Big Pipe Comes Home

Some landmarks simply must be noted.

When I was in my early 20s, while I was a grad student at CSU, Fort Collins, I was working for the housing and food services department. When I approached them for a second phone line to run my modem over, they pointed out that it would be much easier to run an ethernet line up to my room, which is what we did.

You have to realize this was 1992, when most dorm rooms didn't have ethernet, and when I was used to a 9600 baud modem. Suddenly I had 10mb/s 802.3 ethernet right to the back of my pc.

Today, with one phone call and a cable modem reboot, I finally exceeded that bandwidth. Comcast is now selling me 16mb/s, faster than the wire speed of 802.3 ethernet.

It bears noting that CSU's link to the public internet in those days was probably a T1, running at 1.544mb/s, but still. The wire speed to my computer now exceeds the fastest link I ever had. Only 17 years later.

I'm sure it will feel slow eventually, but right now it's mind blowing.

:)

-JRS