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I don't think it's the Sum total of all data. I think the problem is that the last mile access is prohibitively expensive. Glass connections in a datacenter ar

I don't think it's the Sum total of all data. I think the problem is that the last mile access is prohibitively expensive. Glass connections in a datacenter are $.10 per megabit, but AT&T DSL over copper to your house is $30 for 1.5 megabits. That copper could become glass, but no one will pay for that upgrade. The distribution problem is that in order to compete with at&t at the residential level, you have to build a parallel connection and the cost of doing so is prohibitively large. Therefore, everyone is forced to rent access from AT&T, BUT since common carriage doesn't apply to residential access lines, AT&T doesn't have to share. If sonic.net could build glass to your house, they would, and they wouldn't ever complain of congestion, but because of artificial barriers to entry no new competitors can enter the market. Does that make sense? I'm not trying to be evasive, it's just a complicated problem. Carriers don't have a problem dealing with aggregate capacity, they have a problem dealing with edge access capacity. Core carrier routers like the CRS-3 from Cisco can move 322tbps+, and they do, but you can't put a CRS-3 in every DSLAM.

SilasX 14y ago
It doesn't make sense, because I asked specific questions, and you seem to focus more on showing off your vocabulary than answering them. Let me rephrase: Forget for a moment about technology/capital upgrades, and assume that the ISP wants to give everyone as much speed as possible. The customers collectively try to download as much as they can, as fast as they can. Naturally, they'll hit a limit. At what point does the limit affect their usage, and how can the ISP fiddle with access so as to discourage overuse? And why is my solution not one possible method (if suboptimal)?
- josh2600 14y ago
  :( sorry. Let me try again. When we talk about wireless bandwidth, there is a big problem with congestion. When we talk about residential bandwidth, congestion isn't the issue so much as competitive access is. It's not that AT&T and Comcast have the best access, they just got there first and are able to block other competitors. Throttling will make the ISPs more money, but it doesn't help consumers or solve this problem. I think this might be explicitly what you're looking for: At the pricing and access tiers available today it is virtually impossible to saturate and block a local connection (at the residential level) such that you impact other subscribers at a regional level. Throttling doesn't solve this problem it just reduces usage. ISPs have the overall goal of reducing usage because it increases profit. The logical fallacy is that while your model proposes an ISP that would want to give everyone as much as speed as possible, the reality is that all ISPs want users to use as little bandwidth as possible. Does that help? Really I'm not trying to show off my vocabulary it's just a complex subject :(.
  - xyzzy123 14y ago
    Well, sort of. Depends on what country you are in, too. In AU/NZ at least (and I am simplifying) you have the last mile, the trunks between exchanges, the handover points between big exchanges and ISP POPs, and finally you have the ISP upstreams - any of which might be a bottleneck if sufficient traffic is generated. In AU/NZ (and much of the rest of the world) you have local peering exchanges etc, but ISPs also have this cost for "upstream", which is money they have to pay to their friendly international cable monopoly to get bits from faraway places. These backhaul links are not normally configured to handle all users running at full rate. That would be expensive, and silly. In the fixed line world, you might observe "congestion", but it the root cause is usually "oversubscription". Everyone oversubscribes backhaul and upstream, the question is how much you can get away with. The reward for guessing lower than your competitors is lower costs (or being able to defer an upgrade cycle). The penalty for guessing way too low is churn. I say "guess" because even though telcos tend to have good models of user behaviour, user behaviour can change very quickly (from a telco's POV) when new services come on line. Such as online video...

SilasX 14y ago

It doesn't make sense, because I asked specific questions, and you seem to focus more on showing off your vocabulary than answering them. Let me rephrase: Forget for a moment about technology/capital upgrades, and assume that the ISP wants to give everyone as much speed as possible. The customers collectively try to download as much as they can, as fast as they can. Naturally, they'll hit a limit. At what point does the limit affect their usage, and how can the ISP fiddle with access so as to discourage overuse? And why is my solution not one possible method (if suboptimal)?

josh2600 14y ago
:( sorry. Let me try again. When we talk about wireless bandwidth, there is a big problem with congestion. When we talk about residential bandwidth, congestion isn't the issue so much as competitive access is. It's not that AT&T and Comcast have the best access, they just got there first and are able to block other competitors. Throttling will make the ISPs more money, but it doesn't help consumers or solve this problem. I think this might be explicitly what you're looking for: At the pricing and access tiers available today it is virtually impossible to saturate and block a local connection (at the residential level) such that you impact other subscribers at a regional level. Throttling doesn't solve this problem it just reduces usage. ISPs have the overall goal of reducing usage because it increases profit. The logical fallacy is that while your model proposes an ISP that would want to give everyone as much as speed as possible, the reality is that all ISPs want users to use as little bandwidth as possible. Does that help? Really I'm not trying to show off my vocabulary it's just a complex subject :(.
- xyzzy123 14y ago
  Well, sort of. Depends on what country you are in, too. In AU/NZ at least (and I am simplifying) you have the last mile, the trunks between exchanges, the handover points between big exchanges and ISP POPs, and finally you have the ISP upstreams - any of which might be a bottleneck if sufficient traffic is generated. In AU/NZ (and much of the rest of the world) you have local peering exchanges etc, but ISPs also have this cost for "upstream", which is money they have to pay to their friendly international cable monopoly to get bits from faraway places. These backhaul links are not normally configured to handle all users running at full rate. That would be expensive, and silly. In the fixed line world, you might observe "congestion", but it the root cause is usually "oversubscription". Everyone oversubscribes backhaul and upstream, the question is how much you can get away with. The reward for guessing lower than your competitors is lower costs (or being able to defer an upgrade cycle). The penalty for guessing way too low is churn. I say "guess" because even though telcos tend to have good models of user behaviour, user behaviour can change very quickly (from a telco's POV) when new services come on line. Such as online video...