>> ^CaptainPlanet420:
>> ^Kagenin:
Guess the sun has set on my first sticky'd post. Thanks again for all the kind words and support. I'm really glad that people enjoyed this piece, and I like how the discussions have gone.
Hopefully, this won't be the last... but the next one may come for a while.
My girlfriend and I have had do move back into her Mom's place, and it's too far off the beaten trails to get DSL. I'll be looking into other broadband options, but there are a few coffee shops with free WiFi that I'll be mooching off of in the mean time.
Thanks again folks, the support means a lot to me. Let's hope this prop gets flushed down the drain with the conservatives' dreams of taking the white house for a third consecutive term.

Good luck on that dialup buddy, I'm with ya. Hopefully when you're outta high school you can afford some BB.


Thanks, Ass. I can afford my broadband. AT&T won't upgrade their rural-area lines to support DSL service.

And I'm in College.

>> ^Kagenin:
Guess the sun has set on my first sticky'd post. Thanks again for all the kind words and support. I'm really glad that people enjoyed this piece, and I like how the discussions have gone.
Hopefully, this won't be the last... but the next one may come for a while.
My girlfriend and I have had do move back into her Mom's place, and it's too far off the beaten trails to get DSL. I'll be looking into other broadband options, but there are a few coffee shops with free WiFi that I'll be mooching off of in the mean time.
Thanks again folks, the support means a lot to me. Let's hope this prop gets flushed down the drain with the conservatives' dreams of taking the white house for a third consecutive term.


Good luck on that dialup buddy, I'm with ya. Hopefully when you're outta high school you can afford some BB.

Guess the sun has set on my first sticky'd post. Thanks again for all the kind words and support. I'm really glad that people enjoyed this piece, and I like how the discussions have gone.

Hopefully, this won't be the last... but the next one may come for a while.

My girlfriend and I have had do move back into her Mom's place, and it's too far off the beaten trails to get DSL. I'll be looking into other broadband options, but there are a few coffee shops with free WiFi that I'll be mooching off of in the mean time.

Thanks again folks, the support means a lot to me. Let's hope this prop gets flushed down the drain with the conservatives' dreams of taking the white house for a third consecutive term.

For my Ontario VideoSift brothers and sisters:

A friend of mine recently switched to a company called TekSavvy Solutions Inc. They run a DSL HiSpeed Service and send you your equipment in the mail, they seem to have little to no actual store-fronts. He told me today that they are actually fighting with Bell Canada about a "service throttling" push which is tied into the whole net neutrality thing-a-ma-bob.

They have a residential "Unlimited" service with a speed of 5M/800k, unlimited bandwidth and static IP at $4 a month for $39.95 per month. They also offer a home phone service, and my friend is incredibily happy with them so far. I'm probably going to be switching to them in the very near future, as I am having numerous problems with my Rogers HiSpeed connection.

If for no other reason, the switch to TekSavvy would just piss off Rogers and Bell because let's face it, fellow Canucks, those bastards have a joint monopoly on their filthy hands.

>> ^jwray:
Ya, but it's bullshit. On average I get much higher speeds on cable than on DSL. When DSL is advertized at a certain speed, you won't always get even a quarter of that speed. Your DSL line connects to some base station that has a bottleneck connection to the rest of the internet, so that in effect you're still sharing a limited amount of bandwidth with the neighborhood.


This was when DSL and cable were new, and dial-up was still popular.

Ya, but it's bullshit. On average I get much higher speeds on cable than on DSL. When DSL is advertized at a certain speed, you won't always get even a quarter of that speed. Your DSL line connects to some base station that has a bottleneck connection to the rest of the internet, so that in effect you're still sharing a limited amount of bandwidth with the neighborhood.

This guys description of that advantage of DSL over cable modem is whacked. You have no idea how the telco/isp hauls your stuff back to their place. If your DSL connects to a trailer 1.x miles up the road and is aggregated with other signals competing for the same connection back to the source, well? You cannot judge the two end access methods unless you know how each one gets back to the big fat pipe.

^ ah, BitTorrent. I never did get the hang of that either, though I did get lucky and managed to download The Mole People for Raven/Zifab way back when. Took me 4 days over my 768/128 DSL...!

I would love to cancel our 8MB Comcast line.

Except 512k DSL would really suck.

I'm gonna take a wild guess that the first two bytes of your internal IP addresses are 192.168. It's a standard subnet which is reserved for local networks.

I think you have a problem with your router setup, probably with NAT or the firewall.

Have you tried connecting your son's computer directly to your cable/dsl/whatever connection, bypassing the router?

I checked. Tracert does in deed say tracing route to videosift.com [69.55.231.118]

I wasn't imagining it was something up at videosift. I figured it was something at our end, but I have no idea what. But from my admittedly naive standpoint (I'm a computer engineer, and ask me about testing ICs, and I know a lot, but I am no network maven) it does look like for some reason castleaccess.com is blocking my son's machine. Is it possible his IP looks weird in some way? I've had dsl since almost no one did, and I have, as a legacy, a static IP. I found out when I bought my new router that people don't expect static ips these days, and I had to have a lot of conversations with experts about it and my router is in "bridge mode" if that means anything useful. Is it possible my static ip's allocation of ip to others on my network is off? But then, that would make no sense given that I have no trouble getting to videosift from my iphone when it is on the same wireless network that my son's machine is on.

There is a difference between the two machines: my machine uses a landline to get to the lynksys n-type router, and his machine uses a usb wireless key (also n-type).

Don't get me started on Hughes, formerly Direcway....retrograde orbit satellites, and the cost of service an insult to folks too far out for a hard line, who KNOW, the difference between DSL speeds and their painful up down up down.....customer service?? Polite, ineffectual, Hindi automotons(hard to be mad at them, they speak better English than most Americans) but jeeez the round and round.......and we still suffer, with Hughes...

L0LZ0RS!!!1!

I admit I was being deliberately provocative. Mainly because every time this issue has been raised by the Sift Gods lately, it's been shot down like a cold stone zeppelin with lead boots on Jupiter. And while I am very much in favour of involving the community in decision-making processes, I am against pandering to those with a vested interest in preventing change.

That, and I'm grumpy because a Bell Canada / Rogers Wireless snafu has left me without DSL for a week and I'm now surfing on 56k dialup. Eeeurgh!

By the way, I think the best method of shortening the queue time would be to tighten it by an hour every day for as long as necessary. For a Code Warrior of Lucky's gargantuan stature, that should be a snap.

^I'm with Adam Internet Dag, who are based here in Adelaide. They seem to be a bunch of techno-geeks who aim to provide no nonsense high-speed broadband, which is what I'm after.

I used to be on an unlimited quote when I was on regular DSL, now that I'm using ADSL2+ there aren't any unlimited plans and the cost shoots up with the higher quota plans.

Thanks for the positive comment too guys .

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

It totally sympathize with the quota thing. I often reach mine - because I forget to use my offpeak for big downloads. Who are you with? I'm with NetSpace. They are not bad- but aside from pricing- they are all pretty much the same because they are reselling Telstra DSL.