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Eye4got
join:2004-06-02
Lancaster, PA
| Complying with the unknown
The dilemma:
A guy gets a cable modem. He is a relatively new user, doesn't remember the 110 baud days and wouldn't associate his three or four daily hours of moderate to heavy usage with abuse. He digs into the Grateful Dead archive  and starts making some custom mix discs of his own. While he downloads, he likes to watch a little rtsp://videosrv.netscalibur.it/encoder/sole24tv.rm so he can keep up on what's happening back in the homeland.
At 300 kilobytes (or better) a second (no sweat for cable modems in my area) he can get one gigabyte per hour with no problem. In reality, he averages 380 kilobytes a second, so in his two and a half hour download, he has 3 gigabytes of concert files.
He's had his computer on for four hours today, two and a half hours of that were spent downloading, and he did his e-mail while that was happening. He used the Yahoo chat thing to chat with his cable modem equipped neighbors while he was downloading, including a neighbor who likes his online gaming. His neighbor says the ping times to his game server are great on the cable modem right now, he's liquefying some guy in Walla Walla on his online game. Then, he watched some streaming TV after doing some web browsing when his downloads were nearly finished. He transferred a little over 4 gigabytes in total today. He has yet to discover all the archives of the other jam bands, but he'll be busy with the Grateful Dead archives for some time yet. That's OK though, he just had an incident with a stray banana, a prostitute and a llama that will keep him from going to work for the next three months or so, he'll have plenty of time to browse the jam band archives.
He's not aware that his usage is causing a problem, because his neighbors who have the same ISP are telling him that their internet is working well and is fast. All is normal and well. He has no reason to believe that he's abusing his service. He's the kind of guy who doesn't want to make things worse for other people. Last summer, he had a gathering of like minded people who, like him, had a power tool erotica fetish. Unusual, maybe. Legal, for sure. He was worried about dimming the lights of his neighbors, so before the "big day", he powered up everything possible and checked with his neighbors for degradation of service, none was apparent. He felt confident that he would cause no harm when his wacky friends came over.
He transferred 80 gigabytes this month, people have been cut off for less. He'll likely do more next month, even in the same 3 or 4 hours of usage per day. We don't know if he will get a letter or not.
Silly scenario aside, how does this perfectly legal user refrain from abusing his service? Is he an abuser, or not? Without a good technical understanding of just how much data is being transferred and what constitutes network degradation, it becomes difficult to understand the concept. How do you comply with the undefined?
He could limit his speed on his downloads so that his ping time to anywhere wouldn't increase, and still limit him to 4 gigabytes per day, but he could still be abusive, even if no one on his node saw a 1 millisecond increase of latency because of his usage at any time, to anywhere.
All of this brings me to my questions.
Is this person's usage "reasonable and prudent"? Why or why not?
Is it unreasonable for the user of a service to expect definition for compliance? What is wrong with this
"Users whose connections have transferred over a combined (incoming and outgoing) *your threshold goes here* gigabytes in a 30 day period *may* (not will) be considered for disconnection of service per definition of abuse of service."
or any variation of that? That keeps it loosely defined enough to encompass heavy users and abusers du jour.
People seem to be getting nailed for heavy usage, not for causing additional latency.
People who actually want to comply will then have the means to do so, and people who are in the top percent can be told "I told you so, here it is".
Doesn't DOCSIS provide for subscriber traffic management?
Systematic reduction of the heaviest users will reduce costs for the ISP, but what will be done after the heavy users are all gone, and the broader average climbs? Every marketing blitz will bring in a certain amount of heavy users, and a certain amount of people who saw the commercials and actually want to watch legal streaming video and do the things in the commercials.
If P2P and the upstream are what's driving the costs up, what can be done technologically to increase the upstream channel?
Let's keep the discussion away from "illegal" uses of the network, there are plenty of entirely legal ways to transfer a lot of data on a connection. I've done 20 GB a week on my 768/128 DSL while not trying too hard. Legally. | |
gatorkram
Spelling and Grammer impared
Premium
join:2002-07-22
Winterville, NC
clubs: | Very well said. | |
shadowspank
@covad.net
| One of the main problems that cable users face is that the internet is hubed and not switched from the cable provider for the Internet its just another channel for them. That's why it mess;s with others Internet when they use it. If the cable providers did the work right and setup the networks with the right hardware it would not be a problem. | |
VirtualLarry
Premium
join:2003-08-01
| reply to Eye4got
Excellent post! Those are very good points.
Something interesting to consider, in contrast, is what dial-up ISPs did when their modem-pool was full, and therefore not accepting any more dial-in connections. (In other words, some of the customers were getting a busy signal.)
*Good* ISPs, would go out and expand their modem pools, purchasing more modems, and leasing more lines from the telco for their POP. Presumably, the ISP was not a fly-by-night operation, and was making a profit from the payments of existing subscribers, so they could afford to expand their POPs as needed. (Proper logistical as well as financial planning.)
Likewise, some had a system for disconnecting those users that tended to spend an excessive amount of time connected to the dial-in ISP's modem bank. Presumably, as long as no-one tried to dial-in and got a busy signal, then the people currently connected were not causing a degradation of service for other users. But once they were, then the ones that had been connected the longest, should be the first ones to be forcibly disconnected, if necessary, and even to have a time-out period enforced for those accounts, so that they couldn't automatically re-dial and connect in again.
Something similar should probably be done with "excessive" broadband users. Such that the ones doing the most transfers during a certain period, should have their bandwidth throttled during times of peak usage, such that their usage will not degrade the service for others. That is all perfectly technically feasable.
What is most disturbing about this whole thing though, and it smacks of greedy profiteering here, is that these broadband providers are considering kicking off users, not because they are explicitly causing network degradations for other users of the service, but because these users are reducing the profit margin that the company will see. That is just wrong, and if the provider's business model would collapse due to the user actually using the connection that was sold to them by that company, then the company should not have made the offer for the service in the first place.
Either the company is basically guilty of fraud, or they had a very ill-conceived business/service model to begin with.
Something has to be done here. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with degrading the service of heavy users, in order to make the network more manageable and usable for other customers. Many university networks do just that.
Anything else is just evil greed from the providers, period. If they go bankrupt because of it, I won't be sorry. | |
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