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Hunting the Mythical "Bandwidth Hog"
eldavojohn writes "Benoit Felten, an analyst in Paris, has heard enough of the elusive creature known as the bandwidth hog. Like its cousin the Boogie Man, the 'bandwidth hog' is a tale that ISPs tell their frightened users to keep them in check or to cut off whoever they want to cut off from service. And Felten's calling them out because he's certain that bandwidth hogs don't exist. What's actually happening is the ISPs are selecting the top 5% of users, by volume of bits that move on their wire, and revoking their service, even if they aren't negatively impacting other users. Which means that they are targeting 'heavy users' simply for being 'heavy users.' Felten has thrown down the gauntlet asking for a standardized data set from any telco that he can do statistical analysis on that will allow him to find any evidence of a single outlier ruining the experience for everyone else. Unlikely any telco will take him up on that offer but his point still stands." Felten's challenge is paired with a more technical look at how networks operate, which claims that TCP/IP by its design eliminates the possibility of hogging bandwidth. But Wes Felter corrects that mis-impression in a post to a network neutrality mailing list.
We aren't getting the advertised bandwidth! Waaah!
Richard Bennett's response is worth the read, and it puts Benoit's theory of "fair bandwidth" in its place.
No one is going to take Benoit up on his offer because there is nothing to be gained either way for the telcos, and there is no point in giving this attention whore any credibility by responding to him.
> I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong.
La de fracking da what you 'feel'. It is obvious you lack the facts to base an opinion on.
And as for the idiocy of somebody like Felten who should know (or at know somebody who could have clued him in before he opened his piehole in public and made an idiot of himself) I'm not sure what to say other than if this isn't proof that some people's reputations are vastly overrated then what will?
Unlike Felten, I actually worked in the ISP game back in the dialup era and actually know of what I speak. We had net hogs then and they still exist. We spent about half of our resources servicing 10-15% of our customers until we finally stopped saying 'unlimited' and put in a 250 hour per month cap to run those guys off. And they mostly did go instead of switching to the dedicated dialup service we had been offering for a couple of years but NEVER sold any of. The same rule applies in the broadband game except the hogs aren't camping on a modem 24/7. But they are still causing most of an ISP's upstream bandwidth expense plus a good chunk of their other network infrastructure buying.
The vast majority of customers, even today, don't have P2P stuff running 24/7/365, don't run servers, etc. Any ISP that could get rid of the small percentage that do that stuff could freeze their infrastructure and upstream expansion for a couple of years, even with the growth of Youtube/Hulu.
Democrat delenda est