> My personal conclusion (as much as people shout at me otherwise) is that geek communities quietly realize they are top-1% users and their usage patterns are subsidized by everybody else
You are conflating two very separate issues and the statement is false. Being a top-1% user by volume does not mean that you are subsidized by everybody else.
Network costs are diven by peak usage, i.e. when there is a risk of congestion. Peak usage is during primetime and the majority of users are online then. Thus almost everybody uses the network at the same time and it makes sense to share the cost equally. Hence nobody is subsidizing anybody else.
Here's the data to back me up:
"In order to investigate these issues, we took real user data for all the broadband customers connected to a single aggregation link and analyzed the network statistics on data consumption in five-minute time increments over a whole day.The data was shared by an ISP in North America who wanted to understand its own network usage. Our analysis tracked both data consumption (i.e. total MB downloaded) and bandwidth usage (i.e. Mbps being used).
...
42% of all customers (and nearly 48% of active customers) are amongst the top 10% of bandwidth users at onepoint or another during peak hours."
You are conflating two very separate issues and the statement is false. Being a top-1% user by volume does not mean that you are subsidized by everybody else.
Network costs are diven by peak usage, i.e. when there is a risk of congestion. Peak usage is during primetime and the majority of users are online then. Thus almost everybody uses the network at the same time and it makes sense to share the cost equally. Hence nobody is subsidizing anybody else.
Here's the data to back me up:
"In order to investigate these issues, we took real user data for all the broadband customers connected to a single aggregation link and analyzed the network statistics on data consumption in five-minute time increments over a whole day.The data was shared by an ISP in North America who wanted to understand its own network usage. Our analysis tracked both data consumption (i.e. total MB downloaded) and bandwidth usage (i.e. Mbps being used).
...
42% of all customers (and nearly 48% of active customers) are amongst the top 10% of bandwidth users at onepoint or another during peak hours."
Source: diffeaction Analysis http://www.fiberevolution.com/2011/11/do-data-caps-punish-th...