Cable Forum - General Do you actually need very fast broadband speeds?

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Re: Do you actually need very fast broadband speeds?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jimmy-J (Post 36129945)

It wasn't always a luxury, there were a few other modems before it, and 2 tin cans and a piece of string before them. Still a luxury to those who had to rely on smoke rings!

Easier than trying to whistle the 1200 and 2400 baud handshake

Re: Do you actually need very fast broadband speeds?

Acoustic couplers? 1.2Kbps, pushing the phone handset into the foam block. Knock the shelf it was on, and you'd likely cause a disconnection.
No direct electrical connection was allowed to the phone network.

Re: Do you actually need very fast broadband speeds?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Qtx (Post 36129909)

Its funny but I remember my pings and latency going by to modem, ISDN and the first 1Mbit cable days and I preferred them over my VM connection later.

96 Ping on an internal modem to quake servers on modem with minimal jitter.

10 to 12 Ping on Blueyonder 1Mbit to quakeworld servers with a jitter of 1 or 2

VM was around 28 to 34 ping and ok at first but then started to get jitter of 30+ all the time with worse spikes here and there. n.

Back in the olden days, Telewest used to host Counterstrike and Team Fortress servers and you could dial-in to the local POP (point of presence) and get very low pings as you were terminating your connection inside the same network as the game servers. 56k users doing that would have better connections than non-Telewest users, it was great :D

When they started doing service via cable modems, this was indeed better for latency and jitter. But the inherent fault with DOCISIS is that it's a wide area broadcast network, and you get allocated a slot to 'shout' your message on. That's fine on a brand new, really quiet network where 99% of people are still using dial-up. You aren't sharing the slots with many others so your packets are sent frequently! But eventually more and more users went to cable, so you had to wait for them to 'shout' before you could, hence jitter got worse.

The VM network is healthier than it was some years ago, where lots of areas were oversubscribed for the capacity available, but getting back to the heady days of only having to share the megaphone with just 1 other user on your street isn't going to happen. VM moving over to full fibre will, eventually, solve this, but only when they finally dispense with the last vestiges of cable - it'll be the old system running on top of fibre for some time.

Re: Do you actually need very fast broadband speeds?

The jitter was mostly over congestion and the limitation of DOCSIS back then.

A couple of friends of mine started Barrysworld which hosted servers and they also had their own POP to dial in to. Before then we had a server hidden away at work on dark fibre which wasn't really utilised properly by the company at the time which we just used among ourselves while 'testing' it ;) Think my ping there averaged about 6 while at work :D