Additional Overhead on a Congested WAN?

[Klueless]

Came up under comments elsewhere and got me to wondering ...

At one of my part time jobs we have 15 employees, 11 PCs and another dozen smart phones, tablets, etc. We also view security camera footage through the Internet. All in all pretty busy for a 15 x 1.5 Mbps Internet Service. Daily utilization was 15 to 20 GB.

Last month we upgraded the Internet to 400 x 20 Mbps. Daily utilization dropped. It is now 10 to 15 GB per day. (And here I was thinking better performance would motivate more utilization.)

I always figured there was some overhead (errors, dropped packets, retransmitts, etc.) to users competing for a limited resource but I never dreamed anything like 25%.

I'm left wondering if my observations are anywhere near correct (and wondering how we ever worked as well as we did all these years)?

And, I'm also left wondering how some of this stuff really works.

 

[coxhaus]

Nice find. Once you hit a bottle neck it cascades.

I kind of wondered if the cable companies are giving us fast speeds to reduce congestion on there network. If your speeds are faster than you can use then the network stays really quick.

 

[Klueless]

Nice find. Once you hit a bottle neck it cascades.

I kind of wondered if the cable companies are giving us fast speeds to reduce congestion on there network. If your speeds are faster than you can use then the network stays really quick.

Interesting point. I'll tell ya, my phone company, at 7 & 15 Mbps, certainly didn't see it that way. Then, given the technology, it's not like they had any choice either.

 

[coxhaus]

Yea I think the phone companies have been fighting high bandwidths all the way. Now they are kind of caught with their pants down. They are trying to make up for it by putting fiber in new neighborhoods.

 

[Klueless]

Yea I think the phone companies have been fighting high bandwidths all the way. Now they are kind of caught with their pants down. They are trying to make up for it by putting fiber in new neighborhoods.

Hard to compete when all they have is a knife to bring to the gun fight. Remember when all we could get over a copper pair was 300 bps? Pretty amazing stuff that they even got to 7 Mbps.

Our phone company's "solution" is to bring fiber to the neighborhood but to continue using the existing copper for the home run. That'll give them about 25 Mbps; too little too late.

Cable companies (at least in NYS) won't fair much better in the long run as we've already a couple fairly aggressive fiber companies delivering more for less.

Couple that with Gov. Cuomo telling everyone that 100 Mbps is everyone's right and demanding that cable roll out 100 Mbps to everyone. That means for every build out to a densely populated area, where they can make a buck, "Cable" has to build out to a "cow pasture" where they are guaranteed to lose a buck.

And while "Cable" is losing a buck "Fiber" companies get to simply cherry pick where they can make the most.

And that is free enterprise in NYS ...