TIL that a single 10Gbps fiber line to a data center can handle over 20,000 simultaneous HD video streams

I read this in a white paper from some networking conference and it blew my mind because my own office of 50 people keeps complaining about buffering on a 1Gbps link, has anyone else noticed the massive gap between what enterprise ISPs promise and what actually works in practice?

2 comments

2 Comments

nora5420d ago

There's always a catch with those theoretical numbers, right? They're probably testing in a perfect lab with zero packet loss and a single protocol, not your office full of people streaming, video conferencing, and random browser tabs sucking up bandwidth. Real world traffic is messy and that 1Gbps link is shared across everyone's bursty usage, plus the ISP probably oversubscribes their lines like crazy. So really, it's less about what the line can handle and more about how they throttle it on the back end to save money.

paul_mason1220d ago

Nora54's got the right idea but the oversubscription ratio is way bigger than most people realize. Standard enterprise ISPs will oversell their backbone by 50 to 1 or more, so your 1Gbps line is sharing a single uplink with 49 other businesses. That's why your 50 person office feels like it's running on dial-up compared to a dedicated data center fiber line.