jannievanzyl
Telecoms expert
No, you're not quite right. Everything I posted (and the PR guys put out) is technically correct. Let me explain (once again).
And let's have a look at what went wrong here, what we could've done better and what we should do. (For those whoactually like to engage in logical discussions.
)Some facts first:
1. BIS works by running an encrypted pipe directly from your handset to RIM's servers in Europe, where you break out into the internet. This encryption has been in the news a lot lately with various governments (including ours) having an issue that they cannot track who's doing what via the interception laws.
2. From Vodacom's perspective we can see total volume used per subscriber. This allows us to do distribution analysis to see what the usage per whatever measurement bucket is, min, max, average, etc. Monitoring-and-Reporting-101 stuff. But we cannot see the details of each transaction at TCP level. This is only visible in RIM's data centre.
3. The stats clearly show that the vast majority (98%) use less than 100MB per month and if you look at those the biggest group is under 40MB/month.
(Side note: I see many here got confused by the various numbers, even when I explained they are different reports on the same underlying data. To try and say I thumbsucked them because they vary merely highlights a lack of understanding of statistical analysis.)
4. The stats also showed that some people are doing volumes which are just way beyond the norm and that these users account for the vast bulk of the capacity on the link to RIM being used.
5. No-one here would dispute these people are openly abusing the system and are creating a bad experience for everyone else and it should be managed.
Those are the facts and the question now is how to do it within the applicable limitations, i.e. how do we manage this with what we've got to work with?
1. First price would be to identify the torrent sites, etc. and either blacklist them or throttle them. In other words, don't target specific subscribers, just specific behaviour patterns. Just like all other ISP's do (my DSL line shape the crap out of news servers during the day). But to do this we need to look inside the pipe and this only RIM can do.So we started a process with them to do this a few months ago and this is well on its way.
2. But abuse kept on escalating, so what do we do in the mean-time? Logically identify the people outside of the typical usage patterns and manage only them. I.e. 'punish' the few that ef-it-up for everyone else.
3. The only way we can this (until the RIM solution is in place), is on volume, that's all we've got to work with. So we need to pick a volume-per-month number that will catch the torrent-boyz but not the typical BIS user.
4. The call was made that we should exclude at least 98% of users and pick a number that's higher than the typical usage, so that there is a very slim chance a legit user can be affected. Statistically this resulted in a volume of 100MB. (Note; I'm not saying this was the right call, merely that this is what the stats showed.)
5. Secondly, the call was made to not cut anyone off even if they do exceed the threshold, but to just drop the service speed to typical '2G' speeds - not switching your device to 2G, just rate-limiting the data stream. This way no-one (even the real abusers) would be without a service. In other words there was never going to be a hard cap (I'm slowly changing my mind on this, BTW. More below).
6. All in all, the feeling was this is a good story; Vodacom is proactivly managing and protecting the experience of the normal BIS user. So the call was made to put it out as a PR piece. Some good news, for a change. So they did this.
Then the proverbial mother of all scheisse-storms exploded all around us.
Why?
A few things, I believe:
1. The PR piece cryptic, we did not explain such an emotive subject carefully. Especially people did not understand:
1-1: Normal users (the 98%) would never be affected.
1-2: The intention was to improve QoS for everyone. Substantially.
1-3: Even if you're inadvertently got rate-limited, you would not be cut off from the BIS service. Ever.
2. We did not anticipate how emotive this issue is. Effectively the 'peace-of-mind' that BIS gave you was removed:
2-1: People did not understand the concept of "100MB of BIS" not being the same as a 100MB data bundle. And why should they? - they never had to worry about it before.
2-2: Peeps had never seen a report of their usage before, so they had no idea if they're affected or not.
2-3: Subs felt they're potentially being 'punished' for the sins of others.
2-4: Many felt they could legitimately exceed the 100MB threhold with no malicious intent and thus were being penalised unfairly.
2-5: BIS users felt something they had before was taken away, even if they've never used it.
And so the cake exploded in our faces. Bigtime.
As you know I spent a lot of time in the last few days here with you guys to understand what went wrong and what to do to fix it. In summary, the general feeling was (and still is, I believe):
1. By all means kill the abusers, but make sure they're really abusing the system.
2. The 100MB threshold is just to low, even if the stats say otherwise. A number of forumites could show they're in the legit group but will trigger the threshold. Most said a number closer to 500MB (5 x the typical usage) is a more logical number. Of course a few said you should never do anything - but we all know what they're were doing in the first place.
So we decided to not do anything right now but to do a few things going forward:
1. Get the usage management system with RIM in place.
2. Look at more realistic rules to catch the real abusers. But then to ef them up properly. (my believe)
So, that's where we are today. And how good intentions turned into the fiasco it did.
One thing I'll categorically state. I've spent a lot of time looking at the reports the last few days and am now hell-bent on sorting out the (proper) abusers. For example, I've got one guy's number (here in Cpt) in front of me that's already done 30GB this month. I'll be calling him shortly.
my 2c's
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