SatSig topic:

Fair access Policy

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Apr 9^th, 2009 at 11:31pm

I would be interested to know the thoughts of forum on Fair Acess Policy , this is where shared packages are throttled when excessive downloading exceeds the laid down quotas to lower speeds in order that the Bandwidth is shared equitably.

We hear many times in particular of providers offering packages that are shared but with no FAP but this in our view is impossible to do as it would mean that the package is the same as dedicated and unless the customer is paying dedicated prices then I can not see how the service package is sustainable .

Your thoughts would be welcome ???

Apr 12^th, 2009 at 9:27am

I am the one who would like to know your good opinion about the FAP. Do you provide to your customer a shared bandwidth with FAP? What is their feedback? Are they satisfied?

We provide shared bandwidth with different contention ratios but without FAB. We are thinking in adding the FAP in our service.

Your advice will be welcomed :D

Apr 12^th, 2009 at 6:19pm

I would suggest that we all as providers make an internal agreement between us so that everyone of us will be obliged to proivde FAP on its services.

Maybe this isn't nice to hear by our clients, but eventhough we are not applying any FAP on the service, clients are always complaining and they need to pay less and get the maximum speed possible.

Apr 14^th, 2009 at 9:14am

I think FAP is a must on every shared platform.

No FAP on a shared platform will eventually exhaust the system when a large network size is reached causing terminals to either run very slow or for the provider to just keep adding bandwidth and reach a point he will no longer be making any revenue out of this!

Fair Access Policy is must for any network to remain healthy in long term.

Apr 14^th, 2009 at 12:00pm

I totally agree with wafanet , FAP is a must.

Apr 14^th, 2009 at 1:17pm

Dear A.Walker,

Could you please explain a bit more what FAP exactly is?

We provide LinkStar DVB-S & DVB-S2 services but with no FAP.

How does the provider gain or what does the customer lose?

Thank you in advance.

Nikolas Kaplanis
KBI-Greece, member of KB Impuls Group

Apr 14^th, 2009 at 8:40pm

Having a fair access policy benefits the customers since they get proportionally what each is paying for.

It benefits the provider also as the customers are happier, particularly if there is a visible FAP so that can see they are not being cheated either by the service provider or by other customers who are abusing the network either accidentally (e.g. virus) or deliberately (e.g file sharing server).

How the FAP is implemented is where it gets very interesting. There are many alternative methods for traffic management to assure fair access and I welcome more discussion about the alternatives.

If people write to me eric@satsig.net with lots of text and images describing FAP systems I would be pleased to make a web page on each.

Best regards, Eric.

Apr 15^th, 2009 at 12:13pm

Thanks Eric.

However, to be honest, we all know that customers are not entirely happy when they get exactly what they are paying for, they always want something more. Afterall, that is what is supposed to be the "magic" of the DVB protocol, that in fact you always get more than the CIR and most customers are aware of this.

Like you mentioned, there must be many ways to apply FAP and I would appreciate if the providers who work with FAP could share their knowledge with the rest of us.

Nikolas Kaplanis

Apr 15^th, 2009 at 1:12pm

I would not want people to get the idea that use of DVB gives more than what you pay for. DVB provides a common encapsulation process so that TV and data etc may be added into the same carrier multiplex. DVB-S2 then adds a great variety of modulation and FEC coding rates that may be adjusted from frame to frame to maximise capacity according to receive dish size and even as the weather changes using a return link to control adaptive changes. DVB-S2 will reduce the cost per bit.

I'm interested in this CIR business.

If you have a 512k/256k system, for example, with 25 sites, each with 2 PCs, and all paying the same $140 per month, do you set the CIR=20kbit/s and the burstable rate=512k ?

i.e. the first 20k bits, per second, to each site have priority, and all packets above that (per second) are marked discardable, which are then, if necessary, dropped at the hub transmit router.

I have the impression that some operators are setting and saying the CIR is much higher, say CIR=100k and hoping that no more than 5 sites will be simultaneously active. This is not right but I have seen official guidance about such "oversubscription". When this happens the meaning of the expression CIR is destroyed and it becomes a meaningless and false sales claim, which misleads customers by unrealistically raising their expectations.

Best regards, Eric.

Apr 20^th, 2009 at 3:03pm

Hi,

I would like to share my experiences and ideas about FAP and its effects on the clients.

Its quite normal that clients want the speed of the service as maximum, it is a human nature. Most of the current clients get shared service nowadays and shared services have a balance between speed and traffic volume. In general I offer FAP enabled service for a client who needs speed and no-FAP service for high traffic volume requirement.

For FAP enabled services the most important thing is the rules of FAP. For example recovery time. Recovery time should not be so long like weeks and months. I mostly prefer FAP which has a 24 hour recovery time . Other important thing is FAP status and traffic volume visibility to the clients and that should be also in case for non FAP services. Unfortunately most of the operators do not provide traffic management and monitoring tools for the end users. Therefore clients dont have idea about their current traffic volume and FAP status.

Last word about FAP is, sales people of the providers and resellers should tell the shared service and FAP idea to the clients in more detail with the truths. I believe this will help a lot. I face this everyday.

Another thing which is also important about shared service performance is sharing on upload (inroutes). Typically clients can get more capacity above the CIR when they make a download test for example. But most cases upload performance is poor and this affects to download rate as well. Therefore providers should keep their eyes to inroute congestions as well. I faced many situations with high latency and low upload rates because of that reason.

Have a nice day,

Huseyin