Morality of Throttling a Local ISP? 640
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a small (400 customers) local cable ISP. For the company, the ISP is only a small side business, so my whole line of expertise lies in other areas, but since I know the most about Linux and networking I've been stuck into the role of part-time sysadmin. In examining our backbone and customer base I've found out that we are oversubscribed around 70:1 between our customers' bandwidth and our pipe. I've gone to the boss and showed him the bandwidth graphs of us sitting up against the limit for the better part of the day, and instead of purchasing more bandwidth, he has asked me to start implementing traffic shaping and packet inspection against P2P users and other types of large downloaders. Because this is in a certain limited market, the customers really only have the choice between my ISP and dial-up. I'm struggling with the desire to give the customers I'm administering the best experience, and the desire to do what my boss wants. In my situation, what would you do?"
Quit and... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>it doesn't sound at all like subby has the freedom to change the ToS or implement hard caps.
That depends. If the original contracts said "unlimited time" not unlimited gigabytes, then yes the ISP can move to a metered model. I'd implement relatively easy limits like "100 gigabytes maximum" with $1 for every gigabyte over the limit. This would catch the most egregious users, and any extra dollars can be used to add more lines to handle more people.
Oh and to justify it to the boss, I'd cite the recent court case which states ISPs may not discriminate against P2P traffic. i.e. It's effectively illegal to filter traffic, but not illegal to implement metered usage such that customers reduce usage voluntarily.
Is throttling really cheaper? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is throttling really cheaper?
Have you tried to compare the price of just buying more bandwidth with what it will cost you to setup and maintain the packed shaping?
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep - that's how they do it here in Australia and despite all the flak we cop on Slashdot about our metered ISP accounts, the user-pays system actually avoids a lot of the problems you see with ISPs overseas.
- P2P throttling? Not here.
- Artificial speed shaping or restrictions. Not here, unless you surpass your monthly limit on a flat rate plan.
- Forbidding servers on residential connections? Not here.
- Deep packet inspection and other traffic manipulation? Not here.
- Bad contention ratios. Not here (on the good ISPs at least).
The 70:1 contention ratio in the summary is pretty shocking ... good ISPs here (iiNet, Internode etc) have 10:1 or less and buy more bandwidth proactively, before they actually need it. They can afford to do that, and keep their links running at 50-70% capacity, BECAUSE it's a user pays system. Additional bandwidth use means more revenue for the ISP and hence it's attractive to them to keep their pipes un-congested and fast.
The other advantage is that light users can pay pretty small amounts for a basic connection. My parents just use email and so I put them on a TINY 1GB per month plan. They never even use more than half of that, and the cost savings are significant (consider that they pay only 20 bucks a month, but larger plans of 50, 100, 200 GB per month cost 60-100 bucks).
So if you absolutely cannot upgrade your links, the "bill, don't throttle" approach is more attractive. It's less work than setting up packet shaping infrastructure and rules, won't affect the large majority of your customers, and will make sure that top 5% of leechers keep their habit under control a bit better (or pay for a higher account, which means more money for you!).
Oh and one last thing. Don't bill for excess usage - just shape their connection. Because if Joe Sixpack gets a virus and their connection downloads 100s of GB without their knowledge, they are not going to want a huge bill. The way most ISPs do it in Australia is after you reach your monthly limit (say, 80 GB at 24 Mbps), they'll shape your traffic to a slower speed (e.g. 128 kbps). That's still fast enough to browse the web and stuff, but will ease backhaul congestion due to P2P etc.
Re:Quit and... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:0, Interesting)
Instead of a typical Ask Slashdot that should have been Ask Google, this is something new. It's an Ask Slashdot that should have been Ask Dr. Laura or maybe Ask Dear Abby. I'm about to just remove all Ask Slashdot stories from my index. I'd rather not do that but I am close to giving up on seeing anything worthwhile (IMO) come out of this section. None of these Ask Slashdot submissions are actually challenging or creative these days, just a bunch of people who either won't do basic research or today, people who think "Morality and Business Ethics" falls under "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" just because a computer is involved.
Here's the real question that is being asked: "I work for a business and my boss has required me to do something I don't want to do - what are my options?" That question is the same whether it's a local ISP or a bakery. It kinda reminds me of the way some politicians think that fraud is somehow a whole new crime requiring brand-new laws just because it's done with a computer. There needs to be a name for this sort of faulty thinking though I wouldn't be surprised if there already is.
Anyway so I'm dissenting and questioning the purpose of this entire submission. I believe that's a down-moddable "offense" around here, ever since the mods seemed to take a "sit down and shut up" attitude towards anyone who questions them or the decisions of Slashdot's editors. None of them seem to care that you explained yourself and gave good reasons for why you are questioning the submission either. That's real democratic and egalitarian guys, keep up the good work.
The funny thing is that when this same thing happens in politics, that is when people who question (i.e. the government) are punished or sanctioned for no other reason, most of these same mods would agree that it's a very bad thing then. Questioning the Slashdot editors and moderators is the same thing as questioning a country's government, because on Slashdot.org those ARE the "government", it's just on a much smaller scale with lower stakes. There is something wrong with you if you think that one of those is okay while the other is wrong - that's called situational ethics and it's an evil thing. The reality is that both are both wrong, the only difference is scale. The people who abuse the moderation system here on Slashdot have a lot more in common with governments that hate free speech than they may care to admit. From a cynical perspective, one could say that they are exactly alike, only the politicians are much more "successful".
It really makes me wonder how such moderators would feel if they had to live under such a standard all the time, anytime they wanted to express something, where they'd be punished anytime they disagreed with the status quo no matter how calmly or how reasonably just because someone didn't like the fact that they disagreed - my bet is that they'd quickly lose their willingness to inflict it on other people. That, by the way, is how you determine if a standard is truly good and has a solid basis in reality. If you would have no problem having it applied to you all of the time, then it's a good standard. If you would have a problem having it applied to you all of the time, then forcing it on anyone else just because you have a little authority (here, that means mod points) is the very definition of hypocrisy. No one on this site should need me to tell them that yet there seems to be a lot of ignorance surrounding this issue.
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:5, Interesting)
That depends on how "limited" the service area actually is. If the customers only choice is between the author's ISP and dial-up, maybe they don't have that many sysadmins to choose from either.
You will be suprised how often a good suggestion is taken, especially one that will keep customers relatively happy.
The choices those consumers have may not always be so limited. Depending on your relationship with management, you might get heard. You never know unless you try. Don't mention "morality" though, because management doesn't know what that means. If you put it in terms of customer retention, you might end up as employee-of-the-month.
Of course, all this depends on if your company is a locally owned independent or one of the big telecoms. If it's the latter and you really feel a moral quandary, your best bet is to get that resume polished up right away. There are a few businesses still run by decent people, and you might get lucky.
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:5, Interesting)
Listen to morgan. He's absolutely right.
If you do decide to bring this issue to your supervisors, try to put it in terms of customer retention or make up some stuff about how they can save money. Most management doesn't know any better.
But by all means do NOT mention morality. Management is trained to be suspicious of such things, and you'll be on the shit list. Don't mention anything about "providing good service" either. That's a sure sign of weakness to them and you'll be out of a job. It's got to be dollars and cents or at best they'll ignore you.
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:5, Interesting)
That depends. If the original contracts said "unlimited time" not unlimited gigabytes, then yes the ISP can move to a metered model. I'd implement relatively easy limits like "100 gigabytes maximum" with $1 for every gigabyte over the limit.
This actually penalizes the guy who downloads a heck of a lot, but he times his downloads so they always run from 11 pm to 5 am.
While it rewards all those folks who download a 10th that, but always max out the link from 4:30pm to 9:00pm, with P2P, and streaming download, at the same time all the other subscribers are trying to surf the web and get decent performance.
Usage-based billing doesn't make any sense -- ISPs often get burstability pay for a CIR, to the 95th percentile.
Consumers should too... That is, you should be able to burst your connection to download files, for certain amounts of time.
Each subscriber should individually agree to how much bandwidth they get to use on a continuous basis, and how much, and how long they will be allowed to burst, before either being billed or capped.
It shouldn't cost you, unless you stay bursted (I.E. max out your connection all the time during peak hours)
And to be consumer friendly, they should provide better terms for off-peak hour time, to actually reduce the number of even normal downloaders.
Legal loophole.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:BS. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never seen a single contract for residential internet that provided "unlimited service" at "xx Mbps", every single one I've ever seen is "up to xx Mbps", the contract isn't going to help here.
The solution for better or for worse is for the US to implement download caps like the rest of the world. It'll be unpopular and it'll have disadvantages, but laying cable still costs money and the current all you can eat payment schemes just don't work.
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:2, Interesting)
What court case is that? For it to be illegal, there would have to be a law.
Turbo Internet... A simple solution. (Score:3, Interesting)
Easy solution... I did something like this a long time ago.
We used to split our upstream into "Priority" and "Non-priority" and all users went into "Non-Priority"
When we gave them a real-time "price" meter... It had a button and a small display that showed how much your bill was for the month.
Use the service at non-priority and the $$$ ticked over slowly.
But hit the "Turbo" button, it added your IPs to the priority stream and the $$$ scream over and you get a big speed boost. Great for businesses who used it.
We only ever tried it in beta while we had significant oversubscription due to limited availability of bandwidth at the time, but we noticed a few strange effects.
First, people just liked pressing the button. They would go on, off, on, off while waiting for anything.
Second, it was instant gratification - you hit th e button and your download speed goes straight up... Very effective and you know it's going faster because the $$$ tick over faster.
Thirdly, the level of satisfaction was directly influenced by the speed the $$$ ticked over... We accidently released a buggy version under Beta where the $$$ ticked over at ten times the rate.
It turned out to be the most popular and people started requesting it after we fixed the bug in the subsequent version... Seems that if they got charged more, the mental connection was that it was faster.
Anyway, then bandwidth prices came down and we just got more bandwidth, and all the beta testers moaned when we turned off their turbo buttons...
We weren't actually charging the beta testers for the button at the time, but they were all willing to pay for the service, because they loved being able to see at all times (through a small widget-like interface) exactly what they were spending.
GrpA
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:3, Interesting)
That part got my attention. May I ask what you mean when you say that they are trained to be suspicious of such things? Is this actually a component of formal training such as business classes or leadership seminars? Or is it more of a situation where it's unfortunate that lots of people who are actually up to no good have been known to such excuses to cover up their wrongdoing and managers just learn this by experience?
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:3, Interesting)
$1/GB is really cheap for satellite ISP.
I'm on wild blue, and pay $80 for 17GB a month.
My daughters discovered video chat, and maxed us out again... Also cold weather causes poor antenna/amplifier performance =(
I have two more options, Hughes and directcon. Directcon has really poor customer service.
Re:Legal loophole.. (Score:1, Interesting)
If you pull that sort of crap out of thin air, you're going to get screwed, maybe fired.
Warn the boss first. Explain what you think will happen. If he says they won't care, then do it and THEN show him how many complaints you get.
If you don't get any complaints, well, just go ahead and do what he said. You were wrong, suck it up.
Don't listen to these fools: (Score:2, Interesting)
1.) If the action your boss is requesting is illegal, inform the proper authorities.
2.) Abuse is a matter of perspective: Is your boss asking you to shape everyone to 64k as a maximum? Our legal system is fucked up. A line could be sold with a 7 Mb maximum, 768 kb average. Said line would only become abuse when it avaergaes 7kb on purpose.
3.) The only reqard for having morals must come from within yourself. If you are looking for anyone to recognize that you have morals, be prepared to be disappointed
Ultimately, you are in charge of your own decision. I happen to agree here with many who say to convince your boss for the alternate solution first.
Unless the request specifically borders on Fraud, your morals are safe and sound.
Do it by usage, not by protocol. (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, the best solution is to strongly throttle large bandwidth usages (P2P, FTP and NNTP streams, etc) during the periods of near-capacity, and automatically relax the filtering during off hours.
That's one way... Here's another:
Instead of trying to choose which protocols are heaviest usage, traffic shape people based on what the actual criteria that you care about is: Too much overall usage over long periods.
In Linux terms, set up a HTB with a queue for every customer. Set the base rate to whatever your backbone speed is (1/70th of the customer's line rate), the ceil rate to their line rate, and give them a nice big bucket - say, 120 seconds times their line rate.
Then, people who are normal users - web surfing, downloading an occasional email attachment, etc - will go full bore, any time they want it. People who are bittorrenting will go full speed for a couple minutes, and then decrease down to whatever bandwidth is available. At night, if there's a lot of backbone free, it'll go fast. At 7 PM, they get best effort on whatever is available.
This is a very simplified example. You could additionally shape them so that their web and email will take priority over bittorrent when they're at the bottom of their token bucket, or other fine tuning...
The basic message I'd like to get across is: you don't have to shape based on protocol, because you care about the usage, not the protocol. Just shape based on usage, and let them work out which protocols they want to use.
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:4, Interesting)
1) a customer has > 20 connections to > 20 different hosts in the world
2) said customer has had a high upload AND download rate for the past 15 minutes.
Then: throttle "connection" #5 and above.
Notes:
By connection I just mean a host to host pair. Nothing to do with TCP connections.
20 connections to the same host won't count - it's still a single host to host pair. It's on a per host pair basis.
Re:Do it by usage, not by protocol. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course... You give consumers best effort bandwidth, and then if business customers want guaranteed bandwidth, they can pay extra for it.
I also don't find it unethical, as long as it's clearly advertised as "unlimited usage 6M burst / 128k committed + best effort".
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:5, Interesting)
Well if he is looking at traffic shaping he should consider bumping priorities rather than heavy handed throttling. Just bump VOIP and HTTP(S) so they go first and wont get interfered with by bulk P2P transfers. This lets people 'at the keyboard' so to speak get priority over say big file transfers in the background.
If you throttle heavily and/or block P2P then keep in mind that P2P packets that arent getting through are potentially being resent repeatedly. This will likely INCREASE network congestion as things get sent multiple times and possibly get dropped at the router rather than being passed along.
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:5, Interesting)
The "most popular" Australian ISP (Telstra Big Pond) charges 15c per MB over the limit, and their cheapest plan only includes 200MB of transfers (up plus down) before excess charges happen. On 256kbps ADSL it isn't too bad, but the same plan is available on 10Mbps cable so you could be up for thousands of dollars excess! There are plans that have 12 or 20GB transfers before 64kbps shaping instead of excess fees. (I put "most popular" in quotes as many of their customers don't like them and would leave if there were alternatives or if they knew about them)
Most ISPs use the "x GB then speed shaping" method. Most still have unmetered uploads.
One former ISP used "Flat rate" in that during busy times the highest downloaders got throttled down, which I thought was a great idea but it is no longer available. The highest we ever got was 80GB in a 30 day period and the net was slow but still usable in peak times. Off-peak times was still full speed.
nice, though per-protocol can help users (Score:4, Interesting)
IP packets let the sender specify which ones are important, via the QoS info. If I'm sending real-time game traffic and a big giant file, I want you to give priority to the game.
Ideally you both respect my QoS info and let me override that via a nice web admin interface that lets me specify ports that are important to me.
All of this is subject to my per-user throttling of course. You use it to select which of my packets get dropped first, not the number of my packets that get dropped.
If you value your job (Score:1, Interesting)
If you value your pay, do what the owner tells you.
If he's over leveraged you (like he has with his users 70:1) then quit. Think. If he's (or she) is going to screw his own customers over, why wouldn't he screw you over too. What else is screwed up in the same company?
Unless of course your locked in to being sysad because you have some investment in the company hanging over your head.
(Don't laugh, it's happened to me)
IF that's the case, you will have to suck it up and tough it out doing whatever nonsense the owner wants until you can get out. It will be painful and can burn you out.
The company sounds just like a wall-street bankster ponsi scheme. Eventually someone will suffer from it. Which would make me wonder if this isn't the best company to be in, for the future. Basically they fell short and now want you to screw people over.
Of course you could also take more of the toxic dump on your shoulders and keep the 400 marks filling the slots. e.g. you replace the accounts who are not grandma checking her web mail (spam.) Work for evil, be evil. Although you would have a steep learning curve since you know linux, not sales.
Why someone moves a lot of data shouldn't be your deal. It's none of your business what or why they are moving data. In short, the owner is a greedy jackass, part ways as soon as possible.
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:4, Interesting)
Local caching proxies, maybe? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason is simple, if you wanted to sell 5Mb service to 2000 people, and you wanted to be able to offer all 2000 people 5Mb at any moment in time, you would need a 10Gb connection to your provider. Which means you are looking at an OC192 or Sonnet-10 connection.
Realistically though, you will never ever have all 2000 customers online at the exact same moment attempting to use their full 5Mb bandwidth.
So while you would need an OC192 to provide the max cap, you can realistically offer everyone their 5Mb bandwidth using only an OC3.
With residential services though, you hit a peek usage. Between 4:30-9:30pm your demand skyrockets. The challenge then is to generate solid reporting data on the usage and find a way to either increase capacity or decrease usage. And that's exactly the boat that the original author is in.
I am no industry insider, but at 70:1, they are likely over sold for the connection. The only way to maintain the promised performance is to either motivate people to consume less bandwidth at peek times, or to reduce the number of customers.
The other option is to decrease usage through traffic shaping. By slowing P2P traffic at the router during peek hours you can reduce the load on your provider, allowing more people to enjoy the expected performance while still allowing P2P users to get the full 5Mb performance during non-peek hours.
As much as I dislike traffic shaping, it is the cheapest and easiest answer, and it will have a positive effect on most user experiences, a negative effect on some, and only be detectable by a slim minority of users. Personally, I, like the author, would much prefer to see more bandwidth. But until traffic shaping become illegal, I don't see anyone making jumps in that direction other than their already established growth plans.
Alternatively, a MB download limit based on credits that have a flexible value based on time of day would likely be a legal way to manipulate usage. From 4:30-9:30 1 credit = 1 MB, from 9:30-4:30 1 credit = 3 MB. Get people to queue up their downloads for non-peek time and the issue largely disappears.
-Rick
Re:bill, don't throttle (Score:5, Interesting)
It's really easy to understand. The ISP business has been engaged in systematic fraud since the beginning. They sell what they cannot provide. In the beginning, shady characters who felt they would never get caught did it. Then people who didn't do it couldn't stay in business, so they either went out of business or did the same thing. Fast forward a few years, and now it's normal for the industry, and you get professionals sounding very technical as they go about explaining how it all works and how to use more technically complex tricks to allow ISPs to continue the behavior as though there was never anything wrong with it.
But, at the end of the day, the ISPs are all engaged in garden variety fraud. Including the one that employs the original submitter of the story. They're not different from the guy who rents his cabin to 3 dozen different people for the summer, hoping that no more than one will show up at a time.
In the long run, the entire society is going to pay dearly for having allowed this to happen.
I am an ISP with the same situation (Score:2, Interesting)
FAP (Score:3, Interesting)
You probably would not see this post as it is hugging the bottom of a long pile of messages, but here are my two cents:
In small scale networks, as few as five to ten over utilizing customers can bring the whole structure to its knees. From ethical perspective, it is your duty to keep network as operational as possible for the whole customer base. So that it is OK in my book to shape traffic as long as you keep it as fair as possible for your customers' benefit. Also it is important to back your traffic shaping with a solid mathematical model, as some (usually below 1%) of your customers can complain, and even can claim that you are stealing their capacity...
FAP (Fair Access Policy) is a rolling average, leaky bucket traffic shaping algorithm. We are using HNS (Hughes Network Systems) implementation with great success for five years. As you are a cable operator HNS solution would not work for you, however it is well documented (by public, in public domain. HNS' own documentation sucks). If you ignore customer complaints about HNS services in USA (problem there is not FAP mechanism, but very tight parameters set by HNS operations team) and concentrate on the system you would learn a great deal about traffic shaping that is adapted to real life conditions.
As you would need an implementation to use, a single layer FAP (HNS implementation permits three layers) can be put in place by using basic traffic shaping parameters in Cisco. For multi layered approach, you can use a Linux firewall. If you have money to spend on this, Allot [allot.com] traffic shapers are very good Linux based devices.
Regards