[tor-relays] Response back from DataCell/Iceland

[Patrick Hooker]

I wrote a nice letter to DataCell about the bandwidth my Tor router was
using and got a quick and good response. It also sheds some light on
Datacell's(in Iceland) connectivity to the outer world.

" Bandwidth in Iceland is an issue in terms of most ISP's charge by the
gigabyte transferred. This is the case because most ISP's depend on
Vodafone or Siminn for their backhaul and those charge by the transferred
Gigabyte on the international side while they don't charge for national
transfer. They do that because they pay outrageous prices on the link to
central europe and probably because they want to make a lot of money too
;-).

Our connectivity does not depend on them however. We managed to get a
somehow acceptable price for international connectivity. Its still 5 times
higher than bandwith in central europe but its at least not 50 times as
high as the first offers we got.

At the moment we have excess capacity. Our links are loaded like less than
1%. Once we get more customer, the link will be filled up.
Our infrastructure is configured to use fair queuing. This means that
every IP in our network gets a fair share of the bandwidth which is the
way we operate.

I don't mind having traffic on the excess bandwidth as long as all
customers get their guaranteed part. If it would become an issue we would
enforce it by using rate limits."

So, for now anyway, there doesn't seem to be a problem with my running
nearly 100GB/day through my Tor middle router. The TOS excludes the
running of open mail proxies doing anything illegal (by Iceland's laws),
this to be expected. I can see nothing in the TOS would directly rule out
Tor, at least a non-exit router. All my contact with DataCell has been
very friendly, I'd recommend  them to anyone who can afford ~US$70/mo. for
a virtual server. Just remember that when in Iceland, never carelessly
throw stones and be polite to the littl' people.

Bless Bless,
Patrick