Thursday, April 25, 2013

Computer networks keep on changing

I guess it is just one of the many signs of my age...

I remember working at Computer Sciences during college. I was lucky enough to be able to take a terminal home and work remotely.  Of course the terminal didn't have a screen, it had a roll of thermal paper and the dial up connection was 2400 bits per second.  Much later in life, I remember a Windows update being 10M bytes.  I was astounded that they would do it online because it took hours to complete and if you lost your connection, you had to start from scratch.

Comcast just recently upgraded our home Internet connection.  I have now tested it at 55M bits per second download and 11 M upload.  Given this, I can now:

  • Download that 10M Windows update in a little less than 2 seconds
  • Upload my directory of over 100G bytes of photos to a backup site in less than 24 hours
If you want to see your network performance, you can go to www.speedtest.net, let it initialize, and then click BEGIN TEST.  Takes about 30 seconds.

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