<p>"During one peak usage time, MIT actually knocked the whole country of Portugal offline."</p>
<p>Can someone confirm this for me? I tried to find an article about this on the internet but I failed. Perhaps this is just a contrived anecdote or an urban legend? Any relevant news story from the time would be great.</p>
<p>"Let's say that it is true that you can't usefully use more than 10Mbps of bandwidth. So if that's true, then why is it that Ethernet LAN cards on most systems have progressed from the the standard 10Mbps to 100 Mbps and now Gigabit speed? Why do NIC vendors ever bother to improve their cards if the extra bandwidth is never used anyway?"</p>
<p>one reason for this -- even if you're only getting 10Mbps to the Internet, that extra speed comes in really handy when you're transferring data on your own private ethernet. for example, transferring big files among the many computers in your own room or streaming video from someone down the hall (assuming you're connected to them on a switch capable of say, 100Mbps or more).</p>
<p>i'm not saying Internet connections faster than 10Mbps don't exist (of course they do), just pointing out the equipment is used for other types of data transfer than just connecting to the Internet.</p>
<p>back to the original question of how fast connections are at MIT, there are really two parts to that -- what the physical connection is capable of, and what speed you'll actually see (varies depending on if tons of people are using the connection or not). my ILG had Gigabit Ethernet to campus, i'm not sure what the connection is like from MIT to the rest of the world.</p>
<p>if you're really curious you can peruse the MITnet router stats at web.mit.edu/mrtg</p>