Originally Posted by
Wayne
Smugmug hosts RAW, and 1080 video too, so huge files if thats what you want to play with.
Not everyone everywhere has the same deals from their ISP.
An example, at home in Sydney I have Bigpond cable @ 30Mb/1Mb with 50GB of usage at full speed before slowing to 128kb both ways, and uploads are counted. I like the 30Mb speed, and despite DSL being advertised at up to 22Mb, the attenuation, distance from exchange etc mean in reality probably not much above 13-15Mb, so cable suits me well.
At home in Mount Isa, there is no cabled area, only DSL, and Telstra have the only exchange, which last year had some 2+ ports installed. Previously you could only get 8mb. Here Telstra offer the same usage as in Sydney at the same price, however the line speed although theoretically possible to achieve 22Mb down, is not more than about 4-8Mb depending on time of day etc, simply due to distance from exchange, poor condition and old copper in the whole place. Upload being only theoretical at 512kb is realistically little above 200kb most of the time. Given the poor value in recent times of Telstra's bandwidth, I have used several other ISP's who wholesale from Telstra to achieve more bandwidth at a lower price.
Sounds great in theory, but despite being cheaper to use another ISP through Telstra's infrastructure, often the backhaul is atrociously slow, making for an even more frustrating experience.
So while some places have the benefits of more high speed bandwidth for less $$, that surely is not the case everywhere, especially when you consider alot of places in Australia (some even in major capital cities) don't have anything but access to wireless such as NextG etc, so no DSL, no Cable and much lower bandwidth limits with much higher costs.
Try uploading 100/10MB images on some of these services... I can tell you it sometimes takes a while, so imagine a 5 min 1080P video or uploading those files as raws.