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Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Jun 14, 2008 02:03 PM
from the if-choking-please-call-for-help dept.
from the if-choking-please-call-for-help dept.
bigwophh writes "Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt — Senior Policy Director for Google — announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs."
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Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality 251 comments
penciling_in writes "CircleID has a post by Richard Bennett, one of the panelists in the recent Innovation forum on open access and net neutrality — where Google announced their upcoming throttling detector. From the article: 'My name is Richard Bennett and I'm a network engineer. I've built networking products for 30 years and contributed to a dozen networking standards, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. I was one of the witnesses at the FCC hearing at Harvard, and I wrote one of the dueling Op-Ed's on net neutrality that ran in the Mercury News the day of the Stanford hearing. I'm opposed to net neutrality regulations because they foreclose some engineering options that we're going to need for the Internet to become the one true general-purpose network that links all of us to each other, connects all our devices to all our information, and makes the world a better place. Let me explain ...' This article is great insight for anyone for or against net neutrality."
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How convenient (Score:5, Insightful)
What, where, why, how? (when?) (Score:5, Funny)
What:
Throttling detector
Where:
The interwho
Why:
Because ISPs like to throttle to give Papa Joe and his daughters a healthy feed of myspace and rain hellfire upon Torrenting Sam and his goon squad of seeders
How:
No details
When:
Who knows?
Is there an award for understatements? (Score:5, Funny)
Still, good on them for coming to a fork in the road - one to eviltown and the other to goodville - and choosing wisely.
Re:Is there an award for understatements? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
ISP throttling (Score:5, Funny)
Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Google is afraid it's youtube dreams are being squashed by evil ISP's. Google more than sure doesn't give a cent about P2P applications, so their app probably will only work for http throttling, namely flv streaming/youtube.
Sorry for the google bashing, but this doesn't seem like google is as much interested in defending the poor customers against the evil ISP's as it's trying to defend it's own commercial interests.
Something else, I don't think there will be a big success in bateling the big ISP's, as trafic rises, there is no way they can maintain the current bandwidth/price ratio, even with massive profit cuts and investments in infrastructure. ISP's are overselling at a massive scale, more than 100 times their banwidth capacity. (well, in the US it's possible to maintain current prices since it's one of the most overpriced countries in this domain).
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:4, Insightful)
David
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What makes Comcast incredibly underhanded is that they advertise the wonders of their fiber optic network...and falsely imply FTTH service with lines like "I actually feel the fiber optic light from Comcast."
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
That's when you know when you can really trust someone, when both parties' interests are aligned. Trusting someone's good intentions has a long history of disappointment.
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Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
Net neutrality is not about giving all types of traffic the same priority. You can have a neutral net in which VOIP packets have a very high priority, HTTP packets a slightly lower priority, and bit torrent packets are bottom of the pile.
Network neutrality is about giving all traffic of the same type the same priority regardless of its source. In other words, in a neutral net ISPs would not make deals with certain content providers to prioritise their traffic.
It is really important that everyone understands this. Some of the organisations who are against net neutrality are using the argument that it is only sensible to prioritise protocols such as VOIP (prioritisation by type, which most people would agree with), when what they really want is to extract money out of the content providers by prioritising traffic by source.
Why is prioritisation by source such a bad thing? Because it turns the 'old internet' on its head. Whereas at present anyone can be a content provider, in the brave new world of a non-neutral net only large organisations can afford to pay the ISPs to deliver their content at an acceptable speed.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Google more than sure doesn't give a cent about P2P applications, so their app probably will only work for http throttling, namely flv streaming/youtube.
Why wouldn't they care about P2P? If they can keep P2P tech evolving until it's mature enough to distribute Youtube videos on them, that translates into free bandwidth and service. I think there's already a lot of movement towards this - see P4P [wikipedia.org], Vuze [wikipedia.org], even NASA TV [digimeld.com] is piloting peer-to-peer distribution of its broadcast.
Potential money loss for Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not caps? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why not caps? (Score:4, Funny)
Free market capitalism, eh? It's just crazy enough to work. We should try that here.
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Re:Why not caps? (Score:5, Informative)
Free market capitalism, eh? It's just crazy enough to work. We should try that here.
Seriously, the biggest provider (a partially state-owned company, which has the entire nation's telephone net infastructure) charges 41 euros (61 usd) for 12 Gigabytes of traffic per month. Twelve, that's nothing! If you want to buy an extra pack of 5 Gb, it costs another 5 euros. Our internet providers would make a terrible model to follow, capped internet is almost just as terrible as a non-neutral net.
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Easy to avoid.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Easy to avoid.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, as has been said earlier in the discussion, Google's likely most interested in the effects of throttling on their own applications, notably Youtube. So if they only test connections to Youtube, then it either forces ISPs to be caught red-handed or unthrottle youtube, a win-win situation for Google.
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Re:Easy to avoid.... (Score:4, Interesting)
If it is as simple as what you suggest it would be a great move for Google as the ISP's could unthrottle Google and Google would get superior network traffic over all of the smaller sites that don't have their own well used network-throttling-detectors.
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not necessary... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, funny thing then that when my bittorrent client inched above 45-50kB/sec (less than half of the new limit, which is 125kB/sec), shortly thereafter ping times exploded from 20-25ms to 300-500ms. On a second occasion, it went up to 1000ms to 3000ms. Even if you throttle back to, say, 20kB/sec, ping times stay the same. They don't drop until you stop the client completely. Seems to take about 10 minutes for the throttling to kick in. It's so bad that ssh latency goes up to 5-10 seconds, and the web interface to my p2p client completely stopped working.
The same thing happened with eDonkey, so either they're going off traffic volume, or they're detecting any p2p traffic.
Check it, your ISP throttles!... (Score:4, Funny)
And the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, you find out for sure, and and then what? In a lot of areas the 'hi-speed market' is a monopoly.
Why Should An ISP Care If You Use Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
If you use encryption on your torrent connection you'd think that would be good for an ISP, if they're required by law to block people from downloading movies and songs but they can't see it since you're encrypting everything that should get them off the hook.
Bell Canada just seemed to just say screw this and started to throttle all encrypted traffic. Although they said it was because of bandwidth issues.
I say for an ISP ignorance is bliss!
How will Google implement this? (Score:3, Interesting)
We need a car analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
The next day 3 customers show up to pick up their Ferraris, clearly the car dealer is outraged!
3 showing up when he only expected 2 even though he sold 3?! Unbelievable!
But the solution is simple, since the evil customers expected to get what they payed for, it's clearly all their fault,
and hence it is only fair to the car dealer that he be fully paid and the customers will have to timeshare.
Of course if the customers drive in California, the car dealer will have to be paid an additional $100/day since
driving in such a high traffic area it just completely unfair to the car dealer who only expected costumers to drive in rural, desolate areas of Idaho.
And in case some people don't know how to make the connection here, just replace "Ferrari" with "GB bandwidth" and "car dealer" with "ISP" (and what ever else needed to make perfect sense
If we let's ISP's get away with any of it, they won't just stop with throttling BitTorrent, they will oversell their bandwidth 1000-10,000x instead of just 10-30x and then throttle absolutely everything to make it all meet. Suddenly you downloading your 500kb Email attachment is an overuse of bandwidth and deserves to be cut down to 3kb/s. But don't worry, that annoying 1.2MB Flash commercial with be subsidized so it won't count and will stream with 10MB(yte)/s over your fiber connection to annoy you instantly. But you can't complain, after all you are getting your full bandwidth worth on SOME content.
In my overly optimistic way, i would hope that it doesn't really matter who releases such a tool and weather it works or not, just that the greedy ISP think there might be something to nail them down or at least make their unethical misdeeds visible might be enough for them to be not quite as bold, maybe even start campaigning with 'no throttling, test it yourself'. But i forgot that in the US there isn't really any ISP Broadband competition, i mean in the areas i lived in there was only once choice, first it was either Cable or nothing... then we moved, now we had the choice of At&t DSL or.... nothing.... yay. And even in those areas where people are lucky enough to have TWO offerings, chances are very good that both are evil bastards and already throttling
Now that i have been living in Germany for a while, i almost get weekly adds from some ISP i have never heard of supposedly being cheaper then my current isp. My 16MBit/s connection combined with some unlimited call package is cheap enough though (compared to the us) but it makes me feel good that if there is ever even the hint of throttling that i can simply switch one of the many other isp's.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:let me guess (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:let me guess (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:let me guess (Score:4, Funny)
Or flush the streams...
eh... I'm tired of all these shitty jokes.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Legality Question (Score:4, Insightful)
More like:
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on the bandwidth thing (Score:3, Interesting)
We currently have an 8Mb line, and I do mean 8, it gets to that speed quite often, especially in transfers from my university machines, other Janet sites, and other good download locations.
Otherwise we get around 4Mb.
Ok, all fine, but now UK ISP have started talking about max 2Mb lines in my area, and several have 'tested' my line and found it cannot go above 2mb, even when I clearly can get much greater speeds then this, and have before and after their 't
Re:on the bandwidth thing (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Interesting)
When it comes to bandwidth the total amount really doesn't matter (despite what the ISPs would have you believe). It's the amount per second, or, more reasonably, minute, that is the real determining factor. If I use 300 Gigs of bandwidth, but do so in 10 gigs a night, at the times when every normal person is asleep, over the course of the entire month that's going to have far less of an impact on my neighbors than if I used 30 Gigs on the first of the month during the waking hours.
Hmm...anyone else getting visions of power company like pricing? You pay per gig (or something) a reasonable fee (such that the average person pays the same then as now), but if you use it during off hours you pay less. It's probably been thought of before but it might help, those torrents would be a lot cheaper to run during off hours, making normal usage faster during on hours.
Parent
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Informative)
That's why ISPs won't do it.
Because most customers are doing just fine the way it is. The customers getting 'screwed' are the ones that want to transfer 1000s of GB per month for 35$ flat rate.
If the ISPs ever actually switched to a supply/demand pricing model, with tiered bandwidth, guess what, the same customers that are moaning about getting 'screwed' now by throttling, are going to be moaning that their internet costs $1500/mo when they they run torrents at 25down:2up Mbps 24x7.
Meanwhile 'regular' people will be complaining because they don't understand their up/down ratios, why bandwidth costs more going in one direction than the other, why they had to pay $5 extra one month when they didn't do anything out of the ordinary.... except update windows to sp3... and according to the MS page, thats only a 97kb download.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=68C48DAD-BC34-40BE-8D85-6BB4F56F5110&displaylang=en#filelist [microsoft.com]
In effect: everybody loses.
Parent
Re:Legality Question (Score:4, Interesting)
You pay a flat fee and you can download as much as you want.
The catch is either in the fine print or its omitted completely.
Its illegal in Australia but legal in the US to do that.
Thats why nearly all our net plans have fixed quotas (sometimes with on and off peak) and your shaped after reaching the limit.
It is the next simplest solution and its extremely fair for consumers.
Parent
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Insightful)
The ones really being "screwed" under the current model are the light users, who push a good 2 or 3 megabytes a day to check their email and the weather report, don't call tech support very often, and are paying $60 a month to subsidize us compulsive downloaders.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The pricing model used by most broadband providers is designed for simplicity, rather than any real representation of value.
The current pricing regime exists because there was no (affordable) way to measure traffic to the individual customer when the Internet first 'rolled out', although routing technology at the time did support capped speeds to customers.
Not any more. That is why countries late to the Internet were able to put a structure in place that allowed measurement of traffic (monthly GB) and charge you accordingly. This happens to be normal in many countries, though the US customer base has had a hard time s
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how this can be. when they're charging per gigabyte, then the more gigabytes they can deliver the more dollars they get!
If you're paying a flat rate for your connection, they've already got their money for the month, regardless of how much downloading you do. To maximize revenue, they have an incentive to discourage downloading, as this allows them to cram more flat-rate subscribers onto less infrastructure.
If instead they can levy a charge on every packet they deliver, then they'll want to facilitate your bandwidth consumption however they can.
Parent
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Interesting)
How ironic that my feelings on the matter so closely match the quote "What we've got here is failure to communicate... Now I don't like this any more than you do."
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Re:Legality Question (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, they can't possibly guarantee you a certain speed. Try explaining to Joe Perv that even though he has the capability of 20 MbPS, the server that has his Chinese industrial accident porn can only deliver at 20 bPS.
There's enough reasons to sling vitriol at unethical ISPs, but advertising "up to [speed]" isn't one of them.
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Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Funny)
You have made this entire thread worthwhile.
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Re:Legality Question (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Informative)
How would you feel if hard drive manufacturers didn't give you all the drive space they advertised or if your new sports car couldn't really run at the advertised max speed all the time? oh, wait...
Seriously though, living in the UK where we have ADSL max and I get advertised as being allowed up to 8mbps broadband but living in an area I can only get 2mbps is one thing. When the ISP then only lets me have 512kbps if I'm lucky half the time despite me getting shafted harder than most people the rest of the time it's a whole different matter, it's a kick in the nads. They really need to rethink their business plan if not only can they not supply what they're selling, but if they then can't even supply 1/4th and can in fact only supply 1/16th of what they're selling and even less than that with some ISPs.
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