[TriLUG] Broadband Speeds

[Steve Williams]

And the available bandwidth per node is a pretty high value in the overall
scheme of things.  While in the past some cable companies did not do a very
good job in managing the utilization of those nodes (leading to those very
funny WEB HOG commercials from Pac Bell), the tools are finally becoming
available to do just that.  The number of users, in and of itself, is not
the best measure - some nodes with small numbers of users can saturate the
link (think college areas), and other nodes with MANY users barely use the
available bandwidth.

Good cable companies are keeping up with the growth, splitting nodes as
appropriate - but its not an overnight process.  At some point, it's not
financially feasible to split nodes for the number of users supported in an
"all-you-can-eat" mode.  Thats where the notion of acceptable use comes into
play, and some cable companies are going to a tiered-pricing approach.

DSL can suffer from this too - if you have too many users (or too many
high-volume users) connected to a DSLAM and the supporting connection back
to the provider's core network is undersized, the same effect will (and
does) happen.

-Steve

> This excerpt comes from DSL reports, which could possibly be wrong, but
> I don't think so.
> http://www.dslreports.com/faq/7135
>
> Sharing bandwidth - how many users per node? (#7135)
>
> The number of modem users per node is important because due to the way
> cable systems are built, nodes are the common aggregation point for all
> the cable signal traffic in a particular neighborhood. This means all
> users connected to one node share the bandwidth available to that node.
>
>
>
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