Kill the bandwidth hogs

SkepticOne

Originally posted by longword
Not true. If you have a 512k leased line, that's a private dedicated circuit between you and the ISP. Nobody else shares that. Needless to say that costs rather a lot more than a DSL line. On every DSL service I've ever seen, the link between the DSLAM in the exchange and the ISP is shared between many users. 50 users seems to be the going rate for most European nations, with 20:1 or thereabouts for more expensive DSL services targetted at business users.[/SIZE]

No. What I was comparing was Eircom's "multi" with six Gb cap and Eircom's 'enhanced' with no cap. My point was that they were run at pretty much the same cost to Eircom since both require 512k bandwidth for every 24 users. The purpose of the cap here is more to extract money out of the user rather than ensure quality of service.

I was making no overall point about the cost of bandwidth in Ireland.

Here's what I said:

"Exactly. The bandwidth argument holds no water because it is the same bandwidth being applied to both [Eircom DSL and Nevada leased line] services: 512k at a 24:1 contention ratio."

The stuff in square brackets was inserted by longword not me. I never mentioned anything about Nevada in this thread.

The point I was making was that 'multi' and 'enhanced' cost much the same to provide per user because the same backhaul is used. Therefore arguments about preserving quality of service by imposing caps is bogus. Surely they'd want to preserve quality of service just as much on the 'enhanced' product, yet they don't impose any sort of cap.

Please be careful when attempting to 'clarify' other peoples posts.

longword

how much would i d/l just playing online games and surfing and being on mirc..bear in mind that i'm in a clan so i would be playing for about 1 hour a day adverage.3 hour if we have a war ?

Well, you have the 800MB/month surfing guesstimate above. IRC takes up barely enough to be worth worrying about. I run #linuxhelp on Undernet - it's pretty active all day round, with 150ish users, most of whom are lurking. The complete 24-hour logs for that channel run to roughly 300MBytes per month. More channels or insanely active too-fast-to-follow channels would serve to increase that number, while spending less than 24 hours a day on IRC would serve to decrease that number and generally promote a healthy lifestyle

As for the gaming, in the interests of Science I've spent the last few hours playing Return To Castle Wolfenstein, a Quake3-engine game, on gamesdomain.co.uk's 50-player server dedicated to mp_marketgarden. Those games are intense. There's always at least 48 players in the game. It's a huge map. And they fight for every pixel of it. In the three hours I was playing, just two rounds were won (both by my team of course ). The downstream averaged out at 12 to 14MBytes per hour of play. About half of the gameplay was on the front lines with a dozen or two players in the immediate vicinity, and the other half was in the quieter base defense rôle.

Three hours a day every month (on top of your 8 hours of moderate surfing) would seem to total about 2GBytes/month. So your grand total comes to under 2.3GB. Plenty left for a few maps, patches and demos.

Ardmore

Originally posted by pete
...we're up against this oft-repeated mantra of "ah yes, but bandwidth is expensive" - I mean I'm not saying it's not expensive (i have no idea how much it is - funnily enough it doesn't seem to be a cost factor in either my 56k eircom line here, or our 512k nevada telecom line in work)

Did you ask them how much a similiar leased line would cost in London?

it's just that I just haven't seen anything concrete

It's generally considered "commercially sensitive information", so you won't see many people posting specific numbers. But I can tell you that 3 years ago, when I worked in the US, we could get a T1 to a major US backbone for less than 1/4 what an E1 from Dublin to a major US backbone costs today. (Nothing to do with Eircom). Over 80% of the traffic from the company I worked for in the US was destined for hosts on a major US backbone. Over 80% of the traffic from our office in Dublin is destined for hosts outside Ireland.

Ardmore

Originally posted by PiE
Fact of the matter is, Eircom aren't capping it cos they're afraid of peoples DSL being degraded by constant-downloading, they just want more cash.

If they just want more cash, why aren't they charging people who've gone over the cap?

The contract actually says that eircom reserves the right to apply a charge of 3 cent ex. VAT per Megabyte for downloads in excess of specified limits . It's a totally rip off price, but so far it hasn't actually been used to generat extra cash. I don't know if it's been used to smack down any bandwidth hogs, or if it's just scared them off.

[Sure haven't they (and Esat) got shed-loads of unlit fibre if they need more bandwidth anyway?

Unlit fibre between Donegal and Dublin isn't much good if the people in Donegal want to look at a site in the UK or the US.

longword

Originally posted by SkepticOne
Here's what I said:

"Exactly. The bandwidth argument holds no water because it is the same bandwidth being applied to both [Eircom DSL and Nevada leased line] services: 512k at a 24:1 contention ratio."

The stuff in square brackets was inserted by longword not me. I never mentioned anything about Nevada in this thread.

Sorry about that Skeptic, the Nevada reference was in what you quoted from pete and I didn't see what else "both" could be referring to since Eircom offer only one 512k service.

The point I was making was that 'multi' and 'enhanced' cost much the same to provide per user because the same backhaul is used. Therefore arguments about preserving quality of service by imposing caps is bogus.

Weeell. Putting on this Devil's Advocate hat I seem to have acquired (very nicely trimmed it is too I must say), Eircom are still discouraging excessive use by pricing the Enhanced product higher than Multi, and all of the other service. Obviously nobody wants to pay more than they need to, particularly those in business at whom those services are aimed. Eircom could reasonable assume that they will have far fewer Enhanced users, eating up the slack bandwidth left by those on Multi. And most of those Enhanced users would probably be in the tens of GBytes range rather than hundreds.

In fact one could go even further and say that Eircom are being Extra Nice by providing this uncapped service when they really don't have to, but if you want it and you can afford it, the option is there for you. Note that if you're an evil Kazaa SOB downloading MP3s and movies hand-over-fist, Eircom can still hit you with their Acceptable Use Policy for copyright violations.

jd

Originally posted by Ardmore
If they just want more cash, why aren't they charging people who've gone over the cap?

The contract actually says that eircom reserves the right to apply a charge of 3 cent ex. VAT per Megabyte for downloads in excess of specified limits . It's a totally rip off price, but so far it hasn't actually been used to generat extra cash. I don't know if it's been used to smack down any bandwidth hogs, or if it's just scared them off.

Perjhaps contention on the backhaul hasn't been an issue-if it becomes one, you may see the charge being applied..

pete

Originally posted by Ardmore
Did you ask them how much a similiar leased line would cost in London?

No, because that's completey irrelevant to prices for comparable services here. And also completely irrelevant to the point I was making, as it happens.

It's generally considered "commercially sensitive information", so you won't see many people posting specific numbers.

Oh come on - it can't be that hard for someone in the know to give a ballpark figure of the price per GB (or TB) of traffic, can it?

pete

Originally posted by Ardmore
If they just want more cash, why aren't they charging people who've gone over the cap?

Probably because it's probably far easier to screw people afraid of being capped up front than it is to fight a 3c per mb battle after the fact? (see also: market segmentation/ price differentiation vis a vis use of threatened cap as a tool to "encourage" (read:scam) people to opt for the "higher quality" service)

PiE

Originally posted by Ardmore
If they just want more cash, why aren't they charging people who've gone over the cap?

There's what, 2200 DSL users in Ireland right now? It's probably not worth the effort charging them for going over the cap at the moment but as jd said, that could (read: will) change sharply once there are more users.

STaN

i sincerely dont believe its there to screw people, just so they have a come back if people go OTT with downloads.

BoneCollector

you could always introduce a reward scheme

those who dont exceed there cap get 20% of unused banwidth added to there following months allowance.

PiE

Originally posted by STaN
i sincerely dont believe its there to screw people

Stan... we're talking bout Eircom here...

;]

SkepticOne

Originally posted by STaN
i sincerely dont believe its there to screw people, just so they have a come back if people go OTT with downloads.

As a side effect it does curb heavy downloading.

The Cigarette Smoking Man

Originally posted by STaN
i believe that the 512/128 service is a maximum limit on your connection and is not a dedicated rate. The reality for a particular exchange is that it may have a 10mb connection to a trunk network, and if it reaches its 50:1 (the contention) capacity which would mean 750 people on that particular exchange meaning 750 people will be sharing that 10mb pipe. 7.5mb of it for downloads 2.5mb of it for uploads. In turn only 15 people could download at maximum speed at any one time. And hence those 15 reduce the shared speed to the rest of the subscribers.

You'd actually get the full 10Mb for downloads. The connections from the DSLAMs back to Eircom.net are ATM, so they give a full synchronous connection. (10Mb up, 10Mb down). Also the fact that eircom own everything - there's no reason why they'd need to cap their own links (if the link is 155Mb, it won't cost them anything else to use the whole lot). The only place where traffic becomes important for them is when it leaves Ireland.

zynaps

Originally posted by PiE
4GB may be (logically speaking) more than each person would be able to get if everyone was connected, but it doesn't work like that as you know. So if one person only uses 1mb of his 4GB in a month... the "spare" 3999MB are going to waste.

Yeah, there is this possibility (likelihood?) with a static cap in place.
Since you can never predict how much bandwidth users will use at any time, or how much overall available bandwidth is free at any time (nor for that matter can the users themselves, unless they really do not download a lot - I know I download a lot for 56k), giving each user an imaginary cap, or even enforcing a cap by throttling or disconnection after it has been reached, doesn't seem at all useful.

If it is really about making sure all users get the best possible service, without the few sacrificing quality for many, then a system of bandwidth monitoring would be much more apt and functional than simply giving people a traffic cap.

I don't see why it would not be possible for eircom/whoever to design a service that would run on some network machine that would watch the DSL network's bandwidth utilisation, and step in to limit speeds/etc only if too many users are using too much bandwidth and worsening the quality of service for other users that may also be demanding bandwidth.
At that point, it could gently reduce the bandwidth available to that/those users in order to give everyone a more or less equal basis.

It is not about pointing at specific users and saying "BANDWIDTH HOG, he's probably downloading porn on winmx/kazaa", it's about regulating the network as needed, if needed.
If noone else is using or asking for the bandwidth, then let the few hog away.

Snap out of it, lads! A set cap for everybody isn't going to do much but put users off, and make a few people feel guilty (when they shouldn't - as has been said, they're paying for the service, not abusing it. If there isn't sufficient bandwidth there and they're taking too much, throttle it enough to rebalance available bandwidth and only for long enough as is necessary).

Sorry to be overly verbose again, but it's pissing me off everyone echoing the same, (to me) negative and truly unproductive sentiments.

zynaps

Dazzer

Originally posted by BoneCollector
you could always introduce a reward scheme

those who dont exceed there cap get 20% of unused banwidth added to there following months allowance.

I see an 8 to 10 GB cap with something similar to this as being the right way to go.