utility capacity, was Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Fri Feb 27 23:44:02 UTC 2015

John,

That's an excellent point. Consider Google fiber, for example. And customer could theoretically demand a gigabit of traffic. Even Google admits that this doesn't scale and that they are highly oversubscribed.

 -mel beckman

On Feb 27, 2015, at 3:05 PM, "John Levine" <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:

>> Water, gas, and to a great extent electrical systems do not work on
>> oversubscription, ie their aggregate capacity meets or exceeds the needs of
>> all their customers peak potential demand, at least from "normal" demand
>> standpoint.
> 
> Hi, former municipal water and sewer commissioner here.  We size the
> system to meet likely demand, but not peak demand.  If it's a hot dry
> summer and everyone wants to water their lawn, or there's a big fire
> that's drawing a lot of water from hydrants, we can have capacity
> problems.  We deal with it by interrupting service to a few large
> customers, a car wash and a golf course.
> 
> But it's not really comparable to broadband service, because on the
> Internet, nearly every consumer end user device could easily saturate
> the entire network if it wanted to.  It's like every house having a
> 100,000 gallon toilet.  Better hope you don't have a lot of people
> flushing at once.
> 
> R's,
> John