Please try to get over the concept that business users consume most of the bandwidth in SA. That's so Y2K!
A million users sitting at home downloading images, videos and MP3s at 4Mbps, will need a lot more bandwidth from international sites, than a million office workers who upload numbers and text to mostly local databases. In case you have forgotten, most people who work, produce things, not consume bandwidth from 8am to 5pm.
The people who are using bandwidth are people like youselves (plural), who think that off-peak times nobody else is doing any downloads, so therefore everything can go faster. Sorry, wrong! The only times when there is little usage is between midnight and 6am, as any traffic graph will show:
JINX:
http://stats.jinx.net.za/
TENET-SEACOM:
http://monitor.net.tenet.ac.za/cacti/graph_view.php?action=tree&tree_id=6&leaf_id=874
End of rant (nothing personal...)
//Rant on
I know Jinx and Tenet probably doesnt reflect actual usage on the mweb network.. but lets take it to be true.
It is a given that at least 90% of the uncapped users is still trying to download 24hours of the day(until they manage to saturate their requirements for the past 10 years of capped internet). This means their pc's is almost constantly requesting the data. Mweb routers currently then see this request and then assigns it to the un-prioritized pool, thereby causing the speeds we are experiencing. After hours(ie after 12am) they probably relax this and/or increase the size of the low priority pool
My problem with this is, is that should proper shaping be in place, we should have seen a constant line of usage all the time. certain percentage of this usage would then have been data(low priority) and the rest http/email (higher priority), pending the time of day.
I am going to provide an example of one of our customers (which can be taken into context with south African internet). We supply satellite data links for customers, and then provide interface systems for those customers to allow providing a constant level of service.
One customer have a hub station in Capetown, which serves as the "source" (Europe if compared with Seacom/South-Africa). This hub station has a 512kbps link over satellite, which provides voice(lets compare that to HTTP/Email in context) and data services(data stays data in context) to the remote. Data is allowed via a 512kbps ADSL circuit interfaced via a router at the HUB.
This link is also used to supply voice, since no other means of communication is available (except via very expensive satellite phones).
I then used the hardware available to me to give the guys a quality of service. Keep in mind that we have 20 okes sitting at the VERY remote site, so the possibility is/was very good that they will abuse the poor 512kbps internet link to death. I was able to split and prioritize traffic via prioirty, to allow the guys to make voice calls when required (lets compare this to opening an http page), and download data all the time without experiencing a constant limit based on the time of day.
This means that whenever i pull the statistics from our equipment i notice that the data traffic is utilizing the
full capacity available 24hrs of the day. The moment i initiate a voice call to the customer(which takes ~30kbps for the first call and then 8kbps for the second/third calls), the data bandwidth is reduced to 470kbps,allowing the 30kbps of prioritized voice traffic to continue un-hurt. Once the voice call is completed (/http page opened when comparing), the system restores full capacity for the other non prioritized services.
I accomplish this via port prioritization (ie certain ports for the voice traffic classified as high), and other ports for data(in my case i just moved all unknown data to a lower priority.
Since this service (QOS) has been available on a lot of routers for a very long time, i am surprised to see this kind of limitation being implemented by MWEB. I understand an on-the fly calculation of requirements will take alot of routing power etc, but i am sure Cisco has a long time released routers capable of this kind of power.
I certainly hope that we will see proper QOS in the future, which i don't think should be that difficult since they have proven already that they can shape all downloads to death. I am sure alot of Cisco boffins out there can confirm this possiblity.
/Rant off
) , and i would like to know if that was normal.
) *wanted to give myself good internet for my birthday present*
