Ant wrote:
In microsoft.public.windowsxp.general Paul wrote:
...
When I first got cable (Excite@Home) on 3/10/2001, it was not DOCSIS
compliant. It was crap. Lots of outages, slow, etc. in the city. And
then, Adelphia redid its cable infrastructure to DOCSIS and digital
which made everything better!

To be fair though, at launch, cable distribution of Internet was a
mess. For example, in the city I'm in, they tried to run way too
many users off a central router. The result was at 9PM, people
were getting 1.5Mbit/sec??? or so. At the mall, Rogers had a booth,
attempting to get people to sign up for the service. An "angry mob"
circulated around the booth, mumbling about the speeds they were
getting. Looked very much like angry bees :-) I happened to step
too close to the bees, and one of the bees told me what
kind of speed I could expect. I flew off and continued on my way.

1.5 Mbs? Ha, I only got like 10 kBs. Still better than my 3 kBs
dial-up speeds with good connections for compressed files. This was for
downloading. During non-peak hours like 3 AM PT, I got like 450 kBs. :O

When I started with cable/'coax' Internet - May 2003 -, the specified/
maximum speeds were 300/64. Not bad heh!? Oops, that was *K*bps, not
Mbps! :-)

Now it's upto 1000/50 Mbps. (I have 'only' 50/5 Mbps, which is plenty
enough for me.) So in 17 years, that's a 3333 times increase in download
speed, all with the same 'last-mile' [1] infrastructure! (And even for
lowly me, 167 times.)

[1] No it isn't a mile, probably only 100 metres or so.