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Comment by Hikikomori | Hacker News Reader

Its a cornerstone of building cost efficient networks. People pay for a certain sized pipe, what they pay also covers the rest of the ISPs networks and costs. With no oversubscription the ISP would need maybe 20-30x more infrastructure, do you think it would have an impact on what you pay?

Not sure why I have to say this, but, networks are not airplanes.

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The water company makes sure that everyone can flush their toilet during Superbowl half-time.

Utter nonsense. Network tech hasvimproved by orders of magnitude over the past decade to let ISPs transmit more data than ever for cheaper than ever.

Oversubscription is not the cost-restrictive mandate it once was.

And last mile access didn't improve?

Not oversubscribing is a cost multiplier at every level. 1 million 1 Gbit customers in a city is going to need 1000 100Gbit connections out of that city and the same for transit, and that will have no impact on pricing? And everything is on average used at 1% of capacity.

If my ISP can only afford to supply me with 1TB of transfer at 1Gbit, that's fine. They can put it in the adverts, the contracts, and the pricing. For customers who want 10TB of transfer, they can offer a higher cost option.

And if they choose to gamble, advertising and entering into contracts promising "unlimited data", which they think will be more profitable across their entire customer base? Then they've got to do supply what they promised in the adverts. They chose to gamble that way, and if they lose money gambling that's their business.

You have that on mobile subscriptions usually, heavy users pay more and low usage users are not subsidizing them.

I take you are fine with paying 10x or even more for your no oversubscription Internet connection then?

Oversubscription is not gambling. The way it works after your last mile connection is that ISPs look at link usage in their network, city level distribution, city to city, transit, peering, etc, once it reaches 60-80% utilization at peak you start looking at adding more capacity. Bad ISPs (most US ISPs) will let this go too far though.

> Oversubscription is not gambling.

Sure it is.

If I promise 30 people they can have a burger at my barbecue, but I only buy 20 burgers, I'm gambling that 20 people or fewer will show up.

It might be a reasonable gamble, based on past barbecues - but the guests left hungry will still be hungry, and I'll have broken my promise to them.

That's not the same thing. A more adequate comparison would be to say that you promised 30 people they can have a burger, but can only produce 5 burgers per minute. If everyone show up at exactly the same time, you won't be able to satisfy them all (they'll have to wait). But overall you can consider that the probability of such thing happening is small enough to take the "gamble".

It might be if traffic had sudden jumps of like 30%, but it doesn't and there is headroom available. Traffic increases slowly over time and you have plenty of time to upgrade your network.

I have a 10gbps fiber LAN. It was cheap to set up and have it running.

I do not buy your argument.

People buy a certain level of service, they should be able to enjoy it as in the rest of the world.

10gbps transit at the rock bottom rate costs $600/mo.

Please max out the line rate for a month or so straight and then tell me how happy your ISP is with you.

They are banking on the fact that you’re pulling 100mbps at the most, with bursts to 10gbps occasionally.

> 10gbps transit at the rock bottom rate costs $600/mo.

So then 300Mb/s transit, which is around the services these incumbent dinosaur ISPs are offering, is $20/mo? And $20/mo is only 10-20% of their large monthly bills? You're basically proving the opposing argument here in the general case [0].

For reference, I've asked my 1Gb/s municipal provider if they have bandwidth caps, and they told me "no" and that they are not concerned with how much bandwidth I use.

[0] The specific case is that most users are streaming video from large entertainment providers, for which the ISP isn't even paying transit but rather merely the electricity and rack units of CDN edge boxes.

Let me know when you've built that out to a million customers without any oversubscription.

ISPs are free to oversubscribe as much as they want.

As long as they also provide people the bandwidth sold to them when they want it.

Otherwise compensation should be in order if they throttle.

The point of oversubscription is maintaining a network that keeps costs low while providing a good service without congestion. They monitor their network (not your last mile connection, everything else) and once links start reaching 60-80% of capacity at peak times you start adding more capacity. Bad ISPs (like most US ISPs) let this go way too far though.

And does your cheap and easy to set up 10gbps fiber LAN cross under the interstate 10 feet deep?

The same fiber I have for 10gbps can be used for 400gbps... just by changing sfp modules.

Same logic for interstate. You lay fiber once and scale equipment as needed. If you already have the fiber there then just use better modules.

It's oversubscription all the way up, and it works. What doesn't work is when a greedy/lazy ISP tries to increase the oversubscription ratio too far.

It appears that your ignorance on the topics of infrastructure and the advancement of technology over the past five decades makes having a useful conversation impossible. Not every cable in the ground was installed with today's state of the art technology. Enjoy your apparently unthrottleable internet connection.

throttling should be an exception, not the norm.

If ISPs sell you a bandwidth per month they should deliver it.

You're the one that's short changed if you accept the throttling.

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