Internet Connection

[nye]

i hope its ok me posting this question in this forum...

i recently bought a CDMA fixed telephone mainly to use it to access the internet...the internet connection has a speed of 230.4 kbps...but when i open the windows task manager, the network utilization hardly ever goes above 20%...download transfer rates are also about 2-3kbps, and if im lucky abt 6 or 7.....

i would like to know if there's a way i can speed up my connection and download speeds with any software or anything...

Thanks...

 

[zachtheterrible]

The 230.4kb/s is the port speed i believe. 56k is the maximum speed that a modem can support. You're getting 2-3k/s because thats what everybody gets. 6-7k/s if I get lucky too :lol:

I've always been curious why we can't get the full 56k, actually I think the phone company limits it to something less than that even, but we still never get that. I guess it's just what the phoen line can support.

 

[nye]

its actually wireless..CDMA is something similar to GSM..its a type of mobile transmission...
so in other words if i want high speeds i hav to get a ADSL or broadband connection right??

 

[_3iMaJ]

The 230.4kb/s is the port speed i believe. 56k is the maximum speed that a modem can support. You're getting 2-3k/s because thats what everybody gets. 6-7k/s if I get lucky too :lol:

I've always been curious why we can't get the full 56k, actually I think the phone company limits it to something less than that even, but we still never get that. I guess it's just what the phoen line can support.

Due to government restriction is the reason that 56k is not achievable. However you'll note that 56k is also very close to the shannon limit on the line. Since the bandwidth of the line is about 3.5khz. The reason DSL works on the same line is a slightly different reason.

In closing, about the best you'll see across a telephone line (excluding different schemes such as DSL) is about 53kbps

 

[audioguru]

A few k-bytes per second is pretty quick for 56k-bit dial-up. I was getting a max of 6k-bytes per second which is about 48k-bits, isn't it?

My daughter has slow high-speed internet over her phone line. The telco provided a special modem then a filter for each phone. It is fast, but no where near the speed of my high-speed internet from my cable-TV provider. :lol:

 

[nye]

unfortunately i live in sri lanka...technology advancement is very little... ADSL is the only option, but it costs abt $25 a month...
my father thinks its a waste of money!!!!!hope they can find a good solution...
my dial-up is not along a phone line...its wireless...like a mobile phone...

 

[audioguru]

unfortunately i live in sri lanka...technology advancement is very little...

I don't understand politics. It is a small world now and the dark ages were a long time ago.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

unfortunately i live in sri lanka...technology advancement is very little... ADSL is the only option, but it costs abt $25 a month...

I don't see as that is low 'technological advancement', and that ADSL price is considerably LESS than I pay in the UK - ADSL is probably as advanced as you get?. Other methods like cable (which has fairly low availability), are probably less advanced technologically than ADSL - basically 'brute force' methods?.

 

[shekiboy]

Firstly modem can not provide more than 56kbps i believe. you need to have broadband connection for more than that.
Secondly download speed is usually specified in bytes/second so a download speed of 5 kbytes/sec is actually 40kbps.Again being 56kbps being modem limit download speed of 7kbytes/sec is the max what you can get.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Secondly download speed is usually specified in bytes/second so a download speed of 5 kbytes/sec is actually 40kbps.

Actually, 5 kbytes/sec is 50kbps, there's 10 bits per byte (8 databits, 1 start bit and 1 stop bit). 56kbps is the theoretical maximum, but won't be achieved in practice - 50kbps is a very good result.

 

[_3iMaJ]

The modem isn't the limiting factor its the bandwidth of the line. I would hardly call cable a "brute force" method. Its just different than ADSL. Its noteworthy that in nearly all high data rate communication systems bandwidth IS the limiting factor.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

I would hardly call cable a "brute force" method.

I would - digging the road up and planting cables looks pretty 'brute force' to me! :lol:

Also, using a decent cable for the connection is pretty 'brute force', instead of being technical and squeezing ADSL down a pair of 19th century copper wires!.

To further support the 'brute force' theory, here's one of my famous analogies 8).

Two people are trying to deliver a parcel to a house, Mr ADSL and Mr Cable

Mr ADSL gets to the door and finds the letter box is to small for the parcel, so he cleverly manipulates the parcel, squeezing it thinner and thinner until he can push it through (where it 'magically' springs back to it's original shape and size).

Mr Cable, faced with the same problem nips across the road, borrows a large Caterpillar digger from a building site and rips the entire front of the house out - he then throws the parcel through the resulting 'hole'.

 

[Someone Electro]

A lot of houses have cable already over here you just plug the modem on like an TV.

But im on ADSL becose the cable guys keep mesing up.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

A lot of houses have cable already over here you just plug the modem on like an TV.

But im on ADSL becose the cable guys keep mesing up.

That's down to particularly thick cable people - even with far better technology they have a bad reputation for messing up a lot :lol:

Cable's OK where it's available, but availablity tends to be very limited - no one is going to run a cable connection to small communities, it's just not viable. The cable franchise for the town where I work was up for bids a few years ago, no one even entered a bid! - and this for a town that's the administrative capital of Derbyshire!.

 

[audioguru]

Everybody has cable TV and internet over here, except for a few souls up in the mountains (Chemelec) and some isolated farmers. The deluxe cable internet is even faster. A few folks use IDSL on their phone line.

I haven't seen a TV antenna or dial-up modem for many years. There's quite a few satellite dishes around.

My "temp" cable still works fine up in the trees. They'll dig up my street to replace it in the spring.

 

[_3iMaJ]

I would hardly call cable a "brute force" method.

I would - digging the road up and planting cables looks pretty 'brute force' to me! :lol:

Also, using a decent cable for the connection is pretty 'brute force', instead of being technical and squeezing ADSL down a pair of 19th century copper wires!.

To further support the 'brute force' theory, here's one of my famous analogies 8).

Two people are trying to deliver a parcel to a house, Mr ADSL and Mr Cable

Mr ADSL gets to the door and finds the letter box is to small for the parcel, so he cleverly manipulates the parcel, squeezing it thinner and thinner until he can push it through (where it 'magically' springs back to it's original shape and size).

Mr Cable, faced with the same problem nips across the road, borrows a large Caterpillar digger from a building site and rips the entire front of the house out - he then throws the parcel through the resulting 'hole'.

I think you have a misconception about how DSL works. Take note of the working bandwidth of DSL, theres a high pass filter that starts at 26MHZ. So the bandwidth is compareable to that of cable (which is why you achieve similar speeds). There isn't anything magical about the modulation scheme that you seem to believe there is. You're certainly not "squeezing" in on these small wires (in reality the size of the wire has very little to do with it). The reason that dial up sucks is because the phone company puts an approximately a 3.5khz low pass filter on the line. See Shannon's channel capacity theorem and work out the numbers and see that the theoretical data rates aren't impressive. In contrast compare that to the useable bandwidth of DSL or cable, its much much larger, IE higher data rates. In closing, the size of the wire has very little to do with the data rate, ultimately it comes down to the available bandwidth.

 

[audioguru]

My cable goes up to about 1.5GHz.
My telephone line was about 5km from the switching office and its capacitance limited its high frequency response to about 1kHz. I think BELL's standards guarantee 3kHz at -9dB, one-way. If I called next door then the 3kHz response was way down at -18dB! If the equalizers in the ASDL boosted the heck out of the high frequencies of my old long telephone line then it would be lucky to reach only 100kHz. If the telco's switching office is on my street (maybe right next door) then ASDL would be pretty quick.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

I think you have a misconception about how DSL works. Take note of the working bandwidth of DSL, theres a high pass filter that starts at 26MHZ. So the bandwidth is compareable to that of cable (which is why you achieve similar speeds). There isn't anything magical about the modulation scheme that you seem to believe there is. You're certainly not "squeezing" in on these small wires (in reality the size of the wire has very little to do with it). The reason that dial up sucks is because the phone company puts an approximately a 3.5khz low pass filter on the line. See Shannon's channel capacity theorem and work out the numbers and see that the theoretical data rates aren't impressive. In contrast compare that to the useable bandwidth of DSL or cable, its much much larger, IE higher data rates. In closing, the size of the wire has very little to do with the data rate, ultimately it comes down to the available bandwidth.

No, I'm aware of how DSL works (the 'magic' was just an analogy), the point I was making was that ADSL squeezes fairly high bandwidth down a very low bandwidth cable, a simple unscreened copper pair. The bandwidth is NO WHERE NEAR that of cable, which (as Audioguru says) is measured in GHz, and uses expensive screened cable (or even optical fibre).

You might like to have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsl for a simple explanation of ADSL?>

 

[bryan1]

Over here in Oz they are proposing to use BPL which is broadband over power lines. They have already done a small trial in Tasmania and reported it a success :shock: . However, reading a few articles it seems BPL will cause that much interference to radio's both ham and am/fm stations there's a huge outcry brewing. Having said that I'm on ISDN here on the farm as dial up would only give me 33.6kps. With ISDN I can get 128kps and on downloading a 3.2 gig file this week it took 78 hours :shock: . But the average speed was around 16KB/s which ain't too sloppy from a copper cable. Although I'm the furtherest line away from the exchange I'm only 4.5 Kilometres away and the Telstra tech said when they finally upgrade the exchange I can get 1.5mbs from adsl. But I'm not holding my breath waiting and atleast with my ISDN I do have unlimited time and data so downloading huge files just takes time and a bit of solar power.

Just my 2 cents

Cheers Bryan

 

[_3iMaJ]

Okay so using your wikipedia the downstream allocated bandwidth is about 1MHZ. And the typical cable allocation is 6MHZ - 8MHZ . And hands down cable will be faster (at least in the theoretical sense, you'll never see down/upload speeds in ADSL that you see with cable). So whats the point of this discussion again? Seems like we're comparing apples and oranges. Note that the modulation scheme of cable is 64QAM. A very good scheme. DSL uses a few different schemes, but most notably OFDM (orthogonality has some wonderful demodulation features). So now we're really comparing apples and oranges.

P.S.

Where the center frequency of a cable modem is tells you nothing about the bandwidth used in the system. And when push comes to shove Shannon always wins.