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ahammer
join:2008-01-06
Maricopa, AZ
| is this right for me I cant get dsl in my area or cable or 3g
so im left with sat or idns I dislike how low the cap is on sat. I alread ck to see there are no caps on the isdn line or isp I will be getting
so my ? is how will do do playing online gaming is bandwith a issue when doing that? | |
|  asterisk20xx
join:2008-04-22
Marshall, TX
 ·AT&T Southwest
| Re: is this right for me Welcome to the ISDN forum 
I just got ISDN about a month ago myself and while I miss my old DSL, I found ISDN to actual be a much better connection than I expected. I can usually maintain a constant 15-16 KB/sec downloading and uploading.
My wife and I both play Guild Wars together and very rarely have any lag. The only bandwidth problem we've ever had is game updates take a lot longer to download and install, but as far as playing the game itself I can't see any difference between my 128kbps ISDN and the 7mbps DSL I had before I moved.
I've also played Battlefield 2 and 2142 in many 32 player matches and had little to no lag as well, though I have not tried any 64 player matches or tried playing either with my wife at the same time yet. My ping times run anywhere from around 70 to 250 and tends to hand around 130 for the most part.
Most online games do try to keep bandwidth requirements low so I don't think bandwidth would really be a problem in most cases.
Also, a note about satellite internet, you will have VERY high ping times (upwards of 1 to 2 seconds or maybe more depending on how crowded your ISP is). That makes the majority of online games pretty much impossible to play. The same is the case for 3G internet as well.
Another thing to keep in mind is your phone company will probably NOT provide ISDN internet access. So definitely be sure to call the ISPs in your area and ask them if they provide ISDN access.
Some other things that you may need to know is that ISDN does NOT use a normal phone jack. When I had AT&T install my ISDN line I signed a 2 year contract to lower the installation price to $78. It would have been $300 to install without a contract. But what they didn't tell me is that "installing" does not include installing an ISDN phone jack and charged me an EXTRA $140 to install the jack, which I didn't find out until I got my phone bill a month later.
And that may or may not be the case with your phone company but that's something that caught me by surprise that you might want to be aware of.
Another expense is that you'll have to buy a special piece of equipment called a terminal adapter to be able to use ISDN as well. I got mine on ebay for about $30, tho I might have just got a lucky deal on that, I don't know.
But don't let any of that discourage you. Aside from the initial expenses in getting ISDN it's been a great little internet connection for gaming for my wife and I and we're quite pleased with it. Browsing is of course much slower than dsl or cable but it's easily 3 or 4 times faster than on dialup, so all in all it's a pretty good setup. | |
| Squidii
join:2004-06-30
Little Rock, AR
| That was well written asterisk20xx. Someone should sticky that post. And probably delete this one.
*okay, I really only had trouble with certain pulls in BWL, which were 40 people plus all of the trash. | |
|
ahammer
join:2008-01-06
Maricopa, AZ
| I saw the old post before I posted this one.. I just posted it becuse this forum does not get post that offten and tech changes alot over the year I wanted a more upto date assment.
what is the best router out there im thinking of getting a cisco for 100 or so.
it going to cost me 300 to install and qwest does not offer anyway to lower that but I dont have a contract at lest. | |
| | asterisk20xx
join:2008-04-22
Marshall, TX
·AT&T Southwest
| Re: is this right for me Well, if you only have 1 computer you're gonna be putting online you may be better off getting a plain terminal adapter.
I got my Cisco 804 for about $30 on ebay but I can't exactly say I'm terribly fond of it. Getting it setup was a huge pain. The FastStep software that I got from Cisco's FTP just didn't work at all. Maybe it was newer than what would have come with my 804? I dunno. In the end I had to take the router to my ISP where one of the techs was Cisco certified and he re-write most of the config manually thru telnet. Thankfully he did that for me for free, and after watching him mess around in telnet for an hour I've got a pretty decent idea of how to make my way around the 804's config now.
Mine also tends to lock up 2 or 3 times a day and needs to be power cycled to get things running again. But I leave it running (as close to) 24/7 as I can so the poor thing probably just passes out from exhaustion. I've gotten into the habit of just resetting it before I go to work, once I get back from work, and once more before I go to bed so it's not really been much of a problem.
The initial 3-4 days of trying to get it to work at all to begin with was much worse. Now that it's up and running it's a pretty solid connection.
The 804 is only a 10mbps speed router, so if you plan on transferring large files between computers be prepared for a slow transfer. | |
| | | ruraltn
join:2008-05-16
1 edit | Re: is this right for me You should be able to plug your 804 into another router with faster speeds. Just run everything else in the house off of that to get your high speed LAN
I run a LinkSys WRT54GL wireless router behind a Netopia R-3100-U ISDN TA/Router. We do local file transfers at very high speed over the LinkSys wireless. I even run a remote desktop downstairs on my laptop, with my desktop upstairs serving. Works great. | |
| | | aeblank
join:2004-09-07
Cadillac, MI
| said by asterisk20xx  :Mine also tends to lock up 2 or 3 times a day and needs to be power cycled to get things running again. Man, that isn't right at all!!
Mine currently has an uptime of 3 weeks 5 days (not sure why its so low either, I can't remember). Both my channels have been online for 4+ days (I don't get many voice calls). Something is funky with yours.
A Cisco 804 with ROM 12.2 is pretty flippin hard to beat. I plug mine into a 24 port 100M switch, but you could use any router or switch/access point combination for the network. | |
| | | | asterisk20xx
join:2008-04-22
Marshall, TX
·AT&T Southwest
| Re: is this right for me 12.2 is what mine has! 
Well... "locking up" isn't entirely accurate. After anywhere from 5-10 hours or so both channels just disappear. LAN functions work fine but anything WAN = dead. And the only fix is to turn it off and on. I can't even telnet to the router when it's in that state. It's not a big enough issue for me to worry about. Mostly I just want my torrents running while I'm at work and asleep :P
Granted 15k isn't particularly fast for downloading stuff but 15k for most of the day is far better than only about half the day. Long as my 804 keeps going I don't mind resetting it a few times a day. | |
| | | | | ruraltn
join:2008-05-16
| Re: is this right for me Don't forget that the problems might be at the Central Office. We have had three different ISDN routers (two brands) hooked to the line, and all of them have had to be reset every now and then.
Resetting the customer's ISDN box causes the equipment at the CO to go through something like a reset, too. | |
| | | | | | aeblank
join:2004-09-07
Cadillac, MI | Re: is this right for me I highly suspect the torrents.
I'm pretty sure torrents are hard on "something" and can cause issues. I'd be curious if there are still problems if there were a couple days with no torrents.
whatever though, if it works, it works. | |
| wierdo
join:2001-02-16
Tulsa, OK
 ·Future Nine Corpor..
·Teliax VOIP
| Just a couple of comments on this months old thread.
First, regarding 804 instability. I'd say it's almost certainly due to the large number of connections BT clients open. Reduce the number of simultaneous connections to around 50 and see if that doesn't help. In the past, I had several 800 series routers that ran for years nailed up without a reboot, and with the good ISPs, not even as much as a disconnect and reconnect. Of course, those were running 12.0 and 12.1 XB releases back when the 800 series was brand new.
When I say brand new, I mean brand new, as in my first 800 series I bought two days after they were released directly from Cisco. They would sell anyone a single evaluation unit for $250. Good pricing at the time, given that I paid around $400 for a USR Courier I-Modem and later $300 or $350 for an Ascend Pipeline 50.
All the other 800s were closer to $500 new. Of course, I found this all very sad when only a few years later I bought a USR NetServer I-Modem/8 (4 ISDN lines..8 channels) for under $100 on eBay for one of my clients to use to terminate 56k modem connections as a dial backup for their VPN.
These days, I've seen ISPs literally throwing away old Ascend (now Lucent) MAX terminal servers. Of course, when I had my 804 I hated those things with a passion, since multi chassis multilink PPP wouldn't work with anything but other Ascend gear, so if your ISP was big enough to have more than one, 128k was down to the luck of the draw.
Second, regarding the phone jack: The U interface (which is what you get from the telco in the US and Canada) comes in on 2 wires just like a regular phone line. You can use a standard 4 pin RJ11 jack and cable, even if the equipment has an 8 pin so-called RJ45. The only problem that you might run into is that it's possible to fit the RJ11 plug into the "RJ45" jack slightly off kilter. If you get it in right, it'll work fine and stay there. I never bothered rewiring in any of the houses I had ISDN in.
Sorry for the rambling..
--
It's wierdo, not weirdo. Yes, I know that's not the 'proper' spelling of the similar english language word.  | |
| | asterisk20xx
join:2008-04-22
Marshall, TX
·AT&T Southwest
| Re: is this right for me Update: Nothing wrong with the 804. It was AT&T's lines that were at fault (big surprise).
After having spent lots of time on the phone with AT&T and having a tech sent out 3 times, the third time he went down the road, following my line to find out what the problem was.
Turns out 2 powered phone lines had worn the insulation between them and they were occasionally shorting each other out causing connections to drop. The tech repaired the line and I've only rebooted once since then.
Poor tech is probably glad to be rid of me because it was the same tech each time and he was also the one that installed the ISDN box and jack to begin with. | |
| | | aeblank
join:2004-09-07
Cadillac, MI
| Re: is this right for me Squeaky wheel gets the grease.
When I had mine first installed, LUCKILY I got home from work just as the tech was finishing up. Went in, turned on my stuff, nope.. Took 1/2 an hour to convince him something was wrong, but then it was fixed first thing the next morning (mismatched ISDN cards, I think). | |
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