AOL - High Speed Cable

[Duane Attaway]

On Tue, 21 May 2002, chuckx wrote:

> Everest definitely does seem enticing.  Internt, TV and video all in one
> package at a very competitive price.  Their tiered internet services even go
> up to 3 megabits / second downstream.

Speaking of bandwidth, it seems to my RR provided sharkfin cablemodem
meters my 2MB/sec cap over several second intervals.  What I see is short,
bursty transfers of small groups of packets that come out to be the full
4MB/sec from the line.  I really noticed this when rsyncing the gentoo
portage tree.  Longer transfers, such as an ISO image taper down to the
2MB/sec rate.

I noticed the same goes for the upload rate, except the upload frequency
is a magnitude lower and its bandwidth capacity is far lower.

Seeing what congested traffic on ethernet can do, I guess the metering of
caps is a good thing.  It keeps the latency low, while maintiaing fair
QOS.  What this means to me is that when surfing, page requests of many
pictures and elements are very quick and not bogged down with collisions.