On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Steve Sobol wrote:
I have no idea what my cable company pays for their bandwidth, but I am certain it's more than the $40 per month I pay for my 3Mbps down/256 Mbps up... and I am able to actually *get* 3Mbps on many occasions, and I average between 1 and 2 (on HTTP/FTP transfers, fwiw).
Oh, you might be surprised how cheap transit is when you're buying it by the multigigabit/s. Also, I know that at least some of the bigger cable co's peer with each other...and exchange large amounts of traffic. Couple that with the fact that most customers are not geeks/power uers (i.e. our parents who do some light web surfing and email) and most of the customers use no noticable bandwidth, subsidizing the ones who do.
Yes, I know the connectivity cost is shared between several thousand customers in this area, but what happens if large numbers of customers start using VOiP on a regular basis?
VOIP with the better codecs doesn't use PIPE. It's just lots of PPS, which may require provider hardware upgrades to deal with the PPS. I've done VOIP over v.90 dialup using older Multitech proprietary gear which I think was doing some flavor of g.723. Quality wasn't perfect, but it really did work. As others have said, PTP is what eats PIPE. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________