Incentive schemes

So I had reason to transfer 350GB of data from a server hosted by Mythic Beasts to a USB drive in order to back up and ship the data to a bandwidth deprived customer. For reasons of my convenience I thought I’d do this from my home office where I have a 10Mbit ADSL connection provided by a small reputable and non bargain basement ISP and a 60Mbit connection provided with an entirely different technology. I split the source files roughly 2:1 between the connections and downloaded them with rsync tunnelled over ssh. Over the next 26 hours the download ran, 99.6GB over the DSL line (average speed 8Mbits),150GB over the cable (average speed 12Mbits).

I’ve taken the bandwidth graph from the server and included it above. The blue box is the DSL line data, the wavy line the cable. You’ll notice the DSL line runs flat out the whole time with it’s performance never wavering, the cable is clearly limited by congestion. This isn’t an issue on the server side – we’ve 100Mbits from the server up to to the router then 1Gbit out to the peering exchanges (LoNAP and Edge-IX) where we pick up the DSL and cable providers.

The main difference here is the incentive scheme. My DSL provider gives me a bandwidth cap and charges me for additional bandwidth over that limit. Consequently they have an incentive to make my line as fast as possible because that makes it easier for me to pay them more. It also means the only other users of the network who are using large quantities of traffic are paying their fair share which provides the money to upgrade the network. My cable connection is ‘unlimited’ which means performance is constrained by congestion caused by other users. The flat-lines are caused by the rate limiting confusing ssh and the connection essentially stopping until I had to intervene restart the transfer. I’ve included these because fast though 60Mbits may be, I’m not going to sit and babysit for the full 350GB download to complete.

This is why servers supplied by Mythic Beasts come with fast connections, bandwidth allowances and excess fees. We want to make your connection as fast as possible so you can easily spend more money with us.