Oh, and my reference to the NBN is more about providing a competitor to Telstra, who I am disliking more and more as I do business - nothing to do with the capability of NBN (which is still far superior to Telstra Broadband because of the upload speed.) Oh look, the free modem Telstra provided has hobbled VOIP ports. Conflict of interest? At least I can plug another router in that bypasses it I guess.
T. From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of David Connors Sent: Monday, 5 November 2012 9:20 AM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: [OT] BigPond You Tube throttling Late to the thread but "Cable is contended" is a furphy. On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 9:55 AM, Tony Wright <tonyw...@gmail.com <mailto:tonyw...@gmail.com> > wrote: I'm interested in seeing how many of you experience YouTube throttling. It irritates me that I have BigPond Cable Ultimate Liberty, experiencing download speeds of between 50Mbps and 100Mbps most of the time, but any time I visit YouTube or ABC iView, I get atrocious speeds. I never got this when I was on TPG. That is what the Internet does. I would think that YouTube would be a small amount of traffic for BP vs BitTorrent etc. More likely explanation: Telstra is notorious for not participating in any sort of Internet Exchange schemes where as other ISPs like TPG do. You would need to look at the path the traffic takes from you to whatever CDN server you're accessing on YouTube and compare that to TPG to understand the topological differences - and that path will change like the weather anyway based on what a variety of parties do in regard to traffic engineering. If you use youtube, there is a youtube page where you can see a comparison to see how throttling is affecting you: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed I get 13.37 mbps out of a 45 mbps link here at work. Looking at the graph it fluctuates between 19 and 8 - so proves two tenths of fk all really as the link speed isn't changing like that. Based on that I would probably blame iiNet business for throttling YouTube too. Basically, normal internet use would see lots of peaks and troughs. When being throttled, the lines flatten out somewhat, and are below the average. My speeds are consistently below Victorian average, and I'm on Telstra's fastest product. WTF? Here's the thing: All of this talk about 'cable being shared' is based on all too common assumptions about the topology and contention ratios of resi-grade broadband products. In an HFC network, yes you do share the C part of that with everyone else in the same run, but as soon as you make it to the exchange, you are also sharing the F part of that with everyone else. Resi-grade contention ratios are typically 80:1 to 250:1. That means, if they have 80 subscribers with 20mbps links, they will have a 20mbps link out of the exchange - or if they're really cheap and nasty they might have a 20mbps link out of the exchange per 250 customers! I don't know what the average backhaul out of an exchange is but I doubt it would be much beyond 100mbps - that stuff costs money. You can get crappy IP Transit for 30 bucks a megabit a month and good stuff for 60 bucks a megabit a month in Oz. So 100mbps uncontended link will be 3000-6000 bucks a month delivered to a DC somewhere central. Yes, this is not what the ISPs charge themselves but it should give you some context to consider when you think about how networks are planned. There simply is not 1-10gbps links into each exchange with bandwidth for everyone all the time. You can buy uncontended business grade DSL services, but you won't get much change out of 500-1000 bucks a month as they have to allow for your bandwidth utilisation all the way back to the core of their network. Even then, it doesn't really make much sense unless you're building a corporate WAN because the whole Internet is contended anyway and you'll lose any sort of traffic prioritisation/special treatment as soon as you leave their network. The only reason the contention ratios work in Oz is that we have tight quotas so you can't really clog the backhaul too much. In the US apparently cable is awful because they have unlimited cable plans - but the ISPs doing that have made a rod for their own back. Bring on the NBN I say. Today you have a very low latency 100mbps HFC link going into a contended resi-grade network with variable performance and an 80-250:1 contention ratio. On the NBN you will have a very low latency 100mbps fibre link going into a contended resi-grade network with variable performance and an 80-250:1 contention ratio. Even the last mile in the NBN is contended - just that the numbers are higher. Anyway, I doubt contention at the head-end of your HFC segment is your issue at all, certainly not in relation to YouTube. Even if they shaped YouTube, which I doubt they would be bothered to, I doubt they would be policing it for HFC customers and differently to anyone else. It uses stuff all bandwidth really. David. -- David Connors da...@connors.com <mailto:da...@connors.com> | M +61 417 189 363 Download my v-card: https://www.codify.com/cards/davidconnors Follow me on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/davidconnors Connect with me on LinkedIn: http://au.linkedin.com/in/davidjohnconnors
