TO ALL THE ADSL ISP's

Another point worth mentioning is that the BIGGER isp's like MWEB should be able to benefit the most from this new billing system purely by the numbers of customers that they have on their books.

They should benefit both by increasing their margins (as most people dont use the allocated 3 gigs) and be in a postion to offer more affordable bandwidth to the people that do need it, YET they are considered to be still very expensive when compared to the smaller guys who do not have this advantage! Whatever potential savings were around (no matter how small) have just been pocketed by them.

Telkom also waved fingers at isp's for not passing on savings to consumers. I think that those waved fingers were probably pointing in the direction of the big ISP's.

Nothing will change in this country unless the rules that govern how Telkom is allowed to operate change.
The wholsale price of bandwidth is a rip-off from the getgo, so we are in effect going nowhere fast, no matter how they (Telkom) or the ISP's try and dolly it all up.
 
Me is correct in that Telkom Internet has an incredibly large proportion of ADSL users, I would say second up is MWeb. However, because of the extremely large amount of users they have compared to, lets say, ourselves, and that the markets they target are invariably the low-usage users (mom and pop users as they claim) their averages are incredibly low. Even though only 4% according to themselves use greater than their cap, the other 96% are more than capable of subsidising the usage of those people who go over.

We can't do that without it being an incredibly risky endeavour (but this is where ISP's are capable of bringing prices down - the more users they attract, especially the lower-usage users, the better prices they can bring on the higher end). MyADSL users for example are generally the lowest payers with the highest usage (which I think we can all believe, based on what this forum is aimed at), but that gives the smaller players *very* little room to move in, especially if all of their users (or a large majority) are members from MyADSL. You are looking at a large portion of your user base consistently reaching or exceeding their cap with a smaller proportion using below their cap (the opposite to lets say the likes of MWeb or TelkomSA), making it almost impossible to reduce the upper-level prices through the same techniques that Telkom uses.

As for what swordfish1 said, it's very easy stating that you wrote a script that recalculates your usage and this is all very well and done, but that is on a single client machine. Here you are talking about that script having to run (for example) for 100-odd thousand users, taking a lot more CPU than your current script might. Then those updates have to also be sent to the RADIUS server's managed by the self-authenticating ISP's (as this is as far as the ISP's such as ourselves go - the actual network remains the property of SAIX), and then those ISP's have to do the various management aspects on their side. It's easy to write a script that works on the client-side which does some counting and addition. It's not easy to design a system that does what you're asking it to do - there are many things that have to be taken into account.

This does not however solve the other burning question, *how* is an ISP supposed to force a user to disconnect when they reach their cap? There is no way for an ISP to arbitrarily disconnect a user at any given point in time (as RADIUS servers don't deal with that functionality - don't blame us, it's how the RADIUS system functions across the world). This is exactly why we have to disconnect the user based on a timeout period we send when they connect, calculate their totals, and then decide such things as when the user will next have to disconnect (sending an appropriate timeout period), whether they are capped or uncapped, etc. which is done then when they next relog in.
 
Last edited:
warichard, I understand that if there are thousands of users it is much more work. I am not suggesting to make it absolutely instant, but what prevents them to go though all users, check their up-to-now usage, add this to the database, clear the counters. Do it once every hour, it is not that much work. Why you need to diconnect the user to recalculate how much they have used???????? I don't understand it! I recalculate my usage at home every minute as far as I remember, but I don't diconnect myself from the internet because of that! How dumb that would be! I don't understand the diconnection part! Why they need to diconnect me to recalculate my usage! They system is obviously flawed and we pay for it!
 
That is the way RADIUS accounting works. You can be pretty sure people with a lot more understanding of networking than us have already spent hours of thought on this problem, and there's evidently no good solution. It's not a matter of counting the bits flowing through each port as a router might do, and it's certainly not as simple as counting the bits flowing out of your single host.

What about upgrading to DIAMETER authentication though? :)
 
Last edited:
Because this is the way it works. There is provision in various RFC's when it comes to RADIUS accounting for you to receive interim updates on usage, so this is indeed possible, and is something I believe Telkom is working on, but RADIUS servers have nothing to do with disconnecting users (all we can do is specify timeouts). It's not a limitation on the side of Telkom, it's a limitation of the way RADIUS servers function. They handle authentication and accounting, they don't handle disconnecting users and the like. As such we *require* the user get periodically disconnected so that we can receive their usage and then determine how they are supposed to authenticate next time (are they capped, uncapped, etc.).

Your usage is counted on SAIX's side in realtime on the NAS (Network Access Server) you are connected to. When you disconnect that usage is then sent to us which we then add to your account (amongst various other calculations), the thing is, even if we received periodic (lets say hourly) updates from SAIX, there is *no* way one can disconnect you if you exceed that cap, RADIUS server's *do not* deal with that whatsoever. If Telkom makes this function available to us someday (and they will have to so that we can be sure we manage our bandwidth correctly), they will have to use some other system whereby we can specify which connection to disconnect. But this would remain separate from the RADIUS/Authentication server itself.
 
well, obviously their system is obsolete or whatever! They made 7 billion R profit, hope they can afford better system!
 
Their system works pretty well in fact, from an authentication perspective anyway. RADIUS is not a particularly new protocol, and the concepts/ideas defined by, for example DIAMETER are "cooler", but RADIUS remains the de-facto authentication protocol across the globe, so from that perspective SAIX has a pretty standards-based system right there.

SAIX is working on the issues we have brought up with them (such as the lack of interim updates on usage, the inability to disconnect users, etc.), but SAIX is not a particularly speedy company when it comes to these things, and there are numerous considerations that must be taken into account. For example, November 1st brought about numerous changes as to how we authenticate users, but I will have to say that the changes are largely positive, they gave us more control and a slightly more straightforward authentication process (even though the actual backend system ended up growing in complexity due to the additional functionality/services). This does not mean we are suddenly pro-SAIX or pro-Telkom, but I think that moaning about Telkom/SAIX just for the sake of moaning does not get you anywhere either. You have to be ready to acknowledge them when they do something positive.
 
warichard, thanks for the explanation, but from my point of view as a customer, things don't improve at all. My monthly limit decreased from comfortable 30GB do 5GB overnight, now I can't download a single file as this will mean I will stay without internet for a couple of days, there is no more "local" after the cap, on top of it I get disconnected 4 times more often than before! So I don't see single point of improvement from my perspective. I am glad you see some improvements from your side though!
 
Naturally from the customer perspective there is no real improvement (and in many cases is a step backwards), and as a user myself I can understand how frustrated one can feel about it. I myself get frustrated by the fact that we cannot really provide the service we are wanting to provide at an affordable level. From a technical perspective things are better than they were. From a user perspective things are worse.

We are constantly looking at how we can revise our prices, in an attempt to make our higher packages more affordable while still remaining profitable (which appears to have become a dirty word on MyADSL), but this is the first month under the new pricing so it's difficult to really see what the numbers are like until December.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X