Re: Cowboys herding cats
- From: dbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ("David G. Bell")
- Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:03:08 +0100 (BST)
On Monday, in article
<MPG.248de05657e422d6989c21@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
netcat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx "netcat" wrote:
In article <e5vu15188anu2bhmt99n91aohv6nbtmbj8@xxxxxxx>,
daveloewe@xxxxxxxxxxx says...
On 28 May 2009 22:26:03 -0400, "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The claim was made that broadband is cheaper than PPP,
PPP and broadband are not mutually exclusive. Lots of DSL providers use
it.
Do you mean dial-up? Because PPP is apparently used on OC-3 lines and I
really doubt that a dedicated OC-3 line is very cheap.
PPP is just a data link protocol. It says nothing about the line type
and/or speed by itself. Dialup is largely PPP and has been for a long
time, and as such it may have become synonymous with dialup among the
general public although it is not entirely correct.
You've also got to look into how the phone line is paid for.
My experience is in the UK, where things have changed. You can now, for
a monthly fee, get "free" phone calls. It used to be that you had to pay
a time-based charge for every call, which encouraged the use of off-line
services: download eveything in a newsgroup, store it on the user PC,
and read at leisure, while disconnected.
By the late Nineties, it was possible to pay a fee to the phone company,
which allowed free calls to an ISP number. This sort of deal is part of
what kick-started the web in the UK. But you were still using the same
line as for voice calls.
In 2003 it was finally possible to get broadband, an ADSL connection,
which doesn't block off voice calls. It is usually continuously
connected. So now, instead of looking through maps and atlases, I can
call up Google Earth. And the Internet-specific parts of my telco
charges are less now than when I was on dial-up.
Now, my ISP notoriously had a problem copying 20GB of news data to a new
server. Be fair: they were keeping the service running, and the dataset
was continuously changing. Now I have about a Terabyte of storage
available to me. They're selling external drives in supermarkets, here.
My PC motherboard hasn't changed. The last internal upgrade I did was an
extra USB card.
And, a couple of times in the last week, I've noticed my ISP running my
ADSL line at triple the speed I pay for. The trouble with the
advertising of "up to" 8 megabits is that few people are near enough to
the exchange. And they set things up so a lot of customers share the
capacity, without telling you what the baseline is. 50:1 contention on
8Mbits isn't too bad. But if your phoneline only can carry 2 Mbits,
you're down in pre-broadband territory if they only guarantee 1/50 of
that.
Anyway, that's a different problem, though it's another factor which
makes comparisons difficult.
--
David G. Bell -- SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.
On the horizon, a carrier task force of the Salvation Navy was
turning into the wind, preparing to launch Zeppelins.
.
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