Mari Silbey of MediaExperiences2Go has an interesting post about “The Changing Face of Concurrency.” She examines the various metrics companies and analysts use to study bandwidth flows or to model network activity. These include households passed, penetration ratio, concurrency ratio, and bandwidth. Concurrency represents the number of subscribers likely to be tuned in or logged on at any given time, which is obviously important for cable bandwidth measures or estimated since it is a shared network. It’s not enough to simply be examining penetration ratios or aggregate bandwidth measures when debating network management policies. Concurrency ratios give us a better way to measure what is possible on existing cable infrastructure.
More broadly speaking, the reason all this is important is because we need to have a common set of metrics when evaluating issues that come up in Net neutrality debates since opponents often use different terms and measures when discussing these issues. Anyway, just thought I would highlight her article for that reason.
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