Hi Ray, no point in debating "how fast is fast" because if someone perceives a huge improvement, that's all that really matters. Their baseline expectations for @HOME are to a large part influenced by the dialup ISP speed they were used to. I carefully chose mine to be among the fastest, so perhaps that's why our perceptions of "fast" differ. I also use a T-1 line at work.
Anyways, the key points from my last post are this:
The vast majority of the customers will never see end-to-end throughput greater than a PEAK of about 1.5 megabits per second within @HOME's network (i.e. cache hits), with TYPICAL rates being much lower.
Outside @HOME's network (in other words, when you ACCESS the internet), all bets are off because it's out of @HOME's control. Depends on time of day, the site you access, server load, router path, and a host of other things. Typical (and again this is loosely speaking) for my connection is about 200 kilobits per second. The standard deviation is huge so averages don't mean much.
My 200 kbit/sec typical and 1.5 Mbit/sec peak was confirmed as essentially the limit by two different @HOME level-2 technical support specialists. They both said that on rare occasion, you may be able to get 2-3 Mbits during short bursts (and only within their local network), but 1.5 peak is more the norm. Also, they agreed that the @HOME webpage makes misleading statements (such as 1-3 Megabits TYPICAL).
So people need to adjust their expectations is all. People are going around quoting "facts" about the speed (like 100x, 10 megabits, 30 megabits, etc) when all they're doing is selectively repeating parts of what they read on the @HOME webpage, without understanding the context surrounding those numbers. That's what marketing is supposed to lead you to do folks! The ADSL webpages do the same masterfully sculpted crap too.
Here's what it comes down to: You're getting the equivalent performance of a full T1 link at a small fraction of its monthly and setup costs. See, it all depends what you compare it to. In these terms, it's a screamin' deal.
I know people will still continue to believe the numbers that they want to believe, but at least I tried to set the record straight. I gave many links to do research ad-nauseum. All I ask these folks is this:
Why did you believe what you read on a webpage as gospel or fact (you don't know who the source is or how credible they are), but any further information you got with exactly the same level of credibility (i.e. unknown)is immediately dismissed as wrong simply because it doesn't agree with the first thing you read.
I completely stand by everything I have said, and am absolutely confident in it's correctness. Absolutely Confident. I have seen and measured it for myself; the numbers fit perfectly within the technical limitations of the end-to-end infrastructure; the company's technical specialists have confirmed it on 2 separate occasions.
dh
P.S if anyone has questions or doesn't understand something I wrote and needs a reference or two besides me, please ask. |
