[olug] Cox Business Pricing

[nate]

> Just sucks that there is little to zero competition where I'm at.  I
> just looked, and Qwest is not an option, which is annoying.  What is
> more annoying is that I'm trying to go through the proper channels
> (ie, NOT reverse proxying in from a Linode, etc) - but they can't be
> more flexible, and the disparity on pricing with what you actually
> need / get, doesn't make sense to me.

The only way it makes sense is that they are basing their pricing on
average amount of bandwidth actually used by a typical user, not the
speed of the internet connection. 

I would expect that their accounting works by taking a particular tier
of service, figuring out the average bandwith usage for that tier and
then do the pricing based on that.

With home users you have the advantage that most people only use their
networks for email and browsing with only the occasional big file
downloads. That is: If your a type of person that takes advantage of the
bandwidth the amount you pay per month is being heavily subsidized by
people that don't use the internet much, but use the same tier of
service.

And the reason they offer different speeds has less to do with reducing
overall usage then it does with creating ways that users can
self-categorize themselves (between light users, medium user, and heavy
users).

When comparing business vs home user the amount of average bandwidth
being used for businesses is going to be considerable higher so thus the
pricing is going to be higher. 


Just guessing, so don't flame me. :)

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It also may have to do with quality of service. I know that when doing
the online 'test your internet speed' online benchmarks those show very
impressive results for home users. 

HOWEVER, I expect that Cox maintains it's own CDN and keeps cache of
data for popularly used websites on the ISP level. The so-called
'SpeedBoost'. Therefore while your cable box may be capped at the levels
your paying the actual connection speed to the internet may be something
totally different.

I've never been able to get to close to the theoretical limit on actual
downloads.

Here is a quick test I just ran...

On my home server:
~$ nc -l 6601 >  file.trash

On my VPS:
~$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=file.trash bs=4096 count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
40960000 bytes (41 MB) copied, 7.59868 s, 5.4 MB/s

~$ time dd if=file.trash |nc -q0 sanguis.bluddclot.com 6601
80000+0 records in
80000+0 records out
40960000 bytes (41 MB) copied, 84.2635 s, 486 kB/s

real    1m24.270s
user    0m0.160s
sys     0m0.470s


Soo.... About 3.8 Mb/s download. This seems to reflect my personal
experience with fast legal bittorrent downloads like Ubuntu ISO
torrents. I've been able to get up to about 4Mb/s, but that is about it. 

I don't think my VPS is bandwidth limited, at least not anywhere close
to what it is like for my home user. I get a soft limit on the amount of
bandwidth used, not on bandwidth speed.


The same going back the other direction:

~$ time dd if=file.trash | nc -q0 cruor.bluddclot.com 6601
80000+0 records in
80000+0 records out
40960000 bytes (41 MB) copied, 370.731 s, 110 kB/s

real    6m10.733s
user    0m0.028s
sys     0m0.328s


So about 880Kb/s.


And what Teir of service am I paying for? 

Preferred, of course. They advertise 15Mb/s with 'Speedboost' and 9Mb/s
download and 768Mb/s upload. 

So the upload works fine, but the download is only 50% of rated speed.

-------------------------------------------------

Trying the same with wget over http (testing only downloads)(:

time wget http://cruor.bluddclot.com/~nate/file.trash && time  wget
http://cruor.bluddclot.com/~nate/file.trash

See if I can get 'speedboost' to kick in.

2010-03-11 16:09:40 (427 KB/s) - “file.trash.1” saved
[40960000/40960000]

2010-03-11 16:11:19 (405 KB/s) - “file.trash.2” saved
[40960000/40960000]


Nope.... 

Try again with smaller file and have it highly compressible. Created a
10M 'zero' file. Downloaded it 8 times in rapid succession. Mixed bag
here... peaked at 569KB/s the lowest download was about 240-300KB/s 

------------------------------------------------

But it would interesting to see how other people's results go turn out.
I deleted that file though off my server so don't try that. :)

I am thinking that if you pay for business and get 100% of the bandwidth
they are actually saying your getting, then it could be worth it.

AND Dammit. Google come to our town. If they do that it's just going to
be hilarous to see how fast Cox pricing drops.