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Hi Erica,
As dial-up was created by Alexander Graham Bell over 100 years ago,
its speed is determined by several mitigating factors: it is technology
that is over 100 years old, it was designed, primarily, for voice
communications between parties, and power regulations deem that telephone
dial-up speeds not exceed 53k, so 56k is a pipe dream. The best you can
hope for with CCN's dial-up is about 51k.
As the internet evolved, it placed a great demand on this old system,
which is why it was supplanted with high speed; direct lines right into
your home, carrying internet signal at far greater speeds than dial-up
could ever. However, there are tricks and workarounds to make dial-up not
as antiquated as it seems, such as using the text account, like Chebucto
offers, which you can buy as a standalone service or which comes as a
bonus with your PLUS connection.
If you want to download a large file, say 5 megabyte in size, and your
PLUS connection chokes on it, copy the url out of the header in your
graphic browser, start up a telnet connection, paste the url in your g)o
bar at the bottom of the text browser and use CCN's high speed connection
to bring the file in quickly, to your account and, then, use your text
account to download the file to your computer.
This gives you the advantage of having crash recovery on your download,
meaning if your download fails part way, you can log off and then on again
and resume downloading the file from where you left off. Graphic browsers
don't have this feature and so you are starting all over at the beginning
each time you try to download the file.
Another trick for YouTube; especially, is to get the add-on called
Video Downloader v2.3 (from www.mozilla.org/add-ons/). This puts both a
blue downward arrow in your browser url bar and also puts a download
selection button below the videos as they play. Once you start playing
the video, click either the blue arrow or the button and your video will
download to your home computer.
It will still be at dial-up speed but, as it is more stable than simply
playing a video, it will download the entire file for you play later.
When your download begins, click the pause button on the video, or close
the window that is playing in, as it will try to use the same bandwidth as
you're using to download the video. This will double the speed of your
download.
The 'error while loading' or 'currently unavailable' messages are a
YouTube technical problem as I've seem those messages many, many times,
even while using high speed to download a video. It has nothing to do
with CCN and is probably caused by a sudden surge of users on one or
more of the their servers. Just try again later.
As Nova Scotia is on the eastern-most coast of North America, our best
download times are 4:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. Atlantic time, as most of North
America is still asleep. After 10:00 a.m., Boston, Chicago, New York,
Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto all come
online, and start slowing things down. By the evening, most of the U.S.
including California and British Columbia, is online and internet traffic
is at a crawl. By the time these places are done with the internet, it's
about 3:00 a.m. in Nova scotia. Use these times to your advantage to get
a good connection and good download speed results.
Hope this helps,
Tony @ CCN Help
-----------------
On Sun, 20 May 2012, ebl7@chebucto.ns.ca wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I am extremely frustrated (that would be an understatement) and want to know
> if this is normal and to be expected with dial-up. Yes, I know it's slow but
> that's not even the problem. Three times I have attempted to watch a YouTube
> video (and it was about wheelchairs, not something frivolous). It is 8 1/2
> minutes long. It takes about three hours, yep, three hours, to download. As
> it's doing this, it plays about 3-5 seconds at a time, then stops, the circle
> going round and round for several minutes, then it plays another few seconds
> and so on. Each time, at the end, I pressed play and what happened? @#$%! It
> started to download from the beginning again. @#$% and @#$%! When a YouTube
> video is over, the screen is filled up with squares of other videos to watch
> and most times the one you just watched isn't visible so when you press play
> it starts to download from the beginning all over again. So, I even tried
> pressing play a few seconds before it ended before it "disappears" to see if
> that was the problem. No difference.
>
> I have watched a few other videos. They lurch along as I have described above
> but when they get to the end, I press play and they play. It seems to only
> work if the video if less than 3 minutes long. It is possible (and keep in
> mind that I have 1.25 GB of RAM) that you can't watch any video that's more
> than a few minutes long with dial-up?
>
> Also, I frequently get some error message when I attempt to download a video
> such as "error while loading" or "currently unavailable". I'm suspicious that
> is more to do with my dial-up than something wrong on the other end. Surely,
> 99% of videos on the Internet can't all be unavailable.
>
> Erica Lewis
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