He was exaggerating a bit when he said "tens" of years ago. It wasn't that long ago that dialup was downright pervasive in North America and Europe. At that tim

He was exaggerating a bit when he said "tens" of years ago. It wasn't that long ago that dialup was downright pervasive in North America and Europe. At that time it didn't take too much abuse to discover just what an overstuffed pipe would do to your connection. On the other hand, we have so much more bandwidth now. 56kBd is a fart in today's gale. Of course we shouldn't start out at full throttle, but the factor of 5 he's endorsing is virtually nothing and it still gives a higher proportion of overhead than we had back then.