I’m looking to make the long-deferred move to broadband, simply because the Heartbreak of Dialup™ has become too, well, heartbreaking. Plus on those occasions I actually need to use the Net in the course of my occupation (it happens) it’s no more rewarding or useful to spend minutes waiting for a page to load than when I’m screwing off as usual.
Nerds! Nerds! And I'm glad to see 'em!
My all-wise (on matters telephonic and web-related, anyway; he’s mostly wise, otherwise) pal Larry uttered to me the dictum: “No matter what, you’re gonna wind up getting Internet from someone you hate.” Given that my choices are Comcast and The Phone Company, that’s a pretty good guess. Therefore what remains is that key cost/hatred coefficient.
So far TPC is coming out ahead. With a twist: while I can get the whole package, DSL + ISP, from them, what I’m looking at is Southwest Cyberport as my ISP. It comes highly recommended by various friends I regard highly, including both Larry and Joe.
Some of my other friends, who will remain nameless, expressed reservations. SWCP doesn’t appear to offer 24/7 tech support (neither, in my experience, does TPC, but let it go.) So am I sure I want to go with SWCP?
Following a visit to them today, I say Hell, yes! Here’s why.
I walk in the door, and what do I see? Nerds.
Walk into The Phone Company office, what do you see? Peppy preppies and suits, right?*
What would you rather see at your ISP? Dapper corporate types? Or dudes with weird beards and clothes that looked as if they happened to be within arm’s reach when they got up to go to work, and women wearing sweaters that look as if they were knitted by blind aunts from unraveled Army blankets?
No contest, right? Give me the latter. Every time.
Important Addendum: no offense, SWCP guys, gals. I mean, seriously? Just having a little joke, here. This is pretty clearly a pro-nerd post, yes? I’m pro-nerd. Totally. I mean, some of my best friends … including all the ones alluded to above. So don’t go channeling my confidential personal data to Abkhazia if I sign up with you, pretty please?
… I realize I’m coming perilously close to violating my own dictum here: never get crosswise of people who are going to be out of your line of sight with your food.
The fact is, they were nice nerds I encountered at SWCP (though gods know what they’ve got chained next to the servers. Then again, that’s industry standard.) Believe it or not, that’s not an oxymoron, either. I even knew a drop-dead gorgeous female nerd, once upon a time.
(I ran into her unexpectedly at NASFiC last year. Even though she’s got to be in her fifties, let’s just say that, no matter how discriminating your taste, if you happened upon a picture of her naked, you wouldn’t look away any too quickly. The same, sadly, cannot be said for me. Then again, it never could. So there’s that.)
There are some financial ramifications to be worked out. I’m trying to save money at the same time as I get, y’know, usable Internet service. So I’ve got to roll those around in my head a while. But I need to make some moves pretty quickly, and the broadband break has got to be one of them.
The picture, by the way, is the immortal Donald Gibb in his definitive role as Ogre in Revenge of the Nerds (hit the title or the pic to buy!) I liked him in Bloodsport too. And whaddaya know? He went to the University of New Mexico. Also he’s one day younger than I am. Poor bastard.
*Full disclosure: I have no actual idea if that’s really what I’d see at a TPC office; I’m guessing. I don’t go into offices unless I have no goddam choice. For example, I resist going to the doctor unless 1) there’s broken bone sticking out somewhere; 2) there’re things visibly crawling around beneath my skin; 3) my temperature exceeds 100°. Centigrade.
Popularity: 7% [?]
“Also he’s one day younger than I am.”
So, you were born nine years minus one day after Hiroshima got flattened. (A dubious fourth dimension “landmark,” but a clear one – for me, anyway.) I’m one day younger than Mary McDonnell (Pres. Laura Roslin in BSG). http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001521/
~~~
I already had accelerated dial-up service (socket [dot] net – my impression of it is that it’s not that unlike SWCP) when, in 2005, I was urged by my sibs to sign up with some ISP that didn’t tie up the voice phone line. I ended up with Charter cable access. I find it *marginally* faster than the dial-up, and a bit _less_ reliable – so I still have the dial-up as a backup. Lately, Socket has been advertising DSL service. Though I’m, by nature, reluctant to change _anything_ that works *well enough* – switching over to the Socket DSL is certainly tempting, especially when the monthly bill from Charter comes in.
- M. \”/
Um, that’d be nine years, minus three days after the terrorist attack on Hiroshima. That was August 6th; I was August 3rd.
It startles me that cable access would be “marginally” faster than dial-up – it’s supposed to what? Upwards of 100x faster than dialup?
I understand that with cable you share the pipe with users in your area, instead of having a dedicated line per DSL. To crib from my pal Larry, is one of your neighbors running a porn server?
“that’d be nine years, minus three days”
Oops. Math skills never were my forté, and I posted that before I’d had my fourth cup of coffee.
“It startles me that cable access would be “marginally” faster than dial-up ”
It is *accelerated* dial-up. But still, yeah. Then again… the cable is Charter. And part of the problem may lie in my computersaur, too.
“is one of your neighbors running a porn server?”
I’d be the most likely suspect for that… if not for the fact of my computersaur.
- M. \”0
OK, I’ve apparently given the wrong impression – you’re sharing the resource with either DSL or Cable (two ways to tell – look for the words “up to” in any statements of speed – or just check the price. If it’s less than $300/month, you’re definitely sharing).
The only major difference is that the phone company is required by law to permit a little bit of “competition” in part of the service segment (and profits from this are guaranteed to them by law, so don’t feel too bad for their duress), and the cable company is not. That’s why you can’t pick your ISP with Cable. And for what it’s worth, the fact that alternate ISPs are allowed also means alternate sharing densities are allowed – each ISP has it’s own business model. Now this is much thinner gruel than real competition would create, but I think it gives DSL an edge (which is why I have it – fair notice, I’m a DSL customer and I have a non-Qwest and non-SWCP ISP for reasons which basically make me a market segment of one, and don’t apply to you.) But I have many nerd pals that have and like cable, so it’s viable too.
Truly dedicated Internet Access with “no” sharing costs hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars per month, and even that just pushes the “sharing” bottleneck upstream a notch or two, assuming you’re lucky.
And you’ll never get anybody to admit how aggressive the sharing is, even if they know. The art of shoving multiple customers down a single pipe so that not too many (but not too few) complain about the speed is an important bit of skill//trade secrecy in the Internet business. It’s difficult to even define. Back when I was in the ISP business I used to spend weeks with a big spreadsheet, and even then I’d end up with 6 or 7 answers to “what’s our oversubscription ratio?”.
And yes, the folks at SWCP are indeed nerds, some of the best, in fact. And although you can’t call them in the middle of the night, you probably won’t get any action from TPC in the middle of the night, either, not for a $50/month service (nor will SWCP – which is probably why they aren’t paying anyone to waste their time trying to push the Telco up a hill).
M. => I thought you said you’d migrated to cable service. So much for my mad reading skilz.
L. => Indeed, I did think DSL was dedicated. Ah, well.
I told you people he was all-wise in telephony.
So what do you think, L., about paying the same for <1.5M DSL vs. <12M cable, please?
Also, WTF is a “computersaur” and why should it interfere with a hard-working lad running a porn server? What is it, Janet Reno in a box?
Ouch. It occurs to me that was infelicitous phrasing…
“I thought you said you’d migrated to cable service. So much for my mad reading skilz.”
Frankly, I’m not sure I phrased that in the officially correct manner either.
“WTF is a ‘computersaur’ ”
A system with a 6GB C: drive, WinME for an OS, and RAM… I’m not really sure, but what I am sure of is that it’s probably about as much (or more) below today’s recommended minimum as my C: drive and OS are. For most offline purposes, it’s reasonably adequate, and will probably remain so for some time. And eight, maybe ten years ago it did just fine online as well.
But reach out into the internets with it today, and not only is it frustratingly slow, I also have to shut down the browser and purge the cache file… several times a day, at this point… to keep it from freezing up entirely.
- M. \”/
Ouch. Ouch.
Seriously.
You might actually be able to get a better machine for free through Freecycle. At the very least, it’d be worth checking out, yes?
V=> So what do you think, L., about paying the same for <1.5M DSL vs. <12M cable, please?
(thought I already posted this, sorry. Probably got interrupted and shut down my browser…)
Well, my first two thoughts are “up to” and “up to”. “up to” 12 may not be really perceptibly much faster than “up to” 1.5, particularly for a single, non-porn-server user. The only exception that springs to mind is if you plan on downloading a bunch of movies from the Cableco itself, that might be faster on “up to” 12. In most other cases, the bottleneck will end up on your computer (or on the server on the other end), so you may never use the difference. The cable co has figured this out, and is, no doubt, oversubscribing accordingly and spreading the greed over a larger customer base. The Telco is more focused on, I dunno, wholesale greed. Take your pick. If there’s a package at either monopoly that includes this and is otherwise price-and-feature attractive to you, then do that.
My third thought is that you’d get tired of 256K pretty damn quick. Looks like you’re not considering it, good call.
L => Thanks. Good info.
Actually I’ve been considering 256K. When I talked to Joe today (at which point I didn’t think to ask him about dinner Sunday, not having talked to you yet) he said he had the 1.5M, and that he was unimpressed with the 256K connections he’d seen some of his associates using.
Given that & your counsel here I’m considering 256K less. It’s just that doubling my monthly Internet hit gives me pause, especially inasmuch as I’m trying to cut expenses.
Still, as Joe reminded me, the time I waste sitting waiting for pages to load on dialup costs money. Not to mention the frustration.
[...] it. I’m going DSL. Tomorrow it’s off to Southwest Cyberport (and, yes, the nerds. The good, and hopefully not-at-all-vengeful [...]