redheadfan
Well-Known Member
How do contention ratios really work?
As far as people have explained contention ratios to me in the past is this:
Your connection is shared with a number of other people. Telkom uses a 20:1 contention ratio, so potentially if my neighbourhood gets connected then I will be sharing my connection with 20 other people. Worst case scenario is that I get 1/20th of my full speed.
But now that I’ve talked about “speed” things get more interesting. I am on a 384k ADSL connection. Is this line that I share also 384k or is it a full speed line? As far as I understand, a full speed ADSL line is 8 Mb/s. Now my connection is one twentieth of the total line speed. Does this mean that for my purposes that I have a 1:1 contention ratio?
This is a significant question because the ADSL regulations say that Telkom, Neotel and the ISPs must guarantee throughput of at least 256k to be classed as broadband. So can Telkom guarantee throughput on their minimum connection of 384k when their contention ratio is 20:1?
As far as people have explained contention ratios to me in the past is this:
Your connection is shared with a number of other people. Telkom uses a 20:1 contention ratio, so potentially if my neighbourhood gets connected then I will be sharing my connection with 20 other people. Worst case scenario is that I get 1/20th of my full speed.
But now that I’ve talked about “speed” things get more interesting. I am on a 384k ADSL connection. Is this line that I share also 384k or is it a full speed line? As far as I understand, a full speed ADSL line is 8 Mb/s. Now my connection is one twentieth of the total line speed. Does this mean that for my purposes that I have a 1:1 contention ratio?
This is a significant question because the ADSL regulations say that Telkom, Neotel and the ISPs must guarantee throughput of at least 256k to be classed as broadband. So can Telkom guarantee throughput on their minimum connection of 384k when their contention ratio is 20:1?