contention

arctictree

Not sure if this has been asked before but...

Is there anyway of actually proving how many people are sharing your BB line? My (wireless) provider says I am on contention ratio of 24:1 but I am convinced with the amount of new connections going up locally that it must be higher. My speed has just got slower and slower and slower over the months....

A

watty

No, only they know. Unless they are inept, in which case no-one knows.

JNive

while you may not know for sure, the ONLY target you can use in such a situation is the 'minimum throughput available on a fully contended usage basis' and as long as its above that then you have no way of knowing if its more contended than they advertise, however if its below it then you have grounds to believe it may be more than advertised, assuming that each client has equal tcp priority.

So if its 24:1 and your Provider gives you a 2mbps/512kbps service for instance, then its reasonable to assume, that even at full contention, that you will be provided with AT LEAST 85kbps/21kbps at all times of the day ( this applies to only relatively near hosts, for best accuracy )

watty

If the data rate is often anywhere near he worst case contneion, then your ISP probably has bigger problems than last mile contention. Or you are being throttled for exceeding fair use/ cap limits.

JNive

exactly, i mean if you are stuck on those speeds for anything more than 30 minutes or so between 5pm and 8pm, then they need to rethink their capacity lol.

watty

JNive wrote:

AT LEAST 85kbps/21kbps at all times of the day

Actually I've only ever seen that slow on Ripwave, 3G and throttled Broadband gone over cap.

gerryo

JNive wrote:

AT LEAST 85kbps/21kbps at all times of the day

watty wrote:

Actually I've only ever seen that slow on Ripwave, 3G and throttled Broadband gone over cap.

I've personally experienced Breeze running @ <80kbps (supposed to be 3M/3M 24:1). Lasted for a few hours. Not funny at all.:mad:

JNive

If the ISP just lumps loads of conenctions together, it may be that its caused by the other 23 users all using torrents/p2p/download accelators resulting in say 40 open connections per host.

If you then were downloading a file in your browser ( single connection ) then that artificially increases contention. 24:1 is contention related to physical connections, which unfortunately has no direct correlation to TCP/Session Contention.

In the mentioned scenario, its really a contention of 920:1, so you can see how things can go horribly wrong for some individual users lol.

watty

Also 24:1 and 48:1 doesn't necessarily mean 24 or 48 users on one connection. 24:1 may mean 48 users on twice the per user bandwidth or 2400 users on 100 times the per user bandwidth.

Higher aggregations of users gives a better user experience.

Little-Devil

arctictree wrote:

Not sure if this has been asked before but...

Is there anyway of actually proving how many people are sharing your BB line? My (wireless) provider says I am on contention ratio of 24:1 A

I would guess from what you were told above you are on 1MB if its 24:1. If your on 2MB then it would be a ratio of 48:1, not sure for 3MB could be 54:1.

watty

The contention does not need to be related to speed. Some suppliers the higher speed packages have less contention (but are very very expensive as a result). Other suppliers have the same contention for all residential customers and a lower contention for Business customers.