How Fast is Fast Enough?
VERIZON is my wired (also wireless and DSL) phone company. I’m in LOVE with Verizon, for a serious yet semi-silly reason. A few weeks ago I realized they were offering a new DSL plan that delivers 3 Megabits per second downstream (from them to me). I called the 800 number, had a pleasant interaction (they tried to convince me to switch from DISH Networks to Direct TV, but it didn’t make sense in my situation). About a week later I received an email saying the bandwidth change had been made.
Downloads here at The Ranch [in Arroyo Grande, CA USA] are now much zippier. In some cases my $29.95/month DSL in a semi-rural area is performing better than at my Day Job where we have two dedicated T1 lines.
My new DSL plan also allows upload speeds of 768Kbps. Can you spell “home server?” I may do that as soon as some geeky friends tell me how to keep it secure.
For a residential user, how fast is fast enough? The answer is “It depends.” For e-mail and web surfing and downloading updates to Windows and new software, my experience says 3 Mbps is great. When “reading the Internet”, 3 Mbps is no faster than 1.5 Mbps, because the bottlenecks are typically elsewhere, most commonly a slow server somewhere.
During the week I live in Santa Barbara near my work. There, I use Verizon’s 1XRTT mobile data service (when not at my desk), which provides about 115Kbps. For e-mail, using Bloglines as my RSS reader, and some web browser stuff) this slightly better than a V.90 modem speed is tolerable. While it’s not an “I died and went to heaven” experience, it’s good enough (absent a need to do big file transfers).
So how fast is “fast enough?”