50M : Should i worry?

[Chrysalis]

Well if we use 250gig as an example figure.

on 10mbit VM's bottom tier once can do 3.2tb a month if full speed 24/7.

250 gig a month is probably enough for 98% of customers.

Whilst for downloading 24/7 its less than a 10th of capacity.

Better to do this then pretend its unlimited and have issues with trying to curtail usage.

[AndyCalling]

Originally Posted by vmfriend

Not sure I agree with the water analogy, my water is metered and if I left my taps on all day my 'flow' wouldn't be restricted. I would just get billed for what I used. I wouldn't get cut off either.

I suspect downloading habits would change if people were charged by the gb.

I think it's a sad indictment of society when people get lambasted for pointing out that downloading movies by torrents etc etc is illegal.

You appear to be trying to compare a metered service to an unmetered service. I think you have the wrong end of the stick, I compared an UNMETERED water service to an UNMETERED broadband service. That makes my example comparable. You have made a mistake there, your example is not comparable.

The current system works fine, and is dead reasonable. Unless one actually tries to break the system by going all mental and turning it all the way up to 11 24h a day the system works fine. We do not need to go back in time to a metered system, if we do things like Youview will not be practical and we'll all have to switch away from VM in 2012 which we mostly don't want to do.

So long as VM and other ISPs keep up with normal usage developments we'll all be fine.

One other comment. Downloading torrents of copyrighted material is not illegal. I am not one for doing this, but I am fed up with trolls coming on here and trying to claim this is covered by criminal law in some way when we all know this is a civil matter. Stop trolling. It's not big and it's not clever.

[vmfriend]

Trolling ?

Oh dear. Instead of reasoned discussion you start calling people names.

I have my view you have yours, we'll leave it that shall we.

[General Maximus]

Originally Posted by vmfriend

like most people I would want any issues resolving, such as my service being impacted by others downloading torrents etc 24/7

I am going to jump in the middle and agree and disagree with both of you. With respect to vmfried, I too find the service good 99% of the time and as a whole never really have cause to grumble. That being said I disagree with the assumptions you make in assuming torrents are the cause of VMs poor network performance. The reason why speed and latentcy are so pants in during peak time, especially evenings around 7 and the weekend is because everyone is online and VM can't handle it which is why they had to introduce traffic shaping and stm. Whilst I am not affected by stm, their traffic shaping makes downloading torrents and using newsgroups impossible (yipee I hear you say) which is why I don't bother using either during these periods and I would assume most people don't. During peak time network perfornace is poor and gaming and youtube sucks ass and you can't blame it on protocols which VM are actively blocking as an excuse to solve the problem.

I agree with Chrysalis and they need to do stop fobbing people off with the "unlimited" service and instead provide minimum guaranteed speed/qos with monthly data caps instead

[qasdfdsaq]

Didn't we figure out already torrents (and all other P2P combined) use something like less than 1/4 of VM's network capacity?

[AndyCalling]

Originally Posted by vmfriend

Trolling ?

Oh dear. Instead of reasoned discussion you start calling people names.

I have my view you have yours, we'll leave it that shall we.

Oh no, you don't get away with falsely accusing people of criminality that easily.

Whatever your view is, whatever your or my ethical position is, downloading copyrighted material is still not illegal. Criminal law has nothing to do with it. You might just about say it is illicit (though since the advent of tape recorders that is debatable), but it is certainly not illegal. You can pretend all you like, but it won't make it so. This is not a point of view, it is the current state of the law in this country. It has been discussed to death all over the internet so you know it, I know it, we all know it.

Why then would you come on to a forum and claim otherwise, accusing people of criminality when you know your claims have no foundation, knowing it will just wind people up? Are you saying it is not for trolling purposes? If so please explain your reasoning, since you're so fond of reasoned discussion.

[Efour]

100mbit - Digital Theft Licence and i bet if you checked the users storage you would find 99 out of 100 have Gigs of copyright infringed stuff, some are also some dumb they will openly gloat about it ??

I honestly wish ISPs would come crashing down on some of you retards.

Yes im pee'd off cos i can see clear as day light the effects that 5mbit uploads being maxed by teenage torrent ***** has destroyed my gaming experience for the past 5 months

[General Maximus]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Didn't we figure out already torrents (and all other P2P combined) use something like less than 1/4 of VM's network capacity?

sweet, so if less than 25% of throughput is torrent traffic and VM supposedly only stm the 1% of users that are having a detrimental impact on the network, this then proves VMs network isn't fit for purpose during peak periods and can't handle what most people would call normal usage for gaming, youtubing and whatever else they do. Sooooooooo, efour's and vmfriend's assumptions appear to be incorrect

[Chrysalis]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Didn't we figure out already torrents (and all other P2P combined) use something like less than 1/4 of VM's network capacity?

No idea what the figure is. But any congestion during traffic management hours is more likely due to over selling rather than p2p/nntp considering they are throttled during those hours.

the last 2 nights in a row my utilisation (tbb latency graph) has peaked at midnight which suggests significant p2p/nntp activity on my port however prior to these last 2 nights I hadnt noticed a jump.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/s...690c2401fe.png

Can see there how late at night my peak is, and that my port appears to be congested for almost the entire day. Congestion at dusk suggests background downloading/uploading activity aka p2p/nntp as the amount of people online then should be minimal.

Sandvine who manage traffic for comcast I believe said now days the % of download activity that is torrents is barely a 1/5 but its a significant amount of upload traffic.

http://www.sandvine.com/news/global_...and_trends.asp

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Didn't we figure out already torrents (and all other P2P combined) use something like less than 1/4 of VM's network capacity?

During shaping periods, in theory, yes. If they didn't use more than that unshaped though people wouldn't notice much of a performance hit when using them during managed periods.

It's also been noted that the shaping seems as much use as a chocolate fireguard when people really try and hide what they're doing, which is why protocol agnostic solutions are the future and will be on a cable ISP near you in time.

---------- Post added at 10:12 ---------- Previous post was at 09:57 ----------

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

<Snip>

Sandvine who manage traffic for comcast I believe said now days the % of download activity that is torrents is barely a 1/5 but its a significant amount of upload traffic.

http://www.sandvine.com/news/global_...and_trends.asp

Check the European bit, we don't have Netflix and iPlayer uses considerably less. Given the discussion is congestion the table below is probably most relevant, and the upload section most relevant of all.

In the United Kingdom, BBC iPlayer comprises 6.6% of peak downstream traffic

P2P, etc, according to Sandvine will be as a minimum 65% of upstream traffic. There'll be some torrent traffic which wasn't identified due to obfuscation, some of the SSL will be NNTP, the Teredo will pretty much 100% be torrents.

59.68% torrents + 3.64% PPStream + 1.76% ED2K gives you 65% without even needing assumptions.

It's not a huge leap to imagine areas where an upstream is running at 50% 24x7 due to P2P or NNTP encapsulated in something else, this is a problem for cable companies throughout the world and one VM are addressing, however it's a more complicated process than the initial shaping deployment.

[Chrysalis]

I did say its significant on upstream

The table clearly shows we behind the times in live media entertainment tho.

VM really simply need to enforce a quite strict upload usage that applies 24/7 (given congestion isnt just peak) and that severely restricts upload speed when this limit is reached, it should apply to 'all' traffic. Basically if you like a much stricter STM thats 24/7. As well as forcefully keep upstream ports to below 40% utilisation, to allow the optimistic 10mbit upload for 1 user per channel.

[Ignitionnet]

Once we get Netflix, and the UK is a priority market for them to move into, things will change a bit. We benefit from iPlayer and other things in the interim though.

Keeping upstreams forcibly below 40% utilisation is silly, 10Mbit up on an 18Mbit channel is fine depending on circumstances as previously discussed repeatedly. There are uplifted areas with over 200 modems on a single channel running just fine.

The next iteration of traffic management you will find much more to your liking though Chris

[kwikbreaks]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

I do occasionally wonder what they'd cost if it weren't for people helping themselves

Same as it does now - costs are based on what they can get away with rather than the income they receive or what they cost to produce.

[Chrysalis]

Ignition I agree 40% is silly.

This is due to the fact they released 10mbit upload on 18mbit channels tho. When in reality they should have used minimal 36mbit QAM64 channels or 2 bonded 18mbit channels for 36mbit.. That would then allow utilisation to hit the 80% figure and still support a top tier customer starting an upload without causing noticeable congestion.

40% of 18mbit is about 8mbit, which gives the 10mbit free for a user to max out their upload, one out of 200 users uploading at any given time is hardly a remote possibility.

---------- Post added at 12:17 ---------- Previous post was at 12:12 ----------

Originally Posted by kwikbreaks

Same as it does now - costs are based on what they can get away with rather than the income they receive or what they cost to produce.

indeed.

couple of ladies were on dragons den last week with their wedding filming service.

They were asked why they charge what they do.

The story was they started at about £250 and ended up at £850 with gradual price increases, initially they were making a loss so had to increase, however it turned out their current price is way above their costs at around £500 and was decided on based thats how far they could push without losing sales.

Barring the uk adsl market which is somewhat weird most business charge what they can get away with and can often bear no relation to costs.

There is a new contract drawn up between the US media sector and various governments, some are apparently signing it soon, the EU not yet. This contract will mean new laws which violate various privacy rights and mean a much more restricted internet for the sake of the 'minor' issue of reducing copyright infringement. That sounds bad? Here comes the more scary part. It will make it law for them to count every infringement as a lost sale without any supporting evidence other than the infringement and they can also value the lost sale at something different to what the product is sold for, eg. a mp3 might be on itunes for 99pence but they can value it at £10. This is clearly going to be a new revenue stream for them and probably has very little to do with lost sales but rather simply a new way for them to make money. Oh and of course it wont have any affect on prices of legal content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Ignition I agree 40% is silly.

This is due to the fact they released 10mbit upload on 18mbit channels tho. When in reality they should have used minimal 36mbit QAM64 channels or 2 bonded 18mbit channels for 36mbit.. That would then allow utilisation to hit the 80% figure and still support a top tier customer starting an upload without causing noticeable congestion.

40% of 18mbit is about 8mbit, which gives the 10mbit free for a user to max out their upload, one out of 200 users uploading at any given time is hardly a remote possibility.

64QAM upstream channel capacity is 27Mbit, a channel hitting 80% is going to show noticeable congestion regardless of its capacity as it shouldn't be spending significant periods of time at 80%, and as you alluded to below the aim of the game is to ensure that that there are few enough users sharing the capacity that the balance of probabilities are far as usage goes are in your favour, or that historical usage levels indicate that MAC domains have an appropriate mix of users.

While torrents eat 60% of upstream bandwidth way less than 60% of people torrent, many people barely use a GB of upload per month.