Many of the Cluetrained will already be familiar with the arguments about the Internet being a peer-based communication system, not a content broadcasting medium.
One great little data point I picked up from this fascinating (if long) interview on municipal broadband:
In fact, in ultra-rural Grant County, WA, where users of the County’s FTTH system have affordable access to speeds of 100 Mbps in both directions, bandwidth usage has jumped more than 600 percent and upstream usage actually exceeds downstream usage. Why? The County believes that small businesses are sending substantially more information to the Internet than they are downloading, and gamers are vastly increasing their real-time usage.
So, it really does seem like asymmetric network bandwidth is doomed. Why can’t we have systems that allocate you a fair proportion of the municipal pipe, and leave the balance of upstream vs. downstream to the user? On an Ethernet-style system, why does it make the slightest bit of difference whether the packet is being sent or received?
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:45 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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I think the real issue here is perceived value. The ISPs know that "Content is Not King" and that most web browsing is of zero value. Meanwhile, everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, so there is a lot more value in operating a website and getting your message out.
Hence, the ISPs want to recover a greater return for the greater value provided in the upload of data to the Internet rather than the download of data from it.
Posted by: at October 8, 2003 12:45 PMIn a world of "virtual" peer-to-peer connections, it would appear that symmetry would be easy to accomodate. However, there are dependencies to the type of delivery system(s) being utilized. CDMA wireless networks are highly contention based. The distribution of traffic from an access node toward a multitude of end-users is far easier and more efficiency scheduled as compared to traffic from end-users toward the access node. This is commonly known as "the funneling effect". Imagine trying to schedule pellets back into the barrel of a shotgun - it's difficult to precisely control traffic in the reverse direction to avoid collisions. Systems with better control of reverse link scheduling (such as OFDM networks) see this effect diminished and therefore achieve improved symmetry.
Posted by: at October 10, 2003 10:53 PM