'Dial Up Speed'

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tchart

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#59299 1-Apr-2010 09:59

So went over my GB allowance the other day and am crawling at "Dial up speeds".

Does any one know what this is defined as? I always thought this refered to 256kbps but its painfully slowwww. In fact much slower than dial up.

For example National Bank Online Banking (which is classic ASP and not graphics heavy) takes about 3-4 minutes to render a simple statement page (around 50 transactions).

I ran the Telecom speed test and it reckons its 20-40kbps.

Anyone have a idea of how slow "dial up speed" is meant to be.

johnr

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#313751 1-Apr-2010 10:02

64k max

256k is broadband speed

wellygary

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#313768 1-Apr-2010 10:40

tchart: I always thought this refered to 256kbps but its painfully slowwww. In fact much slower than dial up.

If you could get 256K on Dial up many people would still be there.

Most people equate Dial up to be 56kbs,

SteveON

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#313806 1-Apr-2010 11:59

although Dial-up 56k is analogue and the speed of broadband throttled back to 56k should still be faster.

nitrotech

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#313811 1-Apr-2010 12:03

SteveON: although Dial-up 56k is analogue and the speed of broadband throttled back to 56k should still be faster.

The only way that 56k on a modem is slower than 56k on an adsl connection is if the modem doesn't sync up to full speed eg only syncs at 33.6 instead because of line noise - is that what you were getting at?

rugrat

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#313822 1-Apr-2010 12:26

I found being slowed down alright for web browsing. Most sites loaded 3 to 10 seconds. Just had to make sure only one thing being done at a time, ie not open second tab till other one has finished loading as doing more then one thing could bring it to a crawl.If tried 2 pages at once would take way more then twice as long to open.

tchart

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#313840 1-Apr-2010 12:53

Mmmm thanks for all the answers. It was probably the multiple installs of Windows 7 that sucked all the bandwidth doing updates and patches.

What Im seeing is definitely slower than I remember 56k modems being. Its actually unuseable!

My wife was trying to do an online shop from Woolworths and gave up after 30 minutes.

Oh well only a few days to go until my billing date.

SteveON

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#313854 1-Apr-2010 13:24

How did we all live with 56k... and how do people still live with it?

On the comment of 56k dialup vs Digital Broadband. generally dial-up is slower at the handshake and the ping is pretty poor. Browsing these days is a lot more bandwith intensive than it used to be. Although some sites are about the same size, there is a lot more http requests and each request is slowed down by the poor ping.

This is possibly why back in the days of 56k you remember the web being faster; sites were optimised for 56k, now many sites are optimised for 512k+ with latency of >50

Try facebook for example, its bloated with all kinds of JS and images. It is getting smaller and sites like geekzone try to limit the http requests; but many still require more bandwith than 5 years ago.

msn.com/yahooextra/most sites; now employ a lot of JS and flash visuals.

I remember being on 56k in 1998 and thinking how impressive it was downloading 400meg in 1 month was. Now I can't help going over 5-10 Gb just from browsing and my web applications.

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Ragnor

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#314044 1-Apr-2010 22:08

When you're shaped to 64k after you've gone over your cap it actually performs far worse than dial up because of the way it's implemented.

Damager

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#314075 1-Apr-2010 23:51

Ragnor: When you're shaped to 64k after you've gone over your cap it actually performs far worse than dial up because of the way it's implemented.

This is 100% correct.

It's been a while since I've dial up, but years ago when I got speed capped, I used my backup dial up account because it was much faster than the capped 64k broadband speed.

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Batman

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#314094 2-Apr-2010 08:01

dial up in theory might be 14.4 - 56kbps!!! works fine for one person surfing (not streaming) but once you have 2 ppl connected both would die younger that they should have

amiga500

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#314484 3-Apr-2010 20:39

When I was on Adventure Plan & got slowed to 64k I found it worked OK. Seemed to be at least as good as dial-up. I was getting around 48k on Xtra dial-up with my computer very close to the jackpoint. More like 42k if I used a 10 meter extension cord.

tdgeek

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#316695 10-Apr-2010 00:20

Dialup is 53k max down in NZ and 33.6k up. Typically in rhe range 48k to 53k. For technical reasons you wil not get 56k in NZ

Throttled BB is 64k down and 64k up.

The filesaize of webpages is far greater these days, so while dialup seems slower, it is the same, it just has to deal with larger webpages.