cost of doing business

Mon Apr 18 15:33:37 UTC 2005

On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Joe Abley wrote:

>
>
> On 17 Apr 2005, at 13:54, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:
>
>> We are talking of two different things here, traffic versus access 
>> bandwidth.
>> It will be a while before the average household generates 5 megabit/s 
>> traffic.
>
> I don't think that's true. I have seen bittorrent clients running on machines 
> that have good connectivity (>>typical North American residential; say 100M 
> access to a data centre on the east coast). With only moderately-popular 
> torrents (think fan movies like fanimatrix or starship exeter, a week or so 
> after the slashdot effect has died down) such a client can easily seed at 
> 10-20Mbit/s.

Yes yes, it's of course technically possible. It's no problem to saturate 
a 100M either if you have a decent computer.

Still, if you take 10.000 random consumers with 10M/10M pipes you'll see 
that this population as a whole only has an average peak of a few hundred 
kilobits/s per user. A few percent will do 5-10M sustained a lot of the 
time, but a lot of them will be totally quiet most of the time.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se