After a long battle with technology, storkus@storkus.com wrote:

Trim your posts, please.

> all of these speeds you refer to, AFAIK, is download.  But who is the UPLOAD
> speed champ? Or do any of these companies care about that?

Nobody cares about that.  The typical home user downloads quite a bit more 
than they upload, so download speed is most relevant.  Also, most cable and 
many DSL providers have terms in their TOS that say, "You can't run servers 
of type X, Y, and Z..." which makes upload even less relevant.

> And while we're at it, what kinds of upload speeds are you all getting
> with cable vs dsl?

23K up, 67K down, DSL.  I live too far from the CO for anything higher.  Cable 
was never an option for me because I want to run my own mail and web servers, 
and Cox's draconian TOS prevents that.

> The result is that we get about 500k usable up and down which is
> nice for being synchronous (for gaming, say) but sucks ass when people
> start doing even normal web surfing because everything is so media-heavy.

There are people who don't have FlashBlock installed?  I guess it'd depend on 
how many users you have at once, but 67K down is usable (barely) with one 
user.  It just takes a long time to download junk from YouTube, so I don't do 
that too often.

> I've thought about adding an ADSL line to increase the down speed and then
> using our firewall for semi-intelligent load balancing, but I don't think
> the boss will go for it.

It might be worthwhile to use traffic shaping on some machines in the LAN to 
show the effect of adding an additional N K down.  People don't understand 
numbers.  They *notice* when something that used to take 5 seconds to load 
takes 2.

> And yet some still use dial-up!

It's all in what you're used to.  (The main effect of increased bandwidth 
seems to be making people more impatient, actually....)

-- 
For every new foolproof invention there is a new and improved fool.
  My blog and resume: http://crow202.dyndns.org:8080/wordpress/
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
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