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> What if, when you were up at a ridiculous hour Skyping your relatives in Australia, you could borrow unused bandwidth from your sleeping neighbors to make you
by chimeracoder 13y ago
> What if, when you were up at a ridiculous hour Skyping your relatives in Australia, you could borrow unused bandwidth from your sleeping neighbors to make your own broadband connection faster and stronger?
Maybe this makes sense if you're lucky enough to have FiOS (which gives you a dedicated line). For me (a Time Warner customer), this is already the case. Except, it's not "borrowing" so much as it is "stealing".
Technically, I should have 2.5MB/s down (20Mb/s is what I pay for), but in reality, I'm often lucky to get 1MB/s, because my neighbors are using the Internet and watching Netflix, etc. And I have never observed more than 2.5MB/s, so it doesn't average out.
Theoretically, this should already be illegal, but it's still very common in practice.
For this inconsistent connection (and no other services!), I am forced to pay over $50/month.
Edit: Updated - I pay for 20Mb/s, not 15Mb/s.
- sliverstorm 13y agoYour neighbors aren't stealing from you, your ISP over allocated your trunk.
- mrkickling 13y ago15Mb/s=1.875MB/s.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- vr000m 13y agoGet one of samknows boxes[1] to measure your broadband. It is like a bandwidth test but mainly measures when you are not using your home network, i.e., it senses for traffic before making measurements. You'll be able to see a historic graph of the available bandwidth, average RTT (to some popular sites) and losses (if any), DNS response times, etc. They run some of the above tests once every hour. The good thing with this initiative is it attempts to build an IETF standard [2] that can be incorporated by all ISPs to make sure that their deployed network is performant. [1] http://www.samknows.com/broadband/ http://www.samknows.com/broadband/ [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/lmap/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/lmap/
- tssva 13y agoFiOS doesn't give you a dedicated line. FiOS uses one wavelength to transmit downstream traffic. All subscribers on a segment (up to 32 or 64) receive all downstream traffic. Your ONU discards the traffic not intended for you. The headend limits the amount of traffic destined for your ONU according to your rate plan. All subscribers on a segment share another wavelength for sending traffic. TDMA is used on the upstream. The number of slots assigned to your ONU varies depending upon your rate plan. Also dynamic bandwidth allocation can be used to adjust the number of slots assigned to an ONU based upon the traffic being sent by the ONU. FiOS uses dynamic bandwidth allocation to enable oversubscription on a segment; therefore, FiOS spends can be impacted by the usage of your neighbors just as cable can be.
- wmf 13y agoRealistically, 2.488 Gbps shared by 32-64 customers is pretty damn good; it's a bare minimum of 38 Mbps/customer. That's like having your own DOCSIS 1.0 channel.
- girvo 13y agoI have no idea what my entire connection is supposed to be, but my cable connection here in Aus pulls down 75Mb/s at peak times. I pay $90/m for that and home phone. The more I research what everyone else has, the more I realise how lucky I am to live where I do :/