[KLUG Members] Charter internet

[Mike Williams]

>Message: 5
>Subject: Re: [KLUG Members] Charter internet
>From: Bruce Smith <bruce@armintl.com>
>To: KLUG members <members@kalamazoolinux.org>
>Date: 04 Jun 2002 10:25:49 -0400
>Reply-To: members@kalamazoolinux.org
>

>>You've got to remember with a dial-up connection, an ISP has to
>>provide a
>>modem for EACH customer that connects.
>
>WRONG!  Dialup ISP's provide ONE modem for every couple dozen
>customers
>or more (give or take, varies between ISP).

Right for total number of customers, but WRONG for concurrent 
connections.  Whether they still use a rack of modems, or they have a trunk 
line (T1 or whatever), each concurrent connection takes one of their lines 
(or T1 channels).  Somebody using 128K ISDN is even worse because 
that takes 2 channels.

>And some big ISP's don't provide any modems.  They lease the 
service
>of
>modems from other ISP's.  You used to have a Earthlink dialup, what
>did
>the modem say when it answered?  Earthlink doesn't have any of their
>own
>modems in this part of the country.  My Earthlink dialup used to
>answer
>with a UUNET modem, or PSI, or ...  depending what number I was
>calling.

true, but irrelevant.  You still have every concurrent connection taking 
one modem (channel) from a finite pool.

>>With Cable Modem, it basically one
>>large ethernet network; a whole lot less wiring / equipment to deal
>>with.

More or less.  upstream and downstream have different capacities, and 
there it's usually more than one segment.  Still generally true, though.

>If you're implying that it's cheaper for cable internet providers,
>I'd
>like to see proof that buying all the digital cable internet
>equipment
>is cheaper than buying a block of modems.  If supply and demand has
>any
>effect on this, I'm betting the cable equipment costs more (but I
>don't
>know either).  And the cable providers have to buy more bandwidth
>since
>they are providing higher bandwidth to their customers.

I don't have any numbers on this either.  The initial cost, of course, will 
be very high to set up the network for digital signals to be carried up in 
the high frequencies.  Also, most of the time, the initial installation of 
digital cable or cable Internet requires new cable to be run from the house 
to the tap, at least in Kalamazoo.  The wire already there is below spec 
for digital because Cablevision was stingy and short-sighted when they 
originally wired the place.

Yes, cable companies SHOULD buy more bandwidth to the Internet, but 
there's no guarantee that they do.  Those would be good statistics to see, 
though:  average bandwidth per person.  Not maximum bandwidth that 
everybody quotes, but how much you'd actually have if everybody was 
trying to download at the same time.  Wonder if it's different between 
Cable, DSL, and dial-up. 

Speaking of which, everybody in this discussion is aware, I hope, that a 
256Kbps cable connection doesn't mean you're guaranteed that?  Just 
means that your modem doesn't start throttling the transfer until 256.