"at some point it just doesn't matter and becomes marketing hype."

There is A LOT of hype over increasing broadband speeds, so much so to the point where immense oversubscription is the only practical way forward, then people piss and moan that ISPs didn't build enough to keep up with non-existent (at the time) demand.


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

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com


From: "Michael Thomas" <mike@mtcc.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2021 3:13:50 PM
Subject: Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge


On 10/10/21 12:57 PM, Mark Tinka wrote:


On 10/10/21 21:33, Matthew Petach wrote:

If you sell a service for less than it costs to provide, simply 
based on the hopes that people won't actually *use* it, that's
called "gambling", and I have very little sympathy for businesses 
that gamble and lose.

You arrived at the crux of the issue, quickly, which was the basis of my initial response last week - infrastructure is dying. And we simply aren't motivated enough to figure it out.

When you spend 25+ years sitting in a chair waiting for the phone to ring or the door to open, for someone to ask, "How much for 5Mbps?", your misfortune will never be your own fault.

Isn't that what Erlang numbers are all about? My suspicion is that after about 100Mbs most people wouldn't notice the difference in most cases. My ISP is about 25Mbs on a good day (DSL) and it serves our needs fine and have never run into bandwidth constraints. Maybe if we were streaming 4k all of the time it might be different, but frankly the difference for 4k isn't all that big. It's sort of like phone screen resolution: at some point it just doesn't matter and becomes marketing hype.

Mike