Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => ISPs => Topic started by: guest on November 02, 2007, 09:56:50 AM
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I'm going to make a concerted effort in November to see if I can trigger this, so we have some idea what the current "limits" of the service are.
I'm at about 30GB now (since yesterday) which sounds quite impressive but I know I'll struggle to keep up with the downloads (unrar, re-encode etc etc).
Most I have ever done was on Be and that was about 230GB in a month (the rest of the months were well below 50GB) so I'll try for 250GB and see if that attracts attention. Assuming of course I can actually find 250GB of "stuff" which I want :D
Oh and if anyone is wondering what the "stuff" is, then its mainly old BBC programmes (comedy usually) which the license fee completely funded. I do not view it as my problem if the BBC are so commercially inept that they fund 100% of a programme and then hand the copyright to their "luvvie" friends for nothing. Others may differ in their opinion but mine is that if we were forced to pay for the programme via a compulsory license fee then we have the moral right to "copy" that programme for free. Strangely I have not really found much in the way of ITV programmes which I would choose to download even if they were legal and free :D
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only just seen this cause Ive been awol..
But funny enough Ive very recently spoken to UKO in respect of something similar and I got some info out of the guy regarding their FUP. Since Im still catching up on stuff on here and to save me time - I'll just paste in the same info from elsewhere
He wouldnt quote any figures but it is entirely on how your adsl is
provisioned (BTIPstream + LLU are same price now). He says that on some
exchanges users can do basically what they like, but if you are on
IPStream... or one of their busier (perhaps read sky?) dslams then your
usage would be flagged up much sooner.
He says they def have their own allocation of ports on the sky equip (dslams)
but share the same "backbone" - therefore Im assuming the equiv of BT VPs
where contention could kick in if you had a pile of sky heavies also using
that same backhaul, in the same way that all ISPs on the BT VPs are
affected?... So to stop too much natural contention kicking in for all (sky
and UKO) they will target the heavier users on that particular exchange?
He couldnt elaborate much further as it varies from exchange to exchange he
said - so the last bit is speculation on my part.
He did say that on some
of their exchanges users get away with many hundreds of GBs per month and
they're not bothered at all.. but they could contact someone else on a
"busy exchange" who does a few hundred.
Regarding IPStream - he wasnt sure/didnt know at what stage things happened.
whilst on I also asked if theyd put me on one of the 22Mb accounts and I'd migrate if they would - but no can do and they wouldnt bite :(
They did tell me that their system reckons I could get up to 17Mb - yeah right on a 7dB atten line :D
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Looks like you're stuck with a max of 16Mbps then kitz. Do remember that the 16Mbps is supposedly contended at a maximum of 20:1, while the 22Mbps is still a maximum of 33:1. Contention is noticeable here at peak times but it doesn't appear to be a problem - I do all my downloads during office hours anyway when there is no noticeable contention.
I've found 28 series of Last Of The Summer Wine on usenet (already DivX'd) so that ought to total about 80GB (200+ epsiodes x 300MB) which helps :)
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>> Looks like you're stuck with a max of 16Mbps then kitz.
Indeed :/
The problem being I dont fancy tying myself up with a years contract for 16Mbps.... just incase Be/o2 etc decide that they may come here after all.
TBH right now I am happy with the connection Ive got. Since Im on "20:1" the exchange seems to be playing ball and most of the time I get a steady 6.5 - 7Mbps. I dont use p2p and Im on a legacy account thats no longer available, but suits my usage.
Actually I just had another thought - this exchange has always been bad for contention. That sky dslam seemed to fill up pretty quick... too damn quick! I wonder if a pile of heavies went over there and thats partially why the BTw dslam is now behaving?
>> I've found 28 series of Last Of The Summer Wine on usenet
lol and when are you going to find the time to sit down and watch all those :D
heh seriously though whats the total so far?
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Yeah I know but a lot of the 1970s comedy stuff is just disappearing from what the BBC laughingly call "archives", so when I see something that is (very) reasonable video quality I tend to grab it all, regardless of whether it'll be watched or not. We have 2TB of RAID5 storage here (3TB physical, so 2TB actual RAID5 storage) which is simply used for media, backups, family photos/videos so we're not likely to run short any time soon :)
I think Newsleecher is indicating 36GB since 31 Oct 07 - I don't bother tracking other usage actively as it's only likely to be 20GB or so.
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55GB now and struggling to download anything I actually want and don't already have. Most of the Last Of The Summer Wine episodes had expired but as its usenet then what goes around comes (back) around soon enough :D
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>> 55GB now and struggling to download anything I actually want
:D That wouldnt stop some.
Can you remember a few years back on AG someone saying they downloaded practically everything - then transferred it over to other media. Most of the time it then sat there doing nothing.
>> as its usenet then what goes around
Yeah sometimes one of the disadvantages of usenet.. that you may want something later but cant get it.
Possibly what prompted action of the above :D
Suppose you could always "put in a request".
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I've always found posting an appropriately worded request results in whatever you asked for being posted within one hour.
I don't believe we'll have usenet distribution of binaries in 5 years. I am in fact rather worried (not on copyright stuff) as to what will be permitted in 5 years. Then again I'm a cynic :P
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>> I don't believe we'll have usenet distribution of binaries in 5 years
p2p tends to get the most attention and nntp seems majorly have been left alone, once the authorities find a way in to stop those companies hosting stuff on their servers, the future of binary newsgroups is bound to diminish.
Then they'll probably get shifted somewhere like china, where the transatlantic link is sooo slow.
>> as to what will be permitted in 5 years.
State of the world isnt it - it seem quite ok for some young thugs to beyond the reach of the law, theres also so called freedom of speech... and less civility. But theres also the nanny state that seems to be cracking down in other areas. But then again thats another topic :-X
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63GB now, so I'm struggling to maintain 7GB/day. I don't think I'll manage 250GB in November. Makes me wonder how on earth I once downloaded 210GB in a month on Zen ??? I guess more people are posting in (decent) divx/xvid format now rather than DVD (MPEG2) as they used to.
Thread digression approaching :P
Amusingly the UK govt looks like they are finally about to give us "fair use" rights - eg make a copy of a DVD for your own use. As part of this "deal" the UK will have to adopt the EU tariff on blank media*. Now either the govt are pretty clever (doubtful) or years behind the times (likely) as I don't know anyone now who copies CD to CD-R. They rip it to MP3/FLAC and dump that on a hard drive/music player/etc. Likewise who rips and burns a DVD when just about every "DVD" player built in the last 3 years understands MPEG4 (divx)? You can fit 3+ divx films on a DVD rather than just one DVD quality film.
*Basically it is (was would be more accurate) designed to compensate artists for assumed losses because for example you don't buy a second CD, you copy the first. I think we can all have a fairly good guess how much of the tariff goes to artists mmmm?
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>> Thread digression approaching Tongue
Indeed :D
>> think we can all have a fairly good guess how much of the tariff goes to artists
Exactly!!!
[Sorry for short replies
One of those days where I could easily go into rant mode and trying to stop myself from doing so as I dont really have the time :D]
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It has just occurred to me that it may not be the govt who are clever. It'll be the lobbyists. Music companies know that nobody bothers with using CD-Rs for writing music to* unless they've downloaded from a legal site, where they'll usually get WMA (with DRM) which can best be converted to MP3 by burning an audio CD and then ripping that.
Oh look they get paid for the download and the media it gets burned to.
Cynical? Moi? :)
*Yes you might do it with a CD player which understood MP3 - just fill up a data CD with MP3 tracks. Its not that common now - it was two or three years ago.
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75GB.
Dear god there's a load of rubbish out there :D
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hahah - youre failing miserably to download the internerd :lol:
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Here's some I downloaded earlier - a poor attempt I know but all divx'd so multiply by four for DVD sizes :P
[attachment deleted by admin]
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Niiiice
(admiring the size of your raid arrays) :D
I need another drive for this PC - well 2 really - cause although I dont use RAID, drive 2 is a replica of drive 1
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RAID - whether RAID1 or RAID5 - is the only way to go now IMHO.
Any other method of storage requires regular backups and the datasets are so large that most people won't bother either making a backup OR verifying it regularly until its all too late.
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/me nods in agreement
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RAID - whether RAID1 or RAID5 - is the only way to go now IMHO.
Any other method of storage requires regular backups and the datasets are so large that most people won't bother either making a backup OR verifying it regularly until its all too late.
I know
Unfortunately its the cost of 2 identical drives (hence my post saying "well 2 really") that is the deterrent. :(
atm I have something which runs nightly and backs up my "working" data and important files.
Then I have something that runs weekly which checks some other stuff.
But the D Drive because of its size and length of time that it takes to do it is a manual task :/
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With a lot of RAID implementations you don't need 2 identical drives - eg for RAID1 its usually enough that the mirror disk is larger than the target.
I know (I've tested it) that on these Terastations I can replace a disk with a larger disk without problems. I know that Clare's machine (Shuttle SD39P2) can do the same with RAID1 so it's not only the "latest & greatest" chipsets which can cope with this. I think I remember a MSI motherboard we have which can do the same too - and that is five years old.
Might be worth a try on your system?
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On this machine I have
Western Digital 250GB - split 100/150 GB
Seagate 7200 - 200GB -
Also have
Buffalo linkstation 300GB
Antec Media Center - WD 320GB
Kims PC 100GB + 40?GB
The seagate drive doesnt have sufficient capacity to mirror the WD (on which the D Drive is forever short of space)
So The Buffalo has a backup of my music /software... and also is supposed to backup all the music on Kimis PC
Ideal situation would be two new RAID drives for this PC.
Take the WD drive and put it in the Media Center currently has 1 x 320GB WD
Put the Seagate in Kims PC to give her more drive space.
Moving everything around would be a nightmare :D :D
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Damn - I was supposed to be downloading wasn't I? Haven't done anything since Monday :doh:
Strangely my ADSL went down at midnight (give or take a minute or so) and stayed down until I powered down the router for 10 minutes this morning. I tried a reboot and I also tried the ST780WL but neither saw any ADSL signal. No indication why it went down either - Netgear's logs aren't great for that (LCP down is rather an unhelpful log entry). Odd.
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Youre slacking :D
Weird about the downtime and that both routers saw no signal though :(
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I wondered if it might have something to do with forcing SRA? I rebooted again (after I got another LCP drop and no attempt to resync) at 07:34 with SRA, Bitswapping and Trellis forced on and its been fine since then.
Odd that it was around midnight - I can't see it being UKO doing that low-level maintenance but I could be wrong. The thought occurs that perhaps some register/counter on the Netgear has wrapped around as it had been up for a couple of weeks with nightly fluctuations in speed. Bitswapping perhaps but why didn't the ST780WL sync?
I'm sure I've seen someone else saying something about SRA and losing sync recently. Who knows where though :D
Edit - oh just to keep roughly on topic. 82GB
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May just be a co-incidence - but somewhere in the back of my memory I seem to recall that certain firmware version in the Netgear caused d/cs at midnight - but this was a nightly occurrence rather than a one-off sort of thing.
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165GB and I give up :)
No reaction from UKO but I wouldn't have expected one for 165GB on LLU.
Now to unrar 40GB of stuff and move it across the network. Thank gods for GigE.......... :D
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:lol:
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Well I've just done 207GB in 3 days so we'll see if that gets a reaction.
Some kind soul (with an upload speed of 6,700kB/sec) posted ALL of Cheers on Christmas Day. Yes every single episode in DVD resolution :clap:
Now if I could only get Series 3 and onwards of Hill St Blues then I'd have all the decent telly from the 1980s - which in retrospect was shown mainly on C4 so I can still claim I paid for it (C4 gets most of its funding from the license fee and always has).
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Nice one.
Now you just have to find the time to watch them all :D
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I have the rest of my life kitz and storage is cheap :)
this is usenet remember where the retention is perhaps 90-120 days.
Norm!! :P
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:lol:
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gonna give ukonline a go, mind you i'l not be on LLU so it may be that i'l get flagged up.
spoke to ukonline recently on the phone and the guy reckoned i would be ok, course he's sales so i guess he would say that. he said they don't restrict speeds though which is interesting. they will send out a polite warning letter then if you ignore that and carry on downloading too much they will cut you off completely. i asked what would happen if that was within the first 12 months and he checked with his supervisor and said i would still have to pay for the full contract period!! better make sure i pay by direct debit just incase i need to cut them off.
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As I said in the PM I'll be very surprised if they allow you to do much more than 40GB/month. That's the limit Sky have on non-LLU connections.
Get something in writing.
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yeah ur right, thanks for the advice rizla. so i'm not going with ukonline
think i'l end up with dmcdial , they were my original choice with a 2meg unlimited ??? service for £17.99 http://www.dmcdial.co.uk/homeusers.htm .
i gave my parents my old pc and used dmcdial to get them a cheap broadband service, at the time they offered 2meg for £14.99 with a 1 year contract.
shame they don't offer that anymore, now they have a 3month term for the slightly higher price.
plus they have a newsgroup service which appears to be included as standard. yey.
have tried applying online but comes up with a charge for a migration fee, which is supposed to be free. so will see if i can get a hold of someone on the phone to sort it out.
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Hi.
In regards to this page, and ukonline, i've got a bit of feedback for you :)
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/caps.htm
I recently signed up with UK Online, and got stitched with a 12 month contract. Just to confirm that they do use Ellacoya, and non encrypted Bittorrent traffic generally travels at 5kb/s, whereas encrypted Bittorrent traffic will go at full speed. And this is before the FUP gets hit. :S
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Interesting then that usenet traffic (unencrypted) is totally untouched. I wouldn't have thought they would throttle P2P and leave usenet alone........
Edit - just tried a 3.3GB torrent (LOTRO) and its fine. Nowhere near as fast as usenet (2MB/sec) but its fine. If UKO were throttling then I'd expect to see complaints on TBB and there aren't any......
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Did you try the torrent, without using encrypted traffic ?
I had to download an old version of Bittorrent (ver 4) to test it like this, since uTorrent would still encrypt, even when set to disabled.
One of the Technical Support guys said that they use Ellacoya in response to an email. :)
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Thats quite interesting thanks, but I havent seen anyone else say anything about this.
Are you on LLU or IPStream do you know? I have been told that the 2 may be handled differently with regards to any throttling.
There's one thing that puzzles me with regards to the Ellacoya statement.
Users tend to use encryption for p2p to avoid certain ISP throttling, but Ellacoyas are to a certain extent able to identify this type of traffic.
I dont understand the total ins and outs.. but whilst the encryption stops deep packet inspection being able to 100% positively identify it being p2p, theres something about the type of traffic + and with it being encypted that makes it highly suspicious as being p2p.
Plusnet openly admit to using ellacoyas, yet encrypted p2p traffic is still identified and throttled. Although there does at times appear to be a running battle between p2per's finding new ways and Ellacoya playing chase up with the pattern identification.
Would need some-one like Carl N whose supposedly one of the top UK experts to explain it properly. Im afraid I dont use p2p these days so my knowledge of whats going on is poor.
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My wife tested it - she's the LOTRO player - and it was unencrypted. I don't use P2P as its too slow anyway :)
I don't believe they are using Ellacoyas (on LLU) regardless of what you've been told as if they were then there is no way I'd be getting 2MB/sec (that's bytes not bits) from usenetserver.com regardless of time of day. It doesn't matter what port I use (25, 119, 80, 443, 563 etc etc) - they all perform identically.
When there is a slowdown (like last Sunday) it is invariably due to some problem at usenetserver.com - eg they were testing new SSL authentication servers at the weekend and that didn't go well. Oh there was one time that the transatlantic transit UKO/SKy/Easynet use went tits-up but that's the only issue that I can blame UKO for in the last 3 months or so.
Are you on IPStream? Perhaps they are using Ellacoyas on that?
As kitz said, it is quite possible to identify P2P traffic regardless of whether its encrypted or not as the upload/download pattern associated with torrents is fairly unique. All encryption does is prevent identification of the traffic content.
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Encrypted traffic not working sounds like Fast4.net the isp i tried before this one. I tested this downloading linux iso's, thinking it would get a fairly consistant speed.
Using the IPStream / LLU test (http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/adsltype.htm)the router Connected using that username but google wouldn't load, is that normal ?
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Since I dont use UKO, Im unable to test this out oneway or another,
but like rizla I stopped using p2p several years ago 1). because it was slow and 2) there isnt really anything that I want that cant be obtained by other means.
If UKO were using ellacoyas to shape it would still catch the encrypted traffic at some point. Ellacoya have made their name and reputation on the fact that they are able to do the deep packet inspection and also identify traffic pattern types.
afaik theres only one way to fool the ellacoyas, (not with encryption) but the ISPs are wise to that too.
If they were shaping to this extent I would have expected to hear about it at least on TBB since its no big secret that many on there moved to UKO because of their FUP which is quite generous compared to most other ISPs.
If UKO has shelled out what must amount to many 100's of £1,000 for ellacoyas I couldnt imagine them not using it for NNTP and the pattern identification for encrypted p2p too.
I'm not trying to defend the ISP - Ive no reason to.. but one thing that does strike me is that certain software is better at p2p than others and its also imperative that you make sure any ports are correctly forwarded. I noticed p2p in general starting to slow down several years ago depending on which client I used. Without a doubt some were better than others.
I also cant remember where I read this since it was about a year ago.. but Im sure that there was something about if you use encrypted then you can only connect to other users who are using encryption.. but the point being made was that unencrypted traffic was tending to be slower since there were less available peers to connect to these days as more users are moving over to encyption, not only to avoid ISP detection
If you want to check if your traffic is being shaped, you could perhaps try capturing data packets with Ethereal/Wireshark.
It should tell you in the Differentiated Services (TOS) field. Its all done in hex... but for eg 0x80 (DSCP 0x20) would be gold, 0x40 = silver, 0x20 = bronze. Whilst 0x00 identifies no shaping/QoS/ellacoyas.
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>> Using the IPStream / LLU test the router Connected using that username but google wouldn't load, is that normal ?
Its normal - That test connection is for BTws "private part" of the network and you wouldnt be able to browse the internet.
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This connection has been caned today on nntp and http - we're talking 60GB+ here so I think we can safely say that LLU has no shaping or throttling :)
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If you want to check if your traffic is being shaped, you could perhaps try capturing data packets with Ethereal/Wireshark.
It should tell you in the Differentiated Services (TOS) field. Its all done in hex... but for eg 0x80 (DSCP 0x20) would be gold, 0x40 = silver, 0x20 = bronze. Whilst 0x00 identifies no shaping/QoS/ellacoyas.
I got 0x00. ???
In that case, still cannot figure out why some protocols work, and others don't for me. (on IPStream).
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>> I got 0x00.
It doesn't necessarily prove that your traffic isn't being shaped in some form.
It is possible to do a lower level of QoS using just the edge routers such as Juniper ERX's. But they dont have the capability of the ellacoyas to do the clever stuff and it is possible to find ways of getting round that sort of QoS (such as encryption).
From what you've seen and also what Ive seen elsewhere I dont think that UKO are using ellacoyas though.
Have you checked that everything is port forwarded through your router correctly? Thats a common cause of slow p2p.
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yes, everything in router is fine. Everything worked good when i was on VirginMedia (through phoneline), except a crappy ping.
From googling about people have been reporting similar issues with ukonline since 2006. All on Ipsteam.
Also some post from back then said Easynet (who ukonline get stuff from) were installing Ellacoyas.
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=easynet&Number=2535266&page=0&view=expanded&sb=5&o=0&fpart= (http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=easynet&Number=2535266&page=0&view=expanded&sb=5&o=0&fpart=)
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Thanks for the linky. - interesting.
Will ask around and see if anyone else has seen similar