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Rakhal · 11-04-2005, 18:04

Well, monitoring they'll have to do anyway, if they want to introduce a 'hard' cap. Something must know when you've hit the limit in real-time so your connection can be cut/slowed down in a timely manner. All that would change is that instead of cutting/slowing your connection, your connection is made 'low priority' instead. The only question is, does the UBR hardware support the concept of traffic priority?

The reason I sort of like this is that it will actually reduce peak-time congestion. Heavy users will automatically get shunted as the bandwidth required increases and the normal users should only rarely see a degradation on their service. Especially since peak-time tends to be in the evening, when the heavy users have likely already used their gig for the day.
Also if for some reason 'off peak' periods become congested as well, the same effect will automatically apply, so you don't get the problem of a free-for-all period making the network unusable for light users.
On the plus side foe heavy users, if the network is NOT congested they can blast away as much as they like (may have to add a small external transfer charge if the amount they transfer incurs unreasonable charges to NTL due to this)

11-04-2005, 18:04	#870
Rakhal Inactive Join Date: Mar 2005 Posts: 18	Re: 1GB Cap Letter!!!! Well, monitoring they'll have to do anyway, if they want to introduce a 'hard' cap. Something must know when you've hit the limit in real-time so your connection can be cut/slowed down in a timely manner. All that would change is that instead of cutting/slowing your connection, your connection is made 'low priority' instead. The only question is, does the UBR hardware support the concept of traffic priority? The reason I sort of like this is that it will actually reduce peak-time congestion. Heavy users will automatically get shunted as the bandwidth required increases and the normal users should only rarely see a degradation on their service. Especially since peak-time tends to be in the evening, when the heavy users have likely already used their gig for the day. Also if for some reason 'off peak' periods become congested as well, the same effect will automatically apply, so you don't get the problem of a free-for-all period making the network unusable for light users. On the plus side foe heavy users, if the network is NOT congested they can blast away as much as they like (may have to add a small external transfer charge if the amount they transfer incurs unreasonable charges to NTL due to this)