Blended & local only ADSL

AcidRaZor said:
With the lack of local content due to high bandwidth pricing for local hosting (even though it has been coming down recently) I don't see how the pricing model of "blended" ADSL bandwidth is sustainable, as most people would burn their bandwidth on international sites anyway.

This thinking is flawed and should be revised. Thank you Telkom for your "genius" number crunching being in effect with all ISP's trying to scramble to make a buck...
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A good use of local only bandwidth is VPN and inter branch comms/database synch/backup. Very useful indeed!
 
wpswart006 said:
How much bandwith does it use to run a website, like this one for instance?
And is it possible to use your Telkom Internet to run it and host it for South Africans?
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the problem is money. I pay R170pm for my own server, 30GB disk space, 512MB RAM, 2 IPs, 300GB monthly transfer, backups, etc etc - its hosted in New York. Fact is I would never get that here. So why would I host it locally?

Answer: So people dont have to use their international caps. Good point, but the fact is that money talks and as long as a site can be reached on the Net, people want the cheapest and most cost-effective hosting. And those two words have nothing in common with any hosting in ZA.
 
wpswart006 said:
How much bandwith does it use to run a website, like this one for instance?
And is it possible to use your Telkom Internet to run it and host it for South Africans?
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its hosted by hetzner locally, the last time i paid attention to stats updates from RPM the website was doing about 160gig+ on bandwidth running this site
 
rurapente said:
the problem is money. I pay R170pm for my own server, 30GB disk space, 512MB RAM, 2 IPs, 300GB monthly transfer, backups, etc etc - its hosted in New York. Fact is I would never get that here. So why would I host it locally?

Answer: So people dont have to use their international caps. Good point, but the fact is that money talks and as long as a site can be reached on the Net, people want the cheapest and most cost-effective hosting. And those two words have nothing in common with any hosting in ZA.
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Crikey, that is cheap - not sure what that would cost you here, I'm willing to bet that 10 times is an underestimate...
 
mbp said:
A good use of local only bandwidth is VPN and inter branch comms/database synch/backup. Very useful indeed!
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Definitely, but then those people would either go local-only accounts for those types of communications or they'd resort to a more expensive setup by telkom rather than ADSL.

When I talk bandwidth I mostly refer to the average user and not businesses. SMB's have been bled dry by the communications industry and some of them know how to save and stretch a buck because it's in their best interests.

But a dad that gets his kids ADSL and a 3gig cap so they can "learn computers" doesn't really know unless someone tells him. And nobody at the ISP side would go, "Hey mister, here's a great way to split international and local traffic to save on money!"... why? because as it's been stated, they make money off of the fact you will use your blended account on local and international. Subsidizing the cheap with the not-so-cheap.

However, my opinion is most of these people use their blended accounts for international websites anyway. So the saving an ISP makes on a per mb level of the 3gig cap is minuscule. And as stated by others, even though they have a 30gig local cap afterward, don't know what to do with it because all of their sites are hosted internationally.
 
Oh and as an added point. Who is the ISP to judge what & where I use my bandwidth for?

If I wanted 2gig international and 1 gig local, I don't want my local browsing to affect my international bandwidth (because essentially they're saying you're more likely to surf locally than internationally which is false)
 
While we continue to have threads about "local" vs "blended", the rest of the world goes on with just one account that gives you full access to the INTERNET...none of this crap differentiation between websites hosted in your country of residence and outside. :sick:
 
AcidRaZor said:
They lied to you.


Telkom (aka SAIX) have had the ability to split local and international since 2002. You're not going to convince me otherwise because I know this as a fact.
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Not only that, all traffic you receive already has markers on it to show whether it local or international

Check the ip precedence field, 0 is local with 2 being international.

Damian
 
damian24 said:
Not only that, all traffic you receive already has markers on it to show whether it local or international

Check the ip precedence field, 0 is local with 2 being international.

Damian
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These markers are only present for inbound traffic, and are pretty useless anyways, since the mechanism by which per user traffic is counted (Radius Accounting) was never designed to be aware of them. Obviously there are other ways of performing the counting, but they are all vastly more expensive & complex.
 
RoganDawes said:
Gatecrasher's howto's are great if you are using DD-WRT. Tumbleweed has a guide to doing it with regular old Openwrt. It is not entirely coherent, and needs reading the whole page, including all the comments, but I got it working without too much effort.

Linky
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I've been programming for over 10 years using a couple of different languages. I find the DD-WRT how-to's daunting. I would be prepared to pay good money for an off-the-shelf one-stop ADSL wireless router that could split my traffic for me with a nice Web GUI and without any scripting.

I'm freaked out that I might totally trash my Linksys router by flashing it.
 
rogerwe said:
I've been programming for over 10 years using a couple of different languages. I find the DD-WRT how-to's daunting. I would be prepared to pay good money for an off-the-shelf one-stop ADSL wireless router that could split my traffic for me with a nice Web GUI and without any scripting.

I'm freaked out that I might totally trash my Linksys router by flashing it.
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The big problem is that 99% of the integrated ADSL routers run on an AR7 platform, to which Linux (and hence OpenWRT) has not yet been properly ported.

Devices such as the Linksys WAG200G would otherwise be perfect for this, but there is no full featured OpenWRT support, and the Linksys bootloader is crippled so that recovery from flashing a bad firmware is near impossible without JTAG.

Actually, it seems that OpenWRT works well enough on the Netgear DG834G, so maybe this is not a futile quest yet.

Anyone care to buy me one, so I can get it all working? :D

Actually, there is SO much that can be done on an open platform.

Obviously, multiple PPPoE connections.
Bandwidth monitoring on a per-connection basis (potentially also reporting specific details to a box with disk)
Advanced inbound connections. e.g SSH to your router (via dyndns lookup), execute a Wake On LAN packet to wake up your PC, then use SMB/NFS to mount a share on your PC and allow you to copy files from it.
 
zamicro said:
My feeling as well.

ISPs/SAIX/IS can distinguish, otherwise there could not be a local only option. They just do not want to...
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It's actually better this way. As rpm pointed out, prices for blended packages are cheaper as ISPs assume some of that will be local. I just got a local account and am now splitting traffic:cool: so all my blended is international!
 
feo said:
While we continue to have threads about "local" vs "blended", the rest of the world goes on with just one account that gives you full access to the INTERNET...none of this crap differentiation between websites hosted in your country of residence and outside. :sick:
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exactly! all we're doing here is asking for a process to be designed to help feed the money-making machine that is fooling us into believing we should differentiate between packets within and outside of our borders. The Internet is here to do away with borders, not make them even higher.

"Do you have a local download server?" should only be asked because of speed. If someone is asking that question because its cheaper, then we have failed to provide what the internet set out to become and are going to compound an already greedy industry.
 
I use a Mikrotik Routerboard 450G, (which runs RouterOS) to split local and international. It's very easy to setup, basically you create your two pppoe connections, one for your local only ISP and one for your international. Create a default route for the international pppoe, and add routes for all the local IPs to the local only pppoe. ;)
 
zamicro said:
ISPs/SAIX/IS can distinguish, otherwise there could not be a local only option. They just do not want to...
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Have tried to explain this many times before, let me take another crack at it ...

Traffic usage is currently counted in the access portion of the network. At this point all packets are inherently marked with their owner by virtue of their session/login id (PPPoE encapsulation). This makes it relatively easy to allocate a packet's byte count to a particular owner (session login).

By the time packets have moved into the core of the network where they are split/routed onward to local or intl (using the destination IP addr), the session information (owner association) is no longer present. This makes it impossible to easily allocate the traffic to a specific account in real-time.

The only possible way to do this is to store a record of all the traffic flows (similar packets) and then retrospectively deduce their ownership i.e. a flow's source IP addr was X and at that particular time it was allocated to Joe, therefore the byte count of this flow should be allocated to Joe's usage.

At this point you still don't know if its local or intl. To deduce this one has to evaluate each flow against the SA network (routing) database to see if it matches (if not, one assumes its intl). Finally now one can add the byte count to the correct user for their local or intl traffic tally.

The above scenario requires much more routing, processing & storage resources, not to mention a major redesign of the network architecture, all adding significantly to the cost of the service. This complex processing also introduces additional risk in the areas of billing accuracy and network stability.

Just not practical at the end of the day.
 
Thanks for explaining it, Roman4604. I really hope that the submarine cables will make things cheaper. Then we won't have to talk about all these complicated ways of routing traffic. It will just be Internet, not local or international Internet.
 
Roman, that makes sense but

Roman4604 said:
By the time packets have moved into the core of the network where they are split/routed onward to local or intl (using the destination IP addr), the session information (owner association) is no longer present. This makes it impossible to easily allocate the traffic to a specific account in real-time.
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Then how does the destination know where to send the result of the transaction?
 
Roman4604 said:
The only possible way to do this is to store a record of all the traffic flows (similar packets) and then retrospectively deduce their ownership i.e. a flow's source IP addr was X and at that particular time it was allocated to Joe, therefore the byte count of this flow should be allocated to Joe's usage.
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Thing is this.. if you control the international and local pipe as well as the authentication servers for the PPPOE & routing then you have all the info you need and it basically is a question of effort vs reward. And lets face it, reward is negative for ISP's.
 
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Well, the first ISP to get this right will pull alot of new clients.
 
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