Re: Is Bandwidth Still a Limit?

The average user still connects with a modem from home - either a 33.6 or 56k, and 56k modems really give you about 40k. That's still slow. Cable and DSL are rolling out very, very slowly.

From work, the average user generally has a faster connection. However, a T1 line shared among dozens, perhaps hundreds of co-workers, can also become rather sluggish. Some offices provide truly fast connections, but for many it's not much better, and sometimes even worse, than a modem connection. Or for students using their school's T3, there are frequent complaints of pitiful performance due in large part to trading mp3s (although this may improve with Napster going down the tubes).

And, of course, massively increased web use has led to many bottlenecks. Even if there are fast connections at both ends, traffic often bogs down somewhere in the middle. As a very satisfied user of a home DSL connection, I still frequently run into sites that are much slower than they should be, for that reason.

So yes, bandwidth is still an issue. Not quite as much of an issue as when 14.4 and 19.2 modems were the norm - maximum file size can, perhaps, be bumped up a bit - but it's still a significant concern.


>>> David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk> 05/10/01 04:54PM >>>
A number of people on this list claim that bandwidth is no longer
an issue on the internet (a point with which I disagree).  However
I notice that the W3C site has abandoned language negotiation and is
now generating cacheable pages.  It used to be very sluggish.  I'd
suggest that they have found that bandwidth is still an issue!

Received on Thursday, 10 May 2001 18:08:59 UTC