3 ms·

As do I. Throttling per user (as in per customer port) rather than per traffic stream (the latter can cause net neutrality issues) is obviously a superior tech

As do I. Throttling per user (as in per customer port) rather than per traffic stream (the latter can cause net neutrality issues) is obviously a superior technological solution. Traffic caps and overage charges do nothing to prevent people from saturating links at peak traffic times (evenings, for home ISPs). How do you know Charter doesn't throttle bandwidth at peak times? Do you track packet loss, and would you notice if it went up by a percent or two? Even if an ISP doesn't voluntarily throttle traffic, border routers automatically will with WRED or some other more modern queue management strategy if there's too much traffic buffered for the link it's trying to send on. It's more a question of whether packet loss is managed on a per-flow or per-ip basis, on egress, or whether it's managed on a per-port basis on ingress from the customers to their ISP.

ktsmith 15y ago
I just went through a very long (about two months) trouble shooting session with Charter after moving to a new town. After getting the personal cell phone number for a local plant supervisor and keeping in touch with him during the time it took to fix things I got some information out of them. They try to keep their lines at 80% capacity all the time. They do have traffic shaping in place though he wouldn't be specific or didn't know. They don't throttle customers, they do disable power boost and more tightly restrict bandwidth to the plan the customer uses during peak hours. Which tools they are using to manage these restrictions I don't know. Since they've finished the DOCSIS 3 rollout here last week I've considered upgrading to 60/5 from my 25/3 plan but it's pretty over priced and would be much more worth it at 60/10 or 60/15. During the period of trouble (not enough bandwidth for their inter city link where they actually do their peering) I was down as low as 1Mbit/s during peak hours on a 25Mbit plan.

ktsmith 15y ago

I just went through a very long (about two months) trouble shooting session with Charter after moving to a new town. After getting the personal cell phone number for a local plant supervisor and keeping in touch with him during the time it took to fix things I got some information out of them. They try to keep their lines at 80% capacity all the time. They do have traffic shaping in place though he wouldn't be specific or didn't know. They don't throttle customers, they do disable power boost and more tightly restrict bandwidth to the plan the customer uses during peak hours. Which tools they are using to manage these restrictions I don't know. Since they've finished the DOCSIS 3 rollout here last week I've considered upgrading to 60/5 from my 25/3 plan but it's pretty over priced and would be much more worth it at 60/10 or 60/15. During the period of trouble (not enough bandwidth for their inter city link where they actually do their peering) I was down as low as 1Mbit/s during peak hours on a 25Mbit plan.