[TriLUG] Google Fiber

[Peter Neilson]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2015 23:48:11 -0500, William Sutton <william at trilug.org>  
wrote:

> +1.  Having been a Comcast customer (I would say "disgruntled", but that  
> would be redundant), and having used HughesNet at my in-laws', as much  
> as I hate Comcast, you would die of old age waiting for data to come  
> back over Hughes.  Even ssh over Hughes is terribly slow.  Nevermind  
> something like Flash....

Testimonials at the Hughesnet website indicate that their customers enjoy  
having something faster than dial-up. They don't mention satellite's  
round-trip delay.

Could anything be worse?

Some of us remember the days when 20 WPM CW over ham radio was considered  
fast. Hold a minute while I convert that to a baud rate... ummmm, on  
second thought, perhaps someone else has already done the math... Hah!  
Here it is, from W8JI:
http://www.w8ji.com/cw_bandwidth_described.htm

60 WPM is perhaps about 50 baud. So 20 WPM (faster than I was ever able to  
copy) is about 17 baud. Seems terribly slow by today's standards, or even  
compared to 110-baud early dial-up.

Even slower were the semaphore and wigwag methods of flag communication:
http://www.scouting.org/filestore/pdf/historic_signaling_new.pdf

For REALLY primitive rapid long-distance communication check out RFC 1149.  
The data transmission rate? Proper implementation might yield 9102 Mbit/s,  
according to this Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers