regulations note on telkom website

[Roman4604]

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?

Thinking about it again, I believe Telkom's quoted contention ratio does not refer to the IP part of their network at all.

I'm guessing their quoted ratio (like most other broadband providers globally) only refers to the access concentration part of their network, basically their DSLAMs. For every 20Mbps of customer access capacity into a DSLAM, they provide 1Mbps from it to the IP network. At least this is resonably easy to verify, but will it ensure customers get fair performance for their money on the IP side ... no.

The sad fact is that Telkom would be complying with the latest ADSL regulations, as all they state is "6.1 Telkom, SNO and ISPs shall publish on its website the contention ratio as a commitment to good business practice". Unfortuantely our regulator is very naive wrt. the underlying technicalities of broadband provision and as such have not defined where contention should be measured, the methodology used or calculations required.

So ya, my gut feel would be they are largely meaningless (from an end-to-end service point of view).

 

[kilo39]

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.

Thanks Roman4604: that gives a clearer picture of the reality.

For interest I looked at:

http://www.apnic.net/db/ranges.html
and
http://www.proxyserverprivacy.com/ipaddress_range.php

I suppose it gets even more complex when we have SA sites hosted overseas (what are they local or international??!)

Ja, I think we should just have no caps 'cause they will never get this right.

 

[Syndyre]

I suppose it gets even more complex when we have SA sites hosted overseas (what are they local or international??!)

International, what matters is where the server is physically located, not the domain or target audience etc.

 

[Roman4604]

Ja, I think we should just have no caps 'cause they will never get this right.

Yep we can all dream of the day we dont have to worry about caps (at a reasonable price). It would certainly solve a lot of headaches for the tech guys, but I dont think it would fly with their beancounters.