Does Internet Speed Vary by Season?

[vandry at TZoNE.ORG (Phil Vandry)]

On 2009-10-11, at 19:22 , Joe Greco wrote:
> (*) In the late 1990's, I heard the most astonishing claims made by  
> a new
> entrant into the Milwaukee ISP market, about how some of the "other"  
> ISP's
> "shared" lines between customers and this decreased your speeds.   
> They had
> no clue who I was, so I engaged their technical person for a while  
> who set
> out to convince me that other ISP's really _did_ do this mythical  
> line-
> sharing - multiple modems to one port.  Until I started talking  
> about the
> technical aspects, that is.

Not so mythical. Around the same time period, we found out about an  
ISP offering always-on ISDN BRI service for such a low price that it  
could not possibly make sense. We wondered how they could make ends  
meet at that rate until we found out how they did it. They daisy  
chained multiple customers' BRI lines together, using the second B  
channel from one customer to connect the next customer down the line.  
Once, one of their customers switched to our service and we  
reconfigured their router (a legitimate action: both router and BRI  
line belonged to the customer). Who knows how many downstream  
customers we broke by doing that.

-Phil