On Sun, Oct 02, 2005 at 08:09:00PM -0700, Wade Curry wrote: > My take is that some (maybe most) ISPs are over-selling the > "upsteam" bandwidth. They want to tell their naive customers that > they have 2mbps upstream knowing that the average user won't > utilize it. Then they sell the same bandwidth again to the person > who buys web hosting from them.
Sometimes. With a cable modem, you have limited upstream bandwidth to begin with... there's only a couple of channels that can be used for upstream. So asymmetrical bandwidth is just a fact of life there. But DSL? It's been a long time since I was involved with DSL, and I recall no such technological barrier. I'm not sure why they love to sell asymmetrically. As for "overselling", it's a simple fact that if you sell 100 users 2Mb/s of bandwidth, you aren't going to see a sustained 200Mb/s of traffic. Unless you own all of the fiber from the COs to your network, you have to pay for carriage of your traffic. So, you might pay for 50 Mb/s in the above case, and 99% of the time, that'll be plenty. If you see the utilization grow over time, you can either pay for more transit bandwidth or face more and more complaints and customers leaving. If you pay for more bandwidth, and if that bandwidth doesn't get cheaper, your profit margin decreases or even disappears. Raising prices for consumer-grade ISP connections is pretty much anathema... there's no better way to see a wholesale exodus of customers. So, you find the few people who are chewing up all the bandwidth and either boot them or make things much more restrictive... the vast majority of your users don't care about server restrictions and aren't going to leave over them. The few who will complain and leave, you're frankly better off without them. they're usually the guys who call screaming 15 seconds after the connection goes down :-) This tells us why the "business grade" accounts cost so much more for the "same" amount of bandwidth... Cox, for instance, not only provides different support, but it's a whole different network. You're charging people on the assumption that they're going to be using a lot more of "their" bandwidth. You keep them happy about paying more for "the same thing" with stellar support and anything else you can provide. I actually miss working in ISPs... :-) -- *********************************************************************** * John Oliver http://www.john-oliver.net/ * * * *********************************************************************** -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
