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To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (3110)	3/15/1999 6:52:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 12823

All, the following was sent to me by John Stichnoth on the Gilder thread: Message 8327854 >>Just to clarify.... My understanding is that the telcos can run T1 from businesses to a central location, then bundle several into one T1 router "at the edge" of the Internet. << John, There are a growing number of delivery schemes which deliver T1 speeds. There are the original T1 lines which were first implemented in 1962 over copper pairs. There are those which use fiber and wireless facilities. These operate at a line rate of 1.544 Mb/s using what is called the DS1 format for the most part (which is easily broken down into 24 individual 64 kb/s voice channels, plus an 8 kb/s overhead channel). Then there are digital subscriber lines (DSLs) that can deliver ~1.5 Mb/s in the downstream direction and considerably less (64 to 680 kb/s) in the upstream. There are also HDSLs and SDSLs that deliver 1.5 in both directions, symmetrically. My point here is that all of these are priced differently, and they each require different levels of provisioning and administration by the carrier or SP. More to the point, however, is that each of these line types can fit the scenario you've inquired about. Therefore, I can't give you a general answer that will fit all cases. What you say is true. Multiple T1s will be aggregated by a carrier or ISP at the edge of the network into a single router. On the other side of the router there will invariably be a fatter pipe [or combination of pipes (each going to other router sites)] of some statistically derived speed.For discussion, consider a T3 line in this case, operating at 45 Mb/s that will be used by all of the individual T1s. There could be many, into the hundreds, of T1s on the subscriber side, and only 1 T3 on the core side of the router. From this you can see that if you had 100 T1s (totaling >150.0 Mb/s), they could easily overwhelm a single T3 (45 Mb/s) if they were all active at the same time. Statistically, this doesn't happen, according to the behavior of most consumer and small business traffic patterns. Nonetheless, if a majority of the T1s were to go live at the same time, it would slow down each subscriber's performance, considerably. The congestion at this point would be in the router, or in the edge domain, or in the upstream trunks leading to the core a NAP. The sizing of each of these network elements would play in this calculus. The oversubscription ratio, that is, the ratio of users (the T1s) to backbone access capacity (in this case the the T3) is an important factor in determining the probability of congestion-affecting slowdowns in the edge. >>If a small business is getting T1 at much less than a couple thousand dollars, they are likely sharing bandwidth with others. (Which might be fine, if they are all small businesses who don't use it all up).... Is that correct?<< Yes. Internet access, by definition, assumes that they will be sharing bandwidth with others. And yes, this does result in a reduction in charges to the individual. HTH, Frank_C.

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (3110)	3/15/1999 9:17:00 PM
From: WTC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

As for Concentric and QoS agreements, I could be out of date, but at the DSLCon last October, the senior Concentric executive attending addressed a question from the floor concerning their QoS offerings. He said that Concentric was not supporting QoS agreement per se, but they engineered sufficient capacity in their IP interconnection and monitored performance such that they could observe a consistent high level of performance and represented that level of characteristic performance to their clients. It sounded like a very frank come-clean statement in a situation where some high-sounding BS about their dreamed QoS implementation might have slid through. I had a lot of respect for the guy's forthrightness -- I think he was an engineer :). The world changes fast in this arena, but I wonder if Concentric has made such a major change in operating practices in 6 months?