Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

[William Waites <wwaites () tardis ed ac uk>]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2015 23:24:17 +0000, "Naslund, Steve" <SNaslund () medline com> said:

    > I was an ISP in the 1990s and our first DSL offerings were SDSL
    > symmetric services to replace more expensive T-1 circuits.  When
    > we got into residential it was with SDSL and then the consumers
    > wanted more downstream so ADSL was invented.  I was there, I
    > know this.

So was I and my experience was different. We decided that it would be
more profitable as a small ISP to re-sell Bell Canada's ADSL than to
try to unbundle central offices all over the place. The arguments from
the business side had nothing whatsoever to do with symmetry or lack
thereof. The choice of technology was entirely by the ILEC.

    > To that I will just say that if your average user spend as much
    > time videoconferencing as they do watching streaming media then
    > they are probably a business.

No, you misunderstand. I don't dispute that the area under end-user
traffic statistics graphs is asymmetric. But that the maximum value --
particularly the instantaneous maximum value which you don't see with
five minute sampling -- wants to be quite a lot higher than it
can be with a very asymmetric circuit. If someone works from home one
day a week and has a videoconference or too, we still want that to
work well, right?

And perfect symmetry is not necessary. Would I notice the difference
between 60/60 and 60/40 or even 60/20? Probably not really as long as
both numbers are significantly more than the expected peak rate. But
24/1.5, a factor of 16, is a very different story.

-w
--
William Waites <wwaites () tardis ed ac uk>  |  School of Informatics
   http://tardis.ed.ac.uk/~wwaites/       | University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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