Dial Up Users Please Stand Up!

Isn't it 3 miles? I know they used to always say 15,000 feet. Has that changed?

I'm still on dial-up.

I have a friend who until recently used dial-up because he lived in a remote area of Illinois. He also had noisy phone lines, which made things that much worse. He had a lot of problems with running on large teams because the standing data rate has been getting larger all the time. Large events such as the Rikti invasion were completely impossible, so he couldn't get any of the badges involved.

Each time a change to the game has been made it has increased the amount of data transmitted. Power customization and AE changes finally pushed him over the edge: although the data required for power customization wasn't all that great, it was enough to make running on teams larger than two or three impossible.

He switched to mobile broadband and after some initial issues is now able play all content without problems.

Well there is supposed to be a ton of cash.. around 6 billion for broadband expansion in the stimulus package Obama got passed. Also Mobile broadband? Hmm...

I know where it is coming from. I am one of the people responsible for collecting it.

But I would strongly suggest we drop the politics. It does bad things to gaming communities and I should know this first hand as a mod of a small one.

Agreed.

Having grown up in the boonies (get your TV from a UHF repeater and your radio over AM cos it'll skip off the ozone layer) I know full well what the problem is in regards to rural broadband.

Market Density.


Put simply, there's just not enough people per square mile to make the 'investment' worth it. So the only way this will happen is if someone hands the broadband provider a grant, and even then it'll be a lowball job.

Back in the 80's and 90's Qwest (the company that used to be known as US West) sunk a TON of money into laying fiber across their entire service area. It bankrupted them. The reason wasn't that there wasn't enough data capacity. People just weren't willing to pay premium rates for all the new 'features' that digital phone service would bring, because all they needed was a phone. This was years before Fiber-to-Premise VDSL (which would be the answer for all the rural folks in Qwest territory).

Not sure if anyone will pick that ball up anytime soon, because again, there's that Return On Investment problem - not enough customers per square mile to justify the upgrade expense.

These days, it seems that satellite is the leading source of media/data access in rural areas, because amazingly enough, it's cheaper to put a bird into orbit and cover ten to twenty states, than it is to run cable to all the potential customers in those states. The issue then is latency - that sat is WAY up there, and it takes a few seconds for your data to be sent from the uplink farm, to the bird, and then back down to the receiver in your dish.

I sometimes have to connect via 'wireless' modem... which is a glorified mobile phone. And it runs at roughly dial-up speeds. Haven't had to do that in a while but may have to real soon. When I did, I can't go anywhere near Wentworths or any similar data intense areas.

I live in regional Australia, so when I'm not on the wireless modem I'm on a very slow ADSL link. Trust me... the network coverage out here and the speeds are lousy.

While I do not play on dial-up, we maintain an active subscription with a local ISP, mostly so some members of the household can keep their old email addresses (they prefer the interface and would rather not have to deal with the hassle of setting up forwarding and having to transfer years' worth of messages and contacts).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Noyjitat Yeah, it makes me sad to know that some areas still only have dial up available. Seems like something the cable companies would want to invest in. New customers, new very very very happy customers.

1. Oftentimes there are not enough customers in certain areas to make expanding infrastructure worth it. You might figure "okay, we have x people in area y, which means we could make z each month in income, so it would be worth the investment in equipment and time," but odds are some people in that area wouldn't want a high-speed internet connection at all, let alone from that company. Generally, it's not worth investing in adding infrastructure in low-density areas. Sometimes people in those areas can make satellite internet work, but that's expensive, slow, and oftentimes spotty.

2. Much of the backbone of our electronics infrastructure (power lines, phone cables, and such) was laid in the 1950s. Existing cable networks were laid in the 1970s and 1980s, and fiber networks were barely coming into being in the 1990s. Very few people, and certainly far fewer cable/phone execs, expected the emergence of the computing era and the huge explosion of the internet over the last 20-25 years, and they're trying to milk the existing, aging, communications infrastructure as long as they can, because it's cheaper for them and means bigger profits. (For example, AT&T is the company that famously told its landline phone users to call their moms a day earlier so as not to clog up the lines on Mother's Day.) This is the same general reason 3G cell phone service is still hard to come by in many non-urban areas and 4G is still in its infancy here, even though Japan has had it for years.

3. Currently, about 10% of American households with internet access use dial-up, mostly because there just isn't broadband service in their area (in many of those areas, even a slower broadband connection would be comparably priced to a dial-up connection).

I pay $10 a month for dial-up, $8 if I pay a year in advance. Even with that the towns that host the phone banks are 15-20 miles away, at least they are in my local calling area (years ago pre-Internet Compuserve, they weren't). If I was in range to get DSL the cheapest service is $30 a month for 768Kbs/128Kbs max. If the cable infrastructure was built out the cheapest cable is $50 a month for 3Mbs/256Kbs. Hill is in the way (as well as the condo association) for Satellite.

But since some people can get DSL or Satellite, my zipcode gets a big check as being broadband enabled in those government figures on coverage, even though it's not available for everyone in town. This means that 10% figure is best case, the actual number is a bit higher.

Japan, Korea, most of Europe, has a much higher population density making broadband penetration easier, less expensive to install and allowing much higher bit rates than here in the US. Doesn't help that the DSL competition is set up to be non-existent and cable franchises are monopolies.

I'm on dial up and it sucks balls. Can I say "balls" on the forums? Anyway, the next time I buy a house, I'll be making damn sure it's in an area where high speed internet is available. And no zombies. I hate those.

Portions of this post have been removed -Mod08

On topic, I think most people on dial up are the least likley to be checking forums.

I played on dial-up for about a year when CoH was launched and never had any trouble running any content or group size. Having moved a few months ago I am again on dial-up and now have a lot of trouble with lag and disconnects just trying to group with 1 or 2 friends.

I find myself still phoning in to my home ISP when the wind snaps down my radio antenna. Count me as +1.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Noyjitat Yeah, it makes me sad to know that some areas still only have dial up available. Seems like something the cable companies would want to invest in. New customers, new very very very happy customers.

Cable is a gorram monopoly. Rural area access concerns are simple to them: they marginalize us to "outlying areas too difficult to install", which reads in fine print "not enough profit for us to care."

There is no law like the phone or other utilities have to follow: cable access is not required in all areas.

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Originally Posted by sblinks On topic, I think most people on dial up are the least likley to be checking forums.

I'm on dial-up, I'm reading your posts just like anyone else here is.

Comcast recently installed cable here, but is only offering television over it. At this rate, we might get cable internet in 20 years.

Currently on dialup and have been since I started paying for this a few months ago. Luckily for me, I get DSL in a week. However, my game won't get past checking updater.

One of my best friends plays on dial-up. His connection is such that if an expansion like Going Rogue is only available through download, he cannot get it. A full update takes him a solid week! That's 24 hours per day for 7 days of non-stop downloading!

We're dial up. this is the norm for us. Just download on your downtime, which since you won't be able to play anyway, will be a week. Good things are worth it.

I also find that I can't really group up with people on my dialup connections, I lag out and drop which kind of sucks in a MMORPG.

Although I am not on Dial-Up, I am glad the Team is looking into those users that do. I would broaden the inquiry to wireless users as well (as some may not get the full speed benefits as DSL and/or Direct-Connect Broadband users.

Sending out an email; similar to this post and expanding this question to your Facebook and Twitter audiences may yield a better response.

Well, I could now go in that category of wireless users. This is my first post on my new WiPoP connection. This is through an ISP, though, so it's a little more stable than cellular wireless plans.

For everyone out there that's still playing on dial-up, my sympathies are with you.