Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Hi I am posting here an answer from a similar thread on the Technion's mailing list. I think it is relevant Shahar start of quote The problem is known and very partially documented (even in ms kb's) any how , the workaround is changing the dc's time zone from Jerusalem to something else within gmt+2:00 limits , try Athens or Cairo. end of quote - Original Message - From: Ariel Biener [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: El-al, Netta [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Linux-IL linux-il@linux.org.il Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 11:52 PM Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more On Tuesday 27 September 2005 15:22, El-al, Netta wrote: p.s. - now i'll really stop replying to this thread so there's no need to flame me to cause me to stop. Thank you. --Ariel -- Ariel Biener e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP: http://www.tau.ac.il/~ariel/pgp.html = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 12:36:47PM +0200, Shahar Dag wrote: I am posting here an answer from a similar thread on the Technion's mailing list. I think it is relevant However, the CORRECT answer is to find a timezone editor. There are several and Microsoft themselves used to publish one. It was NOT included with any operating system install disks, but it was available. Speaking of that, did you all remember to update your ZICFILE (/etc/localtime in dead rat) on all your Linux/UNIX systems to reflect the last minute change in the end of IDT from Saturday to after Rosh HaShanah? As always Ephraim Silverberg of HUJI has made the updated files available, with instructions at ftp.cse.huji.ac.il. Thanks, Ephraim. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (077)-424-1667 IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Support the growing boycott of Google by radio users and hobbyists. It's starting to work, Yahoo has surpassed Google. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 01:19:57PM +0300, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote: On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 12:36:47PM +0200, Shahar Dag wrote: I am posting here an answer from a similar thread on the Technion's mailing list. I think it is relevant We're in the wrong thread, right? This thread simply won't die. Tough luck, Ariel. However, the CORRECT answer is to find a timezone editor. There are several and Microsoft themselves used to publish one. It was NOT included with any operating system install disks, but it was available. Speaking of that, did you all remember to update your ZICFILE (/etc/localtime in dead rat) on all your Linux/UNIX systems to reflect the last minute change in the end of IDT from Saturday to after Rosh HaShanah? Unless you have an up-to-date one from glibc. Chances are you have one. -- Tzafrir Cohen | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | best ICQ# 16849755 | | friend = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
when i expressed my concern about the high price after a half a year, your representatives assured me that i would just have to call up and get a new deal. they should have told me that i may not get a good deal if i use a lot of bandwidth. do u really want customers for a half a year who then leave pissed off? isn't it better to not have this customer in the first place? if your representatives told me that i wouldn't get a good deal after a half a year if i used over 9G a month then i wouldn't have joined *and* i wouldn't have been pissed off. but basically forcing me to switch isp's after a half a year obviously didn't please me too much. if u really don't want high bw users, then your representatives should confirm this when a person wants to sign up as a new customer. believe me, it would have been much nicer to know this before than after... (as for the static ip, i just asked for it stam. i don't miss it at all now that i don't have one. if i absolutely needed it then yeah, maybe i'd sign up with actcom, but i don't need it and for me it's not worth more than 5 shekels a month) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Mon, September 26, 2005 12:13 AM To: El-al, Netta; Linux-IL Subject: RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more On Sep 25, 14:28, El-al, Netta wrote: } Subject: RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more that was a very nice and detailed email but the bottom line is: the other isps are now giving very low prices that stay low and don't change after a certain period. when i first signed up with actcom, they said that after a half a year i would be able to sign up for a new deal with similar prices. they did not mention the possibility that i wouldn't be able to get a low price if i used a lot of bandwidth. had i known that, i obviously wouldn't have signed up with them in the first place. Netta, please look in the form on which you sign and see if what you say is exact. It lists the price after half a year. Please tell us what is says. We didn't ask more than that. We indeed don't detail our considerations of how much a discount off the pre-agreed price we are willing to give. You also had a static IP. As far as I know the low prices of the other ISPs don't include a static IP. Please correct me if I'm wrong. it seems to me that when an isp is willing to lose customers (and even kind of encourages these customers to leave) that maybe it's time for the isp to give in to the real isp's that can actually afford to have customers. As I already said (and gave some figures) the percentage of users who have a high traffic is small, but their combined traffic is *VERY BIG*. In the current competitive market it is very hard to loss *many* hundred of thousands of NIS per year on these users, or to raise the price for the majority of the users. Some other companies are not able to find the traffic of their customers due to technical difficulties. This is going to get changed. i think most ppl would rather donate money to their favorite distribution or something rather than donating money to an isp who supports linux. (that would be like having an account at a bank that charges a lot more money by far on transactions because they have nice support for online banking in firefox...) We use free software and we feel we should support it. We will continue to do so, independent of whether users of free software are willing to register to our services or not. However, to most of these users we are able to give good prices. We plan to solve the traffic issue of free software users by our new project of a near-real-time detailed traffic analysis per user, plus establishing big local mirrors (part of them already exist). Amir -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael Vasiliev Sent: Sat, September 24, 2005 9:56 PM To: Linux-IL Cc: Shachar Shemesh; Ilya Konstantinov; Nadav Har'El Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more [snip] Our ADSL and Cable deals are like many similar deals of other ISPs, in that they contain an initial period of low price (now typically for 6 or 12 months, depending on the deal) and only then the regular price applies (Bezeq and the Cable companies have a similar arrangements of there infrastructure cost). So after the initial period, the regular price, as signed by the user, applies (not like most other ISPs, users at ACTCOM sign on a written agreement to prevent any misunderstanding). Absolutely most of the times we are able to make a discount, because absolutely most of the users have low traffic. However, for users who have very high traffic we keep our right not to give a discount (or not to give a big discount) from our official price as agreed
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
I would like to add to the Static IP bonus that other ISP's such as Netvision are now willing to give free of charge a Static IP to a business account (which anyone can be pretty much). -David -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Yedidyah Bar-David Sent: Monday, September 26, 2005 9:26 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: El-al, Netta; Linux-IL Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more Hi, On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:13:24AM +0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sep 25, 14:28, El-al, Netta wrote: You also had a static IP. As far as I know the low prices of the other ISPs don't include a static IP. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I would like to know, if possible, what is the real price for the ISP to give a user a static IP. In dialup days, when a single IP address was shared by maybe 10-20 users because they were connected 1-2 hours a day, a static IP was more expensive for the ISP. But these days, when many, probably all the static IP potential customers, have a router that is connected 24x7 and effectively do have a static IP, the only price I see is the cost of administration, not of the address itself. So I guess it should be low (or zero) and one-time. Am I far from the truth? If I am right, it just means that you, Actcom, did the expected thing and gave away something that doesn't really cost you, while the other ISPs do the evil thing of using market forces to charge for something that should be free. I do not underestimate your brave decision, just shedding some light on it. I'd also like to thank you for your sincere and interesting answers. -- Didi = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
I'll start off that I do not know the internals of the business model behind how much ISP's make money and how, I can only speculate. I agree with you about the Israeli customer and yet, at the same time, different government regulations (handled by Bezeq) have been limiting us from receiving different packages from the ISP. Now that large upload packages are finally coming out, you can see already how the heavy users will start going for those packages (including myself which I consider a medium user as far as how much usage I do- about 3-5GB/month), they will happily pay double the competitive amount for the regular packages to receive the gain from 128 to 512kbit's and IMHO it will greatly help the whole market in general. I disagree that we are one of the cheaper prices on the market of Internet compared to what we get- I don't think in the USA anyone would pay the 150NIS (say 35$ including infra+ISP) for 1.5Mbut/96Kbit ADSL line but would happily pay 50$ for say 2Mbit/1Mbit (I am not completely up to date as you can see but you should still get the point). Bottom line, users have been pressing the market down because the difference between the packages is so low when dealing with such a limited uplink that it has been driving the flag product of 1.5Mbit to low prices. These new packages with higher uploads which are clearly aimed at the heavy users and/or gamers will dramatically help I believe. Correct me if I'm wrong.. Cheers, -David -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ariel Biener Sent: Monday, September 26, 2005 10:11 AM To: Yedidyah Bar-David Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; El-al, Netta; Linux-IL Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more On Monday 26 September 2005 10:26, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote: connected 24x7 and effectively do have a static IP, the only price I see is the cost of administration, not of the address itself. So I guess it should be low (or zero) and one-time. Am I far from the truth? The price involves money payed to RIPE for the IP blocks needed in order to be able to provide so many clients with permanent IPs. Actually, in management overhead, it has some advantages, at least security wise, since hunting down an abusive client becomes very straight forward, without any need to search radius logs for accounting START/STOP. However, if you come to divide how much money is payed for an IP in a /16 block, which all the big ISPs use (each has a few), you'll probably find that it amounts next to nothing compared to what they charge customers for. However the Internet in Israel is cheap compared to the large world outside, and the Israeli are a tough crowd to serve, as they want everything, while they are not willing to pay anything. So, using the pretense that a permanent IP belongs to a VIP class of service (business or whatever) is a economical model that allows the ISPs to charge a price that can actually allow them to earn something from the private sector. Just to sum up, in general I think Israelis are shitty customers, in all respects, and while the no one will fuck me over slogan was good at first, and taught a lesson to people trying to break our backs, later on, like everything else here, it got twisted and taken too far away, to a place where we pirate everything (software, music, films), and are unable to pay a price for a service. The ISPs cut throat competition for the basic ADSL/Cable packages, and the ridiculous price they charge for them is just a testimony of how powerful the Israeli customer has become. But, will driving the ISPs into bankruptcy, or worse, keeping their income so low that they cannot advance and offer any new services and improvements, will that serve us as customers in the end ? I believe a good deal is based on the fact that after provider and customer shaked hands, both are content with the result. That is not the reality today. --Ariel -- Ariel Biener e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP: http://www.tau.ac.il/~ariel/pgp.html = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Sep 26, 10:26, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote: } Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more Hi, On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:13:24AM +0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sep 25, 14:28, El-al, Netta wrote: You also had a static IP. As far as I know the low prices of the other ISPs don't include a static IP. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I would like to know, if possible, what is the real price for the ISP to give a user a static IP. In dialup days, when a single IP address was shared by maybe 10-20 users because they were connected 1-2 hours a day, a static IP was more expensive for the ISP. But these days, when many, probably all the static IP potential customers, have a router that is connected 24x7 and effectively do have a static IP, the only price I see is the cost of administration, not of the address itself. So I guess it should be low (or zero) and one-time. Am I far from the truth? There are many things that their real price is determined by the market. This is one of the things. On one hand, ISPs are willing to sell static IPs because they don't get income out of them otherwise, and on the other hand, some users would like to get static IPs. You should also note the following: 1. In IPv4 IPs are not something that an ISP can very easily get (this may change with IPv6). 2. Hence there are strict rules on when to give a static IP, that ISPs must obey to. 3. Even though routers are tend to connect 24x7, yet with dynamic IPs there is still a need for significantly less IPs. It is interesting to note that most of the users don't want static IPs (many don't know what a static IP is, and many others don't want to be identified by a fixed IP). If I am right, it just means that you, Actcom, did the expected thing and gave away something that doesn't really cost you, while the other ISPs do the evil thing of using market forces to charge for something that should be free. I do not underestimate your brave decision, just shedding some light on it. ACTCOM doesn't really give away static IPs. The other ISPs also don't do any evil thing by directly charging for static IPs. It is just the model of charging for static IPs which is different. I'd also like to thank you for your sincere and interesting answers. I hope I was of some help here, even though I couldn't tell the the real price for the ISP to give a user a static IP. -- Didi Amir = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:25:36PM +0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sep 26, 10:26, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote: } Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more 3. Even though routers are tend to connect 24x7, yet with dynamic IPs there is still a need for significantly less IPs. Care to explain why? Not on-average, but for those who do have 24x7 connections. I do realize that if you give a static IP to every customer, there is still a significant percentage that are far from 24x7, and they would need much fewer addresses if they are dynamic. I'd also like to thank you for your sincere and interesting answers. I hope I was of some help here, even though I couldn't tell the the real price for the ISP to give a user a static IP. I was misunderstood - I did not intend to thank you for an answer to my question (and I also did not expect to get something like 5 NIS/year. Happy?), but for other things you already said and were interesting to read. Thanks, -- Didi = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Amir, First, regardless of how satisfied the Linux-IL members are with your answers, I would like to thank you for treating the matter seriously enough to personally subscribe to this list and participating so actively. I hope that as a compensation you are getting some useful feedback from a bunch of heavy users. I may have missed you addressing the point in the long thread, but as additional feedback I would like to re-iterate the reason why I decided against becoming an Actcom customer a few years ago. It was solely because Actcom were so insistent that I should tell them in writing how many computers I had at home. My pointing out that if I lied they would never get past my firewall and NAT to verify it didn't help. I don't like lying, especially in writing, and the price for 2 computers was several times higher than for one (my memory may be faulty - a lot higher anyway). I don't think I got a better deal from a competitor (compared to Actcom's single computer quote), but they specifically said they didn't care what I had on my home network. I could not accept Actcom's insistence on the single computer clause. The rest of my original message was pure speculation that your buy bandwidth wholesale / sell retail margins were narrower than the competitors, and that you were assuming that a user with several computers would use more bandwidth than the average (not true in my case). I am curious to know what the real reasons were. On the original topic of the thread, I now have a no-dialer cable connection with one of your competitors, it's a business deal, etc. I must say that as a customer I see a lot of advantages in direct DHCP, and I will insist on having no dialer in my future dealings with ISPs. Your point that lack of dialer makes it harder for you to track abuse makes me wonder why I - a paying and law-abiding customer - should be inconvenienced. As Nadav pointed out, there should be an easy way for the cable provider to notify you whenever an IP address is assigned to a particular MAC, without any need for a dialer on the customer's side. I am glad to hear that you have a project running to implement just that. By the way, as quite a few others on this list I use my Internet connection at home to connect to my employer's LAN over VPN. It was my employer who insisted on a no-dialer setup because the protocols dialers use (L2TP, PPTP) interfere with the VPN stack. Therefore, for some of us a dialer is simply not an option. Best regards, -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.goldshmidt.org = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Sep 26, 15:27, El-al, Netta wrote: } Subject: RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more look, i'm not accusing u of fraud or anything. i know what the written agreement says. *but*, i am accusing u of misleading me. your representatives basically implied (not promised) that i would be getting the same price (or lower) after a half a year. I take what you say here seriously, and will check how come this was apparently implied by our sales representatives, even though they are directed to make it clear that we have no obligation or commitment to change the price to be cheaper than in the written contract. They only imply that we *MAY* do it, and indeed this is true in absolutely most of the cases. In order to prevent any sort of misunderstanding we went all the way to require the customers to sign on a written contract, a thing that, as far as I know, no Israeli ISP have done. But as we see here, even this doesn't solve some kind of misunderstandings. you keep talking about 90% of the users. i don't care about 90% of the users. i care about me. i got screwed. and guess what? you should care about those other 10% because this thread is proof that a handful of dissatisfied customers can make a big mess... I must admit that there are always dissatisfied customers. Especially customers that our prices are not good for them. What you say is that we should unconditionally reduce our prices to the price the customer request in order to not make her/him dissatisfied. I don't agree with that. and by the way, when i called to get another deal and the representative told me i need continue paying 100 shekels, i obviously threatened to leave. and i expected the guy to offer me a better deal but instead he said to me that yes, i should leave, because i'm costing actcom more than i'm paying (even at the ridiculous price of 100 shekels). He was just telling you the truth about the situation. Our representatives are not explicitly told to do so. But this is according to our policy of transparency (prices in our web site, contracts with the customers, help desk which admits faults when we have them and doesn't try to cover by blaming the customers, 1-800 phone for *all* departments, not only the sales department, etc.) It can be that just refusing to give a better deal (without any explanation) is better in such cases. i don't know much about business, but it seems to me that it's not very good for a business to tell certain (non-abusive) customers that they are not welcome. if u ran an all-u-can-eat restaurant, chances are you wouldn't last very long because u'd piss of the fat customers who eat a lot and they'd tell all their skinny friends how shitty your restaurant is. and if u think about it, i'm probably costing u a lot more now than i would have if i had stayed with you and continued paying normal prices... It is very rarely that we tell a customer she/he is not welcome. It didn't happen in your case, we just said we cannot lower the price. Many users move all the time between ISPs, if they find a cheaper deal. I guess that if you find a significant cheaper deal at another ISP and your current ISP will not reduce the price for you, you will again move to this cheaper ISP. This happens many times to many users at different ISPs. This is nothing personal. This is competition. Amir -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Mon, September 26, 2005 1:42 PM To: El-al, Netta; Linux-IL Subject: RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more On Sep 26, 11:44, El-al, Netta wrote: } Subject: RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more when i expressed my concern about the high price after a half a year, your representatives assured me that i would just have to call up and get a new deal. they should have told me that i may not get a good deal if i use a lot of bandwidth. do u really want customers for a half a year who then leave pissed off? isn't it better to not have this customer in the first place? if your representatives told me that i wouldn't get a good deal after a half a year if i used over 9G a month then i wouldn't have joined *and* i wouldn't have been pissed off. but basically forcing me to switch isp's after a half a year obviously didn't please me too much. They of course didn't promise you that you will be able to get a deal in the price you would like. However, about 90% percents of the users are able to get competitive offers. Note that absolutely most of the potential customers don't even know what is a traffic, let alone GB. Also note that not like some other ISPs, we are revealing our prices in advance, in a written agreement with the customer, which says for which period of time the initial price applies and what will be the price afterward. We indeed don't detail there our discount policy (like
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Monday 26 September 2005 12:06, El-al, Netta wrote: so you think that customers should pay double prices to their favorite businesses in order to keep them in business. that's not what capitalism and competition is about. hey, if you're a little business and then a bigger business starts offering the same thing but for much cheaper and you go bankrupt, then it may not be fair, but that's life. i, as a customer, care about myself. i want the best deal and i don't want to be screwed. period. like i said, if i want to donate towards the linux cause, i'll donate to my favorite distro, not to businesses who support linux. those businesses will only have me as a customer if i also like what they offer. That is your right, and you'll do as you please. Lucky enough, not all of us are like you. --Ariel -- -- Ariel Biener e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP: http://www.tau.ac.il/~ariel/pgp.html = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Monday 26 September 2005 15:27, El-al, Netta wrote: Hello, Please stop posting the whole thread in your mail, it is uselessly long, and against the list etiquette. Secondly, please stop using this list in your piss fight against Actcom, as we're not your rant amplifiers. I think we have given you too much stage as it is. We already got the picture of what you consider to be wrong, and Amir's answers. Enough is enough. --Ariel -- Ariel Biener e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP: http://www.tau.ac.il/~ariel/pgp.html = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Monday 26 September 2005 21:06, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: By the way, as quite a few others on this list I use my Internet connection at home to connect to my employer's LAN over VPN. It was my employer who insisted on a no-dialer setup because the protocols dialers use (L2TP, PPTP) interfere with the VPN stack. Therefore, for some of us a dialer is simply not an option. What VPN do you have that is affected by the link layer ? I had no problem using either PPTP or L2TP VPNs, or IPSEC VPNs from either Cisco, Checkpoint and the free projects over either PPPoA or PPPoE, with dialer and everything. --Ariel -- Ariel Biener e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP: http://www.tau.ac.il/~ariel/pgp.html = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Ariel Biener [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: What VPN do you have that is affected by the link layer ? I had no problem using either PPTP or L2TP VPNs, or IPSEC VPNs from either Cisco, Checkpoint and the free projects over either PPPoA or PPPoE, with dialer and everything. None of the above ;-) I am not sure exactly what the ultimate origin of the VPN was, but the external manifestations were those of ATT. At some point I recall a rather involved presentation explaining how the protocols interacted and what the problems were. Even if I find the slides now I suspect the contents could be confidential. If and only if they are open, and if I find the slides, I will be glad to send them to you. No promises. By the way, since then I switched to a newer infrastructure and I don't know (yet?) how it works exactly. What I said may be no longer relevant, or just a srelevant, or even more relevant. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.goldshmidt.org = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Hi, The copy you got was my first try, before I was subscribed to the list. I then subscribed to the list and posted my message *TWICE* more (second time after I saw that the first one didn't appear for much time). My mail log says iglu mailer got it fine (it said ok) and I didn't get any confirmation or error messages. So definitely something in this listar is bogus. I hope that it will not handle the same further mail from me. Amir On Sep 24, 22:00, Michael Vasiliev wrote: } Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more On Saturday September 24 2005 08:00, Shachar Shemesh wrote: [skipped] On a totally different note, I, as it seems some other people as well, forwarded this thread to Actcom's CEO. He sent us back an email saying that he tried to send a reply, but the reply never appeared. Could the list moderator please approve that reply? It's unfair to have a one sided discussion. Ugh. You got me. But I did! Unfortunately, due to some glitches at the SMTP server I use, the bunch of listar control mail messages was going around in circles. Honestly, as of now, there is no easy way for me to track mail that I approved but did not reaIly reach the list. I used a different server and resent the mails, but with that particular email it did not help. Please, in the future, please mail me directly for any lost email, or at least yell for moderator in your mail subject. I don't read all threads immediately as they grow. -- Sincerely Yours, Michael Vasiliev Linux-IL moderator In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Sep 24, 4:18, Ilya Konstantinov wrote: } Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more On ×', 2005-09-22 at 10:41 +0300, Nadav Har'El wrote: The strange thing is that for some reason, getting this sort of dialer-less setup required fighting with the cable company. Actually, for the reasons already specified, it's the ISPs who are actually not interested in those deals: it complicates abuse tracking and, more important, it makes applying the service package limitations more difficult -- they either need to ask the cable company to notify them of any subscription upgrade/downgrade requested by the user, or do IP-based traffic shaping (rather than interface-based). With IP-based traffic shaping, what if you acquire all the 3 IPs (Max CPE limit) you're allowed to? Will they let you full bandwidth for each of the computers (assuming you inflated your cables subscription and didn't notify them)? I didn't mention it in my original answer. But the use of dialer is needed by the ISPs not only for traffic tracking. Without a dialer, when we get an abuse report on an IP (say a spam, virus, hack or fraud report) we DON'T have a way to locate the user! If we block the IP, the user eventually gets a new IP and our blocking is useless. Moreover - some other user eventually gets the blocked IP and calls for support... Regarding speed limit, this is not a main issue with Cable connection due to a procedure between HOT and the ISPs of mutual updates. However, as someone mentioned, with a direct connection (without a dialer) in principle the user can bypass the speed limitation in the modem and the ISP cannot prevent and even cannot detect that. Limitation per IP cannot be done because without a dialer the user gets a random IP which the ISP doesn't know (and also the user can get up to 3 IPs). We are going to start a project to solve this problem. The idea is that users without a dialer will get authenticated according to their MAC address (we will have to get the DHCP records from HOT in real time). This will allow us to track the traffic and to shape the speed, without a need for L2TP or PPTP termination (this project is done on Linux, of course), and eventually connect all of our Cable users without a dialer. Amir = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, The copy you got was my first try, before I was subscribed to the list. I then subscribed to the list and posted my message *TWICE* more (second time after I saw that the first one didn't appear for much time). My mail log says iglu mailer got it fine (it said ok) and I didn't get any confirmation or error messages. So definitely something in this listar is bogus. I hope that it will not handle the same further mail from me. Amir Listar? Listar was renamed to ecartis approx. 4 years ago due to a naming conflict. The mail I get from the ecartis list doesn't have LISTAR in its headers anywhere. -- Thanks, Uri http://translation.israel.net = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Sep 25, 22:15, Uri Bruck wrote: } Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, The copy you got was my first try, before I was subscribed to the list. I then subscribed to the list and posted my message *TWICE* more (second time after I saw that the first one didn't appear for much time). My mail log says iglu mailer got it fine (it said ok) and I didn't get any confirmation or error messages. So definitely something in this listar is bogus. I hope that it will not handle the same further mail from me. Amir Listar? Listar was renamed to ecartis approx. 4 years ago due to a naming conflict. The mail I get from the ecartis list doesn't have LISTAR in its headers anywhere. -- Thanks, Uri http://translation.israel.net Mail that I get from the linux-il list contans this header line: X-listar-version: Listar v0.124a Amir = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
that was a very nice and detailed email but the bottom line is: the other isps are now giving very low prices that stay low and don't change after a certain period. when i first signed up with actcom, they said that after a half a year i would be able to sign up for a new deal with similar prices. they did not mention the possibility that i wouldn't be able to get a low price if i used a lot of bandwidth. had i known that, i obviously wouldn't have signed up with them in the first place. it seems to me that when an isp is willing to lose customers (and even kind of encourages these customers to leave) that maybe it's time for the isp to give in to the real isp's that can actually afford to have customers. i think most ppl would rather donate money to their favorite distribution or something rather than donating money to an isp who supports linux. (that would be like having an account at a bank that charges a lot more money by far on transactions because they have nice support for online banking in firefox...) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael Vasiliev Sent: Sat, September 24, 2005 9:56 PM To: Linux-IL Cc: Shachar Shemesh; Ilya Konstantinov; Nadav Har'El Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more [snip] Our ADSL and Cable deals are like many similar deals of other ISPs, in that they contain an initial period of low price (now typically for 6 or 12 months, depending on the deal) and only then the regular price applies (Bezeq and the Cable companies have a similar arrangements of there infrastructure cost). So after the initial period, the regular price, as signed by the user, applies (not like most other ISPs, users at ACTCOM sign on a written agreement to prevent any misunderstanding). Absolutely most of the times we are able to make a discount, because absolutely most of the users have low traffic. However, for users who have very high traffic we keep our right not to give a discount (or not to give a big discount) from our official price as agreed when the account was set up (for monthly accounts) or from the prices written in our web site, as applicable for the particular case. [snip] *** Information contained in this email message is intended only for use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or the employee or agent responsible to deliver it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the [EMAIL PROTECTED] and destroy the original message. *** To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Sep 25, 1:19, Alex Shnitman wrote: } Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more I am sorry to hear that your feeling was that we treated you as an ISP terrorist. I will validate our customer service people make sure the users understand that this is not anything personal, and that they didn't do anything abusive or not according to the contract, but it is only a matter of the maximum discount we can make off our official prices depending on the situation. Amir, the price I was asked to pay is more than 2000 NIS a year for a 1.5 MBit connection. That's 170 NIS a month -- more than four times the price I pay to Netvision (not for a limited period, but the fixed price for unlimited time). To be fair, I am using a lot of traffic, but I wonder, what are your official prices after all? Are they indeed 4.5 times the official prices of the other Israeli ISPs? Our official prices are indeed high. They are currently 2057.38 per year for 1.5M/128K (and you had a higher upload). They are reserved for users with an exceptionally high traffic. You indeed had a relatively very high traffic. Only a minority of the users are ever offered such prices (less than 0.5% of the users have traffic like you had). --Alex Amir = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
I am sorry to hear that your feeling was that we treated you as an ISP terrorist. I will validate our customer service people make sure the users understand that this is not anything personal, and that they didn't do anything abusive or not according to the contract, but it is only a matter of the maximum discount we can make off our official prices depending on the situation. Amir, the price I was asked to pay is more than 2000 NIS a year for a 1.5 MBit connection. That's 170 NIS a month -- more than four times the price I pay to Netvision (not for a limited period, but the fixed price for unlimited time). To be fair, I am using a lot of traffic, but I wonder, what are your official prices after all? Are they indeed 4.5 times the official prices of the other Israeli ISPs? --Alex __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Just wanted to point out, that if a user is smart enough to hack the modem to remove the bandwidth limits he is smart enough to reprogram the MAC address (a feature that is not uncommon on pro modem/routers). Regards, tzahi. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2005 9:22 PM To: Ilya Konstantinov; Nadav Har'El Cc: Linux-IL Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more On Sep 24, 4:18, Ilya Konstantinov wrote: } Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more On ׳”', 2005-09-22 at 10:41 +0300, Nadav Har'El wrote: The strange thing is that for some reason, getting this sort of dialer-less setup required fighting with the cable company. Actually, for the reasons already specified, it's the ISPs who are actually not interested in those deals: it complicates abuse tracking and, more important, it makes applying the service package limitations more difficult -- they either need to ask the cable company to notify them of any subscription upgrade/downgrade requested by the user, or do IP-based traffic shaping (rather than interface-based). With IP-based traffic shaping, what if you acquire all the 3 IPs (Max CPE limit) you're allowed to? Will they let you full bandwidth for each of the computers (assuming you inflated your cables subscription and didn't notify them)? I didn't mention it in my original answer. But the use of dialer is needed by the ISPs not only for traffic tracking. Without a dialer, when we get an abuse report on an IP (say a spam, virus, hack or fraud report) we DON'T have a way to locate the user! If we block the IP, the user eventually gets a new IP and our blocking is useless. Moreover - some other user eventually gets the blocked IP and calls for support... Regarding speed limit, this is not a main issue with Cable connection due to a procedure between HOT and the ISPs of mutual updates. However, as someone mentioned, with a direct connection (without a dialer) in principle the user can bypass the speed limitation in the modem and the ISP cannot prevent and even cannot detect that. Limitation per IP cannot be done because without a dialer the user gets a random IP which the ISP doesn't know (and also the user can get up to 3 IPs). We are going to start a project to solve this problem. The idea is that users without a dialer will get authenticated according to their MAC address (we will have to get the DHCP records from HOT in real time). This will allow us to track the traffic and to shape the speed, without a need for L2TP or PPTP termination (this project is done on Linux, of course), and eventually connect all of our Cable users without a dialer. Amir = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Sep 25, 22:46, Tzahi Fadida wrote: } Subject: RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more Just wanted to point out, that if a user is smart enough to hack the modem to remove the bandwidth limits he is smart enough to reprogram the MAC address (a feature that is not uncommon on pro modem/routers). Regards, tzahi. Then he will not be able to get authenticated (his MAC will not belong to any registered user) and thus will not be able to connect. If he uses a MAC which belongs to a registered user than the ISP and the Cable company will note the clash and will catch him. Amir -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2005 9:22 PM To: Ilya Konstantinov; Nadav Har'El Cc: Linux-IL Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more On Sep 24, 4:18, Ilya Konstantinov wrote: } Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more On ×', 2005-09-22 at 10:41 +0300, Nadav Har'El wrote: The strange thing is that for some reason, getting this sort of dialer-less setup required fighting with the cable company. Actually, for the reasons already specified, it's the ISPs who are actually not interested in those deals: it complicates abuse tracking and, more important, it makes applying the service package limitations more difficult -- they either need to ask the cable company to notify them of any subscription upgrade/downgrade requested by the user, or do IP-based traffic shaping (rather than interface-based). With IP-based traffic shaping, what if you acquire all the 3 IPs (Max CPE limit) you're allowed to? Will they let you full bandwidth for each of the computers (assuming you inflated your cables subscription and didn't notify them)? I didn't mention it in my original answer. But the use of dialer is needed by the ISPs not only for traffic tracking. Without a dialer, when we get an abuse report on an IP (say a spam, virus, hack or fraud report) we DON'T have a way to locate the user! If we block the IP, the user eventually gets a new IP and our blocking is useless. Moreover - some other user eventually gets the blocked IP and calls for support... Regarding speed limit, this is not a main issue with Cable connection due to a procedure between HOT and the ISPs of mutual updates. However, as someone mentioned, with a direct connection (without a dialer) in principle the user can bypass the speed limitation in the modem and the ISP cannot prevent and even cannot detect that. Limitation per IP cannot be done because without a dialer the user gets a random IP which the ISP doesn't know (and also the user can get up to 3 IPs). We are going to start a project to solve this problem. The idea is that users without a dialer will get authenticated according to their MAC address (we will have to get the DHCP records from HOT in real time). This will allow us to track the traffic and to shape the speed, without a need for L2TP or PPTP termination (this project is done on Linux, of course), and eventually connect all of our Cable users without a dialer. Amir = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: prices of bandwidth [was: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more]
On Sep 25, 8:38, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: } Subject: OT: prices of bandwidth [was: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs m Just a comment on a topic raised. Not specific to Actcom. [...] So sometimes we cannot give a large enough discount off our official prices (as published in our web site or agreed with the user) to users which have high traffic. Instead, we prefer to give as bigger as possible discounts to the absolute majority of the users who have relatively small traffic. However not all traffic costs the same to the ISP. I figure that international traffic is the most expensive, Israeli traffic is less expensive, and internal (ISP-internal) traffic is the least expensive. You are of course right. Thus an actcom user downloading a bunch of ISOs from Hamakor/Iglu's mirrors is less expensive than an actcom user downloading the same files from a remote mirror. Ditto a p2p user downloading files from an Israeli user rather than from somewher in the US. In our internal calculation of the price of 1GB traffic we take into consideration the average mix of traffic. We use a lower price than reality in order to compensate for users who have more Israeli and local traffic than international traffic. But of course this calculation over-estimates the price by much for user who mainly have Israeli and local downloads, and we don't have a solution for that for now (but see below). Is there an easy way to meassure local traffic only? How do you handle proxied traffic such as SMTP? Currently we don't have a way to break down per-user traffic into international, Israeli and local traffic volumes. We started to work on a project in this regard, to break down the traffic to its components in nearly real time (so the users will be able to track their traffic continuously). Regarding proxied traffic, HTTP proxied traffic is regretfully totally negligible after we removed the transparent proxy (much time ago). SMTP traffic through our mail servers is big, but comparing to the whole traffic is negligible too. Amir = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Sep 25, 14:28, El-al, Netta wrote: } Subject: RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more that was a very nice and detailed email but the bottom line is: the other isps are now giving very low prices that stay low and don't change after a certain period. when i first signed up with actcom, they said that after a half a year i would be able to sign up for a new deal with similar prices. they did not mention the possibility that i wouldn't be able to get a low price if i used a lot of bandwidth. had i known that, i obviously wouldn't have signed up with them in the first place. Netta, please look in the form on which you sign and see if what you say is exact. It lists the price after half a year. Please tell us what is says. We didn't ask more than that. We indeed don't detail our considerations of how much a discount off the pre-agreed price we are willing to give. You also had a static IP. As far as I know the low prices of the other ISPs don't include a static IP. Please correct me if I'm wrong. it seems to me that when an isp is willing to lose customers (and even kind of encourages these customers to leave) that maybe it's time for the isp to give in to the real isp's that can actually afford to have customers. As I already said (and gave some figures) the percentage of users who have a high traffic is small, but their combined traffic is *VERY BIG*. In the current competitive market it is very hard to loss *many* hundred of thousands of NIS per year on these users, or to raise the price for the majority of the users. Some other companies are not able to find the traffic of their customers due to technical difficulties. This is going to get changed. i think most ppl would rather donate money to their favorite distribution or something rather than donating money to an isp who supports linux. (that would be like having an account at a bank that charges a lot more money by far on transactions because they have nice support for online banking in firefox...) We use free software and we feel we should support it. We will continue to do so, independent of whether users of free software are willing to register to our services or not. However, to most of these users we are able to give good prices. We plan to solve the traffic issue of free software users by our new project of a near-real-time detailed traffic analysis per user, plus establishing big local mirrors (part of them already exist). Amir -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael Vasiliev Sent: Sat, September 24, 2005 9:56 PM To: Linux-IL Cc: Shachar Shemesh; Ilya Konstantinov; Nadav Har'El Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more [snip] Our ADSL and Cable deals are like many similar deals of other ISPs, in that they contain an initial period of low price (now typically for 6 or 12 months, depending on the deal) and only then the regular price applies (Bezeq and the Cable companies have a similar arrangements of there infrastructure cost). So after the initial period, the regular price, as signed by the user, applies (not like most other ISPs, users at ACTCOM sign on a written agreement to prevent any misunderstanding). Absolutely most of the times we are able to make a discount, because absolutely most of the users have low traffic. However, for users who have very high traffic we keep our right not to give a discount (or not to give a big discount) from our official price as agreed when the account was set up (for monthly accounts) or from the prices written in our web site, as applicable for the particular case. [snip] *** Information contained in this email message is intended only for use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or the employee or agent responsible to deliver it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the [EMAIL PROTECTED] and destroy the original message. *** To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Some other companies are not able to find the traffic of their customers due to technical difficulties. This is going to get changed. We plan to solve the traffic issue of free software users by our new project of a near-real-time detailed traffic analysis per user, plus establishing big local mirrors (part of them already exist). I should perhaps point out that in the UK the entire broadband market went through a revolution around 18 months ago where ISPs started offering pricing connected with data transfer. One particular ISP that I followed offered unlimited transfer for twice the price of their cheapest deal (1GB/month). While paying for bandwidth hurts, and it feels like a step back to the dial-up days when you had to count the cost of your usage, users should note two advantages to this approach: 1. You do not have to pay for bandwidth that you do not use (ie you no longer subsidise people who download movies non-stop) 2. Your ISP can offer you a higher speed connection for the same price, giving a more pleasant internet experience. If Amir is accurate in what he prophesies above (and I suspect he is), then we will soon see similar offerings here. As soon as one ISP offers cheap services to low-usage users they will all be forced to do so. I know that it would be a departure from tradition, but I would be very interested to see how costing would look if provided to the user in the following form: 512k768k1.5M2M 5M Basic Cost v w x y z Bandwidth Prepurchase Overuse Local x/GBy/GB Israeli u/GBv/GB Internat. w/GBz/GB People might be a little more interested in making proper use of proxy cache servers and mirrors if they new that it was saving them money... R.P. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Saturday September 24 2005 08:00, Shachar Shemesh wrote: [skipped] On a totally different note, I, as it seems some other people as well, forwarded this thread to Actcom's CEO. He sent us back an email saying that he tried to send a reply, but the reply never appeared. Could the list moderator please approve that reply? It's unfair to have a one sided discussion. Ugh. You got me. But I did! Unfortunately, due to some glitches at the SMTP server I use, the bunch of listar control mail messages was going around in circles. Honestly, as of now, there is no easy way for me to track mail that I approved but did not reaIly reach the list. I used a different server and resent the mails, but with that particular email it did not help. Please, in the future, please mail me directly for any lost email, or at least yell for moderator in your mail subject. I don't read all threads immediately as they grow. -- Sincerely Yours, Michael Vasiliev Linux-IL moderator In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
OT: prices of bandwidth [was: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more]
Just a comment on a topic raised. Not specific to Actcom. On Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:37:08 +0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Our ADSL and Cable deals are like many similar deals of other ISPs, in that they contain an initial period of low price (now typically for 6 or 12 months, depending on the deal) and only then the regular price applies (Bezeq and the Cable companies have a similar arrangements of there infrastructure cost). So after the initial period, the regular price, as signed by the user, applies (not like most other ISPs, users at ACTCOM sign on a written agreement to prevent any misunderstanding). Absolutely most of the times we are able to make a discount, because absolutely most of the users have low traffic. However, for users who have very high traffic we keep our right not to give a discount (or not to give a big discount) from our official price as agreed when the account was set up (for monthly accounts) or from the prices written in our web site, as applicable for the particular case. Some background about traffic: The traffic is the thing that consists most of the marginal cost a customer costs to the ISP. A customer with much traffic costs to the ISP much more than she/he pays, sometimes even 10 times more. In a later letter somebody raises the question how come we pay for our links according to the amount of traffic - I will answer when I get to that letter. Some dry (and maybe astonishing to some) statistics: 10% of the ADSL users use 50% of the total ADSL traffic (and hence the total ADSL bandwidth). In Cable (for a reason which is not entirely clear to me, but I have guesses) the picture is even worse: 8.7% of the users use 50% of the Cable traffic. This means this relatively small number of users are very heavily subsidized by the rest of about 90% of the users (not by tens of percents - by several folds). Another way to look at it: 20% of the users use 70% of the bandwidth, and 50% of the users use about 93% of the bandwidth. The 50% of the users that use only 7% of the bandwidth use less than 1.1G/month. 9GB/month, which is mentioned in the quote above, is used only by about 12% of the Cable users, which use more than 60% of the Cable traffic. (To remind you, the traffic is the major marginal cost to the ISP of a broadband user.) So sometimes we cannot give a large enough discount off our official prices (as published in our web site or agreed with the user) to users which have high traffic. Instead, we prefer to give as bigger as possible discounts to the absolute majority of the users who have relatively small traffic. However not all traffic costs the same to the ISP. I figure that international traffic is the most expensive, Israeli traffic is less expensive, and internal (ISP-internal) traffic is the least expensive. Thus an actcom user downloading a bunch of ISOs from Hamakor/Iglu's mirrors is less expensive than an actcom user downloading the same files from a remote mirror. Ditto a p2p user downloading files from an Israeli user rather than from somewher in the US. Is there an easy way to meassure local traffic only? How do you handle proxied traffic such as SMTP? -- Tzafrir Cohen | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | best ICQ# 16849755 | | friend = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
ik wrote: I myself can not see or understand any reason why as a customer I need to be interested that the ISP have any issues with the cables companies. Maybe I can shed some light on the use of dialers in cable modems. Abroad, there is no such thing. You hook up your computer, you get an IP, and you're done. In Israel, however, there is a law that states that a connectivity provider cannot also act as an ISP. That's why the cable companies require you to also buy connectivity from an ISP. Ironically, if you buy your connectivity from Med-1 (yes, they sell point 2 point connectivity, though nobody seems to know about it), they will insist on not knowing what you route through it, lest they be violating the above law. The network infrastructure is such that if you connect via DHCP, your cable operator needs to know which ISP you belong to. They then allocate an IP for you from that ISP's IP pool, and you are connected. The information regarding who connected when never reaches the ISP, and they have no control over it. In fact, there have been cases in which the cables company associated a customer to the wrong ISP by mistake, and only when that client would call about an unrelated problem would such an error be caught. All that time, the customer would use up the wrong ISP's bandwidth for all operations. For that reason, ISPs prefer not to allow you to use DHCP directly. They prefer that you establish a tunnel with their termination servers (called PNS, I don't remeber what the TLA stands for), and thus they have control over who's connected, and when. Shachar = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Thu, Sep 22, 2005, ik wrote about Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more: In cables, it seems that without a dialer, the cables company controls your connection, and with one, the ISP control it. I have a cable connection, without a dialer. Because cable clients are offered a choice of ISPs (rather being forced to use one specific one), this sort of connection requires a bit more work on the cable company side: they (or their modem, or wherever this magic happens) need to reply to my DHCP request with a new IP address which belongs to my ISP's range, and have all my packets go to that ISP rather than some other ISP. Apparently, this is not very difficult to do, because my connection works fantasicaly. In fact, I'm not even limited to one IP address, and I can have two (at least) computers running DHCP and getting two different IP addresses. The strange thing is that for some reason, getting this sort of dialer-less setup required fighting with the cable company. I can't for the life of me understand why they'd want to complicate their clients with these idiotic dialers (namely, some sort of IP over IP tunneling protocol), NAT and other crap, when simple ethernet works. Just like when you plug a computer in an office it just works, without any dialers, why shouldn't exactly the same thing work in the home? And how come I here more and more from people who once did not need a dialer, and then their ISP or cable company forced them to switch to using one? So again, as a customer, for me a dialer is a hoax that only make things complicated without any real need, and if I need to use a dialer, I do not Exactly what I think. -- Nadav Har'El| Thursday, Sep 22 2005, 18 Elul 5765 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is http://nadav.harel.org.il |a fine for doing well. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
The need for the dialer on Cable is mostly because of the ease of uncapping the cable line using the Motorola Surf cable modems + DHCP, with the pptp/VPN style connection they can easily limit the connection speed on their firewall/router and even if you successfully uncap your cable modem you will still be limited. -David -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nadav Har'El Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2005 9:41 AM To: ik Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Linux-IL Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more On Thu, Sep 22, 2005, ik wrote about Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more: In cables, it seems that without a dialer, the cables company controls your connection, and with one, the ISP control it. I have a cable connection, without a dialer. Because cable clients are offered a choice of ISPs (rather being forced to use one specific one), this sort of connection requires a bit more work on the cable company side: they (or their modem, or wherever this magic happens) need to reply to my DHCP request with a new IP address which belongs to my ISP's range, and have all my packets go to that ISP rather than some other ISP. Apparently, this is not very difficult to do, because my connection works fantasicaly. In fact, I'm not even limited to one IP address, and I can have two (at least) computers running DHCP and getting two different IP addresses. The strange thing is that for some reason, getting this sort of dialer-less setup required fighting with the cable company. I can't for the life of me understand why they'd want to complicate their clients with these idiotic dialers (namely, some sort of IP over IP tunneling protocol), NAT and other crap, when simple ethernet works. Just like when you plug a computer in an office it just works, without any dialers, why shouldn't exactly the same thing work in the home? And how come I here more and more from people who once did not need a dialer, and then their ISP or cable company forced them to switch to using one? So again, as a customer, for me a dialer is a hoax that only make things complicated without any real need, and if I need to use a dialer, I do not Exactly what I think. -- Nadav Har'El| Thursday, Sep 22 2005, 18 Elul 5765 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is http://nadav.harel.org.il |a fine for doing well. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Thu, Sep 22, 2005, Shachar Shemesh wrote about Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more: The network infrastructure is such that if you connect via DHCP, your cable operator needs to know which ISP you belong to. They then allocate an IP for you from that ISP's IP pool, and you are connected. The information regarding who connected when never reaches the ISP, and they Why does the information regarding who connected never reach the ISP? How hard is it for the cable company to send some sort of message to the ISP, saying that client X (defined by home address, MAC address, or whatever the cable company uses to define people) is now associated with IP address Y? -- Nadav Har'El| Thursday, Sep 22 2005, 18 Elul 5765 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Cats know what we feel. They don't care, http://nadav.harel.org.il |but they know. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Nadav Har'El wrote: On Thu, Sep 22, 2005, Shachar Shemesh wrote about Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more: The network infrastructure is such that if you connect via DHCP, your cable operator needs to know which ISP you belong to. They then allocate an IP for you from that ISP's IP pool, and you are connected. The information regarding who connected when never reaches the ISP, and they Why does the information regarding who connected never reach the ISP? How hard is it for the cable company to send some sort of message to the ISP, saying that client X (defined by home address, MAC address, or whatever the cable company uses to define people) is now associated with IP address Y? Because they are using a CISCO DHCP server? Or was it Microsoft? Because they claim that they need to protect privacy of users? I think the main answer is Because we are in Israel. The bottom line is that I heard cases where there was actual abuse requests, and the ISP, who is legally responsible for anything done from that IP, could not, or had a hard time, getting the logs of who connected to that IP at a specific time. Shachar = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Hi, For dialer was no issue with Actcom. I have been their faithful customer for many years now, until I wanted to switch from cables to ADSL. When I called I have been told it requires cancellation of current program and sighing up to other. That's ok, but since I use p2p and d/l at least 20gb/month I have to pay 120 nis/month. That was not ok, and Netvision got me a nice deal of 35nis/month and no ridiculous demands on bandwidth. Actcom has lost customer and I have lost faith in the company I used to appreciate so much for their service and support. Be aware. Alon. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of ik Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2005 6:35 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Linux-IL Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more Hi, I myself uses cables, but dialers are a hoax (at least for customers). In ADSL instead of making the modem/router of ADSL to speak ADSL and Ethernet, it speaks only ADSL, and the dialer make the talking of ADSL and Ethernet for you. In cables, it seems that without a dialer, the cables company controls your connection, and with one, the ISP control it. I myself can not see or understand any reason why as a customer I need to be interested that the ISP have any issues with the cables companies. He chooses to support this technology, and it's the ISP problem only. I do not need any dialer and I do not need to control this type of thing. ADSL and cables can be 100% LAN for customers if they do not need any dialer. Just think about all the lack of disconnections that users will experience without any dialer for example. So again, as a customer, for me a dialer is a hoax that only make things complicated without any real need, and if I need to use a dialer, I do not think that I'll use Actcom anymore specially after reading other comments here. Ido On Wednesday 21 September 2005 23:30, Aaron wrote: Hi, I had this happen as far as price was concerned. I just compared the price others were getting for the same or more service and threatened to switch to the other company and I got a better price. The dialer issue I never even fought though, and you are right the dailer is a pain, I had no idea there was a choice to connect without a dialer. Are you talking adsl or cable? Aaron On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 12:07 +0300, Ido Kanner wrote: Hi list, Recently I updated my 4 years old account in Actcom (this is my 4th year). After watching the price of the account in my office, I found out that I pay a lot more for a lot less. That is I pay 760 NIS for 750 without a dialer, while at work we pay a lot less for a faster connection. BTW I was told that if I'll move to a dialer, it will cost me 200 NIS less !!! After a long talk with the finance, I found out that the reason for that is that I do not use a dailer, and the CO of Actcom decided that users without a dialer should pay more, alto as most of you know, the infurstracture and the technical stuff for Radius and other servers that are working in the background requires a lot more work (not to mention the support team that need to handle very stupid issues such as passowrd lost, incurrect login issues etc) ... The finance person also mentioned that I need to pay more, because a dialer gives them (Actcom) the ability to monitor connections. But on LAN (you all know that cables connection is a LAN) you can monitor activities as well, and not to mention that a dialer and the rest of the servers that you pass along the way makes the connection slower. Now don't get me wrong, I really like Actcom, and the fact that they support our community is a hugh Plus for me, and thats even before I mention their very good tech and Linux support etc.. But I do not wish to have a dialer, And I do not like the fact that the user should handle PPP connections for such thing. ADSL btw also does not really requires user intervention (L2TP is the protocol that ADSL talks, and theoretically the ADSL router should make the converting between Ethernet and ADSL on it's own). BTW If they will not give a better price, I don't think that I will continue working with them next year ... What do you think ? Ido = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Artificial Intelligence: Making computers behave like they do in the movies. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Hi, I had the same problem, but not with the money issue. When i upgraded my Internet line, they automatically moved me to dialer. All my body was shaking from anger ;) I called them and fought for my right to continue with DHCP. I finally got it, but a bitter taste still floating in my mouth. I have lot of respect for Actcom, because at the beginning they supported Linux, but now they don't support, and you need to have luck, in order to find someone there that understand Linux. I understand that Actcom is in a very tight market and a very aggressive price war, so i guess they have hard time and we as customers feel it. I really don't understand why the have to monitor my activity?! When there will be a law for it, i will understand, but now most of Actcom's clients want to use DHCP, so let them be. We can raise the power of Actcom, but i see them going direct to the opposite way. On 9/21/05, Ido Kanner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi list,Recently I updated my 4 years old account in Actcom (this is my 4th year).After watching the price of the account in my office, I found out that I pay a lot more for a lot less. That is I pay 760 NIS for 750 without a dialer, whileat work we pay a lot less for a faster connection.BTW I was told that if I'll move to a dialer, it will cost me 200 NIS less !!! After a long talk with the finance, I found out that the reason for that isthat I do not use a dailer, and the CO of Actcom decided that users without adialer should pay more, alto as most of you know, the infurstracture and the technical stuff for Radius and other servers that are working in the backgroundrequires a lot more work (not to mention the support team that need to handlevery stupid issues such as passowrd lost, incurrect login issues etc) ... The finance person also mentioned that I need to pay more, because a dialergives them (Actcom) the ability to monitor connections. But on LAN (you all knowthat cables connection is a LAN) you can monitor activities as well, and not to mention that a dialer and the rest of the servers that you pass along the waymakes the connection slower.Now don't get me wrong, I really like Actcom, and the fact that they support ourcommunity is a hugh Plus for me, and thats even before I mention their very good tech and Linux support etc..But I do not wish to have a dialer, And I do not like the fact that the usershould handle PPP connections for such thing. ADSL btw also does not reallyrequires user intervention (L2TP is the protocol that ADSL talks, and theoretically the ADSL router should make the converting between Ethernet andADSL on it's own).BTW If they will not give a better price, I don't think that I will continueworking with them next year ... What do you think ?Ido=To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] withthe word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the commandecho unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
this is what i have to say about actcom: last year i got sick of bezeqint's crappy service and their hanging up on me every time i uttered the word linux so i switched to actcom. they were a little more expensive but offered me a deal for a half a year for fifty something shekels for 1.5M. after a half a year, they started charging me about 100 shekels so i called them up and asked them what deal they could offer me now. they said that since my download bandwidth usage was over 9G a month that it wasn't worth it for them and they couldn't offer me anything better! so i switched to netvision who give me 1.5M for forty something shekels without having to even agree to be with them for a minimum amount of time. also, my new connection is much better because apparently actcom was putting a limiter on the connection... so as much as i like actcom's attitude towards linux, i don't think it justifies paying more than twice as much for less bandwidth... oh, and another annoying thing about them - they charged me on the 24th of each month for the service of the month after, so when i called to cancel, they couldn't even reimburse me on the days that i no longer wanted their service. so to sum it up, imho, actcom sux. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Ido Kanner Sent: Wed, September 21, 2005 12:08 PM To: Linux-IL Subject: Actcom without a dailer costs more Hi list, Recently I updated my 4 years old account in Actcom (this is my 4th year). After watching the price of the account in my office, I found out that I pay a lot more for a lot less. That is I pay 760 NIS for 750 without a dialer, while at work we pay a lot less for a faster connection. BTW I was told that if I'll move to a dialer, it will cost me 200 NIS less !!! After a long talk with the finance, I found out that the reason for that is that I do not use a dailer, and the CO of Actcom decided that users without a dialer should pay more, alto as most of you know, the infurstracture and the technical stuff for Radius and other servers that are working in the background requires a lot more work (not to mention the support team that need to handle very stupid issues such as passowrd lost, incurrect login issues etc) ... The finance person also mentioned that I need to pay more, because a dialer gives them (Actcom) the ability to monitor connections. But on LAN (you all know that cables connection is a LAN) you can monitor activities as well, and not to mention that a dialer and the rest of the servers that you pass along the way makes the connection slower. Now don't get me wrong, I really like Actcom, and the fact that they support our community is a hugh Plus for me, and thats even before I mention their very good tech and Linux support etc.. But I do not wish to have a dialer, And I do not like the fact that the user should handle PPP connections for such thing. ADSL btw also does not really requires user intervention (L2TP is the protocol that ADSL talks, and theoretically the ADSL router should make the converting between Ethernet and ADSL on it's own). BTW If they will not give a better price, I don't think that I will continue working with them next year ... What do you think ? Ido = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** Information contained in this email message is intended only for use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or the employee or agent responsible to deliver it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the [EMAIL PROTECTED] and destroy the original message. *** To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Ido Kanner wrote: Hi list, Recently I updated my 4 years old account in Actcom (this is my 4th year). After watching the price of the account in my office, I found out that I pay a lot more for a lot less. That is I pay 760 NIS for 750 without a dialer, while at work we pay a lot less for a faster connection. I don't know about you. I just know that their initial stake is to increase your payment each year. then if you shut up, you pay more for less. they want to make money, in the end. fight with them, argue, make some noisy letters and they will prefer a lower price than no customer at all. unfortunately this is a very common practice in Israel. ( cannot witness about other countries ) I personally hate this. Best regards, Max. BTW I was told that if I'll move to a dialer, it will cost me 200 NIS less !!! After a long talk with the finance, I found out that the reason for that is that I do not use a dailer, and the CO of Actcom decided that users without a dialer should pay more, alto as most of you know, the infurstracture and the technical stuff for Radius and other servers that are working in the background requires a lot more work (not to mention the support team that need to handle very stupid issues such as passowrd lost, incurrect login issues etc) ... The finance person also mentioned that I need to pay more, because a dialer gives them (Actcom) the ability to monitor connections. But on LAN (you all know that cables connection is a LAN) you can monitor activities as well, and not to mention that a dialer and the rest of the servers that you pass along the way makes the connection slower. Now don't get me wrong, I really like Actcom, and the fact that they support our community is a hugh Plus for me, and thats even before I mention their very good tech and Linux support etc.. But I do not wish to have a dialer, And I do not like the fact that the user should handle PPP connections for such thing. ADSL btw also does not really requires user intervention (L2TP is the protocol that ADSL talks, and theoretically the ADSL router should make the converting between Ethernet and ADSL on it's own). BTW If they will not give a better price, I don't think that I will continue working with them next year ... What do you think ? Ido = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
After being with Actcom for almost 8 years even when their bandwidth was crappy, the same things recently happen to me with them- they claimed that in 3 months I downloaded 20GB of Data and that according to that I should be paying them 3 times the amount I paid until now (I paid a year in advance), I told them that to me that sounds reasonable and I reminded them that I have no contractual limit on my usage, that I paid extra to increase my upload to 150kbps and to be fair, I don't think 20GB for 3 months (both TX and RX) is abusive of the service. I was insulted and left them a couple weeks early even on my expense just to get rid of them- nothing I could say could talk them out of their treating me as an ISP terrorist. They are not the same pro Linux community small and friendly ISP, they are moving to be completely business oriented and care less about the small single user. (IMHO) -David -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Alex Shnitman Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 1:00 PM To: linux-il@linux.org.il Subject: RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more Same story here. I signed up for a year, and after the year ended they told me I have too pay 2000 NIS for the next year (that's 166 NIS a month!) because of high bandwidth usage. So I guess that's what they need the monitoring for. I'm also a happy Netvision customer now. Although having a static IP was pretty cool. --Alex --- El-al, Netta [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: this is what i have to say about actcom: last year i got sick of bezeqint's crappy service and their hanging up on me every time i uttered the word linux so i switched to actcom. they were a little more expensive but offered me a deal for a half a year for fifty something shekels for 1.5M. after a half a year, they started charging me about 100 shekels so i called them up and asked them what deal they could offer me now. they said that since my download bandwidth usage was over 9G a month that it wasn't worth it for them and they couldn't offer me anything better! so i switched to netvision who give me 1.5M for forty something shekels without having to even agree to be with them for a minimum amount of time. also, my new connection is much better because apparently actcom was putting a limiter on the connection... so as much as i like actcom's attitude towards linux, i don't think it justifies paying more than twice as much for less bandwidth... oh, and another annoying thing about them - they charged me on the 24th of each month for the service of the month after, so when i called to cancel, they couldn't even reimburse me on the days that i no longer wanted their service. so to sum it up, imho, actcom sux. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Ido Kanner Sent: Wed, September 21, 2005 12:08 PM To: Linux-IL Subject: Actcom without a dailer costs more Hi list, Recently I updated my 4 years old account in Actcom (this is my 4th year). After watching the price of the account in my office, I found out that I pay a lot more for a lot less. That is I pay 760 NIS for 750 without a dialer, while at work we pay a lot less for a faster connection. BTW I was told that if I'll move to a dialer, it will cost me 200 NIS less !!! After a long talk with the finance, I found out that the reason for that is that I do not use a dailer, and the CO of Actcom decided that users without a dialer should pay more, alto as most of you know, the infurstracture and the technical stuff for Radius and other servers that are working in the background requires a lot more work (not to mention the support team that need to handle very stupid issues such as passowrd lost, incurrect login issues etc) ... The finance person also mentioned that I need to pay more, because a dialer gives them (Actcom) the ability to monitor connections. But on LAN (you all know that cables connection is a LAN) you can monitor activities as well, and not to mention that a dialer and the rest of the servers that you pass along the way makes the connection slower. Now don't get me wrong, I really like Actcom, and the fact that they support our community is a hugh Plus for me, and thats even before I mention their very good tech and Linux support etc.. But I do not wish to have a dialer, And I do not like the fact that the user should handle PPP connections for such thing. ADSL btw also does not really requires user intervention (L2TP is the protocol that ADSL talks, and theoretically the ADSL router should make the converting between Ethernet and ADSL on it's own). BTW If they will not give a better price, I don't think that I will continue working with them next year ... What do you think ? Ido
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Wed, Sep 21, 2005, David Randelman wrote about RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more: have no contractual limit on my usage, that I paid extra to increase my upload to 150kbps and to be fair, I don't think 20GB for 3 months (both TX and RX) is abusive of the service. What's strange about these stories is that they appear to complain about usages which don't appear extreme at all. 20 GB for 3 months is just 2.5 KB/s (20 kbps), an amount that even a modem user could use (say, connected 8 hours a day). If you're not even allowed to constantly use 20 kbps, what's the point in selling you a 1500 kbps connection? If you use the full speed of your connection for just 19 minutes a day, you'll reach 20 GB after 3 months. And when you consider that downloading a new Linux distribution takes up about 4 GB, that maintaining your system upgraded often requires a further 100 MB a week (hey, Fedora, stop updating huge packages like X, KDE, etc.!), 20 GB for 3 months doesn't even sound that much. I'd be suprised if I don't reach 20 GB for 3 months as well - and I swear that I don't download any movies :-) -- Nadav Har'El| Wednesday, Sep 21 2005, 17 Elul 5765 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I put a dollar in one of those change http://nadav.harel.org.il |machines. Nothing changed. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
btw, i asked them why they care how much bandwidth i use and they said something about them paying netvision for the bandwidth usage... strange... are they basically using netvision's service and charging users to be the go-between? (oh, and btw, i had a problem accessing www.craiglist.org and when i called actcom and complained, they said that craiglist bans all actcom addresses and there's nothing they can do. wtf?) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of David Randelman Sent: Wed, September 21, 2005 4:20 PM To: linux-il@linux.org.il Subject: RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more After being with Actcom for almost 8 years even when their bandwidth was crappy, the same things recently happen to me with them- they claimed that in 3 months I downloaded 20GB of Data and that according to that I should be paying them 3 times the amount I paid until now (I paid a year in advance), I told them that to me that sounds reasonable and I reminded them that I have no contractual limit on my usage, that I paid extra to increase my upload to 150kbps and to be fair, I don't think 20GB for 3 months (both TX and RX) is abusive of the service. I was insulted and left them a couple weeks early even on my expense just to get rid of them- nothing I could say could talk them out of their treating me as an ISP terrorist. They are not the same pro Linux community small and friendly ISP, they are moving to be completely business oriented and care less about the small single user. (IMHO) -David -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Alex Shnitman Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 1:00 PM To: linux-il@linux.org.il Subject: RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more Same story here. I signed up for a year, and after the year ended they told me I have too pay 2000 NIS for the next year (that's 166 NIS a month!) because of high bandwidth usage. So I guess that's what they need the monitoring for. I'm also a happy Netvision customer now. Although having a static IP was pretty cool. --Alex --- El-al, Netta [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: this is what i have to say about actcom: last year i got sick of bezeqint's crappy service and their hanging up on me every time i uttered the word linux so i switched to actcom. they were a little more expensive but offered me a deal for a half a year for fifty something shekels for 1.5M. after a half a year, they started charging me about 100 shekels so i called them up and asked them what deal they could offer me now. they said that since my download bandwidth usage was over 9G a month that it wasn't worth it for them and they couldn't offer me anything better! so i switched to netvision who give me 1.5M for forty something shekels without having to even agree to be with them for a minimum amount of time. also, my new connection is much better because apparently actcom was putting a limiter on the connection... so as much as i like actcom's attitude towards linux, i don't think it justifies paying more than twice as much for less bandwidth... oh, and another annoying thing about them - they charged me on the 24th of each month for the service of the month after, so when i called to cancel, they couldn't even reimburse me on the days that i no longer wanted their service. so to sum it up, imho, actcom sux. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Ido Kanner Sent: Wed, September 21, 2005 12:08 PM To: Linux-IL Subject: Actcom without a dailer costs more Hi list, Recently I updated my 4 years old account in Actcom (this is my 4th year). After watching the price of the account in my office, I found out that I pay a lot more for a lot less. That is I pay 760 NIS for 750 without a dialer, while at work we pay a lot less for a faster connection. BTW I was told that if I'll move to a dialer, it will cost me 200 NIS less !!! After a long talk with the finance, I found out that the reason for that is that I do not use a dailer, and the CO of Actcom decided that users without a dialer should pay more, alto as most of you know, the infurstracture and the technical stuff for Radius and other servers that are working in the background requires a lot more work (not to mention the support team that need to handle very stupid issues such as passowrd lost, incurrect login issues etc) ... The finance person also mentioned that I need to pay more, because a dialer gives them (Actcom) the ability to monitor connections. But on LAN (you all know that cables connection is a LAN) you can monitor activities as well, and not to mention that a dialer and the rest
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
El-al, Netta [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: this is what i have to say about actcom: last year i got sick of bezeqint's crappy service and their hanging up on me every time i uttered the word linux so i switched to actcom. they were a little more expensive but offered me a deal for a half a year for fifty something shekels for 1.5M. after a half a year, they started charging me about 100 shekels so i called them up and asked them what deal they could offer me now. they said that since my download bandwidth usage was over 9G a month that it wasn't worth it for them and they couldn't offer me anything better! This fits my (lack of) experience with them. Some years ago I was shopping for an ADSL connection and called a few ISPs. I called Actcom because of their reputation within the community. They asked (via a written contract) whether I was going to connect one computer or several. I said it was none of their business. They said that for 2 or more computers I would have to pay several times more. I asked how they were going to notice. They admitted they could not, but still insisted that was their pricing model. In the end, I called Netvision and asked, among other questions, if they cared about what I had on my end behind NAT. They said, not in the least. Deduction: Actcom are cheap. They buy bandwidth from the networks and sell it to subscribers, living off the difference. They buy too little, and overbook (in terms of the nominal bandwidth), counting on the typical user to use only a small fraction of the nominal allocation. Then, if a particular user has several computers (hence several potential simultaneous users) or just downloads a lot, they are in trouble, and they want to charge extra for this. Other providers, such as Netvision, buy more BW, probably live on a thinner margin, but don't oversubscribe so drastically. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.goldshmidt.org = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 03:59:57AM -0700, Alex Shnitman wrote: Same story here. I signed up for a year, and after the year ended they told me I have too pay 2000 NIS for the next year (that's 166 NIS a month!) because of high bandwidth usage. So I guess that's what they need the monitoring for. I'm also a happy Netvision customer now. Although having a static IP was pretty cool. Having a static IP in netvision costs me $15/month, signed up for a year. That's around 20 NIS more than not having it. I am not sure about actcom rates, but IIRC they are a bit higher, which makes it even less than 20 NIS more expensive. This is, BTW, for 1.5mbit/s dl. I am not sure about the upload - I think it's 150kbit/s. I did not buy from bezeq higher upload as it costs much more, but I still get around 120kbit/s, although I think my deal says I have 96kbit/s. To buy this from netvision, you have to be a business customer. I do not know what advantages this gives, if at all, except having prices in $ (which IIRC is illegal?). One weird small disadvantage is that you can't change your password from the website - only by phone, only to a new random one. Weird. -- Didi = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Nadav Har'El [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: What's strange about these stories is that they appear to complain about usages which don't appear extreme at all. 20 GB for 3 months is just 2.5 KB/s (20 kbps), an amount that even a modem user could use (say, connected 8 hours a day). If you're not even allowed to constantly use 20 kbps, what's the point in selling you a 1500 kbps connection? If you use the full speed of your connection for just 19 minutes a day, you'll reach 20 GB after 3 months. The point is that they don't count on you to use the full bandwidth apart from maybe very short bursts. 9GB/mo that Netta reported if used evenly on a day-on-day basis works out to about 300MB/day. If their typical household customer spends maybe an hour or two a day on line, mainly emailing and browsing, and only occasionally downloading a few songs or a movie, such a customer will not reach 300MB/day. And when you consider that downloading a new Linux distribution takes up about 4 GB, that maintaining your system upgraded often requires a further 100 MB a week (hey, Fedora, stop updating huge packages like X, KDE, etc.!), RedHat release a new sewt of CDs what, twice a year? And the updates, even if they are 300MB a week, will not reach 300MB/day. I am not arguing that 300MB/day is excessive (I don't recall any caps on download volume on top of the bandwidth allocation). I am just saying it is more than what they base their cost/profit calculations on. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.goldshmidt.org = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 04:06:51PM +0300, El-al, Netta wrote: btw, i asked them why they care how much bandwidth i use and they said something about them paying netvision for the bandwidth usage... strange... are they basically using netvision's service and charging users to be the go-between? (oh, and btw, i had a problem accessing www.craiglist.org and when i called actcom and complained, they said that craiglist bans all actcom addresses and there's nothing they can do. wtf?) Maybe it has something to do with Craig's sponsoring Palestinian charaties? Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (077)-424-1667 IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Support the growing boycott of Google by radio users and hobbyists. It's starting to work, Yahoo has surpassed Google. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Hi list, I am hoping that somebody from Actcom themselves is reading this list and will give us some facts. I personally have been very satisfied with the service I have received from them for the last 2 years. Their presence at August penguin contradicts the claim of some that they are no longer interested in Linux users. I called them and asked about dialers Chaygan and they told me that it was not possible to connect to the service without one, and that a 750kb connection is NIS513 a year. I currently connect without any such tool and paid a few shekels more than that for my 750kb connection. With regard to the bandwidth and routing issues, I did a few traceroutes to check people's claims. The results are summarised here, a little raw data is below as proof. Actcom are connected to IIX, so at list for data transfer within Israel are an ISP in their own right. Actcom and Netvision appear to be connected together independently of IIX. Packets sent to google.com possibly go via 012. Packets sent to apple.com,microsoft.com,ibm.com,fbi.gov all go via netvision (fbi.gov is only five hops, which is a little spooky) Conclusion: Actcom possibly buy their international bandwidth from other larger providers, this being more economical than buying directly since they are a small ISP. Disclaimer: Above is guesswork, I am not associated with Actcom and the above is derived from my traceroute results shown below with no other info. - l:~$ traceroute www.012.net.il traceroute to www.012.net.il (212.199.79.167), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 1 v2.actcom.co.il (192.114.47.251) 43.803 ms 29.465 ms 27.990 ms 2 rtr76.actcom.co.il (192.114.47.250) 35.826 ms 28.717 ms 28.003 ms 3 IIX-G-Actcom.iix.net.il (192.114.62.73) 40.600 ms 34.900 ms 31.366 ms 4 GoldenLines-G-IIX.iix.net.il (192.114.62.18) 40.019 ms 36.778 ms 29.935 ms 5 ta-212.199.28.106.012.net.il (212.199.28.106) 40.964 ms 39.342 ms 31.983 ms l:~$ traceroute www.google.com traceroute: Warning: www.google.com has multiple addresses; using 64.233.161.99 traceroute to www.l.google.com (64.233.161.99), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 1 v2.actcom.co.il (192.114.47.251) 30.914 ms 18.080 ms 18.810 ms 2 rtr76.actcom.co.il (192.114.47.250) 19.584 ms 17.937 ms 48.062 ms 3 212.117.157.165 (212.117.157.165) 29.654 ms 32.213 ms 31.971 ms 4 sa-pt-212.199.26.34.012.net.il (212.199.26.34) 41.273 ms 34.046 ms 29.340 ms 5 pos4-3.ar03.ldn01.pccwbtn.net (63.218.13.137) 109.217 ms 101.065 ms 98.152 ms l:~$ traceroute www.fbi.gov traceroute: Warning: www.fbi.gov has multiple addresses; using 212.143.162.152 traceroute to a33.g.akamai.net (212.143.162.152), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 1 v2.actcom.co.il (192.114.47.251) 53.353 ms 32.749 ms 26.490 ms 2 rtr76.actcom.co.il (192.114.47.250) 36.254 ms 28.737 ms 28.235 ms 3 nv-act.ser.netvision.net.il (199.203.173.126) 38.604 ms 34.349 ms 31.424 ms 4 gi1-1.srvc02.hfa.nv.net.il (212.143.8.8) 38.955 ms 31.444 ms 28.763 ms 5 212.143.162.152 (212.143.162.152) 38.726 ms 35.511 ms 30.949 ms l:~$ traceroute www.ibm.com traceroute: Warning: www.ibm.com has multiple addresses; using 129.42.21.99 traceroute to www.ibm.com (129.42.21.99), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 1 v2.actcom.co.il (192.114.47.251) 40.634 ms 20.987 ms 19.143 ms 2 rtr76.actcom.co.il (192.114.47.250) 26.717 ms 19.492 ms 33.986 ms 3 nv-act.ser.netvision.net.il (199.203.173.126) 19.839 ms 22.514 ms 23.643 ms 4 gi1-1.core2.hfa.nv.net.il (212.143.8.65) 22.608 ms 21.647 ms 23.406 ms l:~$ traceroute www.apple.com traceroute to www.apple.com.akadns.net (17.254.0.91), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 1 v2.actcom.co.il (192.114.47.251) 34.423 ms 30.354 ms 28.062 ms 2 rtr76.actcom.co.il (192.114.47.250) 36.322 ms 29.157 ms 27.967 ms 3 nv-act.ser.netvision.net.il (199.203.173.126) 40.476 ms 22.413 ms 23.060 ms 4 gi1-1.core2.hfa.nv.net.il (212.143.8.65) 19.717 ms 36.502 ms 32.242 ms 5 pos1-0.brdr1.nyc.nv.net.il (212.143.12.13) 229.689 ms 221.862 ms 188.585 ms 6 Gigabitethernet4-0.GW12.NYC4.ALTER.NET (157.130.25.37) 165.940 ms = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Wed, 21 Sep 2005, Random Penguin wrote: Packets sent to apple.com,microsoft.com,ibm.com,fbi.gov all go via netvision (fbi.gov is only five hops, which is a little spooky) Your data is faulty... All these are hosted in Israel via akamai or similar services. Alon -- This message was sent by Alon Altman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ICQ:1366540 GPG public key at http://8ln.org/pubkey.txt Key fingerprint = A670 6C81 19D3 3773 3627 DE14 B44A 50A3 FE06 7F24 -- -=[ Random Fortune ]=- Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death. -- James F. Byrnes = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Actcom without a dailer costs more
On Wed, 21 Sep 2005, El-al, Netta wrote: btw, i asked them why they care how much bandwidth i use and they said something about them paying netvision for the bandwidth usage... strange... are they basically using netvision's service and charging users to be the go-between? (oh, and btw, i had a problem accessing www.craiglist.org and when i called actcom and complained, they said that craiglist bans all actcom addresses and there's nothing they can do. wtf?) I also complained about this and it is fixed now. Peter = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more
Hi, I myself uses cables, but dialers are a hoax (at least for customers). In ADSL instead of making the modem/router of ADSL to speak ADSL and Ethernet, it speaks only ADSL, and the dialer make the talking of ADSL and Ethernet for you. In cables, it seems that without a dialer, the cables company controls your connection, and with one, the ISP control it. I myself can not see or understand any reason why as a customer I need to be interested that the ISP have any issues with the cables companies. He chooses to support this technology, and it's the ISP problem only. I do not need any dialer and I do not need to control this type of thing. ADSL and cables can be 100% LAN for customers if they do not need any dialer. Just think about all the lack of disconnections that users will experience without any dialer for example. So again, as a customer, for me a dialer is a hoax that only make things complicated without any real need, and if I need to use a dialer, I do not think that I'll use Actcom anymore specially after reading other comments here. Ido On Wednesday 21 September 2005 23:30, Aaron wrote: Hi, I had this happen as far as price was concerned. I just compared the price others were getting for the same or more service and threatened to switch to the other company and I got a better price. The dialer issue I never even fought though, and you are right the dailer is a pain, I had no idea there was a choice to connect without a dialer. Are you talking adsl or cable? Aaron On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 12:07 +0300, Ido Kanner wrote: Hi list, Recently I updated my 4 years old account in Actcom (this is my 4th year). After watching the price of the account in my office, I found out that I pay a lot more for a lot less. That is I pay 760 NIS for 750 without a dialer, while at work we pay a lot less for a faster connection. BTW I was told that if I'll move to a dialer, it will cost me 200 NIS less !!! After a long talk with the finance, I found out that the reason for that is that I do not use a dailer, and the CO of Actcom decided that users without a dialer should pay more, alto as most of you know, the infurstracture and the technical stuff for Radius and other servers that are working in the background requires a lot more work (not to mention the support team that need to handle very stupid issues such as passowrd lost, incurrect login issues etc) ... The finance person also mentioned that I need to pay more, because a dialer gives them (Actcom) the ability to monitor connections. But on LAN (you all know that cables connection is a LAN) you can monitor activities as well, and not to mention that a dialer and the rest of the servers that you pass along the way makes the connection slower. Now don't get me wrong, I really like Actcom, and the fact that they support our community is a hugh Plus for me, and thats even before I mention their very good tech and Linux support etc.. But I do not wish to have a dialer, And I do not like the fact that the user should handle PPP connections for such thing. ADSL btw also does not really requires user intervention (L2TP is the protocol that ADSL talks, and theoretically the ADSL router should make the converting between Ethernet and ADSL on it's own). BTW If they will not give a better price, I don't think that I will continue working with them next year ... What do you think ? Ido = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Artificial Intelligence: Making computers behave like they do in the movies. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
