Comcast just hooked up their triple play deal (internet,phone, tv,) yesterday and they gave me a new modem because the one I bought doesn’t support the phone line. I have a few questions though, is a telephony modem better/worse then a regular cable modem? ( My old modem is a SB5120) and will I notice any additional lag if someone is using the phone line at the same time I’m playing online?
edit: They gave me a touchstone telephony modem, is that a good brand? If not is there a better one?
I used one for a while and did not notice anything particularly untoward. The phone uses a very, very small amount of information and the modem forces it to have the highest priority. It will be like somebody is up/downloading like 10kbps while you’re doing your thing. You won’t notice at all.
Your bandwidth usage on average calls will probably be 20-24kbps both ways, with spikes and lows raising and lowering it some. This is assuming they are using the relatively industry standard g.7.29 voice codec. If they are using g.7.11, which uses no compression, usage is about 75-80kbps.
As far as the modem goes I can’t imagine you’d see any real difference in throughput. It’s either a router or a bridge and neither are really complex at that level. You run into more issues if you talk about wireless stuff but I don’t know if your previous or existing modems have that.
One more question, the guy who hooked everything up installed something called the desktop doctor, anyone know what it does and if it’s important to keep on my computer?
I didn’t know either, but I was able to find out via google in about four seconds…
Basically when it detects a working internet connection it takes a snapshot of the netowrk settings of your PC, and if you ever lose the connection you can restore it from that snapshot. Only thing I see it being useful for is if you have a static IP and you go to DHCP based lanparties on a regular basis and want something easier then entering your numbers back in…