Interesting, wonk; thanks.
... Hence I don’t think your construct of the oversubscription ratio being peak to average SPEED is necesarilly the most illuminating. In an always-on, always-connected world of dsl, we’re back to the concepts of the busy hour, and sizing the backside pipe relative to the numbers of users in the busy hour and the average utilization of those users in that time frame.
I think we're in agreement here. My article suggests that the current marketing model, based on peak rate, is wrong. That's the one that gives rise to an oversubscription ratio. Instead, the proper product should be bucket-of-bits-per-month. And that is slightly more amenable to traffic engineering.
Just because it is called “Special Access” according to Part 32 of FCC Rules doesn’t mean it really is “access.”
Special access is what I (and I think better) describe as transport.
The term "Access" is a tariff construct dating back to the coincident-with-divestiture MTS and WATS rules. It's semantically obscure in this usage, but the original meaning was that the LEC was providing IXCs with access to their subscribers. ISP circuits are jurisdictionally interstate so the interstate Access tariffs apply to intraLATA circuits too, not just intraLATA legs of interstate circuits.
Say I’m a small rural ISP, 100 miles from the peering point serving a town of 12,000 people. Thus my addressable market at 100% penetration is 4,000 households. At 50 kbps average, to serve the town to handle 100% dsl penetration I need 200 mbps of transport and bandwidth – a little over an OC3. The bandwidth at the peering point costs me no more than the guy in the peering point city provided I can get there (say $4K a month using your numbers – and boy that’s a steal compared to 10 years ago).
Reread the numbers. 100 miles * $100/mile/month + $2k loop = $12,000/month for a single DS3 or OC1. OC3 is no longer tariffed as of last year, so it could cost $1,000,000/mile, or $1,000 per hundred miles, as the ILEC sees fit on a case by case basis. It is unreasonable for an ISP to pull 100 miles of fiber! In some places (the soft-soil regions), it's possible to trench it in pretty cheaply, and sometimes poles are available, but the farther you go, the less likely you are to get the whole path. A few miles, maybe. But ISPs are not in the long-haul fiber business. You can't expect them to pay $1M to build a fiber path to the backbone. What kind of schytthole country doesn't even have a common carrier backbone network? Oh, I forgot, we live in New Argentina.
Overcharging is a pejorative phrase.
It's accurate. The phone world gave us "residual pricing", wherein the regulators intentionally set the price of almost everything except 1FR at the monopoly profit maximization point, in order to minimize 1FR. It was a very, very costly bargain. Now, deregulated, the ILECs still milk their monopolies. |
