4 ms·
Demanding that a home ISP be able to satiate torrent junkies who peg their line 24/7 is not reasonable. That's like half the membership of a gym showing up on t
by supertrope 4y ago
Demanding that a home ISP be able to satiate torrent junkies who peg their line 24/7 is not reasonable. That's like half the membership of a gym showing up on the same day and expecting that there be machines available without any delay. Or everyone withdrawing their savings from a bank at the same time without any issues. Or someone claiming on their home insurance every year. Consumer Internet access is shared. If ISPs had to guarantee 100% of line rate they would have to lower the advertised speeds or raise prices to MPLS/DIA prices ($$$ instead of $$).
This is a separate argument from whether some ISPs abuse their monopoly or duopoly position to convert consumer surplus into economic rent.
- Retric 4y agoIf you do 1:30th oversubscription the a monthly data cap of 1/30th of your hypothetical bandwidth is fine. That’s easily enough to catch torrent junkies and your network is likely only congested for a small fraction of the day. However, a bandwidth cap of 1/10,000th or less the hypothetical monthly cap has got nothing to do with how congested your network is.
- supertrope 4y agoIsn't 30:1 over-subscription extremely aggressive? ISPs used to use 10:1 but Netflix after dinner became popular and now ratios like 3-5:1 are more typical.
- Retric 4y agoDepends on speeds. People will peg a DSL line for hours watching video, but the vast majority of households don’t download more jumping from 200 Mbps to 1,000 Mbps.
- viraptor 4y agoNetflix pretty much solved that by colocating their caches at the ISPs. Netflix itself shouldn't be an issue for any reasonable size ISP these days. Edit: Just realised after writing this that it may actually be an issue for starlink - they're in a different position here. I wonder if satellite links will force multicast of some sort to make a return for customers.
- bombcar 4y agoNow I’m imaging satellites with Netflix caches shoved in them. (I wonder if Netflix is even a majority of streaming anymore)
- bombcar 4y agoAs speeds get higher oversubscription gets higher too, just from a practical standpoint. They dropped 1Gb/s fiber to the entire town and I doubt we have multiple terabits of uplink.