OT: was Facial Hair... now New Speeds available

[Fairlight]

Only John Esak would say something like:
> 
> My God a savings of about $1k per month.  I'll *take* the possibility of a
> fe tiny outages.... Hell, I have a fail over dial-up line, and the new Sonic
> Walls provide fail over DSL as well.
> 
> Incidetnally, the business optical service is 30Mb down and 10Mb up.
> 
> Also, the cable people here Optimum Online are also offering 30Mb service
> residentially at least... maybe even businesss haven't checked yet though.

I'm confused...is the cable company the one offering what you're moving to,
or is that someone else and the cable company is also offering competitive
service?

Those numbers sound good.  I dunno though...I mean, I personally haven't
had cable in like (*checks watch*) 9 years.  But when I did, they'd just
converted to fibre here, and it -still- went out at least twice a week for
a few hours each.  This was fibre to the break-out point.  It was still
coax from the demarc point, at least back then.  I suppose I'd have to have
more recent experiences with cable to make a completely valid judgement,
but there'd be a good 6 month period of eval of just cable before I even
considered turning over my net connectivity to it.  I didn't even trust my
cable company to deliver cable, much less anything else.

Actually, those numbers worry me on two counts.  There are two possibilites
here, and both are actually capable of being partially or completely true:

1) They're overselling their available bandwidth, and congestion will
eventually cause bottlenecks that make those numbers false advertising.
Hell, some places can't even actually guarantee their 1.5/256 because they
oversell, and it ends up acting like a digital 56kbit after a certain
point.  Certainly -far- below what they're advertising, and not many people
will notice because the far end of the distribution channels are not
putting out data at those rates, so who'll be the wiser until places are?

2) Those numbers are real, but eventually the main routes will become
oversaturated when endpoint providers dole out more connections at these
rates than the main carrier routes are providing.  Don't immediately scoff;
in the news about a month ago I was reading a news article commenting on
the drain that digital distribution of large software (we're talking like
5+ 640MB ISO images here for one game to several thousand people at once)
and -especially- all the realtime video (CNN, YourTube, all the sites
that are really popular with realtime video) are putting on the net.  The
consensus among telecom experts was that the current infrastructure isn't
really ready for such a shift to realtime video, and after a point it will
really start having an effect.  And upgrading the main routes is going to
cost.

Now in case #2, which is likely to come after case #1 because people
-always- oversell their bandwidth if they want to make any money at all,
those prices you're getting sound good now, but will eventually likely be
hiked when the main carriers have to pass down the cost of upgrading the
major infrastructure.  I would agree that this is probably at least a few
years off, but eventually I think it's going to happen.  There's way too
much cheap broadband out there, and eventually the market is going to go
through a readjustment period to sort it all out again.  It's one thing
to have those speeds when people use it in bursts because the average was
still under the main feed, so you -could- oversell reasonably -to a point-.
But now people are starting to use streaming video like 6-8hrs a day,
solid.  If it gets much more widespread, there are going to be issues that
affect everyone's pocketbooks.

$1440 for a T1?  Who's your provider, because you're getting reamed.
IgLou would give me a full, real T1 for $350/mo if I could afford it,
not including the local loop.  I'm doubting the local loop would be more
than $350 itself based on past experiences when rates were far higher
than today.  So even at $700 (probably overshooting on local loop, but
let's assume worst case), that's still half the price you're paying.
$500 installation, but that's standard anywhere.  Actually, that's cheap
compared to what I'm used to from the old days.  We used to pay 2.5 times
that for a single PRI installation in Myrtle Beach.

Yeah, I'd wanna dump whoever's currently bilking you as well--especially
for the delivery of more bandwidth.  They're out of line with the rest of
the industry's offerings.

I just hope the transition works out for you, really.  And smoothly!

Am I jealous over the numbers?  A little, but not really.  The reality
is that my DSL 1.5mbit is damned fast compared to modem that I was used
to, and a year plus later I'm still not wholly used to it coming in that
fast, and a lot of sites that I get large files from are throttled for
QoS anyway, so it doesn't even fill my pipe unless I "abuse" them and
use a multi-segment download program (which I can...I have GetRight).
Wouldn't mind a symmetric line for the uplink, but that costs more than
I can afford or justify even if I could.  I don't do anything intensive
enough to actually use much more than I have very often.  Work doesn't
usually use more than 56kbit worth, and even with -both- of us gaming, I
can allocate 80% of the bandwidth to background downloads and we see no
ill effect both gaming and loading web pages simultaneously.  I just don't
-need- more.  But would I love it if it was there just for the hell of it
to be used whenever?  Sure!  But in reality, I'm going to be waiting on
the other end, who likely doesn't have that large a pipe and who throttles
anyway, so I'm still not going to see the full benefit of it in many cases.

Truth is, bandwidth is actually growing faster and bigger than the industry
it's supporting.  It's like the car industry in ways.  They dumped bigger
and bigger performance engines into vehicles for a LONG time.  The reality
was that with speed limits, you're paying for something you can't really
fully use.  For now that's a close analogy.  I forget whose axiom it is
about data expanding to fill all available space, but the difference with
bandwidth is that we -will- eventually use it all and have to raise the
speed limits on the main throughfares.  It's not like when they scaled
back engines in cars.  In that respect, it differs.  But for now, anything
higher than about 3mbit is practically redundant--even 1.5mbit is overkill
depending on the remote site.  I literally have -recently- had to be
impatient at something coming in at 80-100KB/sec, when I can take 150.  And
it was from a dedicated file redistribution site.  I'm not making this up
out of nowhere.

> We, at least, are moving on up... to the east side...
> tad-dah-deeh-dah-dee-... dah-dee-dah! :-)

Now THAT brings back memories!

mark->