nanog mailing list archives
RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial
From: Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:47:10 -0500 (EST)
On Mon, 21 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:
You're right, the major cost isn't the bandwidth (at least the in the U.S.), but the current technologies (cable modem, DSL, and wireless) are thoroughly asymmetric, and high upstreams kill the performance of the first and third.
There are symmetric versions for all of those. But ever since the dialupdays (e.g. 56Kbps modems had slower reverse direction) consumers have shown a preference for a bigger number on the box, even if it meant giving up bandwidth in the one direction.
For example, how many people want SDSL at 1.5Mbps symmetric versus ADSL at 6Mbps/768Kbps. The advertisment with the bigger number wins the consumer.
I expect the same thing would happen with 100Mbps symmetric versus 400Mbps/75Mbps asymmetric. Consumers would choose 400Mbps over 100Mbps.
Long-term, fiber avoids the upstream performance issues.
Asymmetric fiber technologiges exists too, and like other technologies gives you much more bandwidth than symmetric fiber (in one direction).
The problem for wireless and cable (and probably PON) is using shared access bandwidth. Sharing the access bandwidth lets you advertise much bigger numbers than using dedicated access bandwidth; as long as everyone doesn't use it. The advantage of dedicated access technologies like active fiber (or old fashion T-1, T-3) is your neighbor's bad antics don't affect your bandwidth.
Remember the good old days of thicknet Ethernet and what happened whena single transceiver went crazy, the 10Mbps ethernet coax slowed to a crawl for everything connected to it. The token ring folks may have
been technically correct, but they lost that battle.There was a reason why IT people replaced shared thicknet/thinnet coax Ethernet with dedicated 10Base-T pairs and switches replaced hubs.
Current thread:
- Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial, (continued)
- Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Taran Rampersad (Jan 20)
- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Frank Bulk - iNAME (Jan 19)
- Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Simon Leinen (Jan 20)
- Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Simon Leinen (Jan 20)
- Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Matthew Moyle-Croft (Jan 20)
- Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Taran Rampersad (Jan 20)
- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Alex Rubenstein (Jan 20)
- Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Matthew Palmer (Jan 20)
- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Alex Rubenstein (Jan 20)
- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Frank Bulk (Jan 21)
- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Sean Donelan (Jan 21)
- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial michael.dillon (Jan 21)
- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Frank Bulk (Jan 21)
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- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Frank Bulk (Jan 22)
- Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Scott McGrath (Jan 22)
- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Frank Bulk (Jan 21)
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- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Rod Beck (Jan 20)
- Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Marshall Eubanks (Jan 20)
- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Rod Beck (Jan 20)
- Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial Joe Greco (Jan 20)
- RE: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial michael.dillon (Jan 20)