Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The way it works in the UK is that the telephone network is owned by British Telecom (BT). They are an ISP themselves, but also act as a wholesaler, selling bandwidth on their network to other ISPs. My ISP buys a certain amount of bandwidth from BT.
In my case, the slowdown I see during business hours is because I live in a small village, which has quite a few "high-tech" businesses in the immediate local area. Our local telephone exchange, being rather old, has a limited capacity IP "pipe" connecting it to the rest of the BT IP network. That pipe gets overloaded during peak hours, resulting in a slowdown in performance for everybody. BT are gradually upgrading their network and adding capacity, but that upgrade hasn't reached down as far as local village telephone exchanges yet, and my local exchange has not yet been scheduled for an upgrade.
This is a very common situation in the UK. People who live in large towns and cities generally get much faster speeds than those like me who live in small villages. It's simply a matter of network capacity and has nothing to do with throttling or traffic management.
|
ahhhh, OK I get it now Harry, thanks for explaining the situation you are having to work within. Has to be frustrating. But there has to be throttling if the pipe is over sold. Otherwise the thing would blow up. They might not admit to it but it's there. It might be a self-defense designed into the system sort of thing, but it is there. It's the whole reason of one of the network layers exists, to protect service integrity with a graceful fall-back. We are just talking at different purposes here. So that is where the misunderstanding comes into play.
Until my selling my home recently, while I live in what is called a small town in the US, about 25k people, we at least can have up to 7.1/768 service and they could sell some people up to 12Mbps service but won't due to the very real physical limitations you outline. The simply aren't willing to grow the CO as they need to. And it will be the next millennium before we see FIOS.
So, sure based on the capacity limits where you are a cap is the most feasible way to distribute the capacity fairly. A shame though because of all the online content these days. I so love many of the BBC shows. Hopefully BBC offers less bandwidth intensive options for content. Over here so many are enamored with the need of HD for everything that people will blow through caps as generous as the 250GB mentioned in this thread just by watching Super Bowl commercials (well that is hyperbole to illustrate the point...
). Hulu is no better but there is a small amount of fail-back in their content.
Anyway, great discussion thanks, I don't get to workout the network designer muscle much anymore as I retired about 10 years ago when I sold my company to come care for my mom & grandmother. Funny this reminds me I don't miss the business one bit. Always fires to put out when you do post install remediation as well as design troubleshooting. Plus 30+ years in IT is waaay to much! haha...off to nod for me now.