We’ve mentioned a lot about data caps, and why they’re not effective methods for controlling congestion, though they’re often sold as such to unwitting consumers. And we’ve done the analysis that shows that the effective speed of a capped plan can be slower than uncapped dialup – at least, when you average it all out.

But Benoit Felton of the Yankee Group went further. Sure, he does the math too, but points out that the users that are labeled as “bandwidth hogs” are hogs because they’re the top 5% of users – not whether those users actually cause performance problems.

The fact is that what most telcos call hogs are simply people who overall and on average download more than others… TCP/IP is by definition an egalitarian protocol. Implemented well, it should result in an equal distribution of available bandwidth in the operator's network between end-users; so the concept of a bandwidth hog is by definition an impossibility.

Now I'm pretty sure that many telcos will disagree with our assessment of this. So here's a challenge for them: in the next few days, I will specify on this blog a standard dataset that would enable me to do an in-depth data analysis into network usage by individual users. Any telco willing to actually understand what's happening there and to answer the question on the existence of hogs once and for all can extract that data and send it over to me, I will analyse it for free, on my spare time. All I ask is that they let me publish the results of said research (even though their names need not be mentioned if they don't wish it to be). Of course, if I find myself to be wrong and if indeed I manage to identify users that systematically degrade the experience for other users, I will say so publicly. If, as I suspect, there are no such users, I will also say so publicly. The data will back either of these assertions.

A great challenge, of course, and the right approach to it: Get the evidence. Make the analysis.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, too often both in ISPs and in enterprise networks, social network and video usage gets blamed for problems with network congestion without enough evidence. It’s true that bandwidth consumption can cause problems with network congestion, but if your congestion problems are caused by a misconfigured router or a slow application, blocking YouTube and chastising FaceBookers are not going to solve your network performance problems.