Traffic Shaping Poll: Good or Bad?

[kmount]

Nod. I agree.

[AndyK]

I was a customer of F2S 2-3 years ago, had no problems during my 18 months with them.

After time away I ordered F2S ADSL a week or so back and it was enabled yesterday (on a previously telephone only line).

I am appalled at the level of shaping, downloading a torrent with my router plugged in to my MADASAFISH line i get over 300k consistently, unplug and plug into the new F2S line and i get 0-1k a sec, I left this on overnight and managed 4% of 100mb file in 10 hours.

I have contacted F2S to cancel my agreement under the distance selling law and will not be back.

[Justin]

Trouble is bittorrent is not really a reliable way of measuring speed as there are a few factors that can cause the slowdown which may not be down to the ISP.

[AndyK]

Agreed, but I can repeatedly change to the madasafish connection and speeds are back up within seconds, back to F2S and nothing, I am pretty sure the product is 'unsuitable for the purpose for which it was sold' (my brother is a litigation solicitor, he tells me the long words) so customers could likely challenge F2S én mass.

[stephen_ex-f2s]

"Unsuitable" was the longest word that you used then.

Perhaps one might say the product deportment is disproportionately low relative to the purported description and deducted currenty taken prior and hence forth from my exchequer depository.

[browolf]

Originally Posted by AndyK

Agreed, but I can repeatedly change to the madasafish connection and speeds are back up within seconds, back to F2S and nothing, I am pretty sure the product is 'unsuitable for the purpose for which it was sold' (my brother is a litigation solicitor, he tells me the long words) so customers could likely challenge F2S én mass.

you could argue you've paid for a high capacity cap that theres no practical way of getting anywhere near.

[keith_thfc]

Originally Posted by Justin

Working for an ISP myself, I can see why traffic shaping is useful, as you would not believe some of the usage figures we see!

There would be no need for traffic management if you imposed a sustainable realistic cap.

[AndyK]

I agree Keith, I personaly use between 5 and 8gb a month, I consider myself a heavy user, 3 PC's and a laptop, 4 kids playing online games etc (I dont allow them to use torrent/limewire etc though), I receive 1-1.5gb of email a month etc, how anyone can use the amounts that you hear of from the ISP's is unbelievable, cap everyone at 10-20gb and surely P2P could be allowed full bandwidth.

[Justin]

Originally Posted by keith_thfc

There would be no need for traffic management if you imposed a sustainable realistic cap.

I kind of agree to a point, but if you have a few people downloading full throttle at 8MB at the same time as each other it takes a lot more capacity than the same amount of usage spread out over a longer period of time, and this is why I'd say traffic management goes on. The key is prioritising rather than shaping is how traffic management should be used.

[stephen_ex-f2s]

AndyK: I live in a shared household with two [other] geeks, and they both use P2P. Their usage would be even higher had it not been for the fact they know I'd rip out their network cables for hogging all the bandwidth. There is also the use of streaming video, which can really take its toll. In short, it's very easy to hit 20GB. At one stage the top 5 f2s users gobbled up over 1TB in a month.

The trick to alleviating shaping is to make people pay for every last byte. They'd then soon change their minds.

[William_Wallace]

Isnt it bad enough having a cap on what you download in a month without punishing us AGAIN with the throttling on p2p.

Instead of wasting our hard earned monthly fees we pay you on an old washed up celeb called "The Hoff" in your adverts, go buy some better equipment and give us our PROPER broadband package that we pay for.

Rant over, where my MAC code, fed up of this rubbish now.

[Justin]

It's not about equipment though, it's about the cost of bandwidth.

[Argos_Bling]

It's not about the cost of the bandwidth, it's about the lack of communication, misinformation, and the fact that f2s has little or no technical competence - they can't do email, can't do webspace, can't do adsl, can't do DNS, can't do keeping their customers informed. Everyone knows that BT Centrals are stupidly priced, but f2s doesn't even bother to engage with their own customers about this. They don't bother to sell a product they can actually supply. They encourage responsible p2p users to use the "off-peak" period - then throttle that - I just wanted to download a kubuntu iso during the socially-responsible "off-peak", but instead to stand any chance of getting it, I have to leave azureus on all day.

The days when ISP's could pile all their efforts in marketing, offsetting the loss of ****ed-off customers with new broadband adopters are (thankfully) drawing to a close, as the market approaches saturation. Companies are going to have to move towards customer retention for their future health. With that in mind, maybe we should have a sweepstake - how long does the f2s "brand" have to live?

It's a damn shame, they were once so bloody brilliant. Sic transit gloria mundi. Damn, using Latin, must be ****ed off today!

[Justin]

With all due respect, I work for an ISP myself and I can tell you one thing for certain, P2P is a huge problem the crux of this is caused by high costs of bandwidth, you work out how many people it takes to fill a 155mbps pipe downloading at full on 8MB and the price they are paying compared to how much it costs the ISP.

You can argue yes there are caps, but there is only a certain amount of bandwidth avaliable at one time, and if everyone downloads at the same time of course there will be slowdowns, buy more bandwidth you say? Yes, but then the products become unviable at their present price points.

Like it or not shaping is here to stay, not because ISP's are greedy, but because of the high price of bandwidth, and I can quite say with a balanced viewpoint from both a customer and network operations centre point of view.

With all the big boys like BT retail conslidating, they can survive on very small margins to attract market share, they have other revenue streams, the smaller ISP's who depend on internet services alone can't.

[acidtechno]

why does bandwidth have to cost so much from BT?

can't ofcom/government force the cost down?

it's just traffic, why can't the rules be changed, so we get more for less, because high speed broadband is about advancing, but in the current state, it cannot happen.

[browolf]

costs as of november 2006

BT Central (capacity charging) list price
Rental (pa) Connection
BT Central 155Mbit/s £347,400 £50,000
BT Central 155Mbit/s L2TP Passthrough £316,200 £50,000
BT Central 622Mbit/s L2TP Passthrough £1,496,760 £175,000

virgin at least may have the finances to increase the cable coverage but until that happens there's no real competition to drive down prices.

this document seems to say something about intended bt pricing
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:9...ient=firefox-a
tho i dont understand half of it. whats that ARPU business?

[pembo]

Originally Posted by Justin

With all due respect, I work for an ISP myself and I can tell you one thing for certain, P2P is a huge problem the crux of this is caused by high costs of bandwidth, you work out how many people it takes to fill a 155mbps pipe downloading at full on 8MB and the price they are paying compared to how much it costs the ISP.

You can argue yes there are caps, but there is only a certain amount of bandwidth avaliable at one time, and if everyone downloads at the same time of course there will be slowdowns, buy more bandwidth you say? Yes, but then the products become unviable at their present price points.

Like it or not shaping is here to stay, not because ISP's are greedy, but because of the high price of bandwidth, and I can quite say with a balanced viewpoint from both a customer and network operations centre point of view.

With all the big boys like BT retail conslidating, they can survive on very small margins to attract market share, they have other revenue streams, the smaller ISP's who depend on internet services alone can't.

with all due respect - If it was just P2P throttling, I could live with it. My web traffic has been reduced to modem speeds and to top it all off, didn't work at all yesterday.

The silence from F2S tech support speaks volumes.

What is annoying F2S were so good - I've been here for nearly 3 years. Its a shame the last 3 weeks have been so bad.

I'll be requesting my MAC code tomorrow. I sincerely hope a large number of other people do.

If anyone from F2S actual is reading this.
The ISP has become a joke in the last 3 weeks.

Just take a look at the number of complaints on this forum and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, rant over - tomorrow will bring me my MAC code, and move me onto pastures greener

[NewsreadeR]

Well I voted yes.

Traffic shaping is the future of ISP's its like Garlic Bread.

Without traffic shaping the internet will become clogged and as fast as 56k - remember that? when MP3's used to take an hour to download?

However, traffic shaping is only good if it is implemented properly. I am going to be selfish here, I do not download P2P or distros or anything illegal like DVD's etc. So to me the Internet only needs to work, ie browse, surf and play games and email. When this starts to suffer, I know traffic shaping has been set up wrong.

What F2S have done is try to protect their network against those who want to download the internet in a night, these are the people that are spoiling it for everyone else. However F2S have seriously cocked their management up. If done correctly then it is hardly noticeable and everyone has a similar share of the bandwith available.

People are greedy, they want everything for nothing. However everything does cost. If you go to Pizza Hut on a Monday and you can have all the pizza you want for £5.99 then you will not leave until you are stuffed. You will sit there and eat and eat and eat, until you feel you have got your £5.99 worth.

This is exactly the same with the internet, although not intentionally you want what you can get for your money. An ISP has to plan for the future, Sky and Talk Talk are peeing over the smaller ISP and so you will probably find that F2S reduce their available bandwith, ie cut it in half, theoretically they could do this and if management is applied professionally we should all be happy. Don't blame them they are a business, the only thing they are guilty of is the same as Plusnet and every other ISP, cocking the implementation of it up.

Once it is stabilised and we accept that things cost money then things will get better. I used to pay £69.99 a month for ISDN and was chuffed to mintballs that I could download 1gb in 3 weeks at 128k. Then I tasted 512mb bb at £49.99 and then 2mb at £39.99, this was great, but then I wanted more. I then wanted 8mb at £23.99 and to be able to download the world. But yet 5 years ago I was happy with 1gb a month.

/rant over

[keith_thfc]

Originally Posted by NewsreadeR

Well I voted yes.

Traffic shaping is the future of ISP's

Do you mean all ISP's or just those who are afraid to charge sustainable prices?

Seems strange to me how the most respected ISP in the land, Zen, have never implemented traffic shaping if its such a great idea.

Once it is stabilised and we accept that things cost money then things will get better.

It was implemented by Pipex in November 2005, well over a year ago. How much longer do you want?

I think you are completely and utterly wrong though as your average punter wants to download more with each year, as youtube showed in 2006. As content on demand takes off this is going to mushroom. And I think the only survivors will be the ISP's who can offer plenty of clean unshaped bandwidth at peak times.

[NewsreadeR]

Do you mean all ISP's or just those who are afraid to charge sustainable prices?

Sorry Keith - I mean't exactly what you say

People will pay for quality and like you say Zen have exactly the right business model and approach. However they will only maintain this until LLU is more widely available.

However I would have thought they have plans for when that happens as well.

There is just no point in being the cheapest if you cannot deliver.

[browolf]

Originally Posted by keith_thfc

I think you are completely and utterly wrong though as your average punter wants to download more with each year, as youtube showed in 2006. As content on demand takes off this is going to mushroom. And I think the only survivors will be the ISP's who can offer plenty of clean unshaped bandwidth at peak times.

i think the ones that will survive are the ones that get creative about pricing & bandwidth usage. entanet seems to have the right idea. traditional methods may be fine for some customers but not for an increasing amount of others.

[stephen_ex-f2s]

browolf: If you ask me Enta are a ticking timebomb. Unless they've got their timing and pricing bang on, then they're setting themselves up for a massive fall (IMHO of course). Although I do like how they handle the throttling when the centrals get full. I think a few ISPs should borrow that idea.

[barryrs]

Originally Posted by stephen_ex-f2s

browolf: If you ask me Enta are a ticking timebomb.

I also fear that, but OTOH their 'Max30' product has a 30GB peak-time cap, which is close to the f2s offerings. So, the difference is really the timeslot for unmetered, which is about twice as long during weekdays, and is all-day at weekends (300GB cap is essentially unmetered ).

Their approach to throttling does seem better, not that I know much about the technicalities of such things. My adslMax connection averages 2.5Mb anyway. Perhaps the ping times etc are very bad off-peak.
Anyway, I will soon be finding out

[browolf]

Originally Posted by stephen_ex-f2s

browolf: If you ask me Enta are a ticking timebomb. Unless they've got their timing and pricing bang on, then they're setting themselves up for a massive fall (IMHO of course). Although I do like how they handle the throttling when the centrals get full. I think a few ISPs should borrow that idea.

i agree and it kind of depends on what other isps do in the future. At least there's someone there thinking creatively. I have more faith in them coming up with helpful solutions to future issues than a lot of other large corporate isps