Goodbye to a flat rate for broadband?

[Ignition]

Originally Posted by erol

Well if you say it is fact I guess it must be. Even accepting this fact what makes you think that the 60% of traffic that relates to p2p traffic is not being caused by 60% of the users of the network?

My apologies, the network stats must be lying.

Originally Posted by erol

The cost of providing the network to mr '13GB a day' and to mr '<100MB a day' are almost identical. They both have to have the roads dug up and cable laid. They both have to have UBR's and POP's etc etc etc. As the cost of providing the network to them is almost identical then it is perfectly fair that they pay the same price. There is some incremental cost (ie cost that relates to the _usage_ of a connection) but these are marginal comapred to the cost of putting the network in and running, which is EQUAL for both users.

The same can be said of the telephone network. I guess that low user tariff must be nonsense. Costs may be equal, but why shouldn't those that use the available facilities more pay more? Those whose usage forces upgrades well before they would normally be required (as occured in Coventry thanks to extreme upstream use new equipment had to be fitted well before would be expected going by normal measures of expected use) but it's ok for those who weren't using much to pay for this along with those who were uploading/downloading 24x7?

Originally Posted by erol

Costs that are incremental should be paid for on a 'pay for what you use' basis. Costs that are fixed whould be paid for on a 'fixed fee' basis. The reality is with BB almost all of the costs are fixed - hence flat rate pricing. It's simple really.

Transit bandwidth is the main incremental cost. That of course and upgrades forced through people raping their connections which wouldn't normally be required.

There are a few problems here Erol. First one is that allowing a network to reach 100% utilisation at any point is a very bad idea. You constantly go on about congestion and utilisation. Would you be happy with using your connection for a couple of hours in the evening and getting a nice slow service due to people constantly soaking up bandwidth? As I showed you on graphs from Plusnet difference in load isn't that great between peak time load and offpeak load. This is simply due to people who use their connection all the time queueing up the downloads on the peer to peer. Therefore it's safe to assume that at least 50% of the usage in peak times is due to said users, so your arguments about them not causing congestion over what would be seen is nonsense. It does cost companies more as they have to provide over and above expected bandwidth requirements due to these users, though of course your Gran should pay just as much for this as Mr Warez Monkey.

If people want connections to use uncontended they can bloody well pay for what they are using. Compare the cost difference between 5:1 contended service and 20:1 and try telling me people using their connections 1:1 shouldn't pay more. They should pay more, both for the data transfer and a higher proportion of the fixed costs.

And no this is nothing to do with my internet service, I always get the bandwidth I pay for, and I want it to stay that way. Those people using the bandwidth 24/7 are slowing down the progress towards higher speed connections now. Have you not thought that a good reason for not providing higher speed services is that as soon as you do warez monkeys start leeching 20, 40, 50GB a day on them, messing up contention and indeed costing money due to large use of transit bandwidth, and forcing of upgrades well before expected?

If we want faster and more competitively priced connections for all of us those patterns of use absolutely must be addressed. bredbandsbolaget.se addresses it with traffic shaping but their network is under the cosh quite badly at peak times - this cannot be allowed to happen with cable as it would result in packet loss and other issues up to and including modems falling offline.

This is ok though, I'm sure the people wouldn't mind this so long as Mr Warez Monkey down the road can leech his 1.5 Terabytes of warez a month and send his 750GB out (assuming 5Mbit / 2.5Mbit connection, won't happen for a while though ).

I would quite like to see 2 things you hate, capping of usage, tiered depending on how much you pay, followed by x pence per gig after this is exceeded.

I know you'll absolutely disagree but please no more horrible analogies

[ian@huth]

My position is:

I do not want capping.

I do not want metered broadband.

I just want to use my connection when I want and as much as I want without being unduly affected by other users at a reasonable cost.

In essence this situation is unachievable unless there is some control over how we all use the internet.

My belief is that the situation is achievable at this moment in time if every user was willing to obey the laws of this land.

[erol]

Originally Posted by ianathuth

The train and the gunman analogy is valid because a few users can affect the service of many.

No it is not. Just as you can only take up as much seat space as the size of your 'bum', so you can only take up as much resource as the the size of your connection. What is more with a connection when all the seat space is taken up the amount of seat space you occupy actualy reduces. In effect when the 'BB train' reaches congestion point _everyones_ bum shrinks equally!

Originally Posted by ianathuth

The two gunmen are grabbing the majority of the seating capacity because of their actions. If ten 1Mb users are online using p2p and maxing out their upstreams (there may be very little us of their downstreams) then they will have saturated that upstream card. The upstream card has a capacity of probably less than 2000 kbps after DOCSIS overheads are taken into account and the 1Mb users at max are using 256kbps. 10 x 256 = 2560 in my book and that is more than the card can accomodate so there is already a slowdown in performance for those ten. Along comes anothr 1Mb user who just wants to download a large legal ISO from a website. He can not achieve the 1048 kbps download that his connection is capable of because his upstream ack packets are slowed down because of the upstream being saturated. Another 100 users come on line at any speed and wish to browse, download or watch streaming video. What will their experience be like? Everyone on that upstream card will have a performance which is slower than dial-up. If the ten p2p users then go offline the other users will more than likely enjoy a normal experience.

I appreciate that because of the total 'bodge' that is Cable BB, upstream usage has a disproportionate effect on downstream (via the need for downstream to use the upstream to say 'hey yeah i got that packet'). What you have described here is a one of the biggest weaknesses of Cable BB btw.

Sounds to me what you want is P2P apps banned. What you hope to get is a connection that shows no signs to you of slow down due to other users usage. OK tomorrow we magicaly 'wave a wand' and on day one your connection starts to improve. Do you really not think that NTL will not just then load more users onto the network until you creep back to the point you started with ?

So what about other applications that use a lot of upstream bandwidth, do you want those banned as well. Like users sending video out from thier machines, or voice, or games or people constantly uploading to their webspace, or accessing data on their machines from remote locations. Do you want these to be 'restricted applications' ?

Do you never upload yourself (apart from 'ak packets caused by your download') ? If and when you upload, do you consider the impact on others both upload and download ?

Bandwidth can be said to be the amount of data that can be passed along a communications channel in a given period of time (look it up on dictionary.com). If the given time is 24 hours then it should be easy to see that a relatively small number of customers on the fastest connections that are using them to the max 24/7 can pass a hell of a lot more data than a very large number of customers that are only on for short periods and may be on much slower connections and just doing a bit of browsing and e-mail checking.

Of course one user can use more bandwidth than another. What matters is how one users usage affects others. Just like you can measure how much road congestion a driver creates by his 'total milage' but only by his milage in 'rush hour', so too is any 'total bandwidth used' figure for a user meaningless in assesing his impact on other users. My problem is not with a statement that '5% of users use 80% of bandwith'. My problem is with statements that 5% of users cause 80% of the congestion.

[erol]

I just tried a rather long reply and got the following

"The following errors occured when this post was submitted:
You have included too many images in your signature or in your previous post. Please go back and correct the problem and then continue again.

Images include use of smilies, the vB code [img] tag and HTML <img> tags. The use of these is all subject to them being enabled by the administrator.
"

So I am gonna try chopping it into more than one post. Mods if you can rejoin them later (and remove the stuff above) please do so.

Originally Posted by JustAnotherN00b

My apologies, the network stats must be lying.

Can I see these stats, that show that the 60% usage overnight is being caused by 5% of users and not by 20%, or 30% or even 60% ?

Originally Posted by JustAnotherN00b

The same can be said of the telephone network.

It is not just said of the telephone network it is the case with the telephone network, acording to OFTEL. In their calculations the monthly line rental does not cover the fixed costs of of the line (and BT has had over 100 years to 'pay down' the capital cost of thier network!). As such BT are allowed an 'uplift' on the per minute cost of calls to 'recoup' this subsidy. If OFTELs figures are to be believed then heavy phone users subsidise low usage users.

Originally Posted by JustAnotherN00b

I guess that low user tariff must be nonsense.

It's not nonsense. It is a 'social inclusion' requirment forced on BT by OFTEL (does NTL offer such a low user telephony service?) that recognises that certain groups (namely the very poor) would be unable to have a phone, even for incomming calls only, if the line rental were to be priced according to cost. Low usage phone users, even without the low users tarrif, are already being susbsidised by heavy users. With it the heavy users are paying even more susbsidy every time they make a call.

Costs may be equal, but why shouldn't those that use the available facilities more pay more?

Sure you _could_ price internet access and telephony on a 'what the market will bear' basis. However in a market as fundamentaly vital as these to the UK's future, and one where the term 'natural monopoly / duolpoly' could have been invented for it, it would be madness to do so. I want to see as much internet usage in the UK as possible. If the costs are fixed then I want the price to be fixed.

Transit bandwidth is the main incremental cost.

Absoloutely right. Totaly right. And the cost of transit bandwidth is miniscule in the over all cost base of provision and it is falling at a rate faster than moores law in relation to processors. What is more something like 90% of the transit fibre has not even been lit yet. It is also worth noting that NTL's congestion problems have _nothing_ to do with transit costs, as they have stated themselves. Sure if you live in Australia that has a relatively small population and is geographicaly about as remote as you can get, so there are limit undersea fiber links, then the cost of tranist can start to rise to levels that it represents a 'significant' proportion of the toal cost of provision. Transit bandwith in somewhere like Oz can be anywhere from 10-100 times more exensive than in the UK. Even then, with the cost of transit falling faster than the demand for it, due to technologies like DWDM, this is a temporary situation.

That of course and upgrades forced through people raping their connections which wouldn't normally be required.

Just what is it that you think has driven the 'core' network of the internet to increase it's capacity by many orders of magnitude of the last 10-20 years? It is 'usage' that has driven that. Without usage there would be no need to increase capacity and we would all be using our BB conections to send emails and nothing else. Usage is good. Usage is the driver for progress.

There are a few problems here Erol. First one is that allowing a network to reach 100% utilisation at any point is a very bad idea.

No one is saying that. What I am saying is that anytime usage is under 100% then resource that has been paid for already is being effectively 'wasted'. Sure you can not avoid this situation in a real world network but it is true non the less. Anyone that uses the network when utilisation is under 100% is affecting _non one_ and thats has to be a fact.

You constantly go on about congestion and utilisation. Would you be happy with using your connection for a couple of hours in the evening and getting a nice slow service due to people constantly soaking up bandwidth?

Why would I blame 'other people' and not myself? My usage affects them as much as thiers affects me (when utilisation is over 100% of capacity) ? I might blame the service provider, if it was very bad, for not scaling their network properly but I would not blame 'other people'. I am as much an 'other person' to them as they are to me.

As I showed you on graphs from Plusnet difference in load isn't that great between peak time load and offpeak load.

Plusnet specificaly provide this info so that people can help them to 'level out' their (plusnets) usage. Judging by the graphs I saw it's pretty effective and all in all a great idea. The closer plusnets users combined usage can get to 'constant' over a 24hr period the better it is for plusnet (and by extension their customers). For NTL to do this however it would have to be usage at the UBR, for that is where the problems occur.

[erol]

reply continued

This is simply due to people who use their connection all the time queueing up the downloads on the peer to peer. Therefore it's safe to assume that at least 50% of the usage in peak times is due to said users, so your arguments about them not causing congestion over what would be seen is nonsense.

Usage past 100% of capcity cause congestion. Every user using the net (ignoring differnet service levels) at these times is causing as much congestion as the next user. No more no less. Even if 50% of peak time usage is P2P, so what? So we ban P2P and peak time usage drops to 30%. So the ISP says hey we are only getting 30% usage during peak times. We need to load more users onto this network. They keep going until peak time usage approaches 80% again. So what do you do then, ban the next single application that generates the most usage ? and the next and then next until we have 1000:1 contention ratios and dirt cheap connections that can only be used for sending a couple of emails a day, because all other usage has been baaned as 'selfish abuse' by the likes of you.

It does cost companies more as they have to provide over and above expected bandwidth requirements due to these users, though of course your Gran should pay just as much for this as Mr Warez Monkey.

Does your Gran go into 'all you can eat for £20' restuarants and say she only wants one slice of toast and 'moans' about all the selfish greedy pigs that are forcing the price of her toast upto £20? There are low price services designed for low usage users. Use those. Even ignoring all that, if the cost of provision of the service is the same for your Gran as for mr Heavy users (and it IS possible to use the internet a lot without being MR Warez) then yes I am afraid she should have to pay the same. If there is a social inclusion issue there, then the government can and will force some subsisdising for those that need it, but for all I know your gran may be the queen, so I see no need to susbsidise her connection at the expense of anyone else.

If people want connections to use uncontended they can bloody well pay for what they are using. Compare the cost difference between 5:1 contended service and 20:1 and try telling me people using their connections 1:1 shouldn't pay more. They should pay more, both for the data transfer and a higher proportion of the fixed costs.

here I am just going to refer you to a peice I wrote for the 'Anticap lot'
http://www.anticap.co.uk/mythbusters.php

And no this is nothing to do with my internet service, I always get the bandwidth I pay for, and I want it to stay that way. Those people using the bandwidth 24/7 are slowing down the progress towards higher speed connections now.

No, exactly the opposite. Those people that use the internet a lot are _driving_ progress and the ever expanding nature of the internet. Without them what would be the point in increasing capacity at all?

Have you not thought that a good reason for not providing higher speed services is that as soon as you do warez monkeys start leeching 20, 40, 50GB a day on them, messing up contention and indeed costing money due to large use of transit bandwidth, and forcing of upgrades well before expected?

Yeah that is a great reason to not provide higher speed services, beacause if you do people might use it! A great reason if you are a telco or cable co maybe. What about people that might want to use it to have 'live in house' links to university (beacuse they are perhaps disabled) or to monitor their house or kids remotely or any other number of legitimate and empowering possibilites. Are they too to be branded 'selfish ****' ?

If we want faster and more competitively priced connections for all of us those patterns of use absolutely must be addressed.

Sure if what you want is cheaper internet access (via higher contention ratios) then go to a service provider that offers such. Don't insist that we all have to have. When the 'moores law' type price curve that exists for moving data around finally levels off, then maybe it will be time to look at restricting usage. to do so before then is to waste the potential of these wonderous new technolgies and their abilty to empwer and change peoples lives for the better.

bredbandsbolaget.se addresses it with traffic shaping but their network is under the cosh quite badly at peak times - this cannot be allowed to happen with cable as it would result in packet loss and other issues up to and including modems falling offline.

Ahh bredandsbolaget. These are the people that are sucsessfuly offering 10mbs symetrical uncapped connections into peoples homes at about 20euros per month are they not? And you are using them as an argument for why NTL, offering capped 600k/128k BB at (what is it now £25pm?) should start restricting people usage and charging by the MB ? Hmmm

This is ok though, I'm sure the people wouldn't mind this so long as Mr Warez Monkey down the road can leech his 1.5 Terabytes of warez a month and send his 750GB out (assuming 5Mbit / 2.5Mbit connection, won't happen for a while though ).

Here we go again. Anyone who use the internet a lot is Mr Warez. Hmm. If you have a problem with P2P then campaign against P2P. It is not P2P that cause congestion but usage. Remove P2P and there wil _still_ be usage. Restrict usage and the internet will never 'grow', not to the 5/2.5 that you think is way off, or to the symetrical 10mbs that bred???? (if you think I am gonna spell that!) are providing _today_ in Sweeden at less than NTLs 600k service.

I would quite like to see 2 things you hate, capping of usage, tiered depending on how much you pay, followed by x pence per gig after this is exceeded.

And you are welcome to them, just do not force them on _everyone_. There are ISPs that offer these or better still move to Oz the land of perfect BB (NOT!)

I know you'll absolutely disagree but please no more horrible analogies

I'll try.

[erol]

Originally Posted by ianathuth

My position is:

I do not want capping.

I do not want metered broadband.

I just want to use my connection when I want and as much as I want without being unduly affected by other users at a reasonable cost.

In essence this situation is unachievable unless there is some control over how we all use the internet.

My belief is that the situation is achievable at this moment in time if every user was willing to obey the laws of this land.

All you need to do is go to a service provider that uses contention ratios that suit your usage (and is well run).

See http://www.anticap.co.uk/mythbusters.php
(same link I used in post above btw)

If you reduce usage by (somehow? how?) banning P2P all that will happen is that ISP will load more users onto the network (and it you are _lucky_ reduce the price, but i doubt it with most) until you are back where you started, except with a lower capcity infrastructure (than if they had upgrade the network to meet demand). So what do you do then ? Find some other usage to ban ?

You think that P2P cause congestion but it is USAGE that causes congestion. Remove one kind of usage and either another will take it's place or the ISP will 'load up' thier networks till you are back where you started.

[ian@huth]

Phew, you must be swaying about on your soapbox after all that Erol. All that in answer to a simple statement that: "Between 60 and 80% of bandwidth is being eaten up by a fraction of customers - who are mainly engaged in peer-to-peer activity - and, according to the industry, the rest are penalised because of the heavy users sharing the network."

There are many myths, misconceptions, presumptions and instances of the lack of understanding of the subject and the technology behind it in your many, many responses and drifting off topic to boot that I doubt anyone would have the energy to fully put you right.

It would seem that you are unable to accept that any usage figures published are correct as they are provided by organisations that have an agenda to distort the truth. You seem to prefer your own ideas of what is going on, which have no scientific or logical explanation.

Your final post of "You think that P2P cause congestion but it is USAGE that causes congestion." is quite correct. But that takes us right back to the start as all p2p is usage and if 60-80% of that is p2p then that is the primary cause of congestion and most of this would not exist if everyone was law abiding.

Originally Posted by ianathuth

But that takes us right back to the start as all p2p is usage and if 60-80% of that is p2p then that is the primary cause of congestion and most of this would not exist if everyone was law abiding.

Having waded through many lengthy and turgid postings on this topic, I think this sums it up nicely for me. I can't criticise p2p per se; ntl and others are to blame if they wrote their business plans without accounting for the use of this technology. However, I am deeply peeved at the thought that I might not be getting the download speed I pay for thanks to illegal exchanging of warez via p2p.

Can anyone - simply - lay out any statistics illustrating what proportion of p2p traffic is estimated to be legal?

[ian@huth]

Originally Posted by towny

Can anyone - simply - lay out any statistics illustrating what proportion of p2p traffic is estimated to be legal?

I doubt it, but you can form your own opinion of this by looking at various forums and using a little common sense.

Originally Posted by ianathuth

I doubt it, but you can form your own opinion of this by looking at various forums and using a little common sense.

I suspected as much ...

*sigh*

[Ignition]

Originally Posted by erol

I appreciate that because of the total 'bodge' that is Cable BB, upstream usage has a disproportionate effect on downstream (via the need for downstream to use the upstream to say 'hey yeah i got that packet'). What you have described here is a one of the biggest weaknesses of Cable BB btw.

Going to reply more in depth at some point, however the above is a weakness of all Internet connectivity that uses TCP/IP - which is everything apart from gaming and realtime applications such as voice and video over IP.

[erol]

Originally Posted by ianathuth

Your final post of "You think that P2P cause congestion but it is USAGE that causes congestion." is quite correct. But that takes us right back to the start as all p2p is usage and if 60-80% of that is p2p then that is the primary cause of congestion and most of this would not exist if everyone was law abiding.

So you really believe that if P2P were to vanish then there would be no congestion on your conection ever again ? That ISP's would never overload too many users on too small a connection ever again ?

If your problem is people breaking the law, then let the law deal with it.

and finally a horrible analagoy.

I like beer. I like pubs. However my enjoyment is spoilt by a 'tiny minority' that spend all day drinking vast amounts, where as I like to drink in the evenings from 9-11. This tiny minority are the cause for 60-80% of all the 'drunken crimes' comitted in my area, ****ing in the street, flashing their bums, causing a public nuicance and more besides. What's more as the pub is open 24/7 and they are almost always there they drink like fishes. So best estimates are that they consume 60-80% of all the beer. So this _must_ mean that when _I_ come in for my evening beer, and can not get to the bar, that it is this this same 5% that is causing all the 'bar congestion'. So not olnly are the responsible for 80% of the 'bar congestion' they are also responsible for 80% of _illegal activities_ associated with it. This can not go on.

Now I do not want beer to be £50 a pint. I do not want there to be a restriction on how many pints a person can order in a day, but what else is to be done. The whole thing is gonna colapse otherwise. So I guess that £50 a pint and restrictions on how many pints you can buy a day is the only option. At least when I do pop in for a pint, I will not be blocked by a 'tiny minority', and will be able to get my pint quickly.

[ian@huth]

Originally Posted by erol

So you really believe that if P2P were to vanish then there would be no congestion on your conection ever again ? That ISP's would never overload too many users on too small a connection ever again ?

If your problem is people breaking the law, then let the law deal with it.

If p2p was to vanish there would be far less chance of congestion. With todays technology and pricing there is bound to be situations where congestion occurs. Statistical diversity allows contention to work and give us our connections at a reasonable price but 24/7 maxing out of a connection does not give that diversity. You could have a situation where there are a couple of hundred very light users on a card but there is always a chance that at any particular moment they all want to do something that uses most of their bandwidth at the same time. We are using a contented service that is priced because it is so and therefore we must expect there to be congestion at times.

Do you not agree that the download of copyright material without the copyright holders permission is illegal. Yes or no?

Do you condone people breaking the law. Yes or no?

Do you think that someone who is performing illegal activities on their connections and activities that are not allowed under the terms and conditions of the service provider should be allowed to affect the service of others. Yes or no?

What is your solution to service levels being degraded?

[erol]

Originally Posted by ianathuth

If p2p was to vanish there would be far less chance of congestion.

Really? So if every car user that is using his car for an illegal activity was to be removed from the roads there would be far less chance of road congestion would there? Or maybe the more you free up the road, the more cars that then come and fill the void until you are back where you started, regardless of whether the journies are illegal or not ?

Originally Posted by ianathuth

With todays technology and pricing there is bound to be situations where congestion occurs. Statistical diversity allows contention to work and give us our connections at a reasonable price but 24/7 maxing out of a connection does not give that diversity. You could have a situation where there are a couple of hundred very light users on a card but there is always a chance that at any particular moment they all want to do something that uses most of their bandwidth at the same time. We are using a contented service that is priced because it is so and therefore we must expect there to be congestion at times.

If you are so het up about this and so convinced that all your problems lay at the door of this 'mythical' 5% of heavy P2P users, then why not go to a ISP that _does_ ban such users and usage? That's not a 'trite' question, I really want to know the answer. Maybe you do not have any options other than cable (though there is satelite and I can _guarantee_ that no self respecting crazed warez theif would use a sat connection) ?

Originally Posted by ianathuth

Do you not agree that the download of copyright material without the copyright holders permission is illegal. Yes or no?

Of course I do. Where have I said different ?

Originally Posted by ianathuth

Do you condone people breaking the law. Yes or no?

Of course not. Where have I said different ?

Originally Posted by ianathuth

Do you think that someone who is performing illegal activities on their connections and activities that are not allowed under the terms and conditions of the service provider should be allowed to affect the service of others. Yes or no?

I think the ISP should warn and then remove service from such people if they ignore the warning. Where have I said different ?

Just a couple of questions for you. What has any of the above got to do with my disagreement that 5% of BB users do (or even physical can) create 60-80% of the congestion in peak periods ?

and

Did you like my 'beer' analogy ?

What is your solution to service levels being degraded?

My solution to people doing illegal things is to use the law to stop them (not service restriction, not caps and not pay per MB (as the _only_ option)).

My solution to service levels being degraded beyond aceptable levels is for ISPs to properly scale thier networks (and price them accordingly). It would also help if they were up front an honest about thier services, and did not 'over promise' when selling them.

You see they are two different problems with two different solutions.

So what exactly is your 'solution' ?

[ian@huth]

Erol, if you wish to use analogies, please use ones that are realistic and comparable.

I am not so het up over the situation and if you think that the "mythical" 5% is not correct then what would your percentage be. It would seem logical to anyone that has an iota of commonsense and has followed these forums over the past year that a very small percentage of users consume a very large percentage of bandwidth and that they are primarily file traders using p2p or newsgroups.

Your statement of "What has any of the above got to do with my disagreement that 5% of BB users do (or even physical can) create 60-80% of the congestion in peak periods ?" is posing a question that was not the initial subject of the thread. 5% of users CAN consume 60-80% of the bandwidth and this is very easily proved, just think about it for a moment and then tell me how they can't.

Your solutions are theoretically correct, but practically have NTL for one got the financial resources to properly scale their resources and what should be the "price". If I or you had the solution to the problems we would be the ones getting £3,500 per day, not Barclay.