Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

[Thomas Leavitt]

Check the AUP and TOS for that EVDO connection - my guess is that by 
viewing stuff from your Slingbox, you're risking termination of service. 
I don't have an EVDO connection myself (still toodling along with my 
Sidekick's GPRS), and part of the reason why is that they have a lot of 
what I think are unreasonable restrictions on how these services can be 
used -- this is based on what I've read on the various mailing lists I'm 
on (Dave Farber's IP, Declan McCullagh's Politech, and Dewayne 
Hendrick's Dewayne-Net).


I don't know how significant restrictions like this are from a 
competitive perspective, but my broadband ISP also has a very liberal 
TOS... and that's one of the reasons I use them. I suspect that as items 
like the Slingbox become more common, folks will start paying more 
attention to what they're permitted to do with their upstream bandwidth.


Thomas

Roland Dobbins wrote:



I recently purchased a Slingbox Pro, and have set it up so that I can 
remotely access/control my home HDTV DVR and stream video remotely.  
My broadband access SP specifically allow home users to run servers, 
as long as said servers don't cause a problem for the SP 
infrastructure nor for other users or doing anything illegal; as long 
as I'm not breaking the law or making problems for others, they don't 
care.


The Slingbox is pretty cool; when I access it, both the video and 
audio quality are more than acceptable.  It even works well when I 
access it via EVDO; on average, I'm pulling down about 450kb/sec up to 
about 580kb/sec over TCP (my home upstream link is a theoretical 
768kb/sec, minus overhead; I generally get something pretty close to 
that).


What I'm wondering is, do broadband SPs believe that this kind of 
system will become common enough to make a signficant difference in 
traffic paterns, and if so, how do they believe it will affect their 
access infrastructures in terms of capacity, given the typical 
asymmetries seen in upstream vs. downstream capacity in many broadband 
access networks?  If a user isn't doing something like breaking the 
law by illegally redistributing copyrighted content, is this sort of 
activity permitted by your AUPs?  If so, would you change your AUPs if 
you saw a significant shift towards non-infringing upstream content 
streaming by your broadband access customers?  If not, would you 
consider changing your AUPs in order to allow this sort of upstream 
content streaming of non-infringing content, with the caveat that 
users can't caused problems for your infrastructure or for other 
users, and perhaps with a bandwidth cap?


Would you police down this traffic if you could readily classify it, 
as many SPs do with P2P applications?  Would the fact that this type 
of traffic doesn't appear to be illegal or infringing in any way lead 
you to treat it differently than P2P traffic (even though there are 
many legitimate uses for P2P file-sharing systems, the presumption 
always seems to be that the majority of P2P traffic is in 
illegally-redistributed copyrighted content, and thus P2P technologies 
seem to've acquired a taint of distaste from many quarters, rightly or 
wrongly).


Also, have you considered running a service like this yourselves, a la 
VoIP/IPTV?


Vidoeconferencing is somewhat analogous, but in most cases, 
videoconference calls (things like iChat, Skype videoconferencing, 
etc.) generally seem to use a less bandwidth than the Slingox, and it 
seems to me that they will in most cases be of shorter duration than, 
say, a business traveler who wants to keep up with Lost or 24 and so 
sits down to stream video from his home A/V system for 45 minutes to 
an hour at a stretch.


Sorry to ramble, this neat little toy just sparked a few questions, 
and I figured that some of you are dealing with these kinds of issues 
already, or are anticipating doing so in the not-so-distant future.  
Any insight or informed speculation greatly appreciated!



---
Roland Dobbins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> // 408.527.6376 voice

All battles are perpetual.

   -- Milton Friedman






--
Thomas Leavitt - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - 831-295-3917 (cell)

*** Independent Systems and Network Consultant, Santa Cruz, CA ***

begin:vcard
fn:Thomas Leavitt
n:Leavitt;Thomas
org:Godmoma's Forge, LLC
adr:Suite B;;916 Soquel Ave.;Santa Cruz;CA;95062;United States
email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
title:Systems and Network Consultant
tel;fax:831-469-3382
tel;cell:831-295-3917
url:http://www.godmomasforge.com/
version:2.1
end:vcard

Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

[Alexander Harrowell]

UK UMTS operator 3 (a Hutchison division) is advertising its so-called
X-Series service, which provides "unlimited" data service (plus various
lumps of steam telephony) for £25 rising to £40 a month. Skype is being
bundled with the devices involved, and here's the kicker - 3 is offering
Slingboxen thrown in for £99 extra.

3 has just begun HSDPA Class 5 upgrades in metro areas (claimed
maximum 3.6Mbits/s) and plans to launch HSUPA in the uplink next
spring, with a claimed
max of 1.4Mbits/s.

On 12/25/06, Thomas Leavitt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Check the AUP and TOS for that EVDO connection - my guess is that by
viewing stuff from your Slingbox, you're risking termination of service.
I don't have an EVDO connection myself (still toodling along with my
Sidekick's GPRS), and part of the reason why is that they have a lot of
what I think are unreasonable restrictions on how these services can be
used -- this is based on what I've read on the various mailing lists I'm
on (Dave Farber's IP, Declan McCullagh's Politech, and Dewayne
Hendrick's Dewayne-Net).

I don't know how significant restrictions like this are from a
competitive perspective, but my broadband ISP also has a very liberal
TOS... and that's one of the reasons I use them. I suspect that as items
like the Slingbox become more common, folks will start paying more
attention to what they're permitted to do with their upstream bandwidth.

Thomas

Roland Dobbins wrote:
>
>
> I recently purchased a Slingbox Pro, and have set it up so that I can
> remotely access/control my home HDTV DVR and stream video remotely.
> My broadband access SP specifically allow home users to run servers,
> as long as said servers don't cause a problem for the SP
> infrastructure nor for other users or doing anything illegal; as long
> as I'm not breaking the law or making problems for others, they don't
> care.
>
> The Slingbox is pretty cool; when I access it, both the video and
> audio quality are more than acceptable.  It even works well when I
> access it via EVDO; on average, I'm pulling down about 450kb/sec up to
> about 580kb/sec over TCP (my home upstream link is a theoretical
> 768kb/sec, minus overhead; I generally get something pretty close to
> that).
>
> What I'm wondering is, do broadband SPs believe that this kind of
> system will become common enough to make a signficant difference in
> traffic paterns, and if so, how do they believe it will affect their
> access infrastructures in terms of capacity, given the typical
> asymmetries seen in upstream vs. downstream capacity in many broadband
> access networks?  If a user isn't doing something like breaking the
> law by illegally redistributing copyrighted content, is this sort of
> activity permitted by your AUPs?  If so, would you change your AUPs if
> you saw a significant shift towards non-infringing upstream content
> streaming by your broadband access customers?  If not, would you
> consider changing your AUPs in order to allow this sort of upstream
> content streaming of non-infringing content, with the caveat that
> users can't caused problems for your infrastructure or for other
> users, and perhaps with a bandwidth cap?
>
> Would you police down this traffic if you could readily classify it,
> as many SPs do with P2P applications?  Would the fact that this type
> of traffic doesn't appear to be illegal or infringing in any way lead
> you to treat it differently than P2P traffic (even though there are
> many legitimate uses for P2P file-sharing systems, the presumption
> always seems to be that the majority of P2P traffic is in
> illegally-redistributed copyrighted content, and thus P2P technologies
> seem to've acquired a taint of distaste from many quarters, rightly or
> wrongly).
>
> Also, have you considered running a service like this yourselves, a la
> VoIP/IPTV?
>
> Vidoeconferencing is somewhat analogous, but in most cases,
> videoconference calls (things like iChat, Skype videoconferencing,
> etc.) generally seem to use a less bandwidth than the Slingox, and it
> seems to me that they will in most cases be of shorter duration than,
> say, a business traveler who wants to keep up with Lost or 24 and so
> sits down to stream video from his home A/V system for 45 minutes to
> an hour at a stretch.
>
> Sorry to ramble, this neat little toy just sparked a few questions,
> and I figured that some of you are dealing with these kinds of issues
> already, or are anticipating doing so in the not-so-distant future.
> Any insight or informed speculation greatly appreciated!
>
>
> ---
> Roland Dobbins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> // 408.527.6376 voice
>
> All battles are perpetual.
>
>-- Milton Friedman
>
>
>


--
Thomas Leavitt - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - 831-295-3917 (cell)

*** Independent Systems and Network Consultant, Santa Cruz, CA ***

Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

[Simon Leinen]

Lionel Elie Mamane writes:
> On Mon, Dec 25, 2006 at 12:44:37AM +, Jeroen Massar wrote:
>> That said ISP's should simply have a package saying "50GiB/month
>> costs XX euros, 100GiB/month costs double" etc. As that covers what
>> their transits are charging them, nothing more, nothing less.

> I thought IP transit was mostly paid by "95% percentile highest speed
> over 5 minutes" or something like that these days? Meaning that ISP's
> costs are maximised if everyone maxes our their line for the same 6%
> of the time over the month (even if they don't do anything the rest of
> the time), and minimised if the usage pattern were nicely spread out?

Yes.  With Jeroen's suggestion, there's a risk that power-users'
consumption will only be reduced for off-peak hours, and then the ISP
doesn't save much.  A possible countermeasure is to not count off-peak
traffic (or not as much).  Our charging scheme works like that, but
our customers are mostly large campus networks, and I don't know how
digestible this would be to retail ISP consumers.
-- 
Simon.

Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Mon, 25 Dec 2006, Simon Leinen wrote:


Yes.  With Jeroen's suggestion, there's a risk that power-users'
consumption will only be reduced for off-peak hours, and then the ISP
doesn't save much.  A possible countermeasure is to not count off-peak
traffic (or not as much).  Our charging scheme works like that, but
our customers are mostly large campus networks, and I don't know how
digestible this would be to retail ISP consumers.


Also, doing fine grained measurements for all your customers (if you have 
millions of residential users) is a big pain. Yes, it makes sense to only 
count usage perhaps between 16.00-02.00 or so, but trying to do this in an 
efficient manner and handle the customer complaint calls might very well 
be more expensive than actually not doing it at all.


Cost of customer interaction should never be underestimated. The simpler 
the service, the less things that can go wrong, the less customer service 
calls you get.


--
Mikael Abrahamssonemail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

[Randy Bush]

i have been hitting kill on this subject.  but i see that good folk are
posting to it.  perhaps the best paper so far on broadband utilization
is that of

Kenjiro Cho, Kensuke Fukuda, Hiroshi Esaki, & Akira Kato.
"The Impact and Implications of the Growth in Residential
User-to-User Traffic."
SIGCOMM2006, pp207-218. Pisa, Italy. September 2006.


as it is based on measurements in a country with more advanced broadband
deployment than the united states, where the carriers just promise it to
the fcc in order to reinstate a monopoly or very small cartel, it may be
more indicative of out future than our present.

randy

Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

[Frank Coluccio]

>doesn't save much.  A possible countermeasure is to not count off-peak
>traffic (or not as much).  Our charging scheme works like that, but
>our customers are mostly large campus networks,

This is similar to what some schools of economic study suggest in order to
achieve equilibrium while attempting to rationalize theoretical models that are
placed under stress. The problem here, of course, is that economists working on
theoretical models don't have to concern themselves with physics, whereas first
mile network providers do. 

Instead of devising variations of schemes that are based on traffic averaging- 
or
95 percentiles (designed primarily for colocation- and IX Point situations),
access network providers must address customer facing bandwidth utilization and
provisioning issues, and while the issues of upstream transiting and peering are
related, they nonetheless are exogenous to the access network problem. 

The main problem areas affecting the original poster's concerns over the ability
to send traffic in the upstream direction, as I see them: 

[a] the nature and being of telcos' DSL and MSOs' cable modem asymmetrical
network designs, and, 

[b] the unrealistic expectations that most stakeholders have (or the bill of
goods that have been successfully sold by incumbents to the community at large)
that suggests that an equitable exchange of money for services could be obtained
from a model that depends on entirely statistical probabilities.

The ultimate answer to this problem is a lot of discussions and subsequent
actions that will need to be taken. However, at the level of line granularity
that exists at the CO hub or head end terminal gear, the 95 percentile pricing
scheme is not  relevant.

Frank A. Coluccio
DTI Consulting Inc.
212-587-8150 Office
347-526-6788 Mobile

On Mon Dec 25 16:50 , Simon Leinen  sent:

>
>Lionel Elie Mamane writes:
>> On Mon, Dec 25, 2006 at 12:44:37AM +, Jeroen Massar wrote:
>>> That said ISP's should simply have a package saying "50GiB/month
>>> costs XX euros, 100GiB/month costs double" etc. As that covers what
>>> their transits are charging them, nothing more, nothing less.
>
>> I thought IP transit was mostly paid by "95% percentile highest speed
>> over 5 minutes" or something like that these days? Meaning that ISP's
>> costs are maximised if everyone maxes our their line for the same 6%
>> of the time over the month (even if they don't do anything the rest of
>> the time), and minimised if the usage pattern were nicely spread out?
>
>Yes.  With Jeroen's suggestion, there's a risk that power-users'
>consumption will only be reduced for off-peak hours, and then the ISP
>doesn't save much.  A possible countermeasure is to not count off-peak
>traffic (or not as much).  Our charging scheme works like that, but
>our customers are mostly large campus networks, and I don't know how
>digestible this would be to retail ISP consumers.
>-- 
>Simon.

Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

[Thomas Leavitt]

Interesting suite of services and features at a price that makes our 
domestic wireless broadband look sick... however, look at their AUP:


http://www.three.co.uk/xseries/fair_use_policy.omp

* Mobile access to Orb or Slingbox does not include using your mobile as 
a modem. <-- so this isn't true wireless broadband


* When using the internet, you can’t use some websites (including adult 
websites) and some websites aren’t compatible with all mobiles. <-- so 
big brother company gets to decide what you can and cannot view


* Fair Use Limit: 1 GB each month <-- it says this right under 
"Unlimited Data" ... and they'll cut off your access to data till the 
following month if you don't voluntarily do so yourself, once that's 
been exceeded


* for some screwy reason (maybe just so they don't have to figure out 
who is a spammer and not) they limit you to 10,000 Windows Live 
Messenger messages (like these are going to suck bandwidth), which 
amounts to 300 a day... reasonable, unless you're a heavy user: that's a 
message a minute for five hours


* 5,000 minutes of Skype to Skype calls

* Slingbox and Orb usage is limited to 80 hours a month...

... all of these are listed under "Unlimited" usage headers. All of them 
are subject to being cut off for the month if you exceed them. Did 
someone change the definition of "Unlimited" in the dictionary?


I'm not saying these are unreasonable limits, but it is rather deceptive 
to advertise services as "Unlimited" while applying limits that a 
reasonable person, using them in the fashion intended, could easily 
exceed (my kids, mobile television, more than eighty hours if I let 
them, no sweat... yap on IM from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. 7 days a week? you 
betcha.)


These limitations, applied to services here in the U.S., make wireless 
broadband access very unattractive to me... even at $60/mo., it'd be 
doable, except for the restrictions... I spend well over $200/mo. 
between my company cell, landline/DSL, and the supplementary services 
associated with each. I'd be totally willing to go out on the bleeding 
edge, kill my wireline Internet access and my cell services, and go with 
a pure wireless data/VOIP solution... but not with the restrictions 
typically placed on them. I want to be able to have my wireless data 
connection backended to my office and home networks... I want to be able 
to download ISOs for Linux distributions, and upload AVIs and WMVs to my 
in house server... I want to be able to run the home media server of my 
own choice and access it from anywhere. Etc.


I wish someone in the marketplace would emerge to serve folks like me.

Thomas



Alexander Harrowell wrote:
UK UMTS operator 3 (a Hutchison division) is advertising its so-called 
X-Series service, which provides "unlimited" data service (plus 
various lumps of steam telephony) for £25 rising to £40 a month. Skype 
is being bundled with the devices involved, and here's the kicker - 3 
is offering Slingboxen thrown in for £99 extra.


3 has just begun HSDPA Class 5 upgrades in metro areas (claimed 
maximum 3.6 Mbits/s) and plans to launch HSUPA in the uplink next 
spring, with a claimed max of 1.4Mbits/s.


On 12/25/06, *Thomas Leavitt* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> wrote:


Check the AUP and TOS for that EVDO connection - my guess is that by
viewing stuff from your Slingbox, you're risking termination of
service.
I don't have an EVDO connection myself (still toodling along with my
Sidekick's GPRS), and part of the reason why is that they have a
lot of
what I think are unreasonable restrictions on how these services
can be
used -- this is based on what I've read on the various mailing
lists I'm
on (Dave Farber's IP, Declan McCullagh's Politech, and Dewayne
Hendrick's Dewayne-Net).

I don't know how significant restrictions like this are from a
competitive perspective, but my broadband ISP also has a very liberal
TOS... and that's one of the reasons I use them. I suspect that as
items
like the Slingbox become more common, folks will start paying more
attention to what they're permitted to do with their upstream
bandwidth.

Thomas

Roland Dobbins wrote:
>
>
> I recently purchased a Slingbox Pro, and have set it up so that
I can
> remotely access/control my home HDTV DVR and stream video remotely.
> My broadband access SP specifically allow home users to run
servers,
> as long as said servers don't cause a problem for the SP
> infrastructure nor for other users or doing anything illegal; as
long
> as I'm not breaking the law or making problems for others, they
don't
> care.
>
> The Slingbox is pretty cool; when I access it, both the video and
> audio quality are more than acceptable. It even works well when I
> access it via EVDO; on average, I'm pulling down about 450kb/sec
up to
> about 580kb/sec over TCP (my home u

Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

[Roland Dobbins]

On Dec 25, 2006, at 3:05 PM, Randy Bush wrote:


Kenjiro Cho, Kensuke Fukuda, Hiroshi Esaki, & Akira Kato.
"The Impact and Implications of the Growth in Residential
User-to-User Traffic."
SIGCOMM2006, pp207-218. Pisa, Italy. September 2006.



I saw this paper when it came out Randy, thanks - I had several  
interrelated questions about TOS/AUP, and whether or not the presumed  
legality/illegality of a potentially popular non-infringing home  
media server vs. standard P2P applications (and the jaundiced view of  
them, rightly or wrongly) would affect what folks are doing or  
considering doing.  The questions were also somewhat specific to  
North America, which is a substantially different market than the one  
described in this paper, and which may well evolve differently.


This is a very interesting and thought-provoking paper, but it  
doesn't answer the questions I was asking, I'm sorry if that wasn't  
clear.


---
Roland Dobbins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> // 408.527.6376 voice

All battles are perpetual.

   -- Milton Friedman