Well, it *is* wireless.... Kidding aside, I'm just casting my bread upon the waters to see what floats. I really need some knowledgeable help with this.
As of today, I've been a new DW customer (the only option for anything resembling broadband where I live) for about 5 days. And based on my googling, the performance I'm getting is *not* what most DW users get. Now, to be clear, I wasn't expecting stellar performance, just something better than the 33.6 dialup that is the only alternative out here. Big latency and modest speeds I was prepared for. Entire client functions that quit working were not. Service: DWay Consumer grade (the cheapest), with DW6000 router/modem. Home WLAN on a Linksys WRT54G, feeding several XP (home and pro) and Linux (Knoppix and Suse) machines. Every problem I list below I have cross-checked by disconnecting the machine from DW, dialing up, and trying the same page/download/client. In every case, the problem goes away. Additionally, I've taken my laptop to Kinko's and used their TMobile to repeat the tests. Again, the problems only occur when I'm connecting through DW. First, HTTP and FTP work pretty well, decently fast... most of the time. But I'm getting weird intermittent problems with graphics not loading, and downloads either not starting or stopping partway but *saying* they're complete (as if DW was adding a bogus EOF marker partway through the file). Sites like Download.com with the "download should start in X seconds" tend to never start, just jump to a blank page. Webcomics, especially frame-based ones, don't show their images about half the time. Second: My POP/SMTP clients (Thunderbird and AOL Communicator) have a
*very* hard time getting a stable connection to a server. And when they *do* connect (usually only after leaving them running for several hours), the connection is often unstable. Third: My antivirus (AVG) had to keep trying for *three days* before it was able to connect and download update files. Norton, OTOH, seemed to have less trouble. Fourth: Streaming. I know DW is not good for streaming, but I expected that low-bandwidth streams would still work in a limited fashion (like NPR, for example). Instead, Realplayer and (yech!) Media Player 9 can't connect at all to any server I tried. Fifth: BitTorrent. Several torrent on several different trackers all display the same behavior -- stuck at zero almost all the time, with occaisional short spurts of 1-5kB/s. I know for certain FAP bandwidth throttling isn't in play, because over the course of 72hrs of testing I only downloaded (between BT and FTP) about 400MB total. Most discussions I've found via Google talk about consistent downloads in the 20-30kB/s ranger, which would make me entirely happy, but unfortunately all the hits I've found so far have been frustratingly lacking in detail or tech specs.I'm just about ready to bite the bullet and call DW support, but I'm not hopeful -- their uslessness is darn near legendary. I'm toying with the idea that upgrading to Professional service and a fixed IP (and control of DW NAT) might help me, but I don't want to go to that extra expense w/o some input from people who've been where I am now. I figure I've got about 20 days left to make a decision...