On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, Roland Turner wrote:
> The local cable loop _can_ be a bottleneck, but the pressures that bring
> this about are commercial, not technical. Likely circumstances include:
>
> - Optus has grossly underprovisioned and is being swamped with business.
> Oops. Same can happen with ADSL. This is a commercial error.
They are handling the customers, and their network is not grossly
bottlenecked due ot the demand. So I don't believe this to be a problem.
> - Optus is failing to adequately penalise users who are abusing the
> service. Oops. Same can happen with ADSL. This is a commercial error.
Having known four people personally who have lost Optus@Home accounts due
to over-usage and having seen the e-mails come through this list of server
scanning and warning, and deleting of accounts on this basis. They are
dealing with it.
> - An area is serviced by Optus cable, but not by either of the Bigpond
> broadband offerings. Optus exploits its monopoly. Same can happen with
> ADSL. This is commercial behaviour.
This isn't a monopoly. Optus haven't done anything to stop Bigpond coming
into the area. If anything, Bigpond have a monopoly because they won't
allow Optus to use their underground cable housing infrastructure, and if
it weren't for the ACCC allowing Optus to use it in areas where overhead
cables are forbidden, imagine that monopoly! It's not Optus' practises
that have caused the monopoly, it is by chance.
> So, to return to my opening simile, when you salivate over your
> "private" 1.5Mbps connection to *The*Internet*, you have implicitly
> assumed that, at the other end of that link is the Internet itself, that
> Telstra, benevolent institution that it is, has provided infinite
> bandwidth, total power, unlimited rice pudding, etc. Nothing could be
> further from the truth. The Internet is not a thing to be linked to, it
> is the links themselves. Telstra's upstream connection from the DSLAM is
> a shared connection like any other (indeed, like a local cable loop),
> and if Telstra fails to punish abusers or fails to upgrade the shared
> link when needed, it also will have an underperforming service.
I don't think people here are mindless enough to assume that. The point
that was trying to be made was that Cable is a shared access scheme whilst
ADSL is not. Of course there are other dependencies further up the chain,
but that's a different concern.
> Major ISPs have no excuse for mail service outages at all. For the sake
> of putting a number on it, anything less than five nines uptime is
> inexcusable. (99.999% uptime implies no more than about five minutes of
> downtime per year.)
Optus@Home and Bigpond don't seem to know how to handle a large mailbase.
I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just saying it could be handled better than
dumping it all into an unstable network.
> > HFC is an inferior solution to ADSL - simply because of the shared
> > bandwidth. If I can get ADSL to my place, I'm going for it.
>
> These are two seperate assertions. The latter may be true, and you are
> free to spend your money as you see fit. The former is false, simply
> because of the shared bandwidth. The differences are commercial, not
> technical.
Differences are technical. HFC upstream is very very much shared. The
downstream is a little more segmented. ADSL is shared amongst you up and
downstreams, but not amongst other users at the delivery level of the
network.
Andrew.
And moo!
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