Slingshot staff are trying to get All You Can Eat (AYCE) axed

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › Slingshot staff are trying to get All You Can Eat (AYCE) axed

harpertown

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Wannabe Geek

#72144 21-Nov-2010 21:13

From a slingshot staff member on the slingshot forums:

Some colleagues and myself put a business case together well backed by
a screed of customer complaints, mis-interpretation, Incident tickets logged
that people think are complaints and a myriad of other palava over the last 3 months
and ... push to get AYCE axed

Btw .. the cricket is all down hill by looks

Cheers

forum link: http://forums.slingshot.co.nz/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=4005&p=45386#p45386

tripp

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#407492 22-Nov-2010 06:46

I have no idea why companies try to do AYCE, yes we are on it but that is because we use around 120gigs a month (games, youtube etc) and this is the only plan that won't break the bank in the way of $$$

However as its the only AYCE plan out there it gets everyone that does big downloads (over 300gigs) a month which stuffs it for everyone.

I have no idea why a company will not come out with a 150 - 200gig plan for $100 or so, after the limit then charge people $2 - $5 a gig.

This kind of plan would be good for flats or people that have more than 2 internet devices in there homes. It also keeps people that just download to download off the plan as $5gig over the limit will hurt.

You could even limit some things (i.e. p2p) but that limit should still be fast and only on major peak hours (6pm - 10pm).
Also no free traffic (off peak) would be good that way the speed should be fine 24/7

NZCrusader

646 posts

Ultimate Geek

#407507 22-Nov-2010 08:31

They keep axing these plans because people QQ that its not full line speed , or even close like capped plans.

They seem to think they will get ultra fast speeds and can download as much as they like..

I think that ISPs need to market these plans, stating that they are slow/slower than capped plans and are not ideal for heavy p2p.
They also need to advertise them directed at families / flats, as to deter the data vampires, so they cant QQ in the end.

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Lias

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#407522 22-Nov-2010 09:06

LOL

If I was serious I wouldn't have put a smiley face there I did forget to put a question mark though
BEFORE the smiley face which obviously has cast some doubt to the true intention of my post.
Also the chances of axing an initiative introduced by senior people is similar to my
winning powerball 3 weeks in a row (Or us winning the 3rd Test in India!!!)

Kindest regards

The guy who posted that also posted this.

I'm a geek, a gamer, a dad, a Quic user, and an IT Professional. I have a full rack home lab, size 15 feet, an epic beard and Asperger's. I'm a bit of a Cypherpunk, who believes information wants to be free and the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. If you use my Quic signup you can also use the code R570394EKGIZ8 for free setup.

scottr

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#407615 22-Nov-2010 12:20

It was actually a misquote from the start., his initial post was in response to a statement someone else made about what would he do if everyone found out a way to beat prioritisation.

NZCrusader

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Ultimate Geek

#407748 22-Nov-2010 15:47

Saved by the..

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Ragnor

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#407947 23-Nov-2010 00:24

ISP's buy bandwidth not data and they do not buy bandwidth at 1:1 rates with users line rates. They buy at a contention ratio that they can afford, example: 400:1 which would be something like 10Mbit for every 40 users, 100Mbit for every 400 users etc.

The principle is somewhat similar to a motorway, if you have 400 cars going south at 8am you don't have a 400 lane motorway, you have 4 lanes and traffic queues and flows.

They charge for data because it's currently the best/fairest way to charge heavier users of a contended bandwidth service more than low usage users.

When you have no limits people will leave things like download managers, torrent programs and online backup agents running 24x7... if enough people do this the contended bandwidth is saturated and general performance for web/email/video suffers.

Unlimited while maintaining decent performance is not economically viable for ISP's until the cost bandwidth both international and domestic comes down to a point where they can afford to provision bandwidth at rates like 5:1 instead of 400:1.

The key point here is ISP's could offer fast unlimited if they could run at low enough contention ratios.

Now lets look at some NZ numbers for domestic backhaul/handover capacity!

Assume average sync rate of 10Mbit (which is the aim of Chorus/Telecom wholesale cabinet program). The handover links from Telecom wholesale to the ISP are currently dimensioned at 45kb/s per subscriber (they are increased periodically for growth but it's effectively 45kb / subscriber)

So hey that's a ratio of 10240:45 aka 227:1 aka 10Mbit for every 227 customers (who have 10Mbit line rates).

Hint: This is bad, "through the straw".

Now this is where the "blame Telecom" brigade will undoutably chime in but first...

What about the "better network", that's using non Telecom LLU gear and non Telecom backhaul/handover.. It's been stated publicly before (iirc) that backhaul for LLU connections for Slingshot is 100kb/s. 10240:100 aka ~102:1 aka 10Mbit for every 102 customers

Ok that's over 100% better than Telecom wholesale which is good but.....

Still absolutely awful by international standards (BT in the UK aims for 5:1 and offered 50:1 and 20:1 5 years ago)

AND that ladies and gentlemen is why we do not have unmetered national or decently performing unlimited or large data cap plans.

Before even taking international capacity into account: domestic transit is too constrained and too expensive. If you have lots of heavy users in NZ the straw gets saturated and maxed out (as per Xnet, Orcon, Slingshot).

Transparent web proxies, p2p and media caching and local akamai and google caches are good tricks but they are also on the ISP network side of the equation ie: after handover links.

Ergo..

Performance on AYCE and all Slingshot plans in peak time will continue to be horrible for the foreseeable future imho!

KiwiSloth

1 post

Wannabe Geek

#408029 23-Nov-2010 10:07

As a small ISP in Hamilton, we do offer unlimited plans to our business customers on the Velocity fibre network, however we have restrictions on traffic type i.e. no torrents.

The difficult part with unlimited plans is the expense of international traffic, for example 10mbit of international capacity costs over $3000 per month PLUS handover costs to the ISP. Then you still have to factor in the national traffic costs (much lower, but still not cheap) and the delivery costs to the end customer, plus any support, admin and billing costs.

The average business only really uses their internet connection for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

The average home user only uses their connection for approx 4 hours per day 7 days a week.

The two slightly overlap at the end of the day (between the end of the school day and business day) but still mix pretty well.

Anything less than 512kbit/sec feels slow to the end user, and ideally you need the connection to be capable of bursts to at least 2mbit/sec to really feel fast.

So this means that for your busy parts of the day you need contention ratios of 20:1 or better to get a connection that doesn't feel slow.

Since in New Zealand we still rely so heavily on international sites, this means the ISP needs to have a good international contention ratio.

Based on $3000 per month for 10mbit international for a contention ratio of 20:1 thats $150 per month just for the international capacity. Add on national, delivery, handover, support, admin and billing costs, plus some profit margin and you get an idea of how much a true flat rate / unlimited connection needs to cost in New Zealand.

If we can shift the NZ internet demand to more national data, then the costs come right down, and in fact there are already consumer grade unlimited national plans around for less than $100 per month.

Akamai and other local caches are helping this, but so many "NZ" web hosts actually host their customer websites overseas. Explaining to end users that a .co.nz doesn't necessarily mean the website is based in NZ can be difficult.

Wise

Send money globally for less with Wise - one free transfer up to NZ$900 (affiliate link).

NZCrusader

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Ultimate Geek

#408626 23-Nov-2010 23:22

Everyone I have helped establish a website with, bar one. Has all chosen to host on US servers because its so cheap.

I dont know why they charge so much here. Its not like many of these simple surfing grade webpages are going to overload their storage capacity , nor their bandwidth ( with obvious exceptions for trade me & other popular public sites. )

We just need to breed faster and get the population up a bit more so services are cheaper with the cost being spread out by more. Would have also been nice if the govt didnt sell off TCNZ.

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matts231

29 posts

Geek

#408638 24-Nov-2010 00:20

Local hosting costs more because guess what? Hosting providers need to pay for bandwidth too ;)

NZCrusader

646 posts

Ultimate Geek

#408652 24-Nov-2010 01:37

True. I dont deny that.

But for a lady simply trying to put up a page for her bird watch group with the latest photos. The cost was too much. ( Dont know if it has changed since then. Was a lady I helped set up a site for, she ended up choosing NZ hosting, but reluctantly.. )

I guess what im trying to say, is that its a little costy for people making sites that arent intended to be high traffic sites.

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webwat

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#408845 24-Nov-2010 12:29

NZCrusader: Everyone I have helped establish a website with, bar one. Has all chosen to host on US servers because its so cheap.

I don't know why they charge so much here. Its not like many of these simple surfing grade webpages are going to overload their storage capacity , nor their bandwidth ( with obvious exceptions for trade me & other popular public sites. )

We just need to breed faster and get the population up a bit more so services are cheaper with the cost being spread out by more. Would have also been nice if the govt didn't sell off TCNZ.

Do you remember what Telecom (or even the Post Office) was like before the government privatised? Better just to demand more competition and complain like anything if another carrier ever tries to become more like a monopoly. Keep an eye on CFH with that in mind... Proposed fibreco are now expected to provide L2 (ie network layer) service equivalent to UBS. Seems like we haven't learned anything.

I am not aware of access equipment that supports 5:1 contention for end users, but it all depends how you calculate it. An OLT may support 64 users on GPON but its still a 2.5Gbps terminal so every 100 OLT ports could share 20Gigs backhaul at 5:1. I think content caching and network peering should be pushed closer to the user instead of telecom's high contention on L2 tunneling all the way to the ISP.

Time to find a new industry!

raytaylor

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#411701 1-Dec-2010 18:33

You can feed a 48 port ethernet DSLAM with a 1gig fibre connection, which would equate to 20 megabits per port. Problem is that the 13,000 best effort ports in hawkes bay / twin cities area would probably be sharing 10 gigabits back to auckland. And the dedicated links like SHDSL and telecom fibre would be sharing that also.

I would have thought that in areas where slingshot or any other isp had unbundled, they could spread or tier the caching equipment out into the exchanges and put it into their cage right before it feeds the dslam.

Ray Taylor

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raytaylor

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#411702 1-Dec-2010 18:37

Also local hosting costs more.

If you do a reverse ip query on a godaddy or some big international host, you may find that they are hosting 500+ websites from the same server box.

Where as in NZ, a web host would be lucky to be hosting 500 websites.
And international bandwidth costs the same to them if visitors from outside NZ want to see your locally hosted NZ website.
When the google crawler hits them every month it must really hurt for an hour or so as it pulls all the html and images.

Ray Taylor

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