Contention

Contention is simply the number of people who must share a particular segment of a service. Although its meaning can be applied equally to dialup internet access and broadband, the result is slightly different.

For dialup accounts, contention means that there are more customers than phone lines. The result of this will be that users will get busy (engaged) tones at peak periods and be unable to connect to the internet at all. The higher the contention rate of a dialup service, the more likely this is to happen.

For broadband accounts, contention means that for each "slice" of bandwidth (Typically 512Kb/s or 1Mb/s) there are multiple customers. This means that at peak periods, instead of not being able to connect, the service is simply slower instead. Typically home broadband services are contended at 50:1 which means that potentially you may be sharing your bandwidth with up to 49 other users. The worst possible case would be that all 50 users were attempting to use 512Kb/s at the same time and would therefore get 10Kb/s each. This is approximately 4 times SLOWER than a modem!!! In practise this never generally happens.

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