Vonage Hits ISP Resistance

Thu Mar 31 15:56:52 UTC 2005

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:

> Korea Telecom recently decided to scrap its flat rate high speed [1]
> broadband offering and move to a traffic based charging plan - must be
> because most korean broadband gets used for online gaming, which is as
> high bandwidth use an app as you can get ... and they're hit by the
> same situation, which does start to bite when a few users start maxing
> out their pipes, and really begins to hurt when "few" suddenly becomes
> "most"

Actually, gaming usually isn't a high bandwidth app, it's merely sensitive 
to latency. The flows are longer, and I'd imagine with Korea's gaming 
addiction, highly numerous, but really only large when taken in volume. 
Now, downloading large patches or entire games.. that's another story, of 
course.

This is one of the problems things like BitTorrent is designed to tackle. 
A time-lapse flow matrix demonstrating the effects of BitTorrent on egress 
traffic would be an interesting project.

- billn