Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow?

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."

Not so slow

See? First post

Re:Not so slow

the internet is so slow cause timmy touches himself at night

The Internet isn't slow..

just the journalists who try to write about it.

Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

...and it couldn't be any other way. Even if they built 100 times the bandwidth we have now, it would still be slow. Like George Carlin's routine about people buying stuff [youtube.com] that fills up their home, and when it's full they move all their stuff to a bigger house, so they can buy.. more.. stuff.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

I think you do not understand net neutrality.

Net neutrality would mean that there should be no prioritising of traffic by content provider: i.e. you should not slow down some websites, to speed others up.

The idea is to prevent anti-competitive, anti-consumer choice agreements between telcos and other big companies that squeeze everyone else out.

I see no problem with providing different service levels to different end users. It already happens, and I have never heard of anyone finding it objectionable.

I doubt many people have a problem with charging per gigabyte either.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

I have a problem with charging per gigabyte. The thing is its very ambiguous how much gigabytes you're using. Theres nothing like an odometer to measure you're overall useage of bandwidth.

These ISPs are SERIOUSLY overselling their network capacity to create an artificial scarcity. I would not be surprised if the number was upwards of 100 (or even 1000) (Customers):1 Unit of Bandwidth. I suspect as much as 10 years ago that the number might have been something more sane like 10 (Customer):1 Unit of Bandwidth. Since no customers (except Bittorrent users) are going to be using their full allotment 24/7. Even at 10:1 you're gonna have many more 'mom and pop' types who just browse email and the web a few times a day for every hardcore 23 hours a day WoW addict that downloads videos of their favorite TV show off bittorrent.

In other words they're being greedy and their own actions (overselling) are creating the artificial scarcity which they are benefiting from by being able to go from 'buffet style billing' to 'individual item billing'.

Banner ad's, dynamic content.

I have on occasion used Firefox plugins that filter out most banner ads. I've found my pages load about 70% faster. I watch the little status line at the bottom of Firefox and I've found that most of my "waiting" time is for advertisements.

I've also found DNS to be slow for some reason. Things that aren't cached on the local machine slow browsing down significantly (something else adverts contribute to).

Of course the people who just leave P2P applications running non-stop are a bit of a pain.

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

Apols, for just posting a "me too", but that's close to my experience, as well. Frequently when I actually have to wait for a website to load, FF has the link for an ad-farm or 'plex as the site being waited for.

The other thing that does delay websites is when their front page is a multi-megabyte FLASH. What's wrong with good ole plain text, guys?

What's the problem?

A contract cuts both ways. People were ranting about personal responsibility when that family got hit by $18k roaming charges a few stories ago by AT&T. Companies need to hold themselves to the contract too, they signed the contract saying they'll provide a service under the given terms, so when a user takes advantage of it they have nothing to complain about. If they have oversold their capacity that is solely the ISPs problem.

Re:What's the problem?

You can be pretty damn sure the contracts are so onesided the company isn't required to really do anything.

Re:What's the problem?

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.

 

Yeah!

Yeah! Damn all those people slowing down *my* internet by using the bandwidth that they paid for! Damn them for cutting into ISPs profit margins. People who expect to get what was advertised to them and what they paid for are nothing but dirty rotten thieves, stealing from the pockets of poor, disadvantaged company directors the world over!

I don't buy the premise, just yet

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.

Slow websites

Nah, it's more because website designers still haven't figured out how to make compact, fast-loading websites. They swear by flash, while we swear at it. They forget to set content expiry properly so your browser reloads all their little images every time you revisit their site (yes Greg Dean of Real Life Comics, I'm looking at you). They consider their site to be "unfinished" if its frontpage is below 500 kbyte.

That site mentioned in the article, ancestry.com, has 59,6 kbyte of HTML, 56,99 kbyte of CSS, 64,88 kbyte of images and a whopping 314,39 kbyte of scripts, totalling 495,91 kbyte. And most of the non-image content isn't even compressed! No wonder it's slow.

Games?

Have online games started using large amounts of bandwidth (instead of trying to minimise traffic in the interests of latency) since I last played a new game?

Or are they just something that the aforementioned Granny doesn't do, and therefore probably antisocial?

Besides size, many sites are "Slow" today...

Because of improperly implemented ad or site statistics scripts. I cannot even begin to count how many times I have thought a site was being served up slow due to network congestion only to see "waiting for doubleclick/google/etc" in the status bar...

Scapegoat

If we let ISP's vilify a minority as an excuse for their aging copper-wire infrastructure, instead of forcing them to upgrade it to European/Asian standards, then their greed with stifle and choke the last growth market the USA has: intellectual property. Good luck selling your movies and music online if downloading is strictly rationed.

Oh man, poor Granny

She's being victimized by the file traders! And we, the ISPs, are powerless to help! If only there were some way to make Granny's internet connection higher priority. Some kind of . . . service quality protocol. Quality of Service, perhaps. We could call it that. But no such thing exists, of course, because if it did, we'd be using it by now. And we aren't. So.

But even if it did, it would rely on web traffic being easily recognizable. And it isn't! It's not like virtually all web traffic goes through a specific "port" or anything. And it's not like HTTP connections are easy to check for and flag as "higher priority". The technology *just doesn't exist*, and can never be developed. Ever.

And even if that all existed, well, of course it would be impossible to implement it! For reasons I don't feel like explaining right now. Just trust me. And I suppose we *could* just buy more bandwidth but, whoops, that takes too much money! Money which we've spent on . . . uh, we just don't have it. That's right. We don't have it. It's . . . I think someone else has it. Ask them. I guess, instead of solving the problem, we'll just have to whine at the lawmakers until they prop up our badly-designed business. Wait that's not right. Let me try that again. We'll have to complain in news articles and attempt to villainize our customers who foolishly took our contracts as contracts. No, no, no, that's not right at all. Man I just can't think of the proper solution right now.

Well, to make a long story short, we're too cheap to solve the problem QUICK LOOK OVER THERE it's an elderly person who's being inconvenienced by those damn hoodlums again! Think of your grandmother!

Traffic shaping is the answer

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...

Games?!

I wasn't aware a few megabytes/hour constituted being a 'power user'. Why do online games always get mentioned in the same sentence as people who download 4 gigabyte movies every day?

Why is Slashdot so slow?

Seriously, why do we need a bloated, plodding DHTML frontend on a glorified forum? Between that and the ever-increasing ads, the user experience is really starting to suck lately. Please stop.

Re:Two words

The point is not about the cost, the point is about this mythical 5% group of cancer/hackers/sharers/etc. who are at fault of everything that's wrong with internet. They are killing the music industry, They are killing the films industry, They are killing the videogame industry, They shamelessly copy copyrighted content to their computers, They disrupting the ad industry with filthy plugins, They do not contribute to the OOS movements, and they are the cancer who is killing random boards on weird websites.

It's always Them.

Backbone transit, lol

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.

Like the man said...

If you filter out all those adverts then you'll do a lot fewer DNS lookups every time you view a page.

It's adverts and multimedia which make the internet feel slow because they create many extra connections, DNS lookups, etc.

Javascript too, sometimes I go to apage with a video on it which is blocked by noscript and I give up clicking "temporarily allow XXX" before I get to the video. It's just not worth it.

Scripts from a dozen sites, adverts from a dozen others, three or four flash animations....

"There's your problem", as Mythbusters would say.

And the solution is a thing called "noscript".

Re:What does this mean?

Do you mean that spam-bot that granny has on her desk is slow accessing internet pages?