slow internet speed

October 15, 2005 4:49 PM

A close friend lives in remote part of Arizona. She tried Cable and DSL for her home.. but could not get more than 20kb download speed.

What can she do make her internet experience better?
both cable and dsl companies checked line and said that thats all she will get in her home. Using phone line can actually better? but it is too much hassle for family.
Is there any other way? I couldn't find any info on satelite system in southern part of arizona. She tried three computer with different router, etc... download speed remaind same...

posted by curiousleo to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Apparently you can use DirecWay anywhere in the US with an unobstructed view of the southern sky.

I have no experience with them, but they claim 700 Kbps down (which is ~85 Kb/s), 128 Kbps up for $600 (yes, $600) activation and $60/month.

Also, changing the computers/routers/etc. isn't going to improve anything -- it's a problem of distance and wiring quality, which you can't fix without lots of infrastructure investment (and the telecom company isn't going to waste money on that for a few rural customers).
posted by nmiell at 5:29 PM on October 15, 2005

It rather depends on how much she's willing to spend. If it's really important, you can lease a dedicated line from the telco (e.g. a T1) that will provide as much bandwidth as the budget affords, but it will be extremely costly -- $500 to $1000 per month at least.

But I have a feeling we're talking just normal home use here, which does not justify the cost of a "real" connection. If she has already tried all the available DSL and cable options then it sounds like that's pretty much it. Regular analog phone modems will never reach 20kbytes/s download, so there's no point in trying to get more there.

There are a number of other ways to get connectivity: satellite, wireless, even through the power lines. But most of these are only available in limited areas or in trial rollouts. So she needs to look in the yellow pages, or on a site like broadbandreports.com and find out what actually is available in her area. But I wouldn't get my hopes up, because people that live in remote areas generally have very few options if the available DSL / cable service is unacceptably slow.
posted by Rhomboid at 5:31 PM on October 15, 2005

DirecWay is OK as long as you're not a gamer, since your latency includes 22K miles up, 22K miles down, 22K miles back up and 22K miles back down for every packet. For web surfing, email, and downloading files, you should be just fine.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:36 PM on October 15, 2005

A phoneline is 56 kilobits, not bytes, so your download speed on Internet Explorer/Firefox would show as 5KB/sec (kilobytes per second), give or take. 8 bits of information = 1 byte of information, and you have to account for protocol overhead - so the conversion ratio in practice works out to 10:1

20 kilobytes per second - if that's the download speed she's seeing - is four times what you'd see with a modem.

If she's going to be gaming, the 20KB/sec is more than sufficient for a game, and the latency should still be pretty low although packetloss will cause some lag due to packets being lost. With a satellite, as crash noted, she'll get much better download speeds but she won't be able to play Counter-Strike or other similar online games. Even more latency-tolerant games like World of Warcraft would probably be unplayable.

Make your decision as best fits your needs, really.
posted by Ryvar at 6:20 PM on October 15, 2005

game is not important.
but she needs to download big files (300mb each) constantly....
The same file I download will reach 40kb/s from another state.
posted by curiousleo at 6:53 PM on October 15, 2005

I had direcway for a while and hated it. It was much less reliable than DSL or cable and the latency was annoying even for web surfing.
posted by callmejay at 8:46 PM on October 15, 2005

I have Starband satellite and it's not bad. Not as good as DSL but a vast improvement over dialup. The latency rules out VOIP and gaming, but web browsing and file download are good. Sorry, don't have numbers, but it's quite fast. Downloading big files is especially much better than dialup.

Starband went through tough times financially a year or so ago, as part of machinations by a major stockholder. I think they're stable now. I've heard their VSAT service is technically better than Directway.

One thing to be careful of with Starband (probably the same applies to Directway) is that they really don't mind how much you download, but will cut you off if you upload too much, so P2P needs to be carefully managed. (The satellite upload channel has a smaller bandwidth, and it gets saturated easily, they told me.)

Downsides: Severe rainstorms can cut off the connection. Also, at peak times (e.g Saturday mornings) the connection gets slow from congestion -- but I think this applies to most non-dedicated connections.

I definitely recommend Starband as a replacement for dialup -- I'd HATE to go back.
posted by anadem at 9:37 PM on October 15, 2005