[lug] DSL OR CABLE MODEM

[Nate Duehr]

> Ferdinand Schmid wrote:

> Those ping times are for Sprint Wireless Broadband(tm) only. Other
> wireless broadband technologies may have significantly different
> bandwidth and latency characteristics. For instance, the wireless
> broadband service that I just had installed has fairly stable internal
> network latency (internal to the ISP) of about 50 - 100ms (depending on
> time of day), which is about what I saw with ISDN. The service I have
> uses much smaller cells than Sprint does, which means far fewer people
> sharing a single set of frequencies. However, the download speed I see
> is rarely over 100kB/s -- and I'm not complaining about that, having
> upgraded from 14kB/s.

A friend of mine has the Sprint Wireless Broadband service.

We had to move a Voice-over-IP application that only uses 32kb/s of
bandwidth from his house to mine (I have DSL -- Qwest transport/FRII ISP)
because of packet loss on UDP sessions, especially during high usage times.

The packet loss was outbound only.  It appeared that the wireless
transmitter has to wait for a sending timeslot, and if the buffers get
overrun, it throws packets away -- it was throwing packets away at only
modem upload speeds... not very impressive.

Download speeds and packet loss were always comparable to Cable modem speeds
or just slightly slower.  Faster than my DSL.

Something to think about, or add to the pile for anyone currently shopping
around...

Nate