Thread: cable internet question

They've finally got cable internet hooked up in my area, but not available to customers yet ( suppose to be this week) they were going to install it a couple of weeks ago at my house and set up an installation date and they said the speed would be 2084 down and 512 up with the package i ordered but called back later that evening and said something was wrong and it would be a little while longer.

anyway, the plant manager told me they had 4 T1 lines running it, and planned to upgrade to 6 T1 lines eventually, he kept telling me how he wasnt going to oversell the bandwidth i was wondering how many customers 4 T1's can handle at 2084/512? it doesnt seem like 4 T1 lines would be enough at all to me

thanks

Unless they have some really aggressive Caps and/or packet-shaping, there will most likely be major slowdowns and high latency at peak times.

I'm just taking a guess that a T1 will probably be set up to service anywhere between 100-250 households. For most residential use this would probably be fine as most web traffic is "burst" traffic, meaning most of the time the line will be idle.

I will mention that if there are no other broadband options there may be alot of congestion on the network as people get onto the system and start running P2P software like Gnutella (Limewire, etc.) or Bittorrent (Azureus, uTorrent, etc.) With P2P bandwidth on a relatively small amount of T1's the system will start lagging very quickly.

IIRC, a T1's link speed is 1.54Mbit/s, so in the case of P2P, about 3-4 customers could monopolize the bandwidth at the caps that you stated.

4 T1 lines are about 6307.84Kbit/s