[NCLUG] Re: DSL Throttling or General Congestion?

[Stephen Warren]

Jim Hutchinson wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 11:52 AM, Ben West <mrgenixus at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>the fact is, DSL is and always will be a shared-access medium, it would be
>>fraudulent for them to sell you a higher service level, considering they
>>can't currently provide you with your maximum allocation...  You're
>>proposing to pay for a bigger buffet at a restaurant where they can't keep
>>all the food-stations full to begin with....  perhaps if you need more
>>bandwidth, you should find out if they have any dedicated-access options
>>available?
> 
> What do you mean by shared-access? My understanding is that cable is shared
> and that if a lot of people in your area are online you will see a decrease
> in performance.

That's pretty much all just marketing FUD by the cable/DSL companies 
(that one is better than the other.)

At some point, on absolutely any network medium, your traffic gets 
mingled with other customers over some line with some finite level of 
resources.

Whether this occurs nearer/further from your house isn't really relevant 
at all; what matters is how big each customer's bandwidth cap[1] is 
relative to the size of the shared medium, at the place where this works 
out worst.

Of course, if the bottle-neck is at a location before bandwith caps are 
implemented, then that could be a worse issue, since then, fair sharing 
can't be enforced. Still, that isn't the case for either DSL or cable 
AFAIK; for upstream, your modem implements this in both cases, and for 
downstream, the ISP's router implements this in both cases.