Let’s suppose money is no option. (Wouldn’t that be nice)
What is the fastest DSL you could get? What is the fastest cable you could get? What about other options?
What about T1 or other such lines or FIOS?
For purposes of this question, let’s say you’re located right next to the phone company for DSL or you’re located close to whatever you’d have to be
I realize a lot of the speeds are “in theory” because I’d imagine it’s like having a car that goes 300mph, if you’re stuck in traffic you ain’t going to go faster than the old junker in front of you
T1 lines, although rather expensive, are in reality, when compared to current speeds, downright pokey. Synchronous speeds (up and down speeds) are 1.5 Mbit/sec. (well, actually 1.544). Here at work, we pay about $700 a month for a T1 line, and a little over $2500 a month for a 25Mbit/sec fiber link right into our carriers Ethernet backbone. Why do we pay $700 for a 1.5Mb pipe when we could get a business class cable connection for $80 or so a month, 6Mb down and 1.5Mb up? Because the T1 is bandwidth dedicated to us and we have exclusive use of it at all times. Cable is a shared pipe with other customers, and the advertised speeds are not guaranteed at all times. Also, from experience, a T1 line goes down very,very rarely, while some of our business class cable connections seem to be fairly often.
Probably something mentioned here, I’ve heard of OC3 lines but it goes to OC768 and beyond. Finding prices will be difficult, it’s not the sort of thing they run into households, you’d have to talk to a salesman. I doubt a connection like that would make your YouTube videos load much faster than Fios would, they’re really geared towards accomodating massive amounts of traffic rather than making particular web sites faster.
Speaking of OC-3’s, I got someone coming in next week to do a site survey for an OC-3 line being installed at our location here. It’s in the neighborhood of $30,000 a month, but that’s for a point to point circuit, and not Internet access.
Yikes… I guess I don’t want to know what our multiple cross-country OC-192 backbone lines cost. I think we have “only” two OC-3 lines into this building.
Ironically, internet speed here is far slower than my 6 meg DSL at home, probably because of line saturation and traffic through all of the switches, firewalls and gateways between my PC and the world.