BitTorrent swarms have a deadly bite on broadband nets

Leo Bicknell bicknell at ufp.org
Tue Oct 23 16:05:13 UTC 2007


In a message written on Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 10:34:00AM -0400, Joe Provo wrote:
> While I expect end-users to miss the boat that providers use stat-mux 
> calculations to build and price their networks, I'm floored to see the
> sentiment on NANOG.  No edge provider of geographic scope/scale will 
> survive if 1:1 ratios were built and priced accordingly. Perhaps the
> M&A colonialism era is coming to a close and smaller, regional nation-
> states... erm last-mile providers will be the entities to grow with
> satisfied customers?

I'm not sure NANOGers are missing the boat, just bemoaning the
economics of the situation and some companies choices.

As an example, if I believe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS (as I'm
no cable export):

DOCSIS 1.x, 10.24Mbps upstream.  With this providers regularly offered
            384-768k upload speeds to customers.

DOCSIS 3.0, 122Mbps upstream.  That's about 12x.  Applying the 12x to
            the original upload speed that's 4.6-9.2Mbps upload speed
            per user.

And yet, today most of the major national providers don't over more
than 1Mbps of upload speed in their fastest packages.

Perhaps the real issue here is that broadband providers don't have
enough diversity in their products.  Picking on an unnamed cable
provider and looking at their web site I can get:

   4M down, 384k up.  $39.
   6M down, 768k up.  $49.
   8M down, 768k up.  $59.

That's their entire portfolio of residential services.  How about
a $99 package with 10M down, 3M up?  How about $5 per meg download,
$20 per meg upload, pick any combination of speeds you want where
both are under 20Mbps?

And why-o-why are they still giving me modems?  Is not the stack
of 5 that I already have enough waste?  How much of my service
charge goes to replacing equipment over and over because it's "how
they work".  (For instance I moved, and got a new modem with the
new install, same make and model as the old modem, which they didn't
want back.)

So, while NANOGers may float the idea of 1:1, what I think really honks
them off is that the current standard (4M down, 384k up) is 1:10, and I
think they feel it's time it became more like 1:4 (4M down, 1M up), and
that seems to be completely within reach of the technology.  Which
leaves the only thing holding it up being big company management and
marketing.

I will point out, one of the smaller providers on the Wikipedia page
under US, CableVision, is said to have 30Mbps down 5Mbps up.  That's
1:6, at a heck of a lot higher speeds.  I think most people here would
be quite happy with that offering.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request at tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
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