A case where cable broadband crushes DSL, and crushes it good

I feel for this guy:

He wanted to replace cable broadband with cheaper DSL, but as you can see, his DSL speed is abysmal. (FYI, my mom’s DSL speed in North Hollywood is similar; at my house in Van Nuys we do quite a bit better, but nothing stellar either).

If you’re good at doing math in your head (I used a calculator), you can see that download speed on cable is 68 times faster than on DSL at his location.

Upload speed is only 10 times faster on cable.

In his area:

Cost of cable broadband: $65
Cost of DSL broadband: $40

He does mention that the cable service does go out a bit, and speeds can drop when there’s a lot of activity from other users, but the promise of a service that’s 6,800 percent faster … the mind is boggled.

Updated: The Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB WiFi adapter in Ubuntu with ndiswrapper

Update on 2/4/08: So far I’ve gotten the computer to recognize the wireless adapter in Ubuntu 6.06, Wolvix 1.1.0 and Puppy 3.00. The latter two I’ve tried in the presence of actual wireless networks, but I still can’t get a DHCP connection. I doubt it’ll work in Ubuntu, either. In Debian Lenny, I got stopped at modprobe ndiswrapper, which didn’t work.

(Original post begins here … proceed knowing that this so far hasn’t worked for me)

Only a few days ago I said I never had any luck with ndiswrapper — the program that enables you to use Windows drivers to configure networking devices in Linux and BSD.

A few months ago, when I heard that the Airlink 101 AWLL3026 USB Wi-Fi adapters, which go for $10 at Fry’s during periodic sales, worked out of the box in many Linux distributions, I decided to buy one.

Well, it turns out that I got the newer model, the AWLL3028, which has an entirely different chipset — it’s a Realtek 8187b. It didn’t work with anything. I couldn’t even get it to work in Windows XP without the driver.

Anyhow, I decided to Google my way into the problem today, and I found the following:

You need to use the Windows 98 driver to get the AWLL3028 to work with ndiswrapper

How to install and configure ndiswrapper in Ubuntu

How to troubleshoot your wireless connection, especially with the Realtek 8187, in Ubuntu

A modified Linux driver for the Realtek 8187b, with explanation

Hacking the RTL8187b

I knew it was only a matter of time before a wireless adapter sold for $10 at Fry’s became usable in Linux. Let’s hope it’s plug-and-play — and we won’t have to do any of this — very soon (perhaps in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS).

I decided to try ndiswrapper on my test box running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. Instead of downloading and compiling my own ndiswrapper, I just searched for it in Synaptic and installed it from there.

Then I did the following:

Go to Places — Home Folder and make a new folder (or “directory” if you want to put it that way) — call it wireless — for the two Windows drivers. Then open the new wireless folder.

Then, put the Windows driver CD in the CD drive, open it with the file manager (double-click on the CD icon on the desktop).

In the CD window, navigate to the Windows 98 folder and drag the two drivers, with filenames rtl8187B.sys.sys and net8187b.inf, into the wireless folder.

Then open a Terminal window and do the following:

You should already be in your home directory, so chage to the new wireless directory you made:

$ cd wireless

Now start using ndiswrapper to make your new wireless driver:

$ sudo ndiswrapper -i net8187b.inf

Verify the installation:

$ ndiswrapper -l

Put the ndiswrapper module into the Linux kernel:

$ sudo depmod -a

$ sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

Then run dmesg and look for something like “ndiswrapper version version loaded” in the output:

$ dmesg

Create an alias for wlan0:

$ sudo ndiswrapper -m

Make sure ndiswrapper is loaded at boot:

$ echo “ndiswrapper” | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

Then reboot. At this point my wireless adapter began flashing, and wlan0 was among the choices System — Administration — Networking.

But since there’s no wireless in this room, I’ll have to try again tonight, except this time in Debian Lenny or Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0. (In those, instead of sudo, I’ll just open a root shell with su).

Thanks to Kevdog, from whom I got all of this information. I made some modifications to his instructions, substituting pointing and clicking for work in the terminal (and leaving off a few precautionary checks) where possible.

And I’ll tell you later whether or not this actually worked. I did this all in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work in Debian, a newer version of Ubuntu, or just about any other version of Linux (I plan to try in Puppy and Damn Small Linux at some point, too).

75-year-old Swedish woman has world’s fastest Internet connection

You might thing DSL is spiffy, or maybe you have cable Internet service. It’s official — what you’ve got sucks. Sweden’s Sigbritt Lothberg has a 40-gigabit/second connection into her home in Karlstad, Sweden. Her son Peter, who lives in California and is a “networking expert,” helped. She can download a full-length movie in less than two seconds:

“We wanted to show that that there are no limitations to Internet speed,” said Hafsteinn Jonsson, who runs Karlstad’s network unit.

…

“She’s a brand-new Internet user,” said her son. “She didn’t even have a computer before.”

His mother isn’t exactly making the most of her high-speed connection. She only uses it to read Web-based newspapers.

How fast is the typical DSL line? Mine from DSL Extreme is rated at 1.5 MB per second download, 384 KB upload.

So a gigabit is 1 billion bits, a megabit is 1 million bits … 40,000,000,000 vs. 1,500,000 — that makes Ms. Lothberg’s broadband connection 26,667 times as fast as my own, or 2,666,667 percent faster.

Bottom line: The Internet can be — and probably will be — a whole lot faster than it is today. And some kind of mega-super-broadband will eventually be the everything-pipe into homes all over the world, delivering all the data we need for audio, video, all kinds of communications and who knows what else.

Radio reprieve

Webcasters and internet radio listeners are breathing a sigh of relief today after it was announced that SoundExchange executive director John Simson had agreed to allow small and non-commercial internet radio operators to continue streaming past the July 15 deadline imposed by the Copyright Royalty Board.
The CRB had decided to foist new royalty fees on webcasters that would have likely put most of them out of business despite objections by legions of listeners, artists (who would not likely ever be heard by many people) and a handful of members of Congress.
Webcasters got a 60-day postponement of the implementation of the CRB decision while parties attempt to come up with a compromise.
Read tons more about this issue at Kurt Hanson’s RAIN newsletter and at SaveNetRadio.
Thanks to Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA).
I don’t know what I would do without my RadioParadise.

Updated: $10 DSL from AT&T

That’s right, contingent on AT&T’s takeover of BellSouth, the communications giant must offer DSL service for $10 a month.

THAT’S $10 A MONTH, PEOPLE.

It’s slower than the average DSL line — 768Kbps down and 128Kbps up — but still, it’s wicked cheap. (And I’m all about the cheap.)

Go here to see if you can get the $10 deal (you can’t have had AT&T DSL anytime in the past 12 months … and there’s a heavy geographical component, too).

But … the great Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing (and sci-fi literary fame) tells you why you SHOULDN’T DO IT:

… even at $10/month, AT&T DSL should be avoided like the plague. These are the scumbags who illegally wiretapped the entire Internet for the NSA, who broke net-neutrality to find “copyright infringements, and who inspired NBC to call for a law requiring all ISPs to do the same (imagine — a law forbidding network neutrality!). Seriously: the only day I wouldn’t piss on AT&T is if they were on fire.

Updated: $10 DSL from AT&T

That’s right, contingent on AT&T’s takeover of BellSouth, the communications giant must offer DSL service for $10 a month.

THAT’S $10 A MONTH, PEOPLE.

It’s slower than the average DSL line — 768Kbps down and 128Kbps up — but still, it’s wicked cheap. (And I’m all about the cheap.)

Go here to see if you can get the $10 deal (you can’t have had AT&T DSL anytime in the past 12 months … and there’s a heavy geographical component, too).

But … the great Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing (and sci-fi literary fame) tells you why you SHOULDN’T DO IT:

… even at $10/month, AT&T DSL should be avoided like the plague. These are the scumbags who illegally wiretapped the entire Internet for the NSA, who broke net-neutrality to find “copyright infringements, and who inspired NBC to call for a law requiring all ISPs to do the same (imagine — a law forbidding network neutrality!). Seriously: the only day I wouldn’t piss on AT&T is if they were on fire.