IIS Aid

It's funny how things that once seemed exceptional seem to become the norm, and in turn start to be taken for granted. Around 12 months ago I joined up with one of Australia's more progressive Internet providers who offered ADSL at full speed (up to 8mbit download, 1 mbit upload). Since then they have upgraded their network to ADSL2+ which can (in theory) offer speeds of upto 24mbit download and 1 mbit upload. Unfortunately I do not live close enough to my exchange to be able to achieve those sorts of speeds, but I am able to get a solid 8mbit connection. Last weekend I was at my parents house who have a "normal" ADSL connection, and after using it for a while I found myself suprised.

What suprised me was that I found this 512kbit connection to be rather slow. For general web browsing I would have said it was maybe a little laggy, but generally acceptable. The point where I really noticed it was when I tried to download some software updates for my parents which was around 10Mbyte. On my 8mbit connection a download like this from a decent server would be done in around 15~20 seconds, but over my parents connection it took a full 4 minutes to download. After the instant Internet I've become accustomed to over the last 12 months this almost seemed like an eternity, which after thinking about it for a minute made me chuckle to think of the access speeds I had when I first got on the Internet 10 years ago.

When I first started out in the mid 90's I used to work for one of Australia's first regional ISP's, and back then our entire backbone was a 128kbyte frame relay which burst to 256kbyte on demand. This bandwidth serviced thousands of users and we were the fastest of any provider in our area. When 56kbit modems came out and we had upgraded our system to accomodate them, I can remember our backbone buckling under the strain during peak times due to the extra bandwidth demands which had basically doubled in the space of a few months. I'd expect that the bandwidth providers of today are going through similar growing pains as the number of Internet users on dial-up migrating to broadband quickens, and then on top of that the roll out of ADSL2+ in the capital cities and most major regional centres. It's funny how the technology changes, but our demands/expectations for it to be able to deliver more and more never do.