Fast pipes and the speed of light
Turned up the Internet T3 at work tonight. Most bandwidth I've ever managed in a shot. Fun stuff, and 8 hops from most things.
Odd bit of related trivia: One thing that's always amused me is when doing traceroutes[1] to overseas sites is that you can generally tell which hop crosses a major ocean or land mass just because the round-trip time jumps by 100-200 ms, just due to the speed of light in glass.
[1] For those that don't know traceroute is a networking tool that shows the general path network traffic will take between you and whatever device on the Internet you want to traceroute to. Most sites are usually on average ten to twelve hops away from your average cable modem subscriber.
Odd bit of related trivia: One thing that's always amused me is when doing traceroutes[1] to overseas sites is that you can generally tell which hop crosses a major ocean or land mass just because the round-trip time jumps by 100-200 ms, just due to the speed of light in glass.
[1] For those that don't know traceroute is a networking tool that shows the general path network traffic will take between you and whatever device on the Internet you want to traceroute to. Most sites are usually on average ten to twelve hops away from your average cable modem subscriber.