On Wed, 19 May 2010 12:46:43 -0700 Russell Senior <russ...@personaltelco.net> dijo:
>All of the phone copper in Portland (proper) pretty much is owned by >Qwest. They are required to lease that copper to competitors in >various ways, so you have options for ISP (the people who take your >bits, and pass them to the rest of the intarweb and back again). >There is an exception: the newer faster DSL that they advertise is >from fiber-to-the-node fed DSLAMs (that is, they run fiber to your >neighborhood, the put the DSL gear in a small closet on the curb and >the rest of the way to your house is over the old twisted pair copper) >and they are not required to allow other ISPs access to that service. >If you get one of the distributed DSLAMs in your neighborhood, you >suddenly don't have a bunch of options you had before. > >The bytes-per-second number that your application gives you typically >is going to be "payload" information. That is, not the raw bitrate, >but the amount of information that you care about being delivered, not >including the packaging information that helps get it there. Because >there is some overhead in packet headers, mentally I usually multiply >by 10 to get the equivalent bit-rate. You are getting something like >20-30 megabits per second from Comcast. If you were extremely lucky, >you might be able to get a bonded service (two DSL pairs) from Integra >for in the neighborhood of $100/month. The speed would depend on you >being close enough to the DSLAM in a Qwest central office, but my >understanding is that the bonded service tops out at about 20Mbps. >Your CO is probably the one up near Denver and Lombard. I wouldn't >count on it. Thanks for the education. And I'd be surprised if my CO is not the one near Lombard and Denver, because I know of no other telephone company buildings anywhere else in the area. I also checked Verizon, and they told me they don't serve my area. Qwest offered me a maximum of 5 mb/s, not even their max speed. >If all you care about is cost and speed, you aren't going to beat >Comcast in the near term. As it turns out, I may have been premature in claiming that my Comcast bandwidth was decreasing from 3 MB/s six months ago to around 2 MB/s today. I use Speedtest.net for monitoring bandwidth, and I just discovered that the problem may be with the Portland server that they are using, rather than Comcast. Using the Portland server I get about 2.0 MB/s (formerly about 3.0 MB/s). Using the Corvallis server gets me 3.1 MB/s (although the ping response jumped from 32 ms to 124 ms). Using the server in Seattle I get about 3.6 MB/s. So maybe Comcast is screwing me only on the bill. >FWIW, I care about more than cost and speed. So do I, but considering that (apparently) I can't get close to what Comcast offers by any alternative, I'll have to suck it up and continue with Comcast. >I want a publicly-owned fiber last mile, where I get cost, speed *AND* >freedom. I'm totally with you on that. I think everyone in PLUG-land agrees. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
