nanog mailing list archives

Re: utility capacity, was Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality


From: Mike Hammett <nanog () ics-il net>
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2015 10:54:20 -0600 (CST)

Selling 1 gig symmetric service to more than one person on GPON is definitely oversubscription. I'm completely fine 
with it, but the fiber\Google zealots think nothing could ever go wrong and they have the world by the [NSFW]. 




----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 



----- Original Message -----

From: "Mel Beckman" <mel () beckman org> 
To: "John Levine" <johnl () iecc com> 
Cc: nanog () nanog org 
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2015 5:44:02 PM 
Subject: Re: utility capacity, was Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality 

John, 

That's an excellent point. Consider Google fiber, for example. And customer could theoretically demand a gigabit of 
traffic. Even Google admits that this doesn't scale and that they are highly oversubscribed. 

-mel beckman 

On Feb 27, 2015, at 3:05 PM, "John Levine" <johnl () iecc com> wrote: 

Water, gas, and to a great extent electrical systems do not work on 
oversubscription, ie their aggregate capacity meets or exceeds the needs of 
all their customers peak potential demand, at least from "normal" demand 
standpoint. 

Hi, former municipal water and sewer commissioner here. We size the 
system to meet likely demand, but not peak demand. If it's a hot dry 
summer and everyone wants to water their lawn, or there's a big fire 
that's drawing a lot of water from hydrants, we can have capacity 
problems. We deal with it by interrupting service to a few large 
customers, a car wash and a golf course. 

But it's not really comparable to broadband service, because on the 
Internet, nearly every consumer end user device could easily saturate 
the entire network if it wanted to. It's like every house having a 
100,000 gallon toilet. Better hope you don't have a lot of people 
flushing at once. 

R's, 
John 


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