At 23:22 25/10/2005, Alastair Johnson wrote:
>This is getting REALLY offtopic.
>
>Keith & Deby wrote:
>>Im no techie...I do know how to identify a problem.
>>So Joel is a techie student or something, no doing a BT. What is offered is
>>not suitable for his needs. And At a Guess he is not the only student that
>>may have these requirements. To go to what business s get he would need a
>>2nd student loan.
>
>I personally would be surprised if many customers had these
>requirements at all. Remember, the average subscriber to this
>mailing list is the exception rather than the rule.
>
>At my previous job (ISP, medium-large), our traffic flows were
>certainly extremely assymetric from the DSL network. The average
>customer uploaded very little traffic.

<sarcasm mode on>

Yes, but is that cause or effect ? Could that perhaps be because they
CANT upload very much traffic ? ;-)

Could it be that people have long since cottoned on to the fact that
they can't do things like decent quality bi-directional video
conferencing that needs more than 128Kbit upstream, and therefore
don't bother ? (Or VoIP for that matter)

Could it be that people that need to send files between home and work
(or between different businesses for that matter) have long since
learnt that its faster to burn it on a CD/DVD and put it in the post,
or sneakernet it ?

(Why pay per MB excess usage charges to send hundreds of megs of
files at a miserable 128Kbit when you can sneakernet it for free, and
get the file there faster ?)

I would suggest that the low use of upstream bandwidth "on average"
is as much about the fact that applications that need higher upstream
DONT WORK and therefore don't get used, leaving only the classic
"email and browsing" type applications as usable...

If the "average" use of upstream bandwidth without artificial
restrictions really is low, then an ISP (and I know its Telecom thats
putting the restriction in place here in the case of ADSL) has
nothing to lose in providing faster upstream, as the "average" use
will remain low, even though a few "power users" would make use of
the upstream to do things they can't do now.

 From a technical point of view, providing faster upstream speeds
(and in the case of wireless, symetrical rates) is easy, and as
upstream bandwidth tends to be "underutilized" anyway, its
effectively free to provide it in most cases. (Unless you also have a
lot of webhosting/telehousing traffic to balance your in/out rates)

The only reason for miserable upstream rates like 128kbit on a 2Mbit
connection is to protect voice/frame/fibre from competition.

Regards,
Simon

-- 
This message is part of the NZ ADSL mailing list. 
see http://unixathome.org/adsl/ for archives, FAQ, 
and various documents. 
To unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@lists.unixathome.org 
with "unsubscribe adsl" in the body of the message