Telkom Internet changes the way they collect usage stats

[Mze]

Hor$e$hit from Telkom

Ranger, your detailed and explicit response will be greatly appreciated.

Originally Posted by Mze View Post
bonobo_sir,

I have PMed you my details and I look forward to your email giving me my actual usage.

SAIX recording of my May usage commenced May 01 at 07:43:43.
This was as a result of LCP being dropped either by Telkom ADSL or TelkomInternet - I don't know which. Please tell me which part of Telkom was dropping LCP.

The part that supplies the same access services to all ISPs.

So you are saying that Telkom ADSL who supplies access services to all ISPs drops LCP. Please correct my understanding if it is incorrect and do us all the courtesy of giving us the correct information.

At 15:38:49 today I dropped LCP to get SAIX to give me a total usage figure for May. This is 138,108,848 bytes, or 134.871922 MB.

Telkomsa.net ADSL usage tracker still tells me that my May usage is 262.2000 MB as it has been doing all day. Someone in Telkom's development section has managed to now get the graphs working, but they show the rubbish usage of 262.2000 MB.

Hopefully bonobo can confirm your stats to you, but the issues with different reporting periods (SAIX vs telkomsa.net) should be resolved soon.
Please explain to all of us as to what the differences in the reporting periods are.

Reviewing my ADSL usage from when it started on February 9, with very poor line quality, LCP was dropping because of line quality but the SAIX stats refelected session usage reasonably fairly.

Once my circuit had been checked and rewired where needed, my ADSL has worked perfectly at 4096, with LCP being dropped, usually at 24 hour intervals to derive the SAIX stats which were passed on to Telkomsa.net.

Tell us all, what is the procedure going to be from Telkom's side to give us usage stats? Will LCP be dropped as has been done in the very recent past?

You should not see a significant change.
You make no attempt whatsoever to answer the question! I repeat, what is the procedure going to be from Telkom's side to give us usage stats? Will LCP be dropped as has been done in the very recent past?

There are several ICASA requirements which Telkom ignores:

Subscribers that have reached the monthly cap shall be allowed to top-up or purchase extra bandwidth without the need to purchase a new account.

This is in the pipeline.
The usual pablum! Please be more explicit. What is in the pipeline? When will we benefit?

Local bandwidth shall not be subject to the cap. the cap shall be increased to a minimum level of 10GigaBytes (GB) per month.

AFAIK, some ISPs abused this in the past, making it no longer economically viable for SAIX (who were left with a large international bandwidth bill and everyone claiming that all their reported usage was local). TelkomInternet is subject to exactly the same issues as all other ISPs using SAIX, so to allow this, would have to let non-abusers subsidise abusers.

Local-only accounts will (or may already do) cater to addressing some user's needs in this respect.

With today's technology, the ability to determine what websites are being accessed, and being able to view content accessed, Telkom should have been able to establish what bandwidth used has been local and what has been International. The fact that Telkom has not been able to implement technology to determine local vs international usage results in the long-suffering paying users paying even more for Telkom's inability to manage bandwidth.

Telkom has full details of all ADSL user accounts so that high end abusers could be capped. Telkom must not penalise the low end users when the high end abusers can be identified and capped before abuse can be perpetrated to the detriment of all. Don't use a shotgun to kill one Mossie and accidently take out the whole flock. Use subtlety and guile to take out the single pirates.

The network operator shall not periodically reset the ADSL service. Any such reset if required for the service maintenance shall be done with a prior notification of at least seven (7) days to the subscribers.

The ADSL service is not reset, each session is started with a session timeout provided to SAIX by the ISP. Tell me about the timeout. How is it implemented or initiated?When the session expires, the ISP will receive the session stop record, and your connection should be re-established by your edge device (DSL modem, router etc.).You are absolutely right. After telkom has dropped LCP, my router uses its built-in intelligence to reconnect. Its a damn good thing that these modems can do this otherwise Telkom would have all paying users without ADSL every morning!

All other service interruptions are (there has been at least one notification for this in the past 2 months) communicated at least 7 days in advance.

We realise that some of the forgoing is beyond your or your department's control, but one of the procedures, such as dropping LCP to gather stats, seems to be squarely in your area.

All an ISP can really influence in this regard is how long the session will be ...
An ISP has no business in determining how long any session will be. It is the user who is paying for a 24/7 service. The ISP, even if it is its royal highness, the almighty Telkom, must respect its paying users. Telkom must remember that its recently departed chief executive had customer centricty as one of his objectives.

Random dropping of LCP to collect usage data is a procedure NOT to be followed as it can compromise automatic software and operating system updating processes.

Sessions termination is never random.
Would you and whoever you wish to assist or guide you, please analyse my ADSL sessions and explain how my LCP induced timeouts are part of some logical plan?

Please elucidate the procedures that will be followed in this new method of calculating daily usage, daily emailing of usage to users, and what will happen when users reach their cap.

The biggest change is less delay between your real usage, and what the tracker reports (and when you are capped).
You are adept at skirting and avoiding giving direct and explicit answers. The question was, "Please elucidate the procedures that will be followed in this new method of calculating daily usage, daily emailing of usage to users, and what will happen when users reach their cap?" A simple kindergarten approach will be appreciated. For example, how is my daily usage going to be determined while keeping my sessions up uninterruptably 24/7, month in and month out?

 

[eremos]

The ADSL service is not reset, each session is started with a session timeout provided to SAIX by the ISP.

What's the maximum session timeout SAIX will support?
If higher than 24 hours, why is TI requesting a 24 hour reset?
Will this change now that capping can be done at any time?

I realise you represent TI and not Telkom ADSL, but
Can you tell me if the ability to get usage in real time is new to SAIX or if it has been around for a while?
Do you know if any other ISPs have implemented or are planning to implement similar policies, thus again negating the need for the 24 hour timeout from their end?

Many thanks, and sorry for the bombardment of questions. I know it can't be entirely unexpected.

 

[pretdsl]

Yeah tough life - unlimited 4Mb/s DSL and all the toys I can play with

Yeah, they say most rapes are commited by someone the victim knows (re:bandwidth usage being called raping)

On a serious note, is it not possible to have capped users connect at a dialup speed, even at an elementary 28.8 kbps modem speed...the hard cut-off is really harsh.

 

[OZiRiS]

lol this month i was capped after a couple of hours downloading with my telkom account.

So ya. Im canceling it too..

It didnt eve wait 24 hours, it kicked me off long before that ( around 3 hours)

 

[iamgoku]

This is my usage "bill" I received @06h00 2007-05-03

Uploaded : 388MB or [0.37GB]
Downloaded : 2.97GB
Combined total : 3.35GB
Service threshold : 3.00GB
Percentage used : 111.66%

I'm still online but for how long I don't know.

 

[ranger]

What's the maximum session timeout SAIX will support?

24 hours.

I realise you represent TI and not Telkom ADSL, but
Can you tell me if the ability to get usage in real time is new to SAIX or if it has been around for a while?

It is not realtime per se, but it has been possible for a fair amount of time for the ISP to ask to receive accounting updates at intervals lower than the session timeout. However, whether the ISP has the infrastructure to support this or not is another question. Obviously the lower the interval, the more accurate accounting can be, and the more resources are required to do so.

Do you know if any other ISPs have implemented or are planning to implement similar policies, thus again negating the need for the 24 hour timeout from their end?

I can't answer anything beyond TI.

 

[eremos]

24 hours.

Okay, so if I were to log a fault saying "I get disconnected every 24 hours" would TI just tell me to wait 2 minutes for my router to reconnect? Or would they take the issue to SAIX to get the maximum session timeout increased (or scrapped altogether)?

There are many applications that get interrupted even in the time it takes my router to reconnect and especially if a new IP is assigned (it happens) and I feel that "it happens, deal with it" isn't really an appropriate response.

Thanks for your feedback.

 

[ldmelsa]

This is my usage "bill" I received @06h00 2007-05-03

Uploaded : 388MB or [0.37GB]
Downloaded : 2.97GB
Combined total : 3.35GB
Service threshold : 3.00GB
Percentage used : 111.66%

I'm still online but for how long I don't know.

You used allot in a short amount of time. You should be more like me.
Here's my one:

[noparse]A friendly notification that according to our records your online usage as at [2007-5-3 00:00:01] reflected the following:

Username : [email protected]
Uploaded : 450KB or [0.00GB]
Downloaded : 1MB or [0.00GB]
Combined Total : 2MB or [0.00GB]
Service threshold : 2.00GB
Percentage used : 0.09%[/noparse]

 

[ranger]

So you are saying that Telkom ADSL who supplies access services to all ISPs drops LCP. Please correct my understanding if it is incorrect and do us all the courtesy of giving us the correct information.

Yes.

You make no attempt whatsoever to answer the question! I repeat, what is the procedure going to be from Telkom's side to give us usage stats? Will LCP be dropped as has been done in the very recent past?

I was under the impression users on this forum were intimately familiar with the previous implementation. An ISP cannot request a session timeout of greater than 24 hours. We are not changing the session timeout, but have now started requesting more frequent accounting updates. The accounting updates are (as before) inserted directly into a database, however, capping is now done directly off the same database (and not batched as it was before). This means that usage displayed to the user (on the tracker) and capping will be a lot more accurate (and not delayed by ~24 hours).

The usual pablum! Please be more explicit. What is in the pipeline? When will we benefit?

Top-up. However, you must understand that I can't give any details on when. The entire change requires a lot of work, to ensure that all the tools are available and have been tested, but work on the infrastructure required to make top-up work has been in progress for a while.

With today's technology, the ability to determine what websites are being accessed, and being able to view content accessed, Telkom should have been able to establish what bandwidth used has been local and what has been International.

Yes, SAIX should have been less naive, and maybe not offered uncapped local access from the start ...

Be aware that bandwidth accounting taking into account source/destination matching is not trivial, even doing it for a 200mb pipe requires significant hardware and storage (as the guys at TeNet for example).

The fact that Telkom has not been able to implement technology to determine local vs international usage results in the long-suffering paying users paying even more for Telkom's inability to manage bandwidth.

SAIX could always put in the infrastructure required to do this, but to offset the cost ... initially there would be almost no benefit.

Telkom must not penalise the low end users when the high end abusers can be identified and capped before abuse can be perpetrated to the detriment of all.

That's exactly what we (TI) are doing at present ...

Tell me about the timeout. How is it implemented or initiated?

The ISP sends the session timeout back to SAIX in the response to the authentication request. I assume the edge devices set an expiry time, and drop the connection when that time is reached. This is similar to the way calls on some pre-paid plans are dropped at one hour ...

You are absolutely right. After telkom has dropped LCP, my router uses its built-in intelligence to reconnect. Its a damn good thing that these modems can do this otherwise

... they would be doing the people who had bought the device a disservice by not implications of RFC 2516 into account.

An ISP has no business in determining how long any session will be. It is the user who is paying for a 24/7 service.

The ISP may prevent abuse of the advertised service, as long as it is providing the service that is advertised. Note that many ISP services include statements of what the service will provide and what constitutes abuse (e.g. spammer's may have their service terminated immediately).

Would you and whoever you wish to assist or guide you, please analyse my ADSL sessions and explain how my LCP induced timeouts are part of some logical plan?

Note that there are other possible reasons for an LCP drop (you get them on dialup ...) than a session timeout. One of our testers has such bad line quality on his home DSL line that his average session time was under an hour (even though we had sent a 24 hour session timeout).

So, while session timeouts are not random, the session being dropped can be.

The question was, "Please elucidate the procedures that will be followed in this new method of calculating daily usage, daily emailing of usage to users, and what will happen when users reach their cap?" A simple kindergarten approach will be appreciated. For example, how is my daily usage going to be determined while keeping my sessions up uninterruptably 24/7, month in and month out?

As noted above, the session timeout will not be changed (and, we can't increase it), but we will now get updates on your usage (interim updates) every hour. These updates will be added (as-is) to an accounting database, and immediately update your usage for the month. The usage for the month for a session that spans the month-end will be pro-rata'ed, (so if you did 120MB in 24 hours, and your session ended at 01h00, we will count that as 5MB for the new month and 115 for the previous). However, the display of the raw sessions doesn't take into account day or month - just when the session started (in SAIX's case, and hopefully on our tracker now) or ended (as it was on our tracker yesterday morning). The tracker is supposed to now display what we take your usage for the month to be (the value that is used for capping) as well.

 

[Mze]

Thank you

Ranger,
Your response is very much appreciated and should take the heat out of many perceptions that exist about Telkom.

I sent this PM to bonobo_sir with User ID details so that he can get back to me with information requested.

Perhaps you can shed some light on the differences?

I cannot understand the stats I am getting on my ADSL usage.

There are differences between:
The email I get from Telkom on daily usage
What is reported by the graphs on Telkomsa.net Usage tracker
and SAIX

Day 1 of May is reported as follows:
Email---------------Upload 10 -------Download 111 -------Total 122
Telkomsa.net Graph--Upload 18.6827 --Download 243.5173 --Total 262.2000
SAIX----------------Upload 15.878072 Download 122.230776 Total 138.108848

Please explain these differences and advise which one is correct.

Are the emailed figures already correctly reflecting usage figures where 1K = 1024 bytes?

The telkomsa.net figures are not corrected daily, but the cumulative total has been adjusted where 1 k = 1024 bytes.

Where there is direct correlation on any day between telkomsa.net and SAIX figures, I find I have to divide the SAIX figure by 1.048 to get it to be approximately the same as the telkomsa.net figure. This very curious and I would be very interested as to why this is so.
Both the telkomsa.net and the SAIX figures then both have to be divided by 1.024 to get the correct daily MB usage.

I did not thank you for your last response. Thank you for that, and I look forward to your response to the above questions.

 

[///MoH]

Ok ok......... so that means i wont get more than 3gig on my 3gig acc ? Wat happened to bein capped at 6?

Anyway guess i shall be jumping ship.... not liking the way telkom is rocking the boat

But now which other ISP's hav softcaps which allow u to go over than your intended cap ?

And i only got my TI acc for like 3 days now lol... o well

O and guys one more thing ?

Which ISP would u guys recommend with a 5gig cap ?
Im on a 384k line