How much b\w does your average and top customer use? in Wireless Service Providers http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20442966 en Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:00:37 EDT Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:00:37 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20604723 iansltx : Hmm superdog, maybe your NetEqualizer will help some of your problem? :)

Seriously, the problem with people using a ton of bandwidth is the principle of oveselling, necessitated by the principle of telcos ripping you off for backbone access. Because of the obscene prices you pay, each gigabyte has a cost to it, and traffic tends to be bursty etc. and therein lies the rub.

Just a crazy idea but maybe "double your speed between 11 pm and 6 am" might get the college kids to use that part of the network. It certainly would make me do so...though with the speeds I'm projecting and bandwidth costs I'm looking at I don't think I'll take my own advice...I would rather have a solid, high-quality video stream in the late evening (with twice the bandwidth that I have right now) then watch a buffer-y, choppy stream during the day when I have better things to doo :). Just a thought.]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20604723 Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:05:05 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20604326 superdog :
said by FreebirdFly See Profile :

The 1.5 Mbps is simply the speed you allow the customer to download, but if they download 1000 kb every second for hours a day, wouldn't you as and IPS say you are using too much b/w and cap them?
If it is on my network?, I have no problem with it provided the network isn't busy. If you are the only one on at 1AM, why not let you have it all?. I tell all of my customers that if you want to download a large file?, please do it after 11PM. Fire it up and go to bed. :D

I have one customer who has college kids that come home on holidays, weekends etc. No matter what I do or say, they run Bit torrent, download music from Itunes or anything they feel like doing.

Now, before you jump up and say, "So what!, they pay for it, so why can't they?!", these people are customers, but...... They are the brothers family of the guy who owns the silo and I do not pay rent for the silo access. Now, with that being said, I owe the silo owner a lot (Hence the free access for silo owner and his family), however, I don't owe the brother anything.

I guess I am complaining because I am giving something for free and all I ask is for them to be kind and wait until everyone else is not using the network. Anyhow, I have no problem serving my customers but at some point I am going to need more bandwidth. I guess we all know that has to happen?, but it seems like whenever I may make a $$ or two, it goes right back out trying to make my customers happy. Oh well............... :huh:
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»www.wavecrazy.net Join WISPA today! »www.wispa.org/]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20604326 Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:30:57 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use?� http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20600755 FreebirdFly : I'd say it wouldn't matter to me. I have a lot of customers getting into the Netflix on demand thing. I tracked one of them and they use almost the full alloted BW on their plan 1.5Mbps download. It didnt even phase me other than saying whoah.... �

Isn't it not so much their speed but how much they actually move through your system. The 1.5 Mbps is simply the speed you allow the customer to download, but if they download 1000 kb every second for hours a day, wouldn't you as and IPS say you are using too much b/w and cap them? ]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20600755 Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:51:10 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use?� http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20597094 AMD Phreak : I'd say it wouldn't matter to me. I have a lot of customers getting into the Netflix on demand thing. I tracked one of them and they use almost the full alloted BW on their plan 1.5Mbps download. It didnt even phase me other than saying whoah.... :-)�]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20597094 Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:41:58 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20596977 FreebirdFly : So, if I live in one of your wireless areas and get an IPTV service sending me 800-950 kbps and I watch TV 5 hours per day- how long would it be until you shut me off or is this no big deal. I still will use the Internet, but just for email and web pages, no downloading. ]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20596977 Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:17:23 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20457534 anon : Well, my connection is 3mb/s down and 768Kb/s up (sustained, burst is 8mb/s down, 1.5mb/s up) and I (on average) pull down about 80 gig/month and push about 40 - 60 gig up. We had to cut my up back to 512 sustained because I was hosing one of our most used AP's. Ya need to watch for ppl like me, b/c we are nasty to WISP's (I am a tech/installer for mine)]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20457534 Fri, 09 May 2008 14:51:24 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20451044 gzerphey : 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.]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20451044 Thu, 08 May 2008 11:32:12 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20450945 VariableARK : 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).]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20450945 Thu, 08 May 2008 11:12:10 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20450703 anon : 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]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20450703 Thu, 08 May 2008 10:28:57 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20450440 tx_tower :
said by iansltx See Profile :

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.]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20450440 Thu, 08 May 2008 09:20:51 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20449763 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.]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20449763 Thu, 08 May 2008 02:23:15 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20448422 Rhaas : 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.

Click for full size
]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20448422 Wed, 07 May 2008 21:12:16 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447962 milbrath : 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]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447962 Wed, 07 May 2008 19:43:06 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447469 cmaenginsb :
said by iansltx See Profile :

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.]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447469 Wed, 07 May 2008 18:04:49 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447421 iansltx : 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?]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447421 Wed, 07 May 2008 17:55:52 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447408 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...]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447408 Wed, 07 May 2008 17:54:18 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447390 Inssomniak : 71 days, 800 gigabytes. 90 users, you do the math :)]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447390 Wed, 07 May 2008 17:50:56 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447354 iansltx : 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!]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20447354 Wed, 07 May 2008 17:44:33 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20446741 slipstream1 : I am going to start swinging customers over to the new 10Mbps fiber connection this weekend. I guess I had better hurry.]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20446741 Wed, 07 May 2008 15:57:36 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20446277 mtroup : I hope you're ready for that 316.4 MB xp sp3 :)]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20446277 Wed, 07 May 2008 14:44:08 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20446204 slipstream1 : 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. :huh:]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20446204 Wed, 07 May 2008 14:32:55 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20445518 tx_tower : 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 ;)]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20445518 Wed, 07 May 2008 12:32:32 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20444810 cmaenginsb :
said by LLigetfa See Profile :

said by iansltx See Profile :

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.]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20444810 Wed, 07 May 2008 10:32:36 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20444367 LLigetfa :
said by iansltx See Profile :

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]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20444367 Wed, 07 May 2008 08:43:42 EDT Re: How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20443538 cmaenginsb : 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.]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20443538 Wed, 07 May 2008 01:18:46 EDT How much b\w does your average and top customer use? http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20442966 iansltx : 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...]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,20442966 Tue, 06 May 2008 22:51:04 EDT