Net connection

[cdybedahl]

Our new home net connection has been activated. We're not really using it yet, since it doesn't have a fixed IP. So we have to move some stuff to other computers first. The only thing on it right now is my iBook running a Battlestar Galactica torrent (which has over 25000 people connected to the swarm at the moment. Twenty-five thousand!) and uploading at around 500 kilobytes per second. Which is about a sixth of the new line's 30 Mbit/s theoretical maximum.

Thirty megabits per second. In an RJ-45 jack next to the front door. That's about thirty times faster than the national backbone was back when I first came into contact with the Internet. Fuck, 30 Mbit/s is faster than most LANs were ten years ago. It's a hundred thousand times faster than the first modem I ever used.

But the thing that really weirds me out about it isn't that we have this much bandwidth. No, the really weird thing is that for the first time in my life I don't have the fastest net connection I could possibly afford. We could get 100 Mbit/s for not very much more than we pay for the 30 (which is less than we pay for the 8/1 assymetric ADSL line today). But we thought about it and decided that we don't need more than 30. Even that is well into the territory where for nearly all applications the other end will be the limit.

We can affordably get more bandwidth than we have a use for right into our home.

That is weird.

Comments

[waveney.livejournal.com]

Many moons ago half a dozen of us round a whiteboard in Cambridge did a back on the envelope calculation for the eventual needs for bandwidth to the home and came up with 50M...

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, it's not hard to come up with uses for it. But today the Internet infrastructure in general is nowhere near able to deliver that to the mass-market, so in practice there is not much use for anything above 10Mbps. We went for 30 mostly because we do have some use for it, and anyway it was a question of 22 or 25 pounds per month, so...

[waveney.livejournal.com]

Key to what we worked out was the "eventual" part, this supposes taht all media (TV, Audio and the web) will be coming through that one pipe. We also worked out that homes should have the capability to send 50M as well, though the upstream data could support much higher contention ratios than the downstream data.

(BTW 50M is achievable with VDSL, if/when it gets deployed)

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

VDSL is deployed in some places here, although the version we have (landlords getting fibre to blocks of flats and Cat-5 ethernet to all flats) is more common. As I said, we could get 100Mbps just buy paying more. At the moment, they cap the line at 30 in the local switch.

The main reason 100 is expensive and not widely sold around here is that the big ISPs doesn't have the backbone infrastructure for 100Mbps times a few hundred thousand households. Most of them are still struggling with accomodating large numbers of 8Mbps ADSL lines...