On 6/1/21 19:14, Christopher Morrow wrote:

On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 12:44 PM Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net> wrote:

That is true, but if no one uses it, is it really gone?

There's an underlying, I think, assumption that people won't use access speed/bandwidth that keeps coming up.

I don't think this is an accurate assumption. I don't think it's really ever been accurate.

Put another way, folk will use more bandwidth, up to a point.

You are more likely to see sustained increases if someone is jumping from, say, 1Mbps, to, say, 100Mbps (and everything else in between).

After that, sustained use if you deliver 500Mbps, 1Gbps, 5Gbps or 10Gbps is not likely to follow the same curve as when they jumped off the 1Mbps train (personal usage patterns notwithstanding, of course).

When I had 25Mbps symmetrical, it was night & day when we moved to 100Mbps symmetrical. Steady state for us (2 kids, 2 adults, the occasional guest) was between 40Mbps - 70Mbps.

We now have 200Mbps symmetrical, and our steady state remains the same. The additional capacity does help when we need to quickly upload and download large bits, but that's the exception, not the rule.

That's why selling 1Gbps symmetrical on GPON is great marketing :-).

Mark.