John Linton
I have been mildly interested in the beat up of alleged problems with Telstra's usage measuring systems that were referenced in this recent article by David Frith (not noted for hysteria or even exaggeration from what I have read over the years):
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25708608-5013038,00.html
I wasn't particularly interested in the references to the possible usage measurement but more in his comments on how he and his colleagues, in their professional capacities I am assuming, actually use a Telstra ADSL service and one that has throttling or shaping or whatever. Now my internet demands are not onerous - some browsing, constant VPN access to our databases and internal systems, a lot of email and not much else (certainly no games playing nor any movie downloading) but I do clearly remember dial up and there is no way known that I could begin to contemplate using a dial up speed connection to do anything - even email.......how David Frith could contemplate such a scenario as an IT journalist is impossible for me to understand....it can't be money.
I have always wondered why the throttling/shaping options were offered to anyone (residential or professional) with ADSL1 and it is beyond my comprehension why they are offered on ADSL2. The internet for even my modest needs is useless at 64 kbps so goodness knows how totally useless it would be for a gamer/downloader. Why do these options even exist today when the cost to a small ISP (such as Exetel) of delivering a gigabyte of data to an end user is less than $A0.80 and for a large ISP it would be far less. It seems to me that any ADSL plan now an be offered with enough included download to eliminate the problem of having to throttle/shape customers who so badly misjudge their usage that they exceed the included download they selected - offering a low cost per gb 'emergency buy' would handle that rare situation far more effectively.
I can understand, just, that when the majority of ADSL users were on 256/64 links and IP transit was 5 or 6 times more expensive than it is today it might have seemed sensible to 'protect' the end customer from large excess bills (such as the ones referenced in the cited article) but those days ended in 2003 when IP costs fell below $A400.00 per gbps and have continued to fall by 20% or more each year since. As there is no sensible reason for offering throttled/shaped plans - unless you count the current explosion of the use of the lying claims by some ISPs of "unlimited usage" when they mean when you reach your miniscule included download all usage for the rest of every month is at an unusable 64 kbps.
So why is throttlng/shaping still so widely prevalent when it is effectively totally useless? For the innumerate few who download so indiscriminately they can't work out how to 'budget' for their daily needs? But what use is a 64 kbps service to such users anyway? I can only assume that if they 'over spent' by a few dollars in a month it would pose such a financial burden on their scant financial resources they would suffer some forms of hardship...but at 64 kbps VoIP is unusable and VoIP is a very common application now used by a rapidly increasing number of users.
My best guess at why this silly practice persists is because of the continuing use of honey trap plans by so many unscrupulous ISPs - the plans where the 'included download allowance is so small that the majority of customers go over the limit and then get slugged by these unethical ISPs for charges like $A150.00 per gb - a sure fire way of gouging the unsuspecting user for huge excess fees. With IP transit plus the cost of customer interconnection now costing so little per gb and the ability to allow an end user to add a few gbs to obviate having their service slowed to an unusable speed it is obvious that the only reason to retain throttling/shaping is to continueto mislead customers.
When Exetel, very reluctantly and for reasons I can't remember now, introduced an option for throttling/shaping we tried to help those customers who selected it to avoid suffering from using a useless service. We did this in two ways. Firstly we sent the customer a warning by an immediately releasable 'block page' that they had only 1 gb, 500 mb and then 250 mb of their included download allowance remaining. After they reached their limit we blocked the access until they acknowledged they would be throttled/shaped after they had used a bonus 2 gb of downloads that we added to their plan at no charge. We thought this would be of great assistance to people who had miscalculated their usage for any month who would then stop indiscriminate downloading until the new month.
Silly us. For some people all this meant was they continued on massive downloads until they very quickly ran through the free 2 gb (a huge amount of downloads for non-large file download usage) and then they complained they were being charged at a penalty download rate of double the normal excess charge. All it proved was that some percentage of users are just incapable of managing even this simple aspect of their internet usage irrespective of what you put in place for them. After the first one or two times these, relatively small percentage of customers, exceeded their usage allowances they stopped or changed providers so it isn't a problem any more....but it serves to illustrate the point.
In the new plans Exetel has introduced the excess usage charge is $A1.25 which should eliminate the selection of throttling/shaping by anyone....if we ever offer it on those plans which is unlikely as it is a pointless option - making a service unusable while pretending it is still a broadband service. I must look for a sensible way of removing the shaping option for the 'old' plans without causing a furore from the few customers who think it's somehow useful. Perhaps just leaving the 2 gb 'safety bonus' in place will do that?
It will be interesting to see whether throttling/shaping options persist much longer by other ISPs.