and see what you get. If you're really getting 50Mbit/s, you should
be able to download a ~600M iso in under three minutes. If you can do
that, color me impressed. But, my gut feeling is as Mark seems to be
suggesting, that it won't be anywhere near that. And I agree with
Matt, if it's just 50Mbit to the ISP but then you slow down after
that, well, that's not super useful is it.
As for Scott's old man grumbling, I've been musing recently
(including here:
http://davidernst.net/blog/2006/05/21/net-neutrality-is-a-deep-issue/
) That once we reach an actual usable home bandwidth that equals the
bitrate of a DVD being played -- 11.08 Mbit/s, according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video -- then I cannot currently
imagine what will drive masses of consumers to demand more bandwidth
at that point. Sure, people on this list would love to be able to
download ISOs faster, but there aren't enough of us to make that much
of a difference, and besides, I personally wouldn't pay any extra to
be able to download a full CD-ROM in 3 minutes (as per above) vs. 15
minutes (as would be at DVD rate). And, the vast majority of users
will be so thrilled that they can talk on Skype in DVD quality that
they'll just take whatever's cheapest and not pay more for more
bandwidth.
Of course, we've got a long way to go in the US before we reach that
point, but I predict a plateau. Maybe software bloat will surprise
me, and maybe some virtual reality thing will actually catch on, I'm
not saying "no one will ever need more than that", but I do predict
lots of bandwidth demand until we can all do DVD quality streaming,
and then a plateau. For whatever my predictions are worth. :)
David
On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 02:22:30AM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
>
> I'm curious, are you actually getting the advertised speeds? What
>would be a good way to test? I would only consider it to be what they
>are advertising if you could download from a single site at a rate of
>about 5 to 6 megabytes per second (for the 50Mbit connection).
>
> Probably downloading an iso from one of the large mirrors would do the
>trick.
>
>On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 08:53:11PM GMT, Ben Shewmaker [benshewmaker@yahoo.com] said the following:
>> Visiting my in laws in Japan, I can't help but gawk at how much faster broadband you can get over here. My in laws (unfortunately) are on ISDN, but the isp they are with (Flets), offers 50M aDSL connections for US $42/month, or I can even get a 100M fiber connection for US $57/month. Makes Insight broadband's advertised 10M cable connections look like a joke.
>>
>> ben
>>
>>
>> ---------------------------------
>> Building a website is a piece of cake.
>> Yahoo! Small Business gives you all the tools to get online.
--
yes, this is a new email address. The old one still works, but it'd
be great if you switched your addressbook entry to
david.ernst@davidernst.net
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