http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060331-6498.html

"In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet capability is irrelevant because the backbone doesn't transport at those speeds," he told the conference attendees. Stephenson said that AT&T's field tests have shown "no discernable difference" between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone.

While there would be no noticable difference in Surfing between 1.5 and 6Mbps, There is a huge and noticable difference between the two speeds when doing common tasks like:

-Patch day in your MMO of choice
-Downloading any software (Online software distribution is getting more and more common)
-Downloading anything from your favorite Online music/video service

How many people here try to find alternate download locations if they get a download running as slow as 1.5Mbps?

IMHO, with this guy leading AT&T, they are going to lose to Verizon and cable companies, big time.

Sure there's a difference, but they're saying that the main throughfare, the backbone of the Internet, can't handle jillions of users with pipes that big. Its like having a garden hose that feeds a fire hose. You're connected to the fire hose, but your water has to get through a garden hose first.

That's like a car salesman telling you the car that only goes 65 miles per hour is as good as the sportcars which goes 130 miles per hour, because the speed limit in Ohio is 65.

I know what they mean, but in reality, I rarely get less than the full 8Mbps that comcast gives me when doing high bandwidth downloads, at least on subscription sites I belong to. And even if that wasn't the case, it's just plain stupid to not upgrade the infrastructure to the house as the backbones pipe will increase and is easier to increase.

It's extremely short sighted for AT&T to not, at the very least, start upgrading the last mile. Especially as bandwidth usage will soon start to increase as IPTV starts becoming popular.

I wonder how they upgrade the cable that goes across the ocean? AT&T will follow suit, I'm sure, once other folks start doing it.

Big boats, big weights, big cables.

That or cable gnomes.

Maybe we can train whales to do it. 'Bout time they earned their keep. They've been free loading for far too long.

I wonder how they upgrade the cable that goes across the ocean? AT&T will follow suit, I'm sure, once other folks start doing it.
They just lay more current technology, just like they always have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telephone_cable

Plus Satalite can supliment.

Combined with localization of servers to optimize download speeds, the trans atlantic cable is minor.

wtf. nowhere in that article does it mention cable gnomes.

The cable gnomes are at the ends, keeping it taut so that the vibrations coming from the orange juice cans at either end, get through. Occassionally they get drunk and start to play tug-of-war and that's when you get a lot of dropped packets.

As one of those people with the Verizon service which puts fiber right up to the house, I can say that you probably will not notice anything when you're doing normal day-to-day browsing. However if you use software which makes multiple connections to a server (like a newsbrowser or GET) you'll use up your entire pipe easily. Also, the download is still completely dependant on backend server having the bandwidth to support your request - for instance, I can grab XP SP2 from Microsoft's servers within two minutes, however, grabbing a 24mb file from Joe Schmoe's server will take a minute by itself. As for MMOs, I don't notice much in the way of reduced lag or patch download speeds (well, WoW is PVP, and trying to grab the patch from their mirrors on patch day suck anyway). My lag time will be about 100ms compared to other's 500ms spikes, but my connection compared to a cable or DSL connection will be 100ms vs. 120ms.

I notice a huge difference in web browsing between 1.5 and 6, unless I'm connecting to a really slow server. Of course if 90% of your web browsing is already cached, you won't notice it much, but use the Firefox paranoia settings (clear cache and so on) and then browse, and tell me there's no difference.

AT&T is full of crap as usual, to complement their crappy service. Coincidentally, around the time SBC (the local phone company and a main DSL provider) merged with AT&T a few months ago, the service went to hell, with routers so overloaded you could barely get 20% of your bandwidth. Prior to that, I had had the service for nearly 10 years with no problems and full bandwidth always. There has been an ongoing thread on DSL Reports about the problems for MONTHS, yet AT&T hasn't done a thing.

There has been an ongoing thread on DSL Reports about the problems for MONTHS, yet AT&T hasn't done a thing.They don't need to. You're in THEIR world now! Muhahahaha!!!

I hate AT&T. Who else Agrees..?

In reality, your internet connection is limited in a dozen different ways by a dozen different pieces of equipment every time you try to download something.

1. Your computer.
A. Your network card, if you have a home LAN
B. Your network adapter to your provider if you are directly-connected (bad idea; a router in the way helps prevent many attacks)

2. Your hub or switch, if you have a saturated home LAN

3. Your router, if you have a crappy router with poor software, especially if it's getting attacked all the time

4. Your external cable modem/DSL modem; most cable modems are rate-limited by the provider when they install it, and tampering with the settings can get you terminated or even prosecuted. Most of the time they re-TFTP the settings every time you reboot it anyway.

5. Your local cable/DSL infrastructure. With cable, it's a shared medium, so if you have a lot of high-traffic neighbors etc. you may get very poor performance. If they cache to help with performance, you may get outdated data. If you have DSL, the infrastructure can still be oversubscribed, but it's a switched structure instead of a hub structure.

6. Your provider's backbone. If they have frequent routing issues, or their network is poorly configured, or if they can't afford to upgrade their backbone, you may run out of bandwidth here, competing with everyone who uses that provider.

7. Your provider's peering. Everyone has to use an ISP. ISP's "peer" with each other at "peering points" all over the world. Peering is a whole can of worms, but suffice it to say, all providers have to connect to other providers, and some providers have better peering and some have worse peering. Sometimes you can access 95% of the internet just fine, but 5% is like watching paint dry. That's usually a peering problem.

8. The site you're trying to reach. Every issue that can affect you (1-6) can also affect the site you're trying to reach. However, most of the time they are commercially-hosted sites (MSN, Google, Yahoo, Slashdot, EQ, WoW, or many of your local guild sites) and have much more robust connectivity than you do because they don't have to connect to a residence; they can connect to a POP (Point Of Presence), a facility where there are lots of content providers and very good internet connectivity.

Latency is introduced into your connection every time a piece of hardware has to make a choice about where to move your packet. Plus, there's that whole speed of light thing. Copper (plain old telephone service, DSL, T1, etc) is a bit slow (DSL is a hack, and depends on your distance to the nearest CO). Fiber optics is much faster, and scales better, but copper is what was laid down years and years ago. Copper also tarnishes, which means connections degrade over time, especially with exposure to moisture.

Every ISP worthy of the name uses fiber optics for their backbone these days, but this wasn't always so.

That said... MOST people would not recognize the difference between 1.5mbps broadband and 15mbps broadband because of the way they use the internet. Email, messaging, surfing, are mostly like city driving. Stop and go.

Gamers are different; some city driving, some highway driving -- mostly due to patching, demo downloads, etc. Even gamers would only notice a difference once in a while.

Plus, it depends what kind of gaming you do. Low-latency games, like Doom, Quake, Counter Strike, etc., excel when everyone has a low latency connection. The software has to do less extrapolation and error-correction on movement.

RPGs are much less latency-dependent. We won't die in EQ because of an extra 80 milliseconds on the line, unless you really like to live on the edge with heals, and you underestimate for a streaky mob while healing your tank.

The internet is like wealth; a small percentage of the world uses a very large percentage of the bandwidth (Google, warez traders, Amazon), and most people only use a trickle. Content providers like Google and Amazon don't just have a cable running to an office somewhere; they usually have racks and racks of hardware set up in special environments with direct high-bandwidth connections to one OR MORE providers; sometimes in multiple locations geographically distributed.

It's true that ISPs cannot scale 15mbps for every user right now. Cable companies don't provision folks with 4mbps or 6mbps and then expect them to actually use that much constantly. The cable backbone would be full long before every user could do that, and that's just 4-6mbps. 15mbps would be even worse. Providers make a guess at how many people they can sell bandwidth to versus how much will actually be in use at any given time. That's called oversubscription, and it has been around for decades in many different types of businesses. Airlines schedule flights based on how many people they expect will need to fly on a certain date. McDonalds has so many employees at lunchtime based on how many burgers they think they'll need to push out the door.

The problem is, giving people 15mbps encourages 3rd parties to develop applications to take advantage of the extra bandwidth. Streaming high quality video was impossible when everyone was using dialup, but now, streaming video is fairly common, which drives up the total internet traffic. If you build it, they will come. The capability has to be there before it can be utilized.

Cable companies couldn't do internet or On Demand until they had enough bandwidth to support the extra unique traffic on their networks. Once they did that, they discovered they could offer all kinds of new services with that extra bandwidth. Voice, music, etc. Cable companies used to be all coax and analog on the back end, and it was ugly. Once they upgraded to digital, overnight cable became a last-mile term instead of a backbone term. Suddenly, cable companies became ISPs like magic.

And this has been your internet lesson for today..