Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Nikko
Am I the only one to think this is actually good news?
|
I think this is excelent news for NTL customers and for internet users in general in the UK. Well done NTL (even if does still look like a reactive strategy and not a proactive one)
Now where's the announcment from BT Wholesale?
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by towny
Cable broadband can provide speeds well in excess of 3 meg. However, without knowing the technical details of all this, I would imagine they would have to lower the contention ratio so that fewer subscribers are sharing the same chunk of bandwidth. If they did not, 3 meg users would fairly quickly notice they were not getting the bandwidth they have paid for.
I know that there are costs for ntl if they lower contention ratios, but someone else will have to explain how that works.
|
Actually the higher the bandwidth for end users the more contended they can be without any noticable effects. This is because in general people tend to do pretty much the same with more bandwidth as they did before with less (at least for an intial period of time). When the file/email/etc takes 100minutes to download that is 100minutes you are using your slice of the shared resource and thus blocking others. When that same download takes only 10 minutes your are blocking the shared resource for 1/10 of the time and thus more people can be 'loaded' onto that shared resource. That is why in dial up terms contention ratios of 10-15:1 were considered 'high' but with BB contetnion ratios of 20:1 and 50:1 are feasable.