On Sat 25 Aug 2018 at 14:27:38 (-0500), John Hasler wrote: > David writes: > > Or are you talking about some type of "shared channel" of which I have > > no knowledge? > > Cable providers may have a great many customers on a single cable with > large (but limited) bandwidth.
Oh, like me, you mean. When we wanted to get our cable strung from the pole with the least obstructed view of our house, the linesman first told us that all the terminations were taken, but on ringing the office, he found that one line was not subscribed to, so we were able to connect to that pole. When I walk down the back alleys, I can see other poles connected to the same main coax feed that links the poles. I'm still scratching my head why subscribing to NNTP newsgroups should lead to bandwidth problems rather than usage ones. I can hit my bandwidth limits in many other ways like downloading youtube videos, watching TV, etc, but the hard limit is my usage, where I would end up paying money for any excess. > Some rural providers may have limited backhaul bandwidth. They make > promises to customers based on optimistic estimates of peak usage. Now it appears that you're using "usage" where I would write "bandwidth". Am I in a minority of one here? Bandwidth is the rate of transfer of bits, whereas usage is the quantity of bits transferred irrespective of how fast they accumulated. Cheers, David.