SatSig topic:

Seeking honest iDirect ISP on AMC12 (for Nigeria)

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Apr 23^rd, 2007 at 1:00pm

If you know or have experienced any, please contact me at +2348035427047 or glessor@yahoo.com. Please, do not recommend those that advertise contention ratios of 1:20 as 1:10. I am currently suffering as a result of that.

My location: Nigeria, West Africa.

Gabriel
+2348035427047
glessor@yahoo.com

Apr 24^th, 2007 at 10:26pm

I've addressed contention ratios in other posts on this forum. Advertised contention ratios are meaningless and of little or no value in determining the quality of a service.

Here's the standard example:

Operator 1 advertises a 10:1 service. Let's say they share 1Mbps between 10 sites. Let's say each of those 10 sites has 10 PCs, no VoIP, no webcams and the operator rate limites Peer to Peer and other abusive traffic. 100 PCs are sharing the service.

Operator 2 advertises a 10:1 service. Again, they share 1Mbps between 10 sites. In this case, each site has 100 PCs, lots of VoIP, lots of webcams and nothing is restricted. 1000 PCs share the service.

In both cases, the network operators are telling the truth when they advertise a 10:1 contention ratio, but of course Operator 1's service will be far superior to Operator 2.

Contention ratios are not a useful method to evaluate service quality. You need to look at how the operator controls and manages the number and type of devices using the service, as well as the experience and expertise of the operator.

I wish network operators would stop advertising contention ratios because all they do is confuse and mislead customers.

It would be interesting to know if there are any more "objective" means for measuring service quality that might be introduced to the industry.

Apr 25^th, 2007 at 5:30pm

The problem is that service providers may sell a service called "1 Mbit/s". The price might be stated to be anywhere between $70 and $7000 per month. Both extremes of price are perfectly reasonable and satisfactory but how are customers to decide what to buy ?

My first strategy has been to insist that all shared services be described as such and have the sharing ratio quoted. For example:
1 Mbit/s shared 1:1 price $7000 per month (i.e. dedicated, CIR or SCPC).
1 Mbit/s shared 10:1 price $700 per month
1 Mbit/s shared 100:1 price $70 per month.

This is very simple, but is the best I can hope to encourage as a start, for this web site.

Assume a VSAT owner has a 10:1 share of 1 Mbit/s. The service he then provides to each of his end user PCs then results in a final customer service that could be acceptable (10 PCs) or awful (100 PCs) - reference the examples above. I would argue that much of the responsibility for the end user PC service lies with the VSAT owner who needs to buy a service with sufficient capacity to serve the number of end user PCs planned to be connected. The VSAT owner needs to be strict to stop viruses and abusive uploading /downloading. In fact the VSAT owner needs to apply a fair access policy to their PC users. This may be by watching a traffic monitor at the cafe desk and marching over to an offending PC as necessary. About 10 to 20 kbit/s per end user PC is needed. The network operator however must apply some fair access policy to his 10 VSAT sites to assure each site gets its fair share of the 1 Mbit/s resource.
wxw
There is much to debate about how this may be done and given the many variables, comparision of different FAPs seems daunting. I can't hope (yet) to get every service provider to explain their FAP.

Anyway I would like detailed descriptions and ideas for FAPs. Please tell us your ideas here or send by email to eric@satsig.net

Best regards, Eric.