ISP with own ADSL Authentication be warned

Yep! The ISP's will have to take this up with Telkom. To turn the customer into a bit counting maniac just because Telkom wants to rape the public is not on. This flies in the face of every good philosophy that started the Internet! Telkom can go **** themselves and the ISP's need to learn that standing up for their customers is in their best interest. If the 1st of November is to transpire, stand together and fight Telkom as one!

What a bunch of nancy wan*ers! Expecting us to do all the fighting? WTF! :mad:

Make no mistake, we will fight, but all this ****e could have been handled much quicker if the minister had some balls, the ISP's weren't so affraid of Telkom and Telkom had proper competition!

This is getting old now. I dare Telkom to start per gig billing come 1st November 2005. We are going to burn them! ICASA will help! The only thing that can prevent this is the minister herself...

**** Telkom!
 
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I definatly second everything Antowan has said

ISP's like baspnet (paarlberg) are simply damn lazy and are not seen to be doing anything constructive. The fault here lies with Telkom's mechanisms and ISP's like webafrica recognise this and question it, wheras the layabouts come onto this forum ranting and raving and flinging the "abuse" accusation around at it's own clients. It almost sounds to me as though they have been brainwashed by Telkom.

The meaning of abuse is to misuse something. Just imagine this scenario. A bank only updates your account balance once a day :eek: . You do multiple transactions on one day and because they havn't calculated your balance in real time your account goes into debt. Is this abuse? I would say it isn't as the bank's as they did not use technology available to them to ensure a customer did not overdraw on their account.

All you mini-telkoms need to die :mad:
 
Agreed! Go antowan!

The thing is, we need to know what is happening. We all said "it's only speculation," , "not anything concrete" but more and more proof is coming from people that, come November 1st A BEEG change is coming and we can't hide that fact!! The question is if we are going to stand divided in this or if we are going to be strong and fight it together!!

I would also like to know when telkom is going to make an official announcement about the whole 1 November issue!! And what is icasa's viewpoint on this, do they even know about the planned change!!
 
Are we missing something here ?

I mean, ain't we ADSL users the one who is currently been "abused" for paying so much for so call "Broadband", and going to pay more in 1.5 month time for that matter.

Now it's our fault we use too much and end of the month, coz we "abuse" the ADSL,
and it's our fault that they don't have a proper system to to real time monitor on the ADSL usage ? since when does everything become "Users fault" ? We just use our ADSL to the extend that we get everything out of it. "each cent is spend on the edge of the knife", what is wrong with that ?

I thought service company should have a "USER IS ALWAYS RIGHT" attitude. Now obviously everybody can c that "USER IS ALWAYS WRONG" in the ADSL scenerio.
 
I would also like to know when telkom is going to make an official announcement about the whole 1 November issue!!

I don't think Telkom will anounce it. They will say that the ISPs measure your usage and bill you for it. Thus the ISP needs to inform you of the so-called 1 November changes.

It concerns me that most of the ISPs are completely silent about the '1 November' changes.
 
Byrd said:
I definatly second everything Antowan has said

ISP's like baspnet (paarlberg) are simply damn lazy and are not seen to be doing anything constructive.
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We have filed a complaint with our Telkom rep. I have also offered to provide any info for the complaint with ICASA. Of course we don't publish everything on these forums..

Also, we never said we would back bill, it is one of the options that an ISP could take. It is also a warning to all users that it could be possible that an ISP will change their policies to protect themselves.

As far as the definition of abuse. If you pay for R30 of petrol, and then pump R100 (knowingly) because the guy at the pump isn't watching you and then you drive off. You have paid for petrol, but you took more than you paid for. Would you be stealing?

If you are down to your last few hundred megs and then you knowingly download as much as possible in order to get it before being capped, that would be abusing the system, If you happen to go over a few hundred meg with normal use, then that would not be abuse. Is the system fair? no. Do the ISP's control the system? no. Do the clients control the system? no. Who does? TELKOM.

We don't blame the users, clients, customers.. for this. However, there are many that would try to take advantage of the system and the ISP would be stuck with the bill. Imagine, 20 ADSL clients using 5GB above the cap, that would be 100GB of non-billable traffic by the ISP. Do the math, that is almost R6k plus VAT that the ISP would have to pay. How long will ISP's allow this to happen and continue to offer ADSL? Not long..

The system needs a fix, but as an ISP, we won't take the risk and provide ADSL via our own RADIUS. We will be forced to use Telkom/SAIX until something changes.
 
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paarlberg said:
As far as the definition of abuse. If you pay for R30 of petrol, and then pump R100 (knowingly) because the guy at the pump isn't watching you and then you drive off. You have paid for petrol, but you took more than you paid for. Would you be stealing?
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Maybe, but at a petrol pump, you can see that you go over and by how much every step of the way.

The point is that a way must be implemented that would allow users to check their usage in realtime, or close to real time. How must the average person check their usage? Most users only knows that he have X Gb of data to use, and can check once a day what he used the previous day. They don't know how to check continiously what he/she is using.

As long as this issue is not sorted out, users can't be held responsible alone. They must be given the tools to monitor themselfs.
 
arf9999 said:
Why does there have to be an session timeout in order to measure usage?
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Cause they use the Radius Stop Records to calculate traffic usage. These records are only generated at session end (disconnect).
 
arf9999 said:
Why does there have to be an session timeout in order to measure usage?
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I think that is the question everyone wants aswered, just nobody seems to have asked it directly yet.

I know it's not exactly the same thing, but the Nukecap VPN is able to disconnect you when you hit your "cap" with them, why can't telkom do the same? Surely the logs could be processed on the fly, but then again I wouldn't like to see the load 100K queries to the logs would generate.
 
Roman4604 said:
Cause they use the Radius Stop Records to calculate traffic usage. These records are only generated at session end (disconnect).
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surely there is a more elegant solution that allows for on-the-fly monitoring
 
Acct-Interm-Updates yes. Sends a 'snapshot' of your usage as often as they configure it to do so (even every second if they MUST). They simply don't WANT to.
 
arf9999 said:
surely there is a more elegant solution that allows for on-the-fly monitoring
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Unfortunately RADIUS cannot "disconnect" a user so even if Telkom's server supported frequent accounting updates the ISP would not be able to do anything.
 
Gangrel said:
I think that is the question everyone wants aswered, just nobody seems to have asked it directly yet.

I know it's not exactly the same thing, but the Nukecap VPN is able to disconnect you when you hit your "cap" with them, why can't telkom do the same? Surely the logs could be processed on the fly, but then again I wouldn't like to see the load 100K queries to the logs would generate.
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Because our developer took 10minutes to impliment our own authentication system, I bet telkom can do the same with their huge ass profits.
 
Nonsense

wamatt said:
Unfortunately RADIUS cannot "disconnect" a user so even if Telkom's server supported frequent accounting updates the ISP would not be able to do anything.
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Bullsh1t!

They seem to do a really good job of disconnecting me every twenty four hours. And as of November 1 they will be doing it every twelve!
 
The disconnection is not caused by the RADIUS server, but is instead managed by the routers and like on Telkom's side. Basically when a user connects a query is sent to a RADIUS server (either Telkom's or the RADIUS server of a self-authenticating ISP) for the "settings" for that user. The RADIUS server then responds, either indicating that the user is not a valid user (or the password is invalid, etc.), or alternatively the proper settings for that user (ie. if they are capped, uncapped, etc.). One of the options sent back from the RADIUS server is how long a session is supposed to last (in seconds). At the moment this is set on Telkom's side to 86400 (or 24 hours), however, self authenticating ISP's will in the future have more leeway on this and be able to specify their own timeout periods (but you'll likely never see a timeout greater than 24 hours - simply because daily accounting would be a nightmare otherwise).

Ideally it would be great if we could receive periodic updates as to the bandwidth usage for a user (at least it would make our accounting more accurate), but even then we would be unable to disconnect them when they reach that specific threshold unless we were managing the physical access hardware ourselves (or Telkom provided some way for us to disconnect someone) - until then we're pretty much left in this predicament.
 
Mmhhh...Me not the only one.

Hi All

When we took up this issue with our Telkom rep,we were told no one else complained about the new billing structure...we were the only ones (Telscum - you bastards) - Just as a matter of interest, we are not planning to take this lying down. Telkom will be the only winner should this per usage billing go thru. We are planning to take this as high up as we can...but leave it, NO WAYS. All I can say to the other ISP's doing final authentication...the more complains Icasa gets w.r.t this, the more pressure on Telkom. Paarlberg, don't stop with whatever action you have planned...it can only help towards the end.

Cheers
Proff
 
Acct-Interim-Interval RADIUS attribute can be used to send interim accounting messages at any specified number of seconds. CISCO does seem to support this and I think Telkom is using CISCO equipment. So the ISP can know the client is over his limit, but there is no way with RADIUS to drop them.
It seems there is a xmit-limit and Recv-Limit attribute, but does not seem to be implimented by Cisco, but Telkom is a big enough customer to ask them to impliment it, but it would take quite some time to get it tested and deployed.
 
ICASA report...

Um, just a side note. If i remember correctly, didn't icasa state in their report that telkom was supposed to increase the cap limit?

But yah, otherwise, this is all a load of bull****. Personally i'm considering going the satellite route. Would work out cheaper than the new pricing scheme by far. Fair enough not necesarily as fast. But better than dial-up...
 
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