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How is it impossible for an ISP to guarantee bandwidth within their own network, including to/from interconnection points/exchanges?! Maybe not at every point

How is it impossible for an ISP to guarantee bandwidth within their own network, including to/from interconnection points/exchanges?! Maybe not at every point in time (if you accept some overbooking), but that doesn't mean that you can't at least guarantee bandwidth for > 99% of the time. The ISP's advertised bandwidth should be available essentially always, with rare exceptions for unusually high levels of traffic, between your connection point and some exchange location where other ISPs can interconnect with your ISP without paying your ISP any money. The ISP doesn't have to guarantee that every server is reachable at advertised speeds, but they should guarantee that if ever anyone wants to send packets in your direction at the speed of your link, they should be able to either bury their own lines or buy transit from a market of transit providers to deliver the packets to some point in their network, and that those will be delivered without major packet loss at full rate.

closeparen 9y ago
Overselling of the last mile infrastructure. If you want to see what a not-oversold last mile connection (with a real minimum speed SLA) would cost, take a look at the “for business” pricing and weep. Most people’s usage is bursty, so the present oversold state is probably the least bad option compared to having a fixed <1Mbps line speed or paying thousands per month for a truly dedicated 50-100Mbps.
- gaius 9y ago
  It WAS bursty when most people were browsing but it's continuous if they've streaming these days.
  - throw_away_4567 9y ago
    Yeah but not much - stream Amazon Prime UHD pretend 4k and consume.. 18mbps. You can support 1k homes doing that on a 10G pon or VDSL build
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  Which is an answer to my question how exactly?
  - closeparen 9y ago
    They can and do provide guaranteed speeds; it costs a lot more. They can't provide guarantees (or 99% guarantees) of existing advertised speeds at anywhere near the existing price structure because the economics are based on overselling.
    - zzzcpan 9y ago
      No, no one provides guaranteed speeds. Guarantees you are talking about that ISPs provide are only for you being able to saturate the link 100% of the time, which you shouldn't do on home or business connections.
    - mjevans 9y ago
      It really shouldn't cost /that/ much more. If there were actual competition in a sane market the price would be practically whatever share of the electricity for powering the network infrastructure along the path plus some part replacement overhead and a small profit margin. That's why the natural monopoly of the last mile should be owned by the municipality (the people in the area) and competition should begin at designated peering points where backbone access can be brokered in an actually competitive way.
      - rayiner 9y ago
        Why do you think it shouldn't cost a lot more? A consumer-grade fiber service will put 16-32 passive fiber strands on a single GPON node and some multiple of that on each 10 gbps network port in the intermediate routers that eventually dump into the backbone. If you're selling dedicated bandwidth, you need active fiber out to the customer site, and your brutally expensive core routers can only have 5 customers per port instead of 50. Moreover, there is actually quite a bit of competition in the dedicated bandwidth business line space. We were recently shopping around our contract at work and had at least 3-4 options IIRC. Having the municipality own the infrastructure out to the peering point is a terrible idea. There's a lot of very expensive hardware between the fiber strand going to the customer site and the peering point.
- throw_away_4567 9y ago
  The for business prices are mostly to do with sla's for repair. If you move from 3 days to 3 hours the cost isn't 32x it's 300x (and more)
rayiner 9y ago
> The ISP's advertised bandwidth should be available essentially always, with rare exceptions for unusually high levels of traffic, You can buy service like this, and you pay for it. At work, we have a 100 mbps line from Cogent, with dedicated bandwidth to their backbone. It's something like $500-700/month. At home, I've got an "up to 940 mbps" line from Verizon, that's usually about 900 mbps but sometimes can fall down to 500 or so. (It's 16 users sharing a GPON node so only 75 mbps per user if everyone is downloading at the same time). But it's only $90/month...
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  "essentially always" != "dedicated" Also, how is "but we couldn't deliver that product at that price" in any way a justification for then simply delivering a different product under the same advertisement? If you cannot actually provide 940 Mb/s for 90 $/month, that's fine ... but then don't advertise it as such. There is nothing wrong with overselling--but it should be the responsibility of the ISP to hide it. From what you write, it seems like what they are actually selling you would fairly be advertised as a 500 Mb/s link. There is no need to actually have reserved bandwidth for each customer, but the moment the ISP saturates a link for more than a few minutes per month, it should be their responsibility to add capacity, or to reduce advertised bandwidths. I as a customer cannot just go "paying the full price this month is too expensive, I'll only pay half", so why should it be an excuse for the ISP to say "building infrastructure to provide advertised services is too expensive, we'll only deliver half"!?
  - rayiner 9y ago
    > delivering a different product under the same advertisement? It's a different product delivered under a different advertisement. Business lines are advertised as "dedicated" X mbps. Consumer lines are advertised as "up to" X mbps. "Up to" does not mean "essentially always." If I see the Microsoft Store is having a sale of "up to $400 off on Surface Pros," I don't expect a $400 discount on "essentially all" the models--I know it's the high water mark. Compare to how other over-subscribed systems are advertised. To pick a random example: https://www.serverhub.com/vps/ssd-cached https://www.serverhub.com/vps/ssd-cached. VPS servers are typically advertised as "4 cores." Are VPS providers ripping people off because you can't expect a $20/month VPS to get you 4 cores of throughput "essentially always?"
dboreham 9y ago
> How is it impossible for an ISP to guarantee bandwidth within their own network It isn't impossible, just too costly to the typical residential customer who expects to pay <<$100/mo.

closeparen 9y ago

Overselling of the last mile infrastructure. If you want to see what a not-oversold last mile connection (with a real minimum speed SLA) would cost, take a look at the “for business” pricing and weep. Most people’s usage is bursty, so the present oversold state is probably the least bad option compared to having a fixed <1Mbps line speed or paying thousands per month for a truly dedicated 50-100Mbps.

gaius 9y ago
It WAS bursty when most people were browsing but it's continuous if they've streaming these days.
- throw_away_4567 9y ago
  Yeah but not much - stream Amazon Prime UHD pretend 4k and consume.. 18mbps. You can support 1k homes doing that on a 10G pon or VDSL build
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
Which is an answer to my question how exactly?
- closeparen 9y ago
  They can and do provide guaranteed speeds; it costs a lot more. They can't provide guarantees (or 99% guarantees) of existing advertised speeds at anywhere near the existing price structure because the economics are based on overselling.
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    No, no one provides guaranteed speeds. Guarantees you are talking about that ISPs provide are only for you being able to saturate the link 100% of the time, which you shouldn't do on home or business connections.
  - mjevans 9y ago
    It really shouldn't cost /that/ much more. If there were actual competition in a sane market the price would be practically whatever share of the electricity for powering the network infrastructure along the path plus some part replacement overhead and a small profit margin. That's why the natural monopoly of the last mile should be owned by the municipality (the people in the area) and competition should begin at designated peering points where backbone access can be brokered in an actually competitive way.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      Why do you think it shouldn't cost a lot more? A consumer-grade fiber service will put 16-32 passive fiber strands on a single GPON node and some multiple of that on each 10 gbps network port in the intermediate routers that eventually dump into the backbone. If you're selling dedicated bandwidth, you need active fiber out to the customer site, and your brutally expensive core routers can only have 5 customers per port instead of 50. Moreover, there is actually quite a bit of competition in the dedicated bandwidth business line space. We were recently shopping around our contract at work and had at least 3-4 options IIRC. Having the municipality own the infrastructure out to the peering point is a terrible idea. There's a lot of very expensive hardware between the fiber strand going to the customer site and the peering point.
throw_away_4567 9y ago
The for business prices are mostly to do with sla's for repair. If you move from 3 days to 3 hours the cost isn't 32x it's 300x (and more)

rayiner 9y ago

> The ISP's advertised bandwidth should be available essentially always, with rare exceptions for unusually high levels of traffic, You can buy service like this, and you pay for it. At work, we have a 100 mbps line from Cogent, with dedicated bandwidth to their backbone. It's something like $500-700/month. At home, I've got an "up to 940 mbps" line from Verizon, that's usually about 900 mbps but sometimes can fall down to 500 or so. (It's 16 users sharing a GPON node so only 75 mbps per user if everyone is downloading at the same time). But it's only $90/month...

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
"essentially always" != "dedicated" Also, how is "but we couldn't deliver that product at that price" in any way a justification for then simply delivering a different product under the same advertisement? If you cannot actually provide 940 Mb/s for 90 $/month, that's fine ... but then don't advertise it as such. There is nothing wrong with overselling--but it should be the responsibility of the ISP to hide it. From what you write, it seems like what they are actually selling you would fairly be advertised as a 500 Mb/s link. There is no need to actually have reserved bandwidth for each customer, but the moment the ISP saturates a link for more than a few minutes per month, it should be their responsibility to add capacity, or to reduce advertised bandwidths. I as a customer cannot just go "paying the full price this month is too expensive, I'll only pay half", so why should it be an excuse for the ISP to say "building infrastructure to provide advertised services is too expensive, we'll only deliver half"!?
- rayiner 9y ago
  > delivering a different product under the same advertisement? It's a different product delivered under a different advertisement. Business lines are advertised as "dedicated" X mbps. Consumer lines are advertised as "up to" X mbps. "Up to" does not mean "essentially always." If I see the Microsoft Store is having a sale of "up to $400 off on Surface Pros," I don't expect a $400 discount on "essentially all" the models--I know it's the high water mark. Compare to how other over-subscribed systems are advertised. To pick a random example: https://www.serverhub.com/vps/ssd-cached https://www.serverhub.com/vps/ssd-cached. VPS servers are typically advertised as "4 cores." Are VPS providers ripping people off because you can't expect a $20/month VPS to get you 4 cores of throughput "essentially always?"

dboreham 9y ago

> How is it impossible for an ISP to guarantee bandwidth within their own network It isn't impossible, just too costly to the typical residential customer who expects to pay <<$100/mo.