Magnet Networks reveals a bit more

Hornet

It seems Magnet Networks who are providing Fibre to the Home in North Dublin have revealed a bit more about their services. ENN and SiliconRepublic are writing about it:

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single4390
http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=9585060

EUR 29.90 for symmetrical 2 Mbit/s to the Internet sounds pretty good to me, unfortunately I won't live where they offer the services, but maybe - overtime - we will all benfit from this lower price point?!?!?!

--Hornet

Moriarty

As far as we know it comes with a 12gb/month cap, which makes it pretty useless.

Slutmonkey57b

The fact that a service like this is being rolled out at all is a positive sign of development - bringing in an alternative operator in the building of new estates not only sticks it directly to eircom where it hurts, which I like a LOT, but offers a proper, modern service right from the off.

Of course, why they're offering 2mb access when FTTH in other markets is typically is the 75-100mb range is a question we all know the answer to.

SkepticOne

Moriarty wrote:

As far as we know it comes with a 12gb/month cap, which makes it pretty useless.

More useful than 512k with similar cap though.

thegills

Of course, why they're offering 2mb access when FTTH in other markets is typically is the 75-100mb range is a question we all know the answer to.

Well if the housing development has say 500 units and they offer 2MB/s per house uncontended then they need a 1Gig pipe into the development; thats were the issue is. How much are they paying for a 1Gig pipe????

Chalk

there only offereing it in new houses
i rang them and they didnt even try to string me along with the "were rolling it out gradualy" crap like most of the others.

its only going to new estates and thtas pretty much that according to there phone person

Chalk

also , why DO they need caps IF its uncontended?

arent the two usually dependent on each other?
ie higher contention = higher caps
less contention - less need for caps?

monster_fighter

thegills wrote:

Well if the housing development has say 500 units and they offer 2MB/s per house uncontended then they need a 1Gig pipe into the development; thats were the issue is. How much are they paying for a 1Gig pipe????

No they don't.

500 users * 12 GB per month = 6000GB per month.

6000GB/ (28 x 24 x 60 x 60) = 0.0024801587301587301587301587301587 GB per second

x 1024 = 2.54 MB per second.

x 8 = 20 Mbit.

Chalk

monster_fighter wrote:

No they don't.

500 users * 12 GB per month = 6000GB per month.

6000GB/ (28 x 24 x 60 x 60) = 0.0024801587301587301587301587301587 GB per second

x 1024 = 2.54 MB per second.

x 8 = 20 Mbit.

what he said

monster_fighter

Of course there are other factors like peak times (usage patterns) and the fact that most users won't use the full 12GB per month (we're not all warez monkeys, well, they're not all warez monkeys...)

SkepticOne

Chalk wrote:

also , why DO they need caps IF its uncontended?

arent the two usually dependent on each other?
ie higher contention = higher caps
less contention - less need for caps?

It would be mad for them to offer uncontended 2 mbit connections to everyone. No way is it uncontended 2 megs.

Chalk

SkepticOne wrote:

It would be mad for them to offer uncontended 2 mbit connections to everyone. No way is it uncontended 2 megs.

Broadband Access

Capacity 2MB Upload/2MB Download

Contention None

Maximum Download/Upload 12GB Monthly

http://www.magnet.ie/default.aspx?pageaction=pricing

oscarBravo

monster_fighter wrote:

500 users * 12 GB per month = 6000GB per month.

That's not what contention means. 500 users x 2Mbit/sec uncontended = 1Gbit/sec.

Maybe they do have 1Gbit backhaul, but I kinda doubt it...

SkepticOne

Chalk wrote:

Contention None

http://www.magnet.ie/default.aspx?pageaction=pricing

I know they say that.

Chalk

so back to the point i was making,

why have such a low cap if it is uncontended?
if they have a one gig line into your 500 houses estate, then surely you should be able to use it as much as you want,

or like monster_fighter said
1 gig line
-(500houses*12gigs)
=
980mbits to spare per month

senseless?

oscarBravo

Chalk wrote:

so back to the point i was making,

why have such a low cap if it is uncontended?

That's the point I'm making: I find it hard to believe that it's uncontended. Shop around for wholesale bandwidth, and let me know if you find anyone offering uncontended Internet transit for under €100 per Mbit per month. That price point means that each subscriber would have to pay €200 per month just to cover bandwidth costs.

Claiming to offer 2Mbit uncontended for under €30 means that they have Internet backhaul that's costing them substantially less than €15 per Mbit per month. I'd love to know where they're buying it.

Hornet

Pipe size (i.e. bandwidth) and caps are - while certainly related - not directly interdependent. If you have a big pipe into the housing estate (and if you use - for example - dark fibre to there the pipe can easily be 1 Gbit/s) you can provide 2 Mbit/s of bandwidth to the home without too high cost. However, the amount of doanloaded data (that's where the cap comes in) is a cost that you need to pay in most cases to your upstream service providers (e.g. Tier 1 ISPs who you peer with). So as a result even if there is FTTH and even if the bandwidth is really big and juicy, there are good reasons for a cap.

The issue about contention baffles me as well. Magnet does indeed claim on their website that it is uncontended 2 Mbit/s. However, here the big question "What is contention and where is it measured?", might play a role!

ADSL providers usually measure contention at the back of the DSLAM. Wireless providers seem to measure it at the "back" of the base station. But this is certainly not the only point where you can have contention. As an example: Eircom has contention at the back of the DSLAM (x users connected to the DSLAM have to share a y Mbit/s uplink to the next hop). The next hop can have overbooking again (maybe UBR links on atn ATM service) and finally the Broadband Access Server (BAS or BRAS) which is the Gateway to the Internet has potentially a completely different (most likely lower!) contention ratio. If many servers (where users can download services/files from) are located within the realm of the DSL service provider, the contention ratio on the BAS can justifiably be lower.

Neither Eircom, nor any of the other service providers (wireless or wire-based) provides information about ALL potential bottlenecks in the network!!

Now I am speculating here, but maybe Magnet sees it like this:
*speculating on* There is NO contention from the home into the network (there is no base station and no DSLAM, just a big router or a switch or something like that). I expect there is some contention on the BRAS, but as others never mention that, so Magnet doesn't have to either. *speculating off*

I agree with others: It is unlikely that the service is fully non-contended and over time, I would expect Magnet to clarify the issue further.

The cap is not on the link into the network (I expect) but on the BRAS and as I explained earlier, at that point a cap probably does make sense.

The other question that was brought up was why only 2 Mbit/s if there is a 100 Mbit/s pipe in the home? Well, some of the other bandwidth would be used for other services VOD, TV, etc. but without a doubt there is plenty of bandwidth available for future services or for bandwith increases for the initial services. The 2 Mbit/s is probably a commercial/user expectation/ISP cost/technical_ease_of-deplyoment driven limit. While DSL or wireless service providers will have serious difficulties to increase the bandwidth above a certain (relatively low) level, with a FTTH soultion, you have plenty of room for growth!

--Hornet

oscarBravo

Hornet wrote:

The issue about contention baffles me as well. Magnet does indeed claim on their website that it is uncontended 2 Mbit/s. However, here the big question "What is contention and where is it measured?", might play a role!

It might, indeed. The question becomes whether a creative definition of "contention" is being used to put an unrealistic gloss on this product.

Hornet wrote:

ADSL providers usually measure contention at the back of the DSLAM.

Have you got a source for this? My information - which is verbal, so I can't reference it - indicates that DSL contention happens much further back.

Hornet wrote:

Wireless providers seem to measure it at the "back" of the base station.

Again, I'd like to see a source for this.

Hornet wrote:

But this is certainly not the only point where you can have contention. As an example: Eircom has contention at the back of the DSLAM (x users connected to the DSLAM have to share a y Mbit/s uplink to the next hop). The next hop can have overbooking again (maybe UBR links on atn ATM service) and finally the Broadband Access Server (BAS or BRAS) which is the Gateway to the Internet has potentially a completely different (most likely lower!) contention ratio. If many servers (where users can download services/files from) are located within the realm of the DSL service provider, the contention ratio on the BAS can justifiably be lower.

Neither Eircom, nor any of the other service providers (wireless or wire-based) provides information about ALL potential bottlenecks in the network!!

Are you saying that a 48:1 contended DSL product is contended at 48:1 at the DSLAM, but may be contended further (at a lower contention ratio) at another point, further back? I can see that this might be the case - but note that the closer you get to the Internet, the lower the contention in your scenario.

Hornet wrote:

Now I am speculating here, but maybe Magnet sees it like this:
*speculating on* There is NO contention from the home into the network (there is no base station and no DSLAM, just a big router or a switch or something like that). I expect there is some contention on the BRAS, but as others never mention that, so Magnet doesn't have to either. *speculating off*

Granted that it's speculation, there's a big problem with it: the contention ratio gets higher as you get closer to the Internet. That makes the end-user contention ratio nonsense.

Let me put it like this: suppose I get a 24:1 1Mbit DSL line in town. I use my shiny new 802.11a kit to share it with my neighbour, and no-one else. Now he has a 108Mbit uncontended broadband connection, right? Um, no.

There's only one useful measure of contention, from my point of view: at what ratio are you competing for the actual Internet backhaul? If a DSLAM has 24:1 contention, but it's fed by a 2:1 contended pipe, the end-user contention ratio is 48:1. If a (hypothetical) FTTH company is feeding 500 users 2Mbit each on uncontended fibre, but only has a 10Mbit backhaul, then the service is contended at 100:1.

Moriarty

oscarBravo wrote:

If a DSLAM has 24:1 contention, but it's fed by a 2:1 contended pipe, the end-user contention ratio is 48:1.

Whu? No it's not, it's still 24:1. The relevant contention ratio is the largest one along the line.

oscarBravo

Moriarty wrote:

Whu? No it's not, it's still 24:1. The relevant contention ratio is the largest one along the line.

How do you make that out?

Let me give you a real-world example: KCN has 33 subscribers, sharing a 24:1 contended 2Mbit DSL connection. Assuming for the sake of argument that all those subscribers have 2Mbit connections, do you think it's valid to describe the connections as 33:1 contended 2Mbit?

ro2

oscarBravo wrote:

That's the point I'm making: I find it hard to believe that it's uncontended. Shop around for wholesale bandwidth, and let me know if you find anyone offering uncontended Internet transit for under €100 per Mbit per month. That price point means that each subscriber would have to pay €200 per month just to cover bandwidth costs.

Claiming to offer 2Mbit uncontended for under €30 means that they have Internet backhaul that's costing them substantially less than €15 per Mbit per month. I'd love to know where they're buying it.

You can get transit in Dublin for well under €100 in Dublin, you just need to know where to look.

From the RIPE database it looks like Magnet have connectivity from Colt, the INEX and they're using Hibernia Atlantic to connect to Boston where they take transit from CTC. CTC take their transit from Cogent and Wiltel.

eircomtribunal

thegills wrote:

Well if the housing development has say 500 units and they offer 2MB/s per house uncontended then they need a 1Gig pipe into the development; thats were the issue is. How much are they paying for a 1Gig pipe????

and the following contention discussion.


Perhaps this example can shed some light on the contention issue:

200 adsl (512kbs) customers are on one Eircom exchange, contention ratio is 1/48= Eircom is backhauling those 200 "broadband" customers with a 2048 Mbs (2 Mbs) line to its connection to the Internet, say the INEX. If more than four users are dowloading at the same time, the bottle neck slows down users. No more 512 kbs speed. The bottle neck is at the back of the dslams (or indeed somewhat further back).

200 dsl (2048 kbs) customers are in the Magnet serviced estate. No contention. Magnet is backhauling those 200 broadband customers with a half Gig pipe (409 Mbs) to the connection to the Internet, say the INEX.

That is the contention issue done with.

The connection to the Internet is not a contention related issue. Millions of European users might share a line through one backbone to one website. You would not start talking about a contention of million to one etc.
This is a utilisation issue.

From the INEX both companies manage their bandwidth at a level of say no more than 60% of average load. The size of this pipe has nothing to do with contention. It would not and could not and need not be a big pipe of the size "amount of users multiplied by the users connection speed", as is clearly understandable from the cost of this connection. This bandwidth is managed by the companies as big as necessary. This is not the bottleneck.

Eircom make sure they have not to buy too expensive Internet connectivity by throttling bandwidth behind the dslams (contention) and by throttling bandwidth usage through the volume cap.
Magnet are using a volume cap alone to keep bandwidth usage down.

P.

eircomtribunal

The European disease.

Not to cap the users (by means of contention, volume cap, or time cap[used by other European ISPs]) would only add insubstantial costs to the provider. Japanese figures suggest a 5% cost increase.

Throttling of dsl is the European disease and Ireland has got one of the worst doses of it.

The providers are throttling the connection, because they have bought into the proposed strategies of the Forresters of this world, which say: give them as little as possible, thus you can keep your cash cow of leased lines and you can offer tiered services, meaning you can ask for substantially higher prices (detached from the cost basis altogether - but still giving the impression of cost relatedness) for less throttled services.

France is the only country so far to do otherwise. But with increasing LLU competition others will follow.

P.

oscarBravo

ro2 wrote:

You can get transit in Dublin for well under €100 in Dublin, you just need to know where to look.

Just clear this up for me - as I said:

Claiming to offer 2Mbit uncontended for under €30 means that they have Internet backhaul that's costing them substantially less than €15 per Mbit per month.

Is that inaccurate? My understanding of contention is the ratio of (bandwidth offered to the customer) to (bandwidth available to the Internet). If you define the Internet as starting at the INEX, that means less than €15/Mb transit to that point. Or am I missing something obvious?

eircomtribunal wrote:

200 dsl (2048 kbs) customers are in the Magnet serviced estate. No contention. Magnet is backhauling those 200 broadband customers with a half Gig pipe (409 Mbs) to the connection to the Internet, say the INEX.

Same calculation: 409Mb being paid for by 200 users at €30 each; 6000/409 = less than €15 per Mb. Is it really possible to get that kind of transit for that kind of money in Dublin?

Obviously it's possible to rent dark fibre and chuck literally gigabits through it. I'm not entirely convinced by the idea that contention isn't an issue at the INEX though, Peter. I'm not very au fait with how it works, but presumably you gets what you pays for there the same as everywhere else; in other words the bigger the pipe from your network to the Internet, the more you pay. If you have a half-gig pipe to the INEX, but you're only paying for a few meg at the peering point, you can't really claim not to have contention, can you?

oscarBravo

eircomtribunal wrote:

From the INEX both companies manage their bandwidth at a level of say no more than 60% of average load. The size of this pipe has nothing to do with contention. It would not and could not and need not be a big pipe of the size "amount of users multiplied by the users connection speed", as is clearly understandable from the cost of this connection.

But doesn't it need to be approximately "users times connection speed divided by contention ratio"? The 200 users are backhauled on a 2Mbit connection, so they will never need more than 2Mbit of Internet bandwidth. Even if the contention is done at a high level, like 2400 customers sharing 12Mbit, the most you need to fulfil their requirements is a 12Mbit Internet connection.

That's where I'm challenging the "uncontended" idea. If 200 Magnet users are simultaneously using their uncontended connections, and there isn't 400Mbit of Internet bandwidth available for them to use at that time, they will end up sharing - or contending for - the available bandwidth.

ro2

oscarBravo wrote:

My understanding of contention is the ratio of (bandwidth offered to the customer) to (bandwidth available to the Internet). If you define the Internet as starting at the INEX, that means less than €15/Mb transit to that point. Or am I missing something obvious?

Magnet probably have a decent sized fibre link from the Grange to their data centre. If it's their own fibre then it could be capable of up to 2.5Gb/s. From there they'd buy burstable bandwidth from the ISPs - probably a 10Mb commit on a fast-e or 100Mb commit on a gig-e. That means they only have to pay for 10Mb up front and if they go over that they pay by the Mb.

The INEX doesn't provide transit, only peering to other Irish ISPs. Transit is provided from the likes of Colt or Level3. 1Mb of INEX traffic works out at under €10/Mb. Magnet run BGP on their network and when someone connects to the Internet BGP will find the fastest/cheapest way to get there. So if someone wants to connect to boards.ie it'll go over the INEX, it won't go through their transit providers.

eircomtribunal

oscarBravo wrote:

That's where I'm challenging the "uncontended" idea.

If 200 Magnet users are simultaneously using their uncontended connections, and there isn't 400Mbit of Internet bandwidth available for them to use at that time, they will end up sharing - or contending for - the available bandwidth.

Magnet will have a contract in place at the INEX which will allow it to connect at whatever the needs from the sum of its uncontended customer lines are. Theoretically that could be 400Mbs at times, and the contract will include this possibility (but that does not mean Magnet is paying for an always on 400 Mbit line), but the contract will be based on a system of average and highest minus x percent etc. You can imagine that the 200 customers with a 12 gig volume cap will require quite a low average connection to the Internet.
Take out your calculator and lets imagine for a while that all the customers would use up their 12 gig limit totally continuously spread over the month:
200 customers using 12 000 Mb =2400000 Mb
Calculate the per second flow: 2400000/30/24/60/60 = 0.93 Mb per second.


If all the customers used up their cap in an equally spread manner, Magnet would only need a 1 Mbs connection, costing them € 100 a month.

Not all customers will use up their contingent, but they will also not use it up evenly spread. In reality Magnet will have to buy some more than the theoretical 1 Mbs average and also pay some more for peak usage. But overall they will have to buy a rather small amount of connectivity.

But all that has nothing to do with contention. Their is no "uncontended" connection to the Internet, in the sense you are expecting. The provider will just make sure that there is no hindrance at this point. The customer is not throttled at this point, (despite the provider not having bought an always on 400 Mbs connection), as the traffic is regulated in such a way that the load does not exceed a certain percentage. All connectivity requests from customers will be fulfilled. It is equal to being an uncontended situation, although this expression does not come into play.
P.

Blaster99

So what you're saying is that contention is a fairly irrelevant concept? And I think you're correct.

SkepticOne

Whatever you want to call it, the ISP is limiting the amount of users can download so the ISP can purchase less backhaul to the internet.

eircomtribunal

Blaster99 wrote:

So what you're saying is that contention is a fairly irrelevant concept?

No, it ain't.

As one of the assumed 200 users on a 1:48 contended Eircom 512kbs adsl line you will experience a possibly considerable slow-down whenever more than a couple of users are using the service.

As one of the assumed 200 users on an uncontended Magnet service, you will not experience any slow-down, even if all of the other 199 users decide to now download that song or movie clip at the same time as you.

The provider of the contended service can get a cheaper connection to the Internet, as he throttles the speed of his users at a set figure.
The provider of the uncontended service has to go for a dearer package, as he does not throttle the speed of his users. But it does not mean he has to buy a permanent connection at the maximum speed.

P.

flamegrill

From what I can gather magnet are running dual 1GBps fibre into each housing estate.

in terms of INEX, transit isn't provided here its merely peering with other carriers and content providers at a local peering point. The lines come in 3 sizes, 10mbps, 100mbps and 1000mbps.


ill ask a representitive to post a replay on monday.

Paul