I agree that things are never quite as they seem they should be. I have a nice venerable 10 megabit cable in my home, but for some reason I top out at about 5 MB/s while my wife, upstairs, gets 10+ of the 20 MB/s Verison FIOS promised us.

Best,

CAM

Of course a round-trip delay is twice the distance. Also, many of the U.S. servers I talk to end up being on the West Coast, or perhaps colos. in places like Nevada. Plus there’s all the mucking around the electrons have to do in routers and such. Pings from here to servers out West typically run in the 150-300ms range.

But we quibble about minutiae. The point I was making was that applications like VoIP work just fine with these sorts of latencies. For example, when I Skype people in California or Australia, it’s no less reliable than when I Skype people in Europe. And it’s not as if the brain perceives the delay (unless Skype breaks the echo cancellation in an upgrade, as they sometimes do).

Also I was saying that the reason some ISPs are fighting the net neutrality meme is that they’re too lazy/cheap to go and add the bandwidth required and expected by their users.

Looking again at my final paragraph, I guess we’re about to go though another painful expectation-versus-overcommitment transition here, as the DSL infrastructure migrates to ADSL2+ with a headline rate of 24Mb/s. I have that here, but the best I can squeeze out of it is 6 down and 1.1 up. Grumble. Moan. Whine…