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March 08, 2004

I'm faster than you are

RCN, my ISP, has recently upped its performance to 5 gigabits. (I sometimes get my units confused so go ahead and have a good laugh at a dumb liberal arts major.) According to DSLreports. I'm running at 4.1 and SpeedCheck says I'm at 4.4. I don't mean to rub your faces in it, but downloading is pretty durn peppy. Why, my pornographic spam is downloading in a fraction of the time that it used to! (Upload times are still under 700kbps.)

So, when will RCN start offering Voice over IP?

Posted by D. Weinberger at March 8, 2004 10:22 AM


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Tracked on March 8, 2004 11:55 AM

Comments

David, are you sure about that number? 5 Mb/sec. sounds reasonable. 5 Gb/sec. is the size of an Internet backbone, not a home network connection. For instance, here in Japan, a fiber connection is 100 Mb/sec., usually coming in around 60-70.

Posted by: Gen Kanai | March 8, 2004 08:35 PM


Gen, of course I'm not sure! Remember who you're talking to!

www.DSLreports.com says that at the moment, I'm running at:

2551339 bps, or 2551 kbps

Yesterday, it was in the 4500 kbps range.

So, what's the right order of magnitude? Have pity on a poor philosophy-religion major!

Posted by: David Weinberger | March 9, 2004 12:22 PM


Right order of magnitude?

Always less than "Jumbo", "Supersized" or "Biggie." Don't be intimidated by a can of "Colossal" olives though.

BK

Posted by: Bill K. | March 9, 2004 06:26 PM


David, according to this bandwidth calculator, you're running between 2 and 4 Mb/sec, which is actually pretty good considering most DSL connections are 1.5 or less.

http://www.wsabstract.com/script/script2/bandwidthcal.shtml

Posted by: Gen Kanai | March 10, 2004 09:04 AM


Gen, as you probably know already, your bandwidth calculator couldn't be applied to hard drive capacity which is increasingly being rated in decimal numbers.

To avoid confusion, it's proposed by the IEEE that we use kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte and tebibyte for binary numbers.

BK

Posted by: Bill K. | March 10, 2004 12:27 PM


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