how can the interent be sooo quick?

might seem like a strange question but i am just wondering how some corporate connections can be so fast. today my university resident network has been up graded from a 10mb connection to a 100mb one! but it's not like it's even 100mb for the whole campus. i can personally dl at close the full speed, if the web server is good enough, and this is the case for a network that has several thousand people on it. so how can the speed be so quick compared to normal consumer connections? any idea's as to what kind of technology allows this? and they manage to do it by only charging £80($140) per person per year for unlimited downloads/uploads.

Well, i think it depends on how close the webserver is and how fast it is... People are moving on up to fiberoptics and wireless is getting faster and faster. Your network also probably has a t3 line or similar.

People keep moving up to faster connections as they are needed, businesses constantly look at upgrading...

Being a country bumbkin myself with dialup, this thread saddens me :)

lol. it saddens me even more when i go home for the summer and i have gone from 100mb to 1mb :( . I’m just surprised there is not some major bottleneck somewhere along the line with this kind of thing. the broadband network isn’t exactly the best in the uk, although it's getting a lot better, and as far as i know the fastest DSL or ADSL available is 24mb. so how can i maintain the 100mb speed all the way from where i am to the server i am downloading off anywhere in the world? the line would have to be 100mb all the way.

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Originally Posted by Jawsh

Being a country bumbkin myself with dialup, this thread saddens me :)

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OMG, another dial-up user!
I can't wait to go to college and rid of this connection...

If I am lucky, we will get some wireless connectivity in my area soon... I live about a mile out of town through and there are some trees and hills.... -cries-

Although I am worried that getting high(er)speed will bite me in the butt with me being bored of the internet...

At least in college I would have a legit reason to use it :P

JudgeJohn, my opinion on this is that the university is operating a proxy server. What happens is that their servers download a large portion of the internet to their servers ahead of time. Then, when you go to download something, you are actually downloading from their servers and not from the internet. If their network is now at 100mbit then thats the speed you will download at. I highly doubt that their internet connection is at 100mbit, rather their internal network runs at that speed.

well yes your right. the network does operate using a proxy server and i am connected to that via a 100mb LAN network. at home i have 1mb and download at about 120kb/s, last week at uni i had 10mb and dl at 1200kb/s, and as of yesterday the Ethernet settings when going to task manager and networking have changed from the previous 10mb to 100mb and i can now dl at 12000kb/s. so while i understand that a lot of the most common web pages i go to are already stored on the proxy the files i am dl are not and yet i still get these very fast speeds. having said that in reality it's very hard to dl at 12000kb/s as most web servers just don't support that speed :( .

FWIW, T1's come in 1.544 and 3.0 Mbps flavors. T3's can do 6.0, 15.0 or 30.0 Mbps. OC's (fiber) range from an OC-1 at 51.85 Mbps to an OC-255 at 13.21 Gbps (13,210.0 Mbps).

OC-3072 - 160Gbit/s

http://www.zytrax.com/tech/data_rates.htm

Network Speeds
http://www.whnet.com/speed.html

OC-3072?! Sheesh! Hang on to your hat eh? :)

I switched from dial-up to cable about 1.5 years ago....it was like experiencing the Dawn of a New Age....like watching the Wizard of Oz; going from Black & White to full Technicolor........like twirling around on a mountain ridge and singing in The Sound of Music.....like finally finding a rest stop on the highway after drinking 5 cups of coffee.......like....*!*......well, you get the idea....

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Originally Posted by SpywareDr

OC-3072?! Sheesh! Hang on to your hat eh? :)

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Probably snatch yah bald before you know what is going on. :eek: ;)

now you making me feel like i have a rubbish connection :( .
but I’m not sure how good this stuff is for the internet at the moment anyway. as it is very hard to find a server that will give you full speed dl with the speed I’m on, let alone 160Gbit/s!!! the best servers i have found will only give you about 1000kb/s-2000kb/s regardless of your speed. it's only when dl a lot of files at the same time that i can get anywhere close to 10000kb/s, and those files dl so quick it's hard get several files going at the same time anyway. so for now i think i have the best connection i will ever need. it's always limited by something else rather than me.

Train, whats the upload speed of those fiber optics connections?

judge john: Yeah, one of the things I discovered with my DSL recently is that 10 Mbps feels exactly the same as 7 Mbps did. :) I can get 3-4 Mbps from some servers, but that's about it. The headroom is nice in knowing that I can just do things without having to worry about saturating the link though.

Usil: They're the same speed in both directions. Asymmetric bandwidth is pretty much an end-user thing (dialup, Cable, ADSL) only. Even the low-end fibre connections for businesses (10 Mbps etc) are symmetric. Ditto for ISDN-based stuff like T1 or E1 connections.

Note that for most purposes, those high-end OC standards are overkill. :) They tend to be used when running wide-scale ISPs. Southern Cross, for example, has individual link segments running at up to 640 Gbps, although by the time you allow for all the redundancy in the network their total sellable protected capacity is "only" 240 Gbps.

You guys are soooooo lucky
Here in Greece it's still Middle Ages...
The fastest ADSL for home use is currently 1Mbp/s! :o
I just installed my SUPER DUPER high speed ADSL at home at 512...
And i'm so happy
At least if u are a student(not for me anymore :( )u can reach something more satisfactory

i understand that, it just happens that uni networks are stupidly good :) .
but it was only 2 years ago that i upgraded to 1mb at home and that was as fast as you could get on ADSL(main BB for UK). and now 2MB is the basic speed for almost all ISP's with a lot of them upgrading to between 8mb-24mb for free. so while the UK lagged behind for a long time it's amazed me how quick it's catching up as the entire network is upgraded. so maybe it will something similar for you Gioannou and this time next year you will be at 10mb or so.
on a slight side note what is the average connection speed in the US? i know that in the UK at the moment it's 2MB and ever increasing, should be 8mb in the not so distant future. i have a lot of friends in the US and the average tends to be around 7-8mb with most people. is that the case?

Wait until "Internet 2" becomes widespread - it promises some amazing speeds :)

http://www.internet2.edu/

http://lsr.internet2.edu/

That sounds the like the sequel to a bad B movie Nick :)

I remember reading a while ago that South Korea was providing XDSL (I think it was VDSL, very high DSL) which was up to 45mbps as their regular DSL lines to customers. They are leap years ahead there.

The only issue with things like VDSL is the distance limits -- VDSL is only workable up to about a kilometre from the telco's DSLAM. That's great in an area as densely populated as Korea, but it doesn't work in the general case. :)

I'm just happy to have a 128 KB/s connection as opposed to the 46,600 bps that we had before. I'm about 5 km away from the DSLAM, so on the fringe of DSL availability. In a country the size of Canada, as soon as you get away from the major centres it's an expensive enterprise to lay all that cable...
Some locals have been pretty creative in getting high speed to their places. Like paying someone DSL service and installing a wireless system that beams to their places across the river (1km instead of 12 km of phone line).
Not sure of all the details but it works for them.