Thursday, January 10, 2008

Bandwidth

I'm with Orly on Bandwidth. He's on Globe, but I get similar quality with my entry-level PLDT-DSL account. Last night I downloaded the CentOS 5 DVD. That finished overnight. Today I'm downloading opensolaris, one the developer edition installer itself, and one the pre-built vmware image. Those will finish by tomorrow (unless Sun's bandwidth gets flaky, as it did when I downloaded a previous opensolaris DVD installer). Or maybe that was PLDT, I don't think it was though, I was downloading from other sources at the time and they were'nt slow.

But, yeah, it's great that for a relatively low price (much less than unlimited dialup cost just 3 years or so ago, in Cagayan de Oro, anyway) I can download DVD ISOs overnight. I remember downloading linux CD ISOs over a week and a half (on dialup though).

My family and I are going to New Zealand. Apparently, the low end residential broadband offerings there have monthly bandwidth caps (which are less than a single DVD ISO) and once the cap is hit, either the subscriber pays per extra GB or bandwidth drops to 64kbps (or so). That's fine most of the time, but when I need to download legitimate software it's going to be a problem. I'll download everything I'll need between now and when I leave so that I can minimize the number of times I'll hit my bandwidth cap :-).

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