Its not too bad ; 40 MB/s downstream 10 MB/s upstream (unfortunately between my house and the street cabinet is more likely CCA (copper covered aluminium) drop wire and any amount of gel spliced pairs, a very clever young woman at British Telecom tipped me off about this problem (its rife here as this area was often the guinea pig for new ideas). This, especially when it gets old and the weather gets in picks up yet more radio inteference which is on the same frequencies VDSL works at…
The idea behind the experiment is also a resilience test; to find out how much of a site like is survivable if the available bandwidth of the Internet was drastically rationed/restricted during a time of national/international crisis; been reading up about this sort of stuff and the reality is very few govts/regulators (even the worst ones) would switch off the whole lot; but commercial pressures regularly cause all manner of behind the scenes problems (in some cases its a miracle any of it works at all).
I’ll dig out the blog post I found from the dude in Finland who pointed out even if tech progress had stalled in 1996; we’d still have a lot of good content and gadgets; and some may even be better and have a real sense of community because the resources are more carefully managed.
