A simpler and hence less costly approach for those providers serving mass markets is to stick to flat rate pricing and outlaw high-bandwidth applications that are used by only a small number of end users.
That's not going to work in the long run. Just my podcasts are about 10 GB a month. You only have to wait until there's more HD video available online and it gets easier to get at for most people to see bandwidth use per customer skyrocket.
To me, it is ironic that some of the same service providers who refused to consider enabling native multicast for video are now complaining of the consequences of video going by unicast. They can't say they weren't warned.
There are much worse things than having customers that like using your service as much as they can.
Are you thinking of scavenger on the upload or download? Because it's just
upload, it's only the subscriber's provider that needs to concern themselves
with their maintaining the tags -- they will do the necessary traffic
engineering to ensure it's not 'damaging' the upstream of their other
subscribers.
If it's download, that's a whole other ball of wax, and not what drove
Comcast to do what they're doing, and not the apparent concern of at least
North American ISPs today.
The vast bulk of users have no idea how many bytes they
consume each month or the bytes generated by different
applications. The schemes being advocated in this discussion
require that the end users be Layer 3 engineers.
"Actually, it sounds a lot like the Electric7 tariffs found in the UK for
electricity. These are typically used by low income people who have less
education than the average population. And yet they can understand the
concept of saving money by using more electricity at night.
I really think that a two-tiered QOS system such as the scavenger
suggestion is workable if the applications can do the marking. Has
anyone done any testing to see if DSCP bits are able to travel unscathed
through the public Internet?
–Michael Dillon
P.S. it would be nice to see QoS be recognized as a mechanism for
providing a degraded quality of service instead of all the “first class”
marketing puffery."
It is not question of whether you approve of the marketing puffery or not. By the way, telecom is an industry that has used tiered pricing schemes extensively, both in the ‘voice era’ and in the early dialup industry. In the early 90s there were dial up pricing plans that rewarded customers for limiting their activity to the evening and weekends. MCI, one of the early long distance voice entrants, had all sorts of discounts, including weekend and evening promotions.
Interestingly enough, although those schemes are clearly attractive from an efficiency standpoint, the entire industry have shifted towards flat rate pricing for both voice and data. To dismiss that move as purely driven by marketing strikes me as misguided. That have to be real costs involved for such a system to fall apart.
That’s not going to work in the long run. Just my podcasts are about
10 GB a month. You only have to wait until there’s more HD video
available online and it gets easier to get at for most people to see
bandwidth use per customer skyrocket.
There are much worse things than having customers that like using
your service as much as they can.
Oh, let me be clear. I don’t know if it will work long term. But businessmen like simple rules of thumb and flat rate for the masses and banishing the rest will be the default strategy. The real question is whether a pricing/service structure can be devised that allows the mass market providers to make money off the problematic heavy users. If so, then you will get a tiered structure: flat rate for the masses and a more expensive service for the Bandwidth Hogs.
Actually, there are not many worse things than customers that use your service so much that they ruin your business model. Yes, I believe the industry needs to reach accomodation with the Bandwidth Hogs because they will drive the growth, and if it is profitable growth, then all parties benefit.
But you are only going to get the Bandwidth Addicts to pay more is by banishing them from flat services. They won’t go gently into the night. In fact, I am sure how profitable are the Addicts given the stereotype of the 20 something …
Actually, it sounds a lot like the Electric7 tariffs found in the UK for
electricity. These are typically used by low income people who have less
education than the average population. And yet they can understand the
concept of saving money by using more electricity at night.
I can't comment on MPLS or DSCP bits but the concept of night-time on the
internet I found interesting. This would be a localized event as night moved
around the earth. If the scheduling feature in many of the fileshare
applications were preset to run full bore during late night hours and back
off to 1/4 speed during the day I wonder how that might affect both the
networks and the ISPs. Since the far side of the planet would be on the
opposite schedule from each other, that might also help to localize the
traffic from fileshare networks.
Seems to me a programmer setting a default schedule in an application is far
simpler than many of the other suggestions I've seen for solving this
problem.
End users do not have any interest in saving ISP upstream bandwidth, their interest is to get as much as they can, when they want/need it. So solving a bandwidth crunch by trying to make end user applications behave in an ISP friendly manner is a concept that doesn't play well with reality.
Congestion should be at the individual customer access, not in the distribution, not at the core.
> Seems to me a programmer setting a default schedule in an
application is
> far simpler than many of the other suggestions I've seen for solving
> this problem.
End users do not have any interest in saving ISP upstream
bandwidth,
they also have no interest in learning so setting defaults in popular
software, for example RFC1918 space zones in MS DNS server, can make all the
difference in the world.
This way, the bulk of filesharing would have the defaults set to minimize
use during peak periods and still allow the freedom on a per user basis to
change that. Most would not simply because they don't know about it. The
effects of such a default could be considerable.
Also if this default stepping back during peak times only affected upload
speeds, the user would never notice, in fact if they did notice they would
probably like that it allows them more bandwidth for browsing and sending
email during the hours they are likely to use it.
IN fairness, most P2P applications such as bittorrent already have the
settings there, they are not setup by default. Also, they do limit the
amount of dl and ul based on the bandwidth the user sets up. The
application is setup to handle it, the users usually just set the
bandwidth all the way up and ignore it.
> The vast bulk of users have no idea how many bytes they
> consume each month or the bytes generated by different
> applications. The schemes being advocated in this discussion
> require that the end users be Layer 3 engineers.
"Actually, it sounds a lot like the Electric7 tariffs found in the UK for
electricity. These are typically used by low income people who have less
education than the average population. And yet they can understand the
concept of saving money by using more electricity at night.
And actually a lot of networks do this with DPI boxes limiting P2P
throughput during the day and increasing or removing the limit at night.
Back in the dawn of the public internet this same sort of thing was
argued fiercely on lists like com-priv (commercialization and
privatization of the internet.)
It was usually around flat rate vs bandwidth charging.
My take was that bandwidth pricing lets you buy as much pipe as you
might ever need, like 100mb/s or more SOHO, but only pay for what you
use, which seemed rational if the technology supported that.
Flat-rate pricing encourages you to guess the most bandwidth you'll
ever need in advance and only pay for that.
In theory hybrid models could exist (variable, on-demand bandwidth
shaping and all that, it's pretty easy in the p-p wireless world.)
What's happened is the worst of both worlds where vendors are selling
end-users flat-rate pipes (think, for example, 20mb/s FTTH for under
$100/mo) but wishing customers would use it as if it were priced per
bit.
This is a business model dislocation.
It reminds me of the time, back in my heartier young man days, when
I'd frequent an all you could eat buffet nearby and finally the owner
tossed me out after I overstayed my welcome one day, I'd sit there
doing school work and make trips to the buffet every so often, saying
"yes, that's ALL you can eat, now get OUTTA here!!!"