[Ti] [OT] DSL Speed Test

[Jesse Brown]

On 7/24/03 8:38, "Chris Scott" <crscott at newsguy.com> wrote:

> What does that mean?  Thanks.
> 
> 
> Jesse Brown wrote:
>> 
>> Whenever I specify T-1 service I always like to know at what tier the
>> provider is. The closer to the backbone the better - I'm talking MAE East
>> and West or equivalent nodes.


Internet Service is like a tree. There's your house, the ISP and then their
Provider and possibly another on top of that and it can go on. Anyone with a
dedicated line can claim to be an ISP. But how many hops do you have to go
through to reach the major backbone provider like AT&T, Sprint, Williams,
etc who send traffic over VERY large optical pipes from one end of the
country to the other.

How far down the food chain you are determines to an extent how many router
hops you have to go through to get somewhere. Of course if the destination
you're trying to reach is also buried deep in the tree it can take a lot.

This is why bandwidth per se is not always the measure of how fast a file
can download or transfer. Video Conferencing is another application that
suffers not from lack of bandwidth but router latency.
-- 
Jesse

"I would rather see the portrait of a dog I know, than all the allegorical
paintings they can show me in the world."  - Samuel Johnson