Re: Not so fast, broadband providers tell big users

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Andrew Burnette <acb () acb net>
Date: March 13, 2007 12:53:20 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Not so fast, broadband providers tell big users

Dave, et al,

the "rumored" soft limit for comcast is 600GBytes/month, or just shy  
of continuous 2Mbps the entire month. A few years back, it was just  
shy of 100Gbytes/month.  You'd be hard pressed to find any colo  
providers who will transit 600Gbytes in a month for $40.  Bellsouth's  
CTO has been quoted the average DSL user typically consumes around  
2Gbytes/month. You can readily see the difference between the two  
types of users.

Ms. Lee is either running continuous p2p traffic, or has a completely  
infested machine (not implausible, I've seen infected machines  
generate as much as 40Mbps at a time).

The way to get off the hook [usually] is to pay them an extra $10/mo  
for the higher rate service and they'll generally leave you alone.  
Afterall, another single Mbps costs them about that much.

Other providers handle it a bit differently. "FIOS" requires use of a  
MoCa (rg-6, coax) connected router, no choice given. fast router, but  
puny (1k) NAT/state table, so if you p2p, bittorrent, etc, you  
effectively deny yourself service (call it a self inflicted DoS  
attack). You'll be unable to surf the web, read or send email, etc  
until the 3-4 minute timeout of any particular NAT table entry takes  
place.

In my home, with a couple laptops, desktops, etc, just doing the  
normal dns lookups, web surfing, email (IMAP) checks, etc, burn up a  
good 400-500 entries in the NAT table at a given time.  One usenet  
session download, or bittorrent, and game over in terms of usefulness  
of the connection (note, each new TCP session or UDP transaction  
occupies a [NAT] state table slot).  Pretty creative way to clamp  
down on heavy users ;-) You can even call it a neutral network and be  
technically accurate in that statement.

of course, if you change the router into a bridge, put your own 'nat  
box' or router behind it that handles more connections, then you  
bypass the issue entirely.  In other words, no complaints here. I run  
an opensource freebsd firewall on an old pIII 500mhz machine. (http:// 
www.pfsense.com to be precise; yes, I contribute a few dollars to  
projects as good as that one) and can easily pull in 22Mbps (and 8k  
nat/state table entries) on the 20/5 service I subscribe to.

cheers,
andy


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