iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Fredericksburg, TX
 ·Qwest.net
 ·Comcast
 ·magicjack.com
 ·BeeCreek Communica..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| How much b\w does your average and top customer use?
Seems like WiSPs are particularly aware that there's a bandwidth crunch coming into their systems, oversubscribing to actually make any money off the system...oversubscribing by a large margin. So that begs the question: does oversubscription work, and how well? How much does the average user really use?
So a question to all you WiSPers out there: what's your average user bandwidth-wise per month? How about the top 10%? What about the top 1%? And, if I may intrude, what's your oversubscription ratio like? i.e. if you added up all "promised" bandwidth amounts for all users, by what factor would it exceed the line you have going out to the internet yourself?
While people are bickering over 250GB caps on Comcast and 60GB caps on TWC, I thought I might just ask... |
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cmaenginsb
Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-19
Palmdale, CA
edit:
May 7th, @01:23AM
| The average user really doesn't use that much.
I won't give a current estimate but from a past figure we had 300 1 Mbps customers. While the circuit was capable of bursting to 45 Mbps we would see a peak of about 6 Mbps with real occasion peaks (ie sudden burst of 10 minutes) at around 9 Mbps. So even with more bandwidth users simply didn't use it.
So that was an uncontrolled (as in each user was limited to 1 Mbps but that is the extent of the bandwidth management) oversubscription ratio of 50:1 with 300 users on a circuit capable of 45 Mbps. Suffice to say adding users increases this ratio to above 50:1 and from experience with other ISPs 1000 users runs around 100:1 or 125:1.
The reality is that most people have more to do than download a bunch of stuff on bit torrent. What we find when adding customers who never had broadband is that the first month they use a lot of bandwidth due to the wow factor and then usage trails off. Yes there are 1-2 PTPers that are downloading all the time but it's not a great as most think. |
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LLigetfa
join:2006-05-15
Fort Frances, ON
| reply to iansltx
said by iansltx  :While people are bickering over 250GB caps on Comcast and 60GB caps on TWC, I thought I might just ask... That trailing comment made me think the OP was looking for gig per month and not bits per second. Hard to quantify bps because it is so bursty.
--
Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it. -- Stephen Vizinczey |
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cmaenginsb
Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-19
Palmdale, CA
| said by LLigetfa :said by iansltx :While people are bickering over 250GB caps on Comcast and 60GB caps on TWC, I thought I might just ask... That trailing comment made me think the OP was looking for gig per month and not bits per second. Hard to quantify bps because it is so bursty. Sorry I focused more on this point:
i.e. if you added up all "promised" bandwidth amounts for all users, by what factor would it exceed the line you have going out to the internet yourself?
It's easy to look at peak Bps on a line that has more capacity than is being used to evaluate what a real world oversubscription factor might be. In our case at the time for the data provided you have an O/S ratio of 7:1 however the users never exceeded an O/S ratio of 50:1. Fortunately we pay for usage not the whole 45 Mbps line. The 6 Mbps comes from 3-4 months of usage where once again outside of a few small time periods it burst to 9 Mbps. |
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tx_tower
join:2007-11-13
Blanco, TX
| we have found that O/S rates of 50:1 or even 100:1 are acceptable as long as you shape the traffic correctly, we have about 500-600 customers on a 20meg circuit with speed ranging from 512k to 2megs and its rarely hits 10megs, i think the most I've even seen on that PoP was 13.4megs when i gave a friend 5megs for him to DL some "stuff for work" i.e. porn  |
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slipstream1
Premium
join:2005-11-15
Jacksonville, TX
| reply to iansltx
I have 150 customers on a bonded pair of T-1's. The packages range from 256Kbps to 1Mbps. There are times when the T's get full and the network slows, but it is mostly peaky, not really sustained, unless Microsoft issues a Windows update.  |
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mtroup
Marty
Premium
join:2007-06-28
Hermitage, AR | I hope you're ready for that 316.4 MB xp sp3  |
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slipstream1
Premium
join:2005-11-15
Jacksonville, TX | I am going to start swinging customers over to the new 10Mbps fiber connection this weekend. I guess I had better hurry. |
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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Fredericksburg, TX
·Qwest.net
·Comcast
·magicjack.com
·BeeCreek Communica..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| Thanks for the info guys. @tx_tower I have been looking at *a cerain usage graph* and now that I have another number to put it with it's very informative. Seems in line with what I though; the vast majority of users don't use the 'net that much, though some users make up for that fact
Any other WiSPers, feel free to comment. Maybe even post an average GB per month usage if you are willing, though the network utilization\customer count info is really helpful. Thanks again! |
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Inssomniak
join:2005-04-06
Cayuga, ON | 71 days, 800 gigabytes. 90 users, you do the math |
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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Fredericksburg, TX
·Qwest.net
·Comcast
·magicjack.com
·BeeCreek Communica..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| reply to iansltx
Upon further inspection, looks like the average internet user, average meaning spread out over all customers, uses about 7 GB per month on the class of connection you guys are talking about (topping out at 1 Mbit usually, it seems). Also, the concept of increasing OS ratios as customer numbers increase is interesting, though I can see how it happens
I wonder what happens when you give customers higher speeds... |
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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Fredericksburg, TX | reply to Inssomniak
re: Inssomniak calculated it out, and it seems quite a bit lower than the others here. Traffic shaping or just lower speed tiers, or something else? |
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cmaenginsb
Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-19
Palmdale, CA
| reply to iansltx
said by iansltx :Upon further inspection, looks like the average internet user, average meaning spread out over all customers, uses about 7 GB per month on the class of connection you guys are talking about (topping out at 1 Mbit usually, it seems). Also, the concept of increasing OS ratios as customer numbers increase is interesting, though I can see how it happens I wonder what happens when you give customers higher speeds... I've found that it stays about the same. Customers don't change their usage patterns, it just means that instead of downloading for 1 hour they do it for 30 minutes etc. |
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milbrath
join:2006-03-27
Dresden, TN
edit:
May 7th, @07:52PM
| reply to iansltx
Please note all my figures are Down only(the only thing that really matters to me). You will never see and ISP concerned that they are maxing out their uplink, atleast not at the NOC level(Acess Point, DSLAM, CMTS possibly). I guess it's possible, just not the reason they ever need to turn up new circuits.
I never figured out our average use but from looking at NTOP the top 10 are usually in the 7-8Gb range. Heaviest user would be the mail server coming in around 15Gb(not really a customer).
Everyone of those people whining on the comcast thread would be stuck with dialup if they were in our service area. I WOULD not serve them. Those 250GB (assuming most all traffic is downloading) users would be costing us $337.30 just in usage per month(consuming approximately 13% of our DS3 at all times).
Our our current DS3 it costs about $1.35 per GB of traffic(assuming it's always being used 100% down). The 6Mb DS3 can push ~1850 GB down per month. (hope I did my math right!).
If you ask me comcast is being extremely generous. Granted their transit costs are probably closer to $.10 per GB.
Hmm, I wonder why I'm always broke now. Damn you AT&T and your overpriced DS3. Even worse since they bought bellsouth they've been trying to raise our local loop charge on the DS3.
BM |
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Rhaas
join:2005-12-19
Bernie, MO
| Right now my top 5 d/loaders are (for 2 weeks) - 190gb, 95gb, 60gb, 55gb and 52gb (all DSL customers).
Top wireless users are at 16gb and 15gb (still in top 20 heaviest users, both 512k users).
I calculated my OS ratio at ~27:1 30Mb pipe with about 800Mb sold.
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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Fredericksburg, TX
·Qwest.net
·Comcast
·magicjack.com
·BeeCreek Communica..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| Hmm, so faster speed tiers just enhances burstiness rather than impacting overall used bandwidth in a hug way (then again landline users seem to use more, so at some point b\w does make a difference).
Thanks to both of you guys for the info, thx to Rhaas for the graphs and "leaderboard". Very helpful.
As to the cost per gigabyte, I agree that unless you're buying in extreme bulk or run your own network you can't come out ahead. Ridiculous what companies are charging now for DS3s etc. Though I'd venture to say that big boys like Comcast (who runs their own nationwide backbone network...FDCServers has a 10GE pipe to them directly) have a bandwidth cost nearer zero than you'd think. With Cachefly's multlink CDN costing 25 cents per gig when you're paying $300 per month, or with Amazon S3's 10-18c per gig with no commitment, I'd suspect the real costs on Comcast etc.'s end are billing overhead, customer equipment and suchlike. Actual bandwidth costs, I'd say, would hover around 6-7 cents per gigabyte assuming full pipe usage. That translates to ~$20 per megabit of dedicated bandwidth, wich would be a reasonable figure to pull out of a hat for such an economy of scale with, what, 14+ million customers? Hecl, I feel it right to complain about their $1.50 per gig overage policy, and that's cost for WiSPs who are at the mercy of telcos for their DS3 loops!
Here's an interesting one though: if providers aren't concerned about uplink capacity (whose usage looks to be at most 30% of downlink) then, on landline guys (note the qualification; yes I know about the whole WiSP connections problem), BitTorrent shouldn't be too much of a problem. The person could download a file once, then seed it out a few times, and that would be that. Just have the ISP tell users "if you must BitTorrent, set your reseed ratio to no more than 2.00 and we're cool with it).
Again, thanks for the information everyone, and thanks in advance should anyone else decide to post some stats. |
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tx_tower
join:2007-11-13
Blanco, TX
| said by iansltx :Hmm, so faster speed tiers just enhances burstiness rather than impacting overall used bandwidth in a hug way (then again landline users seem to use more, so at some point b\w does make a difference). Thanks to both of you guys for the info, thx to Rhaas for the graphs and "leaderboard". Very helpful. As to the cost per gigabyte, I agree that unless you're buying in extreme bulk or run your own network you can't come out ahead. Ridiculous what companies are charging now for DS3s etc. Though I'd venture to say that big boys like Comcast (who runs their own nationwide backbone network...FDCServers has a 10GE pipe to them directly) have a bandwidth cost nearer zero than you'd think. With Cachefly's multlink CDN costing 25 cents per gig when you're paying $300 per month, or with Amazon S3's 10-18c per gig with no commitment, I'd suspect the real costs on Comcast etc.'s end are billing overhead, customer equipment and suchlike. Actual bandwidth costs, I'd say, would hover around 6-7 cents per gigabyte assuming full pipe usage. That translates to ~$20 per megabit of dedicated bandwidth, wich would be a reasonable figure to pull out of a hat for such an economy of scale with, what, 14+ million customers? Hecl, I feel it right to complain about their $1.50 per gig overage policy, and that's cost for WiSPs who are at the mercy of telcos for their DS3 loops! Here's an interesting one though: if providers aren't concerned about uplink capacity (whose usage looks to be at most 30% of downlink) then, on landline guys (note the qualification; yes I know about the whole WiSP connections problem), BitTorrent shouldn't be too much of a problem. The person could download a file once, then seed it out a few times, and that would be that. Just have the ISP tell users "if you must BitTorrent, set your reseed ratio to no more than 2.00 and we're cool with it). Again, thanks for the information everyone, and thanks in advance should anyone else decide to post some stats. well at the risk of a beating the poor dead horse, its not so much bandwidth as it is connections and pps on a wireless network that makes lots of p2p usage a nightmare. |
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George Zerphey
@cticonnect.com
| reply to mtroup
That is why a transparent caches are such a wonderful thing.
I actually recommend providing an internal FTP server for such things to the customers for just such a use. Weekly or Monthly "newsletters" can direct customers to the server without being considered spam and saving your bandwidth. Just make sure you restrict access to download only or strange thing can happen.
-George |
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VariableARK
join:2003-03-17
USA | What happens when users start dumping porn and copyrighted files on your ftp server?
Sounds like a legal nightmare. I do not think I would ever let users store any files on a server of mine (outside of mail). |
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gzerphey
join:2008-05-08
Willowbrook, IL
edit:
May 8th, @12:03PM
| Again this why the FTP server is control by the administrator and the users only have read / download rights. By no means would I let just anyone throw files up there. Legal problems would probably be the least of your concerns at that point. |
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