I could be wrong but I work for WorldCom (still hanging in there) and honestly, their backbone is pretty bad ass... I brought up an IP Network map and we have all sorts of OC-192s running all over that run at somewhere near 10Gb/s (About 1.xxx GB/s which could do a DVD in 6 seconds) I think the 6-Bone is pretty cool but couldn't you just plug a computer in with some some Gigabit ethernet controllers bonded together and do this to say a huge ramdrive or somethig stupid. Unless maybe this was meant to showcase the computer hardware more than the network? A gigabit doesn't impress me that much, or perhaps maybe no one has done it before...
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Lifetime Careers in IT?
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You'd be surprised, a good mechanic and a body technician (repair wrecks) can make really great money. It's really hard work but good mechanics can make 65K and body guys can top 6 figures and that's just working for a shop. Most of those guys get paid by the bill hours and the job hours aren't how long it actually takes. There's a big book with how many hours it takes to do EVERYTHING but if you can do it in half the time that's twice the money.
Honestly I think unless you have access to some FTP server or something like that just on the other side of their DS-3 you will have no reliable way to tell for sure. Yes, you could run a bandwidth meter like DSL reports or something like that but unless there is no congestion between you and the server running the test you may not get accurate results. In otherwords, you may have slow link somewhere in between that would make it hard to check how fast your connection actually is. The only sure fire reliable way to test is to run a check from your site to something just on the other side of your provider(your providers provider) if you can find out where they buy their uplink from. You could have a T1 while your provider has a T3 or something but maybe they sold 100 T1's with that T3 uplink. (a T3 is 40-some T1's) so you may never get close to T1 during peak traffic hours. (But it may appear you have a full T1 during off hours) Unless you show up and ask for a tour of their co-lo or office I think you'll just have to take their word for it that they own enough bandwidth to cover your needs.
Say they get their uplink from WorldCom, if you could find a server on the WorldCom/UUNet backbone where you could download a large file and check the speed during peak hours it might give you an idea. (Just incase it is WorldCom, http://www.sunfreeware.com has a mirror site on the UUNet backbone)
Sadly, I work for WorldCom still and when I was hired about 1.5 years ago I do remember them in their "come work for us because we're cool" speech they mentioned that they backbone capacity was doubled every year. Probably some PR person heard it wrong and assumed what would sell more stock.
I recently built a system out of parts from Access Micro a month or so ago and was reasonably pleased. Their prices weren't too bad, it was easy to build a mb+proc+ram combo and they didn't jack the shipping way up.
Watch that on some companies... sometimes they will charge 10$ for each item that you add to the cart so the part looks really cheap but it's actually 5-6$ more than you thought compared to the shipping cost of another company.
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I could be wrong but I work for WorldCom (still hanging in there) and honestly, their backbone is pretty bad ass... I brought up an IP Network map and we have all sorts of OC-192s running all over that run at somewhere near 10Gb/s (About 1.xxx GB/s which could do a DVD in 6 seconds) I think the 6-Bone is pretty cool but couldn't you just plug a computer in with some some Gigabit ethernet controllers bonded together and do this to say a huge ramdrive or somethig stupid. Unless maybe this was meant to showcase the computer hardware more than the network? A gigabit doesn't impress me that much, or perhaps maybe no one has done it before...
You'd be surprised, a good mechanic and a body technician (repair wrecks) can make really great money. It's really hard work but good mechanics can make 65K and body guys can top 6 figures and that's just working for a shop. Most of those guys get paid by the bill hours and the job hours aren't how long it actually takes. There's a big book with how many hours it takes to do EVERYTHING but if you can do it in half the time that's twice the money.
Honestly I think unless you have access to some FTP server or something like that just on the other side of their DS-3 you will have no reliable way to tell for sure. Yes, you could run a bandwidth meter like DSL reports or something like that but unless there is no congestion between you and the server running the test you may not get accurate results. In otherwords, you may have slow link somewhere in between that would make it hard to check how fast your connection actually is. The only sure fire reliable way to test is to run a check from your site to something just on the other side of your provider(your providers provider) if you can find out where they buy their uplink from.
You could have a T1 while your provider has a T3 or something but maybe they sold 100 T1's with that T3 uplink. (a T3 is 40-some T1's) so you may never get close to T1 during peak traffic hours. (But it may appear you have a full T1 during off hours) Unless you show up and ask for a tour of their co-lo or office I think you'll just have to take their word for it that they own enough bandwidth to cover your needs.
Say they get their uplink from WorldCom, if you could find a server on the WorldCom/UUNet backbone where you could download a large file and check the speed during peak hours it might give you an idea. (Just incase it is WorldCom, http://www.sunfreeware.com has a mirror site on the UUNet backbone)
Good Luck...
Sadly, I work for WorldCom still and when I was hired about 1.5 years ago I do remember them in their "come work for us because we're cool" speech they mentioned that they backbone capacity was doubled every year. Probably some PR person heard it wrong and assumed what would sell more stock.
I recently built a system out of parts from Access Micro a month or so ago and was reasonably pleased. Their prices weren't too bad, it was easy to build a mb+proc+ram combo and they didn't jack the shipping way up.
Watch that on some companies... sometimes they will charge 10$ for each item that you add to the cart so the part looks really cheap but it's actually 5-6$ more than you thought compared to the shipping cost of another company.