Ahem: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a carrier pidgeon with a 4GB USB stick" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8248056.stm John Patterson a.k.a "InetDaemon" -----Original Message----- Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:35:59 -0500 From: Lamar Owen <lowen@pari.edu> To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: XBOX 720: possible digital download mass service. Message-ID: <201201281136.00093.lowen@pari.edu> Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset="US-ASCII" On Friday, January 27, 2012 05:56:19 AM Randy Bush wrote:

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Can internet in USA support that? Call of Duty 15 releases may 2014 and 30 million gamers start downloading a 20 GB files. Would the internet collapse like a house of cards?.

not a problem. the vast majority of the states is like a developing country [0], the last mile is pretty much a tin can and a string. so this will effectively throttle the load.

Being in 'the middle of nowhere' as I write, even we are a few notches above RFC1149 capabilities. As one visitor to our site (who had been recently to NRAO Greenbank) said 'if this isn't the middle of nowhere, you can probably see it from here.' Our base DSL is 7Mb/s down, 0.5Mb/s up, with 11Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up available to over 99% of our very rural county. We (work) have 1Gb/s on the local loop fiber pair, throttled to the amount of IP we actually pay for at the ISP's PoP. Now if RFC1149 supported jumbo frames, it might give tin-cans-and-string a run for its money....