Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow? 812
Anti-Globalism writes "The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth, sometimes more, during peak hours. While these 'power users' are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."
Yeah! (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is poor granny picked on as an example? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't have any grannies of my own left, but I have no reason to believe that every otherwise canny granny has a slower connection than you or that she hasn't discovered the delights of FasterFox or premium service or whatever! Try to give up the annoying and patronising stereotypes...
Back to the point: it's called the tragedy of the commons. Shared and limited resources are misused by the greedy or impatient or desperate.
Perhaps we'll need peak-hour kWh and MB charges to help persuade people to use those resources sensibly and fairly, and not be too anti-social.
I just paid 3x more than baseline up front, negotiated with my ISP, volunteered an AUP for my own usage, and I down-regulate my traffic when there is Net congestion, and hey-ho! I'm not disappointed with my service.
Rgds
Damon
I don't buy the premise, just yet (Score:5, Interesting)
This report is perhaps based on a false premise. While it may be true that 5% of all the users are using 50% of the bandwidth, that's only because the rest of us aren't as demanding. Were we so demanding, TCP, which is what most of the world runs on, would provide more of a fair share. It wouldn't be perfect, mind you, but particularly with WFQ, if you're using more there is a larger chance that your traffic will drop. This doesn't hold true with UDP-based applications that are less friendly to the network.
Also, where is that 50% measured? Is it on peering points or is it at the access point? If it's at the access point then (A) it could be p2p traffic that never transits a backbone and (B) some of that traffic could be dealt with by making arrangements with content providers like Akamai to bring the content closer.
Not just the poor granny.. (Score:2, Interesting)
If the story that it is due to 5% of the users is true, I feel it should be set right.
"WHO" (Comcast) might have paid for that "ad"? (Score:4, Interesting)
How incredibly obvious and transparent is this ad? This is not a problem for DSL providers because they have bandwidth limiting built in to their service. Only cable has the problem described where there is bandwidth sharing going on.
Comcast is appealing the FCC ruling with the courts. I hope they lose, but it is pretty easy to imagine that they will win by arguing something stupid like "we provide the internet and we need to control it."
What does this mean? (Score:4, Interesting)
bias (Score:2, Interesting)
Anti-Globalism writes "The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth, sometimes more, during peak hours. While these 'power users' are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."
Wow. Awesome. About two lines of text but they pack two dimensions of bias. While I"m sure most here will descent into the discussion with the 5% vs. 50% angle
Anti-Globalist(?) also attempts to convey the idea that somehow text traffic is obsolete / desired to a lesser degree - i.e. "granny" in a pursuit of a topic most find extremely boring.
Backbone transit, lol (Score:5, Interesting)
Big ISP don't pay for backbone transit, they have peering agreements. And content providers pay for the transit, in cash and service, it's spelled A.K.A.M.A.I.
You've fallen prey to the corporate american bullshitocracy. They are trying to lobby and lawyer their way out of a technical problem instead of investing in network and equipment.
My ISP [www.free.fr] did that, they have zero caps whatsoever, they make shitloads of money. It's not in the US, obviously.
Re:Yeah! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. Because they paid for the bandwidth. And that remains true regardless of whether they're downloading pr0n, sharing movies, running a 24/7 multi-webcam stream or just streaming white noise between locations.
You can't have it both ways. If the law is the law, then it protects the subscribers right to fully use the service they paid for, just as it does much as rights of copyright holders. You can't justify throttling everyone just because some of those people using the full amount they contracted to have available may be engaging activities that arguably impact the profitability of the big studios and software houses.
Traffic shaping is the answer (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd love to have an ISP that could do something like the following:
1. My hardware identifies traffic streams as 'Interactive', 'Download', and 'Bulk Download'. 'Interactive' is the obvious ssh, rdp, etc traffic. 'Download' is for stuff I want sooner rather than later, 'Bulk Download' is for stuff that I don't necessarily want so fast (eg torrents).
2. I get 'Interactive' traffic at full speed for the first 10MBytes and then at a much lower speed after that, eg a Token Bucket Filter. The 'much lower speed' is to stop customers just classifying their p2p data as 'Interactive', but the initial 10Mbyte bucket ensures that you'll never hit it otherwise.
3. I get 'Download' traffic at full speed (lower than interactive though) for the first (say) 200MBytes and then at a lower speed after that. I'm not sure how well TBF's scale up to the bucket being 1GByte though...
4. I get 'Bulk Download' traffic at whatever is left over after other customers 'Interactive' and 'Download' traffic is taken into account, up to my monthly download limit (eg 20G or whatever)
This only happens on the customer end of the ISP's business, and because it is done in agreement with the customer (eg the customer nominates the tier of their traffic) I don't think it breaks net neutrality in any way. If an ISP did this sort of thing without customer agreement then the deal is off...
I've done this sort of TBF shaping (eg with a big bucket) on a smaller scale at the local library and it works really really well. They offer free 802.11abg wireless that works at the full 20mbits/second off of the DSL for the first 10MBytes, and then shapes back to 200kbits/second after that. People coming in to surf, chat, or update facebook etc never notice the limit, but anyone using p2p gets shaped down almost immediately. No deep packet inspection or anything required at all. Having the tiers though would mean that your interactive traffic doesn't suffer just because you hit your download limit...
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, you are correct. But we're going to hear a lot more about how "the few are making it slow for the many" because the telecoms and ISPs are looking for a big price increase.
They're jealous of the oil industry, who was able to raise prices by 300 percent in a few years.
Believe me, now that the oil industry has raised the bar for profit, the other monopolistic industries are going to go whole hog, especially if their favorite Party gets another four years in office.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the problem?
The real one? That in the US it's far too easy to terminate customers that you don't want. If they tried anything like the blameshifting in the US our consumer protection agency would tell them to put a sock in it and fix their terms. I do remember them trying here in Norway with X Mbit/s for Y GB, then ISDN-speed = 64 kbps for the rest of the month or pay an extra boost. It was pretty much a flop so now the commonly understood definiton is that "X Mbit" means that speed 24/7. Also they've been pretty strict on the "up to" under normal circumstance, on the highest tier it's "as much as possible" but on lower tiers it's fairly strict. So if they're offering up to 2, 5 and 20Mbit but only able to deliver 12 (dsl line speed) then that's fair for the 20Mbit, but if you're not normally delivering 5Mbit on the 5Mbit service you'll be in trouble.
In the US, particularly in the monopoly areas (which we don't have much of because the telco giant must lease the lines to others btw) it seems people are afraid to complain because what'll happen is that there'll be a stink, they might get some petty cash and the company will terminate their broadband access and say they don't want them as customer anymore, which means they're back to dialup. Seriously, if any company here tried to terminate or deny customers service on such vague grounds they'd be slapped so hard they just don't do it. If all it costs you is some petty cash to get rid of a "problem" customer who's using a lot of bandwidth and isn't profitable anyway forever, they'll do it. And if you think PR - a heavy user telling other users, which often are also heavy users, to stay the hell away from them is not bad PR - it's good PR to lose customers you don't want in the first place.
Re:Yeah! (Score:3, Interesting)
...or telecommuting (which I do a lot of)
That said, I've been quite happy with FiOS in that I've never seen slowdown that I could attribute to the network itself. Part of the problem with cable is everyone on the block shares the same coax, and therefore the same bandwidth. FiOS has dedicated fiber runs from each house on the block to a head-end with very high bandwidth so there's no congestion there.
=Smidge=
Re:Why is poor granny picked on as an example? (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps we'll need peak-hour kWh and MB charges to help persuade people to use those resources sensibly and fairly, and not be too anti-social.
In some countries we already have higher charges during the day for electricity, and lower charges at night (here in the UK you have a choice between that [wikipedia.org], or a flat-rate). Some appliances (e.g. washing machines, dryers, dishwasher) have an in-built timer so you can set them to start at night, or you can use a normal timer switch that you connect between the appliance and the socket. Some buildings have "storage heaters", where cheap night-time electricity is used to heat up a block of concrete, which radiates its heat to the room during the day.
Some large users of electricity (factories etc) are even charged a different rate every half-hour or so.
Last time I was on a pay-per-GB ISP it was free between midnight and 6am, but I've since switched to an unlimited connection.
Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content. (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed.
I worked for a couple of years as administrator for a couple of large websites. We had our own ad system. I kept it running fast on some RH servers, making sure that it served everything quickly.
Then one day some in da management wanted to outsource our ads to one of the big known companies.
And I promptly asked if they had made sure that the contract specified something about perfomance. Of course I had seen what you described about other sites being slow when using these banner companies.
So one day they changed the templates of all the sites to the external ad company and the load times for a page went from 4-8 seconds to 18-30 seconds before the browser were done. I always checked the sites in a browser even though we had some external companies monitoring the response times.
And then I sat waiting for the call that I knew would sound something like this "the sites are slow, do something".
So I got my ammo ready and made some speed tests in firefox with Adblock+ and Tamper Data, which clearly showed that all the load time was the external ads.
Of course I had to be a BOFH about it for a couple of minutes when they called and said stuff like "there is no problem" and "I get fast load times here". :D I mean I did tell them that it would happen
Then of course I asked politely again if they had some sort of performance / response time written into the deal they signed and then mailed them the results of my speed tests which clearly showed the problem. I also sent at mail to the web developers that gave instructions on how they could make the tests themself.
I then continued running adblock+ because it was hard to maintain the sites and find problems when there were elements on the sites that could not do anything about.
The sites were quite slow for many months ahead but it went from all the times to peak hours. it annoyed me because the system I had built could handle the large load, even 9/11 like events. (though everyday traffic now was larger than that day and big news didn't make the same type of spikes perhaps just 4x normal.)
I know that today it is not just geeks like me that notice that "the internet" has been slower. Friends and family sometimes comment on that it seems that browsing is slower.
Most people are not sitting on dial-up or ISDN anymore(I pity the ones that does) and the designers make pages that have way more data on them than before. I tried a ISDN backup line I have, about a year ago when my ADSL2 went down. I powered on the router and thought, "hey this was not all bad if I run 2 lines the speed will be acceptable". Wrong. even with adblock+ on it still took 60-120 seconds to load some pages, with all the images, and 1000 objects.
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Interesting)
The ironic thing about net neutrality is that in order for any package-based traffic management scheme to work, you would have to slow down the packets for big video and audio file. These are the same files that big media hopes will bring in the profit. Throttling /. posts or granny's ancestry.com searches will do nothing to improve overall traffic speed.
Bottom line is you would have to make people pay MORE in order to waste bandwidth downloading the content big media has to sell. This would make downloading legal content less attractive, forcing people to download illegal encrypted content that wouldn't get picked up by the filters - and I'm positive someone will come up with a way to fool the filters.
Problem not solved!
Even more ironically, Comcast's decision to throttle bittorrent traffic actually sounds logical in this context.
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:4, Interesting)
For any other utility (water, gas, electricity), we pay by the usage. Why not this? Everybody should be accountable for whatever they are using and pay as much. At the moment, low bandwidth users are paying for higher users.
And once pay-as-you-use is in place, it may also force a lot of websites to revert to basic, nice and simple html pages without the bloat (Flash and such) we see today.
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:4, Interesting)
Comcast used to be able to sell unlimited until p2p came along. Then they started using sandvine and other mitigating tactics to still make it 'unlimited' while continuing to make a profit. Since the FCC has now disapproved of this, Comcast has no choice but to start measuring and capping, since there's no other way to provide unlimited service. Now they've started putting 250GB monthly caps in place, which is exactly what you want. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that soon we will see more tiers available.
Other ISPs will probably soon follow suite - especially mom and pops since it's extraordinarily expensive to do anything remotely close to traffic shaping without ungodly amounts of money for hardware. A lot of these mom and pops are going in the red in bandwidth because of p2p. Since comcast has set a precedent, they will either adapt so they can control costs, or go away.
Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content. (Score:2, Interesting)
State your affiliation and don't try to discredit criticism that you full well know is true.
if you *want* them to screw with your DNS [...], they'll happily do that. Yes it's the default behaviour,
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Interesting)
In case you didn't know, all your other utilities are contended too
Yeah, but the utilities didn't seem to mind updating the contention ratios as time passed. I'm guessing that the contention ratio on today's power distribution network is not the same as it was back in the 50s when the biggest electrical appliance was the icebox, air conditioning was a luxury and nobody had PCs and a TV in every room.
The ISPs don't seem to want to update for the times. Look at Roadrunners purposed 40GB cap. Do you really think 40GB is fair in this day and age of streaming on-demand video? Did you watch any of the streaming video during the Olympics or Political Conventions? It would have been pretty easy to blow past this 40GB limit if you did so -- and that doesn't even count other services like Amazon's Unbox or Netflix instant view.
They can blame bittorrent all they want but at the end of the day if they can't handle 5% of the customers running p2p how are they going to handle 50% of them using streaming video?
I do find it amusing that it's generally the cableco's trying to impose these limits. Verizon doesn't seem to have any problem offering unlimited services to their customers -- and several of their executives have even made a point of mentioning this. I guess it's easier when your bread and butter isn't video (like the cable company) and you don't have a revenue stream to protect......
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:4, Interesting)
My ISP here in Ireland has reliable QoS and bandwidth, thanks to the fact that they strictly enforce a rolling 30 day cap (so you don't have network degradation at the start of each calendar month as heavy users use up their cap).
They do in fact have a meter webpage you can visit when on their network, that not only tells you how much you've used, but provides graphs of inbound and outbound traffic in the last 30 days (P2P activity is very obvious by the heavy outbound traffic).
Sure real serious P2P users won't consider the network at all, but it is more honest and up front than other ISPs who pretend you can have your cake and eat it. The worst service is from the ones who have no usage restrictions (service levels jumped on one network recently that went from unrestricted to strict cap).
Net neutrality, pro or anti, is a piece of nonsense. The simple and fair answer to it all is to bill for usage. Heavy users may wail about this, but why should everyone else subsidise them? (It's not just the companies taking the hit, but other consumers).
Re:Not so slow (Score:5, Interesting)
It shouldn't be happening, but it is. Why?
My personal opinion is that capitalism in the U.S. mutated some time during the 1980s from "spend more to provide a better product, get more customers, make more money" (classic capitalism) to "spend less to provide a cheaper product, get more customers, make more money" (the race to the bottom). U.S. consumers have followed suit: spending less is worth more than higher quality. I've heard some blame Harvard's MBA program for the whole mess.
Europe appears to be following the U.S.'s lead. As Gordon Ramsey would say, "What a shame!"
--Rob
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people would have their bills lowered, and us-in-the-know would mercilessly jump towards the cheapest gigabyte.
The fatcats in the broadband business would go from relatively high-margin to cutthroat business.
OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric. (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot readers may have noticed a large volume of submissions coming from Anti Globalism [slashdot.org] and burnitdown [slashdot.org], many of which are being accepted onto the front page. Taken on their own, many of the articles are indeed interesting.
However, these accounts always link to corrupt.org [corrupt.org] in their submissions, a site that advertises the goal of "remaking modern society". The content is mostly boilerplate 'society is failing' rhetoric, with an emphasis on how we are out of touch with reality and hung up on "emotional abstractions" that are holding us back.
So what is this reality our society has denied? Corrupt.org is somewhat evasive on the specifics. Talking points include the impending danger of overpopulation, derision and scapegoating of people seen as inferior (who are called "parasites", "schemers" and "leeches", among other things), and why democracy doesn't work and needs to be replaced with "strong leaders".
As for the "emotional abstractions" they would like for us to dispense with, those seem pesky things like valuing human life. Corrupt betrays their intentions in their mission statement [corrupt.org]:
And no, they're not referring to prisoners guilty of capital offenses there - they're talking about dealing with the 'undesirables'. This kind of rhetoric is intended to prepare their audience to accept the idea of killing on a large scale as a solution to society's problems. They also preach thinly veiled racial separatism on the same page [corrupt.org]:
corrupt.org is registered to Throne Networks, which is run by a neo-Nazi [ephblog.com]. Throne has been behind several other fringe sites, including anarchy.net, nazi.org, pan-nationalism.org, antihumanism.com, and amerika.org. Each of these sites targets a different demographic, but the modus operandi has been the same - appeal to intellectual and philosophical outcasts who are inclined to distrust 'the system', and then reel them in with an empowering philosophy that paves the way for fascist indoctrination.
Their fake anarchist website managed to piss off [libcom.org] some real anarchists earlier this year, who proceeded to do an excellent job of exposing them in that thread. It's long and heavily peppered with debates/flamewars about anarchism (if you find yourself tuning out after a couple pages, skip to page 10), but it documents who is behind corrupt.org along with their goals and strategy. It's really quite damning.
Of coarse, even manipulative crypto-Nazis have the right to free speech - but that doesn't mean Slashdot should be providing them with free advertising. Unlike dumb aggregaters like Digg, Slashdot is supposed to have editors. Is it really too much to ask that they remove links to neo-Nazi fronts from front page articles?
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting post.
Have you thought of having a subscription model that degrades service, say per 3 day, based on the average bandwidth usage for the last 2 days and the current day? This way old granny can have a fast internet connection (assuming she is not into P2P all day long).
For a faster connection and slower degrading transfer rates you could charge more to cover more bandwidth on your side. You could allow the customer to choose both the best connection rate and how fast the service degrades.
Also, not all P2P traffic is copyrighted material flowing along the tubes of the internets.
Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, in this 'context' it does. If by 'context', you mean the utter bullshit that was in TFA. Comcast wasn't 'throttling' bittorrent. It ENTIRELY DISABLED IT! They didn't make it a lower priority so Ancestry.com would load, they just completely turned all bittorrent traffic off!
Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content. (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps the problem is that there are to few internet users who leave their P2P applications running non-stop.
Seriously, the problem telecoms and ISPs are complaining about is users using the bandwidth they purchased and has nothing to do with P2P.
In fact, if a greater number of people were leaving P2P applications running there would be a higher probability that the packet you need is available from a peer that is fewer hops away. The result would be less traffic leaving the ISP network and impacting the Internet as a whole.
Of course this assumes the P2P application is coded in a way that it can prioritize peers on the same network or geographically closer to one another. I don't know if this is currently implemented in any P2P applications but if not it could be.
And if telecoms and ISPs have so much issue with P2P then perhaps they should invest in setting up automated P2P clients of their own that watch Internet P2P traffic and dynamically join in so they can eventually seed on their network and reduce traffic leaving their network.
Whether we keep using P2P or not the bandwidth usage is going to keep increasing, be it peer to peer sharing of media files or the telecoms getting what they really want which is control of the file sharing and content so they can add one more charge to your bill.
burnin
Re:OT: Godwin? (Score:1, Interesting)
Does Godwin's Law [wikipedia.org] apply when you're pointing out real neo-Nazis?
Just askin... :)
p.s. Great response, but creating a new account just to tell us this suggests you might be in collusion with the site in question.
The myth of P2P expansion (Score:2, Interesting)
This gave me pause for a while, because on the SURFACE, it sounds like, yes, it'd be a problem. You add more infrastructure to your system (lay cables, etc...) and then what happens? P2P just gobbles up that resource and you're back to square one...
Except that its not true at all. Its a complete fabrication. Here's why.
P2P expands to fill allotted bandwidth, not available bandwidth.
If you have 100mbit total, and say 100 users, and you give each user a hard cap at 1mbit, then there's absolutely no way, even if all your users ran maximum p2p, 24/7, that they'd step on each others toes.
Unfortunately, the real scenario here is that ISPs have, for example, 100mbit total, and they accept EVERY USER THEY CAN (obviously), and then allot them far more bandwidth than they have. So they'd have 100mbit total (for example) and they'd allot each user 10mbit... and have 10,000 users.
The only reason they say 'p2p expands to fill all available bandwidth' is because they've so vastly oversold the available bandwidth, and allotted it so deeply overlapped, that a couple users fully utilizing the bandwidth they have been allotted can hit the limit.
This is not a case of P2P expanding, this is a case of deep overlap and overselling of resources, instead of infrastructure upgrading and proper resource management.
And in a couple years its just going to get worse. We're seeing the start of a trend that shows that ordinary users, the ones that you could count on to never use their bandwidth, are starting to go download HD movies, be it from netflix, itunes, pirated copies, Miro, a plethora of other services. The content is getting bigger and this time "ordinary" users are consuming it.
This means that 'headroom' that ISPs have for the number of people they can pack onto the same segment of bandwidth, the number of times they can sell the same thing to different people, is shrinking rapidly.
P2P might be the scapegoat now, but in a year or so its going to be 'online video', something which many of the cable providers have direct competitors for.
In America it is because population is sparse (Score:1, Interesting)
I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after living in France and I noticed that internet service was more expensive in America. I always thought that it was simply because population is sparser in America than in France.
The denser the population is, the easier it is to provide internet service. That's why you get cheaper or better service in France, Hong-Kong, or Korea than you get in America.
I do not believe that French, Hong-Kong, or Korean Internet Service Providers are neither nicer nor more competent than their American counterpart.
There might be sparsely populated areas whose internet service is as good as densely populated areas but those would be exceptions, not the rule. The denser the population is, the easier it is to provide internet service.
Re:Not so slow (Score:4, Interesting)
well, that certainly explains our lower broadband penetration. and i agree that we should take geography and population density into account. but why should moderately-populated suburbs, or densely populated urban areas still have relatively poor/expensive broadband service compared to similar areas in other developed nations?
since all IT infrastructure is currently run by the private sector, shouldn't rural areas like Alaska, Wisconsin, etc. be part of a different market from states with similar population densities to Japan/South Korea/France/etc. such as California and New York?
i mean, if we had a nationalized ISP and networking infrastructure or municipal wi-fi, then i could accept the higher cost and lower average value of broadband access in the United States. we would be paying for a cohesive national IT infrastructure, whereby those of us living in more network-accessible states help to subsidize the cost of spreading broadband access out to rural areas like Alaska. i would be all for this kind of public internet access.
but that isn't the reason why i'm currently paying 10-15 times the average monthly rate for internet access as someone in France or Finland. and the majority of the U.S. population is still composed of urban communities and their surrounding suburbs. it's not like we're Canada or Australia.
Re:Not so slow (Score:2, Interesting)
Part of the blame is the slowness of ISPs to understand and invest in improved technology. For example, the Anagran TCP/IP flow manager easily restores 30% of the unused bandwidth along any network connection by eliminating traffic bursts and preventing huge packet losses. But network mangers in the big ISP and Tel Co engineers can't even begin to suggest to upper management spending money for new flow-management technology (actually invented by the project manager of the ARPANET!). ISP execs like the simplistic idea that they need to be punitive. It is a fear of limits rather than a desire to maximize usability. On the other hand, how many web pages use HTML 1.1? We are shooting ourselves in the foot all the time.
Re:Population densities... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why should the monopolies in the US plop down more lines when they can keep getting subsidies and billions given to them to 'roll out broadband'.
The realization of ubiquitous broadband is right up there with Duke Nuke'm Forever, except the telcos have actually figured out how to keep getting paid for a mythical product. The phone companies collected over $200 billion [newnetworks.com] in higher phone rates and tax perks, about $2000 per household and the FCC and legislature keep letting them get away with empty promises. What a great Lobbying effort!
Re:Not so slow (Score:5, Interesting)
Your missing part of the big picture here actually. Focusing on something that is not even part of the problem at all.
All the copper wire has been converted to fiber optics with the exception of the "last mile". That last little bit of copper is not what is slowing us down at all. The bandwidth that can be achieved on copper is actually quite high and is perfectly capable of delivering 20-50 MegaBYTES per second. How many power users do you know that have all fiber optic networks in their house? Yeah, I don't know any yet either. %99 of us exist on copper networks in our houses, yet we can easily reach sustained Gigabit speeds. Changing the last mile over to fiber is quite difficult considering just how much has to change. The average home builder employs guys that have intelligence barely above that of an average chimp. Maybe that is overly harsh, but changing the communication infrastructure of an average residential house to fiber optics and deploying the devices to use it is not as easy a task as one might think. It is understandable why residential houses are still relying on copper as it really is easier to use.
The fiber that was purchased all those years ago is NOT the same fiber that can be purchased today. A mile of 1995 fiber pushes less data than a mile of 2009 fiber. Technology is getting better all the time. Capacity is the problem that exists today, and the inevitable comparisons between South Korea, Japan, etc. are fallacious. The distance between fiber endpoints in the US is dramatically longer than in smaller countries. That results in much higher costs to deliver the bandwidth. A packet has to travel over VASTLY LARGER DISTANCES to get from Los Angeles to New York. Plain and Simple. The US could be the leader in the world as far as Mb/s per citizen, but it would cost at least 10x the money than any other country. Every mile of fiber adds up. The US just requires so much more of it. With that logic, people might as well complain that it costs less to deliver packages from one end of Japan to the other, than it does from coast to coast in the US. You can't compare the two when the scale of the problem is dramatically different.
The GREATEST problem facing the US is that a large investment needs to be made in the fiber optic infrastructure yet again to increase the capacity to deliver bandwidth on par with smaller countries. That "5% of users taking %50 of bandwidth" argument is getting old. That is NOT THEIR FAULT. If you were to listen to the marketing-bullshit speak coming out of ISPS one might think that the capacity was endless. Far from it, as any reasonably intelligent person already knows. "Unlimited" was the greatest curse to befall Internet users in the US. It came into existence by a corrupt desire to make huge amounts of profit while never intending to contractually deliver on obligations to provide anything close to unlimited bandwidth.
The GREATEST reason why we are still at a perceived standstill today is the Over Sell that exists. Estimates vary between 10x and 150x the bandwidth being sold than the capacity that actually exists. 100 Mb/s per user is a pipe dream (no pun intended), and even with a fiber optic last mile, it could never be delivered.
You want to see things change? Then US voters (as if they had any power to change anything) would demand that it be ILLEGAL to sell bandwidth that DOES NOT ACTUALLY EXIST. That would change things in a hurry. Not only would people finally get a clear picture of just what bandwidth is really available in the pipes but it would eliminate the catalyst for truly frightening totalitarian fascist developments in efforts to control the net.
Re:Off-Topic (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't consider the submitters homepage to be part of the submission.
You don't seem to understand how Slashdot submissions [slashdot.org] work. Take a look at the form, you enter a homepage for each submission.
Your post made it seem as if the fine editors here at slashdot were routinely posting stories linked to articles on corrupt.org.
Not the articles themselves, but the submitter link is part of the summary and is posted on the front page. Their little site is getting quite a bit of free publicity from Slashdot.
So what you're actually advocating is blanket censorship of an individual because they belong to a group that you don't approve of?
That's a giant leap. Not once did I say that the editors should ban their accounts or stop accepting their submissions. I only suggested that they should think twice before posting links to Corrupt's neo-fascist site on the front page.
no two groups can exist in the same place. For this reason, local cultures can decide who or who not to accept on any basis they desire, including heritage and culture. We believe this will prevent the crass and destructive racism that is a consequence of two or more populations competing for cultural and economic dominance in the same area.
Translation - 'the solution to racism is to separate the races'. This crap is nothing more than stock White Nationalist rhetoric dressed up in more politically correct language.
Re:Not so slow (Score:5, Interesting)
so which ISP's paid you?
comcast?
the bells?
all of them?
this is a blatant lie.
It doesn't cost substantially more to push data across longer distances beyond the initial investment which you claim has already been expended properly.
wooo the HORROR.. a few more boosting stations in the US than japan.
The bandwidth doesn't cost anything more than the cost of upkeep on the network because of peering agreements.
finally, a fiber cable is a fiber cable is a fiber cable.. the "advancements" in capacity have been in the control units, not the cable itself.
once again.. a minimal outlay to increase capacity exponentially which your cash grabbing overlords don't want to put into place.
Re:Not so slow (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with metered accounts is that it breaks the internet. Suddenly users are paying for things like spam and all those unnecessary flash animations. While it probably wouldn't amount to much, it would be like getting spam phone calls on your cell phone all the time that you have to pay for.
I think that instead of metered, your bandwidth should dynamically scale based on the amount of bandwidth consumed over the last 24 hours. Bandwidth and latency. Then, a person who fires up Quake to play a game for an hour or so would have a blazingly fast connection, but the person who is downloading torrents 24/7 get QOSed down to a bulk-transfer rate that gets less precedence than other people on the network, but with some guaranteed minimum. I know several people that run 10 or 20 torrent downloads all the time, 24/7. The won't care if their download takes 5 days instead of 3, but lots of people would care (and in a good way) if their ping time or web page access speed suddenly doubled. Best of all, such a plan is protocol-neutral, meaning ISPs don't need to know if their clients are running torrents, or FTPing ISOs, or just consuming terabytes of porn.
Just scale em down, and everyone wins. After a day of no bandwidth, they get fast service again.
Re:Not so slow (Score:3, Interesting)
'The won't care if their download takes 5 days instead of 3'
I would certainly care. Using QoS to lower the priority of downloads is one thing, doing so to the extent that it actually has a visible effect on my download speeds instead of just impacting my latency is not appropriate.
That is what makes this ridiculous. I use simple QoS on my home network. I am able to run 20 torrents wide open, browse the web/play streaming video, and my wife is able to enjoy a low latency world of warcraft experience on two computers.
Is the bandwidth maxed out at all times? Pretty much. That doesn't prevent all the services on my network from performing well.
Re:Not so slow (Score:4, Interesting)
Selling bandwidth that does not exist is lying . There is no excuse for selling services that you cannot render. This activity does not exist in many products in the US, and it is corruption that allows it to continue past the point it starts to fail. It is failing now, and instead of changing the business model, they are destroying the TCP/IP protocol with their "bandwidth management" devices to get users to stop using their connection. The way to get them to stop is to bill them correctly.
Your FUD about 900% increases in Internet Access Fees is also incorrect.
We can't go on selling people on the idea that you can have X Mb/s of bandwidth with an unlimited transfer cap per month. Especially, since now people are STARTING TO FUCKING USE IT. The Golden Days of the Over Sell are coming to a close one way or the other.
Over Selling only works as a business model when the average consumer only uses 1-10% of their paid-for slice of the pie. When everyone shows up for their slice, and some have to go without, than things get ugly. It's unethical.
With my proposal, people would be forced to use less bandwidth. This is true, unless you believe that the telcoms can waive their magic +10 wand of Infinite Capacity. The main point of my argument here, is that the ISPS have to come clean and just tell people they can only deliver less, but it will be it will be more transparent and easier to understand.
The ISP gets paid the same for their bandwidth overall with no over selling.
The average residential user would have access to burstable bandwidth at higher than 5 Mb/s, but would be guaranteed a much smaller floor. Even if the floor was only 256 Kb/s, that is guaranteed and more than capable of regular use. For those that are determined to download large files, which would be at the highest sustainable speed with the neighborhood traffic, they would pay for it at the end of the month.
So Internet Access fees would not increase for the average user. After all, it's the infamous 5% of the users that use 50% of the bandwidth anyways. Those would be the people that see their access fees increase by 900%, which is the correct thing to do. If you are going to transfer Terabytes of data around each month you are going to have to pay.
It's funny, the moment you mention to people that they have to pay 10x what they are paying to max 20 Torrent files 24/7 they go nuclear and start to claim you are in league with the "enemy". They are the victims of the Over Sell and magically-technically-impossible unlimited plans. They don't want to understand the the simpleness of the truth. The free ride is over.
You either move to transparent and easy to understand bandwidth contracts, or things will only get worse. Unlimited Internet is about as real as Unicorns. Both words of course, being in the Marketers Dictionary of Bullshit Terms.
If you worked for an ISP then you probably have an idea about how bandwidth is sold commercially, and it is nothing like how it sold residentially. I am only proposing that residential users be sold bandwidth the same way. I certainly don't think absolute destruction of the Internet in the US will be a result of doing that.
Re:Not so slow (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say in that sentence. The poster I was replying to was trying to say the reason we don't have higher speeds comparable to other countries was that the "last mile" was copper and not fiber optic.
I was only pointing out that amount of bandwidth at the street is insufficient to deliver 100 Mb/s to each house regardless of whether each house is connected by copper, or fiber optic. If you are not going to lie to the customer, and actually deliver the bandwidth to them with no "funny business" then you obviously need to have 10 Gb/s at the street to service 100 homes with a 100 Mb/s connection each. If that were true, then you would also have to 1000 Gb/s of capacity to service 100 neighborhoods. So and so forth.
I don't think the capacity actually exists at the street to deliver the bandwidth they are claiming now, much less the 100 Mb/s number the poster came up with. Pretty sure it does not. ISPS have been over selling the bandwidth capacity at the street by 10-150x depending on who you ask.
That is the crux of my argument by the way, the over selling of bandwidth. If you take that out of the picture, than you can understand why there is a sudden capacity problem everywhere as unlimited usage of 10 Mb/s accounts adds up rather quickly if all that capacity has to exist at the street.
If you can't over sell the bandwidth anymore, and really have to deliver 100 Mb/s to each customer (the main reason for that is that unlimited requires it), than you have to increase the ISPS capacity at the street.
As for the expense of getting the data from LA to NY and to bigger cities, that is related to the increased capacity required to deliver 100 Mb/s to each home WITHOUT the over sell in place. I doubt all of your customers are going to share data just between themselves. They need to send and receive data from other networks. That is where peering and transit agreements come into place. Caching websites, and smarter Torrent networks could reduce that, but still you are going to require greater capacity connecting your network to your peers.