Topic: So You Think Your ISP Is Slow...

[Corbomite]

I think this is hilarious.

Link to article

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm


SA pigeon 'faster than broadband'
 
 
Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery - but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds.

The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.

He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.

"We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement," Unlimited's Kevin Rolfe told the Beeld newspaper.



'No cats allowed'

Winston took off from Unlimited IT's call centre in the town of Howick to deliver the memory stick to the firm's office in Durban.

According to Winston's website there were strict rules in place to ensure he had no unfair advantage.
 
They included "no cats allowed" and "birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within".

The firm said Winston took one hour and eight minutes to fly between the offices, and the data took another hour to upload on to their system.

Mr Rolfe said the ADSL transmission of the same data size was about 4% complete in the same time.

Hundreds of South Africans followed the race on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.

"Winston is over the moon," Mr Rolfe said.

"He is happy to be back at the office and is now just chilling with his friends."

Meanwhile Telkom said it could not be blamed for slow broadband services at the Durban-based company.

"Several recommendations have, in the past, been made to the customer but none of these have, to date, been accepted," Telkom's Troy Hector told South Africa's Sapa news agency in an e-mail.

South Africa is one of the countries hoping to benefit from three new fibre optic cables being laid around the African continent to improve internet connections.
 

[Bonk]

Isn't the usable limit on ADSL about 2500 meters? In my experience it performs best if you are within 500 meters of the local telephone company switchhouse. It is retarded to try and send data over a long distance by adsl. Traditional 56K modems would be far faster over a 60 miles  distance. Way faster.

Additionally, I expect a pigeon would be faster than anything short of fiber. As storage densities increase I expect this comparison to hold well into the future. In fact I bet I am faster than 10 Mbit cable. I can probably carry about 100TB to my friends place much faster than any existing network technology.

Rural areas will be stuck with sucky wireless for quite some time. Until some new technology emerges 56K (~4KB/s) is as fast as it will ever get. No one will lay out the money on copper to lay coax to these areas. Maybe if they can get cable bills into the thousands per  month range, but few rural residents could afford that. A better solution would be community owned towers and local coax or fiber from there. Towns and counties will have to do it themselves, no private company wil do it. There is no money in it. The days of yore when copper was laid for the sake of communication and not profit are long gone.

In fact I doubt this 4% of 4GB number... lets work it out... the fastest donwloads I have ever seen over ADSL are about 250KB/s (within 500 meters of switchhouse).. so 4% of 4GB (160MB) @ 250KB/s = 10 minutes @ 500 meters. The slower end of ADSL I have seen @ about 1500 meters from the switchhouse are around 130KB/s so that 4% at 1500 meters would take about 20 minutes. Very optimistically assuming a linear decrease in signal (but it is almost certainly exponential) lets see how long that would take at 60 miles... 60 miles is about 96560 meters (sorry ADSL cannot go that far, I call bullsh*t - but lets work it out anyway...) uh lets see what's the slope of the line? (x=distance(m),y=time(min)) The two points I have are (500,10) and (1500,20) yielding a slope of 20-10/1500-500=10/1000=0.01 ... so, the time for 96560 meters would be 965.6 minutes or 16.1 hours. For the whole 4GB? 16.8 days.  Or 11.8 days over 56K dialup.

Whatever they are using, it is not ADSL. If it really is, then these guys are idiots. They should be using dial-up, it would be much faster.

[Corbomite]

I remember when I got my first ADSL. They gave you a six foot cable to hook into your phone jack from the modem and the way my desk was set up it ran right across the floor where we had to walk to the kitchen. There wasn't enough cord to go over or around and when I called my ISP to ask for a longer cord they told me anything longer than six feet might make for performance problems. I looked at my computer, the cord and the jack and couldn't figure out how after traveling however many miles to get to my house, the info was going to have a problem going a few more feet.

[Bonk]

Because it is not coaxial. Not even unshielded twisted pair (UTP). There is no twist in standard interior telephone wiring. (Whereas their cable on the poles/ground is likely somewhat shielded.) The phone companies sing the song of shared bandwidth on cable in order to pull the wool over your eyes on how bad ADSL really is. Coaxial cable will always be a superior signal conductor. (only needs a small repeater on the pole every few kilometers.) And like dial-up, ADSL is affected by the quality of devices attached to the telephone wiring in your house. Plug a cheap and nasty phone into the circuit and watch your network data error rates soar.

Where's Panzergranate and Capt. Mike? They'll probably back me up on this one, but may know more.

[Corbomite]

They give you filters to plug into every device on the line to help with that.

[Bonk]

They give you filters to plug into every device on the line to help with that.

Right, but they are intended to filter known ranges (basically filtering the network signal leakage from the voice range, not the reverse). These filters cannot predict the range and amplitude of noise produced by cheapy phones or partially failed phones or other devices.

I have direct experience from troubleshooting family member's ADSL connection where the tech at the pole could see increased inductance in the line when a particular cheapy phone was plugged in (through a filter). Now this location was about 1500 meters from the switchhouse and there was also a power corridor in between as well.

[candle_86]

yes I think mine is slow, west fortworth is having rampant phone issues, the lines got flooded underground and sevral switch boxes got flooded also. My 6mb internet is connectiong at 128k with a 32k upload because they dont have enough crews to fix everything at once, where supposed to have a tech at our house next friday