A.J. Where do you live? I live in FairLakes and I haven't heard of this. So there is a faster modem that cox is giving out for free to it's customers??

A.J. - yes, it was a benefit...you got upgraded for free!! It's about time the 1996 Telecom act pays off!

Yes, we have used Internet 2 (I2) for several years doing things like
'distance collaboration', where we've piped live video and audio to
remote locations. For example: Dancers in my studio appear hundreds lof miles away as giant projections behind another dance company at
Columbia University.

Recently we linked up with The New World Symphony out of Miami, FL.
Using a new technology called DTVS, we are now able to take the
firewire output of a camera, tape deck or CPU, and with a big enough
'pipe', funnel DV (with full res. audio) back an forth with something under
a 250 mil. seconds of latency.

Greg, I live near Fairlakes also (very close to hwy 29 just east of the parkway and West Ox road).
FIOS is not available at this time (Verizon were the first ones I called when I moved in). But I did opt for the speed upgrade from Cox that give me up to 15MB down and 2MB up and it appears to be working great. Don't need FIOS for now. I am currently using my own DLink cable modem to save money each month. Skype and Festoon work great on it too.

BTW, nice to meet you, I just moved out to Fairfax from Arlington. Maybe we could get together and talk shop? Have you eaten at the Crab House yet?

Whoa James, that's some screaming bandwidth! I've got to find out if any local libraries have that around here!

RE: What is FIOS? Well the F stands for Fiber and that's about as far as I go. It is Verizons home fiber optic service.

Note that 300 MByte in 20 minutes is 2 Mbps. I'm guessing the limitation is in your wireless connection - not the T3.

Upstream Speed
 

I cant really see how, the internet as a whole can be speeded up any further untill ALL the telephone infastructure AROUND the world is replaced with high bangwidth technology. The old copper wires where never intended for that kind of bandwidth. Any telecom engineers lurking in these forums could please shed some light on this matter?

Anhar

James,

Yes, and that's the speed I get from cable in the up direction.

Anhar,

Think of the internet as a big river with tributaries with the tributaries being fed by creeks. The river is the internet backbone using the latest and greatest broad band communications methods with tons of throughput capacity. The tributaries which feed the big river have less capacity and some of the creeks less still. But some of the creeks are larger than others and as long as I have broadband and can reach a tributary with enough bandwidth and my intended recipient has the same at the other end I can communicate with him at broadband rates. None of the backbone runs on copper. Copper is pretty much limited to the "last mile" i.e. the access into peoples homes. If I send a person with copper a 300 Mbyte file I can upload it in minutes and it will be forwarded to that persons ISP within minutes but it will take him hours to download it. If, OTOH, he has 5 Mbps cable or fiber he will be able to download it in 8 minutes and if he has 15 Mbps, 3 minutes.

You are right that ALL the internet cannot be sped up until everyone has a high speed connection. But it can serve all high speed connected users as long as the backbone capacity is there and for the moment it is.

I've been lucky enough to live close enough to a CO switch that was tested to be good up to 5.5mbs on copper wire. Everytime I think we've hit the limit with copper, someone comes up with a way to up the ante.

-gb-

Thanks AJ ! I wonder how the intenet will now start to evovle as wireless technology expands, who knnows in 20 years time the way data may travel around the world might become even more complicated.

Anhar

If I remember it correctly a T1 is 24 VGCs at 8 ksps with a depth of 8 bits. That's 1.536 Mbps payload. Again, if I remember correctly, a T2 is 24 T1's or 36.86 Mbps and a T3 24 of those for 847.3 Mbps. Thus at 2 Mbps you are only using 0.2% of a T3. That's why I commented that the limitation was bound to be your WiFi connection - not the T3. I have noted many times that the incoming rate when I transfer files from home to work is very close to 2Mbps. That's what my cable company and Verizon both advertize. Note again that my upload was about 200 kbps from Cox until Verizon moved into the area and started offering 2 Mbps.