North American Network Operators Group
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Re: cost of doing business

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Mon Apr 18 11:26:53 2005 
On 17 Apr 2005, at 13:54, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:
We are talking of two different things here, traffic versus access bandwidth.
It will be a while before the average household generates 5 megabit/s traffic.
I don't think that's true. I have seen bittorrent clients running on machines that have good connectivity (>>typical North American residential; say 100M access to a data centre on the east coast). With only moderately-popular torrents (think fan movies like fanimatrix or starship exeter, a week or so after the slashdot effect has died down) such a client can easily seed at 10-20Mbit/s.

I think for the average household which contains at least one teenager with a computer, today, the average household is easily capable of generating 5Mbit/s, sustained for long periods.

[Widespread use of p2p file sharing can blow transit/peering costs per port out of the water. Until there's a distribution mechanism for the kind of content most file sharers exchange that ISPs can participate in (instead of the current mechanism which ISPs have trouble legally acknowledging the existence of) it seems reasonable to think the risk of cost explosion will only get worse; people will continue to share media around the edge, and ISPs will continue to play whack-a-mole with the protocols concerned to try and keep their costs under control.]

Even in Korea and Hong Kong, where the average broadband link is in the
5-10 Mbps range, average traffic is about 0.1 Mbps.
Average traffic is not as interesting as peak traffic, I think, from the consumer's perspective.

For example, if I lived within the permitted catchment of a future comprehensive BBC video archive, a big last-mile pipe would allow behaviours that a small last-mile pipe would not, such as pulling video content on-demand. The fact that I might only pull content a couple of times a week means the average utilisation might be very low. The benefit of having the big pipe is fairly clear, however, even with such low average utilisation.


Joe