[Demented Avenger]

Here is a copy of the email I got from my ISP. Hope no one else on the @home network is in the same boat as me.

Eastern@Home, a small Connecticut cable network, will also drop service today.

Dear Eastern@Home Customer:

We have been informed that our internet partner - Excite@Home - will no longer provide service effective 12 noon today December 3rd. Because of this you will not be charged for the service as of today, and if you already have been billed it will be credited to your cable account.

Rest assured that we are taking all the necessary steps to provide reliable high-speed service to our customers. As a precaution you should check your e-mail because opened messages will be saved automatically to your hard drive. If you have a personal web page you should back it up to your hard drive or a CD.

We are deeply committed to providing you with a quality high-speed internet service, and we have been hard at work pursuing creating our own network. There are many benefits to directly managing our own network. These include improved (local) customer service and enhanced network performance. We will inform you by mail when an alternate high-speed Internet service is available.

We will do everything in our power to get you back up and running as soon as possible, and you will be able to use the modem you currently have.

We consider you a valued customer and we thank you for your patience and understanding.


Sincerely,

Eastern Connecticut Cable Television, Inc.

Though it is 12:15 am EST, i doubt I will have service in the morning.


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I'm not as good as I once was, but I'm as good once as I ever was.

[Guest]

I have Charter@Home, "had", but it turns out that Charter has there own cable internet provider called "Charter Pipeline". Anyway My ping dropped 100ms on almost every server. I was stunned. I now ping many servers around 30. Anyway I just wanted to say sorry to all the @Home peeps. They just dont realize what kind of affect they have on the gammers. Someone should come up with a gamers only connection. And make it available everywhere. That'd be sweet.

[Rata-tat-tat]

Is it just me or do other people notice the huge hassle in having high speed net connection. These people need to get their crap together. these idiots in this "dorm" im at says hey we got fiber optics. Hurm last time i checked fiber optics was a bit faster then a ping of 1000+. atleast I had a stedy connection with my 56k connection and most the time i got better ping with it.

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Rata-tat-tat on yo hat. Eat it up fast or you will get the bat.

[Warhammer]

Rata, there are several fundamental problems and misconceptions with providing high speed net access (i.e. over 1.5Mb/s).

1) When providers say they have a fiber backbone or high speed connection, that doesn't mean you're going to get 100Mb dedicated from ISP POP to your PC. Usually it means they have a 100Mb or gigabit backbone that all user traffic traverses to ensure that the provider's infrastructure is not the bottleneck. How oversubscribed the infrastructure is makes the difference in performance during peak times.

2) Most university/dorm connections give the end users a 10Mb half duplex ethernet connection. While this might sound fast, it's usually distributed to the users via a hub, not a switch. This means that, like cable internet, all the users "share" that bandwidth. Half duplex ethernet is also prone to collisions as traffic increases, causing further slowdowns as retransmissions are needed to get the data across.

3) Commercial ISP's these days are scrambling to make a profit. This means they have to optimize their biggest cost, high speed infrastructure. Usually this means oversubscribing users to Internet bandwidth. In other words, say you have DSL with a provision for 1Mb/384Kb up/down speeds. This means they need a T3 (45Mb connection) to serve approximately 50 users at the point your DSL line terminates. Now, a T3 circuit will cost anywhere from $8,000 to $40,000 a month depending on distance to the Internet peering point. Now is the ISP going to let 50 users eat the cost of say $20k a month just for network access? Not likely. Instead, they oversubscribe by a factor of 10:1 and now that cost goes from $400 per user to $40 a month. The economics of the ISP industry are very interesting, to say the least. But now you know why it's a rare moment when you do get the full bandwidth you're promised.

In the end, your best bet is to work for a company with an Internet connection to a tier 1 ISP (UUnet, AT&T, Sprint, etc.) UUnet in particular owns about 60% of the Internet infrastructure. I work with a guy who used to sit at the Worldcom NOC in Denver and his average ping ANYWHERE in the Internet was 20ms.

</Rant about the ISP Industry>

[Robert E. Lee]

[Pornstar]

lmao Rob. (Pornstar hands Rob a hanky to wipe his chin)Warhammer is right. I have worked for several B2B ISPs. On the most part if you are paying for a T1 then you will pay the ISP for full price, but for smaller circuits like ISDN and DSL, providers usually rate their WAN connection down. Ex. You the provider have a PRI(T1 divided into 24 64kb channels for dial-up service)and you have customers dialing into you with an ISDN line at full 128kb. Now you have full 128kb to the provider. But the provider may not want to provide or pay for a full T1 on the WAN side so they take a T1 and partition it (with Cisco equipment more then likely) for 384kb for ISDN customers and using the rest for something else.I hope this doesn't confuse anybody, but the same does apply for DSL. Your link to the internet is only as fast as your providers link to the internet. That is why it is best like Warhammer said to get your connection from the companies that own the infastructure.

[Snaggletooth]

Hey Kids, If you can, I would recommend getting Charter. I have that here through the University. My ping sits from 40-60 most of the time. It's not as fast as living in the dorms here (equivilant of about a T-10 with pings @ about 10-20) But, it's reliable. I work for CNS (Computing and Networking Services here and we have to deal directly with Charter. Most of the time they have their act together, except when a user is on the wrong VLAN and they say it's our problem, when they have to change the settings.....anyway, check out Charter if you have it locally. Happy Fragging, Snagg

[Robert E. Lee]

Ummmm.. I don't believe there is such a line called a T-10..

• T1 1.544Mbps
  
• T2 6.312Mbps
  
• T3 44.736Mbps
  
• OC-1 51.840Mbps
  
• OC-3 155.520Mbps
  
• OC-12 622.080Mbps
  
• OC-48 2.488Gbps
  
• OC-96 4.976Gbps
  
• OC-192 10Gbps
  
• OC-255 13.21Gbps
  

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[Hamese]

You are correct Rob.

But if I have ten T1's, or three T3's and a T1, does that make a T10?

[DukeNukem]

[Snaggletooth]

What I meant by T-10 was that it was veeery fast. Figuratively, not literally. Snagg

[Bada Bing]

Ok I know what y'all are talking about but, how many players are MCSE's and know what the !@#$% we are talking about.
hehehehe

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Are you threatening me ???

[Snaggletooth]

Ok, just to clear it up, I asked the network guys at school, and we have an OC 48 connection

[Twisted29]

Very odd.

I use a dual OC3 for my gaming pleasure, but have hit over 500mb/s on web-downloads and peer to peer transfers. I guess I shouldn't complain...maybe the school upgraded again and didnt tell us. I think they ARE planning to overlay another dual bundle

[Demented Avenger]

Yeah whatever, My cable modem is out again and the will be it for me on the ville servers. No use in playing with a ping that goes from 400 to 2000 when I use to average 80. Well everyone, it has been an honour and a privilage playing with you all. My skills are way better leaving here then I started playing here around 10 months ago. Who knows, maybe in a year or 2 DSL will finally make it out to my(literally) neck of the woods. I would have had some hope if my cable company was Comcast or one of the other big boys. I will still poke my head into the forums now and again to say hi but I am afraid that will be about it.

_________________
I'm not as good as I once was, but I'm as good once as I ever was.