Online games stealing your bandwidth

Tue Sep 28 20:20:00 UTC 2010

On 9/28/2010 2:22 PM, manolo hernandez wrote:
> What is keeping your company from buying more bandwidth? I find the
> excuse of over subscription to be a fail. If that's your companies
> business model then it should not be whining when people are using what
> you sell them. Provision bandwidth accordingly and stop being cheap and
> squeezing every last dime from the end user for bandwidth that can be
> had for less than the price of a burger in some places.
>

You replied to him but under my quoted text, so I'm not sure who you 
were referring to. However, my company has issues in buying long haul. 
Bandwidth is cheap, yes. Getting a circuit is not. Currently I have 1 
option for a 10Gig circuit if I needed it today. That's not very 
redundant. It took 6 months to get facility upgrades by a large NSP to 
give me 1gig-e in OKC from DFW (very few NSPs have routers or high speed 
facilities in Oklahoma and even fewer in OKC. Tulsa has a few extra 
options). I'm still waiting on what looks like it'll be 1 year+ for a 
gig-e from another NSP. Going to remote ILEC towns, there's shortages of 
long haul facilities (in some areas, a single OC-12 sonet run is all 
that exists and it's dropped off in 3-5 places to various other 
companies on the way to the ILEC, and the fiber dwindles to 6 meaning 
primary pair, secondary pair, and backup dark pair is all that exists). 
The cost to bore new fiber and light it is extremely prohibitive.

We actually have no problems with people using what we sell, and we 
still have nice oversell margins which makes up our profit (0% oversell 
would be roughly break even). Many of our problems aren't with users 
using their bandwidth, but with applications screwing with the user's 
bandwidth (against the user's will). Someone linked bittorrent's work on 
latency based fallback for congestion control. I think that is an 
awesome piece of work. However, not all p2p applications do this, and 
some even install and work in the background without customers knowing. 
This gives the perception to the customer that things are slow and not 
working right. We care what our customer's think, so we absolutely hate 
such products as we can see the bandwidth usage itself, but helping a 
computer illiterate customer fix the problem without them spending money 
at a computer tech is difficult at best.

Jack