said by billaustin:It buys them time. Every month they delay turning up more capacity means a delay in increasing expenses. No ISP wants the heavy users on their network. They all have methods for dealing with them. The more capacity a network has, the less likely they are to implement the control methods to alleviate the impact of the heavy users.
While this is true, they'd need to be terminating _a lot_ of DSL users to make any real difference. This buys them a little bit of time perhaps, but it also means they're getting rid of a recurring revenue stream and pissing a customer off (who may then go and tell 10 other people how badly they've been treated, and who probably won't be coming back to CL).
I'm wondering though if this is an attempt at putting off some upgrade expenses until next year. CL's fiscal year is the same as a calendar year according to Yahoo Finance. If this is really what they're doing, it's incredibly stupid and short-sighted.
said by billaustin:Normally, a few customers won't cause the saturation of upstream links in a fiber fed area. As I said before, we don't know how widespread this CL tactic is, or the capacity and status of the network links it affects. There are still many CL areas (mostly rural), where a few heavy users can bring a DSLAM to a crawl.
You are right; in my mind I've got the idea that this is getting to be more common because it's the 2nd reported case in the last few weeks, but you are correct in that this really isn't a large enough sample size to develop an accurate picture.
I agree about the rural areas as well; when you've got a DSLAM served by a few T1s, it's easy to see how a single customer can cause congestion problems for everyone else, and in those rural areas it's also easy to see why they wouldn't want the expense of running fiber, upgrading the DSLAM, etc.
