Symmetry, DSL, and all that

Mon Mar 2 20:14:04 UTC 2015

On Mon, Mar 02, 2015 at 02:41:30PM -0500, Fletcher Kittredge wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 2:21 PM, Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:
> 
> > The most important point is yes, that no one cares. If people wanted it,
> > it would be sold to them. End. of. story.
> 
> 
> I will repeat myself, speaking very slowly. Please see original message for
> citations.
> 
> Verizon has eight million FIOS customers. As of last year, Verizon decided
> it was worth it to supply all of those customers with symmetric speeds. So,
> by your reasoning, people wanted it, so it was sold to them.
> 
> Verizon is only one of many fiber-based ISPs selling symmetric speeds.

What Fletcher Wrote, in spades. 

I will wager that most residential customers have never heard of symmetric
speeds. I also will wager that they would like to be able to send large mail
faster, upload to Yahoo! and other web hosting services faster, and so on. I
know that *this* particular Cox Business customer would like faster uplink
speeds, and doesn't see 20 MBps in either direction on the best days; since
this is the threshold for "broadband" according to Uncle Charlie, Cox is not
providing me "broadband" service.

Before I got into this, I "owned" large to very large IBM mainframe computers.
There *always* was latent demand for bigger and faster, much the same way an
Interstate highway, on the day it is opened for service, is *always* over its
design capacity immediately, on the day it is opened. 

-- 
Mike Andrews, W5EGO
mikea at mikea.ath.cx
Tired old sysadmin 