The Lord has a fiber internet connection
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
After what seemed like forever, I finally got my fiber optic connection to the internet.
With 100mbps downstream and 50up, I feel like a more integral part of the internet. Of course, these results can only be gotten when connecting within the country, and through wire. When you make the switch to wireless, the speeds drop dramatically, even more so when you're not within the same room.
After a lot of tinkering, I finally managed to get my wireless connection speed to something decent in my room. (as the wireless router is outside in the hall). Achieving a connection speed of between 40~58mbps. Of course, due to all the overhead and extra bullshit too long to be explained, the actual internet speed is only about 12~18mbps.
Now, Mb/s stands for megabits per second, the speeds you see when downloading files is MB/s which stands for megabytes per second. The upper or lower case is very important, as 8 Megabits = 1 Megabyte.
Now, you might be wondering, why the hell do people use megabits since most of the things around us are written as megabytes. Well, that's partly due to the evolution of operating systems and how they count the data, and some marketing bull-shittery.
Okay let me explain a little about bits.
You know that a computer works using binary coding right? Which means that it operates based on 0s and 1s. For example, 1010 = 10, 1100 = 12, 110001100 = 198. Each digit is a single bit that is either a 1 or 0. There is a lot of fascinating things about it so read up on it if you're' interested.
1 Megabit, refers to 1 million bits. Which means that if you have a 10mbps connection, your network is actually capable of transferring 10MILLION ZEROs OR ONEs PER SECOND. Per second, can you even imagine how blistering fast that is?
Technology is amazing and that's why I love it.
Now for some ranting and relatively geeky section.
I can't believe how anal Starhub is with their routers. I wasn't able to connect my own and access the internet easily. Which was no problem if the wireless router they provided wasn't so unnecessarily lousy. I'm just a room away and the connection was basically shit.
My own routers for some reason couldn't take a private IP address as it's WAN address without fucking up it's wireless radios and giving me errors the entire time.
I didn't feel like using an old router with such a new network (even though it's running DD-WRT), after some research I finally decided to flash my new TP-LINK WDR4300 with OpenWRT. Which worked pretty flawlessly. That router is now running a custom version of Linux, which says a lot about how much customizability is given to it. The wireless is now running smoothly and internet is functioning well as well.
Unfortunately not all is well as most of the things are manual, using CLI more often that I would prefer. Even so, the amount of freedom with a good software is limitless. I shall be experimenting like crazy as much as I could.
Exams are starting next week. Oh well.
Labels: amazing, awesome, fiber networks, geek, historical, internet, life, like a boss, lordofgeeks, show off, speedtest
