Acceptable DSL Speeds (ms based)

Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu
Thu May 5 06:02:59 UTC 2005


On Wed, 04 May 2005 13:18:22 CDT, Luke Parrish said:
> I think we are WAY overanalyzing...

Oh, we're just getting started. ;)

The overanalyzing is a result of the fact that in a *very* large percent of
cases, the question that's asked isn't the question that the asker really wants
answered.  Even simple "Where did they hide the router config option that does
XYZ?" questions often take a very sharp left turn into "They intentionally hid
it because you probably don't actually want that, as this other thing is
usually a better solution".

And especially on a list like this one, where the list participants are busy
trying to sell into wildly different value propositions, there are often
multiple correct answers, and they are often *very* sensitive to boundary
conditions.  The set of answers that works for my employer probably won't
work for the average cablemodem ISP, and neither of our answers will be right
for people who are trying to buy/sell an OC-192 worth of transit to each other.

For that matter - our answers often aren't interchangeable with another
public university just 10 miles down the road (in fact, they *were* a part
of us from 1944 to 1964) simply because we're 4 times bigger and they're
liberal arts oriented.

> I have always noticed that about this list which is why I rarely post. 
> Seems that people spend more time picking apart your question then actually 
> answering it.

Well... the *original* question was "What's an acceptable speed for DSL?", and
the only *really* correct answer is "The one that maximizes your profit
margin", balancing how much you need to build out to improve things against
whatever perceived sluggishness ends up making your customers go elsewhere.  As
noted elsewhere, it really depends on the hoover quotient of the other DSL and
cablemodem providers with a presence in the area.

The average user may have ping and tracert, but couldn't figure out how to use
them or interpret the results even if you stapled a cheat sheet to their
forehead.  It's strictly "www.cnn.com is/isn't acting piggy".  If you find a
user who figures out how to open a CLI window and launch ping, you have a
*geek* user on your hands - and at *that* point it's of course totally
acceptable to go into turbo-geek mode and discuss the forwarding paths inside
the routers. ;)


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