On Tue, 2016-03-29 at 13:38 +1100, Paul Brooks wrote: > What I'm getting at is that, over the course of a month or 6 months, > the average broadband link utilisation is less than 1%. Sure there > are instantaneous peaks when somebody is actually trying to do > something, but most of the time the link is idle.
So provided there is enough bandwidth for the times when nobody is doing anything, we're OK? Alright, that was mischievous :-) But seriously, the only bandwidth that matters is the bandwidth you have (or don't have) when you need it. It is IMHO disingenuous (and I'm not putting these words into your mouth) to suggest that as long as the average utilisation is low, we have enough bandwidth. There are lots of things that don't require lots of bandwidth, because they are not time-critical. Email is the canonical example, who cares how long it takes to arrive as long as it gets there? But anything that wastes a person's time with waiting is a problem. The canonical example there is video (or voice); people are very intolerant of lag and jitter in those applications. Gaming too - and I dare anyone over 30 to say "but gaming doesn't REALLY matter does it?" - especially if they are also insisting that grand finals and B-grade movies be delivered perfectly smoothly, or expect telepresence or VR to be a thing. > And all this breaks down on low speed links that some are lumbered > with But Paul, just about everyone IS lumbered with just such a connection! That's the problem! And the second problem, coming up like a freight train, is that what people consider "low speed" is getting higher all the time. > around the 1 Mbps level Which EVERY ADSL user has on their outbound link. Mostly about half that. > but these don't form a significant fraction of the ABS stats. That might be a problem right there. > Confusing the two things, or assuming that you have to double one to > double the other, is a common fallacy. Not confusing either. But 99% of users could not give a flying hockey puck about what's going on when they are NOT filling their link or NOT going over quota. Technically, data volume and bandwidth are not related. In practice - oh yes they very are! All you have to do to see this is stop looking at continuous periods of very low usage as if they formed a meaningful part of the calculations. Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer ([email protected]) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer http://twitter.com/kauer389 GPG fingerprint: E00D 64ED 9C6A 8605 21E0 0ED0 EE64 2BEE CBCB C38B Old fingerprint: 3C41 82BE A9E7 99A1 B931 5AE7 7638 0147 2C3C 2AC4 _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
