few things that don't work well on wireless though, like making 8GB file backups. The wireless connection is not reliable enough for really big file transfers, but that doesn't happen very often.

[mike]

Even with the SlipStreem accelerator, the dial-up connection in painfully slow accessing this site. I'm going cable modem Friday and wireless router. I'm getting a laptop and should be able to using it anywhere in the house with a wireless router.

You mean you're still on dialup!?!

BTW, you'll love the wireless thing... for me, my Airport-equipped Powerbook is the new "newspaper" in terms of having reading material while, well, you know.

And it's great to be able to go anywhere else in the house and still be connected.

--Mike
(don't ask where I am right now)

[richandlori]

I use the PC5220 wireless card from Verizon Wireless (No I don't work for them). At $79/month, I get 150kbs at minimum and regularly get 2MB in selected areas. I travel the countryside for my job and it is great not to have to play the 1-800 dial in game in the hotel at close to $5,467,444,000 per minute! (it at lest seems like that is how much they charge). Msot importantly, if my verizon cell works out on the water, so does my wireless internet!

Regards

Rich

[Ken Orthner]

Unfortunately we live in the "boonies" - the only high speed available to us is via sateliite - very expensive and very unreliable - maybe someday this part of the country will join the real world and we'll have modern stuff like high speed, telehones that actually work all the time (when the cables get wet, they get noisy) etc.

Love it when I'm travelling and use high speed at hotels and marina's. I just can't believe how much faster it really is!

[Jim Bunnell]

The "other" choice I indicated is DSL. I had cable, but as more and more people joined, it started to slow down in the peak evening hours. Plus, as I understand it, cable is like a big LAN, and your machine is potentially (depending on security) available to everyone else on the cable branch. DSL has not shown any varience in speed, and is in effect a direct connection to the ISP hub.

I agree, wireless is wonderful. My airport reaches through the house and covers most of the back yard. In the summer I go out to the pool and surf - and I don't have a wave pool!

[kmclemore]

DSL for me too... works great (Verizon) and we distribute it via Wireless LAN throughout the house. Been using W-LAN in the house for over 9 years now... I first rolled it out on OS/2 using an IBM PS/2 Model 95 server but now use Thinkpads and XP. (Yeah, I know, OS/2 is like Sanscrit, but hey, it's still the only OS that not a single virus has ever attacked!).

And Jim, you are somewhat correct regarding cable - your local area is kind of like a big LAN with all of you sharing your connection to the provider... so, if some bozo down the street decides tonight is the night he'll begin downloading a boatload of porn, your transfer rate will suffer. Now, as to the security of cable, that would depend greatly on how it was implemented and how your local machine is configured.

DSL works differently from cable, in that your line to the phone company's "central office" is a dedicated (point-to-point) line, so your performance to the provider is pretty consistent... you don't share your connection to the provider so the pipe is all yours. Most providers offer different speeds of DSL, and so, like anything else, you pays for what you gets.

In a perfect world, cable is faster than DSL... but life ain't perfect, and that bozo down the street with the Lolita fetish can really easily hog the line, making DSL just as fast or faster than cable.

[Moe]

Well... admittedly I'm the other guy still on dial-up at home. Unlimited access (we stay dialed in about 16 hours/day), 5 accounts with email and webspace, for $14.95/month. All we do at home is email, IM, and surfing the same places, so all the pictures are in cache, no accelerator needed or used. For the big stuff, I use the T3 at work and bring it home on a 512MB thumb drive.

We use the no-contract (Cincinnati Bell) $32.95/month, free long-distance cell phone for voice, so the $19.95 for the landline really is there because of 911, and the fact it's powered by batteries at the phone company and still works when the power goes out. We don't have cable (DirecTV... a lot cheaper than Time-Warner cable and more reliable, even considering weather) and would have to have the landline to get DSL anyway.

When we travel, I carry a list (in a file) of local access numbers for all the states along the way at places we might stay. But I also carry a Cat 5 cable for places with free Ethernet.

Works for us.
--
Moe

[Duane Dunn, Allegro]

My DSL is easily as fast as most of my friends cable modems. Comcast is pretty stingy with the bandwidth to each area and cable modems are on a shared network much like a old ethernet that used hubs. DSL, while having slower raw speeds is a switched network that connects right to your ISP. The cable company is also very tight on upstream bandwidth and has a fit when people host servers on their network. They are far too restrictive for me. My DSL goes to a very open little ISP that hosts our domain and includes unlimited emails, 50Mb of space, all for less than a cable modem connection, DSL price included.

My network here at home is on all the time sitting behind a Cisco router doing NAT for the 5 computers using private address space. The 3 desktops are wired at 100Mbs to the central switch. I wired every room with Cat 5 to central closet for voice and data. The two laptops use the 54g wireless network. All the printers are on print servers so they don't depend on a computer being present and on.

If you set up wireless make sure you take good security precautions. Change the default SSID, and disable broadcasting it. Turn on one of the encryption schemes. WPA is prefered but not supported by all devices. While not perfect even WEP is better than nothing. If you don't expect guests lock down which MAC addresses can access the network. I locked mine further by setting it only to run 54g, this precludes all the older 11b devices from connecting and makes the network faster since it doesn't have to support the 11Mb devices.

From my house I can see 2 other very unsecure WiFi nets that neighbors have setup.

[Moe]

FWIW, I just got 45.8 kbps (3.0 minutes per megabyte) w/286ms latency download, 27.26 kbps w/10ms latency upload, with a 52.0 kbps dial-in, on the max speed test on that site.

--
Moe

[Dimitri-2000X-Tampa]

Duanne, your setup sounds very much like mine, except that I have a cable modem. I have 2 routers, one that sets up an IPSec VPN so that I can get to my corporate secure network from home (also has a dial backup in case the cable modem goes down), and then the wireless router (for 2-3 laptops). I use encryption and Mac filtering, but I don't think my brand unit allows disabling SSID broadcasting. Like you, I have several neighbors who have wide open wireless networks including a guy who is supposedly a network engineer... Sounds like you have a good deal on the hosting. I think cable will let you do that if you pay more money (business class or something like that).

Moe, I'm really surprised that you are one of the (apparently very few) narrowband users on this site.. By the time you add up the cost of a phone line and the ISP service, it is not that much less than cable or DSL Besides the speeds that are about 10 times faster in reality (much faster in theory but you never get that kind of throughput out on the Internet), it is also real nice for multiple computers using NAT like Duanne was saying. When you have 5 computers that all use the same connection, that is a big plus.

You are right that the plain old telephone service is still the mark to beat for reliability, etc. but they are making some big gains with wireless and VoIP also. During all the hurricanes, much of the cell phone service remained intact here due to generators at the cell towers. Still not as good as landline reliability but making progress. Also, VoIP service is getting more sophisticated and some already offer 911 service. More carriers will be soon.

[Duane Dunn, Allegro]

Yeah, technically I have a second router as well in the Wireless AP, but it really served no purpose using it's router/firewall function so I disabled that and just have it set up as a 54 Mb access point.

[Pouw Geuzebroek]

I have DSL too, it is a great relieve after the slow dial-up world. Watch out with wireless though. You will not believe how unsafe wireless can be. Anything that goes in the air can be picked up by others, unless you take safety messures. There are guys driving around in vans on industrial estates picking up all sort of classified information from wireless PCs. At home the range is usually not that big, but I should n't make a connetion to your bank from the garden if I where you.

[Dimitri-2000X-Tampa]

All the bank sites I use have 128 bit SSL (application layer) encryption on the web page traffic, so that shouldn't be too big of a risk (especially when you add a second layer of encryption with WEP). What you really have to watch out for are some of the older protocols (telnet, FTP, Pop3, etc.) which all send their passwords in the clear. Many of the conferences I go to these days have wireless access in which case, I use an extranet client (IPSec tunnel) for all network communications. The same would go for a Wifi hotspot like a flying J truckstop or some coffeshop or cafe.

[Moe]

To get to my AT&T mail and webspace when not dialed in through their net (i.e. at the Flying J), I have to use SSL SMTP, POP3, and FTP .

--
Moe