[olug] Cox Business Pricing

Fri Mar 12 03:39:50 UTC 2010

Speaking of colo.olug.org, the forums are in need of some sanitization and
CAPTCHAs.

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 6:07 PM, Aric Aasgaard <aric at omahax.com> wrote:

> For now IMO best bang for the buck is Cox home premier for $59.
>
> Then get a dedicated server in a datacenter.
> https://www.theplanet.com/servers/Default.aspx
> Talk to a sales rep at theplanet.com they did much better than advertised
> prices for me.
>
> If you just want to sit around and bitch about it, may I suggest the
> colo.olug.org list.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: olug-bounces at olug.org [mailto:olug-bounces at olug.org] On Behalf Of
> nate
> Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 4:19 PM
> To: Omaha Linux User Group
> Subject: Re: [olug] Cox Business Pricing
>
> > 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. :)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> 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<http://cruor.bluddclot.com/%7Enate/file.trash>&& time  wget
> http://cruor.bluddclot.com/~nate/file.trash<http://cruor.bluddclot.com/%7Enate/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.
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