Tom Worthington wrote: > > The term may be understood in the industry, but what is needed is a > measure of network performance the general public can understand.
Hi Tom It *is* widely understood by the general public. That's why the definition has retained its popularity. At the moment if you buy a 100Mbps service and you want to distribute that around your house you go to OfficeWorks and buy a 100Mbps "Fast Ethernet" switch (or access point, but let's use switch for this exposition). It's readily understandable that if you want to buy a 300Mbps service and want to distribute that around your office you go to OfficeWorks and buy a 1000Mbps "Gigabit Ethernet" switch. If people have issues with SI units then that's well within the capabilities of OfficeWork's staff. Now let's say the ACCC alter the definition of the Internet service speeds, and the client buys a 1.1Mbps service (the description of a 100Mbps service which meets the definition of "worst case transport layer throughput across the link" which ACCC is proposing, although they don't realise it). That OfficeWorks worker would be wholly excused when they sold that customer a 10Mbps "Ethernet" switch. A switch which is ten times too slow. In short, the ACCC is acting suboptimally. Viewing only a small part of the consumer experience with networking. I view the current definition of bandwidth as the "single useful rating" which you seek. It's independent of traffic mix. It informs the customer of which matching products they should purchase. That it misstates achievable throughput by a small amount is readily understood. A site's technical staff can measure their site's packet size distribution and easily calculate the transport-layer throughput across the link, should those few percent matter. -glen _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
