Gene, for the most part, when you connect to the Web from your home, the biggest bottleneck in terms of bandwidth is the connection into your home. The Internet itself is made up of high-speed digital and optical lines (e.g. T-lines or OC-lines). This is not switched, if you mean going thru POTS switches. The signals go from network to network via high-speed routers, usually. And, as I mentioned before, Web sites usually are connected directly to the Internet backbone, via digital lines. Therefore, the slowest link is the circuit into your home, and this does go thru POTS switches if you are connected via analog modems.
Cable modems will make things faster because it speeds up this final link to your home. Instead of just 56K, you get up to 5M bps, as the final link into your home. Now, you mentioned what happens if you try to put too many users on a cable. Good question, but I think its a different point, and is a ways off in time, imo. Remember, cable is a broadband media, which means you can have many, many channels on one cable. By the time there are too many users accessing a local cable into the home, there will be certain modeulation/compression techniques to solve this problem.
Another point you made is that SI is slow during certain peak hours. That has nothing to do with the communication media. Its slow because the SI server is being overloaded with requests.
joey |
