[TelstraClear] How was your TelstraClear performance during free data weekend

Forums › One New Zealand (including Vodafone, WxC, Farmside) › [TelstraClear] How was your TelstraClear performance during free data weekend

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43 posts

Geek

#553721 4-Dec-2011 21:35

Talkiet: So, you're ok with them making unlimited usage weekends available, for no extra revenue, so long as they spend a ridiculous amount of money dimensioning their network for the MASSIVE peak loads generated by non-paying occasional usage.

Yep... I'd be very happy with that as well!

Cheers - N

yes! it's called looking after your existing customers.

what makes you think it would be a ridiculous amount of money?

Teeps

501 posts

Ultimate Geek

#553723 4-Dec-2011 21:37

Talkiet: So, you're ok with them making unlimited usage weekends available, for no extra revenue, so long as they spend a ridiculous amount of money dimensioning their network for the MASSIVE peak loads generated by non-paying occasional usage.

Yep... I'd be very happy with that as well!

Cheers - N

If you actually bothered to take note of what i post instead of just sniping back at everything I say you would realise I have no interest in this offer personally, but there is a rather large section of society who will take something for nothing if it's offered to them. If TelstraClear have decided that for some reason this is advantageous to their business model fine, go ahead and give away services to customers who will abuse your network when they don't have to pay, but also have no intention to go to a higher data cap (why would they when they can get it for free!?). As a customer who pays for the data he uses I would just like to be able to use that on any day of the month I choose, and not be told that because they are giving free data to all customers, and their network is insufficient to cope with this offer, I cannot use my internet as I normally would!

Talkiet

4792 posts

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#553726 4-Dec-2011 21:39

adrianj:
Talkiet: So, you're ok with them making unlimited usage weekends available, for no extra revenue, so long as they spend a ridiculous amount of money dimensioning their network for the MASSIVE peak loads generated by non-paying occasional usage.

Yep... I'd be very happy with that as well!

Cheers - N

yes! it's called looking after your existing customers.

what makes you think it would be a ridiculous amount of money?

Mostly it's because I'm involved in telco level network designs as a day job.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

adrianj

43 posts

Geek

#553735 4-Dec-2011 21:44

Talkiet: Mostly it's because I'm involved in telco level network designs as a day job.

Cheers - N

ok, so what do they need to do? bearing in mind that
1) some nodes are getting much more of a hammering than others.
2) the knock on effects on international traffic

spacedog

482 posts

Ultimate Geek

#553739 4-Dec-2011 21:52

2 hours to go until it ends. International traffic throughput is atrocious right now.

I would note that the latency looks ok though. Makes me wonder if the crew in the datacenter managed to get a grasp on shaping to protect latency. Which would be good.

At the end of the day, I'll take latency over sheer volume. Skype, games, browsing is always more important than streams/volume.

Of course, I would rather pay money and have solid service than try to get 'something for nothing'...that just never works. Last time I checked, it violates the first law of thermodynamics. ;-)

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#553740 4-Dec-2011 21:53

Talkiet: Mostly it's because I'm involved in telco level network designs as a day job.

Ya, guys, Neil's not manning L1HD, I will attest to him actually having some clue here, more than I do by a long shot.

However, I also agree with those of you asking about opting out of this deal.

Telstra's HFC network is just a big VLAN as I understand it. The obvious question is why customers who wanted to opt out weren't just bridged to a different network space.

The DSL network is just a PPPoA network, so why protected capacity couldn't be provisioned in there, I don't know.

However, it doesn't appear Telstra was even able to protect performance for it's commerical customers who were not part of the deal.

Hey, I confess, I just don't know enough about this space to know what planning and provisioning you can do to make something like this work in a big provider like Telstra. I suspect that Neil does.

I don't know if Neil was about when Telecom were doing the 'go large' thing, but that fell in a big heap and cost the company a bit. I would have thought that industry observation by Telstra would have given them a heads up, but clearly I'm just not thinking straight.

D

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Screeb

698 posts

Ultimate Geek

#553745 4-Dec-2011 22:03

Well, it's nearly over, so I might as well chip in with my experience.

I was fortunate (or perhaps "not unfortunate") to live in an area that wasn't severely affected like Hataitai. My real-world speeds seemed to fluctuate between 5-8 Mbps here in Khandallah on 15Mbps cable. Not bad. I've managed to pull about 125GB - about 5.27Mbps average over the entire period of 54 hours. That's not counting web browsing and Youtube, but that wouldn't affect it very much. I didn't try any gaming, but by the sounds of it, it wouldn't have been pretty.

Given that this is an "event", not a permanent state of "all you can eat", as has been said many times, performance is expected to be worse in this case. So with that in mind, I have to say, kudos to TelstraClear! No, I'm not being sarcastic, they actually impressed me for once! What would impress me more though, is if they offered a permanent "unlimited" plan. Remember that the only real expense to ISPs is in keeping good speeds for customers. How much data is actually used is irrelevant. Assuming they didn't provision extra capacity for this weekend, it seems TelstraClear's network is perfectly able to handle more data usage than currently (before and after this weekend, that is), for the same expense.

To me, this weekend has proved uncapped broadband for a reasonable price, and with good speeds, on TelstraClear, is easily possible. It would of course have to be a bit pricey, so as not to degrade ARPU from the high-end users. I reckon they could offer one for $150/month and retain good speeds for everyone, and without hurting ARPU. Those with problems seemed to be outliers, which could be fixed relatively easily (and, as said, wouldn't have anywhere near the same problems anyway).

I do feel sorry for those severely affected though, especially those on downstream ISPs.

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Talkiet

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#553746 4-Dec-2011 22:04

adrianj:
Talkiet: Mostly it's because I'm involved in telco level network designs as a day job.

Cheers - N

ok, so what do they need to do? bearing in mind that
1) some nodes are getting much more of a hammering than others.
2) the knock on effects on international traffic

Building a network isn't hard... Building it to a financially sensible level depends on what tradeoffs you're prepared to make.

If any ISP (not just TCL) wanted to dimension their network to deal with the peak demand that an unmetered weekend clearly places, then they need to augment pretty much every part of their network... Some things just off the top of my head...

Local aggregation - at some point you may have gige connections that become saturated - now you need either faster optics (expensive) or new fibre (maybe expensive), dwdm (maybe expensive), extra ports in aggregation chassis'... Those are cheap until you run out of ports - now you need another card (expensive) or another chassis (REALLY expensive since you need another set of switching/forwarding hardware) and since you have multiple chassis' now, how do you provide comms between the chassis (if you choose to do it that way)? Oh, lets link the chassis together... Ooops, that's MORE PORTS please. And we're not even out of the local aggregation layer yet.

national backhaul - if you're paying someone else (Telecom/Chorus/Kordia etc) then I really don't know and don't want to know exactly how the contracts work - but you'll pay someone more, and I'm reasonably confident you couldn't augment your links just for a couple of days.

If you have your own backhaul, then you need to augment it if it's going to be congested. So again, we have more ports or faster optics, more DWDM (and optics), maybe even more fibre(!). You may need more switching capacity - and if you need more chassis, then you multiply the optics required again... If you build your network with complete failover capacity then you can DOUBLE everything you just spent, plus some more to make the redundancy work.

But let's assume you have spent all this and now you're at a major datacentre with some CDNs... Do your content redirectors have the capacity to deal with the increaed number of sessions and throughput or are they going to chug and shed traffic? What about the actual CDNs themselves? If you're normally serving high bandwidth material from a local POP and it has to start shedding load to an upstream node, how is that traffic going to get there? Oops, bigger links please.

Finally, you actually have your various links to national and international networks. You can make these a bit bigger usually, not quite in realtime but several of the providers can work pretty quick - but you pay more money...

It's not as simple as adding a switch, or plugging more things in... To guarantee (remember I didn't use that word, but several others have suggested it's what they want) that performance won't degrade you will have to upgrade a lot of infrastructure - and if any of those points are near a step change (new optics, line card, chassis, backhaul links required) then start writing zeros...

Finally, assume the technical people can do this (and they can!)... Before it gets done you have to present a business case that essentially says this...

"Mr Boss, I want to spend $x million to upgrade the network so that it doesn't congest anywhere next time we do an unmetered weekend... Unfortunately there is no extra revenue from this, so I'm asking you to spend this money and any return will be in customer goodwill only"

This is all massively simplified, but it boils down to the fact that large ISPs have large networks, and upgrading them so that everyone gets hugely more than it's built for today is a major, major deal.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

adrianj

43 posts

Geek

#553759 4-Dec-2011 22:16

Talkiet: This is all massively simplified, but it boils down to the fact that large ISPs have large networks, and upgrading them so that everyone gets hugely more than it's built for today is a major, major deal.

Cheers - N

thanks for taking the time to reply - if TC want to go down this route they will have to start on the expenditure though.

DoomlordVekk

129 posts

Master Geek

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#553772 4-Dec-2011 22:38

adrianj:
Talkiet: So, you're ok with them making unlimited usage weekends available, for no extra revenue, so long as they spend a ridiculous amount of money dimensioning their network for the MASSIVE peak loads generated by non-paying occasional usage.

Yep... I'd be very happy with that as well!

Cheers - N

yes! it's called looking after your existing customers.

what makes you think it would be a ridiculous amount of money?

if you wanted to go get hardware + Manpower to do the job... aim for a bit under quarter of a million dollars US.
(and that is just the DOCSIS/BNG side of things, then you have transport back to the international gateway and then the international traffic costs, the mind does start to boggle somewhat at the $$ involved).

Service provider hardware, designed to scale to support customer load multiples of 25,000 users does NOT come cheap, even when procured from China.

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DonGould

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#553779 4-Dec-2011 22:53

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1824910

Well it looks like it's not just Snap that got a whack... Telstra Australia customers also got a good whack by the looks of things.

Might have to ping off an email or two on Monday and get the gos on the fall out... not that anyone's going to say a word.

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Teeps

501 posts

Ultimate Geek

#553781 4-Dec-2011 22:54

Talkiet:"Mr Boss, I want to spend $x million to upgrade the network so that it doesn't congest anywhere next time we do an unmetered weekend... Unfortunately there is no extra revenue from this, so I'm asking you to spend this money and any return will be in customer goodwill only"

Sounds like we have the same feeling then, don't offer 'free data weekends' because it costs too much to implement the network that can cope.

r2b2

586 posts

Ultimate Geek

#553785 4-Dec-2011 23:03

Thought I'd just quickly pop in my experience from Paraparaumu Beach (although it wasn't much as haven't really used the Internet much this weekend)

Speeds to Wellington speedtest is around 7Mb down and 2mb up but trying to upload a 55Mb file to Dropbox is running at around 42kb/s which is a lot slower than what I usually get I think (usually takes 5-10 minutes to upload but its still got 25-30 minutes left tonight :( )

mattbush

784 posts

Ultimate Geek
Inactive user

#553791 4-Dec-2011 23:24

Shadbolt: Here's a question - and I'm not trying to stir in any way, just trying to improve my understanding.

I think it was teeps who pointed out that this weekend's congestion was preventing him from using his paid-for 60Gb.

My question is: do the TelstraClear Terms and Conditions - or residential Service Level Agreement - imply or state that your paid-for data cap will be available, spread evenly across the month? What I'm getting at, is 60Gb is an average of 2Gb per day. Teeps has lost two days of his time this month - one fifteenth. Is there anything preventing TCL saying that it's perfectly fine having that 60Gb spread across 28 days instead of 30 days?

Just curious.

Its more about TCL deliberately and intentionally interfering with the normal capacity of the network without taking due care to make available enough international bandwidth to cope.

Ragnor

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#553792 4-Dec-2011 23:25

freitasm:
One of the great things of the TelstraClear service: there's no filtering or shaping of any kind, except for the transparent proxy for caching purposes.

Typically all ISP have some traffic management and prioritisation in place, it's really a matter of how much.

I believe Slingshot, Telecom and yes Telstraclear all use similar clusters of Bluecoat appliances that can do this stuff.

Telsraclear are also participate in the DIA's filter scheme, so you can't say they don't filter.

I would say the latency increases a lot of people saw over the weekend was a direct result of not having enough or the right polcies in place at the beginning.

The collateral damage that affected non residential customers of their upstream service that they sell to other ISP's and businesses was particularly sloppy.

Would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall on Monday at Telstraclear.

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