broadband in east Watertown

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> writes:

> What do you do with all that bandwidth?  The radio streams I listen to

I host a web site for my company; I have some cron jobs that mirror
a lot of (changing) information locally so I have a local cache;
My wife works for MIT and needs to do work there, so she's using it
a lot...

Am I using ALL of the 1-3Mb?  No, not averaged.  But I certainly do
short-term bursts of data at capacity, and those are extremely
noticible differences.  I used to have 2B+D ISDN, and later I tried a
DSL line (although it didn't work well) and I can certainly notice the
difference between that and 1-3Mb.  Granted, I think it's the RTT time
that really effects me -- my network felt faster when I had a T1 than
it does with the cablemode, even though the CM claims almost twice the
capcity.  Note that this is true even though I'm only using an average
of about 128kb...  The burst speed of full capacity makes _my_
experience much better.  Then again, MOST of my traffic goes to MIT,
and RCN has a great back-door into MIT :)

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available