[plug] iinet freezone

[Adam Hewitt]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 10:00 AM, gavin chester <gavin.chester at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/1/9 Niffum <bulkniffum at iinet.net.au>:
> [...]
>> Now, maybe i was silly in thinking that traffic from one iinet user to
>> another iinet user in the same state would be covered in the 'freezone' but
>> that is not where it ended up.  That traffic was counted as peak quota NOT
>> freezone. [...]
>
> Don't know if this a similar case to that I suffered with my provider,
> amcom when I first started with them. I deliberately aimed for large
> iso downloads from a waix peer (iinet, in that case) since it was
> supposedly 'quota-free' traffic. Blow me down if it didn't end up
> using up all my non-peered quota with this operation. A call to amcom
> could only reveal that there was no guarantee that traffic coming from
> one waix peer to another was going to go direct. Further investigation
> using wireshark and traceroute showed that packets were skipping from
> iinet over the border to third parties before ending up with amcom;
> hence, non-waix peers were involved in the mix instead of coming from
> one Perth server to another. This ruined my free traffic. In the end
> the only reliable waix peer was UWA for large downloads. Perhaps iinet
> did the same to you between you and your friend? :-/
>
> Gavin.

It is not "iiNet" doing this, but rather Amcom not advertising their
IP ranges to WAIX properly.

All of this routing is done dynamically and iiNet can only sent the
traffic to the interfaces on its network that it learns them from, in
this case Amcom were obviously advertising their IP ranges (with a
higher priority) to their upstream provider which in turn advertised
them (either directly or indirectly) to iiNet. There is no way iiNet
could have fixed that problem.

Without trying to make wild accusations it wouldn't surprise me if
they did this deliberately given they are one of the last ISP's to
offer an additional WAIX quota....*shrugs*.

On top of this it has never been mentioned anywhere, as far as I know,
that same state peer-to-peer inside iiNet was free traffic. The cost
to install and/or lease fibre from QV1 to the exchanges is a serious
investment which has to be recouped by iiNet in some form and
providing traffic free over these links is not the way to go about
doing so....unless it is saving them money by not using their upstream
bandwidth (hence the 'freezone' being ftp/akamai related) or provides
what iiNet consider to be a "value add" service such as the streaming
football etc.

Adam.