AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet connections "irrelevant"

Sat Apr 1 15:06:58 UTC 2006

At 05:25 AM 4/1/2006, Sean Donelan wrote:
>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.

Since AT&T provides nearly all of the transit bandwidth to Comcast in 
New England, this thread says to me, more or less, "those folks at 
Comcast claim speeds they can't deliver, because the backbone they 
use -- which happens to be AT&T's -- is too congested to deliver 
those speeds anyway." Or something like that.

Yes, clearly I'm poking fun at AT&T here. Large providers who want to 
play in both the wholesale and retail space really should think about 
how their marketing in one area affects their claims in another. 
That's a non-marketeer's view, clearly. 