Connection speed, in fact, is not everything, even surfing the Web.
My wife is a professional journalist covering the Web, so she is
surfing constantly. We have ISDN 2-B-channel. In regular usage,
with a 601-based Mac, we never brought up the second B-channel.
In fact, the limiting throughput was the rendering on the browser,
even with RAM disk for caching. We recently upgraded her machine
to a G3. Now the second B-channel gets pulled up much of the time,
and qualitatively, we feel that at this level for Web browsing, the
ISDN and Macintosh are pretty well matched. What this shows is that
if streaming content becomes a reality, people will need to upgrade
not only the connections to something faster than ISDN, but also the
machines, either with faster processors or specialized accelerators.
It also shows that for things like Web browsing, the current top
level machines and connections (G3 and ISDN) are well matched. |
