ISP with own ADSL Authentication be warned

Telkom has been using Redback to terminate PPP sessions, and some of them are still in use. From my understanding they're moving over to CISCO only gear for the DSL termination.

Interim accounting updates would help ISP's to provide more accurate accounting but will not help to disconnect a user that has reached his "cap". A nice way would be for Telkom to allow ISP's to terminate a session using the original session ID. Trivial to do on Redback or Cisco kit, and can be easily implemented using Radius DAE from the self authenticating ISP, to a custom built Telkom radius that's capable of disconnecting clients via either Cisco CLI, or Redback's proprietary protocol.

Needs some development work, which is probably why Telkom won't be doing this. This is just anothe reason why LLU is should be such a big priority. The loop should be unbundled to the point where ISP's can rent DSLAM ports on behalf of their customers from the Telko, and terminate the PPP sessions themselves.

This is what revolutionized ADSL access in the USA. Let Telco's provide the basic infrastructure, and charge for it. Let ISP's do the clever stuff.
 
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proff said:
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
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I got the same reply from our Account Manager - after my constant bitching he even suggested moving our account off his profile as I was simply being "difficult".

Maybe the ISP's on this forum should form an alliance and take the matter up with Telkom collectively - not that it's going to change anything. Only Telkom stands to gain with this new system.

---
Pedantic
www.saol.com
 
I think this issue would be perfect for a court case based around the competition laws. I've been in competition lawsuits before against monster companies (Reuters e.g.) and the small vendor I was working for at the time won. Our issue wasn't even as blatantly obvious as this.

Competition law is there to protect monopolies from nailing small companies playing in the same sphere.

Telkom is a monopoly, no change to that. But SAIX, and the other ISP's are ISP's and in the ISP business SAIX is being given an advantage that the others cannot have.

That is anti-competitive behaviour in my view.
 
VJB 449 said:
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.
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Because they seem to have some kind of non-disclosure clause in their agreements with Telkom.

Telkom is behind the silence, make no mistake!
 
paarlberg said:
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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I will refuse to deal with any ISP that is going to charge me for anything I may use over the cap because they cannot monitor it. I am NOT going to sit at my PC and make sure that I stick to the limit. That is what computers were made for. This situation is so ****en bizarre it is borderline insane! Telkom kicks the ISP's into whichever ball of nerves they like and we end up getting screwed. WTF!

The South African Internet user is getting boxed into an ever tighter box of **** that is simply endless in its restrictions. "Don't do this, you can't do that, we limit you to this and we overprice you for that!"

I have reached my limit a long time ago and Telkom and the silent ISP's need to know that you are dealing with a public that is sick and tired of being bullied, shoved around, abused, raped for money and treated like slaves. We should be king and we are! It is time the ISP's started to realise it! Concider the 1st of November a line in the sand... Whatever happens after that... is entirely up to you... :mad:

PS. I am not picking in Paarlberg here. He is communicating. Good for him! :)
 
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Sorry, bit off the big topic ...

TheRoDent said:
Telkom has been using Redback to terminate PPP sessions, and some of them are still in use
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Never heard of anyone using this equip in S.A ... whose the distributor?

To my knowledge Telkom initially started of with Alcatel BRAS access concentrators to terminate PPP session but these have been totally replaced by Cisco 10000 series ESR routers a while ago.
 
antowan said:
I will refuse to deal with any ISP that is going to charge me for anything I may use over the cap because they cannot monitor it.
PS.
I am not picking in Paarlberg here. He is communicating. Good for him! :)
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No picking taken ;-)

The problem is that you are stuck with TelkomInternet, or an ISP that uses the authentication systems provided by Telkom/SAIX. Which we may consider doing to eliminate the headache for us and our clients. Not to mention, the pricing model is better. The sad thing is we won't be able to offer immediate activation or custom packages. But sure beats someone taking us for a ride, and you know some people will do it just to feel important.

The other option is to limit sessions to 30 minutes or an hour. But that would impact the users and would not exactly be always on.. more like always authenticating. Not something we want to do..

Remember a happy ISP is built with Happy Clients.. The fewer support calls and problems the better for an ISP and client. You don't want to spend all your time and resources dealing with problems, especially ones that are not under your control.
 
Perhaps if there are 10 ISPs complaining, they each have a different account manager, who then has not heard of any of the other complaints and thinks nothing of passing these comments on since he thinks its an isolated complaint. It may be best if all ISPs wrote individualy to someone higher up in Telkom. What about also asking ISPA to make some noise?
 
Further thought, how about all ISPs on this forum put together a list of complaints about the new billing systems and sign a letter together, add to it major points from the myadls forum, some poll results and a petition. MyADSL can publish it and send out press releases, letter to Telkom MD etc etc.
 
You can monitor your usage at http://userstats.adsl.saix.net/. It may not be live, but it's frequent enough that you whining ninnies have nothing to complain about and you can work out your monthly usage quite accurately. If you're doing 10Gb in your last few minutes it is definitely an abuse of the service if you have only paid for 3Gb and should be billed for that.

I'm not arguing the merits of per Gig. Idealy it should be cheap and flexible - If I use 1Gb this month I'm only billed for 1Gb, If I use 10Gb next month, I'm billed for it albeit after the fact, EXACTLY like a contract cell phone.
 
Well Alcatel or Redback it doesnt matter as these units are irrelevant for the Telkom ADSL network going forward as your PPP session (& associated AAA) is going to be terminated by Cisco IOS.

Steering this back to the topic, is the IOS running on Telkoms ESRs technically capable of providing the following for self authenticating ISP ...

1. Realtime accounting stats down to a granularity of say 1 hour or less
2. A mechanism by which the PPP session can be terminated (not reset) at a certain traffic count (injected by Radius) OR enable an IP address re-negotiation in session (doubt it)

Point is can Telkom's infrastructure provide self authenticating ISPs with the tools neccessary to precisely manage their customers. If not then there gonna bleed, if so then they better hurry up, make the changes, and provide it to the ISPs.
 
Every Cisco IOS with L2TP terminating capabilities, and Redback I know of is capable of providing periodic Interim Accounting updates to a radius. The radius will then have to look up the session identifier in it's active session table, and match it up with the account name used to login. From that, the authentication realm can be determined, and the accounting update can be proxied to the authenticating ISP as per normal.

The problem comes in providing the ISP a mechanism to terminate a session. There's no well defined open method for doing that, and it cannot be done by radius. Telkom would need to invent and develop a way to do this efficiently using a standard interface to manage both these disparate systems.

Internet Solutions' assertion during the ICASA hearings that "the session timeout to do accounting is crap" is entirely correct. Modern equipment can handle this easily.
 
Contact details to take this further...

Hi Guys

For those who don't know who to contact but would like to take this further, herewith some contact details of the guys who caused this in the first place:

Kenny Coert: Senior manager, account management Telkom Wholesale
Tel:012-4268906 Fax: 012-4268901 E-mail: [email protected]

OR

Marius Olivier Product manager SAIX Wholesale
Tel:012-4268889 Fax: 012-341 6989 E-mail: [email protected]

Again, I have no problem giving ot their contact details because they have no loyalty towards anybody they do business with.

<Me click send button> There goes our formal complaint to Ispa and Icasa

Give them a hard time guys!!!!!

Proff
 
paarlberg said:
If you buy 3GB and use 10GB, and don't want to pay the difference, I won't even go there..
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With the 10GB limit I can understand an ISP back billing (although I am sure you will get people who fly from ISP to ISP "abusing"). Quite often people can go as much as 700 - 800 meg over without even knowing it. Cell phone providers will stop the traffic in that case (Pay as you go). There are a lot of people who only use 1GB or 2GB and the ISP's will rake it in with those clients.

paarlberg said:
My point in this thread is that SAIX/Telkom can and will allow traffic to go over the cap set by the ISP on its RADIUS, but on SAIX RADIUS the ISP is not billed for it. Also, ISP's should not be financially responsible for clients that will refuse to pay for their usage (as noted by several here) above the cap.
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Telkom should be responsible if they let people go over.

What does concern me is the statement from your initial post:

paarlberg said:
I had originally agreed with some of the ISP's that welcomed the new pricing from Telkom. A great way to offer more specialized services.
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This would explain why ISP's have not been fighting it. I would like to have seen a concerted movement from all ISP threatening action not just acceptance.

Cheers

Dean
 
proff said:
Hi Guys

Marius Olivier Product manager SAIX Wholesale
Tel:012-4268889 Fax: 012-341 6989 E-mail: [email protected]

Proff
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Marius is a decent guy. I have worked with him on several issues. His hands are tied by Telkom's internal crap..
 
mystic said:
Rodent, do you know what Redback equipment Telkom's using? If they're using the SMS 10000 SL (http://www.redback.com/resources/pdf/RB_SMS10000SL_0405.pdf), then I can't see why they can't keep realtime track of bandwidth usage per session?
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Real-time monitoring may be available to Telkom/SAIX. However, whether they will allow an ISP to tap into it or not is a different issue. Will they allow an ISP to control the session or not.

Also, you will have to consider that a user may have multiple accounts that are used on the line. So monitoring by port on the DSLAM is out the window.
 
Ok, I understand that the main question is how ISPs will get control of sessions in order to terminate them when certain subscriber bandwidth limits have been reached.

What I don't understand is the following: Telkom uses Cisco at the edge and the core of the network. Cisco also has products that seem to provide exactly the functionality required to manage the subscriber. From a cursory glance at their web site, they have a product which is called Cisco Subscriber Edge Services Manager SESM (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/netmgtsw/ps4889/products_white_paper09186a0080118815.shtml) which seems to provide all the functionality required for actively managing subscriber sessions.

Is the problem that Telkom isn't using this product or that they're using a mish-mash of different vendor products, such as Cisco at the edge and core, another vendor's Radius product etc and it is therefore not possible to provide this functionality to ISPs out of the box?

Apologies in advance for potentially derailing the thread into technical trivia or for ignorance on my part.
 
While I think Telkom use some of the components in SESM setup (10000 routers & Radius AAA servers), they use them in a less sophisticated way (currently).

The full SESM system looks more like a session & content redirection system like you see at WiFi hotspots. For example if Telkom had SESM you could do the following ....

- Configure your ADSL router with no username or password
- Connection would still be established
- Type in the URL of of any site e.g. www.google.com
- Instead of getting the requested site your browser would be transparently redirected to a 'buy bandwidth page'
- You signup & buy traffic with credit card
- Retype in the original google URL and viola your through
- When your credit (bw) runs out, any request to any site will be redirected back to 'buy bandwidth page' again

These mechanisms could also be used for managing access to paid for networks/content instead of just the Internet.
 
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