RE: ADSL rant (was: Re: [SLUG] Telstra Cable Anouncement)

[John Wiltshire <jw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Jason Rennie [mailto:jwrennie@xxxxxxxxxxx]

>> This is based on the somewhat false assumption that all people are using
>> their full bandwidth all of the time.  Given that the average ISP has at
>> least 10 users per modem and at least 10 times the number of modems that
>> their external bandwidth can handle I think 20 people sharing a cable
>> segment (which can handle 33Mb) is a pretty fair amount.  If it got up to
>> about 100 I'd start to get a little worried.
>
>Not to rain on your parade or anthing, but for what it is worth, Optus has
>exactly this sort of a problem at the moment, with too many of there users
>trying to use all of the bandwidth at once and run it as fast as they can
>24/7.
>
>Cable is a rather different beast to a dial up modem, and the usage etc is
>more open to abuse (as optus has discovered), so i think your comaprision
>doesn't really work that well.

Are you sure Optus' problem is with the local loop, or with the total number
of customer saturating their external connection to the internet?  My
understanding was that people had no problem accessing local content, but
ran into problems accessing external information (not hosted with
Optus@Home).  Note also that I actually built in a factor of 10 in different
usage patterns with my analogy to dialup services.

Remember if the problem is not with the local loop but with the structure of
the network itself (as the problem with Big Pond at the moment is) then ADSL
will give no better performance than cable.  It's like saying it is better
to buy a switch over a hub for your internal network to improve the speed on
your dial up link.

John Wiltshire