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

[commodore64_love]

>>>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.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[Cimexus]

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.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[morgan_greywolf]

I agree, but with the caveat that you have to do what your boss tells you to do. By all means, present this idea to the boss, but be absolutely sure that you are complying with the requirements of the job you are assigned: after all, in this economy, you do not want to give your boss a reason to fire you.

You will definitely have to consult your boss about this, and you would be remiss in not telling your boss to send the TOS to your company's attorney and have him advise on the legalities regarding whatever plan you and your boss ends up deciding on. You don't want your company to get sued and you don't want anyone to say it's your fault because that would be another reason you might get fired.

In the end, look over the TOS, and if your boss asked you to shape it and shaping doesn't meet with the TOS, by all means CYA and ask your boss to send his request to you in writing. Preferrably signed. Digitally signed e-mail might be okay, too. Just make sure you have some proof of what you were ordered to do, because you want to be sure if there is any fallout from the shaping that you can prove you were just doing as ordered.

It bears repeating so I'll say it again: always CYA.

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

[PopeRatzo]

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.

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.

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

[PopeRatzo]

be absolutely sure that you are complying with the requirements of the job you are assigned: after all, in this economy, you do not want to give your boss a reason to fire you.

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.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[mysidia]

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.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[BikeHelmet]

$1 per GB is a little steep, isn't it?

These guys only charge $0.10/GB.

Your suggestion seems like the best way to go. Up here, Telus(big ISP) has caps at 10GB, 60GB, 100GB per month based on how much you're paying.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[astarf]

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.

Minor point, but it was an FCC hearing against Comcast not a court case. Part of the problem was that Comcast ran around terminating connections behind your back -- and without notifying customers via TOS or any other method.

When it comes to throttling, seanadams had it exactly right: you have to provide the auto-throttle option so that people don't get slammed with a huge bill at the end of the month. Very few people want to sit around adding up their monthly bandwidth usage, so it's a good idea to start warning users as they approach the limit. Unless, of course, slamming people with a huge overage bill is part of your revenue-maximizing business model.

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

[MoFoQ]

I thought the problem was also because of they way they did the dropping the connection (via a "reset"); they "masqueraded" as someone else which is a no-no under the law.

Here's a simple diagram:

A is downloading from B.
C (Comcast/ISP) "throttles" by telling A that it's B and makes the changes that way.
Essentially, a "man-in-the-middle" situation.

If Comcast was some poor sap, it would be in the federal pokey...hopefully without soap on a rope.

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

[NoobixCube]

One particular Australian ISP I was looking at, I forget who. It may have been Dodo or something, it always seems right to blame Dodo for these things, sold ridiculously low download caps (in the less than a gigabyte range) coupled with reasonable speeds (so as to very quickly eat the allotted cap up), and charged excess usage at 10c per megabyte. And they had the audacity to throttle usage after the cap was exceeded.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you think your ISP might not be using lube when it fucks you, try spending some time in Australia.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[bsDaemon]

In a country full of thieves, expect to get robbed ;-)

Re:bill, don't throttle

[Tuoqui]

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.

Re:bill, don't throttle

[lazybeam]

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.

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

[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

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

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.

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.

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.....

[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?

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.

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.

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.

Re:BS.

[falconwolf]

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.

No, the solution is for broadband providers to do what they've already gotten billions of taxpayer dollars to do but didn't, build out broadband. These companies are trying to double dip, first take taxpayer money then bill customers more.

Falcon

Legal loophole..

[s0litaire]

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).

very few cable companies contract to provide that

[Trepidity]

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".

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.

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.

Do it by usage, not by protocol.

[subreality]

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.

Re:Do it by usage, not by protocol.

[subreality]

Of course... You give consumers best effort bandwidth, and then if business customers want guaranteed bandwidth, they can pay extra for it.

I also don't find it unethical, as long as it's clearly advertised as "unlimited usage 6M burst / 128k committed + best effort".

Re:Do it by usage, not by protocol.

[subreality]

HTB is Hierarchical Token Bucket, a CBQ (Class Based Queueing) discipline for Linux. It lets you create a hierarchy of queues for a network link. The "Token Bucket" part means each leaf and node in the tree has a "bucket" that constantly, slowly fills with tokens. Sending a byte removes a token. So, on average, you're only guaranteed the fill rate, but if you haven't used it for a bit, you can send a burst until your bucket is empty. Extra tokens can be borrowed between nodes if they're not used by the others, up to the max rate. Thus you get minimum guarantees, max limits, and bursts, such as being able to quickly fetch a web page even if the link is full from others' usage, if you haven't used up your tokens.

For instance, you could have Customer A, Customer B, and Customer C at the top level, and then they each have a second level of HTTP, BitTorrent, and SSH. Customer A and B get a rate of 128k, and C gets 512k since he pays extra as a business customer. They all have a max rate of 6M, since that's the speed of their DSL lines, and a burst size of 1MB. Then, they have SSH (with a small rate and a small burst), HTTP (with a high rate and a large burst), and BitTorrent (with a 1k rate, and a small burst).

As long as Customer C isn't using any bandwidth, A and B can use it all. As soon as C wants to use some, he first gets his guaranteed 512k - no matter what - and then they all split any leftovers in proportion to their committed rates (So A gets a share, B gets a share, C gets four shares). If C only wants 512k, A and B each get to split all the leftovers evenly.

If A is using BT like mad, but then opens an HTTP connection, it'll be allowed most of his net connection (it has a high rate, but still lower than the full line speed). BT will automatically (and instantly) be throttled until HTTP is done. When he types on the SSH connection, it'll use little bits of its burst speed to refresh the window instantly, but its small rate won't let it consume the whole net if he accidentally cats /dev/urandom.

Sounds great, right? There are a few gotchas: You can only queue packets like this when *sending*. What're you going to do, receive a packet from the slow link and then delay it before sending it over the fast one that's not saturated? (Well, yes, you can, and it makes a limited amount of sense to fine tune TCP's flow control, in addition to selectively dropping packets to make it back off, and other tricks.) It's good, but it doesn't necessarily make optimal tradeoffs between latency and bandwidth - HFSC is an attempt to address this. Also, this is a moderately heavyweight way to do things. It has to spend some CPU classifying packets, and memory to track the buckets' state, so other queueing disciplines and schedulers exist that work on other methods (such as statistical, instead of discrete tracking), that are more appropriate for very large ISPs. Also, as a large ISP, you're going to be using Cisco, not Linux, for routing. :) But Cisco has sophisticated QOS as well.

Despite how complex this sounds, even using the simplest case on your home router will make a huge improvement in the weak side of your DSL line, the uplink. Several of the open source WIFI router firmwares support it out of the box for this reason. I have survived having my web site on my DSL linked to the front page of a popular site known to bring servers to their knees, without any lag in SSH or games, or interruption of mail or other services. We only noticed because our bulk transfers slowed to a crawl, as intended.

Learn more:

HTB: http://luxik.cdi.cz/~devik/qos/htb/ (the user guide has a good overview and pretty graphs)

HFSC: http://linux-ip.net/articles/hfsc.en/ (More pretty graphs and good explanation)

Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control list: http://lartc.org/ (The howto is out of date, but very enlightening)

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: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.

Local caching proxies, maybe?

[Lesrahpem]

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.