AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet connections "irrelevant"

Sat Apr 1 06:34:36 UTC 2006

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060331-6498.html

"In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet capability is 
irrelevant because the backbone doesn't transport at those speeds," he 
told the conference attendees. Stephenson said that AT&T's field tests 
have shown "no discernable difference" between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and 
Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last mile but in the 
backbone."

Is this something held generally true in the US, or is it just pointed 
hair-talk? Sounds like "nobody should need more than 640kb of memory" all 
over again.

I can definately see a difference between 2 meg, 8 meg and even faster, 
even when web browsing, especially transferring large pictures when 
running gallery or alike. When I load www.cnn.com with 130ms latency I get 
over 1 megabit/s and that's transatlantic with a lot of small objects to 
fetch. Most major newspapers here in Sweden will load at 5-10 megabit/s 
for me, and downloading streaming content (www.youtube.com) will easily 
download at 10-20 megabit/s if bw is available. flickr.com around a couple 
of megabits/s. (all measured with task-manager in XP, very scientific :P)

I can relate to there being a sweetspot around 1.5-3 megs/s when larger 
speed doesn't really give you a whole lot of more experience with 
webbrowsing, but the more people will start to use services like 
youtube.com, the more bw they will need at their local pipe and of course 
backbone should be non-blocking or close to it...

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se