Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Psychotext
p.s. To all of the "normal" users. Be thankful us superusers are around. Without us pushing for faster and better services since the start, the likelyhood is that you'd all still be on pay-per minute dial-up connections.
|
Push for unmetered dialup was from the Campaign for Unmetered Telecomms, a focus group, they along with some industry managed to get FRIACO out of BT.
If you weren't around now we'd all probably be on much faster and cheaper connections as the average bandwidth usage would be lower. Broadband was kickstarted by limited P2P usage and is now held back by excessive usage, 60+% of internet traffic is P2P now.
'Superusers' are the thing that forces contention down and prices up on the wholesale level on ADSL and to cablecos in terms of hardware and bandwidth provisioning.
Not going to thank 100+GB users for anything thanks, I helped kickstart it all downloading a GB a month from Napster ta. The wholesale abuse of P2P etc by 'Superusers' has just made life harder for light users of it - notice the law suits going out in US to small P2P users, and as the Plus.net example shows are forcing ISPs hands in order to keep their prices half decent.
I'd love it to be different but at the moment pricing, etc, is built on low contention models where bandwidth is scarce. If it weren't for the 'Superusers' using 10s of times more bandwidth than Joe 'Average' whose 'average' is skewed massively by these bods we'd have faster, cheaper connections because higher contention would be doable with no apparent loss of quality of service,
especially on the upstream side of things as this is where the biggest difference in relative usage is. In some areas upstream usage is higher than downstream despite the highly asymettrical speeds, simply due to people running servers, be they FTP or P2P, on their connections.
A hell of a lot of capacity increases have been due to nothing more than this P2P / FTP upstream usage. Unlike DSL the access / transport network on cable is inherently asymettrical. Lines had to be drawn somewhere, if heavier users are going to leave ntl I think that'd go down as 'mission accomplished'.