[LINK] Net firms quizzed on speed limits - BBC News

[Richard Chirgwin]

Geoff Huston wrote:
> About the only tool I've seen in recent times that can measure 
> available capacity is BitTorrent. Most of the reasons why network 
> transactions are slow have not all that much to do with bandwidth per 
> se and have lot to do with latency, jitter, application design and the 
> (woeful) quality of many protocol stacks in use in popularly deployed 
> clients and servers.
>
> But then again why should mundane aspects of technology get in the way 
> of a good "consumers are being duped" story in the popular press?
>
> :-)
Geoff,

If there was a way to educate enough media about technical fundamentals 
... some years ago, companies like 3Com and (now gone) Cabletron would 
get reasonable turnout for media educationals - stuff like "Ethernet 101 
for media". It had the effect of at least delivering a small handful of 
moderately well-informed writers; but eventually it died out for lack of 
interest.

The "consumers are duped" story has, in my memory, been pumped up for 56 
Kbps modems, various Ethernet releases, every wireless Ethernet release, 
ADSL and cable broadband...

I have mentioned in the past my own experience with very badly designed 
Websites. If I try to load White pages on the home ADSL, the load time 
is pretty much open-ended. If other people were to suffer the same 
experience, I would bet they'd be complaining about their broadband. But 
here's a curiousity: if I use the same home connection, log into the 
office VPN, and access White pages over that connection, everything 
works just fine. Go figure...

RC

>
>    Geoff
>
>
>
> Richard Chirgwin wrote:
>> Ahh, that old saw again.
>>
>> Things that don't run to their maximum rated capacity all the time 
>> (off the top of my head):
>> Cars (can do 160 km/h, don't)
>> Computers
>> Ethernet (can run gigabits/second, but most connections are idle most 
>> of the time)
>> Wireless Ethernet (sold on line speed, perform by "maximum 
>> throughput", mostly idle most of the time)
>> ...and so on.
>>
>> The problem is: what *do* you sell broadband on? The "minimum" speed 
>> may be zero. Or realistically, the average per-user throughput is in 
>> tens of Kbps.
>>
>> Further: the "speed test" performance may not even reflect badly on 
>> your service provider; there may well be congestion between you and 
>> the speed test; or the speed tester site is under heavy load, or...
>>
>> For example: on the office ADSL2+, the maximum sync speed when I had 
>> a service provider technician visit during installation was near 20 
>> Mbps. The provider's own Web pages loaded at roughly 16 Mbps. Stuff 
>> from people who peered with that provider, roughly 10 Mbps. From 
>> non-peers, anything down to 3 Mbps.
>>
>> So what's a reasonable measure for broadband "speed"?
>>
>> RC
>>
>