[dundee] Telewest Broadband 512Kb

[Mark Harrigan]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 06:00:29PM +0000, Andrew Clayton wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-01-16 at 17:52, Mark Harrigan wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 05:04:06PM +0000, Andrew Clayton wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > > I'd agree with Tom here, get proper ADSL if you can.
> > 
> > Sorry, I find that quite amusing. "Proper" ADSL until relatively
> > recently was seen as the poor cousin of cable modem because a number of
> > compromises that BT made to make the install as simple and cheap as
> > possible for their wholesale business.
> > 
> > They should be looked on as pretty much evenly matched unless upload is
> 
> Incorrect (in this country at least), the way cable works here is quite
> different to ADSL.

I wasn't in any way saying that they worked in the same way merely that
the expected performance from each system would be very similar.

> 
> The contentions are different and the way the traffic flows is
> different. IIRC everybody on the same bit of cable sees everyone elses
> traffic (a bit like a LAN, but in an uncontrolled environment) which
> isn't ideal.
> 

Well yes... if you happen to have a HFC interface card lying
around because the modems in the uk will all disregard everyone elses
data. And have a driver that supports promiscuous mode.
There's a very nice discussion on sans.org about the possibility of
sniffing cable. 
http://www.sans.org/rr/papers/26/623.pdf
If someones desperate enough to do all that then they deserve to sniff
my slashdot.org data :).

> IMHO, in this country, ADSL is clearly supperior to what the likes of BY
> provide.
> 

You opinion may be many things Andrew but humble it is not.

Mark

-- 
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. 
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, 
by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan