ISP with own ADSL Authentication be warned

LaRoosTa I would say you're being highly presumptuous when it comes to what the ISP's are trying to do, unfortunately Telkom tends to be very steadfast in their plans. We, as well as numerous other ISP's no doubt, have been attempting to negotiate with them before the prices were announced and especially more-so since the prices were announced, and they have effectively stated that they will not negotiate with regards to better pricing.

We've spoken to them about the matter of timeouts and the like, and while self-authenticating ISP's will have finer control of when a timeout occurs (something that does not happen at the moment) you are unlikely to ever see a timeout that is greater than 24 hours (as it would make accurate accounting a nightmare). I feel the 12 hour timeout is Telkom's response to this, which in essence does reduce the problem slightly (as now one can check twice throughout the course of the day whether an account is capped or not). Unfortunately as a wholesaler ISP, one does not have control over the network (not like Telkom does), and as such we cannot "force" disconnects, even if we wanted to, there is no "quick install" system that Telkom can just put in to make this work, it would likely require at least some proprietary work, which in turn costs money and takes time.

On fixed-cap accounts you are likely to not be charged extra for usage, as those will remain fixed-rate, so for example a 3GB account will be hard-capped at 3GB and will be flat rate at whatever the price would be for 3GB.

However, you are likely going to see some more "flexible" options, such as usage-based ADSL, etc. which you are definitely going to pay for on usage, so if you use 5GB you pay for 5GB, etc.
 
warichard, I'll ask you as well please since nobody seems to want to tell me and seem to be side stepping the question.. What if I'm downloading a large file and I get reset? Who gives me my Bandwidth back for that wasted usage? I am not talking about P2P here as I hate the use of that like the plague.

Surely there are better ways as stated here than resets?
 
Kalvaer said:
warichard, I'll ask you as well please since nobody seems to want to tell me and seem to be side stepping the question.. What if I'm downloading a large file and I get reset? Who gives me my Bandwidth back for that wasted usage? I am not talking about P2P here as I hate the use of that like the plague.

Surely there are better ways as stated here than resets?
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Use a download manager that supports resuming. And yes there are options better than resets. I'm pushing them daily on it as well as chatting to ISPA and the other ISP's what we can do about it.
 
Kalvaer said:
warichard, I'll ask you as well please since nobody seems to want to tell me and seem to be side stepping the question.. What if I'm downloading a large file and I get reset? Who gives me my Bandwidth back for that wasted usage? I am not talking about P2P here as I hate the use of that like the plague.
Surely there are better ways as stated here than resets?
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Kalver, it pains me to say this, but I think Telkom and the ISP's looks at this point and think - don’t make your problem ours.
At the end of the day, like Paarlberg so proudly states: We are all in it for the money.
Bear in mind that Telkom will do everything possible to make as much money as possible before a SNO or other option comes to life. If ADSL will get better (price-wise and cap-wise) they want to make sure they make as much money as possible out of us before that time comes. Just think about it - say ADSL prices fall by a third in a years time for what ever reason - in theory that means that for the next two years there after that they don’t have to make a sent as they already made that profit in the year leading up.

It’s seems to be obvious that until there’s more options we’re going to be screwed in any way, shape or form possible. Sorry to say, but this will be by Telkom and most ISP’s – money makes the world go round.
 
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wamatt said:
Use a download manager that supports resuming. And yes there are options better than resets. I'm pushing them daily on it as well as chatting to ISPA and the other ISP's what we can do about it.
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Fair enough.. What about if I cant resume? My Fiance is connected via SSH to Jefersons Lab in the USA, and is downloading 1 gig of Research Data for her Masters degree... Half way through she get disconnected?

I Make a video of SA champs wakeboarding, I'm trying to upload the 250 meg file to my website, I get reset.. How will a Download manager help me

I've got 2 gigs worth of Autocad Drawings for a Plant my company is designing, I have to email them to Australia at 1.99 gigs, I get reset.. How will a download Manager help me?

I'm holding thumbs and praying that the ISP's (and what ever you are talking to them about helps) can do something about this as its really unacceptable
 
sh1, we agree that 12 hour resets and resets themselves aren't the best method(s) and that it is unfortunate that this is a part of the service, however, this does not mean that all is lost. As wamatt indicated, there are various download managers (such as GetRight, FlashGet, etc.) which not only improve the speeds when downloading large files by splitting it up across numerous threads, and can resume files half-way (which would be needed), but BitTorrent (and most downloaders for large files these days - except browsers strangely enough) provide this type of functionality. Chances are if you are doing a large download (greater than 30MB I would say) you should be using a download manager.

Unfortunately, if you are in the middle of the download and get disconnected, it is unfortunately not the responsibility of the wholeseller, nor the responsibility of Telkom, as there is a way for the end-user to ensure their usage is not "wasted". There is no way an ISP would absorb the cost for a consumer that had to restart a download, regardless of the reasons for it - that and there is no way for the ISP to corroborate what a user states (as no monitoring of what files and the like are downloaded takes place) so a user could easily take us for a ride stating that they were downloading a 600MB ISO and at 550MB it stopped and had to restart because of the disconnect. There's no way we can look at the numbers and determine whether this is true or not.
 
warichard said:
Chances are if you are doing a large download (greater than 30MB I would say) you should be using a download manager.
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Download managers and Bittorrent is fine when firstly the host support resumes which is not the case in a lot of cases and lots of things are just not available via Bittorrent.
 
Agreed that there are limits, however, a large percentage of hosts these days provide resuming. FTP, HTTP, BitTorrent, DC++, eMule/eDonkey, IRC, etc. all these provide the ability to resume downloads, the only ones that currently have the poorer support would be HTTP, but that is changing and I would say you'll likely see more hosts supporting HTTP resuming than not.
 
warichard said:
Unfortunately, if you are in the middle of the download and get disconnected, it is unfortunately not the responsibility of the wholeseller, nor the responsibility of Telkom, as there is a way for the end-user to ensure their usage is not "wasted".
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As I posted above.. What if you can not resume? What if you are uploading as Posted above.. My Jaw SERIOUSLY hit the floor when I read what you said there warichard.. I can understand that some people can take you for a ride but its not your responsibility for disconnecting me.. NO WAY! What if i'm uploading as well and it takes more than 12 hours? due to bad servers or down routers at the time.. Thats not my fault.. But i'm guessing thats not your responibilty either.. Really I'm still shocked!

Surely everything is logged on your or telkom side. How else did I get given logs of a session and IP address that somebody used from telkom when my account was hacked? I was shown where XXX logged into my account at XXX time, Created session to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX ip for XXX time.. Of course you can check if we are lying or not! Though it would cost time and money to do that i'm sure!
 
warichard said:
Unfortunately, if you are in the middle of the download and get disconnected, it is unfortunately not the responsibility of the wholeseller, nor the responsibility of Telkom, as there is a way for the end-user to ensure their usage is not "wasted".
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There's a lot of unfortunate's in your thread. The unfortunate thing for me and most users is actually the fact that we even have to talk about all of this.

Download managers is not the answer to anything (are you joking?):
1. It can’t be used in all cases of uploading and downloading.
2. For me and you maybe, but what about the other 80% of home users that don’t even have a clue what a download manager is. What about mom and dad that need to download a video or something, send by the little ones from overseas. Are we going to tell them: You should have used a DM? I can already see their answer: I just got round learning what the internet is - what the **** is a DM...

I’m sorry to say, but to me it seems like companies (especially Telkom) are jumping into an idea that some moron came up with, without thinking about what the consequences might be, and without working on a workable solution.
Unfortunately for the time being the consumer is going to pay for that. But I guess that's also not your problem as ISP's, as well as Telkom will be making money out of this.
 
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As a wholeseller the network is unfortunately not our responsibility but instead the responsibility of the provider, in this case SAIX, therefore disconnections, routers and the like are unfortunately not up to us to control and maintain.

It is of course our responsibility to ensure that you can log in at all (as we maintain the actual authentication part of the service) as well as provide accurate accounting and reporting for our users (as again, this is where our responsibilities lie).

The kind of "fidelity" or "granularity" you are looking for is unfortunately not provided. We cannot see files that you download, we cannot see how many files or how much individual data was sent or received. All we get is when a session was formed, what the ID was, the IP, etc. the rest is generally calculated (ie. you get the session length, you know when the session started, and you know when the session ended, etc.). No ISP's provide that kind of fidelity to any wholeseller, hell, I doubt even Telkom monitors things at such a fine level (it would be a nightmare to maintain those kinds of logs anyway). So no, not *everything* is logged - and if it was, people would be up in arms due to the privacy issues it would cause.

This isn't merely a matter of the 12 hour resets, even now, at 24 hour resets, if your service goes down mid-download (and I'm sure it does) there is nothing you can do. Luckily the 12 hour resets will only be with Telkom's service, wholeseller ISP's will now have better control over this and you'll likely see some sticking to 24 hour periods.

Telkom/SAIX provides absolutely no service-level on the ADSL service, it's very much "best effort" and as such we can provide no service levels either (even if it was over own own network or the network of some other major ISP, it would still only be "best effort" as Telkom holds a large portion of the ADSL service).
 
Indeed there are a lot of "unfortunately"'s in the responses as this is an unfortunate circumstance. But there is also an extremely large amount of misinformation and misrepresentation that tends to float around the forums, and it's generally due to misunderstanding of how the system works. We would all love to have the ability to disconnect users at a whim and obtain fine reporting on usage and have the ability to provide fixed IP's and the like, but the reality of the situation is that some of these options are up to Telkom, some of the options are (slowly) becoming available to the wholeseller, and some of these options are impossible (or so difficult to quickly implement as to make them an impossibility).

At the moment there's a lot of wishful thinking on the parts of many people, everyone wishing that this was possible and that was possible. But sometimes one has to come back down to earth and realise that not everything *is* possible.
 
Privacy I can understand.. I've still got all the logs I got sent from telkom when my account was hacked at home.. I'll check them and see how far into detail they all went.

I also do apprecaite the work you are all doing to try get this sorted out though there are so many problems associated with the resets that its not funny anymore. For the ISP or the customer.

Download Managers and My Fiances downloads and my uploads aside. How do you resume a email download or upload? Luckily I guess most people have caps on their email accounts. Though I have one account set up for large drawings files to be sent to. Some of these are about 300 megs. What then?

I know the answer I guess but its still Bull ****. We are not living in the stone ages anymore, there is hardware and software available to handle this all. We the customer can not force telkom to change since 90% of the customers dont know or care. However ALL the ISP's who buy from them do know and you are all our last hope?

Not even Eskom just turns off your power when the want to, They send you letter stating on this and this day we will be offline or reseting breakers X, Y Z, For such and such a period. I'm glad that some ISP will hopefully keep the 24 hour reset. I also hope since nothing can be done about it, researched and at least checked which is the lowest period of use during the day and everyone informed that each day at 3:47 am we reset. At least then we might be able to plan around it
 
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warichard said:
At the moment there's a lot of wishful thinking on the parts of many people, everyone wishing that this was possible and that was possible. But sometimes one has to come back down to earth and realise that not everything *is* possible.
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I agree, like providing a decent ADSL service. Like so many other countries have proved now – almost everything regarding a decent ADSL service *is* not possible.
So consumers just shut up and bent a bit lower – NOW!!

People are not really asking for miracles here, just a solution to a problem that Telkom are creating.
 
Unfortunately the only people that can provide a solution to that problem would be Telkom themselves, and their solution was a 12 hour reset. Is it a good idea? One cannot tell, I personally don't feel it is, but one cannot tell until it happens. The biggest concern for me is not the 12 hour reset, but instead the billing model itself and the pricing thereof, which I feel is far more unreasonable than being disconnected sometime during 12 hours.
 
warichard said:
Unfortunately the only people that can provide a solution to that problem would be Telkom themselves, and their solution was a 12 hour reset. Is it a good idea? One cannot tell, I personally don't feel it is, but one cannot tell until it happens. The biggest concern for me is not the 12 hour reset, but instead the billing model itself and the pricing thereof, which I feel is far more unreasonable than being disconnected sometime during 12 hours.
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Think of it from our point of few (Which I am also sure you do often) The new billing model is a BIG problem, though the new time outs make it ever worse.

Before we had a small chance of lossing conn once a day due to resets. Now that chance has doubled. Due to the billing model this added chance of losing DAMN expensive bandwidth is a MAJOR concern.

Not to the ISP, because well you still get your money regardless. Its the customer that loses each time, There are countless situations I can think of that this will hurt people from a kid who gets 1 hour of playing WoW a night and gets to the end boss and being reset just before he loots that EPIC item he was searching for 9 months for, To people uploading emails, and grandparents using their pension money to get ADSL to get that video of their grand children in the UK and having thier email shut down half way through the download because of it, I can think of tons of sob stories, and even more Critical business related ones.

The billing is a problem.. the time outs just compound the problem. You.. The ISP are the only people who can do anything MAJOR about it. If you all had to turn around as one and say.. STUFF OFF TELKOM! FIX THIS NOW! what would they do.. I'm guess nothing right... So can we at least ask for some form of ky-jelly with our monthly ADSL now?
 
Kalvaer said:
Think of it from our point of few (Which I am also sure you do often) The new billing model is a BIG problem, though the new time outs make it ever worse.
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Absolutely!

The billing is a problem.. the time outs just compound the problem. You.. The ISP are the only people who can do anything MAJOR about it. If you all had to turn around as one and say.. STUFF OFF TELKOM! FIX THIS NOW! what would they do.. I'm guess nothing right... So can we at least ask for some form of ky-jelly with our monthly ADSL now?
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Take this energy and direct it into the regulator. Consumers can get involved too, see Lonegunmans thread. From our side we working on something too and letting this 1Nov stuff go ahead is the very last option on our checklist believe me!
 
I think we all agree that there are major issues with the new structure. However, the ISP is also in a bind. We have to be competitive, while still covering the cost to provide the service. I met with wamatt a few weeks ago in Atlanta and we briefly discussed this (and other things) and we hate it as much as the end user does.. It is a catch 22 for the ISP and end user at this point.. Only Telkom/SAIX will see anything positive from this.

As long as there is a cap, then the resets are going to be there. Remove the cap and the daily resets should/would go away..

I agree that all people (ISP and end users) that don't like it, send a complaint to ICASA and if they get enough complaints from ISP's and end users they will either have to make a decision or ignore it. If they ignore it, then there is a problem that is larger than the November 1 pricing.. Even if they make a decision that is not what you want, then they have done their job in acting as a middleman between the consumer (ISP and end user) and Telkom/SAIX. However, you can still complain about the decision to them and to ask that it is reversed or changed.

When submitting to ICASA, you should address the issue carefully and consider all possible changes that could happen when offering an optional solution. If you don't fully understand the ISP and end user side as it relates to international standards, refrain from comparing to them.. If you fix this part, it might cause other issues that will be as damaging in the long run.
 
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Perhaps less frequent resets would be available on non-caped, pay as you go/unlimited type packages? That may keep paarlberg happy. For most other users we are content to set a timer to force a login so can be sure our drop happens at a time its not going to cause problems.

WA...I hope you will become resellers of the new IS packages? ... and one day once UUNET finally decides what to do will you continue to resell their packages?
Offering all 3 will give your clients a great choice depending on their needs.
Your service levels are so good and it would be convenient to only have to deal with one company for all accounts.
 
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