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I'm in St. Paul and have used Qwest DSL with Visi as my ISP for about 3-4 years now. It's been very reliable and fast enough. That said, I don't do too much in the way of large downloads. I do a lot of MS Terminal Services (similar to Citrix) and VNC over my VPN client - that's more chatty than it is bandwidth intensive. Just a plug for DSL. I've heard enough horror stories about both DSL and cable that I'm reluctant to mess with success.
As for the hardware, I use a Netgear NR814 wireless router. My one complaint is that this one (and the one at work which I think is identical) seems to drop connections periodically (perhaps on average once every 3-4 hours but with a wide distribution of connection times). I thought this was my laptop or card but it's occurred with 2 laptops (both dell, different models), both Win2k and WinXP, 2 different PCCard devices (one Netgear and the other Belkin) and one integrated 802.11b/g chipset (from Dell/Intel). My roommate uses a new Apple laptop (not sure which model, 2 months old, 12" screen) and hasn't commented on difficulties. I blame the Netgear routers.
Anyway, while looking around for a new 802.11g router, the reports I read seemed to indicate that the G standard is not fully ratified yet and that reports of good performance and setup experiences were mostly when using bundled card/router packages. I'm opting not to upgrade yet - it's of minimal value to me (see below) and doesn't seem to be ready for prime-time in terms of cross vendor support and standard-adherence. And it's expensive compared to cheap B stuff.
As George stated, the bandwidth of B is still significantly more than your cable modem (or even a T1) can deliver. So, unless you're moving large files around the house (or work in my case), moving from 11Mbits to 54Mbits will do you little good. Cable service here, I understand, is 320Kbits upstream and "up to 1.5Mbits" downstream. That's still only ~13% of your 11MBit router.
By the way: I've had similar dropped connectinos at the Dunn Brothers coffee on 15th st. on Loring Park. Can't complain about the price though! On the other hand, the UMN-TC's campus coverage for WiFi is amazing and rock-solid. It seems you're limited to a real throughput of 5.5Mbits there but you'll hear no complaints from me! It's probably the one place me student service fees go that I truly use.
Bryce
posted by 209.98.22...
, Sun, 21 Sep 2003 17:59:54
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