Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se> wrote:
Let's say for the sake of argument that by 2010 we want to give every household 5 megabit/s on average. How could this be done with technology today seen on the radar? Remember that the households should want to pay for the bandwidth as well, meaning they might be willing to pay $30 per month for the bandwidth part (this is kind of high, but let's go with it).
Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:
fwiw, 100mb to the home costs about that in japan
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. Even in Korea and Hong Kong, where the average broadband link is in the 5-10 Mbps range, average traffic is about 0.1 Mbps. The main purpose of high speed links is to get low transaction latency (as in "I want that Web page on my screen NOW," or "I want that song for transfer to my portable device NOW"), so utilizations are low. Andrew Odlyzko
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. I think for the average household which contains at least one teenager with a computer, today, the average household is easily capable of generating 5Mbit/s, sustained for long periods. [Widespread use of p2p file sharing can blow transit/peering costs per port out of the water. Until there's a distribution mechanism for the kind of content most file sharers exchange that ISPs can participate in (instead of the current mechanism which ISPs have trouble legally acknowledging the existence of) it seems reasonable to think the risk of cost explosion will only get worse; people will continue to share media around the edge, and ISPs will continue to play whack-a-mole with the protocols concerned to try and keep their costs under control.]
Even in Korea and Hong Kong, where the average broadband link is in the 5-10 Mbps range, average traffic is about 0.1 Mbps.
Average traffic is not as interesting as peak traffic, I think, from the consumer's perspective. For example, if I lived within the permitted catchment of a future comprehensive BBC video archive, a big last-mile pipe would allow behaviours that a small last-mile pipe would not, such as pulling video content on-demand. The fact that I might only pull content a couple of times a week means the average utilisation might be very low. The benefit of having the big pipe is fairly clear, however, even with such low average utilisation. Joe
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
On 18 Apr 2005, at 11:33, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Joe Abley wrote:
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.
My point was not just that it was technically possible, but rather that with active filesharing clients running it's something that a naive user can easily do, today -- no future killer apps required. Joe
fwiw, 100mb to the home costs about that in japan
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. Even in Korea and Hong Kong, where the average broadband link is in the 5-10 Mbps range, average traffic is about 0.1 Mbps. The main purpose of high speed links is to get low transaction latency (as in "I want that Web page on my screen NOW," or "I want that song for transfer to my portable device NOW"), so utilizations are low.
For those of us that are already running triple play architectures and working on the data analysis related to the bandwidth usage growth (in my case over the last 18 months and adding services one after the other) I see this with a different light: I fully agree with the transaction latency syndrome, people are compulsive customers that want to buy right now and you (as a service provider) want to see to them purchase the service before they change their mind, just need to look at the ringtones market to see how much people are willing to spend within seconds for a piece of music they will replace in a few days/weeks with their next favorite tune from the charts that marketing is feeding them with. Where I don't agree is on the bandwidth usage analysis, once you add the IP based TV/VOD* services you will be carrying close to 5Mbps on average on your network in the near future. Either for the one of the TV channels (currently the market is talking about 2 concurrent TV channels down the same pipe to an end user's home in the North American model or 1 for the European) or the VOD. So agreed this is not Internet traffic but you will need to carry it beyond your access termination device (DSLAM/CMTS/ Ethernet switch) since the economics of the IPTV/VOD market and (current?) technical scalability will prevent you from being able to have a the full IPTV/VOD streaming (= unicast and/or multicast in this case) in each POP to keep the traffic as local as possible. So anyhow within your metro area network accessing and aggregating the customers the amount of bandwith required to service all customers will grow quite a bit with IPTV/VOD services. IMHO (of course) Thomas *Triple play IPTV/VOD = IP packets carrying a video signal using (name your favorite format) either as unicast or multicast stream. This excludes the current hybrid HFC networks that still provide digital TV via an HF stream using (insert your favorite standard here) and the Internet access and voice service over IP. Anyhow they will migrate once DOCSIS 3.0 and the wideband benefits have been marketed to all the cable operators as the "next big thing" they need to have and hence run an IP only service for all the triple play services.
participants (4)
-
Joe Abley -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
odlyzko＠dtc.umn.edu -
Thomas Kernen