Taking a slightly different approach to the question, it's obvious that
overcommit continues to be a problem for ISP's, both in the States and
abroad.
It'd be interesting to know what the average utilization of an unlimited
US broadband customer was, compared to the average utilization of an
unlimited AU broadband customer. It would be interesting, then, to look
at where the quotas lie on the curve in both the US and AU.
Regardless, I believe that there is a certain amount of shortsightedness
on the part of service providers who are looking at bandwidth management
as the cure to their bandwidth ills. It seems clear that the Internet
will remain central to our communications needs for many years, and that
delivery of content such as video will continue to increase. End users
do not care to know that they have a "quota" or that their quota can be
filled by a relatively modest amount of content. Remember that a 1Mbps
connection can download ~330GB/mo, so the aforementioned 12GB is nearly
*line noise* on a multimegabit DSL or cable line.
Continued reliance on broadband users using tiny percentages of their
broadband connection certainly makes the ISP business model easier, but
in the long term, isn't going to work out well for the Internet's
continuing evolution.
And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU
ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here
in the United States, as well.
... JG
I think the implication here is that there's a smoothing effect that comes with large customer bases.
For example, I remember back to when DSL was first rolled out in New Zealand. It was priced well beyond the means of any normal residential user, and as a result DSL customers tended to be just the people who would consume a lot of external bandwidth.
At around the same time, my wife's mother in Ontario, Canada got hooked up with a cablemodem on the grounds that unlimited cable internet service cost less than a second phone line (she was fed up with missing phone calls when she was checking her mail).
She used/uses her computer mainly for e-mail, although she occasionally uses a browser. (These days I'm sure legions of miscreants are using her computer too, but back then we were pre-botnet).
If you have mainly customers like my mother-in-law, with just a few heavy users, the cost per user is nice and predictable, and you don't need to worry too much about usage caps.
If you have mainly heavy users, the cost per user has the potential to be enormous.
It seems like the pertinent question here is: what is stopping DSL (or cable) providers in Australia and New Zealand from selling N x meg DSL service at low enough prices to avoid the need for a data cap? Is it the cost of crossing an ocean which makes the risk of unlimited service too great to implement, or something else?
Joe
The popular content is still international and the population
density sucks in a lot of places.
I note that no ISP runs "free local bandwidth" anymore at least
in Western Australia because it started impacting on the ability
to send data back to the client through the DSL aggregation
network. Me, I think the network design needs to change to not
be so PPPoE-to-the-nearest-capital-city, but ISPs keep telling
me "its a great idea - but our current structure is fine, why
try to change it?". I understand the economic reasons (upgrading
the network to route IP all the way out to the exchanges and
let customers talk to other customers and across IX fabrics without
potentially crossing the same god damned wholesaler L2TP-tunnelled
network == expensive) but its gotta change someday.
Me, I wonder why the heck cheap services -in the CBDs- don't seem
to be popular..
Adrian
And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical
towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the
ball in a major way here in the United States, as well.
We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is
to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are
concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between
users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and
forth over the same congested circuits. And P2P is the main way to
reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet.
--Michael Dillon
Hm, Australia is pretty much that exact architecture.
Adrian
Michael - I don't think this is the case for most NA cable operators. P2P
between subscribers in the same general area simply hairpins back over the
HFC from the aggregation hub (location of the CMTS), no unnecessary backhaul
to another distant PoP location. Now, the rest of the traffic will be
aggregated further up on its way towards upstream peering...but that is a
different traffic flow.
-ron
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And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical
towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the
ball in a major way here in the United States, as well.
We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is
to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are
concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between
users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and
forth over the same congested circuits. And P2P is the main way to
reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet.
We could have used IP Multicast, but nobody on the consumer side wanted
to carry state instead of packets.
Multicast works when watching broadcast TV or recordings that were
scheduled in advance, but people on the net want video on demand.
Tony.