Re: [Pan-users] Policy discussion: GNKSA

[Steven D'Aprano]

Travis, please fix your quoting. That is, use Reply, not Forward, when 
replying to posts.

More follows below:

Travis wrote:
> -----Original Message----- From: Alan Meyer
[...]
> Does someone have data to suggest that there is a real advantage
> to having more than four connections?
>
>  From the Giganews web page:
> "Speeds as Fast as Your Connection
>
> Every Giganews account features unlimited download speed. Whether you 
> have a 10Mbps or 1000Mbps connection, our Usenet servers will max out 
> your connection. Unlimited speed means unlimited speed. Test your 
> connection speed with our speed tester."

I think you have missed the point though. All that bit of advertising 
claims is that, *whatever speed you have*, Giganews can take advantage 
of all of it. It doesn't imply anything about the value of more connections.

More connections are only valuable when the provider applies a 
per-connection throttle which is less than your total bandwidth. If your 
total bandwidth is (say) 100Mbps, which will be a hard limit applied by 
your ISP, or possibly a physical limit imposed by the laws of physics 
and your modem, then adding additional connections won't increase that.

If your news provider throttles connections to 10Mbps, then 4 
connections give you a total of 40Mbps used and 60 unused, and 10 
connections would give you 100Mbps used and zero unused. But 20 
connections *still* gives you 100Mbps used, because that's the hard 
limit from your ISP and/or modem -- adding more connections once you 
have saturated the available bandwidth just slows them all down.


--
Steven