How slow will cable modems be when everyone has one?

[videotips]

How much slower will cable modem connections be once most people start using them instead of regular modems? Right now Im downloading 4.5 meg files in about half a minute!

 

[rickn]

the more ppl that hop on your node, the slower it will get. If you dont have a lot of ppl on your node, then chances are it will not get any slower. Road Runner allows for up to 500 modems on a node. Mine is probably half full judging by how slow it gets during prime time

 

[pdo]

At that speed might as well use free ISP. hehe. Mind were gettin' pretty bad before and then I switch to DSL.

 

[Engineer]

http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/00/May/0524/mu5.htm

 

[BoberFett]

If everyone on your local cable segment is downloading enough that it slows you down too much, you can bet that your segment isn't the only thing that's being hit hard. The internet backbones are going to quickly become saturated as more and more people get broadband access.

 

[dkozloski]

The cable guys here (Fairbanks, Alaska) have the cable modem system throttled at 256/64 or 512/128 for ten bucks more and have been very good at keeping performance up by adding equipment as required. In my experience the slow downs are servers or routing problems.

 

[oblivion2888]

dood.....i dont care if cable goes down to isdn speeds.....all i care about is having an always on connection!

 

[pm]

Ijust got my cable modem last friday from AT&T@Home. I'm typically pulling 2.4Mb/s off of it for files from MS and cdrom.com, but I'm definitely one of the first in my block since they only opened it two weeks ago. The nicest thing is the latency... 35ms to Yahoo.Com. 40ms to USWest.Net. Pretty amazing. Even if my download speed gets cut down to 1/10 of what I'm getting now, I'll be happy if the latency stays as low.

Next summer I'll bet that wireless internet will be out (256kb/s symmetric), Gilat's satellite will be running.