rec.autos.simulators

Can anyone using Cable in Canada tell me how it responds to
GPL and hosting. I am seriously considering going with WAVE
a division of Cogeco and wonder about your experiences.

Any info appreciated.

Tony

I've had it since December and there's been two complete outages that I've
noticed.  About once every two weeks, there might be a night in which I'm
getting disconnected from GPL races.

Aside from that, there's been a lot of problems with reading news groups -
although the last couple of weeks have been quite good, there's been
problems with news about 20% of the time.

Brian

(ask anyone who reads my GPL page), but I would not trade it for a 56k
link.  Only ADSL would be faster, but 24hrs a day service is over $1500
a year where cable is $468.  The news server does not hold many R.A.S
entries so you will have to look elsewhere for a good newserver.

From my cable installer I heard they are adding 10,000's of user more
than they anticipated with the move from $60/ month to $39/month.  This
could be the cause the of slow web and news servers, but the ping in GPL

30-60kb/s upload speeds.  With my P2/333 I can handle 10 drivers, but I
think the limit due to my PC -- the start is bad with more than 10
drivers on the grid, but during practice I can handle up to 12-14
drivers.

Overall, get cable.  You won't want to go back to a slow connection.

Jason.

--------
Jason Monds
"My other car is a Ferrari"
http://members.home.net/gpl.mondsj/gpl - For my combined gas/brake setups
(Please remove 'no extra spork' when replying)

Joe

BTW, I read this newgroup from work and CADvision has execellent news
groups, but only provide ADSL as a top-of-line internet solution -- too
expensive for me.

Jason.

I'm on Shaw like Jason as well, and have had good success with mine. I've
hosted up to 15 drivers, with my lowly 300A running at 340. I do have an 8M
Thriller that seems to work well with the slower machines.

There are at least 4 people in my league who have cable, that cannot host,
or even race with out disconnects. The ping times look very good, but every
once and awhile, there is high packet loss, or horrendous ping times of
several seconds, and the connection gets dropped. Two of the people with the
problem are in Ontario, one in the US, and one in Holland.

We are not sure what causes the problem - the ISP server, or possibly the
cable modem. They all have LanCity cable modems I believe, while I have a
Motorola cable modem. Without side-by-side comparisons, it is impossible to
say this is the problem, but one of the cable co. did say the LanCity modem
is more susceptible to noise.

Just a caution that getting cable doesn't necessarily mean good things for
GPL. These four are back to analog modems for racing.

Kevin Caldwell
Calgary, Canada

GPL measures the latency in ticks. One tick is 1/36 secs or 27.778 ms. So
.056 is two ticks (the mininum even on a  local network), 0.111 is 4 ticks
etc.

Bart Westra

Personal site : http://www.toptown.com/INNERCIRCLE/1846/

AMCA web master : http://www.amcaracing.nl/

their cable for everyone.  This includes those in the States.  There are


they are capping upload speeds to something along 56k.  This way they
can oversell their service and not have to install more pipes to the
Internet.  Also, it appears that many cable companies have their routers
overloaded, thus many "lost packets".  Lost packets may slow download
speeds a little bit, but are deadly to online GPL.

I would suggest that you have people do traceroutes to your machine and
then e-mail the results to you.  If it appears that the slowdowns and
lost packets are coming on your side of the connection, forward them to
the "customer service" division of your cable company.  Hopefully when
enough people start complaining about poor service, the cable companies
will wake up and react to customer demands.  While cable may have the
high speed connection monopoly at the moment in your area, that will
soon change and they will have to compete with xDSL and other services.

One other problem with cable is that you end up sharing the bandwidth
with others in your immediate neighborhood.  The more they use the less
you have access to.  While the other problems outlined earlier can also
happen to xDSL customers, the latter doesn't apply.  So the more popular
cable modems become, the lower the quality of service.  It's sorta like
watering down wine for a big party to make it go further.

% pretty bad. I can't reliably host GPL races. Every once in
% awhile, everyone is lost, it seems like I"m being put on
% hold by the server. sometimes this happens alot, sometimes
% just enough to make it impossible to host. As for racing on
% other servers, it's good some nights, impossible others. I'm
% very dissapointed, they can't do anything about it, and
% franklly, I think they're overloaded with customers. I
% figure it'll just get worse, some people are lucky now,
% maybe not so many of their neighbours have it yet, but in a
% year from now, everyone will have sucky service.

--
**************************** Michael E. Carver *************************
     Upside out, or inside down...False alarm the only game in town.

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