Recently had a new fibre line installed into the office for general office use, VoIP and video. As you can see from the picture it is bloody fast bringing a 50 MB file from the internet to my desktop in the office in 4 seconds. However one thing bothers me and that is in general office use it seems not much quicker than the ADSL2+ line it replaces and if anything is too fast and hence feels slow! Odd thing to admit being that I work for an ISP but for all the hassle on installing it, excess charges and the time it took I could now do without it.
Obviously for certain purposes such as file backups, replication or shifting large files it is fantastically fast. But it is only now I have tested a leased line like this for general use and my experience isn’t mind blowing. I assume it is because the rest of the internet doesn’t work that fast and just how quickly do you want that email or read a web page? Most websites and services have been optimised for 3G and broadband so jumping from 20 Mb/s on ADSL2+ to 100 Mb/s on a leased line just doesn’t give the increase I thought I would see. It certainly isn’t twice as fast let alone five times.
In the datacentres we have many Gb/s of data flying around so I can see the benefit of a fast pipe but for the office there still seems to be some life left in good old copper.
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