Is this for real?

[Michael_google gmail_Gersten]

The whole point of "You are limited by the slowest upload speed of
your routers", plus the whole "My un-tor'd download speed is great" is
a big concern.

Here is a thought. Since most of the time I'm not downloading -- most
of the time my connection is "idle" with tor traffic -- I don't mind
giving more of my traffic to others.

When I'm active, I want to make full use of my download bandwidth.
That means I need to get downloads from multiple people.

If I'm looking at 20K tor upload, and 1.5 MB download (about 150K),
then I need to download from 7 different tor nodes. At once. Yes,
there are fast routers, but if I ever get a slow one, or an overloaded
one, then I am slowed for using Tor, and Tor looks unattractive.

If an average user is active 10% of the time, and uses 7 connections
when active, that's still a surplus of network resources (70%
utilized).

That means, that for Tor to get fast,
1. Rather than everything using one connection by default, we need to
use many connections, load balanced. Round robin is probably a "good"
first approximation to load balanced. Since we know the speed of the
routers we are using, we can do a better approximation.
2. ???
(3. Profit :-).

(Yea, getting keep-alive to work will help a lot with web browsing,
but that means tossing privoxy and using something else. But
keep-alive, by reducing the number of connections, will magnify the
problem of a slow router over doing multiple connections.)

> *how* much bandwidth is required to run Tor as a server, or router?

Tor wants a minimum of 20K, or about 220 kbps. DSL Light, that I've
seen, has a 384kbps upload, although I've heard that it goes as low as
256 kbps up. Either one is sufficient to run Tor as a router.