jkroon

Recently we’ve seen an explosion of uncapped accounts entering the market. We’ve also seen that they are typically horribly slow in comparison to capped accounts – and if one goes and reads most of the acceptable use policies it becomes clear that they are in fact not uncapped, but rather, severely shaped capped accounts.

Shaping implies that certain traffic classes will get priority over others, so for example http traffic and smtp to their local services will be OK’ish and mostly everything else will be rather bad. This, dear providers, is NOT broadband. This is abuse of the word uncapped and you should clearly mark your products for what they are. If you have a “soft cap” of 30GB – that is still a cap. If you have a (like IS’s newly released business class uncapped accounts) floating CAP – state it (thanks IS, at least you don’t try to mislead here, 20 GB over 10-days floating CAP with the top 20 % of users throttled sounds reasonable).

Now, the price tag on the IS uncapped account mentioned above is slightly in excess of R2000 ex VAT. For my office I’ll need two of those accounts (we run through approximately 100GB worth of traffic each month and I’m NOT willing to sacrifice on quality of the service). For those doing the math already, R4400 vs R5000 … yea. If those were the complete facts I might consider switching and doing some careful load balancing over the two accounts to try and stay out of the top 20 % as well as to remain under the floating cap. However, the price difference isn’t severe enough for me to honestly consider it, and I’ve got another trick up my sleave: split routing.

I’ve approximately three years ago figured out how to separate local and international bandwidth at the client premises into two separate accounts. This allows me to utilize cheap local-only ADSL accounts for local bandwidth, and normal blended ADSL accounts for my international traffic. Seeing that our split is about 60 % local 40 % international this means that my cost ends up being around R2500 to R3000 per month, ex VAT for my bandwidth every month. And I get this at the same quality that you’ve come to expect from SAIX’s ADSL accounts. No frills, no fuss, good international latencies (usually at around 250 to 300 ms) and excellent local latencies of as low as 10ms (compared to around 25 to 30 on IS accounts).

Even three years ago this was beneficial, and I thought that this concept was going to be killed when the uncapped accounts started entering the market … yet the opposite has become true – I’ve now got even more inquiries asking WHY uncapped is so bad, and what alternatives are there. And this is only from a “consumer dsl” perspective (ie, sme and home market).
When one starts looking at data centres the costs associated with bandwidth starts looking even worse. No more el-cheapo ADSL (yes, trust me when I tell you ADSL bandwidth is EXTREMELY cheap). Now you have to start getting things like metro-ethernet. You need to start buying transit. If you’re hosting you’re most likely paying per GB over a certain thresshold (eg, first 3GB for your server is included with monthly and after that you’re paying per GB). If you’re the hosting environment you’re most likely buying bandwidth in per mega-bit chunks.
No matter in which of these arenas you’re playing there is NO SUCH THING as uncapped bandwidth. Either you’re being limited by an artificial cap such as you can use 3GB at any rate you please (which is also a lie as the upstream BW has a limit in terms of bits per second) or you’re being limited by the bits per second.

What uncapped really means is unmetered. In other words: We will allow you to consume bandwidth at an average of X bits per second, and we won’t actually (for billing purposes) measure how many bytes you push over the link. This means immediately that you pay for capacity instead of per byte. It’s also possibly to buy such unmetered solutions in an oversubscribed manner, for example, you can buy “gold” or “silver” transit from SAIX, “gold” means that you will have a contention ratio of 1:1 (meaning you will always be able to use your full capacity), or with silver you can get a contention ratio of 3:1 – which means that permitting that the other people aren’t consuming bandwidth you can burst up to your pipe size, but you’re only guaranteed of a third of it. Either way – 4Mbps of this is likely to make you understand why uncapped ADSL is a bad idea.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 4th, 2010 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.