Their network is under provisioned. They sell an apartment building 300mbps connections to all 8 tenants, but only have a 1Gb connection. To make sure that link isn’t always saturated, they impose a data cap to make you not want to use the bandwidth you’re paying for. On top of that everyone’s connection is crippled during hours like the evening when everyone is using it. As a bonus, they can sell you cable TV on top, so you don’t hit your data cap watching shows.
I build ISP and private data networks for a living.
A contention ratio for residential circuits of 3 to 1 isn’t bad at all. You’d have to get pretty unlucky with your neighbors being raging pirates to be able to tell that was contended at all. Any data cap should scare the worst of the pirates away, so you probably won’t be in that situation.
If you can feel the circuit getting worse at different times of the day then the effective contention ( taking into account further upstream ) is probably more like 30 to 1 than 3 to 1.
Steam can do pretty well filling a tail circuit, probably better on average. But a torrent of a large file with a ton of peers when your client has the port forward back into the client absolutely puts more pressure on a tail circuit. More flows makes the shaping work harder.
Sometimes we see an outlier in our reporting and it’s not obvious if a customer has a torrent or a DDoS directed at them for the first few minutes.
I cringe every time I hear people choosing LTE / 5G for home connection over DSL / fiber. Here ISP’s can’t legally have a mimimum bandwidth less than 70% of the nominal bandwidth for fiber / copper described in the contract.
But they can sell as many mobile subscriptions as they please and they sure like selling them.
Their network is under provisioned. They sell an apartment building 300mbps connections to all 8 tenants, but only have a 1Gb connection. To make sure that link isn’t always saturated, they impose a data cap to make you not want to use the bandwidth you’re paying for. On top of that everyone’s connection is crippled during hours like the evening when everyone is using it. As a bonus, they can sell you cable TV on top, so you don’t hit your data cap watching shows.
I build ISP and private data networks for a living.
A contention ratio for residential circuits of 3 to 1 isn’t bad at all. You’d have to get pretty unlucky with your neighbors being raging pirates to be able to tell that was contended at all. Any data cap should scare the worst of the pirates away, so you probably won’t be in that situation.
If you can feel the circuit getting worse at different times of the day then the effective contention ( taking into account further upstream ) is probably more like 30 to 1 than 3 to 1.
Wouldn’t two Steam users downloading a game be enough to notice?
QoS is a thing, so it depends.
Yeah, stream is faster than most Linux torrents in my experience
Steam can do pretty well filling a tail circuit, probably better on average. But a torrent of a large file with a ton of peers when your client has the port forward back into the client absolutely puts more pressure on a tail circuit. More flows makes the shaping work harder.
Sometimes we see an outlier in our reporting and it’s not obvious if a customer has a torrent or a DDoS directed at them for the first few minutes.
Depends. If steam is pulling a full 300mbps on both connections there would still be 40% of the bandwidth available.
No, if two 300 megabit tails are shaped correctly, a third user shouldn’t notice that the 1G backhaul has got a bunch of use going on.
If you do, there’s something wrong or you aren’t really getting the 1G for some reason. Not generally a concern in a carrier platform.
I cringe every time I hear people choosing LTE / 5G for home connection over DSL / fiber. Here ISP’s can’t legally have a mimimum bandwidth less than 70% of the nominal bandwidth for fiber / copper described in the contract.
But they can sell as many mobile subscriptions as they please and they sure like selling them.