Uncapped Bandwidth good or bad thing?

Now I just want to let you all know that I dont take part in stealing but I wanted to bring up a few good points on the subject of cable companies and uncapping. first off uncapping is not a legitimate crime yet as for there are no real set rules to bandwidth and how much of it is to go around, and also I did my research and found no internet laws appling to this subject.

now I want to tell you all a little story about how I called the cable company.. Ring ring hello welcome to crooked cable how can I cheat you out of your money?.. answered the ladie on the other end. Hi I was wanting to get road runner and was wondering at what speed does your company promote downloading and uploading? I asked... she replies with ..... well here a crooked cable we guarantee a 2000 kbps download speed and an upload speed of 384 kbps. WOW....I replied and hung up.

Now after having this news I ran a program to tell what my accual speed is...you wanna know what it was? do ya ok it was 41.36 kbps holly molly your saying slower than dialup. yeap I know its not because of my computer. I ran this same test on a freinds DSL and he came up with 36 kbps not much of a difference you know. so where is my other 1959 kbps I ask you?

is it right that i pay 45 dollars a month for a dialup speed and let these crooks get away with stealing from me?

Now where is your ethics? If this was hapening to you and most likely it is would you be pissed too? would you want to get what you had coming.

So my question about uncapping is, would it still be stealing if you are only taking what was promised to you in writing?

now take the poll and post your reasoning why you feel the way you do.

Well you are on cable you say? (1) Well it's probably all the peer-to-peer sharing that drops your connection. (2) Or your ISP having to much subscribers.

(1) Did you know that 4 users (4!) can limit the speed of 1000 cable subscribers only by uploading things? So all those kazaa stuff seriously limit speeds (even if you don't use it yourself). It's easy to explain: the continous upload stream from several users on the same cable end station blocks the ack packets needed for the downstream. So due to upstream saturation wich can be very quick since it's only 384kbps and download is 2Mbps, your wonderfull downstream drops to upstream speeds or lower. Meaning you get something like 128k or less. This is due to TCP/IP and not due to cable or DSL.

(2) Your isp lies to you, it has more customers than it should have, cause their bandwidth is too small.

check the tutorial by Problemchild to solve some of the problems by those upstream saturations. http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=234382

I would say even more; uncapping your modem, means that you can 'steal' some bandwidth, consuming more than canculated and therefor causing others to go even slower due to downstream or upstream saturations. This makes others to think: "wow she goes really fast, I want to uncap my modem too" causing more and more users going faster (some individuals) while other go slower and slower. If everyone wasn't an egoist / free rider those problems would be smaller. The same goes for the isssue VictorKaum pointed out: a big upload can block a whole cable segment for some moment.

And didn't you made a typo in your post?

2000kbps -> and you want 2000k in your browser statistics???

I always thought that 2Mbps (baud rate) was the same as 256kb theoretical maximum speed.
calculated as follows 2Mbps = 1024k bits per second x 2
8 bits make one byte (by-eight)
2048 / 8 = 256k bytes per second

so 56k bps modems mean 7k
128k ISDN is 16k downstream

and you get 41,36 that's the same as 332,8 kbps
so it means you get 17% of your bandwidth
but it is close to your downstream speed.
Perhaps some peepz are uploading a lot on your segment?

Or is this completly wrong?

there is a reason your speeds are not what they are advertising. There might be signal loss due to bad wiring, an excessive number of people in your area are subscribed to the same service. Do you know if any of your neighbors have the same ISP? Can you ask them to run the same speed tests? If they are slow as well, then there is a problem common to both of you.. be it the underground wiring from the pole to the house, or the pole to the junction box, or a misconfigured router in the junction box.

Now you should tell your isp that you are having problems, tell them and if your neighbor is having the same problem tell them that too. Is your television reception fuzzy at time? Does your television breakup or go out often?.. all signs of bad wiring.

And yes there is a law that protect the ISP from uncapping, it's called the contract you signed or agreed to when you subscribed. Uncapping is covered in the Terms Of Service that you have to agree to to get service.

When I first tried to get broadband internet cable was my first option, and they came out and hooked me up and left, the cable didn't connect, 3 months and the cable never connected. Turns out that when they put in my housing community they had burried the wrong cable in the ground so there was so much interference on the line that the modem could not connect, After testing this they came out and ran fresh cable from my house to the junction box for my street. However once this failed they found that the junction boxes were linked with the same wrong wires.

Just because you have cable television does not mean that your wires are working properly. Ask them to test it all, investigate DSL in your area, and tell your cable company that if they can't fix the problems that DSL is your next choice.

oh, nobody asked so i will, what speed tests are you running? I personally use http://www.dslreports.com/stest and they return the same unit of measure that my ISP reports to me, so i am sure that i am getting 95% of my bandwidth (which is amazing).

just some things to think about.

ok, DSL can have similar problems. It's no garantee for a good signal / sync.
Some halogen lightning and their dimmers can cause DSL lines to drop 30% of thier speed. Also a too long cable path from your filter to your ADSL modem can cause sync probs. The same goes for the distance from your DSLAM to your modem. In theory an ADSL connection can sync on 8Mbps with a good modem and if the DSLAM is in close proximity. This means the network provider has to choose between stability / speed / investment. More amplifiers mean more stability at higher speeds. They could give some users 5 or 6 Mbps if they wanted to but that's just unfair cause others cannot sync on those speeds.

About that slow cable modem, I would notify your provider that you are not happy with the situation.

someone mentioned this already, but all the chump kids in your neighborhood running kazaa or limewire is going to affect your speed.

www.thebandwidthplace.com is a bandwidth testing site, which should give you an accurate readout..

also mentioned. poor coax cable in your house, or from the wall jack to the modem will slow you down. so will running it through a firewall, switch, hub, surge protector, coupler, etc. most of this is negligable, but thing about it like this....every connection you make slows down overall quality. also, the longer the cable and the lower the quality, the more room for siganl loss/distortion. if you have a crappy old house, and you used the cheapest cable possible, you're bound to lose some of the speed.

my personal advice.... test bandwidth at a really inconvenient time. 5 AM on a tuesday or something. the gamers are all just going to bed, most people's nightly kazaa downloads are all done, and no one is really up and active in your area, so bandwidth should be pretty good. if that is within a certain percentage of what they advertised. (i think it's +/- 30%) then your company is okay.

kinda messed up, but it's the law on advertising. (imagine if companies could advertise a 100GB hd and give you a 70 GB HD and get away with it.)

hope this helps... or at least calms some people down

Call your cable company. I had a similar problem when code red hit, I called and complained and they switched me to a segment with a lot less traffic.

Although technically I was stealing the cable to begin with, the cable company neglected to turn on my cable when they "installed" the modem...I called and mentioned this but they claimed that they could "talk" to my modem...not my modem wasn’t plugged into the line at the time. well I eventuality got the janitor to let me into the wiring closet and turned on the cable my self...not being a cable expert I just turned everything on and ended up with all the stations for free ;)

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Originally posted here by sickyourIT

kinda messed up, but it's the law on advertising. (imagine if companies could advertise a 100GB hd and give you a 70 GB HD and get away with it.)

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Umm they can..check out the fine printon your next Dell or HP add, they clame one "GB" is 1000 "KB" and one "KB" is 1000 bytes, so you are loseing 124 bytes per k and 124 kbytes per gig it ends up with 16gig drives being called 20 "GB" drives :mad:

so yes a 100 "GB" drive is probably around 70 gig

Stealing bandwith that you deserve is great. screw the man. but when its taking from other peoples connection its not so cool. but then again you have a right to the bandwidth so its the cable companys fault in the first place soooooooo. id have to vote yes, steal away.

I got so fed up with cable's limitations such as blocking port 80, and the terrible upload speeds, that i ditched it and got a fractional T1. **** cable. If you are serious about computers, and want to do more than visit a couple web sites a day, cable isn't for you.

I have had a pretty good experience with cable , the main thing i have noticed is that with windows doing a speed test i get .8 - 1.3 mbps and with linux i get 2.4-3.3 mbps same hardware with the 2 tests the only thing different is os and browser. The people upstairs had problems with there cable tv reception so we installed a signal booster it cured their tv problems and seemed to help my computer ? (no scientific evidence though,just my perception)

Well it seams alot of people take the no side. But I dont get why I got so many neg points for this post, its not like I acually did uncap. But any ways thank you all for your input be it bad or good it got everyone including myself to think. I read of several people in Ohio who got arrested by the FBI for this same thing. Didn't know the cable companys had that type of power. Thanks again for the input....

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Originally posted here by Ghost_25inf
I read of several people in Ohio who got arrested by the FBI for this same thing. Didn't know the cable companys had that type of power. Thanks again for the input....

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well, uncapping could be labeled as defrauding the cable company and therefore the FBI could potentially be brought in, idk, just a thought.

Uncapping is a clear violation of the acceptable use policy of the cable companies. It also steals bandwidth from your neighbours.

Remember it isn't some faceless corporation you're stealing from to leech your MP3s, but other people who are attempting to use the internet.

Now what im about to say could be it or not....im going by how my cable ISP works, as all do but, well let me explain, a CMTS will enable as many as 1,000 users to connect to the Internet through a single 6-MHz channel. Since a single channel is capable of 30 to 40 megabits per second (Mbps) of total throughput, this means that users may see far better performance than is available with standard dial-up modems. The single channel aspect, though, can also lead to one of the issues some users experience with cable modems.if you are one of the first users to connect to the Internet through a particular cable channel, then you may have nearly the entire bandwidth of the channel available for your use. As new users, especially heavy access users, are connected to the channel, you will have to share that bandwidth, and may see your performance degrade as a result. It is possible that, in times of heavy usage with many connected users, performance will be far below the theoretical maximums. The good news is that this particular performance issue can be resolved by the cable company adding a new channel and splitting the base of users, see cause a cable company that offers Internet can use the same cables as the ones used for your cable TV because the cable modem system puts downstream data, data sent from the Internet to an individual computer, into a 6-MHz channel. on the cable, the data looks just like a TV channel. so Internet downstream data takes up the same amount of cable space as any single channel of programming. upstream data information sent from an individual back to the Internet, requires even less of the cable's bandwidth, just 2 MHz, since the assumption is that most people download far more information than they upload.......so in short, I think your ISP is like mine, they just suck. because like what others said earlier they are excedding the maximum amount of users for that cable and they need to open another channel, I could be wrong.

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I got so fed up with cable's limitations such as blocking port 80, and the terrible upload speeds, that i ditched it and got a fractional T1. **** cable. If you are serious about computers, and want to do more than visit a couple web sites a day, cable isn't for you.

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That kinda speed would cost me a few hundred $$$ a month, personally I don't have that kinda money - yet.

ok...so I have a cable connection that advertises 1.5 download and 256 upload. I get 210kps download, which is good yes. Can I do anything to get more??? How do i "uncap" as we are discussing here? I could careless if its illegal. :) i work for Comcast!! hahaah!

I agree with isabyon. My connection here at home is 4.5megabit or 4500kilobit but in the download windows the most I have ever gotten is 500kilobytes a second. Heh my ISP does get pissed off at me when I overload ther crapy servers by having to many open connections at once... I like hoging bandwidth when I need it but most of the time I dont so what the heck I'll just take the average :)

Whoah 500kb/s a second don'tt complain dude, i was on 56k for YEARS before they rolled out highspeed bandwidth in this redneck town i live in.

by the way how much money does that connection cost you? and what part of town do you live in? urban? rural? surbban?

no crap...that rocks!!!!!

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Originally posted here by XoN-ASSIM
I agree with isabyon. My connection here at home is 4.5megabit or 4500kilobit but in the download windows the most I have ever gotten is 500kilobytes a second. Heh my ISP does get pissed off at me when I overload ther crapy servers by having to many open connections at once... I like hoging bandwidth when I need it but most of the time I dont so what the heck I'll just take the average :)

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sorry but 500kbytes is very fast for a cable connection and still good for a 4.5 megabit connection. Like Isabyon explained -> 1byte is 8bit. So to calculate your maximum theorethical speed (which means you have no loss at all on the lines and no congestions) you do 4.5 x 1024kbps = 4608 and divide that by 8 -> 4608 / 8 = 576
So your maximum download speed from you to your CMTS is 576kbytes.
If you get 500kB that means you still have 500 x 8 = 4000kbps or 4Mbit. This speed is 86,8 % of your line speed, this is very good. I don't think many ISP have this kind of ratio's for their users.

It's worth noting as well that uncapping won't neccessarily give you the bandwidth you say you should be getting. If the area you live in is oversubscribed, contention is the likely problem. DOCSIS cable modems have a shared bandwidth of 33Mbps downstream and 10Mbps upstream per channel. This means that it could only support 16 customers with a 2000/384K service before contention comes into play. It would be unfeasible to have a CMTS for every 16 customers due to costs, so all cable companies will have between 20 and 100 times this number of subscribers per CMTS.

The only real solution is to either change ISP/cable company, or hope they see the frustration they're causing their customers with their greed, and resegment their network to reduce contention.

Yep I love it. I only pay $50 a month for 802.11b wireless access. So I guess I cant complaind that much except that my upload sorta sucks(I get like 25kbytes). Aslo I called them up and they told me I am not capped just limited upload wise. So I'll have to figure out a deal with them. And no im not promoting illegal activity! lol I just think that if you are capped and its not part of the contract then you can uncap yourself...(tyring not to get myself into trouble, kinda got suspended a few times at school for "hacking"). For those who dont know what the term "hacker" really means i suggest you go to www.dictionary.com and look it up.

I'll not complain about my service again anytime soon after reading these posts...I whine when I'm only getting 700kb :mad: I have a DSL connection rated as 1100 down/384 up...here are the most recent speed tests I've run @ dslreports.com

Speed test (la) 1101/1150 kbps
Speed test (ec) 1070/1132 kbps
Speed test (la) 1098/1149 kbps
Speed test (ec) 1066/1136 kbps
Speed test (la) 1065/1150 kbps
Speed test (ec) 1065/1043 kbps
Speed test (la) 1102/1154 kbps
Speed test (ec)1040/1673 kbps
Speed test (la) 1102/1154 kbps
Speed test (la) 1082/1154 kbps
Speed test (ec) 1044/1145 kbps

Apparently they slipped up and forgot to restrict the upload speeds. :D

I think you'd better asked the provider first. Maybe they have many customers.
so they have to shared their bandwidth.

ciaooo.

People, I think there is some comfusion in this thread related to bits and bytes...
Remember, bit is with a lowercase "b", and byte with a uppercase "B"
ie: Kilobit = kb, kilobyte = kB... Kbps = Kilobit/second, KBps (or more often "KB/s") = Kilobyte second... same thing for megabits/megabytes...

Of course 8 bits = 1 bytes, so a 2Mbps connection will give you a max transfer rate of 256KB/s

Remember that :
connection speeds (ie: ISP advertised bandwidth) are measured in Kilo/Mega bits per second,
transfer speeds (ie: Web browser or ftp client shown speed) are measuered in Kilo/Mega bytes per second.

So don't forget to do the conversion (bits -> bytes: divide by 8, bytes -> bits: multiply by 8).

And also, bauds aren't exactly the same as bps:
"Baud was the prevalent measure for data transmission speed until replaced by a more accurate term, bps (bits per second). One baud is one electronic state change per second. Since a single state change can involve more than a single bit of data, the bps unit of measurement has replaced it as a better expression of data transmission speed" [SearchNetworking.com]


This surely is known stuff to many of you but it can be really confusing if you don't know it.


Ammo

lol,
Ammo, like Isabyon said at the start of the thread, and like I repeated in the middle of the thread...
anyway good reminder cause many people seem to confuse those numbers thinking a 3Mbit connection will give them 3000kB ... ;)
so, indeed no, it does not.

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