[95254] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: [funsec] Not so fast, broadband providers tell big users (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Sprunk)
Tue Mar 13 13:18:19 2007
From: "Stephen Sprunk" <stephen@sprunk.org>
To: "Jack Bates" <jbates@brightok.net>,
"Jeff Shultz" <jeffshultz@wvi.com>
Cc: "North American Noise and Off-topic Gripes" <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:02:37 -0500
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Thus spake "Jack Bates" <jbates@brightok.net>
> I would like to blame the idiots that decided that of the signal range
> to be used on copper for dsl, only a certain amount would be
> dedicated to upload instead of negotiating. What on earth do I
> want to do with 24Mb down and 1Mb up? Can't I have 12 and 12?
> Someone please tell me there's a valid reason why the download
> range couldn't be variable and negotiated and that's it's completely
> impossible for one to have 20Mb up and 1.5 Mb down.
That's ADSL. I have 25+25 VDSL at home. My ISP frowns on "excessive"
uploading, though, but they were kind enough to tell me what "excessive"
means and I happily capped my uploads at that rate. Everyone wins.
So why has Ma Bell chosen to only use ADSL for consumers? Economics. Their
model of having business customers subsidize residential customers relies on
having at least one end of every conversation be a business customer. When
both ends are residential, as in P2P, there's nobody to pay the bills and
keep them afloat. That's also where the net neutrality and peering disputes
come from; you only care about people using your pipes "for free" when your
customers aren't paying the true cost to get bits to/from the peering point.
By limiting residential upload speeds, they make it difficult to source
content and thus keep their subsidy model on life support.
At least the cablecos have a decent excuse for bad upload speeds; shared
bandwidth is bad enough, but in addition 1000 nodes transmitting to 1 node
is much tougher electrically than 1 node transmitting to 1000 nodes. Sooner
or later, they're going to have to start shrinking cell sizes and/or
allocating a heck of a lot more channels to data to keep up with demand.
S
Stephen Sprunk "Those people who think they know everything
CCIE #3723 are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
K5SSS --Isaac Asimov
