Internet Connection Speeds

[Brovane]

I was just doing some thinking about Internet speeds and all the take of FIOS and pushing speeds over 50Mbits+ for residential Internet. At home I have a 20Mbps Cox HSI connection. At work I have access to a 1GB Internet connection. I really don't notice much difference between the two. The only time I see the difference is when I D/L a file from a major company, like a Cisco or MS and then I can see D/L speeds of over 4-5MBytes a second versus usually 1-2MBytes I will see at home. Even when I upload files most sites cannot take a upload of over 1-2MBytes a second even when I am pushing the file from a machine with a GB connection and a 1GB Internet pipe. I know the pipe isn't saturated because usually this back office connection is only pushing a Max of 30Mbps. Does anyone else see the different between using say a 20Mbps internet connection and a 50 or 100Mbps Internet connection? It just seems to me that most Internet servers just cannot push data this fast. Opinions?

 

[imagoon]

For basic browsing, no. For everything else we push out of the datacenter (VPN / Citrix etc) yes. For 30,000 people browsing at the sametime: yes.

 

[Brovane]

I am really reffering to residential Internet usage. I can see a difference between 5 and 15 Mbps. However is there really a big noticable difference between 20Mbps and 50Mbps for residential connection?

 

[jstnmarsh]

Your connection may be a faster one but everything will depend on the traffic that you will face while having the files downloaded. Though you have better speeds for Internet at your workplace but also do not forget the fact that the speeds available are shared among all the users, while at your house you are the only user so you get all the Internet speeds allotted to you.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Its just for epeen and bragging rights. Noone can really utilize that currently. But as time progresses im sure they will become needed.

We have around 2k employees where i work with a 30/30 connection and it never gets saturated more than 20%

 

[Brovane]

Your connection may be a faster one but everything will depend on the traffic that you will face while having the files downloaded. Though you have better speeds for Internet at your workplace but also do not forget the fact that the speeds available are shared among all the users, while at your house you are the only user so you get all the Internet speeds allotted to you.[/QUOTE

I do not forget the fact that this 1GB connection is shared between 1200 users. However I know that the connection maxes out during the day around 30Mbps for traffic. There is a lot of extra overhead on this connection. I just feel that really for the home user anything above 15-20Mbps just is bragging rights and is not really practical.

 

[azev]

For home user anything above 10Mbps is really only beneficial for file download... I dont think browsing the web would feel any faster if you have a 50Mbps connections.

As far as download speed goes, it really depend of both side ISP... you can have a gigabit internet connection and if the other side only have 100Mbps your download would be limited to 100Mbps max... there's also lots of routing involve with the different ISP, if one of them is congested, that would slow down your download, and there are many other factor like peering, etc.

 

[ViviTheMage]

I constantly download at 5-6MB/s at home on my 50mb pipe...I also cap the upload often.

On a few of my servers, i've seen downloads reach 46MB/s, so it's possible.

Otherwise larger pipes don't really help all that much, you can have a 1GB pipe and have a latency of 150ms, and be slower browsing the web/gaming then if you had a 20MB pipe and 30ms latency.

 

[Brovane]

I constantly download at 5-6MB/s at home on my 50mb pipe...I also cap the upload often.

On a few of my servers, i've seen downloads reach 46MB/s, so it's possible.

Otherwise larger pipes don't really help all that much, you can have a 1GB pipe and have a latency of 150ms, and be slower browsing the web/gaming then if you had a 20MB pipe and 30ms latency.

What sites are you hitting that you get 5-6 MB/s D/L speed? I was just D/L a 800MB file for Exchange 2007 from MS and I topped out around 1.5 MB/s. D/L from Cisco sometimes I will see 4-5 MB/s.

 

[ViviTheMage]

MS and CISCO, I constantly cap out my home connection..any of my servers I cap out.

Some random download servers will hit 3-4MB/s .. STEAM always caps my connections at 5-6MB/s.

torrents tend to cap it as well, after it gets going.