Concurrent Session Limitation !@$$@!^@^#$@

recon1025

Back again with some bitching to do... I've realized this problem for a while, GDS the LSP(Local Service Provider) has enforced these session limitations on all residential broadband customers. However, as I recall, It was never mentioned in the EULA(End user license agreement) I know I'm in Lebanon but doesnt this country have any laws against fooling customers? I'm really sick and tired of the 20 concurrent session limitation that they've enforced and their defense is "we're doing this so you dont go around and open a net cafe" It's pure garbage, with 20 session limitation I can barely get enough (seeds/peers) to be able to download torrents... I tried to speak with the ISP but they said I have to take it up with GDS. Contacting GDS didnt help much they simply said its a company policy and they cant change it for anyone. They told me I can always go with a dedicated line and we all know how much that costs for a mere 64kbps connection heh... Lebanon got major issues. I'd really like to know everyone's opinion on this and how you're coping with it. Does anyone recall wether the session limitation was mentioned in the eula, when they first signed up? If not, it cant go unnoticed, a company cannot have its customers agree to one thing then go around and change it unless they mention they're low lives! (subject to change without notice) those words should at least exist in the eula.

rolf

Yeah I know, I am as angry as you.
I wish we could have some sort of initiative to ask for better internet.
BTW they ministry of economy has a new hotline for consumer complaints
http://www.economy.gov.lb/MOET/English/Panel/ConsumerProtection/Complaints/

I have no idea how efficient it is, but if you have nothing better to do :D

Another wonderful limitation is blocking VPN. Thanks to GDS too.

You can actually bypass these limitations. You need a tunnel that would multiplex your connections, multiplexing meaning transmitting several sessions over one connection only.
Commercial tunners such as httptunnel unfortunately do not support multiplexing. That's a pity since multiplexing is technically very simple to implement, but they probably never thought of it because only in lebanon do we have such freakish limitations.

They are tunnel softwares that can multiplex, but they dont provide public servers like httptunnel, so you'll have to set up your own server outside the GDS network. If you have a friend with DSL in the US or Europe you can install the server software on his pc, he wont notice the 256k traffic on his 20mbits dsl :)
You can also lease a dedicated server at 70$ and up per month and install on it whatever you want. That's expensive but if you're a web designer and host your sites for your clients, then you can also use it to put your sites on it. And anyways GDS 512k + a dedicated server is still much cheaper than a dedicated connection. That's what I would have done if I had a cyber-cafe. But you have to know how to setup the whole thing.

rolf

Say, if we get more persons like you who are bitchin' about the session limitation, then we could lease a dedicated server and somehow split the price.

recon1025

heh, yeah.. That multiplexing is news to me I've never heard of it before, going to google some stuff and read up about it, I got several friends in the us who are subscribed with an ISP over there called Optimum Online. www.optimumonline.com I had it while i lived there for the past 5 years in new jersey, 10Mbps down 1Mbps up for 35/month and its a cable modem, I also got a VOIP enabled modem so i could make free calls to anywhere in u.s canada and puerto rico for 30/month flat fee! This is definatly the last visit im doing to lebanon it just gives me a headache to know i dont have reliable and fast internet connection. It's funny when i talked to the guy from GDS he said yeah we set the limitation on sessions so you wouldnt take more bandwidth i said excuse me how the hell can i take more bandwidth if you've set a limitation on bandwidth he insisted that there was a relation between bandwidth and session and any educated person knows it only takes 1 session to use all your bandwidth it doesnt matter wether you have 1 or 10k sessions if there's a bandwidth capacity and limitation in place you cannot exceed that, but none the less he kept argueing so i just said yeah ok you're right im wrong... Seems like most ppl in lebanon think they're right about everything which makes it extremly hard to communicate, forget online communication im talking about human social communication here... but yeah thanks for the tip about multiplexing will def look that up now

recon1025

I just submited a complaint to http://www.economy.gov.lb/MOET/English/Panel/ConsumerProtection/Complaints/

here's what I had to say, I doubt they're actually going to read it but I sure took the time to explain problem and bitch, guess that's the only thing we can do knowing that we live in a $!@$ ditatorship!

This is a bit of a technical program, GDS the local service provider has set a limit of 20 concurrent sessions and enforced it on all 4 major ISPs, their defense is to stop people from sharing their internet connection or opening net cafe's. Being that I'm an IDM residential broadband customer, It affects my daily operations and severly limits me. I tried to come with an agreement with GDS regarding this issue even suggested to write a formal paper and sign it that i would never share or open a net cafe and they would have the right to sue me if i did but they disagreed. I simply want the full potentional of the internet, an internet connection has the capability to have 65,535 concurrent sessions in theory nobody actually uses that much. But when you're limited to 20 sessions at the time time(concurrently) it severly affects your operation! It's just absurd and if ARPA (founders of the internet) heard about these enforcements I'm sure it would make them toss over in their grave! I urge you to contact GDS and come to some kind of agreement, I've lived in many countries, europe, states and in canada and not one ISP has this absurd limitation! I believe when I pay a hefty absurd price such as $200/month for a mere 512kbps download that's the least i should expect a normal internet connection without any session limitation! They told me the only way to get around this is to pay for a dedicated line which would cost around 3000/month, for 512 that's theft and abuse! This is just a session complaint, lets not talk about the incredibly low upload speed.. Thank you for reading this lengthy post.

rolf

Right on! Man you impress me.

The thing in lebanon is that there is a state monoploly on the internet backbone, and they (the gouvernement) are sucking it to the marrow. Lift the restrictions and you'll see internet fly.

But I dont know if that'll fix your social communication problem, through :)

wollyka

Actually they mention it at least for IDM ( i knew about it when i sign in 5 months ago but it was better than 33.6kbps dial up)

1. High Bandwidth Internet Access up to 512kbps
2. 24/7 "always connected"
3. 24/7 support and maintenance @ 01- 23 77 33
4. E-mail address @idm.net.lb with 10MB space
5. Wide range of plans: 128K, 256K, and 512K.
6. For Home users only
7. 10 sessions limitation per subscription

it is bullshit i know, i called them to complain but they told me it is GDS. so i called GDS and complained and they said they cannot do a thing, it is a company policy!!!
:( :( :x
edit:they consider each IE window a 3 sessions so u can't open more than 3 IE at the same time, so basically u have 20 TCP connections limit at the same time

rolf

edit:they consider each IE window a 3 sessions so u can't open more than 3 IE at the same time, so basically u have 20 TCP connections limit at the same time

What's that? Is it 10 or 20? I dont get it.

wollyka

Terranet and IDM says 10 sessions in their web sites..
but in azureus i can connect to 18 peers, so i think they consider a session like 2 TCP connections (each IE window make 4-6 TCP connections at the same time)

rolf

recon there is a tunnel called htun:
http://htun.runslinux.net/about.html
That will tunnel the whole IP stack on one connection (hence multiplexing), also enabling you to use VPN. Due to this approach there is a 20% performance loss compared to a non-tunnelled connection. And it only runs on linux (both on the server and client-side).

recon1025

recon there is a tunnel called htun:
http://htun.runslinux.net/about.html
That will tunnel the whole IP stack on one connection (hence multiplexing), also enabling you to use VPN. Due to this approach there is a 20% performance loss compared to a non-tunnelled connection. And it only runs on linux (both on the server and client-side).

Thanks for the link rolf, ill check it out soon. Im sure its not a surprise to you but i still havent heard back from the complaint i submited to economy.gov.lb heh .. I'd be surprised if they actually answer, since they gave me a ticket number it makes me wonder..

rolf

Gouvernement ministries have redone their websites lately... old sites were absolutely horrific, most probably the ugliest sites you'd ever see. But the new ones still dont get updated on a decent basis.

Note the website of the ministry of telecommunication still sucks big time:
http://www.mpt.gov.lb/
my little brother could do a better website... not exactly a showcase for technical expertise. With all the money they charge us for internet you'd think they'd hire a decent graphic designer to give an illusion of respectability and maybe fix all these "file not found" errors, but noooo...
By the way check this out from the above website:

The Internet sector is liberalized in Lebanon, any one can apply to a license and become ISP. (...) However, Voice over IP and Videoconferencing are illegal in Lebanon. (...) The (ISP receiver) stations need to be licensed by the Council of ministries (decree 8804).

Now that's some kind of "liberalisation"!

To go back to our topic, the websites of the ministry of finance and that of the ministry of economy are some of the most serious gouvernement websites around IMHO... These 2 ministries also have a good reputation... But did they reach the point where they actually read feedback? Let's cross our fingers... I think they will read it, since it's a whole program with a hotline involved... But I'm afraid they wont understand it, they're probably more used to stuff like "I bought a bag of bread and there was a cockroach inside!" (eeek!). That's obviously not from the same level...

And about that link, I'm just providing it as a curiosity... I mean it works for sure but I would NOT recommend you to loose your time with this, you'll need to setup 2 linux computers for a start... and you dont know what bad surprises you'll have on the way...

vi_c

<< any educated person knows it only takes 1 session to use all your bandwidth it doesnt matter wether you have 1 or 10k sessions if there's a bandwidth capacity and limitation in place you cannot exceed that

Actually, you need the other site you are communicating with to actually supply you the data at a rate fast enough to saturate your link.In other words, your single download may or may not use up your entire 512kbps (or whatever downstream bandwidth you have) depending on whether the other site is rate-limiting your download.
In any case, controlling bandwidth by limiting user sessions shows lack of technical experience as far as bandwidth management is concerned, as the ISP can simply use rate-limiting on their routers which is the easiest thing to do. That's less of a headache for them and for the end-user. Alas, looks like QoS is not part of their vocabulary.
Tunneling your traffic via http or any other protocol for that matter provides a partial solution. I am not sure how well peer2peer will peform in that scenario. Most tunneling solutions will require that you have another server sitting somewhere with some decent bandwidth. Look into openvpn as it's a pretty easy thing to setup and use. Cheers.

rolf

They are not using session limitation as a bandwidth restriction. They are implementing it to make it difficult to redistribute this connection. Share a GDS link over more than 2 or 3 computers and you'll quickly run out of sessions. So that should keep internet cafes, illegal isps and companies from using this link instead of more expensive "professional" dedicated connections offered by isps.

some of the motivations are:
-internet cafes, illegal isps, and the such are huge badwidth consumers.
-The isps dont want cheap broadband to cannibalize their more expensive "business solutions"
-They want to maximize their revenue by limiting connection sharing.

As for their level of technical expertise in bandwidth shaping, I think they're doing fine, since they are apparently classifying their traffic, with http having a higher priority than p2p traffic.
In this case you can use tunneling to accelerate your p2p traffic, since the tunnel will encapsulate the traffic in HTTP and it will go through with the higher priority of HTTP.

You mentionned something about VPN? Unfortunately, like I said earlyer in this thread, these guys have blocked VPN connections for the same "motivations" mentionned above. But thanks for the tip 8) And welcome to the forum!

vi_c

I'm not sure if you took a look at OpenVPN, but it doesn't use IPSec and hence any blocking that may be in effect with regards to IPSec protocols, will be irrelevant since it allows you to tunnel your traffic over TCP/UDP ports of your choice.(assuming they don't block non-default TCP/UDP ports as well :) )

Disregarding GDSs financial motivations to implement things the way they did, protecting themselves from Internet Cafe abuses by depriving home-users out of their rights is not acceptable. Prioritizing http over p2p is hardly any sign of technical prowess, and screening violators with flagrant bandwidth use from 'normal' users is not hard to do. In any case, I was referring to the rate-limiting part of QoS, and not prioritization of traffic.
Of course, if they want to do it the easy way, then it can be done, but it'll affect everyone, the 'good and the bad'. Cheers.

rolf

Oh yeah thanks for the openvpn link, I checked it and I saw support for connection trough HTTP proxies... I'll definitely give it a try - I still need a server outside the network for that.