Increased Bandwidth Irrelevant?

halbert writes "ArsTechnica has a story about AT&T COO Randall Stephenson telling folks that there is 'no discernable difference' between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps, because the backbone is slowing everything down. The main argument from the article is that fiber to the home is not necessary. How about letting the consumer decide that?" From the article: "This is a direct response to the criticism that AT&T has suffered for deploying a fiber optic network that reaches only to the local node, not directly into a customer's home--which means that the 'last mile' connection is still copper wire. Verizon, by contrast, is deploying fiber directly into the home, making for much higher speeds. AT&T argues that its model is cheaper, faster to deploy, and just as capable as Verizon's, which currently uses much of its massive bandwidth to distribute RF TV channels."

Faster to deploy?

[JoeWalsh]

AT&T's method is faster to deploy?

I live in a development constructed in 1999.

When I moved in, there was no consumer-level high-speed Internet access offered in the neighborhood.

Now, in 2006, Comcast has fiber to each and every home.

AT&T? "Sorry, DSL isn't offered in your area."

Faster to deploy? Right.

the difference comes when

[Surt]

... the backbone is not the bottleneck. What if I want to serve up home videos of my kids to their grandparents? I can serve up more than 1.5mbps, my parents can consume it, and there aren't any heavily contested resources between us. As more and more people catch on to the fun factor of serving up their own content, and as tools to make that easy become more widely available, the demand for high bandwidth connections is going to go through the roof.

Connection not so important

[a_nonamiss]

I tend to agree with TFA. I used to work at a UUNET datacenter, and my desktop PC was literally two hops away from multiple OC48 connections. (My computer -> wiring closet switch -> department router -> ATM switch -> UUNET backbone.) Truthfully, the experience was not much different that browsing on my cable modem at home. Sure, if I wanted to download something from the university in my city (which was on the same sonnet ring) it was fast as hell, but other than that, it wasn't really that much different. Where you get an advantage with huge bandwidth like that is in aggregate connections. There were tens of thousands of servers and multiple circuits terminating in that building, and hardly any latency at all on anything. But for an individual user... not much difference.

Re:Vested interests...

[spxero]

I think you're absolutely right on. Of course he would say there isn't any difference. To the average non-techie internet user, there isn't any difference when going to google and searching. But to the person running multiple torrents on one machine, MMORPG's on another computer, and browsing the internet on a third (more than one person, but only one connection) there is a HUGE difference between 1.5Mbps and 6Mbps.

I had two 1.5Mbps DSL lines back at my parent's house(they work for ATT) and the connections were fine. But I couldn't connect too many computers to one connection and run anything more than one or two torrents without bottlenecking the connection. And the ping times were around an average of 100-200ms. Now I'm on a 4Mbit connection with ping times around 50-100ms while running a few torrents.

You can't blame the guy for trying to help his cause, but you most certainly can blame him for being blind about the facts. Sure, I know they're putting fiber down in Southern California with ~30Mbit connections (I have no idea of the cost). But until that happens in my area, I'll stick with my 4Mbps connection (yes, it's not as good as some, but fast enough right now).

Let the customers decide what they *want*

[Zedrick]

What a load of crap. I've had 10Mb full duplex for the last few months, and sure - I was quite happy with that. Do I really need more? No. Last week my ISP without any warning or notification decided to raise it to 100Mb. I'm not downloading (and seeding...) at around 9-11MB (yes, 11 MegaByte) per second. Do I need it? No. Do I want to go back to 10MB? No.

Also: "because the backbone is slowing everything down". Well, if the 6Mb is 6Mb only in theory, then it's not 6Mb, and the customers shouldn't pay for 6Mb. I understand that the situation is a bit different in the US than here (Sweden), but still - that sucks and is not acceptable.

One at a time..

[squison]

"we're not constrained by bandwidth. You're not constrained by the size of the pipe anymore," Stephenson said, referring to the switched-video capacity of the network which delivers only one service to a single customer at a time."

So, he expects every home in America to have only 1 TV hooked to his TV network, and while that TV is on, nobody is using any computers in their house. It's this ignorant management and lack of innovation that makes most current telcos a dying breed. At least Verizon is taking a step forward with Fios and IPTV.

Can 1 HD channel even fit through a 15mbps pipe?

Having used both

[NFNNMIDATA]

Having used both services and numerous others I can say 1.5Mbps is noticeably slower than the 6Mbps, and the FIOS is just way faster than both for pretty much everything. By "way" I mean usually double the download speed. And for me it's cheaper than cable was by $10/mo, which is wonderful. Obviously you can hit some bottlenecks outside anyone's control, but these are actually pretty rare. Also, it's probably not relevant, but I also have a much more consistent low latency connection to the World of Warcraft servers now. I think that's more of an issue with the shared-bandwidth nature of the cable connection I had though. Anyway, that AT&T guy is incorrect as far as I can tell about there being no discernable difference, the difference between 1.5 and 6 is noticeable and from 6 to 15 is huge.

I'd look into a replacement for SpeakEasy.

[ClioCJS]

They terminated my service today for not restricting my downloads to 100G / month. This is in spite of their 'unlimited' sales pitch, and the conversation I had with pre-sales using a psuedonym: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/tags/speakea sy [flickr.com] (read in reverse order)

And what would you do with a gigabit?

[briancnorton]

Lets pretend that you have virtually unlimited bandwidth to your house. What are you (as a consumer) going to do with it? Forget businesses and industrial use, what would a consumer do with it? Video is a good option for IPTV, but that's a hard financial sell against a deployed coaxial cable network. (not impossible, but hard) What else? Play quake with no lag? Seriously, there is a point of diminishing returns until the software has a valid reason to use that much bandwidth.

Actually, deciding IS hard.

[jd]

Most customers have bugger all idea of how much bandwidth their applications use, or what bandwidth would be required by the services they are demanding (CD-quality VoIP, movies-over-IP, things like that), or what bandwidth will be needed by applications invented next week on Thursday.

I do agree that the backbone is lagging behind, but don't butcher the users' capabilities simply because the telecos can't get their fingers out. Especially as it seems to be the telecos who are complaining. Doubly so, when it is the lack of multicast at the home that prevents users from making better use of what backbone there is.

A gigabit to the home is about the most that can usefully be used using current technology. None of the providers listed do full-duplex gigabit. Until that time, everything is excuses. If home computers can push/pull ten gig before even a single gig is on tap, then that would be the new minimum before excuses can possibly be acceptable.

When the providers don't provide, don't blame the users if they don't use. They can't, whatever their choice might be, even if they knew what that choice would be.

Re:Vested interests...

[Garak]

With a simple bit of traffic shaping a single 1.5mbit DSL line can handle the webbroswing of alot of users. Even if a few are using Bittorrent and other bandwidth hungry applications. The big downloads will be a little slow but one shouldn't notice latency on small transfers if its setup properly.

The real problem with Bittorrent on ADSL is on the upload side. The send queue on the modem fills up and packets will take a few 100ms to get through if they don't get dropped. This makes for a painfully slow experience.

Greater than 1.5mbit service only really required when you want to offer services like streaming media. Using a MPEG4 codec like xvid you can stream fairly good quality TV at 1.5mbit but that dosn't leave much for overhead and other applications. Also thats only one channel, these days your typical home may have 4 people watching 4 different things on 4 differnt channels, so then you need 6mbit of bandwidth.

No major provider is going to get behind peer to peer. The idea behind p2p is to avoid the bandwidth cost. Well thats lost income for the provider. Peer to peer is a cool idea but in the long run its going to be squashed.

I can see the day comming when its impossible to get a publicly routed IPv4 address to your home. Some ISP's are already using private addressing for their subscribers. The switch to IPv6 just isn't happening and there really isn't a need. Between virtual hosting and NAT the IP address shortage has been solved. No desktop computer really needs an Internet routable IP and this also adds a layer of security.

As much as I love getting my weekly fix of TV for free off Bittorrent, I just don't see ISP's allowing this to continue for much longer. Once they work out an effective way to stream content I can see them filtering it out all together. They are not going to let people to get what they are selling for free. Both of the local broadband ISP's here already are cracking down on it by heavly throttling all traffic to users who exceed a cerntain threshold.

Very few public sites can supply a single user with 6mbit. Most servers are still on 100mbit ethernet and are serving alot more than 20 clients at a time. Currently the only way to get more than 1.5mbit from the public internet is via bittorrent. Unless you have your own server in a datacenter thats not seeing much load. When I had 5mbit DSL I could download at 500kB/s from my colocated server.