johnkzin: Well, if MetroPCS can get T-mobile scared enough to move, they should in turn get the big three to blink as well, hopefully making our cellular system better, with zero contracts, no limits, and a set price.

TSO: Peering wouldn't be an issue. Most of that's already worked out well in advance, way back when they sign the initial contract for high speed service to the towers. The only way this would affect what's already in place is if they had to upgrade capacity, and that's already usually covered in the initial peering agreements. I know this because I used to work for a Tier 1 ISP and dealt with broadband setups and contracts every day.

murky261: Yes, overselling is the big thing these days. The typical rule is to sell 50% more service and/or bandwidth than you have actual capacity for. Why? Because, 10% of users account for 90% of bandwidth, and the remaining 90% account for the other 10% of usage. We used to do that all the time. And in well over 98% of cases, the 90/10 rule holes up pretty well.

In fact, I remember several cases during my tenure at the ISP where we were actually able to oversell our pops by as much as 300%, mostly because the people connecting were only interested in email and weren't online more than 20-30 minutes a day tops. However, we got bit a couple times on that. One case I remember specifically involved our DSL service in Wisconsin I believe it was. Our pop where the Redback was located was oversold by 50%, which was pretty typical at the time for most of our pops. That came back to haunt us about 3 months after that DSL pop opened.

We had no way of anticipating that the majority of customers on that pop were all power users. I think when the dust settled, we were at a 1:1 capacity level, and while there was a little breathing room on the connection, it wasn't much. Again, that was the extreme exception, given typical usage rates, but it just goes to show that it can happen. However, with only a 2% chance that it will, most ISP's use the 50% rule to setup their core bandwidth requirements and then only build up from there if capacity remains continuously above 85% capacity for more than 3 days.