Being Capped Technically

[axisK]

Could someone please explain to me what happens exactly when I get capped each month, how does Telkom route me throught the capped lines etc. ? Do I get thrown over to other SAIX proxies or what happens? How do they determine which proxies they will route me through and stuff like that.

Thank You

 

[stoke]

Gathering of stuff i've read from this forum, and based on Teklom Prolog...
1 - You get disconnected daily.
2 - When you reconnect, the main authentication server checks your usage figures and assigns the appropriate IP Address. If you're over nGB, you get assigned an IP address in the "slow" range. If you're under nGB, you are assigned an IP address in the "fast" range.
3 - The routers on the SAIX backbone are configured to route "slow" IP Address ranges through a 64Kb international line, and the "fast" IP Address ranges route through an unspecified size international line.
4 - The transparent proxy processes both "slow" and "fast" IP ranges, but it sits on the international side, just before the JUMP to the UK.
5 - You are now sharing the 64Kb line with all the capped users, and probablee some other people that don't even use ADSL, like dial-up users with no international aspect to their subscription. And that can be verrrrry sloooooow.

Thats as much as I know, from what other people have said, and from tracert's output.

 

[daffy]

concerning point 2.

The usage figures are updated early every morning.
So every morning, the radius server (the authentication database, holds all the usernames/passwords and usage data) does a run through the database, totalling up all the usage. If the user has gone over 3gb, that account it flagged as capped.

1 - You get disconnected 24 hours from connection (The PPPOE Session has a lifetime of 24 hours)
2 - When you reconnect, the PPPOE Server checks to see if your account is capped. (Keep in mind that this capped/uncapped status only updates in the early morning)

So you could exceed 3gb and then reconnect without getting capped, as long as you reconnected before the Radius server ran its update in the morning.
But because your ADSL session will timeout after 24hours, you will end up reconnecting a day or 2 later and find yourself capped.

 

[axisK]

thank you, that sheds a bit of light onto the topic

 

[slimothy]

do you happen to know what time the radius server updates?

 

[bb_matt]

I'd also like to know the times, but there's another odd thing that I get with my tracker.

Yesterdays usage is reading as 27mb down and 2.6mb up and I know for a fact I used more, but by later today / tommorrow, it will display the correct usage amount.

My tracker always does that - when I checked it yesterday morning for Sundays usage, it was on about 30mb down - today Sunday reads 266mb, which I know I used.

This means you could probably get more than 24 hours extra when your cap is reached. Knowing the exact times would be useful.

 

[Mean_Monster]

why would one put the proxy on the international side? If they put it locally then less traffic would count towards the cap. Oh yes, telkom counts everything towards the cap

It would be a gr8 idea if only actual fetches form the internet would count towards the cap and not cached info. Or put differently only actual international bandwidth was capped.

 

[stoke]

Agree'd 100% Mr Monster.
Now all ya gotta do is get all the Teklom shareholders to agree with you.

 

[st3ve]

Thanks Stoke and Daffy that explains things to me.

I got capped for the first time last night. This morning I couldn't re-connect, so I called Mweb, I even told them I'd been capped because I'd received an email from them. They said they were working on it. I called Mweb 3 hours later then they said it was Telkoms fault, called Telkom at the end of the day they said they'd put in a fault report.

Fiddled around with the software and noticed the network bridge was disconnected, problem resolved.

Now that I have dsl I get so annoyed with the quality of tech support from Mweb who all too often blame it on Telkom, without running me through all the possible settings like they used to do. As for Telkom, well I never really expected technical support from them in the first place so what can I say... I even called Telkom back to tell them I'd fixed the problem and they needn't send a techie... "oh no" they said we've logged the fault now you see so you will have to wait until they call you.

At any rate I noticed from my winxp event log (under control panel/admin tools/event viewer/system) that the connection was ended by PPPoE6-0 at 01h40. So an educated guess would be 01h40.