Re: [nanog] Re: Microsoft offering xDSL access

[M. David Leonard]

On Fri, 23 Jan 1998, Paul A Vixie wrote:

> 
> Nobody in their right mind would sell T1 to every customer and do 1000:1
> overcommit of their transit links without some kind of bandwidth shaping.
> Since that shaping is part of the engineering plan, the marketroids will
> have to find some way to come clean about it in the advertising glossies.
> 

	Funny, last year in Boston I spoke to a rep from Highway1 
(Media1's Internet division) wherein he stated that they planned to sell 
off 2,000 cable modem links (subscribers) from a single T3 while 
promising 10Mbps speeds to the home.  I pointed out this was an oversale 
ratio of something like 400:1.  He countered that I must not understand 
the statistics of network traffic.  I countered that he must be engaged 
in wishful thinking if he expected end users not to push the limits of 
technology and expect the moon for only $19.95 per month.  I predicted 
that people would decide that CUCEEME (sp?) was too cool to live without 
and that they would want to listen to their neighbor's CD audio over the 
'net.  Needless to say, we parted company with neither having been 
convinced by the other.  So in general the cable companies seem to 
believe in high oversale ratios, although not perhaps in the thousands.

					David