John, That's an excellent point. Consider Google fiber, for example. And customer could theoretically demand a gigabit of traffic. Even Google admits that this doesn't scale and that they are highly oversubscribed.
-mel beckman On Feb 27, 2015, at 3:05 PM, "John Levine" <[email protected]> wrote: >> Water, gas, and to a great extent electrical systems do not work on >> oversubscription, ie their aggregate capacity meets or exceeds the needs of >> all their customers peak potential demand, at least from "normal" demand >> standpoint. > > Hi, former municipal water and sewer commissioner here. We size the > system to meet likely demand, but not peak demand. If it's a hot dry > summer and everyone wants to water their lawn, or there's a big fire > that's drawing a lot of water from hydrants, we can have capacity > problems. We deal with it by interrupting service to a few large > customers, a car wash and a golf course. > > But it's not really comparable to broadband service, because on the > Internet, nearly every consumer end user device could easily saturate > the entire network if it wanted to. It's like every house having a > 100,000 gallon toilet. Better hope you don't have a lot of people > flushing at once. > > R's, > John
