On Wed, 04 May 2005 13:18:22 CDT, Luke Parrish said:
I think we are WAY overanalyzing...
Oh, we're just getting started. ;) The overanalyzing is a result of the fact that in a *very* large percent of cases, the question that's asked isn't the question that the asker really wants answered. Even simple "Where did they hide the router config option that does XYZ?" questions often take a very sharp left turn into "They intentionally hid it because you probably don't actually want that, as this other thing is usually a better solution". And especially on a list like this one, where the list participants are busy trying to sell into wildly different value propositions, there are often multiple correct answers, and they are often *very* sensitive to boundary conditions. The set of answers that works for my employer probably won't work for the average cablemodem ISP, and neither of our answers will be right for people who are trying to buy/sell an OC-192 worth of transit to each other. For that matter - our answers often aren't interchangeable with another public university just 10 miles down the road (in fact, they *were* a part of us from 1944 to 1964) simply because we're 4 times bigger and they're liberal arts oriented.
I have always noticed that about this list which is why I rarely post. Seems that people spend more time picking apart your question then actually answering it.
Well... the *original* question was "What's an acceptable speed for DSL?", and the only *really* correct answer is "The one that maximizes your profit margin", balancing how much you need to build out to improve things against whatever perceived sluggishness ends up making your customers go elsewhere. As noted elsewhere, it really depends on the hoover quotient of the other DSL and cablemodem providers with a presence in the area. The average user may have ping and tracert, but couldn't figure out how to use them or interpret the results even if you stapled a cheat sheet to their forehead. It's strictly "www.cnn.com is/isn't acting piggy". If you find a user who figures out how to open a CLI window and launch ping, you have a *geek* user on your hands - and at *that* point it's of course totally acceptable to go into turbo-geek mode and discuss the forwarding paths inside the routers. ;)