Post
by Admin » Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:48 pm
Traffic Shaping, Packet Shaping, Internet Bandwidth Control, Bandwidth Management, Bandwidth Throttling and Quality of Service are all terms used to describe the same process - the process of limiting bandwidth consumption on a network. Internet Service Providers (ISP's) in North Cyprus are no different to those in the rest of the world and use various techniques to slow down their users internet connections, but why do they want to slow it down ?
When a hotel, or restaurant calculates the cost of providing a self service buffet to the guests at a function, they calculate the cost per head based on the amount of food that they need to provide to ensure that every guest receives their fair share of food, but if you have ever been to a self service buffet, you will have seen certain people not only fill their plates, but pile the food high. If everyone in the queue for the buffet did this, the food will run out before everyone has received their fair share. The hotel, or restaurant has to do something to ensure that this doesn't happen. There are a number of things that it can do, for example :-
1. Put out smaller plates so that even if some guests fill and pile the plate high, they cannot take too much food.
2. Place the salad bar before the rest of the food, in the hope that guests fill up their plates with salad, before they get to the more expensive food.
3. Place several members of staff behind the buffet table to serve the food. Each guest receives the portion of food that they are served.
In the hotel and restaurant business this is called portion control. In the business of internet service provision, the same process is called Bandwidth Management Control.
To ensure that all the users on their network receive their fair share of Internet bandwidth, ISP's employ various techniques to limit the amount that their users can consume. Before we look at some of these however, remember that an ISP's job is to attract customers and to do this, they advertise the fastest speed that a customer 'may' hope to receive when using their service. Bearing this in mind, the bandwidth limiting techniques that they employ must be compatible with the claims that they make in their advertising.
So, an ISP may employ an internet bandwidth limiting technique that allows 'some' users to receive more internet bandwidth between midnight and 6am in the morning for example, and based upon this speed, they may advertise speeds "up to 20 Mbps" when in fact, the average internet speed that their users may hope to receive during 'normal' hours, may only be 4 Mbps.
Another 'common' bandwidth limiting technique that some ISPs use is to constantly monitor the amount of bandwidth that their users consume and to use this figure to restrict their internet usage so, for example, an ISP may give their users a daily allowance of 'say' 3GB of Internet bandwidth after which the maximum achievable speed on the connection is drastically reduced. A customer who uses their Internet connection to watch live streaming TV will quickly use up their daily allowance watching TV during the day and may find that they cannot continue to watch TV after 6pm in the evening, for example.
Most internet users understand why their ISP needs Bandwidth Management Controls to effectively manage their network's resources and do not object to their ISP imposing controls to maintain the quality of service that they receive, but they do however, strongly object to Bandwidth Management Controls being used to enable their ISP to advertise a much higher speed than the average speed that is available to them most of the time, during 'normal' hours. Most Internet users view this as sharp practice.
There are many other ways that ISPs can utilize Bandwidth Management Controls to manage their Internet bandwidth, but by far, the fairest way, is to use them to enable users to receive the advertised speed, at least 80% - 90% of the time and not to impose total Internet bandwidth throughput limits.
Before choosing your ISP, check out their quality of service terms and conditions and read all the small print !
Please contact 0533 869 4371 or 0533 869 4372 for more details and/or to arrange installation of internet in your home.