Broadband: Section 4

However, we can take our roads analogy a stage further here. One of the problems with road transport policy is that building new roads only seems to encourage more traffic rather than spreading the load more evenly.

So it is with broadband. As the technology has become more widely used, so it experiences more strain from the amount of data it carries.

A particular issue here is contention.

When you join a broadband network, you share that part of the network with other users. The advertised load that these networks can bear is based on a contention rate of around 20:1 for businesses and around 50:1 for domestic use.