PCIP - SOPA/PIPA All over again

[Vena]

Originally Posted by djmaca

But this isn't always the case. And that computation is flawed due to the fact that 5MB/s isn't always 5MB/s. D:

Naturally there is a ramp up time of about ten or so seconds, if you wish to add it on but that's hardly a large amount of extra time. (In total you have about ten seconds of finding the best ppers, and ten seconds of maximizing the speed). After that, though? There's hardly much in the way of a flux in download speeds. If you use Usenet, you only have a ramp up speed and then its smooth sailing.

Remember, though, this is my connection. Experiences vary and I'm on a college campus abusing a very, very fast internet to its fullest.

[DonQuigleone]

Originally Posted by djmaca

You exaggerate. A file takes a minimum of 10mins with a top notch connection if it's 250mb(average anime fansub size). But movies takes 2.5gb.

My friend lives closer to the center of the city, and can obtain torrent speeds of ~2 megabytes per second. You can do the math yourself. Also, a lot of film files are only 700 megabytes, they're not always 2 GB, only when they're highdef.

Me, I'm stuck at the lowly but still respectable 200 kilobyte per second.

Though I've always been perplexed by why we quote broadband speeds in bits, but otherwise only ever use bytes.

[Dhomochevsky]

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

Though I've always been perplexed by why we quote broadband speeds in bits, but otherwise only ever use bytes.

For a technical person, the speed of a transfer channel in bits/s is more informative, because not all bits that get transfered have to be data, even if you ignore such higher level things as IP-packet headers.
There may be Start/Stop-Bits, parity checks etc on the hardware level, so for every byte of data you transfer, you may have to transmit 9-11 bits. Depends on the implemented protocoll.

I don't understand why they keep this up when selling bandwidth though. As a product, it should be bytes of data. No one cares about the technical details when buying broadband.
It may have legal reasons. They can sell you a line that is set to a certain bit rate. But the actual bytes/s may depend on the error rate. If you have a lot of errors and bytes have to be retransfered, you might end up with a lower byte/s count than they advertised. The bit count is still accurate though.

[Random32]

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

My friend lives closer to the center of the city, and can obtain torrent speeds of ~2 megabytes per second. You can do the math yourself. Also, a lot of film files are only 700 megabytes, they're not always 2 GB, only when they're highdef.

Me, I'm stuck at the lowly but still respectable 200 kilobyte per second.

Though I've always been perplexed by why we quote broadband speeds in bits, but otherwise only ever use bytes.

They probably advertise bits because it makes the number about 10 times bigger.

Don't think its for legal reasons, that's what the "up to" statement is for.