NTL Upgrade

UberNewb

ROVER wrote:

I got Ntl 3mb line in before Christmas with wireless router and USB connection. For general surfing it is fine but I notice if I use Skype or online games I can lose connection for 5 - 6 secs is this a limitation of the USB connection. If so how much would it cost me to buy a card instead of the USB?

That sounds a bit odd, but I used a network card anyway so I wouldn't know.
Network cards are VERY cheap!! You should get one here

http://www.elara.ie/products/networkcard.asp

oceanclub

I've got a 2Mb connection from NTL and the first I knew of any upgrades was when I saw it mentioned in the IT this morning. I haven't received any letter about it either. Am I entitled to an upgrade?

P.

paulm17781

oceanclub wrote:

I've got a 2Mb connection from NTL and the first I knew of any upgrades was when I saw it mentioned in the IT this morning. I haven't received any letter about it either. Am I entitled to an upgrade?

P.

Where was this mentioned? I had a look in the Irish Times and didn't see it. What page?

maquiladora

oceanclub wrote:

I've got a 2Mb connection from NTL and the first I knew of any upgrades was when I saw it mentioned in the IT this morning. I haven't received any letter about it either. Am I entitled to an upgrade?

P.

What was written in the article?

dlofnep

paulm17781 wrote:

Wireless USB??? Bad NTL, no biscuit.

Ethernet is more reliable for networking. I have no idea what the performance difference is but one is designed for networks the other is designed for convinience.

Moan, moan, moan. You'd find anything to cry about. They are giving out a "free" wireless router and wireless adapter and you complain about it?

Giving the fact that the transfer rate of USB far exceeds that of the bandwidth of NTL's current connection and future upgrade, it doesn't matter if they use USB or Ethernet. Stop trying to nitpick.

paulm17781

dlofnep wrote:

Moan, moan, moan. You'd find anything to cry about. They are giving out a "free" wireless router and wireless adapter and you complain about it?

Giving the fact that the transfer rate of USB far exceeds that of the bandwidth of NTL's current connection and future upgrade, it doesn't matter if they use USB or Ethernet. Stop trying to nitpick.

Christ it was a joke. Please don't judge me or my humour based on one post.

If you bother to look I only mentioned it because people complained about wired USB connections constantly failing and then fixing when they used wired ethernet.

Madong

dlofnep wrote:

Moan, moan, moan. You'd find anything to cry about. They are giving out a "free" wireless router and wireless adapter and you complain about it?

Giving the fact that the transfer rate of USB far exceeds that of the bandwidth of NTL's current connection and future upgrade, it doesn't matter if they use USB or Ethernet. Stop trying to nitpick.

Ah man give him a break its his opinion, thats what Boards is about? lol

seamus

paulm17781 wrote:

If you bother to look I only mentioned it because people complained about wired USB connections constantly failing and then fixing when they used wired ethernet.

Just to clear this up, USB and ethernet are two entirely different things.

Ethernet is a form of network medium. 802.11b/g is another form of network medium (wireless). In order to connect to a network, you need a network adapter. So in the above two cases, you have Ethernet adapters and you have 802.11x Adapters. These adapters can come in many forms. You can get USB 802.11x Adapters, and you can also get USB Ethernet Adapters, which both plug into a USB slot. You can also get PCI Adapters for these network types which plug into a PCI slot inside your machine.

Otherwise, his assertion is OK - USB Adapters depend on software to do error-checking, compression, etc etc, which eats up CPU time. PCI Adapters have chips on-board which do all this, saving the CPU from having to do it. Whether that adapter is for an Ethernet or Wireless network is irrelevant.


(Sorry, it was annoying me )

paulm17781

seamus wrote:

Otherwise, his assertion is OK - USB Adapters depend on software to do error-checking, compression, etc etc, which eats up CPU time. PCI Adapters have chips on-board which do all this, saving the CPU from having to do it. Whether that adapter is for an Ethernet or Wireless network is irrelevant.

Thanks for the clarification. Am I right that PCI wirless would be more efficient or would the Wireless USB adapter do the same job?

maquiladora

Going back to the topic of this thread for a moment.....has anyone seen this reported article in the Irish Times mentioning NTL upgrades?

dlofnep

paulm17781 wrote:

Thanks for the clarification. Am I right that PCI wirless would be more efficient or would the Wireless USB adapter do the same job?

The differences are would not be noticeable in anyway, shape or form to be honest. If you really wanted to check the differences, you could benchmark each and scrutinize them at very minute values.

dlofnep

maquiladora wrote:

Going back to the topic of this thread for a moment.....has anyone seen this reported article in the Irish Times mentioning NTL upgrades?

No, tell us more.

paulm17781

dlofnep wrote:

The differences are would not be noticeable in anyway, shape or form to be honest. If you really wanted to check the differences, you could benchmark each and scrutinize them at very minute values.

Is that fact or that you don't know but need to have an input to 'jutify' having a go at me for no reason?

dlofnep

paulm17781 wrote:

Is that fact or that you don't know but need to have an input to 'jutify' having a go at me for no reason?

I'm not having a go at you mate. Sorry about earlier.. I'm jsut tired of people moaning over anything on these forums, not to mention something that is free.

As far as it goes, yes that's a fact. There is no noticeable difference between usb and ethernet. I'm qualified for many reasons to answer the question, but the most important is that I have two systems at home, one via ethernet, one via a usb wifi adapter - Both equal in performance.

The only time you'll notice a difference is if you exceed the transfer rate and capabailities of the usb standards. Don't take my word for it, try it yourself. Even benchmark it, you'd have to really scrutinize it at low values like I siad to see any differences and that's only when you are really using major bandwidth.

bk

dlofnep wrote:

As far as it goes, yes that's a fact. There is no noticeable difference between usb and ethernet. I'm qualified for many reasons to answer the question, but the most important is that I have two systems at home, one via ethernet, one via a usb wifi adapter - Both equal in performance.

USB shouldn't effect the performance of your BB connection (it may cause a delay 1 or 2 ms), however it will effect the performance on your CPU. This is because a lot of work has to be done in software due, which would normally be done in hardware on an ethernet card. Now this effect on the CPU might be small, but if you are a gamer or have an old PC it maybe an issue.

Also because USB has to have drivers this can often lead to extra issues, I have seen many people with disconnect, bad stability issues with USB adaptors that were fixed by changing to an ethernet card.

Finally most USB adaptors won't work with alternative OS's like Linux, Solaris, Mac, etc.

Snaga

USB1.1 has a working throughput of about 3.8-4Mbps. (12Mbps theoretical etc...).

(For the lazy - http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=usb+1.1+3.8Mbps&btnG=Search&meta= )

If you have multiple USB devices this is going to drop as its a bus, not a port, all your usb devices time share.


802.11b is roughly the same - especially with multiple devices on the wlan.

(oops a google link, how did that get there - http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=802.11b+3.8Mbps&btnG=Search&meta= )

And a toms hardware one for good measure... http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Reviews-63-ProdID-SOHO6TCW-9.php

With 3Mb Broadband and a usb keyboard and mouse, maybe that usb voip phone, and god forbid a usb 802.11b adapter plugged into a usb1.1 port you are not going to get your full throughput.

As speeds increase this will get more noticeable with people using older machines. USB2 ports and 802.11g should alleviate this (mixed mode wireless networks will still suffer a bit though), but for the sake of 15 quid, get yourself an ethernet card.

You get 100Mbps throughput - no bottleneck, less cpu overhead and best of all - less threads on boards giving out about slow broadband on your new sparkly 10Mbps super connection.

christophicus

will an ethernet card be fully taken advantage off by an old pci connection?the pc is probably from between 1998 and 2000.

seamus

I'd be surprised if an ethernet card from then wasn't 10/100Mbps christophicus. This means that it will auto-negotiate with the router/hub to decide whether it uses a 10Mbps connection or a 100Mbps connection. Unless the router is 10Mbps only (or the connection/line is badly damaged) is should run at 100Mbps.

If your card will only support 10Mbps, you can pick up a faster card (even a Gigbit one - 1000Mbps) for next to nothing these days.

stag39

come on guys get back to the topic in hand!!

paulm17781

dlofnep wrote:

I'm not having a go at you mate. Sorry about earlier..<snip>

That's cool, it was the "you'd" based on not knowing me or reading the full thread that angered me.

dlofnep wrote:

As far as it goes, yes that's a fact. There is no noticeable difference between usb and ethernet.

I believe there can be I have seen one connection improve dramatically when using Ethernet over USB. Wireless is still a blackbox to me that is why I keep bringing this up.

As for upgrades, someone mentioned an article in IT? Was that Irish times? I had a scan through it and saw nothing. Did anyone see this phantom article? What did it say???

dlofnep

bk wrote:

USB shouldn't effect the performance of your BB connection.

That is what I was referring to.

Also because USB has to have drivers this can often lead to extra issues, I have seen many people with disconnect, bad stability issues with USB adaptors that were fixed by changing to an ethernet card.

Yes, anyone can have problems with USB. In ratio, they are very low and USB is not an actual bad medium. It doesn't change the fact that a working usb adapter and a working ethernet card will have no noticeable difference on your connection.

Finally most USB adaptors won't work with alternative OS's like Linux, Solaris, Mac, etc.

That's not performance related. That's software related. Alot of alot of things won't work on alot of operating systems. It's not relative to my points

ambro25

'been with NTL BB for about a year and a half (Sep'04), started with their 300kbps (coming from UK, I just refused to pay the fee for the higher packages + didn't need them, at the time). The recent(-ish) 1MB update was nice and welcome for MSN webcam chats with family abroad

Using it both wired (desktop) and 802.11g (lappies) through D-Link 524 router (eBay, £19 - back in August'04). Worked from day one and never skipped a beat - never even had to reset the NTL box! (I think it's a 100 or 120).

Oh - never used WiFi USB but used plenty others: 802.11b CF card, 802.11b PCMCIA, 802.11b/g PCMCIA, 802.11g Mini-PCI (lappie). It does not make any difference whatsoever, in practical terms, until and when we get 10 Megs + per sec. Under that, the bottleneck is still your 'puter processing grunt and browser/software config (e.g. currently P166MMX/96MB/802.11b CF card in PCMCIA pass-through, on Win98Lite with IE5 is just as fast as Centrino 1.6/512MB/Mini-PCI on XP Pro with IE6)

Right, that's for setting up the small point, but on-target, which follows: something's up, as my BB connection was shot-to-sh1t last night for the first time ever. Connection was so slow (was there alright), I kept getting time-outs from email servers :eek:

Fine this morning, but haven't had chance to test the line speed . Area is Rathfarnham/Ballyboden. Anyone else?

ambro25

:mad: ...and again last night!

Weird thing is, it was working absolutely fine yesterday AM and I know it's not my setup, I've been through every imaginable check up last night on PC (ports/f'wall/etc/etc.), on router (making sure noone's cracked my WEP & sucking my bandwidth) and I've re-set NTL cable modem twice for good measure -

Gonna call'em up & find out what's what - not that it's likely to do any good, judging from earlier posts in thread

dillon_the_rabb

Morning All.

ambro25, I am in Clonee D.15, and I have been having connection issues as well over the past couple of days. One minute everything is working fine, the next minute, browsing may go down, but mail is ok, or vice versa. I spoke to tech support and they said they were carrying out tests and checks on the service and there may be some minor disruption. Its the first I heard of it

It seems to be working OK this morning though...

Cheers

Matt

Madong

lads goes wonky when they are upgrading nodes bear with it for a few days

paulm17781

My connection (Temple Bar) has disconnected twice in the past two days. A reset always fixes it but it is normally rock solid. I can only assume it is upgrade related.

ambro25

Lads - resets not fixing nothing, and their Customer Service is... well, nu'f said :rolleyes:

AFA I can tell, (i) over the last 4 days, (ii) at any given time, I'm getting anything between 5kbps and 70 kbps

Router appear to be a '200' (but looks like to 100/120 shown in pix in thread above), RDY and SYNC lights steady on... Tried everything, even direct connection (modem straight into LAN on PC, not thru router) + taking down MS F'Wall/Internet protection + disabling my own + antivirus (Mommy!!!), with none but the bare minimum of XP processes running (after a full sweep/clean with AVG,Adaware,Spybot etc. - PC's totally clean).

Just at my wit's ends now

fatherdougalmag

What are your signal strengths like? (via modem admin page)

ambro25

Didn't know there was a modem admin page

What's usual IP for it, please, if you know it? Or do I have to go through NTL's website?

Madong wrote:

lads goes wonky when they are upgrading nodes bear with it for a few days

I wouldn't usually be annoyed when it's a couple of days or so (as I know they are fiffin' & faffin' with upgrading the speeds and all), but it's been 5 days now... no play BF2 makes ambro25 sad

fightin snr

ambro m8, ip:192.168.100.1

username:root
password:root
can also use (admin) as user name and password also.

important points to note are ur downstream receive power and snr
Rx power should be between -5 and +5 ideally
snr somewhere in the 30db range.

now check ur upstream transmit power,this should be below 61db ideally somewhere between 40/56db.

hope this helps