To be completely honest with you I am not sure which bandwidth capping packages will be offered. All I got was a memo from a higher up saying that it was only experimental, and there where not any plans to spread it beyond the testing in Texas. If it does not go over well with customers, then they wont be continuing with it I am sure.
VOD is a different beast altogether. It does not use the high speed data infrastructure at all, they use their own QAM's (MQAM's soon when 'start over' rolls out) which only ties up more frequencies on the coax. Right now with DOCSIS 1.1 we are only using 2 32Mghz bands on the coax for HSD, one for the upstream and one for the downstream. I can only speak for my division here in Bakersfield, but I know that as of 2011 we are planning on dropping our analog signal from the plant altogether, freeing up a lot of frequencies on the cable, making plenty of room for DOCSIS 3.0, which one modem can "talk" to multiple downstream giving more capacity.
We are constantly doing node splits on the fiber transport to lower the number of homes passed, putting the new node on separate upstream/downstream. We also do a lot of moving around of the nodes themselves. Typically we like to keep the modem counts around 400 per downstream, this depends largely on what bandwidth packages are offered in your area and what usage is like. Most of the time a decombine (moving a node to a new downstream) happens when we traffic hits certain thresholds on the downstream. Each upstream we keep at around 100 modems (4 upstream share the downstream port). This seems to support our area pretty well, we are getting ready to change all of our standard package speeds to 10 down 1 up and make the premium speed 15 down and 2 up. So to answer your question, yes most of the congestion issue occur in the last mile access. Bakersfield is handled by 2 OC48's to our LA POP sites, one to L3 and one to B-Bone. Right now it's 7:00 PM and bordering on our peak time. Here is the current traffic across one of our OC48s.
30 second input rate 1080735000 bits/sec, 168436 packets/sec
30 second output rate 340324000 bits/sec, 144683 packets/sec
As you can see we are not even using half of the 2.4Gb/s the link is capable of. The majority of traffic shows as incoming here because it is the last hop before it get routed back to the modems, input is the modems downstream traffic. I just did a check and there are close 60,000 modems online right now. Here is the downstream stats from one of the CMTS with approx 400 modems on the downstream.
Just over half of the downstreams 37,500 Kb/s. Mind you this is sharing bandwidth with the MTA's for VoIP traffic as well. Though the issue is the last mile access, the nature of 90% of our users traffic (and most peoples for that matter) does not make it that big of a deal. Most peoples downstream traffic happens in bursts and sustained upstream traffic is even farther between.
Being on the front line I can tell you just how busy we really are, keeping everyone happy and surfing along at the best speeds possible. The cost of one 5x20 cable card for a Cisco 10k chassis is around $100,000. That's 5 downstreams and 20 upstreams. I have added 2 of those cards to accomodate growth and releave congestion in the last 3-4 months, and those are just in our 2 fastest growing hubs.
If you're still with me I know that was long and probably riddle with typos, but I hope it sheds a little on the subject.
I work for Time Warner, I'm a network engineer for Road Runner even. I can say the bandwidth capping is just a test, there are no plans at current to spread it beyond Texas. As for services being excluded from the cap (if it happens) I could totally see that. In the LA area we have what are called back bone peer agreements with several companies. YouTube for example has their normal internet access from another provider, but we have made peering agreements allowing them to have an interface that touches our backbone. As you can imagine, this gives our customers, and theirs plenty of bandwidth, without going through "the internet". There are agreements like this all over the place on the web.
Oddly enough one argument that we didn't go to the moon is proved wrong again by these photos, the complete lack of stars. The Sun in the "day" area of the moon is bright enough to make the cameras use quick exposure times, causing the weak light from the stars to not appear. I personally want to see some pictures from the dark side of the moon!
Ok, so basically, if this makes no sense to you at all (I don't even know if some of those 'words' in the article exist, WTH is a braneworld!) then you must have already flipped your shit right?
NEVER underestimate the power of geeks in large numbers!
It's impressive to see though, that is for sure. Can't wait to see the flight video, and if it's successful, what they will be adding to it's functionality.
By network engineer I meant the guys responsible for configuring and designing the UBR's and backbone. I feel it's unrealistic to think that an ISP supporting even a small network of say 50,000 subscribers, can answer every call with top level network savvy guys, when 70% of those callers can't find the start button. Even worse, the people who think "the internet" is down because myspace.com gave them a 404!
I have used a variety of ISP's in my past, large and small. I do have to agree, I prefer the days of the small mom and pop ISP, where when the digi-board bank of modems I was dialing into needed a reboot at 2AM I could call the guy (who usually recognized me by voice) and get him to reload it. Those days have gone the way of the dodo, and have been replaced by massive infrastructure with much more speed, and fewer problems when looked from a user-to-issue ratio.
This is just my opinion though, and I know a lot of people disagree with me. Being on the other side of the line now, I know that there is a lot more commitment and dedication that nobody see or recognizes.
Being a TWC employee I can say this is absolutely true. Most users don't need anything more than a "reboot the modem." There is a number that you can call that will get you directly into the tier 3 call queue. They are the ones that can actually tell you what is going on. If they can't then they come to me, and I get to figure it out. I have heard a lot of calls that don't belong anywhere near tier 3, but they still help everyone of them. I can't speak for all offices, but compared to the level of support you get with DSL and other ISPs TWC is top notch. I don't know any ISP that a single users issue can make it all the way to a network engineer for help.
Not sure why my comment was considered off topic, the article even suggests PC use.. Toasters generate exuberant amounts of heat, an ideal source of electricity (using this new method) to power the toaster PC. hehe Anyways, cool link! This story reminded me of the BSD toaster that was/.'d a while back, which triggered my comment.
This new technology should bring us one step closer to the uber efficient linux toaster! "Anyone want more bread? I need more power to finish this compile!"
You might be really interested in some of the things Trent Reznor has been doing with his creations. He's started whole "hidden message" thing music again. You can still get some feed back from people, smart people at that. Wikipedia has a lot of info about the CD and all the cool tricks he's done for his loyal followers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(album)
The problem is people these days are suckers, and keep paying for shit.
I could not agree more, the sad reality is though, if suckers did stop paying for it all together, then the rich won't get richer and they will stop producing. First guy may have realized he could make money by entertaining people, but that realization occurred as a result of him doing because he enjoyed it first.
I agree the movie industry has always been just that, an industry. Being a musician myself though, I would have to say I would just be happy if people listened to me. I feel that most bands these days have forgotten that they all started playing in a garage somewhere, and are more concerned about making sure they get paid every time someone wants their creation.
The core of my comment was essentially this, when will these money grubbing assholes stop giving a shit that they only made 30 Million dollars instead of 40 Million because a small section of society actually had enough of a clue to say "I'm paying that much for this crap!"
Honestly, who is really loosing out on pirating?
Some would argue the musicians are. Last I checked Metallica (oops just violated the DRM, thought about them without having a license) STILL makes more money than any pirate. If the group is small all they should care about is that their music is getting more exposure.
Some would argue the movie industry. I wont even go into the elevenity billion dollars the studios are still making despite pirating. If they would make more of a effort to get the movie to DVD quicker there would be less pirating imho. Who wants to take the chance of blowing 50$ (without snacks) for your family to see a movie that sucks, which quite a few now days do.
Really though, when did the entertainment industry stop being about entertainment, and more about milking every cent out of it they can.
Explosive-powered nail guns for only one possible example.
True, true still, a marker would resolve that, but then people would just use their own mix. Regardless it was just food for thought. I was mainly making a point about how the government has a tendency to take awesome advances in technology and turn them into ways to further protect us from ourselves. On the flip side if it weren't for government programs like NASA we wouldn't have velcro. I suppose it a fair trade!
I was actually assuming that continuing advances would soon detect muzzle flash, which would be a more reliable method imho. Gases involved during a burn are already easily detectable, they do it for stars with prisms, and I am fairly certain that gun powder would have a specific signature. If not a marker gas could easily be added.
There is a bad ass little project out there right now called Zoneminder (http://zoneminder.com/). Works great! You can pick up a 4 port surveillance card for about 100$ and Wal-Mart has color cameras with good res for about 50$. ZoneMinder even does motion detection pretty well, I use it to watch all my stuff, and to solve those, SHE HIT!!! No I DIDN'T!!! argument between the kids!
Linux for teh win!!!!111elevenity
I want to know how far out it is until we start seeing this type of technology like this on satellites. Imagine the government being able to watch a whole city from space for gun shots.
"Defense network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination." -Terminator
I think the thing we need to think about is when this may be useful to us. Right now it has to cost around elevenity billion dollars to make just enough to test... I think I will stick with the current speed of light through fiber.
Actually most/.ers are on a slightly more informed level then your typical reader. I think its fair to point out the fact that he retains his right to the software, even though he is distributing the code and binaries without cost.
Not only that.. Lots of people give their software away. Its called freeware (or malware most the time!;). I feel its the fact that the linux kernel, and 99% of GNU, is "Open Source" that makes Linus stand out for being revolutionary.
----
68% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Slashdot Mirror
To be completely honest with you I am not sure which bandwidth capping packages will be offered. All I got was a memo from a higher up saying that it was only experimental, and there where not any plans to spread it beyond the testing in Texas. If it does not go over well with customers, then they wont be continuing with it I am sure.
VOD is a different beast altogether. It does not use the high speed data infrastructure at all, they use their own QAM's (MQAM's soon when 'start over' rolls out) which only ties up more frequencies on the coax. Right now with DOCSIS 1.1 we are only using 2 32Mghz bands on the coax for HSD, one for the upstream and one for the downstream. I can only speak for my division here in Bakersfield, but I know that as of 2011 we are planning on dropping our analog signal from the plant altogether, freeing up a lot of frequencies on the cable, making plenty of room for DOCSIS 3.0, which one modem can "talk" to multiple downstream giving more capacity.
We are constantly doing node splits on the fiber transport to lower the number of homes passed, putting the new node on separate upstream/downstream. We also do a lot of moving around of the nodes themselves. Typically we like to keep the modem counts around 400 per downstream, this depends largely on what bandwidth packages are offered in your area and what usage is like. Most of the time a decombine (moving a node to a new downstream) happens when we traffic hits certain thresholds on the downstream. Each upstream we keep at around 100 modems (4 upstream share the downstream port). This seems to support our area pretty well, we are getting ready to change all of our standard package speeds to 10 down 1 up and make the premium speed 15 down and 2 up. So to answer your question, yes most of the congestion issue occur in the last mile access. Bakersfield is handled by 2 OC48's to our LA POP sites, one to L3 and one to B-Bone. Right now it's 7:00 PM and bordering on our peak time. Here is the current traffic across one of our OC48s.
30 second input rate 1080735000 bits/sec, 168436 packets/sec
30 second output rate 340324000 bits/sec, 144683 packets/sec
As you can see we are not even using half of the 2.4Gb/s the link is capable of. The majority of traffic shows as incoming here because it is the last hop before it get routed back to the modems, input is the modems downstream traffic. I just did a check and there are close 60,000 modems online right now. Here is the downstream stats from one of the CMTS with approx 400 modems on the downstream.
5 minute output rate 20707000 bits/sec, 3834 packets/sec
Just over half of the downstreams 37,500 Kb/s. Mind you this is sharing bandwidth with the MTA's for VoIP traffic as well. Though the issue is the last mile access, the nature of 90% of our users traffic (and most peoples for that matter) does not make it that big of a deal. Most peoples downstream traffic happens in bursts and sustained upstream traffic is even farther between.
Being on the front line I can tell you just how busy we really are, keeping everyone happy and surfing along at the best speeds possible. The cost of one 5x20 cable card for a Cisco 10k chassis is around $100,000. That's 5 downstreams and 20 upstreams. I have added 2 of those cards to accomodate growth and releave congestion in the last 3-4 months, and those are just in our 2 fastest growing hubs.
If you're still with me I know that was long and probably riddle with typos, but I hope it sheds a little on the subject.
I work for Time Warner, I'm a network engineer for Road Runner even. I can say the bandwidth capping is just a test, there are no plans at current to spread it beyond Texas. As for services being excluded from the cap (if it happens) I could totally see that. In the LA area we have what are called back bone peer agreements with several companies. YouTube for example has their normal internet access from another provider, but we have made peering agreements allowing them to have an interface that touches our backbone. As you can imagine, this gives our customers, and theirs plenty of bandwidth, without going through "the internet". There are agreements like this all over the place on the web.
LOL Actually I was looking for something more like this! http://www.pinkfloyd.com/darkside.html
Oddly enough one argument that we didn't go to the moon is proved wrong again by these photos, the complete lack of stars. The Sun in the "day" area of the moon is bright enough to make the cameras use quick exposure times, causing the weak light from the stars to not appear. I personally want to see some pictures from the dark side of the moon!
Ok, so basically, if this makes no sense to you at all (I don't even know if some of those 'words' in the article exist, WTH is a braneworld!) then you must have already flipped your shit right?
NEVER underestimate the power of geeks in large numbers!
It's impressive to see though, that is for sure. Can't wait to see the flight video, and if it's successful, what they will be adding to it's functionality.
By network engineer I meant the guys responsible for configuring and designing the UBR's and backbone. I feel it's unrealistic to think that an ISP supporting even a small network of say 50,000 subscribers, can answer every call with top level network savvy guys, when 70% of those callers can't find the start button. Even worse, the people who think "the internet" is down because myspace.com gave them a 404!
I have used a variety of ISP's in my past, large and small. I do have to agree, I prefer the days of the small mom and pop ISP, where when the digi-board bank of modems I was dialing into needed a reboot at 2AM I could call the guy (who usually recognized me by voice) and get him to reload it. Those days have gone the way of the dodo, and have been replaced by massive infrastructure with much more speed, and fewer problems when looked from a user-to-issue ratio.
This is just my opinion though, and I know a lot of people disagree with me. Being on the other side of the line now, I know that there is a lot more commitment and dedication that nobody see or recognizes.
Being a TWC employee I can say this is absolutely true. Most users don't need anything more than a "reboot the modem." There is a number that you can call that will get you directly into the tier 3 call queue. They are the ones that can actually tell you what is going on. If they can't then they come to me, and I get to figure it out. I have heard a lot of calls that don't belong anywhere near tier 3, but they still help everyone of them. I can't speak for all offices, but compared to the level of support you get with DSL and other ISPs TWC is top notch. I don't know any ISP that a single users issue can make it all the way to a network engineer for help.
Not sure why my comment was considered off topic, the article even suggests PC use.. Toasters generate exuberant amounts of heat, an ideal source of electricity (using this new method) to power the toaster PC. hehe Anyways, cool link! This story reminded me of the BSD toaster that was /.'d a while back, which triggered my comment.
This new technology should bring us one step closer to the uber efficient linux toaster! "Anyone want more bread? I need more power to finish this compile!"
You might be really interested in some of the things Trent Reznor has been doing with his creations. He's started whole "hidden message" thing music again. You can still get some feed back from people, smart people at that. Wikipedia has a lot of info about the CD and all the cool tricks he's done for his loyal followers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(album)
I could not agree more, the sad reality is though, if suckers did stop paying for it all together, then the rich won't get richer and they will stop producing. First guy may have realized he could make money by entertaining people, but that realization occurred as a result of him doing because he enjoyed it first.
I agree the movie industry has always been just that, an industry. Being a musician myself though, I would have to say I would just be happy if people listened to me. I feel that most bands these days have forgotten that they all started playing in a garage somewhere, and are more concerned about making sure they get paid every time someone wants their creation.
The core of my comment was essentially this, when will these money grubbing assholes stop giving a shit that they only made 30 Million dollars instead of 40 Million because a small section of society actually had enough of a clue to say "I'm paying that much for this crap!"
lol, sadly this is so true... :'(
Honestly, who is really loosing out on pirating? Some would argue the musicians are. Last I checked Metallica (oops just violated the DRM, thought about them without having a license) STILL makes more money than any pirate. If the group is small all they should care about is that their music is getting more exposure. Some would argue the movie industry. I wont even go into the elevenity billion dollars the studios are still making despite pirating. If they would make more of a effort to get the movie to DVD quicker there would be less pirating imho. Who wants to take the chance of blowing 50$ (without snacks) for your family to see a movie that sucks, which quite a few now days do. Really though, when did the entertainment industry stop being about entertainment, and more about milking every cent out of it they can.
WTF does the practice of beautifying the face and hair and skin have to do with science.... oh wait.. nm
True, true still, a marker would resolve that, but then people would just use their own mix. Regardless it was just food for thought. I was mainly making a point about how the government has a tendency to take awesome advances in technology and turn them into ways to further protect us from ourselves. On the flip side if it weren't for government programs like NASA we wouldn't have velcro. I suppose it a fair trade!
I was actually assuming that continuing advances would soon detect muzzle flash, which would be a more reliable method imho. Gases involved during a burn are already easily detectable, they do it for stars with prisms, and I am fairly certain that gun powder would have a specific signature. If not a marker gas could easily be added.
There is a bad ass little project out there right now called Zoneminder (http://zoneminder.com/). Works great! You can pick up a 4 port surveillance card for about 100$ and Wal-Mart has color cameras with good res for about 50$. ZoneMinder even does motion detection pretty well, I use it to watch all my stuff, and to solve those, SHE HIT!!! No I DIDN'T!!! argument between the kids!
Linux for teh win!!!!111elevenity
I want to know how far out it is until we start seeing this type of technology like this on satellites. Imagine the government being able to watch a whole city from space for gun shots.
"Defense network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination." -Terminator
Ok, stop humping the nano-cable... Why don't you and the frickin' nano cable get room?
This is awesome! Now if we can only get people coding html in Winblows to test their pages on firefox we'll be in business!
I think the thing we need to think about is when this may be useful to us. Right now it has to cost around elevenity billion dollars to make just enough to test... I think I will stick with the current speed of light through fiber.
Actually most /.ers are on a slightly more informed level then your typical reader. I think its fair to point out the fact that he retains his right to the software, even though he is distributing the code and binaries without cost.
Not only that.. Lots of people give their software away. Its called freeware (or malware most the time! ;). I feel its the fact that the linux kernel, and 99% of GNU, is "Open Source" that makes Linus stand out for being revolutionary.
----
68% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
ummm tinyurl.com dude..