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:( sorry. Let me try again. When we talk about wireless bandwidth, there is a big problem with congestion. When we talk about residential bandwidth, congestio

:( 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...

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...