Time Warner shared internet "up to" speeds

I forgot one thing, someday maybe, the telcos might go the way of cable, etc. and have only digital coming to you house on the copper pair, like DSL or Uverse. A box at your house would strip off the telephone bits and provide an analog line for "old fashioned" phones. Or maybe we could use digital phones! Probably not as phones seem to be going wireless. I just hate talking on these when you have to keep saying "you just dropped out, repeat!" and "no it's not me it must be you". Who know what the future will bring. Back in the 70s, no one would accept the relatively poor quality of today's cell phones, but we do. Or was that the old AT&T speaking!!!

The devices I cite above are not analog, they are digital. With copper phone wires using the above methods, the analog interface ends at the SLC equipment at the subdivision. From there back to the CO it's on a T1 or similar, ie a digital line. T1 is 1.5 Mbits and carries 24 voice channels. This stuff has been around for many decades, back to the 70s.

And presumably your data then winds up riding on some higher speed link back into the network, no? At some point your traffic rides on the same pipe/s with other traffic, the only question is where it starts.

IDK what you mean here. The Telcos have been offering DSL, which is digital, for two decades. That era is winding down, for the most part as they move to better technologies for most customers.

That's how the Telcos have been doing DSL. Many carriers are way beyond that, at least in some areas. Verizon FIOS for example, is fiber into your house. Cablevision here provides VOIP service, where they give you a cable/modem/router that converts to the analog interface for your phones.

Or maybe we could

Your experience with cell phones is a lot different than mine. I've had Verizon for a long time and then Virgin Mobile which rides on Sprint for the last year. I really don't have a problem with poor call quality. Verizon is better, but Sprint is close. It all depends where you use them, what the coverage is. Here in NJ, those work fine for me. If I go into some rural or mountain area, like snowboarding in Vermont, then yes, there I have had areas with dropped calls, poor coverage, etc.

Agree. But the line to your house is analog. Even DSL to you house is analog ... that's why you have a modem.

Actually, it's regular DSL and rides parallel to the regular voice stuff. That's why you have to strip off the DSL carrier when going to a regular phone, using filters. At the remote site, the data is then combined with all the other data (DSLM) from others and leaves via digital fiber.

Yes I agree and what I mean is basically quit using regular analog phones and put the phones on the digital on higher speed carrier along with the computer data. Of course once could do this using things like Skype, but is not the norm for most people.

This may be changing soon: It's just been announced that Charter is buying TWC. We've had Charter for 11 years, during which time we've had just three outages, one of which was caused by the gas company digging up the cable.

Charter's advertised "down" speeds seem to be conservative: We're paying for 18mbps down and 4mbps up, and although the "up" speed is occasionally a little lower (never below 3.8mbps in my tests, IIRC), the "down" speed is often over 30mbps. But Charter doesn't offer speeds as high as TWC: Even Charter's "business" package offers only "up to"

What speed do you get with U-Verse?

Much of the USA is way behind many other parts of the world when it comes to Internet speeds. As mentioned previously, the highest we could get from Charter is 60mbps, whereas a family member in Australia has

I wonder whether those higher TWC speeds will be offered to existing Charter customers.

A speed test just now showed 31.64/4.44.

Perce

Well, now I see a report that Charter may face the same regulatory hurdles that Comcast faced when it tried to buy TWC. But Why? Where is the competition that a takeover would kill? Hands up all those who currently have a choice between TWC and Comcast or TWC and Charter? Anybody? (OK, so municipalities -- at least in some areas -- get to choose to which company they grant a franchise, but that's not the same.)

Another poster in that same forum says he pays 469 Swedish Crowns (~US$55.88) per month for 100mbps up and down (although the SpeedTest report he displayed shows only ~94mbps up and down). To that someone responded that Cox (Canadian, eh?) charges $180/month for a 50/10 business service.

Perce

The VOIP is already with the internet data. That's why it's called VOIP. For example, you get high speed internet service from your cable company. They give you a modem/router that has a phone interface built into it. The conversion to digital happens at the modem/router box. The VOIP traffic then goes out on the same internet cable connection as your other internettraffic.

With that model established and so many good, cheap, cordless phones out there, I don't see the compelling need for changing things and doing the conversion to digital at the phone, as opposed to how it's done now. You'd have to continue to support the phones looking for an analog interface for decades too, so you'd have two differing ways of doing it, for no big advantage that I can see.

In that sense, what is the internet service that the cable company provides? It's digital, but it too rides on a carrier outside the house. I see what you're saying, it is encoded, and not just a simple string of ones and zeros. Examples of things that would be pure digital would be Ethernet and fiber optics I guess. Even there though it's still an analog world when it comes to transmitting and receiving. An ethernet transceiver makes a call on whether it's a one or a zero by the voltage it sees on the wire.

Good point. DSL is unique in that the voice is done the same way as it always has been, coexisting on the same twisted pair that now has data. At least for most people. I guess you could add any of the independent VOIP services, like Vonage, connect your existing phones to it and then the VOIP would ride on the same DSL pipe. How well that would work, IDK, would depend on how fast your DSL is.

We got rid of our AT&T landline years ago and ported the number to the T-Mobile@Home $10/mo. add-on to our cell-phone plan. When we switched to a no-contract prepaid plan we couldn't keep T-Mobile@Home, so we bought an Obihai VOIP adapter and ported the number to Google Voice. Now we have another number (which we give only to family members) from PhonePower ($5x.xx per year, IIRC), and the "public" Google Voice number forwards to that. In the house we have six Panasonic cordless phones that serve as an intercom system as well.

Perce

Are you distinguishing B and b? MB and Mb are two different measurement. I have 50Mb down/3Mb up plan and no issues with all the devices connected wired(Gbit), WiFi(-N and -AC modes) to it thru a router. No stuttering in real time AV streaming always regardless time of the day.

There are some overbuild areas here where the choice is Comcast or Charter and Comcast or Wave/Astound/RCN/Name Of The Week. Historically in overbuilds the two companies share the customer base right down the middle. Often this means that the potential profits do not justify the build unless one system is really really crappy and all the subs jump to the new company.

I think the real answer to all of this is to unbundle all of the cable companies, the same way they did to AT&T and IBM. That is what spurred innovation and lower prices in the phone and computer business. Cable companies should only be selling bandwidth and it should be as a common carrier. Then "last mile" services would be a separate competitive business and content would be sold by the producers