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Author Topic: Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)  (Read 4257 times)

Weaver

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Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)
« on: July 09, 2015, 07:43:38 PM »

A couple of questions, apol if this has been covered elsewhere a long time ago:-

(see recap === below as to what BTW Premium is.)

[Well worth a read for all : http://www.aa.net.uk/broadband-premium.html]

Q1. Does anyone have any experience of with-vs-without Premium comparisons on their favourite ISP in respect of inbound traffic prioritisation?

Q2. Has anyone seen any more detailed documentation about where, how and what happens inside the BTW network in respect of honouring premium packets/flows?

For example, A&A are pretty vague about what happens in the BTW internals, understandably, and do a good job underselling the option at £12. The thing is, A&A are pretty keen on hitting BT with a large club if BT’s network develops congestion at any point, regarding this as brokenness which need to be fixed foc, not charged for.

By the way, some ISPs (A&A for example, possibly Plusnet) also prioritise traffic that is marked _Premium_ within their _own_ networks too. See example :
    http://clueless.aa.net.uk/linkreport.cgi
A&A’s internal treatment of Premium-marked traffic under congestion.



*************

=== v. brief and skimpy recap :-

BT trading as BT Wholesale (“BTW”) offers an extra cost _performance enhancement_ option to sell to your ISP. The BTW _Premium_ option is covered here :
http://www.aa.net.uk/broadband-premium.html

ISPs who resell Premium, either as an extra-cost-per-month option or who bundle it into one of their products supposedly “for free” include: Plusnet, Zen, Demon, Andrews & Arnold (AAISP - aa.net.uk)
=== end of recap
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ejs

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Re: Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)
« Reply #1 on: July 09, 2015, 09:49:29 PM »

Q1, I haven't any experience, but regarding Q2:

On 20CN, there's "Max Premium" which has the 832k upload in addition to the higher priority.

On WBC (21CN ADSL and FTTC), it's referred to as Elevated in BTWholesale documentation. The WBC FTTC Handbook, and the WBC Operational Handbook too, can be found via a well known search engine. The Elevated option also increases some of those minimum speed ranges, but I don't think many people would put up with the throughput speeds in those particular ranges anyway. The "Minimum 'Best Efforts' Planned Downstream Throughput" for a full speed 80 Mb FTTC line is 40Mb/s Standard or 60Mb/s with Elevated.

Plusnet offer Max Premium on 20CN I think at the extra wholesale cost. I don't think Plusnet offer WBC Elevated, the "Pro" add-on only changes Plusnet's internal traffic prioritisation.
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Weaver

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Re: Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)
« Reply #2 on: July 11, 2015, 12:09:24 PM »

The table mentioned earlier, showing how A&A deal with traffic belonging to the sheep snd the goats (at http://clueless.aa.net.uk/linkreport.cgi) is difficult to understand, because it doesn't say which direction traffic going in nor where the measurements are made and there is no helpful pic of the topology of things.

But it is interesting how A&A do treat Premium seriously. BT should be able to come up with something similar themselves, firstly to keep them honest and secondly to let us know how Premium is working.
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kitz

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Re: Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)
« Reply #3 on: July 11, 2015, 11:42:01 PM »

I used to have it years ago when Plusnet charged £5 for it in the days of maxdsl.  My exchange was known for congestion and moving to max premium sorted this plus gave me the additional upload speed which is another reason why it was worth it.   IMHO it seems more of value on the 20CN exchanges as these have older and smaller backhauls and tend/ed to be more prone to congestion.    Max Premium was certainly beneficial to me and did make a difference - it definitely sorted my frequent issues with hot VPs as they are less contended.   

Although BT dont use ratios for contention these days, Premium always gets priority over standard and is the equivalent of the old 20:1 compared to 50:1 and I was put on a different VP which has a higher performance threshold.

BT SIN quotes

Quote
Max Premium products have priority through the shared part of the IPstream network over the BT IPStream Hone and BT IPStream Max products.   During a busy period Premium product{s} will receive a higher downstream throughput that the equivalent Home or Max product.

Its not something Ive done on 21CN though and since it only affects the VP and not anything to do the ISP, its not something Ive found a need for.   
iirc jelv also found it useful when he was on 20CN.
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Weaver

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Re: Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)
« Reply #4 on: July 12, 2015, 05:20:03 AM »

@Kitz - That’s very valuable. Thank you very much for your experiences on that point.

Since I’m on 20CN and also A&A support it themselves it seems to be potentially worthwhile.

I did once try knocking it off for a month or so a few years back, when it was £10 per line. The results were pretty dire and I didn't follow it up for long enough to be able to get some kind of halfway decent stats out of it that would stand up to sensible scrutiny. Nor was I sure enough that things were totally quiet on my network for the tests back then, as there was a lot going on.

[There is another trick that A&A can exploit in order to tackle hopeless intractably congested BTW exchanges, which is-off topic for this thread, but basically involves the use of PPP LCP packets as a kind of odd virtual link layer. If anyone is interested I could possibly dig up a post about it from somewhere, but that would be, as I say, for another thread.]
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kitz

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Re: Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)
« Reply #5 on: July 12, 2015, 12:43:39 PM »

If you are experiencing issues that are related to the VPs then its certainly worth thinking about. 


I am aware atm that there are areas on the BT network which appear to be suffering from congestion.   BTw are keeping pretty quiet about it and most of the complaints and BT kicking appears to be coming from RevK himself.    With PN users also reporting problems and from attempting to put 2 and 2 together (hopefully not making 5), then I would guess the point of congestion is the BTw MSILs.   (ie the point of entry before the CORE). 

Although both 20CN and 21CN now both use MSILs on the converged network, it would appear that the current issue is only affecting those on 21CN... and more notably those using fttc.
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Weaver

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Re: Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)
« Reply #6 on: July 13, 2015, 09:32:06 PM »

BT kicking - is this a good thing?  ;D

Does this mean that RevK is forgiven? from his sin some years back.  ::)
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Weaver

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Re: Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)
« Reply #7 on: December 29, 2015, 11:55:39 AM »

The link mentioned below to the A & A link congestion report was broken, fixed as follows (I hope):
     https://control.aa.net.uk/linkreport.cgi
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aesmith

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Re: Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)
« Reply #8 on: December 29, 2015, 03:53:34 PM »

.. With PN users also reporting problems and from attempting to put 2 and 2 together (hopefully not making 5), then I would guess the point of congestion is the BTw MSILs. ...

Plusnet problems may be due to their gateways.  That's reading between the lines, but I don't think there's another ISP whose user group offers a web page for you to easily see which gateway you're on (the suggestion being to try PPP disconnect/reconnect until you land on a different gateway, then see if the problem's gone away).  Furthermore I think the issue may be on upload.  On the PN forums the staff point out if the user was uploading significant data during the problem period.  On my connection I've seen times where upload of 90k bits per second brings the link to it's knees.
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Weaver

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Re: Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)
« Reply #9 on: December 29, 2015, 04:57:59 PM »

A & A 's clueless.aa.net.uk server shows you which BRAS is associated with each line. Am confused- ;D
« Last Edit: December 29, 2015, 05:42:59 PM by Weaver »
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Weaver

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Re: Premium option for £12/mon (BTW Premium)
« Reply #10 on: December 29, 2015, 07:45:34 PM »

Ejs kindly pointed out
    http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,15721.msg292628.html#msg292628
that Premium - also referred to by BTW as "elevated" - does not apply only to ADSL1. I'm not sure why I ever imagined it was so restricted, it's just that I had never thought about it in a wider context.

* What is the story for the ADSL2/ADSL2+ user in terms of upstream?

* Just to recap, it is available with VDSL? Is that correct?
« Last Edit: December 29, 2015, 08:01:15 PM by Weaver »
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