broadband cable throughput quality

[Chuck Hallenbeck]

My ISP offers a speed test link on its web site so that
subscribers can test their transfer speeds. When downloading from
an arbitrary site, your observed speed will depend on the slowest
link in the path of hops between that site and your system, and
that is generally not known in advance.

With cable, your bandwidth is shared with a (hopefully) small
group of neighboring subscribers, and if all your neighboring
subscribers happen to be downloading at the same time, your
performance (and theirs) will suffer.

The only practical thing you can do that I know of is to shoot
your neighbors, but that is going to extremes.


I can generally count on download speeds of 125 k bytes per
second, and have seen as high as 250 k bytes per second, and as
low as 13 k bytes per second. The last figure was due to limited
upload bandwidth at the originating site. My upload speeds when
doing an FTP to my ISP runs from 15 to 25 k bytes per second. I
cannot account for the variation by anything over which I have
control.

Chuck


-- 
The Moon is Waning Gibbous (92% of Full)
My home page is at http://www.mhcable.com/~chuckh