Re:How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service
by JoshTriplett on Sunday November 01, 2015 @09:11PM
(#10489544)
> And if someone's constantly at their limit?
They still won't do any harm to anyone else. (Or if they do, then either the traffic shaping or the billing is broken.) Still not a good reason to track where the traffic is going.
However, it would make sense to give everyone fully-automated metrics on their bill, letting them know their total transfer, along the same lines as what the upstream providers provide. Make it clear that it's perfectly acceptable to use what they pay for, and that by design there's no information about the type or destination of traffic, but inform them that if the usage looks unexpectedly high compared to their own known usage (provide equivalencies in "hours of HD video" or similar so they have a baseline), they may want to investigate for themselves.
Re:How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service
by spc476 on Sunday November 01, 2015 @11:15PM
(#10489965)
In the video, there's a shot from what looks like Cacti, an SNMP monitoring program typically used to monitor network utilization on routers (among other things). That's probably what they mean when they mention "connections".
To take an example from another domain, much of California's Central Valley municipal water infrastructure is unmetered. A consequence of this is that problems with water infrastructure go unaddressed. In most of the cases I'm aware in which meters have been installed, even where there's no actual usage service billing, a near-immediate result is to find many previously undiscovered leaks, mains breaks, or service pipe breaks. While I'm not an uncritical fan of "you cannot manage what you don't measure", there are times when having some sanity checks on usage help.
In the case of online usage, it may be that you're a spam hub. Or that, as at one hosting provider I worked discovered, the interaction of a client's autoplay audio and a particular version of MSIE meant that we were continuously streaming what should have been a 5 second audio clip. We overshot out 95%ile bandwidth cap that month.