[ NNSquad ] Re: Do the Happy Dance people...

[Kriss Andsten <kriss@proceranetworks.com>]

On 1 sep 2008, at 12.19, George Ou wrote:

> You just made the same fundamental mistake again.  Comcast does not
> advertise nor do they have in their contract the word "unlimited".

You pay a flat fee. Previously they didn't have any tangible  
restrictions in place. Now they do, but the limit is set pretty high  
so it won't affect the majority of the customers. It doesn't really  
matter much whether or not the word 'Unlimited' is mentioned  
explicitly as far as I'm concerned, but feel free to point out the  
fundamental issue in case I missed it. (People who get hinged on words  
might think otherwise - I'm absolutely uninterested in going down that  
particular path myself)

> Your other fundamental mistake is that you compare packets to people.

'Active subscribers' is a *very* relevant metric when planning network  
capacity. For a normal commercial wireline ISP, "active  
subscriber" (i.e where the host is hauling meaningful amounts of data  
in either direction) generally translates to one or more physical  
persons doing something in front of the machine. You'd be surprised at  
how many people actually sleep or shut off their computers when  
they're not using them.

Sure, that rule-of-thumb is becoming less true the more automated  
agents - or clones hauling bits of a DVD in my analogy - you see out  
there, BT being a prime example. In terms of traffic, the very few  
users (relatively speaking) doing heavy P2P are extremely far off the  
median user. Granted, if you stream video en masse, you chew bandwidth  
too - but not nearly to the same extent as a heavy P2P'er. Thus, a  
number of clones hogging seats on the bus.

Feel free to drag up any number of examples where it's perfectly valid  
and legit to run apps talking a lot to the net when you're not  
actively using the computer and I'll be the first one to agree. But  
this really isn't about your backup jobs, your iTunes video store  
account downloading stuff or your hobby shell/web server - at the end  
of the day, heavy P2P is what's causing headaches. This might not be  
the case tomorow, but today, it is.

> There's only one of you traveling around on an unlimited ticket and  
> you can
> only be using the system 24 hours a day 30 days a month.  Not so with
> packets as you can generate an unlimited number of packets.

Hence, they introduced a limit to discourage and/or get rid of the  
heavy P2P'ers, whacking them way closer to the users who mostly use  
bandwidth when they sit in front of the machine.

I don't think there's anything more nefarious involved here to be  
honest. They've got a bus service where seats were getting hogged to a  
high enough extent for it to be a problem. The new DOCSIS 3 buses are  
already on order and being delivered, which will alleviate the problem  
for Comcast in more than one way. That said, bandwidth usage per  
subscriber will grow and the active subscriber count at peak will grow  
so I wouldn't be at all surprised for them to play it safe and keep  
the 250 GB limit for a while even if they upgrade their capacity -  
especially if their median user is at 2-3 GB/mo today.


> George Ou

Kriss
http://www.shortpacket.org/