Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Brandon Galbraith wrote: Not to drag this too far off topic, but have serious studies been done looking at moving switching fabric closer to the DSLAMs (versus doing everything PPPoE)? I know this sort of goes opposite of how ILECs are setup to dish out DSL, but as more traffic is being pushed user to user, it may make economic/technical sense. I know some som non-ILECs that do DSL bitstream via L3/MPLS IPVPN and IP DSLAMs, which then if they implement multicast in their VPN would be able to provide a service that could support multicast TV. For me any tunnel based bitstream doesn't scale for the future and in competetive markets it's already been going away (mostly because ISPs buying the bitstream service can't compete anyway). -- Mikael Abrahamssonemail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On 10/12/07, Tony Finch [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: If it's multicast TV I don't see the problem, it doesn't increase your backbone traffic linearly with the number of people doing it. However if you have UK-style ADSL ppp backhaul then multicast doesn't help. Tony. Not to drag this too far off topic, but have serious studies been done looking at moving switching fabric closer to the DSLAMs (versus doing everything PPPoE)? I know this sort of goes opposite of how ILECs are setup to dish out DSL, but as more traffic is being pushed user to user, it may make economic/technical sense. -brandon
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: If it's multicast TV I don't see the problem, it doesn't increase your backbone traffic linearly with the number of people doing it. However if you have UK-style ADSL ppp backhaul then multicast doesn't help. Tony. -- f.a.n.finch [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://dotat.at/ IRISH SEA: SOUTHERLY, BACKING NORTHEASTERLY FOR A TIME, 3 OR 4. SLIGHT OR MODERATE. SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD, OCCASIONALLY POOR.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Marshall Eubanks wrote: Many people leave the TV on all the time, at least while they are home. On the Internet broadcasting side, we (AmericaFree.TV) have some viewers that do the same - one has racked up a cumulative 109 _days_ of viewing so far this year. (109 days in 280 days duration works out to 9.3 hours per day.) I am sure that other video providers can provide similar reports. So, I don't think that things are that different here in the new regime. If it's multicast TV I don't see the problem, it doesn't increase your backbone traffic linearly with the number of people doing it. But this is of course a problem in a VOD environment, but on the other hand, people are probably less likely to just leave it on if it's actually programming they can have when they want. You don't need a TiVo when you have network based service that does the TiVo functionality for you. Personally, I'd rather pay per hour I'm watching VOD, than paying nothing for channels filled with commercials where I have no control over when and what I could watch. -- Mikael Abrahamssonemail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Joe Greco wrote: It's arrogant to fix brokenness? Because I'm certainly there. In my experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side. There's a big difference between fixing brokenness and demanding that somebody else do something that might make sense in your situation but not in theirs. Well, then, when someone actually demands that, then why don't you have that little chat with them. Otherwise, you might want to recognize that someone actually /asked/ me what I would do - and I answered. For you (or anyone else) to turn that on its ear and make it out like I was demanding that somebody else do something is, at best, poor form. [lots of boring and obvious US Internet boom/bust history snipped] In other words, capacity in the US is cheap because a bunch of investors screwed up. That's nothing new; it's how the American railroads got built in the mid to late 1800s, and it's how the original American phone networks got built in the early 1900s. Investors will presumably keep making similar mistakes, and society will be better off because of it. But counting on them to make the same mistake while investing in the same thing within the same decade may be pushing it. So there's nowhere else in the world that there's cheap capacity? There are other areas of the world that are served by the Internet, and it seems unlikely to me that cheap bandwidth in every single area is due to the competition/bankruptcy cycle. Actually, the thing that tends to be /most/ special about a location such as Australia is that running the capacity out there is a lot different than running fiber along tracks in the US. The race into financial ruin caused by competitiveness among carriers was not a certainty, but the excessive levels of excess capacity from numerous providers probably forced it to become one, as smaller fish fought for a slice of the pie. The lack of large amounts of excess capacity on competing carriers clearly keeps the AU costs high, possibly (probably) artificially so. Therefore, I'm not sure I would accept this argument about why US capacity is cheap as being a complete answer, though in the context of talking about why AU is expensive, it's certainly clear that the lack of competition to AU is a major factor. If you're an ISP in an area served by an expensive long haul capacity monopoly rather than a cheap competitive free for all, the economic decisions you're likely to make are quite different than the decisions made in major American cities. If you can always go get more cheap capacity, encouraging your customers to use a lot of it and thereby become dependent on it may be a wise move, or at least may not hurt you much. I'm not actually certain under what circumstances *encouraging* your customers to use a lot of bandwidth is a wise move, since there are still issues with overcommit in virtually every ISP network. It's probably cheaper than keeping track of who's using what and having to deal with variable bills. But if the capacity you buy is expensive, you probably don't want your customers using a lot of it unless they're willing to pay you at least what you're paying for it. Charging per bit, or imposing bandwidth caps, is a way to align your customers' economic interests with your own, and to encourage them to behave in the way that you want them to. Well, my initial message included this: : Continued reliance on broadband users using tiny percentages of their : broadband connection certainly makes the ISP business model easier, but : in the long term, isn't going to work out well for the Internet's : continuing evolution. So, now you've actually stumbled into a vague understanding of what I was initially getting at. Good. :-) I am seeing a continued growth of bandwidth-intensive services, including new, sophisticated, data-driven technologies. I am concerned about the impact that forcing customers to behave in the way that you want them to has on the development of new technologies. Let's get into that, just a little bit. One of the biggest challenges for the Internet has got to be the steadily increasing storage market, combined with the continued development of small, portable processors for every application, meaning that there's been an explosion of computing devices. Ten years ago, your average PC connected to the Internet, and users might actually have downloaded the occasional software update manually. Today, it is fairly common to configure PC's to download updates - not only for Windows, but for virus scanners, Web browsers, e-mail clients, etc., all automatically. To fail to arrange this is actually risking viral infection. Download-and-run software is getting more common. Microsoft distributed Vista betas as DVD ISO's. These things are not getting smaller. Ten years ago, portable GPS-based
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Hi Andrew, On Mon, 8 Oct 2007 08:36:12 -0500 (CDT) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Andrew Odlyzko) wrote: As a point of information, Australia is one of the few places where the government collects Internet traffic statistics (which are hopefully trustworthy). Pointer is at http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/govstats.html (which also has a pointer to Hong Kong reports). If one looks at the Australian Bureau of Statistics report for the quarter ended March 2007, we find that the roughly 3.8 M residential broadband subscribers in Australia were downloading an average of 2.5 GB/month, or about 10 Kbps on average (vs. about 20x that in Hong Kong). While Australian Internet traffic had been growing very vigorously over the last few years (as shown by the earlier reports from the same source), growth has slowed down substantially, quite likely in response to those quotas. These quotas have been around since the late 90s in .au, pretty much since broadband became available. Their origins are probably the dial up plans that were also measured that way - although there were also dial up plans that were measured by minutes online. The only significant change to plans that has happened is that rather than people who go over their quota being changed a per MB excess fee, the customer's service is now rate limited (shaped) down to a dialup like speed e.g. 64Kbps, resulting in a fixed monthly bill. This feature was introduced something like 3 to 4 or maybe 5 years ago, and has wildly spread across the industry (and as you say in one of your papers, people like it because it's insurance against unexpected and variable bills). There are various levels for these quotas. The 500MB ones are really only aimed to be for people who don't want to spend more per month than they are for dialup - they probably act as a taster as to what you can do with broadband, rather than being a broadband plan. Common proper broadband quota plan values are 4000 or 5000, 1 or 12000, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8 MB per month. Regards, Mark. Andrew Odlyzko P.S. The MINTS (Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies) project, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints provides pointers to a variety of sources of traffic statistics, as well as some analyses. Comments, and especially pointers to additional traffic reports, are eagerly solicited. On Fri Oct 5, Mark Newton wrote: On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 01:12:35PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As you say, 90GB is roughly .25Mbps on average. Of course, like you pointed out, the users actual bandwidth patterns are most likely not a straight line. 95%ile on that 90GB could be considerably higher. But let's take a conservative estimate and say that user uses .5Mbps 95%ile. And lets say this is a relatively large ISP paying $12/Mb. That user then costs that ISP $6/month in bandwidth. (I know, that's somewhat faulty logic, but how else is the ISP going to establish a cost basis?) If that user is only paying say $19.99/month for their connection, that leaves only $13.99 a month to pay for all the infrastructure to support that user, along with personnel, etc all while still trying to turn a profit. In the Australian ISP's case (which is what started this) it's rather worse. The local telco monopoly bills between $30 and $50 per month for access to the copper tail. So there's essentially no such thing as a $19.99/month connection here (except for short-lived flash-in-the-pan loss-leaders, and we all know how they turn out) So to run the numbers: A customer who averages .25Mbit/sec on a tail acquired from the incumbent requires -- Port/line rental from the telco ~ $50 IP transit~ $ 6 (your number) Transpacific backhaul ~ $50 (I'm not making this up) So we're over a hundred bucks already, and haven't yet factored in the overheads for infrastructure, personnel, profit, etc. And those numbers are before sales tax too, so add at least 10% to all of them before arriving at a retail price. Due to the presence of a quota, our customers don't tend to average .25 Mbit/sec over the course of a month (we prefer to send the ones that do to our competitors :-). If someone buys access to, say, 30 Gbytes of downloads per month, a few significant things happen: - The customer has a clear understanding of what they've paid for, which doesn't encompass unlimited access to the Internet. That tends to moderate their usage; - Because they know they're buying something finite, they tend to pick a package that suits their expected usage, so customers who intend to use more end up paying more money; - The customer creates their own backpressure against hitting their quota: Once they've gone past it they're usually rate-limited to 64kbps,
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Joe Greco wrote: One of the biggest challenges for the Internet has got to be the steadily increasing storage market, combined with the continued development of small, portable processors for every application, meaning that there's been an explosion of computing devices. The one thing that scares me the most is that I have discovered people around me that use their bittorrent clients with rss feeds from bittorrent sites to download everything (basically, or at least a category) and then just delete what they don't want. Because they're paying for flat rate there is little incentive in trying to save on bandwidth. If this spreads, be afraid, be very afraid. I can't think of anything more bandwidth intensive than video, no software updates downloads in the world can compete with people automatically downloading DVDRs or xvids of tv shows and movies, and then throwing it away because they were too lazy to set up proper filtering in the first place. -- Mikael Abrahamssonemail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Oct 10, 2007, at 5:18 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Joe Greco wrote: One of the biggest challenges for the Internet has got to be the steadily increasing storage market, combined with the continued development of small, portable processors for every application, meaning that there's been an explosion of computing devices. The one thing that scares me the most is that I have discovered people around me that use their bittorrent clients with rss feeds from bittorrent sites to download everything (basically, or at least a category) and then just delete what they don't want. Because they're paying for flat rate there is little incentive in trying to save on bandwidth. If this spreads, be afraid, be very afraid. I can't think of anything more bandwidth intensive than video, no software updates downloads in the world can compete with people automatically downloading DVDRs or xvids of tv shows and movies, and then throwing it away because they were too lazy to set up proper filtering in the first place. Many people leave the TV on all the time, at least while they are home. On the Internet broadcasting side, we (AmericaFree.TV) have some viewers that do the same - one has racked up a cumulative 109 _days_ of viewing so far this year. (109 days in 280 days duration works out to 9.3 hours per day.) I am sure that other video providers can provide similar reports. So, I don't think that things are that different here in the new regime. Regards Marshall -- Mikael Abrahamssonemail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Oct 10, 2007, at 5:18 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Joe Greco wrote: One of the biggest challenges for the Internet has got to be the steadily increasing storage market, combined with the continued development of small, portable processors for every application, meaning that there's been an explosion of computing devices. The one thing that scares me the most is that I have discovered people around me that use their bittorrent clients with rss feeds from bittorrent sites to download everything (basically, or at least a category) and then just delete what they don't want. Because they're paying for flat rate there is little incentive in trying to save on bandwidth. If this spreads, be afraid, be very afraid. I can't think of anything more bandwidth intensive than video, no software updates downloads in the world can compete with people automatically downloading DVDRs or xvids of tv shows and movies, and then throwing it away because they were too lazy to set up proper filtering in the first place. Many people leave the TV on all the time, at least while they are home. On the Internet broadcasting side, we (AmericaFree.TV) have some viewers that do the same - one has racked up a cumulative 109 _days_ of viewing so far this year. (109 days in 280 days duration works out to 9.3 hours per day.) I am sure that other video providers can provide similar reports. So, I don't think that things are that different here in the new regime. That's scary enough. However, consider something like TiVo. Our dual- tuner DirecTiVo spends a fair amount of its time recording. Now, first, some explanation. We're not a huge TV household. The DirecTiVo is a first generation, ~30 hour unit. It's set up to record about 50 different things on season pass, many of which are not currently available. It's also got an extensive number of thumbs rated (and therefore often automatically recorded as a suggestion) items. I'm guessing that a minimum of 90% of what is recorded is either deleted or rolls off the end without being watched, yet there are various shows (possibly just one) on the unit from last year yet. All things considered, this harms no one and nothing, since the TiVo is not using any measurable resource to do the recordings that would not otherwise have been used. A DVR on a traditional cable network is non-problematic, as is a DVR on any of the next gen broadcast/multicast style networks that could be deployed as a drop-in replacement for legacy cable. More interesting are some of the new cable video on demand services, which could create a fair amount of challenge for cable service providers. However, even there, the challenge is limited to the service provider's network, and it is unlikely that the load created cannot be addressed. Multiple customer DVR's requesting content for speculative download purposes (i.e. for TiVo-style favorites support) could be broadcast or multicast the material at a predetermined time, essentially minimizing the load caused by speculative downloading. True in-real-time VOD would be limited to users actually in front of the glass. All of this, however, represents content within the cable provider's network. From the TiVo user perspective above, even if a vast majority of the content is being discarded, it shouldn't really be a major problem. Now, for something (seemingly) completely different. Thirty years ago, TV was dominated by the big broadcast networks. Shows were expensive to produce, equipment was expensive, and the networks tried to aim at large interest groups. Shows such as Star Trek had a lot of difficulty succeeding, for many reasons, but thrived in syndication. With the advent of cable networks, we saw the launch of channels such as SciFi, which was originally pegged as a place where Star Treks and other sci-fi movies would find a second life. However, if you look at what has /actually/ happened, many networks have actually started originating their own high-quality, much more narrowly targetted shows. We've seen Battlestar Galactica and Flash Gordon appear on SciFi, for example. Part of this is that it is less difficult and complex to produce shows, with the advances in technology that we've seen. I picked SciFi mainly because there's a lot of bleedover from legacy broadcast TV to provide some compare/contrast - but more general examples, such as HBO produced shows, exist as well. A big question, then, is will we continue to see this sort of effect? Can we expect TV to continue to evolve towards more highly targetted segments? I believe that the answer is yes, and along with that may come a move towards a certain amount of more amateur content. Something more like video podcasting than short YouTube videos. And it'll get better (or worse, depending on POV) as time goes on. Technology improves. Today's cell phones, for example, can take
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Joe Greco wrote: It's arrogant to fix brokenness? Because I'm certainly there. In my experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side. There's a big difference between fixing brokenness and demanding that somebody else do something that might make sense in your situation but not in theirs. People in different places deal with different economic factors, whether in terms of telecommunications, or the movement of goods, or labor. In the US, we automate a lot of household tasks (dish washing, clothes washing, etc.) because the machines to do those tasks are cheap, and peoples' time is expensive. Many people have cars, because they can afford them, but hiring a chauffeur would be extremely extravagant. In some other parts of the world, importing machines to wash dishes or wash clothing would be considered extremely expensive. Anybody who could afford such things would instead spend $10 per month on a servant who would do what those machines do, and clean the house and cook meals. Cars, made with expensive foreign materials by expensive foreign labor, would mostly be unaffordable, but anybody who could afford one would also spend the extra $10 per month on somebody to drive it for them. The same goes for telecommunications connectivity. In the US, we've been conditioned over the last ten years to think of long haul telecom capacity between major cities as a seemingly infinite resource with a price approaching zero, so expending extra effort to limit its use wouldn't make much sense. In parts of the world where the same long distance capacity that we take for granted sells for $5,000 per megabit per second per month, and where $5,000 represents 10 or 20 years of income for the average person, people look at it differently. So, what drives the telecom cost differences? Distance and difficulty of terrain are certainly partial answers, as are economies of scale. But, if we look at what happened in the US, the story is a bit different. In the late 1990s, we had a telecom construction boom. Demand for capacity was surging and lots of investors wanted to invest in new capacity. There was a set of cities that were seen both as where the money was, and where a network had to be to be a peer of all the other networks. Once somebody was laying a little bit of fiber, it didn't cost much more to lay a lot of it, so lots of companies ended up burying lots more fiber than they had a use for between the same set of points. Doing that was really expensive, and the construction had to be paid for up front before the fiber could be used. Presumably, the investors assumed that once the fiber was in, it would sell for what fiber was selling for before the construction boom, and they'd all make their money back. Unfortunately if you're an investor, but fortunately if you're an American consumer, the market didn't work that way. It became a competitive market with high capital costs, a near infinite supply of the product, and lots of competition. The fiber companies couldn't price their services to recover their construction costs, because if they had charged more than any of their competitors they wouldn't have made a cent. Instead, they priced their services to be cheaper than the competition, trying to salvage whatever money they could. The competitors responded by pricing things even cheaper, trying to make sales of their own, and the cycle repeated itself again and again as the price of capacity along those routes fell towards zero. Eventually, the construction debt went away in bankruptcy, the fiber got bought up cheaply by companies that hadn't lost everything in building it, and what it had cost to build ceased to be relevant at all. In other words, capacity in the US is cheap because a bunch of investors screwed up. That's nothing new; it's how the American railroads got built in the mid to late 1800s, and it's how the original American phone networks got built in the early 1900s. Investors will presumably keep making similar mistakes, and society will be better off because of it. But counting on them to make the same mistake while investing in the same thing within the same decade may be pushing it. Unfortunately for consumers, and fortunately for investors, this pattern didn't repeat itself everywhere. Those who built fiber on paths that were not seen as where the money was ended up with monopolies. They can charge far more than their construction costs, as long as they can find customers willing to pay. They're vulnerable, of course, to somebody else coming along and building a parallel cable that forces their prices towards zero, but such a cable would force its own price towards zero as well, and generally wouldn't be a good investment. Second cables do occasionally get built, but often their either on
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Mark Newton wrote: Thought experiment: With $250 per megabit per month transit and $30 - $50 per month tail costs, what would _you_ do to create the perfect internet industry? I would fix the problem, ie get more competition into these two areas where the prices are obvisouly way higher than in most parts of the civilised world, much higher than is motivated by the placement there in the middle of an ocean. Perhaps it's hard to get the transoceanic cost down to european levels, but a 25 time difference, that's just too much. And about the local tail, that's also 5-10 times higher than normal in the western world, I don't see that being motivated by some fundamental difference. -- Mikael Abrahamssonemail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Andy Davidson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes In this bit of Europe (UK), it's the opposite: the cable companies (CLEC style companies) tend to run unlimited (but within fair use) aggregate throughput policies, but the DSL operating companies have to impose aggregate throughput caps because the last mile connectivity is run by the national incumbent. Surely the incumbent doesn't impose a cost on the bandwidth along the local loop - the bottleneck (and cost per gigabyte) is the backhaul from their locally operated DSLAM to the ISP's own network. -- Roland Perry
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On 8 Oct 2007, at 13:06, Roland Perry wrote: Surely the incumbent doesn't impose a cost on the bandwidth along the local loop - the bottleneck (and cost per gigabyte) is the backhaul from their locally operated DSLAM to the ISP's own network. Yes, and it's £1,758,693 ($3.5m) PA for a 622Mbit BT Central, (so in bandwidth terms, equates to $471/Mbit per month - if the central is maxxed out). (Using $2=£1)
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Mon, October 8, 2007 1:06 pm, Roland Perry wrote: Surely the incumbent doesn't impose a cost on the bandwidth along the local loop - the bottleneck (and cost per gigabyte) is the backhaul from their locally operated DSLAM to the ISP's own network. If you're buying wholesale from the incumbent, it's effectively the same thing, as there's some kind of L2 connection per subscriber back to your own network, so no possibility to talk to other local subscribers without the hairpin. (At least, I've yet to see such a thing in the offering from any European incumbent. I guess you could in theory with a virtual-router or VRF per ISP on the incumbent's kit at the exchange, but that brings other problems when you want to do things beyond basic Internet, e.g. VPN or pseudowire services.) Unbundling does change the model - renting just the metal path from BT is not actually *that* horrific - but you then have to factor in your own kit in the exchange. That's not just cost, there's a big logistics piece - and a lot of processes to change if you've built your business around wholesale. Regards, Tim.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Andy Davidson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 8 Oct 2007, at 13:06, Roland Perry wrote: Surely the incumbent doesn't impose a cost on the bandwidth along the local loop - the bottleneck (and cost per gigabyte) is the backhaul from their locally operated DSLAM to the ISP's own network. Yes, and it's 1,758,693 ($3.5m) PA for a 622Mbit BT Central, (so in bandwidth terms, equates to $471/Mbit per month - if the central is maxxed out). Wow. The pricing of the local incumbent in .NL is public - you can find everything on www.kpn-wholesale.com. Here is a direct link to the pdf with wholesale-prices: http://www.kpn-wholesale.com/content/doc/WBA%20annex%204%20CM%20v1.3.pdf I guess it's about 50-100 times cheaper, but OTOH, we only put like ~3000 customers on an STM-4, so we need way more of them. Mike.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
As a point of information, Australia is one of the few places where the government collects Internet traffic statistics (which are hopefully trustworthy). Pointer is at http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/govstats.html (which also has a pointer to Hong Kong reports). If one looks at the Australian Bureau of Statistics report for the quarter ended March 2007, we find that the roughly 3.8 M residential broadband subscribers in Australia were downloading an average of 2.5 GB/month, or about 10 Kbps on average (vs. about 20x that in Hong Kong). While Australian Internet traffic had been growing very vigorously over the last few years (as shown by the earlier reports from the same source), growth has slowed down substantially, quite likely in response to those quotas. Andrew Odlyzko P.S. The MINTS (Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies) project, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints provides pointers to a variety of sources of traffic statistics, as well as some analyses. Comments, and especially pointers to additional traffic reports, are eagerly solicited. On Fri Oct 5, Mark Newton wrote: On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 01:12:35PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As you say, 90GB is roughly .25Mbps on average. Of course, like you pointed out, the users actual bandwidth patterns are most likely not a straight line. 95%ile on that 90GB could be considerably higher. But let's take a conservative estimate and say that user uses .5Mbps 95%ile. And lets say this is a relatively large ISP paying $12/Mb. That user then costs that ISP $6/month in bandwidth. (I know, that's somewhat faulty logic, but how else is the ISP going to establish a cost basis?) If that user is only paying say $19.99/month for their connection, that leaves only $13.99 a month to pay for all the infrastructure to support that user, along with personnel, etc all while still trying to turn a profit. In the Australian ISP's case (which is what started this) it's rather worse. The local telco monopoly bills between $30 and $50 per month for access to the copper tail. So there's essentially no such thing as a $19.99/month connection here (except for short-lived flash-in-the-pan loss-leaders, and we all know how they turn out) So to run the numbers: A customer who averages .25Mbit/sec on a tail acquired from the incumbent requires -- Port/line rental from the telco ~ $50 IP transit~ $ 6 (your number) Transpacific backhaul ~ $50 (I'm not making this up) So we're over a hundred bucks already, and haven't yet factored in the overheads for infrastructure, personnel, profit, etc. And those numbers are before sales tax too, so add at least 10% to all of them before arriving at a retail price. Due to the presence of a quota, our customers don't tend to average .25 Mbit/sec over the course of a month (we prefer to send the ones that do to our competitors :-). If someone buys access to, say, 30 Gbytes of downloads per month, a few significant things happen: - The customer has a clear understanding of what they've paid for, which doesn't encompass unlimited access to the Internet. That tends to moderate their usage; - Because they know they're buying something finite, they tend to pick a package that suits their expected usage, so customers who intend to use more end up paying more money; - The customer creates their own backpressure against hitting their quota: Once they've gone past it they're usually rate-limited to 64kbps, which is not a nice experience, so by and large they build in a safety margin and rarely use more than 75% of the quota. About 5% of our customers blow their quota in any given month; - The ones who do hit their quota and don't like 64kbps shaping get to pay us more money to have their quota expanded for the rest of the month, thereby financing the capacity upgrades that their cumulative load can/will require; - The entire Australian marketplace is conditioned to expect that kind of behaviour from ISPs, and doesn't consider it to be unusual. If you guys in North America tried to run like this, you'd be destroyed in the marketplace because you've created a customer base that expects to be able to download the entire Internet and burn it to DVD every month. :-) So you end up looking at options like DPI and QoS controls at your CMTS head-end to moderate usage, because you can't keep adding infinite amounts of bandwidth to support unconstrained end-users when they're only paying you $20 per month. (note that our truth-in-advertising regulator doesn't allow us to get away with saying Unlimited unless there really are no limits -- no quotas, no traffic shaping, no traffic management, no QoS controls. Unlimited means unlimited by the dictionary
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Mark Newton wrote: Thought experiment: With $250 per megabit per month transit and $30 - $50 per month tail costs, what would _you_ do to create the perfect internet industry? I would fix the problem, ie get more competition into these two areas where the prices are obvisouly way higher than in most parts of the civilised world, much higher than is motivated by the placement there in the middle of an ocean. Perhaps it's hard to get the transoceanic cost down to european levels, but a 25 time difference, that's just too much. That's approximately correct. The true answer to the thought experiment is address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and complain about how unique your problems are. Because the problems are neither unique nor new - merely ingrained. People have solved them before. And about the local tail, that's also 5-10 times higher than normal in the western world, I don't see that being motivated by some fundamental difference. The fundamental difference is that it's owned by a monopoly. Here in the US, we wrestled with Mark's problems around a decade ago, when transit was about that expensive, and copper cost big bucks. There was a lot of fear and paranoia about selling DSL lines for a fraction of what the cost of the circuit if provided with committed bandwidth would cost. The whole Info Superhighway thing was supposed to result in a national infrastructure that provided residential users with 45Mbps to-the-home capabilities on a carrier-neutral network built by the telcos. These promises by the telcos were carefully and incrementally revoked, while the incentives we provided to the telcos remained. As a result, we're now in a situation where the serious players are really the ILEC and the cable companies, and they've shut out the CLEC's from any reasonable path forward. Despite this, wholesale prices did continue to drop. Somehow, amazingly, the ILEC found it possible to provide DSL at extremely competitive prices. Annoyingly, a bit lower than wholesale costs... $14.99/mo for 768K DSL, $19.99/mo for 1.5M, etc. They're currently feeling the heat from Road Runner, whose prices tend towards being a bit more expensive, but speeds tend towards better too. :-) Anyways, as displeased as I may be with the state of affairs here in the US, it is worth noting that the speeds continue to improve, and projects such as U-verse and FIOS are promising to deliver higher bandwidth to the user, and maintain pressure on the cable companies for them to do better as well. US providers do not seem to be doing significant amounts of DPI or other policy to manage bandwidth consumption. That doesn't mean that there's no overcommit crisis, but right now, limits on upload speeds appear to combine with a lack of killer centralized content distribution apps and as a result, the situation is stable. My interest in this mainly relates to how these things will impact the Internet in the future, and I see some possible problems developing. I do believe that video-over-IP is a coming thing, and I see a very scary (for network operators) scenario of needing to sustain much greater levels of traffic, as podcast-like video delivery is something that would be a major impact. Right now, both the ILEC and the cable company appear to be betting that they'll continue to drive the content viewing of their customers through broadcast, and certainly that's the most efficient model we've found, but it only works for popular stuff. That still leaves a wildly large void for a new service model. The question of whether or not such a thing can actually be sustained by the Internet is fascinating, and whether or not it'll crush current network designs. With respect to the AU thing, it would be interesting to know whether or not the quotas in AU have acted to limit the popularity of services such as YouTube (my guess would be an emphatic yes), as I see YouTube as being a precursor to video things-to-come. Looking at whether or not AU has stifled new uses for the Internet, or has otherwise impacted the way users use the Internet, could be interesting and potentially valuable information to futurists and even other operators. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
At 09:50 AM 10/8/2007, Joe Greco wrote: On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Mark Newton wrote: Thought experiment: With $250 per megabit per month transit and $30 - $50 per month tail costs, what would _you_ do to create the perfect internet industry? I would fix the problem, ie get more competition into these two areas where the prices are obvisouly way higher than in most parts of the civilised world, much higher than is motivated by the placement there in the middle of an ocean. Perhaps it's hard to get the transoceanic cost down to european levels, but a 25 time difference, that's just too much. That's approximately correct. The true answer to the thought experiment is address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and complain about how unique your problems are. Because the problems are neither unique nor new - merely ingrained. People have solved them before. Address those problems sounds quite a bit like an old Sam Kinnison routine, paraphrased as move to where the broadband is! You live in a %*^* expensive place. Sorry, but your statement comes across as arrogant, at least to me. And about the local tail, that's also 5-10 times higher than normal in the western world, I don't see that being motivated by some fundamental difference. The fundamental difference is that it's owned by a monopoly. Bingo. So, how do you propose an ISP in Australia fix the political structure, and do it in a timescale that fits your expectations? Here in the US, we wrestled with Mark's problems around a decade ago, when transit was about that expensive, and copper cost big bucks. There was a lot of fear and paranoia about selling DSL lines for a fraction of what the cost of the circuit if provided with committed bandwidth would cost. The whole Info Superhighway thing was supposed to result in a national infrastructure that provided residential users with 45Mbps to-the-home capabilities on a carrier-neutral network built by the telcos. These promises by the telcos were carefully and incrementally revoked, while the incentives we provided to the telcos remained. As a result, we're now in a situation where the serious players are really the ILEC and the cable companies, and they've shut out the CLEC's from any reasonable path forward. Despite this, wholesale prices did continue to drop. Somehow, amazingly, the ILEC found it possible to provide DSL at extremely competitive prices. Annoyingly, a bit lower than wholesale costs... $14.99/mo for 768K DSL, $19.99/mo for 1.5M, etc. They're currently feeling the heat from Road Runner, whose prices tend towards being a bit more expensive, but speeds tend towards better too. :-) I should note that this applies only where the ILEC (or cable company, for that matter) has bothered to deploy service. Unlike telephone service, there has been no universal service approach. There are large areas without service other than dialup. Verizon, it's particularly sad, charges $19.95/month for dialup that'll also tie up a POTS line, where it'll offer the lowest DSL speeds at $14.95. And Verizon cherry picks the places where it offers DSL (and moreso for FiOS) so the affluent towns get high speed service, while the rural and poorer places only have available dialup (and that dialup is more expensive). I would be curious if any of the places in the world with higher-cost high-speed service also have any sort of requirement of coverage? Anyways, as displeased as I may be with the state of affairs here in the US, it is worth noting that the speeds continue to improve, and projects such as U-verse and FIOS are promising to deliver higher bandwidth to the user, and maintain pressure on the cable companies for them to do better as well. Of course this only applies if you live in an inner city or wealthy suburb. US providers do not seem to be doing significant amounts of DPI or other policy to manage bandwidth consumption. That doesn't mean that there's no overcommit crisis, but right now, limits on upload speeds appear to combine with a lack of killer centralized content distribution apps and as a result, the situation is stable. My interest in this mainly relates to how these things will impact the Internet in the future, and I see some possible problems developing. Do you believe there is any reason for the Internet of the Future to be everywhere? You're concerned about video over IP delivery and other advanced applications, but do you expect to make a video call to your cousin who owns a farm outside of town? This question is largely ignored in discussions about cranking the 'net to ever faster speeds, at least in the US. I'd be interested to know how it's addressed elsewhere in the world. I do believe that video-over-IP is a coming thing, and I see a very scary (for network operators) scenario of needing to sustain much greater levels of traffic, as podcast-like video delivery is something that would be a
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Mon, Oct 08, 2007, Joe Greco wrote: With respect to the AU thing, it would be interesting to know whether or not the quotas in AU have acted to limit the popularity of services such as YouTube (my guess would be an emphatic yes), as I see YouTube as being a precursor to video things-to-come. Looking at whether or not AU has stifled new uses for the Internet, or has otherwise impacted the way users use the Internet, could be interesting and potentially valuable information to futurists and even other operators. .. or try to attract those sorts of content delivery networks into Australia to serve said content locally and bypass the whole US transit issue. Of course, the Australian market is so god damned small compared to the American one, let alone trying to get content providers over to the West Coast when there's two million people here, and 15+ million over east. Some ISPs played around with Youtube caching. I won't name names, but there were more than two of them. Its whats inspiring me to start getting some numbers on bandwidth saved. What they found is that caching Youtube under test conditions gave -immediate- traffic savings, but it skewed the TX/RX ratios. Their inbound dropped but their outbound stayed the same, so their links were just as utilised. They then judged it not to be worth it at this time. Of course, I'd say can't you invent something to put in place of your now lower RX utilisation? but I'm just an Arts student, what do I know about content? :) Adrian (Why don't I move overseas again?)
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
From: Daniel Senie [EMAIL PROTECTED] Verizon, it's particularly sad, charges $19.95/month for dialup that'll also tie up a POTS line, where it'll offer the lowest DSL speeds at $14.95. And Verizon cherry picks the places where it offers DSL (and moreso for FiOS) so the affluent towns get high speed service, while the rural and poorer places only have available dialup (and that dialup is more expensive). In my experience, the support cost of DSL is significantly cheaper than dial-up in terms of helpdesk calls. DSL/Cable/FiOS is typically a plug and play, where as dialup can be quite a bit more troublesome, involving more tech time in the long run.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Andy Johnson wrote: In my experience, the support cost of DSL is significantly cheaper than dial-up in terms of helpdesk calls. DSL/Cable/FiOS is typically a plug and play, where as dialup can be quite a bit more troublesome, involving more tech time in the long run. I occasionally see providers offering pay-per-incident tech support, particularly for their lower-priced service offerings, as a way to offset the higher support costs as a percentage of overall revenue from those users. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it is out there. jms
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
That's approximately correct. The true answer to the thought experiment is address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and complain about how unique your problems are. Because the problems are neither unique nor new - merely ingrained. People have solved them before. Address those problems sounds quite a bit like an old Sam Kinnison routine, paraphrased as move to where the broadband is! You live in a %*^* expensive place. Sorry, but your statement comes across as arrogant, at least to me. It's arrogant to fix brokenness? Because I'm certainly there. In my experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side. And about the local tail, that's also 5-10 times higher than normal in the western world, I don't see that being motivated by some fundamental difference. The fundamental difference is that it's owned by a monopoly. Bingo. So, how do you propose an ISP in Australia fix the political structure, and do it in a timescale that fits your expectations? I have no expectations for them, and therefore there's no required timescale. However, apparently I am not the only one to recognize that a problem exists. Upon a minor amount of further research into the issue, it appears that Pipe Networks, VSNL, etc., are working on a new cable, a project referred to as Project Runway, to connect Australia to Guam at multiterabit speeds - so it may soon come to pass that the current off-continent duopoly for bandwidth may need to adjust somewhat. That could represent one significant problem - solved in a year or two. The local political problem - well, I have to note that political != technical, and politics can be affected, whereas technical problems tend to organize them into problems that can be solved, and problems that cannot. Despite this, wholesale prices did continue to drop. Somehow, amazingly, the ILEC found it possible to provide DSL at extremely competitive prices. Annoyingly, a bit lower than wholesale costs... $14.99/mo for 768K DSL, $19.99/mo for 1.5M, etc. They're currently feeling the heat from Road Runner, whose prices tend towards being a bit more expensive, but speeds tend towards better too. :-) I should note that this applies only where the ILEC (or cable company, for that matter) has bothered to deploy service. Unlike telephone service, there has been no universal service approach. There are large areas without service other than dialup. Large geographic areas, yes. This isn't good. Our regulation of the telecoms has sadly been extremely permissive when it comes to giving up on the points that were originally part of the plan for broadband in America. Verizon, it's particularly sad, charges $19.95/month for dialup that'll also tie up a POTS line, where it'll offer the lowest DSL speeds at $14.95. And Verizon cherry picks the places where it offers DSL (and moreso for FiOS) so the affluent towns get high speed service, while the rural and poorer places only have available dialup (and that dialup is more expensive). I would be curious if any of the places in the world with higher-cost high-speed service also have any sort of requirement of coverage? Interesting question. Anyways, as displeased as I may be with the state of affairs here in the US, it is worth noting that the speeds continue to improve, and projects such as U-verse and FIOS are promising to deliver higher bandwidth to the user, and maintain pressure on the cable companies for them to do better as well. Of course this only applies if you live in an inner city or wealthy suburb. Oddly, it's reported that the cable company, which has very high penetration rates, has boosted RR speeds throughout the service area, and the speeds being offered exceed U-verse speeds, AFAICT. I would actually view this as a challenge for the ILEC, though I fundamentally dislike the duopoly aspects. I would much prefer to see a carrier neutral last mile network here, and I've yet to see a compelling argument that it wouldn't work if it was given a chance, which is probably why the telcos have lobbied so incredibly hard against actually doing it. US providers do not seem to be doing significant amounts of DPI or other policy to manage bandwidth consumption. That doesn't mean that there's no overcommit crisis, but right now, limits on upload speeds appear to combine with a lack of killer centralized content distribution apps and as a result, the situation is stable. My interest in this mainly relates to how these things will impact the Internet in the future, and I see some possible problems developing. Do you believe there is any reason for the Internet of the Future to be everywhere? Above Vint Cerf's IP Everywhere? :-) You're concerned about video over IP delivery and other advanced applications, but do you expect to make a video call
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Sat, 6 Oct 2007, Joel Jaeggli wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And P2P is the main way to reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet. We could have used IP Multicast, but nobody on the consumer side wanted to carry state instead of packets. Multicast works when watching broadcast TV or recordings that were scheduled in advance, but people on the net want video on demand. Tony. -- f.a.n.finch [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://dotat.at/ IRISH SEA: SOUTHERLY, BACKING NORTHEASTERLY FOR A TIME, 3 OR 4. SLIGHT OR MODERATE. SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD, OCCASIONALLY POOR.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
$quoted_author = Joe Greco ; That's approximately correct. The true answer to the thought experiment is address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and complain about how unique your problems are. Because the problems are neither unique nor new - merely ingrained. People have solved them before. Address those problems sounds quite a bit like an old Sam Kinnison routine, paraphrased as move to where the broadband is! You live in a %*^* expensive place. Sorry, but your statement comes across as arrogant, at least to me. It's arrogant to fix brokenness? Because I'm certainly there. In my experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side. it's arrogant to use throwaway lines like address those problems when the reality is a complex political and corporate stoush over a former government entity with a monopoly on the local loop. AU should be at a stage where the next generation network (FTTx, for some values of x hopefully approaching H) will be built by a new, neutral entity owned by a consortium of telcos/ISPs with wholesale charges set on a cost recovery basis. if either political party realises how important this is for AUs future and stares down telstra in their game of ACCC chicken, that may even become a reality. cheers marty -- You get 10 points for difficulty, but for execution you get minus three. Holding On - Lazy Susan
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
$quoted_author = Joe Greco ; That's approximately correct. The true answer to the thought experiment is address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and complain about how unique your problems are. Because the problems are neither unique nor new - merely ingrained. People have solved them before. Address those problems sounds quite a bit like an old Sam Kinnison routine, paraphrased as move to where the broadband is! You live in a %*^* expensive place. Sorry, but your statement comes across as arrogant, at least to me. It's arrogant to fix brokenness? Because I'm certainly there. In my experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side. it's arrogant to use throwaway lines like address those problems when the reality is a complex political and corporate stoush over a former government entity with a monopoly on the local loop. AU should be at a stage where the next generation network (FTTx, for some values of x hopefully approaching H) will be built by a new, neutral entity owned by a consortium of telcos/ISPs with wholesale charges set on a cost recovery basis. if either political party realises how important this is for AUs future and stares down telstra in their game of ACCC chicken, that may even become a reality. So, in other words, it is arrogant for me to not have a detailed game plan to deal with another continent's networking political problems, and instead to summarize it as address those problems. Okay, then. Well, I certainly apologize. My assumption was that the membership of this mailing list was: 1) Not stupid, 2) Actually fairly experienced in these sorts of issues, meaning that they are capable of filling in the large blanks themselves, and 3) Probably not interested in a detailed game plan for something outside of the North American continent anyways, given the NA in NANOG. Certainly the general plan you suggest sounds like a good one. We kind of screwed that up here in the US. Despite having screwed it up, we've still got cheap broadband. I'd actually like to see something very much more like what you suggest for AU here in the US. But there was more than one problem listed. The other major factor seems to be transit bandwidth. I believe I already mentioned that there are others who are actually working to address those problems, so I am guessing that my terse suggestion was actually spot on. Otherwise they wouldn't be working on a new fiber from Australia to Guam. The only thing that seems to be particularly new or unique about this situation is that it was a momentary flash here in the US, when broadband was first deployed, and providers were terrified of high volume users. That passed fairly rapidly, and we're now on unlimited plans. I would, however, caution the folks in AU to carefully examine the path that things took here in the US - and avoid the mistakes. We started out with a plan to have a next generation neutral network, and it looks like it would have kept the US in the lead of the Internet revolution. The first mistake, in my opinion, was not creating a truly neutral entity to do that network, and instead allowing Ma Bell to create it for us. But it's late and I'm guessing most of the interested folks here have already got a good idea of how it all went wrong. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Sat, Oct 06, 2007, Joe Greco wrote: However, it is equally possible that there'll be some newfangled killer app that comes along. At some point, this will present a problem. All the self-justification in the world will not matter when the customers want to be able to do something that uses up a little more bandwidth. The next newfangled app came along - its P2P. Australian ISPS have already responded by throttling back P2P. I'm not talking about the next newfangled app that came along 8 years ago. That's what P2P is. P2P, as it currently exists, is a network-killer app, but not really the sort of killer app that I'm talking about. The World Wide Web was a killer app. It transformed the Internet in a fundamental way. Instant messaging was a killer app. It changed how people communicated. VoIP and YouTube are somewhat less successful killer apps, and that less successful is at least partly tied into some of the issues at hand here. We're starting to see the (serious) distribution of video via the Internet, and I expect that one possible outcome will be a system of TiVo-like video delivery without the complication of a subscription to a cable or satellite provider's choice of package. This would allow the sourcing of content from many sources. It could be that something akin to video podcasting is the next killer app, in other words. Or it could be time for something completely different. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Comparative to Milwaukee, I'd be guessing delivering high performance internet and making enough money to fund expansion and eat is harder at a non US ISP. It's harder, but there's nothing wrong with it. It compels you to get inventive. The costs to provide DSL up here in Milwaukee are kind of insane, Insanity is a relative term :-) Try to deliver Internet outside of the US in countries that share western culture and you'll start to understand why caps are seen as an excusable form of treatment for the insanity. Okay, so, let's pretend that today I'm sitting in Sweden. Go. Extremely high speed connectivity, uncapped, well in excess of what is delivered in most parts of the US. I was just informed that Road Runner upgraded locally from 5 to 7Mbps a month ago, and has a premium 15Mbps offering now, but there are folks with 100Mbps over there. So, your point is, what, that it's easier to deliver Internet outside of the US in countries that share western culture? That could be true, we're tied up by some large communications companies who don't want carrier- neutral networks to the residence. If we just want to start making up claims that fit the observed facts, I would say that the amount that a user can download from the Internet in countries that share western culture tends to decrease with distance from Sweden, though not linearly. AU gets placed on the far end of that. :-) (That's both a joke AND roughly true!) Clearly they're not something we'd prefer, but they are useful to manage demand in the context of high costs with customers who benchmark against global consumer pricing (or those who think that the Internet is a homogeneous thing) ...Hmm, that's a good idea, perhaps you should do that (get out of the US) before you start saying what we're doing is wrong with your business or insane or perhaps unreasonable. And I agree with Mark Newton's sentiments. It's completely delusional of you to insist that the rest of the world follow the same definition of reasonable. We're not the same. Which is good in some respects as it does create some diversity. And I'm quite pleased about that :-) Well, since I didn't insist that you follow any definition of reasonable, and in fact I started out by saying : Continued reliance on broadband users using tiny percentages of their : broadband connection certainly makes the ISP business model easier, but : in the long term, isn't going to work out well for the Internet's : continuing evolution. it would seem clear that I'm not particularly interested in your local economics, no matter how sucky you've allowed them to be, but was more interested in talking about the problem in general. I *am* interested in the impact that it has on the evolution of the Internet. That you're so pleased to be diverse in a way that makes it more difficult for your users to join the modern era and use modern apps is sufficient to make me wonder. There's certainly some delusional going on there. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 10:33:19AM -0500, Joe Greco wrote: Well, since I didn't insist that you follow any definition of reasonable, and in fact I started out by saying : Continued reliance on broadband users using tiny percentages of their : broadband connection certainly makes the ISP business model easier, but : in the long term, isn't going to work out well for the Internet's : continuing evolution. With respect, Joe, you also said this: # Of course, that's obvious. The point here is that if your business is so # fragile that you can only deliver each broadband customer a dialup modem's # worth of bandwidth, something's wrong with your business. Now, I don't know what you think you've trying to achieve by throwing around doubts and aspersions about other peoples' business viability without the faintest idea about the constraints said businesses are working under, but whatever it is I doubt you're achieving it :-) Thought experiment: With $250 per megabit per month transit and $30 - $50 per month tail costs, what would _you_ do to create the perfect internet industry? Be warned that the industry is already full of sharks who don't know what they're talking about, and if what you suggest happens to match the business model deployed by one of those guys who has subsequently gone broke, I reserve the right to point and laugh derisively. Yours, - mark -- Mark Newton Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (W) Network Engineer Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 Network Man - Anagram of Mark Newton Mobile: +61-416-202-223
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
$quoted_author = Joe Greco ; The real problem is the ability of users to adopt new killer apps. This eventually breaks down to issues of how long is it reasonable for users to fund that shiny telco network at $50/line/month and things like that, because rather than solving the problems, it appears that AU ISP's are simply passing on costs, minimizing the services offered in order to keep service prices as low as possible, and then sitting around justifying it. if only it was so easy. AU's infrastructure has a long been a quagmire of political fumbling and organised chaos. as mark keeps trying to point out the current state has nothing to do with the wants of the ISP industry. they all wish it was different too... At a certain point, the deployment cost of your telco network is covered, and it is no longer reasonable to be paying $50/line/month for mere access to the copper. nice rhetoric. can you come and convince our politicians of that? cheers marty -- You need only two tools, WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use the WD-40. If it moves and shouldn't, use the tape.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Mon, Oct 08, 2007, Martin Barry wrote: At a certain point, the deployment cost of your telco network is covered, and it is no longer reasonable to be paying $50/line/month for mere access to the copper. nice rhetoric. can you come and convince our politicians of that? I think you meant why wouldn't business love that? and who is going to fund my next infrastructure upgrade? Adrian
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
AU's infrastructure has a long been a quagmire of political fumbling and organised chaos. hey, i thought it was great of you folk to take joe nacio, convicted felon, off our hands. randy
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Vassili Tchersky [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes In Europe, the only ISPs where i've seen bandwith quotas was some cables operators Almost all ADSL operators in the UK operate bandwidth quotas. eg: Currently my ISP is selling 50/20/5/0.5 GB a month options. There are many reasons, the most powerful being price competition - the cheapest domestic ADSL is $18 a month (inc tax), ranging up to $50 a month for the highest quotas. -- Roland Perry
RE: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
ISPs offering 200Mb plans on ADSL2+ here in Australia, then charging HUGE amounts for excess - usually with no notification (at around the $12AU/Gb rate) may well find themselves in an interesting legal position. Under Australian law, the 'Bait and Switch' protection is very strict. With things such as Windows Updates, Virus definition updates, anti-spyware updates, etc etc etc on a monthly basis, this would easily eat up the 200Mb allowed by the ISP - leaving ANY usage by the users to be billed at a very expensive rate. I've thought for a while that it's only a matter of time before someone sues an ISP under the 'bait and switch' rules arguing that the ISP knew of these facts and charged them a premium rate for all their normal surfing - or offer to switch them to a more expensive, higher quota plan. Out of interest, has anyone heard of this happening elsewhere on the planet? -- Steven Haigh Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.crc.id.au Phone: (03) 9001 6090 - 0412 935 897 -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Roland Perry Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2007 6:01 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas? In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Vassili Tchersky [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes In Europe, the only ISPs where i've seen bandwith quotas was some cables operators Almost all ADSL operators in the UK operate bandwidth quotas. eg: Currently my ISP is selling 50/20/5/0.5 GB a month options. There are many reasons, the most powerful being price competition - the cheapest domestic ADSL is $18 a month (inc tax), ranging up to $50 a month for the highest quotas. -- Roland Perry
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Joe Greco wrote: Technically the user can use the connection to it's maximum theoretical speed as much as they like, however, if an ISP has a quota set at 12G/month, it just means that the cost is passed along to them when they exceed it. And that seems like a bit of the handwaving. Where is it costing the ISP more when the user exceeds 12G/month? Think very carefully about that before you answer. If it was arranged that every customer of the ISP in question were to go to 100% utilization downloading 12G on the first of the month at 12:01AM, it seems clear to me that you could really screw up 95th. First, the total transfer vs. 95%ile issue. I would imagine that's just a matter of keeping it simple. John Q. Broadbanduser can understand the concept of total transfer. But try explaining 95%ile to him. Or for that matter, try explaining it to the average billing wonk at your average residential ISP. As far as the 12GB cap goes, I guess it would depend on the particular economics of the ISP in question. 12GB for a small ISP in a bandwidth-starved country isn't as insignificant as you make it sound. But lets look at your more realistic second whatif: Wasn't actually my whatif. 90GB/mo is still a relatively small amount of bandwidth. That works out to around a quarter of a megabit on average. This is nowhere near the 100% situation you're discussing. And it's also a lot higher than the 12GB/mo quota under discussion. As you say, 90GB is roughly .25Mbps on average. Of course, like you pointed out, the users actual bandwidth patterns are most likely not a straight line. 95%ile on that 90GB could be considerably higher. But let's take a conservative estimate and say that user uses .5Mbps 95%ile. And lets say this is a relatively large ISP paying $12/Mb. That user then costs that ISP $6/month in bandwidth. (I know, that's somewhat faulty logic, but how else is the ISP going to establish a cost basis?) That *is* faulty logic, of course. It doesn't make much sense in the typical ISP scenario of multiple bursty customers. It's tricky to compute what the actual cost is, however. One of the major factors that's really at the heart of this is that a lot of customers currently DO NOT use much bandwidth, a model which fits well to 12G/mo quota plans. It's easy to forget that this means that a lot of users may in fact only use 500MB/mo. As a result, the actual cost of bandwidth to the ISP for the entire userbase doesn't end up being $6/user. If that user is only paying say $19.99/month for their connection, that leaves only $13.99 a month to pay for all the infrastructure to support that user, along with personnel, etc all while still trying to turn a profit. In those terms, it seems like a pretty reasonable level of service for the price. If that same user were to go direct to a carrier, they couldn't get .5Mbps for anywhere near that cost, even ignoring the cost of the last-mile local loop. And for that same price they're also probably getting email services with spam and virus filtering, 24-hr. phone support, probably a bit of web hosting space, and possibly even a backup dial-up connection. That makes it sound really nice and all, but the point I was trying to make here was that these sorts of limits stifle other sorts of innovation. My point was that cranking up the bandwidth management only *appears* to solve a problem that will eventually become more severe - there are going to be ever-more-bandwidth-intensive applications. That brings us back to that question of how much bandwidth should we be able to deliver to users, so the $6/user is certainly relevant in that light. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
In the Australian ISP's case (which is what started this) it's rather worse. The local telco monopoly bills between $30 and $50 per month for access to the copper tail. So there's essentially no such thing as a $19.99/month connection here (except for short-lived flash-in-the-pan loss-leaders, and we all know how they turn out) So to run the numbers: A customer who averages .25Mbit/sec on a tail acquired from the incumbent requires -- Port/line rental from the telco ~ $50 IP transit~ $ 6 (your number) Transpacific backhaul ~ $50 (I'm not making this up) These look like great places for some improvement. Like I said a few messages ago, as much as your marketplace derides caps and quotas, I'm pretty sure that most of you would prefer to do business with my constraints than with yours. That's nice from *your* point of view, as an ISP, but from the end-user's point of view, it discourages the development and deployment of the next killer app, which is the point that I've been making. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Of course, that's obvious. The point here is that if your business is so fragile that you can only deliver each broadband customer a dialup modem's worth of bandwidth, something's wrong with your business. Granted 12G is a small allocation. But getting back to the original question which was Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP? Why yes, yes there is. Transit out of the country (or in a US context, out of a state) is around 25 times more expensive. Than local peering costs? That seems fine. The real question is what transit bandwidth costs. We've got small ISP's around here paying $45- $60/Mbit. Combine that with a demand on offshore content of around 70-90% of your total network load and you can see that those kind of changes to the cost structure make you play the game differently. Add to that an expectation to be as well connected as those in the continental US, and you can see that it's about managing expectations. Comparative to Milwaukee, I'd be guessing delivering high performance internet and making enough money to fund expansion and eat is harder at a non US ISP. It's harder, but there's nothing wrong with it. It compels you to get inventive. The costs to provide DSL up here in Milwaukee are kind of insane, as you tend to get it on both ends. However, I'm not aware of any ISP's setting up quotas. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
No, its that they've run the numbers and found the users above 12G/month are using a significant fraction of their network capacity for whatever values of signficant and fraction you define. Of course, that's obvious. The point here is that if your business is so fragile that you can only deliver each broadband customer a dialup modem's worth of bandwidth, something's wrong with your business. If your business model states that you will not charge clients for something when they have no problem paying for it in order to make the service better for them, then there is something wrong with your business model. Note that no one said can't deliver the service. You want unlimited bandwidth, either pay for it, or go to one of the bigger guys who will give it to you. Good luck when you want any sort of technical support... Actually, I wasn't talking about unlimited bandwidth. I was talking more about quotas that are so incredibly small as to be stifling to new offerings. There are USB pen drives that hold more than 12GB. I'm really expecting InterneTiVo to become a big thing at some point in the not-too-distant future, probably nearly as soon as there's some broadband deployment capable of dealing with the implications, and an Akamai-like system to deliver the content on-net where possible. However, it is equally possible that there'll be some newfangled killer app that comes along. At some point, this will present a problem. All the self-justification in the world will not matter when the customers want to be able to do something that uses up a little more bandwidth. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 10:16:16AM -0500, Joe Greco wrote: So to run the numbers: A customer who averages .25Mbit/sec on a tail acquired from the incumbent requires -- Port/line rental from the telco ~ $50 IP transit~ $ 6 (your number) Transpacific backhaul ~ $50 (I'm not making this up) These look like great places for some improvement. Of course. Transpacific backhaul may drop in price once the AJC/Southern Cross duopoly is broken. Perhaps 2009, we'll have to see. Port/line rental? Ha. We have an incumbent telco who owns 100% of the copper local loop, who is so aggressive about protecting their monopoly that they've actually sued the Federal Government to obtain relief from the requirement to offer wholesale access to the local loop to their competitors. The competition regulator has recently imposed an order on them to drop their price of access to the raw copper; The incumbent's response has been to initiate a national political debate during the present federal election campaign campaign over the merits of a nation-wide Fiber-To-The-Node network which, just coincidentally, requires the exclusion of competition to make the numbers in the business case add up. So I wouldn't be holding my breath about that one. Like I said a few messages ago, as much as your marketplace derides caps and quotas, I'm pretty sure that most of you would prefer to do business with my constraints than with yours. That's nice from *your* point of view, as an ISP, but from the end-user's point of view, it discourages the development and deployment of the next killer app, which is the point that I've been making. Generalizing: We're living in an environment where European service providers use DPI boxes to shape just about everyone to about 40 Gbytes per month, and where US service providers have enough congestion in their reticulation networks that the phrase unlimited access carries ironic overtones, and where Australian and New Zealand service providers give uncongested access at unconstrained ADSL2+ rates for as much capacity as an end user is prepared to pay for, and Asian ISPs where in-country is cheap but international is slow and expensive (but nobody cares because they don't speak English and don't need international content anyway), and most of the rest of the world is so expensive that hardly anyone uses it anyway. If there's another killer app on the way, there are enough global constraints on its development that I reckon Australian ISPs' business cases probably aren't the be-all and end-all of its developmental merits. Five years ago the typical .au quota was 3Gbytes per month. Now it's more like 30 - 50 Gbytes per month. If there's a killer app there'll no doubt be commercial pressure on ISPs to bump it again. But until said app comes along? Well, it isn't an ISPs job to subsidize the RD overheads of application developers, is it? The point here is that you guys in the US have a particular market dynamic that's shaped your perspective of what reasonable is. It's completely delusional of you to insist that the rest of the world follow the same definition of reaosnable, *ESPECIALLY* when the rest of the world is subsidizing your domestic Internet by paying for all the international transit. - mark -- Mark Newton Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (W) Network Engineer Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 Network Man - Anagram of Mark Newton Mobile: +61-416-202-223
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Sun, 7 Oct 2007, Mark Newton wrote: We're living in an environment where European service providers use DPI boxes to shape just about everyone to about 40 Gbytes per month, This doesn't fit with my picture of european broadband at all. Most markets are developing into flat rate ones without per-minute or per-traffic charges, and residential broadband is closing in on 50-70% market penetration all across the continent, with the northern part being a bit ahead of the southern part. Competition is so fierce that a lot of ISPs are electing to get out of certain markets due to uncertainty of future profits even with quite slim organisations and tight budgets on technology without ATM etc (IP dslams). France for instance, it's hard to make any money unless you sell triple play and try to make total profits on the combined services, just selling one doesn't work. It's not uncommon for low-bandwidth (.25-.5 megabit/s) residential access to be in the USD15/month range and 24 meg costing USD30-50 per month including tax. This is without any monthly quota at all, ie flatrate. 5-10% of swedish households have the possiblity to purchase 100/10 over CAT5 for USD50 a month including 25% sales tax, without any quota, and they can actually use the speeds. Some even have 100/100. Recipe for this is to have competitive markets with copper being deregulated and resold at a decent price. Bitstream with incumbant providing access just doesn't work, new services such as multicast IPTV doesn't work over bitstream. In a lot of continental europe ISPs can purchase wholesale internet in the gigabit range for USD6-15/meg/month depending on country and if it includes national traffic or not. Having a competitive market with a lot of players makes all the difference. -- Mikael Abrahamssonemail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
5-10% of swedish households have the possiblity to purchase 100/10 over CAT5 for USD50 a month including 25% sales tax, without any quota, and they can actually use the speeds. Some even have 100/100. from japan that seems pretty normal, except for it being available for such a small proportion of the population. north america is a ridiculous back-water with insanely high prices for negligible bandwidth. in hawai`i i pay $70/mo for just layer two of 768k. tokyo is significantly less money for usable 100m/100m. randy
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
... a month including 25% sales tax ^^ and we are complaining about download quotas, ouch -- James
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Sat, Oct 06, 2007, Joe Greco wrote: However, it is equally possible that there'll be some newfangled killer app that comes along. At some point, this will present a problem. All the self-justification in the world will not matter when the customers want to be able to do something that uses up a little more bandwidth. The next newfangled app came along - its P2P. Australian ISPS have already responded by throttling back P2P. adrian
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
The competition regulator has recently imposed an order on them to drop their price of access to the raw copper; The incumbent's response has been to initiate a national political debate during the present federal election campaign campaign over the merits of a nation-wide Fiber-To-The-Node network which, just coincidentally, requires the exclusion of competition to make the numbers in the business case add up. Sounds much like the sort of shenanigans that happened here in the US. Problem is, by many accounts, we already paid for a carrier neutral fiber network and the telcos took the money and ran. The reality is that if you allow them to make up the numbers for the business case, it always appears to be bad business. So I wouldn't be holding my breath about that one. Yet it's fairly obvious that there is a solution. Just not necessarily the one that the carrier prefers. Like I said a few messages ago, as much as your marketplace derides caps and quotas, I'm pretty sure that most of you would prefer to do business with my constraints than with yours. That's nice from *your* point of view, as an ISP, but from the end-user's point of view, it discourages the development and deployment of the next killer app, which is the point that I've been making. Generalizing: We're living in an environment where European service providers use DPI boxes to shape just about everyone to about 40 Gbytes per month, HUH? What in the world are you talking about? I see stats of numerous European customers where they're pulling TERABYTES per month on a resi connection, some more terabytes than you can count on a hand, from a wide variety of providers. Now, if you're extending European to include Israel and Egypt, or possibly eastern Europe, I guess maybe it could be happening SOMEWHERE, but not as a general rule Otherwise, the only major EU thing I can think of is: Virgin in the UK, having introduced their fair use policy, which seems to be intertwined with what appears to be an unpublicized problem with US-facing capacity where they're pegging it during peak times, and appear to have solved this with shaping during peak hours, but this only affects peak hours. Actual reality may be different, I'm talking about observed data, posted policy, and extrapolation. and where US service providers have enough congestion in their reticulation networks that the phrase unlimited access carries ironic There are a few Canadian providers which seem to have some congestion from the US into Canada during peak times. There are some problems with one very specific US cable provider and backbone capacity that I'm aware of. There are probably lesser problems with a whole bunch of networks, providers and backbone, where they run their network at a capacity percentage that might lead to some discomfort. There are reports of Road Runner implementing some sort of fair use policy as well. However, from what I can tell, it is statistically extremely unusual to find a US broadband customer on a sufficient circuit who cannot get a constant 1Mbps of download capacity, and that's been improving fairly steadily. overtones, and where Australian and New Zealand service providers give uncongested access at unconstrained ADSL2+ rates for as much capacity as an end user is prepared to pay for, The ideal situation, from a service provider's viewpoint. and Asian ISPs where in-country is cheap but international is slow and expensive (but nobody cares because they don't speak English and don't need international content anyway), and most of the rest of the world is so expensive that hardly anyone uses it anyway. If there's another killer app on the way, there are enough global constraints on its development that I reckon Australian ISPs' business cases probably aren't the be-all and end-all of its developmental merits. No, it'll be developed in Europe, most likely, where 20Mbit access is pretty common, and growing. The problem, from my point of view, is that I'd rather see new killer apps being designed here in the US, and driven by customer demand here in the US. Five years ago the typical .au quota was 3Gbytes per month. Now it's more like 30 - 50 Gbytes per month. If there's a killer app there'll no doubt be commercial pressure on ISPs to bump it again. But until said app comes along? Well, it isn't an ISPs job to subsidize the RD overheads of application developers, is it? No, but then again, that's not the problem I'm pointing at, is it (and it isn't even a real problem, regardless, unless maybe you're some kid writing the next Napster, but I'm willing to pretend even that doesn't happen). The real problem is the ability of users to adopt new killer apps. This eventually breaks down to issues of how long is it reasonable for users to fund that shiny telco network at $50/line/month and things like that, because rather than solving the problems, it
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well. We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and forth over the same congested circuits. And P2P is the main way to reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet. We could have used IP Multicast, but nobody on the consumer side wanted to carry state instead of packets. --Michael Dillon
RE: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well. We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and forth over the same congested circuits. And P2P is the main way to reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet. --Michael Dillon
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Fri, Oct 05, 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well. We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and forth over the same congested circuits. And P2P is the main way to reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet. Hm, Australia is pretty much that exact architecture. Adrian
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On 10/5/07 5:28 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well. We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and forth over the same congested circuits. And P2P is the main way to reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet. Michael - I don't think this is the case for most NA cable operators. P2P between subscribers in the same general area simply hairpins back over the HFC from the aggregation hub (location of the CMTS), no unnecessary backhaul to another distant PoP location. Now, the rest of the traffic will be aggregated further up on its way towards upstream peering...but that is a different traffic flow. -ron This E-mail and any of its attachments may contain Time Warner Cable proprietary information, which is privileged, confidential, or subject to copyright belonging to Time Warner Cable. This E-mail is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient of this E-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying, or action taken in relation to the contents of and attachments to this E-mail is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this E-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and permanently delete the original and any copy of this E-mail and any printout.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Now, ISP economics pretty much require that some amount of overcommit will happen. However, if you have a 12GB quota, that works out to around 36 kilobits/sec average. Assuming the ISP is selling 10Mbps connections (and bearing in mind that ADSL2 can certainly go more than that), what that's saying is that the average user can use 1/278th of their connection. I would imagine that the overcommit rate is much higher than that. I don't think that things should be measured like this. Throughput != bandwidth. No, but it gives some rational way to look at it, as long as we all realize what we're talking about. The other ways I've seen it discussed mostly involve a lot of handwaving. Technically the user can use the connection to it's maximum theoretical speed as much as they like, however, if an ISP has a quota set at 12G/month, it just means that the cost is passed along to them when they exceed it. And that seems like a bit of the handwaving. Where is it costing the ISP more when the user exceeds 12G/month? Think very carefully about that before you answer. If it was arranged that every customer of the ISP in question were to go to 100% utilization downloading 12G on the first of the month at 12:01AM, it seems clear to me that you could really screw up 95th. Note: I'm assuming the quota is monthly, as it seems to be for most AU ISP's I've looked at, for example: Yes most are monthly based on GB. capacity is being stifled by ISP's that are stuck back in speeds (and policies) appropriate for the year 2000. Imagine a case (even in the largest of ISP's), where there are no quotas, and everyone has a 10Mbps connection. I'm imagining it. I've already stated that it's a problem. I don't think there is an ISP in existence that has the infrastructure capacity to carry all of their clients using all of the connections simultaneously at full speed for long extended periods. I'll go so far as to say that there's no real ISP in existence that could support it for any period. As bandwidth and throughput increases, so does the strain on the networks that are upstream from the client. Obviously. Unless someone pays for the continuously growing data transfers, then your 6Mbps ADSL connection is fantastic, until you transit across the ISP's network who can't afford to upgrade the infrastructure because clients think they are being ripped off for paying 'extra'. Now, at your $34/month for your resi ADSL connection, the clients call the ISP and complain about slow speeds, but when you advise that they have downloaded 90GB of movies last month and they must pay for it, they wont. Everyone wants it cheaper and cheaper, but yet expect things to work 100% of the time, and at 100% at maximum advertised capacity. My favorites are the clients who call the helpdesk and state I'm trying to run a business here (on their residential ADSL connection). 90GB/mo is still a relatively small amount of bandwidth. That works out to around a quarter of a megabit on average. This is nowhere near the 100% situation you're discussing. And it's also a lot higher than the 12GB/mo quota under discussion. What are we missing out on because ISP's are more interested in keeping bandwidth use low? I don't think anyone wants to keep bandwidth use low, it's just in order to continue to allow bandwidth consumption to grow, someone needs to pay for it. How about the ISP? Surely their costs are going down. Certainly I know that our wholesale bandwidth costs have dropped orders of magnitude in the last ~decade or so. Equipment does occasionally need to be replaced. I've got a nice pair of Ascend GRF400's out in the garage that cost $65K- $80K each when originally purchased. They'd be lucky to pull any number of dollars these days. It's a planned expense. As for physical plant, I'd imagine that a large amount of that is also a planned expense, and is being paid down (or already paid off), so arguing that this is somewhere that a lot of extra expense will exist is probably silly too. What fantastic new technologies haven't been developed because they were deemed impractical given the state of the Internet? Backbone connections worth $34/month, and infrastructure gear that upgrades itself at no cost. Hint: that money you're collecting from your customers isn't all profit. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well. We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and forth over the same congested circuits. This would seem to primarily be an issue /due/ to congestion of those circuits. The current solution, as you suggest, is not ideal, but it isn't necessarily clear that a solution to this will be better. Let's look at an infrastructure that would be representative of what often happens here in Milwaukee. ATT provides copper DSL wholesale services to an ISP. This means that a packet goes from the residence to the local CO, where ATT aggregates over its network to a ATM circuit that winds up at an ISP POP. Then, to get to a DSL customer with actual ATT service, the packets go down to Chicago, over transit to ATT, and then back up to Milwaukee... Getting the ISP to have equipment colocated at the point where DSL lines are concentrated would certainly help for the case where packets where transiting from one neighborhood customer of an ISP to another neighborhood customer of an ISP, but in the common case, it isn't clear to me that the payoff would be significant. Getting all the ISP's to peer with each other at the DSL concentration point would solve the problem, but again, the question is how significant that payoff would be. It would seem like a larger payoff to simply make sure sufficient capacity existed to move packets as required, since this not only solves the local packet problem you suggest, but the more general overall problem that ISP's face. And P2P is the main way to ^currently reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Fri, Oct 05, 2007, Joe Greco wrote: Technically the user can use the connection to it's maximum theoretical speed as much as they like, however, if an ISP has a quota set at 12G/month, it just means that the cost is passed along to them when they exceed it. And that seems like a bit of the handwaving. Where is it costing the ISP more when the user exceeds 12G/month? No, its that they've run the numbers and found the users above 12G/month are using a significant fraction of their network capacity for whatever values of signficant and fraction you define. Adrian
RE: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Joe Greco wrote: Technically the user can use the connection to it's maximum theoretical speed as much as they like, however, if an ISP has a quota set at 12G/month, it just means that the cost is passed along to them when they exceed it. And that seems like a bit of the handwaving. Where is it costing the ISP more when the user exceeds 12G/month? Think very carefully about that before you answer. If it was arranged that every customer of the ISP in question were to go to 100% utilization downloading 12G on the first of the month at 12:01AM, it seems clear to me that you could really screw up 95th. First, the total transfer vs. 95%ile issue. I would imagine that's just a matter of keeping it simple. John Q. Broadbanduser can understand the concept of total transfer. But try explaining 95%ile to him. Or for that matter, try explaining it to the average billing wonk at your average residential ISP. As far as the 12GB cap goes, I guess it would depend on the particular economics of the ISP in question. 12GB for a small ISP in a bandwidth-starved country isn't as insignificant as you make it sound. But lets look at your more realistic second whatif: 90GB/mo is still a relatively small amount of bandwidth. That works out to around a quarter of a megabit on average. This is nowhere near the 100% situation you're discussing. And it's also a lot higher than the 12GB/mo quota under discussion. As you say, 90GB is roughly .25Mbps on average. Of course, like you pointed out, the users actual bandwidth patterns are most likely not a straight line. 95%ile on that 90GB could be considerably higher. But let's take a conservative estimate and say that user uses .5Mbps 95%ile. And lets say this is a relatively large ISP paying $12/Mb. That user then costs that ISP $6/month in bandwidth. (I know, that's somewhat faulty logic, but how else is the ISP going to establish a cost basis?) If that user is only paying say $19.99/month for their connection, that leaves only $13.99 a month to pay for all the infrastructure to support that user, along with personnel, etc all while still trying to turn a profit. In those terms, it seems like a pretty reasonable level of service for the price. If that same user were to go direct to a carrier, they couldn't get .5Mbps for anywhere near that cost, even ignoring the cost of the last-mile local loop. And for that same price they're also probably getting email services with spam and virus filtering, 24-hr. phone support, probably a bit of web hosting space, and possibly even a backup dial-up connection. Andrew
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Hex Star wrote: Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP? In the UK there is a very good reason - BT, see this write up: http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/adsl_cost.htm J -- COO Entanet International T: 0870 770 9580 W: http://www.enta.net/ L: http://tinyurl.com/3bxqez
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Fri, Oct 05, 2007, Joe Greco wrote: Technically the user can use the connection to it's maximum theoretical speed as much as they like, however, if an ISP has a quota set at 12G/month, it just means that the cost is passed along to them when they exceed it. And that seems like a bit of the handwaving. Where is it costing the ISP more when the user exceeds 12G/month? No, its that they've run the numbers and found the users above 12G/month are using a significant fraction of their network capacity for whatever values of signficant and fraction you define. Of course, that's obvious. The point here is that if your business is so fragile that you can only deliver each broadband customer a dialup modem's worth of bandwidth, something's wrong with your business. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 01:12:35PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As you say, 90GB is roughly .25Mbps on average. Of course, like you pointed out, the users actual bandwidth patterns are most likely not a straight line. 95%ile on that 90GB could be considerably higher. But let's take a conservative estimate and say that user uses .5Mbps 95%ile. And lets say this is a relatively large ISP paying $12/Mb. That user then costs that ISP $6/month in bandwidth. (I know, that's somewhat faulty logic, but how else is the ISP going to establish a cost basis?) If that user is only paying say $19.99/month for their connection, that leaves only $13.99 a month to pay for all the infrastructure to support that user, along with personnel, etc all while still trying to turn a profit. In the Australian ISP's case (which is what started this) it's rather worse. The local telco monopoly bills between $30 and $50 per month for access to the copper tail. So there's essentially no such thing as a $19.99/month connection here (except for short-lived flash-in-the-pan loss-leaders, and we all know how they turn out) So to run the numbers: A customer who averages .25Mbit/sec on a tail acquired from the incumbent requires -- Port/line rental from the telco ~ $50 IP transit~ $ 6 (your number) Transpacific backhaul ~ $50 (I'm not making this up) So we're over a hundred bucks already, and haven't yet factored in the overheads for infrastructure, personnel, profit, etc. And those numbers are before sales tax too, so add at least 10% to all of them before arriving at a retail price. Due to the presence of a quota, our customers don't tend to average .25 Mbit/sec over the course of a month (we prefer to send the ones that do to our competitors :-). If someone buys access to, say, 30 Gbytes of downloads per month, a few significant things happen: - The customer has a clear understanding of what they've paid for, which doesn't encompass unlimited access to the Internet. That tends to moderate their usage; - Because they know they're buying something finite, they tend to pick a package that suits their expected usage, so customers who intend to use more end up paying more money; - The customer creates their own backpressure against hitting their quota: Once they've gone past it they're usually rate-limited to 64kbps, which is not a nice experience, so by and large they build in a safety margin and rarely use more than 75% of the quota. About 5% of our customers blow their quota in any given month; - The ones who do hit their quota and don't like 64kbps shaping get to pay us more money to have their quota expanded for the rest of the month, thereby financing the capacity upgrades that their cumulative load can/will require; - The entire Australian marketplace is conditioned to expect that kind of behaviour from ISPs, and doesn't consider it to be unusual. If you guys in North America tried to run like this, you'd be destroyed in the marketplace because you've created a customer base that expects to be able to download the entire Internet and burn it to DVD every month. :-) So you end up looking at options like DPI and QoS controls at your CMTS head-end to moderate usage, because you can't keep adding infinite amounts of bandwidth to support unconstrained end-users when they're only paying you $20 per month. (note that our truth-in-advertising regulator doesn't allow us to get away with saying Unlimited unless there really are no limits -- no quotas, no traffic shaping, no traffic management, no QoS controls. Unlimited means unlimited by the dictionary definition, not by some weasel definition that the industry has invented to suit its own purposes) - There is no net neutrality debate to speak of in .au because everyone is _already_ paying their way. Like I said a few messages ago, as much as your marketplace derides caps and quotas, I'm pretty sure that most of you would prefer to do business with my constraints than with yours. - mark -- Mark Newton Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (W) Network Engineer Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 Network Man - Anagram of Mark Newton Mobile: +61-416-202-223
Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Yeah, try buying bandwidth in Australia! The have a lot more water to cover ( and so potentially more cost and more profit to be made by monopolies) than well connected areas such as the US. Also there may be more tax costs, staff costs, equipment costs with import duty etc which obviously means buying more equipment to support more throughput costs more money. -- Leigh Hex Star wrote: Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Hex Star wrote: Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP? There are more than a few US ISPs that have bandwidth quotas, mostly in the last-mile fixed-wireless space. I imagine the cost of backhauling traffic a few thousand miles in underseas cables would add to the cost of running an ISP in, say, Australia, especially since many sites the end-users will want to see are still hosted in the US. David Smith MVN.net
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 03:50:11PM +0100, Leigh Porter wrote: Also there may be more tax costs, staff costs, equipment costs with import duty etc which obviously means buying more equipment to support more throughput costs more money. The biggest issues are the transmission costs to get to the USA. There are basically two cable systems, Southern Cross and AJC (we'll ignore SEA-ME-WE-3 because you can only buy STM-1's on it, and who wants to mess around with trivialities like that?) Ask an economist what happens to prices in duopoly environments. The cost of crossing the Pacific is north of US$200 per megabit per month in .au, which I reckon is about ten times what it costs you Europeans to get across the Atlantic (or what it costs the Japanese to cross the very same Pacific) There are a few cable projects underway at the moment which may break the duopoly, e.g., http://www.pipenetworks.com/docs/media/ASX_07_08_09%20Runway%20Update%204%20-%20BSa.pdf I suspect we're going to have an interesting few years. - mark -- Mark Newton Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (W) Network Engineer Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 Network Man - Anagram of Mark Newton Mobile: +61-416-202-223
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Caribbean has the same problem, though... .smaller countries, less ability to negotiate bandwidth usage/cost... bananas for bandwidth program. Leigh Porter wrote: Yeah, try buying bandwidth in Australia! The have a lot more water to cover ( and so potentially more cost and more profit to be made by monopolies) than well connected areas such as the US. Also there may be more tax costs, staff costs, equipment costs with import duty etc which obviously means buying more equipment to support more throughput costs more money. -- Leigh Hex Star wrote: Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP? -- Taran Rampersad Presently in: Paramaribo, Suriname [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.knowprose.com http://www.your2ndplace.com Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/knowprose/ Criticize by creating. — Michelangelo The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine. - Nikola Tesla
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Hex Star wrote: Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP? Depending upon the country you're in, that is a possibility. Some countries have either state-run or monopolistic telcos, so there is little or no competition to force prices down over time. Even in the US, there is a huge variability in the price of telco services from one part of the country to another. jms
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Oct 4, 2007, at 1:29 PM, Justin M. Streiner wrote: On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Hex Star wrote: Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP? Depending upon the country you're in, that is a possibility. Some countries have either state-run or monopolistic telcos, so there is little or no competition to force prices down over time. Even in the US, there is a huge variability in the price of telco services from one part of the country to another. jms Hint: whenever/wherever service providers are able to secure the majority of their essential inputs on a predictable fixed cost basis (e.g., circuits rather than variable IP transit), they tend to extend the same pricing model to their customers. However, in some cases there is a major lag separating the timing of the change in the provider-level cost model and the change in customer-facing pricing. Absent competition, the lag may be infinite. In other cases, there may be more variable costs associated with service delivery than is immediately obvious. Southern Cross was completed in late 2000, and not long after (couple of years) incumbent operators in AUNZ had done a pretty good job of leveraging the new infrastructure to effect just the sort of variable- to-fixed cost conversion described above. Marginal improvements in customer pricing are just starting to happen in the last year or so... TV
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Hex Star wrote: Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP? Depending upon the country you're in, that is a possibility. Some countries have either state-run or monopolistic telcos, so there is little or no competition to force prices down over time. Even in the US, there is a huge variability in the price of telco services from one part of the country to another. Taking a slightly different approach to the question, it's obvious that overcommit continues to be a problem for ISP's, both in the States and abroad. It'd be interesting to know what the average utilization of an unlimited US broadband customer was, compared to the average utilization of an unlimited AU broadband customer. It would be interesting, then, to look at where the quotas lie on the curve in both the US and AU. Regardless, I believe that there is a certain amount of shortsightedness on the part of service providers who are looking at bandwidth management as the cure to their bandwidth ills. It seems clear that the Internet will remain central to our communications needs for many years, and that delivery of content such as video will continue to increase. End users do not care to know that they have a quota or that their quota can be filled by a relatively modest amount of content. Remember that a 1Mbps connection can download ~330GB/mo, so the aforementioned 12GB is nearly *line noise* on a multimegabit DSL or cable line. Continued reliance on broadband users using tiny percentages of their broadband connection certainly makes the ISP business model easier, but in the long term, isn't going to work out well for the Internet's continuing evolution. And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On 4-Oct-2007, at 1416, Joe Greco wrote: It'd be interesting to know what the average utilization of an unlimited US broadband customer was, compared to the average utilization of an unlimited AU broadband customer. It would be interesting, then, to look at where the quotas lie on the curve in both the US and AU. I think the implication here is that there's a smoothing effect that comes with large customer bases. For example, I remember back to when DSL was first rolled out in New Zealand. It was priced well beyond the means of any normal residential user, and as a result DSL customers tended to be just the people who would consume a lot of external bandwidth. At around the same time, my wife's mother in Ontario, Canada got hooked up with a cablemodem on the grounds that unlimited cable internet service cost less than a second phone line (she was fed up with missing phone calls when she was checking her mail). She used/uses her computer mainly for e-mail, although she occasionally uses a browser. (These days I'm sure legions of miscreants are using her computer too, but back then we were pre- botnet). If you have mainly customers like my mother-in-law, with just a few heavy users, the cost per user is nice and predictable, and you don't need to worry too much about usage caps. If you have mainly heavy users, the cost per user has the potential to be enormous. It seems like the pertinent question here is: what is stopping DSL (or cable) providers in Australia and New Zealand from selling N x meg DSL service at low enough prices to avoid the need for a data cap? Is it the cost of crossing an ocean which makes the risk of unlimited service too great to implement, or something else? Joe
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:50:11 +0100 Leigh Porter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yeah, try buying bandwidth in Australia! The have a lot more water to cover ( and so potentially more cost and more profit to be made by monopolies) than well connected areas such as the US. I don't necessarily think it is only that. Customers on ADSL2+ usually get the maximum ADSL2+ speed their line will support, so customers can have speeds of up to 24Mbps downstream. Download and/or upload quotas have an effect of smoothing out the backhaul impact those high bandwidth customers could make. As they could use up all their quota in such a short time period at those speeds, and once they exceed their quota they'd get their speed shaped down to something like 64Kbps, it typically forces the customer to make their bandwidth usage patterns more bursty rather than a constant. That effect, averaged across a backhaul region helps avoid having to provision backhaul bandwidth for a much higher constant load. Regards, Mark. -- Sheep are slow and tasty, and therefore must remain constantly alert. - Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On 4-Oct-2007, at 1416, Joe Greco wrote: It'd be interesting to know what the average utilization of an unlimited US broadband customer was, compared to the average utilization of an unlimited AU broadband customer. It would be interesting, then, to look at where the quotas lie on the curve in both the US and AU. I think the implication here is that there's a smoothing effect that comes with large customer bases. Probably not even large customer bases. For example, I remember back to when DSL was first rolled out in New Zealand. It was priced well beyond the means of any normal residential user, and as a result DSL customers tended to be just the people who would consume a lot of external bandwidth. At around the same time, my wife's mother in Ontario, Canada got hooked up with a cablemodem on the grounds that unlimited cable internet service cost less than a second phone line (she was fed up with missing phone calls when she was checking her mail). She used/uses her computer mainly for e-mail, although she occasionally uses a browser. (These days I'm sure legions of miscreants are using her computer too, but back then we were pre- botnet). If you have mainly customers like my mother-in-law, with just a few heavy users, the cost per user is nice and predictable, and you don't need to worry too much about usage caps. If you have mainly heavy users, the cost per user has the potential to be enormous. It seems like the pertinent question here is: what is stopping DSL (or cable) providers in Australia and New Zealand from selling N x meg DSL service at low enough prices to avoid the need for a data cap? Is it the cost of crossing an ocean which makes the risk of unlimited service too great to implement, or something else? Quite frankly, this touches on one aspect, but I think it misses entirely others. Right now, we have a situation where some ISP's are essentially cherry picking desirable customers. This can be done by many methods, ranging from providing slow basic DSL services, or placing quotas on service, or TOS restrictions, all the way to terminating the service of high- volume customers. A customer who gives you $40/mo for a 5Mbps connection and uses a few gig a month is certainly desirable. By either telling the high volume customers that they're going to be capped, or actually terminating their services, you're discouraging those who are unprofitable. It makes sense, from the ISP's limited view. However, I then think about the big picture. Ten years ago, hard drives were maybe 10GB, CPU's were maybe 100MHz, a performance workstation PC had maybe 64MB RAM, and a Road Runner cable connection was, I believe, about 2 megabits. Today, hard drives are up to 1000GB (x100), CPU's are quadcore at 2.6GHz (approximately x120 performance), a generous PC will have 8GB RAM (x128), and ... that Road Runner, at least here in Milwaukee, is a blazing 5Mbps... or _2.5x_ what it was. Now, ISP economics pretty much require that some amount of overcommit will happen. However, if you have a 12GB quota, that works out to around 36 kilobits/sec average. Assuming the ISP is selling 10Mbps connections (and bearing in mind that ADSL2 can certainly go more than that), what that's saying is that the average user can use 1/278th of their connection. I would imagine that the overcommit rate is much higher than that. Note: I'm assuming the quota is monthly, as it seems to be for most AU ISP's I've looked at, for example: http://www.ozemail.com.au/products/broadband/plans.html Anyways, my concern is that while technology seems to have improved quite substantially in terms of what computers are capable of, our communications capacity is being stifled by ISP's that are stuck back in speeds (and policies) appropriate for the year 2000. Continued growth and evolution of cellular networks, for example, have taken cell phones from a premium niche service with large bag phones and extremely slow data services, up to new spiffy high technology where you can download YouTube on an iPhone and watch videos on a pocket-sized device. What are we missing out on because ISP's are more interested in keeping bandwidth use low? What fantastic new technologies haven't been developed because they were deemed impractical given the state of the Internet? Time to point out that, at least in the US, we allowed this to be done to ourselves... http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On 10/4/07, Hex Star [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP? One early US cable modem company started propagating the Don't Let Customers Run Anything Resembling a Server meme to many other ISPs, primarily cable but also DSL. One early Australian cable company started propagating the Don't Let Customers Download More than X MB/month meme, and while it hasn't been picked up as widely, there are a number of ISPs that have adopted it. At one time Australia did have a relatively small amount of Internet bandwidth and a large non-data-clueful dominant carrier, which had only gradually been bullied into accepting that there were data customers who wanted an E1 line because they wanted the whole 2Mbps for one medium-sized data channel as opposed to 30 channels of boringly slow 64kbps (perceived by the carrier to be blazingly fast...) So they charged their users a lot to download data from outside; I forget if they were the ones who had a cheaper rate for data downloaded from inside Australia or not. But outside the Land of Oz, it used to be that European PTTs also charged excessive amounts of money for connections around their countries or across borders. That's changed radically with liberalization. And of course Japan and Korea charge minimal amounts for huge home broadband bandwidth - Korea has about triple the population of Australia, in much smaller land area, and while it's not quite as far from Silicon Valley as Australia is, and of course it's much closer to Tokyo, it's still got to cost a bit to run the cables there. -- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
On Thu, Oct 04, 2007, Joe Abley wrote: It seems like the pertinent question here is: what is stopping DSL (or cable) providers in Australia and New Zealand from selling N x meg DSL service at low enough prices to avoid the need for a data cap? Is it the cost of crossing an ocean which makes the risk of unlimited service too great to implement, or something else? The popular content is still international and the population density sucks in a lot of places. I note that no ISP runs free local bandwidth anymore at least in Western Australia because it started impacting on the ability to send data back to the client through the DSL aggregation network. Me, I think the network design needs to change to not be so PPPoE-to-the-nearest-capital-city, but ISPs keep telling me its a great idea - but our current structure is fine, why try to change it?. I understand the economic reasons (upgrading the network to route IP all the way out to the exchanges and let customers talk to other customers and across IX fabrics without potentially crossing the same god damned wholesaler L2TP-tunnelled network == expensive) but its gotta change someday. Me, I wonder why the heck cheap services -in the CBDs- don't seem to be popular.. Adrian
