Comment Re:One last try (Score 1) 218
My understanding is that it's more like 25 to 5000 customers (I think Cable Labs suggests 250 for DOCSIS 3.0) sharing a certain amount of channels/bandwidth (probably around 300Mbps down for DOCSIS 3.0 and over 1Gbps down for DOCSIS 3.1) on their node to CMTS.
The target over-subscription ratio for gigabit seems to be no more than 50:1 from the few papers I've read.
300 Mbps * 1 month = 98.6 TB; / 250 subscribers = 400 GB but that's saying if everyone used an equal amount / all of their share.
With the realistic 1.3Gbps+ range for DOCSIS 3.1 with 50 subscribers it'll be over 8TB.
And, like you say, it only matters if everyone is competing for bandwidth at the same time and most of the time that doesn't happen.
Flat caps don't make sense for that problem. Most people aren't home during the weekday and so bandwidth is going unused during that time.
Peak usage caps or traffic shaping heavy users to give priority to light users or even much higher overall caps with weighted data during peak usage times would make a lot more sense than the current flat cap scheme.
It seems to me that ISPs don't really want to deal with it and would rather attempt to balance keeping ahead with capacity and speed upgrades as needed while every now and then moving data cap targets to protect themselves from the heaviest of users.