NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: nnsquad Digest, Vol 3, Issue 223
The only thing worse than Telco mentality is self righteous activists who conflate "up to" with "at least" and/or grossly exaggerate how bad it is by falsely claiming that the delivered speeds are less than half of what's promised. What is needed is a rational debate (http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/09/the-need-for-a-broadband-transparency -standard/) that tries to highlight the issues and solve the problem rather than try to demonize people. " And if you have many users at the office using the same 500kbps upstream, that latency goes up dramatically and the ability to use the 3Mbps downstream is severely limited. This is a major reason that a 1.5Mbps T1 link can handle a lot more simultaneous users. A T1 link is 1.5Mbps symmetrical." That's not how networks work and you're confusing latency with congestion induced jitter. You can almost flood the upstream and still be able to download very quickly. I do this every week with P2P and so long as you leave just a little bit of upstream capacity to allow the TCP ACKs to get through, the downstream will flow very quickly because the TCP window will eventually get wide open. A T1 line will definitely not permit more typical simultaneous users than a 3 Mbps DSL connection unless you have users that all want to upload which is very unusual. A T1 line definitely has much lower contention ratios and minimum speeds, but the typical DSL or Cable broadband connection will almost always be much faster than a T1 even though the theoretical minimum capacity is MUCH lower. You can also fill the downstream with 15 Mbps of isochronous IPTV traffic and produce almost zero measurable jitter (yes I've run the experiment), yet filling the downstream with 3 Mbps of P2P traffic or filling the upstream with 0.1 Mbps of P2P traffic can induce horrible jitter in the range of " Why is it not assumed that most businesses would have a fiber link?" Why assume? Have you ever asked most businesses if they want a fiber link. I've dealt with businesses as an IT guy most of this decade, and I can tell you that the vast majority of them don't want it for the office. If they need to host content and applications, they'll put a server in a colo or they'll least something in the cloud. They don't want YouTube in their offices. They might want 1.5 Mbps of upstream capacity for occasional 720P video conferences, but for the most part they aren't asking for more than a T1 line for their business users. The larger offices may have a fractional T3 or a full T3, but that's probably 45 Mbps shared between 1000 employees and all the servers, and even that is typically 80% idle in my experience. "The US is doomed to be the first country in modern times to go from being the leading "1st World" country to a "3rd World" country due to political / economic corruption of the means of communications." And this is the type of hyperbole that really isn't very helpful. There are all these studies that compare small individual European countries to the entire US showing the US trailing a bit, but if you compared US to the EC, the US actually leads. So you know what they say about statistics. George