Interesting thread. dudedog, I posted a response to your initial post in the Internet Support forum.
And you all are pretty much correct. Dale and I have been talking about the warps. The connections to the Internet are still running at much higher throughputs than before the 1.04 release. We still know this is download traffic and it is starting to subside.
For this reason, it would not be prudent to go off half cocked and start making changes, but we are looking at it.
dudedog, I did not post this part to the Internet forum, as it was not stated there. An ISP that has an OC48 has it for a reason. There is not ISP in this business that will put in an OC48, when they only need a DS3. In other words, a good ISP, will run thier connections up to 70% average bandwidth utilization, before incrementing thier bandwidth to the Internet.
Any sudden changes in the amount of bandwidth the ISP has, will cause congestion. This can be witnessed easily by most users/clients. Let's see, Sprint has an OC192 going to Chicago, which during prime-time hours, takes a packet of data about 1 second to traverse.
No ISP can nor will accomodate for a worst case bandwidth scenario. You have to accomodate for the average case, if you want to stay in business. I have another client who moves more data/month that HTC does, but it is sustained and accomodations for that are made. As a result, the client is a happy camper.
HTC has plenty of bandwidth for the servers, based on what they typically need. Right now, the need is much higher and is a wore case scenario, which is trailing off. It has not gotten back to the level it was before the 1.04 release, but it is headed in that direction.
Long term, no one knows what we (HTC/AppLInk) are up to and it would not be prudent to discuss those plans until they are finalized.
Doing anything in haste is simply not the correct course to take. An example, complaints about warpiness and dropped conntions were running pretty high about 1 or 2 months ago. Roughly 3 weeks ago, we made an upgrade to the Main arena connection router. We have been watching and studying the impact of that change. Once the upgrade was done, virtually all the complaints ceased.
We beleive the upgrade accomplished what we wanted it to do, so we are know looking to upgrade the Alt arena connection router.
As far as doing what we can do, I try hard to insure a presence in the main arena, for no other reason than to listen to what folks are saying about connects. Once in a while I go ahead and fly, but my primary reason for being there is to hear what the pilots are saying about connects. That feedback is invaluable for me and HTC.
Let me put it to you this way. Would you be a happy client of your ISP, if all of a sudden your server could only deliver 2K/sec to your connecting clients?
The current release of 1.04 would have required a full OC3 to deliver the download to all the connections that were made. And the download rate for that would have capped at 12KBytes/sec. If this would have been on your ISP, your server would have been strangled. Would you then switch ISP's?
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Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.netskuzzy@applink.net