India Broadband Forum

sharatq

I was wondeing whether anyone could explain this to me.

I have basically been using a 1 Mbps broadband connection with Beam Cable in Hyderabad. I know the ISP well, I am 10 minutes from the office, in terms of broadband, I know the area technical manager, and have the technical person who services my house mobile number. If its down, I know how quickly they will respond if I run the complaint through the call centre and how long it takes if I call the technician on his mobile.

In terms of India, they are pretty good.

Anyway I have just paid out 120K including tax and installation, for a duplex semi leased line, that comes with a service level agreement.

The speed is 20 Mbps, minnimum speed guarantee of 16Mbps with a 90 gig data transfer limit

I took it primarily because of the service level agreement, which means they incur penalites for downtime, I have mobile numbers for people running the data centre, and as the downtime continues, I have different numbers should downtime extend for half an hour, then four hours right up to 24 hours with the complaint escalating right up to the CEO at that point.

The line is 1:1 it is semi leased. I asked what that meant and have looked on the internet, from what I understand and I am a fool at the best of times, a duplex leased line means the line can both transmit and receive data, and I think a semi leased means it can do onlhy one of those functions at a time.

Is this correct, and what does it mean for me?

I am pretty clueless when it comes to these things. I took the package because the company has built a level of trust and I know I have a signed agreement which I can pursue at a legal level should they breach it.

In fact speaking to them on the many occasions I have dealt with them, they have 40,000 BB connections in Hyderabad which are largely as a result of defections from Hathway and Airtel, they realise the gap in the market is customer service and uptime.

The gap they are exploiting with me is I am prepared to pay 10K a month and pay in advance for a 20 Mbps line with that kind of data transfer limit provided I get the service and comittment enforcable in law.

Its not that different from the BB connections being advertised by airtel right now, it costs 5K a month for 16Mbps, no speed guarantee, no service level agreement, ordinary broadband with a data transfer limit of 50 gigs, so I am really just paying for two lines and I get all the extras thrown in.

I've paid for it now, but could someone explain the difference between leased and semi leased, the salesman said a semi leased just means they have a server in between me and their backbone to monitor usage. Is this true? or should I know more, and as a package what do people think?

I was willing to comitt and see where broadband prices are at after a year. Its not installed, I have delayed full installation till my network person gets back and can network all 5 computers in the house, so I have no idea how it will be and was wondering if anyone had any feedback.

Bump

anybody??

udaygour

You should study the terms and conditions (contract agreement) of the provider, the answer lies there itself. Now a days the companies formulate newer terms which are often disguised to mislead you and trap you to market their products, hence one should be always careful.

sharatq

Of course I did that mate. I appreciate the advice, but that goes without saying.

I went through the service level agreement word by word with a ruler and pen underlining ambiguous sentences and getting the salesman to define them. The agreement is a carbon copy of their agreement with their backbone Do you really think I would lay down 120K without reading the contract? would you.?

Ultimately they have 130 leased lines, so that is the number of customers, the enterprise division has to deal with. As opposed to their broadband unit which has 40-50K subscribers.

What that means is in the end, you negotiate your grievance if it escalates that far with the CEO rather than the manager of a call centre or an area technical manager.

The agreement is for a duplex semi leased line, there are no definitions beyond what I have said on here, which is the response I got when I asked the salesman. Hence the reason for the question.

hexwiz

Legacy ethernet is Half-Duplex, meaning information can move in only one direction at a time. But with advancement in technologies came Full-Duplex which refers to the ability to send and receive data at the same time.

Now an ethernet device, before it talks to another similar device, negotiates the duplex mode and port speed. Communication between the two ethernet devices happens at the HIGHEST common settings supported by both.

For eg. If a 100Mbps full-duplex device communicates with a device which supports upto 10Mbps half-duplex only, they'd settle for the lower - at 10Mbps half duplex. If both supports full-duplex - send and receive can happen at the same time; in which case it makes up a total of 20Mbps.

The most common ethernet standard as of now is 100Mbps which by default is half-duplex. But if it supports full duplex and the second device also supports the same duplex and speed they should have upto 200Mbps between them. There are several standards viz 10Mbps/100Mbps/1000Mbps. 1000Mbps or 1Gbps is slowly catching up by the way - even 10Gbps ethernet. 10Mbps is almost generic and is still supported by most ethernet devices for backward compatibility.

Having said all that, I do not mean your "semi-leased" connection means half duplex. I don't really have an idea what that is and your provider would be the best person to help you with the definition of the term. But - if - that actually means a half duplex, then the switch where your line terminates at is probably set to 100Mbps half duplex (full-duplex wouldn't make sense and can't possibly be 10Mbps half duplex since it mentions a commited rate of 16Mbps) Now that is to say you line supports upto 100Mbps half duplex but you have been limited to a maximum of 20Mbps half duplex. For basic home use or normal downloads though you don't always see much difference whether it's a half or a full duplex. But it does really matter when it comes to time critical applications.

But then again
So "semi-leased" as per your provider shouldnt mean half-duplex since you specifically mentioned duplex semi leased.

At least that's what I make of it *sigh*. Pardon the jargon

sharatq

Dude

thanks for the response. I don't really understand the response fully, but I can tell you obviously know what you are talking about and it seems to differ somewhat from what they tell me.

can you explain to me why I cannot download a single file at 16 Mbps. I can download multiple files which add up to that bandwidth, but very few sites, including Microsoft go beyond eight to ten for a single file.

Am I being ripped off?

basically I have given two cheques for the 120K, if I am being ripped off, I will cancel the second cheque which is posted.

Thank you so much for taking the time to write that response by the way.

hexwiz

All web servers impose a limit on the bandwidth being consumed per user and that's probably why you cannot download a single file at 16Mbps. And of course different server would set different limits. Imagine you have a web server hosted with a limited bandwidth of say 100Mbps. If you'd let users download at about 10Mbps - that'd mean only 10 users would be able to download at a time and the rest of the world would have to wait and you probably wouldn't want that.

Try a quick search on "bandwidth throttling quota limits shaping balancing sharing" and you'd get a better picture.

And of course limitting concurrent connections to a single ip/host can also be done at the gateway/isp and not only at the web server but I'd doubt that's happening here. Cheers

sharatq

Man

thanks for that, I thought I was being ripped off, because no one from the ISP has explained that to me the way you just did.

It was stressing me out.

Had a look at your site, seems you are pretty hardcore. Anyway, torrent speeds, I know there are a lot of things that affect the speed of a torrent, but for a good torrent, I get about 500 KBps max with my connection which i guess is 4Mbps. Is that good or bad for the type of connection, I have no idea how fast they go for other people in other countries.

I am from Hong Kong originally, and there they get unlimited 30Mbps for a few thousand rupees a month, but no one seems to tell me how fast their torrents go, so I have no way to judge.

I don't trust bandwidth tests online, different ones say different things, so I constantly have panic attacks cause I laid down what is a fortune for me on an internet connection, and I have doubts all the time.

player

Regarding the download speed till date i have seen the maximum speed in torrents was aout 700 KB/s and more which amounts to some 5.6Mbps i guess

This much speed you will only get thrugh private trackers not in simple general trackers

And yes port forwarding is a must for your type of connection

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sharatq

Hi Player

thank you for coming back to me. so 400 KBps is decent then?

regarding port forwarding, the guy came after I bellowed, and he first did what all ISP technical guys do, tries to make out there is no problem (the boradband guys were cool and never denied there was a problem, just always told me they did not know what it was). These guys I am just getting to know, so they try the there is no problem, which depending on what you say may be actually true.

Anyway. they gave me a Zyxel 5 router, and I could not find on the internet how to sort out port forwading. They show how to do it for other models of that router, but not that. That router goes through a linksys wireless router, and I have no idea whether I should forward the linksys or the Zyxel.

He told me they give raw bandwith up to the router, and there was no need to forward, and then showed me a telegu torrent (obviously predetermined) which showed speeds of about 400+ KBps.

Should I sort out port forwarding? is he correct?

I did this test

broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php?measure=yes&down=yes&up=yes&port=-1&port2=-2&tcp=yes&duration=20&

I cant post links so you need to ad htttp:// in front of that

to see whether they were throttling, and I got these results.

Clearly there is no throttling according to these guys, but it seems to me is no need to forward either. Is that assumption wrong?

hexwiz

Hi Sharat,

If that's the test results you quoted in your last post, I'd say there is no need to forward any port anywhere as your pc looks like it's wide open to the internet - which IMHO is more of a security concern. So it'd be wise to invest in a good antivirus/firewall. I personally used McAfee and it's serves me well. You might need to tweak some settings in the Zyxel or the Linksys to effect a firewall of sorts.

Thanks for checking out my site though there really isn't anything worth a visit

About torrent speeds I can't tell you much because the highest I've ever attained is about 36KBps over a 256Kbps/32KBps connection which is the best I can afford just yet and that's only lucky bursts. Besides a torrent can only be downloaded as fast as the sum of the upload limits of the seeds/seeding peers. The more seeds the better the download (doesn't always translate into 'faster' though). I haven't seen/read/heard about the maximum possible download speed for torrents so I believe it'd only be limited by the sum total of the upload speed of all seeds if the torrent has DHT/Peer Discovery and Peer Exchange enabled, else it can be limited at/by the tracker

Your speed is awesome by the way. Cheers