I am at my parents's house for a few days and they just have dial up internet. I noticed yesterday when downloading something that it was only downloading at 2kpbs (or less.)This might be a stupid question, but is dial up internet normally that slow? I thought it might be around 36kps for downloads, but not 2.

Yes its that slow. You'd get 5kps on a good day! Never ever ever as much as 36kps. Aah for the good old days of Napster and 25 minutes to download a song

I assume he was talking about bits and that you are talking about bytes. 36,000 bits a second is a speed that you might hope to get on dial up.

It's pretty much near impossible to do anything useful on dialup now. Patches take forever to download, and even peoples photos take way too long to be able to enjoy much.

33.6kbit does translate to around 4.2kbyte per second (divide by 8), but thats assuming optimal conditions.

3 KiloBytes/second is a reasonable real-world expectation for dial-up without line or connection problems.

My parents have dial-up which costs more than light high-speed service but only because they still can't get any high speed where they are. However their connection is ultra-crap due to bad line conditions. When the weather gets a bit better and I have some time to test and document everything I'm going to tear the phone company a new one about this. I think a year of free service would be the least they could offer as compensation.

Hi,

I usually connect at 50.6 or 52kbps. During downloads, it usually starts out at around 6k then for real long downloads it degrades to around 4k.

That's using standard telco, standard home wiring and Sisna.com as the ISP. It's cheap $9.95 USD/mo, and everytime I connect, it reassigns a new IP Address (all dial-up does that) which is a security feature to me. No one wants to bother with sniffing slow systems either.

Ross

Good luck with that. These sorts of things are usually covered by a little asterisk pointing to a disclaimer that actuals may vary due to conditions.

I'm going to tear them a new one based on lousy line conditions in general not because downloads are slow. They have come and repaired a portion of the lines (their equipment) on my parent's property, but I told them right from the start that I believed the problem was with the cabling down from that, at the road.

The call quality is atrocious, the slow internet is only a by-product of that. The internet connection is actually frequently unusable because of the line quality. There's no asterisk that's going to get around that. We're talking no outgoing mail (all SMTP connections to THEIR mail servers fail/time-out), can't load up a plain text web page, can't do anything other than a slow ping or can't connect at all. All problems that have been coming up over the past 2 years and just seem to be getting worse.

http://go.gethughesnet.com

Yes...it's expensive, but it's awfully nice when there are no other broadband options. You probably won't be able to do stuff that requires low latency (voice, vpn, remote control) very well, but it's still better than dial-up.

I don't live in the US. (Phew!)

I was on Hughesnet for about 15 months. It was OK but the FAP was terrible. I couldn't even download a 120MB audio book without exceeding their FAP. I'm now using Wildblue. The FAP is based on a sliding windows of 30 days. It's much better and I've never been dinged. I don't think the connection is quite as good as HughesNet. It goes down first in a large storm or when it's snowing. But even with that I like it better. Geez, I wish I could get broadband. I just live too far out in the sticks. No Broadband and no cell phone.

FAP... ??

Oh, uncle Google to the rescue. FAP



tanstaafl.

I figured he was just having trouble downloading porn.

Phone Company: Sir if we detect a problem in your house you will be charged do you want us to proceed with a test?

You: Yes, I just told you that you have crappie lines and I demand they be fixed.

Phone Company: I just ran a test and your lines are not down you should be able to make a call.

You: I told you I can make a call but I can’t connect very well to the internet using my ISP

Phone Company: Sir, what is Mr. ISP’s number and I’ll check his lines.

You: Its not a who its my Internet Service Provider

Phone Company: Sorry we’re showing that broad band internet service is not available in your area. Can I help you with anything else today?

You: “Bang” (your head explodes)

No Bitt, Luckly, our tastes differ in that regard.

Hughesnet does have a 3am to 6am policy that allows unlimited downloading during this time.

Oh, so "agricultural photos", eh?

For the record as to what I was talking about: fap

So, for the second time in a single day, I realize just how culturally deprived I really am.

MILF....fap fap fap fap fap fap fap!!

I thought I detected a certain familiar onomateopoeia there, but I am just slow on the uptake.

Does this mean I was being Fapped around? Or maybe I just Fapped myself? Naw, it means you used 10% of your brain which overloaded mine.