Sharing Bandwidth with the Neighbors
By Wayne Hickey – Neighbors, when asked, will typically share a cup of sugar. In some cases, the ‘cup of sugar’ request was, and is, a great way to meet or start a friendly conversation with our neighbors. Waving from 50 feet away, or over a fence, isn’t as inviting or approachable. While being a good neighbor has its benefits, most draw the line for sharing with things like Internet access, typically by simply adding a security key to their home WiFi network. After all, now we’re talking bandwidth, and not sugar!
But with the Internet, every connection is a ‘shared’ connection. Sometimes sharing is done close to your house, a fiber node, headend, or Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) router. BGP is the routing protocol used to route traffic across the Internet Wide Area Network (WAN).
If you want to guarantee that your service is not shared, you must get an enterprise level connection. But even with enterprise level connections, they only guarantee your speed up until the BGP router of your Internet Service Provider (ISP), and as soon as you get on the Internet – you guessed it, its shared and all bets are off!
For cable operators today, coaxial cable is used to deliver broadband services to their existing customers, and will continue for many years. In the cable operator coaxial access network, cable bandwidth is shared among all subscribers in a service group. Service group sizes can vary, but typical coaxial access networks can range in the hundreds (300-500), depending on region. more>
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