[134013] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rettke, Brian)
Tue Dec 21 14:32:13 2010
From: "Rettke, Brian" <Brian.Rettke@cableone.biz>
To: Lamar Owen <lowen@pari.edu>, "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 12:31:27 -0700
In-Reply-To: <201012211333.47912.lowen@pari.edu>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
--"Congestion =3D=3D oversubscribed. I would love to see a public posting =
or notice or something on my ISP's website showing current flows and conges=
tion (the Cacti driven Network Weathermap is one such tool I've seen networ=
ks use; one of my providers used to have one publicly available, and it was=
very useful). Would make it much easier to make informed decisions on my =
part.
But this CMTS subscriber wanting to do medium-low bandwidth H.323 never had=
trouble seeing our stream to him; that was the funny thing. It was always=
the return stream from him to us that broke up. And it didn't act like co=
ngestion; it acted like some sort of filter in place that would only allow =
the full upstream briefly, and then would die for some period of time, and =
then would allow another burst of traffic. (I've received one private repl=
y mentioning a possible technology to do this....)
Many if not virtually all residential broadband subscribers are under the i=
mpression that they really get the full use of the advertised bandwidth; it=
is a shock to most when they learn about oversubscription practices and Qo=
S congestion management."---
I'm not sure you can speak for the majority of all subscribers, but=
it's fair to assume that people who are not used to "checking under the ho=
od" before making a purchase are of that mind. And congestion does mean ove=
rsubscribed, but that's a rather narrow argument. You are buying a shared s=
ervice, which never guarantees full use of anything. The reason that you pa=
y ~$100 instead of 5-10 times that amount is that you are buying a time sha=
re. You do not own or lease any part of your connection. It is the adverti=
sing and marketing of such things that generally leaves the consumer cluele=
ss unless they do their own research.
Being that this is NANOG, and the expectation is that this communit=
y is the cognoscenti, I'd say we can dispense with the marketing. If you us=
e a cable modem or DSL service, your expected use is entertainment. Dependi=
ng upon your neighborhood, and the amount of people that latch onto a trend=
, you will see oversubscription, because no one ever builds supply that wil=
l far exceed demand in an instantaneous manner.
If you expect your service to not be oversubscribed, you need to dr=
op your modem for a leased line service. The SLA guarantees you get what yo=
u pay for. If the contrary argument is that you pay enough for your service=
, we need to define the costs of implementing your end-to-end service, and =
the difference between that and what you pay.
