Contention


Bandwidth contention means that the bandwidth between you and the Internet is shared with other users.

BT are contending the network between users and ISPs by:
50:1 for home users
20:1 for business users

Does this matter?
Normally no. Not everyone will use their computers at the same time & users spend a lot of time reading the web pages
Maybe yes. If streaming media become popular, there won't be enough bandwidth
We'll have to wait to see how the ATM network performs when there are hundreds of thousands of users