Ace-Internet Restrictions

I was just wondering, Ace-Internet blame the extra use of World Cup streams for their lack of bandwith - so why are they/Mistral now punishing P2P and Usenet users? Surely if there were no problems before with the P2P users using up all the bandwith, the solution would be just to stop the World Cup stream users from using up the bandwith?

Thanks. Sorry if there are similar posts elsewhere.

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I was just wondering, Ace-Internet blame the extra use of World Cup streams for their lack of bandwith - so why are they/Mistral now punishing P2P and Usenet users? Surely if there were no problems before with the P2P users using up all the bandwith, the solution would be just to stop the World Cup stream users from using up the bandwith?

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Hi

The extra traffic by the BBC streams were originally stated to us last Monday. This is just one of the factors involved.

There are however QoS issues that needed to be addressed. It is not as important for, say, a P2P file download to take a little longer, but a media stream needs x amount of bandwidth to actually function.

Kind Regards

Steve

Steve probably want to watch all his football highlights or live on the site, so he kept an eyes on the forum.

LOL

So you're saying that World Cup stream users are getting the prioritised service over P2P users? So P2P users are being effectively punished so that World Cup stream users can watch a football match?

Even though the World Cup stream users can watch the football matches on the television? It may 'need' x amount of bandwith, but surely, they don't have more of a right to it over P2P users, do they? We are all paying for the services, right?

I think that if you are faced with limiting some connections, you need to distribute it over the World Cup streams and P2P - not just one or the other. Surely that is the fair thing to do? I hope you understand where I am coming from.

No, but if the all users are left to fight for bandwidth, P2P would not work, nor would streaming....

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It is not as important for, say, a P2P file download to take a little longer

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What?
A little longer?
My mate has seen his p2p and Usenet speeds drop from 700+kB/s to 20kB/s from 9am till 6pm.That is a drop of over 97%.
How does this equate to a little longer?

God only knows what his speeds will be when you start the next level of throttling from 6pm till 11pm plus 6am till 9am.

Ah well at least he will be able to get the speeds that his line is capable of for the other SEVEN HOURS left in the day. Hey hang on; won

Why let users fight? Can't you somehow allocate fair amounts of bandwith to each?

You say that world cup users aren't being prioritised although P2P users are having extremely limited speeds, when those who want to watch a football match get to. If it's the world cup streams straining the network - then why not stop the world cup streams?

Please realise these are TEMPORARY restrictions.

And how long is "TEMPORARY"?

Will you still charge your customers full price even though they can't take full advantage of the advertised service?

Dear Mark Thank you for your email. We have taken the urgent steps necessary to protect the vast majority ofcustomers who do not use P2P. If we did not take the required measures, the service would be completelyunusable for anything. We have taken these steps in accordance with section 3.5 of our terms andconditions which states "We reserve the right to suspend, restrict orterminate your access to Ace Internet". This is only a temporary situation, we are working to bring back the serviceto a level you should expect, in the meantime subscription costs do remainthe same. Kind Regards

as you can see from the email i recieved they are still going to charge me

Please realise these are TEMPORARY restrictions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mistral have now discovered what happens when you offer what Ace were.

Granted not every Ace member was a member of the urine extraction squad who've started squatting in Mistral's car park, however, the latest "temporary restrictions" are a strong indication of the way things may go. Most members probably just tried to do what it said on the tin. Many tried to warn them and got shouted down for doing so.

It's unlikely Mistral will sling in a few more pipes to help alleviate the temporary restrictions (remember the lead times on pipes -- even 155 ones take a while) that are now in force which kinda indicates the restrictions might not really be that temporary. I can't seem them being able to boot enough "excessive" users to balance it all out again. This final paragraph is of course is total speculation on my part

I admired UKFSN's post earlier today. It spoke volumes.

But in their public statement - AceInternet blamed the world cup streams for the lack of bandwith - NOT P2P users. So why punish P2P users?

I doubt a vast majority do not watch the world cup streams either, so why let them watch them in full glory while those who use P2P can't use P2P?

Because if you're going to do any sort of QoS/prioritisation/throttling p2p takes a huge amount of capacity and the bulk (not suggesting all) of p2p use is downloading copyright stuff.

Also bear in mind that streams, well, they stream, they aren't much fun to watch if they keep breaking up. On the other hand a p2p download just takes longer.

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Also bear in mind that streams, well, they stream, they aren't much fun to watch if they keep breaking up.

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They're not much fun to watch even if they are not breaking up from what I have viewed, terrible quality. lol

Edited by deleted (Thu 15-Jun-06 18:08:52)

But then - why can't the people watching the streams just watch the television? Or they could record the world cup and then watch it later. It's not as though they NEED to see a match.

And P2P users are paying to be able to get the full service - what they do with the service shouldn't mean that another person paying for the same full service has priority.

We could keep arguing over this - but at the end of the day - I don't think that the world cup stream users should be able to do what they want when the P2P users aren't allowed. Even though, according to the statement, it's the world cup users straining the network.

There needs to be a balance so that P2P users can get an adequate service whilst some who want to watch the world cup can too. And I don't think that these "temporary" restrictions are fair to P2P users.

My question is, at what point in the evening will speeds return to normal.
It is after 6.00pm now and on a 3-4 meg service i am still getting speeds of 6.6Kbps on newsgroup d/l's

and as for 1/5 of a spped decreas, mine is actuallt 50x slower.
This is just not on, and is now depressing me and I can get anything done.
Screw it I'm off down the pub, if things are not up not normal pseed when i get back look out.

In reply to:

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"
My question is, at what point in the evening will speeds return to normal.
It is after 6.00pm now and on a 3-4 meg service i am still getting speeds of 6.6Kbps on newsgroup d/l's
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Yes and tommorrow I am going to take advantage of Steve's kind offer and get my MAC.



Take no notice of:

p2p doesn't require a high quality download to operate... streaming, voip, vpn, etc. does require it. In essence, p2p can saturate things to the point that a number of other things are useless. However, on the other hand p2p just takes a bit longer to download. This is usually not a problem as a lot of p2p activity is usually unattended while people are asleep or at work.

Streaming in many cases only requires less bandwidth than p2p. Do the maths on a 622 central with x number of 8mb users running P2P full blast 24/7. It is simply not economical to sustain. Some Ace users have reportedly downloaded over a terrabyte a month. I challenge anyone to prove on these forums that this is sustainable given the known costs which are publicly available. So far in the debates particularly over the last year, once you cut back the emotions, it simply is impossible.

If you do think it is possible, you could also go the extra step by starting up an ISP right now and showing the country how to do it. You would be the wonder child of the industry over night.

Until this miracle occurs, we need to lobby OFCOM to push BTw to overhaul its costs ASAP, so that bandwidth costs in this country becomes sane again.

Mate I dont blame you.

It is now 11.00pm an I am still under 1/3 of my normal download speed, this is taking the [censored] already.

Steve, do you care do offer an explination as to why this is still so slow?

It's not about Ace-Internet not being able to offer unlimited though - it's what they're doing as a result of it. Streaming may use less bandwith than P2P, but why give the bandwith to streaming and not P2P? Just because a P2P file can be downloaded over a longer period of time? But then as I said, there's nothing stopping the stream users from going and watching a television or watching a recorded version of the game when they get home.

I think I read that Ace is asking for user feedback. Perhaps if enough users say p2p is more important, you can get the priorieties set according to what you are suggesting. My guess is that many users would disagree with you.

P2P is hit because it takes up lots of bandwidth, thats the only reason.

If P2P apps would die tomorrow I bet there would be a lot of smug ISP's around, thing is something else would take its place and they'd just have to deal with the bandwidth from that.

They think it's acceptable to cap P2P because it's largest and most frequent use is for warez, but it's got legal uses as well, most torrent mirrors of perfectly legal files, such a large demos are god send when the mirrors get so bogged down you can't get on them.

I've seen some massive windows vista torrents for the open beta 2 *edit - wasnt a leak*, if it wasn't for them Im bettering microsoft would have probably taken down their mirrors all together. Most linux distros are done via P2P and quite frankly I struggle to find good mirrors for any popular content now a days.

I don't really know what applications use a LOT of bandwidth other than other downloads, why should I go from 400ks/ torrents on peak to 20k/s

Are the people browsing and reading emails really needing that other 380k/s? No... it's going towards ftp, http downloads, why are they more important?

Edited by Princess_Frosteh (Thu 15-Jun-06 23:43:02)

P2P is hit because it takes up lots of bandwidth, thats the only reason.

Absolutely, especially with Max coming online. Compound it by the fact that you don't have to sit at your computer... it can just carry on and on while you are at work, asleep, etc.

You may have seen this elsewhere, but here's a primer on the costs:

http://www.adsleconomics101.org.uk/cost.html

and excerpt from this article:

"Putting this into perspective; if you expect to saturate your line 24/7, it costs your ISP an absolute minimum of

Edited by deleted (Fri 16-Jun-06 00:00:47)

I'm aware of the costs, the costs should be lower from BT

The more I use the internet the more I'm convinced its doomed in the UK

But how soon will we hear of what Ace-Internet is considering? How long can they keep up the strict limits on P2P users?

The obvious one would be to kick off the heaviest users, if they really have downloaded one terrabyte. I believe that there is "heavy" and "heavy" and the real heavy users might want to consider limiting what they do.. Or surely Ace-Internet could ask for maybe donations or ask that the heaviest users pay more.

And is traffic caching an optioon?

I don't actually think that many users would disagree with me - I believe that a majority of AceInternets customers are P2Pers.. Why would paying a considereably high price for unlimited, non restricted or managed appeal to any other sort of user?

The more I use the internet the more I'm convinced its doomed in the UK

I agree with you. We are in big trouble if bandwidth prices stay the way they are for another year or two.

I don't actually think that many users would disagree with me - I believe that a majority of AceInternets customers are P2Pers.. Why would paying a considereably high price for unlimited, non restricted or managed appeal to any other sort of user?

I don't know what Ace will ultimately do. However, this whole episode will shake a few of the heaviest users off as they go looking for the next great deal. That's why I suggested to another user to sit tight for a month or so to see how things shape up.

And bandwith prices are high because of Ofcom - right?

So really, Ace-Internet would be clever if they arranged some sort of lobbying of Ofcom so that prices become lower?

That's what happens when you let a dinosaur run the network, and a bunch of glorified civil-servants keeping tabs on them.
Now Bulldog, Tiscali and LLU in general seem to be reasonably well established, we need BT to be allowed to compete on price.
Maybe now BD has moved into being an LLU provider for customers other than individual retail, we might see one of the bigger ISPs move over to using BD as a carrier.
The bigger the ISP, the better. Might make BT drop their wholesale prices a bit.
Having said that, it'll all go pear-shaped if the ISPs just pass on the savings (as they've done in the past) instead of using the money saved to buy more bandwidth.

Just my two-pennies

Well, the deal is something like 1.5 million LLU lines need to be installed before anything is done. That's why, from what I understand, that the costs of centrals is the same as it was two years ago. The good news is that some think we might reach this goal by the end of this year or early spring next.

In the meantime, there is a bit stirring here and there on the subject regarding lobbying a bit. Entanet has been raising some of the related issues here: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.cgi?id=EEuAylVZAVaWMWejAG

It'd be nice to know if AceInternet have signed up to the site set up by Entanet.

I just joined Ace's 8mb ADSLMAX8000 Biz at a cost of

which you will replace with other ones for sure your statement on your website says so.

The amount of times you posted about not taking on more then you can handle

now we see you blaming a few users for downloading 2 TB's

something doesnt smell right to me

I have a suggestion on your site clearly state you are a slave of minstral, and therefore so is your system.

I wonder what minstrals side of the story is hmmmmmmmmmmmm

jesus... stop the crying & bitching and give Ace a chance to announce what their next step is. whats the point of ace looking for a quick fix solution, i'd rather they spent a little time thinking about a realistic bandwith restriction for their customers. I moved from pipex almost 2 weeks ago and im still getting better download speeds on the Ace 2mb line than i was on my 2mb pipex line (+ it saves me

In other words, you can't offer an unlimited service without some type of restrictions.

Quelle surprise.

The slow motion train-wreck that is Ace internet has just de-railed.

Common sense as usual doc.

Anybody would think the end of the world had just happened or that internet suddenly went bang with some of the paranoia posts over the last few days.