On 19 Feb 2003 at 14:11, Casey Roberts wrote: > One of the downers of having a cable connection versus > a DSL connection is that cable modem users actually > share bandwith with other users in that area.
I understand the theory of CM operation and am aware of the shared concept of a local node but at what point in the DSL path does your bandwidth mix with the others? Is it at the CO or further up? At some point a local area or group of individuals would have to be sharing a common pipe. Is this point far enough away that some of the traffic has already left for other destinations? I always hear this as a downside with CM but after looking at this big picture, isn't DSL sharing bandwidth also, just a little further up the stream? I have Comcast on the mainland now and they are very different then the RR I had in Hawaii a few years ago. RR had local content and mirrors that were hosted locally and were always fast, even during peak times when off island access was slower. I never really noticed the local nodes getting bogged down, it was always the pipe to the outside, beyond the shared bandwidth zone. Maybe I was on a relatively unloaded local node.