Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Mon Mar 2 18:42:48 UTC 2015

Naslund, Steve wrote:
>> Average != Peak.
>>
> What is peak?  There is a question for you. If we get all the way down to the fundamentals of any network, peak is always 100%.  There is either a bit on the wire or not.  Your network is either 100% busy or 100% idle at any instantaneous moment in time.  What matters is average transfer rate to the user experience and even that varies a lot depending on the app in question and how that app tolerates things like jitter, loss, and latency.

That's simply wrong - at least for folks who do any work related stuff 
at home.

Consider:  I've just edited a large sales presentation - say a PPT deck 
with some embedded video, totaling maybe 250MB (2gbit) - and I want to 
upload that to the company server.  And let's say I want to do that 5 
times during 12 hour day (it's crunch time, we're doing lots of edits).

On average, we're talking 20gbit/12 hours, or a shade under 500kbps, if 
we're talking averages.  On the other hand, if I try to push a 2gbit 
file through a 500kbps pipe, it's going to take 4000 seconds (67 
minutes) -- that's rather painful, and inserts a LOT of delay in the 
process of getting reviews, comments, and doing the next round of edits.

On the other hand, at 50mbps it takes only 40 seconds - annoying, but 
acceptable,
and at a gig, it only takes 2 seconds.

So, tell me, with a straight face, that "what matters is average 
transfer rate to the user experience."

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra