On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, James Wilkinson wrote:
> > Cable connections will now have max bandwidth of 256k rather than 400k.
>
> Apologies to everyone who's explained why O@H is no good for them but:
> why would you bother at all with telescum? I mean... optus cable is
> download capped at 3Mbit, like almost 10 times that of BPA cable and
> ADSL. For roughly the same price.
Sure - 2 meg - SHARED_ access - and if you have, say, 20 people on each
cable segment - that 2 meg disappears pretty quickly.
> ADSL can in theory do 8Mbit. I can't back this up, I heard from a
> friend, but if that's true, then why are Smellstra so keen to limit
> everyone's access? Can't their infrastructure cope with such a high
> bandwidth? What kind of service do they think people will pay for?
The difference between ADSL and HFC systems is that HFC system uses a
_shared_ carrier - it's more of a broadcast system - and ADSL is a
_direct_ connection - you get your 1.5 meg ALL the time - not just when
none of your neighbours are using the net as well as you.
> Optus servers can be flakey, but they're never as bad as BPA.
> Apparently the BPA mailservers were down for 7 days and mail was lost.
> Optus servers have been known to be down for 3-4 hours at most, with no
> lossage.
All servers are flakey - Optus' news server is often down for weeks at a
time - then comes back up completely rebuilt, with no old articles left.
Not just once - often.
As for BPA's mailservers being down - it was a one off situation, caused
by a serious hardware failure - which can happen to anyone. And 7 days is
a bit of an overstatement - I believe it was something like 18 or 20 hours
total downtime.
HFC is an inferior solution to ADSL - simply because of the shared
bandwidth. If I can get ADSL to my place, I'm going for it.
DaZZa
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