How does contention work?
As of March 2006, BT Wholesale has dropped the notion of up to 50:1 contention for Home products and 20:1 for the Office product ranges. It how states that Office products will be given a higher priority. This change in wording reflects the changes to the BT Wholesale network to cope with products like the Max services, where much larger chunks of bandwidth were used at the exchanges. Contention is something that appears to be only talked about in the UK, but it is a major part of the Internet across the world. Without contention at the various interconnection points of the Internet it would be vastly more expensive to run and very few people would even have access to a 500Kbps service. An urban myth has grown up that the 0.5Mbps service is shared between 50 users, the contention on BT IPStream 0.5Mbps and higher speed services is done very differently. How is BT Wholesale Contention carried out Their is no set contention figure given for the Home and Office products by BT Wholesale. A
