Cellar hits increasing

[russotto]

Originally posted by Tony Shepps
It's pretty arbitrary. People seem to like their cable providers but, if the service becomes popular it's doomed, because your download speed can be ruined by someone else in your neighborhood downloading at the same time.

As I understand it, DOCSIS cable modems are throttled in such a way that others can't take all the bandwidth -- even if everyone is downloading at once, you still get reasonable performance, though not nearly as good as if you're alone on the line. In theory anyway, bets on whether Comcast sets this up properly not accepted!

I'm getting about 31 kilobytes/sec (symmetric) on my current DSL line. This is pretty good for being about 15000 feet from the CO. My former Northpoint DSL line topped out at 17 kilobytes/sec. Static IP, reliability is good (though DNS is screwed up... not a DSL issue), but financial stability of the provider (Rhythms) is not the best.