Geek help

On Thu, 16 Dec 2010 15:42:50 -0800 (PST), Larry L
wrote:

On Dec 16, 3:18*pm, personaobscura
wrote:
On Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:45:10 -0800 (PST), Larry L
wrote:



My kid is moving back home while he waits to head off to grad
school. * In the mean time he has three jobs, two of which are as
research assistants for professors and apparently require lots of time
on the Internet.

So, I guess we're in the market for a fast connection. * *Nothing
"wired" is available out here and I'm trying to figure out the
differences between "radio" and satellite wireless providers.

Currently my little tray icon says 26.4 kbps and I'm also trying to
get a feel for how much faster 1.5 megabyte/sec is and how that should
be abbreviated ... MB/sec *MBps *mbps mb/sec etc etc. * *I thought I
knew some of this stuff but it's many many years since I had any real
interest in puters and my "knowledge: has evaporated. *After thumbing
through 3 wireless ISP companies brochures I'm even more confused than
my norm.

TIA

Well, the math is simple enough: if you really can achieve 1.5 Megabytes per
second on a wireless WAN connection available in your location, that's nearly
500 times higher throughput than your 26.4 Kilobit dial-up connection
provides.

From a utility viewpoint, that's a humongous enabler. Indeed, in this era,
your dialup connection is not far removed from Marconi's time wrt
practicality. Just saying...

I know how bad my current connection is, I've been trying years to get
something done about it. I'm the last house on a dead end rural road
and the phone lines are so old they actually go through trees in a
couple places ( the wood has grown around the wires, over time.) The
phone repair guy once told me he had never seen worse or more spliced
lines BUT the phone company says they meet the minimum data transfer
required by regulations ( enough for a FAX machine, apparently ) and
there is no way they are going to replace a mile of line to make me
happy.

One thing I want to know is there an official difference between mb
and MB ... are these a million bits and a million bytes and is byte
8 times the data as bit. The people on the phones seem to use
"megabit" and "megabyte" interchangeably but I think that is
wrong .... are most advertised speeds in bits or bytes?

TIA,again

A byte is officially 8 bits, Mb is the accepted notation for Megabits, and MB
is Megabytes. From a utility viewpoint, throughput is most readily compared in
bits per second.

I don't know that there actually are any "regulations" on minimum phone line
quality - or what entity would enforce them if there were any. Does the FCC
give a crap about such matters - when there isn't any sort of competition to
regulate in the first place? (can you pick from more than one phone company? I
can't).

If one wants to play keyboard commando over voice-grade lines (which only need
about 2 kilohertz of bandwidth to do their job adequately) one must accept the
condition of the playing field.

As for "people on the phones", with remarkably few exceptions you can safely
count on them all to be script-reading idiots, and no matter how little you
think you know about anything, they'll know less...