Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
Yeah, try buying bandwidth in Australia! The have a lot more water to cover ( and so potentially more cost and more profit to be made by monopolies) than well connected areas such as the US. Also there may be more tax costs, staff costs, equipment costs with import duty etc which obviously means buying more equipment to support more throughput costs more money. -- Leigh Hex Star wrote:
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 03:50:11PM +0100, Leigh Porter wrote:
Also there may be more tax costs, staff costs, equipment costs with import duty etc which obviously means buying more equipment to support more throughput costs more money.
The biggest issues are the transmission costs to get to the USA. There are basically two cable systems, Southern Cross and AJC (we'll ignore SEA-ME-WE-3 because you can only buy STM-1's on it, and who wants to mess around with trivialities like that?) Ask an economist what happens to prices in duopoly environments. The cost of crossing the Pacific is north of US$200 per megabit per month in .au, which I reckon is about ten times what it costs you Europeans to get across the Atlantic (or what it costs the Japanese to cross the very same Pacific) There are a few cable projects underway at the moment which may break the duopoly, e.g., http://www.pipenetworks.com/docs/media/ASX_07_08_09%20Runway%20Update%204%20... I suspect we're going to have an interesting few years. - mark -- Mark Newton Email: newton@internode.com.au (W) Network Engineer Email: newton@atdot.dotat.org (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 "Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton" Mobile: +61-416-202-223
Caribbean has the same problem, though... .smaller countries, less ability to negotiate bandwidth usage/cost... bananas for bandwidth program. Leigh Porter wrote:
Yeah, try buying bandwidth in Australia! The have a lot more water to cover ( and so potentially more cost and more profit to be made by monopolies) than well connected areas such as the US.
Also there may be more tax costs, staff costs, equipment costs with import duty etc which obviously means buying more equipment to support more throughput costs more money.
-- Leigh
Hex Star wrote:
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
-- Taran Rampersad Presently in: Paramaribo, Suriname cnd@knowprose.com http://www.knowprose.com http://www.your2ndplace.com Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/knowprose/ "Criticize by creating." — Michelangelo "The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine." - Nikola Tesla
On Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:50:11 +0100 Leigh Porter <leigh.porter@ukbroadband.com> wrote:
Yeah, try buying bandwidth in Australia! The have a lot more water to cover ( and so potentially more cost and more profit to be made by monopolies) than well connected areas such as the US.
I don't necessarily think it is only that. Customers on ADSL2+ usually get the maximum ADSL2+ speed their line will support, so customers can have speeds of up to 24Mbps downstream. Download and/or upload quotas have an effect of smoothing out the backhaul impact those high bandwidth customers could make. As they could use up all their quota in such a short time period at those speeds, and once they exceed their quota they'd get their speed shaped down to something like 64Kbps, it typically forces the customer to make their bandwidth usage patterns more bursty rather than a constant. That effect, averaged across a "backhaul region" helps avoid having to provision backhaul bandwidth for a much higher constant load. Regards, Mark. -- "Sheep are slow and tasty, and therefore must remain constantly alert." - Bruce Schneier, "Beyond Fear"
Hex Star wrote:
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
There are more than a few US ISPs that have bandwidth quotas, mostly in the last-mile fixed-wireless space. I imagine the cost of backhauling traffic a few thousand miles in underseas cables would add to the cost of running an ISP in, say, Australia, especially since many sites the end-users will want to see are still hosted in the US. David Smith MVN.net
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
The combination of an English language society, its distance from content of interest to those speaking said language and countries sheer lack of population density outside of a few towns (sorry cities ;-). -- James
On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Hex Star wrote:
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
Depending upon the country you're in, that is a possibility. Some countries have either state-run or monopolistic telcos, so there is little or no competition to force prices down over time. Even in the US, there is a huge variability in the price of telco services from one part of the country to another. jms
On Oct 4, 2007, at 1:29 PM, Justin M. Streiner wrote:
On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Hex Star wrote:
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
Depending upon the country you're in, that is a possibility. Some countries have either state-run or monopolistic telcos, so there is little or no competition to force prices down over time.
Even in the US, there is a huge variability in the price of telco services from one part of the country to another.
jms
Hint: whenever/wherever service providers are able to secure the majority of their essential inputs on a predictable fixed cost basis (e.g., circuits rather than variable IP transit), they tend to extend the same pricing model to their customers. However, in some cases there is a major lag separating the timing of the change in the provider-level cost model and the change in customer-facing pricing. Absent competition, the lag may be infinite. In other cases, there may be more variable costs associated with service delivery than is immediately obvious. Southern Cross was completed in late 2000, and not long after (couple of years) incumbent operators in AUNZ had done a pretty good job of leveraging the new infrastructure to effect just the sort of variable- to-fixed cost conversion described above. Marginal improvements in customer pricing are just starting to happen in the last year or so... TV
On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Hex Star wrote:
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
Depending upon the country you're in, that is a possibility. Some countries have either state-run or monopolistic telcos, so there is little or no competition to force prices down over time.
Even in the US, there is a huge variability in the price of telco services from one part of the country to another.
Taking a slightly different approach to the question, it's obvious that overcommit continues to be a problem for ISP's, both in the States and abroad. It'd be interesting to know what the average utilization of an unlimited US broadband customer was, compared to the average utilization of an unlimited AU broadband customer. It would be interesting, then, to look at where the quotas lie on the curve in both the US and AU. Regardless, I believe that there is a certain amount of shortsightedness on the part of service providers who are looking at bandwidth management as the cure to their bandwidth ills. It seems clear that the Internet will remain central to our communications needs for many years, and that delivery of content such as video will continue to increase. End users do not care to know that they have a "quota" or that their quota can be filled by a relatively modest amount of content. Remember that a 1Mbps connection can download ~330GB/mo, so the aforementioned 12GB is nearly *line noise* on a multimegabit DSL or cable line. Continued reliance on broadband users using tiny percentages of their broadband connection certainly makes the ISP business model easier, but in the long term, isn't going to work out well for the Internet's continuing evolution. And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On 4-Oct-2007, at 1416, Joe Greco wrote:
It'd be interesting to know what the average utilization of an unlimited US broadband customer was, compared to the average utilization of an unlimited AU broadband customer. It would be interesting, then, to look at where the quotas lie on the curve in both the US and AU.
I think the implication here is that there's a smoothing effect that comes with large customer bases. For example, I remember back to when DSL was first rolled out in New Zealand. It was priced well beyond the means of any normal residential user, and as a result DSL customers tended to be just the people who would consume a lot of external bandwidth. At around the same time, my wife's mother in Ontario, Canada got hooked up with a cablemodem on the grounds that unlimited cable internet service cost less than a second phone line (she was fed up with missing phone calls when she was checking her mail). She used/uses her computer mainly for e-mail, although she occasionally uses a browser. (These days I'm sure legions of miscreants are using her computer too, but back then we were pre- botnet). If you have mainly customers like my mother-in-law, with just a few heavy users, the cost per user is nice and predictable, and you don't need to worry too much about usage caps. If you have mainly heavy users, the cost per user has the potential to be enormous. It seems like the pertinent question here is: what is stopping DSL (or cable) providers in Australia and New Zealand from selling N x meg DSL service at low enough prices to avoid the need for a data cap? Is it the cost of crossing an ocean which makes the risk of unlimited service too great to implement, or something else? Joe
On 4-Oct-2007, at 1416, Joe Greco wrote:
It'd be interesting to know what the average utilization of an unlimited US broadband customer was, compared to the average utilization of an unlimited AU broadband customer. It would be interesting, then, to look at where the quotas lie on the curve in both the US and AU.
I think the implication here is that there's a smoothing effect that comes with large customer bases.
Probably not even "large" customer bases.
For example, I remember back to when DSL was first rolled out in New Zealand. It was priced well beyond the means of any normal residential user, and as a result DSL customers tended to be just the people who would consume a lot of external bandwidth.
At around the same time, my wife's mother in Ontario, Canada got hooked up with a cablemodem on the grounds that unlimited cable internet service cost less than a second phone line (she was fed up with missing phone calls when she was checking her mail).
She used/uses her computer mainly for e-mail, although she occasionally uses a browser. (These days I'm sure legions of miscreants are using her computer too, but back then we were pre- botnet).
If you have mainly customers like my mother-in-law, with just a few heavy users, the cost per user is nice and predictable, and you don't need to worry too much about usage caps.
If you have mainly heavy users, the cost per user has the potential to be enormous.
It seems like the pertinent question here is: what is stopping DSL (or cable) providers in Australia and New Zealand from selling N x meg DSL service at low enough prices to avoid the need for a data cap? Is it the cost of crossing an ocean which makes the risk of unlimited service too great to implement, or something else?
Quite frankly, this touches on one aspect, but I think it misses entirely others. Right now, we have a situation where some ISP's are essentially cherry picking desirable customers. This can be done by many methods, ranging from providing slow "basic DSL" services, or placing quotas on service, or TOS restrictions, all the way to terminating the service of high- volume customers. A customer who gives you $40/mo for a 5Mbps connection and uses a few gig a month is certainly desirable. By either telling the high volume customers that they're going to be capped, or actually terminating their services, you're discouraging those who are unprofitable. It makes sense, from the ISP's limited view. However, I then think about the big picture. Ten years ago, hard drives were maybe 10GB, CPU's were maybe 100MHz, a performance "workstation" PC had maybe 64MB RAM, and a Road Runner cable connection was, I believe, about 2 megabits. Today, hard drives are up to 1000GB (x100), CPU's are quadcore at 2.6GHz (approximately x120 performance), a generous PC will have 8GB RAM (x128), and ... that Road Runner, at least here in Milwaukee, is a blazing 5Mbps... or _2.5x_ what it was. Now, ISP economics pretty much require that some amount of overcommit will happen. However, if you have a 12GB quota, that works out to around 36 kilobits/sec average. Assuming the ISP is selling 10Mbps connections (and bearing in mind that ADSL2 can certainly go more than that), what that's saying is that the average user can use 1/278th of their connection. I would imagine that the overcommit rate is much higher than that. Note: I'm assuming the quota is monthly, as it seems to be for most AU ISP's I've looked at, for example: http://www.ozemail.com.au/products/broadband/plans.html Anyways, my concern is that while technology seems to have improved quite substantially in terms of what computers are capable of, our communications capacity is being stifled by ISP's that are stuck back in speeds (and policies) appropriate for the year 2000. Continued growth and evolution of cellular networks, for example, have taken cell phones from a premium niche service with large bag phones and extremely slow data services, up to new spiffy high technology where you can download YouTube on an iPhone and watch videos on a pocket-sized device. What are we missing out on because ISP's are more interested in keeping bandwidth use low? What fantastic new technologies haven't been developed because they were deemed impractical given the state of the Internet? Time to point out that, at least in the US, we allowed this to be done to ourselves... http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Thu, Oct 04, 2007, Joe Abley wrote:
It seems like the pertinent question here is: what is stopping DSL (or cable) providers in Australia and New Zealand from selling N x meg DSL service at low enough prices to avoid the need for a data cap? Is it the cost of crossing an ocean which makes the risk of unlimited service too great to implement, or something else?
The popular content is still international and the population density sucks in a lot of places. I note that no ISP runs "free local bandwidth" anymore at least in Western Australia because it started impacting on the ability to send data back to the client through the DSL aggregation network. Me, I think the network design needs to change to not be so PPPoE-to-the-nearest-capital-city, but ISPs keep telling me "its a great idea - but our current structure is fine, why try to change it?". I understand the economic reasons (upgrading the network to route IP all the way out to the exchanges and let customers talk to other customers and across IX fabrics without potentially crossing the same god damned wholesaler L2TP-tunnelled network == expensive) but its gotta change someday. Me, I wonder why the heck cheap services -in the CBDs- don't seem to be popular.. Adrian
And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well.
We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and forth over the same congested circuits. And P2P is the main way to reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet. --Michael Dillon
On Fri, Oct 05, 2007, michael.dillon@bt.com wrote:
And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well.
We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and forth over the same congested circuits. And P2P is the main way to reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet.
Hm, Australia is pretty much that exact architecture. Adrian
On 10/5/07 5:28 AM, "michael.dillon@bt.com" <michael.dillon@bt.com> wrote:
And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well.
We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and forth over the same congested circuits. And P2P is the main way to reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet.
Michael - I don't think this is the case for most NA cable operators. P2P between subscribers in the same general area simply hairpins back over the HFC from the aggregation hub (location of the CMTS), no unnecessary backhaul to another distant PoP location. Now, the rest of the traffic will be aggregated further up on its way towards upstream peering...but that is a different traffic flow. -ron This E-mail and any of its attachments may contain Time Warner Cable proprietary information, which is privileged, confidential, or subject to copyright belonging to Time Warner Cable. This E-mail is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient of this E-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying, or action taken in relation to the contents of and attachments to this E-mail is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this E-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and permanently delete the original and any copy of this E-mail and any printout.
And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well.
We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and forth over the same congested circuits.
This would seem to primarily be an issue /due/ to congestion of those circuits. The current solution, as you suggest, is not ideal, but it isn't necessarily clear that a "solution" to this will be better. Let's look at an infrastructure that would be representative of what often happens here in Milwaukee. AT&T provides copper DSL wholesale services to an ISP. This means that a packet goes from the residence to the local CO, where AT&T aggregates over its network to a ATM circuit that winds up at an ISP POP. Then, to get to a DSL customer with actual AT&T service, the packets go down to Chicago, over transit to AT&T, and then back up to Milwaukee... Getting the ISP to have equipment colocated at the point where DSL lines are concentrated would certainly help for the case where packets where transiting from one neighborhood customer of an ISP to another neighborhood customer of an ISP, but in the common case, it isn't clear to me that the payoff would be significant. Getting all the ISP's to peer with each other at the DSL concentration point would "solve" the problem, but again, the question is how significant that payoff would be. It would seem like a larger payoff to simply make sure sufficient capacity existed to move packets as required, since this not only solves the "local packet" problem you suggest, but the more general overall problem that ISP's face.
And P2P is the main way to ^currently reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet.
... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
michael.dillon@bt.com wrote:
And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well.
We've dropped the ball in any place where the broadband architecture is to backhaul IP packets from the site where DSL or cable lines are concentrated, into an ISP's PoP. This means that P2P packets between users at the same concentration site, are forced to trombone back and forth over the same congested circuits. And P2P is the main way to reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet.
We could have used IP Multicast, but nobody on the consumer side wanted to carry state instead of packets.
--Michael Dillon
On Sat, 6 Oct 2007, Joel Jaeggli wrote:
michael.dillon@bt.com wrote:
And P2P is the main way to reduce the overall load that video places on the Internet.
We could have used IP Multicast, but nobody on the consumer side wanted to carry state instead of packets.
Multicast works when watching broadcast TV or recordings that were scheduled in advance, but people on the net want video on demand. Tony. -- f.a.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ IRISH SEA: SOUTHERLY, BACKING NORTHEASTERLY FOR A TIME, 3 OR 4. SLIGHT OR MODERATE. SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD, OCCASIONALLY POOR.
On 10/4/07, Hex Star <hexstar@gmail.com> wrote:
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
One early US cable modem company started propagating the "Don't Let Customers Run Anything Resembling a Server" meme to many other ISPs, primarily cable but also DSL. One early Australian cable company started propagating the "Don't Let Customers Download More than X MB/month" meme, and while it hasn't been picked up as widely, there are a number of ISPs that have adopted it. At one time Australia did have a relatively small amount of Internet bandwidth and a large non-data-clueful dominant carrier, which had only gradually been bullied into accepting that there were data customers who wanted an E1 line because they wanted the whole 2Mbps for one medium-sized data channel as opposed to 30 channels of boringly slow 64kbps (perceived by the carrier to be blazingly fast...) So they charged their users a lot to download data from outside; I forget if they were the ones who had a cheaper rate for data downloaded from inside Australia or not. But outside the Land of Oz, it used to be that European PTTs also charged excessive amounts of money for connections around their countries or across borders. That's changed radically with liberalization. And of course Japan and Korea charge minimal amounts for huge home broadband bandwidth - Korea has about triple the population of Australia, in much smaller land area, and while it's not quite as far from Silicon Valley as Australia is, and of course it's much closer to Tokyo, it's still got to cost a bit to run the cables there. -- ---- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.
Hex Star wrote:
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
In the UK there is a very good reason - BT, see this write up: http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/adsl_cost.htm J -- COO Entanet International T: 0870 770 9580 W: http://www.enta.net/ L: http://tinyurl.com/3bxqez
participants (18)
-
Adrian Chadd -
Bill Stewart -
David E. Smith -
Hex Star -
James Blessing -
James Spenceley -
Joe Abley -
Joe Greco -
Joel Jaeggli -
Justin M. Streiner -
Leigh Porter -
Mark Newton -
Mark Smith -
michael.dillon＠bt.com -
Ron da Silva -
Taran Rampersad -
Tom Vest -
Tony Finch