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Usage Counters (Cogeco)

BTW how does it know who I am if I don't need to login tothe website?

reply to rocca
Oh noos

Your current monthly usage to date is:

3.2 GB

Your estimated usage for this month is:

32.3 GB

only 32GB what will I do.

reply to rocca
Interesting. Question, though. How will disputes be settled in regard to say, my usage statistics compared to yours. This is the reason I switched to Start in the first place. Cogeco said I used 90GB more in a month than my logs indicated. All over the cap @ $1 per.
Their meter and my meter never saw eye to eye, however, it was fairly close usually and never a concern. Until that month.

reply to 79512968

reply to Phorkster
For a technical background, we're using Cisco Netflow on our edge interfaces. It uses traffic flows and aggregates them prior to sending them to our collector. There are no estimates or sampling involved, ie Netflow is tracking actual traffic passing through the interface by IP in bytes. It's pretty straight-forward and we are definitely erring in the favour of the customer, ie we are currently not including uploaded traffic and the only error Netflow can make is to under-report traffic if a particular flow export record doesn't make it from the routers to the collectors for whatever reason. Provided you have accurate monitoring (ie you are polling your routers snmp) I think you'll find our usage reports will be a fair margin less than the actual traffic used. We are also updating statistics regularly so any concerns can certainly be addressed early instead of a surprise at the end of the month.

Additionally, in an effort to help our customers manage their usage and avoid overages, we will be implementing an 'early warning system' shortly so if our systems think you may hit your limit it will email you give you a heads up. Our intention on the caps was never to use overages as a revenue source, rather it's there to help ensure fair use and prevent dedicated usage which would otherwise cost upwards of $1000/month for a single customer with the current tariff on the higher speeds. This is the reason we picked caps that were high enough that most users don't have to worry about it, but provides the protection against terrabyte+ downloaders who otherwise left unchecked could cause congestion and/or higher prices for everyone else.

On a personal note, I can assure you I have no interest in trying to charge someone an overage fee when they don't deserve it. We haven't had a single dispute with our usage reporting on ADSL which has been in place for years and we've built our reputation over the past 17 years on being open, honest and ethical -- no plans to change that by being evil now.

Hope that helps answer your question, thanks and have a good night.

Answers everything just fine. Sort of refreshing to see that kind of love for customers. I look forward to a long and happy relationship with you guys.

reply to rocca
rocca:

Now that you are using Cisco Netflow, is that enough to implement unlimited downloading during off-peak hours ? (for example: 2 a.m. to 8 a.m.) Obviously, if a lot of your users on the Cogeco network download a lot of data during off-peak hours, and as long as the total "network peak" remains during the prime-time periods (10 - 11 p.m. for example), it shouldn't cost Start any extra money.

For my own comfort, i need a cap of at least 400 GB, or 300 GB plus unlimited off-peak usage.

Having said what i just said, i'm still not convinced that adding unlimited off-peak usage would drive even higher the highest spike of on-peak usage (and thus having to pay a higher bill to Cogeco) -- but at the same time, i do recognize that it is very likely that rocca has gone much further in-depth into the research of the costing model than i have.

reply to silvercat
Close. My point was that in the costs calculated with "300GB" of usage is already an implied amount of off-peak time. Let's take a simple example of half peak and half non-peak, in this case we assume that the usage of 150GB during peak is what we base our costs on. If we offered an 'unlimited off-peak', then for the costs to remain the same the peak usage allowance would be 150GB, not 300GB, otherwise our costs would be doubled.

k... i do understand that.

reply to rocca
Hi, I think you should set the usage counter to only show stats in GB (with decimals if less than a gig)
At first glance, I thought one day was 25 gigs already, but it was only 25 megs!

Thanks for the suggestion - will have to give it some thought as the majority of users don't use a GB/day but maybe we can make it use all MB or all GB depending on your usage level.

reply to sssscary
It's been updated so if any of the daily usage figures are GB then all the units will be GB. Thanks.

reply to rocca
looks good, thanks!

reply to rocca

Yes we track ip changes pretty much real-time and your usage counters are tied to your account rather than to your ip. It's possible if you change your ip and immediately hit the web counter that it may take a minute for the interface to recognize you that but all the usage itself follows your modem.

reply to rocca
Great! just have the page bookmarked and with 2 clicks I can see my usage. Love how easy it is, also seems pretty accurate so far with my router stats.