Re: "download" caps

J Edgar Hoover <zorch@totally.righteous.net> writes:

>I'm wondering if you could effectively DoS a capped account for a month by

This has happened quite a lot here, with full-rate accounts where you get charged for traffic over a certain level, and rate-limited accounts with no charges. The traffic is billed based on what heads your way at the DSLAM, so you end up being billed for syn floods, traffic aimed at whoever last had your IP, etc etc etc. There are no figures on this, but from anecdotal evidence a large number of users are abandoning full-rate for rate-limited DSL which doesn't have this problem (I switched after DSLAM records showed I'd done 130MB of traffic in two days while my external router recorded < 30MB). It's a pain for everyone, users go from 8MB/s to 128Kb/s, and the provider loses a lot of revenue when people switch to the DOS-proof non-capped (and much cheaper because of the slow speed) accounts. One possible solution is to run at full rate until you've used your monthly quota, then switch to rate-limited, but apparently the DSLAM technology being used makes this impossible.

Peter. Received on Tue Nov 26 01:29:48 2002