At 05:25 AM 4/1/2006, Sean Donelan wrote:
But I think Mr. Stephenson's point was a network bottleneck is not always based on the access link speed some ISPs put in their advertising. Just go to any ISP user forum and you will see long threads complaining they can only download X Mbps from site Y in city Z. The bottleneck may be the remove server, a peering interconnect, a backbone link, a city router, etc. On the other hand, its not a good idea to generalize because other users in other cities may get better performance from other sites.
Since AT&T provides nearly all of the transit bandwidth to Comcast in New England, this thread says to me, more or less, "those folks at Comcast claim speeds they can't deliver, because the backbone they use -- which happens to be AT&T's -- is too congested to deliver those speeds anyway." Or something like that.
Yes, clearly I'm poking fun at AT&T here. Large providers who want to play in both the wholesale and retail space really should think about how their marketing in one area affects their claims in another. That's a non-marketeer's view, clearly.
