On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Joe Abley wrote:
On 17 Apr 2005, at 13:54, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:
We are talking of two different things here, traffic versus access bandwidth. It will be a while before the average household generates 5 megabit/s traffic.
I don't think that's true. I have seen bittorrent clients running on machines that have good connectivity (>>typical North American residential; say 100M access to a data centre on the east coast). With only moderately-popular torrents (think fan movies like fanimatrix or starship exeter, a week or so after the slashdot effect has died down) such a client can easily seed at 10-20Mbit/s.
Yes yes, it's of course technically possible. It's no problem to saturate a 100M either if you have a decent computer. Still, if you take 10.000 random consumers with 10M/10M pipes you'll see that this population as a whole only has an average peak of a few hundred kilobits/s per user. A few percent will do 5-10M sustained a lot of the time, but a lot of them will be totally quiet most of the time. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se