A quickie, (or a slowie depending on your interpretation)
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.
8th June 2008 in Consumerism, Techie Stuff
itelli responded on 02 Jul 2008 at 3:47 pm #
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.
Political Penguin responded on 02 Jul 2008 at 4:12 pm #
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.