Sign up with GoogleNB: These are not official minutes, details are summarized, and I'm writing this from my notes (and my handwriting sucks, and my Sentech pen stopped working [xx(] ) So please remember: E&OE and YMMV. Please take these notes as informational and incomplete, I'm not going to get into a debate about strategy and methods.
Date: 4 Sept;
Venue: Sentech offices, Fourways.
Attendees: About 10 MyWi users plus 1 observer, representatives from ST departments including Marketing, PR, Customer Service, Technical, Legal (No representative from Finance), Two external facilitators.
Key Issues discussed:
1. Bandwidth
As this is the key issue that I'm sure everyone wants to know about, I'll start here.
What happened in May?
Sentech's explanation:
When the MyWi service started, Sentech used their total pool of bandwidth and assigned bw to users of all their services from this pool: this included MyWi, InfoSat, VSTAR etc. They found that the MyWi users were impacting on the other services (it wasn’t said but between the lines it seems as if the open proxies may also have created problems here). In order to reduce this impact the MyWi users were put into a separate smaller pool, this was done at the beginning of May, which coincides with he period that the service degraded. It also seems that during this period, for some technical reason (which I don’t personally understand), users with lower latency got preference in terms of bw. Hence some people (noone for example) were receiving 90%+ of package, while others were receiving very little. The “fix” that was undertaken in August was supposed to correct this situation. The “fix” consisted of the following, Hardware upgrades of certain nodes, software upgrades of certain equipment, additional peering, and the installation of a new bw management system. The new bw management system works as follows: a separate pool of bandwidth is created for each package 128, 256, 512. The available bandwidth for each package is dynamically allocated to each active user (I.P.) equally within that package. i.e. If there is 2Mb/s available for 512 package users (NB this is just for clarity- I don’t know what the actual numbers are), and there are 10 active IPs of 512 package users, the available bandwidth for each user will be 2Mb/s divided by 10. Each user will therefore have around 200kb/s international bw – whether they are using all of it or not.
Our Response:
This is the actual problem, everyone is getting equal bandwidth in a package, no matter what each user requires. This is bw sharing and not contention. It basically means that a user will never get close to the maximum bandwidth, as long as many other users are online – no matter what their real demand for bw is. A power downloader will be assigned the same bw as someone who is just downloading a web page. A keep-alive ping alone will mean that bandwidth is allocated to the IP address, even if it is not required. A demand was tabled that Sentech investigate this immediately, and institute the correct contention based allocation of bw. From what was said in the meeting it does seem that they do have enough international bw.
End of part 1.
Part 2 to follow when I get some time to type…
MW128, Tower <b>60</b>(Northpark Plaza), Signal:16%,S-N-L: 7, BER: 45%
Date: 4 Sept;
Venue: Sentech offices, Fourways.
Attendees: About 10 MyWi users plus 1 observer, representatives from ST departments including Marketing, PR, Customer Service, Technical, Legal (No representative from Finance), Two external facilitators.
Key Issues discussed:
1. Bandwidth
As this is the key issue that I'm sure everyone wants to know about, I'll start here.
What happened in May?
Sentech's explanation:
When the MyWi service started, Sentech used their total pool of bandwidth and assigned bw to users of all their services from this pool: this included MyWi, InfoSat, VSTAR etc. They found that the MyWi users were impacting on the other services (it wasn’t said but between the lines it seems as if the open proxies may also have created problems here). In order to reduce this impact the MyWi users were put into a separate smaller pool, this was done at the beginning of May, which coincides with he period that the service degraded. It also seems that during this period, for some technical reason (which I don’t personally understand), users with lower latency got preference in terms of bw. Hence some people (noone for example) were receiving 90%+ of package, while others were receiving very little. The “fix” that was undertaken in August was supposed to correct this situation. The “fix” consisted of the following, Hardware upgrades of certain nodes, software upgrades of certain equipment, additional peering, and the installation of a new bw management system. The new bw management system works as follows: a separate pool of bandwidth is created for each package 128, 256, 512. The available bandwidth for each package is dynamically allocated to each active user (I.P.) equally within that package. i.e. If there is 2Mb/s available for 512 package users (NB this is just for clarity- I don’t know what the actual numbers are), and there are 10 active IPs of 512 package users, the available bandwidth for each user will be 2Mb/s divided by 10. Each user will therefore have around 200kb/s international bw – whether they are using all of it or not.
Our Response:
This is the actual problem, everyone is getting equal bandwidth in a package, no matter what each user requires. This is bw sharing and not contention. It basically means that a user will never get close to the maximum bandwidth, as long as many other users are online – no matter what their real demand for bw is. A power downloader will be assigned the same bw as someone who is just downloading a web page. A keep-alive ping alone will mean that bandwidth is allocated to the IP address, even if it is not required. A demand was tabled that Sentech investigate this immediately, and institute the correct contention based allocation of bw. From what was said in the meeting it does seem that they do have enough international bw.
End of part 1.
Part 2 to follow when I get some time to type…
MW128, Tower <b>60</b>(Northpark Plaza), Signal:16%,S-N-L: 7, BER: 45%
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