On Apr 21, 2006, at 1:29 AM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
What's a contention ration? Something to ask about?
It reflects how much the provider oversells their upstream connection. Not everyone is downloading at full speed all the time, so it's senseless to rate the upstream connection as if they were.
So for (say) 20Mbit of uplink capacity, their might be a hundred 2Mbit subscribers. Even if some people are simultaneously downloading large files, it doesn't affect the other users who are just browsing or emailing or whatever, where 95% of the time there's no data being transferred.
Because of this, the provider doesn't have to pay for an uplink that's going to carry nothing most of the time.
On digital telecommunications networks, voice calls are treated in exactly the same way, but with one small difference. Because voice calls need a certain realtime data rate, connections will be dropped if the load gets too high. Those cheap international calling cards take advantage of this by buying ultra-low-priority connection time from the provider (ie they're the first to be dropped when the links get busy).
- Dave
