broadband myth on dsl.

yoshytoshy

noticed someone is mentioning magnet broadband ,which is a company i would see as one of the better providers. my dad has it in his apartment and its mighty fast.

thing is when i rang them not long ago for a better package than my 7mb eircom ,guy for magnet said no problem. when i asked him how they did this ,he told me that it was because they use different hardware in the exchange ,mostly because of fibre optics.
after reading up here on the forum ,it wasn't long before i noticed people saying they couldn't get any faster than 6 or 7 meg because of their lines.

Is it possible to get higher speeds from providers ,because of different equipment in the exchange ?
I decided to got with ntl ,always wanted cable broadband and because the only other company i'd go with seem to lie ,didn't make my decision any harder.

Rob_l

proximity to the exchange directly affects speed as in the closer you are the faster you can get

yoshytoshy

Rob_l wrote: »

proximity to the exchange directly affects speed as in the closer you are the faster you can get

gotcha ,when my line was increased from 3mb to 7mb ,my ping more than doubled.
i notice from posts on threads that this happens because of the noise in the line and because its far away ?
would that be a proper assumption of things ?

Spear

yoshytoshy wrote: »

gotcha ,when my line was increased from 3mb to 7mb ,my ping more than doubled.
i notice from posts on threads that this happens because of the noise in the line and because its far away ?
would that be a proper assumption of things ?

Eircom used heavy interleaving and this is what lead to the higher latency. In Magnet's case they use ADSL2, hence they can provide packages higher than 7.6 meg. Whether it's ADSL2 or 1 you'll always be limited by your line conditions, regardless of the provider.

yoshytoshy

the guy i was talking to from magnet was right in what he was saying so.
i read so many posts of people saying speeds were no better with magnet ,that i thought the guy was spoofing.

can someone check a live broadband connection before they sign up to a dsl package?

Kensington

yoshytoshy wrote: »

can someone check a live broadband connection before they sign up to a dsl package?

Nope, unfortunately not - you have no idea what sort of speeds you can expect until you've signed up and received the modem. If you move into a new apartment or house, and order a line in specifically for broadband, there's no guarantee when the line is installed it'll even take broadband. You don't know until you've signed up to eircom and had the copper put in.

On the note of speed, Magnet, Smart and now certain BT exchanges can do up to 24Mbps download speeds, since they use ADSL2+. Eircom still use ADSL1. ADSL2+ is also slightly better at coping with poorer, noisier or longer lines and can usually provide higher speeds, further out from the exchange. Typical example was when Smart went into offering broadband - quite a few people whose lines failed for eircom broadband (and resellers) were able to get a pretty good connection with smart.

yoshytoshy

thanks kensignton ,thats set things fairly straight. i will see how i get on with ntl for now ,i'm sure the more it gets a take up the more issues will arise.
I'm still trying to figure if peak time television times have any effect on the cable throughput. probably a different signal going through the cable ?

Kensington

Well the more people who get cable broadband in your area, the slower it will become at peak times due to congestion. The cablemodem data channel is a completely different to any of the TV channel signals.