On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, Todd Vierling wrote:
(...The frustrating part about those figures is that I might as well have FTTH, because my DSLAM is less than 50 feet from my premises -- it's in a green-monster canister on the corner of the block. The modem says I *could* attain better than 9Mbps down and 2Mbps up, were such service available to consumer low-lifes like myself. <g>)
The GigEthernet interface on my PC says I should be able to get 1,000Mbps too. There are lots of different bottlenecks in a typical network. Changing your access link speed may or may not make a performance difference. Suppose you hacked your cable modem configuration or your DSLAM configuration, and opened your access link full throttle. Would you be able to download 27Mbps cross-country from your favorite server? It depends where the bottleneck was. All things being equal, a faster access link usually results in better performance. But I would think the people on this list would know better than most, that things are almost never equal in the network world. Remember all those debates whether Keynote or other performance tests were actually valid measurements.