On Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:50:11 +0100 Leigh Porter <leigh.porter@ukbroadband.com> wrote:
Yeah, try buying bandwidth in Australia! The have a lot more water to cover ( and so potentially more cost and more profit to be made by monopolies) than well connected areas such as the US.
I don't necessarily think it is only that. Customers on ADSL2+ usually get the maximum ADSL2+ speed their line will support, so customers can have speeds of up to 24Mbps downstream. Download and/or upload quotas have an effect of smoothing out the backhaul impact those high bandwidth customers could make. As they could use up all their quota in such a short time period at those speeds, and once they exceed their quota they'd get their speed shaped down to something like 64Kbps, it typically forces the customer to make their bandwidth usage patterns more bursty rather than a constant. That effect, averaged across a "backhaul region" helps avoid having to provision backhaul bandwidth for a much higher constant load. Regards, Mark. -- "Sheep are slow and tasty, and therefore must remain constantly alert." - Bruce Schneier, "Beyond Fear"