B Fraser
Nortel kit was rather good too
You're not meant to put "Nortel" and "good" in the same words when Mike's lurking around the forums...
afterthought : if you have 6Mb today, what will you do with anything more ? Video on demand needs less than 2Mb (standard definition).
I would tend to agree with you. Infact, I would caution people to remember the old saying
quality, not quantity.
Take some time to ignore the headline figures. Do some reasearch into your ISPs customer service (e.g. are their callcentres in the east or west ?, what's being said about them on thinkbroadband etc. ). What's the quality of their network like ? What are their contention/packet shaping / rate limiting policies ?
At home, I've got an 8Mb connection.
Bandwidth wise, it's more than enough on a day-to-day basis. The only time it comes to its own is when I'm running software updates etc., and even then, downloading 1GB of data happens at a reasonable enough rate.
But, more importantly, I'm willing to ignore those large billboard adverts for 40Mb speeds from competitors.... because I know it won't be a like-for-like comparison when you start looking at the small print. I know I'm on a good deal.
Wearing one of my work hats, I can download a copy of, say, the latest BBC Podcast in a few seconds (70Mb in 2.54 seconds, equivalent 215 Mbps).
Which is great... but that's 2.54 seconds of the 31536000 you would be paying for in a year (or 0.000008%).
But I also know the above is 1:1 contention, uncongested direct access into the BBC :
$ ping
BBC - Homepage PING
BBC - Homepage (212.58.244.71): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 212.58.244.71: icmp_seq=0 ttl=60 time=0.384 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.244.71: icmp_seq=1 ttl=60 time=0.955 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.244.71: icmp_seq=2 ttl=60 time=0.357 ms
You wouldn't get the same results on those deals they advertise on the billboards at pennies per month.
Personally, unless someone else was paying for it, I'd much rather have a "slower" connection at home, but of the highest quality, then have a "super-fast" marketing-hype connection at home that consistently fails to deliver on hyped up its promises on a congested network.