I believe you are misremembering the architecture here.
A dial-up connection would operate at whatever speed it operated at,
there wasn't any way for it to slow down or speed up. Noise on your
phone line could force it to step down a notch or two, but that wasn't
affected by traffic. It was more likely to be affected by weather.
Cable systems are the reverse of this. A cable operator provides a
specific bandwidth from their network center to a device in the field
and then every connection goes to that one device. If they provide a
gigabit of bandwidth to that device, and a hundred people are using it,
each will be able to suck up 10 megabits simultaneously. But they
install that device in a place where they hope to someday have two
hundred users but today only have ten. All the early reports are
ecstatic because everybody is actually able to draw more than expected.
This attracts more users, and eventually it gets to a point where there
actually are over a hundred users. Then if you have a plant closure that
sends a bunch of people home, during the summer when all the kids are
home, the whole thing is going to get pretty sluggish.
They also probably have one feed that heads out toward your neighborhood
and goes to a bigger hub which then splits that signal to go to ten
neighborhoods. The same phenomenon means that the neighborhoods where
cable is adopted first will seem to have really good speed.
Using fiber to feed that neighborhood device means they can start with
more bandwidth, but that also means they plan on the device serving more
homes. And though the fiber itself might be able to carry more signals,
it's the equipment at the two ends that control the amount of data, and
just like with copper, they really can't do anything about that other
than replace equipment.
In other words, in the telco architecture, everyone has a direct
connection to the switch, and other than physical changes to the wire,
the capacity doesn't change. Whatever rate you get, you'll always get,
your neighbors don't affect it. Cable systems use a star architecture,
with the bandwidth to the neighborhood stars being fixed, and the
individual throughput dependent on the other users of the same star.
Assuming that your community is growing at some rate, and almost all
are, and that the cable operator is able to sell more of your neighbors
on internet service over time, your service can deteriorate over time.
You're probably getting 10mbps now because the endpoint is set to limit
you to that based on your service plan. But you can bet that the cable
operator is not able to provide that same level of service once they
hook up every possible subscriber and all of them are home at the same time.
Van
On 08/12/2010 9:13 AM, Andrew Mills wrote:
>
> Hello James,
>
> > Wow. I don't know who your DSL provider is, but typical DSL
> > residential download speed is usually maxed out at about 6Mbps, not
> > 15. Comcast at it's fastest advertises up 20Mbps.
>
> It really depends upon where you live, and how close you live to the
> nearest exchange, more than the ISP.
>
> Back when I was on ADSL, I got around 13mb on a 20mb max service, a
> friend who lives 5 miles away out in the country gets around 2mb.
>
> I think the average here in the UK is something like 6mb.
>
> > In practice, cable
> > can be much slower as more users come online, and system wiring gets
> > older.
>
> I'm on a 10mb package on cable now, and 10mb is what I get - I believe
> they used fibre optic cabling for the most part, so it should not suffer
> from the same problems as copper wiring. It doesn't seem to suffer from
> slowdowns at peak periods, certainly not that noticeable or like how
> dialup could slow to a crawl.
>
> --
> Andrew Mills
>
>
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