[LINK] World's biggest luddite strikes again! / Content is ha ndmaiden.

[DaZZa]

On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Chirgwin, Richard wrote:

> And I just cannot resist commenting on this remark:

Ditto. :-)

> Points:
> 1) The effectiveness of widespread broadband will last only until Website
> designers find ways to make a 6M link act like a 2400bps modem.

You mean they haven't already? Flash, frames, CSS, Java, graphics,
graphics, graphics.

I could download full screen ANSI pages in my BBS days as quickly - or
quicker - than a lot of web pages download these days.

> 2) Saliya, nobody, but nobody, gets 100% utilisation out of any link.
> Nobody, never. Try this experiment: take a broadband link, work out the
> theoretical download time of, say, a txt file from project Gutenberg; then
> run the download with a stopwatch. I'll bet anything up to five dollars that
> the actual download time is rarely better than around 40% theoretical.

You're assuming the link is doing one thing at a time only.

I assure you, I get 100% utilisation out of my dialup link almost
permanently. I can also provide stats on a permanent net connected service
which gets close to 100% utilisation outgoing all the time {256k frame
relay service - it serves a couple of incredibly popular web sites}.

> (which is another point that probably holods consumers back: carriers
> advertising X megabits per second, but delivering X/50 actual).

Oversubscription is a technological fact. It's done on the assumption that
at any one time, 90% of network traffic is idle, allowing time division
multiplexing to be enormously successful.

Which is fine in a circuit switched, voice based paradigm. Unfortunately,
packet switched networks {which the internet is} simply don't have this
slack to compress. Unfortunately, most capacity planners for large Telco's
still think voice only, curcuit switched networks - even ISDN capacity
planners rely heavily on multiplexing to make up for over subscription of
available data bandwidth - and ISDN is supposedly a packet switched
network.

Until Telco's realise that voice is no longer the sole and only money
spinner, things will always remain this way.

DaZZa