Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

[PaulC]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

Sounds like you have a great provider. That's awesome. Wish we had stuff like that here. I'm stuck with Comcast Business. They have way better terms than the residential services, but still not as good as what it sounds like you have!

I'm lucky, no doubt about it. It's not all roses, but they definitely care about the service they're providing to their customers. I hope they remain successful, I'd hate to go back to some huge uncaring ISP.

Good to have you here..

Thanks - nice of you to say so

Great quote there, and an even better point.

Thanks

When I find bots signing up for some of the vBulletin and phpBB boards I run (and you can always tell by the way the info is filled out), the domestic IPs are often Comcast's. I'd bet if they simply did some better screening, they wouldn't have to worry about people using too much of the bandwidth for which they signed up.

With the number of subscribers these huge ISPs have, they could easily spot an abnormally large number of connections all hitting the same IRC server, and chop off the control channel at its source. Doesn't matter how many bots in your botnet if you can't issue commands to them

But they're not even doing the basics, like nuking well-known worm propagation traffic. The Snort project has done the hard work of figuring out and distributing the signatures, so there's really little excuse. It comes off as a complete disinterest in the wellbeing of their customer's machines, and by extension, poor net responsibility.

Maybe I'm crazy, but in my opinion known malicious traffic should never leave their network. Just think of the upraw if some major corporation had the same attitude - let thousands of infected machine run loose on their network, doing nothing to prevent their activities, and largely ignoring external problem reports? The CIO would be fired within days, and never find another job in the field. Why isn't someone like Comcast and SBC held to the same standard by their customers? or an even higher one?

To use another phone analogy: If there were a phone company that did nothing about abusive anonymous phone calls you received from random phone numbers every 5 seconds, day and night, how long would they have your business? how long would other phone companies continue to accept calls originating from their network?

I wonder if the various security-related government organizations have put any thought into what kind of threat a large botnet poses. Passively, that's a great way to break cryptography. Actively, it could saturate any internet-connected service at will. And not just web sites or email servers; with the rise of VoIP, it's starting to be possible to attack the public phone system in the same way. Suppose someone found a vunerability in the Cisco VoIP system widely used by corporations? or cracked the security of that OOMA product just launched?

Ok, enough ranting. This has nothing to do traffic shaping or Vudu in general. Whatever you do, don't ask me about credit companies and identity theft

(related subject: check out http://dshield.org - they accept and process firewall logs, and provide aggregated info back. They also have a 'fightback' service that emails abuse reports to the NOC of a given netblock for machines seen attacking multiple targets. free service.)

[NA9D]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

Paul,

Sounds like you have a great provider. That's awesome. Wish we had stuff like that here. I'm stuck with Comcast Business. They have way better terms than the residential services, but still not as good as what it sounds like you have!

Good to have you here..

[MaxH]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

I wouldn't touch Comcast with a barge poll personally. Terms of use aren't acceptable to me, and the standard of service would drive me crazy. Then there's the filtering, blocking and throttling they do - like the phone company telling me what kinds of conversations I can have on 'their' phone. And yet no egress filtering of known worm/virus traffic.

Great quote there, and an even better point. When I find bots signing up for some of the vBulletin and phpBB boards I run (and you can always tell by the way the info is filled out), the domestic IPs are often Comcast's. I'd bet if they simply did some better screening, they wouldn't have to worry about people using too much of the bandwidth for which they signed up.

[PaulC]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

I've stayed away from wireless providers because of the burst rates vs. the long term rates. Perhaps your ISP is using equipment from Motorola/Netxnet which would give you those sorts of rates (it's a pseudo WiMax implementation).

Etheric started with Trango gear, not sure what they're using now.

Anyhow, one thing to be aware of in speed tests is that they test very short terms speeds. It fools a lot of us who have Comcast. Comcast has a burst mode as well and I test out at 25 Mbs but my speeds after the first 15 to 20 MB are max'd at 8 Mb/sec.

There's no soft cap or throttling of traffic on Etheric that I've observed. I've seen sustained downloads of 1.1-1.3 MB/sec from servers for extended periods (when the other end is fast enough). Then again, I'm paying quite a bit more than mainstream broadband rates (though I've no regrets).

I'm fortunate enough to have a choice of service providers where I'm located. I wouldn't touch Comcast with a barge poll personally. Terms of use aren't acceptable to me, and the standard of service would drive me crazy. Then there's the filtering, blocking and throttling they do - like the phone company telling me what kinds of conversations I can have on 'their' phone. And yet no egress filtering of known worm/virus traffic.

I was using DSL for a while, but ended up with two lines, from different providers. Outages were common enough I couldn't count on one, and I'd have to escalate a couple of levels of CSRs before I could have an intelligent conversation about the problem ('unplug your modem for 30 seconds sir', 'oh, so you're not using a single Windows XP PC with no firewall? then that's not a configuration we support, sir').

Anyhow, it's late and I'm drifting far off-topic...

-- Paul

[Nded]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

What would explain that? Was it something that happened because the Vudu server went down? Do periodic updates increase the traffic for some number of days?

You'll like the answer when we can share it with you. Right now our lips are sealed.

[NA9D]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

What would explain that? Was it something that happened because the Vudu server went down? Do periodic updates increase the traffic for some number of days?

If we told you, we'd have to shoot you...

[redwein]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

Hi PaulC,

Your box is probably "catching up" with the latest catalog of movies, software, etc... This happens when someone buys a box that has been in a warehouse/shelf for a while, so there is a period of time when it will be transferring faster while it's catching up.
In steady state, however, the typical background use is much lower than that.

I thought my boxes had achieved a steady state. The blinking LEDs on my network switches, router and modem had slowed down dramatically. Then, with what looks like the "outage" last Sunday night, the heavy traffic resumed by Monday night. Since then, they have been moving data like crazy. What would explain that? Was it something that happened because the Vudu server went down? Do periodic updates increase the traffic for some number of days?

[NA9D]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

Paul,

Good to know and yeah, when the box isn't streaming or doing database updates, the downlink traffic is pretty minimal. Uplink trends around 100 to 200 kbps and as high as 300 kbps depending on requirements. But it never stays at 300 kbps for more than a few minutes - it's not at all constant.

Good news about your service as well. I've stayed away from wireless providers because of the burst rates vs. the long term rates. Perhaps your ISP is using equipment from Motorola/Netxnet which would give you those sorts of rates (it's a pseudo WiMax implementation).

Anyhow, one thing to be aware of in speed tests is that they test very short terms speeds. It fools a lot of us who have Comcast. Comcast has a burst mode as well and I test out at 25 Mbs but my speeds after the first 15 to 20 MB are max'd at 8 Mb/sec.

Jon

[PaulC]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

Yes, sorry, my bad - kilobytes/sec, not kilobits/sec.

Thanks Greg, that's good to know it's not a long-term situation. I did only just get a unit (didn't make the cut for the beta test, unfortunately). It's been constant and creaping up over several days from 25 KB/sec to 60 KB/sec currently, so I was assuming it would be long-term (and that the trend may continue upwards).

Etheric Networks doesn't enforce a dynamic 'cap' on the transfer rates - i.e. you can 'burst' as much as you want, for as long as you want, within reason. The 'committed rate' is what they guarantee to be available at all times, i.e. it's the contractual minimum for the purposes of the service level agreement.

I have Etheric's 'Gold T1' plan, so my committed rate is 1.5 Mbps, and my traffic is prioritized over the lower plans. The table on the 'residential' page hasn't been updated in years. The '6Mbps burst' was for first generation equipment that tapped out at 8 Mbps. The third generation equipment is much faster and more reliable (about 3x faster). In practice, I've never seen it below 8 Mbps unless there's been a problem or maintenance underway. Historically, it's been more like 12 Mbps on average. More recently, I've been seeing 15-18 Mbps quite often - in both directions (all numbers measured regularly using DSLReports). One of the things I love about Etheric is that the service is constantly improving.

The VUDU speed test 'pegs the meter' in both directions - I just did the test again, and got ~11Mbps down, ~12Mbps up. I don't think I'll have a bandwidth problem the only extra wrinkle is the non-zero packet loss. It's usually a fraction of a percent, but it's not zero.

[NA9D]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

I think Paul is looking at the downstream traffic, and he is expressing it in KiloBytes/sec (i.e. 60 KBytes/s ~ 600 Kbits/s).

-- Greg

Ah, that would be about right for catch-up..

And Paul, this is not a constant download...

[NA9D]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

I

I do have a fairly fat pipe (~10 Mbps symmetric), is it possible that the Vudu protocols are scaling themselves up proportionately?

Paul,

I took a look at who your ISP is and I see that EtherIC is a wireless internet provider. You may have an issue using the Vudu period and it has nothing to do with your ISPs limits.

Wireless ISPs typically have a guaranteed rate and a burst rate. The burst rate is likely what they are saying is the 10 Mb/10 Mb rate. The burst happens for a particular length of time and then the guaranteed rate kicks in. The guaranteed rate is much, much lower and not fast enough for Vudu streaming.

I'm looking at the plans here: http://www.etheric.net/residential.html

Do you have the Diamond plan? If so, the guaranteed rate is 5 Mbps which is sufficient. I'd double check on this to be sure though..

Jon

[Greg]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

60 Kbps is about right for uplink traffic.

Let's see here 60 kbps is about 7.5 kBytes/sec = 450 KB/min = 27 MB/hour = 648 MB/day = 19.44 GB /month.

So I don't understand how you arrived at the 140 GB per month number? I think you got bytes and bits mixed up. In fact, I'm positive that's what you did.

Who is your provider?

I know I'm right on this because I typically max out my 1 Mb/sec upload pipe for the entire month and that's only a little over 300 Gigs...

I think Paul is looking at the downstream traffic, and he is expressing it in KiloBytes/sec (i.e. 60 KBytes/s ~ 600 Kbits/s).

-- Greg

[Greg]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

Hi PaulC,

Your box is probably "catching up" with the latest catalog of movies, software, etc... This happens when someone buys a box that has been in a warehouse/shelf for a while, so there is a period of time when it will be transferring faster while it's catching up.
In steady state, however, the typical background use is much lower than that.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

-- Greg

[NA9D]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

60 Kbps is about right for uplink traffic.

Let's see here 60 kbps is about 7.5 kBytes/sec = 450 KB/min = 27 MB/hour = 648 MB/day = 19.44 GB /month.

So I don't understand how you arrived at the 140 GB per month number? I think you got bytes and bits mixed up. In fact, I'm positive that's what you did.

Who is your provider?

I know I'm right on this because I typically max out my 1 Mb/sec upload pipe for the entire month and that's only a little over 300 Gigs...

[PaulC]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

I know I'm going to have to do something to restrict how much bandwidth the Vudu box is taking for P2P traffic.

I'm seeing a fairly constant background transfer rate of around 60 kb/sec. That's going to add up to about 140 GB a month, roughly. My provider considers about 50 GB a month to be a reasonable limit for a residential user. They're pretty cool about the occasional overage, but they'd be justified in considering being 2x-3x over on a regular basis to be a problem.

This is not related to actual movie streaming, i.e. my use of my Vudu box. It's purely Vudu's P2P 'background' traffic. I haven't yet rented a movie.

I do have a fairly fat pipe (~10 Mbps symmetric), is it possible that the Vudu protocols are scaling themselves up proportionately?

-- Paul

p.s. my firewall is a linux box.