Merger Mania

So, Sprint buys Nextel, SBC buys AT&T, and now Verizon buys MCI, all in the space of two months.  Will all this movement in the telecom sector mean that I’ll finally be able to get an internet connection that isn’t castrated in the upstream bandwidth department?

Somehow I doubt it.

Posted by Anthony on 9 replies

Comments:

01. Feb 14, 2005 at 06:12pm by Solution 9:

I doubt it too.

What is your up speed right now?

Mine is 100kb/s, and my download is 500kb/s. We dont really have a bandwidth limit either. But i mean, if your pushing 80gb/month, they will think something is up.

02. Feb 14, 2005 at 06:37pm by Anthony:

My upload is capped at 256 kbit/sec (32 kbyte/sec).  And it makes me really angry.

Adelphia is supposedly selling me an "internet connection" -- that’s what I pay them for.  But really I only have half an internet connection, the receiving half.  I can receive (download) data at 3000 kbit/sec but can only transmit (upload) at 1/12th of that speed.  So according to my calculations I am paying for 100% of an internet connection but am only able to utilize 54.3% of an internet connection.

I should be able to transmit at the same rate that I can receive at -- 3 mbit each way.  But I’d be happy even just to be able to have 3 mbit TOTAL, if it could be allocated in a way that isn’t brain-dead, i.e. when you’re not currently receiving at 3mbit you can use that bandwidth for transmitting.

03. Feb 14, 2005 at 08:03pm by Solution 9:

Do you have DSL, or cable? My old DSL had a cap at 15kb/s, now that was brutal :P.

04. Feb 14, 2005 at 08:30pm by Anthony:

15kb/s, really??  Lowercase "b" as in bits?  That IS brutal.  I mean 15kB/s is half of my current cap, and even that would be terrible... but 15kb/s?  Dial-up is four times faster than that.

Anyway, my connection is cable.

05. Feb 14, 2005 at 10:40pm by Patrick Copland:

My Time Warner Cable is rockin’ at 2.4 Mbps downstream!!

I can’t find a test for upstream.  I could probably get an estimate by running some tests.

06. Feb 14, 2005 at 11:36pm by Anthony:

If you have an account on a remote Linux/Unix/BSD system, scp is one of the simplest ways to test your tx rate:

scp bigfile.log user@remotehost:/tmp/

Depending on the version of scp, it’ll show you the tx rate in kB/s (most Linuxes) or else just the total elapsed time in seconds and the number of KB transferred (OSX I think), so you can do the math yourself.

07. Feb 15, 2005 at 01:46am by Solution 9:

It was 15KB/s. Not 4 times slower than dial up :P. My down was 2.5MB/s with that ISP.

Right now, with cable, i have 500KB/s down, and 100KB/s up. Which works perfect for my server.

08. Feb 16, 2005 at 10:10am by kaiser:

Will these mergers cause monopolies?  Didn’t the government split telecom back in the day because one of the telephone companies was charging a fortune for service and had no competitors?

09. Feb 16, 2005 at 10:58pm by Patrick Copland:

No remote host to test scp with, but OS X does have man page entries for scp.  I will try once I find a host.  Thanks for the tip!

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