Shaw Launches 100Mbps Broadband > You could hit your cap in less than 5 hours!

You could hit your cap in less than 5 hours!

I may be mistaken, but since the acks are pretty small, all you need is fast latency to send them, not a big pipe. ACK packets are only a few bytes in size.

Yes, but on my network they consume over 20KB/sec when downloading at 800,000KB/sec.

And over the internet that number would be way higher..... contrary to popular belief, on the net the more ACKs the better unless your upload is THAT small. I hit over 20KB/s in ACK's all the time... my own testing on all major Canadian ISP's (Telus/Bell/Shaw/Rogers/Eastlink/Videotron) revealed the setting to ACKs to one or two yielded the fastest speeds and usually I hit the connections caps even during peak, and negliable loss off peak. If I was doing it on a small LAN, then obviously that ACK setting is a bit rediculous (instead of ACK to every 1.5KB I'll boost it up to whatever the LAN controller caches.. usually around 64/128KB). For 10Mbps of downstram it reachs almost 60KB/s if there is heavy packet loss. Windows' default is every 3 packets and if you are using windows at 800MB/s and getting 20KB/s that means if you went 1:1 you would only use 60KB/s but at least wehn another node starts chatting on the line, you won't gets those pops and sputters during your transfer (get Netstat live, do a download with the default 1:3 setting from a busier server and do it on a cable modem, you'll get the hills, now change windows ACK to 1:1 and run it, you'll get a very flat line on your graph nad probably hit your caps, unless there is heavy congestion, at which you'll slow down a bit but it should remain smooth if TCP's flow control is working properly).