AT&T wants you to read more

[Dumas]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

I don't see anything wrong with what they are doing. The limits seem reasonable. High volume users SHOULD pay more than me.

There is no shortage of ISPs, If you don't like it, don't buy it

Should high volume users really pay more than you, or should you be getting a refund? Sounds to me like you're part of the 98% that is over paying!

It seems that the US has some of the worst service and highest prices for internet services among developed nations. And "no shortage of ISPs" ... you're kidding right? We're talking about the US here. Perhaps your choices abound in Reading, PA, but my experience indicates not so much elsewhere outside of major metro areas.

It appears the marginal cost for one Gig of data over the Internet is 3 cents (at least in Canada.) You would expect it to be about the same in the US, and yet AT&T is looking to charge 15x+ for going over the cap. At that rate, the first 150G cost them $4.50. Who has AT&T DSL and what are you paying per month?

This article has some detail on marginal costs and their decrease over time due to advances in technology. This coincides with what I've read about UK ISPs moving away from bandwidth caps because of upgrades they've made to their network.

Furthermore, whereas metered service is most commonly associated with Utililties, the telcos certainly do not want to be regulated as Utilities. They really don't want their "metering" procedures to undergo the scrutiny that traditional utility meters and measurements undergo, let alone seek approval for rate increases.

As others have suggested, I don't think this is about the network, but about control. This is why net neutrality is so important in the US and caps such as these are really only possible in anti-competitive environments.

Does anyone know of net neutrality problems in the UK, Europe, and Asia? I'm guessing this isn't an issue because of greater choice and vastly superior services.

[HarryT]

The problem is that with a shared resource like ADSL it only takes a very small proportion of selfish users to degrade performance for everyone. For example, when my ISP here in the UK introduced a usage cap they reported that 0.1% of their users were using over 50% of their network bandwidth. It's only fair that high volume downloaders should pay more - it is a limited resource.

[grumpy3b]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The problem is that with a shared resource like ADSL it only takes a very small proportion of selfish users to degrade performance for everyone. For example, when my ISP here in the UK introduced a usage cap they reported that 0.1% of their users were using over 50% of their network bandwidth. It's only fair that high volume downloaders should pay more - it is a limited resource.

ADSL is provisioned and guaranteed bandwidth not shared. Cable is actually the shared and can vary over the course of a day. If you are trying to assert that ADSL is a shared resource simply because of the commonality of the DSLAM or other network control devices, well sure so is any other form of networking.

Now if there was a change in the ADSL topology in the past decade I must have missed it.

[HarryT]

No, it is shared. You have your own piece of wire from your house to the telephone exchange, but your ISP buys fixed bandwidth from the telephone company which all their users share.

[grumpy3b]

Originally Posted by HarryT

No, it is shared. You have your own piece of wire from your house to the telephone exchange, but it's a shared "pipe" from the telephone exchange to the ISP.

You have got to be kidding me? You consider that shared? hahahaha...really? Well by that logic there is zero existence of unshared bandwidth.

The fact ALL networks have an inherent commonality at some point is a given but the definition of a shared resource that matters here revolves around the DSLAM to the home wire and that is not shared.

To call ADSL a shared service is downright misleading perhaps in an attempt to engender opinion to your position. It is in fact not a shared service. On a shared service the actual rate delivered is variable in real-time. Cable is the case of a shared service at the neighborhood level. ADSL is not shared at the neighborhood level which the only relevant level of sharing to the end user. Everything else is at a layer or more abstracted from the actual users access and service.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by grumpy3b

To call ADSL a shared service is downright misleading perhaps in an attempt to engender opinion to your position. It is in fact not a shared service. On a shared service the actual rate delivered is variable in real-time. Cable is the case of a shared service at the neighborhood level. ADSL is not shared at the neighborhood level which the only relevant level of sharing to the end user. Everything else is at a layer or more abstracted from the actual users access and service.

No, with the very greatest respect that's not the case. ADSL certainly is a contended resource at the level of the local telephone exchange, and performance varies with the activity of local users.

Eg, my nominally 8MBit ADSL service has a download speed of about 5MBit/sec at quiet periods such as this (early Sunday morning). During working hours, when all the local businesses come online, download speed drops to about 1.5-2MBit/sec because of contention at my local telephone exchange. Between 4-6pm, speed gradually increases again as those businesses stop using the internet.

Cable is contended at the local street cable level; ADSL is contended at the telephone exchange. To say that it's a fixed bandwidth resource is highly misleading. The only fixed bandwidth part of the system is the wire from your house to the telephone exchange; beyond that, it's all shared.

[grumpy3b]

Also the argument that a service provider is justified in charging more because you dare to actually use the services you are sold is laughable. In fact why would you not question if the ISP is not intentionality creating an artificial shortage by not updating and upgrading to maintain the proper bandwidth to user ratio.

Never have I read a single comment where the ISP has used the argument of the form --"blah, blah....blah....{insert targeted group of users here} are using 99.9999% of the service....blah, blah, blah"-- been taken to task if they are growing their network as they should be to service the added customers over time. Nor are they offering the customers who are on plans which far exceed even their most rigorous day of usage, a lower rate plan.

Their network is not being bogged down, which is the problem, what is happening is the theoretical peak bandwidth demands exceed the current capacity of the back-end of the network not the front end. This means the ISP has oversold the capacity. They do this intentionally. You will never see a slowdown of an xDSL network because a small core of users actually use the service and that is because of the provisioning side of the design. Room is reserved in a properly configured network. Again shared bandwidth networks such as cable networks all are indeed going to be degraded by a certain amount to load balance the service to each node. But even then the slow-down is at the neighborhood layer not the actual net access and control level.

xDSL only has performance issues when ISP's and whoever is actually providing the access do not do their jobs growing their hardware. Any claims by the ISP, in this case AT&T, are made up due to the way the xDSL networks are built.

[grumpy3b]

Originally Posted by HarryT

No, with the very greatest respect that's not the case. ADSL certainly is a contended resource at the level of the local telephone exchange, and performance varies with the activity of local users.

Eg, my nominally 8MBit ADSL service has a download speed of about 5MBit/sec at quiet periods such as this (early Sunday morning). During working hours, when all the local businesses come online, download speed drops to about 1.5-2MBit/sec because of contention at my local telephone exchange. Between 4-6pm, speed gradually increases again as those businesses stop using the internet.

Cable is contended at the local street cable level; ADSL is contended at the telephone exchange. To say that it's a fixed bandwidth resource is highly misleading. The only fixed bandwidth part of the system is the wire from your house to the telephone exchange; beyond that, it's all shared.

Then your ISP has oversold their capacity and/or improperly configured their network. This is quite often intentional in order to add fees. But to claim xDSL is shared is flat out incorrect. As I point out at some point ALL networks must share or they can't communicate with other networks. It is proper design of the load balancing and over all topology that affects this. I have no idea what they are doing in the UK or for your service but I have never encountered a case where an xDSL service degraded based on use. Now if there is insufficient capacity out to the external network, say the web, then sure there might be some sort of degradation but that has nothing to do with the xDSL part of the service.

End user slow downs are 99% of the time related to changes an ISP makes in the layer(s) above the DSLAM and can always be corrected by the ISP returning the end user's service to what they are paying for. Otherwise it can often be the case where the xDSL line to the end user is actually moved to a cable bundle which also has fiber near by. The fiber will often be improperly shielded and generate a lot of xtalk interference which pretty much makes the service slow down to try and correct the errors. I don't care what the ISP is saying though xDSL not shared in the sense it is used in network design.

Sure things can go awry in the CO at any level but again that is not part of the xDSL definition. Your ISP may vary.

You can spin it however you want but you are not right it's that simple. And I am done.

[grumpy3b]

All I can think of is your ISP was throttling bandwidth. That is as far as I can see a reason for a degraded service level to the end user which is based on network load.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by grumpy3b

All I can think of is your ISP was throttling bandwidth. That is as far as I can see a reason for a degraded service level to the end user which is based on network load.

The way it works in the UK is that the telephone network is owned by British Telecom (BT). They are an ISP themselves, but also act as a wholesaler, selling bandwidth on their network to other ISPs. My ISP buys a certain amount of bandwidth from BT.

In my case, the slowdown I see during business hours is because I live in a small village, which has quite a few "high-tech" businesses in the immediate local area. Our local telephone exchange, being rather old, has a limited capacity IP "pipe" connecting it to the rest of the BT IP network. That pipe gets overloaded during peak hours, resulting in a slowdown in performance for everybody. BT are gradually upgrading their network and adding capacity, but that upgrade hasn't reached down as far as local village telephone exchanges yet, and my local exchange has not yet been scheduled for an upgrade.

This is a very common situation in the UK. People who live in large towns and cities generally get much faster speeds than those like me who live in small villages. It's simply a matter of network capacity and has nothing to do with throttling or traffic management.

[GeoffC]

BT owns the telephone network, as an ISP they can provide me with 2.5 mbps download; my ISP on the same cabling succeeds in providing 6.5 mbps !

Capped at 30GB per month ....

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

BT owns the telephone network, as an ISP they can provide me with 2.5 mbps download; my ISP on the same cabling succeeds in providing 6.5 mbps !

Capped at 30GB per month ....

Which is a perfect illustration of what I was saying, Geoff. It's not the wire from your house to the telephone exchange that determines performance (unless you live a long way from the exchange), but what happens beyond that.

For us in the UK, 250GB/month sounds like an unbelievably generous allowance. Most UK ISPs cap at the level of 10-50GB/month, depending what package you buy.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Which is a perfect illustration of what I was saying, Geoff. It's not the wire from your house to the telephone exchange that determines performance (unless you live a long way from the exchange), but what happens beyond that.

For us in the UK, 250GB/month sounds like an unbelievably generous allowance. Most UK ISPs cap at the level of 10-50GB/month, depending what package you buy.

I'm at about 2.5 km from the exchange, and on copper.

But it is crazy (no?) that BT has a slower speed than someone else - in fact BT come out at one of the slowest that are available.

[HarryT]

What you're seeing sounds like contention at the level of BT's "ISP" stuff. With me, it's contention at the local exchange. Same basic problem (not enough network capacity) but in different locations.

My exchange isn't even on the schedule yet for the 21CN upgrade.

[grumpy3b]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The way it works in the UK is that the telephone network is owned by British Telecom (BT). They are an ISP themselves, but also act as a wholesaler, selling bandwidth on their network to other ISPs. My ISP buys a certain amount of bandwidth from BT.

In my case, the slowdown I see during business hours is because I live in a small village, which has quite a few "high-tech" businesses in the immediate local area. Our local telephone exchange, being rather old, has a limited capacity IP "pipe" connecting it to the rest of the BT IP network. That pipe gets overloaded during peak hours, resulting in a slowdown in performance for everybody. BT are gradually upgrading their network and adding capacity, but that upgrade hasn't reached down as far as local village telephone exchanges yet, and my local exchange has not yet been scheduled for an upgrade.

This is a very common situation in the UK. People who live in large towns and cities generally get much faster speeds than those like me who live in small villages. It's simply a matter of network capacity and has nothing to do with throttling or traffic management.

ahhhh, OK I get it now Harry, thanks for explaining the situation you are having to work within. Has to be frustrating. But there has to be throttling if the pipe is over sold. Otherwise the thing would blow up. They might not admit to it but it's there. It might be a self-defense designed into the system sort of thing, but it is there. It's the whole reason of one of the network layers exists, to protect service integrity with a graceful fall-back. We are just talking at different purposes here. So that is where the misunderstanding comes into play.

Until my selling my home recently, while I live in what is called a small town in the US, about 25k people, we at least can have up to 7.1/768 service and they could sell some people up to 12Mbps service but won't due to the very real physical limitations you outline. The simply aren't willing to grow the CO as they need to. And it will be the next millennium before we see FIOS.

So, sure based on the capacity limits where you are a cap is the most feasible way to distribute the capacity fairly. A shame though because of all the online content these days. I so love many of the BBC shows. Hopefully BBC offers less bandwidth intensive options for content. Over here so many are enamored with the need of HD for everything that people will blow through caps as generous as the 250GB mentioned in this thread just by watching Super Bowl commercials (well that is hyperbole to illustrate the point...). Hulu is no better but there is a small amount of fail-back in their content.

Anyway, great discussion thanks, I don't get to workout the network designer muscle much anymore as I retired about 10 years ago when I sold my company to come care for my mom & grandmother. Funny this reminds me I don't miss the business one bit. Always fires to put out when you do post install remediation as well as design troubleshooting. Plus 30+ years in IT is waaay to much! haha...off to nod for me now.