And we thought the text part of the Starr Report would be bad

Fri Sep 18 19:53:17 UTC 1998

On Fri, 18 Sep 1998, Jerry Scharf wrote:

> >  The standard T1 connection of an Internet service provider handles a
> >  maximum of 53 dialup connections pumping data to a user, he said, but a
> >  54th user could cause a major problem."
> >
> 
> The number of dialups on a T1, the number of bytes in a framed ATM cell.
> I see a telco conspiracy here. (:-) for the humor impaied)

It could be a conspiracy, or it could be they multiplied 28.8 kbps times
53 and 54...  :-)  It took me a few minutes to figure out how they came up
with those numbers as well..  They used the wrong figure for a T1 though.. 
You can only fit 1.536 Mbps of real data down a T1 unless you've figured
out a funky way to send it across using the framing bits. 

8 b per channel * 24 channels per frame * 8000 frames per s = 1536000 bps
28.8 kbps * 53 = 1.526 Mbps
28.8 kbps * 54 = 1.555 Mbps

So technically they should have used the numbers 52 and 53. :-)

--zawada

Paul J. Zawada, RCDD     | Senior Network Engineer
zawada at ncsa.uiuc.edu     | National Center for Supercomputing Applications
+1 630 686 7825          | http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/zawada