Originally Posted by
JDNSW
This has always been an issue with consumer grade internet. As a simple explanation for those who do not already know:-
If you are selling a service with, let's say 25Mbps speed, to 1000 customers, you need to buy from your NBN and upstream (NBN is only the link from the customer's house to your retailer) links with 25,000Mbps - right? Wrong! Because you can bank on the fact that not all of those 1000 customers will be using the full bandwidth every millisecond, you only need a fraction of that. The fraction is called the contention ratio, and might typically be between 10 and 20. And this is the major difference between retailers, other than the service they give.
Continuous streaming services such as Youtube, netflix etc represent a change in consumer behaviour that has been quite rapid, and has almost certainly caught a lot of RSPs by surprise.
John