High Speed Internet, Suggestions?

As a test, I timed how long it took for my last reply to post: a full 43 seconds from the time I hit "add reply" to the time the page came up on the screen. On my home machine, it would have taken under two seconds.

I scream a lot at work.

A.J.

Here on my new Dell is not to bad. It isn't 2 seconds but under 10 seconds for most forum posts and messages to come up as compared to sometimes minutes on dial up all depends on what thread I was loading and if I was doing other things. But bare in mind you can do a lot more work on highspeed cause you have a lot more speed. SO for instance on Dial up if you're listening to HR you might have sluggishness while doing other things cause the station is taking part of the bandwidth your using where as on highspeed you have a ton more to use and alocate between what you're doing on-line.

>>My husband's convinced dsl stands for dedicated service line and that means have to have a line only for dsl. <<

Nope. DSL stands for "Digital Subscriber Line." When you get DSL, it's completely transparent to you and your phones. The phone company generally just has to flip a switch, and your line is converted. You won't even notice it telephone-wise.

>>Other question.... Do you use an e-mail account provided by the dsl provider or one of the freebies out there? And is there anyway to keep from getting junk e-mail?<<

I use the one provided by SBC/Yahoo. It has excellent spam screening, and even allows you to set up "dummy" e-mail addresses to guard against your e-mail being harvested from forums, newsgroups and other online sources. How it works is you create a new e-mail address just for registering at a site that functions as an alias. You'll receive the mail normally through your regular e-mail address inbox, but the sender doesn't know that. A header on the e-mail lists the alias address that has been sent to. If you suddenly start getting a lot of spam addressed that alias address, you just delete it. For example, my alias e-mail address on eBay is [email protected]. If I suddenly start getting junk mail sent to that alias, I know exactly where it came from and just delete the address.

Hope this all helps.

A.J.

I'm still in the learning phase of this too.

NetZero is offering a line for $14.95 that dials up faster but it isn't as fast as a DSL line. I've had others tell me they sometimes have problem getting on at night. That's not good.

We have AllTel and Bell South in this area and they are offering a DSL line for $29.95. I think my hubby has decided to go that route since he is the computer nerd of the family. He knows best.

A

Elspeth,
I have earthlink cable ISP for $41.95 and it is available through the local Time Warner Cable operator.
I've had it for a few years now. Before I had Road Runner. RR is ok, but it costs more than Earthlink. Check your cable operator and see if they offer other cable ISPs other than Road Runner. Shop around the local phone company where you live and see what they have in DSL. Whatever you pick, you can check your bandwidth speed by going to www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/. There are other sites like this where you can test your speed. Also go to Gibson Research at http://grc.com (not www.grc.com) and test how secure your system and connection is. Steve Gibson is a nationally recognized security expert. He recommends Zone Alarm firewall and he gives some explanation of firewalls.

Seawarrior

I wouldn't suggest spending anything for these so called cheap highspeed deals like netzero or earthlink though earthlinks free if you have their service but when I tried earthlinks in order to get the highspeed I had to give up quality so like my animations wouldn't animate and the images were dropped in quality and if I went max it might not load all the images to help the pages speed up. To me this is not worth the trade off.

Annabelle, I think it really depends on two things: 1. which type of broadband Internet access you want (cable or DSL), and 2. which packages are available in your area. For instance, if you have cable TV, you might be able to get a discount either on your cable or Internet (or both ) if you sign up for broadband Internet.

Same with phone and net. I actually found cable to be almost $10 more a month here over DSL.

And my local cable company isn't worth squat so was not about to give them $10 more a month I know cable prices are outragious down here over $500 a year. Glad my new community has a deal so costs us only $200 a year for cable TV.

Earthlink is a major ISP in the US. I have been using it for a long time and I get a consistent T1 to T2 connection speed. They don't give popup ads like RR does or AOL on your startpage. I upgraded from dialup to cable without a hitch, then again, Dell is packaging Earthlink with new PC so there may be some differences in the packaging deal between Dell and Earthlink. Images loaded fine for me even back when I had dialup and still does quite well when I travel with my notebook and use dialup. There are more and more people going online everyday and the net does get crowded. I would check to see if you have the lastest Macromedia flash browser plugin from www. macromedia.com to help load your images a little better. Also, clear your web browser cache and check your speed from a speed test site like www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest. There are other test sites out there too.

Seawarrior

I was talking about their highspeed for dial up users not their actual highspeed service. This is some lame junk their dishing out to dial up users it's not worth the cost. You give up quality to get a few KBS more.

I have Comcast cable service, I have had very little trouble with it and it cost me about $45 a month. But as much as much as I am online its well worth it. In my opinion If you can get a cable service, do it you won't be sorry.

OK i have had highspeed a week now so can give a better opinion of it.

I LOVE IT!!!

Does anyone know anything about High Velocity Dial-Up Service? They claim
the ability to "browse Web sites up to 5 times faster than normal dial-up*."

We have been on Corecomm for the last 3 years and really like the service. It is cheap and reliable. I have my own homepage and I get no annoying popups from Corecomm. And our e-mail address with Corecomm has extremely little unwanted mail filtering in - like 5 or so a week. This is very attractive to me. And they don't add commercials on the bottom of the e-mails like yahoo, hotmail and msn do. Again something I like.

It has these features - "CoreComm Defender - blocks viruses before they even reach your computer CoreComm SpamCatcher - puts a stop to unwanted E-Mails"

But even high velocity dial-up is slower than dsl - right?

Is this a viable option for my needs? It is only $2 a month over regular service.

Any oponions or thoughts?

My view don't waste your money. I know Earthlink includes it in their $21.95 package but in order to get the higher page loads you have to sacrfice quality. For instance if you go with fastet speed the graphics look poor and those that are animations do not move they are just poor images. For medium speed the images move but not great quality and then you have the slowest which is pretty much normal but back to slow. So I wouldn't waste money on this better spent getting highspeed where quality if anyting improves cause things load a lot faster.

Definitely review DSL Reports. Cynic that I am, I always wonder if the same people that have problems delivering a one way video signal to your house can miraculously provide 2 way digital data. that said the only people I know using cable modems are happy. Speed is higher than DSL but they do sometimes notice slowing down at peak hours.

The high speed dial-up uses compression on images, so images load faster at a loss in quality, but if you get a lot of text there is no increase in speed. Dial-up can only go so fast.

I run DSL on a 300mhz Win 98 machine recently upgraded to a new bigger hd and 256 vice 64k ram saw some speed increase but think its more from the HD being freed up than the 256k. I have no problems listening to Highlander Radio and surfing at the same time.

For the most part unless you have way too much stuff clogging the works on your computer, which slows down everything, almost any computer that can run DSL will process it as fast as others. Except for very ancient machines with minimal RAM, you can process faster than DSL or CABLE delivers.

Do not get an internal modem. Get the hardware arrangement that uses an NIC card and external modem. Much easier and allows you to network easily. If you get the internal modem because you don't network if you decide to change later you have to get an external modem and this will cost you.


This may be out of date - But applies to my SBC DSL as of installation 2 years ago.

Most routers now have firewalls built in. Most modems don't (yet). If you are not networking you don't need a router. However for $30 or so why not get one for the firewall capability. This also has the advantage of eliminating the need for the communication program for talking to the modem.

No router / network = Computer with NIC card using Enternet 300 to communicate with modem, which communicates as a network unit on the SBC network using tcp/ip. Everytime you want to go on line you have to run the Enternat program to establish communications. This apparently slows things down some. Mine did slightly. Advantage here is that everytime you establish comms you get a "new" address (from the SBC pool) so if a hacker did get your address and tried to attack or just snoop, he has a good chance of finding somebody else that got your number at that time or an invalid number (not in use). This is a firewall of sorts.

Router / Network = computer uses tcp/ip to communicate via router which communicates with modem and routs between all the computers or devices on your network and basically sees the internet as one more device on your network. Eliminates the Enternet program. Your router gets a new tcp/ip address each session from the DSL provider, but assigns internally it's own. So a hacker using the assigned number just sees the router and unless he figures out (which might not be too hard if your router assigns same default and you haven't changed the default) your internal addresses he can't atack them. Once your browser is running you communicate just like any other program.

A firewall just adds additional protection at that point.

I got the free Zone Alarm firewall. I removed it in a few days. I have file and printer sharing, and my kids have internet access on their computers. I got alarms all the time everytime they attempted to print or go on-line or file share. It was a real hassle and as far as I could tell I would need to buy the professional version to easily eliminate it.

I have everything backed up and nothing valuable so I don't worry about hackers. I turn the machine off when not in use.

Cable however is different, you get a permanently assigned tcp/ip number so it is easier for someone to get into your machine. Especially if you leave it on. You are fully connected all the time when it is on. A firewall is advisable otherwise you could end up filesharing with Chester down the street and not know it.

In the past most ISPs tried to charge more for having more than one computer hooked up, and want you to buy networking from them, but for the most part it is a losing effort on their part and there really isn't any need to.