Best Leased Line for small data centre?

[mgcarley]

Actually professional DCs provide what they promise and mention clearly on their product list their usage policy.

I am using both dedicated 1Gbps and 95th Percentile billing (50Mbps) so its always better when usage policy is clear.
I mean you sign a contract with CtrlS when at first call they say "Yeah you can use upto 1Gbps" but on 7th call they are saying "You can use upto 1Gbps or more but it depends how much bandwidth is available free for use at that time"


Dedicated port != dedicated Internet bandwidth. No data centre is providing you with the latter - especially not at the $80-100/month range. You could get your own carrier bandwidth but that's not the same.

Secondly, yes our usage won't be 100Mbps at all. 10-30Mbps line would be good enough but its always good to know how much we can expand with our current provider, also getting BSNL FTTH line of 10Mbps unmetered for just 1 server or 2 servers I dont think should count in commercial. I can just show that usage and those servers in a apartment for personal use. But yeah from a legal point of view, I had rather not do it and look for alternatives.

It would be a wise choice, IMO

MTNL/BSNL Leased Line offers are not so decent priced on high links.

34Mbps is for Rs 1.08 Lacs I guess.
Is the price yearly ? As then it makes it almost 9k INR a month which would fairly be decent enough for a dedicated line.


The price you see on the MTNL website (I assume you've looked at this page (Mumbai tariffs)) is annual, but is not all inclusive, of, among other things, Internet Bandwidth. This is a *circuit only* price from one point on MTNL's network to another (and not even premises to premises).

From MTNL Mumbai's page:
"Leased Circuits are dedicated link which interconnects important nodal centers and sites. The Leased Circuits are popular medium which is being utilized Enterprises to conntect their data centers, operational sites, call centers etc to run their business applications. A leased circuit may be a speech circuit, a data circuit or a telegraph circuit. MTNL Procvides different types for Leased Circuits."

The correct pages for leased lines from MTNL Delhi or MTNL Mumbai

I'd point you at the relevant pages on BSNL's site but it's unreachable half the time so I'm not even going to try right now.

However nowhere bandwidth is mentioned.
Can I assume its unmetered ?


Leased lines are not metered.

E2E provides colocation ?

I don't know. Ask them.

Can they also provide a optic fiber line to a apartment/office nearby from their facilities ?


Laying cable and providing services on them requires a specific type of license, so, no.

Reliance is outta question, too damn costly as per what I have read regarding their service and rates.
Their network might be the topest in India, but in that price I can take a Plane and colocate same servers in Singapore or HK maybe.

It'd be a lot cheaper, of course, but whatever quotes you've had from Reliance are for Leased Lines, so comparing them to the prices you've seen on MTNL/BSNL's sites for Leased Circuits would not be fair. At the end of the day, prices aren't going to vary significantly from the big 3, especially when you're only buying small amounts of bandwidth - they might even go so far as to just use the TRAI ceiling tariff which was set, what, 5 years ago or so.

 

[shubhank]

http://www.bsnl.co.in:9080/opencms/bsnl/BSNL/services/enterprises/leased_tariff.html#high

Can you tell me the about the above prices ?

Are they not for the leased lines itself but just Circuits ? And then what are the cricuits for then ? How to get bandwidth to them.

 

[mgcarley]

http://www.bsnl.co.in:9080/opencms/bsnl/BSNL/services/enterprises/leased_tariff.html#high

Can you tell me the about the above prices ?

Are they not for the leased lines itself but just Circuits ? And then what are the cricuits for then ? How to get bandwidth to them.

Same same - they're just circuits. Basically they're for point to point usage, for example, if you've got multiple offices around the city or country and need to exchange information (but not on the public Internet). You'd probably find banks and stuff use these types of products.

For a leased line with actual bandwidth, this is the product you'll need: http://www.bsnl.co.in:9080/opencms/bsnl/BSNL/services/broadband/internet_tariff1.html (31.25 lakhs for 34mbit/s if you want 1:1 uncontended bandwidth, or cheaper if you can deal with 1:4 contention), so, I was right when I said to expect over Rs6k/mbit/month in one of my first posts to you (this price works out to Rs7,659/mbit/month in case you don't feel like doing the maths)

Frankly though, prices listed by BSNL are a bit on the high side even if you're purchasing 10gbit/s, so... I'd still say talk to Tata and all the others I've already mentioned first, or better still, just find somewhere to Co-Locate - they would all be more than happy to figure something out for you - but without knowing your budget it's really hard to say much more.

Put simply, you're pretty much guaranteed to get a better deal - and probably performance - sitting on a 100mbit/s port that with contended bandwidth than getting a 34mbit/s leased line irrespective of contention - and from a private player you're almost guaranteed to get better support as well, irrespective of whether you choose to lease or co-locate.

 

[bajechele]

How much do they pay for this? I guess they dont have to pay per gb to their uplink provider(reliance,airtel) whatever it maybe considering they have 5.8gbps unlimited bandwith to share among users:S
http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/1296/fivenetwork.jpg

Please clear my doubts :S

 

[mgcarley]

How much do they pay for this?

Don't know. Every ISP negotiates differently according to how much they buy and how good of a relationship they have with their account manager(s). If I were to use BSNL's pricing (which, as previously mentioned, is a bit on the expensive side), around 35 lakhs per year per STM (so 14 crores or so for 40 of them).

Although given that they don't buy from BSNL plus knowing what my pricing is, it's very likely that it's significantly less than that. But exact figures I either don't know (in their case) or can't reveal (in my case). Sorry.

I guess they dont have to pay per gb to their uplink provider(reliance,airtel) whatever it maybe considering they have 5.8gbps unlimited bandwith to share among users:S

No ISP pays per GB to their upstream provider. All the bandwidth any ISP buys comes in the form of unlimited leased-lines at whatever capacity they buy (in this case, appears to be 40x STMs or so) - but therein lies the problem.

They can't resell that bandwidth uncontended to their users (would be too expensive) and this is why as consumers we have contention ratios and fair-usage policies to deal with. It's up to the ISP how he distributes the bandwidth he buys, what contention he places on it and what his plans are going to be (and as a result, how much he charges).

I come up with Rs/GB equivalencies using a pretty simple formula: price per STM / 12 (months) / 140 (mbit/s usable after overhead) / 320 (approx GB transferable per mbit per month), so if I was paying for example 35 lakhs per year per STM, that would work out at about Rs6.5/GB + tax (as delivered to my office).

 

[bajechele]

so 5.8gbps bandwith and 50k+ users with 1.5mbps Unlimited at 800. Average users uses their 1mbps 499 unlimited pack. So how much is the profit? Their DC ++ is said to contain every media content in world about 320TB + so they save a huge amount of bandwith from that I guess :Sas per their infrastructure 5860mbps they can feed 5thousand 1mbps unlimited users. But they have 50,000 users so how cum network is managed?? Do they run their STM links at full capacity? I guess at peak hours 20-25thousand people are online at a time downloading or surfingif they use BSNL FTTH 100mbps 40links priced at 83k they will sum up to 33lakhs saving 2lakhs :haha:

 

[mgcarley]

so 5.8gbps bandwith and 50k+ users with 1.5mbps Unlimited at 800. Average users uses their 1mbps 499 unlimited pack. So how much is the profit? Their DC ++ is said to contain every media content in world about 320TB + so they save a huge amount of bandwith from that I guess :S

Caching will be more important for them than DC++. DC++ requires the users to actively go and use (and know how to use) DC++ clients and hubs and all that, which most of those 50k users do not.

I don't know how much their profit margins are - if they're charging 499 for 1mbps unlimited then they must be contending bandwidth at at least 1:4 to break even, but I expect this ratio to be higher, as they have to allow for expansion and peak-traffic, expenses and of course. profit. Plus of course, they also have those 10mbps plans so the ability for those customers to get multi-megabit speeds needs to be accounted for.

as per their infrastructure 5860mbps they can feed 5thousand 1mbps unlimited users. But they have 50,000 users so how cum network is managed?? Do they run their STM links at full capacity? I guess at peak hours 20-25thousand people are online at a time downloading or surfing

Doubtful. They're not supposed to run their links at more than 80% capacity. Presumably they must be contending traffic at at least 1:10 which is roughly in line with what MTNL claims to contend theirs at. But may be more, may be less.

if they use BSNL FTTH 100mbps 40links priced at 83k they will sum up to 33lakhs saving 2lakhs :haha:

Ummm... no. Also, you got the maths wrong.

Even if it were possible, that would be 59 links * Rs83k/month = 49 lakhs per month = ~5.9Cr per year, but then, that would be with already contended bandwidth, so you'd have contention upon contention meaning probably 100 users per megabit - and that wouldn't be fun.

 

[bajechele]

What is contending traffic actually? If a 1mbps line is shared among 10users that's what I understand about contention ratio then 1024kbps/10users=102kbps but TRAI guideline is to provide 80% that is min 768kbps so how cum its possible? I read somewhere on the internet that BSNL shares a 33mbps line to 300users across an exchange.

 

[mgcarley]

What is contending traffic actually? If a 1mbps line is shared among 10users that's what I understand about contention ratio then 1024kbps/10users=102kbps but TRAI guideline is to provide 80% that is min 768kbps so how cum its possible?

Whoa whoa, stop there. That's not how contention works. It's not "if there is a 1mbit's line it's shared between 10 users" because it's not contention at the last mile that we're worrying about here, it's contention as a sum of the total available bandwidth, as in "if the ISP has 1gbit/s to the outside world, therefore a contention of 1:10 means they should not sell more than 10gbit/s worth of service", although the rules state that they could sell up to 50gbit/s worth of service if they really wanted to.

How much is 10gbit/s of service going to be? Well, that is entirely up to the ISP and what plans he wants to provide. If he decides on 1mbit/s plans at a 1:10 contention ratio, that's 10,000 customers. Or 10mbit/s customers is 1,000 customers. Or 100mbit/s for 100 customers. And so forth. The higher the speed, the higher the contention ratio needs to be to justify it economically BUT CONVERSELY, the less the customers are likely to notice.

As for the 80% rule, if an ISP sells you a 1mbit/s line they are obliged to provide up up to 80% of that - within their network but to the outside world the max they can guarantee you is about 20kbit/s for every megabit they sell you, so a Speedtest result that gives you only like 0.4mbit/s during peak hours is actually not a violation of anything if you can still get >0.8mbit/s to a server within your ISP's network. Or, if you're on ADSL and your line syncs at 80% of the speed it's considered to be OK (so if you're promised 1mbit/s and your modem syncs at 805kbps or so, you're within the limits and nobody is likely to care if you complain).

Unfortunately, many of the TRAI guidelines are actually too difficult for your average person to measure and desperately need clarification - this goes for the "80% rule" as well as contention ratios, because both are frankly too easy to fudge.

I read somewhere on the internet that BSNL shares a 33mbps line to 300users across an exchange.

This is different again. How BSNL contends it's bandwidth is their own thing, but typically a DSL line is given x amount of bandwidth as a committed information rate, and the speed you're sold is a burst speed. This is probably the case with BSNL (and other operators) but because the burst speed is not significantly higher than any CIR they might have (and that they have slow unlimited plans), slowdowns are more noticeable for more time during the day.

I don't know BSNL's numbers, but in NZ, ADSL lines get 45 or 90kbit/s as a CIR even though most of the time I would get 16+mbit/s were I to be downloading something (locally... information from the US or Aussie is an entirely different matter). Basically though, because there are hundreds of lines connected to an exchange or cabinet, you're able to get these kinds of speeds much of the time: if a cabinet serves 500 homes, you're looking at say 45kbit/s * 500 = 225mbit/s or so is supplied to that cabinet.

Obviously 10 or 12 users downloading simultaneously would saturate that upstream but because the attainable speeds are usually 16+mbit/s, it means download times are short, so you have a 1 gigabyte file coming down in a few minutes and then the lines are free for the other 490 customers. Most of the time, nobody ever even notices speed drops except when a lot of people in one area are on a particular ISP that does offer "unlimited" then their speeds drop right from 16+mbit/s to like 0.5 or 1mbit/s... but the rest of the ISPs that don't offer unlimited manage to keep relatively consistantly high speeds.

This is why I agree with fair-usage policies in principle but so long as the limits are fair and reasonable to the customer - and the speed of the line is not limited. I'd rather share a 100mbit/s line with 100 people than have 1mbit/s to myself (statistics suggest I would probably get at least 10mbit/s most of the time).

 

[bajechele]

http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/642/wishnet.jpg

Please clear this thing.I head that they have 4mbps bandwith allocated to a pool and users with that network say 10.10.222.65 gateway and under it from 10.10.222.68-10.10.222.255 they accommodate 20-30 users and they share that pool bandwith

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/6126/poolvu.jpg

Cablewalas in Kolkata uses this software for everything starting from contending bandwith,pool creation,bandwith policy etc.