Computing Myth #2: Broadband only works with a new computer February 2, 2006
Posted by Trixter in Family, Home Ownership, Technology.trackback
While this isn’t technically true, I can definitely see how this myth was formed. My father ran on a 486/66 with a modem from 1995-2001. In 2001 he got cable modem broadband, but his 486/66 was so slow that it couldn’t process complex web pages much quicker than it already was, so he saw no actual speed benefit. So he went back to the modem, at which point I almost lost it (”How can you want to go slower?!”)
Later he upgraded to a Pentium 3 @ 450MHz, and could finally perceive the modem as a bottleneck.
Ironically, two years later, I did the same type of thing (downgrade powerful hardware): Through a telephone conversation mix-up, I agreed to reserve and purchase a Yamaha snowblower — and when I got there, I had reserved the wrong one. What I thought was going to be a $600 18- or 24-inch blower was actually a $1300 36-inch semi-industrial model. I was coerced into buying it because renigging on the reservation meant I would be charged $50 because these things were in demand in the middle of winter. So I bought it to avoid the fee, took it home, opened the box, took one look at it and knew I could never use it for my tiny driveway without being embarrased (it wouldn’t even fit in my garage with both cars), and proceeded to box it up and return it. On that day, a snowstorm began. As I’m returning this monster snowblower, I get a goofy look from the kid helping me; when I inquire, he says, “I’ve just never seen anyone return a snowblower in the middle of a snow storm!”.
Well, this isn’t really myth-busting so much as saying “it’s true, broadband isn’t very useful on old hardware”.
If you had the energy, you could’ve charged neighbors to snowblow their driveways. :)
You’ve given anecodtal evidence of one situation where it’s true, but this is not entirely a myth, as anyone who tried to run a 14.4kbps modem on an 8550 UART can attest.
You won’t be prevented from reaching “broadband” speeds necessarily, but “broadband” is defined to be 128kbps and up; if your CPU and bus speed aren’t capable of handling the Mbps, you definitely can be held back.
We’re currently working with several embedded processors at Kiyon, and with all of them, the actual performance is CPU-limited; the 133MHz MIPS is limited to about 8Mbps on 100Mbps ethernet and 15Mbps on 54Mbps wireless (including TCP overhead — yes, we are a networking company, we know about TCP overhead), for example. In all of these embedded chips — PowerPC, ARM, MIPS — the CPU is used for the ethernet controller, rather than having an external chip controlling the bus. As a result, the performance is CPU-limited, and worse, having a busy CPU murders your networking performance (even less than the numbers I gave).
In any case, your Dad was right to return the broadband until he had a processor where he could see the performance benefit.
I think that shows how the modem was not always the bottleneck in Internet speed.