regulations note on telkom website

[silversurfer]

Not sure if this has been highlighted and discussed yet:

http://www.telkom.co.za/athome/products/dsl/home_faq.html#adsl

ADSL regulations

ADSL regulations as per Government Gazette no:29141


On 17 August 2006 the Authority's regulations on the provisioning of ADSL services was published in Government Gazette 29141 (Notice 1112 of 2006).

The regulations require some changes in the manner in which services are currently being provided.

One of the areas where Telkom needs to comply is that the contention ratio for its ADSL service should be published. The contention ratio for ADSL is 20:1. Contention ratios are an international norm and all ISP's make use of it. The contention ratio does not remain constant as it fluctuates as the service grows and more customers and infrastructure are added.

Another regulation that we are in compliance with is that Telkom shall publish updated information on ADSL-enabled exchanges in the white pages of the telephone directory or electronic directory. Telkom is in full compliance with this requirement as customers can access Telkom's exchange checker on the Telkom website found by clicking on the Exchange Checker click through above.

 

[kaspaas]

One of the areas where Telkom needs to comply is that the contention ratio for its ADSL service should be published. The contention ratio for ADSL is 20:1. Contention ratios are an international norm and all ISP's make use of it. The contention ratio does not remain constant as it fluctuates as the service grows and more customers and infrastructure are added.

What are they trying to tell us here: The contention ratio is 20:1 at some times but could change without notice or compensation to those adversely affected to 200:1?

 

[dominic]

..selective mention of those few regs which they have managed to get into place with no mention of the others.....

 

[bekdik]

..selective mention of those few regs which they have managed to get into place with no mention of the others.....

Remind us again of the ones missing.

I recollect things like

No local cap
30 days installation time

 

[stoke]

Thanks silver.

 

[silversurfer]

im moving house.. and thus need to organize a new adsl line in my new place... omg i have been on the phone with these retards about 10times in the last 2days, EVERYtime i pickup something else wrong with my order, it changes everytime i call them to confirm something.

Its the most frustrating thing on the planet. I just know between cancelling my old line and putting in the new one, there WILL be a f#ckup somewhere, and i will be the one paying for it.

 

[silversurfer]

What are they trying to tell us here: The contention ratio is 20:1 at some times but could change without notice or compensation to those adversely affected to 200:1?

yup.. what exactly is the point of publicizing a contention ratio, if its not static.

 

[bekdik]

yup.. what exactly is the point of publicizing a contention ratio, if its not static.

So that they can say they complied with ICASA. No other reason.

The fact that the information is wrong and misleading is unimportant.

 

[Cara]

im moving house.. and thus need to organize a new adsl line in my new place... omg i have been on the phone with these retards about 10times in the last 2days, EVERYtime i pickup something else wrong with my order, it changes everytime i call them to confirm something.

Its the most frustrating thing on the planet. I just know between cancelling my old line and putting in the new one, there WILL be a f#ckup somewhere, and i will be the one paying for it.

We had same problem and even when we manage to the right order the chap did the wrong thing

Asked him what was on the form and it said upgrade so we asked him why he was disconnecting and said he didn't know but still wanted to do it. Needless to say it took a few frantic calls to stop the nutter from disconnecting us

 

[Roman4604]

What are they trying to tell us here: The contention ratio is 20:1 at some times but could change without notice

No network provider can guarentee exact contentions when their network is in a constant state of growth. Good planning can only take you so far, however regional uptake will sometimes temporarily overtake capacity thereby altering the contention ratio until infrastructure deployment catches up.

Without a crystal ball, or a promise from customers that they will collectively space out their services applications uniformly over the year, it bound to happen.

No local cap

This one will probably have a time lag to it. Due to the extensive technical re-engineering required it cant just happen overnight. As I've mentioned in another thread Telkom have to move from their current Radius based traffic accounting architecture (which cannot distinguish local/intl at point of collection) to one based on (probably) Netflow.

This is no trivial task, besides the cost, the complexity of change has great potential to destabilize the network without proper integration testing. Unfortunately network stability will always be the primary concern, so we may have to wait a bit for this one.

30 days installation time

This is probably the most difficult one. No matter how much staff you have there will always logistical & enviromental factors delaying an installation ... they will always have terms & conditions associated with the 30 day period.

 

[Syndyre]

. Due to the extensive technical re-engineering required it cant just happen overnight. As I've mentioned in another thread Telkom have to move from their current Radius based traffic accounting architecture (which cannot distinguish local/intl at point of collection) to one based on (probably) Netflow.

Of course they could just make all connections uncapped and relieve themselves of this problem.

 

[kilo39]

This one will probably have a time lag to it. Due to the extensive technical re-engineering required it cant just happen overnight. As I've mentioned in another thread Telkom have to move from their current Radius based traffic accounting architecture (which cannot distinguish local/intl at point of collection) to one based on (probably) Netflow.

Well I know what they'd say elsewhere: tough, telkoms problem. If they are the primary and cannot conform then we should have no caps at all until they can differentiate local from international.

(... and I know I'm probably being simplistic but how difficult is it to separate one country's IP range from another; especially if you are only looking for one, ie, us?)

 

[arf9999]

No network provider can guarentee exact contentions when their network is in a constant state of growth. Good planning can only take you so far, however regional uptake will sometimes temporarily overtake capacity thereby altering the contention ratio until infrastructure deployment catches up.

Yes and no. On a regional backbone basis this is probably true, i.e. it could happen that the uptake in a particular region overtakes the links for that region and the local contention ratio is temporarily higher until the links can be upgraded. [edit: For the record, I don't think that this is an issue for Telkom atm.]

However this is only half the story. When people are asking about contention ratios from an internet provider, they are usually asking about the outgoing internet bandwidth of the supplier, and it is fairly easy for Telkom to plan to keep the contention ratios for this across all ADSL subscribers at under 20:1. What they also don't mention is whether their contention ratio is fixed for international and local bandwidth.

[edit2: Telkom will pro'ly argue that the contention of internet access is the responsibility of the ISP...}

 

[Roman4604]

how difficult is it to separate one country's IP range from another; especially if you are only looking for one, ie, us?

Very, as there is no country to IP range correlation. Not sure what the exact figure is, but in their most summarised form, SA runs ~1000 IP ranges.

So for every user's traffic you have to check every conversation (flow) to see whether the source or destination are within the ~1000 SA ranges. If so discard the traffic count, if not add to the intl only cap. And this has to be done in near-real-time as you use this traffic info to determine whether a user is currently capped at login time.

Now scale this processing to the present 150-200K concurrent ADSL logins. Even worse scale it to the potential 1M+ concurrent ADSL logins the traffic accounting system will have to cater for. The amount of flows/sec they're going to have to process will be quite serious.

Not so easy peasy.

 

[Roman4604]

What they also don't mention is whether their contention ratio is fixed for international and local bandwidth.

Even here the contention ratios are an approximation at best. The reality is there isnt a single in/out pipe from SAIX's network to local and international. There are multiples paths, even internationally ... http://www.saix.net/diagrams/ipnet_aug2006.pdf.

So lets say some desirable content which everyone wants to get to is released in the US. So for a period SAIX's US links are hammered (i.e. effectively running more than 20:1 contention) while the London links are relatively quite (i.e running at effective 10:1 contention).

There is no holy grail to ensuring precise contention ratios (economically).

 

[dominic]

Roman - any ideas on where telkom would be calculating this contention ratio?

would it be fair to say that it would be
(a) impossible to disprove the published ratio?
(b) impossible to publish a contention ratio other than as a summary over the entire universe of network users?

 

[Roman4604]

Roman - any ideas on where telkom would be calculating this contention ratio?

would it be fair to say that it would be
(a) impossible to disprove the published ratio?
(b) impossible to publish a contention ratio other than as a summary over the entire universe of network users?

Its impossible at a technical/practical level ... there is potential contention on every outbound interface of ever network device (router/switch) along the multitue of paths your packets happen to take.

I would assume the only way to calculate it would be via some theoretical model ...

National = sum(capacity of all ADSL lines sold) : sum(capacity of all SA peering links)

International = sum(capacity of all ADSL lines sold) : sum(capacity of all international peering links)

This is obviously external contention and would not cover internal network contention e.g. paths between JHB & CTN or SAT3/SAFE paths between Telkom's POPs in SA & the ones in US, UK & HK.

 

[dominic]

Its impossible at a technical/practical level ... there is potential contention on every outbound interface of ever network device (router/switch) along the multitue of paths your packets happen to take.

I would assume the only way to calculate it would be via some theoretical model ...

National = sum(capacity of all ADSL lines sold) : sum(capacity of all SA peering links)

International = sum(capacity of all ADSL lines sold) : sum(capacity of all international peering links)

This is obviously external contention and would not cover internal network contention e.g. paths between JHB & CTN or SAT3/SAFE paths between Telkom's POPs in SA & the ones in US, UK & HK.

excellent thank you

would you regard the regulation in its current form as meaningless / largely meaningless at least until there is a uniformly implemented methodology for the calculation of a range of contention ratios? it seems that otherwise we just have another way to mislead consumers with estimates that cannot be proved or disproved as opposed to a potentially useful basis for comparison...

i am not too clued on how this is done in other jurisdictions but get the impression that forced publication of rations can be an effective consumer empower and service differentiator - any ideas on how this is achieved?

 

[bekdik]

@Roman
Not to shoot the messenger, but ...

Your explanations cover the world from Telecom's eyes. The regulator having created the rules needs to be obeyed.

As mentioned by Syndyre, if they can't comply with no local cap, then they should remove all caps until they can. They should not make their problems everybody else's.

As far as contention goes, if they can't control it to 20:1, then they should state the upper limit of what it could be.

 

[arf9999]

Its impossible at a technical/practical level ... there is potential contention on every outbound interface of ever network device (router/switch) along the multitue of paths your packets happen to take.

I would assume the only way to calculate it would be via some theoretical model ...

National = sum(capacity of all ADSL lines sold) : sum(capacity of all SA peering links)

International = sum(capacity of all ADSL lines sold) : sum(capacity of all international peering links)

This is obviously external contention and would not cover internal network contention e.g. paths between JHB & CTN or SAT3/SAFE paths between Telkom's POPs in SA & the ones in US, UK & HK.

This is what I was trying to get at in my post... sorry if it wasn't clear. I think dominic may be correct tho', it would be best if there was some type of standard methodology of calculating the CR else any statement by the supplier cannot be proven or disproven..