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Morality of Throttling a Local ISP?
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a small (400 customers) local cable ISP. For the company, the ISP is only a small side business, so my whole line of expertise lies in other areas, but since I know the most about Linux and networking I've been stuck into the role of part-time sysadmin. In examining our backbone and customer base I've found out that we are oversubscribed around 70:1 between our customers' bandwidth and our pipe. I've gone to the boss and showed him the bandwidth graphs of us sitting up against the limit for the better part of the day, and instead of purchasing more bandwidth, he has asked me to start implementing traffic shaping and packet inspection against P2P users and other types of large downloaders. Because this is in a certain limited market, the customers really only have the choice between my ISP and dial-up. I'm struggling with the desire to give the customers I'm administering the best experience, and the desire to do what my boss wants. In my situation, what would you do?"
This is not a hard problem. You can not maintain a reasonable oversell ratio unless you have low average usage. Yes, one way to get that is throttling, but it's difficult to do that in an effective way that won't piss off your customers.
What you should do is tell them they get 40G/mo or whatever, plus a usage fee above that, and let the customers throttle themselves if they want to. If you want to be a nice guy about it, you could give them the option of being auto-throttled or suspended if they approach the limit, so they don't get an unexpected bill. Of course whatever you do, you'll need to revise your terms of service.
Voila, you maintain low pricing and good performance for everyone, because the p2p guys will police themselves now. If you have customers that routinely transmit hundreds of GB because they're a professional video editor or something, then they won't mind paying for the bandwidth.
Here's the thing - you have no choice. Do the shaping.
That said - form a compelling argument for doing the right thing, and present that to your boss. Don't defy him, but give him a reason to reconsider. In the meantime, do as you're told. You can always undo shaping. Don't screw your employment in the interim.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Outweighs the good of the few... or the one. Throttle.
start my own ISP, reselling third party bandwidth. If the market is that limited and poorly serviced, there is money to be made by providing a decent service. You will be happier and as the owner you also stand to make more money.
Petition for your boss to do the right thing.
While you're petitioning, do what your boss tells you.
If what your boss tells you to do is unethical, quit, and tell him why in your resignation letter.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
How does your upstream contracts work? You could try and see if you can buy traffic per 95th percentile with a commit instead if you need the burst capacity . Then throttle the worst offenders if you notice your 95th percentile going over your commit.
well, first of all you should be worried about doing what your boss told you to do, if he wants shaping, shaping it be....you said that the locality doesn't helps, if they can't use your solution, it's dial-up....i presume you're also using your own ISPs broadband connection...
you could also {if you're a downloader} set up shaping for everyone else and secretly {oops!} set up a rule for your login/pass that'll bypass the firewall rules, so free internets for you dude :P
i know i'm a filthy ass but that's what i would try to do, protect my job (just answer stuff with "yes, sir!") while taking benefit :P
This might be problematic if his work contract has a non-competition clause. It is also fairly likely that his new business venture would fail (most do).
And not everyone is cut out to be an independent businessman.
Quit
I had a situation once where my bandwidth was metering during regular hours but free from midnight - 7am. Any smart heavy user will set up their downloads to happen during the free period and take the load off the network during peak hours. I've never understood why more ISPs don't do that.
If you just tell people they have a 40G cap then they'll feel entitled to use it whenever they want, and you really can't argue with that.
Is throttling really cheaper?
Have you tried to compare the price of just buying more bandwidth with what it will cost you to setup and maintain the packed shaping?
So long as you're not singling them out by content or otherwise subjecting them to your (your boss's, your company's) conflicts of interest, then I think you're fine. Just follow some of the other fine suggestions here to do it responsibly.
Am I the only one who read the title and had an image of strangling a local ISP executive?
Unfortunately, my "local" ISP choices are Time Warner and AT&T, and, despite the miserable service, their executives are out of my reach.
The P2P boys will quickly figure out what is going on and they can set their clients to download from Midnight to 8am. That way, there's plenty of bandwidth when Joe Average wants to check their Facebook and when businesses are operating and the bandwidth through the night which is mostly unused is utilised better. Everyone wins.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Quit.
Your boss is a jackass and needs to go bankrupt.
For a 400 user ISP, there is presumably only a dozen or so high traffic users...
Privately, encourage them to shift some of their activity to off times, such as late morning and middle of the night - explain to them it will help other users, plus help them too in they'll get better speed while helping to keep prices low.
If not enough voluntary compliance, then try enabling aggressive throttling / shaping during day / evening, but allow unthrottled speed during off-hours for high traffic users.
Presuming the ISP has access to multiple providers, then another option to consider is evaluating how much the ISP is paying for bandwidth - see if there are better options and/or if contracts can be renegotiated.
Ron
Count their traffic but allow for unlimited downloads during the lowest periods of the day. Everybody would be glad to download torrents during the night and surf the net during the day.
You don't want to punish customers for how much they download so much as when they download.
The guy who downloads 100Gb overnight when no one else is online? He isn't a problem.
The 100 users who all connect and download from together at peak hour? They are the problem.
So you want to allow people who don't use the net when everyone else is using it full-speed access. And you want those who use the net at peak hour to be slowed down.
The way to acheive this?
Do nothing and let congestion shape them.
The problem is that there may be civil and even criminal penalties for committing fraud, so please consult a lawyer.
Morality is a tool for the herd to feel more important than their leaders. Instead, get pragmatic: how can you make this business work for most people?
You probably want heavy downloaders to use another service, anyway. You might even consider setting up two plans, one for ueber-users and one for normal users.
However, I would prioritize traffic. Email, web, SSH, et al come first; after that, all p2p protocols in order of usefulness.
You need to define your business audience. If it's people who are going to check the mail and web surf, and 5% of your customers are p2p users, cut out the p2p users and focus on the people you want to serve.
Futurist Traditionalism
Your boss understands his customers and the contracts in place. Your boss understands the political consequences of changing his service under the feet of his existing customers. Your boss has lawyers that understand the legal ramifications of his decisions.
If this is an error in judgement, his customers will let him know by either (1) suing him, or (2) withholding payment, or (3) leaving the service. All three mean less revenue for him no matter the outcome.
Your job is to do what he asks within the law. If you think he is asking you to break the law, talk to your personal lawyer for advice. If you have a moral issue with him, gracefully resign.
Don't stick your neck in the guillotine.
This is not an ISP problem; but a business problem. How does maintaining a small ISP enhance the primary business? Can expanding the ISP business enhance the primary business? Will implementing rate limiting and traffic shaping bring unwanted negative attention to the primary business? Can you make a business case to the owners indicating costs and profits for not implementing traffic shaping?
This is not a technical problem. If the you cannot answer the questions I have listed, can you find another person in the company who can answer these questios? If the other person is interested, team up to make a pitch to the owners.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Throttling, as in hitting with a stick?
I'd say it's only moral to do that to Comcast or AT&T. The local guys usually don't deserve it.
I would say it all depends on what the terms of service say in the contracts you sold the customers. When did it become ok to charge people for using their broadband ("always on") connection as much as they want? I know my contract has no text about how much i can use my connection.
Im wondering what you have for backbone that you are 70:1 oversubscribed. If you deploy 768/256 connections with 400 customers sounds like a whopping 3 T1 lines (~4.5Mb/s). if you do a more standard 1.5MB thats 6 T1 lines(~9Mb/s).
Maybe you should look at your upstream provider and see if you can get a fractional T3 to replace the T1s if my math is anywhere near correct. You will likely have a longer contract to sign but you may be able to pull in 10Mb/s for less than you currently pay. Then you could try to match the current expense.
There are other ways to trim back your backbone usage. Consider a cluster of transparent proxy servers. You can get pretty aggressive with the cacheing mechanise in squid and you can easily balance the cluster with DNS and not have to worry about session awareness as clients also cache DNS temorarily so each client will use the same proxy for their browsing session.
Certainly some sort of QoS will work for you and lessen the need to directly throttle.
If you just throw some proxying in there and give http and https higher priority and do some packet inspection to sniff out the P2P traffic and drop it down a level you will put off the inevitable need to grow your bandwidth for a while.
if my math is correct on 1.5Mb/s cable, you look like you have a per users upstream cost of just $7.50 each. That is pretty low. Too low.
...blackjack and hookers would also be involved somehow?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
400 divided by 70 = 5.71.
I have no problem with you scheduling low-latency traffic over filesharing traffic, filtering, or whatever, but it seems a little short-sighted that it only takes 5.71 users to completely muck up your network. (I.E if you sell 1mbit connections, you could "theoretically" support 420 customers on a 6mibt pipe (6*70=420 at a 70:1 oversell ratio).
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
I think P2P is servers used this way are a great tool helping ISP's reduce their upstream bandwidth costs. My ISP does it and, for example, has mirrors of Fedora and Ubuntu update repositories plus a whole library of popular downloads that I don't get charged for if I use their servers to download (and it's faster too). Furthermore their servers will download files via P2P and make that available to all their other users.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There is no morality for throttling. It's done for either technical or business reasons.
What?
Or to get more BW.
By your description, you are The Man when it comes to this, he won't fire you, he is forced for more BW. He can't replace you because you refuse to teach your follower if it goes that route, and in effort he would loose the ISP business.
What stuns me, people are ALL UP FOR THROTTLING! Give me a break! Everyone here recommending it is either shooting themselves on their legs due to sheer ignorance or working for a anti-net neutrality party.
To really start saving BW, think about caching, you can rather easily implement transparect proxy using squid and simple routing rules, and your customers won't notice a thing even if WWW traffic is cached. On that size it sums up to quite considerable amount of data.
You can consider other caching methods too, but you can also implement QOS, prioritize SSH and WWW, and immediate increase in service quality achieved, given you use powerfull enough routers.
Any kind of throttling beyond mere QOS is plain and simply EVIL.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
>However, I would prioritize traffic. Email, web, SSH, et al come first; after that, all p2p protocols in order of usefulness.
That's why I do all my usenet and ftp over SSH.
What would I do? I'd start by doing what the boss says. This is a really bad time to have to look for employment elsewhere. If you don't do what the boss says, customers of your former employer are not going to start sending you money to live on because you did the "right" thing but lost your job.
Then after things have been at least temporarily taken care of, research better alternatives and present them to your boss.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I had a great job... working for a govt ownde company. however I chose ethics and would do things like refuse to modify auditor reports to lower the number of open helpdesk cases and to fix network issues with $10 Cables rather than $100,000 capital works projects. Now that boss still has her job and I scrape together what I can by cutting odd bits of code. In this economic climate... I recommend keeping your head down... no ones life is likely at stake here. DonÂt rock the boat. Acting ethically has never done me good in business !
Jaded !
He has no choice but to honor the contract they've made with customers.
If, as most cable companies do, they've contracted to provide "unlimited" service, at "xx Mbps rate", then that's what they need to provide.
If such is the case, then throttling anyone is fraud.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
just because people CAN use it for illegal purposes it can ALSO be used to legal purposes. so are you saying the use of P2P shouldnt be allowed because its POSSIBLE to use it illegally?
you know you can get child porn on the regular internet as well. i think maybe you should stop using your internet all together.
slashdot as well. people could possible link to child porn and since the possibility exists, get rid of it.
that is your line of reasoning isnt it?
Don't ask Slashdot, ask yourself:
"What would the BOFH do in my position?"
Then profit.
It's a crappy economy right now. Your job is to implement what your boss asks and the REAL ethics question is whether you feed your family or not. In an idea world, tell your boss to go shove it. Right now, IMO you need to say "I'm on it, boss." and continue on implementing packet shaping, et al.
If your customers don't like the service, they'll find alternatives or drop his service
This is a last-mile monopoly. The "alternative" is more than likely unacceptable: 0.05 Mbps dial-up.
> we are oversubscribed around 70:1 between our customers' bandwidth and our pipe.
I assume that's theoretical. If your actual traffic was 70x your pipe you'd have a very different complaint.
So what is your actual peak usage vs. your pipe? And what's the portion of that due to high volume users? And if you throttle them, will it make enough of a difference?
Your boss assumes the problem is P2P etc., while it may well be business users (you may not have that classification, but don't tell me nobody there works from home). Or it may be people watching shifted video, and throttling watchers would be a bad move for a cable company.
I think you owe it to your boss to find out before implementing any throttle just who is going to be affected. If you just throw on a throttle without finding this out you could cost him some valuable customers and PR. Throttling may or may not be ethical, but testing before implementing is what a responsible employee would do.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The answer to this, and many such sticky situations in IT, is to update your resume` and leave town.
The way I see it, you're screwed if you throttle, and you're screwed if you don't throttle. Some of the solutions given sound good and well on paper. But then again, so does communism.
The game.
Check the contract your customers sign. there's usually (if the lawyer who wrote it up was worth his salt) would have a clause in the contract stating "The ISP can change he terms of the contract with 30 days notice." or words to that effect. All the OP needs to do is set up a mail shot to all subscribers telling them of the changes to the contract will come into force in 30 days and wait..... Then dump all the complaints on the boss's desk. The reality of him loosing about 10%-20% (pulled out of the air guestamate) of the customers might make him rethink and that's when you suggest a few alternatives (Just make sure you do a lot of fact finding and homework on the issues before you talk to the boss).
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Your best option is really to just tell the boss you need more bandwidth... the fact of the matter is that you're selling something you don't have, and that's just not good business. The alternative is that the company can face the distinct possibility of alienating paying customers, who are unlikely to respect any internal distinction between the cable service and ISP and might abandon, or even sue, the one for the sins of the other.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
>>Morality is a tool for the herd to feel more important than their leaders.
That attitude is why America is in the hell-hole it is in. Morality is the compass. Try it, you might just be amazed.
is too vague a term: does that mean ensuring a few don't hog all the bandwidth ? Or instituting a free-for-all where, on the contrary, a handful of heavy users degrade the experience of "lighter" users ? Have you actually looked at how much of your bandwidth the top 5 or 10% of your subscribers use ?
At home, I hate it when uTorrent screws up my warcraft lag; the 'rents are unhappy when their daily dose of skyping with their 3yo grand child is choppy; and I do notice when webpages take a handful of seconds to come up.
So, to me, offering the best experience means actually capping the bandwidth, QOS, and shaping the traffic. I'd guess it's mainly a question of balance, though.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
You're a troll, but I'll bite.
If you can't think of any legitimate uses of P2P, you're not thinking. You exclude linux distros for no valid reason, yet without bittorrent most of those distros would be dead in the water from hosting costs alone. Wikileaks doesn't have the bandwidth to host some of the massive file dumps that they've released, but torrents allow everyone to see the malfeasance of their elected officials. Warcraft is far from the only game that uses torrents to spread the load on patch days; can you imagine millions of gamers frantically downloading a single file from a single server at the exact same time? publicdomaintorrents hosts classic out-of-copyright movies as a historical archive, without torrents there's no possible way they could afford the bandwidth and remain free. Jamendo.com hosts CC-licensed music, again with bittorrent, making a free service possible.
Torrents ain't just for your warez and porn, actionbastard.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
And then buy more bandwidth.
I agree that shaping and prioritization should be done, but I have to wonder about your priorities.
I would prioritize traffic. Email, web, SSH, et al come first; after that, all p2p protocols in order of usefulness
Web and *interactive* SSH yes, but email?!?!?! Email?!?!?! SMTP should come *LAST* (but be given a guaranteed slice, even if
Seriously - for regular text/HTML email with no attachments, they'll likely be sitting in the queue longer than they'll be delayed by shaping, and if a 10MB attachment takes 15 minutes instead of 10, who's going to notice?
I'm of the opinion that there is far more illegal P2P traffic than legal.
Do what you're fucking well told. If you don't like it, then quit and set up your own ISP.
But in the meanwhile you work under the direction of your manager.
Comcast got in trouble with the FCC for traffic shaping P2P bandwidth. They implemented a change to the service agreement that places a monthly limit of total bandwidth usage of 250GB. Exceeding that limit gives Comcast the right to suspend your service without notice. Their service agreement allows the terms to change with 30 days notification. I believe the change gave me 90 days notification. I upgrade and update my linux systems and run windows update service on my wife's windows system. I frequently download movies from Amazon via TiVo. I have not exceeded this limit. Seems like a fair alternative.
I've never seen a cable-ISP contract that provided service at a specified rate in Mbps. You can get those contracts as a business user, but they're not the standard ones home users have. Usually home contracts say something along the lines of "up to xx Mbps; actual speeds may vary and are not guaranteed".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You may very well be correct in that view.
I'm personally of the opinion that there is far more illegal Oxycontin used than legitimately prescribed. That's still not at all a good reason to ban the drug entirely.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
What about throttling PSP traffic once it reaches say 80% of your total pipe size. Make sure customers are that this will take place and also make available to them the ability to see the pipe capacity (and current P2P level). That way they can schedule their big downloads in lower peakage times. The advantage being when you are throttling you may only have to by a small percentage of P2P traffic.
you are oversubscribed 70:1.
traffic shaping is not a tool to allow ISPs to juice every last dime out of a pipe.
It is there so sysadmins can keep traffic fair and also prioritize applications.
Your boss is mistaken. You have a contract with your customers you need to honor it.
Your boss seems unethical in asking you to place a technical band-aid on management's logistical problem.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Tell your boss that you're interested in relieving him of this hassle. Offer to buy this portion of the business from him, work together on the terms.
The he won't have to worry about bandwidth issues and you can make a few extra bucks while offering quality service to your customers.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Or charge the few out 400 rural users that are downloading like that. Perhaps I don't get it, but I have no need to download gigs of movies or games, or pirate software.
Get up!
Yyyyyeah...bittorrent is saturating the link with linux ISOs and crappy old black-and-white movies. Sure.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
That's not the issue. The issue is whether there is any legal P2P traffic. geekboy642 proved there was, and you didn't offer anything to refute it, so I guess that you agree with him.
Since you agree that there *is* legal P2P traffic, the argument that "it's illegal so there is no problem throttling it" is a non-sequitur.
Clearly both. You have two issues. One of the issues is the same issue that's being faced by the rest of the ISPs around the world, and that issue is how to prioritize "good" or "real-time" traffic by prioritizing packets. This issue is really an inevitable change that will result in the business running much more efficient when done properly.
The second -- and more important problem -- is the demand of your bandwidth is 70x the supply. It is your role to explain this properly to your boss so that he acknowledges and budgets for a solution. If you can hit these two birds with one stone (implement more bandwidth while moderately shaping packets) you can propose the change to subscribers as two improvements for the "same low price". Lets face it... the 99% of illegal bit-torrent movie downloads can wait an extra 20 minutes to download while the 1% of people downloading a legitimate Debian or Fedora CD through the same service will inevitably suffer. Packet shaping is not fair to everyone, but seldom a business improvement that is.
Lastly, make sure to communicate the issue and the resolution to your subscribers. Despite what the marketing strategies will tell you, honesty is better for long-term customers than fluffed and sugar-coated bullsh*t.
-Tres
If you want to convince your boss otherwise I would recommend comparing how much bandwidth users consume to traffic on the road aka driving. When someone wants to drive from point A to point B it doesn't necessarily mean they will take up more space on the road regardless what speed they drive. In other words, if someone wants to download a 100MB file it will be 100MB regardless if it is at 2kB/s download or 2MB/s download. The only thing that limits someone from driving all over the place all the time is time itself. If it takes 4 hours to get somewhere vs 4 minutes they will be far less inclined to do so. The comparable when it comes to the internet is steaming video and uploading. Incorporating throttling will only piss valuable customers off and will not limit overall bandwidth usage. If throttling is a 100% must I recommend limiting all consumers equally to keep response times high so grandma checking her recipes online may not notice that her max download rate has lowered but her grandson will notice his downloads possibly falling from say 500kB/s down to 400kB/s while the max download of the total pipelines are being hammered. I'd incorporate the same type of system for both download and upload as long as all users are limited EQUALLY. Ping times are far more important than they seem, but keeping consumer respect is as well. I think of it as juggling. Also, keep in mind that the average power user's bandwidth today is a normal users bandwidth tomorrow. If anything, upgrading the pipes ensures a strong future and throttling is nothing more than a quick solution with bad consequences.
Easy solution... I did something like this a long time ago.
We used to split our upstream into "Priority" and "Non-priority" and all users went into "Non-Priority"
When we gave them a real-time "price" meter... It had a button and a small display that showed how much your bill was for the month.
Use the service at non-priority and the $$$ ticked over slowly.
But hit the "Turbo" button, it added your IPs to the priority stream and the $$$ scream over and you get a big speed boost. Great for businesses who used it.
We only ever tried it in beta while we had significant oversubscription due to limited availability of bandwidth at the time, but we noticed a few strange effects.
First, people just liked pressing the button. They would go on, off, on, off while waiting for anything.
Second, it was instant gratification - you hit th e button and your download speed goes straight up... Very effective and you know it's going faster because the $$$ tick over faster.
Thirdly, the level of satisfaction was directly influenced by the speed the $$$ ticked over... We accidently released a buggy version under Beta where the $$$ ticked over at ten times the rate.
It turned out to be the most popular and people started requesting it after we fixed the bug in the subsequent version... Seems that if they got charged more, the mental connection was that it was faster.
Anyway, then bandwidth prices came down and we just got more bandwidth, and all the beta testers moaned when we turned off their turbo buttons...
We weren't actually charging the beta testers for the button at the time, but they were all willing to pay for the service, because they loved being able to see at all times (through a small widget-like interface) exactly what they were spending.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
if you give them more bandwidth - the p2p freeloaders will use that all up too - at extra cost to you for getting a bigger pipe - throttle them until they self regulate to 80% of thier monthly limit. dont throttle them if they show some self-restraint.
Trent Reznor's HD footage: 400 gigs http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?52,378166 http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download/ And, yes, the newest Ubuntu upon release.
If my only choice in broadband was this guy's crappy ISP. Sounds about as bad as on-campus Internet. Now that I'm a grown-up, if I buy 6mbps I damn well want 6mbps.
The kind of traffic shaping you espouse would very likely be illegal. Not to mention unethical. The fact that some people may be downloading illegally does not give you the right (or justification) to throttle those who are using it quite legally... possibly even for business. For example, Mozilla's use of BitTorrent for distributing their new Beta last years was a perfectly legitimate -- and high-traffic -- use of P2P. Other companies are picking up on this.
If you are going to traffic-shape, you had better have damned good justification for your particular shaping priorities, not just so you can explain it to your business customers, but also to justify it to the jury, if and when that time comes.
For the company, the ISP is only a small side business....
That's ok you are using the same business model as Time Warner and Comcast. They treat the Cablemodem side as a Small side business.
Honestly, Throttling may end up being more expensive than buying more bandwidth. what is your business plan on it, what are the costs and ongoing expenses for the Throttling upgrade?
You and your boss DID that right?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Your solution is simple. Request the order to alter the bandwidth traffic shaping with an email. In that email, include a copy of the current company sales contract and ask if HOW you should implement the traffic shaping so that it complies with the contract. You may want to provide advice in the email that indicates that some customers may not like the throttling efforts and may leave the company as a result. Keep the tone light and asking a question for clarification. Don't be accusatory or hostile.
The key thing is to get the response in writing.
Keep your bosses response, implement what he tells you.
of what other comments might call the 'best solutions' for the bandwidth problem - if you want to remain employed, do what your boss tells you, if you can't convince him otherwise.
This is a prime example of why the telecommunications, medical, banking and the power industries just need to be nationalized. These people or not going to be told what is going on, there are going to be no changes to there terms of services and more than likely this guy is going to be fired. In the end they will throttle the entire network, put hard caps in, and close the accounts of people who make a fuss. And probably turn them in to the RIAA/MPAA.
Linux modi 2.6.26-2-parisc
Ideally you shouldn't have to throttle your users' connections at all, but if you must I hope at least that you'll pick a strategy that doesn't discriminate unfairly against specific protocols. The purpose of QOS should be to ensure equitable sharing of bandwidth between all your customers, and not to penalize those who are heavy users of protocols the people in charge consider illegitimate due to the kinds of content being transmitted.
I wonder... Would your boss be so quick to suggest throttling if the heaviest users were VOIP users instead of P2P users, where the FCC might respond negatively to any throttling?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
You should not throttle the customers, get fired, and let the bastard they replace you with throttle the customers to hell. That way everyone wins. Well, except for you, you got fired. And except for the customers, they got throttled. Ok, your boss wins no matter what.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Concert recordings (from performers who allow it). These are transferred in lossless formats and run 700 MB or more each.
If the bandwidth throttling negative affects ONE "legitimate user" (which is always subjectively based on your own personal judgment) then you are doing something wrong.
What I would do is research solutions from this page (I like the QoS/Caching ideas in particular). Then, I would prepare a lengthy, extremely technical, report to your boss which would explain that by implementing this new system it will:
1) Cost your company a ton of time and money
2) Never be completely possible to implement
3) Is unethical based on your principles
4) Will be extremely difficult to maintain, wasting more time and money perpetually
"In this economy" arguments in favor of becoming a corporate zombie are BULLSHIT. I will not sacrifice my beliefs for a paycheck. If you cannot find a way to make money with your computer skills, then you deserve to be flipping burgers or making tacos.
If you cannot outsmart your superiors, then what do you even spend your time doing all day?
Do the fucking job you are paid to do or quit and give back your salary.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Determine who is using the bandwidth. Is it a few people downloading a lot or a lot of people downloading a little. Bandwidth caps won't work if the load is everyone downloading a little.
Why screw morality? Utilitarianism claims the morally right choice is the one that maximizes pleasure. From that perspective, the morally right action is to throttle, prioritize and otherwise keep the high-usage 5% under control so the 95% can get more pleasure.
If Comcast came to me and said we need to throttle P2P traffic I would have been all for it. Instead they caused disruptions in traffic (which crashed my router every 4 hours of bit torrent use) and then lied about it. They couldn't have handled the situation more wrong.
Do what your boss asked you to do.
1.) If the action your boss is requesting is illegal, inform the proper authorities.
2.) Abuse is a matter of perspective: Is your boss asking you to shape everyone to 64k as a maximum? Our legal system is fucked up. A line could be sold with a 7 Mb maximum, 768 kb average. Said line would only become abuse when it avaergaes 7kb on purpose.
3.) The only reqard for having morals must come from within yourself. If you are looking for anyone to recognize that you have morals, be prepared to be disappointed
Ultimately, you are in charge of your own decision. I happen to agree here with many who say to convince your boss for the alternate solution first.
Unless the request specifically borders on Fraud, your morals are safe and sound.
I'd do what the boss says. He signs your paycheck. When traffic shaping STILL doesn't work, show him that you're still hitting the pipeline cap, and suggest more bandwidth again.
you are having a *moral* problem with throttling p2p traffic? Huh?
Oh sure, mod me troll, and yeah, it's cliche', but a business has to play statistics and look at trends. The overwhelming majority of people using p2p for *legit* things aren't using it for such things day in and day out; they're torrenting a fedora dvd, or something like that. That's fine, works, etc. But if you see someone with a constant stream day in and day out...
...that person, on a general level, you feel morally obligated to protect? Really?
There are plenty of valid uses for p2p. Certainly. Just assume that's not the people who your boss is after; it shouldn't be difficult to determine the difference.
He's skipped past the obvious mathematics of it to the morality. First, check the numbers and see what is going on. With only 400 users, a simple answer is probably going to present itself.
In my situation, what would you do?
First, at 70:1 oversubscription there is no bandwidth shaping policy which will improve the user experience, so you'll piss off the top 10% of your users without making the other 90% any happier.
I'd explain to the boss that the accepted norm for residential oversubscription is 10:1 and that oversubscription rates in excess of 20:1 flat out don't work. You either need to increase your system bandwidth reduce your subscriber bandwidth. In other words, you either buy more T1s at the head end or you drop those 5 meg lines to 768kbps and be honest about it.
Next, implement traffic shaping for ports other than UDP 53, TCP 22, 25, 80 and 443 during the prime time hours on your graph. You'll piss off the torrent freaks in the top 10%, but oh well.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Just give us a url for your ISP and a few of us will check out the TOS :)
How are the cable side of things? may you can push for more bandwidth and HD channels at the same time.
Also do you have a Weather Star XL?, IntelliStar?, Weatherscan Xl?, IntelliStar based Weatherscan?
The intellistars do have back channel ethernet.
How about hosting some stuff at the head end? To cut down on bandwidth.
... you mean "choking" said ISP, then yes, I would say it's all right.
First find out just how much p2p is going on. I would be real surprised if p2p is sucking up your bandwidth.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
They just freed up a bunch of cash for broadband projects. Yours is the type of company that deserves/could use the money the most. I would see about getting some of it or urging your boss to do it.
Cornell University addressed this issue for off campus (WAN) traffic a few years back by charging a fixed base fee for up to 5GB/month and then charging by the MB for traffic over that. It has worked out well. People self regulate to what they are willing to pay for. If there is large demand for more WAN connectivity the money is there. Cornell has several processes in place to deal with abnormal situations out of the users control. After initial roll out rates were adjusted down several times to since the trustees mandated the operation be revenue neutral.
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/ncs/netrates/overview.html
In my opinion, the best solution is to strongly throttle large bandwidth usages (P2P, FTP and NNTP streams, etc) during the periods of near-capacity, and automatically relax the filtering during off hours.
That's one way... Here's another:
Instead of trying to choose which protocols are heaviest usage, traffic shape people based on what the actual criteria that you care about is: Too much overall usage over long periods.
In Linux terms, set up a HTB with a queue for every customer. Set the base rate to whatever your backbone speed is (1/70th of the customer's line rate), the ceil rate to their line rate, and give them a nice big bucket - say, 120 seconds times their line rate.
Then, people who are normal users - web surfing, downloading an occasional email attachment, etc - will go full bore, any time they want it. People who are bittorrenting will go full speed for a couple minutes, and then decrease down to whatever bandwidth is available. At night, if there's a lot of backbone free, it'll go fast. At 7 PM, they get best effort on whatever is available.
This is a very simplified example. You could additionally shape them so that their web and email will take priority over bittorrent when they're at the bottom of their token bucket, or other fine tuning...
The basic message I'd like to get across is: you don't have to shape based on protocol, because you care about the usage, not the protocol. Just shape based on usage, and let them work out which protocols they want to use.
At least not if you're wanting to target specific protocols rather than users or port, as TFA is.
You have 2 choices: do as told by your boss or quit. Easy, huh? --Anon Amos
whats the name of your business so we can sue you for false advertising before you change your TOS.
It is hard if the service was sold with no limit.
You can not maintain a reasonable oversell ratio unless you have low average usage.
The problem is that many cable ISP sold unlimited access and now their unhappy customers actually took them up on the offer. What I find really galling about it all was that the cable companies enjoy a monopoly and was given billions of taxpayer dollars to upgrade their net access but didn't.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I still don't see why this is so hard to understand: absent specific contract language addressing this, where do ISPs get off deciding which types of traffic should get priority? You can cap or charge by the byte (if the contract allows), but why do you believe it is ok to arbitrarily decide that certain types of traffic are "legitimate" and which should be throttled? I pay for an uplink, and I won't tolerate you telling me how I should use it, unless there are specific contract terms which say otherwise (in which case I'd go elsewhere).
So your boss likes having customers that pays, but doesn't like to give them any services... you got a hell of a lot too much traffic for the bandwith you have and the only solution he comes up with is reducing what he gives to the customers...
Screwing up the customers that have no alternative is plain cheap...
This isn't an issue of morality, it's an issue of business.
As an employee you do your job as asked. You'd be hardpressed to argue that you're being compelled to do something illegal, which is the only reason to refuse orders from your superior.
Do your job, or get a new one.
I'd do it, but then protest and start looking for another job somewhere else. Throttling is unethical and should be illegal, because an ISP provides Internet, not Web or e-mail, so the users should be able to use any protocol they want. If you have to, raise the fees, but don't lie/cheat/steal from the customers... It's not a nice situation, good luck!
You've given him everything he needs to make the decision. It's no longer your problem.
You could make this to your hill to die on if you like, but it seems kind of pointless to me to risk your job so that some other guy can download two movies today instead of one today and one tomorrow.
throttle them mofo's down...
To the detractors -- you want cheap bandwidth, you wanna do what you wanna do, but you dont wanna pay for it..
Screw traffic shaping and screw your boss. If the customer needs it, give it to them. I'm sick of companies oversubscribing and then thinking it's OK. I understand 1:1 isn't feasible but c'mon 70:1?
Companies need to realize that the customer IS their source of income, not a shareholder. Investment capital IS NOT and should not be your primary source of income. Take care of the customer and they will take care of you. Shit on them with traffic shaping and they'll drop you just like I did Comcast.
I consider this similar to the cafe question. Is it ethical to run bit torrent on a cafe's wireless, while many other people are using it? No, I don't have the right to slow down their internet for my bit torrent. The point being, the people bit torrenting constantly aren't being respectful of their neighbour's need to use internet, so yes, you have a right to force people to be polite to each other by putting the most important protocols (http, https, stmp, imap, POP3) first.
First question isn't what to do, it's "what is the real nature of the problem?". Profile the traffic. Find out what exactly is eating your bandwidth. Malware doing ape shit? Set up a DNS black hole and whack it at the source. Heavy HTTP usage? Transparent proxy. Throttling may be the wrong answer. Buying more bandwidth may be the wrong answer. Only once you sort out what the real problem is will you be able to act sanely in accordance with your boss' wishes and your own moral code.
the name and location of the ISP so I won't move there. Thanks.
However, I would prioritize traffic. Email, web, SSH, et al come first; after that, all p2p protocols in order of usefulness.
and when the p2p users encrypt their torrents?
You need to define your business audience. If it's people who are going to check the mail and web surf, and 5% of your customers are p2p users, cut out the p2p users and focus on the people you want to serve.
dumb idea. 95% of users are clueless and when faced with getting an ISP (or changing it) will do what the other 5% recommend. Given the large overlap between p2p users and the people are listens to by their friends on technical matters, pissing off that 5% is a bad move!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Your details are a bit vague, but let's pretend "your pipe" is a single DS3 (45 megabits) out in the boonies somewhere and you are offering a mix of plans that average out to 7.8 megabits per customer (400 * 7.8 / 70 = 44.5).
Assuming you are in the US, 45 megabits of transit is unlikely to cost you more than ~$2k/month ($50/megabit transit is easy to come by, you can do way better if you shop and have access to many carriers), but due to the amazing power of phone company pricing, the DS3 to carry it could easily run $10k-40k/month depending on how far out of a major city you are. (Within a major city, DS3s are closer to $3k/month.) Let's use the low end of that range and call it $10000/mo for the DS3 and $2000/mo for the bandwidth, or $12000/mo total for 45 megabits or your total cost of ~$267/megabit.
If your customers were to demand no oversubscription (as most Slashdotters seem to), delivering a 10 meg cable connection would therefore cost you $2670/month to deliver to your customers. At standard retail markup (including maintaining the cable lines, buying routers, paying rent, paying salaries, etc) of ~2x, let's call it $5k/month per customer. This poses a problem, since no residential customer will pay $5k/month.
If you work it from the other angle, starting from what your customers will pay, let's pretend they are comfortable paying $80/month for their 10 meg cable connection. (This is high if they were in a city, but if this is their only option vs dialup, they'll buy it anyway.) Assuming you have some overhead and only half that can pay for bandwidth, you have $40/month for 10 megabits or $4/megabit.
How do you reconcile that your customers will only pay $4/megabit when your costs are $267/megabit? The magic of oversubscription.
These customers need to be willing to live with the idea that they are expected, on average, to use only 143Kbit/sec on their 10 meg pipe. If on average they want more than that, they have to be willing to pay for it, otherwise the ISP is just going to fold, and they can go back to dialup.
For some reason, Slashdotters see this as evil. Is it? How else can you make the numbers work? (Most of these numbers are ballpark since the posters details were so vague, but they real-ish.)
Aaron
Implement some form of ineffective throttling. Make it broken on a number of levels that sound attractively greedy. Then show your boss some pretty cooked numbers graphs demonstrating that you'll need more bandwidth around .
Your boss doesn't care but can't buy links if they aren't in the budget. Let him know they need to be so that he can take the case to his boss when budget planning comes around.
Throttling generally causes pretty large customer backlashes and a lot of resentment, as it is generally an unfair method of controlling bandwidth. In my own experience, customers have an easier time dealing with Bandwidth Caps, as they can grok that bandwidth costs ISP's money, but they don't feel discriminated against. Extra fees for over-usage charges can help finance a larger bandwidth pipeline in the future.
Also, looking at the usage stats, can you actually determine that P2P is a major cause of congestion? The last time I saw a breakdown of types of traffic, HTTP still took up the largest portion of bandwidth even in peak hours, on account of sites like youtube and google video.
fuck them, threaten to quit or refuse to implement what he requests. There are too many ISPs that do shitty things like this.
No. No. No.
Depending on how the contract is written, shaping traffic may be failing to honor terms of the contract.
Failing to meet obligations under a contract is not fraud.
Please don't say such things if you have no idea what the hell you're talking about.
If you don't like the way your boss does things, and if its not criminal, go find a new job or make your own business. This really is a no-brainer. The harsh reality of the world is that unless you're an upper up, you're not going to change anything.
But of course...you want someone ELSE to do your MORAL deeds
Choke the man with a Ethernet crossover cable.
Overselling seats on aircraft, buses, trains, or ISP's means that you are taking money for something that you don't have. Especially selling 70:1 - that is simply outrageous. I am the customer at one of those outback nowhere ISP's. There is no NEED for capping my bandwidth, because there IS NO BANDWIDTH for much of the day. 15 gig per month? I doubt it - allowing BitTorrent to run full time, with Wondershaper limiting the torrent to allow web surfing, it takes a week to download the latest 64 bit Debian full install ISO. Morally speaking, it's up to Congress to stop the over-development and cut-throat practices in the city, and extend some of that infrastructure out here into the boonies. I pay to much, for a very poor service, while the city people brag about speedy MB connections? Something is wrong here....
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Morality is a tool for the herd to feel more important than their leaders.
Cute, but wrong. Without morality, there would be no leaders.
I was in a similar situation where I was admin for a small ISP. T1's were running $1600 per month (now down to $1200 woohoo) and our network was coming to a crawl.
I added a mikrotik router between our customers and the cisco 2600 connected to the T1. We then added two 6mbps DSL lines and NAT'ed them from the tik box and put split http on to one DSL line and p2p on the other using router marks.
Email and essential services stayed on the T1 and if a DSL circuit went out I had a script to reshuffle the routes and test the line until it came back up. Drop an MTA on each cheap circuit and you at least have some redundancy too.
It was a crappy way to do it, but it worked and kept customers happy. It was certainly better than the piece of shit FatPipe box we bought and much cheaper.
100GB caps before throttling may seem all and well, except that 100GB is nothing now. The average 24 (TV's 30 minute) videos are now around 160-170 MiBs, meaning that if you are anything like me and watch videos on Hulu, YouTube, succumb to the myrad of program updaters on windows and yum/apt-get update on linux, play video games, and browse webpages (most major webpages are 4-5MiB or even more depending on the content) that averages to 3-4 GiB a day a person. Factoring in the fact that I have a roommate raises that to 6-8GB a day. This means that I basically would hit the 100GiB caps in 2 weeks tops. Factoring in the random major downloads that need to happen due to service pack updates, or major game updates, I can hit that cap in less than that.
If you have to do throttling and capping due to normal usage, then your company is not doing its job properly. ISPs are not normal companies, they are utility providers due to the massive infrastructure requirements, much like the power company or the water company. Because of this, you need to treat the internet like a utility, and make it so that you can support the people you are providing service to.
Tell your boss if you have to throttle due to normal usage, you are not upgrading your infrastructure at the rate that the customers need and that they have a moral obligation to meet the customer's needs.
Morality is a tool for the herd to feel more important than their leaders.
Who would have guessed that Dick Cheney was posting on slashdot?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Let email ports and ssh ports and telnet ports and port 80 through ahead of everything else, let the rest of the stuff have the rest of the bandwidth, dropping any of those packets on the floor that will not fit.
This way people reading their emails or looking at CNN or logging into the shell at work will not have to wait behind the 50 teenage boys downloading "Butt Banging Babes 31" and without actually denying those users "best effort" service.
Dog is my co-pilot.
at 70:1 you can only handle about 6 of your users at any given time, are exaggerating wildly, or some few are killing your area's bandwidth with their disproportionate usage. With only 400 customers, that might actually only be one or two people.
There are legal issues with the shaping... but you might want to do a prioritization scheme, where those who use the most, get the least preference.
Otherwise, you might think about the legal issues of promising what you can't deliver.
IP packets let the sender specify which ones are important, via the QoS info. If I'm sending real-time game traffic and a big giant file, I want you to give priority to the game.
Ideally you both respect my QoS info and let me override that via a nice web admin interface that lets me specify ports that are important to me.
All of this is subject to my per-user throttling of course. You use it to select which of my packets get dropped first, not the number of my packets that get dropped.
It's all about Pre-Paid wireless. They pay for a block of bandwidth, when it's used up, they pay again for another block.
I wrote some software for my WISP that allows customers to add as much as they want. They want 40GB, they buy it.
That way I can pay for the bandwidth and they get the service they want.
The above is not worth reading.
I did router work for a place with the same problem. No local cable company at the time, or at least didn't offer internet, so the only other option was dial-up. But this ISP was the telco, and any dial-up calls not to them were toll, so really there was no other option.
I don't know their actual terms, but if they found someone leaching like crazy, they gave them a warning, and if they kept doing it, they just cut them off.
I think the best policy is just transparency. State the ToS in plain English, and if you're going to have limits, let the users see where they're at (I hate that Comcast doesn't show my usage, yet there is a cap). Throttle them to nearly nothing once they cross that. Give them dns, email access, and local isp website access. Setup a squid proxy and once they've hosed themselves, tell them that's the only external "internet" access they have.
Now I'm not getting the web server I think I'm getting. You're pretending to be the server.
No thanks!
I know it could be helpful, but that's fraud. It also subjects me to any bugs in the cache coherency software. I've seen it bite before, while using an ISP to test the outside view of a web page I was developing for work. ("Really boss, I swear I changed the page!")
I work for a similar company, but with about 5k DSL subs.
Occasionally, we get cease and desist orders from various copyright holders concerning PTP traffic from our users. Consider just sending out a friendly message to your "problem" users that you have been contacted, and are cooperating with law enforcement and the copyright holders.
I bet your big users cut back on bandwidth usage very quickly.
Second, be sure the users you have a problem with know they are big users. Its quite possible that you may have some customers who have been infected by a zombie bot.
Lead an armed insurrection against your boss, and leave his head on a pike in the lobby as a warning to others.
I think you need to make sure the traffic you are seeing is actually P2P. I would highly doubt it given your subscriber to bandwidth ratio. The majority of "normal" long flow traffic is actually http. Mostly flash video or http downloads. That said, you have such a high ratio that it's possible its not even downloads hitting up against your cap. If you have as flat a usage pattern as you say you have, it likely already sucks to be your customer doing anything at all at peak times. People would do better on dial-up....at least it would be consistent and they wouldn't get stuck with nil at certain intervals.
Confirm you have a P2P problem before you start shaping. If you tell your boss the traffic is mostly http no amount of packetshaping is going to fix this problem to anyone's satisfaction(unless it actually is all http downloads).
Since you're on a tight budget already, I recommend running nTop on a box connected to a mirror or span port. That would be an easy way to determine what's actually going on.
When presented with the fact that shaping is pointless your boss will either buy more bandwidth or do nothing at all. Either way you aren't forced to shape. If he chooses the second option your customers should make him uncomfortable or fix the problem altogether by moving to dial-up.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
Morally, get more bandwidth, morally ask the users to, at their own discretion, limit P2P traffic to respect their neighbors. Pragmatically, Prioritize the traffic. It's not fair to the non-P2P users to make them wait for the P2P bandwidth hogs, the P2P bandwidth users should wait for everyone else's traffic.
One of the potential problems with rationing everything is that lots of people will be on continuously, and other people will be going in bursts. The people with bursts could be served quickly even in peak times. I think the cable companies offer super high burst rates, but then slow down as the transfer continues.
VOIP and gaming, if a client is asking for a steady stream of data, but not a lot of bandwidth, it should be possible to have "micro bursts" of low latency small periodic packets.
I don't care about latency for downloading an ISO. This should also be factored in to your calculations.
So, "burstyness" of the data, and datarate are how these must be calculated.
One level of Policy can Set the rate as averaged over 10 minute, another can do it at 1 minute, and another at a sub-second rate
You'll need to consider all of the connections in the routing... one way to download more than fair share is to just open many connections. You should be able to account for that in routing.
All bandwidth should be used all the time, so you'll have to let things go for a bit, then start throttling back, then increase allowed rate if bandwidth is not being used.
A nice graph would show the 3 noted traffic usage patterns, (fast, periodic, bulk,) for each user, and not used.
You'll see the percentage of traffic types vary over the day, but you should still see close to 100 percent usage.
Another usefull graph is latency,
traffic types: Red Green Blue and white, with darkness of the color showing latency.
You can have a graph for each user
and everything combined.
If you start filtering P2P, or prioritising based on port, or are hard capping, You're not doing it right.
Do it by incoming data, or total data transfer, with an expectation for business accounts. In this case the ISP doesn't give a crap about what is being torrented, just the cloggage of bandwidth. Encryption makes no difference in the bandwidth used.
A contention ratio of 70-1 is really high. What exactly are you selling your customers?
Most ISPs around my part run on an contention ratio of between 20-1 and 50-1. In practise it sits closer to the 20-1 than the 50-1. At 70-1 I'm not surprised that the pipe's constantly full: it's twice what it should be.
Unless, of course, you're selling an 'lite' package. But as you've got an monopoly, it sounds like you're probably selling an 'lite' package at 'premium' prices.
Seriously. This has nothing to do with morality. It is a question about ethics. Is it ethical to throttle P2P? If you advertised unlimited internet access, the answer is no. Throttling would be a violation of the implied contract you have with the customer.
Personally, I see throttling as a reasonable compromise when just a few people are causing a bandwidth issue during peak hours. But first you need to inform your customers of the planned change. Then you need to implement the change in the least intrusive way possible. As someone mentioned earlier, throttling just during peak hours might all that is required.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Recommend that the ISP be shut down. You don't have enough upstream to manage your capacity.
Read your ToS, carefully. Don't do anything that isn't in there, or you'll land your boss a court-case. If he asks you to do stuff that isn't in there, tell him he better hire a lawyer first :P
Sorry to burst yours, but the idea that traffic shaping might be illegal is absurd, is absurd. If you don't believe me, just ask Comcast.
if there is any, that is. and there is not. that f@cktard boss of yours sold what products/services HE DOESNT HAVE, he should have to suffer the consequences.
Read radical news here
I would have thought traffic prioritising traffic was standard practice. Everyone cares if their webpage takes 1 minute instead of 30 seconds to load. Nobody cares if their 2gig bluray rip takes an extra 5 minutes.
Just prioritise "interactive" traffic (HTTP and streaming protocols), and lower the priority of "bulk/noninteractive" traffic. Case closed, over and out
The throttling, the turning to shit, of your Internet connections may allow someone new to enter the market. Maybe the dialup people can start competing.
If the market is healthy in your area, that is.
Is the market healthy? No? Why not? Can you do something about it? Can someone?
When you guys have answered that question, feel free to cap and throttle. As long as it's in a non-monopolistic environment, or one that has potential to not be monopolistic.
Jag pratar lite svenska.
Remember the Story of Mel?
http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
Screw of the people that have other options(Web surfers and other light users) and give the bandwith to the people that need it P2P and heavy downloaders. The other can go to Dail-Up. the Hearvy downloaders have to move to some other town.
I'd throttle their computer in addition to P2P, and add delays to incoming and outgoing email. Blame it on the continuing shortage of bandwidth.
If the boss doesn't like it, then he might empathise with his customers.
The TOS probably prohibit P2P and "excessive usage" (meaning, usage that is many times the median usage) altogether, in which case the ISP could legally actually just terminate the contracts of those people. Throttling is nicer than termination, isn't it? At least the customer gets to decide when/if to terminate if they don't like it.
Now, you may be able to do the math yourself. How much would 70x the bandwidth cost your company? How much would 2x the bandwidth cost your company? How much would 4x, 8x, 16x, 32x cost? At what level would your company go out of business? Keep in mind that merely upping the bandwidth wouldn't help: peak users tend to fill all available bandwidth, so after you double your connection, you'll probably have to double again soon.
The best choice is probably to make the policy explicit in the TOS: customers get their first 30G/month at full speed, afterwards, they're throttled to 256kbps (always or when necessary). People should be able to see their current volume on a we page. You save yourself support calls that way compared to quietly throttling users. However, volume caps can be a bitch to implement correctly: you may need more equipment and you're the person implementing the policy.
Seems like most of these comments don't live in reality...
You should have been traffic shaping a long time ago to ensure heavy users aren't impacting the network. You really have no say in the matter.
Set up a rival ISP with better bandwidth.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If this is as described a small ISP with 400 customers whose bandwidth use is right at the limit most of the time, then throttling is already implemented. Automatically. By the ISPs upstream provider. So if customers would be unhappy because of throttling, then they are unhappy already. If there are contract problems because unlimited service was promised, then these contract problems are already there.
And as described, this is a small sideline of the companies business, so anything that will keep their lawyers busy, like contract changes, won't fly. Anything that is a major investment most likely won't fly. The only thing that could fly is anything that either makes money, or significantly improves the reputation of the company which could have other positive side effects.
Since Megabits are limited in this situation, his boss is absolutely right that the only thing he can do is to maximise the number of _happy_ customers. And that would be maximised by throttling the heavy users, giviing low bandwidth users fast access whenever they need it.
From the user's point of view: As a group, they pay 400x dollars per month to the ISP, who for that money gives them a total bandwidth with some limit. As a group, they don't want to include anyone who uses tons more than their fair 1/400th share.
So I pay still the same price, but I'm getting a lot worse service? This is how people feel when throttling is in effect. My ISP started applying it in December. Now I have to wait most of my time even to get a silly jpeg (~300k) downloaded and you wouldn't believe my line used to be 12Mbit before the dark times. Now I have ~1.2Mbit (depends on how much ISP is throttling right now) and strict filtering.
BitTorrent -> blocked ports, throttling based on deep packet inspection
DC++ -> blocked ports, mostly cannot connect without VPN
FTP / HTTP / DNS -> throttled so much, that I have to wait most of the time.
Videos (flv) -> almost unwatchble, it's buffering 30 seconds to play 3 seconds.
Frankly, I'd love to have my 40GB FUP back and no throttling at all, but I guess it's too late. My ISP seems to be extremely overselling since the economical crisis arrived in here.
save a load of traffic by seeding whatever you legally can on your on servers, then throttle whatever is no seedable. maybe have your own tracker.
The first thing to do is to read the contract that the customers signed up to and see what your boss actually sold them. Next, you compare what your boss wants (and what he's already doing by contending at 70:1) to what he's contractually allowed to do.
If the contract says he's ok to contend at 70:1, cap and throttle etc. then do what he says, but point out that his monopoly will only be temporary the moment anyone else serves that market properly, the business will die.
If the contract gives any sort of 'not being total gits' guarantees then you tell him IN WRITING what he can and cannot legally do under the contracts, how you recommend he complies with his obligations (if he's not already doing so), and that you will be perfectly happy to implement whatever he wants, provided he either gets the customers to sign new contracts or gives you a written notice that he's aware that what he's asking you to do is in breach of contract, and that he is prepared to indemnify you personally against all claims made against you. For added credit, provide alternative schemes with costings. If he signs that, then he's an idiot. Put the shaping in, quit and then start up a competitor that doesn't suck. If he says 'hmm, thanks for pointing that out, I don't want the customers suing us either' and goes away to rethink his plans then the problem is solved.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Although you bring up a point that is well worth reading, it's still wrong. Screw morality per se, but fairness--and the perception of fair treatment--is critical for long term business relationships.
Being all cold and calculating is all fine and good, but it's lousy marketing. Over time people will come to know you for the type of business you are, and if they have a choice, they'll go with the other guy every time.
Being nice is a survival characteristic!
expandfairuse.org
Or buy more bandwidth so the lot of them can 'get more pleasure'.
If you value your pay, do what the owner tells you.
If he's over leveraged you (like he has with his users 70:1) then quit. Think. If he's (or she) is going to screw his own customers over, why wouldn't he screw you over too. What else is screwed up in the same company?
Unless of course your locked in to being sysad because you have some investment in the company hanging over your head.
(Don't laugh, it's happened to me)
IF that's the case, you will have to suck it up and tough it out doing whatever nonsense the owner wants until you can get out. It will be painful and can burn you out.
The company sounds just like a wall-street bankster ponsi scheme. Eventually someone will suffer from it. Which would make me wonder if this isn't the best company to be in, for the future. Basically they fell short and now want you to screw people over.
Of course you could also take more of the toxic dump on your shoulders and keep the 400 marks filling the slots. e.g. you replace the accounts who are not grandma checking her web mail (spam.) Work for evil, be evil. Although you would have a steep learning curve since you know linux, not sales.
Why someone moves a lot of data shouldn't be your deal. It's none of your business what or why they are moving data. In short, the owner is a greedy jackass, part ways as soon as possible.
Bandwidth caps, or Pay As You Go is a horrible idea.
All Internet connections are merely the transfer of little positively and negatively charged electrical bits which stream down the wire. The limitations are not in the availability of the resource but in the capacity of distribution. We are not, in other words, "running out of bandwidth" like we run out of oil, run out of water, or run out of diapers.
What is limited is the capacity of the "pipe." To strain a metaphor, you could push Lake Michigan through a coffee stirring straw, but it would take a very, very long time.
Any pay-as-you-go plan has a fatal flaw - it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to bill people for the data they are downloading because data is not the limited resource!
What is limited is the capacity of the ISP's infrastructure at any particular moment in time, so it would be saner to limit the usage of the pipeline at a particular time.
But wait a minute! ISPs already do this - I know that my Internet connection at home is capped at a certain speed. In fact I could get a faster speed simply by asking for it and paying a premium - no delay nor needed infrastructure upgrades. Just cash.
So the move to a pay-as-you-go plan seems, to be at best a case of solving the wrong problem, and at worst a case of "double dipping" by making people pay for data and bandwidth. (If there are network slowdowns, charging people per-gigabyte won't help much if people are still downloading that gigabyte at the same time of the day, after all.)
Okay, you've got oversubscription. Here's what you do:
1) Be open and transparent with your users. Send out an e-mail, plain english, no legalese, no bull, explaining that you're currently oversubscribed, and that you are taking the following measures.
2) Implement a QoS policy that only takes effect at those times of the day when the line is congested.
3) During congestion times, provide higher QoS for customers who have, over the past 12 hour time period, used the least amount of bandwidth. During this time, someone downloading tons of BitTorrent traffic (or Linux distros via FTP) will probably see a reduction in speeds - but the information will not be blocked, and the download will complete. On the other hand, someone sending an e-mail with pictures, gaming, or chatting on Skype (all relatively low-bandwidth uses) will probably not notice a slowdown.
What this means is that:
1. There will be no changes to packet priority when the line is not congested.
2. The system identifies those users who are using the most bandwidth at that moment in time.
3. It places a lower priority to the packets of those heavy users. So, in an overcongested pipe, the large file downloader (FTP or BitTorrent) will have to suffer reduced speeds at higher latency (though they will still be able to get the data) while the e-mail/web/gaming/voip user will likely not see reduced throughput or increased latency.
This is a platform, application, and protocol agnostic method of choosing who will have service reduced during times of congestion. It attacks the limited resource â" bandwidth â" without attacking the unlimited resource of data. It only takes effect during times of peak usage.
It is, in other words, a moral way to solve oversubscription problems until you can increase your capacity.
We've covered this issue extensively at networkperformancedaily.com - do a search on the site for "pay as you go" if you're interested in more detail.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
[quote]
That attitude is why America is in the hell-hole it is in. Morality is the compass. Try it, you might just be amazed.
[/quote]
I disagree. First, I disagree that America/the USA is a hellhole. I think it has mixed attributes between what I'd consider "good" and "bad."
Second, I think morality is why most of those negative attributes come about. We spend too much time thinking about the emotions of "the crowd" and not enough focusing on pragmatic, scientific solutions.
I believe this extends to religious people as well: there is no God greater than the one whose mind encloses science.
With morality, you have a series of negatives -- you cannot do this because it is immoral, or offends someone, and so on. People are constantly sabotaging each other by claiming X or Y act is immoral, which is hard to define as there's no clear goal, yet we cannot define one because that will offend someone or make someone think it is immoral. Morality is a consensus-destroyer.
With logical thinking, you set a goal, establish which behaviors support that goal and which don't, and everything else is OK. Logic is a consensus-builder.
Futurist Traditionalism
not screw the customers over.
"In the old days", the bakers dozen was invented because a baker found giving short weight would be dragged around the city by his hands as punishment. So they put an extra loaf in to make sure that under-weight loaves would not have him dragged out in the street.
If the customers are already 70:1 then you're screwing the customers already. Throttle them and they may as well use dialup. And then where's his job? It no longer exists.
So the end result is the same. Either be a twat and lose a job when people leave or be nice and get sacked.
Which one will have you sweating on your deathbed?
What would I do in your situation? What the boss told me to do. I would certainly document it (just in case the axe falls on my neck for it), but it has been my experience in my 10 working years that if the boss says to do something, and you refuse, that the boss will simply pay somebody else to do the thing that you did not want to do.
In today's economy, I would be even more inclined to consider doing what I had to do to remain employed, whether I liked it or not. To a business, there are three decisions to be made. 1) The company has decided it wants something done (or done in a certain way). 2) The company has therefore committed to paying somebody to get this job done. 3) This last decision has not necessarily been made yet. This decision is about WHO will get paid to do whatever it was that came up as a result of 1). You get paid for it, or somebody else does. Subversion and refusals will not prevent this thing from going through.
To be honest, I never dreamed of growing up to be a yes-man, rubberstamping everything my employer puts in front of me, but my (rather limited, but growing experience) has taught me that I could not seem to hold a job for more than 18 months before I changed my mindset and became just that. I've been with my current company for over six years now, and I'm not planning on leaving any time soon.
Shape, not throttle. If done correctly shaping is what makes a difference between a good ISP and a great ISP. It is not a problem to detect P2P traffic and shape it to a lower priority, provided that you shape important traffic as high priority - ACK's, Skype voice, game traffic (WoW, CS, ...), first 100k of any HTTP or HTTPS connection, SSH, ...
As a power user it is not that critically important that my torrents only come at 16kb/s during the day if my web, games and IM apps are snappy, but I would like to have the torrents saturate the pipe during off-peak.
Also, hard caps are overrated - you don't pay per Gb, why should we? Just prioritise traffic correctly and everyone will be happy.
inspecting packets and limiting p2p will only end up users starting to use encryption and an encrypted packet is bigger then a none encrypted one, basically leads to more traffic, I would suggest you introduce a Qos and encourage downloaders to download during the off hours, depending on whether or not you have hard limit, you can enable 50% rate at night this will encourage downloaders to download at night, because then only 50% of the traffic is counted. Also I'm not sure if it's legal to inspect packets because you have privacy issues as well, so I don't think it's just a moral issue. Then on the other hand what about skype just to call an example I'm sure there is other legal p2p traffic, .. this one just comes to mind, .. I don't think people would really enjoy you shaping their phone calls ending up with a crappy connection.
If you can put a bandwidth limit on services, do so during peak hours only, then for over downloaders, throttle by user, not by service. It's more fair, because it's the nature of most routers to proportion bandwidth by number of open tcp connections, not by IP address. The same thing happens to most commercial and enterprise class routers, not just the little Linksys paperweight that someone may have at home. This is one reason to add a specific per-address bandwidth restriction in a coffee shop. The nature of the system is that the single pig whose bit torrent program opens 200 connections at once gets as much bandwidth on the system as everyone else combined who is just reading the news and checking their stock quotes. Essentially what you do is offer a guaranteed speed of half a megabit per second, and a max of 6Mbps (example) and as soon as the user passes a 50GB peak hours quota, cut him down to 1Mbps (or even to the 500kbps figure) until 9PM. This would probably solve the problem for the most part. It will force people to reevaluate the times they choose for their large downloads (unless they have to be done at a certain time), encourage those who really should be paying for a larger package to do so, and not degrade specific services. Bandwidth shaping systems are really problematic. It's best to just limit traffic by user.
Seriously, you have 400 customers, but enough bandwidth for... FIVE? That's not "overselling" that's flat out fraud.
Not to be a total jerk, but would you be willing to take a salary cut to pay for the higher bandwidth? I doubt it. Maybe it's time you branch out and offer competition for your employer. I sounds like the guy is tight and just looking to stretch his hardware and bandwidth likely until it fails or he starts losing customers. Get a plan together, get some funds and start your own service. Set reasonable ToS/bandwidth limits that you can comfortably provide.
An other approach is to run your own services so most of your content is local and also your traffic will be local, by providing your own services you take away stress on your peer.
You're heavily oversubscribed. And doing protocol-specific traffic shaping is asking for trouble. So you should think about optimizing traffic patterns.
If your bandwidth is primarily being consumed by p2p traffic, you can look into using P4P (http://www.openp4p.net/) to allow the p2p traffic to be optimized within your network. Field tests have shown that P4P internalized over 80% of p2p traffic, which would significantly help your network, and by putting a p2p cache server in your network.
If your bandwidth is primarily being consumed by download traffic from CDNs (e.g. YouTube) you could save a lot with an HTTP cache configured to cache large files, or by getting the CDNs to put servers in your infrastructure.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
... just think about tcp congestion control. If someone uses more tcp-connections than the other users he is seriously harming their experience. Therefore in a congested network sometimes it is important to do some sort of traffic shaping.
Solution is, write up a report recommending purchasing more bandwidth based on future needs. Even if you limit p2p now demand for bandwidth will keep going up. If its denied well you've done all you could
Ok, let me understand the situation; your over sold at 70:1 ratio, your pipe is maxed most of the day, and you asked your Boss for more bandwidth.You've gone to the Boss with traffic graphs, and still he won't budge. What would happen if you where to implement traffic shaping and bandwidth management? Would it make a difference? How many people would be needed for this, and what is the equipment cost? What is the bandwidth improvement going to cost? It sounds like your Boss makes the calls for the ISP side. Prove to him it's not cost effective, cover your bases, and CYA. He, and the company rely on you to make the best call; make your case.
Hello, This is your boss. You thought by posting anonymously that I would not see this. YOUR FIRED ! Seriously, go start your own ISP and see if you can make a profit without oversubscribing or throttling.
Every time the issue of ISP throttling comes up we see this knee jerk blame pointing at p2p file sharing. More likely the we should be pointing at YouTube, Fox online, ESPN online etc. Normal users are starting to actually make use of their high speed connections as streaming video sites pop up left and right.
I would not throttle , but filter by ports.
Block and known mail server, web server, and p2p traffic.
And send a out a e-mail to customer's backing up your action.
I would not start limiting the amount of information downloaded, because of legal movie downloads etc.
I always do the 6 GB per Xbox 360 HD movie math at 3 a day, which equals to about 540 GB's per month. Now people are paying for these, at $6 a movie, and it does happen.
As long as you are not violating the terms of service, and you yourself are not required to lie to the customers, I see no moral issue here.
There IS a business issue: if you provide really crappy service, you open yourself to competition.
Do what your management orders. But do draft an alternate proposal (or two) and present it to your management. If your management is even half-way competent, they will appreciate the effort put forward.
Unless you know the intimate financial details of your employer, they may well not be currently able to improve their facilities. Having a plan ready for when they are able to improve things would be a bonus.
First let me say that I'm in charge of managing approx 500,000 internet and voip customers for a cable isp. I do have a few small towns that fall into the size your dealing with however. Bottom line, you need more bandwidth. QOS, port blocking, throttling and the like are all "tricks" us network people have available to us but all they do is buy you some time. If my 8 years in charge of a cable isp has taught me anything, it's that usage is much closer to exponential growth than linear. I'd try to a fiber hand off into the location from a teleco. What's great about this is once it's in it's a matter of picking up the phone to scale up the bandwidth to pretty much whatever you need. From the sounds of it you could start out at something like 10mbit for the time being. Secondly, I'm also in charge of a team of network engineers. If you have concerns about the morality of what your being asked to do, it's usually perfectly acceptable to voice those concerns to your management and/or HR. After that's done I would continue with the task you were given as until further notice that's the plan of action.
"He who sells what isn't his'n must buy it back or go to prison"
- Daniel Drew.
Has it ever occurred to you that your company may be committing CRIMINAL FRAUD by "overselling"?
Who hasn't wanted to throttle their ISP from time to time?
you shouldn't make out that it's all sunshine and roses in bandwidth cap land
He doesn't. He said how much money you have to spend on a pittance of a cap.
This morning, I saw a 25/25 fiber connection advertised on a bus (that's 25 megabit per second in both directions). I can only assume that it's cap free; all the Internet(s) are cap-free in Denmark AFAIK. Cost: 44 Australian bucks (http://www.google.com/search?q=169+DKK+in+australian+dollars).
It sounds like I want to stay the fuck away from Australian interblags.
Your problem is simple. If your customer have a "1mbps" contract with you and they PAY for this, you need to honor the contract, everthing else is a fraud and can led to a process on a court. If your boss do not understood this, is better you get another job with a better boss. A 70:1 ratio is impossible to mantain into my honest opinion.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Start a competing ISP, and tell all the customers of your old employer that they're being secretly throttled.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Let's not forget, in an environment without competition, the boss is actually doing the right thing for his investors/shareholders by finding the service point that maximizes profit. The root problem is lack of competition in this market.
That said, definitely shop around for other transit providers (though if you're way out in rural USA circuits costs may dominate.) And as a user and former network operator, in the interim use WFQ with proportional fairness by IP address. It avoids the measurement complexity and "big brother" feeling that you are watching what users do, and encourages what I think is the right end user behavior anyway.
Also, consider not limiting anyone, but offering a better service option for those willing to pay more. You could increase their WFQ allotment, or give them access to a web cache you run on your network. It's not clear with that number of subs you'll get the statistics needed to make it efficient, but disk is cheap enough these days.
Hey, here's an idea. Don't over-subscribe.
If you are selling 2Mb/s you are selling 2Mb/s not "might be 2Mb/s some of the time but the rest of the time be 1Mb/s which is £5 cheaper if you were on the 1Mb/s plan"
This whole thing about throttling because heavy users are slowing down other users has only risen because ISPs are selling something that they *do not have*. The popularity and increasing use of streaming video etc. is going to cause that bubble to burst sooner or later.
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
Well there is only thing a responsible sysadmin in your position can do. Go and purchase the bandwidth from your salary, give users the best experience and when your boss sees the light he will give such a big bonus that you can start your own ISP which can easily beat this ISP :)
Have you considered any other means of reducing network load? For example, Squid? A significant portion of your traffic is likely your users visiting the same content-rich websites, like MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, etc. If you can locally cache this content (especially the Flash stuff) you'll probably see a large drop in load.
I have to explain to a lot of ppl what the xx is in "xx Mbps" internet: The speed your ISP guarantees you won't exceed.
Either do what the boss says or leave. He whose name is on the door makes the rules.
A harder solution here, but one that might reach your morality guidelines would be protocol shaping and not overall customer shaping. When it gets to *YOUR* outbound pipe its just a bunch of packets, throttle out all the P2P traffic to 40% of your outbound pipe there and keep the HTTP flowing for the rest of your customers. While I've never tested this on size of customer base that you have, it works wonders for me whenever I install systems for 20 to 40 people. People can still use bit torrent, and the people who want to IM Grandma can IM Grandma. Better yet, you can only shape that traffic during peak times and give your torrenters what they want during the rest of the day.
This may sound ignorant or unsound, but how about emailing/sending a letter out to your user base, explaining in simple terms the predicament... of course, rather than tell them straight out that your infrastructure isn't sufficient or up to task, you can simply mention that you're "revising and improving your internet infrastructure" and need user feedback... based on the feedback, perhaps you can make a better decision.
Some people might prefer bandwidth caps, some people might prefer throttling... you can't please EVERYONE, so better to keep the majority happy.
You can also show your boss and the higher-ups what the USERS wants - anyone with any sort of wit will do what it takes to keep customers, and possibly keep them happy...
that's just my two cents anyways. I would rather get a letter from my ISP asking my preference than the sudden restrictions I got from my old cable ISP - they didn't even bother notifying me until I had breached the "contract - terms may change at any time without notice". I have DSL now.
In any case, it'd be interesting to hear from your user base, no?
Nowhere in your writeup do you say whether P2P is actually the problem here. If all you have is a bandwidth graph, then what else is your boss going to do but make assumptions? There are a number of excellent tools on the market to monitor traffic and tell you exactly what services are using how much bandwidth, as well as which individual customers are the largest users of your network. What happens if you implement shaping and packet inspection, then discover that most of your bandwidth is going to people using Hulu and other video sites? I doubt your boss is going to say "turn off the shaping", you'll just wind up adding ever more draconian restrictions.
I agree as well with the people who are saying that this is fighting a losing battle. Your customers' usage patterns are not going to stay the same. They will want to use more bandwidth as time goes on, even if their surfing habits don't change - their favorite sites will include more and more video and Silverlight and all sort of shit, and they will be very angry with YOU if they cannot continue to operate as they have been. Packet-shaping and such tricks will not be sufficient in the long run.
Sounds like they need you more than you need them. Use your leverage as the Linux whiz and tell them you don't think this is right and won't do it. The realization that they could lose a critical staff member may help enlighten them. It may cost you a job, it may not, but even if you end up having to quit, is that bad? Theyre already shafting you by dumping sysadmin work you don't really want on you.
You could decrease the bandwidht. Web pages will still open and downloads will be less. Your network will improve so much.
What format lets you compress a full concert (in my experience, at least an hour) to 700MB losslessly?
Not a flame. Just haven't kept up with the latest in video technology and I WANT THAT.
Your boss obviously is cost-sensitive, and adding bandwidth adds cost, but little income. So, try a compromise - ask your customers if they would prefer a download cap + additional $$ for overage, throttling, or generally higher prices to keep unlimited downloads without throttling. Some combination of these options would probably cover your customers' requirements. For example, I am an independent software developer and a lot of my P2P downloads are getting operating system updates, not your normal file sharing, and limiting that for me would be unacceptable, though I could probably justify another $5-10 per month on my costs to keep the pipes open. Others might prefer the cap + additional $ / GB, and others would be OK with throttling. The main thing is to give the customer an option - and don't shove only one option down their throats.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Connection speeds with any of the technologies out there are full-duplex, and they may be symmetric or asymmetric. DSL's almost always asymmetric, and cable is also, and if you ask what the upload speed is they'll tell you, usually with the same level of vagueness that their download speed is. DSL used to be sold as ADSL or SDSL, though now it's mostly [random bunch o'letters]DSL as the technology keeps evolving.
But if you're a good little couch potato \\\\\\\ typical consumer, you're mostly downloading far more bits anyway, either to read web pages or watch video or whatever. Unless you're running a server or file sharing, download speed is the speed you care about. (Ok, video conferencing is an exception, but most of that's at 128kbps or below, so you're even ok there.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Take a look at these guys (netequalizer dot com). They divide the bandwidth up equally at times when the pipe gets full. Used a lot in education environments.
http://www.netequalizer.com/NetEqualizerServiceProvider.pdf
You've only got 400 users? Put it to a vote. Explain your company's predicament, and then send them each an email asking if they'd prefer to either:
A) Pay more for an increase in upstream bandwidth
or
B) Accept throttling based on service and content
Personally, I don't have a problem with QoS-based filtering. For example, give torrents a lower priority so they'll wait in line behind real-time apps like voice or even web browsing
A little transparency in your decision-making process will gain you a lot of respect with your customers, and make them feel like they are part of both the problem and solution
Unfortunately you don't have the control over the data at the right places to do what you need here. The bottleneck isn't getting from the ISP to the user's house (unlike in adequately-funded ISPs) - it's the feed that that the ISP is getting in from their upstream. You might still do something like run Weighted RED to harass the FTP and BitTorrent traffic, but it's not as effective there as if you got your upstream to prioritize what they're sending you.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Because this is in a certain limited market, the customers really only have the choice between my ISP and dial-up.
Or they could buy their connectivity the same way you do and resell it to their neighbors...
Sure, there are issues, but my point is that what you should do technically isn't really an ethical question of any difficulty. You work for the company, your boss has told you to do something that isn't illegal, and unless your customer contracts promise not to use traffic shaping, it is very hard to argue that it is unethical. Do what the boss wants. If you are routinely pegging your upstream bandwidth for long periods, you are already restricting customer traffic. As it stands, that is being done without any attention to how it happens and is almost certainly causing more trouble for customers in practice than a carefully managed traffic shaping policy would. If the company isn't going to buy more bandwidth upstream for customers, figuring out some way to allocate the bandwidth you have fairly and wisely is an ethical no-brainer. Arguably there are better approaches than targeting specific protocols, but in a small operation you may have no better option.
Where there could be a moral question is on the customer communication side. The wording commonly used in selling retail ISP services is easily misunderstood even with more traditional oversell ratios and without chronic upstream saturation. With saturation "for the better part of the day" it may be easy to make the case that what you have told customers that they are buying is actively deceptive, particularly if you've sold different classes of service differentiated by bandwidth. When you are saturated upstream, the congestion flattens the differences in bandwidth that customers can see. It is also a problem because once you have your link saturated most of the time, every new customer cuts into the quality of service you can provide existing customers. If the company can bear the discomfort of being truly honest about the situation with customers, there's no moral dilemma here. Unless the Boss is telling you to deceive customers, that's not your issue.
Since you agree that there *is* legal P2P traffic, the argument that "it's illegal so there is no problem throttling it" is a non-sequitur.
Actually, it's a false premise. A non sequitur has a conclusion that does not follow from the premises (even if they are supposed to be true).
In-laws had a similar situation from the customer end. They had a small ISP servering thier community. When the community started using more bandwidth than the ISP could handle, they started throttling anyone they thought was P2P. DSL eventually made it's way out there and as soon as that happened, nearly everyone in the community immediatly switched. P2P throttling is the fastest way to piss off your customers. And you can only retain a pissed off customer until there is another option, regardless of price.
In this current economic environment are you really surprised they are asking you to throttle instead of paying for bigger pipes? It is not your moral duty to ensure that people get the best internet experience. You do what you have to do to enforce your company goals and standards within the situation you've been given and ensure that they don't step across your moral standard - ie. lying, cheating, murder, etc. (If that is your particular moral standard. I once knew of a man who killed his wife yet felt morally bound to OSS for some reason. Hmmmm...) To throttle or not to throttle has little to do with your own morality.
I agree with this idea. But I might suggest, rather than Capping them at a said limit, 40G/mo or 100G/mo, and charging more there after. you can throttle them after a said limit. If a customer reaches 30G/mo they become subjected to minimal throttling at certain hours.
seeing as you only have 400 customers, the best approach is give them options and let them decide.
They will stay with you if you are still clearly a better option than you're competition, and will like you even more if they are apart of the decision making.
You might also want to ask them what it is they are doing/using. Some Offices use programs that are like P2P and give them a red flag for throttling. These companies chose you because they can't be throttled or it will damage there business process.
Find out what they are doing and you'll know who not to throttle and why.
If I where you.. I'll set up QoS in working hours so you can threat p2p traffic as non-prior traffic, and on non-working hours change that policy so you could give more speed to p2p traffic, and your customers will not have to complain. Your customers will have the feeling that inet is faster.
It's not your company. You can give your opinion but if the boss doesn't care you can either do your job or quit. Maybe if people start quitting your company will figure something else out. Maybe another company will see this as an opportunity to start an ISP with no limits. In the end though, no need to stress over anything like this. In the grand scheme of life, this is hardly a big deal.
Yes, you should get more bandwidth. Yes, you should shape traffic to favor real-time traffic over bulk traffic. You should be doing both.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Create a totally ineffective shaping, and ensure that it does almost nothing to load the equipment. You probably would cripple small ISP equipment by deep inspection, anyway. Make some per user, time of day specific, limits on max b/w. Or similar. When nothing changes, tell the boss that you are clearly simply oversubscribed, and users are probably watching legit streaming video during peak times, from what you see.
Bandwidth isn't expensive. $50 per megabit is high. $10K for a DS3 loop? Better be international. Try more like $1800/month or so in most areas, unless you really want a direct connect to Level 3, and want to peer with the world.
As of last summer, Cogent was ~$11 per megabit. Your boss is greedy. Let him pay the extra few dimes for bandwidth upgrade. If you are using a copper WAN link, that's foolish. If you are using fiber, the upstream provider can dial it up, unless you need a new card to go higher. That isn't your problem. Teach your boss to sell value added services, like 10 mail boxes for $2/month, free personal web site hosting.
If you are not using hardly any outbound bandwidth, design web sites (simple ones....) and sell hosting for $2 per month. Etc etc. I am not an ISP guy. I'm just a lowbie network grunt. ISP guys could go on all day with ways to use outbound bandwidth to fund more overall bandwidth.
Another idea is to have an ISP home page with a ton of locally cached Youtube vids, and a local (as in, amlng your customers only) file storage area.
The list goes on.
Taking away freedom, or playing binary big brother is not a good answer.
Easy answer- you work for your boss... and your boss works for the customers.
If there are any complaints, that's his responsibility. So do your job... or quit.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm also a small ISP, but I made the mistake of doubling my bandwidth when customers started bumping up against the limits of available bandwidth. It took less than three days to saturate the addtional bandwidth with no new customers.
The problem with P2P is that it will use all available bandwidth, no matter how much there is. That is why it brakes the ISP revenue model; there is no relation ship between number of users and bandwidth use if you allow P2P to run amuck.
Most ISP's have rules against customers running servers (without paying extra). Simply tell them to remove the server (i.e. P2P) program or pay by the full cost of their bandwidth (plus a reasonable profit). Almost no one will opt to pay for people downloading pirated files from their computer, so we have found this to be enough of a deterrent. Perhaps, not surprisingly, 90% of them don't use the P2P programs; they tried them at one time, maybe years ago, but never removed them and were not aware they were dishing out files. Of the remaining 10%, only 2% really care, but will remove the program (or block the server protion it if not using Bittorrent) rather than pay extra. If they decide to move to a competitor's service, that's a lot cheaper than buying more bandwidth.
Unfortunately, you will run into another problem. People seem to have bought into the hype that you can use Internet for watching TV, cancel their cable or satellite service and subscribe to Netflix or something. This works okay for the first few to do it and they tell EVERYONE else. Soon, you are back to no available bandwidth.
Contrary to net neutrality, there is no reason that backbone providers and Internet providers should be forced to allow any stupid, unthinking thing some edge company thinks will make them rich at your expense.
Most people aren't using their connection 24/7. They use it in smaller amounts. However when they use it, it is of value to them to have things get done as fast as possible. Hence a high bandwidth connection is useful, even if you can't use it full blast all the time.
That's the whole design behind a LAN at work for that matter. For example I have a gigabit connection to my desktop. The switch I'm on has a gigabit connection back to the core switch. That switch has a gigabit connection to our central storage. Now, were I to try and use the whole connection to our central storage the whole time, well then nobody would be able to use it but me. However, that doesn't mean the connection is useless to me. What it allows me to do is get the files I need very quickly, then drop back to no usage. So it works better over all that I, and everyone else, have gigabit links, then if we were all limited to 1mbit/sec which is about what our proportional amount would be roughly.
If you want an Internet where there is no over subscription at any level, where it is assumed that everyone uses their full connection all the time, well then get prepared to have modem speed links, or even less. If you try to guarantee everything all the way up it gets real unmanageable real quick. As an example:
Suppose you've got a company and you want to provide 10mbit Ethernet to each desktop, however you want it with no oversubscription anywhere. So your buildings have 100 people per floor, and each floor is on a switch. That means that every floor switch needs a gigabit ethernet uplink. Ok no problem. Now your building has 10 floors, so your core building switch needs to have a 10gig uplink. You've got 4 buildings in a city, so your core switch for a city needs an OC-768 (actually a bit more). You have buildings in 5 cities, so you then needs 5 OC-768s to your central company server (and to the Internet), not that you can find a computer that can handle that.
Seem a little excessive? All that and the end users still get only 10mbit. You'd probably be better off putting in gigabit everywhere. Yes, you'd be oversubscribed at every level, but the end users would see better transfers.
Throttle your boss instead.
I know there are very complex propositions to make P2P easier to handle on ISPs but I didn't check them too deeply.
What about the most obvious solution? Squid cache all .cab (or whatever MS uses) on windows update and Apple software update respectively? I don't say HTML or anything else, they have potential privacy concerns and sometimes issues but why should all 400 guys download the exact same huge binary file? A single quicktime update means 70MB sometimes. Should it be just 70 MB or 70MB*400? No security threatened too, both uses file signatures.
If Real and Apple didn't mess up with streaming, they both have proxy solutions but you gotta look to Flash caching these days as everyone is on Youtube downloading 40 mb files and call it ''streaming''. Well, the obvious popular ones like Quicktime trailers, mp3 files (over plain http, like podcasts) can be cached too.
I an the senior network tech for a small ISP. We manage 10 sites. Some with as many as 2000 customers, some with as few as 40. All it takes is one abusive user to ruin the internet experience for all people in a site. We also face the problem of satellite delivery for our network content since most of our locations are unaccessible via terrestrial means. So bandwidth is not only limited, but very, very expensive. We also limit our DSL and cable modem services down to 256k because of the cost of delivery. We have implemented Packeteer Packetshapers and have filtered out all P2P traffic except bittorrent. And we have torrent traffic limited to a max rate of 10% of the pipe to an area. This is especially important to satellite as most p2p software streams without regard to satellite latency and bandwidth constraints and floods the link causing service outages for our sites. We have only had a few complaints over the years. And those folks we refer back to our ToS as we lay out the p2p restrictions in there. We have had to take the approach to penalize the few for the sake of the many. We would rather have one or two pissed off customers then have 1000.. We also utilize monitoring software to track overall bandwidth utilization of each client to find abusive users (users that peg their bandwidth 100% of the time) and penalize them if it is causing detrimental service to our other customers. We have learned over the years that you can never had enough bandwidth. The more you provide, the more the users utilize. And you will always have a few that push the envelope.
As a geek who transitioned to management - and who has worked in Fortune 500 and small companies, I think that it's fair to say that you don't understand the motivations.
Caveats:
1) Some management people are evil - a small minority may be - a la Madoff, but generally they are not evil
2) Some management people are incompetent. The Peter Principle applies, and some management folk are nincompoops.
3) Some management people are led by nincompoops and can't do the sensible thing
Now that I've got that out of the way, I want to challenge some of the /. groupthink about management.
I know of a company making the choice between $free DB and $notfreeDB. At a point in the dev cycle when it was reasonable to select a new platform, the company opted to pay thousands of dollars for $notfreeDB.
A HA! Management must be corrupt/stupid/evil! Right?
No! The technology evangelist for $freeDB could not make a sensible argument about why the company should invest the time in retraining and purchase of tools to support $freeDB.
For what it's worth, the geeks most comfortable with $notfreeDB pushed HARD against a switch, and argued that a change was a risk to success due to it being an unknown, and it would cost time and slip the schedule.
All in all, IMNSHO, selection of $notfreeDB is sub optimal, but the geek could not make a case in business terms. That geek's thinking that $feee is inherently better than $notfree should be enough of an argument.
Silly.
Management values finding a way to monetize technology. This is NOT evil. It is what EVERY geek does. If geeks focus on technology, they miss the point. Failure to understand that there are levers other than "technically better" is the fauls and failure of the geeks, not the fault of management.
If you (the general you, not parent specifically) are unable to understand that - that would be YOUR fault, not the fault of management.
Think outside the technology box - find ways to monetize your brilliant ideas, and you will go much farther than the geek who blow out the candle then curse the darkness.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
You probably would not see this post as it is hugging the bottom of a long pile of messages, but here are my two cents:
In small scale networks, as few as five to ten over utilizing customers can bring the whole structure to its knees. From ethical perspective, it is your duty to keep network as operational as possible for the whole customer base. So that it is OK in my book to shape traffic as long as you keep it as fair as possible for your customers' benefit. Also it is important to back your traffic shaping with a solid mathematical model, as some (usually below 1%) of your customers can complain, and even can claim that you are stealing their capacity...
FAP (Fair Access Policy) is a rolling average, leaky bucket traffic shaping algorithm. We are using HNS (Hughes Network Systems) implementation with great success for five years. As you are a cable operator HNS solution would not work for you, however it is well documented (by public, in public domain. HNS' own documentation sucks). If you ignore customer complaints about HNS services in USA (problem there is not FAP mechanism, but very tight parameters set by HNS operations team) and concentrate on the system you would learn a great deal about traffic shaping that is adapted to real life conditions.
As you would need an implementation to use, a single layer FAP (HNS implementation permits three layers) can be put in place by using basic traffic shaping parameters in Cisco. For multi layered approach, you can use a Linux firewall. If you have money to spend on this, Allot traffic shapers are very good Linux based devices.
Regards
And I might just go down to their office and throttle the whole lot of them one of these days.
What this means is that his 400 user ISP only has the capacity for less than SIX users to be running full tilt at a time! To me that's a bit extreme. I can see 5:1 or even 10:1 but 70:1??!!
When ever you are up at level when your upstream pipe is running full speed then you are already in effect throttling. So the idea of limiting your customer's bandwidth is not even a question. You ARE doing it now.
The question then is how to do it fairly. To do nothing is to throttle very un-fairly
My opion is to prioritise the packets. First off
Interactive protocols should go ahead of "background" stuff, that is "stuff" where the user is not sitting there at the screen like email, downloads (FTP and p2p) Next those using only low bandwidth should go to the front of the queue. (Let those not using there full share go first in line for more.)
This way those doing normal web surfing see fast page loads and those downloading pirate copies of DVD get whatever bandwidth you have left over. This is the only fair way. It is NOT fair to let those getting the DVD rip-offs stomp all over the others nd if you do nothing that is what happens.
One More Thing: You can cache pages. This will take a load off your pipe. There are any number of free page caches that will run onder Linux. And big disks are cheap now.
You have done us a favor by revealing your uncomfortable dilemma.
Now we know that your ISP's absurd oversubscribing isn't just a technical oversight...it is corporate policy to oversell to such an extreme degree.
So your company is probably abusing monopoly power.
And, perhaps other ISPs that have bandwidth issues have the same top-down power structure where the techies get pushed around by the higher ups.
If your system is capable of it: Configure it to divide the bandwidth equally between the active customers during congestion. Do this moment-to-moment by dropping packets of the over-share customer or dynamically adjusting his bandwidth on a very short term basis. This will cause his TCP connections (and some UDP flow hacks) to throttle back. (If you can do it, give preference WITHIN A CUSTOMER'S FLOWS to the packets related to low-bandwidth streaming traffic such as VOIP, so it's less-sensitive traffic that takes the hit.)
Note that I said "between customers", not "between flows". Some download tools open a bunch of connections, so this would cheat if the throttling algorithm didn't take into account which customer the flows were going to.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What we do is to prioritize packets.
The top priority goes to certain essential network traffic. Things like DNS, for example.
The next level of priority is for very interactive traffic such as ssh.
After that comes e-mail and web browsing.
At the very bottom is anything else.
The idea is that the type of things that are most critical in terms of being very aggravating to users as they wait are at the top. The more batch-like traffic is at the bottom.
That is as it should be.
in the past given month, find the top 10, assume these cause the vast majority of the congestion and ask them to find ways to knock it off or they'll have to upgrade to a professional tier of bandwidth. Then, in theory if you keep doing this every month there will be less of the problem of congestion.
Otherwise, implement some sort of automated controls to ratelimit those who cause congestion. Do it based on total traffic volume, not by service.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Step 1. Set up several tiers of service (at different price points)
Step 2. In periods of network congestion, drop packets (in a way that is NEUTRAL to the content of the packet) of customers who are in a cheaper tier. (aka "Quality of Service" in networking jargon).
For Step 1, you may wish to gather statistical information then advertise to your customers about what kind of bandwidth customers may expect during congestion and noncongestion hours at each given tier.
I would detect all the worms and other malware that are clogging up the pipes, and redirect all those customers' traffic to a special web page that gives them nothing but links to antivirus information and vendors. After they fix their problems, I'd let them back on the general net, where they'd use a tiny portion of the bandwidth they were using whilst infected.
I'd make damn sure the telephone support staff were thoroughly briefed and ready to deal with the flood of angry phone calls. They will need some scripts for dealing with difficult people and at least one class on how the detection and redirection will work. The phone reps should make the customers happy that you've helped them avoid federal prosecution for child porn etc. spread through malware.
That's what I'd do.
(I'm also a very small WISP, about 35 customers. I guess I'm oversubscribed about 15 to 1)
You should do what your boss tells you (#1 rule).
But: maybe you could take a more proactive approach to the problem. Maybe do some research and find a deal on more bandwidth (maybe you will discover why the boss doesn't want to buy more).
Do you have to upgrade lots of infrastructure to enable more bandwidth, or can you just add it at the headend and it automatically works?
I'm also curious if you have a graph of transfer per customer? That might be interesting - is it only 10% of customers that are using 90% of packets? Maybe it is a selling opportunity (more income for the cable co) and you could become the Internet division.
But the HTB traffic shaping sounds best, if that fits your contract.You might compare the costs of a NetEqualizer with more bandwidth, rather than the old pentium running linux - that might make the bandwidth look like a winner.
We've got a horrible pricing model in the US. We should be paying for usage instead of an all-you-can-eat monthly fee. But the die has been set, and I don't see any way out of it. It's the tragedy of the commons writ large.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
If they have cell phone coverage (Sprint/Verizon) then they probably have their data/wireless modem availability also. In which case, you just might loose customers to the cell phone company.My brother could not get anything but dialup, but then discovered that the cell phone company offered for $60/month the UM150 wireless cell modem.
You have here a very small ISP with only 400 customers. They are 70/1 oversubscribed and they want most of their customers to be happy with the service.
A few things to consider, not all customers are worth keeping. If keeping customer A costs you customers B & C, then you are much better off getting rid of customer A. Heavy downloaders do not have a right to use the network in a way that negatively affects other customers or the business that provides the service. The business is not morally obligate to provide anything but what they contract says they will provide. And, 70:1 oversubscription is not so bad. I once worked for a major TLA telecom company who regularly allocated 8Kbps of backbone for each DSL line.
The key is to provide all customers a consistent user experience and to provide all customers what they pay for. If the heavy downloaders do not pay more they have no right to use more. And, lets make this clear, just because you let customers use more than their fair share in the past is not a reason to allow them to continue their antisocial behavior. You made a mistake, a seriously immoral mistake, by allowing the bad behavior in the first case. You are now morally obligate to correct the problem.
Ok, so how many customers do you plan to support before you upgrade the backbone? Is it the 400 you currently have or the 1,000 that your boss dreams about? Pick a number, call it planned for customers or PFC for short. Each customer is paying for 1/PFC worth of the backbone. And that is exactly what they should get. IMHO it would be reasonable and moral to throttle everyone to (1/PFC)*(available bandwidth) worth of bandwidth.
there are other considerations. At some times of the day there are very few people using the net and at other times there are a large number using it. Take the average number of users by hour, call it AUBY, add 50% to it, and allocate bandwidth so that each user gets (available bandwidth)/(1.5 * AUBY).. The 50% is to cover variance in the number of users and to provide for growth in the number of users. You want to be able to add customers and deal with busy times without seriously interfering with the customer experience. Now, don't impose throttling on a connection until it exceeds 75% of its allocation. When it hits the limit start throttling to keep the connections total usage below its limit.
Doing it that way will give all users the same experience. Web surfers and folks who make the occasional big download with see a fast and consistent service. Heavy downloaders can still do heavy downloads. They will notice that their download speed varies with the time of day. They will still get their fair share, but they will not affect the other customers. Your business will be able to add new customers without harming the experience of existing customers and you will have fair warning of when you need to increase backbone bandwidth.
If I read the original question correctly you feel that throttling heavy users may be immoral. That is not the case. By allowing the heavy users to hurt performance for the rest of your customers your business is the one taking the immoral action.
Stonewolf
From your text, I assume you are an employee who is not a director of the corporation.
If this is the case, you have two choices. 1) install traffic shaping. 2) quit
I say this, because you have explained your point of view already and your boss has rejected it and requested you do something else. You have done everything you can/should do on this topic.
As long as a decision is not illegal, then it is your duty as an employee to follow it. If this bothers you, search for new work at a location where the spirit of the company suits your opinions more closely.
do you happen to live in a remote town in Canada BC?! :P
For clarification, the FCC's ruling was not that comcast could not throttle BitTorrent traffic, but the method they used (packet injection -- causing connections to drop/terminate) was unlawful.
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't read the FCC's ruling, just the CNet article, which like a lot of /.'s articles, is mis-titled.
While YOU may want throttling to be illegal, it isn't.
No, I don't want throttling illegal. Or traffic shaping. What I want is the ISPs to hold up the way they billed their services. They sold unlimited access but now that they oversold the service they want to renege on it. I also want them to do what they were given taxpayer dollars to do, build out broadband. Telcos were given $200 billion to buildout broadband but all they did was use the money to pad their bottom line. I also want they to stop trying to block competition.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
You may not like it and you are free to take your business elsewhere but it is not illegal for them to do so.
At most many people only have one choice for broadband, if they're lucky and live close enough they can get DSL and in other locations cable may be offered. Few people can choose between them. So the only choice is to put up with an aristocratic cableco or telco, or not have broadband. Now in a free market there would be more choices.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Under no circumstances should you bill for bandwidth used - this kind of gotcha capitalism is immoral.
You should, however, set up multiple tiers of service. For example, the entry level can be 256 kilobits a second, and for a little more money allow 640kbits etc etc. I would also do some limited QoS to limit the 256k users to maybe 128k if there is a lot of traffic.
Just don't have surcharges for bandwitch usage.
I agree both with the parent's GENERAL point and with the other replies that say it's too confusing. That is, for actual, and probably rural users, your proposed system is way too complex. In addition, the POST itself is complex.
OP's goal seems to clearly be to be nice about this. As the parent suggests, the key to trying to be nice about this without paying for a bigger pipe is to properly encourage users to use off-peak downloads. You need a simple, fair system, that just works with users who aren't thinking about it. And I agree, filtering by traffic type is lame.
So from a bulk-downloader point of view you want a system that limits everyone's bandwidth during peak times only - and you want to publish when the offpeak times are so that aggressive downloaders can choose to download stuff during those times if they so desire.
The peak limits should be stiff enough that you aren't quite pegged in either upload or download (separate limits) so everybody gets a relatively low latency connection. Feel free to add more than one tier of "peak" if you need to, especially internally. Or if you're really cool, it will automatically detect when you're about to be at 100% and throttle based on that... so you're not actually 'setting' peak times, you're just publishing guidance on what times tend to be peak.
This kind of traffic shaping - limiting everyone's bandwidth fairly when there isn't enough - is basically good for your users as a whole.
Another key thing to do is HOW this bandwidth is limited. What you want to do is not, really: no more than 200 kb/s. What you really want is more like no more than 12000 kb/min, and no more than 2000 kb/s. There are more complex algorithms for this... but the important thing is to average their bandwidth over a modest time period. Somewhere between 5 seconds and a couple minutes is probably right. Because most typical web users who AREN'T bulk downloading need a lot of bandwidth for very short periods, and to keep the interactive web experience fast you need to give it to them.
The 2.6 kernel does this pretty easily; 2.4 might but I can't remember. Of course, I don't have a clue whether you're using a linux router. TrafficControl or tc, I think the module was called. But I haven't had to adjust mine in a good long time.
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That plan results in everything becoming ssh.
And since everything is ssh, then you should just ignore protocols altogether, and prioritize by volume. Light "ssh" users should have priority over heavy "ssh" users.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What do you want out of life?
What do you believe is right?
Do you care about sucking up your morals to do your job? If not, you probably won't have this same job for long. I'd contact a local news station to "break" the news about the coming traffic shaping, etc.
Or you can suck it up and do what you're being paid to do.
From my experience, life is a long series of having two choices
not everyone is recession proof
or you could do a really good job of filtering etc, but go back to show your boss that even with filtering etc, you're still up against a wall, and need to expand. But that's not going to happen because even if the customers complain, they'll be reminded that in order for their complaints to be justified the problem has to persist for a full 24 hours, or whatever is in the contract. My parents have had their cable-net go down for 18 hours and some change, but were told flat out they don't get credit for the day because it had to be a solid 24 hours. They changed to DSL (no better) etc etc
better yet, demand a raise if they want you to fuck shit up, make it cost them less to pay you than having someone else do the job correctly plus the cost of your current salary, but not more than seems reasonable.
Hack the Planet, I'll drink beer for you tonight!
"It's the Law of the Universe, and I'm the sheriff." Slash-cott 2/10-2/17
However, I would prioritize traffic. Email, web, SSH, et al come first; after that, all p2p protocols in order of usefulness.
and when the p2p users encrypt their torrents?
Absolutely nothing, because it doesn't matter. You don't identify p2p traffic, you identify all the higher priority protocols and everything else (read: p2p, encrypted or otherwise) is best effort. Absolutely everything that needs better than best effort is trivial to positively identify without having p2p traffic appear to be that higher priority traffic (i.o.w. more than just simplistic port matching).
The only thing encryption on torrents gains you is some protection against a 3rd party with a network tap from identifying the file(s) you're transferring from chunk hashes. Of course if they have that tap they already know what you're transferring anyhow from the info hash when you talk to the tracker or DHT so it fails at even doing that. It most definitely does not protect you from throttling OR having the connections disrupted.
There are two types of jobs you're ever going to see:
1 - The type of job where you do what your boss tells you after he's ignored your educated and thought out advice.
2 - The type of job where you ignore your boss and do something correctly. Unfortunately, your current job probably pays better than unemployment.
After such wonderful service, I'd love to strangle Comcast.
Oh, you meant network traffic? That's very different. Never mind.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
Find and eliminate any existing spam originators.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
An ISP using a wireless last mile is certainly not free from the requirement for "connections in government to pull the physical layer [...] over non-subscribers' private property to reach subscribers." In this case, the physical layer is spectrum, and the connections in goverment would involve the Federal Communications Commission or foreign counterparts.
I'd do what I always do and got fired for more then once.
If all of us did the same, the IT landscape would change rather quickly.
Do whats right, not what maximizes profit.
The entire thing wrong with the economie is that companies seek to increase profit over all else.
Instead of maximizing profit while keeping the customers happy. They maximize profit as far as the customers will accept abuse.
Since the situation your descibing gives the customers no alternatives, abuse will go to extremes if noone intervenes.
Your questions are two. Your boss, asks you to manage a piece of his/her business. You have discovered an issue; although no customers have complained, (you did not say either way.) If you ignore your boss, your insubordinate; however, you should be aware of the "terms of service" (TOS) that frames what service is delivered to your customer; and use your skill and experience to deliver value to "all" of your customers, and if a minority (you didn't say either way) is abusing the service (outside of the TOS) then they may need to police "excessive" usage. If you have a definition of excessive, that is, according to your TOS. Welcome to the real world. dr Your questions: 1) I am struggling with the desire to give the customers I am administering the best experience. Answer: You did not say that any customer is getting a bad experience; nor have you defined what the "best experience" is. Customers meaning "all customers" the best experience that you can. If a small handful of customers are getting more value at the expense of others, than doing some load balancing is appropriate. The key here are two things a) your terms of service and b) keeping all customers equally satisfied, value given for value ($) received. c) (one extra) you need to work with your boss in what the terms of service are, because in the end, you/me/all of us needs to behave in an ethical manner. 2) The desire to do what my boss wants. Answer: since you are the employee, you need to do what your boss directs, assuming it is not illegal or unethical. Suggesting you do two things: a) do what your boss says, or at a minimum do the analysis of what any such change will mean to the customers. b) do some root-cause-analysis, find out what is causing the issue...peak usage is just that "peak" usage; alternatively look at the overall environment, and make some "technically" sound assessments, and come back to your boss with HERE is what I did based on your instructions; HERE are the results; HERE are how our calls to customer service have changed; HERE is dada, dada, yada. In my opinion. dr
Using a bucket system (CFQ or the like) you give each user a large bucket, and fill it at a slow rate (could be the 1/70th share they "should" get, but could be faster if a faster fill rate takes care of the congestion.)
Charging for overage is bad, people should not have to carefully have to watch some meter to make sure they aren't getting a large unexpected bill. Those who are dumb enough to use Windows and get a box pwned will get a bill for usage they don't even know about. Whether it's that or P2P, people who get some large unexpected bill WILL cancel rather than pay it.
Throttling, on the other hand, will get people to cut out undesired behaviors to avoid getting throttled (or they'll be slowed down by the throttle anyway.) Problem solved. A few heavy bandwidth users may be using VPN, well, they should have a business plan for business use, simple as that. Depending on your business relationship with these people, if they do bitch to much it could be easier to just unthrottle these few users.
I'll second squid too. I would set it restrictively, only cache jpg, gif, png, avi, etc., so you are not caching stale web pages. I have heard there is P2P caching technology too, which could cut down your P2P bandwidth usage.