[Bloat] 22 seconds til bloat on gfiber?

Dave Taht dave.taht at gmail.com
Thu Oct 27 15:41:41 EDT 2016


On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 12:30 PM, David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Oct 2016, Dave Taht wrote:
>
>> I am curious if studies exists of the actual consumption in typical
>> 100mbit and above plans, vs 20Mbit, here and worldwide. Again, my
>> thesis is, aside from business (and bittorrent) users, your typical
>> 250mbit plan would have very close to the same consumption as the
>> 100mbit plan. They'd use up 250mbits for a couple hours a month, but
>> that's it.
>>
>> I am increasingly convinced that without a killer application that
>> requires it,
>> we've hit "peak bandwidth".
>
>
> You sound like my College Professor from the early 90's who said that the
> networks were now going to be so fast that there was no way that users would
> need all the available bandwidth, and that it was up to the students in the
> class to invent new uses :-)
>
> Then the web happened.

Yes, it did, and it drove adoption for a long time. Given the
interactivity required for web, however, the demand curve for more
bandwidth for it has tapered off. Web page size growth, which looked
exponential back 2012 is now linear, as both web sites "tightened up"
things, and folks installed adblockers everywhere.

I have the data on this somewhere...

> any declaration of 'peak bandwidth' is only a temporary state.

Well, even then, in the early 90s, we had a good grip on the basic requirements
for everything that is now deployed today - video streaming,
videoconferencing, etc. Web traffic is now *trivial* compared to that.

Sure - there may be a killer app in the future (AR? VR?) but it is
hard to predict that! And my overall point is that when you are on one
slope of an S-curve, it's hard to see where it will peak - or start
again.

Take, for example, the over-optimistic fiber build-out that
essentially terminated in 2000 - it's taken 16 years to use all that
up....



-- 
Dave Täht
Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
http://blog.cerowrt.org


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