High-Bandwidth Users Are Just Early Adopters 162
silverpig writes "Cisco has released a whitepaper on mobile data usage which has some interesting data in it. The top 1% of users consume 20% of the bandwidth, but that share is down from 30% previously. 'Regular' users are catching up as they watch more video. High-bandwidth users of today will be relatively average users by 2015, so network operators should look to those users for insight in designing their future networks."
But.. But... (Score:5, Informative)
That means I actually have to spend money on my network!
The ISPs know this all too well (Score:3, Informative)
In Canada, we are facing a fight over Usage-Based-Billing, and whether the federal government can effectively force it on ISPs. The idea isn't actually terrible per se, but the way they're trying to implement it certainly is.
One thing that has come up time and time again is that it's to protect the consumer from the excess of the 1% of extreme consumers. They're often implicitly labelled as pirates by the ISPs, but in fact are the vanguard.
An excellent article in the Globe and Mail [theglobeandmail.com] had this to say on the matter:
The knowledge that penalties await heavy Internet usage does something quite terrible: discourage desirable behaviour. Most of Bell’s arguments for treating consumers as wrongdoers rely on the villainization of “bandwidth hogs” who use up everyone else’s bandwidth and generally bring misery to the land. But there are better words for big users of the Internet: “pioneers” and “innovators.” A nation that spends its time worrying about bandwidth caps is not a nation that leads.
Re:But.. But... (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, everything we've heard seems to support this study about bandwidth, which probably means that it's valid.
Re:But.. But... (Score:1, Informative)
>>>In urban areas we aren't getting the level of service that happens in Japan or Korea or even (I think?) some European countries
Yet another myth. Okay yes Korea/Japan have great speeds, but they also live in sardine apartments where they can install short-run VHDSL which gets 50 Mbit/s at 1/2 mile from the central server. --- Urban americans simple do not live that tightly, so the same technology does not work for us. Our DSL extends over miles and therefore operates slower. So even if we tried the Japanese solution (upgrade to VHDSL) it would not work.
As for Europe, it's no better than we are. If you compare the US federation with other continent-spanning federations you see this:
Mbit/s
1: 12.3 Russian Federation
2: 10.3 US
3: 10.0 EU
4: 9.3 Canada
5: 8.0 Australia
6: 4.8 Brazil
7: 3.8 China
8: 3.4 Mexico