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> ISPs have profited massively from many many Moore iterations while consumer bandwidth is stuck on below 1990 technology.

On what planet? I did a speedtest.net run the other day on LTE and got 150 Mbps down/20 Mbps up near a strip mall in exurban Maryland. That network did not come cheap.




The effective bandwidth of that network even on some unobtanium 50 GB plan is <1 Mbps and that's before we get into latency and packet loss discussions.

Nice distraction, but no cigar.


That's like saying the "effective speed" of a 777 is 45 mph because that's the maximum average speed over a month accounting for refueling and servicing. Or that the "effective battery life" of a MacBook Pro is 70 minutes because that's how long you can run it at full tilt. It completely ignores the typical customer use case.


I feel nerdsniped! The utilization rate of a major airline 777 is ~12 hours per day. If the ORD-LAS flight I took today is representative, average in-transit speed is 331mph, so the average speed of a jetliner isn't 45mph, but rather... 165mph?


Hmm, I think that figure could be off by a decent amount though depending on what exactly is measured by "utilization". Taxiing, for example, or sitting at the gate with an hour delay.

I think the best way to figure this out is to conduct a little study: set up a script to monitor a representative sample of planes on FlightAware for a while.


Taxiing is included in utilization time, but also in my average transit time (I just took the nautical distance traveled and divided it by the actual transit time).


I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't even try to do the math.




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