How is Sprint ION so fast?

[MrCraphead]

Sprint ION

and then my University is T1, or 1.5 MBps both upstream and downstream am I correct? Why is there such a huge difference? How is Sprint able to offer 8 MBps downstream connections to home users? Is their connection truly 8 times faster than T1 or is there something I'm missing here?!?

 

[PlatinumGold]

1st it's 1.5 mb/s (mega bits per second) not mB/s (megabytes / sec). same w/ DSL, 8 mb/s not mB/s

2nd dsl / cable has a maximum capabilities in the range of 6 to 10 megabits per second. you will almost never see that kind of throughput tho. I have cable right now and I can get as high as 400 kiloBytes / second = 3.2 megabits / second. but that is only downloading things that are cached. it's rarely sustained.

t-1's are more consistent and have better latency than cable or dsl. that's why ppl pay more for a t-1. t-1's at college, however, are different from t-1 your average business pays Mucho bucks for. t-1 at college is t-1 connected to the college server / servers but not directly to the internet. when you do online gaming you'll see a lotta college dorm room t-1's w/ pings as bad as many 56k modems because there is basically a bottleneck at the college server.

 

[daddyo]

I don't know about that college T1 statement.

When I was at Northwestern, all of us who played Q2 online would pretty much ping sub-30 to any server in the midwest. Even servers on the coasts rarely went over 80ms. Maybe we just had a sweet-a$$ network.

 

[slipperyslope]

I know from experience that some college T1 lines suck a$$. I lived on campus at Clemson University for two semesters and at night I could not get below a 300 ping in Q2. I moved off campus to get DSL. Much nicer pings on my DSL connection.

Jim

 

[Noriaki]

PlatinumGold: Be careful there.

b = bits, B = bytes true, but you used m = milli, M = mega

 

[thorin]

"1st it's 1.5 mb/s (mega bits per second) not mB/s (megabytes / sec). same w/ DSL, 8 mb/s not mB/s"

Actually the "m" would be M for Mega.

Thorin

 

[MrCraphead]

Well, my university T1 line is really clean for online gaming, I ping pretty well in counter-strike.

So I'm assuming that Sprint ION is indeed 8 times faster than my University resnet?

 

[PlatinumGold]

for those that corrected me on the milli mega, cool but w/ a caveat.

no one speaks of millibits or millibytes / sec. that's a nonsense statement since there will never be a situation where we would measure 1/1000th of a bit or byte.

 

[PlatinumGold]

mr craphead

no way. hehehe. dsl has a theoretical output of roughly 5 times your university t-1. in real world you can expect approximately the same performance.

 

[thorin]

"no one speaks of millibits or millibytes / sec. that's a nonsense statement since there will never be a situation where we would measure 1/1000th of a bit or byte. "

Exactly so a mb or mB is something that doesn't/can't exist.

I can't explain exactly why it's ~8x faster then your T1, however you can speculate that it uses: compression, different transfer modes, different transfer freq, and better error correction. Just like the improvements seen with DSL vs standard dialup on the same copper line(s).

Thorin

 

[Ender78]

The T1 at school is also likely guratanteed badwidth. The two links even though rated for different speeds, deliver literally the same performance. The school pays for 1.536 Megabits/sec (1.544 minus 8 for signalling)and has the right to demand it. With many other broadband services (cable/dsl/wireless) there is no guaranteed thoughput or uptime. Many broadband services are heavily oversubscribed. Although each user is promissed 8Mbps, this may be shared among 100-1000 users. There may only be a 10-100 Megabit feed to the internet for 100's or 1000's of customers.