[Snap] will snap join the other ISPs and do unlimited?

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › [Snap] will snap join the other ISPs and do unlimited?

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

1873 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1042593 12-May-2014 19:27

cjmchch: I find it rather intriguing that so many of you would rather have a data pack than unlimited - so as to ensure consistency with your data transfer rates - bizarre really, given your speed will be no different if you are downloading at 100Mb/s on an unlimited plan compared to being on a data pack. The only thing that will change is the amount you pay.

If I am on an unlimited plan of 100Mbits and download an item, is that materially going to affect your speed purely because I am on unlimited.

Currently my download/upload speeds will be identical irrespective of whether I am on data package or unlimited.

Come on people, put some logic into your thinking - dial up modems are history

Odd thought patterns...

i don't even....

cjmchch

264 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1042594 12-May-2014 19:29

JamesL:
cjmchch: I find it rather intriguing that so many of you would rather have a data pack than unlimited - so as to ensure consistency with your data transfer rates - bizarre really, given your speed will be no different if you are downloading at 100Mb/s on an unlimited plan compared to being on a data pack. The only thing that will change is the amount you pay.

If I am on an unlimited plan of 100Mbits and download an item, is that materially going to affect your speed purely because I am on unlimited.

Currently my download/upload speeds will be identical irrespective of whether I am on data package or unlimited.

Come on people, put some logic into your thinking - dial up modems are history

Odd thought patterns...

Can't tell if you're serious or not..

Data caps help the ISP manage their bandwidth which is only a finite amount. It stops people from downloading the internet for the sake of it.

Unlimited plans mean that an ISP needs to constantly purchase bandwidth to deal with the peaks or traffic manage the bandwidth. Traffic management, depending on what's used, will either slow down particular forms of traffic or by placing users on unlimited plans into a separate pool of bandwidth to those which have data caps.

This ensures that those with data caps aren't impacted by the leechers on unlimited plans hence why some people would prefer to remain on a capped plan...

If it was that easy then Telecom wouldn't have tried and failed twice

I total understand that - but a lot of these comments aren't about bandwidth, they are about performance...and the only way performance can be affected on your connection is speed and continuity - sure there may be some loss to your performance when more users are on the same leg as you but that will be the same no matter whether the others are on unlimited or data packs.

e.g.

NzBeagle: Would rather pay for the data pack that suits and have relatively consistent performance. Having suffered with previous attempts at AYCE plans, consistancy was what lead me to switch to Snap.

hio77

12999 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

Lizard Networks

#1042596 12-May-2014 19:36

cjmchch:
JamesL:
cjmchch: I find it rather intriguing that so many of you would rather have a data pack than unlimited - so as to ensure consistency with your data transfer rates - bizarre really, given your speed will be no different if you are downloading at 100Mb/s on an unlimited plan compared to being on a data pack. The only thing that will change is the amount you pay.

If I am on an unlimited plan of 100Mbits and download an item, is that materially going to affect your speed purely because I am on unlimited.

Currently my download/upload speeds will be identical irrespective of whether I am on data package or unlimited.

Come on people, put some logic into your thinking - dial up modems are history

Odd thought patterns...

Can't tell if you're serious or not..

Data caps help the ISP manage their bandwidth which is only a finite amount. It stops people from downloading the internet for the sake of it.

Unlimited plans mean that an ISP needs to constantly purchase bandwidth to deal with the peaks or traffic manage the bandwidth. Traffic management, depending on what's used, will either slow down particular forms of traffic or by placing users on unlimited plans into a separate pool of bandwidth to those which have data caps.

This ensures that those with data caps aren't impacted by the leechers on unlimited plans hence why some people would prefer to remain on a capped plan...

If it was that easy then Telecom wouldn't have tried and failed twice

I total understand that - but a lot of these comments aren't about bandwidth, they are about performance...and the only way performance can be affected on your connection is speed and continuity - sure there may be some loss to your performance when more users are on the same leg as you but that will be the same no matter whether the others are on unlimited or data packs.

e.g.

NzBeagle: Would rather pay for the data pack that suits and have relatively consistent performance. Having suffered with previous attempts at AYCE plans, consistancy was what lead me to switch to Snap.

the use of the word performance, is getting at bandwith for the most part...

as a point of comparison, throughout trying multiple ISPs, snap is the only ISP so far, which will max out to my servers in NL, over an single TCP stream.

thats the network performance level i have grown to expect, in-which snap currently provide...

call me stupid, but im more than happy to pay for my data, if thats the level of performance from snap network i get.

#include <std_disclaimer>

Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

cjmchch

264 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1042601 12-May-2014 19:48

hio77:
cjmchch:
JamesL:
cjmchch: I find it rather intriguing that so many of you would rather have a data pack than unlimited - so as to ensure consistency with your data transfer rates - bizarre really, given your speed will be no different if you are downloading at 100Mb/s on an unlimited plan compared to being on a data pack. The only thing that will change is the amount you pay.

If I am on an unlimited plan of 100Mbits and download an item, is that materially going to affect your speed purely because I am on unlimited.

Currently my download/upload speeds will be identical irrespective of whether I am on data package or unlimited.

Come on people, put some logic into your thinking - dial up modems are history

Odd thought patterns...

Can't tell if you're serious or not..

Data caps help the ISP manage their bandwidth which is only a finite amount. It stops people from downloading the internet for the sake of it.

Unlimited plans mean that an ISP needs to constantly purchase bandwidth to deal with the peaks or traffic manage the bandwidth. Traffic management, depending on what's used, will either slow down particular forms of traffic or by placing users on unlimited plans into a separate pool of bandwidth to those which have data caps.

This ensures that those with data caps aren't impacted by the leechers on unlimited plans hence why some people would prefer to remain on a capped plan...

If it was that easy then Telecom wouldn't have tried and failed twice

I total understand that - but a lot of these comments aren't about bandwidth, they are about performance...and the only way performance can be affected on your connection is speed and continuity - sure there may be some loss to your performance when more users are on the same leg as you but that will be the same no matter whether the others are on unlimited or data packs.

e.g.

NzBeagle: Would rather pay for the data pack that suits and have relatively consistent performance. Having suffered with previous attempts at AYCE plans, consistancy was what lead me to switch to Snap.

the use of the word performance, is getting at bandwith for the most part...

as a point of comparison, throughout trying multiple ISPs, snap is the only ISP so far, which will max out to my servers in NL, over an single TCP stream.

thats the network performance level i have grown to expect, in-which snap currently provide...

call me stupid, but im more than happy to pay for my data, if thats the level of performance from snap network i get.

So what you're saying is that you are happy with the speed? I get constant max out speeds as well, but I also get constant disconnects, does that make the performance great? No. Performance that you are talking about are the physical qualities of a connection, speed and connectivity (which in turn leads to bandwidth consumption) My connection speeds will be no different if you are downloading or uploading irrespective of whether you are on a data pack or on unlimited (without some form of restriction, but then it is not unlimited :) )

hio77

12999 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

Lizard Networks

#1042609 12-May-2014 19:56

cjmchch:

So what you're saying is that you are happy with the speed? I get constant max out speeds as well, but I also get constant disconnects, does that make the performance great? No. Performance that you are talking about are the physical qualities of a connection, speed and connectivity (which in turn leads to bandwidth consumption) My connection speeds will be no different if you are downloading or uploading irrespective of whether you are on a data pack or on unlimited (without some form of restriction, but then it is not unlimited :) )

see, i dont have any dropout issues.

and DLM is purely to blame for the disconnection in the first place (PPP session has the same uptime).

no, drop outs arent great, not one bit.

we are not talking the physical qualities here (which if im reading this right, you are referring to sync rates assuch.. if not disregard what i have said.)

to put this is REAL simple terms, testing my line vs a friends line (them being on a different ISP)

to testing link, hosted in NL datacenter, i get my full 7MB/s, while they get about 400KB/s (prettymuch expected for TCP/IP values without window scaling, so yes, not exactly the plans fault.)

since they have moved to unlimited, their throughput on this testing file has reduced a bit more, and is a heck of alot more inconstant throughout the day..

as i said, no other ISP i have personally used has delivered performance quite like snaps, ild like to see that continue.

#include <std_disclaimer>

Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

eXDee

4032 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1042623 12-May-2014 20:29

cjmchch: I'm a bit confused what point is trying to be made here. If you bring unlimited plans into the mix, performance will not necessarily be identical and it depends on your customers usage patterns/consumption.

Water pipes are often an analogy for Network connections, so lets use that here, even if it over simplifies. I acknowledge you probably understand this, so not trying to be condescending, but just want to go back to square 1 just to alleviate misunderstanding of what you're trying to say.

The ISPs total bandwidth (bandwidth being the total available connection speed/capacity, not quantity of data) is one big pipe, with lots of little pipes coming off it. With capped plans, everyones only allowed to take a certain amount of litres out every month. What this means, is people are sparing with their usage of the water, and so self limit their usage. The result is a consistently high water pressure through every customers pipe, as at any one time when you take some water from it, as everyone is being mindful of how much water they use and how often.

However, make that unlimited, and now we have customers taking water constantly. There are now several customers continuously with the tap on. The water pressure is going to drop, as more people are simultaneously using it. Even the ones who arent using it continuously may possibly use the water for a longer period, because they don't have to be concerned about using too much. If the pipe doesn't have a high enough water pressure to cope with this, everyone just ends up with a trickle coming out of their tap.

It doesn't matter if the pipe to your house is really big (100Mb/s) if the amount of water available to you is a trickle. Can't fill the pipe with that.

The solution of course is to increase the water pressure, but that of course costs the ISP more. And if the price of the plans are all the same, and people who were previously paying more for large caps, are now playing less, you can see why unlimited plans can easily make problems for ISPs if not managed properly. This is why peoples expectation of zero traffic management free for all on unlimited plans can actually not be a good idea in times of high loading.

Note that its water pressure, or perhaps rate of flow if thats preferred, not a total quantity of water. Thats because ISPs buy their capacity in megabytes per second (water flow rate) whereas you pay per megabyte (litre).

cjmchch

264 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1042642 12-May-2014 20:43

eXDee: cjmchch: I'm a bit confused what point is trying to be made here. If you bring unlimited plans into the mix, performance will not necessarily be identical and it depends on your customers usage patterns/consumption.

Water pipes are often an analogy for Network connections, so lets use that here, even if it over simplifies.
The ISPs total bandwidth is one big pipe, with lots of little pipes coming off it. With capped plans, everyones only allowed to take a certain amount of litres out every month. What this means, is people are sparing with their usage of the water, and so self limit their usage. The result is a consistently high water pressure through every customers pipe, as at any one time when you take some water from it.

However, make that unlimited, and now we have customers taking water constantly. There are now several customers continuously with the tap on. The water pressure is going to drop, as more people are simultaneously using it. Even the ones who arent using it continuously may possibly use the water for a longer period, because they don't have to be concerned about using too much. If the pipe doesn't have a high enough water pressure to cope with this, everyone just ends up with a trickle coming out of their tap.

It doesn't matter if the pipe to your house is really big (100Mb/s) if the amount of water available to you is a trickle. Can't fill the pipe with that.

The solution of course is to increase the water pressure, but that of course costs the ISP more. And if the price of the plans are all the same, and people who were previously paying more for large caps, are now playing less, you can see why unlimited plans can easily make problems for ISPs if not managed properly. This is why peoples expectation of zero traffic management free for all on unlimited plans can actually not be a good idea in times of high loading.

Note that its water pressure, or perhaps rate of flow if thats preferred, not a total quantity of water. Thats because ISPs buy their capacity in megabytes per second (water flow rate) whereas you pay per megabyte (litre).

I couldn't agree more...but just as an aside to your analogy - If the pressure has dropped because I, as an unlimited user, am using the water constantly, surely the pressure will drop further if my data pack neighbour comes on-line and turns on his tap. Reverse that and it is no different - the pressure will be identical for me, as a consumer, at any given point no matter whether my quantity of water is restricted or unlimited as any other user. The 'pressure' of the flow of water is determined by the number of people with their taps open, when all taps are flowing at the same rate, not by how much water they run through their pipes.

Lenovo

Shop now for Lenovo laptops and other devices (affiliate link).

Aredwood

3885 posts

Uber Geek

#1042650 12-May-2014 20:58

The other reason I would like to see Snap stay with their current setup. Is that their needs to be at least 1 ISP in NZ that offers better network performance than the other main ISPs. Without needing to pay for a business grade plan.

Snap would probably need to charge quite a bit more than the other ISPs to offer an unlimited plan while still offering their current network performance.

I think the other ISPs are partly making their unlimited plans cheaper to try and bring in more customers who don't use the internet much. But who don't want to worry about possible bill shock. And in Telecoms and Vodafones case they can bundle mobile services. To spread their fixed costs per customer across more products.

It will also get alot worse when UFB becomes more common. Out of my "circle" of close friends Im the only one who currently has UFB. When some of the others get UFB I will probably setup permanent VPN links between them. Copying large amounts of data around, at 50Mbit without any traffic shaping (due to VPN encryption). And yes there are ways to download torrents while bypassing traffic shaping. Supposedly this was partly why Telecoms previous attempts at unlimited plans failed.

eXDee

4032 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1042652 12-May-2014 20:59

cjmchch:
eXDee: cjmchch: I'm a bit confused what point is trying to be made here. If you bring unlimited plans into the mix, performance will not necessarily be identical and it depends on your customers usage patterns/consumption.

Water pipes are often an analogy for Network connections, so lets use that here, even if it over simplifies.
The ISPs total bandwidth is one big pipe, with lots of little pipes coming off it. With capped plans, everyones only allowed to take a certain amount of litres out every month. What this means, is people are sparing with their usage of the water, and so self limit their usage. The result is a consistently high water pressure through every customers pipe, as at any one time when you take some water from it.

However, make that unlimited, and now we have customers taking water constantly. There are now several customers continuously with the tap on. The water pressure is going to drop, as more people are simultaneously using it. Even the ones who arent using it continuously may possibly use the water for a longer period, because they don't have to be concerned about using too much. If the pipe doesn't have a high enough water pressure to cope with this, everyone just ends up with a trickle coming out of their tap.

It doesn't matter if the pipe to your house is really big (100Mb/s) if the amount of water available to you is a trickle. Can't fill the pipe with that.

The solution of course is to increase the water pressure, but that of course costs the ISP more. And if the price of the plans are all the same, and people who were previously paying more for large caps, are now playing less, you can see why unlimited plans can easily make problems for ISPs if not managed properly. This is why peoples expectation of zero traffic management free for all on unlimited plans can actually not be a good idea in times of high loading.

Note that its water pressure, or perhaps rate of flow if thats preferred, not a total quantity of water. Thats because ISPs buy their capacity in megabytes per second (water flow rate) whereas you pay per megabyte (litre).

I couldn't agree more...but just as an aside to your analogy - If the pressure has dropped because I, as an unlimited user, am using the water constantly, surely the pressure will drop further if my data pack neighbour comes on-line and turns on his tap. Reverse that and it is no different - the pressure will be identical for me, as a consumer, at any given point no matter whether my quantity of water is restricted or unlimited as any other user. The 'pressure' of the flow of water is determined by the number of people with their taps open, when all taps are flowing at the same rate, not by how much water they run through their pipes.

(fyi edited my post above for clarification)

Exactly, hence why having unlimited plans available from an ISP, if not separated into a separate bandwidth pool, can affect all users.
If half the ISP is on unlimited with the taps on full blast consistently, and the people on capped data plans are drinking from the same pipe, they too will get poor performance.
If however, the unlimited plan is being fed off a separate pipe, then the people on the capped data plans may have perfectly fine rate of flow, even when the people on the unlimited plan are down to a trickle.

Thats what people here are concerned about - both having unlimited users affect the capped users performance, or having a situation like telecom did where the 500gb plan stopped being advertised when the unlimited one came in. Some users want to move this much data but at a guarantee of high speeds, so are willing to pay for it. (yes i know telecoms 500gb plan is still available by request, but you get the idea)

There is of course the option that BigPipe took, and just go no frills, opting to spend it up on tons of spare bandwidth so they dont run out even if everyone has the taps on full blast, but thats a totally different tactic and i imagine couldn't work for many other ISPs. Of course, i cant speak on behalf of snaps capacity at all, so this is all just concern and/or speculation.

Of course, there are ways of offering unlimited plans without everything being poor performance. This ranges from separate bandwidth pools or buying heaps of bandwidth as mentioned, to traffic prioritization, to aggressive shaping, to large cache farms, and more.

cjmchch

264 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1042653 12-May-2014 21:00

I come back to what I have said previously, there are people here mistaking flow as opposed to volume.

Performance = flow and flow is your transfer rate/speed (simplified) 100Mbit's/50Mbits/20Mbits ~ whatever
Bandwidth = volume and volume is your data allocation = unlimited, 500G, 200G, 100G ~whatever

Never will they be the same thing.

Do you think that by me having unlimited the performance of your connection is going to drop, but it won't if I am on a data pack? If so, you're sadly mistaken.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that unlimited isn't going to create issues, what I am saying is that the same performance issues are going to be there for all customers irrespective of whether or not they are on data packs or unlimited. It is the number of people connected, the speed of their connections and throughput that create the performance issues.

mercutio

1392 posts

Uber Geek

#1042655 12-May-2014 21:01

cjmchch: I find it rather intriguing that so many of you would rather have a data pack than unlimited - so as to ensure consistency with your data transfer rates - bizarre really, given your speed will be no different if you are downloading at 100Mb/s on an unlimited plan compared to being on a data pack. The only thing that will change is the amount you pay.

If I am on an unlimited plan of 100Mbits and download an item, is that materially going to affect your speed purely because I am on unlimited.

Currently my download/upload speeds will be identical irrespective of whether I am on data package or unlimited.

Come on people, put some logic into your thinking - dial up modems are history

Odd thought patterns...

well the move from dialup modems to adsl is what brought us bandwidth caps. dialup was just charged by the hour...

but i think it's you that's not really applying logic.

the real cost of bandwidth in NZ is generally considered to be around $20 a megabit in small quantities plus backhaul, equipment etc. it can be less than that - it is now common to use redundant capacity in parallel, and there are two legs of the southern cross. which means if you use more than 50% capacity you will run out of capacity in the case of an outage at peak times. it's also less within new zealand etc.

but $20/megabit as a gross simplification is a nice number. a megabit can do about 320 gigabytes of traffic a month, but most users bias their traffic and don't spread their downloading, youtube etc over a 24 hour period. so for residential users they tend to use it more in the evening and businesses they tend to use it more during the daytime.

so if each individual user means you need to buy say 2 megabit of bandwidth at a cost of $20/megabit, then each user has a bandwidth cost of $40/month. but if you have a 50/50 split of business and residential users, with different peak time utilisation you may be able to only buy 1 megabit of bandwidth per user and still give good speeds.

but then you bring in an unlimited plan, and people download at fast speeds in peak hours, opening lots of connections, using up 10 megabit on peak every night through the whole of the peak time. well, unless you have enough business users and light users to buffer costs, then the raw cost can end up being more like 5 megabit, costing more like $100/month. so say you want to charge them $200/month, then only the heaviest users will want to use it. but if you charge them say $120/month, then you may find that only 1/10 is a high usage user, and a lot of other people only watch the odd youtube video, or have kids that watch youtube after school before peak time starts or such. and say those other users are are doing 1/4 megabit each peak time utilisation, then 9*1/4+10 is 12.25 at 12.25*20=$245 bandwidth cost, for 10 users, putting it more down to a more paletable $24.50/month cost for bandwidth. then if there's more bandwidth used by businesses that needs to be bought anyway, then it may end up being the overall cost of bandwidth is even less.

the thing is when you have capped plans, and free off-peak, it encourages people to download off-peak, reducing utilisation on-peak, which means the bandwidth cost can be less than if the off-peak wasn't there at all. personally when i download stuff i never want to schedule it, but if i upload stuff i want to schedule it just because i know it'll take so long and make my internet go really slow. and i don't really want to upload any more than i can finish over night.

the problem is that even if it looks like it'll work right now that assumes that internet usage stays the same. and it doesn't. internet usage is going up constantly. new zealand volume usage is lower than some other countries, say australia, and so right now it's probably safer to do unlimited internet in new zealand than australia. and the mad australians are trying it afaik. but it's even more scary for them, because on their new fibre network the cost of backhaul is set by the government at $40/megabit or thereabouts. and it's not unlikely that in the near future people will want to do 10 to 20 megabit constantly during evenings while watching tv etc. streaming 1080p with high bitrates uses considerable bandwidth, enough so that youtube is reducing quality significantly compared to normal 1080p content. but once it's common to have 30 megabit internet, people will expect to be able to stream 1080p at 10 megabit/sec etc. and 4k will push bandwidth usage up even more if it takes off.

right now tv in nz is only streamed over freeview hd at 1080i and 720p, and satelitte freeview is stuck at 480p iirc. (maybe interlaced not sure) there are real bandwidth limitations around everywhere.

and i'm using a 1440p monitor, and if youtube actually had content i wanted to watch at 1440p i'd watch it in 1440p. if movies came out in 1440p i'd at least consider watching it in such if an option was given to me.

when xtra's go large plan started, a lot of heavy users downloaded a lot of data and brought the whole system to a crawl. they tried to deprioritise bittorrent etc, and the heavy downloaders just masqueraded their traffic as https, ssh etc. which meant that even using ssh and visiting normal web sites could be slow on their network. slingshot's been well known to prioritise http and https to this day. and it sets up a dangerous precedent.

if users really want to transfer large volumes of traffic, then it's beneficial to all if they do it in such a way that it doesn't impact other network users. and having at least soft policies to encourage such is a good thing. that said, it's well known that trucks have a large impact on the road networks in new zealand, and we just let them away with it at the moment, and there's been no serious push to move when they travel around. it's certainly easier to treat everyone equally, and you know some of these heavy users may use bittorrent and seed locally, uploading lots of data to other new zealand users decreasing the international bandwidth costs of new zealand in general.

charsleysa

597 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1042660 12-May-2014 21:09

cjmchch: I come back to what I have said previously, there are people here mistaking flow as opposed to volume.

Performance = flow and flow is your transfer rate/speed (simplified) 100Mbit's/50Mbits/20Mbits ~ whatever
Bandwidth = volume and volume is your data allocation = unlimited, 500G, 200G, 100G ~whatever

Never will they be the same thing.

Do you think that by me having unlimited the performance of your connection is going to drop, but it won't if I am on a data pack? If so, you're sadly mistaken.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that unlimited isn't going to create issues, what I am saying is that the same performance issues are going to be there for all customers irrespective of whether or not they are on data packs or unlimited. It is the number of people connected, the speed of their connections and throughput that create the performance issues.

You don't seem to get that bandwidth and throughput go hand in hand.

When you offer people unlimited they aren't going to be watching their bandwidth so you are more likely to have an increase of throughput for an increased period of time.

If someone only had 1GB of bandwidth on a 100mbps connection they would not want to be using the internet often, if at all for anything other than checking emails. On the other hand if they had 10TB of bandwidth then they wouldn't mind running at 100mbps for extended periods of time.

So yes, offering unlimited will cause increased throughput and congestion.

Regards
Stefan Andres Charsley

cjmchch

264 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1042663 12-May-2014 21:13

mercutio:
cjmchch: I find it rather intriguing that so many of you would rather have a data pack than unlimited - so as to ensure consistency with your data transfer rates - bizarre really, given your speed will be no different if you are downloading at 100Mb/s on an unlimited plan compared to being on a data pack. The only thing that will change is the amount you pay.

If I am on an unlimited plan of 100Mbits and download an item, is that materially going to affect your speed purely because I am on unlimited.

Currently my download/upload speeds will be identical irrespective of whether I am on data package or unlimited.

Come on people, put some logic into your thinking - dial up modems are history

Odd thought patterns...

well the move from dialup modems to adsl is what brought us bandwidth caps. dialup was just charged by the hour...

but i think it's you that's not really applying logic.

the real cost of bandwidth in NZ is generally considered to be around $20 a megabit in small quantities plus backhaul, equipment etc. it can be less than that - it is now common to use redundant capacity in parallel, and there are two legs of the southern cross. which means if you use more than 50% capacity you will run out of capacity in the case of an outage at peak times. it's also less within new zealand etc.

but $20/megabit as a gross simplification is a nice number. a megabit can do about 320 gigabytes of traffic a month, but most users bias their traffic and don't spread their downloading, youtube etc over a 24 hour period. so for residential users they tend to use it more in the evening and businesses they tend to use it more during the daytime.

so if each individual user means you need to buy say 2 megabit of bandwidth at a cost of $20/megabit, then each user has a bandwidth cost of $40/month. but if you have a 50/50 split of business and residential users, with different peak time utilisation you may be able to only buy 1 megabit of bandwidth per user and still give good speeds.

but then you bring in an unlimited plan, and people download at fast speeds in peak hours, opening lots of connections, using up 10 megabit on peak every night through the whole of the peak time. well, unless you have enough business users and light users to buffer costs, then the raw cost can end up being more like 5 megabit, costing more like $100/month. so say you want to charge them $200/month, then only the heaviest users will want to use it. but if you charge them say $120/month, then you may find that only 1/10 is a high usage user, and a lot of other people only watch the odd youtube video, or have kids that watch youtube after school before peak time starts or such. and say those other users are are doing 1/4 megabit each peak time utilisation, then 9*1/4+10 is 12.25 at 12.25*20=$245 bandwidth cost, for 10 users, putting it more down to a more paletable $24.50/month cost for bandwidth. then if there's more bandwidth used by businesses that needs to be bought anyway, then it may end up being the overall cost of bandwidth is even less.

the thing is when you have capped plans, and free off-peak, it encourages people to download off-peak, reducing utilisation on-peak, which means the bandwidth cost can be less than if the off-peak wasn't there at all. personally when i download stuff i never want to schedule it, but if i upload stuff i want to schedule it just because i know it'll take so long and make my internet go really slow. and i don't really want to upload any more than i can finish over night.

the problem is that even if it looks like it'll work right now that assumes that internet usage stays the same. and it doesn't. internet usage is going up constantly. new zealand volume usage is lower than some other countries, say australia, and so right now it's probably safer to do unlimited internet in new zealand than australia. and the mad australians are trying it afaik. but it's even more scary for them, because on their new fibre network the cost of backhaul is set by the government at $40/megabit or thereabouts. and it's not unlikely that in the near future people will want to do 10 to 20 megabit constantly during evenings while watching tv etc. streaming 1080p with high bitrates uses considerable bandwidth, enough so that youtube is reducing quality significantly compared to normal 1080p content. but once it's common to have 30 megabit internet, people will expect to be able to stream 1080p at 10 megabit/sec etc. and 4k will push bandwidth usage up even more if it takes off.

right now tv in nz is only streamed over freeview hd at 1080i and 720p, and satelitte freeview is stuck at 480p iirc. (maybe interlaced not sure) there are real bandwidth limitations around everywhere.

and i'm using a 1440p monitor, and if youtube actually had content i wanted to watch at 1440p i'd watch it in 1440p. if movies came out in 1440p i'd at least consider watching it in such if an option was given to me.

when xtra's go large plan started, a lot of heavy users downloaded a lot of data and brought the whole system to a crawl. they tried to deprioritise bittorrent etc, and the heavy downloaders just masqueraded their traffic as https, ssh etc. which meant that even using ssh and visiting normal web sites could be slow on their network. slingshot's been well known to prioritise http and https to this day. and it sets up a dangerous precedent.

if users really want to transfer large volumes of traffic, then it's beneficial to all if they do it in such a way that it doesn't impact other network users. and having at least soft policies to encourage such is a good thing. that said, it's well known that trucks have a large impact on the road networks in new zealand, and we just let them away with it at the moment, and there's been no serious push to move when they travel around. it's certainly easier to treat everyone equally, and you know some of these heavy users may use bittorrent and seed locally, uploading lots of data to other new zealand users decreasing the international bandwidth costs of new zealand in general.

I come back to what I said earlier - is the speed at which you are going to watch your program going to be different if you are on a 100Mbit data pack than it would if you were on 100Mbit unlimited. It will be identical! Your PERFORMANCE will not change at any given point no matter what plan you're on.

eXDee

4032 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1042689 12-May-2014 21:54

cjmchch: Performance = flow and flow is your transfer rate/speed (simplified) 100Mbit's/50Mbits/20Mbits ~ whatever
Bandwidth = volume and volume is your data allocation = unlimited, 500G, 200G, 100G ~whatever

Bandwidth is actually the transfer rate/speed:

In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth,[1] network bandwidth,[2] data bandwidth,[3] or digital bandwidth[4][5] is a measurement of bit-rate of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits per second or multiples of it (bit/s, kbit/s, Mbit/s, Gbit/s, etc.).

Data, data cap, quota, allocation etc are all better terms to refer to the amount you get per month.

cjmchch: I come back to what I said earlier - is the speed at which you are going to watch your program going to be different if you are on a 100Mbit data pack than it would if you were on 100Mbit unlimited. It will be identical! Your PERFORMANCE will not change at any given point no matter what plan you're on.

Im a bit confused by this.

I like using the water pipe analogy because its extremely clear to anyone else reading, so going back to that.

Situation A: 50 customers are using a 1000 litre per second pipe. They have 100 litre per second pipes connected to it. They are allowed to take up to 5000 litres of water from this pipe each month.
This means that customers will be watching their usage, and limit their usage habits accordingly. The result is that on average, not very many customers are taking water from the pipe at any one time. We might get a customer turning on the tap to full for a short period of time, but would likely turn it off fairly soon, for fear of using up their 5000 litres very quickly. While its possible that they coincidentally could, it is less likely, on average there is less usage. As a result, every time a customer turns on the tap, they get the full 100 litre per second rate out of it.

Situation B: 50 customers are using a 1000 litre per second pipe. They have 100 litre per second pipes connected to it. They can take an unlimited amount of water from the pipe each month.
As there is no limit, 10 of these 50 customers decide they are going to turn the tap on, and leave it on at the full 100 litre per second rate . The pipes entire capacity is now used up, as we have 10 people using the entire total capacity. So when 10 more want to also leave the tap on constantly, the rate of flow for everyone now halves, we now have 20 people using it, but they are are now only going to get 50 litres per second if evenly split, as there isnt enough to go around. None of these people are penalised by leaving the tap on constantly, so thats what they do.
And then people who want to turn on the tap occasionally are also going to get a less than 100 litre per second rate - their performance is reduced due to other users, compared to the first situation. All they wanted was a reasonable amount of water for a short amount of time, without having to wait ages for it to flow in.

With that laid on the table, can you explain what you're trying to say, in similar terms? Unlimited plans change customer usage habits, and thats what is key here. Data caps are all about customer usage habits, and making it so on average, all customers aren't using the available bandwidth at any one time, as thats what the ISP is paying for and has a finite resource of, capacity in the form of bandwidth, not data allocations/quotas.

Its also important to note that as per my example above, they do what is known as overselling, which is done in all areas of IT services. They cannot provide all their customers simultaneously with the maximum advertised speed, but work on the theory that on average not everyone needs to use all the resources simultaneously. If you don't oversell/oversubscribe, you don't make any money and end up having a lot of wasted bandwidth sitting around unused.

As you can see above in that example, by having unlimited plans, performance has changed. Its halved in my simple example, compared to in the first situation.

cjmchch

264 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1042694 12-May-2014 22:05

eXDee:
cjmchch: Performance = flow and flow is your transfer rate/speed (simplified) 100Mbit's/50Mbits/20Mbits ~ whatever
Bandwidth = volume and volume is your data allocation = unlimited, 500G, 200G, 100G ~whatever

Bandwidth is actually the transfer rate/speed:

In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth,[1] network bandwidth,[2] data bandwidth,[3] or digital bandwidth[4][5] is a measurement of bit-rate of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits per second or multiples of it (bit/s, kbit/s, Mbit/s, Gbit/s, etc.).

Data, data cap, quota, allocation etc are all better terms to refer to the amount you get per month.

cjmchch: I come back to what I said earlier - is the speed at which you are going to watch your program going to be different if you are on a 100Mbit data pack than it would if you were on 100Mbit unlimited. It will be identical! Your PERFORMANCE will not change at any given point no matter what plan you're on.

Im a bit confused by this.

I like using the water pipe analogy because its extremely clear to anyone else reading, so going back to that.

50 customers are using a 1000 litre per second pipe. They have 100 litre per second pipes connected to it. They are allowed to take up to 5000 litres of water from this pipe each month.
This means that customers will be watching their usage, and limit their usage habits accordingly. The result is that on average, not very many customers are taking water from the pipe at any one time. We might get a customer turning on the tap to full for a short period of time, but would likely turn it off fairly soon, for fear of using up their 5000 litres very quickly. While its possible that they coincidentally could, it is less likely, on average there is less usage. As a result, every time a customer turns on the tap, they get the full 100 litre per second rate out of it.

50 customers are using a 1000 litre per second pipe. They have 100 litre per second pipes connected to it. They can take an unlimited amount of water from the pipe each month.
As there is no limit, 10 of these 50 customers decide they are going to turn the tap on, and leave it on at the full 100 litre per second rate . The pipes entire capacity is now used up, as we have 10 people using the entire total capacity. So when 10 more want to also leave the tap on constantly, the rate of flow for everyone now halves.
And then people who want to turn on the tap occasionally are also going to get a less than 100 litre per second rate - their performance is reduced due to other users, compared to the first situation.

With that laid on the table, can you explain what you're trying to say, in similar terms? Unlimited plans change customer usage habits, and thats what is key here.

I agree, the term bandwidth was used by me purely because the term has been used so loosely around here.

Getting back to my original comment which was talking about people wanting Data packs instead of unlimited, my whole point is that if I am on a 100Mbit 550Gb plan and you are on a 100Mbit Unlimited plan, which one of us is going to be a burden on the performance of the 'pipe' - neither, as we are both downloading at the same time, at the same rate, from the same pipe. Sure the pressure has dropped but if it was two data pack people and no unlimited users then the same problem exists. So people saying they would rather have data packs than suffer performance issues are plain and simply misguided. The issue of performance is all to do with the number of customers and the speed rather than the data allocation!

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8