Reviews:
 ·Frontier Communi..
| reply to Skippy25
Re: Why? said by Skippy25:Their entire network can sit there turned on and unused and the cost of its operation compared to full capacity (80% utilization) would be marginal. This has been discussed many times. *sigh*, you're still missing the point.
Yes, once the infrastructure is in place it doesn't matter from a cost standpoint if utilization is 0% or 100%. Utilization matters most from a quality of service standpoint. An excessive amount of utilization will translate into poorer performance for the end user and will ultimately (if uncorrected) cause them to flee to a superior ISP. Would you be happy if your peak hour bandwidth was substantially less than what you signed up for? I doubt it.
Any network needs to strike the right balance of capacity to ensure an optimal end user experience while not paying for an excessive amount of infrastructure that goes largely unused. As each user consumes more bandwidth the amount of infrastructure required to maintain an ideal contention ratio will grow.
Spin it any way you want but as the average bit-rate goes up so does the cost of the underlying infrastructure to deliver that bit-rate to the end user. |
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| 2 Things about that.
1.) You make the assumption that you have a competing service to flee too. Most have cable and phone, though they dont really compete being DSL speed is nowhere near that of cable (for the most part).
2.) I agree with your statement about utilization, but point being rarely are you running at full line speed for an extended period of time. Let's say with a 50MB cable connection - a slow down would not be evident on a fast network like that when doing most things. Sure if you are downloading or doing a speed test, you would notice. But if you are surfing the web, doing email, streaming audio, streaming a movie (it would still cache quicker then you can watch it) you would not notice unless that node had several "hogs" all eating from troughs at the same time. But as pointed out, they (you know the ones these caps are meant to capture) are such a small % of user's surely that would not be the case.
3.) How do these caps protect against high utilization anyway? The caps are monthly so they are free to eat away as much and as fast as they want until a.) They reach their limit or b.) they keep paying to keep hogging away. |
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Reviews:
·Frontier Communi..
| said by Skippy25:1.) You make the assumption that you have a competing service to flee too. Most have cable and phone, though they dont really compete being DSL speed is nowhere near that of cable (for the most part). Speed is relative. I fled TWC's 15mbit/s (on paper) product in favor of 3mbit/s Verizon DSL because TWC's speeds dropped to 1.5mbit/s or less during peak hours. 3mbit/s 24/7 > 15mbit/s at 4am, IMHO anyway.
said by Skippy25:2.) I agree with your statement about utilization, but point being rarely are you running at full line speed for an extended period of time. Then you have nothing to worry about from the caps/overage, do you?
said by Skippy25:you would not notice unless that node had several "hogs" all eating from troughs at the same time. But as pointed out, they (you know the ones these caps are meant to capture) are such a small % of user's surely that would not be the case. Even with eight bonded downstream channels you've still only got a bandwidth pool of about 330mbit/s (less with overhead) to draw upon. With your hypothetical example of 50mbit/s connections it would only take six users to effectively consume all of the available bandwidth.
This is one of the reasons why I hate cable internet products; the performance is so variable and entirely outside of your control. When I lived in a neighborhood populated by old retirees I actually got the speeds I was paying for most of the time. When I had the misfortune of winding up on the same node as a bunch of college brats I was lucky to get T-1 speeds during normal waking hours.
said by Skippy25:3.) How do these caps protect against high utilization anyway? The caps are monthly so they are free to eat away as much and as fast as they want until a.) They reach their limit or b.) they keep paying to keep hogging away.
I've repeatedly said that caps are not the best solution, they are just the simplest to explain to end users. As far as "they keep paying", good! That's money that can go towards network upgrades. |
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