Getting around capping...

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rockett

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I'm not 100% sure how this site works:
http://www.mybroadband.co.za.redirect.keljob.com/
but I assume that that it is redirecting traffic from one site to itself and then on to you.
You can replace www.mybroadband.co.za with any web site, however, I assume that accessing mybroadband.co.za in this manner takes you over international lines...?

Now what if someone set up a ...redirect.keljob.co.za/
That way, once you're capped, you can access any web site through this redirect mechanism and your speed won't be affected because you're accessing a local ZA site...

These are just my musings and I'd love to hear your comments.

Now moving on from that. How does Telkom decide if a web site is local or international before it redirects capped users? Does it look at that web's IP address or does it just look at the .co.za suffix? If the latter, then you could host the ....redirect.keljob.co.za/ site overseas on one of those really cheap $5/month reseller servers and use their bandwidth and that would give you a ton more bandwidth per month.

Comments on the errors in my logic please...
:)
 
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Sadly - the person/company hosting the local version of keljob.redirect.com will be paying for international bandwidth, and will pass the costs on to you.

The determiniation of "What country does this IP reside in" is not a simple domain name string mask, it is instead a lookup on a database of ip addresses, so that will fail.

Checkout http://ip.ludost.net/ for and example of a site that can access the database.

But yea - keep looking - there must be a way.
 
Thanks stoke.

Do you know for a fact that the Telkom guys use IP lookup instead of domain name string mask to determine if a site is local?
Or are you just guessing?
I assume that you're right (in that they use IP) because it's a simple task and would also allow any TLD to be hosted in ZA with the benefits and drawbacks that has.

This also raises an interesting question about www.arteraturbo.com hosting a ZA version of its accelerator. This would mean that you would never have a cap if you went through them because you would always be accessing a local (ZA) site. However, the ZA version of artera would pick up the international bandwidth and cost.
 
Dead sure - its basic network fundamentals. The string you see in the browser is never transmitted anywhere.

i.e. The request for data from www.killscottsville.co.za never sends the name, just the ip address.

It would be extremely inefficient to then take that ip address and do another name lookup at the router to get the ".co.za" - whereas the routing table must be stored on the router anyway, and that's what it does.

PS - I loved that atricle by Chris Ellis in your sig.
 
This nice little page by TheRoDent will explain how to tell if a site is local or not.
I use the same data through a custom script to split local traffic over a capped account and international over an uncapped account.

http://rodent.za.net/BGPInformation

BGP is a fantastic protocol, and every core router on the Internet uses it to build its routing tables.
 
telkom does not interogate your traffic to find out if its local or international.

When you logon to the dslam you get validated by a radius server. If your'e capped the radius server gives you an address in one vlan ( virtual lan ) and if youre not capped you get an address in another vlan. You can see the address change when you get capped.

Thereafter its just routing rules. Vlan1 had one default gateway ( the big fat pipe ) and vlan2 has another gateway ( the small one where everybody ends up blocking eveyrone else ). Alternatly they use QOS settings for vlancapped to give uncapped traffic higher priority.

This is highly oversimplified, but you should get the gist of what i'm trying to explain.

Obelix
 
Subwebs are enough to setup with a webserver like apache, or with squid. You look at the requested url and do the neccesary fetch and passon. You traffic doesnt get redirected, rather the server issues a new request to the website you wanted and then passes the response on to you.

This means 2 things. The server this runs on will have to be fast, and the amount of traffic generated is double that of what you will see. Anyone doing this will generate a huge amount of bandwidth.

Obelix
 
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Obelix said:
...Vlan1 had one default gateway ( the big fat pipe ) and vlan2 has another gateway ( the small one where everybody ends up blocking eveyrone else )...
Click to expand...

Why is the speed of local traffic unaffected once you're capped then? Surely you're going down the thin pipe?

What do you think of an accelerator company such as artera setting up a local hub? Considering that the traffic speed to a local site is unaffected once you're capped then you will essentially turn your ADSL connection into an uncapped connection by going through the accelerator company...
 
Obelix is referring to the international pipe that leaves SA, which does not affect local bandwidth.

Using accelerators may conserve bandwidth in that they generally use compression technologies. If the accelerator company actually procures the bandwidth, they won't really be an accelerator company, but rather a proxy who will eventually pass the cost for international bandwidth on to you... so you still end up paying.
 
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rockett - like Kaot said - youre not hitting the international gateway so youre not getting limited. The gateway for the capped users is either a completely different link, or a link with limited QOS. I dont know which telkom uses. I suppose traceroute comparisons will show that.

<Speculation mode>This is probably also why telkom cannot distinguish between local and internation traffic on the dslam end, as they dont actually know where the traffic is going, just the default route for your account. I suppose an app of some kind could be written that monitors the international link in promiscuis mode and tally's all traffic based on IP, but then that has to be tied up to which account had which ip at what time. This could open abuse by means of ip spoofing though.</speculation mode>
 
I agree with you guys.

So the accelerator in this case is really a proxy (that I'm refering to) but also saves a bit using the compression algo.

So what if someone sets up an account with UUNet (is that their name) where you get unlimited international bandwidth at a fixed price and then use that account for a local web site which redirects local traffic to the UUNet international pipe. You then allow capped users to subscribe to your local proxy...
 
web accelerator

Kaot said:
Obelix is referring to the international pipe that leaves SA, which does not affect local bandwidth.

Using accelerators may conserve bandwidth in that they generally use compression technologies. If the accelerator company actually procures the bandwidth, they won't really be an accelerator company, but rather a proxy who will eventually pass the cost for international bandwidth on to you... so you still end up paying.
Click to expand...

In the case of Artera, by having a Data Center in SA, Artera would as a proxy retrieve any data that is not cashed and send it to the local user. They would not pass on any of the cost. Not only would it benefit the user but also the ISP. It would reduce international bandwidth cost tremendously.
 
If Artera or Google had an SA hub for their accelerators it would greatly increase the speed of any type of connection and also remove the 3Gb (or whatever) cap from your bandwidth.

You would still be capped at 3Gb but because ALL your traffic would be local you wouldn't notice the cap.

Of course as soon as that became available then Telkom would change the rules to remove this benefit.
 
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