Six Things You Don't Know About Broadband (1)

Do you know broadband?

You may answer yes. I know you may have tried different broadband from
several broadband ISPs. You may have installed broadband by yourself
several times. You know broadband speed - 2Mb, 8Mb or 24 Mb. You may
understand the monthly usage and control your usage. But if you are
not a technician in that area, you may not know everything behind
these numbers. There are something broadband ISPs will not tell you,
or try to write it in a shady corner on their web page.

Let me tell you all these things:

Price:

As more and more ISPs have packages, the price became more and more
incomparable. Some packages like Talktalk have call bundles (including
anytime package or off-peak package), some are combined with mobile
phone contract, and some deals are only available to TV Program
subscribers.

A main problem is most deal descriptions don't show whether the price
contains the line rental. They may wish customer forget the existence
of line rental. But usually, if the deal doesn't tell you that, it
means the line rental is not included in the price. If the line rental
is included, no ISP will forget to tell you.

Speed:

When we talk to speed, I should tell you broadband ISPs are playing
two tricks in words.

The first is the unit. They usually use Mb to describe the speed. Do
you think if the speed can reach the theoretic max speed, you can
download a song in MP3 format (about 4MB) in half a second? You are
tricked. In computer, the size of the file is displayed in MB, which
means MegaByte. While in broadband specification, speed is showed in
Mb, which means Megabit. 1 MegaByte = 8 Megabit. So 8Mb per second
means 1 MB per second.

Another instance I have to emphasise is: Do ask your broadband ISP the
maximum speed your phone line can support. Because not all the phone
line in UK support 8Mb broadband. Phone lines in some areas can only
reach 2Mbps. If your telephone line can't support fast speed, it's a
waste of money to buy fast broadband. And I know some ISP don't check
it for customers and just open fast broadband for customers no matter
real speed the phone line can reach.

Connection Rate:

Now, we know the actually speed broadband ISPs provide to us. However,
there is another bad news - you may have to share the bandwidth with
other 49 people.
So in Internet rush hour, the real speed may be slow down to 160 Kb a
second. That is 20 KB per second.

Wonder why? Because there is a connection rate for broadband! Few
broadband ISPs tell customers its connection rate on an explicit place
on the web site. But it does affect the speed a lot.

So what is connection rate? Connection rate shows the number of users
who share the bandwidth on a single broadband connection between your
local exchange and your broadband ISP. Normally, the connection ratios
are 50:1 and 20:1.

In UK, the connection rate for home broadband is 50:1, which means you
would likely to share your bandwidth with 49 other users, of course,
never more than that number. The connection ratio for business
broadband is 20:1. It will be much faster in Internet rush hour.

You mean "contention ratio" not "connection rate"

Alec


"free-broadband" <free.broadband.org@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1188524501.139684.172900@q4g2000prc.googlegro ups.com...

"free-broadband" <free.broadband.org@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1188524501.139684.172900@q4g2000prc.googlegro ups.com...
There are thousands of things I don't know about broadband.. your six are
not amongst them so you may like to rephrase it to "six simple things that a
newbie might not know if he can't read".

"dennis@home" <dennis@killspam.kicks-ass.net> wrote in message
news:fb8pmp$mgf$1@news.datemas.de...
Yep - another offering from the guy trying to push the free broadband
site -see also the "how to choose suitable broadband product" thread, which
is full of schoolboy howlers, poor spelling and grammar. I would hazard a
guess that the author is of non-British extraction or poorly educated.
Looks like they'tre trying to compete with Thinkbroadband. If they are, they
have a long way to go...

George

"free-broadband" <free.broadband.org@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1188524501.139684.172900@q4g2000prc.googlegro ups.com...
a lot of cut and pasted text from various sources.

[free-broadband], on Fri, 31 Aug 2007 01:41:41 -0000, said :-


That is a complete pack of lies.

It is Contention ratio, and also it is _not_ based on 50 (or 20)
people.

You are one maroon sonny.

Spin Dryer wrote:
Hardly a pack of lies, your right he used the wrong wording and although not
exclusively based on 50 or 20 people, 50 is a common contention ratio used.
What he says IN PRINCIPLE is actually correct.

you are a maroon....very funny...nice typo

XPUser wrote:
By who? Not BTwholesale for several years.

"Paul Cupis" <paul@cupis.co.uk> wrote in message
news:fbhl9j$1bfe$1@energise.enta.net...
Correct - ADSL Max ("up to 8 Meg") has made contention ratios redundant, as
far as I'm aware.
Contention is all now in the network and invisible to the user.

George