Cox 1Ghz Upgrades, 25Mbps Speeds > What about the monthly caps

reply to DotMac4

Re: What about the monthly caps

It does if you use that 25Mb for more than 6 hours a month.

If that is all you do, having 25Mb service won't benefit you either. In web browsing, because most site pages are so small it's low latency, not throughput that gets you fast browsing.

Reread my post...

The latency of your connection has more impact on browsing speed that throughput does. Latency has EVERYTHING to do with browsing performance, speed does not once you get over 512kbps.

You will never see any difference in browsing between a 7Mb connection and a 25Mb one. The pageload times between these speeds are fractions of a second, in which case LATENCY differences far exceed any page load differences.

The ONLY benefit to having a 25Mb downstream connection is downloads, in which case you will blow through your cap in less than 6 hours of TOTAL monthly usage.

If all you do is browse you will see ZERO benefit of having a 25Mb connection over a 10-15Mb one (or whatever the premium tier is in your area).

The reason is simple...page load times for web pages is so short anyway, the difference amounts to tiny fractions of a second. When you're looking at differences of tiny fractions of a second, everything else (like differences in latency) have FAR more impact.

Thus since having 25Mb does nothing for web browsing, what is it good for? Downloads. And with a 60GB/mo cap, having 25Mb instead of 15Mb is of little use. It takes very large files before you see an appreciable difference or benefit to having 25Mb service but with Cox's monthly caps, if enforced, you can't download for more than 6 hours a month.

If all I'm going to do is browse the web, I can do that just fine on an 8ms $15/mo ADSL connection. If I'm limited to less than 60GB a month, 7Mb will certainly get every job done as well.

Bottom line, I could set up a 768kbps ADSL connection next to your 25Mb Cox connection and we won't be able to tell the difference when going to Yahoo.com, DSLR or any other site. In fact the ADSL connection may even be faster with browsing because of it's inherently lower latency which again, has a far greater impact on page load times than the speed of the connection.

Where you would smoke a 768kbps connection or even a 7Mb one is in downloads. But with a 60GB/mo cap, you aren't allowed to download very much.

That's the difference between me and you I guess. I'm not willing to pay for a premium tier to save 10 minutes a month. I download 100's of GBs a month and could justify paying that cause it would save me hours and hours over my current 15Mb connection.

I just see a 25Mb connection with a 6 hour cap a bit pointless. If I'm expected to just browse, I'll take $15/mo DSL.

Linux certainly isn't the only OS you can change RWIN settings on. Win 9X, XP and Mac OS X easily accept RWIN changes and Vista auto tunes RWIN to prevailing conditions to changes aren't really necessary.

I've changed the RWIN on both my XP and Mac OS machines to better match my 15Mb Road Runner service. I don't bother messing with my Vista machines 'cause they don't seem to need any messing with in terms of RWIN.

It it's neither here nor there as to the discussion. Showing off a 15 or 25Mb speed test doesn't mean much. It's what you can do with it. Unfortunately if Cox decides to enforce their caps there isn't much you can do with a 25Mb connection (that you can't already do just fine with a 7Mb one).

I do more than 60GB a day all the time and wouldn't pay for service that limited me to so little usage.

Moore's law has nothing to do with networking only transistor count.

And 25Mb is pointless on a capped service. In fact with Cox it will make the service worse. Cox is already throttling P2P traffic in their attempts to support the speeds they advertise now. So the next time you try and grab a Linux distro via BT the service will be slower, not faster.