said by chrisf8657:Skeechan,
Interesting...3/256 is what we started with back in 2001 or 2002 - forget which. It's interesting it was still that back in 1996.
Actually, prior to 2001 the modems were mostly provisioned wide open and data rates depended on the technology you got (early DOCSIS, Moto CDLP, LanCity, and Com21 for Cox IIRC)..they went as high as 10M down depending on the technology.
@Home wanted to provision the modems to a fixed, defined service level - it was actually going to be 128K/3M but several engineers at Cox were concerned that 128K up wasn't enough to support 3M down due to TCP replies so Cox ended up with 256K/3M
the 3M was actually to support the marketing claims at the time of "up-to 100 times faster than a 28K modem"...they provisioned it to 3M to allow for overhead incurred in the Ethernet to DOCSIS conversion at the modem so that you would have a better technical chance of achieving 2.8M down at your computer.