True Limiting Bt Transfers

[Firefoxx]

I'm not really only talking about large file tranfers, I'm talking about normal everyday browsing and internet usage (the net is not only BT and HTTP). Whenever I tried Skype computer to computer calls (to Europe and the US) from any home package, the quality was terrible, if I was even able to esatablish a connection. Newsgroup browsing was atrocious, doing the bunny-hop from 0k to 16k. Normal HTTP web browsing wasn't *that* bad, but on a 2.5mbit home connection it was a whole lot slower than my 512k connection, and upon inspection of the connection graph, also doing the bunny hop.

I realize that some lucky people have not had this kind of experience, and have had fairly good speeds even before the p2p bandwidth limit. However, there are those who aren't so lucky, and from my experience, there are quite a few that get horrible speeds. I personally know several BT users, and I know all too well how heavily they use their bandwidth, and what utter nonsense they use it for. One acquaintence uses BT for practically everything, just so that he *doesn't* have to go to pantip (a couple of blocks from his house) and pay a measely 100 baht.

I don't think I've ever mentioned anything about the morals of p2p... Everyone knows that 99.999(ad infinium)% of p2p users are using it for copyrighted material. I too use p2p for that purpose (yes, for stuff that I can't find here.. otherwise I'd go buy it at pantip, it's way easier). However, I don't use it 24/7 at full steam, and that's what I'm against. I think I stated before that I felt True was taking a step in the right direction, albeit with a bit too much gusto. The things that are limiting your transfers are the routers you're connected to, not servers. The difference in router configs may be because there are only certain areas which have heavy users, or it may be that True's techs messed up (not uncommon).

What I see this as is a case in which some really greedy/selfish power users are ruining everything for others (paying the same per month but using 100 times the resources). Like I said, I'm hoping that this will make them cancel their subscriptions, and everything can go back to normal.

[sajal]

i totally disagree with firefox..

whatever the users use their bandwidth for should be their own choice and not someone else preaching...

we pay true for unlimited downloads and the users should be given that freedom.

if anyone has to be blamed thats true..

true should have a seperate connection with limited downloads and better share ratio for the normal users,...

so that the heavy users and normal users have some sorta seperation.

maybe the 1000 baht a month has no value for you but for me it does and i would like to use the connection for whatever i desire....without someont tellin me i should use lesser so that everyone using true can get their share of bandwidth...

if u want proper bandwidth with no bunny hops i suggest u take KSC(share ratio 1:10) rather than true(1:50...or more).

[Gleen_tea]

I agree with devil_dog.

I think True has got far too many users and not enough bandwidth.

[melus]

As Firefoxx noted in his previous post,

...they're entitled to the overuse of their bandwidth, and the rest be damned.

A profligate always thinks they're entitled to whatever no matter what the circumstances are. If we are to expect fair prices from True in the future, isn't it reasonable for True to expect that we all download in moderation - at least until True and other Thai ISPs can add more international bandwidth. Prices will fall - and that's good for everyone - if bandwidth abusers can - at least for now - forgo downloading that video that they can just as easily buy for a hundred baht at the nearest pirate's video stand.

[yeti]

Guess some of you will be happy : I'm checking when i can stop my True contract to move on to CSLOX (even if i never used BT).

[Hikage]

I agree with devil_dog.

I think True has got far too many users and not enough bandwidth.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

When all's said and done this is the bottom line. You can't be advertising 4mb connections, giving only a small fraction of that and then cutting services? True should advertise REALISTIC packages that they have BW to cover.

Also, going to Panthip is not an option for everyone. When you live all the way on the other side of town, you will pay over 400B to get 1 DVD (including taxi and DVD) You also need to find the time to do it. 400B is half a month's connection fee. Why should I do/pay that when I can just click a button? Simple!

"Good" users like firefox are being F#CKED too. Even when he does the odd p2p transfer, he has too contend with true's blocking/shaping. That sound a little unfair? hmm!

EDIT

Oh and also, I DID go to Panthip about a week ago to get some SW (could not find it on p2p) got it home and the CD was F#UCKED (400B + 4 hours wasted). After more searching found it on BT, pressed a button and el-shwamo!

Edited April 17, 2005 by Hikage

[Firefoxx]

The basis of consumer broadband pricing comes from the contention ratio: users share bandwidth, and that sharing results in consumer-level prices. This works well enough when users are behaving and using their connection moderately, and it will even work if there are a few heavy users. If, however, a number of users take it onto themselves to utilize nearly all of their alloted bandwidth all the time, this system comes tumbling down. If you want "true" unlimited transfers at full speeds, then pay the full corporate price and enjoy the 1:1 contention ratio. Let's be realistic here, folks. You know that 1mbit of actual international bandwidth costs a whole lot more than 1,000 baht/month (in the order of magnitudes more), yet you want to monopolize that bandwidth for your own dubious reasons.

What if you lived in an apartment, with only a set amount of hot water (which is the norm). What if your neighbor kept his hot water running at full blast all the time... just to keep his aparment nice and humid. On cold winter mornings, you get to enjoy that refreshing -10 degree shower you've always wanted, and your balls shrink to the size of raisins. Ain't sharing great?

Limiting transfers isn't something new, it's been done in the UK and the US before, and the reason was because of heavy p2p usage by a small number of users.

Lastly, if you've bothered to read your contract, it says (I'm paraphrasing from Thai) "the user will not use this service for immoral things, things that affect national security, etc. etc., *illegal things* etc. etc.". Unless you've got a lot of legal, non-porn BT content to load (I doubt it) you can't complain, since you're in breach of the contract. Not only that, another clause states that "this is not guaranteed speed, only best effort, etc. etc". That's what you get for a consumer price. Pay up the corporate price, or live with the consumer limitations.

Again, folks, I have *absolutely NOTHING* against moderate P2P usage for stuff you actually need. It's the "I'll download everything I see" mentality that's ruining things.

[Abandon]

When all's said and done this is the bottom line. You can't be advertising 4mb connections, giving only a small fraction of that and then cutting services? True should advertise REALISTIC packages that they have BW to cover.

absolutely !

So if you use lots of aircons, should the electricity board cut your amperage?

Maybe hospitals should refuse seriously ill patients so that the others get more resources?

Or maybe the highways to bangkok should be restricted to one lane to give the occasional driver jam free roads.

I am not a heavy BT user and lots of us use the Thai Hub so that we don't get stuck with international bandwidth - that's why we set it up. And a good 10% of my p2p (not bit torrent) is legit, legal, and not immoral in any way, but gets limited too.\

TRUE - may their balls shrivel to raisins

Edited April 18, 2005 by pandit35

[marquess]

What if you lived in an apartment, with only a set amount of hot water (which is the norm). What if your neighbor kept his hot water running at full blast all the time...

That's a fallecious argument, why would anyone have their hot water on all day?

[autonomous_unit]

I suspect Firefoxx cannot get through to the BT fans anymore than someone can go to BKK or the US and suggest that people ought to reduce their car trips to improve the traffic problem and reduce pollution. It reminds me of the "libertarians" in Los Angeles who use kerosene lighter fluid for their charcoal barbeque, cheery wood fires on a balmy December night, and two-stroke engine garden equipment while blaming everyone else for the smog...

I only wish the network technology were mature enough to track usage that leads to congestion and implement fair multi-level queueing so my low-bandwidth email and ssh connections were low latency while my infrequent VOIP calls were effective and everyone's BT, ftp, or otherwise bulk transfers would fight it out among themselves for the remaining capacity.

Alternatively, I wish I could choose to pay for better service on some packets to accomplish the same thing, rather than having to change my router to the "true2m" login and back again several times a week.

[slimdog]

One of the big problems regarding all p2p networks has been the prolific prescence of virus's,trojan's and other backdoor codes. Originally these were mostly written for the fun of it. Since the clampdown on p2p networks by both the music and film industries these have changed.

Although simple virus's and trojans are still around, more sophisticated codes have appeared over the last few years, most of these are aimed at trying to mask p2p ip address's by using an infected machine as a proxy. When this happens massive amounts of bandwidth are taken up, and as a result transfer speeds slow to a crawl.

For anyone interested in how this works; here is an interesting example:

http://members.chello.nl/s.pechler/Backdoo...roxy_server.htm

[Firefoxx]

Marquess, I was talking about the constant abuse of a shared resource for a fairly pointless objective: In one case, it's using hot water all day just to keep one's apartment humid (as I stated). In the broadband sense, it's using bandwidth all day to get files that you don't actually need.

(Again, if anyone forgets, I'm arguing against the *abuse* of a shared resource, which in this case is turning on BT at full steam all day, every day, for stuff you don't use. I'm not against moderate BT'ing for files that you need/use.)

[Abandon]

I see that for my friend in Japan he has a 10 m DL and 5 m UL which means that he can BT far more stuff in a day than he can watch.

But actually he does not get that much - like me maybe 3 or 4 movies a week. I simply do not believe that many people are using BT 24/7 - no one can watch that much stuff, even at (unrestricted) Thai speeds.

The only real solution is to get the high speed infrastructure that Japan has which would give all users all they want. I still BT as much as I did before, but now I just leave it on 24/7 instead of my previous method of just DL a movie during the night 3 or 4 nights a week.

[withnail]

I've got a 2.5Mb True connection so "technically" I should be able to download at about 300kB/s. Now, even with True running at "full" speed the most I'm likely to get from a single torrent download is about 60kB/s. Therefore for me to be abusing the system I would have to be downloading 5 movies simultaniously 24 hours a day.

The fact of the matter is though that I'm never going to do that and who is unless they have a DVD factory set up in their bedroom. I would happy to get the three files I download a week at half that speed but as it is I've been downloading only one file for about a week now.

I also don't agree with the argument that using all of your allocated speed (which I have never achieved even when trying to "abuse" the system) is not fair because that argument only works if you pressume that the only people that use the internet are people like my Mother who want to pay lots of money just so that Hotmail loads a bit quicker when they check it once a week. It won't be long before lots of people are using the internet to transfer a high volume of information legally or illegally and unless people account for this they'll be ****ed.

[Firefoxx]

Like I said folks, I have absolutely nothing to say against people who don't abuse BT. But, as I've said, I know plenty of people who do abuse it. Yes, by downloading 5+ torrents at a time (not to mention the other 5+ torrents being seeded). If you can read Thai, you can try to go browse the Thai ADSL forums before the bandwidth limit, and you'll see tons of posts of people bragging about how much they can saturate their links with BT, complete with screenshots of 10+ active torrents. Other posts carry on about how to configure BT to make it use the most bandwidth possible.

People who use 100% bandwidth 24/7 (no, you can't acheive 100%, but you can saturate at 80-90%) and people who are like your mother are two opposites and extremes. Presuming that either are the total sum of the subscriber base is playing at being ignorant. Most users are somewhere in between, surfing most of the time with the occasional high bandwidth download.

Originally, True (TA) coped with the limited bandwidth problem by not allowing unlimited internet. They had unlimited LOCAL internet, and if you wanted the costly international surfing, you paid by the hour, so anyone doing heavy P2P paid quite a lot. Of course, only True was happy with this, so they had to (after quite a while) change to actual unlimited internet hours. If you really want no holds-barred surfing, you can switch back to the original plan (they still offer it) and pay by the hour (24/7 P2P=20k baht/month). If the heavy downloaders really think that they're entitled to abuse (again, abuse=saturation 24/7 for useless files) shared bandwidth then True will be forced to switch everyone back to the original plan. That's the only way they'll break even and give you your bandwidth.

Does anyone truly realize how much 1mbit of international bandwidth costs in Thailand? Thanks to CAT, it's a whole lot more than in other countries. The fact that True can offer this service at this price to a tiny (200k is tiny) subscriber base is a miracle in itself. If you want freedom to abuse, you can go to Japan or Korea. It's just not practical here.

If anyone thinks that I'm a True lover, think again. I hate True as much, nay, more than any other bloke. If you do a forum search, you'll see quite a few posts by me about how I've been screwed by True one way or another. However, I think True did (sort of) the right thing this time... appeasing the majority of moderate users who were getting lousy speeds by screwing the heavy users (and some moderate users). Of course, I say this again, they could have been a bit less heavy-handed.

Edited April 19, 2005 by Firefoxx

[withnail]

I don't want to start a fight but I think we're going to just have to agree to disagree here.

Why would someone choose to pay extra for a 4.5Mb or 2.5Mb unlimited package. If they are told that they a) must use the package moderately and they cannot be given those speeds (at least with certain types of downloading).

If there is a limited bandwidth problem then limit the bandwidth or charge more for it. I agree that the price is low but at the end of the day you aren't getting what they're selling. I would happily accept slower but consistent downloads if I was on the lowest package or upgrade to the highest package but either way I want to get what I've asked/paid for. I've paid for a certain speed and I've paid for unlimited use, your saying that I shouldn't get either.

If I was on the old package and offered unlimited no holds-barred surfing which I had to pay for then sure I wouldn't be downloading movies 24/7 (which I'm not anyway) but would I have the option to anyway or would p2p still be limited?

[Hikage]

I don't want to start a fight but I think we're going to just have to agree to disagree here.

Why would someone choose to pay extra for a 4.5Mb or 2.5Mb unlimited package. If they are told that they a) must use the package moderately and they cannot be given those speeds (at least with certain types of downloading).

If there is a limited bandwidth problem then limit the bandwidth or charge more for it. I agree that the price is low but at the end of the day you aren't getting what they're selling. I would happily accept slower but consistent downloads if I was on the lowest package or upgrade to the highest package but either way I want to get what I've asked/paid for. I've paid for a certain speed and I've paid for unlimited use, your saying that I shouldn't get either.

If I was on the old package and offered unlimited no holds-barred surfing which I had to pay for then sure I wouldn't be downloading movies 24/7 (which I'm not anyway) but would I have the option to anyway or would p2p still be limited?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Exactly, True are offering unrealistic packages (knowing they cannot deliver a reasonable percentage of specified BW)

This is an attempt to FOOL as many potential customers as possible into signing up knowing they cannot deliver. Their marketing strategy: Sign up as many people as possible by offering unrealistic numbers, deliver a small fraction of the BW, then renege by cutting services.

If the numbers were realistic, there would be no problem.

Don't blame the BTers, blame True! I'd rather have a 256k connection that delivered 70-90% than a 4m connection that delivered < 5%. But no, that would not look good enough on the glossy marketing brochures now would it?

[Abandon]

BT transfers are loosely tied to what you UL - so I simply do not beleive that people abuse it by soaking up all the DL bandwidth. The fastest UL capacity is 512 - so if folks have 2.5 or higher DL bought and paid for their restricted UL would limit their DL speeds. Most of the good BT sites require a share ration of 1:1. It is pretty difficult to DL a LOT more than you UL with BT.

[autonomous_unit]

BT transfers are loosely tied to what you UL - so I simply do not beleive that people abuse it by soaking up all the DL bandwidth. The fastest UL capacity is 512 - so if folks have 2.5 or higher DL bought and paid for their restricted UL would limit their DL speeds. Most of the good BT sites require a share ration of 1:1. It is pretty difficult to DL a LOT more than you UL with BT.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I got the 1024/512 package specifically to get the highest upload speed they offered. I routinely see 512 upload but the effective download is much less than 512, so that mean it is sufficient to add to the congestion with a 1:1 BT share ratio. (Effective by my seat of the pants measure of what can I expect for short transfers and interactive stuff after eliminating the freakish outliers. Once in a while it peaks to 1 Mb/s and once in a while it completely stops.)

The real problem w/ BT, I think, is that it is not very aware of network topology. It would be great if people in Thailand were actually sharing the same files amongst themselves and not redundantly transferring files over the international link, but there isn't anything in BT to really enforce that until the international link gets completely screwed. More traditional (regional) ftp or website mirrors would be better in this regard (as would plain old http downloads that get handled by the ISP proxy cache).

A first step in making BT play nice might just be to restrict its TCP window size and to reduce the packet queueing in the True network so it becomes more sensitive to congestion loss. Unfortunately, I believe Firefoxx when he suggests a lot of BT users are tuning it for maximum bandwidth rather than socially responsible behavior. Maintaining too many peer connections will erase any benefit from playing with window sizes etc.

I am glad to see True is trying to do something to reengineer their networks rather than just sitting with the same terrible, oscillating failures I have seen over the past year or so. It's more art than science so I am not surprised there have been hiccups in the first few weeks of adjustments.

[Abandon]

so has anyone found that TRUE is faster for blocking bit torrents ???

It has not been for me.

If they actually did free up any bandwidth I'd bet my bum fluff they would just bung more users on to each server.

[yeti]

And it's more and more difficult to get an IP address for which p2p traffic is not limited.

Seems they have installed their system nearly on all their network

[sajal]

yesterday night happily surfing(true 1024/512) on the 20something.x.x.x IP....at abt 2:30 am the net gets dicsonnected....nuthin works...call the customer service center....the girl with the sleepy voice told me that there is some network problems in my area.....anyways...been up since morning....using the 91.60.x.x IP....and getting amazing speeds on BT.....

i guess they probably allocated more bandwidth on the router i feed on...

any similar experiences to true customers in asoke/sukhumvit area???

for a change im impressed with true and will upgrade from 1024/512 package to 2.5mbps/152 kbps...

its 1 pm on a regular office day and i can get 100 KBps on BT...

or is it that bandwidth management of true that sucks...and i happen to be on the receiving end.

[Hikage]

Yeah, as soon as you get lucky 91 you're laughing, but it's normally not long till your back on 90.

I tried disconnecting/reconnecting about 50 times to try and get on the 91 subnet, but to no avail.

I've never had a problem with http speeds and the new BT limiters seem to make no difference to that.

I've not had speeds over 3 kB/s on BitTorrent for a month

[autonomous_unit]

Just wanted to comment that I started seeing very bad performance on our True ADSL today. It is giving 4-6 second ping times to hosts in the US which usually get 200 milliseconds! That completely kills TCP performance and is several times worse than a GPRS connection.

This happens on all subnets I have managed to get by reconnecting the modem, e.g. 61.90, 61.91, and even a 200-something-or-other address I got once. However, it is not happening to all destinations, as thaivisa.com is still around 300 millisecond right now.

This kind of ping delay really only happens with serious routing and/or packet queueing misconfiguration and I wonder if this is what some of the people seeing "traffic shaping" are really experiencing... it is not showing high packet loss on my ping tests, but just this absurd delay.