utility capacity, was Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Sat Feb 28 16:54:20 UTC 2015

Selling 1 gig symmetric service to more than one person on GPON is definitely oversubscription. I'm completely fine with it, but the fiber\Google zealots think nothing could ever go wrong and they have the world by the [NSFW]. 

----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Mel Beckman" <mel at beckman.org> 
To: "John Levine" <johnl at iecc.com> 
Cc: nanog at nanog.org 
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2015 5:44:02 PM 
Subject: Re: utility capacity, was Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality 

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 