[nzlug] Broadband bandwidth drop: WTF?

[Nevyn]

On Jan 21, 2008 9:13 PM, Mark Foster <blakjak at blakjak.net> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, 21 Jan 2008, Robin Sheat wrote:
>
> > On Monday 21 January 2008 20:05:03 Cliff Pratt wrote:
> >> I think that the 2Mbps is a *maximum* that you can get under ideal
> >> conditions (eg distance from the exchange, quality of line come into
> >> it). Most people get less than that - many a lot less than that.
> > The maximum for an ADSL line is something like 8Mb (I think). An average line
> > should be able to reach 2Mb quite happily. For example, I'm currently
> > connected at 7616 Kbps, although the actual rate I get depends on things like
> > the time of day (as apparently Telecom is quite bad about over-committing
> > their DSLAMs).
>
>
> 7616 or therabouts is the theoretical limit that I seem to recall for
> ADSL1.
>
> > However, I think the real issue behind the speeds is a confusion over bits and
> > bytes, as others have mentioned. The speeds mentioned sound about right for
> > that to be the case (i.e. 2Mbit is 2,000kbit, and 2,000/8 is 250kB, which is
> > exactly what was described)
>
> Yep. Trap for new players that one.

The computer industry is notorious for doing things like this. I.e.
the difference between b and B when talking about units, the
difference between 1000 and 1024 for hard drives, the claims about
speed of whatever which gets strangled by the speed of the pci bus
etc.