fancy capping

A

AntjeSomers

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If Telkom is so keen to cap bandwidth, why dont they make a distinction between international and local usage, as far as I can understand it is the international bandwidth that is costly. Users might then end up with a local and international cap, that is regulated seperately, and paid for seperately, it wil be more logical and fair than any idea their overpaid henchmen could come up with to date in any case...
 
if local traffic is treated different, (cheaper), then you can link to a local gateway/proxy and get international access, thats how most uncapped solutions worked. so according to telkom you link to someone up the road from you and download crazy amounts of data, meantime you are downloading stuff from international sites.

only way to stop this is capping everything

what i dont get is telkom admit to 2.5% of users abusing the service, it should balance out for the rest of users who do not abuse it. so what is the problem???
 
yes and the people who are designing and implementing the capping system were told not to bother or are too lazy etc to implement such a billing system.

see, at present all they do us drop you into another bandwidth pool once capped. So technically, the local bandwidth while uncapped is not the same (can be slower/faster) as when capped.

Would be nice if local didnt count but we have been begging for years.. for nothing
 
albert123 said:
if local traffic is treated different, (cheaper), then you can link to a local gateway/proxy and get international access, thats how most uncapped solutions worked. so according to telkom you link to someone up the road from you and download crazy amounts of data, meantime you are downloading stuff from international sites.

only way to stop this is capping everything
Click to expand...
This realy doesn't make sense as "abuse" since that international bandwidth was payed for, its not like its being stolen... In most cases it doesn't even go over the SAIX international links but over uunet/IS/etc.
 
Down the road

If you connect to someone down the road then that someone will also have an international cap and it would be up to that someone to regulate or pay for his seperate international cap, which really means that it it is impossible to abuse this system. Each cap is regulated independantly, and I fail to see how it can be abused, the proxy pay for the use of it's international bandwidth. Telkom can't seem to police the 2.5% that jeopardise everyone a dual cap system such as this will, as each proxy will have to regulate ii's own bandwidth to be economically viable. Telkom's henchmen get paid big bucks for 'ideas' maybe they should come up with a 'plan' ones in a while, if they can't well then they just can't compete in a democratic, captilistic market, and should soon become a distant bad memory ... oops! and then I woke up... :eek:
 
albert123 said:
what i dont get is telkom admit to 2.5% of users abusing the service, it should balance out for the rest of users who do not abuse it. so what is the problem???
Click to expand...

I agree with you, local and international traffic should be measured differently.
The answer to your question is that the 2.5% of users use up something like 50% of the network resources. But they only pay for their accounts, not the 10x to 20x capacity that they use compared to the 'average' user.
It's an incentive to Telkom and to ISPs to target the lower end of the market.
The high-usage, low-payage (to coin a phrase) customer base is not that attractive if it costs more to serve those customers than they pay you.
The recent situation of uncapped and 30GB accounts was not a realistic reflection of the real costs incurred for that bandwidth. Anyone who has had to pay SA market rates for international bandwidth will tell you that.
 
Can anybody tell us what is the real cost for international bandwidth then? I don't think it is R75 per gig.
 
Vio said:
1 word: Money
Click to expand...
In a roundabout way.

It is far more difficult (read you need a lot more expensive kit) to measure and manage international bandwidth only. Much cheaper to do it on total only.
 
Spamtheman said:
No, it's merely technically challenging, not more expensive (in terms of equipment).
Click to expand...
I beg to differ .... cause you have to start managing things on the aggregate level not the individual virtual interface. Working at the aggregate level means you need serious horsepower.
 
SAIX are ALREADY tagging traffic to distinguish between local and international.

Using their simple instructions, I've configured our router to show us our international / local bandwidth usage (This is on leased line). Packets marked with precedence 2 is international, and precedence 0 is local.

Code: 
some_local_router>sh policy-map int s0
 Serial0

  Service-policy input: international

    Class-map: precedence2 (match-all)
      9901601 packets, 5115027176 bytes
      5 minute offered rate 236000 bps, drop rate 0 bps
      Match: ip precedence 2
      QoS Set
        precedence 2
          Packets marked 9901602

    Class-map: class-default (match-any)
      6367215 packets, 2187780929 bytes
      5 minute offered rate 57000 bps, drop rate 0 bps
      Match: any
      QoS Set
        precedence 0
          Packets marked 6367216
I only set up the policy map a few days ago.

It's not that difficult, since they are already doing it!
 
thisgeek said:
SAIX are ALREADY tagging traffic to distinguish between local and international.
Click to expand...
And outbound?

What about the fact that your dealing with possibly over 100 000 concurrent flows that you have to process in real-time?

Not as trivial as you make out.
 
I didn't say that it was trivial - just not that difficult.
I agree that it will take some major horsepower to handle that - that's why there are bandwidth management clusters that can handle that kind of thing.
Just very expensive usually.

Anyway, I was referring more to the classification of traffic more than anything else.
 
thisgeek said:
Just very expensive usually.
Click to expand...

What does very expensive mean? R1 billion? R1 million? How much profit did telkom make? maybe by not spending trivial amounts - trivial in this context - on infrastructure telkom could provide a more equitable service.

fact is that telkom's only aim is ream its customers and cap the tube of lube.
 
TimTango said:
I agree with you, local and international traffic should be measured differently.
The answer to your question is that the 2.5% of users use up something like 50% of the network resources. But they only pay for their accounts, not the 10x to 20x capacity that they use compared to the 'average' user.
It's an incentive to Telkom and to ISPs to target the lower end of the market.
The high-usage, low-payage (to coin a phrase) customer base is not that attractive if it costs more to serve those customers than they pay you.
The recent situation of uncapped and 30GB accounts was not a realistic reflection of the real costs incurred for that bandwidth. Anyone who has had to pay SA market rates for international bandwidth will tell you that.
Click to expand...

Timtango you are always making these high usage allegations, but obviously have not realised that the web can be used for many purposes requiring bandwidth, such as music streaming and tv streaming as well as many legitimate other uses such as transferring data between branches etc. I do not dispute that a cost is attached to this service and that usage charging is necessary. I do however dispute the fact that we have to pay a line rental for ADSL as well as an exorbitant per gig amount. To put it in perspective, to watch an online movie would cost me in terms of the new pricing +-R220, which is extravagant in the extreme.
Also Telkom have repeatedly been asked to provide details about their input costs(band width) and so far have hidden all parameters that determine their costing such as contention ratios from the public and in fact from that useless regulator ICASA. Also if they cut all the cr*p and produced a normal working ADSL service without packet priorisation etc,
they would need far smaller call centres etc that also contribute to their high overheads. Also their profits are excessive and even as you stated elsewhere they have to provide non-profutable services to smaller areas, I believe thir total loss was only in the region of R2billion for the total rollout that they had to write off. And then if their pricing was fair, maybe they would have by now started to show a profit on that investment instead of a write off.

I must admit, Telkom loves people like you. Let me do a calculation for you assuming you use 512 DSL(avccording to you you never exceed 2gb a month)

ADSL Rental: R477
3gb TelkomADSL account R270
Total Cost Per month R747 ( we do not even include the cost of your router or the other rental for a telephone line)

Cost per gigabyte R370
Well if you are happy with that,I wish you good luck
 
AntjeSomers said:
If you connect to someone down the road then that someone will also have an international cap and it would be up to that someone to regulate or pay for his seperate international cap, which really means that it it is impossible to abuse this system. Each cap is regulated independantly, and I fail to see how it can be abused, the proxy pay for the use of it's international bandwidth. Telkom can't seem to police the 2.5% that jeopardise everyone a dual cap system such as this will, as each proxy will have to regulate ii's own bandwidth to be economically viable. Telkom's henchmen get paid big bucks for 'ideas' maybe they should come up with a 'plan' ones in a while, if they can't well then they just can't compete in a democratic, captilistic market, and should soon become a distant bad memory ... oops! and then I woke up... :eek:
Click to expand...

But so what? From Telkom's side, local bandwidth is a LOT cheaper to supply than international, so they wouldn't care anyway. Besides which, the person you connect through will have to buy international through them anyway
 
ernstn said:
I must admit, Telkom loves people like you. Let me do a calculation for you assuming you use 512 DSL(avccording to you you never exceed 2gb a month)

Cost per gigabyte R370
Well if you are happy with that,I wish you good luck
Click to expand...

I agree with you, and I don't think it's good value. I lived in the UK and had a great ADSL line with a fixed IP address. Very different to here, and much cheaper.

But what you need to understand is that the people on this forum represent an online 'elite', and their usage patterns are different to the bulk of the 100k ADSL users in the SA market.

Telkom is the bad guy here - all the ISPs want to offer higher-cap, cheaper products. Why wouldn't they want to be able to cost-effectively stream content to their users?

But the cost structures in this country prevent it.
Please don't think I'm siding with Telkom and thinking the consumers are getting a great deal.
The 2 points I have consistently tried to make are:
1. Many users do not need a hi-cap package. This is true internationally too - the low-end package from BT includes just 2GB of traffic. Don't slam the low-end users or the ISPs serving that part of the market. Their needs ARE being met. I count myself in this group. I use my ADSL connection for email and browsing, and the odd system update and file download. 2GB is plenty for me.

2. This forum likes to think it is representative of the average SA internet user, but it's not. Even the ISPs represented in these forums tend to serve the high-end of the market and have technically sophisticated users that demand higher bandwidth packages.

3. Costs can and should come down. Telecoms regime change needs to happen before this is a reality. Telkom is manipulating the market and the ISPs expertly, and are extracting as much money as they can before they are forced to open up to real competition. There is no justification for charging line rental, telephone line rental, and ISP fees for the same piece of copper wire.

peace
 
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