[NCLUG] internet access options
John L. Bass
jbass at dmsd.com
Sat Jul 20 18:19:30 MDT 2002
With Qwest you'll get V.90 or pair gain, depending on location. Pair gain
generally limits to 26400 and the local loop can drop this to 21600 or
24000. A few of the latest modems seem to be able to eek 28800 out of pair
gain. If you get 31200 or 33600 with a v34 modem, you'll get higher with
v90. There is almost no K56Flex or X2 support any longer, so those 56K
modems only hit v34 speeds.
This is the problem I had south of Masonville - the pair gain system had a tough
time - normally connecting well below 19.2 ... most of the time at 12-14.4, and
frequently at 9600baud and wasn't stable - dropping several times an hour.
Then tried ISDN over the Pair gain system, which was even more unstable. Several of
us that started CWX.net fought with ISDN over pair gain, and were never successful.
Quest gave me a 6 month credit when they disconnected it after fighting with it
for a year.
Others up in the Rist Canyon area, east of Loveand, and north of Ft.Collins have
had a wonderful experience with ISDN over Pair gain. Depends a lot on the stability
of the hand selected T-1's that server/drive the pair gain system. If you are into
heavy FPS games, MP3 swaping, or other high bandwidth applications you certainly
should look into this option when outside DSL/Cable areas.
Remember, in the Internet world if all you want is fast, reliable, and
cheap, pick two. CWX has some AUPs you might want to be aware of before you
sign up. It really depends on your user profile, it's a good solution for
some, poor for others.
Frank Whiteley
Greeley
CWX certainly isn't a great sollution for everyone ... the shared bandwidth techology
doesn't handle certain FPS games that flood the network very well, and has mild packet
loss problems under saturation which means that if you use high rate streaming UDP protocols
(streaming video, audio, and certain conferencing programs) you will seriously impact
interactive performance for all the other members, and not be a very good cooperative
member (so we generally ask people not to do it). For similar reasons multiple, long,
high rate FTP's seriously affect everyone as well - so we have voluntary guidelines for
bandwidth management, and sometimes are forced to hard shape bandwidth to manage
packetloss too. The technology also doesn't handle high rate servers at the end
of a wireless link very well due to collisions - it works best when most of the
traffic is downloads to the member sites - so we have a restriction that personal
servers with a very low served content are allowed, but higher volume servers are
not - external hosting is relatively cheap these days and is a much better place for
the higher volume traffic.
As a small member owned, member operated, cooperative, we choose not to subsidize
anyone. Bandwidth is a significant expense - so we have a strict everyone pays
their fair share policy, which includes metered service past a reasonable quota of
3.5GB/mo. Most people don't come close to that each month. We have local linux
mirrors for RedHat and Debian which we do not meter/charge access to - which is
the largest source of external traffic for several members that are linux developers
and testers. The biggest thing sending some people over quota was downloading pirate
MP3 audio and Video - or inadvertantly setting up MP3 servers (against our AUP) -
which can easily send a person over quota in a few days. Since this also drives
up the coop costs quickly - the every member pays their fair share policy - translates
into metered "over quota" charges that pass the costs thru to the member, hardly
"Free" - actually pretty expensive, and actually buying the music/video CD/DVD's
is probably a lot cheaper for the member (and CWX). We monitor bandwidth to manage
network performance and CWX costs - and typically warn members before seriously
exceeding quota - past that the member can choose to pay for "over quota" bandwidth
that they need/want.
For the last 3 years we have mostly ran our system with full available bandwidth
available to all members - hard shaping only as necessary to control costs and
excessive packet loss (when a few members have violated the voluntary rate shaping
guideline for long periods). The 512kbps accounts are mostly used by a few members
needing a higher quota, higher sustained bandwidth, and several businesses that
have more than 2-3 users online. When we do need to rate shape, the cap is nornally
2X the nominal billing class and 1/2 to 1/4 nominal rate for sustained large transfers
(like the voluntary guidelines). As a member owned, member operated group - we do
not have to deal with arbitary business decisions - but rather have a serious vested
interest in providing the best service we can to ourselves. At some point we will
probably have to always bandwidth shape all members, due to buffer limitations in
the repeater radios that cause packetloss under load, probably in the next year sometime.
We can also go down for hours (or even days worst case) due to weather and certain
equipment failures - we strongly suggest that people maintain another source of
internet access if they have mission critical needs. Over the last 3 years, this
has happened a few times - mostly due to ice build up on the hill top towers, and
certain member antennas. We have a best effort policy to clear and resume service,
but safety comes first - none of us will risk our lives to get our own service
online in bad weather. The FCC mandate for using the public unlicensed band is
that we accept other interference sources which can sometimes impact service till
we can identify the source and engineer around it - our mandate that members use
very narrow beam dish antennas minimizes this problem for most members, but some
people are affected by their own, or nearby microwave ovens and other 2.4GHz gear.
John Bass
FYI - This one of the monitoring metrics I sometimes run to manage CWX - shows free
available FTP bandwidth between our FRII gateway/server machine and my site over Milner.
Translated to available raw bandwidth, we generally have something better than a megabit
available for interactive use (and latencies typically in the 6-25ms range).
Sampled every 10 minutes.
# weighted average
* data point not under average
FRII.cwx.net 07/19/02 Average FTP Transfer Rate in KBytes/second - min/avg/max 53.9K/127.3K/166.2K
169K+
| *
|* * * * * *
## * ** **** * * * * * * *
148K+### #* #* # ### ####### **
| * ########## ## ##*### # * * ** * * *
| ** * ## * * * * * * * *
| * * * * * ### * * * *
127K+* * * ** * ## ## ## * * * * * *#
| # * # ### ## # * # * * * ###
| # * ##* * #*########## ###### * * ###
| * # *# * # ###### * * ### * # # * *
106K+ # **### # * ### ##
| ### ###
| * * * * * * * *
| * * **
84K+ * * *
| *
| * *
| *
63K+
| * *
| * *
|
42K+
|
|
|
21K+
|
|
|
0|------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------|
19 19.1 19.2 19.3 19.3 19.4 19.5 19.6 19.7 19.8 19.8 19.9 20
12AM 2AM 4AM 6AM 8AM 10AM Noon 2PM 4PM 6PM 8PM 10PM 12AM
Y scale is KBytes/sec for 250,000 byte file from frii.cwx.net to gate.dmsd.com
X scale is fractional days of the month
Which is significantly better than the 14-15KBytes/sec that ISDN delivers, and the nominal 256kbps
(30KBytes/sec) service listed in our billing rate structure.
More information about the NCLUG
mailing list