| The larger problem.. Is the fact that Comcast (atleast in the DC Metro area) has to compete with the likes of DSL and Fiber (I have FIOS personally, even though I despise verizon). What they end up doing is upping the bandwidth offerings to their customers to keep them from jumping ship, without providing sufficient infrastructure on the back end to support it. For the record, normal ISPs suffer the same fate (you can only have so many dialup customers on a single POP being fed by T1's and T3's) Cable customers are not tier 1 backbone providers, like ATT and Verizon. ATT and Verizon can offer extremely high speeds without suffering any impact simply due to the fact that much of the customer infrastructure hits the backbone immediately, rather then going through the ISP's (comcast, cox, cable companies/satellite providers) backbone, then hitting the tier 1 backbone. I suspect most of the cable companies and such are probably running OC3's, potentially OC12's, but I doubt anything higher. That is where many of the bottlenecks will occur. Except on shared mediums, where yes, a single user can saturate the link, that is just a limitation of the technology, but that is not the customers problem, that is the providers problem for pushing a service they cannot support. |
