[ILUG] Problems with Three Mobile-Broadband Router

[Michael Watterson]

Niall O Broin wrote:
> On 21 Jul 2009, at 15:04, Michael Watterson wrote:
>
>> No-one gets charged for "packets" but you get charged for "traffic".
>
> This is as wrong as a very wrong thing. It reminds me of the U.K. 
> tech. journalist who advised people to watch BBC programmes on iPlayer 
> streaming rather than downloading them, as that way you wouldn't use 
> up your download allowance  :-(
>
That's not what I'm suggesting.
> If you're using a network provider which charges you for incoming 
> bits, you're getting charged for those bits whether you're interested 
> in them or not, 
Yes.
> whether you think of them as "packets" or "traffic"
However if you look at the graphs I uploaded, all "packets" (or whatever 
it is the router is measuring) do not result in the same traffic. My ISP 
estimation (used in calculation of charges / upload/download Traffic).  
Compare daytime and night time.
Only about 2/3rds of the "packets" (or perhaps connection attempts?) 
result in any traffic that the ISP measures, not just my desired traffic.
> - hence you can be badly screwed if you get some bastard doing 
> something as simple as pinging your IP for a long time, or from many 
> hosts.
That's traffic. The amount depends on number and payload of pings. Which 
can be ignored. Then the traffic is almost non-existent. Routers 
typically do this with pings nowadays which why a Traceroute will 
nowadays give meaningless high figures for most intermediate routers 
even though the over all ping is lower. Many mail servers are invisible 
if you ping (i.e. almost no traffic)
>
> This is exactly what O2's distinction between 'internet' and 
> 'open.internet' protects you from - you receive no 
> bits/packets/traffic using the 'internet' APRN which is not part of a 
> connection YOU have already set up hence malicious pings or whatever 
> never get sent to you, so you don't pay for them. If you use the 
> 'open.internet' APRN OTOH you are susceptible to DDOW (distributed 
> denial of wallet) and the suggestion is that this might be happening 
> to the OP on his 3G connection.
Possibly true. However a well configured firewall is a good plan. My 
traffic *AS MEASURED BY ISP* has dropped by 20% since changing to a 
better firewall configuration, i.e. not just my desired traffic. In the 
previous case the LAN was not seeing the Traffic, only the Router & ISP 
was seeing it.
>
>
> Niall
>
A connection has to be accepted for there to be traffic.


-- 
Mike