Course.

If the ISPs network is saturated and has no traffic management then all protocols will come down at a slower speed.

Even when our network is full, Gaming and HTTP are still prioritised, ensuring that they come down as quickly as possible.

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Even when our network is full, Gaming and HTTP are still prioritised, ensuring that they come down as quickly as possible.

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When your network is full, everything slows down. The volume of traffic attempting to use the network will therefore be slower across all protocols. It's safe to say in that case, that prioritisation of gaming and HTTP within a congested network won't necessarily make it any faster across the internet than an unprioritised network.

Yes it will.

Because the traffic is prioritised above other traffic, the network should adapt to ensure that titanium/gold traffic comes down faster. That's the entire point of traffic management.

some protocols will be hit to create bandwidth for the high priority ones. Congestion typically comes from small number of protocol not across the board. p2p is a bandwidth hog that can dramatically effect gaming/http etc but p2p isn't really time dependant so reduce that protocol for the period of congestion to allow the more important time dependant ones bandwidth

I must admit to not having a technical background, and therefore tend to work on logic.
To me it's logical that if a network is congested it can only accept a finite number of connections at any one time, or deal with a finite amount of bandwidth.

Am I right/wrong in believing a situation could arise whereby a congested network could drop traffic at it's access point, or delay traffic at the access point, before it even gets to the inspection phase?.

I appreciate this could also happen to a network that doesn't employ prioritisation/shaping.

You probably need to read up on TCP flow and congestion control to see why (at least for TCP traffic) this isn't the case. My connection to my router is 100Mb/s, as is yours (probably), but if the two machines are talking directly to each other over ADSL then the connection between them is only 512kb/s (max upload speed). The PCs don't send data out at 100Mb/s and let the router throw most of it away - they 'sense' the overall bandwidth available and adapt themselves to it. So if you (PlusNet) then throttle the bandwidth somewhere in the middle to (say) 10kb/s the two ends will adapt and slow down. Another connection (not throttled) can then use all that is left.

The same isn't true for UDP itself - though higher layers of protocol will often do something similar.

So in your example, rather than the access point dropping all the traffic the endpoint will sense something is wrong and slow down (but this is done on a per connection basis!).

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Edited by deleted (Thu 10-Jan-08 15:29:56)

"I must admit to not having a technical background, and therefore tend to work on logic.
To me it's logical that if a network is congested it can only accept a finite number of connections at any one time, or deal with a finite amount of bandwidth.

Am I right/wrong in believing a situation could arise whereby a congested network could drop traffic at it's access point, or delay traffic at the access point, before it even gets to the inspection phase?.

I appreciate this could also happen to a network that doesn't employ prioritisation/shaping. "


Yes you are correct. At some point any heavily conjested network connect will first slow down and then eventually stop working. Usually what happens before this is applications that are time sensitive stop working anyway. To get round this issue most companies not just ISP's use what is called quality of service. This means if the connection is congested that business / service critical traffic such as EMail, Citrix etc will be given priority and traffic that is not business critical will be dropped if needed.

This is the same approach Plusnet seem to use. Quality of service would only drop low priority traffic as last restort and normally limit it to an designed minimum level so traffic of that kind still flows.

I visualize something along the lines of a funnel. The wide end being customer facing, the spout being the feed into a network. We all accept that ISP's have more customers than actual connections available.

What I'm trying to understand is, if the wide end gets full with requests for various protocols before it even gets into the network for prioritisation, what happens then?.

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We all accept that ISP's have more customers than actual connections available

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Yep. Every 622Mbps Pipe will allow 32,000 connections, but obviously not everyone will remain logged on at the same time.

We're going over my technical knowledge here, so I'll apologise if I'm not answering the right question. Because we're able to drop bronze and/or silver traffic to ensure that we're meeting the demand for gold and titanium traffic this will then allow us to sustain speed on those protocols.

I'll see if Tommo is about. He knows everything.