dsl/cable-cable

[storkus at storkus.com]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:18:40 -0700, "Matt Graham"
<danceswithcrows at usa.net> said:
>
> 23K up, 67K down, DSL.  I live too far from the CO for anything higher. 
> Cable 
> was never an option for me because I want to run my own mail and web
> servers, 
> and Cox's draconian TOS prevents that.

Wow, you must be REALLY far!

> There are people who don't have FlashBlock installed?

Umm...<cough cough> <blush>...I must be one of those since I never even
heard
of it before!  But it's going on as soon as I'm done with my e-mail!

>  I guess it'd
> depend on 
> how many users you have at once, but 67K down is usable (barely) with one 
> user.  It just takes a long time to download junk from YouTube, so I
> don't do 
> that too often.

One other problem we have here is that these people with laptops are
often
the most moronic of computer users.  I now know how an IT helpdesk
feels. :(
And I've also discovered the Big Box Store(R)'s IT help (Geek Squad et
al)
is more about suckering these poor people than actually doing real help.

As for how many users, like I said, I notice it even between just me and
one other person (looking at PfSense's state table) if they're doing
heavy
web browsing.  Right now that's typical.  In the busy season, which just
concluded, I've seen a half-dozen on simultaneously, and there's no
reason
why there couldn't be more.  If any of them are trying to do video or
some other download, it slows the connection for everyone to a crawl.
I've finagled the firewall the best I can, but the problem is the amount
of data coming down is just saturating the incoming pipe and is out of
my
control.

> It might be worthwhile to use traffic shaping on some machines in the LAN
> to 
> show the effect of adding an additional N K down.  People don't
> understand 
> numbers.  They *notice* when something that used to take 5 seconds to
> load 
> takes 2.

Agreed, but as I stated above and in the previous message, this is a
motel,
and the machines are people's own laptops, which I have no control over.
I've configured the firewall for shaping the best I can, but, as I said
above, the main problem seems to be out of my direct control: the amount
of data coming down.  The only 2 fixes would be a bigger pipe or traffic
shaping on Echelon's end (and even if they did that, it probably
wouldn't
be cheap).

Mike