On Fri, 23 Jan 1998, Paul A Vixie wrote:
Nobody in their right mind would sell T1 to every customer and do 1000:1 overcommit of their transit links without some kind of bandwidth shaping. Since that shaping is part of the engineering plan, the marketroids will have to find some way to come clean about it in the advertising glossies.
Funny, last year in Boston I spoke to a rep from Highway1 (Media1's Internet division) wherein he stated that they planned to sell off 2,000 cable modem links (subscribers) from a single T3 while promising 10Mbps speeds to the home. I pointed out this was an oversale ratio of something like 400:1. He countered that I must not understand the statistics of network traffic. I countered that he must be engaged in wishful thinking if he expected end users not to push the limits of technology and expect the moon for only $19.95 per month. I predicted that people would decide that CUCEEME (sp?) was too cool to live without and that they would want to listen to their neighbor's CD audio over the 'net. Needless to say, we parted company with neither having been convinced by the other. So in general the cable companies seem to believe in high oversale ratios, although not perhaps in the thousands. David