truth in cable

[Frank Carmickle]

Shall I demistify a bit....

On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, Kirk Wood wrote:

> There are good and bad providers. But as for the cable being limited, it
> is true. Except that adding more bandwidth to the cable system is a simple
> matter. They can add another chanel for the cable modem to communicate on
> and this adds the equivelant of 2 T1 lines to the bandwidth.

t1's...  Well actually.  The cable system is made up of a backbone that
will support up to 27mbit.  Each cable modem will allow up to 7mbit of
download.  Most companies cap there upload speed at 128kbits although in
some areas there is no cap at all.  What was said years ago when cable was
first rolled out was that there would be 528 users per 27mbit
pipe.  Weather or not that still holds true I do not know.  What I can
tell you is that I get different performance all the time.  When using
traceroute to find the bottle necks I find that they are usually the isp's
link in to my city and not my local neighborhood.  I am also on at&t
@home.  But on those days when new iso images come out for distros
grabbing them at 300/400kbytes is pretty nice.


-- 
     Frank Carmickle
phone:     412 761-9568
email:     frankiec at dryrose.com