Rant regarding blended access in South Africa

S

Slovak

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A naive Slovak logged onto his bandwidth usage monitor facility via telkomsa.net just to check a few things out.

We have two separate areas, blended total and local usage. Big red letters, we reserve the right to charge your should you exceed your... blah blah blah.

Right so we have a 3gb account and 10gb local access. Nice I think.

Slovak begins patching his Battlefield 2 via saix.games.net, a local favourite. Wet behind the ears I think, telkom are nice people, they even have a separate area for my local usage, how sweet. Let me be nice and rather use my local cap for the downloads and achieve extra ordinary lightning quick downloads. Oh what the heck, let me take America's Army too, I may as well - have 10gb as advertised to burn.

Let me go check my usage screen quick...

*Insert glass shatter sound here*

Would you look at that, my blended total has exceeded the 3gb range and local usage registers nothing. Wow - i've successfully managed to kick myself in the balls by falling prey to a clever bit of wording on their part.

You see (and this is for the rest of the gimps out there) if you consume your local bandwidth to the value of 3gb you have automagically forfeited your international usage.

Bravo Telkom, You have successfully taken my money in full and scored by the international bandwidth I cannot use now :)

When I grow up, I want to be as clever as you guys are!
 
Its been like this since forever. I f*** up yes but thats the sate of broadband in SA. And then we get the minister standing up and saying. WE MEET INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS! OMG she is sooo dumb. hate her wish she trips and fall down right in her face! I guess she can afford any broadband option thats why she would say something like that
 
As cavedog said it has been like that for ages. Of cause its weird how they can't do anything else except when it was trial
 
Linoman said:
Of cause its weird how they can't do anything else except when it was trial
Click to expand...
When were they ever splitting international and local access?

There is a really simple reason for them not doing this:-
It will cost the consumer more

The technology required to measure and bill international and local traffic separately would cause the cost of an ADSL service to double. Various solutions have been looked at and most of them would require truck loads of extra Cisco kit (and other expensive gadgets) as well as millions of rands worth of R&D to get it working since it has never been done anywhere else in the world.

There are cost effective ways of splitting traffic between a blended and a local-only account at your home router. There are plenty of howto's scattered around these forums for that. That is going to be your only viable solution.
 
Lol Slovak, I also thought local downloads constituted to the local blend... I also found out the hard way
:(
 
ambo said:
When were they ever splitting international and local access?

There is a really simple reason for them not doing this:-
It will cost the consumer more

The technology required to measure and bill international and local traffic separately would cause the cost of an ADSL service to double. Various solutions have been looked at and most of them would require truck loads of extra Cisco kit (and other expensive gadgets) as well as millions of rands worth of R&D to get it working since it has never been done anywhere else in the world.

There are cost effective ways of splitting traffic between a blended and a local-only account at your home router. There are plenty of howto's scattered around these forums for that. That is going to be your only viable solution.
Click to expand...

Sorry I don't agree. Where are you getting your facts? If it's so easy for us to do then it should be even easier for a large company to do. The reason it's not being done is so that Telkom can make money.

I would jump at a chance to own an account where all the irritating account maintenance can be handled ISP side - the way it should be.
 
This is an interesting one, with regards to netflow usage tracking of international and national traffic, this can be done, but I will openly say, Cisco has problems with netflow implementations on high volumes of traffic and processing large volumes of netflow data is a complex and expensive operation. A 15 device license of crannog netflow tracker (now owned by fluke) costs around R100k, and would not really be suited for this purpose. A full arbor peakflow implementation can run into the millions, its not cheap, and besides which, netflow is not really an ideal solution for eliminating national traffic from caps. The problem comes in the fact that radius typically records volume based on throughput on a single interface, it doesn't know how to split it either.

The blended total that was referred to in the original posting was almost definitely a radius figure.

So, how to realistically split this stuff up and control it. Here we have to start looking at something like Cisco SCE devices, a really nifty device and in the grand scheme of things not hugely expensive (about half a million for a device that can process 2 gigabit (well, it has 2 x 1gig throughput mechanisms), but again, they rely on the fact that they look at a single ip, single pipe, you still need to split the traffic to monitor it differently if you want to do this effectively, and *THIS* is where things get horribly complicated.

In an ideal world with ideal hardware, you could do this through bgp policy propogation, tag all the national traffic with a community, match the community, throw the national traffic outta one interface, the international out the other and monitor/shape them separately. Unfortunately, this doesn't work on most of the larger cisco platforms that are required to run high volumes of traffic (I know for a fact that the Cisco 7600 can't do this, and I'm pretty sure that it can't be done on the GSR's either) This means that you have to go back to traffic splitting via policy routing on OTHER systems, similar to what UCT runs to split their national and international, on linux boxes. Unfortunately, this is not really a scalable solution to vast amounts of bandwidth that are required for thousands of DSL customers. (More information on how they split can be found on
http://wiki.tenet.ac.za/tenetnetwork/index.php/National_International_Traffic_Split

The point is this, I would LOVE to see national/international split up properly, with the monitoring being done by netflow, or other systems. But I'm also not under the illusion that this is technically simple. It's simple enough to *NOT* cap national traffic (don't apply the rules to the national interfaces that you do to the international), but to segregate the traffic out for monitoring purposes to avoid applying those rules to the international based on national traffic, thats far far more complex.

I think the fundamental problem is that Telkom is promising things that I'm not convinced they *CAN* deliver!
 
Let me say this first. You must work for Telkom.

Read up about how dns works here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_system

From that you will see that every piece of data has to resolve to an ip address. you want to tell me that for purposes of recording you cannot lump data for 196.xxx.xxx.xx into local counting and the rest into international.

Please pull the other one.
 
Actually, I definitely don't work for Telkom, secondly, DNS has absolutely nothing to do with routing, netflow or accouting. Routers, netflow systems, radius systems and other such things have zero knowledge of DNS, the global routing works on a protocol called BGP, and routes based on ASN numbers, routing inside a network is done with an IGP that is based on IP addresses, so I'm REALLY confused what your DNS url has to do with anything, please explain.

Thirdly, 196.* does not only cover South Africa. The block is not fully utilized and because AfriNIC has control over large portions of that still arent announced, it could be announced anywhere on the African Continent.

I think you misread my message, I also would like to see national bandwidth free from caps, and there are ways to do it, its just not as technically simple as people make out.

Its very similar to the reason that in almost no circumstances will you find ISP's peering with a company or another ISP that they buy transit from, the segregation of data for accounting and monitoring purposes becomes extremely difficult.

I am no fan of Telkom's and anyone on here who knows who I am and knows anything about me can confirm that, but at the same time, I do have enough technical knowledge about these systems to realize that this is NOT as simple as everyone makes out in an SP environment. The problem here is actually NOT national or international caps, its the vast price differential between national and international bandwidth caused by Telkom's monopolistic ways. My view? If they can find a way to split this properly that scales in an SP environment, great, but I'd far rather see the billions in profit being generated from SAT-3 disappear, and with that the capping of national/international can become a single (much larger cap) with no differentiation at all because of little to no differentiation in price.

We can all sit and wait for the day Seacom arrives :)
 
Guys, shot for the responses. We all feel the same here.

I can say one thing... their own services like Saix - can be omitted from their count and shifted to local usage.

Good to hear back from you all. Time to get familiar with local search engines ... er I mean engine. Hehe :D
 
SlowJoe said:
Actually, I definitely don't work for Telkom, secondly, ..........
Click to expand...

I actually wasn't talking about routing but since you insist. A member of this forum wrote something call Route Sentry. Look it up. He can do it yet the mighty Telkom cant.

I was referring to them counting access to a local ip address during the eg given a local game server so its not even like its browsing all over the place, its a static ip. Telkom counts that usage towards the international cap because they just dont care. Not because they cant.

I monitor external usage on my network at work quite comfortably with an off the shelf network monitor package, internal vs external based on ip range which is resolved with a free open dns.

I am trying hard to not get in a fight with you only to enlighten you. :)
 
Myrrdin said:
I actually wasn't talking about routing but since you insist. A member of this forum wrote something call Route Sentry. Look it up. He can do it yet the mighty Telkom cant.
Click to expand...
Spend some time looking at how Route Sentry works and you will notice that it uses TWO PPPoE connections and routes traffic over them. There is no accounting being done by the Route Sentry. This means that you have 2 different IP's for your machine and what you are in fact doing is making what the rest of the internet sees as 2 devices available on one machine.

Myrrdin said:
I was referring to them counting access to a local ip address during the eg given a local game server so its not even like its browsing all over the place, its a static ip. Telkom counts that usage towards the international cap because they just dont care. Not because they cant.
Click to expand...
Wrong. The network has to count your traffic at your entrance to the network. The only place that can be done is at the point where your PPPoE session terminates (device called a BRAS). Once your traffic passes through the BRAS it joins the traffic of everyone else and becomes unidentifiable on the network.

Myrrdin said:
I monitor external usage on my network at work quite comfortably with an off the shelf network monitor package, internal vs external based on ip range which is resolved with a free open dns.
Click to expand...
Well done - the BRAS does the same. But the DSL cloud is separate from any 'on-net' services that SAIX might host... so they are measured as 'external' traffic anyway.

Myrrdin said:
I am trying hard to not get in a fight with you only to enlighten you. :)
Click to expand...
I don't think SlowJoe needs any help from you to learn how the Internet works :rolleyes:
 
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Telkom should spend the money - take the knock themselves and then maybe their customers would hate them a little less.

If they set uncapped local usage at a fixed price , and they will open up a HUGE market that did not otherwise exist that will use their traffic.

However , as with all parastatals ending in "kom" - they can't see beyond their noses.
 
retromodcoza said:
Telkom should spend the money - take the knock themselves and then maybe their customers would hate them a little less.
Click to expand...
Thats just silly - the costs will eventually hit the consumers pocket one way or another. Where do you think they get their cash from? A money tree?

I'd much rather they spend that money on some more international capacity.
 
ambo said:
Wrong. The network has to count your traffic at your entrance to the network. The only place that can be done is at the point where your PPPoE session terminates (device called a BRAS). Once your traffic passes through the BRAS it joins the traffic of everyone else and becomes unidentifiable on the network.
Click to expand...


Unidentifiable? Then its even more of a miracle I can type in www.whatever.com and expect data back and before it reaches the BRAS it must also not contain any of the following. Or maybe the BRAS strips this info of every ip package. Maybe only on Telkom networks. Who knew.

http://mybroadband.co.za/photos/showphoto.php?photo=3395
 
Last edited:
 
Last edited:
Myrrdin I think you're still not understanding it properly.

Obviously the BRAS doesnt strip the IP headers off the packets (routing would cease to function), but then neither does it actually look at them either (for counting). And thats what makes the current 'count all packets' (per virtual customer port) relatively cheap to implement.

As soon as one has to inspect the header information of each and every packet (to assertain counting), then the process becomes much more complex and resource intensive, resulting in the large increase in costs and effort as mentioned by others.

Make more sense?
 
SlowJoe said:
This is an interesting one, with regards to netflow usage tracking of international and national traffic, this can be done, but I will openly say, Cisco has problems with netflow implementations on high volumes of traffic and processing large volumes of netflow data is a complex and expensive operation. A 15 device license of crannog netflow tracker (now owned by fluke) costs around R100k, and would not really be suited for this purpose. A full arbor peakflow implementation can run into the millions, its not cheap, and besides which, netflow is not really an ideal solution for eliminating national traffic from caps. The problem comes in the fact that radius typically records volume based on throughput on a single interface, it doesn't know how to split it either.

The blended total that was referred to in the original posting was almost definitely a radius figure.

So, how to realistically split this stuff up and control it. Here we have to start looking at something like Cisco SCE devices, a really nifty device and in the grand scheme of things not hugely expensive (about half a million for a device that can process 2 gigabit (well, it has 2 x 1gig throughput mechanisms), but again, they rely on the fact that they look at a single ip, single pipe, you still need to split the traffic to monitor it differently if you want to do this effectively, and *THIS* is where things get horribly complicated.

In an ideal world with ideal hardware, you could do this through bgp policy propogation, tag all the national traffic with a community, match the community, throw the national traffic outta one interface, the international out the other and monitor/shape them separately. Unfortunately, this doesn't work on most of the larger cisco platforms that are required to run high volumes of traffic (I know for a fact that the Cisco 7600 can't do this, and I'm pretty sure that it can't be done on the GSR's either) This means that you have to go back to traffic splitting via policy routing on OTHER systems, similar to what UCT runs to split their national and international, on linux boxes. Unfortunately, this is not really a scalable solution to vast amounts of bandwidth that are required for thousands of DSL customers. (More information on how they split can be found on
http://wiki.tenet.ac.za/tenetnetwork/index.php/National_International_Traffic_Split

The point is this, I would LOVE to see national/international split up properly, with the monitoring being done by netflow, or other systems. But I'm also not under the illusion that this is technically simple. It's simple enough to *NOT* cap national traffic (don't apply the rules to the national interfaces that you do to the international), but to segregate the traffic out for monitoring purposes to avoid applying those rules to the international based on national traffic, thats far far more complex.

I think the fundamental problem is that Telkom is promising things that I'm not convinced they *CAN* deliver!
Click to expand...

Or something as simple as this could be implemented:
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=102492

But how do we get them to see this idea?
 
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