Bandwidth!

I was downloading a file yesterday and I looked up at MenuMeters and saw something that sort of stunned me.

It was saying the download was 2MB/sec.

Now keep in mind that is MB=Mega Byte, so 2MB is 16Mbits/second.

I'm on a cable modem and I actually pay an extra $10 a month to get the 'gold' package of 8mbps. Previously I had a wireless DSL connection that would get me 1mbps so I was oh-so-happy to get the cable modem (it wasn't available in my area until recently)

So I had gotten used to seeing max downloads of 1MB/s, but what was this?




A little snooping let me to dslreports.com forums where I found out that it's true. Comcast (my cable provider) is rolling out 16mbps, apparently I was recently provisioned.

Needless to say I was pretty happy. It's sort of amazing to have a connection this fast, very few sites can fill my pipe so I can download away and still cruise the web without any apparent slow downs -- It make me start thinking of all sorts of crazy ideas of how you could use this much bandwidth.

For a person who remembers painfully logging on with 300 baud modems on a vic-20 it's amazing how far we've come.