"Broadband is not yet a reality in S.A." - iBurst

[louisp]

If local becomes almost free...

Wouldn't this then start a bigger trend of mirrors in SA. Wouldn't we then see ftp.is.co.za and similars become much bigger than they are at the moment?

Maybe even make it open, then when I download my ATI drivers, I also upload them to a local server?

Then we save on international connectivity.

[lewstherin]

This is all very restrictive and iBurst's international bandwidth is going to be very expensive, that's understood.

My view is, that in order to up the standard of broadband in South Africa, local access should be almost free.

theRodent is spot on with this. One of the primary reasons I've gone ADSL is that local bandwidth remains uncapped. This is a great boost for local gaming, internet banking, online retail and other domestic offerings that will benefit our economy.

Sentech essentially offers the advertised speeds for local access, as does ADSL - so iBurst is really shown up on this side. If Sentech can afford to offer essentially uncapped local access, then iBurst should too.
If the current telecoms environment doesn't allow it, then WBS must lobby government - its their problem, not their users' problem.

If iBurst really wanted to kick Telkom's ass and start some real competition, they should:
-> Implement unshaped 3GB cap for INTERNATIONAL access only
-> Allow international bandwidth to be purchased per GB - eg. pay-as-you-go
-> Offer uncapped LOCAL access

The above recommendations are within reason given our telecoms context, and in fact does not represent a significant financial risk to WBS's offering.
If anything the above should help them grow faster by stealing many ADSL users...
If iBurst did the above - without increasing price/decreasing service - they would have the best product offering on the market. Period.

[slimothy]

Actually, p2p shaping on Telkom ADSL is non-existant to all intents and purposes.
For bittorrent, I just NAT it through to port 80, setup my torrent client to run on port 80 and providing there's enough seeds, I reach close enough to top speed.

Actually it doesn't matter which port you set bittorrent to listen on, its which port the server users to listen on that counts.

[nonroker]

The server is just a tracker. It's updated maybe once every 10 mins.
The problem is the ports that your peers/seeds are listening on.

[fergus]

Doesn't the tracker use port 80 already?

Continuing with the discussion re Telkom / iBurst...

I think its probably a case of local ISPs being too scared to compete with Telkom. How could anyone possibly compete with Telkom when Telkom controls everything. Theres no way. It would be a case of biting the hand that feeds. I think until such time as Telkom decides to do us customers a favour and stop ripping us off for a bit we're all stuffed! Just a thought...

[slimothy]

The server is just a tracker. It's updated maybe once every 10 mins.
The problem is the ports that your peers/seeds are listening on.

indeed, that is what i mean, by server i was referring to the person(s) that serve the file pieces.
In good torrent clients you can set the client to only request/download pieces from client on a certain port, that was you can be sure your stuff comes from port 80.

Its not all gravy though, because of the torrent (tit for tat) system, seeds are the backbone, and although a few people do seed from thier homes high speed connection with windows, the majority seed from linux servers (mainly webservers) and infact the private seeder clients that site give out to thier top seeders are linux only 99% of the time. What this basically means is, the seeders wont have thier torrent client set to port 80, sicne that is 1) a privleged port on linux (you cant run anything on ports 1 - 1024 without being root) and 2) they already have a HTTPd running on that port.

oh and fergus, the tracker can be on any port, but even if it was on port 80, it won't speed transfers, it just means you'll get the list of peers to connect to faster

[nonroker]

You can't force another client to serve you on a certain port, the port range that the client configured is where you'll get the data from.

[slimothy]

i never said you could force them to serve on a certain port, i said you can configure your client to only download pieces from a client if they are on a certain port, so your client checks the list of peers and then if it sees people serving on the selected port number, it will try connect to them and request pieces, if they're not on that port, it ignores them

[qDot]

I might be offtopic here but how does local peering work ?

Do ISP's have to go through Telkom for local peering ?

In otherwords is the cost of peering with other networks (IS,UUNET etc) a possible barrier for local access not being virtually free ?

Can I read about local peering anywhere ?

[nonroker]

Go read http://www.jinx.net.za/

The idea is to use local connections for local traffic. JINX is basically a switch in IS's Rosebank building where all the ISPs plug in to (if they pay their membership fee) and save lots on the cost of local traffic. IS and POSIX afaik plug directly into the JINX switch with UTP cable

[qDot]

thank you.

[Grimsqueaker]

lewstherin:
-> Implement unshaped 3GB cap for INTERNATIONAL access only
-> Allow international bandwidth to be purchased per GB - eg. pay-as-you-go
-> Offer uncapped LOCAL access


I would just like to add my agreement to that. Has anyone mentioned this to Shaun as something to do?