On Wed, 9 Oct 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
You know, maybe I'm crazy but I rarely see the troubles that people mention so often.
Am I crazy? Are other people seeing massive bandwidth shortages that I just haven't noticed? (There are some of these occassionally for a week or two on some provider, but they rarely seem to last long.)
That's Perry's view from New York City, now my view from Vernon, British Columbia, Canada. This is a town of 40,000 population in the mountains, 6 hours drive from Vancouver, BC and 7 hours drive from Calgary, Alberta which are the nearest two major cities. My ISP has a 10Mbps fibre ATM circuit to BCNet in Vancouver that was installed in Aplril 1995. From there it connects to CA*Net which has a T3 into MCI Seattle as well as links to the East where more T3's head south to MCI. The T3's were T1's until Sept 1995 at which point there was a small improvement in speed at times. But I have to agree 100% with Perry. Speeds are great most of the time. Congestion is generally something caused "out there" often at WWW server sites. In my case the ISP has ample bandwidth to their provider and the next two upstream links in the chain do a good job. IMHO this is the reason I have such good service. That's why I think most problems that people complain about are due to the ISP's network. In the case of a university, they themselves are the problem. This assumes a model of NSP connected to some sort of regional or large ISP connected to your provider. The NSP's are good, the regionals and large ISP's are usually good and the provider is usually the source of the problems with bandwidth and congestion. But these problems *ARE* fixable. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com