On Fri, 27 Feb 2015 12:03:35 -0500, Bruce H McIntosh said:
The REAL evil in the ISP marketplace is, of course, essentially entirely unremarked-upon - ASYMMETRY. For the Internet, as such, truly to live up to its promise to continue to revolutionize the world through free exchange of ideas, information, data and so forth, Joe Average User *MUST* have the same pipes going UP as he does coming DOWN. Just as an example, my service at home is what, 50 down/5 up? That structure is less conducive to free interchange
Consider a group of 10 users, who all create new content. If each one creates at a constant rate of 5 mbits, they need 5 up. But to download all the new content from the other 9, they need close to 50 down. And when you expand to several billion people creating new content, you need a *huge* pipe down. Bottom line is that perfect symmetry isn't needed for content distribution - most people can't create content fast enough to clog their uplink, but have trouble picking and choosing what to downlink to fit in the available bandwidth. You'd be better off arguing from the basis of protocols and applications that need symmetric bandwidth (for instance, heavy use of Skype and similar, but with HD video - you'll need as big a pipe for your outbound video as you need for the inbound). Similar considerations will apply to at least some gaming models, bittorrent, and so on. You already noted the remote backup issue - keep focusing on that sort of thing.