TheRodent / Karnaugie? Q

[guest2013-1]

I was thinking the other night (yea, that was me you heard all the way over there, wherever you stay)

Would it be possible to have, lets say 10 Sentech users, run a little proggie on their PC, that allocates unused or idle bandwidth to this "proxy" and then let other users, connect to lets say, mymoerse.proxy.co.za and used whichever bandwidth they can? For instance ADSL users etc

Reason why I had this idea was when I looked at the concept of torrents, and thoughts, hell, if we connected every sentech customer in south africa to a central hub where one can then access it like a proxy, we would have moerse bandwidth.

Or am I just sleep deprived?

Why do you have to "put your two cents in"... but it's only a "penny for your thoughts"? Where's that extra penny going to?

 

[TheRoDent]

Whilst it is a neat idea in theory, and doable in reality (with a lot of clever coding/routing/proxying) there's just one flaw.

Why would I want to give away my hard-paid-for bandwidth? What incentive would anyone have in running such a piece of software on their PC?

At least with torrents, you're sharing the file you're downloading, so there's incentive. The same with any other kind of PtP sofware. You're getting something out...



<center><h6> MyWireless <s>Hacks</s> Tweaks & Tech Info || Have you checked the fawking FAQ? <br /> <font color="red">Tired of bad Service? Want to compare speeds? We at least listen...</font id="red"></h6></center>

 

[Perdition]

Hmmm noone, while you may be sleep (and/or just generally) deprived you've actually hit on an interesting concept. I agree that nobody wants to share their hard-paid-for bandwidth but lets expand the idea a little...

What could be done is to create a kind of P2P proxy that is paid for by the ADSL users connecting to it. Let's take noone's figure of 10 connections, that gives us a theoretical ~5mb/s of golden international bandwidth goodness. Of course you won't get near that in terms of actual delivery but it would still be a fair amount. You could possibly even use 20 x 256k for better real world performance.

Anyway carrying on, each computer running the Sentech connection has client software running that feeds back the current connection load to the central proxy server. The proxy server would then direct incoming requests from ADSL users to the connection with the least load (not sure if the ADSL users would also require client software to make this happen).

The benefits are :

a) It's cheap - R15000 for 5mb/s is a good deal in anyone's book and would comfortably support 100 ADSL users (R150 per person per month).
b) It's redundant - If the modems are sufficiently spread across the network then a tower going down or performing poorly would not significantly affect the speed.
c) It's expandable - Need more bandwidth, add more modems.
d) It's unstoppable - While there may be the legal issue of reselling bandwidth, technically you would just be selling connections to your central server which does not provide the actual bandwidth []

What does everyone think?

 

[TheRoDent]

The central proxy server will only be as good as its "weakest" link. Thus, if you have a guy with a 128k connection on the "moerseproxy" he will be giving 128k, and that's if he is idle. You need to understand that even with high-end routers it's nigh impossible to balance someone's traffic out across 10 different connnections, and have things work as normal when 1 of the links go down.

Also, organizing the kind of "micro billing" that you're talking about is nearly impossible.

The idea is stoppable. It's as weak as it's weakest link. It's not redundant either. When a single guy disconnects, everyone that might have been routed through him will have to reconnect, and retransmit, and re-request their files.

There's isn't a business model in the world that this thing well be able to run from profitably, or non-profitably. Also, who supports the entire thing? Who "appeases" users when their torrents and porn don't come down?

It's like Karnaugh's signature stated sometime: "There's one way to get traffic shaping right. Don't!"

There's one way to enter the ISP business. BUY YOUR OWN POWER AND IP.


<center><h6> MyWireless <s>Hacks</s> Tweaks & Tech Info || Have you checked the fawking FAQ? <br /> <font color="red">Tired of bad Service? Want to compare speeds? We at least listen...</font id="red"></h6></center>

 

[Perdition]

Points taken, however I should have expanded a bit more...

Firstly the Sentech connections would "hosted" by dedicated users i.e. not just any current MyWireless user wishing to join the bandwagon. While the connections would be signed up under said users' names (so Sentech can't bitch), it would be paid for by everyone... I know it's risky but just humour me here. In turn for hosting and managing that connection the users could, for example, have free internet access.

Basically each node would be a proxy and the central server would merely instruct the client which proxy to connect to. I know it's tricky but yeah clever coding []

I agree that if a node goes down that people would be disconnected from it. There may be a way around this by but I couldn't think of one directly and would certainly require the aforementioned clever coding. However, as not all requests from a user would go through the same node, if a node went down it may only drop a couple of the user's connections.

The intention was not to run it as a business but more as a virtual community. Perhaps you would only have 3 nodes and 30 users and everyone would know the risks involved. It would require a few people to manage the finances and the infrastructure but they could include a fee in the subscriptions for their efforts. If a person doesn't pay they get their access revoked. Of course this system would rely on trust between everyone involved but at the end of the day you get cheap international access after your cap.

Anyway I guess most of this is moot as it's unlikely to get implemented, just interesting to ponder ways out of this telecommunications nightmare. Necessity is the mother of invention []

 

[Karnaugh]

that could work, but single connections would still be limited to whatever bandwidth was avaliable, like 128Kbps

- Colin Alston
colin at alston dot za dot org

"Getting traffic shaping right is easy and can be summed up in one word: Dont." -- George Barnett

 

[kaspaas]

You also forget about the contention ratio which will slow things down even more.

It won't take long for a decent ISP to realise what is going on, and combine the 10 (or 20 or...) connections into a single contended bundle. That will really slow things down.



South Africa needs World Class Broadband at World Competitive Prices.

 

[Perdition]

Yep that's why I said you won't get 5mb/s in reality but still a fair amount. It would be tricky for Sentech to control as each node is owned by an individual and each individual could just moan that their speed is slow while acting dumb if "proxy" is mentioned. Also as long as the nodes are not maxed out all the time they probably wouldn't investigate it.

 

[beerygaz]

I'm not convinced that you could effectively load balance the IP connections across multiple routes to deliver a suitable service.

This depends on the services you intend to offer though. If it's only going to be used for bulk d/l or P2P type traffic, then you might be able to get the proxy to balance it's load on a per-connection basis, but I'm not sure of the purpose.

why would you offer this service to ADSL users? They are still limited to their 3Gb cap and their 512k download stream, so how does this fat pipe benefit them?

In a similar vein, however, I've got no problem with anyone using my 512k Sentech pipe at home while I'm at work. Other than a sot of P2P traffic, or the odd torrent, it's sitting there idle so if someone wants to pop around and use it (you should be able to hit my 802.11 AP from the street anyway) then knock yourself out.

This is the concept behind http://www.consume.net/nodedb.php - of course the may be that nasty ICASA regulation that gets in the way...

 

[Perdition]

It benefits them AFTER they hit their 3 gig cap as the requests they make would be local which is not restricted after the cap (at the moment).

Basically this is how it would work. Let's assume that there are three Sentech nodes A, B, C :

Each node has client software that monitors load on the link and sends it to a central server.
Each ADSL user has client software which acts as a local "proxy"

User makes an HTTP request
ADSL user's client software intercepts request and contacts central server
Central server determines Node A has the least load at the moment
Central server sends Node A's address to ADSL user's client software
ADSL user's client software redirects request to Node A
Node A processes request (fetches data) and sends it back to ADSL user

Now during this time the user makes an FTP request
Central server determines Node B now has the least load
ADSL user's client software redirects request to Node B

Now the user is getting his HTTP request being serviced via Node A and his FTP via Node B. The traffic for each request is only being routed via ONE node. This means if Node B goes down the users FTP download would be interrupted but his web request would continue. The software could perhaps monitor for this and automatically make a new request via another node.

Hope all this makes sense []