[RTC List] [Fwd: Re: Broadband speeds and stability for streaming video?]

[William Van Hefner]

Patrick,

I probably got carried away with my caps in the last post. I was
definitely referring to megaBITS per second though. I am used to dealing
with these issues at a carrier or reseller level, where no one ever refers
to megaBYTES per second. I can understand how poorly-trained customer
service people might get confused about it though.

I don't have Sonic.Net's bonded DSL service. I have their ADSL-Pro
service, which is advertised as being UP TO 8 megabits per second
downstream. I pay like $60 a month for that service, which includes 8
public IPs, the ability to admin my reverse DNS records, NO port blocking
of any kind, no special software/spyware needs to be installed and they
don't care what operating system I use, web and mail hosting for a single
domain with no registrar fees, remote backup service, nationwide dial-up
in the event that the DSL connection goes down and excellent customer
service. I have used them at home for the past 6 years or so, and really
like dealing with them. They offer both wireless and ADSL2 service in
Santa Rosa and much of the bay area. With any luck, maybe they will extend
their network up here some day.

I don't know much about their bonded DSL service. I talked to someone
there about a year ago though, and was told that it was available in
Eureka, works at up to 20 megabits downstream, used a commercial circuit
with a much better service level agreement than you would ever get on any
residential product and cost just slightly less than a dedicated T1.
Unless you are using the circuit to do hosting, I would think that the
bonded DSL service at up to 20 megabits per second would be preferable to
a 1.5 megabit per second T1. It's DSL, not ADSL, so upload speeds should
not be terribly slower. As I recall, the price was like $350/mo.


-- 
William Van Hefner - President
Vantek Communications, Inc.
e-mail: vantek at humboldtonline.com

On Wed, January 28, 2009 2:58 pm, Patrick Moon wrote:
> William Van Hefner,
>
>
> How much are you paying for the bonded "
>
>
> 20MBps" which is approaching the "155 Megabits per second " of an OC-3?
> I WANTS some!
>
>
> BTW I have screwed up in other posts...it should always be a "M" for
> mega and I used a "m" by accident... sorry to make a confusing situation
> worse.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Patrick
>
>
>
> see these for more info: http://www.oempcworld.com/support/MB_vs_Mbits.htm
>  http://www.infobahn.com/research-information.htm
> http://netbook.cs.purdue.edu/othrpags/qanda188.htm
>
>
> William Van Hefner wrote:
>
>> David,
>>
>>
>> The first thing you should do is call Suddenlink and schedule an
>> appointment for someone to come out and test your connection. Most
>> online "speed tests" are pretty unreliable. Suddenlink should be able to
>> tell pretty quickly where the problem is.
>>
>> That being the case, I'm pretty sure that most cable modem and DSL
>> customers in the area get well over 1 MBps downstream. I know that
>> Sonic.Net advertises a bonded DSL service here that goes up to 20MBps
>> downstream. My ADSL line at home feeds my DirecTV receiver/DVR for
>> viewing their HDTV Video On Demand service, and it regularly sucks
>> bandwidth at a rate of 3MBps for hours at a time. It can burst well over
>> that though.
>>
>> BTW, most streaming video services do not actually show movies in "real
>>  time". They generally buffer the video on the receiving device for at
>> least a few seconds. That way, a temporary loss of signal won't lead to
>> an interruption in the picture. For movies, the delay wouldn't really be
>>  noticeable. It's a different story when it comes to things like news
>> and sports though. Nobody wants to be 5 seconds behind everyone else
>> that is watching the Superbowl.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>




-- 
William Van Hefner
President

Vantek Communications, Inc.
3144 Broadway, Ste. 3
Eureka, CA USA 95501-3838
707.476.0833 ph
e-mail: vantek at humboldtonline.com