[Info-vax] DE500 and hardware version

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <nospam-D1E663.13595504012013 at news.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture
<nospam at sture.ch> writes: 

> > > I was looking to upgrade my home network to Gigabit ethernet just over a 
> > > year ago and was surprised how much kit in the marketplace was still 
> > > 10/100.  Basically unless Gigabit or 1000 was somewhere in the product 
> > > name or prominent in the description, 10/100 was what you would be 
> > > getting.
> > 
> > Well, consider that the typical home user doesn't run a LAN-based VMS 
> > cluster.  :-|  
> 
> Not a VMS cluster, but every PC sold in the last few years (3-4 years?) 
> has come with GbE, and there are a lot of NAS and media streaming 
> devices on the market.

Right; as I said, it is interesting for people with more than one device 
on the LAN.  But I suspect that most people have just a PC connected to 
the internet.

> > Most DSL connections are not more than 16 Mb/s, and most 
> > people essentially connect one device to the internet. 
> 
> My cable company currently offers up to 100,000 Kbit/s down, 7,000 
> Kbit/s up:
> 
> http://www.upc-cablecom.ch/en/b2c/internet.htm
> 
> and see the TV/internet/phone packages here:
> 
> http://www.upc-cablecom.ch/en/b2c/kombiangebote.htm
> 
> The "Top Deal" there is very little more than my current cost for a 
> 25,000 Kbit/s internet and digital TV package.  In essence I would get a 
> 4 times speed boost plus free telephone calls to land lines in 
> Switzerland.

Yes, they exist, but they are not available in all areas.  The problem 
with these package deals to land lines, at least in Germany, is that 
calls to other countries are expensive.  Sometimes, a flat rate for 
international calls can be purchased, but that is not interesting if it 
doesn't include the countries one needs.

> > So, the 
> > bottleneck is the WAN connection; 100 Mb/s on the LAN is thus more than 
> > enough.  For people with several devices on the LAN who also transfer 
> > big files between them then, yes, Gb/s at home would make sense.
> 
> Back to NAS and media streaming, though many folks will use wireless 
> networking instead.

Right.  Like in some third-world countries where people went from not 
having a phone at all to having just a mobile, Gb ethernet might have 
been leap-frogged by people who need more bandwidth, going directly to 
wireless.