The 8008 was: Blinky lights WAS: The SR71 Blackbird was designed ENTIRELYwith slide rules 654

I work in the industry; it's common knowledge. The precise figures I can't give you thanks to NDAs.

However, you can do the math yourself. 1Mb-s of Internet transit costs about $50-150-mo these days depending on how much you buy. When users pay $39.95-mo for ~6Mb-s, how much oversubscription is the absolute minimum they could have and break even? Now factor in the costs of the routers, internal circuits, data center space, marketing, billing, support, etc. that they have to pay on top of transit costs.

I think if you and every other user in your cable cell ran that test at the same time, you'd find the average result would be well under 1Mb-s. The reason oversubscription is so popular is that most users aren't using their bandwidth at any given time. That's why cable and DSL providers are going nuts over P2P traffic -- it breaks their oversubscription model.

IP overhead is 2.6% with 1500 byte packets; that's negligible and certainly worth the ability to do other things with your pipe than just stream video.

S

-- Stephen Sprunk "Those people who think they know everything CCIE #3723 are a great annoyance to those of us who do." K5SSS --Isaac Asimov