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Re: AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet connections "irrelevant"

  • From: Marshall Eubanks
  • Date: Sat Apr 01 11:23:35 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?????

- --
=========
bep

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