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Originally Posted by deadite66
much the same happened to me when i was on plusnet dialup, they don't tell you what the cap was but got kicked off for breaking it.
claim you have an unlimited service then whine as some people make best use of it.
plusnet are gits in my eyes.
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Actually I think this is a good approach, they aren't getting kicked off or capped, but being segregated to their own bandwidth at an extremely good contention ratio (about 4:1) at a cost of £316,200 a year.
Of course that 4:1 isn't going to be nearly enough for them, but hey, networks are necessarily contended and with pricing changes to BT wholesale products ISPs are working on a 'metered' model, ISPs have always had to pay per GB for transit, and ADSL ISPs are paying on a similar model now for BT bandwidth.
The alternatives really are capping or paying per GB (Plusnet pay BT about £1.50 per GB not including transit costs, support costs, etc, etc, etc) so would you rather say £1.75 per GB, which in the case of the chap above means a bill for over £300 by the end of the month?
Until we see massive changes in how the internet operates, where there's no scarcity in bandwidth and it's a plentiful enough commodity that its' impossible for it to be run uneconomically that's how it's got to be.
Or I'll put it another way. At peak times Plus use nearly 2.5Gbit/s, this 300 users use 10% of their resources. 300 users using (going to midway between minimal and maximal usage) 200Mbit/s between them, or about 665kbps each. When you consider that each user is provisioned about 25kbps it might put things into more context. This 300 were hitting plus for 200Mbit/s in peak times, when going by the boring averages they would have been using 1/4th of that.
These 300 users cost plusnet over 16k a month in extra BT Centrals costs that are required to try and alleviate congestion which would not otherwise be there.
300 users costing their ISP 16k a month, and causing peak time congestion for a userbase of over 77,000 other people. (I'm working on peak time to avoid all the rubbish about how congestion isn't caused by heavy users, running a network as closely to the wire as Plus are REQUIRED to by both their costs and prices charged it makes all the difference.
Chop that 200Mbps for this 0.3% of users off the graph at bottom of this post, then tell me it doesn't make a difference to the other 99.7%.
Worst of all they can't complain, their service stays unlimited, so apologies if my post title was confusing, they just get to enjoy congestion even though the product is operating WELL within the 50:1 contention they have been sold. As I said I guesstimate them to be under about 6:1. The money they are paying won't even get close to touching plusnet's BT costs for doing this, let alone all the other costs associated, it will however remove the congestion that the other users are suffering.
In my opinion a very fair way to go, no-one's package has been changed, no-one's contract voided, and the only possible reason to sulk is that the 2Mbit/s may not be reachable 24x7 anymore. That's contention being supplied at a premium business quality ratio costing 100s normally.
Absolutely no sympathy, and big thumbs up to plus for taking this innovative approach rather than blanket capping, traffic shaping or the other alternatives.
As I said I wish this could be done on cable networks, would have saved those who aren't taking the michael some cash and some cap!
http://www.plus.net/support/adsl/adsl_utilisation.shtml