Upstream Bandwidth -- Continued → Re: Head in the arse....

To respond to your statement, people in small numbers have been asking for faster speed, so if I justified the cost of opening up the pipes, to suffice the needs of even a hefty 45% of the users, I would need to increase my revenue to cover the cost of the data hitting the backbone. You're a businessman, trying to get away with paying mediocre rates as a residential user. You want more speed, but don't think you should pay for a business account from any ISP. Now, you need a bigger pipe to do this uploading, how can you do it on a shared medium, easy, QoS the UBR/BSR router and open a separate upstream channel to handle the individual traffic from business customers coming from node X, Y, and Z (as you can splice those signals into the CMTS from different nodes). Do you think an ISP would be able to offer a business plan/package without at least guaranteeing 90% of promised speed on a business plan?

The problem with people and their understanding of how Cable and DSL are shared is that people don't "really" know how it's done. There is SOOOO many ways to free up nodes in Cable Internet, that oversold nodes are practically a thing of the past. Load balancing and putting 3 nodes with nobody in them on 1 cmts card, or separating a part of a node to another ubr card is just a few things done. QoS rules can also be used at timed intervals to prevent a heavy load when everyone decides to download their e-mail at 5:30 to 5:45 each day. I won't even talk about DSL, because they can't guarantee their max speed usually, and wifi isn't even reliable enough or consistent with regards to latency.

To do what you purpose, rates would increase, and the people who didn't care (the 55%) would consider leaving. Why do you need 512k up for on residential service. I haven't seen an online game that REQUIRES anything higher than 128k to 256k upstream, which even the slowest DSL package could handle. Per the TOS, you aren't suppose to run anything other than personal services, so downloading or streaming an mp3 thru IIS can survive off 14k/s. If you're uploading lots of movies to your job, then thats more a business need, because it make YOU money, and is convienent, as opposed to burning lots of CD's. I do lots of VoIP with Asterisk, and ran a chatline capable of 40 calls at one time on 786k upload speeds.

Thats another thing, "DOES IT MAKE YOU MONEY??", and if you use if for work, then you should be grunting "YEAH!", and to that I say, "Welcome to the cost of making money". Money isn't free, you have to work for it, and pay your dues. If your job is worth a crap, they would pay for your internet if you are suppose to be doing work from home. If you're a small home business, tough, deal with it, nobody said owning a business that requires internet should be the same as a regular ol' residential user. If you have a demand for more speed, then pay for it, you're job will thank you. Even the phone company has different rates for business telephone use, not just T1's, but plain old copper. And you get priority repair service, instead of "the next available slot" if you have a service visit, which means your job won't suffer as long.

More would be great, but at the moment, it's just not practicle enough for everyone to jump in on. Look at Verizon's investors right now, they don't want to wait for money to come. And I don't see how their service can be always reliable if it passes thru regular everyday neighborhoods. Cut a fiber feed, everyone goes out, including phones (we know it's a SONET ring).

The problem is that most so called "Business" Accounts are just Residential Class accounts with a higher price tag.

To be a REAL Business class account, it must offer the following features:

1) A separate IPN Block that is NOT listed as DHCP/Dial-Up in the black lists so that the company's SMTP Server can actually send email without the possibility of having it rejected by the receiving SMTP Server due to being on a "not allowed to send due to being DHCP/Dial-Up" Black List.

2) A static IPN and DOMAIN Name (not a generic type DHCP Name) OR if the address MUST be DHCP, the automatic updating of the rDNS and DNS A records when the ISP alters the IPN (a short TTL to expire the prior IPN if this is a scheduled split would be useful so when the new address goes into effect, the cached copies will expire fast).

3) No restrictions on Servers or Bandwidth usage. If you DO have caps, they must be specified and able to be monitored by the user not "invisible"/"undocumented".

NOTE: I am NOT asking for the full QoS Commitment of a Dedicated Line type contract but only some justification for the extra money that is being charged due to it being labeled as a Business Class account.

Why do I need the upload speed? Hmmm ... lemme think.

1) I'd like to send my quicken data to my personal accountant to have him do my taxes.

2) I'd like to upload my photos and videos (my camera does both) to my personal web-site so i don't have to email them to everybody.

3) I'd like to use one of the on-line backup companies to backup my system (80Gb currently).

4) I'd like to video conference with my relatives (spread out all over the world as they travel a lot).

5) I'd like to upload my pod-casts (yep, we make'em) to the appropriate servers.

6) I'd like to tag Google-Earth sites with my photo's and videos.

It's not that I can't do these things at all, but that they take so darn long to finish. Waiting an hour to upload a 10 minute pod-cast is ridiculous.

I guess my last point would be this; how in the world can you say no one wants upload speeds when they aren't offered at all? Offer them and THEN tell me no one wanted it!

BTW, trying to use cable for ANY business reason is a sure fire recipe for disaster. Between invisible caps, erratic performance, and lousy tech support, you can't get anything done.

"Even the phone company has different rates for business telephone use, not just T1's, but plain old copper. And you get priority repair service, instead of "the next available slot" if you have a service visit, which means your job won't suffer as long."

T1 customers ALWAYS get top priority. That's just part of why they pay much more for that T1. If I have a problem with a DSL customer that requires a truck roll I get "Someone will be their by 6pm tomorrow" If I get the same thing on a T1 I can have someone from Bell there with in 4 hours.

Then open up shop and offer what "YOU" call a business package. The point is, it IS treated different in the headend/CMTS. You pay extra for the guarantee that it will work, and provide you with a consistent class of service at all times. Comcast gives you 5 IP's, up to 10 e-mail account standard, and a whole list of other things that can be viewed at »work.comcast.net. Just an example. And there is no caps, or limits to the amount of usage.

And if cable is not for you, you can pay a few hundred/thousand more for a T1 with all the bells and whistles. All I'm saying is, you want UPLOAD, then tell me why we should pay all this money to have it for everyone, when most of the paying world could give a crap about it (and I DO care about upload, but I am not upset that mine is 768k, and not higher). I feel, given the current pricing of all thats out there, the speed is perfect. I also know that more upload leads to more expense for ISP's, and backbone providers, as upgrading is necessary to cover all the additional equipment and cable costs for capacity. With the numbers I just threw in there stating how many "concerned, savvy users" this site alone carries. If you compare that to the world population (since this is a world wide site), all the numbers on »/who added together wouldn't even be 1% of the entire world population. Nobody on a grand scale gives a crap about more upstream, just statistically speaking, but I myself would love any more speed that is given to me for the same price, aka, free, and I know I'm not alone here..

NOW... Why did you even post your business requirements for service, when this discussion was based on upstream increases, and who has a valid, legitimate, non work related, legal use for the extra bandwidth? None of the things you just posted have anything to do with upload, including the NOTE you placed at the end of the message about not asking for QoS Commitment, etc. Why do you feel you should have the special option of more upload, as opposed to the rest of the happy subscribers who enjoy our rates remaining static, while our speed increases?

WOW! Your ISP really sucks bad if you don't have enough upload to do 1 thru 4 quick enough. About # 2, considering if you e-mailed it, and it went thru (under 10 megs) you should be able to host it as a link to your own page, and at 384k, it will d/l in about 3 or 4 minutes, or if you upload it to a filelocker, they (family) can d/l it in less than 1 minute.

80Gig on a online backup is not a "requirement" for a residential user, as you can also burn CD's. Backing up something that large, unless your upload is a gig a sec, is never going to be easy or quick.

I'm glad you make podcast, judging they are finally starting to rise again in distribution. Nobody cared about them for the longest. Since you make them, perhaps you can upload them to YouTube so everyone can download it at a decent speed. I hope your podcast do not contain any copyright material, because if so, you're not showing a "valid" reason for upload increase. Excluding ILLEGAL activities, I can't see a reason NOT to deal with the current upload speeds.

Tagging Google-Earth sites with photo's and videos doesn't seem like it should take that long. I imagine you're on DSL, or a wireless provider, as you don't seem too fond of cable, and currently cable and fiber are the only 2 out there with the best upload speed for the $.

A 10 minute podcast should only take you about 10 minutes, unless you decide you want to record a high resolution picture on a low resolution I-Pod. Depending on your market, faster upload speeds are available. I have 384 or 768k upload speeds available to me thru Comcast. I really hardly use the upload. It's nice to have, but I recently removed it because I didn't need the speed as much as I felt I needed the $10 difference in billing. When you benefit once a week from it, it's nothing to remove it.

Cable internet for business works great, I'm thinking Cable has made you pissed about something, and you feel that it's an incompetent method of internet. I can assure you, being able to run a chatline with 40 callers on the line @ 768k with virtually no jitter is an amazing feat. I doubt the 60ms ping times I was maintaining during that load would be possible without QoS'ing my modem. The node I did this in has 312 modems on the same node. The difference, my UBR/BSR card is different than the other 312 modems, so I don't "share" that pipe with everyone. I have called for tech support, and they walked me right thru the Cisco UBR900 commercial modem setup. Caps haven't ever (that I know of) been brought to BBR by a commercial customer, all are residential people. And again, erratic performance has never been an issue, and I have a very busy node I am using, so lots of competition for bandwidth, but somehow I always get at least 90% of the max, which is all you really can EXPECT someone to hold true to. I don't know how many logged speed tests I have, but you are welcome to look.

Just keep wishing, you're now offically noted as one of the 20% - 30% who feels that everyone should pay for your speed increase, when they don't want it. I hope that podcast collection works out for ya.