Cable Connection Speed

[Nick-Zack]

I currently have the 5.0Mbps service from my cable company for $44.99 a month. If I lower the speed to 1.5Mbps for $29.99 or even 96Kbps for $19.99 will it be terribly slower?

I am trying to lower my monthly bills but don't want to have timeout issues when playing poker. My desktop is hard wired to the router, I have 2 laptops that are wireless and my Tivo is wireless.

[nuclear500]

5Mbps. I doubt you actually get that. But anyway.

Dropping to 1.5 you will only notice a difference on extremely big downloads (Xvid, DivX rips of DVDs etc). Your general web browsing will have zero difference.

I would not drop to 96Kbps, thats only a little more then twice as fast as a dialup modem. It'd be more stable, but not worth it. 1500Kbps or 96Kbps. You tell me [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Drop to 1.5 if you don't do serious downloading.


FYI
"Speed" has nothing to do timeouts - two different aspects of networking.

[Nick-Zack]

I switched yesterday to the 1.5 service. I can tell absolutely no difference at all. I think I may go ahead and save and extra $10 a month and take it down to 96.

[Neuge]

[ QUOTE ]
I switched yesterday to the 1.5 service. I can tell absolutely no difference at all. I think I may go ahead and save and extra $10 a month and take it down to 96.

[/ QUOTE ]You will notice a big difference between 1.5 Mbit and 96k.

[CORed]

96k will probably be all right for poker, aside from the half hour wait to download upgrades, but it will suck for just about anything else. I have 250k DSL, and it's tolerable for everything but video and big downloads, but I wouldn't want anything slower. 96k will be sluggish even on web pages with lots of images or big images, and painful for software downloads, streamig video, etc.

[flash8pro]

It is worth the $10/month to have the 1.5Mb service. Dropping from a 5Mb to a 1.5Mb line is different because most websites/servers don't take full advantage of a 5Mb line anyway. It only helps if you have a couple of bandwidth hogs at your home (who are always on at the same time) or you do intensive downloads frequently.

I have a 6Mb cable line (I got it on special - I will be dropping to the cheaper plan once the normal rates kick in), and there is little difference between it and a 1.5Mb line (In fact, I often even get speeds between 6.2 and 6.5Mb). Only a few web servers give individual users enough bandwidth to take advantage of a line like that. I still suffer from latency (time it takes to send a message and receive a reply) issues, just like any other line. So, even though I have overkill bandwidth for a poker site, sometimes I'll still timeout.

Trust me, you'll see a big (bad) difference by switching to the 96k line. Don't do it.

[nuclear500]

[ QUOTE ]
I would not drop to 96Kbps, thats only a little more then twice as fast as a dialup modem. It'd be more stable, but not worth it. 1500Kbps or 96Kbps. You tell me.

[/ QUOTE ]

As stated previously.