Dial-up vs Broadband

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What do you use?

Dial-up
3
4%
Broadband/cable/something really fast
67
96%
 
Total votes: 70

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Voodoomaster
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Post by Voodoomaster »

Broadband is a lie.
All internet connections travel at the same speed.
The Speed of Light.
Reason why Broadband is faster, Broadband is like the M25 (not when there is a traffic jam though) lots of lanes for traffic or in this case data to travel down. Whereas Dial up is a single Lane like an old country road, imagine putting a moterway's traffic on that road compared to the M25.
thats the difference between Broadband and Dial up as i was taught it.
I use an 8MG Broadband so i don't complain.
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Post by Mr green »

Voodoomaster wrote:Broadband is a lie.
All internet connections travel at the same speed.
The Speed of Light.



Electricity does not travel whit the speed of light.
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Post by Tarbo »

Voodoomaster wrote:Broadband is a lie.
All internet connections travel at the same speed.
The Speed of Light.
How would this make broadband a lie? It is faster, isn't it, regardless of the method?
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Post by Voodoomaster »

@Tarbo: Just what i was taught by my teacher at ICT, and he used to work for BT, and anyway the claim on many adverts is "50 times faster than dial up" when it isn't, thats my point, it is faster because it has more data streams, not because of speed.
@Ketchup: most internet/phone cables now aday's are fiber optic in the UK, so it does travel at the speed of light.
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Post by Tarbo »

Your teacher has a point in that the speed they advertise is a theoretical ceiling, and is rarely if ever reached. If you're really quick, you can read that off the small-print on the television commercials. So yes, it's never as quick as they claim, as is generally the case with most statistics used in advertising, sadly.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "having more datastreams", though. If you mean it's faster because it opens more connections, then you are referring to application technology like a browser, which is not related to your physical link.

If you mean that there are more wires in the cable, then I fail to see what the issue is. The data clears the cable faster than it did before, so the method is faster; I would make the same claim.

It is true that a single bit (better, a pulse) would probably reach the server at about the same time, regardless of dial-up or broadband. However, if I decide to use 1Mbps cable instead of 100Mpbs for my LAN, then my network will slow down considerably. The issue here is "how much data can I send/receive in rapid succession", i.e. a burst, which is generally what's important when considering bandwidth for a client like you and me.

Suppose I'm using a text browser like Lynx (gotta love that), and I'm visiting Druchii.net, carefully reading through the pages. I will have lots of short bursts coming over the line each time I load a page, after which everything will remain silent. In this case, a dial-up modem with 9.6Kbps will do perfectly.

However, when visiting an image-heavy site like that of many ISP's (with a browser that supports images), the burst will be much heavier, charged on an about equally long timeframe. Suppose the page totals 500KB with images included; it would take at least 8 minutes to load on the modem.

So the question isn't as much "how fast does electricity go on my wire," but: "how much data does my physical medium allow".

And then, of course, "how powerful is my ISP's server park?" ;)

PS: I'm not telling you off, you just touched my area of expertise. :lol:
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Post by Voodoomaster »

i know i touched your area of expertise tarbo, its just the way that i was taught it. From the Way my Teacher taught us in College last year he described Internet Connection as Roads, when the bursts coming over the line have to go down a single track, rather than a series of tracks.
Anyway, you do describe it way better than i could ever could, i have only thus far done a single year at ICT higher course at college, i am just happy that i know far more than the US Senator in charge of the Net Neutrality Bill.
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Post by Tarbo »

I'm going to buy a sniper rifle now.

While I'm there, anyone else you want me to cap? Requests?

No further comments on what politicians to kill please. While this is still just a joke, any further comments would be likely to develop into an argument. Remember the no politics rule. Any further comments on it will be deleted and I might hand out warnings.

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Post by Voodoomaster »

Edit - No politics!
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Post by Lord k »

Edit - No politics.
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Post by Devoured_mazarine »

At my mom's we have broadband, and at my fathers we have dial up. Wich costs him more than double the price mom pays for the broadband :P
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Post by Eeeeron »

Broadband - about 2Mb at the moment soon going up to about 6Mb.

Broadband speed is also determined by how far you are away from the exchange which provides it and it's definitely the way to go, with all these new deals on it (well in the UK at least).
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Post by Animatronicdemonskwerral »

when i was on dial up, i just took it like a man when there were big pictures.
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Post by Rork »

Voodoomaster wrote: most internet/phone cables now aday's are fiber optic in the UK, so it does travel at the speed of light.


Just a shame we have to suffer with copper up to our doors :(. If they could afford to dig up all that old junk we could have symmetric connections and all sorts of fun :D.

(Asymmetric is used since it's a compromise to the POTS. Damn, I love that acronym.)
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Post by Voodoomaster »

@Rork, Unlucky, we had fiber optic installed down here years ago, when something really odd happened to the phone lines and we didn't have a phone line for about a week or so, was rather odd and i cannot remember what exactly it was as it happened when i was around 8 or 9.
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Post by Eeeeron »

No idea what we've got outside but it seems to run alright most of the time. That is once it got set up, when I first got BB I had to spend a while on the phone to the BB provider and the phone provider getting them to talk to each other and sort out my exchange.
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Post by Rork »

Voodoomaster wrote:@Rork, Unlucky, we had fiber optic installed down here years ago, when something really odd happened to the phone lines and we didn't have a phone line for about a week or so, was rather odd and i cannot remember what exactly it was as it happened when i was around 8 or 9.


That's the benefit of living in a major city, I suppose. Perhaps no one will notice if I borrow a digger and a mile or so of fibre optic cable...
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Post by Voodoomaster »

actually rork, i live in a suburb to the north of portsmouth, however it is around 20 years old so the cable had to fail eventually.
and whats wrong with random acts of distruction ;)
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Post by Langmann »

Bigass. (My connection is fast).

I remember the days when I used to have to suffer with 300 baud modems, that is 100 bits per second. It took quite a while just for a page of text to show up. You literally could see the characters being printed on the screen.

When 2400 baud showed up we were laughing.

Then 10k

then 24k

Then 32k

Then 56! Wow.

Of course in the old days it was much easier to break into banks and phone companies... ;)
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Post by Rork »

Voodoomaster wrote:actually rork, i live in a suburb to the north of portsmouth, however it is around 20 years old so the cable had to fail eventually.
and whats wrong with random acts of distruction ;)


Suburbs don't usually involve 25 miles of fields between you and said city, though ;).

Of course in the old days it was much easier to break into banks and phone companies...


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Post by Voodoomaster »

Rork wrote:"By day, he's a doctor tending to his patients needs; by night he's known as one of those guys out of 'Weird Science' ..."

so Langmann is the mad prof from the begining of robot chicken :shock: i never knew.

Rork wrote:Suburbs don't usually involve 25 miles of fields between you and said city, though Wink.

ahhh, ermm would 2 miles of fields count :P
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Post by Beastmaster kurlan »

no guy, thats too obviously the weetos guy, on drugs of coarse lol.
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Post by Doriili bariiliia »

what is this dial-up? never heard of it!
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Post by Tarbo »

Doriili Bariiliia wrote:what is this dial-up? never heard of it!
I'll take the bait and assume you're not being sarcastic. ;)

"Dial-up" (sometimes translated literally "dial-in") is a method using a connection other than computer networking to reach a genuine computer network. In English, that means people connect a modem to their computer and "dial" to a modem bank of their ISP. The ISP's server park takes any requests that are parsed over the phone line, and sends them back.

Dial-up is notoriously slow and unreliable. This isn't so much the method as the way it is used: ISP's sell many more connections than they have lines and/or modems. The speed is due to the nature of a phone line, which isn't meant to transfer such huge amounts of information much like a dedicated Ethernet cable.

Also, dial-up requires you to actively make a connection ("active connecting") rather than have the network available to you at all times, as is the case with cable connection ("passive connecting").

There are a number of other disadvantages to dial-up:
  • Caching is often done forcibly on the server. This means that you may not always have up-to-date information, even when you force a refetch.
  • You have access only to services your ISP allows. If their server doesn't understand RTP, then you can't use RTP.
  • You have access only to the servers your ISP can connect to. This is rarely a problem anymore, but it used to be (I'm speaking of the late 80's, early 90's) that not all was as interconnected as today.
  • You have to pay for the phone. Some countries have free local calls, which is handy if your ISP has a nearby server, but many countries charge for phone connections. This comes on top of your fee to the ISP.
  • Related, your phone line is busy while you're connected, whether you're surfing or just passively connected. So while your daughter is on the phone, you can't check your mail, and vice versa.
There will be more, but that's all I can think of right now. (Ah, a nostalgic tear drops.)

On the plus side, nobody can hack your computer if your modem is switched off...

langmann wrote:You literally could see the characters being printed on the screen.
Gives meaning to the term "Text browsing", eh?
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Post by Doriili bariiliia »

Tarbo wrote:
Doriili Bariiliia wrote:what is this dial-up? never heard of it!
I'll take the bait and assume you're not being sarcastic. ;)

"Dial-up" (sometimes translated literally "dial-in") is a method using a connection other than computer networking to reach a genuine computer network. In English, that means people connect a modem to their computer and "dial" to a modem bank of their ISP. The ISP's server park takes any requests that are parsed over the phone line, and sends them back.

Dial-up is notoriously slow and unreliable. This isn't so much the method as the way it is used: ISP's sell many more connections than they have lines and/or modems. The speed is due to the nature of a phone line, which isn't meant to transfer such huge amounts of information much like a dedicated Ethernet cable.

Also, dial-up requires you to actively make a connection ("active connecting") rather than have the network available to you at all times, as is the case with cable connection ("passive connecting").

There are a number of other disadvantages to dial-up:
  • Caching is often done forcibly on the server. This means that you may not always have up-to-date information, even when you force a refetch.
  • You have access only to services your ISP allows. If their server doesn't understand RTP, then you can't use RTP.
  • You have access only to the servers your ISP can connect to. This is rarely a problem anymore, but it used to be (I'm speaking of the late 80's, early 90's) that not all was as interconnected as today.
  • You have to pay for the phone. Some countries have free local calls, which is handy if your ISP has a nearby server, but many countries charge for phone connections. This comes on top of your fee to the ISP.
  • Related, your phone line is busy while you're connected, whether you're surfing or just passively connected. So while your daughter is on the phone, you can't check your mail, and vice versa.
There will be more, but that's all I can think of right now. (Ah, a nostalgic tear drops.)

On the plus side, nobody can hack your computer if your modem is switched off...

langmann wrote:You literally could see the characters being printed on the screen.
Gives meaning to the term "Text browsing", eh?


Thank you I found it very enlightening and thank you for the information. 8)
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Post by Kida »

Wow, just as I predicted in a thread that provoked this thread's existance - it is 20 to 1 against dial-up.

:D
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