[olug] Cox Business Pricing

Fri Mar 12 04:05:37 UTC 2010

Aw snap - redirected for now ;-)  thanks for the heads up!

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 9:39 PM, Aaron Keck <keckbug at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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<http://cruor.bluddclot.com/~nate/file.trash>>&&
> time  wget
> > http://cruor.bluddclot.com/~nate/file.trash<
> http://cruor.bluddclot.com/%7Enate/file.trash<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.
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