Our excuse? We have purchased every available transponder on every spacecraft suitable for transmission out of Alaska. Granted, there are additional spacecraft out there with Alaska footprints. We however, being a service provider, are interested in space segment which gives us quality over quantity. Sometimes fiber just isn't an option. So that burger analogy doesn't quite apply here .. because the burger is 100mbps, it space segment alone is 150k a month. Not to mention the modems (and remote people who admin them) in the neighborhood of 140k each side of the link. Plus, the diesel used to provide power to the Earth station (9$ a gallon) so it can transmit. Expensive happy meal. -----Original Message----- From: Jack Bates [mailto:jbates@brightok.net] Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 12:20 PM To: manolo hernandez Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Online games stealing your bandwidth On 9/28/2010 2:22 PM, manolo hernandez wrote:
What is keeping your company from buying more bandwidth? I find the excuse of over subscription to be a fail. If that's your companies business model then it should not be whining when people are using what you sell them. Provision bandwidth accordingly and stop being cheap and squeezing every last dime from the end user for bandwidth that can be had for less than the price of a burger in some places.
You replied to him but under my quoted text, so I'm not sure who you were referring to. However, my company has issues in buying long haul. Bandwidth is cheap, yes. Getting a circuit is not. Currently I have 1 option for a 10Gig circuit if I needed it today. That's not very redundant. It took 6 months to get facility upgrades by a large NSP to give me 1gig-e in OKC from DFW (very few NSPs have routers or high speed facilities in Oklahoma and even fewer in OKC. Tulsa has a few extra options). I'm still waiting on what looks like it'll be 1 year+ for a gig-e from another NSP. Going to remote ILEC towns, there's shortages of long haul facilities (in some areas, a single OC-12 sonet run is all that exists and it's dropped off in 3-5 places to various other companies on the way to the ILEC, and the fiber dwindles to 6 meaning primary pair, secondary pair, and backup dark pair is all that exists). The cost to bore new fiber and light it is extremely prohibitive. We actually have no problems with people using what we sell, and we still have nice oversell margins which makes up our profit (0% oversell would be roughly break even). Many of our problems aren't with users using their bandwidth, but with applications screwing with the user's bandwidth (against the user's will). Someone linked bittorrent's work on latency based fallback for congestion control. I think that is an awesome piece of work. However, not all p2p applications do this, and some even install and work in the background without customers knowing. This gives the perception to the customer that things are slow and not working right. We care what our customer's think, so we absolutely hate such products as we can see the bandwidth usage itself, but helping a computer illiterate customer fix the problem without them spending money at a computer tech is difficult at best. Jack