North American Network Operators Group
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RE: Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Fri Oct 26 15:47:00 2007

On Fri, 26 Oct 2007, Paul Ferguson wrote: 
The part of this discussion that really infuriates me (and Joe
Greco has hit most of the salient points) is the deceptiveness
in how ISPs "underwrite" the service their customers subscribe to.

For instance, in our data centers, we have 1Gb uplinks to our ISPs,
but guaranteed service subscription (a la CIR) to a certain rate
which we engineer (based on average traffic volume, say, 400Mb), but
burstable to full line rate -- if the bandwidth is available.

Now, we _know_ this, because it's in the contract. :-)

As a consumer, my subscription is based on language that doesn't
say "you can only have the bandwidth you're paying for when we
are congested, because we oversubscribed our network capacity."

That's the issue here.

You have a ZERO CIR on a consumer Internet connection.

How many different ways can an ISP say "speeds may vary and are not guaranteed." It says so in the _contract_. So why don't you know
that?

ISPs tell you that when you order, in the terms of service, when you call
customer care that "speeds may vary and are not guaranteed."

How much do you pay for your commercial 1GE connection with a 400Mbps CIR? Is it more or less than what you pay for a consumer connection with a ZERO CIR?

ISPs are happy to sell you SLAs, CIRs, etc.  But if you don't buy SLAs,
CIRs, etc, why are you surprised you don't get them?

Once again <blink>speeds may vary and are not guaranteed</blink>.

Now that you know that speeds may vary and are not guaranteed, does
that make you satisified?