Optical Fiber VDSL - Page 2

Oh, goodie! A chance to gloat! Heh heh.

Ridiculous isn't it? Companies basically buy out cities and establish unofficial monopolies in certain districts. When I was trying to get a WISP going I had to jump through hurdles and eventually couldn't topple Microsoft/Comcast, who were trying to overthrow SBCs shoddy local market. I had lawyers of the big property I rented on telling me to cease and desist. Screw them though, they can't control the airwaves. Needless to say I quit pushing my WISP publicly but still kept it running so I could make back money from my initial investment. Another reason why ADSL sucks is that its speed is limited to how far away you are from the hub. 5000 feet or something is as far as it will go too. vDSL works with fiberoptics basically and that stuff can be run for miles without needing to be repeated.

I wouldnt say fiber to node ,residentially speaking, is 5 years away. I can remember Time Warner was in the process of updating their infrustructure as early as 2 years ago to make this a possibility in certain markets. Great thing about it is if they install it properly now, theoretically fiber has almost unlimited throughput potential. I think proximity to the hub was the reason ISDN never gained ground.

ISDN is the opposite, it is for people who are too far away from a hub to get DSL and it is their last option usually. It costs bling and it's slow as hell. Certainly the best option for when 56K modems were in use but a dinosaur by today's standards. Whoever implements fiber first will win. Companies are now starting to run fiber or lease fiber lines for their services now. There is a hell of a lot of old lines that need to be updated though and whoever does it first wins.

Yeah...I live on a farm and can't get anything but 56kps. Actually, I can get a satellite service called "Wild Blue" : http://www.wildblue.com/. I would actually be willing to pay the ridiculous sum if I were able to play games. Any opinions (yeah, I know it's doubtful as it doesn't have a constant signal, but still...)?

I had this problem so I got my own T1 run to my house and then shared it wirelessly. if you have a clear shot to any friend's houses you could try to mount antennas on some long poles and bridge wirelessly. I know of many people who have done this successfully. The wifi equipment is kind of expensive and you may need a little bit of a learning curve but a fun project. I used this www.locustworld.com just use an old PC motherboard and cram it into a weatherproof box. There might be better options now, this was 3 years ago. Also, I'd recommend 802.11b, not the newer/faster 802.11g for going long distances.

Satellite has good download speeds, bad upload, and horrible latency. Dial-up is better for gaming.

You can also use lasers if you have LoS. Kinda expensive though!

Alter, I'm betting that your dsl modem is also a router with locked configuration options and possibly some firewall capabilities. ISPs often pre-configure them to prevent the sort of port access required for P2P services. Often times, you can find a generic, non-isp specific firmware for your dsl modem/router and patch it allowing you access to the configuration screens so that you can properly forward the required ports. Depending on how technical you are, you might or might not want to try it.

When I ran a WISP, p2p was almost impossible to prevent without working full-time on it. I ended up writing an open source system to monitor users on the access point and then manually (never got around to auto) throttling them when I saw they were up to no good. I would think p2p these days is all smart enough to run on any open port and spoof some sort of traffic. I suppose the ISP themselves could have some sophisticated p2p detection systems, that is what the university I work at has invested in. Law suits every month from the RIAA.

I'm not sure exactly how they go about it as it's never been much concern to me. It's something I read about when I was trying to unlock my modem/router so that I could change the MTU. They could definitely limit p2p users at a number of points. The approach i've seen the most of is simply the elimination of unlimited bandwidth accounts. Bell no longer offers it. You get 30gigs aggregate bandwidth and anything over that they charge you for. Cable does that too unless you pay 60/mo for unlimited, which is way overkill for an internet connection imo, especially given how slow many sites are.