I remember when my Dad got the family and America Online dial-up account . . .

SolidSqual

inspiredsports wrote: »

I had my numbers mixed up because of the way Time Warner jumbles up my bundled services bill, so I just called them for clarification.

We pay on average $152 per month = $1,800 per year for Phone, TV and Internet.

Phone = $25/mo = $300/yr
TV = $92/mo (2DVR's) = $1,104
Internet = $35/mo = $420/yr (that gets us just 10 MB/s down and 1 Mb/s up)

The 30 Mb/s down sounds inviting, but would cost me another $15/mo = $180/yr

I don't have a TV package. I just buy the internet connection and then stream Hulu, Netflix, HBO Go and some ZuneVideo. I love having so much control over what I watch. My wife and I stayed at the in-laws not too long ago to house sit. They have every cable channel known to man and there was never anything on. Cable is a rip-off. I also have a HD Antenna and get all the major stations clear as crystal.

inspiredsports

SolidSqual wrote: »

I don't have a TV package. I just buy the internet connection and then stream Hulu, Netflix, HBO Go and some ZuneVideo. I love having so much control over what I watch. My wife and I stayed at the in-laws not too long ago to house sit. They have every cable channel known to man and there was never anything on. Cable is a rip-off. I also have a HD Antenna and get all the major stations clear as crystal.

I'm considering doing that also to cut costs.

All 6 of us have cell so we don't really even need the home line, but we've had the same one for 27 YEARS so it's hard to let go of. I could port it to one of the cells we are already paying for, but 27 years of being added to call lists eats up a lot of minutes.

TV would be hard to reduce as we are all addicted to shows that don't yet come from other sources.

Jstas

nadams wrote: »

We just upgraded from 2 to 4 bonded T's at work . Pay a crapload of money for them, too. Digital service just isn't available here... My connection at home is faster for downloading than here at work. However, another thing to remember is that T's are symmetrical, so we also get 6mbit/s upload, which I don't get at home.

Anyway, I'm looking to take my 7mbit DSL and team it up with a cable line. Looking at building a PFSense box to tie them together and get something like 15mbit download (which isn't available as a single package anywhere around here). Gonna cost me over $100/mo, though.

4 bonded T1's? So that's like 6 Mbit/s then on an NxT1?

Geez, that's a drag. Running the entire facility on 6 megs. Unless you're

But yeah, the only places I see or hear of T1 lines anymore are in podunk places out in the sticks. Not to say that you're in a podunk place but the farther you get away from city centers, the slimmer your options become. T1 lines are good in cases like that because there is very little signal degradation over long distances. Unlike phone lines which carry ISDN and the various DSL's which drop 50% of the signal strength/quality in less than 3 miles from the switching station.

The thing that sucks with the T1 is that they are symmetrical so you can get like a 6 meg bonded connection but you only get to use 3 megs of it for download. I've seen people use duplexers to boost the down speed by cutting the up speed in half and running half the up connection as down. But that can get flaky.

Either way, you have my sympathies. I've been spoiled at my jobs. Every one has managed huge data centers that have digital trunk drops managed by places like AT&T to supply Innerwebs access.

pitdogg2

Jstas wrote: »

The only way I am changing is when Verizon runs FiOS in my neighbor hood. Then I'm getting a gigabit router and running the feed straight through from the modem without their converter.

Thanks Jstas for the explanation.

On the other hand I thought Verizon had dropped all plans for Fios?
I live in Bloomington Ill and we made sound and vision a few yrs back when verizon announced the fios thing as this was there home base. We never seen any FiOs here at all after they made a big deal of it. But I thought last year sometime Verizon announced they were not implementing any more FiOs due to cost. well they sold out to Frontier couple of years back so everyone here went to Frontier most have not been to happy with the result. Really our options here are very limited we have Comcast or Frontier and if you don't get Comcast cable package your going to pay 65.00 a month and Frontier if you do not get a land line you pay 50.00 a month for 1.5mbs. Either one with a package is over 100.00 a month so as i have dish network I'll never go back to cable and to pay 60.00 a month for a phone that will just sit there is a waste of money IMO.

wayne3burk

but what is all that bandwidth good for????

Jstas

pitdogg2 wrote: »

Thanks Jstas for the explanation.

On the other hand I thought Verizon had dropped all plans for Fios?
I live in Bloomington Ill and we made sound and vision a few yrs back when verizon announced the fios thing as this was there home base. We never seen any FiOs here at all after they made a big deal of it. But I thought last year sometime Verizon announced they were not implementing any more FiOs due to cost. well they sold out to Frontier couple of years back so everyone here went to Frontier most have not been to happy with the result. Really our options here are very limited we have Comcast or Frontier and if you don't get Comcast cable package your going to pay 65.00 a month and Frontier if you do not get a land line you pay 50.00 a month for 1.5mbs. Either one with a package is over 100.00 a month so as i have dish network I'll never go back to cable and to pay 60.00 a month for a phone that will just sit there is a waste of money IMO.

As far as I know FiOS is still on. I know they sold off a chunk of infrastructure they put in because they grew it far too fast. They were originally supposed to use NJ and Oregon as the pilot states, deck them out fully and see how it went. But demand was so high, they started pushing it out elsewhere.

Alot of the cost they have run in to is legal problems. They usually have to dig up the ground to put it in and people go all NIMBY on them. I still gets advertisements weekly about what neighborhoods have FiOS now though. So maybe they just '86'ed the midwest for now and went back to the coastal areas. I dunno.

I just wish they would put it in my neighborhood already. I'm tired of forking over $120+ a month to the cable company for just TV access and $70 for phone and Innerwebs when I could get my TV, phone and Innerwebs for about $80 a month and get better service on top of it.

SolidSqual

/\/\/\/\/\/\ Amen to that.

BeefJerky

Jstas wrote: »

They usually have to dig up the ground to put it in and people go all NIMBY on them.

NIMBY's can kiss my a$$. They're also the reason for a lot of cell phone dead spots. They want the service, but aren't willing to work with the provider to actually allow them to provide it.

musky1963

Lol..........nerds!

Jstas

Lasareath wrote: »

Verizon is not installing Fios anymore. They are just maintaining it.

2 Years ago they invested in their new system. They bought up almost all of the TV bands when TV went digital. So the signal that you used to use to receive channel 2, 4, 5, 7, etc.. will eventually carry your internet if you use Verizon.

Then why are they stringing new lines up the street?

pitdogg2

Jstas wrote: »

Then why are they stringing new lines up the street?

puttin in audioquest optical cable??

zane77

I got Fiber direct to my home a few months ago, my nearest neighbor is 3 1/2 miles away, they ran approx 9 miles of fiber for 4 houses. Part of the Rural Development Act. My first modem was a 300 baud dial up unit on my Apple IIe. Man I'm getting old, currently have 12M down and 1M up, crazy for the middle of nowhere

JimMueller

My first experience was an acoustic coupler attached to some sort of line printer with a keyboard that I sat down and read the information off paper instead of a screen. It dialed into the local university and I would play games on it in the early 80's. No idea on the baud rate, but I went through a LOT of paper.

I also remember paying around $1000 for a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 when it was released, to attach to my then-new //e and later GS. Later paid around $500 through the local college student discount program for a 9600 baud modem. Real-time two-way chat on a dial-up connection to the Apollo workstations was cool. Started using that to transfer warez; I remember complaining to a local sysop that I was exceeding my 60 minute time limit just to upload an 800K image. I later bought (and still have) a USR Dual Standard modem with the 'sysop use only' plate riveted to it. I setup a (Renegade, I think) BBS for them to dial into to validate I had a BBS before sending it out. I switched to PCBoard 14/15 a year later, running on OS/2 v3 and later v4.

I later internet-enabled that BBS so people could telnet to it from any client. I would dial into the server, and they'd connect back to my BBS over the dialup line. And the service was free because the local computer club president was just testing out the possibility of offering internet dial-up service. Too many people were looking for chat BBS's back then though.

We have a Level3 50Mbps fiber circuit at work, but from our tests they aren't capping it. The best I've gotten has been ~90Mbps downstream and ~60Mbps upstream, to a test site 90 miles away. I've not found many test servers which can measure that bandwidth.

JimMueller

Found this speedtest I did today, but it's not the same server as the 90/60 result I referenced above, although located in the same metro area.

Strong Bad

Verizon FIOS from the comfort of my home...

Jstas

Lasareath wrote: »

I bet they are repairing only. Wireless is the future not fiber strung from every pole in the USA.

I really doubt that. There isn't a wireless standard available now or on the horizon that can come anywhere close to fiber optics.

quadzilla

After BBSes I found a VAX I could dial into. That was my first internet connection. After that, I was connecting to my first ISP about '91 with a 14.4, and using tools like wais, archie, veronica, and gopher. I spent most of my time on IRC and playing MUDs. Now, my IQ drops by about 60 points if I don't have an internet connection.

Sherardp

I remember those good ole days. Think I had the old Diamond External 56K modem then. I now run a 200meg fiber line into the whole. NTT Japan will be out here this Tuesday to upgrade me to a true 1gig line. Cost will be about 6000 yen a month. They will upgrade my router to support it, some minor cable installation and a flip of the new switch they put in and BAM!!!

Looking forward to insane speeds like this
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/kKA3-F3KK24&quot; frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

BeefJerky

Sherardp wrote: »

I remember those good ole days. Think I had the old Diamond External 56K modem then. I now run a 200meg fiber line into the whole. NTT Japan will be out here this Tuesday to upgrade me to a true 1gig line. Cost will be about 6000 yen a month. They will upgrade my router to support it, some minor cable installation and a flip of the new switch they put in and BAM!!!

Looking forward to insane speeds like this
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/kKA3-F3KK24&quot; frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Sounds like it's time for me to move to Japan. Want a roommate?

Ugh, the US is so far behind when it comes to broadband.

Sherardp

Ok so I'm only bumping this because I have 1gb fiber in the home and it is simply awesome. I won't post any speedtest, to rub it in but 890Mbps is insane. This is intense gents.