Naslund, Steve wrote:
Average != Peak.
What is peak? There is a question for you. If we get all the way down to the fundamentals of any network, peak is always 100%. There is either a bit on the wire or not. Your network is either 100% busy or 100% idle at any instantaneous moment in time. What matters is average transfer rate to the user experience and even that varies a lot depending on the app in question and how that app tolerates things like jitter, loss, and latency.
That's simply wrong - at least for folks who do any work related stuff at home. Consider: I've just edited a large sales presentation - say a PPT deck with some embedded video, totaling maybe 250MB (2gbit) - and I want to upload that to the company server. And let's say I want to do that 5 times during 12 hour day (it's crunch time, we're doing lots of edits). On average, we're talking 20gbit/12 hours, or a shade under 500kbps, if we're talking averages. On the other hand, if I try to push a 2gbit file through a 500kbps pipe, it's going to take 4000 seconds (67 minutes) -- that's rather painful, and inserts a LOT of delay in the process of getting reviews, comments, and doing the next round of edits. On the other hand, at 50mbps it takes only 40 seconds - annoying, but acceptable, and at a gig, it only takes 2 seconds. So, tell me, with a straight face, that "what matters is average transfer rate to the user experience." Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra