Quote:
Originally Posted by Chrysalis
I will repeat what I said before isp's like BE and easynet who have their own heavy users dont have customers with 50+ ms jitter downloading at dialup speeds due to congestion, they properly provision capacity, even if it means they make a operational loss. Cant fault them for that.
125kbit per customer allocated? on their guidelines? too low in 2010.
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Not really, easily enough for most, the vast majority of service groups / nodes run just fine at this level of provision. Talk Talk and BT are running sub-30kbps. Talk Talk for example have over 4 million customers and use at peak about 100Gbit/s of bandwidth - 25kbps average per customer.
Be run at a loss in some cases due purely to having the largest telco in the world as a sugar daddy, prior to this they had congestion in various places on their network and are starting to show congestion again. Thanks to lighter O2 users the Be network is ok for a while, prior to this it was losing a ton of cash and had bandwidth problems. I can remember being on a group of nearly 30 exchanges that were all congested due to there not being enough bandwidth on the Be transport / core network.
Along with that oversupplying LLU backhaul is, in shorter term, simply cheaper than a node split and line card.
ISPs are businesses, they don't provision capacity if they think they'll make a loss on it longer term. Cost differential for Sky between 100Mbit, 1Gbit and 10Gbit is relatively small so as a general rule they took 1Gbit.
Check the price lists on
www.openreach.co.uk for more information on why the LLU price comparison isn't a valid one. Going from 100Mbit to 10Gbit isn't a 100-fold price increase
If, of course, you have some genuine data that shows that 125kbps / customer peak bandwidth isn't enough for Joe Average I'd welcome the correction. I think it can be taken as read that in some areas such as your stereotypical student areas it won't be enough due to usage patterns, 5 people sharing each CPE though only paying once, etc, though in those areas Virgin, ntl and Telewest's experience along with that of many other cable companies has shown that it just doesn't matter how much bandwidth you throw at the area it gets used up.
I can think of a VM area that was, 4 or 5 years ago, split down to less than 70 modems. Remember the tiers of service available at this time, and this area was still congested. A 10k (at the time) line card and pulling fibre to the cabinet, with the next step a brand new node construction and pulling yet more fibre. Really worth it to give two sets of 35 customers their full bandwidth to cane on newsgroups, P2P, etc?
I can also think of a foreign cableco that served university halls of residence, not large blocks I might add but fairly small apartments. They went as far as installing fibre into the basements to try and mitigate congestion and in the end gave up. Whatever capacity they added got eaten. They had areas with 500, 800 'standard' customers happily motoring along on their 10Mbit service with no capacity issues at all, while for these apartment blocks 50 - 80 customers was too many.
I have no idea how many modems are in your area, would be interesting to know.