Why you'll never see 200Mbps from a 200Mbps 'Net connection

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/why-your-cable-internet-connection-gets-slow.ars

by pert • 17 years ago

4 5 17 years ago

arstechnica.com

pert3• 17 years ago

This also has some relevance to this post:

The Internet sky really is falling (networkworld.com)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=597699

CalmQuiet• 17 years ago

Seems to be just a marketingn ploy by Virgin... like a manufacturer of auto tires saying, "tested to 400 mph." :/

pert3• 17 years ago

They claim it's just to test the technology, but I'm sure a few PR people will have been involved in the announcement and will not be rubbing their hands with glee at the press coverage it's generated.

I found the post to be interesting because it goes into a bit of detail about how local end of the cable networks work.

ZeroGravitas• 17 years ago

Not really, most of that post is FUD from cable competitors in the US (ADSL and fibre-to-the-home providers). I'm not sure how much of it even applies to Virgin Media as their network has a great deal of fibre-optics in it, though not the last mile.

The part about home equipment, where the falling standards of Ars journalism really shows, is just restating "640K is enough for anyone" repeatedly, to the point of absurdity. It appears that to actually have a computer connected physically to the internet via ethernet is some wacky use case and the very thought of providing internet access faster than an 11b wireless router is crazy talk.

In the UK it is the ADSL providers that market misleadingly, they all use weaselly "up to X Mbp/s" language, and for maximum speed you need to be physically located near to the exchange, it drops the further away you are.

Virgin Media have consistently provided whatever you pay for, even as it has increased from less than 1Mbps to 2, 5, 10, 20 and now as we speak 50Mbp/s is in the middle of deployment. I see no reason for their talked about 100 and 200 Mbp/s rollouts to be any different.

A bigger issues is when can they roll them out to the whole country as they always talk about the next big step publicly before having to deal with the very real problem of bringing the whole network up to the level neeeded. By the time it arrives there will be some who can take advantage of it, those who can't or don't want to will be able to pay less for lower tiers of service, generally the stick to three tiers and users on the bottom tier gets bumped up for free, which probably has a big impact on usage too depending on the ratio of users on different plans.

That's not to say Virgin don't have various other things you could complain about but it seems unfair to complain about misleading speed numbers when that is something that (at least from a UK perspective) they are on the right side of.

pert3• 17 years ago

I think you're very lucky if you're not seeing any contention at peak times. In highly populated areas (central Edinburgh and Livingston in my personal experience), there is huge congestion on the local loop at peak times.

I've not got any bandwidth test results to show this but a friend of mine in Edinburgh does log ping times:

http://cress.dom0.org/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi?target=DSL

The contention at evenings and weekends is very obvious from these graphs.

Why you'll never see 200Mbps from a 200Mbps 'Net connection

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