Smart Intentionally Restricting P2P

dahamsta

An admission by Garfield Connolly of Smart Telecom in the BB forum that they intentionally limit their upstream in an attempt to limit P2P traffic. This is as insidious as Eircom's efforts to block VoIP, and almost as insidious as blocking ports.

This is not the way to handle abusive usage.

adam

Urban Weigl

So how do you think that Smart should deal with abusive usage? For example from his post: "We've a customer that's dloaded 120GB in a 10 day period, with their upload constantly nailed at 128k."

I do agree that limiting the upload speed to 128k for everybody is probably not the right way to go about it, but I would be curious as to how you would handle a situation such as the above.

dahamsta

Urban Weigl wrote:

So how do you think that Smart should deal with abusive usage?

You know that discussion will just turn into a flame war Peter, and besides, I've stated my thoughts on how it should be handled many, many times. (In a nutshell, set limits and apply them. The one thing UTV got right in principle, and oh-so wrong in practice.) My point is that this is not the way to do it.

adam

SkepticOne

Don't go for it so.

zuma

128K is an abysmal limit...but like eircom Smart wants to protect its telephjone operations by limiting VOIP.

Digiweb and NTL would be examples of ISP's who would gain nothing by limiting upload.
Smart/BT and eircom gain by limiting upload speeds as it would cost they greatly in their telephone business.

NTL currently offer the fastest uploads...but if they has a good telehone system in place already, we wouldnt have NTL at such high upload speeds!!!

CuLT

zuma wrote:

128K is an abysmal limit...but like eircom Smart wants to protect its telephjone operations by limiting VOIP.

Digiweb and NTL would be examples of ISP's who would gain nothing by limiting upload.
Smart/BT and eircom gain by limiting upload speeds as it would cost they greatly in their telephone business.

NTL currently offer the fastest uploads...but if they has a good telehone system in place already, we wouldnt have NTL at such high upload speeds!!!

I think you'll find that IBB offer the highest upload speed on residential products, business too, iirc (if you don't count the highly obscure companies out in the styx).

zuma

I was just giving a couple of examples...not a thesis.
Also I forgot to mention Netsource....tsh!

Dungarvan(ites) wont be too happy about your last statement...hahaha!!!

TimTim

If I remember Garfields previous post, its a far more expensive thing to increase upload then it is to increase download. So from a purely economic point its perfectly valid with only a profit of 11euros after paying your line rental.

If you want 256k upload go for their basic business product.

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

We do have a 2Mb/ 256k for e54.45 (inc. VAT) and free line rental. It's the basic business package.

Cabaal

TimTim wrote:

If you want 256k upload go for their basic business product.

Its a sad thing when a home users that wants to use things such as VoIP has to get a Business package,

Cryos

Cabaal wrote:

Its a sad thing when a home users that wants to use things such as VoIP has to get a Business package,

who in turn would need a business line, because if it shows up a residential line you cant get a business package. As we found out.

dahamsta

I could go nuts now and suggest that Smart are "intentionally encouraging Internet users to lie to their providers", but that would just be silly. I stand by my first statement though, I don't believe that anyone bar apologists can say or suggest that a statement like this...

"Once of the principal reasons that we haven't gone to a default 256k upload is peer to peer traffic."

...is anything but crystal clear, despite Connolly's McRedmond-like denial.

adam

djmarkus

why would you need 256k upload when i can use voip quite succesfully on my 56k dial up?

WoHoo my 100th post!

zuma

TimTim wrote:

If I remember Garfields previous post, its a far more expensive thing to increase upload then it is to increase download. So from a purely economic point its perfectly valid with only a profit of 11euros after paying your line rental.

If you want 256k upload go for their basic business product.

Line Rental is payed to maintain the line to eircom.
With LLU AFAIK control of the line is given over to Smart(you are no longer on eircoms network) so line rental is whatever Smart wants to set it at(to cover LLU).
Believe me Smart are getting at least €20 or the €35 straight into their pockets !

Cryos

zuma wrote:

Line Rental is payed to maintain the line to eircom.
With LLU AFAIK control of the line is given over to Smart(you are no longer on eircoms network) so line rental is whatever Smart wants to set it at(to cover LLU).
Believe me Smart are getting at least €20 or the €35 straight into their pockets !

thats not true, smart do have alot of overheads so in reality they are probably only getting 1/4 of that.

TimTim

zuma wrote:

Line Rental is payed to maintain the line to eircom.
With LLU AFAIK control of the line is given over to Smart(you are no longer on eircoms network) so line rental is whatever Smart wants to set it at(to cover LLU).
Believe me Smart are getting at least €20 or the €35 straight into their pockets !

I have a pretty good idea how LLU works and Smart just don't make their mind up at what line rental is. Its a price agreed between eircom and ComReg and its fixed. So Smart pay whatever eircom is charging for LLU lines and then the rest goes into their pockets. Which according to Garfields post is around 11 euros

Sponge Bob

Jeez lads.

1. They do not 'limit' , they simply dont offer a higher upload because of the implications of what p2p apps will do to their networks. 50% of all global Internet traffic is P2P. Nobody else offers over 128k up to 'domestic' clients save the cablecos who use DOCSIS not ADSL

2. Any Smart customer can have their Biz package for about €54 a month including line rental and with 256k up. Thats what we paid Eircom for 512/128 DSL and no line rental included on the 1st of Feb 2005 before Smart launched. The Biz package does not come with 'lifetime free line rental' IIRC although I am sceptical of how that will pan out for the home users long term anyway . Still, its €54 a month without that .

3. At €35 all in for 2Mbit BB and Line Rental the base Smart package is still a very good deal even with BT on the prowl recently .

dahamsta

Sponge Bob wrote:

1. They do not 'limit' , they simply dont offer a higher upload because of the implications of what p2p apps will do to their networks.

Smart (and Eircom of course, but Smart have specifically admitted it) are intentionally hobbling everyone's product for the actions of what very likely amounts to less than 50% of their customer base. Many of whom will be using P2P for legitimate purposes.

Exactly when did it become ok for ISP's to preemptively dicate what people do with their connections? Will it be ok when they disable P2P ports? How about FTP ports? You can download porn, warez and mp3's over HTTP too, how about that?

If I'm flooding your network - with whatever traffic - thats fine, you just warn me or bill me. If I don't cop myself on or pay my bill, then you boot me. You do not limit my upstream on the off chance. That's a very slippery slope.

As for Mike's inevitable smartarse comment - pardon the pun - you can bet your sweet bippy I won't matey. Between dodgy policies like this and "no limits", and the bullsh*t they got caught rotten feeding the press, I wouldn't touch Smart with a barge pole.

Unfortunately that means sticking with another hobbled piece of crap like Eircom's bitstream product via BT. I feel real privileged.

adam

TimTim

dahamsta wrote:

... Many of whom will be using P2P for legitimate purposes.

Thats the most over used excuse on boards.ie. Seriously does Ireland have the highest percentage of "Linux ISO downloaders" And then you want everything under the sun for €35 a month? Get over it. Smart have a business to run not a charity. They are offering you 256k upload in their business product for about the same price as eircoms package. It just looks like some people are just hard to please.

And face it this is a niche we're looking at here on boards . Not ever one wants to use P2P, VoIP or cares about ping times. You're looking at the demanding techies on this forum which I'd assume is a small percentage of Smart's customer base or any ISP for that case.

SkepticOne

Yes, I don't see what the big deal is. It has been 2048 down/128 up from the start when they first made their announcement. If they had been advertising 256 but only delivering 128 uploads then there would be an issue. If 128k up does not meet your requirements then go for a product that does.

Cabaal

djmarkus wrote:

why would you need 256k upload when i can use voip quite succesfully on my 56k dial up?
WoHoo my 100th post!

What VoIP service do you speak of?
Skype perhaps? Not much of a VoIP service since...
- You can't take incoming calls in Ireland from landlines/mobiles
- You can't get a 076 VoIP number
- You can use a ATA or IPPhone
- It does not support SIP or other VoIP standards

If you want to use a decent service like skytel or blueface with a ATA/IPPhone and get a 076 or Irish geogarphical number and all the bells and whistles you won't have a very good service on 56k

While these services will properly work ok on 128K it does not leave much bandwidth for other thjings like webpages or streaming audio/video.

Speaking from experience 256K does the job nicely and is perfectly usable.

On a side note while other services like Project Gizmo (which actually uses SIP) will also work on 56k you are really limiting yourself.

Blaster99

Where are Smart's business ADSL services described? I can't find them on their site.

Cabaal

Blaster99 wrote:

Where are Smart's business ADSL services described? I can't find them on their site.

Gold: 4mb / 512k - 6 Static IP Addresses - €120 per month (ex VAT)
Silver: 3mb / 256 - 1 Static IP Addresses - €70 per month (ex VAT)
Bronze: 2mb / 256 - 1 Static IP Addresses - €45 per month (ex VAT)

Of course bare in mind you have to have a Business to get any of these products.

SkepticOne

I wonder, though, whether there would be sufficient extra interest in VoIP to justify raising the upload speed. True, there would be some extra customers, but they might also attract a load of p2p fans which they probably don't require as customers.

zuma

If eircom believed VoIP wasnt going to take off and harm eircoms telephone business then we would have got the upload speed increase when we got the download speed increase.

Its as simple as that!!!

Urban Weigl

Cabaal wrote:

Of course bare in mind you have to have a Business to get any of these products.

Is that a fact?

Sponge Bob

Cabaal wrote:

Gold: 4mb / 512k - 6 Static IP Addresses - €120 per month (ex VAT)
Silver: 3mb / 256 - 1 Static IP Addresses - €70 per month (ex VAT)
Bronze: 2mb / 256 - 1 Static IP Addresses - €45 per month (ex VAT)

Of course bare in mind you have to have a Business to get any of these products.

Its Not like they check/verify as do Netsource.

4096/512 for €145 a month incl Vat is fairly OK. You could run a GBS off 6 statics

Cabaal

Urban Weigl wrote:

Is that a fact?

I'm not saying 100% you do, but your supposed to be,
Hows that?

Urban Weigl

Cabaal wrote:

I'm not saying 100% you do, but your supposed to be,
Hows that?

I know what you mean, but I actually meant something a little different: Do you know for a fact that Smart do not want non-business customers to go for their business packages, or is it merely that they market them towards businesses, but they don't care either way who signs up?

I don't know myself as I have not read any of their terms and conditions, so I was just curious whether it was just speculation, or whether they have stated somewhere (terms and conditions, product page, etc) that this is for businesses only.

GarfieldConnoll

Cabaal wrote:

Gold: 4mb / 512k - 6 Static IP Addresses - €120 per month (ex VAT)
Silver: 3mb / 256 - 1 Static IP Addresses - €70 per month (ex VAT)
Bronze: 2mb / 256 - 1 Static IP Addresses - €45 per month (ex VAT)

Of course bare in mind you have to have a Business to get any of these products.

Whilst it's described as a business product, anyone can take it.

Garfield.

Sponge Bob

Smarts should have LESS of a problem shifting Business ADSL because companies normally have a spare line that they could convert and afford some downtime on and give up the number on ...unlike the household with its one line one number topology .

The free calls to other Smart customers would help too, seeing as businesses are daytime users...does that apply during the day ?

That Business DSL is a shockingly undersold product and deserves a relaunch except that Oisin is too busy trying to buy Meteor or punt for a 3G licence nowadays .

Cabaal

Sponge Bob wrote:

That Business DSL is a shockingly undersold product and deserves a relaunch except that Oisin is too busy trying to buy Meteor or punt for a 3G licence nowadays .

Agreed, I could find 0 info on their website and it only happened by chance that I was in a Doctors waiting room and saw a advert for Smart Business 4MB in one of the papers...so I looked into it further and got the info above

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

Whilst it's described as a business product, anyone can take it.

Thats great to hear, the Bronze package is a bloody good deal imho.

Blaster99

If I sat on ADSL2+ technology, I would put it to use and not mimick Eircom's offerings with a bit of a discount.

zuma

Blaster99 wrote:

If I sat on ADSL2+ technology, I would put it to use and not mimick Eircom's offerings with a bit of a discount.

Exactly!!!
WHy cant Smart start to mimick Bulldog in the UK and really begin to push the boundaries???
I realise Smart need a marketing plan...but for their business to take off in the new year(hopefully the court battle will be over by then)...doubling of all current speeds will be required to stimulate the industry as what happened in March of this year!!!

lucernarian

Smart have a problem here if they increase the speed further because our phone network is not up to the standard needed for speeds greater than 6 MBs in the majority of cases.

If 40% of phone lines cannot handle 1 Megabit broadband then I'd love to see how the rest can cope.

TimTim

To_be_confirmed wrote:

Smart have a problem here if they increase the speed further because our phone network is not up to the standard needed for speeds greater than 6 MBs in the majority of cases.

If 40% of phone lines cannot handle 1 Megabit broadband then I'd love to see how the rest can cope.

Depends on who's equipment you are using

Garfield himself said he fails eircom line checker for broadband and yet can get 6Mb down.

It would be interesting to see the average speed that a user can reach assuming Smart, they must have stats around somewhere.

Kare Bear

Gold: 4mb / 512k - 6 Static IP Addresses - €120 per month (ex VAT)
Silver: 3mb / 256 - 1 Static IP Addresses - €70 per month (ex VAT)
Bronze: 2mb / 256 - 1 Static IP Addresses - €45 per month (ex VAT)

Of course bare in mind you have to have a Business to get any of these products.

Why do businesses need such speed.All they do is send word documents to each other.

GarfieldConnoll

TimTim wrote:

It would be interesting to see the average speed that a user can reach assuming Smart, they must have stats around somewhere.

This was the topic of conversation today. At present 70%-80% of unbundled lines could achieve 6Mb+. I don't have an equivalent number for upload speed, but I'll get it and post it here.
Now that's not a representative sample of Irish lines, but it's our experience to date.

Garfield.

leeroybrown

Kare Bear wrote:

Why do businesses need such speed.All they do is send word documents to each other.

A 256K upload rate can be quite a bottleneck if you have a business with plenty of e-mail users. The extra download speed is a nice bonus. It's not about being able to use 4mb/512k all the time, it's about having 4mb/512k when you need it.

lynchie

Cabaal wrote:

Agreed, I could find 0 info on their website and it only happened by chance that I was in a Doctors waiting room and saw a advert for Smart Business 4MB in one of the papers...so I looked into it further and got the info above





Thats great to hear, the Bronze package is a bloody good deal imho.

Agreed, I never knew of this either. Dont see why I need to pay €ircon the 169 a month for their package when I could get it for 50 yoyo cheaper with a 512 upload.

Blaster99

I'm using IBB's 3Mbps service and despite all its ups and downs, I would have serious difficulty seeing myself moving to something pathetic like 256kbps up for the same money. Ideally I would like to use another more reliable provider, but if this is the best the ADSL folks can come up with, well, then it's not to be.

PiE

I don't understand this "higher upload will attract P2P leechers!" idea... most P2P programs allow full-speed downloads as long as your upload is above ~5kb/s (Azureus for instance). Limiting upload to 128k isn't gonna stop anyone from downloading at their 200k/s+ max speeds and likewise, doubling the upload is not gonna suddenly turn their 2mb/s connection into a 4mb/s connection.

Besides, most leechers are just that: leechers. The vast majority of P2P users have no intention of 'sharing' their ill-gotten wares. They get on, get what they want, get off. Again, increasing the upload is not gonna affect any of this, but it will make life a lot easier for the people who legitimately need/want a higher upload rate.

TheMonster

The only thing I can think of is most of the good torrent sites(not public ones) expect people to maintain at least a 0.5 ratio and some even a 1-1 ratio.

Solair

I've had a lot of conversations with eircom engineers and other than the long rural lines (which are an unfortunate fact of life in rural areas everywhere) and the multiplexed lines in cities, which they will now sort out for you if you phone them up and order broadband. Most problems with phonelines and DSL come down to the fact that eircom set the line quality limits far too high. This was probabally initially done to limit the need for service calls / engineer calls. i.e. the lines that qualified for DSL are 100% perfect and won't ever drop a connection / cause any problems thus eircom never has to do anything.

The other huge issue is customer's internal wiring and it really is a huge issue it's not eircom just making stuff up.
Most other countries have always had very tight regulations about what you can / can't connect to a telephone line. The line would enter your house and there's a "NTU" network termination unit or some form of demarkation between the public network and your internal wiring.
In Ireland, Telecom/Eircom adopted a very haphazard approach to this and allowed people to wire anything to a line. So, you've got poor quality internal wiring, reversed polarities, ground leaks, inappropriate cable (e.g. bell or speaker wire that's both unshielded and too high resistance for decent communications traffic)

BT, for many many years insisted that you PLUG IN any extensions to your master socket. If you opened / moved / rewired the master socket they would pretty much reserve the right to charge you a huge some of money to fix it. In the old days it was actually illegal to open it!

Telecom's / Eircom's approach was quite consumer friendly i.e. you could drop down to the local shop and buy any old phone, wire it up and away you go.

However, it's causing havok for DSL.

They also need to run more frequent line tests. once a month isn't good enough. They should be available pretty much on request where possible.

They also need to produce some advisory information on the testing process.

e.g.:

1) New lines arn't necessarily tested for up to 1 month, so will come up as failed even though they're potentially perfect for DSL (this has happened to me twice!)

2) If your line fails you should be given step by step instructions to remove internal wiring problems. e.g. unplugging phones, making sure the line's not over loaded and even, how to remove DIY extensions completely.
They could even suggest that you replace your internal extensions with a nice new DECT cordless phone set & a couple of handsets.

You should then be able to schedual a retest / at least know when your line will be hit by the tester again.

Just saying PASS/FAIL isn't good enough.

Sponge Bob

All very true Solair except that when your line is manifestly unfit for the purpose in a rural area Eircom will still not bother testing or fixing it .

My consistent advice to anyone with 'issues' is to disconnect ALL their internal wiring and leaving one socket in service thats the one with the TE or Eircom logo only and then plugging in a bog standard phone....not one that sucks lekky to power a display...and then hassling Eircom.

Internal wiring is your own problem but there are a lot of bus formation internal distributions out there which should all be in series.

Solair

What's worse is that Telecom Eireann / Eircom didn't even stick to their own wiring rules when they wired most homes in the 1980s

Lots of places have multiple master sockets all connected in a star configuration back to a junction box in the hall or in the attic.

Best bet is rip the whole thing out and put in a decent DECT phone system ... no need for wires at all.

I'm totally convinced that eircom has set the test bar way way too high though and are failing lines that are marginal but quite passable for DSL.
They should at the very least be able to give you a breakdown of line noise stats etc rather than just FAIL.

And yeah, in rural areas I would agree 100% they need their asses kicked by use of the universal service obligations clause. Rural areas are being understaffed and local distribution networks arn't being maintained the way they used to be.

There should be some sort of a formula that redistributes money earned on urban line rentals to the higher cost rural areas. i.e. an accounting mechanism that's fully transparent.

I can't see why this couldn't be implemented given their unusual position as an almost total monopoly. There will certainly be no major incentive for the likes of smart telecom or anyone else to unbundle in rural areas, so the rural - urban broadband divide is just going to increase if someone doesn't step in and regulate the market properly.

It's a bit like the old days of rural electrification. Some areas are not going to be economic to wire up for broadband, but for social inclusion reasons they need to be funded somehow and that doesn't have to be via direct taxation it's just a case of redistribution!

Sponge Bob

Solair wrote:

What's worse is that Telecom Eireann / Eircom didn't even stick to their own wiring rules when they wired most homes in the 1980s

Lots of places have multiple master sockets all connected in a star configuration back to a junction box in the hall or in the attic.

LOL , seen them .

And yeah, in rural areas I would agree 100% they need their asses kicked by use of the universal service obligations clause. Rural areas are being understaffed and local distribution networks arn't being maintained the way they used to be.

The issue here is that Eircom offloaded a bloated engineering staff in the early 90's but has not recruited anyone for about 25 years. Rural areas are maintained by too small a staff who are now typically aged about 50 and not as athletic as they once were. They probably have the oldest line engineers in the world . The lads even got nice new vans with Cherry Pickers this year to save them horsing ladders around on their own.

They went from overstaffed to understaffed to undertaffed and ancient ....and with somewhat more copper around now than there was then.

There should be some sort of a formula that redistributes money earned on urban line rentals to the higher cost rural areas. i.e. an accounting mechanism that's fully transparent.

They should relax the installation targets to allow the engineers find copper and not be under time pressure to provision, time = pairgain installation. Rural lines are simply LONGER and more awkward to trace , give the engineers time.

I can't see why this couldn't be implemented given their unusual position as an almost total monopoly. There will certainly be no major incentive for the likes of smart telecom or anyone else to unbundle in rural areas, so the rural - urban broadband divide is just going to increase if someone doesn't step in and regulate the market properly.

Thats already happened Solair . It happened when Comreg defined a phoneline line as Functional at a data rate of 0k in 2002/2003 . Smart et al can get a line fixed under the CLFMP but customers have to ring 1901 <gnash>

It's a bit like the old days of rural electrification. Some areas are not going to be economic to wire up for broadband, but for social inclusion reasons they need to be funded somehow and that doesn't have to be via direct taxation it's just a case of redistribution!

Funny that because country folks pay higher line rental (standing charge) to the ESB but we get our 220 + or - 10% same as everyone else .

I am not saying the ESB should flatrate that either .

Solair

Does that mean that in 5 years time when they all retire we'll have a new young fit crew out to fix everything?

I just had a line installed in Dublin and 2 guys arrived up on the hottest day of the year (Aged 50+)
Scaled two walls to get into where the line needed to go! Certainly no shortage of athletic ability!

It was also 4 days after the order date!

zuma

Ever hear the saying "Young and dumb!"?

They must have staggered recruitment or else you'll have no one left with any experience once they start mass retiremnet.