Bandwidth

[Adam Maloney <adam@iexposure.com>]

I agree with Scott.  When you get a $25/month DSL connection or cable or
whatever, you aren't paying for 256k (or 1MBit or whatever) of
bandwidth.  You're paying to share the ISP's bandwidth with the
customers.

There was a message to isp-routing tonight asking about how to
rate-limit DSL customers to 0kb CIR and 10MB burst.  There was also a
thread on isp-dsl (or maybe isp-routing) about making DSL traffic the
lowest priority on the network.  That's how it's treated because the ISP
has customers paying $500 / month or more for the same amount of
DEDICATED bandwidth.

If you want to see how ISP's, telcos and cablecos are handling
residential broadband access, I'd encourage you to read one of the above
mentioned isp lists to find out more (and also isp-bandwidth).  It's
quite interesting.  So before you go slamming whatever company for not
being able to pull 256k full time even though you signed up for 256k
DSL, remember which customers are paying full price for that bandwidth
and who's just paying to sharing it.

That turned into more of a rant than I had hoped.  For the most part
this is the idealogy of ISP's from what I've seen on the lists.

Adam Maloney
Systems Administrator
Internet Exposure, Inc.