Topic: Speedtest.net results for your ISP

[Pestalence_XC]

If you want to know how fast your ISP really is you can use

www.speedtest.net

and get a clost to accurate speed test...

You can test locally or globally..

I'll start of by posting my speed first locally to San Marcus, Texas



now my speed to London, England



My ISP is Time Warner Road Runner Turbo

[Brush Wolf]

The first one is local to Minneapolis, MN



The second is to London



I have a grandfathered CAP 640k line and upgrading to a faster DMT line is a royal pain so it keeps getting put off.


Edit: Re-did the local test as I got an abnormal ping on the first test and that is actually still a bit on the high side.

[Tus-XC]

Local one (Denver, CO)


London


I use Verizon Wireless.

[Age]

This is mine from my home town.



This From my Home town of Van. BC to Oslo Norway.



I have Shaws Light Speed Internet.

[NJAntman]

Up the coast to New York


across the pond to London


Freaky NY or Kinky London, the porn will come just as fast.

P.S. Comcrapstic Cable

[FCM_SFHQ_XC]

Atlanta

Wenatchee Washington

I have Earthlink internet DSL

[Bonk]

Face it, you're all jealous of my uber-connection! 

I never noticed my upload is that good. Clearly it is my destiny to provide content, not view it.

P.S. I have no idea who Stentor National Integrated Communications is. My ISP is Aliant. (EDIT: it seems they are related. Its odd as sometimes I get a 142 block IP address other times I get a 207 - they're both 26Kbps though!)

[NJAntman]

OMG, are you tapping morse code on a copper line?!

[Bonk]

OMG, are you tapping morse code on a copper line?!

Pretty much, that is what MODEM stands for.

Modem (from modulator-demodulator) is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem

I'd go satellite, but ping times are just too high on satellite for even a remote hope of online gaming, and they use proprietary packet compression protocols that cannot be relied upon for accurate transmission of information.

There will never be fiber, cable or DSL here. There is no money in it. Which is also why it is a great place to live.

[Tus-XC]

Well bonk you could try using a wireless provider.  I get wireless broadband through Verizon with good results.  I've been able to play OP, Guild wars, and some DoD with out to much problem.  The only catch is price... about 60 bucks a month for unlimited bandwidth.

[Bonk]

Well bonk you could try using a wireless provider.  I get wireless broadband through Verizon with good results.  I've been able to play OP, Guild wars, and some DoD with out to much problem.  The only catch is price... about 60 bucks a month for unlimited bandwidth.

No providors. Actually I thought of doing it myself. I have considered canvassing the area to see what people would pay then looking into the cost of towers, directional antennae, amplifiers and a commercial account with the cable company then transmit from where the coax stops. It just might be viable. The more I think about it the more I think I should seriously investigate, I could make a living on it. There's not enough profit in it for the big guys but it would most likely pay for my rice and smokes. The cellular companies offer data service but the rates are absurd and connection quality abysmal.

[Pestalence_XC]

Bonk, why not see if a real Dial up provider is available to you?

try Surf Best.. it is $12.95 a month U.S. and they have servers located in even remote areas.. I lived in Pipe Creek, Texas for a while.. population was about 1000 people scattered over 9 miles.. they had 8 local dial up numbers.. Plus I Overclocked my modem and found Modem tweaks online and actually got my speed up to 86K without packet loss using them.

but either way, you will at least have a 56K connection and probably even have fewer hops to the Dyna Directory server.. maybe 8 to 12 instead of 25 to 35.

www.surfbest.net

I even ran a EAW server on their Dial Up Connection and it supported 13 players stabily.

You never know.. they may have a server close to you for local dial in.. at least you would double your speed.. you could even triple it if you tweak your network connections and your modem.

[Bonk]

Not a bad thought, but its the copper on the poles. The same ISP gives connection speeds of the full 49.6 allowable on telephone lines when closer to urban areas. I've already gone over all the wiring in the house and purchased a used telephony switch that powers devices on the line. It helps considerably. (up to 26 from 18) It doesn't matter who I dial to, the result will be the same from this location.  (population here is about 150 spread over 20 miles)

86K on phone lines? And the FCC did not beat down your door? 

[Just plain old Punisher]

Not a bad thought, but its the copper on the poles. The same ISP gives connection speeds of the full 49.6 allowable on telephone lines when closer to urban areas. I've already gone over all the wiring in the house and purchased a used telephony switch that powers devices on the line. It helps considerably. (up to 26 from 18) It doesn't matter who I dial to, the result will be the same from this location.  (population here is about 150 spread over 20 miles)

86K on phone lines? And the FCC did not beat down your door? 

Wow...an actual dial up modem. Where did you get that? The smithsonian?

[Bonk]

I have a 1200 baud acoustically coupled modem here somewhere...    ... and the rotary pulse dial wall mounted phone to match!

[Pestalence_XC]

No FCC didn't bother me.. I was in a rural area and it was back in 2001.

I ws running Win 98.. I just used IE to dial into Surfbest.. no problem there..

then I went looking for tweaks..

I found string commands for my brand of modem with allowed it to open up a little more, then I found Registry tweaks, then I found Networking configs for TCPIP and adjusted my Comm Port in Device Manager along with the Modem in Device Manager to be fully open...

I also found a way to make a layman's ISDN 128 K connection but I never tried it.. it requires 2 modems.. I think Speedguides.net and Tweak3d.net have the step by step articles on how to get your modem overclocking your ISP..

basically what happens is when configured correctly you initally connect at 53.3 Kbps.. but once connected, your modem throttles up and you can reach a max of 92.1 Kbps with a single modem.. however I never got over 86 K when I tested on speedtest.net.

It is all in your configurations.. the modem is not hard coded for 56 K, your ISP isn't limiting you to 56 K, it is the settings on your system for your ports, registry, browser, Modem, etc that is holding the true speed back...

FCC states that Dial Up should provide you with 56 K if available at all in your area.. FCC does not state the max speed of Dial-Up.. so if you are going faster than your ISP's rated speed.. it is up to your ISP to hard limit connection speed.. Surfbest sent me a email stating that they have no intention of limiting dial-up speed, but that was years ago..

AOL on the other hand does have a hard limit at 53.3 Kbps.. there are ways to hack AOL software to get faster speed and to open connections for gaming, but that is illegal..

I never hacked any software to get the speeds I got.. all I did was tweak user adjustable settings provided by Microsoft in their OS using the dialer built into IE..

Maybe you can tweak your settings to get even better speed than y9ou are currently getting.

[Dracho]

Using my Verizon Wireless USB modem

[Bonk]

Maybe you can tweak your settings to get even better speed than y9ou are currently getting.

Even better? Wow!  Sorry, that just sounded funny, like it was already good.

FCC does not state the max speed of Dial-Up..

Not speed explicitly, but power and frequencies yes, thus speed. (considering the mechanisms of mo-dem of digital data on analog voice lines)

47CFR68.308

A good but somewhat dated article on the subject:
http://www.mttlr.org/html/ShortNotes/jamison.html

I had found a better description of how modems work before, but I can't seem to locate it now.

I have considered a second wired line and use a multilink setup to get double the speed. It would be kind of expensive though.

In my case, obviously I'm not getting anywhere near the allowable maximum, as the limitation here is the signal quality over the copper on the poles between me and the switch... Hey! maybe somebody on my road is overpowering the line!   .. It wasn't so long ago that we were on a "party line" on our road. (Anybody else old enough to know what that is?)

I've already been over all the init strings, firmware updates and most usable tweaks. As I mentioned, I do get slightly better speeds using the tighter networking stacks of QNX or lesser *nixes, thus the interest in getting OP working on Wine again.

One thing to watch is how an OS reports the connection speed (Windows included), this can be misleading if you have not actually tested it. I can get windows to report a connection speed of 115K by setting the physical serial port I'm using so, but the negotiated speed between my modem and the v.92 server at the switch house will be unaffected by how fast my PC talks to my modem.

I have even looked into developing a superior mo-dem specification, I had envisioned use of FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) to modulate and demodulate complex analog signals containing digital information. It seems to me that article I can't find described this is essentially what is already being done. Then I thought about other possibly smarter ways analogous to psychoacoustic MP3 encoding but lossless. If you think about it if you play a 4 minute song over the phone line you are transmitting considerable amounts of data (already in analog form) In digital form that would represent more data than you could download in the same time on the same voice line. I think it may possible to cram way more digital data into an analog signal, we just have to be smarter about it.

Obviously a lot of thought has already been put into it:
http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-v
And now that DSL, cable and fiber have come along, it probably will not get any further attention unless someone like me finds a way to cram just a bit more in that skinny little wire.

[Bonk]

Using my Verizon Wireless USB modem

Wireless and USB! The HORROR!

* Bonk runs screaming from the thread.

[Tus-XC]

Using my Verizon Wireless USB modem

Which modem btw?  I'm using the USB720

[Dracho]

Using my Verizon Wireless USB modem

Which modem btw?  I'm using the USB720

Same model.. lets me move it between the laptop and the desktop (as opposed to a PCMCIA air card).

Out of curiosity I should tether my Palm and see what it gets.

[Dracho]

Using my Verizon Wireless USB modem

Wireless and USB! The HORROR!

* Bonk runs screaming from the thread.

Hah.. beats my dial-up...my phone line has more noise than the Christmas party at the national enquirer.  The latency is FAR less than the satellite Internet I replaced with this.

[Bonk]

The latency is FAR less than the satellite Internet I replaced with this.

I recall when you switched. Definitely a better choice.

Fun with USB modems - watch cpu use (with kernel times) with a  low overhead networking app like wget or ftp at the command line. It is not as much as an issue with the CPU horsepower we have today, but put a heavy load on the processors like a graphically intensive game... Compare the cpu use to the result of using an actual ethernet card. Not long ago, this was a serious issue. (Say PII 300MHz - Win98...)

[marstone]

my wireless speed.
Local

long hop to Japan

and a shot to other side of the puddle


will have to try my wired one also.

[Dracho]

The latency is FAR less than the satellite Internet I replaced with this.

I recall when you switched. Definitely a better choice.

Fun with USB modems - watch cpu use (with kernel times) with a  low overhead networking app like wget or ftp at the command line. It is not as much as an issue with the CPU horsepower we have today, but put a heavy load on the processors like a graphically intensive game... Compare the cpu use to the result of using an actual ethernet card. Not long ago, this was a serious issue. (Say PII 300MHz - Win98...)

You are correct sir.  Fortunately, my desktop runs a dual core AMD 2 GHZ chip with 2 GB of RAM and my laptop has a Centrino Duo 1.6 GHZ chip with 1 GHZ of RAM, so I don't notice it so much. 

[Centurus]

These results are from my laptop right now.  My ISP is AT&T Yahoo DSL and we pay 25 bucks a month for a 1.5-3.0 mbps connection.  We got the service before they changed their plans.  To get the same speed now, we'd have to pay an additional 5 bucks a month.

My laptop right now is using a wireless connection and my router is a 2WIRE DSL gateway that came with the DSL service. 

My mother is currently on the main computer doing a few things on the internet.  Oh, that reminds me, last week she retired finally after nearly 42 years on the job with L.A. Sheriff's.  She was a civilian employee. 

When I get a chance I'll do speed tests on my main computer, but I don't think the speed results will be any different really.

[Corbomite]

Does anyone else think its odd that my download/upload speed to London is faster than to San Francisco which is less than 10 miles away? (I don't care what that thing says, there is no way the server is 50 miles away from me. SF just isn't that big!)



Bonk, have you ever considered setting up your own DSL server and providing service to your neighbors? Is that even possible?

[Bonk]

Does anyone else think its odd that my download/upload speed to London is faster than to San Francisco which is less than 10 miles away? (I don't care what that thing says, there is no way the server is 50 miles away from me. SF just isn't that big!)

I would say that difference is not significant, and is probably related to time zone differences than anything. The latency figures are appropriate. I'm also not so sure about speedtest.net model of operation. From what I gather I could register my connection as a test site.

Bonk, have you ever considered setting up your own DSL server and providing service to your neighbors? Is that even possible?

No. The nearest switch is 6 KM away. DSL has a maximum usable range of 2.5Km. If I were to build a switchouse here I would still need to bring in coax or fiber to then redistribute by DSL. (Insane costs, not enough subscribers)

I've looked into packet radio before as a possibility.
http://www.tapr.org/pr_intro.html

[Dracho]

Here are the results using my Palm 700WX "tethered" to my laptop.

[Bonk]

Here's what I get from my Kubuntu install (Konqueror/Flash9r48):



As expected, a faster download but oddly a bit slower upload and looks like a higher ping, but that might just tbe the time of day. (I also got a 207 IP address registered to Aliant proper to day... but I don't think that is the difference)

[Pestalence_XC]

At least you almost doubled yor download speed.

[Bonk]

At least you almost doubled yor download speed.

Try running QNX on your connection... The wire will get hot! 

This observation tells me though that your advice does have merit, there may be some tweaks I haven't found yet that I can make in windows to get similar results, so the connection will behave more like it does in Linux.