"D. Peter Maus" wrote in message
...
Heavy users downloading hd movies and tv shows, playing high speed
games requiring large amounts of bandwidth, can cause performance problems
for other users on the radius as the bandwidth limitations of the network
are approached. In the case of Comcast or ATT U-Verse, this can actually
cause TV performance compromises for users who are very light internet
users, but pay heavily for cable TV. I've experienced this in prime time
at my g/f's house with Comcast.

Bandwidth limitations are necessary to prevent a few heavy users from
compromising the performance of other users who equally pay the costs.
Though Comcast abuses the privilege, to be sure.

Further, bandwidth limitations prevent residential users, on less
efficient pipes, from using the net for high bandwidth businesses, like
hosting FTP sites, as I do on my T-1, video streams, and other servers.
Again consuming the bandwidth of other users. Compromising their service,
for which they pay.

The way to solve this problem is not to oversell bandwidth. For instance,
if they sell you a 15 Mb/s connection, then you should be able to have that
15 Mb/s available to you at all times, no matter what you are doing with it
(running an FTP server, or whatever). If they don't want you to use 15 Mb/s,
they shouldn't SELL it to you. They should sell you 680 Kb/s or whatever
they really MEAN for you to have. Right now, we are paying for three 10 Mb/s
cable drops, and between the three we're getting MAYBE a solid 1.5 Mb/s. One
drop is dedicated to a 64 Kb MP3Pro audio stream, and yet it can't even
always keep up with that! I've had to pay for the additional drops (from two
different providers, two completely different systems) in order to have an
almost constant net connections for the home computers (one drop), the audio
stream (one drop) and our Vonage phone lines (one dedicated drop). Our
internet drops on the line for the computers about once every 3-7 minutes
for about a second and a half. It's annoying as hell.