next »

[neilarmstrong]

Yep - easily the fairest way ... however - that would require PlusNet to actually have the bandwidth to offer you full line speed for x gb each month

Anyone seen this? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/21/blueyonder_gets_throttled/

Lets do some maths - take 200,000 customers give 1GB totally unshaped traffic available at peak, adjust to 8Mbps line speed, work out how fast someone can use 1GB, multiply that by number of customers online at once gives you the theoretical bandwidth requirement at that split-second in time. Divide by 622Mb (minus overheads) for a central pipe and that will give you a totally unrealistic number of pipes that would send any ISP bust in days.

No ISP budgets based on everyone using everything at once, it just isn't possible. No ISP can guarantee full line speed on anything because it isn't in their control. What we have said is that customers get an allowance and those customers, individually, will not get restricted within that allowance. However there is still a finite amount of bandwidth based on our business rules (which are well publicised on the site and havent' changed) and therefore contention always exists.

A few months ago the system was working fine. Now its not. We recognise that. If we don't fix it so that customers get what they are paying for all our customers will leave, its as simple as that. That's why we're fixing it.

We're seeing the new LLU providers promising unrealistic usage levels, and early customers getting good speeds. That will change as soon as the massive backlogs of customers actually get provisioned and their accountants actually understand the horrendous costs of unmanaged bandwidth. And lo and behold every single one of those ISPs will have to fess up to a usage management system. NTL/Telewest have finally come clean 12 months after they implemented Ellacoyas. Does anyone honestly believe that every other ISP isn't also doing this?

[Tam]

I wouldn't recommend posting your ip in the forum.

Ian

Yeah - coz its not hard to look up the IP associated with smithies is it !

[Tam]

Yep - easily the fairest way ... however - that would require PlusNet to actually have the bandwidth to offer you full line speed for x gb each month

Anyone seen this? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/21/blueyonder_gets_throttled/

Oohh .. look Plusnet/Neil Armstrong trying to spin their way out of something again!

Neil, if your going to spin everything - at least try it with something useful which might convince more than a blind midget, using the suggested link above is, to be honest, offensive and I would suggest a short term ban on your posting is in order! 

The link you have posted is blueyonder shaping "high usage" users (these appear from other forums to be 100gb+ per month! and it is a small trial in a small area of the UK) its not shaping every protocol of every user on its platform.



Lets look at it another way shall we?

NTL/Telewest/Blueyonder don't shape UNLESS the customer is a heavy user (reports are 100Gb+ per month).

BT don't shape they have fixed allowances. (Full speed to their allowed limit)
Zen don't shape they have fixed allowances. (Full speed to their allowed limit)
Eclipse don't shape they have fixed allowances. (Full speed to their allowed limit)
Freedom2Surf don't shape they have fixed allowances. (Full speed to their allowed limit)


Need i go on? 


PlusNet cannot provide full speeds, not even to their PAYG users on all protocols at anytime! ... but other ISP's can all the time?? - Seems like it is PlusNet with the problem if you ask me (Greed would be top of my list!).

[Inactive]

Well all I have to say on the matter is this;

I was with PN until last weekend on their Premier 1 Option MAX via BT. @ £21.99 per month.

I rarely use over 5GB per month, my speeds varied widely from around the 3000 mark up to a max of 5000.


I have moved to IDNet using their £17.99 a month service which includes 2GB per month and an additional £1 a GB over and above.

So costs are around the same, some months cheaper.

I get a fixed IP Address, as many e mail addresses as I want, a human being that answers the phone within 3 rings and knows what they are talking about, and my speed has never gone below 5000, usually it is over 6000 even at busy times.

So why can Plusnet not do it then?

[biondani]

Yeah - coz its not hard to look up the IP associated with smithies is it !

Maybe not but at least it keeps more "amateur" hackers/spammers at bay

Ian

[glloyd]

But you don't have 200,000 customers on IPSTREAM and not everybody is on 8Mbps and those that are few get maximum 8Mps speed. Not everybody would want to download at the same time, even if they did natural contention would kick in. Even at off peak times there is traffic shaping and speeds are up and down like a yo yo.

It has never made any sense to me to restrict download speed rather than volume. If you slow down downloads customers are using a given bandwidth for a longer time than if they could download at full speed and free up the bandwidth for someone else.

As I said in my last post lite users get punished at the same rate as high users which in my view is not fair. I only download the odd file now and again but get managed as the same rate as someone who downloads loads yet I pay for a Premiem account for which I see no advantage over the cheaper accounts.

Lets do some maths - take 200,000 customers give 1GB totally unshaped traffic available at peak, adjust to 8Mbps line speed, work out how fast someone can use 1GB, multiply that by number of customers online at once gives you the theoretical bandwidth requirement at that split-second in time. Divide by 622Mb (minus overheads) for a central pipe and that will give you a totally unrealistic number of pipes that would send any ISP bust in days.

[neilarmstrong]

As I said in my last post lite users get punished at the same rate as high users which in my view is not fair. I only download the odd file now and again but get managed as the same rate as someone who downloads loads yet I pay for a Premiem account for which I see no advantage over the cheaper accounts.

The system is designed that business customers have the highest priority, then teleworker, then PAYG, then Premier than Plus. The differences for those who have one of each account are obvious to see - Plus for example explicitly isn't designed for file downloading at peak times and is restricted even off-peak. PAYG customers have no specific restrictions on file downloading and off-peak neither to Premiwer customers. Light users absolutely should (and do) have a much better experience than heavy users, but clearly the difference is not evident enough. Likewise customers who pay more should (and do) get a better experience, but again the difference is clearly not obvious enough and on certain protocols is not good enough (FTP being an example). The system is designed to be totally fair about how we allocate the bandwidth according to how much customers pay and how much they use.

Right now the traffic management issues that you are experiencing are causing a lot of customer dissatisfaction (and therefore MAC key requests) and we are highly motivated to resolve it so that customers like you get a great experience and want to stay with PlusNet.

[Tam]

As I said in my last post lite users get punished at the same rate as high users which in my view is not fair. I only download the odd file now and again but get managed as the same rate as someone who downloads loads yet I pay for a Premiem account for which I see no advantage over the cheaper accounts.

Right now the traffic management issues that you are experiencing are causing a lot of customer dissatisfaction (and therefore MAC key requests) and we are highly motivated to resolve it so that customers like you get a great experience and want to stay with PlusNet.

If i was a premier user paying £21.99 per month - the only thing that would make me stay at plusnet is allowing me my 15Gb peak time allowance at full speed on whatever protocol i use.

If not - then I'll take my £21.99 per month and move it to any other ISP all of whom appear to be able to offer me exactly what I want, some considerably cheaper than PN to begin with!

[fenlandbroadband]

Yep - easily the fairest way ... however - that would require PlusNet to actually have the bandwidth to offer you full line speed for x gb each month

Anyone seen this? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/21/blueyonder_gets_throttled/

Lets do some maths - take 200,000 customers give 1GB totally unshaped traffic available at peak, adjust to 8Mbps line speed, work out how fast someone can use 1GB, multiply that by number of customers online at once gives you the theoretical bandwidth requirement at that split-second in time. Divide by 622Mb (minus overheads) for a central pipe and that will give you a totally unrealistic number of pipes that would send any ISP bust in days.

Ah but you see, that's not how an ISP works.

You know full well, just as the rest of us do, that not all 200,000 customers are going to be online at the same time, they're not all going to be downloading at full speed, and aren't all going to be doing so on the same day (straight away you'd have to spread the usage out over a month rather than lumping it in as all happening on one peaktime evening).

By the way, are all of the bits of information on http://www.plus.net/8mb 100% fully accurate and truthful with regards to the PlusNet offering?

[Oldjim]

[PAYG customers have no specific restrictions on file downloading and off-peak neither to Premier customers.

This may well be true but P2P is still limited at peak times for all users. It's just that some have extra throttling added to slow it even further. To state that there are no specific restrictions is being somewhat economical with the truth as there are still the non specific restrictions.

[LC100]

Hi

Plus for example explicitly isn't designed for file downloading at peak times and is restricted even off-peak.

And the marketing department have the nerve use the word "Plus"!  Is this for "Plus extra throttling".

I can understand PlusNet throttling certain traffic to managed it's costs etc, however the problem seems to be now that there isn't enough bandwidth to go around even when managed.

Keep the management of course, but stop bushing this as the only way forward because you can of course buy more bandwidth!  Okay, we know this isn't going to happen due to the pending takeover and has been the issue for a while now, PlusNet have been penny pinching.

When I first joined PlusNet (several years ago) it only seemed like every other week PlusNet boasted they were adding further capacity, how times have changed!

[neilarmstrong]

When I first joined PlusNet (several years ago) it only seemed like every other week PlusNet boasted they were adding further capacity, how times have changed!

Absolutely - we've posted many times before about how much we over-provisioned bandwidth following the laucnh of CBC. Because of that we had to lower the number of pipes and imnplement traffic management in the first place in order for the business to be sustainable. We've seen plenty of ISPs go bust or be bought and there will be more who still haven't got their capacity budgeting under control.

Only yesterday we attended a BT Wholesale broadband industry forum where senior staff from three ISPs (one larger than PlusNet, one smaller than PlusNet but well established and another smaller than PlusNet who are attracting lots of customers at the moment) admitted that their bandwidth growth is out of control and causing operational and financial difficulties.

[jelv1]

Would one of the "another smaller than PlusNet who are attracting lots of customers at the moment" be one where we are seeing a lot of people on the portal forums reporting they are migrating to at the present time?

[kitz]

>> too much apathy from the PUG on this one. Perhaps noone in the PUG uses p2p,

And why I (and others) have spent evenings running p2p and giving them graphs and figures showing them exactly what Ive been been experiencing.
I cant speak for whats happened over the past 11 days since Ive not been around.

>> and it would be expected that as the number of VPs rise as broadband use grows.

There are actually far FEWER VPs.  
In usual BT style they havent released full details, but what I can gather over the past few months all exchanges should now have "Super VPs".

Previously you could have a DSLAM with many VPs (6/12 etc) all with xMB of bandwidth.
The SuperVPs work differently the DSLAM has XMB of backhaul and this is shared by all users on the dslam.  Theres no longer a 50:1 or 20:1 VP - it all goes down the same pipe, with BT doing the shaping for which users get priority (Home v Office etc).

No-one ever really knew what caused an exchange to go to red in the past - but from my own personal experience it was speeds of under 400Kbps for several days in a row.  At this point the exchange would be marked red and a fix date set.
However - if before the fix date the exchange suddenly got "acceptable" speeds again for a few days - then nothing was done.  Hence why at one point so many exchanges swung in and out of red for months and users complaining that fix dates used to seemingly come and go without a final decent fix.

What causes these new super VPs to be classed as red - I dont know - obviously it wont be quite the same as the old system.

PN capacity is something that does concern me - its something I do periodically nag about from time to time - hell its why I spent so much time trying to work out what was going on and what the capacity report was all about.
Its why I used to get figures from the old style graphs and accumulate hard facts.

Im not up to speed yet on whats happened over the past 10 days or so - but I do find it strange that so many more reports of poor speeds seemed to co-incide with release 6 whatever of the ellacoyas.  I am strongly of the opinion of what speeds you can get depends on which gateway youre connected to.
I stand firm that PN customers shouldnt have to go pipe hopping to get better speeds.

[kitz]

Lets do some maths - take 200,000 customers give 1GB totally unshaped traffic available at peak, adjust to 8Mbps line speed, work out how fast someone can use 1GB, multiply that by number of customers online at once gives you the theoretical bandwidth requirement at that split-second in time.

Doesnt work like that though - like you say no ISP could ever afford to do that and that isnt what people here are asking for.
They are simply asking for their "fair share of the pizza", without someone taking the cheese topping off.
Even Zen despite their -cough- "no contentention on our network" -cough- claims cant guarantee, nor do they do the maths like that.

Ive tried to do the maths before, it took me a long time to work it out despite the fact that I dont have the full figures that you have access to, but I suspect they were pretty damn close.
Ive said before I feel you went wrong with the BB+ account and the early claims. Theres very little profit in this account yet too many users "abused" it trying to get out what they could simply because no strict limits were set.
Therefore can you really blame anyone for at least trying it on?

I do see both sides of the fence in this - I realise that the customers you are targeting with the BB+ product are those self same customers who are looking at the likes of Tiscali and Orange etc and their claims of "Unlimited".
It should be OFCOM who are stamping hard down on this practice in the industry as a whole.

NTL/Telewest have finally come clean 12 months after they implemented Ellacoyas. Does anyone honestly believe that every other ISP isn't also doing this?

PN were the forerunners to experiment with the ellacoyas to squeeze out what they could.  Yes I do believe you have some of the best experts.
No they werent the first to implement traffic shaping.
How many other ISPs are doing this? -  I honestly dont know.

I understand where youre coming from many ISPs refuse to discuss this with their users.

Tiscali, Homecall etc are being very restrictive with p2p.
Several ISPs dont have ellacoyas yet are likely to be doing "primitive shaping" using Junipers or equivalents.
Eclipse - Ive tried several times to get information from them as to what extent they shape - but they aint saying anything.
Pipex do and have done shaping for a long time - heck I remember feeling worried over 2 years ago at the massive influx of pipex users that came over to PN when you first introduced the first 2Mb product.

I strongly suspect that "one of the largest ISPs" has had a hell of a lot of ellacoyas for quite a while, they just dont know how to work them properly yet, so perhaps havent put their users under so much "pressure".

Something that PN "forgot" is that you still have some "techies" who arent as likely to be fobbed off with some of the pathetic excuses Ive seen given to users of other ISPs such as the likes of the average tiscali/wanadoo users.

One thing I do strongly object to is the words "Unlimited".. and the mention of "Free" 
IMHO the contention based explanations (ie the 30:1 stuff) are totally meaningless.
I should imagine that most of the larger ISPs are running at way over 100:1