Quote:
Originally Posted by grumpy3b
To call ADSL a shared service is downright misleading perhaps in an attempt to engender opinion to your position. It is in fact not a shared service. On a shared service the actual rate delivered is variable in real-time. Cable is the case of a shared service at the neighborhood level. ADSL is not shared at the neighborhood level which the only relevant level of sharing to the end user. Everything else is at a layer or more abstracted from the actual users access and service.
|
No, with the very greatest respect that's not the case. ADSL certainly is a contended resource at the level of the local telephone exchange, and performance varies with the activity of local users.
Eg, my nominally 8MBit ADSL service has a download speed of about 5MBit/sec at quiet periods such as this (early Sunday morning). During working hours, when all the local businesses come online, download speed drops to about 1.5-2MBit/sec because of contention at my local telephone exchange. Between 4-6pm, speed gradually increases again as those businesses stop using the internet.
Cable is contended at the local street cable level; ADSL is contended at the telephone exchange. To say that it's a fixed bandwidth resource is highly misleading. The only fixed bandwidth part of the system is the wire from your house to the telephone exchange; beyond that, it's all shared.