[ian@huth]

Originally Posted by erol

"Between 60 and 80% of bandwidth is being eaten up by a fraction of customers - who are mainly engaged in peer-to-peer activity - and, according to the industry, the rest are penalised because of the heavy users sharing the network."

ahh an old chestnut here Where do these figures come from ? If they are saying during peak hours (when congestion occurs) that a tiny 'fraction' of users are using 60-80% of the bandwidth, they are quite simply lying. You can only use as much bandwidth as your connection allows and when congestion occurs all users slow down equally. This simply means it is impossible for one user, during peak hours, to use 60-80% of the 'bandwidth'. If they are saying '60-80%' during all hours, peak and off peak, then the statment is meaningless in terms of congestion and one users impact on other users. However this 'story' is highly 'emotive' and a great 'propaganda' tool for the telcos, trying to convince a public that all the gains of a 'dumb' network should be reversed and control should be restored to telco hands, who will then decide what 'services' are offered and bill for each one, regardless of the cost of provision.

I think that you have to take account of both upstream and downstream bandwidth when you look at this. If you have an upstream channel on a UBR with 200 users on it and eight or ten 1Mb users are leaving their computers running on p2p with their upstreams being saturated by people downloading from them then those few can be using up 60-80% or even more of the available upstream bandwidth and slowing down the service for all users on that upstream card.