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Why should I not be allowed to saturate my connection? What difference does it make how I am doing that? I am paying for a connection; if I can only use it in

Why should I not be allowed to saturate my connection? What difference does it make how I am doing that? I am paying for a connection; if I can only use it in bursts, don't advertise it as "gigabit," advertise it as "gigabit for a few moments at a time." The Internet is not a network where some nodes have different capabilities from others, or at least it was not supposed to be. This is not some ITU standard that favors large monopolies on communications service. All nodes have the same capabilities on the Internet, as far as sending and receiving packets to other nodes is concerned. TCP does not discriminate between "business" and "personal" computers. This, of course, is what makes the Internet such a fantastic system and the reason that the Internet overtook all those online services we used to use. I doubt that Google could have gotten started if the Internet were designed any other way.

nemothekid 13y ago
>All nodes have the same capabilities on the Internet, as far as sending and receiving packets to other nodes is concerned. This is clearly untrue. Just look at DOCSIS (Cable Internet). If everyone on your block is streaming netflix at the same time you all suffer, which is why some people complain about speed during peak hours. This is simply the case that the architecture being laid out to consumer is designed for specific use cases.
- betterunix 13y ago
  None of that has anything to do with the capabilities of Internet connected computers. Regardless of your connection speed or latency, you can communicate with any other computer that is connected to the Internet. That was the vision and thankfully it remains the reality of the Internet (despite the increasing threat).
  - nemothekid 13y ago
    It has everything to do with the capabilities of Internet connected computers. Your previous post asked why you couldn't saturate your connection. While we would all like to believe every node on the internet is equal, there are physical engineering limits and cost constraints we have to adhere to. Simply put, the economics simply don't make sense to give everyone in the neighborhood the ability for 24/7 1Gbps. It doesn't make sense because your grandma, won't max the connection 24/7, however she would still like for her Netflix movies to download quickly. So its been decided upon that ISP-x will only put $10 million rather than $20 million so that everyone can enjoy 1Gbps internet, just not 24/7 and all at the same time. If you do need this type of connection, then get a business class connection where you do have these guarantees, and the extra money you pay goes into making sure the infrastructure can meet your demands. However, at the end of the day it doesn't make sense to charge everyone more, for the needs of what must be 1% of the population. Remember for the most part this isn't used to stop you from SSHing into your home computer. This is stop people from using the connection in a perverse way from how it was designed. Its a simple engineering tradeoff.
- dpe82 13y ago
  If everyone on your block (and the rest of your ISP) is streaming Netflix at the same time it's more likely to be slow either because your ISP has effectively capped Netflix traffic upstream by not adding more peering connections [0] and/or is not taking advantage of Netflix' freely provided cache[1] system. 0. http://gigaom.com/2013/06/17/having-problems-with-your-netflix-you-can-blame-verizon/ http://gigaom.com/2013/06/17/having-problems-with-your-netfl... 1. https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect
  - nemothekid 13y ago
    It was an example, Netflix and the people who play well with YouTube do extensive work to make sure their videos stream quickly.
baddox 13y ago
I realize that this may be an attractive principle to adhere to, but I suspect you would not like the results in practice. Most likely, the only thing an average household would be able to afford is an incredibly small amount of bandwidth that can be fully saturated at all time. Of course, most people use the Internet in huge spikes throughout the day, so this would mean most bandwidth would still go unused, and during a person's peak usage it would be extremely slow.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  >Of course, most people use the Internet in huge spikes throughout the day, so this would mean most bandwidth would still go unused, and during a person's peak usage it would be extremely slow. This is exactly why it wouldn't be very expensive. Because almost nobody is actually going to use 324TB/month, so if some small minority does, it raises the average monthly bill by some small number of pennies. Conversely, if it turns out that large numbers of people are experiencing an unexpected pent up demand for massive amounts of bandwidth, prices go up until supply and demand meet, which is how the market is supposed to work. And nothing stops the person who only wants email while 50% of the other users want to participate in some kind of P2P holographic video chat system from subscribing to the 10Mbps package rather than the 1000Mbps package and paying correspondingly less.
  - baddox 13y ago
    > This is exactly why it wouldn't be very expensive. Because almost nobody is actually going to use 324TB/month, so if some small minority does, it raises the average monthly bill by some small number of pennies. Conversely, if it turns out that large numbers of people are experiencing an unexpected pent up demand for massive amounts of bandwidth, prices go up until supply and demand meet, which is how the market is supposed to work. But then you have monthly payments which vary, potentially wildly. I can move into your neighborhood and probably triple your bill within a month. This is bad for the vast majority of users. The demand for it would almost certainly be very low. Virtually nobody is going to want to share the bandwidth costs with their neighbors and virtually nobody is going to want 24/7 throughouts of any speed. And speaking of markets, what about the demand for low-cost, high-burst but transfer-limited connections? I would guess that to be the product in the highest demand, based both on average non-tech-savvy users, and even bigger users like myself. And, lo and behold, that's what the vast majority of home Internet plans are (all the ones I've heard of). Note that I'm not suggesting that we truly have anything like a free market when it comes to telecoms, but in this case, I feel like supply is meeting demand quite well.
johngalt 13y ago
I don't think you have an accurate picture of how the nuts and bolts work for networking and the internet. You seem to think of your connection as (1Gbps -> Internet) when in reality there are several switches/routers in between you and your ending destination each with significantly less bandwidth than the total number of customers they serve. Bandwidth is oversold by an extremely large margin (rightly so). If you saturate your connection it has downstream effects that can degrade service for other users.

nemothekid 13y ago

>All nodes have the same capabilities on the Internet, as far as sending and receiving packets to other nodes is concerned. This is clearly untrue. Just look at DOCSIS (Cable Internet). If everyone on your block is streaming netflix at the same time you all suffer, which is why some people complain about speed during peak hours. This is simply the case that the architecture being laid out to consumer is designed for specific use cases.

betterunix 13y ago
None of that has anything to do with the capabilities of Internet connected computers. Regardless of your connection speed or latency, you can communicate with any other computer that is connected to the Internet. That was the vision and thankfully it remains the reality of the Internet (despite the increasing threat).
- nemothekid 13y ago
  It has everything to do with the capabilities of Internet connected computers. Your previous post asked why you couldn't saturate your connection. While we would all like to believe every node on the internet is equal, there are physical engineering limits and cost constraints we have to adhere to. Simply put, the economics simply don't make sense to give everyone in the neighborhood the ability for 24/7 1Gbps. It doesn't make sense because your grandma, won't max the connection 24/7, however she would still like for her Netflix movies to download quickly. So its been decided upon that ISP-x will only put $10 million rather than $20 million so that everyone can enjoy 1Gbps internet, just not 24/7 and all at the same time. If you do need this type of connection, then get a business class connection where you do have these guarantees, and the extra money you pay goes into making sure the infrastructure can meet your demands. However, at the end of the day it doesn't make sense to charge everyone more, for the needs of what must be 1% of the population. Remember for the most part this isn't used to stop you from SSHing into your home computer. This is stop people from using the connection in a perverse way from how it was designed. Its a simple engineering tradeoff.
dpe82 13y ago
If everyone on your block (and the rest of your ISP) is streaming Netflix at the same time it's more likely to be slow either because your ISP has effectively capped Netflix traffic upstream by not adding more peering connections [0] and/or is not taking advantage of Netflix' freely provided cache[1] system. 0. http://gigaom.com/2013/06/17/having-problems-with-your-netflix-you-can-blame-verizon/ http://gigaom.com/2013/06/17/having-problems-with-your-netfl... 1. https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect
- nemothekid 13y ago
  It was an example, Netflix and the people who play well with YouTube do extensive work to make sure their videos stream quickly.

baddox 13y ago

I realize that this may be an attractive principle to adhere to, but I suspect you would not like the results in practice. Most likely, the only thing an average household would be able to afford is an incredibly small amount of bandwidth that can be fully saturated at all time. Of course, most people use the Internet in huge spikes throughout the day, so this would mean most bandwidth would still go unused, and during a person's peak usage it would be extremely slow.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
>Of course, most people use the Internet in huge spikes throughout the day, so this would mean most bandwidth would still go unused, and during a person's peak usage it would be extremely slow. This is exactly why it wouldn't be very expensive. Because almost nobody is actually going to use 324TB/month, so if some small minority does, it raises the average monthly bill by some small number of pennies. Conversely, if it turns out that large numbers of people are experiencing an unexpected pent up demand for massive amounts of bandwidth, prices go up until supply and demand meet, which is how the market is supposed to work. And nothing stops the person who only wants email while 50% of the other users want to participate in some kind of P2P holographic video chat system from subscribing to the 10Mbps package rather than the 1000Mbps package and paying correspondingly less.
- baddox 13y ago
  > This is exactly why it wouldn't be very expensive. Because almost nobody is actually going to use 324TB/month, so if some small minority does, it raises the average monthly bill by some small number of pennies. Conversely, if it turns out that large numbers of people are experiencing an unexpected pent up demand for massive amounts of bandwidth, prices go up until supply and demand meet, which is how the market is supposed to work. But then you have monthly payments which vary, potentially wildly. I can move into your neighborhood and probably triple your bill within a month. This is bad for the vast majority of users. The demand for it would almost certainly be very low. Virtually nobody is going to want to share the bandwidth costs with their neighbors and virtually nobody is going to want 24/7 throughouts of any speed. And speaking of markets, what about the demand for low-cost, high-burst but transfer-limited connections? I would guess that to be the product in the highest demand, based both on average non-tech-savvy users, and even bigger users like myself. And, lo and behold, that's what the vast majority of home Internet plans are (all the ones I've heard of). Note that I'm not suggesting that we truly have anything like a free market when it comes to telecoms, but in this case, I feel like supply is meeting demand quite well.

johngalt 13y ago

I don't think you have an accurate picture of how the nuts and bolts work for networking and the internet. You seem to think of your connection as (1Gbps -> Internet) when in reality there are several switches/routers in between you and your ending destination each with significantly less bandwidth than the total number of customers they serve. Bandwidth is oversold by an extremely large margin (rightly so). If you saturate your connection it has downstream effects that can degrade service for other users.