New upload speeds and Network Management

[RainmakerRaw]

The thing I'm still thinking about is "Why push on with headline speeds if the capacity isn't there"? Don't give me all the spiel about "only a couple of percent 'abuse' the network" as if that was the case you'd expect (a) not to be hitting capacity issues and (b) not to have people clamouring for 50Mbps, 100Mbps and 200Mbps as they're rumoured to be released.

If you can't sustain 50Mbps without shaping/throttling, why push on towards 100 plus Mbps? Great headlines, but poor delivery. You sometimes get "Yes but NNTP means bigger downloads than streaming as people can comfortably get x264 now rather than being stuck on dial-up with xvids"... But that's a self-defeating statement. If you don't want customers to USE the internet to its capability, don't go releasing 50Mbps (and later 100-200Mbps) products. Sell dial-up, and they'll actually STICK to downloading less.

No, wait. Bad headlines!

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by RainmakerRaw

BTW as I asked above: For those who know, even with DPI how will VM be able to distinguish between NNTP/BT and "legit" (I hate that as it's not true) SSL traffic on the same ports such as work/VPN, financial transactions, etc etc? Surely traffic over 443 which is SSL is the same whether it's NNTP or HTML or whatever else inside?

TCP analysis and source-destination analysis can be trivially done which will expose things.

SSL VPNs to work use one connection, not several, SSL to news.giganews.com is a no brainer, P2P can be trivially spotted by the number of connections to a specific port on the client side. Remember that each connection our PCs make to a remote server we increment our source port and connections are initially unidirectional and to a single or relatively few servers, while with P2P there will be several connections coming in to us (the initial SYN / datagram of the flow will be inbound) and all to the same port, and outbound flows will be a single connection to several remote machines as we incorporate into the swarm.

From the point of view of these analyses the main job of DPI is to ensure against false positives. If it's not recognised assume that it's bad and place it in the excrement list.

Decent DPI systems can happily operate with unidentified flows low down in the single digits.

---------- Post added at 17:48 ---------- Previous post was at 17:41 ----------

Originally Posted by RainmakerRaw

The thing I'm still thinking about is "Why push on with headline speeds if the capacity isn't there"? Don't give me all the spiel about "only a couple of percent 'abuse' the network" as if that was the case you'd expect (a) not to be hitting capacity issues and (b) not to have people clamouring for 50Mbps, 100Mbps and 200Mbps as they're rumoured to be released.

If you can't sustain 50Mbps without shaping/throttling, why push on towards 100 plus Mbps? Great headlines, but poor delivery. You sometimes get "Yes but NNTP means bigger downloads than streaming as people can comfortably get x264 now rather than being stuck on dial-up with xvids"... But that's a self-defeating statement. If you don't want customers to USE the internet to its capability, don't go releasing 50Mbps (and later 100-200Mbps) products. Sell dial-up, and they'll actually STICK to downloading less.

No, wait. Bad headlines!

Simple - because the vast majority of users don't increase their usage very much when they are upgraded. A minority do, and either the costs of the packages must increase dramatically or measures must be taken to minimise the impact of these people on their local networks.

Perhaps you'd prefer pay per GB?

Everything we do should be noted in the context of the prices paid and the amount of bandwidth our subscriptions actually pay for. Free upgrades don't suddenly make our money go further and a compromise has to be struck between burst, sustained throughput and cost.

I would prefer to pay more for less restriction sadly the UK market doesn't really roll that way. The only operators who offer such services of any scale are either expensive or have a sugar daddy paying the bills for them.

[nomadking]

The 'are unaffected' is in the context of the 5pm-12am weekday, 12pm-12am weekend restrictions on P2P/NNTP. I think you'll might find that P2P & NNTP traffic doesn't count towards the 'Fair Use amount' but everything else(iPlayer etc) does. Testing today, I downloaded over 9Gb NNTP data without STM kicking in, but at 5pm the speed dropped to 2.5Mb.

IIRC some newsgroup providers used to allow access using HTTP. That would bypass the NNTP restrictions.

Something is limiting iPlayer HD to 2.5Mb. Is it STM or has use of NNTP affected non NNTP/P2P traffic as well?

[RainmakerRaw]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

TCP analysis and source-destination analysis can be trivially done which will expose things.

So NNTP over a decent Swedish VPN it is, then? That or back to FTP.

Simple - because the vast majority of users don't increase their usage very much when they are upgraded. A minority do, and either the costs of the packages must increase dramatically or measures must be taken to minimise the impact of these people on their local networks.

Perhaps you'd prefer pay per GB?

Everything we do should be noted in the context of the prices paid and the amount of bandwidth our subscriptions actually pay for. Free upgrades don't suddenly make our money go further and a compromise has to be struck between burst, sustained throughput and cost.

I would prefer to pay more for less restriction sadly the UK market doesn't really roll that way. The only operators who offer such services of any scale are either expensive or have a sugar daddy paying the bills for them.

Well to be fair my usage hasn't increased since I moved from ADSL2+, and I was only paying half the price for that than I am for XXL. I wasn't shaped, throttled or 'managed' on the ADSL2+ either...

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by RainmakerRaw

So NNTP over a decent Swedish VPN it is, then? That or back to FTP.

Depends whether or not they have a list of VPNs usually used for nefarious purposes and shape those as well

Originally Posted by RainmakerRaw

Well to be fair my usage hasn't increased since I moved from ADSL2+, and I was only paying half the price for that than I am for XXL. I wasn't shaped, throttled or 'managed' on the ADSL2+ either...

Mine hasn't changed since I dropped from XXL to ADSL2+.

If you are referring to the ADSL2+ service I think you are, UKOnline, that was heavily subsidised by Sky, as Be is by O2/Telefonica.

[RainmakerRaw]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

Depends whether or not they have a list of VPNs usually used for nefarious purposes and shape those as well

Hence why I mentioned the (very quick, free and easy) method of setting up a ready-made NNTP proxy on a dedicated server to be shared by its users. That, coupled with SSL, would I imagine be indistinguishable especially over 443. There are more decent VPN providers than I could care to count, especially in Scandanavia and some parts of Europe etc.

FTP's still good too.

If you are referring to the ADSL2+ service I think you are, UKOnline, that was heavily subsidised by Sky, as Be is by O2/Telefonica.

Yep, Easynet/UK Online are owned by Sky and the service on LLU is impeccable, totally throttling/STM/whatever free and has truly no download limits. All for a few quid a month. Now that's internet.

EDIT: the two threads really need merging!

[BenMcr]

Originally Posted by v0id

Spotify streaming however will

Er no it won't

This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer and Newsgroups, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected.

[RainmakerRaw]

As I've said though, being serious for a moment, how many users want 50/100/200Mbps to browse email and read the Telegraph? I'm very certain some take it "just because it's the top one" or because some sales guy twisted their arm, but in general I'm willing to bet the majority of users are there because they want the fastest downloads possible, whatever the service, its content, or reason for using it.

To sell massive headline speeds, followed by blanket throttling, just turns users towards other ISPs imho.

[BenMcr]

Originally Posted by Masque

As you said above it needs clarification as that still gives me nothing to tell a customer why they are slow and will lead to people disconnecting, what are agents supposed to do guess what has happened..

You can still tell if someone is STM'd, so I would assume that you would run your usual tests e.g download from gamefiles, check the modem etc.

If all tests came back ok but P2P was running 'slow' during the evening period then it's likely they are being shaped on the protocols

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by RainmakerRaw

As I've said though, being serious for a moment, how many users want 50/100/200Mbps to browse email and read the Telegraph? I'm very certain some take it "just because it's the top one" or because some sales guy twisted their arm, but in general I'm willing to bet the majority of users are there because they want the fastest downloads possible, whatever the service, its content, or reason for using it.

To sell massive headline speeds, followed by blanket throttling, just turns users towards other ISPs imho.

No more than time critical services running appallingly during peak times or having services costing twice as much to ensure the capacity is there to cater for heavy usage would though.

[RainmakerRaw]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

No more than time critical services running appallingly during peak times or having services costing twice as much to ensure the capacity is there to cater for heavy usage would though.

But as above if that's the case and they can't provide that capacity, then why double (and re-double) the available speed and thus increase the incidence of problems? They had to introduce STM - which was wildly criticised - on 20Mbps and below because of 'congestion'.

Roll on 50Mbps because it's "DOCSIS 3" and "truly unlimited fibre optic broadband that won't suffer from congestion like lower DOCSIS 2 tiers"...

Now we're back at square one with shaping, while they continue to double the headline speed. Surely that doesn't sound right to you? Blame "abusive" users while offering yet another speed doubling so you can "do stuff quicker*" (*provided you don't actually want to really really use it). I'd happily pay £50 or whatever for a true 50Mbps service. They were charging that originally anyway. There's only a minority of VM customers on 50Mbps at the moment and no doubt (without heavy discounting at least) it'll be even less on 100Mbps. So with so few users, on a DOCSIS 3 network, how on earth are they needing shaping and to blame users?

BRB, doubling the network speed... LOL

[Ignitionnet]

The DOCSIS 3 network exists to supply capacity relief to the legacy network. That it could do 50Mbps was a bonus

[RainmakerRaw]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

The DOCSIS 3 network exists to supply capacity relief to the legacy network. That it could do 50Mbps was a bonus

It didn't help much if they're still increasing/adding shaping? Further, 50 megs was sold to me as "OMG no need to throttle, manage or shape. Truly unlimited 'fibre optic broadband'". D'oh.

[FrankieX]

I'm disappointed that they haven't increased the download fair use limit in the new STM. You would think if this tiny percentage of users are taking all the bandwidth and this new traffic management can stop them during peak hours then there should be a lot more to share around for video streaming. I subscribe to MLB.tv which streams live baseball games, most of them out of peak hours but some are played from 6-9pm, and if I tried to watch them I would go over my peak download limit within an hour. And I even have difficulty catching up on the weekend because of the whole day (well 10am-9pm) is covered by the STM still. Virgin is certainly the fastest and most reliable ISP available in my area, but without upgrading from L to XXL (which is obviously a lot more money a year) it still isn't much good at providing streaming video in my opinion.

[Peter_]

Originally Posted by BenMcr

You can still tell if someone is STM'd, so I would assume that you would run your usual tests e.g download from gamefiles, check the modem etc.

If all tests came back ok but P2P was running 'slow' during the evening period then it's likely they are being shaped on the protocols

It will not be a good experience for the customer to find out that they are being shaped in a way that are not truly aware of as the wording is rather ambiguous and will very likely lead to customers wanting to disconnect as they will feel they are being misled or told a tall tale.