The 21st century just made it to my neighborhood.

[Matt Meiser]

Those who have been here a while might remember the trials and tribulations of my Internet situation since I'm in a pretty rural area. We've done dialup. We've done satellite. We've done 3G with Sprint in the old uncapped days. We tried a 2.4GHz wireless provider that was a complete failure. We paid $169/mo for uncapped 3G. And we've paid $80-100/mo for Verizon and lived within 10GB-12GB of data a month. 8,164 days of waiting for DSL ended about an hour ago...

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2173531984.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

Its not screaming fast by most anybody's standards, but at twice the speed for half the cost, without severe caps, and with a public IP address so I can remotely access some stuff...I'm a happy guy today!

[Bill Edwards(2)]

Cool! Now you can work on getting rid of that coal fired printer.:D

[Scott Shepherd]

You're one of the lucky ones. I posted some time ago about a family member that ordered DSL and was told it would be 10MB/s for $100 or $110 a month. Then it became $160 a month, the guy installed it and said "Sorry, it's capped at 1 MB/s at the box down the road". Called up, they said 1MB would be fine, not to worry, despite the promises of 10MB/s.

Well, 2 months later, he's had 2 bills, both for over $250 a month, and that's with unlimited downloads and no downloaded movies or extras. So what started as $110 a month ended up being $250 a month. Needless to say, he's not a happy camper.

Liars, they are, liars.

[Matt Meiser]

Cool! Now you can work on getting rid of that coal fired printer.:D

They have COAL fired ones now? Mine's still wood-only!

[Bruce Page]

They have COAL fired ones now? Mine's still wood-only!

If you shop around you can even find pellet fired!

Congrats on joining the 21st century

[Matt Meiser]

Actually my printer situation is worse than that. I bought into the myth that Kodak makes a decent printer. :eek:

[Todd Burch]

Actually, I think you just joined the 20th century.

[Matt Meiser]

Around here it was right about 2000 that everyone started getting broadband. We got it at our old house in December 2000 and beat a lot of people in Ann Arbor that I worked with at the time.

[Brian Elfert]

I haven't used dial-up in so long I can barely remember what it was like. I used to run an ISP so I got a T-1 to home around 1994 or so. The business got too big for home in 1996 and the T-1 was converted to ISDN in 1997. I signed up for DSL the day US West announced it in 1997 or 1998, but it took months to get it installed. I had DSL from 1997 or 1998 up until about 8 months when I converted to Comcast as promotions with cable TV make it cheaper than DSL.

[Matt Meiser]

I haven't either Brian. We were using various 3G devices from Sprint, Verizon, and a 3rd party for the last 6 years.

Speeds seemed to jump a couple hours after the install. I've been getting mid-4's to as high as 5.9Mb/s. I will NOT complain about that!

[Matt Meiser]

Did you all know the Internet is in color???? :D

[Kevin W Johnson]

My Comcast for comparison.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2174037357.png

[Matt Meiser]

Yeah, I know. A cable project for my area is in the capital budget next year for the regional cable provider. And there's talk of a FTTH project down the road (time wise, not literally. )

[David Weaver]

Strange how similar the comcast results are, but the response time for me is a lot slower. 240992

[Gary Hodgin]

Way too fast for me. I'm like the Comcast turtle.:cool:

[Bill Cunningham]

I have unlimited (supposedly) through Bell Canada, 5.? mb download, .67 upload. $39.00 a month. no webspace or email (I have my own domains for those) It's slow, but fast enough for me..Right now anyway..

[Todd Burch]

So, I'm looking to move to the country.... but speeds like this now, and potentially going to Matt's speed causes anxiety...

241004

[Matt Meiser]

Moving out to the country, make sure ANY speeds are available. Satellite is god-aweful and anything cellular is limited, but that said for $120/mo on Verizon's 4GLTE HomeFusion plant 30GB per month would give you a lot of speed and usage as long as you don't stream much video.

My speeds did improve. The CSR that has been following my case for the past week said they send some configuration to the modem that tells it what your max speed is. She's checking to make sure I'm getting everything I can. The technology is capable of 12, but maybe not at the location I'm at and I'm only paying for "up to 6" at the moment. This has been the kind of thing I've been seeing this afternoon and evening.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2174290151.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

We just Skyped for the first time ever from our house for almost an hour with my parents and it worked great. That's going to be real nice when I'm out of town for work. And I listened to Pandora in the shop for a couple hours. Going to pay for an unlimited account tomorrow because I think I'm going to be using it a lot.

[Bill Edwards(2)]

I haven't used dial-up in so long I can barely remember what it was like.

Really? I thought it was a lot like being kicked in the wrong place... few guys forget.

[Curt Harms]

For me, faster is better -- to a point. We used to have DSL, went to Verizon FiOS, first the 'slowest' tier, then mid-range. We went back to the 'slowest' tier; nothing we do taxes a 25 down 5 up connection and it saved us a few $. In fact, for surfing SMC and the like, I didn't notice much difference between DSL and FiOS. I did notice a difference when downloading large files such as Linux distros (about 700 MB. to 1.4 GB.), went from 40 minutes - 1 hr. + to < 5 minutes. Maybe if we streamed HD video we'd notice a lag, dunno.

[Ole Anderson]

I know we are fortunate to have had Comcast for over 15 years now. Frustrations at times, but generally good Internet speed. Compared to the cost some of you have paid to try to get broadband (with the T1 dinosaur at over $200 per month for a 1.5 mbs speed) I still cringe when I get our bill for the "bundled" Internet/phone/digital TV package at $150 per month. They finally got our connection fixed when they ran a fat RG-11 all the way to the house.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2175143728.png

[Randy Henry]

I've had the same problem Matt. I live in the country, but the local cable provider would not bring the cable to my house since my driveway is 600 ft. long. I've had several different cable techs here and they all said the same thing-it would take the main big cable to go that far, and for one house, no way. I've tried the Sprint, Verizon hot spots which are better than dial up, but that's about it. About the 2nd week of August, I saw a local cable engineer at a local establishment, told him I would love to have cable and of my situation. He said he would follow me out to my farm. As soon as we got of our trucks, he said my driveway was too long....He then looked at my shop and asked me about it. I took him into my shop, and he ended up staying for about 2 hours, asking me questions about all of my large machines (shaper, Woodmaster sander, table saw, DJ-20, etc). When he looked at his watch and said he had to go, he told me that if I would dig a ditch down the length of my driveway, 2 ft deep and put 6" sand/fine gravel in it, I could have cable. I jumped on the offer, got the ditch dug the next day. They brought out the cable (main line-about 1" diameter), put it in the ditch, and within a week, I was connected. For the same price as I was paying for Dishnet, Verizon internet 3-G, I now get cable tv, high speed internet/unlimited, and free long distance phone. It's unreal how fast my internet service is now. When you mentioned Pandora, that is something I've never heard of. Can you educate me on what that is and how it works? Can it be run through the phone lines to my shop from the house? I am completely clueless on it.

Thanks-

[Matt Meiser]

Pandora (www.pandora.com (http://www.pandora.com)) lets you stream music. 40 hours a month for free, or unlimited for $36/year.

What is cool about it is that you can create "channels" by selecting an artist, then it suggests other stuff you might like. You can interact with it and tell it you don't like, or do like a suggestion and it will adapt from there.

The local cable company here said the fact that so many houses in our area sit back from the road is a big cost factor here. I'm still hoping that will go through, but as long as our speeds stay where they are and its reliable, I'm content for now.

[Jim Koepke]

Actually my printer situation is worse than that. I bought into the myth that Kodak makes a decent printer. :eek:

They promised cheaper ink too. The cartridges were cheaper, but they ran out quicker and as I recall you can't just change one color.

Got rid of mine and went back to an HP.

jtk

[David Weaver]

HP does the same thing. You used to be able to get about 2000 sheets of text out of an ink cartridge for $22.

Now the cartridges are $15 but you only get 450 sheets out of them.

As long as the printers are a loss leader, the ink will always be a ripoff.

On my laser printer at home, HP ink costs about 4 cents a page. Generic reman off of amazon (I have to throw away about 1 out of 4) is still only about 0.5 cents per page even after tossing 1/4th of the drums.

I don't trust anything any peripheral or printer maker says until I see it happen in real life. The "affordable ink" promise and the new cheaper inks are all a joke that probably originated in the marketing department and never made it to engineering or finance.

The only thing missing from commercials about computer ink is Joe Isuzu.

[Ken Mosley]

Having been a fax machine salesman way back when, I can shed some light on the print page count output; If you put a 1" square in the center of the page leaving the rest of the page blank, that's considered 1 page of output. So, depending on the output use of the printer, the 'count' varys considerably. Pictures, even small ones consume possibly 10 pages of "output", as does pages of financial data such as spreadsheets etc. Count doesn't mean much-just empty it and keep filling or replacing it!

[Myk Rian]

I went with a Samsung laser printer. No more dried out cartridges.

And to think, the Internet used to be free. I used to logon to Detroit Freenet back in the late 70s.

[Matt Meiser]

Uh, 70's????

[Curt Harms]

HP does the same thing. You used to be able to get about 2000 sheets of text out of an ink cartridge for $22.

Now the cartridges are $15 but you only get 450 sheets out of them.

As long as the printers are a loss leader, the ink will always be a ripoff.

On my laser printer at home, HP ink costs about 4 cents a page. Generic reman off of amazon (I have to throw away about 1 out of 4) is still only about 0.5 cents per page even after tossing 1/4th of the drums.

I don't trust anything any peripheral or printer maker says until I see it happen in real life. The "affordable ink" promise and the new cheaper inks are all a joke that probably originated in the marketing department and never made it to engineering or finance.

The only thing missing from commercials about computer ink is Joe Isuzu.

If you have one of a limited selection of printers, ink cost can be pretty reasonable. I've gotten Brother cartridges & ink from these guys:

http://www.inkowl.com/index.php?C=10&S=25

The nice thing about Brother ink cartridges is that they don't have any chips or other electronics, they're really just tanks. The down side is that unlike some HPs, the print head is separate from the ink cartridge. If the print head fails it's likely not practical to fix, the repair will cost nearly as much as the printer.

[Myk Rian]

Uh, 70's????

Yep. Used a 300 baud modem, until I upgraded to a screamin fast 1200 baud.

[Ben Hatcher]

This thread is going to be hilarious in 20 years.

[Matt Meiser]

Not if I still have 5MB internet.

[Art Mulder]

Seriously... Internet connectivity would be a major point for me in any future move to a small town or to a country property.

I'm not a realtor at all, but I'd be very curious to know about how many country realtors get asked about high speed internet by clients.
Things like, has it peaked yet, is it basically 100% of people want it now, or what?

[Eric DeSilva]

You may have been using dial-up in the 70s, but it wasn't the Internet. At best, back in the day, it would have been the Arpanet, but unless you were using telnet to access a university system, that is pretty unlikely. Most "nets" were BBSes run on small computers that weren't really networks at all. Sadly, I remember all this--playing star trek on a PDP-10 via a remote terminal that used a thermal printer for output, a daisywheel teletype that ran 115 baud and would start clacking away when you whistled at it, my S100 bus 8080 system with the dual 8" floppy disks and having to customize the BIOS in assembly to configure a new printer... At least, at the time, computer viruses were confined to books like Shockwave Rider.

[Myk Rian]

Yes, it was telnet to the DFN system. Had a doorway out to the net. All text, and no pretty pictures.
I ran a 3 node, 700+ user BBS under OS/2 for 14 years. I charged $25/year for access to the other nodes. Shut it down when incoming calls went from over 200 to 1 or 2/day. That was when this county finally started getting a couple local ISPs, and then cable.
Hartland Pride BBS now resides on a CD or 2.

[Eric DeSilva]

Yes, it was telnet to the DFN system. Had a doorway out to the net.

I don't know anything about DFN, but OS/2 didn't even arrive until the mid/late 80s... Even in the *late* 70s, Z80s were high end, and most systems were 8080 (or worse) CP/M-based -- heck, the 70s even pre-dates MS-DOS. Maybe it is the geek in me, but I can't call anything the "Internet" that was before 1/1/83 when TCP/IP went live.


All text, and no pretty pictures.

Aside from centerfolds rendered as ASCII art, you mean. ;)

[Myk Rian]

It was a Merit system accessed by dial-up.
I don't feel like arguing over it.

[Peter Kelly]

Sign up for Verizon FiOS when it comes your way. Cheaper than TWC or RCN and much faster.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2180597215.png

[Curt Harms]

Sign up for Verizon FiOS when it comes your way. Cheaper than TWC or RCN and much faster.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2180597215.png



Verizon FiOS is good but from what I'm reading if it's now available in your neighborhood now, it's not going to be anytime soon. They're not going to run any more fiber until they get better market penetration in areas they already have 'wired'. It seems like FiOS has done pretty well in our development, I see Verizon trucks a lot more often than I see ComCast trucks.

[Matt Meiser]

Someone is proposing a FTTH project for our area but I'm not holding my breath.

If I was moving today I would definitely consider broadband availability. In 2003 who thought it would be a long term issue?

[Kevin W Johnson]

Someone is proposing a FTTH project for our area but I'm not holding my breath.

If I was moving today I would definitely consider broadband availability. In 2003 who thought it would be a long term issue?


True enough. However, when I bought my house in 2004, cable internet was on my list of must haves. But seeing as I was moving from an apartment that had cable internet, I knew I couldn't give it up.

[Bill Cunningham]

Aside from centerfolds rendered as ASCII art, you mean. ;)

Don Royer WA6PIR was the master at that! He could do most ASCII art that at 15 feet was indistinguishable from a black and white photograph..
http://www.rtty.com/gallery/SiamesePussycat_WA6PIR.pix

[Matt Meiser]

And now we also have Verizon 4GLTE service. It wa turned on in our area sometime in the last couple hours. When it rains, it pours!

[Myk Rian]

I got 20meg up and down speed tests on my 4gLTE phone.
Faster than my 12meg cable connection.

[Matt Meiser]

Yep, I would have been thrilled if we'd gotten just 4G too. They have a workable plan for home access. Can't stream tons of video with it due to caps, but for everything else it would have been great. I've thought about getting it anyway on the lowest plan for redundant connections since I work from home. I have a Mifi too though that shares data with our cell phone plans so that works too, just not as convenient.

[Matt Meiser]

And now I just got word that our area is getting cable by late summer. Engineering is underway, determining where they need to add poles, etc. Its entirely possible that within a 1 year time span we are going to from the fastest internet available at our house being just over 1MB/s with only one really viable carrier (Verizon since ATT coverage is poor and Sprint reliability was poor) to just over 100MB/s with three viable carriers (Buckeye Cable up to 110MB/s, Frontier DSL up to 6MB/s, and Verizon HomeFusion LTE service up to 12MB/s.) Amazing.

[Kevin Bourque]

Did you hear that Mr. Lincoln was shot!! Some say it was that nice young man John Wilkes Booth!!

[Mike Cogswell]

Yep. Used a 300 baud modem, until I upgraded to a screamin fast 1200 baud.

Could be worse - when I first was online the state of the art was a 110 baud acoustic coupler. When I got one, I thought my 300 baud Hayes modem was heaven.

[Mike Cogswell]

I don't know anything about DFN, but OS/2 didn't even arrive until the mid/late 80s... Even in the *late* 70s, Z80s were high end, and most systems were 8080 (or worse) CP/M-based -- heck, the 70s even pre-dates MS-DOS. Maybe it is the geek in me, but I can't call anything the "Internet" that was before 1/1/83 when TCP/IP went live.

Sounds about right. In the late '70s I was a DARPAnet / ARPAnet user at work and had an 8080 based S-100 and a Heath Z80 at home. Home access was to Micronet which morphed into Compuserve. At first it was forums and chat, then around 1980 we gained file transfer. At that point neither OS/2 nor its target system (the IBM PC) existed and DOS still belonged to Seattle Computer Products. My 8080 system ran CP/M while my Z80 ran HDOS, which was written by J Gorden Letwin who later wrote OS/2 in the late '80s. TCP/IP and UUNET got us the basic internet and email in the early '80s. Remember BANG addressing, when you had to know all the intermediate bounces between us and a distant user? It all seemed so advanced, but compared to now it was crayons and etch-a-sketch.


Aside from centerfolds rendered as ASCII art, you mean. ;)

Yeah. A centerfold took a fair amount of fanfold paper.

Remember PLUGH and XYZZY? No joysticks back then.

[Bill Cunningham]

I remember loading HDOS from a cassette tape into a H8..A big leap from The front panel Octal input..I think 040100 <go> is still burned into my brain..:D I bought 24k of memory from a company in Calif. (2 12kboards and parts+200 2102's) for just under $900.00 and it kept your coffee warm ontop.. compare-Just bought a 32gig flashdrive for $19.95

[Mike Cogswell]

I remember loading HDOS from a cassette tape into a H8..A big leap from The front panel Octal input..I think 040100 <go> is still burned into my brain..:D I bought 24k of memory from a company in Calif. (2 12kboards and parts+200 2102's) for just under $900.00 and it kept your coffee warm ontop.. compare-Just bought a 32gig flashdrive for $19.95

Ah, you skipped the paper tape and went straight to cassette. Did you ever go to any of the HUG conferences in Chicago? I was a member of the DC area group - the Capitol Heath Users Group (CHUG) and its Assembly Language Users Group subcommittee (AKA CHUGALUG). We had a lot of fun and drank a lot of beer in the process.

[curtis rosche]

heres mine :P
http://www.speedtest.net/result/2522436604.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

[Jim Becker]

Congrats, Matt. Hopefully, there will be a way to kick that up a notch over time, too, with those new options coming to you. This is really nice to have... ;)
------

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v646/a-j-adopt/speedtest_zps0ba8279d.jpg

[Bill Cunningham]

Ah, you skipped the paper tape and went straight to cassette. Did you ever go to any of the HUG conferences in Chicago? I was a member of the DC area group - the Capitol Heath Users Group (CHUG) and its Assembly Language Users Group subcommittee (AKA CHUGALUG). We had a lot of fun and drank a lot of beer in the process.

The only paper tape I had was 5 level for RTTY in the ham shack.. I actually bought the computer for the shack, but got hooked on programing and never used a computer on the air. Once RTTY shifted to computer, I lost interest in RTTY.. Never went to a HUG meeting, never had the time..