Backhaul dimensioning

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icepicknz

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Topic # 84373 29-May-2011 17:30

So I recently heard telecom were notifying ISP's of backhaul dimensioning on UBA links like they did on UBS. I myself have seen the documents that give a default 45kb per user with the option to buy up to 100kb per user.

I thought dimensioning was being removed as old ATM links were phased away to ethernet so the costs had come down hence dimensioning was no longer required.

Has anyone posed the question as to how they expect this to work. With the current scenario, if an ISP has 100 users times the 45k provided per user, this only gives you 4.5Mbps, meaning one user of the 100 could get 4.5Mbps to speed test, or if all 100 users were doing a speed test they'd get 45k.

Find it hard to believe this would be allowed by the commission as it seems like a backwards step to UBA.

Barry Murphy
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Vibe Communications LTD - Business ISP and Wholesale Carrier

Any comments made by myself don't reflect the views of my employer, they are mine and mine alone

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Reply # 475486 29-May-2011 17:54

Backhaul on the older network was 32kbit/s wasn't it? This is a step up but indeed a terrible limit, especially considering peak traffic hours is always such a squeeze.

Talkiet

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Reply # 475497 29-May-2011 18:19

Note I am an employee of Telecom, but I post this as my personal opinion only, and feel free to take it as you wish.

Anyone commenting on this that doesn't have intimate knowledge of the behaviour of large populations of residential NZ BB users is speaking from a position of relative ignorance. There are perhaps a few dozen people in the country with access to the actual aggregate usage figures to know exactly what the limits mean. You'll find VERY VERY few of those people prepared to comment publicly on it as the aggregate usage of their customer base could be considered commercially sensitive information.

The facts I can attest to are that the dimensioning figure USED TO BE 32kbit/sec, and is now 45Kbit/sec, with options to upgrade to 100Kbit (and an interim number that eludes me at the moment - perhaps 75Kbit/sec

There's also a base limit so the dimensioning formula doesn't apply for small numbers of users.

Cheers - Neil G

BlakJak

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Reply # 475503 29-May-2011 18:40

How many ISP's with direct wholesale to Telecom for ADSL purposes are at the ~100 customer number anyway?

This would be me...

Talkiet

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Reply # 475520 29-May-2011 19:00

BlakJak: How many ISP's with direct wholesale to Telecom for ADSL purposes are at the ~100 customer number anyway?

I don't know those numbers... Logic and economics would suggest ~0.

Cheers - N :-)

icepicknz

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Reply # 475523 29-May-2011 19:01

BlakJak: How many ISP's with direct wholesale to Telecom for ADSL purposes are at the ~100 customer number anyway?

was just an example :)

And thanks Neil for the input regarding smaller numbers not being dimensioned.

Barry Murphy
ISPMap - New Zealand ISP map
Vibe Communications LTD - Business ISP and Wholesale Carrier

Any comments made by myself don't reflect the views of my employer, they are mine and mine alone

Talkiet

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Reply # 475546 29-May-2011 19:37

icepicknz:
BlakJak: How many ISP's with direct wholesale to Telecom for ADSL purposes are at the ~100 customer number anyway?

was just an example :)

And thanks Neil for the input regarding smaller numbers not being dimensioned.

Actually I have to fess up here that I was thinking of another type of link for the minimum bandwidth - but as has been pointed out, these handovers aren't the sort that should have a small number of users on them. In any case, it's likely there's a minimal dimensioning rule - but I can't be sure of it for this specific instance.

Cheers - N

insane

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Reply # 475606 29-May-2011 22:59

Talkiet: Note I am an employee of Telecom, but I post this as my personal opinion only, and feel free to take it as you wish.

Anyone commenting on this that doesn't have intimate knowledge of the behaviour of large populations of residential NZ BB users is speaking from a position of relative ignorance. There are perhaps a few dozen people in the country with access to the actual aggregate usage figures to know exactly what the limits mean. You'll find VERY VERY few of those people prepared to comment publicly on it as the aggregate usage of their customer base could be considered commercially sensitive information.

The facts I can attest to are that the dimensioning figure USED TO BE 32kbit/sec, and is now 45Kbit/sec, with options to upgrade to 100Kbit (and an interim number that eludes me at the moment - perhaps 75Kbit/sec

There's also a base limit so the dimensioning formula doesn't apply for small numbers of users.

Cheers - Neil G

Niel, indeed you are so correct, however assuming marketing departments work hand-in-hand with engineering it would seem that Telecom's user base on average uses a modest amount of bandwidth, and presumably far below the 45kbps dimension rate. I say this purely based on the new plans being advertised with improved datacaps and option to purchase more data for $2/GB and not be slowed down to 56k.

I do wonder though how much consultation there is between Telecom retail and Telecom wholesale in determining what the dimension rates should be. It would be great to see dimension rates in excess of 100kbps per user on offer to cater for ISPs with a younger demographic than what Telecom would have.

Put it this way, it seems that this dimension rate is an artificial limit imposed on ISPs so that they can not offer much larger datacaps. Don't get me wrong, I understand there are finite resources when it comes to backhaul). ISPs make a profit from selling bandwidth so this dimension does limit the amount of income ISPs can generate.

Can you identify with this?

Talkiet

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Reply # 475611 29-May-2011 23:21

insane:
Talkiet: Note I am an employee of Telecom, but I post this as my personal opinion only, and feel free to take it as you wish.

Anyone commenting on this that doesn't have intimate knowledge of the behaviour of large populations of residential NZ BB users is speaking from a position of relative ignorance. There are perhaps a few dozen people in the country with access to the actual aggregate usage figures to know exactly what the limits mean. You'll find VERY VERY few of those people prepared to comment publicly on it as the aggregate usage of their customer base could be considered commercially sensitive information.

The facts I can attest to are that the dimensioning figure USED TO BE 32kbit/sec, and is now 45Kbit/sec, with options to upgrade to 100Kbit (and an interim number that eludes me at the moment - perhaps 75Kbit/sec

There's also a base limit so the dimensioning formula doesn't apply for small numbers of users.

Cheers - Neil G

Niel, indeed you are so correct, however assuming marketing departments work hand-in-hand with engineering it would seem that Telecom's user base on average uses a modest amount of bandwidth, and presumably far below the 45kbps dimension rate. I say this purely based on the new plans being advertised with improved datacaps and option to purchase more data for $2/GB and not be slowed down to 56k.

I do wonder though how much consultation there is between Telecom retail and Telecom wholesale in determining what the dimension rates should be. It would be great to see dimension rates in excess of 100kbps per user on offer to cater for ISPs with a younger demographic than what Telecom would have.

Put it this way, it seems that this dimension rate is an artificial limit imposed on ISPs so that they can not offer much larger datacaps. Don't get me wrong, I understand there are finite resources when it comes to backhaul). ISPs make a profit from selling bandwidth so this dimension does limit the amount of income ISPs can generate.

Can you identify with this?

Look, I understand where you are coming from and I realise many people simply can't understand that operational separation really does meant that Telecom Wholesale and Telecom Retail can't have different discussions than Telecom Wholesale have with other retail providers.

Where possible, employees are not co-located, and there are serious processes and rules that dictate what can be said between structurally separated groups. It's unfair and a little disrespectful to suggest that Telecom wholesale and retail collude. I work in shared services so I do work for both units, and I have _very_ clear guidelines about what information I can share. People that are Wholesale or Retail specifically have quite clear separation.

I can't be specific about how the 32/45/75/100 numbers were derived because I don't know where they came from.

People also need to remember that the Commerce Commission have significant input into the conditions of wholesale BB in NZ - Telecom doesn't have choice in some areas. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

Cheers - N

insane

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Reply # 475615 29-May-2011 23:59

Talkiet:

..Look, I understand where you are coming from and I realise many people simply can't understand that operational separation really does meant that Telecom Wholesale and Telecom Retail can't have different discussions than Telecom Wholesale have with other retail providers...

Cheers - N

Forgive my earlier comments, I wasn't having a dig at you by any means!, more thinking out load. Based on your reaction it sounds like you get accused of playing on both sides of the fence a lot..

Are you at all able to comment on whether the concept of dimensioning was present under WBS (DSL not over L2TP) ?

Ragnor

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Reply # 475621 30-May-2011 01:51

Backhaul and Handover links dimensioning are two entirely different things.

As I understand it (for EUBA0):

Backhaul is a minimum CIR per user but burst rates of whatever is available (cabinets and exchanges have heaps of capacity with the new fibre due to cabinetisation).

Backhaul traffic rates are managed at the first EAS (ethernet access switch), typically this means at the larger regional aggregation exchanges eg: Mt Albert, Mayoral Drive etc.

From there the ISP has the option of: a tail extension, p2p backhaul, regulated backhaul (these have their own service descriptions) to where you have your handover OR they can handover at the local EAS there if you have a presence or a partner with presence at that exchange.

Either way typically backhaul does not appear to be a big an issue these days (for the EUBA service).

The new ethernet handover links are not being artificially dimensioned like the old (ATM) ones. Telecom wholesale account managers have been talking up how ethernet handover links are not dimensioned.

Dark days if they considering artificially dimensioning ethernet handover like they do the older handover links (atm based) imo. It was probably necessary with the old handover links, but the new ones being ethernet I can't understand how they would justify it.

icepicknz

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Reply # 475635 30-May-2011 07:37

It is a shame seeing as telecom just won majority of the UFB around the country, lets hope the commerce commission puts enough pressure on the project and learns from the mistakes of DSL.

It seems strange that up until now there has been no dimensioning on UBA so things have worked fine, providers have offered free content to sites such as isky, youtube caches on their own network and other high volume sites, and now telecom is looking to put a cap in place to slow this all down.

Personally I feel that an artificial limit is being imposed per user, a limit of 45k per user would mean a maximum transfer per user of 14Gb of downloads in a given month, if they were downloading 24/7 * 30. This was worked out the same way you'd get the value of 316Gbs in a month if you had 1Mbps.

The bottleneck of international will not be the case anymore, it will be going back to the cabinet/exchange as far as I can see.

Obviously there may be provisions in place that I'm not sure about, i.e. this limit being placed of 45k may be a CIR bandwidth and if the cabinet had lots of capacity then perphaps the userss would get a peak rate, but it doesn't appear so.

Thanks for everyones feedback thus far.

Barry Murphy
ISPMap - New Zealand ISP map
Vibe Communications LTD - Business ISP and Wholesale Carrier

Any comments made by myself don't reflect the views of my employer, they are mine and mine alone

Ragnor

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Reply # 475713 30-May-2011 12:16

When you say UBA do you mean EUBA or BUBA, they are quite different services.

For how EUBA is different read 4.4 of the EUBA service provider guide, this shows what traffic management is done at which points with a diagram and table.

insane

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Reply # 475915 30-May-2011 20:00

Ragnor:

The new ethernet handover links are not being artificially dimensioned like the old (ATM) ones. Telecom wholesale account managers have been talking up how ethernet handover links are not dimensioned.

Dark days if they considering artificially dimensioning ethernet handover like they do the older handover links (atm based) imo. It was probably necessary with the old handover links, but the new ones being ethernet I can't understand how they would justify it.

UBS and UBA (non Ethernet service) has been been able to be delivered over an Ethernet handover connection for a long time now, however not all ISPs have been using this.

EUBA/HSNS is an Ethernet (end-to-end) based service and runs off the new network, so the thought of a limit per user, even on EUBA0 is indeed a scary prospect and a major step backwards if they do.

Telecom account managers came to visit today, would have loved to ask them but was in another meeting.

webwat

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Reply # 476479 31-May-2011 23:07

I can't imagine they would still be rate limiting anymore because that would also have to apply to Telecom Retail now (and would also cost them a few million if it didn't). Perhaps its just that the CIR on those aggregation switches mentioned are now combined with far more best-efforts bandwidth than before. My guess is that any ISP with less than 1000 or 2000 DSL connections would avoid investing in its own network edge or negotiating telecom contracts, although some might do it with smaller numbers of high value commercial users.

Does anyone know if there's congestion on the Telecom backbone, which might be another choke point? But definitely international has to still be the peak time limiting factor because its most expensive and has to be shared around.

Qualified in business, certified in fibre, stuck in copper, have to keep going ^_^

insane

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Reply # 476505 1-Jun-2011 01:49

webwat:But definitely international has to still be the peak time limiting factor because its most expensive and has to be shared around.

You'd be surprised these days, depending who you are, how much you're purchasing, and who you are purchasing off, international transit can in some situations be around the same or less than national transit. Which would also imply the cost of National transit is too high, which it is.

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