[Gllug] ADSL or cable?

[Ian Northeast]

Matthew Thompson wrote:
> 
> > NTL told me that there is no contention ratio on their cable service
> > and
> > experience bears this out, I get a good 1Mb/s and can download a CD in
> > an hour and a half, reliably. A friend subscribed to their 128Kb/s
> > service and we measured her connection at about 190Kb/s. Mine delivers
> > exactly what was promised.
> 
> NTL are lieing to you then. NTL as with Telewest operate a non specific
> contention system where the contention is set by the number of
> customers in the area you are connected to against the bandwidth
> available.

Possibly true, but I have yet to catch them out. It is possible that
there are few other customers in my area. Their marketing encourages
this - I once called them and was told that BB was not available here.
Which might have put me off, had I not spoken to a different droid the
previous day who told me it was. And of course it is. Subscribing to NTL
was surprisingly difficult. Much harder than setting it up:)

> I too have never seen slower than the quoted speed of the line when
> accessing the right sites although if you're getting a CD in an hour
> and a half it sounds like you're getting faster than 1Mbps or you're
> beingshort changed on your CDs. On the end of a 2Mbps leased line I get
> CDs in about 1 hour - full 650 - 700Mb ISO images.

1Mb/s = 120KB/s = 422MB/hour = 1.54 hours for 650MB. Which accords with
my experience. OK so I rounded it a bit, but it should not take an hour
to download a CD on a 2Mb link.

The CDs are fine BTW, I have downloaded Debian 3.0 both i386 and
PowerPC, and RH 7.3 an 8.0 i386; md5sums all check out and I installed
them all without problem.

Regards, Ian

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