Your humble Penguin has been knocking around on computers for let’s say, a fair while. He even remembers the days when you had to put a telephone receiver onto a little box so that it could make lots of little clicking sounds while trying to exchange data across a phone line.
However those days of hideously slow net connections are over as this is the 21st century and everything’s like all fibre optics and stuff so I was surprised to get this little reading while downloading an update for my system.
Yes, 481 bytes a second, lucky boy that I am. Not that this is the first time, the other week I got an estimate for downloading an ISO image of a Linux distribution of sometime about three weeks later – bless.
According to my ISP they’re connections are faster than a speeding… Well actually they don’t say so this is probably one of those clever bits of marketing like ‘up 1 trillion megabits’ when in reality you’re going to be bumbling along on half a meg, presumably that would be a speeding snail then.
However that said, it has been a very long time since my download speed was measured in bytes. Suffice to say I didn’t get much done that night and opted for an evening playing Age of Empires 2 Conquerors Expansion.
Viva la technical revolution.
Change of ISP on the cards.
481 b/s??? That is so much more than the 78 b/s I used to get with Virgin… Currently with Plus.net (for the next couple of months, but not out of choice though) and contemplating O2 as well.
OK I can’t match that but it is rather nice to notice that Virgin have been done today by the Adevertising Standards Authority over their connection speed.
I’m not exactly a speed freak as long as it’s reasonable and usuable but I did clock circa 22Mbits/sec speeds on my new connection last night which is a distinctly impressive thing to witness. There are indeed some benefits of living around the corner from the local exchange.