[afnog] monitoring my ISP

[Brian Candler]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 12:24:08PM +0100, Herbert Maosa wrote:
> Sunday Adekunle Folayan wrote:
> > Please note that some ISPs in Africa do
> > traffic shaping deliberately to differentiate service levels, especially
> > for customers who do not want to pay much. 
> Traffic Policing, you mean  ?

That's one option, but there are others, such as:

- Traffic Policing: dropping packets which exceed contracted rate
- Traffic Shaping: queueing packets, emptying the queue at contract speed
  (eventually will result in packet loss if the queue overflows, but as
  long as the queue is bigger than a few TCP windows, it will normally
  just make the service appear like a slower leased line)
- Contention: if 100 customers each with a 512K service share a 1M uplink,
  and simply fight it out between them, this is a 50:1 contention ratio
- "Sin Bin": customers who exceed a particular usage quota are lumped
  together in a small pipe, which they fight for with other sin bin users

Regards,

Brian.