Report on Web-Surfing Speeds Finds Pervasive Throttling 189
Stirling Newberry writes "New York Times has a report on web-surfing speed tests that their reporter ran using Glasnost, a tool that mimics the bittorrent protocol and measures the results. BT in the UK was among the worst. From the article: 'In the United States, throttling was detected in 23 percent of tests on telecom and cable-television broadband networks, less than the global average of 32 percent. The U.S. operators with higher levels of detected throttling included Insight Communications, a cable-television operator in New York, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, where throttling was detected in 38 percent of tests; and Clearwire Communications, where throttling was detected in 35 percent of the tests.'"
Re:Depends on the time (Score:3, Interesting)
Same here.
If traffic is too much on servers, not throttling them would degrade other services as well.
I'd hate it if I wanted to check up on, say, Slashdot, but the page was loading at 56k speeds because half the country was watching / torrenting the latest episode of whatever show, as an example.
Throttling is a necessary evil until the ISPs, which are also evil (well, the corrupt ones), get off their ass and actually use our monies to upgrade the lines at a reasonable speed and not slow just because they all agreed it is better for them, when in fact it is actually worse for them because they'd get considerably more money with cheaper lines and more people. ..something-or-other, the Apple game market, even Facebook, has made a huge shift towards cheaper and simpler games that still play good, still work just as good, and can sometimes even last just as long as big budget games. Usually of teams less than 10 people at that.
The lower that price goes, the significantly higher the number of people who can afford it, probably even in the powers of N range as it goes up, to a point of course.
Good example is how the movie industry can stay afloat pretty easily with cheap tickets, even though their productions cost several hundred millions in some cases, yet the videogame industry is still in that backwards mentality that higher prices = more profit, companies dying all over the place. You'd think dying once would have got it through to those who took it back up to what it is now, but nope.
Games just keep on getting more expensive because "oh, hey, we need to work more, increase the price and make it even more of a niche market"
Not only would this get rid of a huge reason for most piracy in the games industry, it would allow considerably more people to afford games more often. That would EASILY make up for the lowered price due to the higher numbers of people.
I know I would be buying more games often if they were cheaper, but I only get one maybe every quarter period, if not half. I make less adventures in what I consume because of that, which is bad for the industry as a whole because they also make less adventures in what they create. The creation of XBLA, PSN and Wii
Anyway...as I was saying before I went off on that tangent.
This whole "cutting losses in short term" mentality is seriously holding back society as a whole, from internet to videogame industry to even government. (except for dat military budget, gotta kill dem terrorists!)
"Gotta spend money to make money" used to be a brilliant term, used by all the hotshots in the industry, now it is just meaningless and laughed at.
It's just insane... really insane.
Re:I'm sure they'll stop (Score:3, Interesting)
Um... how is mimicking the BitTorrent protocol taking money away from people? It's not. You, just like the people who pay you, are so scared of losing control you will go to any means to suppress a technology instead of innovating and coming up with new business models that make it easy for people to consume your product.
Of course, I'm sure it's just cheaper to buy politicians and people like you.
That low eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not surprised at all that ISPs are throttling internet speeds. If a cable company throttles netflix and youtube data then that increases the probability that people will get frustrated and just watch cable tv (especially the advertisements). If Verizon deprioritizes VOIP traffic to reduce call quality then that increases the probability people just go back to using P.O.T.S [wikipedia.org] (which they conveniently sell). Maybe my tin foil hat is a little to tight today, but I think the only real way to prevent this kind of stuff form happening is a decentralized internet.
Get rid of the FCC (Score:0, Interesting)
And all laws preventing anybody from setting up an ISP of any kind. Then you will see thousands of competitors pop up that will pressure on the current firms in place into being more honest.
That they're selling spectrum is retarded. It takes billions for anybody to get in the way it is now. The current system is closed to anybody that doesn't play ball with the FCC. Let's have a free market.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a web server hosted in location X. My ISP is company Y. I transport data to people hitting the site all using different ISPs. That data is carried by several different companies. They are very much covered under the definition of common carriers.
Telephone companies were considered common carriers. ISPs have fought back against being branded common carriers, but they aren't any different in principle to phone companies. The FCC hasn't gone out of their way to rule definitively on the matter, only vaguely determining that telecommunication companies can be considered common carriers.
The net neutrality debate could be made considerably simpler if the FCC would outright call all American ISPs common carriers.