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Originally Posted by ianathuth
The train analogy is rather flawed as a comparison. It assumes that one passenger takes up one seat. You could have the situation where several large people take up more than one seat each, somebody has vandalised a carriage and is virtually unusable or the ultimate that a gunman has forced all the passengers into the end carriage and his accomplice is pilfering from the luggage and bags left behind. In the latter case two people could occupy 80% of the train whilst 98% of the passengers are crowded ino the other 20%.
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The analogy is good when Robin uses it and flawed when I use it?
The analogy is not flawed as far as trying to make the point that I am. Yes you might get very small passengers (children) or very large passengers that take up two seats. These in alanlogy temrs would relate to 150kbs connection or the 1mbs connection. The point is there is a limit. No one person is so big that they take up 20 seats, or 50 seats. The limit is the size. As for gunmen / vandalised that is irrelevant (to the point I am trying to make) and interms of the analogy would relate to the network being broken or a gunman taking over NTL and closing the network down.
Where the anaolgy is flawed however is when you consider what happens when the train reaches congestion point (when there are more passengers trying to travel than there are seats). When this happens on a train, then yes you get an unfair situation because some get seats and some do not. When a network reaches this point however things are still fair, because everyone slows down EQUALLY. There is no equivalent of one user 'getting the seat' and another not.
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Originally Posted by ianathuth
The other point to note is what is going on during non-peak times, particularly during the night. Most users are tucked up in bed or may be posting on a forum or in achat room. None of these consume much bandwidth. The file sharers though are likewise tucked up in bed but their computers are hard at work both downloading and uploading. They could be consuming well over 90% of the bandwidth at this time.
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If they are consuming 90% of 'the bandwidth' at these times that means that there is no problem at all. All they are doing is getting value from a resource that has already been paid for and which if they were not using would still have to be paid for. In train analogy terms again - a train that is 90% full still costs the same to run as one that is 10% full. The problems occur when the train reaches congestion point. Before that there is no problem.
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Originally Posted by ianathuth
If you look at the total data moved by file sharers and compare it to the data moved by others you can see that a small percentage of customers can be responsible for a very large percentage of data moved.
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The problem is one of 'congestion' not volumes moved. The 'argument' is that one person usage is affecting another person usage (unfairly) and it ratios of 5% to 80%. This is not true and not physicaly possible.