Shaun,
Your question can be answered in basic economic terms, using an analogy. If there is only one loaf to go around, and there are ten hungry people, then everyone ideally would get one tenth of a loaf. This is the way the cable system design is set up today. In cable terms, the loaf becomes a 10 Mb/s pipe, and more realistically, there might be hundreds of users vying for it. Run the numbers. Although, there is no guarantee that they will all be attempting to access the line at the same time. However, there is also the possibility that only one or two of them might attempt to grab the line full time by accessing very large files, or streaming multimedia. It's up to the cable cos to do the arbitration and fair weighting, which is something they haven't figured out yet, and if they have, they've not implemented it yet.
Another challenge they face is how to make more loaves available. That's what T is working on doing, and one of the goals of the Salt Lake City trials. It doesn't take a star wars or a Library of Congress download to tie things up, just a busy telecommuter rebuilding a data base at the office from his home.
Hope this helped.. Frank
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Shaun wrote:
I am interested in getting your thoughts about the bandwidth restrictions that
take place when there are "Too many people in the pipe". If too many people are
downloading large forms of data on the same piece of pipe they will experience a bit of
network degradation. I am afraid that the new Internet users will not grasp this concept
right off the bat. They wont understand that they are downloading the new "Star Wars
Trailer" on their computer while their neighbor is downloading the whole movie off the
newsgroups on the same pipe.
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