Look at the prices of unmetered commercial connections to understand the economics of overselling and burst connectivity.
I have a 15Mbps home connection, which serves me brilliantly when I need to grab an ISO or watch a couple of videos. I have no illusions that this is equal to a business 15Mbps connection, which would be significantly more expensive. A T3 runs $3000 a month, best case. I pay $45 a month.
The original point that I disagreed with was the assertion that everyone should have a unmetered 6Mbps connection. Firstly, I don't want a 6Mbps connection -> I want a 15Mbps burst connection that best accommodates a normal user. Secondly that's enough bandwidth that if you filled it at Amazon's AWS, you'd be paying some $240 a month, and Amazon is at the crossroads of a number of primary connections, pretty much the cheapest place to possibly origin data.
Joe Homebody is many nodes down, through a lot of infrastructure and choke-points, and the cost for throughput is significantly higher: My neighbourhood has a large number of cable modem subscribers, and to aggregate the total sum up through each junction would lead to enormous bandwidth potential.
In the mobile space the situation is vastly uglier. I don't think most people realize how incredibly crowded the data space is.
The price of unmetered commercial connections has more to do with competition (or lack thereof) among broadband ISPs and willingness to pay than technical reasons. Broadband in Japan costs 15x less and runs about 6-7x faster than in the U.S:
I have a 15Mbps home connection, which serves me brilliantly when I need to grab an ISO or watch a couple of videos. I have no illusions that this is equal to a business 15Mbps connection, which would be significantly more expensive. A T3 runs $3000 a month, best case. I pay $45 a month.
The original point that I disagreed with was the assertion that everyone should have a unmetered 6Mbps connection. Firstly, I don't want a 6Mbps connection -> I want a 15Mbps burst connection that best accommodates a normal user. Secondly that's enough bandwidth that if you filled it at Amazon's AWS, you'd be paying some $240 a month, and Amazon is at the crossroads of a number of primary connections, pretty much the cheapest place to possibly origin data.
Joe Homebody is many nodes down, through a lot of infrastructure and choke-points, and the cost for throughput is significantly higher: My neighbourhood has a large number of cable modem subscribers, and to aggregate the total sum up through each junction would lead to enormous bandwidth potential.
In the mobile space the situation is vastly uglier. I don't think most people realize how incredibly crowded the data space is.