Bandwidth Control idea

[ninedd]

Assuming Star-OS doesn't already do this and I'm not blind...

Would it be possible for the Bandwidth Control rules to take into account the overall bandwidth use on the box, or average ping times upstream, or some other stat that would let it know how much overall bandwidth is used system wide?

What I'm thinking is that limiting users to 256K with a fallback rule is fine, but if there just doesn't happen to be much else happening online (ie. it's 4 AM) then it would be nice to have any user that wants it get the full T1.

Something like:
if upstream T1 use is > 80% of T1, then limit users to 128K/64K
if upstream T1 use is > 60% of T1, then limit users to 256K/128K
if upstream T1 use is > 40% of T1, then limit users to 512K/256K
if upstream T1 use is > 20% of T1, then limit users to 1024K/256K

- Todd Chamberlain

[tony]

Hello,

We do not have support for this, however it seems like a good idea which is worth investigating.

Thanks!

[lonnie]

If we do this, and we are not making any promises, I just caution that there is a movement in the Industry to be charging based on usage. You really don't want your users trained into thinking that there are any freebies as a large downloader can consume every bit your bandwidth. It is tough to take things away, and if they have always enjoyed unlimited speed at night, you will get major discomfort if you ever have to take it away.

Question to the group - Does your upstream provider turn up your speed when they have excess capacity?

As a provider you have to stop thinking like a user. That means you really want to sell that excess capacity and not simply be a nice guy and give it away. If you let your users always max out the channel how will you know if you have any spare capacity?

ADVICE - set your users to a fair speed based on a percentage of what you pay and do your best to make sure you can provide them with that speed.

[ninedd]

I agree, and I'm not a WISP who prices things below cost just to grab market share. When I first started in sales 20 years ago, I was told ''any idiot can give it away'' and that is very true. The key to being a good salesman is to make a profit doing it. I fully understand and agree that one 13 year old with a MP3 Fetish can drag my T1 down in no time. :-)

However, what I'm thinking here is that if I have a T1 coming in, and 20 users, I probably shouldn't offer more than 128K each, and for 128K bandwidth, I'm not going to get much $. However, if I can offer them burst speed to 512K, but only when there is ample available bandwidth so that they are not bumping into other users, then that allows me to both be conservative on bandwidth, but still offer premium burst speeds for premium prices and therefor more profit. I'd like to offer business customers something like a 128K base / 512K burst account.

The other issue is that with caching, I'd like a customer to be able to download things in the cache at much faster speeds than he's allowed to download things from the Internet. Again, I might well be blind and StarOS may already do this, I don't know. :-) I'm thinking it would be nice to offer them burst speeds to radio speeds for items in the cache or items locally on our site as long as they wern't occupying all the available radio bandwidth.

Again, I agree with what you are saying - and I don't want to train anyone to get it for free. We've always resisted going unlimited dialup for that exact reason. 100 hours is LOTS for 95% of the users out there. The other 5% can either pay us a premium price for a dedicated account, or they can go to the competition. Emotionally it hurts to have any customer go to the competition, but financially I'd rather someone else get the 5% of users who will use 80% of your resources. That's exactly why we're not in the $39.95 CDN Residential High Speed market. There isn't any money in it and those customers have been trained to expect exclusive use of T1 bandwidth for $39 / month, and would be disapointed with anything less.

[ninedd]

Hello, We do not have support for this, however it seems like a good idea which is worth investigating. Thanks!Is there anything like this now, or have changes to CBQ allowed us to simulate this idea? I'm _NOT_ a CBQ guru, and I only use it with a pipe for each customer, but perhaps using the parent method, could I accomplish this 'burst' or 'excess bandwidth' idea?

If I set a parent to 1024k, and then setup children of that at 512k, would that provide a single user at 4AM with 512K, and would it gracefully limit 10 users going full throttle to 100k each at peak times?

[ninedd]

I'm not sure how the PARENT works to shape and share data. If I set a parent rule to 1024k, and then pointed children rules to it of 300k each, would that provide 300k to a single user (if there was only one downloading at once) but would it gracefully limit 10 users each trying to go full throttle to 100k each?

[lonnie]

Yes. As I also pointed in your post to the list, you can achieve a solution by sharing a 1024 pipe amongst a group of users and when nobody was using the pipe they would busrt to the maximum and their minimum is the pipe/# users.