AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet connections "irrelevant"

Joe Provo nanog-post at rsuc.gweep.net
Sat Apr 1 13:11:05 UTC 2006


On Sat, Apr 01, 2006 at 05:25:40AM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:
[snip]
> But I think Mr. Stephenson's point was a network bottleneck is not always
> based on the access link speed some ISPs put in their advertising. Just go
> to any ISP user forum and you will see long threads complaining they can
> only download X Mbps from site Y in city Z. The bottleneck may be the
> remove server, a peering interconnect, a backbone link, a city router,
> etc. On the other hand, its not a good idea to generalize because other
> users in other cities may get better performance from other sites.

Bing.  With the dayjob hat of a high speed access provider, we get no 
end of issues on everything from end-users not "getting their full speed"
due to loacl or remote using 802.11b or lousy TCP implementations (untuned 
win98) or the like.  These occur just as often as remote hosts on a DS1
or swamped 10M access, etc.  

> That's not to say things are static, and will never change. If you
> listen to Stephenson's presentation, he says access link speeds will
> increase, as well as the backbone capacity will increase.  For financial
> analysts, the foreseeable future is the next quarter's financial
> results. Next year is long term.  Two years is an eternity.

This also bears repeating.  The investment community's timescale is 
dramatically different than that of the decisionmakers for capital 
spending in most companies.

Joe

-- 
             RSUC / GweepNet / Spunk / FnB / Usenix / SAGE



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