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You mean Snow Leopard 10.6.8 v1.1. This can be crashed (as I did covered) by a Wifi AP providing IPv6.

Solution is to disable IPv6 in OS X, which is simple enough albeit you need to disable or move out of range of the AP to do so.

What actually happens is, the machine boots fine, you might be able to start an app or two, but then it'll beach-ball, and nothing will work thereafter; it's not actually frozen, but all disk activity stops and you can't even shutdown.

Details here.

10.6 Snow Leopard has an interesting bug where it works until you get a new router that supports IPv6, and you configure it with your old SSID and password. WiFi appears to work... but then it doesn't... and then the whole OS beach-balls... you can't even shutdown and have to hard-power off.

The solution is to disable WiFi on the router, power on the Mac, go into network prefs and disable IPv6.

Details here if anyone ever needs it.

I guess the code is a complete whitewash to avoid legislation on the issue then?

The reason I say this is that I have a line with PlusNet and they most definitely do not support net neutrality. Service throttling is a stated part of what they do:

http://www.plus.net/support/br...

Whatever this code is, it clearly doesn't do what it claims to. If an ISP is intentionally slowing down certain traffic (and charging you more to have lower priority traffic increased on your line as PlusNet does - £5 for their "pro addon" which increases priority of deprioritised traffic) then this is most definitely not net neutrality whatever they say.

My ISP (Plusnet) is a division of the old state monopoly (BT), and they even have a page on how to set up a home email server: http://www.plus.net/support/email/smtp_mail.shtml [plus.net]

To be fair, they tell you nothing about setting up a home SMTP server, they merely show you how to get your Plushnet mail forwarded to your server after you get it set up. You are on your own as far as getting Postfix or Sendmail up and running.

But at least they are ahead of the game here compared to most US broadband providers.

To bounce back on topic, it is precisely inexpensive consumer devices such as the Raspberry Pi solution discussed and similar very small "wall wart" style computers that can come loaded with everything you need to run a web server, email server, VOIP and VPNs out of the box, after just entering some very basic information. Not much more complex than setting up your cell phone.

Like you, I suspect most users wouldn't want to put up with the Spam, Spam filtering with Spamassassin seems pretty solid, but it is the single biggest consumer of CPU and bandwidth on my home server. (But on the other hand if you pop your mail off of something like Google, directly into your own MDA you bypass most of the spam.)

But for the family photo album, or blogs or messaging, voip, video chat, the types of devices proposed in TFA could become quite popular. Who knows, Maybe Jabber will have a resurgence!

Too many ISPs forbid this for no rational reason.

Can they not be convinced?

My ISP (Plusnet) is a division of the old state monopoly (BT), and they even have a page on how to set up a home email server: http://www.plus.net/support/email/smtp_mail.shtml

I don't run a home email server -- it's too much effort to filter spam -- but there's been a web server running on port 80 for the past year. My mum has another web server in her house (for family photos), with a competing ISP (o2?) and that's been running for almost 10 years.

But they don't advertise the cap, do they?

It depends on your ISP. As I said, iff they are advertising the cap, instead of saying "unlimited" then I see no problem. And indeed, this is what _most_ of the ISPs do here in the UK (certainly the smaller ISPs pretty much never say "unlimited" and advertise a cap.) Some of the ISPs that fall into the "big, cheap and crap" category do still sell dirt cheap "unlimited" accounts with hidden caps, but this is increasingly uncommon.

And a cap that can be consumed in 1-2 days of moderate usage is a fraudulent advertisement when you claim multiple megabits of capacity.

No, no it isn't. If the advertisement says "unlimited" then I would agree that capping it is fraudulent (unfortunately the ASA disagrees on this point); but my ISP says "up to 24Mbps capped at 15GB/month during peak hours" (and defines those "peak hours"), and there is nothing fraudulent about that: I'm absolutely happy with that advertising because I bought the account knowing full well what the cap was and how much it would cost me to increase the cap if necessary. This is good for me - I'm not a heavy downloader, I don't use more than 15GB/month during those peak hours, I don't want to be subsidising the people who thing that they have some kind of a god given right to max out their connection 24 hours a day.

Not that my ISP has caps. Nor that I'd ever sign on with an ISP that has them.

But that's because I'm not interested in getting conned.

I don't see how you can claim an ISP capping people at the advertised limit a "con" - if you can't read the terms of the contract you're signing then that's your own stupid fault, not an attempt to con you. Now, if the ISP is genuinely misadvertising and not explaining the caps in their literature, then that would be a con, but since you said you'd never sign on with an ISP that had caps, you presumably mean you'd know about them _before_ signing, so no, it wouldn't be a con.

Now if the ISPs were to advertise something like "260GB per month at up to 5mbit speed", then they'd be producing fair ads. Ditto if they sold different cap tiering levels and bundles without requiring you to pony up for a higher speed to get a higher cap.

Oh look, that's exactly what they do.

they should be spending money investing in IPv6 and not IPv4 - period.

http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,106125.0.html

Not their customers fault they didn't start this quick enough.

It is something I remember reading on thinkbroadband last year. I can't find the post with pictures from back then but another search pulled up the same details elsewhere.

http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=a2bb7e60ca518a58ecd18c417f8926fb&topic=83633.msg704352#msg704352

Same thing for Plus, they've put a FAQ up which states they were subject to court orders to turn over their customers details, here.

It's expensive, although much better than last time I looked at a similar ISP.

I pay £18/month, including the phone line rental -- I get 40GB/month although I'm not aware of ever hitting that limit. There's also unlimited UK landline calls. (It's with TalkTalk, who recently spoke out against the proposed pro-big-media copyright laws, which was a nice surprise. I only picked them because they were cheap.)

Yesterday I noticed an advert for broadband for £6.95/month (not including phone line), with Plus.net. That's only 10GB/month.

That was tried in the UK with ADSL providers advertising "unlimited" broadband. They got around it by reclassifying exactly what is unlimited - it is now "unlimited access" so at any time 24/7/365.25 you can have access, but it isn't unlimited bandwidth.

Not so - the ASA don't care as long as you can demonstrate that the vast majority of your subscribers aren't impacted by the cap and that you mention clearly that a fair use policy applies. See here, here, here, and especially here. Extract from ASA ruling:

The ASA noted all the ads made clear that a fair-use policy applied to the service and the level at which the allowance was set. We noted the information provided by Vodafone demonstrated that only a very small proportion of their customers had exceeded the fair-use policy limited and that action was likely to be a request to moderate their usage in the first instance. We acknowledged that the vast majority of customers used only a small amount of the available allowance and concluded that the existence of a fair-use policy did not contradict the claim "unlimited mobile internet".

Sue all you like - they'll find a loop-hole somewhere and the only people to really gain will be the lawyers.

Agreed - they're all bastards

Isn't this what plus.net has openly been doing sucessfully for a few years now

Isn't this what plus.net has openly been doing sucessfully for a few years now

With these bigs pipes in place they will no longer have any justification for caps. Their main justification (at least in UK's case) is that (1) the copper infrastructure in UK has poor quality or (2) that it's overloaded or (3) BT Telecom's prices for bandwidth and connecting are huge.

For the 3rd point, you can read about how much BT charges ISPs here:

http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/02/28/how-uk-isps-are-charged-for-broadband-the-cost-of-ipstream/

Let me quote from that page because probably some people will be too lazy to click the link:

A central pipe can be ordered with a maximum capacity of 622Mbps (we could buy pipes with less, e.g. 155Mbps but we only buy 622â(TM)s now).

There are four charges associated with the central pipes. The first is a one off installation fee of £175,000. In general there is a lead time of around 3 months for a new installation, but this can take longer if new fibre needs blowing, especially if that requires extra digging.

Secondly, thereâ(TM)s a per customer rental charge of £1.25 per month. With around 200,000 customers on IPStream that equates to £250,000 per month.

Then thereâ(TM)s a base rental for the 622Mbps central pipe of £160,000 per year and from there a £166,800 yearly rental for each 155Mbps segment that is active.

cabling.pngSo you have yearly charges as follows:

        0Mbps of capacity - £160,000
        155Mbps of capacity - £326,800
        311Mbps of capacity - £493,600
        466Mbps of capacity - £660,400
        622Mbps of capacity - £827,200

As you can see, because of the £160,000 base rental it actually costs less per Mbps the more segments are active. It will cost less per year to have one fully active 622Mbps than have two centrals with two segments lit each. But you then have to balance that against the lead time for installing a new central pipe.

As such, 1Mbps costs per month costs the following (the calculations are based on 139Mbps per segment which is the usable amount excluding overheads):

        With 155Mbps of capacity - £195.92
        With 311Mbps of capacity - £147.96
        With 466Mbps of capacity - £131.97
        With 622Mbps of capacity - £123.98

At the time of writing we have 25 active segments across 7 pipes giving us a total annual cost of:

        (7 x 160,000) + (25 * 166,800) = £5,290,000

Which equates to a per Mbps cost of £126.86 per month before we consider any transit or routing costs on our own network.

So while in US or in Holland I can get bandwidth from a datacenter at an average price of 7$ for 1mbps, in UK this ISP pays about $190.

With 10gbps links all over UK, how will BT keep justifying those insane rates? At least the installation fee wouldn't exist anymore, because the fibers would already be in place. Will probably have to see.

One of the tech gurus at my local ISP posted an excellent thread which details how UK ISP's are charged for their bandwidth.

It is certainly UK specific, but it does go into some depth as to how and why there are bandwidth limitations on ISP services in the UK. By far and away the most expensive part of the connection is between the Customer and the ISP, and not between the ISP and the Internet.

The blog post is available here. Makes for some interesting reading.

I realise I'm oversimplifying this a bit but what you're suggesting is:

Games over VNC. (or other similar technology, e.g. RDP, X-Windows protocols etc.)

Okay. No problem with that. You can even do 3D acceleration with local hardware running remote programs, vice versa and all sorts of fancy stuff. The problem, though, is the next logical step they have taken:

Games over VNC via the Internet.

Not being funny but on a bog-standard DSL business line communicating with a bog-standard DSL consumer line, if my VNC isn't in one of the ridiculously limited colour modes and high compression, it struggles. Sure, I can do 24-bit colour etc. but my FPS drop even on an empty-ish desktop. Both lines are capable of 8MBps and both touch that in real life, on idle networks, and both have 2Mbps upstream.

So their claim of "only 1.5Mbps" is pushing it a bit for "real-time" traffic, especially if they are relying on MPEG compression of highly-graphical scenes. Now, I *can* stream movies and TV-shows from the Internet at phenomenal rates and I can get full-screen (non-HD), full motion video quite easily. However, I usually have at least a 5-second buffer on such things because otherwise it gets about a second into the stream and then just stutters constantly. I assume that's because trying to do "real-time" streaming is much, much, much harder than just streaming a video by brute force.

You can *already* demonstrate this with VideoLAN and some sticky tape if you can be bothered - you can stream anything but trying to keep it in synch requires a lot more bandwidth and effort than just the video and normally relies on heavy buffering and synching "in the past" (i.e. buffer 5 seconds ahead at all times, but just co-ordinate what frame should be shown *now*). That can't happen on a real-time-response game, and as pointed out by many, the latencies are already horrendous once you get out onto the net (the best latency I get to a remote location is about 10-15ms, and that's not even leaving my ISP).

It's a wonderful idea, it really is. But if it was remotely plausible, Nintendo would have done it with their Wii originally, had it as a bolt-on, or be announcing it for their successor. Wii is the perfect machine for this - network connected, in the home, connected to the TV, payment infrastructure already in place, online gaming, games are quite small and downloadable, little backing storage to reduce costs, etc. You could even offload the GL parts to the local hardware rather than trying to create a super-server somewhere just yet (there's a version of X-Windows that can do this already). But the fact is that it would be *fantastic* for something like, say, a gaming cybercafe. And then it's usefulness stops dead. And in that sort of arena, you're looking at it being orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to just slap a real computer on each seat.

I wouldn't even like to THINK of the 3D calculations and rendering that would have to be done for even a simple point-and-shoot running over the Internet from 16 or 32 different points of view, the MPEG'ing the result and then trying to stream it to 32 different people in under, say, 50ms. Sure, you can just build a server farm packed full of GPU's, but you're looking at one GPU per simultaneous customer, and it would have to be able to handle quite modern games and be upgraded constantly. Then the infrastructure (bandwidth alone! 1.5Mbps to each simultaneous online customer. Wow!), codec licensing, etc. You'd never be able to even do it for $29.99 a month, even if it was terrible and you had to cutback.

Just the bandwidth - a 1.5Mbps, uncacheable, non-multicastable stream to, say, 2000 simultaneous users - that would be 3Gbps.

According to my ISP, quite a large ISP owned by British Telecom now, the iPlayer application is a big bandwidth problem for them.

http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/08/19/online-o

Checked and double checked, hit submit, and forgot to include the link to how PlusNet do the filtering...
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,60045.0.html

I get a fully unshaped 8Mbit connection with 15GB transfer per month for £20.

Anything downloaded between midnight and 8am is not counted towards the cap

One of the tech gurus at my ISP wrote a fine blog article about how UK ISPs are charged for their transfer. It's a completely different market economic to the US, which is why we've had transfer limits for some time.

I'd argue for weighted fair queuing and QOS in the cable box.

Seem to me that for ADSL it would be ideally placed in the DSLAM, where there is already a per-subscriber connection (in any case, most home users will only get 1 IP address, hence making a 1:1 mapping for subscriber to IP -nothing need be per IP connection as the original article assumes). In fact, the wikipedia page on DSLAMs says QoS is already an additional feature, mentioning priority queues.

So I'm left wondering why bandwidth hogs are still a problem for ADSL. You say that this is a "huge collection of tuning parameters", and I accept that correctly configuring this stuff maybe complex, but this is surely the job of the ISPs. Maybe I'm overestimating the capabilities of the installed DSLAMs, in which case I wonder if BTs 21CN will help.

Certainly though, none of the ISPs seem to be talking about QoS per subscriber. Instead they prefer to differentiate services, ranking P2P and streaming lower than uses on the subscribers behalf. PlusNet (a prominent UK ISP) have a pizza analogy to illustrate how sharing works - using their analogy, PlusNet would give you lots of Margarita slices, but make you wait for a Hawaiian even if you aren't eating anything else. Quite why they think this is acceptable is unknown to me; they should be able to enforce how many slices I get at the DSLAM, but still allow me to select the flavours at my house (maybe I get my local router to apply QoS policies when it takes packets from the LAN to the slower ADSL, or mark streams using TOS bits in IPv4 or the much better IPv6 QoS features to assist the shaping deeper into the network).

Right. The article seems to be written on the assumption that the bandwidth bottleneck is always in the first few hops, within the ISP. And in many cases for home users this is probably reasonably true; ISPs have been selling cheap packages with 'unlimited' and fast connections on the assumption that people would use a fraction of the possible bandwidth. More fool the ISPs that people found a use for all that bandwidth they were promised.

Obviously AIMD isn't going to fix this situation - it's not designed to. Similarly, expecting all computers to be updated in any reasonable timeframe won't happen (especially as a P2P user may have less little motivation to 'upgrade' to receive slower downloads). Still, since we're assuming the bottleneck is in the first hops, it follows that the congestion is in the ISPs managed network. I don't see why the ISP can't therefore tag and shape traffic so that their routers equally divide available bandwidth between each user, not TCP stream. Infact, most ISPs will give each home subscriber only 1 IP address at any point in time, so it should be easy to relate a TCP stream (or and IP packet type) to a subscriber. While elements of the physical network are always shared, each user can still be given logical connection with guaranteed bandwidth dimensions. This isn't a new concept either, it's just multiplexing using a suitable scheduler, such as rate-monotonic (you get some predefined amount) or round-robin (you get some fraction of the available amount).

Such 'technology' could be rolled by ISPs according their roadmaps (although here in the UK it may require convincing BT Wholesale to update some of their infrastructure) and without requiring all users to upgrade their software or make any changes. However, I suspect here the "The politicization of an engineering problem" occurs because ISPs would rather do anything but admit they made a mistake in previous marketing of their services, raise subscriber prices, or make the investment to correctly prioritise traffic on a per user basis, basically knocking contention rates right down to 1:1. It's much easier to simply ban or throttle P2P applications wholesale and blame high bandwidth applications.

I have little sympathy for ISPs right now; the solution should be within their grasp.

Right. The article seems to be written on the assumption that the bandwidth bottleneck is always in the first few hops, within the ISP. And in many cases for home users this is probably reasonably true; ISPs have been selling cheap packages with 'unlimited' and fast connections on the assumption that people would use a fraction of the possible bandwidth. More fool the ISPs that people found a use for all that bandwidth they were promised.

Obviously AIMD isn't going to fix this situation - it's not designed to. Similarly, expecting all computers to be updated in any reasonable timeframe won't happen (especially as a P2P user may have less little motivation to 'upgrade' to receive slower downloads). Still, since we're assuming the bottleneck is in the first hops, it follows that the congestion is in the ISPs managed network. I don't see why the ISP can't therefore tag and shape traffic so that their routers equally divide available bandwidth between each user, not TCP stream. Infact, most ISPs will give each home subscriber only 1 IP address at any point in time, so it should be easy to relate a TCP stream (or and IP packet type) to a subscriber. While elements of the physical network are always shared, each user can still be given logical connection with guaranteed bandwidth dimensions. This isn't a new concept either, it's just multiplexing using a suitable scheduler, such as rate-monotonic (you get some predefined amount) or round-robin (you get some fraction of the available amount).

Such 'technology' could be rolled by ISPs according their roadmaps (although here in the UK it may require convincing BT Wholesale to update some of their infrastructure) and without requiring all users to upgrade their software or make any changes. However, I suspect here the "The politicization of an engineering problem" occurs because ISPs would rather do anything but admit they made a mistake in previous marketing of their services, raise subscriber prices, or make the investment to correctly prioritise traffic on a per user basis, basically knocking contention rates right down to 1:1. It's much easier to simply ban or throttle P2P applications wholesale and blame high bandwidth applications.

I have little sympathy for ISPs right now; the solution should be within their grasp.

The details (as made public by PlusNet) are explained somewhere on here: Broadband Your Way Blueprint. Check the section called: IPStream Broadband Pricing.

Good on you! That is how PlusNet attempt to sell their broadband.

The problem here is that iplayer is being pushed very heavily to non savvy audiences via the TV, so all these people who don't understand this either use up all their usage very quickly, or hammer their ISP's connectivity to the customer.
Because of the way (non cable/LLU) ISPs have to buy bandwidth to the customer from BT, you end up with either spiralling costs as the ISP tries to give the customer a good service, traffic management to control it, or the VoIP, gaming, HTTP traffic of ALL of the customers using that pipe being slowed/dropped

You provide a false choice by suggesting ISPs could possibly choose to sell service without any oversubsription. Say the 10mbit service my company offers were sold assuming 100% usage 100% all the time. Depending on infrastructure costs and typical bandwidth costs for a decent size ISP in the US, you would be talking around $500 to $1000 per month. Say you have 1,000,000 customers in a modest size city. Are you suggesting that the ISP should plan on delivering 10 Petabits of data to that community? I'm not sure that that kind of bandwidth is even feasible with current technologies.

If they want to sell "unlimited" connections then yes, they need to provide enough bandwidth to support what they are selling and set their prices appropriately to cover the cost.

Alternatively a more sensible suggestion would be to stop misadvertising their services as "unlimited" and instead include information as to what the limits actually are. Also, providing several different products with different limits and appropriate pricing seems a good idea to keep both the light users and the heavier users happy, rather than having one group of users subsidising the other.

Really, if you advertise a service and use the fact that it's "unlimited" as a selling point, you damned well can't complain when people try to use it in an unlimited way.

An ISP could just change their terms of service and next month the customer can decide if they want to stay.

Herein lies the problem - when everyone else in the market is advertising "unlimited" services, your service doesn't _look_ attactive if it's similarly priced but has published limits even though the "unlimited" services probably have similar limits which just aren't published.

Changing your terms of service also leads to bad publicity (those few unprofitable heavy users can make a lot of noise - I saw it happen when PlusNet changed their terms in this way). And even the less well informed people who don't overuse the service may feel hard done by since you appear to be taking something away that they paid for (even though they aren't using it and their service will probably actually _improve_ as a result).

So in a market where everyone else is misrepresenting their products it's pretty hard to be truthful whilest still looking competetive.

Thankfully here in the UK, many of the smaller ISPs have stopped advertising their connections as "unlimited" and in a number of cases have put together a good explanation of why no ISP can offer unlimited internet connections. I would be interested in how many potential customers ignore that and still believe an "unlimited" connection is better value for money so go elsewhere though.

ISPs in the UK are starting to moan about having to carry traffic too, even going so far as to suggest the BBC should pay them.

The big ISPs are certainly complaining ("oops, we underpriced our product and are now making a loss - we'll demand that some random 3rd party bail us out of our mess"). Notably many of the smaller ISPs are now very explicit about their limits rather than selling everything as "unlimited". The smaller ISPs are showing that if you charge people appropriately and make it clear what they are paying for, even the high bandwidth users can be profitable customers.

Hopefully the end result will be that all ISPs will stop misleading their customers by selling limited accounts as "unlimited".

I don't think Europe is immune to profiteering by reducing the service standards so you can get by on a lesser investment.

Indeed not - underprovisioning the network and deprioritising bittorrent seems to be a reasonably common bad practice. However, by provisioning the network correctly and setting the pricing model appropriately, the high bandwidth users can pay for their own bandwidth rather than being subsidised by everyone else.

In the Plus.net plan screenshot (http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/plus_net. png), they show the different tiers you can purchase, differing by usage allowance and gaming usability. What's really interesting is that right below the GB's allowed they say: "Looking for unlimited broadband? There's a good reason it's not listed here." That then links to here: http://www.plus.net/unlimited_broadband/

From the site:
Every ISP has a finite amount of capacity - there's only so much traffic that you can get through the network at one time. If a broadband provider offers unlimited broadband, and users actually try and use it as an unlimited service, then the provider's network will grind to a halt (find out more about how you share broadband capacity). To try and combat these slow downs a provider can add more broadband capacity, but this is expensive and traffic such as peer-to-peer quickly fills up the new space on the network.

Expensive huh? Much like how you're charging $20 for one gigabyte a month? Anyways, I like my current "unlimited" plan, even if it has a hidden cap (Comcast, rumored to be at 200GB/month).

Ellacoya are well-known for selling routers optimised (and I use that word with the kind of looseness only Goatse man can convey) for bandwidth shaping, in particular for throttling P2P. PlusNet were one of the first ISPs in the UK to be hated for widespread deployment of their kit.

Remember, a press release is almost always marketing; and this form of marketing is about getting people to purcahse solutions for problems that don't quite exist as described. (Microsoft are good at this; Google are first rate.)

19/05/2007 @ 14:28 Reports of Spam Email (42837) - UPDATE

This is an update to the previously reported issue regarding the increased volume of unsolicited email being sent to some customers' mailboxes. A copy of the last update can be seen here:-

http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/117952039 0.htm

Following the withdrawal of our Webmail service on Wednesday, we have been working around the clock to build a replacement platform for our customers. This solution is now in final testing and we envisage that it should roll live this evening.

We will provide a further update once one is available.

Kind Regards,

Chris Parr
Customer Support

I don't know about the US, but you want an ISP that is intelligent about bandwidth. It is finite, and providing everyone with unlimited bandwidth would bankrupt the ISP. So... you need one that ignores your usage on non-peak times, that gives you a fair chunk of allowable bandwidth, and one that is upfront about its policies.

I use plusnet (in the UK), I have really unlimited usage between midnight and 4pm, 30Gb the rest of the time. They are open about their policies and have 'been in contact' with users that have used the network at full capacity 24/7. Apparently less than 1% of users use a noticeable amount of bandwidth, for these, Plusnet say: Of course, for the vast majority of people who don't use up to the usage allowance every month, a shared design like this doesn't pose any problems at all. However, the nature of any product designed in this way is that there will always be a number of customers who end up with an unsustainable long term usage pattern. This may be deliberate in some cases, but more often than not it is because after choosing a product, a customer's usage habits subsequently change. For these customers there are effectively three choices:

      1. Upgrade to a different PlusNet product that is more suited to the new usage requirements.
      2. Moderate peak time usage, either by reducing the amount of large downloads, or by scheduling more downloads to overnight periods when demand for interactive traffic is lower.
      3. Find another ISP which is more suited to the specific usage requirements of that customer.


Plusnet did send out warning letters to a few users (adslguide has a report on it here.
It should be noted that this was 2 years ago when everyone was on 0.5Mbps lines.

So anyway, for you - if you have a shortlist, ask them about traffic shaping and capacity management.

I don't know about the US, but you want an ISP that is intelligent about bandwidth. It is finite, and providing everyone with unlimited bandwidth would bankrupt the ISP. So... you need one that ignores your usage on non-peak times, that gives you a fair chunk of allowable bandwidth, and one that is upfront about its policies.

I use plusnet (in the UK), I have really unlimited usage between midnight and 4pm, 30Gb the rest of the time. They are open about their policies and have 'been in contact' with users that have used the network at full capacity 24/7. Apparently less than 1% of users use a noticeable amount of bandwidth, for these, Plusnet say: Of course, for the vast majority of people who don't use up to the usage allowance every month, a shared design like this doesn't pose any problems at all. However, the nature of any product designed in this way is that there will always be a number of customers who end up with an unsustainable long term usage pattern. This may be deliberate in some cases, but more often than not it is because after choosing a product, a customer's usage habits subsequently change. For these customers there are effectively three choices:

      1. Upgrade to a different PlusNet product that is more suited to the new usage requirements.
      2. Moderate peak time usage, either by reducing the amount of large downloads, or by scheduling more downloads to overnight periods when demand for interactive traffic is lower.
      3. Find another ISP which is more suited to the specific usage requirements of that customer.


Plusnet did send out warning letters to a few users (adslguide has a report on it here.
It should be noted that this was 2 years ago when everyone was on 0.5Mbps lines.

So anyway, for you - if you have a shortlist, ask them about traffic shaping and capacity management.

It may be a Windows thing

Don't look now, your bias is showing. I've seen a lot of systems, *nix and Windows where proper partitioning of drives hasn't happened. Even then the article only states that the drive containing the data was erased; it mentions nothing about the OS being on the same drive. And of courser RAID doesn't help in this, unless you have a very delayed snapshot mirroring system; identical mirrored drives don't help when you delete a file because, guess what, mirrors stay the same, so it's deleted everywhere.

Heck my pathetic excuse for an ISP in the UK managed to blow away 3 months worth of mail and that was on a NetApp, moving to a Sun NAS. Admin stupidity happens on all platforms; pretending it doesn't on your chosen one is more stupid than deleting a crucial file.

Here:

"As with my initial posting on the loss of customer email data - http://usergroup.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,24 72.0.html, what follows is an open and honest account of the events surrounding the attempt to recover the data.

Firstly you need to understand that in an attempt to recover the data swiftly, the engineer who deleted the 3 volumes in the first place swiftly followed up his error by immediately trying to create a volume of the same size as the 1st of the volumes in the same place. This is an old sysadm "trick" that on some file systems could have revealed the lost data, however in this case, it did not work, and in fact caused us more problems, as you will see later on in this account.

Within 2 hours of the data being deleted, a data recovery company had been contacted and within 3 hours the NAS was in transit to them. By 14:00 on that day the specialists were racking the NAS and began the process of copying all the 1's and 0's from our equipment to their own. This is standard operating procedure for anyone working in the field of data recovery, and is simply about ensuring that there is always an untouched copy of the information in case something further goes wrong while working on the recovery. Due to the volume of data that was being dealt with, the copy took until the early hours of the following morning.

At that point, based on their initial investigations, the data recovery specialists set the expectation with us, that we would recover some of the data, possibly not all of it though, and that it could take 4-5 days. From that point forward we have a tale of increasing woe as each new deadline set by the data recovery people was broken as they discovered more and more problems. In the following paragraphs I will briefly cover off the main problems that have been encountered.

The Sun NAS that we had selected for the mail storage platform is the first series of products to emerge from Sun since their purchase of StorageTek, and as such does not run the usual Sun OS of Solaris. It uses StorageTek's own proprietary OS which is a heavily modified FFS2 (Fast File System 2). The modifications are all about increasing the performance of the system to ensure enterprise level performance.

As the kit is fairly new to market, the data recovery specialists had not worked on this specific OS before, though they do have a lot of experience with NAS's in general, Therefore they had to significantly rewrite the tools that they use for analysing and recovering data. They utilised their engineering departments in both the UK and the US to work around the clock to achieve a re-worked set of tools.

Apart from the tools issue, the proprietary OS, uses the 1st volume it has access to, to store the master inode table. For more information about inodes, take a look at the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode. Essentially this is the table that tells the system where all the other files on the system are. As I mentioned earlier, the PlusNet engineer involved, had attempted to recover the data by creating a volume of the same size in the same place as the 1st volume. That action more than any other has caused us the most issues. By creating a new volume, the existing inodes were wiped and all data that was on that volume was essentially gone. Without that master inode table and with no knowledge of where the system stored it's back-up copy of this table, it has proved very difficult to work out what the data on the relatively undamaged 2nd and 3rd volumes actually is.

We have received a partial file list from the 2nd and 3rd volumes. This list amounts to a list of inodes and the data in them, not the list of complete files. Without even a partial directory structure it becomes vastly more complex to work out which inodes are associated with which other inodes and therefore piece together t

Could someone repost http://usergroup.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,27 53.0.html. I would like to see the technical details without going through the process of registering. Kudos to them for being open, hones, and forthcoming with the information. Not often you see someone doing that. I would love to see the after action report to see what changes they are making. Learning from a mistake like this can prevent it from happening to someone else.

Erroneous email sent to 3,500 customers.

I'm a PlusNet customer, and fortunately I haven't been affected by either event.

Here's what PlusNet has to say about the incident. Pretty nonchalant about the whole thing if you ask me. I wonder if they are crediting individual users who claim serious loss?

I have unlimited broadband, but that's probably because I don't download continuously all day long. I'm with PlusNet (who are great), and a while back they introduced a 'fair use' policy that caused quite a fuss.

The whole industry is based around buying X mb of bandwidth from BT, and then reselling it on to customers, expecting the customer to use a fair amount of it - not to use all the 2mb that they are given. This overselling is common as you'd be paying £100 a month for a 512Kb connection if they had to give everyone that much. So, they introduced the fair use that said you won't saturate your connection so other users wouldn't be disadvantaged (as the company wouldn't buy more capacity just for the few users who do abuse the service).

That said, they do give several options, and the expensive (£22) connection gives you a lot of bandwidth anyway - 20Gb during peak hours (4pm to midnight) and unlimited at other times. Even then, if you download more, they won't do anything about it until you d/l more than 60Gb. Its more of a reason to stop people who are literally downloading all the time. (hmm, that'll be you)

The fai ruse policy is something every ISP has, to a greater or lesser extent simply because the economics of providing broadband don't allow it otherwise. http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/network/sust ainable_usage_guide.shtml

You might want to check out Adslguide.org which has a list of all UK BB providers, you may find a better one in there, or you may want to try the "business" offerings from places as they should be mouch more friendly to your large bandwidth needs. Alternatively, contact the ISP and ask!

Plusnet rock. Up to 8 meg downstream with no limits for £14.99 a month. And you get wide open ports and a static IP address. Great for bittorrent, hosting your own web server, gaming... And apparently they now throw in VOIP, just for the hell of it.

And the referrals program means you may end up not even having to pay for any of it. Tell them negativezero sent you.

What really annoys me is they have three levels of service, and their own VoIp traffic gets higher priority than competitors. That is an abuse of power.

-steve

My ISP has been doing this for months now.

My ISP has been doing this for months now.

my provider offer up to 2MBit down and 256k up; my modem is connected at 2272k down and 288k up, and occasionally gets data transfer speeds to match, even with TCP overhead :-)

Yep, PlusNet are pretty good with good prices too. Cheapest service is £14.99 (approx $30) for 2Mb down, 256up (best you can get in the UK without using cable or a LLU provider. Support is generally pretty good, and I can only remember one outage about 2 years ago.

I moved to London from Sydney a year ago, and had to go through the same experience.

I'd recommend PlusNet for an ISP, if for no other reason than they give you a subdomain on their network, which can be handy for us geeks.

POP3 sucks compared to IMAP though. Myself I'm happy with my ISP mail, pop and imap access, unlimited mailboxes, unlimited storage space, and a no-nonsense webmail interface if I need it. (Shameless sponge: if anyone else in the UK likes the sound of that, take a look at http://www.plus.net/, just put sdonag as your referrer if you decide to go with them. Thanks.)

Here in the UK the opposite is completely true - I used to have cable from NTL but I gave up in the end because they were so bad:

1. In August 2000 I phoned NTL to arrange an installation of telephone and cable TV. The wiring was already in from the previous owner of my flat but I was told that they couldn't do the installation for 6 weeks (first sign I should have given up right there). I also checked on the availability of a cable modem and was told that the current service was analogue but they were upgrading the whole network in my area to digital in November 2000 so it'd be available then. They also refused to do the installation on a weekend so I had to take half a day off work (I didn't really see this as a huge problem at the time).

2. On the arranged installation date the engineer showed up, plugged the analogue cable decoder into the existing wire (that worked ok), tested the phone line and told me he was just going down the the multiplexer to reconnect it. He never returned (second sign I shoudl have given up). I phoned up their support line, waiting in the queue for 90 minutes before being told that my phone line hadn't been connected because they needed to upgrade the multiplexer first (they had already had 6 weeks notice that they were installing the line!). They said it would be 3 months until they did the upgrade! (third sign)

3. Eventually the phone line was connected (they tried to make me take anouther day off work for that but I managed to convince them that they *would* do a weekend install), but the network upgrade to digital never happened and I eventually decided to save money by switching my Demon dialup internet connection to an NTL one since they did unmetered dialup. I was told that this wasn't available in my area.

4. Whenever you needed to phone them you would end up having to wait in the phone queue for 60 - 90 minutes and 75% of the time they would then just hang up the call (I have since been told by people who work in NTL call centres that the line-managers do that when the calls aren't being answered quickly enough, since if they don't meet their quota of answered calls they lose their bonus pay - picking up and immediately dropping a call counds as an answered call).

5. The cable TV connection would break for several hours at a time not infrequently.

6. The analogue cable TV connection broadcast everything in 4:3 ratio - if it was a 16:9 channel they chopped the sides off the picture. I have a 16:9 TV so I'm left with a choice: chop the top and bottom off to make it 16:9 again (you lose way too much of the picture), squash the picture to make it 16:9 (ugh, distortion) or live with it in 4:3 ratio and big black bars down the side of the screen.

6. Eventually in 2002 (well over a year after the promised digital upgrade) I gave up, dropped the NTL phone line and TV and switched to Sky Digital satellite TV, a BT phone line and a PlusNet DSL internet connection. BT connected the phone line within 12 hours.

7. Sky only very rarely goes out (usually due to bad weather - happens maybe once a year for a few minutes)

8. If I need to phone Sky, BT or PlusNet they pick up the phone almost immediately

9. PlusNet's service is almost flawless (I know many people who use NTL cable modems and they are always having outages). I also get a subnet of real IP addresses and am allowed to run services on my DSL connection with PlusNet's blessing (NTL won't give you a static IP and their AUP explicitly disallows you from running services on it). The DSL connection almost never goes down.

10. In 2004 (i.e. almost 4 years after the promised digital upgrade), NTL came canvassing the area to say they now had digital services. They asked me what kind of internet connection I had and I replied "DSL

www.plus.net, who I use, do 2Mb/256Kb 50:1 home ADSL with 2Gb bandwidth - their 'lite' service - and you pay £2 for each Gb over and beyond the 2Gb.

Ideal for me (a light user by the standards of most around here) and a really fair and decent company to deal with.

John

Almost, but not quite. For home users, NAT will always have a place, as long as ISPs only include one IP address, and want to charge $$$ for a second or third IP.

They shouldn't be doing this under IPv6 - everyone will be getting a reasonable sized subnet. And besides, if your ISP is doing this under IPv4 you need to change ISP - I have a normal home user account from PlusNet and they are quite happy to hand out small IP subnets (4, 8 or 16 addresses) for free so long as you can provide justification for their requirement. Most reasonable UK ISPs will do this for DSL connections on their standard accounts, if this isn't the case in the US then I think you're being horrendously ripped off.

This was the rationale behind the first NAT boxen, with the firewall being a happy side-effect.

NAT was designed to aleviate the IP address space shortage, period. There is no reliable security in doing NAT - you're relying on your ISP's routers to "do the right thing". If you want that kind of security you need a connection tracking firewall.

What you say is true for business users who get a block of addresses, though.

As I said above, so long as you can provide justification for the need, most decent UK ISPs will give you a small subnet for free, even on home accounts. However, this wasn't the original arguement: The original arguement was that you do not need NAT for security (a connection tracking firewall does the job properly and without all the nasty side effects) and that once the IP address space problem is removed (e.g. through IPv6 roll out) you will neither need nor want NAT. NAT is a kludge that works for the short term but causes many problems - the sooner we can ditch it the better.

Actually nearly all ISPs in the UK including mine sells routers as a package solution. Here's Eclipse's package

Also my ISP have got Linux help pages here

1.6TB?

Based on the recent posting from Plusnet, that's about three months worth of downloading over ADSL.