Contention/Oversubscription maths

[gbonser at seven.com (George Bonser)]

> We offer peak speeds of 4mbps, and we
> have an
> extrordinary amount of people using (abusing as some would say)
> streaming
> video for many hours of the day causing headaches for us.  

I would bandwidth limit the ports, as someone else already mentioned.  I
would also enable WRED, ECN and everything else I could lay my hands on.
What is that port connected to in the customer's end?  Are they plugging
into a 8 port switch and fanning out that connection to their DVD player
which they use to watch Hulu and Netflix and a bunch of other services?
My Sony DVD player came with about 6 Internet video services programmed
in it and it has an ethernet port.  Do they have a slingbox where they
are going to watch their home TV from work?  And just having all those
users on a flat switched network would be one heck of a security hazard
(again, as someone else mentioned).  But to be honest, I wouldn't deploy
that model at all.  One person can DOS the entire building depending on
how it is deployed and that is without even touching the uplink port.

Now figure about a tenth of those computers will be infected by bot nets
and will sit there sending spam and click fraud all night long, too.

G