My experience with BigTime

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › My experience with BigTime

jarlaxe

23 posts

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#37367 12-Jul-2009 00:22

I was amazed over the first two days of signing up, seeing 1megabyte per second for multiple downloads after only 8pm.

However, on the third day things started to slow down. It was at dial up speed throughout the day, although past midnight the speeds suddenly picked up to a whopping 11kbytes per second, and even better, they have stayed like this since. I am sure this is slower than my dialup connection.

I will give this to telecom however, they did not fail to deliver what the promised which was nothing.

Usually on the 20gb plan or the 40gb plan my speeds for multiple downloads (from rapidshare) is 1.4 megabytes per second, the local adsl2+ 'green box'is not far away from my house.

I hope everyone stays away, I know I will!

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#234256 12-Jul-2009 00:37

Same for us! Great initial performance for the first 4-5 days and then web browsing/skype/video streaming performance degraded enough for us to probably switch back to adventure next month if this continues. Mass downloading isn't really that important for us at the moment. We found that we were downloading anything and everything because we could. ;)

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thinhvy

136 posts

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#234261 12-Jul-2009 01:14

Wow...173GB for just over a week...or 42GB per day...that's amazing!

Ragnor

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#234264 12-Jul-2009 02:44

Here's an example of the problem imo...

Assume 10Mbit is the average sync speed for Big Time users which is generous considering a lot of people haven't been hooked up to cabinets yet.

Next assume it's economically viable to provision the bandwidth pool for Big Time at 50:1 contention ratio, that is a pretty standard ratio for residential service as far as I know. I doubt they could afford to provision it at a lower contention ratio or they would lose money.

Now say 1000 users on the plan, they are all freetards who run bit torrent 24x7 downloading as many tv episodes and moves as possible.. 1000 users with a 10Mbit average sync speed at 50:1 contention ratio means the bandwidth pool is limited to ~200Mbit/s

Given 200Mbit/s and each user downloading 24x7 they will be getting at most 0.2 Mbit/s aka 25 KB/s each.

Unless every ISP offers an unlimited plan the few unlimited plans will end up with a disproportionate number of leechers, the lack of low usage mom and pops who don't download 24x7 means these plans will always effectively be limited to slow speeds.

I think the Xnet model was better, you want to discourage p2p and heavy downloading in "peak time" thus pay per GB "on peak" and free data "off peak". However you absolutely must have quality traffic management and caching servers in place (which they didn't at the time). One example: I don't know of any ISP yet in NZ using p2p caching appliances which is basically epic fail. I know of at least one Australian ISP that runs a PeerApp p2p cache and it serves ~300Mbit's pretty much constantly. That's a lot of international traffic and $$ saved you would think...

paradoxsm

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#234294 12-Jul-2009 11:02

I'm on one of the Business Broadband plans.
My broadband speeds have increased phenomenally since big time's introduction, i'm loving every minute of it, the online store I buy my music from is blisteringly quick now though I have not tried a torrent. (I stay within legal grounds)

It was so-so beforehand, 1Mbps internationally/3Mbps nationally and now I'm getting 4.5Mbps most places in the world with only a 5Mbps sync (we are being cabinitized October)

There is also a "go large" plan in the household which is dial-up speed at best at all times, I don't go near it apart from some speedtests.

tunafish

93 posts

Master Geek

#234297 12-Jul-2009 11:22

I think there is an ISP that has a P2P cache up and running, regular P2P user would either know, or can work out who it is.

l43a2

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#234420 12-Jul-2009 20:02

OmniouS: Same for us! Great initial performance for the first 4-5 days and then web browsing/skype/video streaming performance degraded enough for us to probably switch back to adventure next month if this continues. Mass downloading isn't really that important for us at the moment. We found that we were downloading anything and everything because we could. ;)

its people like you who kill the net for the rest of us.. downloadin so muchin such a short period..

Screeb

690 posts

Ultimate Geek

#234440 12-Jul-2009 21:00

Ragnor:
Next assume it's economically viable to provision the bandwidth pool for Big Time at 50:1 contention ratio, that is a pretty standard ratio for residential service as far as I know.

Ahahahahaaahahahahhahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

No way. A while ago some people determined Telecom's contention ratios were around 90:1 to 130:1 IIRC. And those were capped plans. I wouldn't be surprised if Big Time was closer to 500:1. 50:1 is a standard ratio in other countries.

bjhoogs

183 posts

Master Geek

#234462 12-Jul-2009 22:00

Screeb:
Ragnor:
Next assume it's economically viable to provision the bandwidth pool for Big Time at 50:1 contention ratio, that is a pretty standard ratio for residential service as far as I know.

Ahahahahaaahahahahhahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

No way. A while ago some people determined Telecom's contention ratios were around 90:1 to 130:1 IIRC. And those were capped plans. I wouldn't be surprised if Big Time was closer to 500:1. 50:1 is a standard ratio in other countries.

Why would the ratio be worse on an uncapped plan which costs more? Isn't the issue on these plans the 'utilisation' of the bandwidth (a large percentage of users choking the available bandwith with whatever they can download 24/7), not the amount of bandwidth available per user?

Ilmarin

94 posts

Master Geek

#234501 12-Jul-2009 23:08

Screeb:
Ahahahahaaahahahahhahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

No way. A while ago some people determined Telecom's contention ratios were around 90:1 to 130:1 IIRC. And those were capped plans. I wouldn't be surprised if Big Time was closer to 500:1. 50:1 is a standard ratio in other countries.

Don't confuse backhaul contention with contention on international links. The numbers you're talking about were relevant to backhaul contention. Nobody talks about international contention ratios because they differ wildly across ISPs and are sensitive information, plus it's pretty hard to guess unless you have some idea of how much bandwidth is allocated to a customer pool and how many customers there are in the pool (numbers that we had a reasonably good handle on for exchange backhaul back when exchange congestion was an issue).

In theory, traffic management on such a plan would involve dividing the available bandwidth across the distinct IP endpoints so that no portion of bandwidth is left unused, and everyone gets a relatively even share. The contention ratio is relatively high because the average demand per kbps of available bandwidth is much higher than it is in the larger bandwidth pool allocated to users on the regular plans. For Telecom to allocate a larger amount of bandwidth to accommodate the heavy users' demands would not be economically viable (or they would need to charge a proportionally larger $/GB rate, which wouldn't fly with the consumer). In essence, it's just an attempt to improve performance for the majority of users, with the hope that the heavy users can wait somewhat longer for their downloads to complete (given that most of them leave their computers on downloading for much of the time).

It puzzles me somewhat that we aren't seeing more caching in practice (though caching hardware isn't necessarily cheap), especially for bona fide content like YouTube. I don't expect to see P2P caching here anytime soon, especially with all that section 92A hooha left unresolved. It would interest me to know just how much international bandwidth could be saved by caching different types of content. I suspect there are engineers who want to go forward with this stuff, but have their hands tied by stubborn management.

tardtasticx

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#234512 12-Jul-2009 23:44

l43a2:
OmniouS: Same for us! Great initial performance for the first 4-5 days and then web browsing/skype/video streaming performance degraded enough for us to probably switch back to adventure next month if this continues. Mass downloading isn't really that important for us at the moment. We found that we were downloading anything and everything because we could. ;)

its people like you who kill the net for the rest of us.. downloadin so muchin such a short period..

Exactly why I'm not moving. I only get about 300kbps atm. Can't bare to think what it would be like with this guy on internet downloading 24/7 taking up all the Bandwidth. Exactly one of the reasons telecom took the unlimited plan they had before off, people were ubusing it and downloading rediculous amounts of data. only a matter of time untill they drop this one too

Ragnor

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#234515 13-Jul-2009 00:05

50:1 was just an example and indications are that traffic from the google/youtube cache is being managed along with all other http traffic for Big Time users.. kind of defeats the point you would think....

Screeb

690 posts

Ultimate Geek

#234528 13-Jul-2009 01:24

bjhoogs:
Why would the ratio be worse on an uncapped plan which costs more? Isn't the issue on these plans the 'utilisation' of the bandwidth (a large percentage of users choking the available bandwith with whatever they can download 24/7), not the amount of bandwidth available per user?

The ratio would be worse because more bandwidth is likely to be used amongst Big Time users than the other plans. The very fact that speeds are slower on Big Time is evidence of this.

Ilmarin:
Don't confuse backhaul contention with contention on international links. The numbers you're talking about were relevant to backhaul contention. Nobody talks about international contention ratios because they differ wildly across ISPs and are sensitive information, plus it's pretty hard to guess unless you have some idea of how much bandwidth is allocated to a customer pool and how many customers there are in the pool (numbers that we had a reasonably good handle on for exchange backhaul back when exchange congestion was an issue).

I was meaning effective international contention. The 90:1 and 130:1 figures I mentioned were backhaul of course, but the point is that that's a minimum, regardless of what the international contention is. Of course we don't know about the exact contention ratio on international of the various plans, but Big Time is at least worse than the others. In other words, the effective (international) contention ratios of the capped plans are at least 90:1 - 130:1. Big Time is the same at a minimum, only we know that since international traffic is heavily shaped on that plan, the effective contention is much worse, which is where my "closer to 500:1" comes in.

Ragnor:
50:1 was just an example

Fair enough, but I just wanted to make sure people know that it's far from that.

indications are that traffic from the google/youtube cache is being managed along with all other http traffic for Big Time users.. kind of defeats the point you would think....

Indeed.

Ragnor

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#234608 13-Jul-2009 10:50

Well I don't see people reporting 2.56 kilobytes/s during peak time so it can't be 500:1

Most people seem to be reporting ~20-30KB on single http connections during peak time from what I've seen which is consistent with my assumptions of 10Mbit average sync speed and 50:1 contention ratio for international traffic.

A few people have mentioned that they suspect Big Time has a fixed pool of bandwidth and known protocols are allocated an aggregate % of the total bandwidth, for example http from all users can use 40% of the bandwidth. This is only speculation but it seems like a fairly limited way to manage the traffic.

It's all just speculation unless someone from Telecom wants to provide more detail on the workings of the plan. You would assume they are tweaking rules and adjusting settings as needed.

thinhvy

136 posts

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#234632 13-Jul-2009 11:51

Just been connected to Big Time Now,the speed is so good.

l43a2

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#234661 13-Jul-2009 12:22

it wont last :)

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