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Originally Posted by ian@huth
I would define peak as the time when most traffic exists which can be any time of night or day. Offering unlimited traffic in your off-peak hours of midnight to 4pm can severely impact on customers who need to use their connection at those times. Just think about the serious bandwidth hogs who would queue up downloads to utilize all those off-peak hours and who allow their upstream bandwidth to be used by people who are not NTL customers and don't contribute a penny to the costs of maintaining the NTL networks. The end result would probably be that your so called peak hours have lower traffic than your off-peak hours.
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Really who cares though the point of a cap should be to avoid severe service affect to existing customers while not breaking the bank.
Not really the customer's problem if ntl offer more than they can afford to handle, averting congestion while controlling costs should be the aim (which is why customers are assigned x kbps) the quieter times where bandwidth is underused are wastes of this bandwidth which costs the same pretty much whatever and really should be utilised as much as is practical.
If people can be convinced to move their downloads outside the peak times, which will stay as peak times whatever your preconception as lighter users demanding responsiveness still vastly outnumber the uber leechers, that means a better service and less investment required to avoid heavy congestion at peak times.
Peak is and will always remain 4pm - midnight Monday to Friday, and pretty much all day apart from the early hours over the weekend.
Just to summarise, the bandwidth utilisation in the early hours tends to be half what it is at peak, why waste it?
If need be traffic shaping can be employed in these offpeak times to ensure that http and gaming traffic is still prioritised, so that even with what you seem to think will be rampant leeching in these times those applications that need responsiveness will still be ok.
Regarding overuse of upload - I haven't seen any 10Mbit customers complaining of poor upstream performance yet
At the time of my leaving certain 'safeguards' were being considered to protect upstream, some of which had even been tested with very good results over a year ago. While none of these were live when I left who's to say they aren't now?
QoS is really the future - just look at the rise of MPLS enabled networks to offer the traffic control and classification that legacy ATM networks could provide but over a fully IP network. Bandwidth will be heavily utilised on networks but thanks to the QoS offered from MPLS and other mechanisms real time traffic that needs the responsiveness will get it while heavy file transfer protocols can eat up as much as is left over