Internet speeds

A long time ago, I knew the Cable way of Internet access was going to have problems. They essentially created a small single hub Ethernet network for a bunch of houses. The whole segment might be 10-100 Mbits. As long as everybody was involved in bursty web viewing, with no uploading, then everything was peachy.

Alas, everybody has become a consumer and creator of content. That means I upload my water polo videos to Youtube, and download lots of cruft. My traffic is no longer bursty, and I can tie up the whole segment, so that the "old lady down the street can't get her email", as the cables-guys like to say.

Needless to say, I went with the other monopoly, which has individual connections to the main switch. All of my roadblocks are elsewhere, perhaps with their DNS servers, or other things. I can only get my speeds, in the morning, from a super-server.

But I think the cable companies are the worse off, with their local chokepoint (Bell is just being cheap!). As such, they are forced to do selective pruning, which is a major invasion of privacy. Naturally, people are up in arms, but you really have to ditch the cable companies.