Posted: 7/13/2006 12:57:11 PM EDT
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At home I have always had dialup and have only had high speed at work. We just bought a new house and its time to set up internet and phone service. We have FIOS available at our house, in fact, the little above ground node thing is in our side yard. Do I: A) Get 768k DSL which is faster than i'm used to having at home for $14.95 or B) Get 5Mdown/2Mup FIOS service for $34.95 Is the speed difference going to be noticable and worth the extra $20 a month? I like online gaming, but am unsure with the new house just how much I will get to partake in the fragging. I'm just not sure if the speed difference will be noticable or not. ETA I guess only team members can put up a poll 
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I don't have any news links handy--but from what I have read, having a connection that's faster than about 1Mb/sec usually doesn't result in much of any typical perceptible speed increase for "regular internet use". The last article I saw was a comparision of 1Mb and 3Mb lines in Britain, and the 3Mb cost quite a bit more but a study showed that in terms of practical performance, the speeds they delivered were essentially the same. The reason is that once you get beyond a certain speed, the limiting factor of the service you can get becomes {how fast all the other servers on the net are running}, and you can't speed that up. Monster bandwidth can help in some circumstances, such as torrent programs--but some ISP's are friendlier to heavy P2P trading than others. Some use equipment to throttle P2P trading down, while others just use a monthly bandwidth cap and charge you extra (or shut you down) for going over it. You could go to dslreports.com and ask around--particularly ask about the ISP/services you are considering,--and see if others who have had both think it was worth the cost difference. ~ |