6 ms·

How 20 mbps Internet can be slower than 8 mbps

42 points by old-gregg 18y ago

sh1mmer 18y ago
Summary: For most internet use Verizon's 8bmps connection with low latency was better than FiOS' high latency 20mbps connection.
- nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
  Correction: it seems the fault of the Fios ActionTec router's DNS resolution, not necessarily the Fios service itself. I would be rather interested to see latency statistics gathered, comparing the use of the default router's DNS with direct OpenDNS usage.
- eb 18y ago
  It's 8Mbps from Comcast, not Verizon.
dattaway 18y ago
Latency on my cablemodem has always been abou 60ms until I negotiated my monthly bill with TW/RR that I just purchased AT&T dsl. I found it fascinating after several years of 60ms ping times, my cable latency dropped to 20ms to match the dsl service. Didn't ask for that. How odd. Name lookup latency improved by many times also. It pays to negotiate. Service just might improve.
prakash 18y ago
re. dns, he could run something like djbdns locally on his machine and that could connect to opendns. the other thing he could do is increase the mtu size, from the std 1440 to 2x-5x of that.
theantidote 18y ago
Does the author realize that the actiontec router can be disabled and used just like a cable modem? That's what I do at home and use a WRT54G instead. I also use opendns instead of Verizon's DNS servers. Latency is pretty low for me.
- lallysingh 18y ago
  OpenDNS is nice, but they give you their crap redirects instead of a proper failure message. Consider the Level 3 dns servers: 4.1.1.1 - 4.1.1.6
  - kmt 18y ago
    Did you mean 4.2.2.1 - 4.2.2.6?
    - deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
    - lallysingh 18y ago
      YES. Sorry about that.
- alnayyir 18y ago
  I actually have cable and am considering getting a symmetric 20/20 FioS connection from Verizon and I was thinking the same damn thing the whole article. 1. Switch to different nameservers. 2. Don't use the fucking actiontec as a router. All that remains is his complaints about slowly degrading performance, and assuming that's true, my experiences with cable modems are seriously not any better. I've given up on ever having a reliable connection at home.
jdbeast00 18y ago
i too have suffered the pain of the actiontec router from verizon fios. i placed it behind another router as people advise. since the internet speed is much slower than ethernet, I figured the extra hop isn't going to kill me, but it does add some tiny amount of latency i suppose.
amohr 18y ago
What was much more shocking than the main point of the article was the statement "Comcast promised 768 kbps up and 8 Mbits down. That's what they delivered, more or less reliably for several years. It seemed quite fast except when I was uploading 12 MB camera RAW files to a server. " I have had Comcast for about 6 years off and on (I keep moving, and they keep devouring local service providers) and have had problems with pretty much every tier of our interaction. We're supposed to have 10 Mbps and get maybe half that on a good day. When I call to ask them about it, they claim that their equipment just can't handle the loads of the area. They also have difficulty accepting that that is not my fault. On simple matters of installing a new router - customer service is a crapshoot at best. Anything beyond that, be prepared to be "transferred to a technical service representative"... often times more than once. It's not all bad though, we did get showtime for free about nine months longer than we were supposed to, karma, I guess.
hs 18y ago
what really kills the speed is packet drop a 1 gbps wireless will be slower than old pots service on heavy rainy day
- drm237 18y ago
  only if it's your neighbors...
  - aaronblohowiak 18y ago
    I believe the OP is talking about stationary wireless, as used in rural areas.
andreyf 18y ago
Many of my friends in their 20s and 30s have dropped their cable TV subscriptions Never had one, never wanted one. Watching shows in just one room, wired to a wall, switching between groups called "channels", interrupted by commercials... isn't that all legacy from the time these things were grouped by-frequency, channeled straight onto your screen? How do people put up with such crap when it's all TCP/IP now?
- eru 18y ago
  Tradition.
  - alecco 18y ago
    Advertisement programmed brains.
- ars 18y ago
  "TCP/IP" can't actually deliver TV to everyone in the US, it only works because a minority of people are using it. We'd need a lot more capacity if everyone was going to watch that way. Maybe multicast plus local caching could handle it.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- old-gregg 18y ago
  "It's all TCP/IP", really? http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-lie/ http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-...
  - ramchip 18y ago
    That's for a TV company. As a consumer, I find Bittorrent perfect for all my TV needs - I don't even own a TV set -, but then I only watch japanese stuff so YMMV.
    - old-gregg 18y ago
sounddust 18y ago
No matter what type of broadband line they're connected to, Actiontec modems have always sucked; what's more important is that FIOS is finally rolling out to a decent portion of the population. A firmware upgrade (or new brand of modem) will hopefully follow soon. Now it just has to drop to a reasonable price. $160 (or even Comcast's $99 triple play) is a testament to how badly the telecom industry is broken in the US. In France, DSL(22mbps up/1.5 down) + HD Cable TV + a landline with unlimited calls to 70 countries is $27/month including all taxes and fees.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
biohacker42 18y ago
The Verizon fios phone service also dies if the electricity goes out. Old fashioned land lines often continue to work when the power is out.
- jonknee 18y ago
  Only if the power goes out for an extended time, there is a battery backup. Not that it's a big deal, home phones are dying off rapidly.
  - electromagnetic 18y ago
    Wired home phones, which do survive without the power, are extinct. I think we have 1 in the house and no one is exactly sure where. It'd be less effort to rip the computer out of the UPS and plug the cordless' station in.
- Zev 18y ago
  The Verizon fios phone service also dies if the electricity goes out. Only if the power is out for > 8 hours or so. If you're without electricity that long, phone service might not be the biggest thing to consider (food that may go bad, for example is more important)
  - biohacker42 18y ago
    Tell me all about it, while I remember the most recent north east ice storm.
e40 18y ago
I've had a similar experience with AT&T Business ADSL. For years I had problems with my router just hanging and needing a reboot (Cayman 3456). Early on, I wrote a script to ping the router just on the other side of mine, and to reboot the router when it noticed a connectivity drop for more than a minute. So, a few weeks ago I just got fed up. After a while on the phone, I was lucky to get a local tech. She told me to get a modem (not router) at Best Buy and do the routing on my Linux box. I did and I haven't had one connection problem since. 6 years of pain, and it was the router all along, which had been replaced (then SBC) with the same model.
known 18y ago
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=955999&cid=24909591 http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=955999&cid=2490...

42 points by old-gregg 18y ago

Summary: For most internet use Verizon's 8bmps connection with low latency was better than FiOS' high latency 20mbps connection.

nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
Correction: it seems the fault of the Fios ActionTec router's DNS resolution, not necessarily the Fios service itself. I would be rather interested to see latency statistics gathered, comparing the use of the default router's DNS with direct OpenDNS usage.
eb 18y ago
It's 8Mbps from Comcast, not Verizon.

dattaway 18y ago

Latency on my cablemodem has always been abou 60ms until I negotiated my monthly bill with TW/RR that I just purchased AT&T dsl. I found it fascinating after several years of 60ms ping times, my cable latency dropped to 20ms to match the dsl service. Didn't ask for that. How odd. Name lookup latency improved by many times also. It pays to negotiate. Service just might improve.

prakash 18y ago

re. dns, he could run something like djbdns locally on his machine and that could connect to opendns. the other thing he could do is increase the mtu size, from the std 1440 to 2x-5x of that.

theantidote 18y ago

Does the author realize that the actiontec router can be disabled and used just like a cable modem? That's what I do at home and use a WRT54G instead. I also use opendns instead of Verizon's DNS servers. Latency is pretty low for me.

lallysingh 18y ago
OpenDNS is nice, but they give you their crap redirects instead of a proper failure message. Consider the Level 3 dns servers: 4.1.1.1 - 4.1.1.6
- kmt 18y ago
  Did you mean 4.2.2.1 - 4.2.2.6?
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - lallysingh 18y ago
    YES. Sorry about that.
alnayyir 18y ago
I actually have cable and am considering getting a symmetric 20/20 FioS connection from Verizon and I was thinking the same damn thing the whole article. 1. Switch to different nameservers. 2. Don't use the fucking actiontec as a router. All that remains is his complaints about slowly degrading performance, and assuming that's true, my experiences with cable modems are seriously not any better. I've given up on ever having a reliable connection at home.

jdbeast00 18y ago

i too have suffered the pain of the actiontec router from verizon fios. i placed it behind another router as people advise. since the internet speed is much slower than ethernet, I figured the extra hop isn't going to kill me, but it does add some tiny amount of latency i suppose.

amohr 18y ago

What was much more shocking than the main point of the article was the statement "Comcast promised 768 kbps up and 8 Mbits down. That's what they delivered, more or less reliably for several years. It seemed quite fast except when I was uploading 12 MB camera RAW files to a server. " I have had Comcast for about 6 years off and on (I keep moving, and they keep devouring local service providers) and have had problems with pretty much every tier of our interaction. We're supposed to have 10 Mbps and get maybe half that on a good day. When I call to ask them about it, they claim that their equipment just can't handle the loads of the area. They also have difficulty accepting that that is not my fault. On simple matters of installing a new router - customer service is a crapshoot at best. Anything beyond that, be prepared to be "transferred to a technical service representative"... often times more than once. It's not all bad though, we did get showtime for free about nine months longer than we were supposed to, karma, I guess.

hs 18y ago

what really kills the speed is packet drop a 1 gbps wireless will be slower than old pots service on heavy rainy day

drm237 18y ago
only if it's your neighbors...
- aaronblohowiak 18y ago
  I believe the OP is talking about stationary wireless, as used in rural areas.

andreyf 18y ago

Many of my friends in their 20s and 30s have dropped their cable TV subscriptions Never had one, never wanted one. Watching shows in just one room, wired to a wall, switching between groups called "channels", interrupted by commercials... isn't that all legacy from the time these things were grouped by-frequency, channeled straight onto your screen? How do people put up with such crap when it's all TCP/IP now?

eru 18y ago
Tradition.
- alecco 18y ago
  Advertisement programmed brains.
ars 18y ago
"TCP/IP" can't actually deliver TV to everyone in the US, it only works because a minority of people are using it. We'd need a lot more capacity if everyone was going to watch that way. Maybe multicast plus local caching could handle it.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
old-gregg 18y ago
"It's all TCP/IP", really? http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-lie/ http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-...
- ramchip 18y ago
  That's for a TV company. As a consumer, I find Bittorrent perfect for all my TV needs - I don't even own a TV set -, but then I only watch japanese stuff so YMMV.
  - old-gregg 18y ago

sounddust 18y ago

No matter what type of broadband line they're connected to, Actiontec modems have always sucked; what's more important is that FIOS is finally rolling out to a decent portion of the population. A firmware upgrade (or new brand of modem) will hopefully follow soon. Now it just has to drop to a reasonable price. $160 (or even Comcast's $99 triple play) is a testament to how badly the telecom industry is broken in the US. In France, DSL(22mbps up/1.5 down) + HD Cable TV + a landline with unlimited calls to 70 countries is $27/month including all taxes and fees.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

biohacker42 18y ago

The Verizon fios phone service also dies if the electricity goes out. Old fashioned land lines often continue to work when the power is out.

jonknee 18y ago
Only if the power goes out for an extended time, there is a battery backup. Not that it's a big deal, home phones are dying off rapidly.
- electromagnetic 18y ago
  Wired home phones, which do survive without the power, are extinct. I think we have 1 in the house and no one is exactly sure where. It'd be less effort to rip the computer out of the UPS and plug the cordless' station in.
Zev 18y ago
The Verizon fios phone service also dies if the electricity goes out. Only if the power is out for > 8 hours or so. If you're without electricity that long, phone service might not be the biggest thing to consider (food that may go bad, for example is more important)
- biohacker42 18y ago
  Tell me all about it, while I remember the most recent north east ice storm.

e40 18y ago

I've had a similar experience with AT&T Business ADSL. For years I had problems with my router just hanging and needing a reboot (Cayman 3456). Early on, I wrote a script to ping the router just on the other side of mine, and to reboot the router when it noticed a connectivity drop for more than a minute. So, a few weeks ago I just got fed up. After a while on the phone, I was lucky to get a local tech. She told me to get a modem (not router) at Best Buy and do the routing on my Linux box. I did and I haven't had one connection problem since. 6 years of pain, and it was the router all along, which had been replaced (then SBC) with the same model.

known 18y ago

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=955999&cid=24909591 http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=955999&cid=2490...