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Gear / Technical Help => Post-Processing, Computer / Streaming / Internet Devices & Related Activity => Topic started by: acidjack on February 17, 2012, 09:30:08 AM
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Currently my home runs off of a T1 line (supposedly) shared by my building, plus we have Time Warner Cable which comes with Internet, which I only currently use for streaming movies to my TV.
This so-called "T1" line is slow as mud - download speeds and upload speeds are OK, but general streaming and webpage loading is pretty bad - like it cannot make it through a YouTube clip a lot of the time. I'm not convinced the TW Internet as-is isn't faster.
I believe my current cable is 10MBPS. Time Warner is offering something now called "wideband" that is 30MBPS for another $20/mo. Does anyone have any experience using that? In particular, what I don't want them doing is throttling my torrents or doing other weird stuff to limit performance. I don't do a ton of torrenting - mostly FTP - but I still don't want to pay the extra $$ unless the Time Warner option is pretty good.
Any experience/thoughts?
[Just to get it out of the way, FIOS and DSL are not really an option for me]
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A t1 line is slow, its only 1.54Mbps so that's why the pages are slow to load.
I have wideband and a docsis 3.0 cable modem but my package is 50 down and 5 up, the package just below what I have is 30/5. I've been using the wideband since about mid December and its been working out pretty well. It did take about 3 phone calls to TW to actually be provisioned to the wideband but that was no issues since. The nice thing about TW is that they don't have contracts so I can downgrade any time I would like and upgrade again.
I haven't downloaded a lot of torrents recently but if you have any, I'll download to test out some speeds. A couple times in Firefox, I have have downloaded files at 6MB/second. It really depends where you are downloading files from to achieve good download speeds. If you have any FTP sites to test out, just paste the links.
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A t1 line is slow, its only 1.54Mbps so that's why the pages are slow to load.
I have wideband and a docsis 3.0 cable modem but my package is 50 down and 5 up, the package just below what I have is 30/5. I've been using the wideband since about mid December and its been working out pretty well. It did take about 3 phone calls to TW to actually be provisioned to the wideband but that was no issues since. The nice thing about TW is that they don't have contracts so I can downgrade any time I would like and upgrade again.
I haven't downloaded a lot of torrents recently but if you have any, I'll download to test out some speeds. A couple times in Firefox, I have have downloaded files at 6MB/second. It really depends where you are downloading files from to achieve good download speeds. If you have any FTP sites to test out, just paste the links.
Thanks for the input. Oh yeah, one other question - does moving to wideband actually require any new equipment or installation, or does it "just happen"? I assume they'd need to ship a new modem, which would be fine. What I don't want is anyone having to come out and do anything, since making those appointments is always a pain.
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Well when I did the upgrade, I required a new modem but that was going from 30 to 50. I'm not certain if you will need a modem going from 10 to 30. If you don't, then twc will be able to send a new cofig file to the modem.
If you do not notice a change with the speeds, you may need to reboot the router or call twc and see if they can check the downstream frequencies and the SNR.
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Thanks, good advice. Order placed. Apparently someone is coming out "to set up the wifi". This is probably good since I intend to continue using my system of Apple routers, and have heard you need some settings fixed in the TWC cable to make that go smoothly.
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Keep us posted on how this "wideband" access works out. Currently have the "regular" TWC internet at home and they definitely throttle my upload speeds. Limited to around 60 KB/s uploading which completely sucks. We have Optimum Online in the office which completely smokes TWC for speed.
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^^ Well you shall know soon. It was making it impossible to work from home with my terrible T1 line, not to mention stream video, so this should be much better.
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Does Time Warner rate limit or have bw caps?
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Do you mean to ask if there is a monthly data transfer cap like there is with comcast? No, TW doesn't have that.
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Does Time Warner rate limit or have bw caps?
well
they say they don't but when i had twc my torrents would always stop after a period of time and the router needed to be reset
twc said my router was broke, i got a new one and the same thing happened
switched to fios and have not had any issues with either router when used on twc
sooo who know but to me twc was the issue and although its not really a cap, it was capping it by stopping everything till you reset
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Do you mean to ask if there is a monthly data transfer cap like there is with comcast? No, TW doesn't have that.
Sorry for the threadjack, but does Comcast have a monthly data cap? Somehow I thought they got in trouble for that and dropped it. Or maybe that was trouble for throttling torrents, so instead they put a data cap in place?
I recently moved and now have Comcast, guess I need to get this figured out.
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Do you mean to ask if there is a monthly data transfer cap like there is with comcast? No, TW doesn't have that.
Sorry for the threadjack, but does Comcast have a monthly data cap? Somehow I thought they got in trouble for that and dropped it. Or maybe that was trouble for throttling torrents, so instead they put a data cap in place?
I recently moved and now have Comcast, guess I need to get this figured out.
They have a general 250GB/month cap. Outside of that, the only constant throttling they should be doing is to keep your rates in line with what you are paying for. For me that translates to ~2mbps/up & ~16mbps/down - after the their initial "Speedboost" wears off that is.
Excessive use info: http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/common-questions-excessive-use/ (http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/common-questions-excessive-use/)
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Thanks fleish, that was very helpful. Maybe I'll need to check into their data meter, but I don't think I have much likelihood of hitting 250GB per month.
Certainly not now anyway, but if I ever start following up on my new years resolution to transfer and torrent more of my lost-in-the-archives shows I might need to pay some attention. Even then, 250gb/mo seems like a lot.