Cable vs DSL

Wow it must be a dream at those speeds, i wish it were available here! The upload speed is what is so impressive. I think they only have it here in high-tech urban areas like southern California but not sure.

I talked to somebody from Europe who had a connection speed of like 40 mbps and he said there is a point where Linden Lab just can't keep up on their end. Do you find this to be the case?

The bandwidth slider in the client maxes out at 1.5Mbps, so you're never going to get 40Mbps communications between client and sim.

ETA: And maxing out the bandwidth slider causes more lag....

I'm on fiber optics (real fast), I like checking the bandwidth from the tester at secondlife.com support page to check from time to time if I am getting what I am paying for.

I Have AT&T U-Verse (fiber optic or something like it). I love it!! Before this I had dsl thru AT&T in 2 different states and I couldn't have been happier with it. Never have service outages and it's always fast and reliable. 2 thumbs up!

Just to throw a "me too" out there, I also use the Fios service, and my connection is remarkable.

CX, I think you may have already mentioned it, but I don't believe it's near your area yet (here's a map of where it is through dslreports.com)
http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios

Perhaps you could check dslreports for something else in your area...I've always checked them first before changing my high-speed carrier (why I went with Fios...for me, they're about the best choice).

(edited to add)
Maureen!! Fios TV is great! Went with it, and the quality is wonderful, including HD (opt in or opt out)...

Wow...I can see that I"m among the minority here. I have DSL and have had DSL since it first came available in my area 7 years ago. I can't give you upload speeds or DL speeds cause I'm pretty technically challenged about those things, but I can say that it's a very rare occurance that it goes out. It's also uber fast and a webpage will load in the blink of an eye. The main box is less than half a mile from my house. I'm running a laptop off of a router. Wow...don't hate me, but I'm very happy with my service. Maybe it's because the main hub is so close?

I've had Verizon FIOS for nearly a year now, and I'm VERY happy with it. Almost no trouble. Before that I had Verizon DSL, and it was quite good too - though I understand early adopters around here had all the sorts of grief one of the other posters has reported. But they seem to have learned their lesson - at least the Verizon staff around these parts has. FIOS installation was trouble-free too. I once used Cablevision for TV, but they were an unfriendly bunch and jacked the price up so high they drove me to satellite - which wasn't bad at all, but was temperamental when there were heavy winds or thunderstorms in the area. Now I use FIOS for TV too, and phone (a package deal that includes free long-distance in US and Canada, and I'm not going to fight that). Downloads speed is rated at 20 mbps and the times I tested it I was getting 16. Way better than DSL, which was good but delivered less than rated too; I guess it's like gas mileage claims: "Your mileage may differ."

Satellite Internet has an inherent problem for SL and gaming or the like: The laws of physics ensure latency. They use geosynchronous satellites, which have to be 25,000 miles up to be geosynchronous. This means a signal from SL to you must go up 25K, then down 25K to you, and your response must make the same round trip. That's a total of about 100K miles, and the speed of light guarantees nearly half a second of lag no matter what - on top of any other latency issues there might be. I think satellite might be fine for most Internet uses, but intensely interactive stuff like SL or WoW are going to be unsatisfactory, unless and until low-orbit satellites become feasible for this use.

Here In Japan ( Tokyo ).....We were introduced to Fiber optics a few years back. Speads and stabilty within the game is very impressive. And withthe lowest end compuers you can still get a very good playabilty factror( had this happen to me when i had adsl 50 mbps connection). I called to a Linden In world a while back and the said they same. The data just get bottled up.....What I try to do is max the memory setting so as much data can pass through more computer. When i do this i can much better usabilty then not.

Usagi

I would never begrudge anyone that is happy with their service. I think the distance issue may be a big factor. My DSL service tech support has told me outright lies and blamed the disruptions on everything from sun spots to street lights. What really ticked me of was getting someone on the phone obviously from India named "Bob" that I could not understand.

Before the slings and arrows start, I work with and for people from India, very intellgent and talented people. My own company has moved our IT support to a company in Bangalore and the quality of our IT service went right out the window.

I also work with an engineer from Scotland and I have trouble with his heavy accent as well. We both have to take extra effort to be understood. He does not answer a phone for a living.

"CX"

Again though, nearby electronics (um, I'm not so sure about sunspots) can cause problems for DSL users. Central heating boilers are a common problem, as are microwaves and DECT phones, and even the PSUs on computers if they're too close to the socket. It's also a very bad idea to plug a DSL modem or router into an extension sockets on a BT line. The master socket is always best -- preferably with an ADSLNation faceplate on a BT line (http://www.adslnation.com/products/xte2005.php) because interference from the ringwire within the regular socket has been known to trash DSL connections.

(I gained a couple of Mbps when I fitted one of those faceplates... but this is with a 24Mbps ADSL2+ service. You're not gonna see that on regular DSL or DSLMax (8Mbps) line.)

Thats what confuses me with the bandwidth slider which i think says kilobits per second, im never sure how kilobits relate to megabits which they use to rate the speed of my internet connection, but 1.5 mbps is the max?

I've been looking for that, but can't find it. Can you point me at the right bit?

Me too...

DSL, because the only option other where I am is dial-up. Which for SL is no-option. The service is advertised as up to 7.6meg. I rarely get above 3meg of that when I test it on ZDnet. The chances of getting much better than that around here are pretty slim, and I live almost on top of the nearest exchange. what I can say in their favour is it have been very reliable, with hardly any interruptions in service in the 5 years I've been using it.

"Up to" download figures are a total rip-off. In theory my ISP could give me 500k, because that's "up to" 7.6meg.

Mbps = Megabits.
kbps = Kilobits.

1Mbps is the same as 1024kbps.

So the SL bandwidth slider goes up to a maximum of 1.5 Mbps. (Almost. It's a few bytes under if I recall correctly; because they rounded it off to 1500kbps.)

In the olden days, back when DSL first came on the scene, 1Mbps connections were expensive, so home users tended to have 256kbps or 512kbps DSL connections. It made more sense to round up sub-1Mbps speeds in kilobits, than 0.25 and 0.5 Mbps, particularly to dial-up users whose last modem probably came with "56kbps!" written all over the box. Now that DSL speeds at home are more typically somewhere between 8Mbps to 100Mbps, it makes more sense to round up the figure in Mbps.

The bandwidth slider in SL doesn't 'rate your internet connection' btw, but allows you to set the maximum speed at which you'd like your client to communicate with the SL servers.

Anyway, the problem with Second Life is that, by maxing out the bandwidth slider, you increase the load of everybody else around you. So if in a sim on your own, not a problem. If standing in a packed sim like Midian City, you're gonna impact on anybody standing nearby, and lag out the whole sim. So, allowing people to increase the bandwidth slider to 8Mbps, 24Mbps or 100Mbps just doesn't make sense.

In this day and age, I would say low latency is more important than speed. I would expect more than 90% of people to have no problem getting speeds of at least 1.5Mbps, but if their latency is high, that's not much good.

Latency signifies a time delay btw. Like, when you connect to that webserver on the other side of the world, how long does it take to respond? The lower the response time (and thus latency), the better. You can test your latency using the ping tool that comes with all operating systems. If you have a stable DSL connection and live particularly close to the exchange, you can request your ISP switch you to a 'Fast Path' profile. This can reduce the latency dramatically (I did this, and my ping response times to European servers dropped from 25ms to 10ms for example). But if your line isn't stable enough, your modem or router will keep losing sync, and you have to go back to an interleaving profile (the standard).

Yap yap. Yeah. tl;dr. Sorry. I got carried away.

In a small Scottish village, connected via ADSL @ 6.1meg down, and 270k up. No cable available here. The service has been reasonable, with only the occasional snag. Actually, now I think of it, the DSL has been more reliable than the power supply this winter
But the router that is supplied with the service has taken to randomly locking up, if it carries on playing up that I'll buy something better

I seem to buy a new router every 18 months... even though there was nothing wrong with the previous one.

It's a new features thing, I guess.

I've got my eye on the Draytek Vigor 2820VN right now. ADSL2+ capable. Annex M. (for faster upstream.) Draft N wireless. (Superfast/MIMO. More like a wired connection.) VOIP. Etc. It's get everything except a fridge to store my beer.

People say you shouldn't get integrated devices because they're often not cost effective to get repaired if one part breaks down, but I've already filled ten electrical sockets in this room... (separate devices require more sockets!) and these things generally come with guarantees anyway.

I think depending on your area your dsl or cable might be better.
M boyfriend has dsl and can download and watch movies.
Yet with my cable he can't but I have cheapest, lowest end cable internet service that is available through the company.
Cable though is constantly cutting off be it television, internet sometimes I swear it goes to snail pace equivalent to dial up. My router that I rent is over 4 years old and they have never offered me a new one.

Ok that would explain why it only goes to 1.5 mbps on the bandwidth slider. I thought it was kind of funny why they wouldn't let it go higher if a megabit equaled 1024 kilobits, considering most people have connections that can go way higher than 1.5 mbps.

I put the slider up to 1500 earlier today and it didn't seem any faster than at 1000 which is where i have had it lately.

Groan, now I am depressed. I am currently on a package which gives anything between 512 and 2MB speeds (sorry, am not very technical), and I normally get between 1.6 to 1.8MB, which is good. However, there is a 10GB a month download limit. I did 2GB in two days just on SL, so that doesn't last long. Every MB over that and they charge you £10.

At the end of the month I am changing to the unlimited plan. Sounds good, but max speed is 256. It's just not going to work, I know it.

Cablevision? They'll think you're in New York City.

I've had DSL (hated it), Cox Cable (loved it) and now Comcast Cable (love it.) I'll only go back to DSL if I absolutely have to.

Cablevision has made out into the Jersey Hinterlands as well.

You people with FIOS can go freeze in the ninth circle of Hell. All around me, everybody's got FIOS. Will Verizon put it in MY neighborhood? Still waiting, after more than a year.

I hate you all.

/hops up onto couch next to Lindal, mouse held in his teeth, a chocolate cream pie balanced on his paw...sets both down next to her...

So sorry! I am here to apologize for all the bad people with FioS.
Here's some pie and mouse as a token of peace. We will yell at Verizon too for you.

I forgot a fork...you may need to use your fingers.