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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?"
>>>it doesn't sound at all like subby has the freedom to change the ToS or implement hard caps.
That depends. If the original contracts said "unlimited time" not unlimited gigabytes, then yes the ISP can move to a metered model. I'd implement relatively easy limits like "100 gigabytes maximum" with $1 for every gigabyte over the limit. This would catch the most egregious users, and any extra dollars can be used to add more lines to handle more people.
Oh and to justify it to the boss, I'd cite the recent court case which states ISPs may not discriminate against P2P traffic. i.e. It's effectively illegal to filter traffic, but not illegal to implement metered usage such that customers reduce usage voluntarily.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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?
Yep - that's how they do it here in Australia and despite all the flak we cop on Slashdot about our metered ISP accounts, the user-pays system actually avoids a lot of the problems you see with ISPs overseas.
- P2P throttling? Not here.
- Artificial speed shaping or restrictions. Not here, unless you surpass your monthly limit on a flat rate plan.
- Forbidding servers on residential connections? Not here.
- Deep packet inspection and other traffic manipulation? Not here.
- Bad contention ratios. Not here (on the good ISPs at least).
The 70:1 contention ratio in the summary is pretty shocking ... good ISPs here (iiNet, Internode etc) have 10:1 or less and buy more bandwidth proactively, before they actually need it. They can afford to do that, and keep their links running at 50-70% capacity, BECAUSE it's a user pays system. Additional bandwidth use means more revenue for the ISP and hence it's attractive to them to keep their pipes un-congested and fast.
The other advantage is that light users can pay pretty small amounts for a basic connection. My parents just use email and so I put them on a TINY 1GB per month plan. They never even use more than half of that, and the cost savings are significant (consider that they pay only 20 bucks a month, but larger plans of 50, 100, 200 GB per month cost 60-100 bucks).
So if you absolutely cannot upgrade your links, the "bill, don't throttle" approach is more attractive. It's less work than setting up packet shaping infrastructure and rules, won't affect the large majority of your customers, and will make sure that top 5% of leechers keep their habit under control a bit better (or pay for a higher account, which means more money for you!).
Oh and one last thing. Don't bill for excess usage - just shape their connection. Because if Joe Sixpack gets a virus and their connection downloads 100s of GB without their knowledge, they are not going to want a huge bill. The way most ISPs do it in Australia is after you reach your monthly limit (say, 80 GB at 24 Mbps), they'll shape your traffic to a slower speed (e.g. 128 kbps). That's still fast enough to browse the web and stuff, but will ease backhaul congestion due to P2P etc.
That depends on how "limited" the service area actually is. If the customers only choice is between the author's ISP and dial-up, maybe they don't have that many sysadmins to choose from either.
You will be suprised how often a good suggestion is taken, especially one that will keep customers relatively happy.
The choices those consumers have may not always be so limited. Depending on your relationship with management, you might get heard. You never know unless you try. Don't mention "morality" though, because management doesn't know what that means. If you put it in terms of customer retention, you might end up as employee-of-the-month.
Of course, all this depends on if your company is a locally owned independent or one of the big telecoms. If it's the latter and you really feel a moral quandary, your best bet is to get that resume polished up right away. There are a few businesses still run by decent people, and you might get lucky.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Listen to morgan. He's absolutely right.
If you do decide to bring this issue to your supervisors, try to put it in terms of customer retention or make up some stuff about how they can save money. Most management doesn't know any better.
But by all means do NOT mention morality. Management is trained to be suspicious of such things, and you'll be on the shit list. Don't mention anything about "providing good service" either. That's a sure sign of weakness to them and you'll be out of a job. It's got to be dollars and cents or at best they'll ignore you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That depends. If the original contracts said "unlimited time" not unlimited gigabytes, then yes the ISP can move to a metered model. I'd implement relatively easy limits like "100 gigabytes maximum" with $1 for every gigabyte over the limit.
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.
While it rewards all those folks who download a 10th that, but always max out the link from 4:30pm to 9:00pm, with P2P, and streaming download, at the same time all the other subscribers are trying to surf the web and get decent performance.
Usage-based billing doesn't make any sense -- ISPs often get burstability pay for a CIR, to the 95th percentile.
Consumers should too... That is, you should be able to burst your connection to download files, for certain amounts of time.
Each subscriber should individually agree to how much bandwidth they get to use on a continuous basis, and how much, and how long they will be allowed to burst, before either being billed or capped.
It shouldn't cost you, unless you stay bursted (I.E. max out your connection all the time during peak hours)
And to be consumer friendly, they should provide better terms for off-peak hour time, to actually reduce the number of even normal downloaders.
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"
I've never seen a single contract for residential internet that provided "unlimited service" at "xx Mbps", every single one I've ever seen is "up to xx Mbps", the contract isn't going to help here.
The solution for better or for worse is for the US to implement download caps like the rest of the world. It'll be unpopular and it'll have disadvantages, but laying cable still costs money and the current all you can eat payment schemes just don't work.
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.
How about if
1) a customer has > 20 connections to > 20 different hosts in the world
2) said customer has had a high upload AND download rate for the past 15 minutes.
Then: throttle "connection" #5 and above.
Notes:
By connection I just mean a host to host pair. Nothing to do with TCP connections.
20 connections to the same host won't count - it's still a single host to host pair. It's on a per host pair basis.
Well if he is looking at traffic shaping he should consider bumping priorities rather than heavy handed throttling. Just bump VOIP and HTTP(S) so they go first and wont get interfered with by bulk P2P transfers. This lets people 'at the keyboard' so to speak get priority over say big file transfers in the background.
If you throttle heavily and/or block P2P then keep in mind that P2P packets that arent getting through are potentially being resent repeatedly. This will likely INCREASE network congestion as things get sent multiple times and possibly get dropped at the router rather than being passed along.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
The "most popular" Australian ISP (Telstra Big Pond) charges 15c per MB over the limit, and their cheapest plan only includes 200MB of transfers (up plus down) before excess charges happen. On 256kbps ADSL it isn't too bad, but the same plan is available on 10Mbps cable so you could be up for thousands of dollars excess! There are plans that have 12 or 20GB transfers before 64kbps shaping instead of excess fees. (I put "most popular" in quotes as many of their customers don't like them and would leave if there were alternatives or if they knew about them)
Most ISPs use the "x GB then speed shaping" method. Most still have unmetered uploads.
One former ISP used "Flat rate" in that during busy times the highest downloaders got throttled down, which I thought was a great idea but it is no longer available. The highest we ever got was 80GB in a 30 day period and the net was slow but still usable in peak times. Off-peak times was still full speed.
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no sig for you. come back one year.
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.
I still don't quite get it. What good is a 10Mbit connection if i can only average 1Mbit? I have a 2Mbit and i average in a high month 1.8Mbit. I don't need more as i don't mind waiting for the larger stuff. But i would be rather unhappy with a 2Mbit link were i am only suppose to average 200kbit or something.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
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 still don't quite get it. What good is a 10Mbit connection if i can only average 1Mbit? I have a 2Mbit and i average in a high month 1.8Mbit. I don't need more as i don't mind waiting for the larger stuff. But i would be rather unhappy with a 2Mbit link were i am only suppose to average 200kbit or something.
It's really easy to understand. The ISP business has been engaged in systematic fraud since the beginning. They sell what they cannot provide. In the beginning, shady characters who felt they would never get caught did it. Then people who didn't do it couldn't stay in business, so they either went out of business or did the same thing. Fast forward a few years, and now it's normal for the industry, and you get professionals sounding very technical as they go about explaining how it all works and how to use more technically complex tricks to allow ISPs to continue the behavior as though there was never anything wrong with it.
But, at the end of the day, the ISPs are all engaged in garden variety fraud. Including the one that employs the original submitter of the story. They're not different from the guy who rents his cabin to 3 dozen different people for the summer, hoping that no more than one will show up at a time.
In the long run, the entire society is going to pay dearly for having allowed this to happen.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth