NBB satellite query

emmemm

on the NBB satellite broadband site under "the Astra Factor":

In the same way as mobile phones used to cost several hundred Euro three years ago but now only cost a few Euro the price of satellite broadband has now dropped dramatically (€13.95 per month. inc. vat) and is now available to everybody.

so how come their packages start at e38.95?

barnicles

NBB satellite is just Astra2Connect's reseller for Ireland.

If your interested in getting BB, don't get satellite unless its a last result.

VoIP, gaming and many other applications don't work .

boggerboy

emmemm wrote: »

on the NBB satellite broadband site under "the Astra Factor":

In the same way as mobile phones used to cost several hundred Euro three years ago but now only cost a few Euro the price of satellite broadband has now dropped dramatically (€13.95 per month. inc. vat) and is now available to everybody.

so how come their packages start at e38.95?

gangsters, don't touch with a bargepole

CamperMan

boggerboy wrote: »

gangsters, don't touch with a bargepole

Getting to think that myself... I signed up with them on the "Home Business" package paying over €80 per month and so far I think this service is S**T... after the first week, my internet went to a painful crawl, then I noticed it went to normal speed after about 10pm.. I phoned NBB and they told me that my service was restricted due to excessive usage, 5GB in over a week, they told me the download limit per month is a poor 2GB... I am running a web based business and how the hell can I run it with such tight restrictions, furthermore, they failed to answer emails, but will take a phone call...

I might start to look elsewhere now... a joke

Sponge Bob

NBB do not mention caps or limits anywhere in their package descriptions .

They once had a fair usage policy but got rid of it it seems !!

http://www.nbb.ie/terms.php

( last item. click)

elsewhere they say

http://www.nbb.ie/faq.php#q7

"Is there a download limit?

There is no download limit but we operate a fair usage policy."

but there is no fair usage policy is there ...or is there ??

2Gb a month is utterly unreasonable for a product marketed as Broadband , even 3 Mobile BB is not that bad , and 3 are deplorable

I did some more investigating and found that Astra 2 Connect ( the Mothership product resold by NBB) have a step restriction policy . A tightening throttle .

ANOTHER A2C reseller publishes it in full, see link below . I fail to see why NBB are not as forthcoming . This other resellers does not offer the 2mbit package but I suspect the throttling starts at 4gb and is full on 64kbits at 10Gb if you have that one .


1. 1024k package 1024k to 2 GB then 768 kbit/s to 2.5 GB then 512 kbit/s, to 3 GB to 64 kbit/s from 5 GB .

2. 512k to 1 GB then 320 kbit/s to 2 GB and above 3GB is 64 kbit/s.

see

http://www.sosat.at/faq.html#095

Was ist die ASTRA2Connect Fair Use Policy??

Da grundsätzlich kein Datenlimit bei ASTRA2Connect vorgesehen ist, muss dafür Sorge getragen werden, dass nicht einzelne User das ASTRA2Connect Netzwerk übergebührend beanspruchen.

Das heißt, dass so genannte Poweruser, die ein extrem hohes Datentransfervolumen verursachen, in der Übertragungsgeschwindigkeit gedrosselt werden. Dies passiert jedoch nur während der Spitzenauslastungszeiten.

Z.B. in der Nacht, wenn das Netz nicht belastet ist, sind auch solche User von der Drosselung nicht betroffen. Grundsätzlich werden von der Drosselung betroffene User im 30-Tage-Rhytmus wieder auf den Standard zurückgesetzt.

Wir reduzieren bei unseren Flatrates die Geschwindigkeit nach dem Fair-Use-Prinzip, um auch denen mit wenig Downloadvolumen die nötigen Bandbreiten zur Verfügung stellen zu können. Die Geschwindigkeit (Up- und Downstream) wird schrittweise wie folgt entsprechend des Downloadvolumens reduziert (dies geschieht allerdings nur, sollte die Bandbreite durch zu viele gleichzeitige Nutzer eingeschränkt sein):

Bei dsDSLcompact (oder ASTRA2Connect flexxx) 1024 ab 2 GB auf 768 kbit/s, ab 2,5 GB auf 512 kbit/s, ab 3 GB auf 384 kbit/s, ab 3,5 GB auf 256 kbit/s, ab 4 GB auf 128 kbit/s und ab 5 GB auf 64 kbit/s.

Bei dsDSLcompact (oder ASTRA2Connect flexxx) 512 ab 1 GB auf 320 kbit/s, ab 2 GB auf 160 kbit/s, ab 2,5 GB auf 96 kbit/s und ab 3 GB auf 64 kbit/s.

Bei dsDSLcompact (oder ASTRA2Connect flexxx) 256 ab 1 GB auf 128 kbit/s, ab 1,5 GB auf 96 kbit/s und ab 2 GB auf 64 kbit/s.

Diese Drosselung wird aber nicht bestehen bleiben, es findet jeden Monat ein Reset statt. nach oben

Furthermore there is a German forum where the Astra 2 Connect 'FUP' policies are regularly discussed, were anyone inclined to seek further information in it

http://www.kein-dsl.de/forum/showthread.php?&t=11083

watty

Via babelfish:

What fair is the ASTRA2Connect Use Policy?
Since in principle no data limit is intended with ASTRA2Connect, must be ensured that individual user the ASTRA2Connect over-being entitled do not stress network. That is, that power user so called, which cause an extremely high data transfer volume in transmission rate it is throttled.

This happens however only during the point extent of utilization times, i.e. in the night, if the net, are not also such user is not burdening affected by the throttling. In principle by the throttling user concerned in the 30-Tage-Rhytmus the standard are put back.

We reduce the speed with our Flatrates according to the fair Use principle, in order to be able to put also to those with small Download Volume the necessary ranges at the disposal. The speed (UP and Downstream) is reduced gradually as follows according to the Download Volumes (this happens however only, should the range by too many simultaneous users be reduced):

With (or ASTRA2Connect flexxx) 1024 dsDSLcompact starting from 2 GB to 768 kbit/s, starting from 2,5 GB to 512 kbit/s, starting from 3 GB to 384 kbit/s, starting from 3,5 GB to 256 kbit/s, starting from 4 GB to 128 kbit/s and starting from 5 GB to 64 kbit/s.

With dsDSLcompact (or ASTRA2Connect flexxx) 512 starting from 1 GB to 320 kbit/s, starting from 2 GB to 160 kbit/s, starting from 2,5 GB to 96 kbit/s and starting from 3 GB to 64 kbit/s.

With dsDSLcompact (or ASTRA2Connect flexxx) 256 starting from 1 GB to 128 kbit/s, starting from 1,5 GB to 96 kbit/s and starting from 2 GB to 64 kbit/s.

This throttling will remain not existing however, it takes place each month a RESET.

The contention is Most of Western Europe. Very much higher than Fixed Wireless, Ripwave or HSDPA contention.

Sponge Bob

de Babeling

If your usage is during peak hours you will certainly be step throttled as I explained , German Business hours I should think.

If late at night they may well be more lenient ...but as they do not explain peak and offpeak I feel NBB should instead .

Ogham

I use NBB - and kept a copy of the fair usage policy from October/November. It's mostly waffle - with no actual hard figures or limits specified.
I've copied it in full below - (if this is not allowed can someone let me know and I will delete it. )
In support of NBB - they are the cheapest 2 way satellite internet provider (when you include equipment etc). Their main competitor - Digiweb - has a shorter mention of their fair usage - which is also vague but they do mention that downloading over 2Gb a month will probably result in speed reductions.
So - not much difference between them maybe?
For people used to crappy dial up like me - the chance of 1Mbps internet connection - even with speed reductions if you go over 2GB a month is a welcome improvement.


Extract frorm Digiweb policy -

"................. policy to provide priority traffic level to users with less than 2000 MB traffic, and lower priority to users over this threshold � this prioritisation should only have effect during peak hours."

NBB Fair Usage from old site - (if you really want to read it!)

Fair Usage Policy

The concept of contention ratio comes from terrestrial networks where typically, when they were once switched, they referred to the number of available ports for a fixed population of users. For example, a telephone exchange had 10 ports for 100 users therefore the contention was 10:1. The 11th caller on a such a network would get a “busy” tone, suggesting the called recipient was engaged. They were not, the exchange was!

Contention ratios exist because the cost of providing a 1:1 or dedicated service to individuals leads to a price point that is unacceptably high. Therefore the concept of resource sharing is introduced; the trade-off is therefore: price of service versus quality of service.

This same concept followed through into shared terrestrial data networks (eg. ADSL) and was used to define the amount of bandwidth available for a population of users (since each user had a dedicated DSLAM at the exchange the contention or concurrency was only seen between the DSLAM and the core network - known as the "middle mile"). So for example, for a fixed middle mile of 500kbps and a population of 10 ADSL customers (each with max 500kbps) the contention is 10:1. The difference being that the first customer online gets 500kbps, the second concurrent customer gets 256kbps (and then so does the first) and so on. You see the degradation of performance according to the number of concurrent users, so on a typical business network it is slow during the day and speeds up at night. Telcos will typically size their middle mile (or even last mile) according to the % fill they see in their core network. Anything approaching 80% and they throw more bandwidth at it – because it is relatively cheap – thus obscuring the true effects of an over-subscribed or over-utilized network. Contention is therefore only relevant for the middle mile for big telcos offering terrestrial bandwidth across national networks.

For satellite operators the rules are different. The satellite network is the first, last and middle mile, therefore there is no cheap core network to push the effects of contention to the edge of the network where published figures of 10:1 and 20:1 are common. Satellite bandwidth is very expensive and because of this, satellite bandwidth is managed in a more creative way. Additionally, satellite networks can either be sized with a CIR (constant information rate) and/or a BIR (burst information rate), the latter suggesting that the burst rate is fixed but the minimum rate (CIR) is not. These are the top-level parameters for determining the performance of any given site in a satellite network.

Let's take the CIR network first (where contention is referred to as “over booking”). A fixed amount (say 500kbps) is allocated to a network and 10 satellites (with max. BIR 500kbps) are installed. The contention is 10:1 since an allocation of 500kbps is shared between 10 satellites. As each satellite uses the network concurrently the actual performance does not degrade linearly with each concurrent use. This is because satellite access schemes (whether CIR or BIR are defined or not) are not the same as terrestrial partly because of the inherent delay in satellite communications that does not exist in terrestrial, and partly because of the history behind the schemes developed for satellite communications.

Firstly, the outbound direction (from the hub to the remote site) is multiplexed into frames (e.g. using DVB-S) much like terrestrial Frame Relay, however, due to the relative expense of satellite bandwidth compared to terrestrial, the encoding and compression schemes deployed on broadcast satellite bandwidth have a much greater efficiency in comparison with terrestrial schemes. On the inbound (from the remote site to the hub) the network topology is classically a star configuration therefore each site is competing with the other for a “share” of the time and frequency allocated to the network as a whole. At its most congested (10 concurrent satellites active all sending/receiving in a pool of 500kbps) the CIR for each site would be 50kbps. If this were a customer network they may assume that the performance will fall to around 50kbps minimum when fully loaded. However, what the customer sees at its most congested may be higher or lower than 50kbps according to the type of applications & protocols being used and the behaviour of the access scheme in place. This is because some applications (file transfer for example) will “grab” an allocation of bandwidth for the duration of the its session and may not use it efficiently for 100% of the time. Similarly, applications that are very “chatty” will use the available bandwidth inefficiently as much of the data transmitted is control information and the volume of “chat” leads to a significant increase in collisions and retries (as a consequence of competing for the time and frequency allocated to the network) which are inherently inefficient in their use of bandwidth. Contention is therefore applied in a meaningless way to the inbound as it can never be fully controlled nor predicted.

On a network where the BIR is fixed (but not the CIR) the same effects are at play but there is no minimum committed information rate. As these networks are subject (increasingly) to abuse by a few individuals who use all the bandwidth, reputable operators, implement complex Quality of Service (QoS) tools and Fair Usage Policies to ensure the network is shared fairly amongst all users. Therefore, on a typical satellite network the concept of Contention Ratio is meaningless because the QoS is dynamically controlled to allocate sufficient bandwidth to each user with a performance commensurate with the service class they are using and their recorded utilisation of the network over a defined period. Therefore, satellite service providers dynamically manage the performance of individual users according to the time of day and network loading so that the actual contention is managed to avoid the typical network congestion associated with contended shared networks.

In other words, for a population of 10 satellites sharing a fixed allocation of bandwidth, if one satellite is not restricted under the terms of the Fair Usage Policy and the other 9 are restricted (at different levels of restrictions) the Contention Ratio will actually be higher than 10:1 since the demand on the network from the restricted sites will be lower than the site that is not restricted. Contention ratio is therefore indeterminate.
Typically, when a network is designed and dimensioned contention can be calculated as (Peak/Allocated per site) kbps. This leads to an artificially high contention ratio but in reality the Fair Usage Policies ensure that this worst-case is never seen. The more important value is the real contention ratio in the network, which varies constantly and can be calculated as (Peak/Actual Performance) kbps.

In practice, utilising QoS tools, the actual contention on the satellite network is often much less than values published by ADSL service providers.
If the satellite service provider did not control QoS and then published contention ratios then these ratios would be false. This is also attributable to the way in which such a network starts its life and grows. There is always idle capacity on such a network at the beginning (or any subsequent upgrade to it). This “over allocation” means that the actual performance of satellites is very good when new bandwidth is added to such a network (equivalent to 2:1 or 5:1) but this strategy mismanages expectations of end users and ultimately leads to a large population of very unhappy customers when the network becomes loaded to its published contention ratio. Even at a point where the network is fully loaded the contention ratio would still not be true because of the effects of the satellite access schemes which, compared to terrestrial, are non-linear. There are classic examples of this in the form of service providers who once made promises of contention ratios and had happy customers at the beginning but hit problems as their networks became loaded, these service providers are sadly no longer in business.
In common with all other satellite internet service providers we find that 60% of our available bandwidth is consumed by just over 10% of our customers. For this reason it is necessary for us to restrict the speed of heavy users so that other users can get access at reasonable speeds. Speeds are reduced incrementally over a 30 day period relative to the amount of bandwidth consumed during that period. After 30 days the customer is reset to their original bandwidth allocation and the process starts again.
Similar to DSL and Wireless services Satellite Broadband also has heavy congestion during peak periods resulting in all users having their speed cut back at those times.
The system does not have a cap on the amount a user can download but if he/she is a heavy user it will restrict their speed of download forcing them to download at off peak times. Unlike DSL and Wireless we do not use extra charges as a means to control download traffic. We are our controls on the download speed. A customer can use as much bandwidth as they want without any extra charges being levied.
Our Fair Usage Policy operates as follows : In order to stop power users from “hogging” the available bandwidth to the detriment of others we apply an incremental speed reduction to these users depending on the amount of bandwidth they have used.
The increments vary depending on the amount of bandwidth available at any one time and they operate as “steps of stairs” on a regulated basis. If for example during off peak times a user has been cut back by 25% of his speed due to fair usage, during peak usage periods he will suffer a further cutback and this cutback will apply to his reduced speed not his originally stated speed.

The majority of our customers fall between 1 Gig. and 2 Gig. usage per month so their speeds are always reasonable.
If you have used a large amount of bandwidth during a particular month and your speed has been cut back there is always the knowledge that within 30 days your speed will be back to it’s original level and the cycle will start again.

Speed restrictions do not apply to the VOIP telephone service at any time.

We reserve the right if, in our opinion, the service is not being used for a residential purpose, to apply appropriate restrictions upon the user. For example if a customer has signed up for one of our residential packages but was in fact using the product in a business capacity this would be unacceptable practice.

Fuzzy Clam

Ogham wrote: »

Their main competitor - Digiweb - has a shorter mention of their fair usage - which is also vague but they do mention that downloading over 2Gb a month will probably result in speed reductions.
So - not much difference between them maybe?

Digiweb halve the speed during daytime if you exceed 2 gigs (I think it used to be 4 Gb and they never made it known that they were halving the cap limit). It returns to full speed after 7pm. If you exceed 3 Gb/month, it drops to 1/4 speed. Since its a rolling cap, its virtually impossible to get back to full rate without stopping using it completely.

CamperMan

Fuzzy Clam wrote: »

Digiweb halve the speed during daytime if you exceed 2 gigs (I think it used to be 4 Gb and they never made it known that they were halving the cap limit). It returns to full speed after 7pm. If you exceed 3 Gb/month, it drops to 1/4 speed. Since its a rolling cap, its virtually impossible to get back to full rate without stopping using it completely.

I must have hit the 2gb limit again just after a few days... it's painful now... I would now say that for less than a week out of the month I get full internet speed... I wish I even had 1/4 speed but know... the download limit is reduced to a point where a simple email consisting of text can take up to 5 minutes to download... now I have to do all my business after 10pm at night.. it's a joke...

I asked NBB if they could increase the GB per month and I would pay the extra, they can't do it so I am restricted...

Ogham

I use sofware from netlimiter.com to monitor my download volumes (it's free). I notice that NBB have a 2Mb speed option - and that should come with double the download limit I would hope. It costs about 20 euro more a month. Did they not mention that option?

watty

higher speeds on anything don't usually mean a similar increase in Cap. The cap increase can be smaller or zero.