Expert: Cezar L. Palconet - 12/31/2011

Question
Hi Cezar:
I am an all experts "expert" as well in auto repair (pontiac) Here is my quastion. I am trying to do streaming video the more disappointed I am. I have DSL by choice/necessity It's a bundle pkg though Verizon. Here are my speeds Download 1.53 MBP/s Upload .37 MBP/s The download is on the load side of the chart I think.... Streaming anything HD is slow and a lot of buffering going on. I think I'm at the far end of this DSL line. It was an after though to the sub division I live in. I have lived here for 11 years and the DSL has only been here for 4 years.... That aside what can I do to speed up what I have going on here. I know it's like trying to funnel down 6 lanes of traffic into 2. The Modem I have is from Verizon it's a Westell 6100 and that goes into my router which is a lynksys WRTG54 my streaming Box is hard wired with Cat 6 cable to the router and the router right into the modem. Someone had mentioned to a router with "N" may help but My real issue here is the DSL will a different modem help? or a modem/router all in one combo???
Thx in advance...

Answer
Hi, Todd

Unfortunately there is no amount of upgrade on equipment that will alleviate your situation, except getting a larger connectivity from the service provider, and even that will not totally guarantee a fast connection as you would expect out of the increased cost and bandwidth.
Here is the bottom line, the service provider only have a certain amount of bandwidth in a particular area ( we will call bandwidth as a  resource at this point) and this resource will not be increased not until the grade of service deteriorates, this degradation or grade of service is defined by the network designer from the service provider, this takes into heavy consideration the number of subscribers that will share the resource, since the resource is fixed to a certain amount, the more subscriber that can be packed into a resource the more profit this area generates, good for the business!, secondly in DSL or on any digital transmission for that matter, the farther you are from the source, the worst your signal becomes, thus the system will try to compensate for lost bits by creating more duplicates of the total bits, so when losses occur there will be sufficient bits to reconstruct the data, this is in addition to call for retransmission when the errors exceed a certain level.

This problem is recurring in all levels of the network transmission down to the individual subscriber.

My analogy would be like: there is a certain water pressure from the water mains, the more users connected to this source, the less the water pressure, until to appoint, that it will just trickle.

The real solution would be to talk to your service provider, about a better service for your location, But this comes at a cost, and sometimes it is just not worth it.

Regards.