Service Providers (Internet, TV, Etc)

gogusrl_sl said:

The perks of living in eastern europe

Torrent downloads cap out at ~80 mbps. ~20$ / month for this + land line + mobile (5 cents / m to ~90% of the world + 4gb internetz) + 3g stick (4gb traffic) + cable TV. Add about 10$ worth of mobile usage and it ends up to ~30$ a month.

Guess there's some healthy competition around here.

Click to expand...

I've always been curious as to specific countries and their policies, as they pertain to telecom and the like. In America it seems like companies really had no reason to expand or improve their services, because all of the competition was willing to sit on their current infrastructure and overcharge instead of taking some amount of risk and competing with others. I think that's why so many people here hate, even detest, companies like Time Warner. We've always suspected that those companies were full of shit and refusing to upgrade like they could have; Google now is simply forcing the issue and bringing it to light. And KC isn't the only city that has a shitload of dark fiber sitting around, these fucksticks could have moved forward if they wanted but they were happy to keep their ROI high by reinvesting as little as possible.

I hope all of these current ISPs get forced out of business.

I figure this is a good thread to post this in.

Since I've been tethering I've had a lot of bad service, which I guess is to be expected - it is stopgap after all. But when I'm throttled down to 2G speeds it's almost unusable, depending on what I am trying to do. Recently, when messing around with Steam (something I hadn't done in a while) I noticed that when I'm not throttled that Steam works fine, but when I am throttled down, it doesn't work...at all. Steam will not DL a single bit, ever, period, which is odd. It will continually tell me that I have no connection whatsoever, suspend downloads, then restart the cycle all over again and do so indefinitely...or at least, until I am unthrottled again. What is frustrating is that my speed was averaging around a 56k modem speed, or slightly below - slow, but from what I could tell still within a range that Steam could operate. This is of course difficult to gauge since I can't find any "specs" for what Steam operates under.

I opened a ticket with Steam 2 1/2 days ago with no response, but tonight I started wondering about my ping. Usually I'd have a test with my ping at around 200ms, which to me seemed hella slow, but still something that could be worked with. But occasionally, I'd catch a ping at around 1800ms-2000ms, which seems unbelievably terrible. It was almost impossible to get a feel for how it was doing over time with speedtest.net, so I DLed some freeware from PingPlotter and this is the hilarity I came up with.

This first set isn't completely uninterrupted but the last 5 or so are one after another, @ 15s intervals:



Since I only have a users level of knowledge here, am I wrong in assuming that this is incredibly off the charts in terms of horrible, terrible latency? Also, since I'm anticipating the possibility of dealing with my service provider and being told some bullshit like "that's user error" or "your signal can be affected by outside conditions", is it possible that it could be a poor signal from my location to the tower? Bear in mind that I have no issues when I am NOT throttled, but I don't know if that is because when I am unthrottled I don't have such poor latency, or I do have similar poor latency but the higher unthrottled speed makes it less of an issue?

I'm guessing that it's safe to assume that this latency issue is bad enough to cause Steam to choke, but I'm still having a hard time with these results: with the Speedtest.net test, normally my ping was listed at around 200ms with the occasional 1800ms or so, with this test everything seems much higher with almost nothing as low as 200ms.

Another set I ran just to see if the results would be similar.

DAT PACKET LOSS