Steve Waddington's Network Notes

We extended the offer for Fair Use plans through April, and will most likely keep them available for May as well. They have proved pretty popular, though, as the only 'no contract' plan on the market, and better value over 12 months than any 'unlimited*' plan, sales have not been has high as I would have thought. Still, it was a good enough deal that I bought it myself for my family use - so no more excess use surprises for me when my son at Uni downloads his semester video assignments in RAW format.

I guess I can understand why some people might be reluctant to buy a Fair Use plan - where the clearest definition of Fair Use we can use is based on an average of use. And if that were the only criteria, maybe we could take an historical average and publish that as an indication. Well, not really - so I am told by our complaisance officer - if we publish a figure we have to stick by it. The other thing is, the average use is quite low, less than 100GB overall, and that is just not an appealing number, where legitimate use nowadays can see in three or four times that downloaded in a month. So 'Fair Use' does require some two way trust; the ISP needs to 'trust' the user not to download the entire Internet, and the user needs to 'trust' the ISP not to penalize them for some arbitrarily low, albeit average, download amount.

Bottom line, no matter how good the deal, Fair Use plans are not for untrusting people. (and I am not using the term 'untrusting' as a criticism of anyone, maybe 'savvy consumer' or 'healthy cynicism' would be better terms)

So what to do?

We came up with the 'Anzac Special', no contract, 1TB allowance, $55pm - same as the Fair Use plan, but for people who want certainty in quota rather than certainty in excess usage charges.

The plan should be on the web site later today, and we will see how it runs to the end of April and decide if we want to extend it into May.

Nearly four years ago we put in place a system to forward on copyright infringement notices that identified an IP address to the account to which that IP address was assigned. The system has been running faithfully for, today, 1299 days, and sending a report each day. Graphing the results shows an interesting trend:



Considering the amount of bandwidth available to residential subscribers has almost quadrupled over that time, the possibilities are:

- Copyright infringement notices and anti-piracy campaigns are effective over time
- P2P stealth has got much better
- Users pirating have got pretty much all there is to get, and there isn't much left
- Copyright enforcement companies have become less active

I don't think the last point is true, their systems would be pretty much automated by now I would think, so there is no particular reason so think they have scaled back.

P2P stealth I don't think is the reason either. No matter how much encryption, both ends still need to know the IP address and the file name, and that can't be hidden transferring a file to/from a 'honey pot' peer.

So, is it Hurrah! for the good guys or has all the gold that can be plundered been plundered from those Spanish galleons?

We were talking about 'unlimited' plans on offer in the market, and how they all have one or more asterisk, tilda or some other super text that points to a 'fair use' policy that explains how 'unlimited' doesn't really mean unlimited. And why the ACCC. for some reason, requires 'unlimited*' actually be 'unlimited'.

So, why not, we mused, just call the plan 'Fair Use' up front - flat rate, no metering, no shaping, except in conditions where it is required - which is what the fair use policy says. Just instead of 'hiding' it and hoping no one notices the tricky conditions of 'unlimited*', have fair use up front, and explain what makes it unlimited. In fact, do away with any word as possibly misleading as 'unlimited' and state plainly what is being offered.

Maybe there is something we all missed in this, why no one does it? I guess we will find out.

The 'soft release' of our Fair Use $55 and Fair Use 65 plans will be on the web site later today. It will be a limited time offer, and we will see how it goes.

I see Delimiter have noticed our new NBN pricing. A fairly well balanced article, but we do have a high use plan which they didn't mention - for a 300Gbps quota. And, famous last words, 300Gb should be enough for anyone, right?

Another important difference is the Exetel quota is download only, in theory, that makes it double the quota of other ISP's who include uploads in the quota. Though in practice, it works out to 15-20% extra, or whatever the ratio of downloads to uploads for a particular user.

I don't know why it is that everyone reporting on the NBN, Delimiter's article included, seems to be using this early 'get it off the ground, feel out the market' pricing as proof of future NBN pricing. It can't have escaped everyones attention that introductory pricing is often much cheaper than the price something will be once it had gained market acceptance. I don't think the NBN will be any different.

Knowing the NBN cost, the number of people who will use it, and the way it will be paid for, it can't be too hard to work out what the price will be for access. Something that hasn't escaped the Coalition's notice, but does seem to escape journalists. Oh well.

We have been running a trial marketing program for a bundled SMB product for the last month. I really like the idea of this sort of product, it meets a 'niche' - but that is a very big niche, of over 1,000,000 businesses.

The marketing is expanding throughout February, and we will be moving support engineers into a specialist SMB support group in March. Which is hand-in-hand with the plan we started in November to increase the number of sales and support engineers for both residential and corporate - ahead of the 2012 sales forecast.

Well, the sales numbers are right on track (better than forecast for residential in fact), so our hiring plan has been right on time.

It is very nice when plans coincide with targets so well, even nicer when the timing works out so well too.

We have had a POP and bandwidth to New Zealand for some time now, but have not had particularly good local loop 'reach'.

That is likely to change soon, as we re-assess the potential, and complete an agreement with a wholesale supplier for local loop circuits. And also significantly increase our bandwidth there.

The price for a cross-Tasman circuit, Glenn tells me, will be very competitive. But my first reaction was 'That much!', because, for some reason, bandwidth to NZ is very expensive. I just don't know why that would be - apart from opportunistic carrier gouging. So I guess we will have to see if we can still offer a service at a price people will want to pay.

January was a record sales month. Yesterday we had one of our highest order days ever.

John and I spoke about why that was briefly last week, and neither of us had a good explanation. My 'throw away' line comment was that it like we had won some sort of battle.

Maybe when you have had your head down plowing through heavy clay for so long, there eventually comes a time when you hit some soft loam, and you don't even realize it at first.

I think I have strained enough metaphors to breaking for today.

I have worked with John for the last 16 years, at four different companies, and been his business partner for the last eight years.

We started Exetel with the objective of creating a 'perfect company'. We faced many challenges, some that would have undoubtedly overwhelmed anyone with less indomitable determination than John.

He was the toughest person I think I will ever meet. The most honest person I have ever met, and one of the kindest. But above all he was unique, with the clarity of vision and sharpness of mind that was simply awesome.

He has been my manager, my mentor and my friend.

Farewell John.

This is the 3rd iteration of the high level diagram we will use in 2012.



There will no doubt be a few more tweaks before it sees commercial release, but I think it captures the essence of what we want to convey.

'Underneath' this diagram will be more detailed, but still conceptual, location and service specific diagrams, about 10 in all, that will show how services are supplied. And finally, there will be the engineering design diagram, individual to each customer, that is attached to a proposal, showing in detail what is being supplied.

Here is an interesting site.



Should give a few people pause for thought.

I have been thinking about how to redraw the Exetel network for sales and marketing material. The network is long past the stage where it can be represented in full, even taking treating each POP as just a circle and only putting in the WAN links.

The challenge is to show 'at a glance' the main features of a network with multi, multi GE and 10GE interconnects, dozens of peers, data centre locations and services, that spans three countries. At the same time contain no false statements (like using a port speed or supplier network capacity to represent a circuit speed), and be accurate; as a summary of a network not a 'lossy' compression.

Yet even if a diagram did that, it's not the whole story of the Exetel network. There is one massively important part of any network that rarely, if ever, makes it onto the diagram.

After a lot of thought, this is what I came up with:



In this iteration I haven't put in the specific WAN circuit sizes, for two reasons; One, given our no contention policy, the size of any one circuit doesn't matter, as long as it exceeds the peak bandwidth at all times. Two, Due also to the no contention policy, circuits are increased often - faster than the print/distribution cycle of a brochure. And, in any event, anyone interested in the fine detail of a location or data path can ask, and be given the up-to-the-minute value at that point.

Only a draft at the moment. It will be interesting to see how the bright and capable minds in sales improve it by the time it gets to 'brochure' stage.

No one can deny that walking around on a big flat field during a lightning storm is a dangerous thing to do. Quite rightly, workplace safety should be observed.

No one can deny that an aeroplane is made of conductive metal, and much, much taller than a person.

So all those planes sitting on the Perth tarmac yesterday were being constantly hit by lightning? It must have been terrifying for the passengers sitting on the planes.

The Perth terminal, last time I looked, has plenty of steel and metal superstructure, and is taller again than the largest plane that docks there. And I would be very surprised if it didn't have substantial lightning rods higher than that as well. It must have been deafening as bolt after bolt hit the building.

With so much metal sticking up in the air, the safest place to be would surely be on the tarmac apron between planes on one side and the terminal on the other, being effectively surrounded by a big Faraday cage.

But physics is clearly only one factor when it comes to workplace safety. Because on the other hand, sitting inside playing euchre all day because it was a bit wet out is probably a better choice.

Over a decade ago I worked for a wholesale IP supplier. It was only a small company, but, because of some innovation and foresight by one of the founders, ended up supplying about 30% of the non-Telstra bandwidth used in Australia at the time.

The great innovation that they pioneered was the use of uni-directional satellite transmission as an alternative to the, then, much higher cost of terrestrial bandwidth. As I recall, satellite bandwidth (on the old, wobbly PAS2) worked out around $5,000 per Mbps per month, compared to terrestrial (pre SCCS) at around $17,000 per Mbps per month.

With a delivery cost less than one third of the alternative, many ISP's found they could overlook the additional 200ms latency, the bi-annual sun transit outage, and the more frequent downlink signal loss (for any number of reasons). So despite the less than perfect service availability, the company had many loyal customers.

Until there was some competition, in the form of much lower cost terrestrial bandwidth. And the 'loyalty' evaporated in a direct relationship to pricing as the cable price approached parity with satellite.

I am not drawing any negative conclusions about ISP's making the only decision possible for them - which is to take the lower cost, better performing, more reliable product. It would have been stupid for them not to. Rather, it's just the fact that many people would start of justifying their decision by saying 'I have been your loyal customer for many years, but...'

Which made me wonder, how is that loyalty?

Loyalty would be where the customer just kept paying whatever was being charged, in the face of all good business sense, forever. Or a company 'loyal to its customers' forgives any non payment for services. Or a patriot, loyal to their country/ideal/football team, lays down their life for it, or at least continues to support it when they are at the bottom of the ladder.

That is loyalty, and that is its price.

So what is the real, commercial price of 'loyalty'? In my experience it can be defined as exactly one cent.

For example, many people I knew in my home town of Albany would go 'loyally' to the petrol station owned by their mate/relative. Until, the price was one cent a litre cheaper somewhere else. Then they would have no qualms about driving to the other side of town (only a 3 minute drive, but still) to fill up.

Or, why are prices $x.99 and not $(x+1).00?

Going back to the wholesale bandwidth provider I was talking about. Customers would remain loyal until the price per Mbyte was 1c cheaper somewhere else.

Still, I suppose 'loyal' is less than a mouthful to say than 'I have been your opportunistic customer, while your price was the cheapest and while it suited me'. Not that there is anything wrong with that. That's what we all, as customers, do. Maybe it is even hardwired into our brains - to constantly weight the price/quality/value, and feel ill at ease if we do not have what we consider the optimal mix.

Interesting that of all the ISP's around in 1995, and still in business now, the most successful by far is the one that (as told to me by the CEO at the time) aimed to always be the lowest cost producer.

I was intrigued by this article, which seems to be advocating the benefit op IPv6 is to allow direct exposure of user (student) PC's to the Internet. An interesting view. I wonder if they have thought about that at all.

I can't recall the source, it was a few years ago now, but it was a reputable authority, and I had no reason to doubt it was true; that a new windows PC connected directly to the Internet, would be compromised and incorporated into a bot-net in less that the 20 minutes it would take to download the security patches from Microsoft.

My own view is that, without NAT, the burden placed on ISP customer support just to say 'Not our problem, you are responsible for the security of your computer' to customers that had been hacked by bot-net collectors would more than double the cost of Internet services. Assuming an ISP could even get away with saying that, which they couldn't, and some officious govt watchdog would no doubt see an opportunity to justify their meaningless existence and step in and make it mandatory for the ISP to fix that too.

Effectively, without NAT, ubiquitous residential Internet would not exist.

IPv6 solves the depletion problem of IPv4. And that's it.

Still, a great opportunity to make lost of consulting money either way. It looks to me like the Y2K of this decade.

[Aside: remember the panicked articles earlier in the year about 'The last IPv4 address will soon be allocated'. While they didn't actually say the Internet would end on that day, none of them went out of their way to point out that it wouldn't either. Well, it hasn't, has it. And shows no sign of doing so. But who gets column inches or sells copy saying 'IPv4 nearly gone, but not really a problem for a few years yet. Experts say'.]

Speaking of civic virtue and social responsibility, I was in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago attending NTT's annual conference. One of the presentations was talking about bandwidth use - predicting the, now unsurprising, exponential growth. But what was surprising was a completely unexpected (by me) sharp downturn in one area of bandwidth use, namely; P2P.

The graph shown was a measurement of OCN bandwidth since 2004, showing a consistent average of a bit over 40% growth per year for 'down' traffic, and the same growth for 'up' traffic, until 2009 where traffic dropped from 200Gbps to 140Gbps over the next two years.

The major contributor to the increase in down traffic was explained as the increasing use of streaming content. But why the puzzling decrease, against all trends, of up traffic?

Quite frankly, I found the explanation astounding.

Apparently, in 2009, the Japanese government issues a 'stern warning' to the nation about the security issues of P2P, and that is was not socially acceptable to download unauthorized copyright content. And so, people stopped doing that.

Draw your own conclusion about how strong the moral fibre of a society that can do that must be. My thought at the time was 'if only'.