| Network Management Plan |
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Our aim is to supply an excellent broadband service for the 99% of customers who use our network in the way they it is designed. However, there will always be a small percentage of end users who push the 'average' above the intended usage design. The following document details why that matters and how we deal with this to ensure that all customers receive good value and a fair service. Our products are designed and built based around the financial modeling to ensure longevity, sustainability, reliability and profitability. Coupled with traffic management and prioritization, our approach ensures that everyone receives what they have paid for, over a network which we believe will perform more elegantly than that which any of our competitors provide. The growth of broadband The advent of universally available broadband has enabled the growth of the Internet to continue almost unabated up to this point. Broadband access in Australia is no longer a specialist product used only by IT professionals and technology enthusiasts. As a mass market commodity, broadband is as important to many people as owning a mobile phone or car. As broadband take-up accelerated, and demand began to outstrip supply, the wholesale charging models for broadband have also changed. The flat rate charging system, which ignored usage, was replaced by capacity based pricing structures. This was advantageous in that it lowered the cost of entry for new consumers and stimulated market adoption of higher speed products. For a time, ISPs tried to absorb the extra costs, which made this change relatively invisible to customers. However it has become clear that with increasing speeds and very diverse usage requirements, a one size fits all product is unfair on many, while allowing others to significantly drive up costs for an ISP. These “all you can eat” models need to be replaced by fairer and more understandable ways to pay for broadband access. Most people are familiar with the traditional sources of high demand placed on Broadband networks. High bandwidth video consumption, initially via P2P (Filesharing) has grown immensely in recent years, and the trend has been accelerated more recently by applications like streaming radio and TV, as well as websites like YouTube and MySpace. Increasing 'average usage' means ISPs now need to reach to the very depths of their technical expertise, and their wallets, to scale existing networks to support these demands. All broadband ISPs have had to adopt measures in one form or another to control their capacity and ensure they are not paying more for overall customer usage than customers are paying them. The situation many ISPs now routinely face is their broadband networks running at or near full capacity for large parts of the day. Whenever that is the case it opens the door to many potential problems. These include exposure to infrastructure failures or a sudden surge in demand. Even with anticipated future reductions in wholesale costs we believe that pressure relating to demand will never be fully offset by underlying cost reductions. The future for broadband There is no shortage of discussion about the applications with mass market appeal which are due on-stream in the next few months and years. All manner of technical innovations are currently in the early stages of life, from networked social computer games through streaming interactive High Definition TV to remote access and the next generation of web applications arriving via Web 2.0. It is clear from experiences in the US and Asia that while not all of these applications will take off, many millions of people will adopt at least some of these new technologies, and will come to rely on them over the next few years. Everything we have listed has the need for a high quality broadband connection in common. At any one time this connection will need to seamlessly support these applications running in parallel, potentially in multiple rooms of a house. Of course, the drivers of demand for broadband so far are also still gaining momentum alongside these new applications. How ISPs design their products and platforms to cope with this growth is one of the biggest questions being asked of the ISP industry globally. However, if the growth of broadband so far is anything to go by, it seems that demand is going to continue to outstrip supply regardless of how much capacity can be provisioned by ISPs. What has happened since mainstream broadband? The product designs have evolved since broadband has been widely available particularly with broadband coverage. Today there are over 3,000 DSL enable exchanges Australia Wide and growing. Service speeds have begun to increase with the implementation of 8Mbps ADSL services and more recently ADSL2+ services which can achieve speeds up to 24Mbps. This has led to more bandwidth being consumed and an increase in the number of large downloads being performed by customers. The most important factor has been the increase in consumption of multimedia content, (e.g. video download sites and web streaming). As the web has evolved many broadband customers have significantly increased their usage too and ISPs are now seeing the real effect of increased usage across their networks. What is iSage doing differently? Customers reading this will be aware that our approach has been different to that of other Providers. Whilst traditional ISPs have grown by taking a completely unmanaged approach to selling services, and added capacity on demand,we have always known that it would be impossible to sustain this in the longer term. Other ISPs have applied network-wide rate limits on certain applications (usually peer to peer) to try and curb the usage which made their products unsustainable. We think that these measures represent an unsatisfactory approach to take. Selling different products with no means of governing their differentiation can't work in the long run. Simply adding capacity on demand is extremely expensive, even when subsidised by higher monthly subscriptions. This can only lead to the provision of a loss making service, resulting in a poor service for customers using those ISPs. Our approach to broadband traffic management is aimed at offering the fairest solution for the vast majority of customers. Sensitive real-time and interactive applications run as fast as possible, and customers can download large files during quieter periods without impacting other customers. We think it is too simplistic to merely rate limit specific types of usage dependent on the time of the day. We believe that customers prefer a system where different types of usage are dynamically assigned appropriate priorities, based on clearly defined and published network management rules. How do ISPs design broadband products? To maintain growth and achieve profitability ISPs must make sure that their pricing is competitive within the market. Pricing for broadband products has been largely dictated by the wider industry, and this especially applies to 'entry level' products where prices have tumbled in recent years. ISPs have numerous fixed costs, and must either pay wholesale providers for the broadband network capacity their customers use, or make long term capital investments in building their own comparable network. Every ISP has taken a similar approach to handling this so far, regardless of whether they sell 'unlimited', 'Pay as You Go' or 'limited usage' broadband accounts. Typically the approach is to assume that not all customers will use the full potential of their connection at the same time, even if they have an active connection. With 512Kbps connections as an example, the available network was shared amongst active customers at a ratio along the lines of 30:1 for a premium service and 50:1 for lower cost 'entry level' products. This sharing of the network is known as 'contention'. Alongside this, another variable that comes into play is "concurrency", i.e. the assumption of how many customers will be logged on and actively using their connection at any one time. This approach was fine when most connections were provided at 512K and broadband usage was relatively low in volume and bursty by nature, (most people used their connections primarily to browse the web or receive email). Then, ISPs only had to deal with customers who had usage habits which pushed the overall usage levels past a point that was profitable. This has mainly been achieved by limiting certain types of traffic or by directly targeting customers who, through sustained heavy usage, push up the overall usage average. The broadband world has evolved rapidly, and usage habits are now much more diverse. The trend has seen consumer demand develop faster than the underlying infrastructure and the associated wholesale costs. Broadband connections are used more constantly and broadband itself can no longer be regarded as a 'bursty' service. This all works against a contended network model, especially because standard connection speeds have increased but underlying fixed and capacity costs have remained the same during the last few years. As such, contention ratios have naturally had to change. As speeds exceeding 1.5Mbps have become the norm and usage has become more “constant” instead of “bursty” then contention ratios have gone up across the industry. How does iSage ensure an optimal service for 99% of customers? We are now using traffic prioritization and management modeling and greater information to our customers which gives an unparalleled view of how a broadband platform operates. An unmanaged network allows the usage of a small minority to impact the experience for everyone. Applications such as P2P (file sharing) and Binary USENET can easily swamp all of an ISP's available capacity, resulting in network congestion and slowdowns. This is especially frustrating for people who want to use interactive protocols such as web browsing or video streaming without delays. Our advanced technology makes sure that this interactive traffic is always treated in the most efficient way possible. Using these techniques we can allow large downloads to take place when the network is not fully used, but still make sure that customers are able to use interactive services all of the time. We are now evaluating our ADSL products to be designed around 'peak' usage requirements. This reflects how effectively we can better manage network capacity and bandwidth allocation on a per service basis. It’s important to understand that usage allowances on ‘data inclusive’ plans represent the maximum level of usage that the account is designed for. We don’t expect everyone to fully use their allowance every month, and if that were to happen the network infrastructure wouldn't be able to cope. Of course, for the vast majority of people who don’t use up to the usage allowance every month, a shared design like this doesn't pose any problems at all. However, the nature of any product designed in this way is that there will always be a number of customers who end up with an unsustainable long term usage pattern. This may be deliberate in some cases, but more often than not it is because after choosing a product, a customer's usage habits subsequently change. For these customers there are effectively two choices: 1. Upgrade to a different broadband plan that is more suited to the new usage requirements. 2. Moderate peak time usage, either by reducing the amount of large downloads, or by scheduling more downloads to overnight periods when demand for interactive traffic is lower. Practical implications The primary goals for the ISP is to provide its customer base with reliable, always-on access to the Internet, so they can consume real-time applications any time of the day or night and be able to download large files without impacting real-time performance traffic for them, or any other users of the platform. That aim presents a multitude of challenges which the ISP must overcome. Most notably, the ISP must be able to determine what type of traffic is being consumed across its network in real-time so it can provide an appropriate level of service for it. The first difficultly therefore becomes the identification of traffic. For an example of how complicated this can be, web based usage can incorporate lots of different types of data: • HTTP on Port 80 for web pages • Streaming on Port 80 for YouTube or similar video clips. • Gaming on Port 80 for services such as Second Life or World of Warcraft. • Downloading on Port 80 for zipped USENET files. • Download on Port 80 for Microsoft patches & updates. • Downloading on Port 80 for large size file downloads such as Linux ISOs. • Browsing on Port 80 for real time business applications such as salesforce.com. • Use of software like Google Earth professional and other 'thin' clients. From the list above, not all are required in real-time. Web pages, streaming services and business applications are interactive and as such require delivering as soon as possible. However, file downloads and patch updates do not require instant delivery and can be spread over a longer period of time before completing. There are additional factors which also impact networks and how ISPs deliver traffic across them, as described below. Consumer usage The peak network demand relating to real-time traffic is driven by consumers, and is therefore highest during normal peak hours; i.e. after 3:30pm when school finishes and again after 6pm when other family members start to use the PC or other Internet based devices. Business usage Business users tend to consume traffic in a similar way to consumers for the majority of web based traffic. However, Business needs are shifting towards more web based applications like salesforce.com (an online CRM tool) as well as running bespoke applications over virtual private networks (VPNs). Here the speed of interaction and reliability is the key. We are also seeing big growth in the usage of VoIP and video conferencing for routine business interaction, all of which needs to be catered for seamlessly. The social networking effect Newer devices, such as Nintendo’s Wii integrate gaming and community into the same environment. With services like the Mii avatar channel, the more people that join the community, the more data needs to be sent between devices to keep each "person" in synch. We expect this to be a common theme as more socially aware devices and features come onto the market. The video effect Receiving data from a web page, predominately made up of text and graphics, has been a feature of the Internet since the beginning. Recently, the web has adopted a number of enhancements, such as advertisements driven by Flash streaming or new service such as Facebook. This is predominately images and not text, and especially with sites like YouTube, where all of the content is streamed, video creates a situation where each web page is now orders of magnitude larger in size than traditional text and image pages. This is further exacerbated when we consider the advent of new devices such as IP enabled set top boxes where complete TV programs and schedules are downloaded or streamed via the Internet to the TV. The P2P effect P2P (Filesharing applications like BitTorrent LimeWire) by their very nature are "dirty" protocols. This means they will consume as much of the available bandwidth as is available - give them an inch and they will try to take a yard! This has driven up total bandwidth consumption worldwide, and continues to grow. Furthermore, the saturating effect of these applications will detrimentally impact the quality of all other traffic being consumed on the network at the same time. P2P is predominately a consumer orientated service, currently used to download music, videos or software (both legitimately and illegitimately). Contention Businesses want to consume their data typically during the normal business hours of 8am and 8pm. Consumers are more complicated. Broadly speaking, consumer use can be categorised into groups like 'family', 'single' and 'gaming'. Family traffic tends to be consumed between 3:30pm and 7:30pm. Single type traffic tends to be consumed between 7pm and 10pm. Gaming content typically gets consumed between 7pm and Midnight. This presents an incremental 'kicker' situation for usage during the day, where the network is a blend of all of these types of users and usage profiles. As a result, these users become contended against the network for all of their types of usage. I.e. the business customer using his online application at salesforce.com at 7pm is using the network at the same time as the family who are watching YouTube video streaming in one room and making a VoIP call to family in Australasia in the other, all at the same time as the gamer is playing their Xbox 360 with friends across the globe. How does this all add up? Based on the above, we can see that certain times of the day are more popular than others for usage. i.e. between 7pm and 10pm is a busy time for many types of users consuming many different types of traffic. This then becomes the most contended part of the day for non-interactive traffic, and as such the value of a packet of data at this time of day is considerably higher than that provided at 3am. If an ISP were to charge on a "Supply & Demand" basis, people would be pay something like $10 per GB during the peak times of 6pm and 10pm, and a nominal amount per GB for the same packets at 3am. Where is this headed? Sooner or later all ISPs are going to need to provide an environment where there is not just prioritization of data, but also that data is tagged for desirability. This will complicate things for ISPs, but will ultimately make the service much more valuable and rewarding for customers. By integrating traffic management, broadband firewalls, content control and parental control facilities into one platform it is possible to offer fully customisable and configurable services which suit every type of customer. To take this to the next level, not only might we need to know that the data being transferred is an image which should be delivered immediately, we also need to understand what type of image it is and whether it’s desirable for that image to actually be delivered at all. For example, a family could have decided that the Internet can only be used on the PC in the living room between 3:30pm and Midnight, but between 3;30pm and 7:30pm it is a restricted service where content only from a white listed set of sites can be delivered and all others are blocked. As such, content of a certain classification can never get delivered to that PC during 3:30pm and 7:30pm, but as soon as the 7:30pm watershed has been reached all types of image content can be delivered. These are the sort of changes that will put customers in control, and provided that the interface for customer use is well designed, the complexity behind the scenes can be made transparent to customers. It’s no trivial task to achieve this, but it is something we are already developing, and which we feel will become an important aspect for consumers when they consider their broadband provision. It's important to add that as an ISP, we have no desire to police what content is consumed - we want to enable our customers to have that control themselves. The future Of course, ours is not a static system; usage habits change, technology continues to evolve and many new bandwidth-hungry applications are becoming popular. Both our traffic management techniques and the product designs behind them will need to change to accommodate this. We believe that Video-on-Demand (VoD) and increase Torrent sites continue to drive up average usage. We are making the plans now that will enable this growth to be supported. We will continue to develop our traffic management systems with an end goal of supplying broadband connection packages that are tailored perfectly to customer requirements and which will ultimately allow people to determine themselves how their service is managed within their own bandwidth allocation.. Moving forward it is our intention to implement functions that allow end users to tailor their own packages to suit specific needs, so a user could potentially configure a package for on-line gaming, or design a product for usage entirely based on web browsing and email We remain confident that the approach we are taking is the best way forwards for us and will ultimately set us apart from our competitors. It is clear that any ISP which has so far provided an unsustainable product will need to address that situation at some point in the near future. iSage’s traffic management solution It is important we explain how we are planning to evolve our broadband traffic management strategy, in order to support the growing demands for broadband in the future. General background Since it has became apparent that ISPs would be unable to continue to support ever increasing usage demands, in a world that was changing from fixed costs to capacity based charging, we have been working on finding solutions to enable us to offer the best possible value for money and performance to our customer base. So what have we done so far? We have invested in equipment which prioritizes packet delivery and ensures that the most time sensitive data is fast-tracked even when the network is very busy. Our traffic prioritization system provide a more graceful experience for our customers than they would receive from an ISP who didn’t adopt such techniques when handling network contention, whether that was caused by an outage or happening for another reason. While our traffic management techniques have been effective at allowing us to keep costs under control, and there have been benefits delivered to consumers in terms of performance of time sensitive application, it’s clear that many consumers still regard traffic management with trepidation. Conclusion Having proportioned our network fairly, and completed a significant amount of the development work on the systems already, we can now focus on delivering more of the benefits that traffic management can offer to the end users. We are in a position where we can openly talk about traffic management and look at better ways to offer marketable products and services. Ultimately we would like to make possible for customers to easily select and control their own traffic based on their own personal requirements at any particular time. Traffic control can provide customers with the tools they need to manage their own bandwidth experience in a way that suits them. There can never be enough fairness in one size fits all profiles for customers who have very differing requirements. Traffic Prioritization Why do we have to manage traffic on our network? We deliver our broadband service over a network which is shared amongst our customers. This means we have to manage our network to ensure we provide a sustainable quality broadband service to all users of the iSage network. The principles of iSage network management policies are; • To protect interactive applications like web-browsing and ‘general’ internet use • To flex the network under demand to cope with normal peaks and troughs from day to day and month to month • To provide a service relative to the amount charged for wholesale broadband the end user pays in terms of usage and experience • Provides a 'quality of service' effect, meaning multiple applications running on the same line interact with each other effectively, and use of high demand protocols like Peer-to-Peer (P2P) doesn't affect all usage. Use of traffic prioritization will have an overall effect on the speeds you can expect to receive at different times of the day. Without traffic priortisation in real-time it is evident would happen if a data-intensive application like P2P was allowed, it would saturate our network. The following picture shows an average daily traffic profile of usage and you can see how much P2P traffic is used;  How do we manage traffic on our network? Different types of traffic have different types of usage patterns on the network, with time-sensitive applications such as gaming and VoIP having different patterns than that of P2P of browsing. What do the categories represent? The applications which are subject to restrictions are those, which left unchecked, could saturate all available network capacity and have an impact on the experience that all customers receive. Note: we won't restrict access to sites which need an interactive experience to use. If it takes a few minutes longer to transfer some files using FTP, then we don't believe that this causes a problem. • Peer-to-Peer (High Demand File sharing applications) – P2P Includes applications such as: Bittorent, Utorrent, Azeurus, Emule, Limewire and others. • Binary USENET Includes access to commercial USENET providers such as easynews.com and giganews. These speed restrictions do not apply to text-only USENET servers. • External FTP FTP is a protocol used to transfer files to and from remote servers. The restrictions listed apply to all FTP data transfers not hosted on our network. • Download sites A small number of high-volume HTTP download sites which are used for file sharing, such as Rapidshare, Megaupload and Imageshack, as well as a number of commercial Adult sites which provide big file downloads are included in this category. • Download servers This includes speeds to some 'mirror' sites and servers run by Akamai which provide high-volume HTTP downloads. • Everything else Includes the vast majority of applications and sites which are not subject to speed restrictions. 70% of our customers only ever use traffic that falls into this category. Sharing Broadband Capacity New and existing broadband users alike are often unsure why or how the broadband service they receive is shared (sometimes described as contended). The following information outlines what this means and how it affects a broadband service. Why is a broadband shared? When users connect to the Internet using broadband technology they are in effect sharing the connection infrastructure with other users. For example; If up to 49 other broadband users share the same portion of bandwidth at the same time. This could be referred to as 50:1 contention (50 customers sharing a single unit of available bandwidth). This industry-wide method is proven to provide reliable, high-speed service at an affordable price. To assist the performance we also prioritize time-sensitive activities such as browsing, gaming and emails. Sharing and connection speed It may be easier to think of broadband usage as a series of bursts. Each time a user opens a web page or receives email, there is a short burst of usage followed by a period of idleness. Broadband technology cleverly handles usage on this basis; allowing simultaneous high speed usage for many users. Yet problems arise when these 'bursts' become consistently lengthy; caused by large files that take a long time to download. Great demand is placed on the available bandwidth and usage speeds consequently drop. |