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?"

Comments

bill, don't throttle

[seanadams.com]

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.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[geekboy642]

From the tone of the article, it doesn't sound at all like subby has the freedom to change the ToS or implement hard caps.

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. A simple email or letter to your subscribers to announce the change, and everybody will be happy. As a bonus, the notification of the changes will help to encourage your subscribers not to attempt to circumvent your filters, especially given that it's so easy for any modern downloading client to schedule for off-peak hours.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[volsung]

Amen, but to add to this: If you are going to institute some kind of usage billing, it is *absolutely* critical you give people the tools to monitor their usage. At a minimum, there should be a web page that customers can view their current usage (no more than 24 hours old) relative to the quota. For bonus points, give people the ability to get email updates when they pass predefined levels, or if their one-day usage exceeds some value.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[bigcmoney]

I run a similar sized WISP. All I do is use NFSEN to see who is using the bandwidth, and then give them a call. Almost all the time the customer's kids are doing the downloading, or they have a virus. This level of service really makes the customer appreciate doing business with you.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[PhoenixAtlantios]

P2P throttling? Not here.

Exetel do, and we know of this only because they've been vocal about it; other ISPs may do it with more subtlety.

Forbidding servers on residential connections? Not here.

The Whirlpool broadband survey 2008 disagrees (search for "not allowed to run server", optus certainly restricts it).

So while the majority of ISPs don't do it, you shouldn't make out that it's all sunshine and roses in bandwidth cap land; some of the larger ISPs (Telstra and Optus) measure both uploads as well as downloads when considering your monthly bandwidth cap too (which seems to be an effective way to reduce p2p since you'll hit your cap that much faster by "giving back").

I agree that shaping connections rather than billing for excess usage makes more sense for ADSL/Cable connections though; it's much less daunting to get throttled as opposed to being charged extra. Internode have implemented a "Data Block" system that allows you to purchase chunks of bandwidth to extend your monthly cap in a pinch if you're about to get throttled (i.e. it isn't cost effective to do regularly) which could be worth looking into later on.

One more thing, if you do implement caps you'd want to look into some sort of monthly usage meter that's easily accessible to your customers. Net Usage Item is an example of a Firefox addon that tracks usage from various ISPs that helps people avoid overrunning their caps.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[mysidia]

There's really very little moral question here, you are selling a service. The quality of the bandwidth you use, and whether the same amount of bandwidth is available in bulk heavy usage, for bulk file transfers, as for normal, expected usage patterns, is your call as an ISP.

And for the most part ISPs don't buy a bit of internet bandwidth, for every bit of subscriber bandwidth. This practice is not oversubscription (per se), you should calculate the expected usage patterns for your average subscriber, and multiply by your total number of subscribers, and add 'safety' factors for flash crowds; as for P2P applications and "bulk data transfers", you should do the math there as well, and determine, what proportions of your traffic are P2p transfers.

Keeping usage of heavy users under reasonable control just as much about providing everyone a quality service, as it is about 'saving on bandwidth bills' -- because, even if you add more bandwidth, downloaders will manage to eat it, if you don't put something in place.

And ISPs all over the country are taking measures to limit P2P's usage, so a few users don't get to hog all the network resources, or to overutilize.

This is not so much a justification based on the theory "everyone is doing it", but more a justification based on "your consumers probably expect you to do this" (do your best to block, prevent, or control, excessive usages from other subscribers that would degrade their services)

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....

He only has 400 customers. There's not enough play here to provision capacity on demand, if a few users want to heavily use the service, he may need to get commitments for this to be affordable.

They can stay below those monthly limits and still cause major problems, if they happen to all be on at the same time fully utilizing their pipe fairly continuously.

Also, consumers will rightly be concerned about the possibility of malware or unwanted DoS attacks artificially inflating their bandwidth bill.

There are a lot of good things to be said for using technologies like NBAR and policing to reduce the flow of unwanted traffic.

Actual general shaping is not recommended, as it will very possibly degrade proper operation of the service, for non-bandwidth-hungry users.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that the question is worded badly but it is a question that would require a technical solution that many of /.'s readers may have prior experience with.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[MrEricSir]

If my ISP called, that's what I'd tell them too.

"Yeah, my 'kids' must be 'downloading' a lot of stuff. Don't worry I'll go spank them until they stop."

Re:bill, don't throttle

[causality]

Do you really have reason to believe that dissenting is "a down-moddable 'offense'," or are you just letting off steam because AC's always start at -1 and seldom get up-modded unless they're presenting a view that is relevant to the discussion? I can't speak for anyone else but I use about 95-98% of any mod points I'm given to reward those who say something meaningful, informative and/or funny in relation to the subject raised in the original summary. So, in answer to your implied question, I'd be glad to have the same moderation standards applied to my submissions.

FYI, Anonymous Cowards don't start at -1 by default. By default, they start at 0. You can modify your personal preferences so that they are displayed as -1 (or +5 if you really wanted...) but of course that is unique to your own account.

Incidentally, you really don't sound like the sort of moderator that the GP was talking about and I mean for that to be a compliment. That you realize promoting good posts is a better use of your points than demoting bad ones is strong evidence that you're one of the better moderators. As someone who values constructive criticism (the real thing, not personal attacks veiled as constructive criticism), who often takes relatively controversial positions and enjoys challenging people to think in new ways, I can tell you from my own personal experience that there is a lot of poor-quality moderation going on. You won't see that very much for posts that just repeat a "party line" (almost anyone's party line) but you do see this targeting some of the more freethinking posters. It became much more noticable after the old metamoderation system was "upgraded". I am not at all surprised that I more and more frequently see a backlash against it to be honest with you. It's not that it's so terrible so much as it is that this is heading in the wrong direction so the bad examples are slowly becoming more common.

To me the situation is quite easy to understand: weak or insecure people think that even the most civil disagreement or the most constructive criticism is an attack against them and they look for ways to retaliate. When those people are moderators, they retaliate by enforcing drastically distorted standards of "flamebait" or "troll" or "offtopic".

Re:bill, don't throttle

[Mistlefoot]

Metering almost positively requires Docsis compatible cable modems. For a business that runs cable as a sideline, as per the submission, I would guess there would be a reasonable chance they don't have the most up to date equipment. With 400 subscribers it's also difficult to implement many high cost options. Will setting up filtering actually cost more than providing more bandwidth? How cost effective is it (it's easy with docsis) different speed options (ie 512 down - for basic email/chatting etc., 5120 for the average user and maybe 10240 for high users, priced incrementally) 400 subscribers in a limited area - where the user base likely won't increase a large amount, isn't going to allow for many cost effective options in my opinion.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[fractoid]

That sounds like it might have been Dodo, back in the 256k days. Telstra also used to charge like a wounded bull for over-cap usage, and only implemented shaping in 2002-2003 iirc.

TPG also springs to mind, not so much with the low quotas and hideous excess charges, but with overly punitive exit fee clauses... like signing users up for "no upfront cost" for a 24 month period, then not even bothering to activate the service, and when the user cancels the contract they're told to pay the rest of their 24 months upfront as severance fee. The TIO was busy with them for a while.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[Jurily]

"Yeah, my 'kids' must be 'downloading' a lot of stuff. Don't worry I'll go spank them until they stop."

But if it turns out to be a virus, you get a) a happy customer, b) reduced bandwidth usage, and c) the world will be a slightly better place. All for a phone call.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[Pikiwedia.net]

Don't bill or throttle, instead prioritize latency-sensitive protocols over other less sensitive traffic.

Prio 1: Voice, http, https, gaming traffic
Prio 2: pop3, smtp, ftp
Prio 3: Other traffic


I've done this myself on a 100 Mbit/s LAN with 500 homes sharing a 20 Mbit/s internet uplink. The uplink was almost continously congested but the web browsing experience was nice and snappy. When the prioritization was implemented, customer complaints dropped sharply.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[Anonymous Coward]

You made an interesting and valid initial point about the quality of the Ask Slashdot section. Regardless of the status quo, this is the type of comment I generally mod up, and in fact, I happen to personally agree with your assessment. But you then spent the next 3 paragraphs, the majority of your post, bitching about how valid conversation points are suppressed and insulting the moderators.

Some mods do take their modpoints and the moderation system in general as something worthy of actual effort because it benefits the community in some minor way and because we wish to reciprocate the benefits that others have provided us, so it took me a moment to consider your post. In the end, I believe that you overshadow your relevant and valid argument with irrelevant assertions about its validity and complaint bordering on flamebait or ad hominem, so I cannot mod this up. I hope that you've vented enough steam to make your next post more succinct. I also believe that there should be a 'meta' tag; something to indicate that the post is valid but about slashdot itself, as there is no proper forum for this kind of conversation.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, he is saying that he pays roughly $4.70 per gig on satellite so the $1.00 doesn't seem that high.

He added the rest to confuse the idiots. I see his evil plan worked well.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[c0p0n]

You seem to live in a world in which every person is a geek and knows what you're talking about.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[Bolzano-Weierstrass]

This actually penalizes the guy who downloads a heck of a lot, but he times his downloads so they always run from 11 pm to 5 am.

Then just count every GB transfered between, say, midnight and 7am as 512MB.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[morgan_greywolf]

What I had in mind was something a bit farther away from the obvious. Just as politicians destroy precious things like freedom in the name of our safety, that post made me wonder if errant or rogue employees might take some very undesirable actions and excuse them on the basis of some nebulous "greater good" and then claim that this constitutes morality.

That might be a bit of a stretch, but it's not that far off. Basically making arguments about morality or what is 'right' and 'wrong' is just plain besides the point. In management classes, you are taught that the best decisions aren't what's right for the employees, and aren't even what's right for you: it's what's best for the company, and what's best for the company is that which lowers cost and other liabilities and increases cashflow and net assets: IOW, that which maximizes shareholder value.

Morality doesn't really have much to do with it, except that they do mention, for good measure, that it's important to be a good corporate citizen and that the results of being a good corporate citizen are usually beneficial to the company. Or some other nebulous B.S. that sounds good on paper but doesn't work that way in the real world.

Anyway, the secret to a successful business of any kind, no matter how large or small, is to balance the four 'cornerstones' that are the foundation of any busines: marketing, finance, product/service production, and administration. They all have to be in balance. The other key is that these cornerstones ALL must be customer-centric. The entire organization must be focuses on its customers, because they are the reason for any business' existence.

In the long run, if this small ISP doesn't take care of these customers, side business or not, at the very least, these customers will look elsewhere. Sounds like there is no competition, but in a free market there's always competition. Who knows? Maybe the AC will quit and start his own small ISP that takes care of its customers. 400 customers at $50/mo is a guaranteed $20,000/month gross income once it gets going. Not bad for an SMB opportunity.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[drsmithy]

Um, if you're paying for X bandwidth, but getting less than that, wouldn't you consider that a "limit"?

You don't pay for "X bandwidth" on home internet connections, you pay for a particular type of connection with a theoretical maximum that the provider makes quite clear a) you may never actually reach (eg: due to unavoidable technical limitations like distance from the exchange) and b) they are under no obligation to deliver at all, let alone constantly.

This is in the fine print of pretty much every ISP contract you'll ever see. It certainly has been in every one that I've ever read. A consumer-grade internet connection is a "best effort", not a contractual SLA, and no remotely intelligent person (and even most stupid ones) seriously believes otherwise when they sign up, no matter how much outrage they might feign on Slashdot afterwards.

Finally, even most of the "unlimited" plans usually only talk about "unlimited downloads", not "unlimited bandwidth", which is my point - it's a measure of volume, not speed.

You're stuck.

[numbski]

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.

Re:You're stuck.

[ssj152]

Better read the current terms of service first - yanking the rug before changing the terms of service frequently leads to lawsuits. Be nice to the pointy-haired one, but point out the likelihood of legal problems here. Also, I liked the first responder 'seanadams' suggestion as an actual solution - if there is no way to actually get the bandwidth upped.

Re:You're stuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree 100%. You're getting paid for this work. It doesn't matter how much you admire Casper the Friendly Geek, it's neither your right nor your job to contradict your boss's decisions. If your customers don't like the service, they'll find alternatives or drop his service, and then he'll either deal with the revenue loss or improve.

Make the business case for it. Feel free to refuse to do anything actually unethical or illegal that he asks you to do. This is neither, so suck it up. Or, alternately; you're suggesting that this is a really small market. I assume that means there's not that much tech know-how in the area. That gives you another option; if you really care that much about not throttling, quit. It'll take him a while to replace you, and that's months and months more that your users can illegally download Battlestar Galactica to their hearts' content.

Oh, man! I need to go watch the latest BSG I downloaded!

Re:You're stuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people act like traffic shaping is the tool of Satan. Y'all need to get over yourselves. I use traffic shaping in my own house. [gasp!]

Traffic shaping doesn't mean that you're screwing anyone. It means that, when traffic is high, some types of traffic get priority over others. Generally, the highly interactive and isochronous traffic like gaming, VOIP, dns, http, VPN, etc. needs to be processed quickly. Less interactive traffic like ftp, large-frame http, P2P, and other forms of bulk data transfer will still do their jobs if they get bumped a bit. I use it to make sure online gaming, DNS, and acks get ultimate priority on my network. ftp, p2p, and large-packet http get low priority. Undefined classes of traffic fall between the two in priority. Works great.

Obviously, an ISP is going to need to put a bit more effort into classifying traffic but it's still not evil. When the load is light, properly designed traffic shaping won't impact anyone. As traffic goes up, the lower priority traffic will see a drop in speed but it still works.

As long as he doesn't do stupid shit like cut off P2P entirely or impose blanket speed caps that have no relation to network traffic conditions, few people will notice. If they do, he can point them at the stats page that shows the overal bandwidth usage and explain that they're using minimal traffic shaping to ensure a quality experience for everyone (as referenced in the TOS, I'm sure).

OTOH, if he starts regularly hitting the BOTTOM limit on traffic types, there isn't much to do but add bandwidth. But, at 70:1, I don't think the submitter's company is insanely oversold for broadband in a one-horse service area. I think they'll be able to provide a reasonable level of service with a good traffic shaping plan. And, if not, someone else will start a competing ISP and he can dump all of his problem users on them. :)

The choice is simple

[Bandman]

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.

Re:The choice is simple

[MeanMF]

Exactly... If there's a business case for buying more bandwidth, then write it up and show it to the boss. Are people dropping the service because they're fed up with slow speeds? Are there people who would be willing to pay more for higher bandwidth? Do the customers even notice or care that speeds are slow at times? Is 90% of the bandwidth being used up by 1% of the customers? If you don't know the answers to these questions, whining to the boss isn't going to get you anywhere.

Add a free period

[grahamsz]

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.

Re:Add a free period

[Rich0]

True, but the beauty of it is that nobody is going to call to complain if their download takes three hours instead of two. You can still give people busting speeds for interactive use during those hours to placate the few folks checking their email at 2AM.

When cell phone companies institute these kinds of policies it doesn't bother them if there is a spike in usage at 9PM - the fact is that the spike is nowhere near what they see mid-day.

Give the customers incentives and get them to work WITH you and not against you.

Striking a balance.....

[Computershack]

You honestly know in your heart that most of the P2P traffic is illegal so throttle it BUT only implement the throttling between the hours of say, 8am to 10pm or midnight. Send out an email to all customers stating that due to the abuse of a minority of users, P2P throttling will take place between the hours of 8am to 12 Midnight to ensure a high level of service to other users.

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.

Re:Striking a balance.....

[z0idberg]

due to the abuse of a minority of users,

If they signed for and are paying for unlimited internet access then where exactly does the abuse part come into it?

Re:Striking a balance.....

[meerling]

As they don't know what the P2P traffic is, you can't say it's illegal. Statistically, it probably is violating a copyright, but that isn't sufficient justification for singling out the P2P traffic alone. That would be like sending everyone in your city with a drivers license a traffic ticket, because you just know that virtually all of them will speed, roll through a stop sign, or commit some other traffic violation this year.
Besides, he didn't even mention what kind of traffic was going on during peak hours, just that the company is (my interpretation) screwing customers by oversubscribing them 70:1 (his statement).
It's possible that their biggest traffic spike is youtubers. Until someone does an analysis, you just won't know.

Re:Striking a balance.....

[iCEBaLM]

It's not the ISPs job to say what is illegal and what is legal. If I buy service from them, and they say that the service is unlimited, then I should get unlimited service, period, for whatever purpose I see fit to use it for. That is not abuse.

Re:Striking a balance.....

[z0idberg]

Bullshit.

So what about someone that uses a media centre PC as their television input and watches Hulu and mlb.tv etc. rather than via cable or satellite or whatever during peak periods causing their ISP to hit its bandwidth limits? Is that abuse as well? Is that guy soaking up bandwidth or is he using what he is paying for?

High Traffic Users Shift Activity to Diff Time

[Ron Bennett]

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

Or... Do nothing.

[SpazmodeusG]

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.

Screw morality. Get pragmatic: prioritize traffic.

[hessian]

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.

Don't shoot yourself.

[lancejjj]

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.

shape and/or prioritize that traffic

[itzdandy]

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.

Morality?? HA!

[iminplaya]

There is no morality for throttling. It's done for either technical or business reasons.

Re:Morality?? HA!

[Adrian Lopez]

Are you saying that an act is not immoral so long as it's done for "technical or business reasons"?

Say I'm the CEO of a nationwide cable TV provider that's afraid of competition from streaming media. I decide, for business reasons, to throttle all streaming media connections to the point that they are useless, unless the content providers pay me $$$ not to throttle them. You'd call it a "business decision", while I'd call it an immoral act. Whether or not I am right, there's nothing about it being a business decision that precludes it from also being immoral.

Tell your boss you quit ...

[Skal Tura]

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.

Re:Tell your boss you quit ...

[intx13]

Ick.. who mods this stuff up? Since when is "quit unless you get your way" a good policy? Maybe the parent is filthy rich, hasn't read the news in 6 months, or is a child, but right now is not exactly the best economic climate in which to be clearing out your desk. There are requests a boss could make that might be so morally appalling that you feel the need to quit on the spot... but imposing throttling on some customers? Probably not one of those requests.

Second, what's so evil or innately wrong about throttling? So long as you don't violate your contract - and ethically, in my mind, don't violate the spirit of your contract either (i.e. tiny print doesn't make it ok) - then what's the problem? The parent is acting like the act of throttling is a "sin"; it's just a technology.

Remember, you've got a job now

[davmoo]

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.

BS.

[msauve]

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.

The Answer:

[thatskinnyguy]

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.

Re:Morality?

[schon]

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.

Heres a though.

[ghinckley68]

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.

 

It is not ethical to throttle internet. Period.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

this is a *moral* problem?

[dAzED1]

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.

Is oversubscription really "evil"?

[Illusion]

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.)

Re:Do it by usage, not by protocol.

[Cylix]

The lesson of the day is not to base critical business applications on consumer bandwidth.

This is why nearly every ISP I have dealt with or worked with offered a free for all business package. Sure, they cost a bit more, but it's usually worth it.

Re:400 / 70 = what?

[KingMotley]

I would consider myself a fairly large user of my internet. I have a 30MB/sec connection, and last month I used approximately 50GB. Calculating that out, I am using my connection 1/197th of the time. A 1:70 ratio sounds pretty decent unless you have an abnormally large number of bandwidth hogs running bittorrent 24/7.

Re:I wouldn't be happy

[daveime]

Ah but you NEVER buy "6mbps" ... you always buy "up to 6mbps" or "maximum 6mbps", and then try to conveniently ignore the bits you don't like in the deal.

Please, cite me just one ISP who offers a "guaranteed 6mbps available 24/7", and I'll gladly admit I am wrong (right after I sign up with them).

Stop fretting and start analysing...

[DarkRecluse]

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.

They are already throttled

[gnasher719]

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.

Shape, not throlle or cap

[AigariusDebian]

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.

Prioritizing at the wrong bottleneck

[billstewart]

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.

Nah man...

[phatslaab]

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.

Re:The MORAL thing to do.

[geekboy642]

Without the email/craigslist/banking net users subsidizing our massive bandwidth usage, our costs would go up immensely. You think guaranteed-rate 6mb lines are cheap? I'd MUCH rather pay a pittance for my bandwidth, and get in line behind the non-geeks.

As an example: I recently installed a proxying squid/pfsense-based firewall for my parent's home. They have 5 people living there, and monthly traffic of about 8GB. My traffic for my desktop system alone for the last 2 weeks is 26GB. I'm extremely happy to have them and those like them subsidizing my costs so I get cheaper bandwidth.