At 11:00 PM 8/22/01 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
Cable modems don't gain you much - there's great downstream speed, so the remailer doesn't interfere with your other usage much and you can absorb bursts of traffic, but the upstream is usually limited to 128kbps in most of the US - only double the capacity of Julf's. Also, most cable-modem carriers have highly short-sighted views of what activities they want to allow and how many complaints they'll tolerate, so you could get the boot pretty fast if you're not a middleman or in-only.
128Kby/sec is 10 messages/sec. That's a lot for a 'commodity' home connection. 10 messages/sec because many remailers are text-only, no attachments. Few messages exceed 10Kby. The real issue IMHO is that, despite the boxes and pipes, the tech is not sufficiently deployed yet. We are hyping phone scramblers when telegraphs are more common.