>From: "David Mill" <maildave@inspire.net.nz>
>As some of you know I work for Inspire Net.

>Before change : Gamers had good pings.
>Gamers could load basic webpages on Jetstart
>Pings would not suffer.

That is because the bandwidth limiting was implemented by dropping packets.

>After change : Gamers have good pings
>loading a webpage, or light network traffic in the
>background now effects their ping times.

If a ping time increases there must be a queue somewhere.

>To me, the after change scenario seems a lot more logical.

We did some testing when Jetstart first came out, depending upon the
application a Jetstart connection would average a 30% packet loss. Thus it
appeared that the rate limiting did not implement any form of queueing, it
just dropped packets and TCP would eventually adjust to the available
bandwidth.

>a) Does anyone have any opinions on this?
>Do you disagree, or agree with my conclusion?

If the shaping has changed such that packets are now queued, then it is good
for you as an ISP and it is good for the user.

With a Jetstart connection running at 30% packet loss an ISP needs 30% more
upstream capacity to handle TCP retries. Think about it, 30% of the packets
coming over your international pipe get dumped by the rate limiting, so they
get sent from overseas again (retried), this eats your upstream capacity.

If you have say a 5GB cap, your users will only receive 3.5GB before they
blow the 5GB cap because 30% of the data is sent to them twice. This change
should fix this.

>c) Is there a solution?

This IS the solution, it is a lot kinder to the Internet.

>I guess one option is to prioritise gaming traffic,
> that sounds yucky and intensive.

Actually it is very simple to prioritise gaming traffic, if gaming is a
critical application then don't download at the same time :)

Cheers

BG

-- 
This message is part of the NZ ADSL mailing list. 
see http://unixathome.org/adsl/ for archives, FAQ, 
and various documents. 
To unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@lists.unixathome.org 
with "unsubscribe adsl" in the body of the message