OT: Off topic ... Hi from an old timer ... plus, a Question

Eric Oyen eric.oyen at icloud.com
Tue Feb 2 23:22:23 MST 2021 

Well,
I unbundled from phone and cable tv as I don’t use them much. I use cox business internet here with guaranteed bandwidth (according to contract). At $86 monthly, it gives me access to anything else I might need (like streaming services, voice over IP, etc).

For the cost of cable tv, I can have 3x the channels with chromecast from google at about 1/2 the cost. As far as phone goes, magic jack still works and it’s interface is easy for us blind hackers.

Oh, and I don’t have caps on downloading or bandwidth usage on business class either.

-Eric
From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Business services dept.

> On Feb 2, 2021, at 1:07 PM, George Toft via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
> 
> I've had CenturyLink and now have Cox.  I would still have CenturyLink if they would have given me a discount when my promotion was up - they refused, so I switched to cox.  When I called up to cancel the service and return equipment, they suddenly found a 50% off for 2 years discount code.  Too late - that ship sailed.
> 
> Cox has me so bundled up that to split the video from the Internet from the phone and just go with Cox video and CL internet will cost me more than what I'm paying now, and the Cox video features were better than CL at the time I switched.  It was literally like stepping from the 20th century with CL into the 21st Century with Cox.
> 
> In the end, in my opinion, bandwidth is good, but latency is king, but QoS trumps everything.  I have a co-worker who has been having problems with his provider in Prescott Valley.  They implemented "a fix" that drops him offline for 23 seconds at 10:00am every day (sounds like rebooting a router).  I also know Cox' service seems to vary from neighborhood to neighborhood, and I got lucky as I have had no problems, except bandwidth from my gamer kids who have to download 25-100GB of games every week.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> George Toft
> On 1/26/2021 6:16 PM, Stephen Partington via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>> Streaming media is indeed a set bandwidth, but the headroom that a faster connection gives will hel offset the more bursty downloads without stalling or impacting the streaming         content.
>> 
>> Having had cox and century link gig fiber century link has been the better experience so far. And for concurrent streams fiber has been far more graceful and I think that the latency was a portion of it. 
>> 
>> On Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 4:54 PM AZ Pete via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org <mailto:plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org>> wrote:
>> I would think hard about upgrading to a "faster" plan.
>> The Wall St. Journal did  a study that basically said you gain no advantage for streaming media by upgrading to a faster plan. 
>> The WSJ article is behind a pay wall, but this article summarizes the results.
>> https://medium.com/gowander/quick-take-wsj-the-truth-about-faster-internet-its-not-worth-it-c73d79a616b9 <https://medium.com/gowander/quick-take-wsj-the-truth-about-faster-internet-its-not-worth-it-c73d79a616b9>
>> 
>> I've been working from home since last March when Covid started. I have two kids. One is in high school who is on Zoom all day for school. The other is streaming Pluralsight/Youtube/Coursera all day doing self-learning to become a software dev. I'm a DBA and am on all kinds of video calls/meetings throughout the day as well as transferring large files to/from my local network. My wife works remotely as well (altho not very many video meetings).  In the evening the kids are streaming movies/Youtube/video games/Discord/etc. With all this streaming going on I've never experienced any noticeable lag/dropouts in streaming or video conference calls. However, we consistently *almost* reach our 1.25TB cap each month. I have the Cox "Internet Preferred" plan (100Mb down/10 up). Since we are using a lot more data I'm considering upgrading our data cap (but not the speed).
>> 
>> As far as the redundant ISP idea, I too worry about this. But my plan in the event of an ISP outage is to use my mobile phone as a hot spot. It'll work in a pinch to get me by until the outage is resolved. I've only ever experienced short outages with Cox, so having a backup ISP seems like a lot of wasted money in my opinion. But, you have to assess you're own situation and make the decisions that work for you.
>> 
>> Something to consider....
>> Peter
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 1/26/2021 3:49 PM, der.hans via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>>> Am 26. Jan, 2021 schwätzte Mike Schwartz so: 
>>> 
>>> moin moin Mike, 
>>> 
>>>> OT: Off topic ... Hi from an old timer ... plus, a Question 
>>>> 
>>>> Please forgive me if I have been "out of radio contact" for too long. 
>>> 
>>> Yeah, it's been a while :). 
>>> 
>>> I believe both CenturyLink and Cox are offering Gigabit if you're in the 
>>> right part of town. At least Cox puts a data maximum on it. I believe 
>>> someone pointed out that a true gigabit connection can hit the monthly 
>>> maximum in a few hours. 
>>> 
>>> I was switching ISPs about the time that the pandemic started, so just 
>>> kept the old connection. I'm on one connection for dayjob and the family 
>>> uses the other. 
>>> 
>>> Since the pandemic has started both ISPs have had multi-hour outages, so 
>>> it's been handy to have a spare. Paying for two connections is a lot 
>>> cheaper than not getting paid due to overloaded bandwidth :). 
>>> 
>>> ciao, 
>>> 
>>> der.hans 
>>> 
>>>> (as in ... the "Wolf Brand chili" slogan) 
>>>>   (see, e.g., 
>>>> https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Wolf+Brand+chili%22+slogan&t=h_&ia=web <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Wolf+Brand+chili%22+slogan&t=h_&ia=web> 
>>>> OR ... just click over to the "[[Slogan]]" *section* of the Wikipedia 
>>>> article about "Wolf Brand chili" ... at 
>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Brand_Chili#Slogan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Brand_Chili#Slogan> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> * * * Question: * * * 
>>>> We upgraded our ISP service (at home) when my wife started working from 
>>>> home ... around the beginning of the pandemic. It is still "DSL", -- 
>>>> through "CenturyLink" -- but supposedly it is now FOUR times faster than it 
>>>> used to be, (it "had been" ... for * * * *years. ** * *) 
>>>> 
>>>> I think we need something faster now. (We have 3 adults ... and make use of 
>>>> [either Zoom or "Google Meet" or something similar] a lot lately. 
>>>> 
>>>> Any advice? 
>>>> (including, whether or not we should have more than one ISP, just to be on 
>>>> the safe side?) 
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks in advance, ... 
>>>> 
>>>> Mike Schwartz 
>>>>    [elderly] timer 
>>>>    I may be in the Plug-Discuss archives ... if they [still] go "WABAC" 
>>>> ... 
>>>> Glendale  AZ 
>>>> schwartz at acm.org <mailto:schwartz at acm.org> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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