[citation][nom]Camikazi[/nom]You realize that 200kb is still about 10 times faster then dial up yes? Dial up might say 56k but you rarely average near that, it's usually much lower.[/citation]
[citation][nom]AMD X6850[/nom]56k dial up is about 7kb/s (56k = 56 kiloBITS, not kilobytes).So 200kb/s internet is almost 29x faster than 56k dialup.[/citation]
kb = kilobit
KB = kilobyte
kbps or kb/s or Kbps or Kb/s = kilobits per second
KBps or KB/s = kilobytes per second
1(one) kilobyte = 8(eight) kilobits
So if you take the full 56kb/s of a 56K modem that would equal 7KB/s.
Wire speeds and transmission speeds for digital communication are almost always listed using bps or b/s (bits per second). The data storage industry typically uses Bytes to reference the amount of data something can store. However, many popular OS's, web browsers, and download managers will show you the download speed using Bytes per second (KBps) instead of the network transfer rate which would normally use bits per second (Kbps). The reason for this is because people see and expect that they are downloading a file of a given size and that file is measured using Bytes and not Bits. Most people know what the Kilo, Mega, and Giga means, but they would get lost when trying to figure the conversion for Bit to Bytes as well. So if you download a 100MB file using a 56K modem at max speed it will show you that the file is being saved at a rate of about 7KBps and it will take about 3 hours 58 minutes and 6 seconds to complete the download.
So anyways, the point is that 200kb/s is only about 4 times faster than dialup (56kb/s). This obviously is still far better than dialup which is usually also prone to added latency from packet loss caused by numerous external sources.
Also, not sure what Alidan was getting at. With a 45M down/5M up connection a hotel could run 100 devices at 450Kbps down/50Kbps up. Now this is also assuming that they would all be running at that max speed all the time. Since this doesn't happen, you could easily support 200+ devices by limiting the per device transmission rate to 5Mbps down/384Kbps up under most normal conditions. Of course you probably wouldn't even need the limit in a lot of cases. It would only be necessary to keep the few that would abuse it and use all the bandwidth they can the entire time and ruin it for others.