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Admin
After about 5 years of DSL "coming soon" from the phone company, we got broadband from the cable company when it became available. (We eventually switched to FiOS, from the same "DSL coming soon" phone company, when it became available.) A quick check shows that DSL is actually available here now, but only the 1MBPS package, despite our FiOS being 20MBPS.
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"He was a great guy. Salt of the Earth."
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Jera Co. could double their bandwidth with a second phone line...
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You get 32 buckets out of 256 for ADSL upload; 64 out of 512 for ADSL2. The latter doesn't double your throughput; it just offers better load-balancing, which might add up to a 10% improvement depending upon the holes in the spectrum.
Bottom line is, your upload speed is likely to be around 1/8 of the total throughput. If your provider is still doinking around with a second-gen DSLAM, or even some wonky piece of tin produced by a Chinese state monopoly, or you're more than 2km from either the exchange or a repeater, your total throughput might easily be 500kbps. Which gives you 60kbps upload.
Yes, it's 10x better than the original crap, but is it good enough to fork out the extra $180, plus monthly charge, and deal with the hassle of weekly phone calls to the ISP when things go wrong? As usual, it depends upon the actual requirements.
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Ah, yes, dialup. Even as I speak, I am going to a friends place to install a router that will use dialup. He hasn't the $$$ to get a DSL line, and I need some way to attach multiple machines. This way I can remote access the machines, and share things like printers (what a concept). Hopefully there will be enough $$$ floating around so a DSL line can be installed. Good karma will follow. I can only wait.
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As always the issue is clueless small business owners who don't understand that sometimes they need to open the company accounts (or, more likely, their own personal funds) and purchase decent equipment. Instead, it's always "But... but... that's ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS!" when they're a BUSINESS. Seriously, people. $100 to you or me might be a lot of money, but to a serious business venture it's a drop in the hat. When will people learn this?
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I woulda been the frist to make a joke about frist posts attempts being submitted via dialup, but I had to take a photo of the screen with my joke on it, then print it out and put the photo on a wooden table, then send the table and the photo to Alex.
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Here is a summary of the corollary WTF to be published next week:
You want us to spend X dollars for this? Are you crazy?
If you don't, you will spend 10*X dollars over the next year in wasted labor.
But that is a different budget, not MY budget.
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Uploading to client web pages, it was likely compressible text. Besides, if they and their provider had V.92 modems, download speed can be sacrificed to provide greater upload speed.
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2005 called, they want their WTF back.
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To quote congressman Barney Frank "On what planet do you folks here spend most of your time?"
FYI there are many tens of millions of rural Americans who have no viable broadband option. Satellite isn't very useful because of the latency. It's difficult to tell how many folks are in that situation because the FCC metrics for broadband coverage are virtually worthless.
(And most of them don't get anywhere near 5kbps. Rural phone lines often aren't that great to begin with, and the ways to lose bandwidth out in the boonies are legion -- especially if the ISP is in a different town)
So areas without broadband have no businesses, libraries, schools or governments? Of course they do. What they don't do is design web sites with hundreds of 3-5 megabyte pages -- which seems to be what this outfit has somehow ended up with. Sure, given where they are now, they should probably pay the few bucks a month, and get broadband. But if their web site had been conservatively designed, they quite possibly wouldn't need broadband.
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Who said anything about a provider? If you're using V.92 modems in a business, chances are you're doing it point(less) to point(less)... And in this case, one would assume that the modem on the other end is distinctly not V.92. My guess would be 1200 baud.
Once again, it's all in the requirements. Rather than fiddle with ADSL, I might have been tempted to replace the modem at the other end with some $15 remaindered item off E-Bay.
Scheduling transfers outside office hours might have been an option, too ...
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They need to just tell the landlord that its unfit to stay in those horrible conditions (due to water damage :) ), gaining them a release and go somewhere they can obtain broadband. But judging by the article, they'd be too cheap to pay the rent anyhow.
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Oh, and who said anything about client web pages? Granted, you could construct an FTP session this way.
And who said anything about text? Or anything other than white noise?
There are more compressible formats, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.
Most formats that go over a V.92 modem, for a start. Otherwise, how do you think they got that stonking performance in the first place?
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puns are evil
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So a couple of questions: 1) the $180: was it for upgrading the phone lines to their house, or was it just a generic 'installation fee' (I know here, it costs about $160CAD to get Bell to install a DSL line whether or not they need to upgrade the copper outside your house)a, and 2) was there a clause in their lease agreement stating that the landlord would be responsible for any installation fees for upgrades to the facility that the tenant wants (usually, these agreements only include responsibility for stuff that breaks down, not necessarily for upgrades) So on that note, if the answer to #1 is that it's an upgrade fee, and the answer to #2 is that there is a clause in the agreement for upgrades, then the manager was right to not pay, because that then nullifies that clause. Anything else and he's an idiot.
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The article said something about a provider.
And there's no way you'd get 5.6KB/s out of 1200 baud. For one thing, I'm not sure compression standards existed at that point, and for another, with stop and parity, you'd be stuck at around 120 bytes/second. And 1200 baud modems were pretty close to obsolete by the time Windows 95 was released anyway.
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Hmmm, is this a troll attempt? Oh well, the article says
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Since the second complaint was that uploads took too long, I kind of doubt that. This guy knew how to solve the problem, he was just too pigheaded/cheap to pay for it.
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It's not unreasonable to assume that an FTP transfer, or upload, to a company's website would target a dump directory rather than some horrible HTTP/Apache simulacrum of such. Most real estate agencies work that way, for example.
Of course, if it truly does involve a Web client, then that's a whole different kettle of WTFish...
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If you want to pick nits, your 56k modem (Assuming you have one) is 2400 baud going up, with lots of bits per symbol. The down rate doesn't have a baud rate because it's digital.
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Anyway, you're right, and I apologise; I couldn't really be bothered to calculate before posting. 9600 baud good enough for you? And I'm guessing -- it's only a guess -- that the "provider" in question is either introduced for purposes of anonymization or else irrelevant to the actual FTP transfer.
It's difficult to tell. This sort of WTF story is almost impossible to compress inside a page or two -- things are bound to be left out. I maintain that this makes no difference when you're talking about a VB6 logging library or some godawful auto-generated XML monstrosity. It does, however, make a difference with comms.
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It's a digital signal, not modulated. Every 8th bit or so is a zero crossing so the telco switching equipment doesn't treat it like DC. If it were actually modulated, it'd be limited to 33.6
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Excellent RLE opportunities, though. Shannon would be proud.
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I can beat that.
My dad wanted to sign up for Comcast for his office building. Comcast said they couldn't give him service without running a line across the street - less than 150 feet. Now, I know, digging up a public street is no picnic, but they told him they didn't want to spend $3000 just for him.
So he did what any sane person who really, really wants fast(er) internet would do - he offered to pay for the line himself, up front.
They refused. That's right; Comcast refused to install a line at no cost to themselves in exchange for a paying customer.
They'd only do it if he could get six other companies in the complex to agree ahead of time to sign up for Comcast. He doesn't really have time to do their marketing for them, so he ended up getting slower DSL from Qwest instead.
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Perhaps there wouldn't be any up front cost to Comcast, but once it's installed they have to pay to maintain it and repair it, as well as paying whatever periodic fees or taxes the local government charges them for having it. Obviously they felt that wasn't worth it unless they could get several customers out of it.
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Many tens of millions? I'm going to guess by "many" you meant "10", meaning 100 million people. There are 300 million people in the US. So 1/3 of americans live out of range of decent DSL?
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if ((many <> 0) && (many <> 1) { Many = "FileNotFound"; }
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I can't imagine that maintenance and taxes would cost a significant percentage of a $100+/month business class connection, barring some sort of natural disaster or insane tax hike...
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My father lives 20 miles west of Charlottesville, Virginia. He's suffered with dial-up for years, and every time he called Verizon about it, was told that his neighborhood wasn't eligible for high speed internet. He has satellite TV but wasn't happy with the cost or reliability of satellite internet.
But then my new boyfriend and I visited there last week. My boyfriend has a wireless card from Verizon on his laptop, which we demonstrated to my father and stepmother in their very own home. There's a Verizon cell tower on a nearby hill that you can see from the house and the signal was excellent.
So Dad called Verizon, who again told him that he wasn't eligible. Then Dad described the wireless card and the excellent reception, and the Verizon rep said, "Oh, that!" Apparently it's a different company and they're too stupid to send business across to the other division.
Dad is now happily enjoying Youtube and web sites that don't take five minutes to load, and his neighbors are also celebrating their entry into the 21st century.
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I wonder if I would still be able to guess the connection speed just by listening to the handshake noise...ah the good old days of BBSs
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The last time I was picked by him for England we had a team talk before the game and Alf [Ramsey, manager] told me we all had to work harder. "Rodney you in particular," he said in his accent. Then he said: "if you don't work hard I'm going to pull you off at half time." And I said: "Christ, at Man City all we get is a cup of tea and an orange."
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Just tell him not to violate the "fair use" agreement or he may be cut off. It's pretty much an arbitrary limit but if you download more than a gigabyte in a month you're on thin ice according to the sales guy at VZW I talked to. But yeah I was so happy when DSL was available in my neighborhood and I could finally dump the satellite.
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There is the old story about an engineer who was responsible for looking after a machine that, in the 25 years he worked there, never once broke down. Soon after he retired, his old boss rang him to ask a favour. The machine had broken donw and they wanted his expertise to find out where the problem lay. "I can't do it for nothing", the old engineer complained, and the boss promised to pay him whatever it cost, provided he could give him an itemised bill justifying any cost he asked for. Armed only with a piece of chalk, the engineer arrived at his old workplace and quickly inspected the machine. He placed an 'X' in chalk on a certain spot, and announced "That's where your problem is, and that will be $50,000." The manager reminded him that he needed to produce an itemised bill to justify the cost. Three days later, the manager received the bill as follows: Cost of Chalk $1 Knowing where to put it $49,999
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The expression "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link" seems to be lost on many IT managers. Apparently, if we have made almost everything faster and better then we must have (on average) made the system faster and better at least by the sum of all the improvements.
They must drink their beer from glasses because the concept of a bottleneck seems a new one for them - or they might be winos(?)
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Best of all, for free
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No shit....Now THAT is low-life. I wonder how often that happens? In bigger companies there is usually a formal process for job reqs but in the type of company where the brother in law is hired, I could see the scumbag manager saying "let's put an ad on CL and see who'll come in and solve this for us!"
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Many tens of millions? I'm going to guess by "many" you meant "10", meaning 100 million people. There are 300 million people in the US. So 1/3 of americans live out of range of decent DSL?
More like 60 to 80 million I'd guess. Hard to tell because the FCC assumes that if one customer in a town has broadband, everyone does, which means that a single T-1 to a business or cable strung down a main highway that clips a corner of the town gets every person in town as having broadband available.
The situation is improving, but it's sloooow. Canada, OTOH, if you believe the internet, has DSL available at wide spots in the road 400 kilometers from the nearest traffic light.
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I love how none of you charge for your time. It's so cute. You think that advice isn't worth charging for! That is truly the WTF here.
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You're not quoting, you are paraphrasing.
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More civilised (male) Australians tend to use phrases such as "Oh, it's you again. Come out back, we've got peeled pommies on the barbie."
(I used to get worried about that, until I realised that they lived in Paddington and they were trying out their bestest version of French. Mind you, cooking potatoes over a flaming mess of plastic dolls can't be easy.)
As for Worcestershire, I have only one word for you. Droitwich.