AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet connections "irrelevant"

Sat Apr 1 16:22:37 UTC 2006

If AT&T is really claiming that their backbone has less than 15 Mbps  
capacity (which
is how "the backbone doesn't transport at those speeds" reads in  
plain English), this is either

- an April Fools joke or
- pitiful.

Regards
Marshall Eubanks

On Apr 1, 2006, at 1:50 AM, Bruce Pinsky wrote:

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> Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
>>
>>
>> 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...
>>
>
>
> Sounds like FUD to me...
>
> Perhaps trying to downplay the push to FIOS?????
>
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