Time Warner Cable Implements Packet Shaping 492
RFC writes "In a move that may be indicative of modern ISP customer service, Time Warner has announced the introduction of packet shaping technology to its network. 'Packet shaping technology has been implemented for newsgroup applications, regardless of the provider, and all peer-to-peer networks and certain other high bandwidth applications not necessarily limited to audio, video, and voice over IP telephony.' As the poster observes, this essentially renders premium service useless. The company is already warning users that attempts to circumvent these measures is a violation of their Terms of Service."
If you don't get (Score:5, Insightful)
in the contract or at very least in the sale, they promise you a certain bandwidth, if they can't deliver what they promise you don't need to pay what you promised.
Re:If you don't get (Score:5, Informative)
There's probably not much the consumer can do except vote with their money and cancel the service.
This is why net neutrality laws are important -- because existing service contracts do NOT protect the consumer from this sort of action.
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if i sold you a car, then ripped out the seats before you picked it up and claimed i didn't guarantee seats in the sale contract, it just wouldn't fly and neither would this.
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Wishing that wasn't the way it works doesn't make it so.
Re:If you don't get (Score:5, Funny)
"What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away."
Re:If you don't get (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact attempting to cancel without being able so show your service has seriously degraded because of the ISPs actions will probably be treated as a breach of contract and trigger the usual attempt by the ISP to penalise you with a fee for the remainder of your contract.
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i can only speak from experience here in australia, if this happens the ISP will usually let you off, if they don't you get the TIO involved they will
Re:If you don't get (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it may be splitting hairs, and someone who's getting 56k isn't going to care either way, but if they advertise "Up to " 20 mbps, there shouldn't be any fundamental limitation preventing you from ever achieving that rate.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps they're capping their rates because their customers claimed that they were not actually getting "not more than" the claimed rate. :-)
(I don't know what we're all complaining about--this is exactly how capitalism (which we love) is supposed to work.)
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Re:If you don't get (Score:5, Interesting)
But there's clearly a difference between
"line speed 6mbit/sec and from there as fast as the target server allows",
"line speed UP TO 6mbit/sec depending on what your neighborhood does and how much we overbooked our DSLAM"
and
"line speed 6mbit/sec but we're turning it down to modem speed if we don't like your face" or
"line speed 6mbit/sec, but we turn it down for every activity that could actually need that bandwidth"
Home contracts used to promise at least the company's best efforts to maintain a certain service level - and now they're effectively promising nothing at all.
Why anyone would enter a contract that states "You pay me every month full and in advance and I promise you nothing" is beyond me. Even mafia hitmen have more customer friendly terms, I think. But if you think that's fair trade practice, you may like to view that bridge I have on sale here...
Re:If you don't get (Score:5, Funny)
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You know there is a market price for buying guaranteed bandwidth - at least here in North Europe - but I bet you can't afford it. Neither can I. Neither does the company I work for. Buying a reserved and guaranteed bandwidth means that you can't "overbook" that amount and you have to pay it in full.
Statistically speaking a normal use of a computer is
Re:If you don't get (Score:4, Interesting)
Citation? I've only seen a few studies on this but so far as I know "bursty" traffic doesn't approach a normal distribution, ever, over any large time frame.
Re:If you don't get (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If you don't get (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody expects home DSL connections to have more than 90% uptime or the transfer bandwidth set in stone. That's what T1, SDSL and enterprise-grade SLA's are for. But I expect my ISP to maintain his contractual obligations in at least *trying* to give the best connection that is feasible from an economical and whatnot point of view.
Traffic shaping and intentionally throttling traffic in applications where sheer bandwidth (not latency) is important is NOT honoring the contract.
To be short: I don't expect my ISP to have 24/7 onsite rapid-response teams, multiple backup lines and
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Nobody expects home DSL connections to have more than 90% uptime or the transfer bandwidth set in stone.
Well, I sure as fuck do.
The contract I signed said that I got a service, not that I got a service when it was convenient for them. 90% uptime is 9.99% less than I expect from any service that advertises itself as "always on".
Also, the transfer bandwidth is set in stone as far as I'm concerned; the bandwidth is what I'm paying for, and I expect to get it. The whole "maximum speed may not be achieved" thing is only supposed to come into play when there is either (1) slowdowns/downtime due to repairs or maint
Re:If you don't get (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you don't get (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with that logic is that the statistical average of all users is pushed up by "Peter." He might not fit into the old distribution, but he is a part of the new one. As Quincy, Robert, Sam and Tom all begin to have similar usage patterns, the average usage begins to fit more closely Peter's usage.
The ISP needs to adjust their models to reflect these changes over time.
Personally, I would prefer for an ISP to tier levels of service and commit to a contention ratio they can afford. If a user exceeds the preset contention ratio for their package over a 7 or 30 day period, they are bumped into the next tier after a warning. Start out with a 512k, 1% contention which should be adequate for most users (ends up at 1.5G/month), then go to a 1.024M, 2% (6G/month), 2M, 5% (30GB/month), 6M, 10%...
Tie the sense of value (bandwidth) into the true cost (transfer), and give the ISP the incentive to improve over time as well as give the customer an incentive to buy into a higher package. If internet TV takes off (for example), over time a market is created for improvements...
Re:It's basically a known value (Score:5, Interesting)
If the system really can't cope with capacity, there is a very fair, reasonable policy for dealing with the system. It has two parts:
Anything else is just your usual corporate scum work. I can't stomach living in a society like this sometimes. Where is the outrage? Where are the regulations? This is greed, not necessity.
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Re:If you don't get (Score:5, Funny)
Posting AC for obvious reasons.
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Remembering Mama Bell (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you just trolling or are you serious?
Let's assume that you are serious....
There was a reason M.B. was broken up.
Imagine for a second that Time Warner was the "Internet" and immediately decided that access to the Internet was $200/month minimum and you had to rent your computer from them for $199.99/month and you couldn't buy any computer to use with their service except through them. If you were late paying your service would be shut off immediately and you would forfeit the "great privilege" of being their customer in the future unless you payed a reasonable $2000 re-connection fee.
Re:Remembering Mama Bell (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, there was a reason, namely greed. By the time Bell was broken up, you had been able to hook anything you wanted up to the phone system, with the sole provision that it didn't interfere with the operation of the system, for over a decade.. See the 1968 Carterfone ruling by the FCC. Relative pricing was, by and large, and artifact of the time and the relative level of technology. Bell provided immaculate professional level service to all its customers. Equivalent to having a guaranteed mainframe service contracts from a company like IBM then, or now.
You also completely ignore the enormous good Bell did (admittedly because they were forced by Congress) in the Form of Bell Labs. Want to even guess what the computer you're using right now would cost without Bell Labs? Sure, engineers at Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit. But Bell Labs developed the transistor out of basic research into quantum mechanics. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs [wikipedia.org]. The Transistor, the discovery of Cosmic Background Radiation, the development of the C Programming Language, UNIX, incredible advances in LASER tech, are just the highlights.
Re:Remembering Mama Bell (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to say, though, I agree. There were a lot of legitimate complaints registered about the Bell System at the time, but customer support wasn't one of them. They had quality of service standards they had to live with, and by and large they did. I ran a good-sized multi-node BBS in the mid-to-late eighties (16 or so lines) and I have to tell you, the technical support I got from our local RBOC was stellar. They had a nominal charge of $40/quarter hour at the time, but I had a guy come out and install 18 phone lines at my home. He spent two days running cables around the place (because of the way the place was built he couldn't drill through the floors) and only charged me a hundred bucks. All solid, quality work, and the installer actually had considerable training in general electronics and telephone theory. Knew what he was talking about, let me tell you, and he told me that he got all that training from the company school. As an engineer myself, I was impressed. But hey, AT&T expected to be around and they expected their employees to stick around, and it was worth the investment. Hell, once he had it all in place he said, "you're gonna want at least one hunt group for this: if you have me set it up for you now it won't cost you anything." Cool.
Contrast that to what I've received from Comcast and SBC in the past fifteen years or so
The reality is that presiding Judge Green (who was oh-so-concerned about unspecified additional "services" that weren't available to the consumer because of the AT&T monopoly) was just too impatient. The Internet came along and we got all those things anyway
Yeah, sure. The breakup was a great thing.
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Removal of anti-trust enforcement = bad
Splitting Ma Bell (a monopolist service provider) = bad
Does not compute. Please re-phrase your statement and bring some coherent standpoint before proceeding.
One question out of curiosity: can you say "functioning government controlled monopolies" with a straight face? I always have to giggle a bit when reading that. But it wasn't until I read "customer hostile corporate policy" that I broke out in tears of joy.
"Functioning government controlled monopolies
Re:Congratulations! (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that splitting Ma Bell didn't do a single thing about its monopoly status.
Oh, sure, if you didn't like your service, you could quit your job, sell your house, and move three or four states away so that you could buy service from a "competitor", but as far as anti-trust issues go, things like regulations forcing the phone company to let you buy and use your own phones went miles farther than the breakup.
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I remember Ma Bell, and you are distorting the history as wildly as anybody I have ever seen.
Under the Bell monopoly, customers were prohibited from connecting any non-Bell equipment to their telephone lines. Telephones were attached to the service with screw terminals, not plug-ins, and a phone technician came out to attach it.
Digital communications, except for ra
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I'm glad that i don't have to put up with the crap that you guys do.
Seriously, i think contracts like this would be made more humane,
If consumers took the time to call them and ask, what each clause of a contract meant, before purchase.
I'm curious as to how much, of the stuff they put in the contract, would be thrown out in a courtroom?
It's not that easy. (Score:5, Informative)
choice four (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:choice four (Score:5, Informative)
Your provider is obviously operating at a loss in your area. The only explanation is that there is a high ranking company employee who lives in your area.
I live five kilometers from a town of about 500 people on a paved road. The best connection avaialble is 28.8Kbps dial-up. You are aware that DSL signals are only good to about 2500 meters from the switch? To provide you with DSL there must be at least four pieces of expensive signal boosting equipment between you and town. It is pretty much guaranteed there are not enough subscribers to pay for it. (Thus my conclusion that an executive of the the ISP you use lives nearby.) Neither DSL or cable will be available in my area until the population grows large enough to make it profitable, at which point I will move farther out because there will be too many people. (Satellite is laughable for internet service and wifi is almost as bad.)
Most modern cable internet service is far superior to T1. (Especially Eastlink in eastern Canada, the industry leaders for over a decade.) Eastlink can provide me a 10Mbit up and down connection for a fraction of the cost of a T1 with 6.6 times the capacity. Cable is superior to DSL. Why? Simple physics. Coaxial cable is a far superior signal conductor to the phone lines used by DSL. Look it up, or take a basic physics course.
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Re:choice four (Score:4, Interesting)
Having grown, lived, and worked in many parts of the South (MD, AL, MS, GA, FL) before moving to New England in my later twenties, I can completely understand the GP's unwillingness. Unless one is predisposed to miserable summer heat, far poorer working conditions, and pervasive bigotry that, while probably no greater in quantity than in much of rural New England, is certainly more confrontational and institutionalized, there is little to recommend leaving New England for the South.
I do recommend it to New England conservatives of my acquaintance, though. What better place to experience the actual results of "limited government," "minimal interference" in labor and health regulation, and gutted systems of public education than dear ol' Dixie?
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Re:choice four (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's not that easy. (Score:4, Funny)
DickTel, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CheneyComm
Re:If you don't get (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, you've seen the wrong contracts then. The contract I have has a minimum bandwidth clause and also a maximum out-of-service period limit. But then again, this is not the U.S. here.
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If a car manufacturer claims that the top speed of a vehicle they're selling is 200mph, it has to be able to reach 200mph in a plausible situation. If the car can only attain 200mph going downhill with a hurricane behind it, it's deceptive marketing.
When you market a product as going "up to" a certain level of pe
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Re:God Smack Your Ass !! (Score:5, Insightful)
interferes with Road Runner's ability to provide service to others,
including the use of excessive bandwidth.
"Using internet service is against the terms of your internet service provider's contract"
Fradulent advertising (Score:3, Interesting)
NTL in the UK has just started to institute a similar policy, and is reputed to be haemorrhaging subscribers at an alarming rate (at least if you are a shareholder). It really defeats the point in having broadband to slap an arbitrarily low usage cap on a service that is expected to be used to transfer rich media content - which is by nature very large.
Either these companies can invest in their network sufficiently to deliver this type of service, or they should withdraw from this business completely.
Usage caps will only buy them a small amount of time, before proper investment in their networks must resume.
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By the way, they're called Virgin Media now.
Is it really a similar policy? They take some users down to 1mb down, 128kb up after 350MB usage at peak times. It still seems fast enough (although I do hate the utter asynchronousness of it, I like my upstream dmanit!)
If anything, what will make me go for Be Unlimited w/ Sky at my next property will be the truly terrible Indian-based 'customer service' call centres they seem to have switched to since
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If a market demands it (And considering the UK market is near-enough completely traffic-management / FUP - certainly amongst the big players), then services willing to take your money to provide the service you want will spring up.
Good providers (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Class action? (Score:5, Interesting)
To do otherwise would cause the ISP to lose their status as a common carrier, and thus, for all legal matters, lose their "Internet Service Provider" status as well as far as the DMCA is concerned. At this point they start to filter and/or interact with the traffic, they are no longer a bipartisan, rather a willing participant in deciding upon the traffic of which they are choosing to send.
Thus, any illegal content, they have chosen to allow. Regardless of protocol, technology, etc.
So they are not liable.
Re:Class action? (Score:5, Informative)
depends on the application of this (Score:5, Insightful)
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Alternatively, the broadband provider could actually improve its infrastructure so it supports advertised speeds for all users.
Packet shaping looks like a method for ISPs to have higher advertised speeds without actually increasing the capacity of their network as they should.
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Well, there will always be a compromise between mean capacity and peak capacity. Expecting everyone with RR to be able to download NNTP feeds at full-speed at prime-time is not reasonable for any consumer service that will be affordable. But if I'm downloading at 3am and there is plenty of unused capacity that i'm capable of having, I certainly expect it not to be slowed down by R
Re:depends on the application of this (Score:5, Interesting)
I do this on my own networks, and I don't get complaints about it. Yes I'm an ISP. No, I'm not evil. I make every effort not to be evil. When it comes to transport out to the internet, YES, I do shape traffic. Priority goes (roughly) VOIP, Video, SSH/RDC, Web, P2P. In that order. Now, that doesn't mean you don't get the full bandwidth you're paying for with P2P. What happens is that packets get dropped and re-sent (as per TCP specs) and the result is additional LATENCY, not a drop in overall throughput. That only occurs if I'm horribly over-subscribed, which just won't happen, because if I'm paying wholesaler rates, there's really no way I'd allow it to happen. Bought in appropriate quantities bandwidth is cheap. TRANSPORT of that bandwidth is what is expensive. I can buy up all the bandwidth I want from the right location for next to nothing. Getting it to you is what costs me big time. If you build the infrastructure to me, support it, and don't whine at me when it's down, I can sell it to you cheaply, too.
No, I don't like the big media conglomerates any more than you do, but being in the business I can tell you that this isn't wholly evil. What I would like to see from them is a release of HOW they're shaping it. That release makes it look to me more like they're doing Web > Everything Else, or putting hard caps on VOIP, Video, P2P, etc, which would be evil as well. I don't hard cap bandwidth below what you're paying for. Now, that said, our service contracts are worded such that you know up front that you're buying burstable service. We offer 10MBit symmetrical connection, but the contract states that we only guarantee 256k symmetrical dedicated. Anything above that is burst, which means that you have no right to saturate the connection full time more than 256k, but you're more than welcome to burst up to that for periods. To me this is fair. If you have a big download, burst away, that's what you've paid for. Running a warez FTP isn't. Running a (high bandwidth) website isn't. We don't have language that says you can't run a server. You can, but you're not allowed to saturate your connection 24/7. If we see that, you get a phone call asking you to purchase a dedicated connection rather than a burstable one. The problem with the cable companies is that they don't offer dedicated connections, because they CAN'T. You're on the same node as your neighbors, and whether you pay for a dedicated connection or not, you degrade the service of your neighbors when you saturate the line, end of story.
I wish I could grow out faster, but I can't. I am try to get some investors to get more infrastructure out there, but Ma Bell isn't too happy about my existence right now.
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But, see, that's not what these guys are doing. What they're doing is forcibly idling bandwidth.
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Fr
oops (Score:2)
A cunning plan... (Score:5, Insightful)
TW are probably HOPING to lose 10% of their customers... the 10% who use 90% of the bandwidth. By biasing their customer base towards those who just want to read their email and check CNN online, they can carry on collecting the fees and not bother with the costs of providing greater bandwidth.
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If this is the reason that TW want to lose these customers then they should not be promoting a high-speed service and hoping that the majority of users will only use low bandwidth applications. I don't use a lot of always on high-bandwidth apps, but on the occasions I do I expect the experience I'm paying $50/month for.
If there is some kind of monthly "bandwidth cap" after which point your service will be degraded that is one thing. To simply degrade the service for anyone using certain types
Re:A cunning plan... (Score:5, Insightful)
PS - once traffic shaping has been turned on, look for Time Warner to start soliciting companies like Google/youtube to 'sponsor' speed zones on TW's network.
Re:A cunning plan... (Score:4, Interesting)
If that happens hopefully Google will be smart enough to turn around and sue Time Warner for effectively charging a ransom for a service which is not artificially degraded. In fact, even if Time Warner does not do this, I hope that their traffic shaping is sufficiently targeted against certain well-funded sites or services who could sue for damages due to degraded customer experience.
It would be perfect if TW actually restricted bandwidth to any online video/media service because IMO (IANAL) this would be directly anti-competitive behavior from Time Warner.
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The fact of the matter is, email users should be paying for the lowest packa
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No, I was just annoyed by the slanted coverage.
Greedy has nothing to do with it...it's about paying for a service and getting that service. Would you pay $70 for unlimited minutes on your cell phone only to have them say "yeah....we're gonna limit you to 1000 because you're using too many", come on...
As I said, some things can be unlimited like the salad bar. If the ratio of the resources used by the high consuming users to the low consuming users
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Conflict of Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just waiting for the jerks to declare any use of IPSEC as a violation of their TOS.
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Re:Conflict of Interest (Score:5, Informative)
Time Warner has a legal, natural monopoly on internet access in many areas. In exchange for that privilege, it needs to serve the public interest. Just as the electric company is not allowed to suddenly increase rates 200% and only provide power during peak hours to people who pay an extra fee, cable modem companies should not be able to discriminate like this.
Just because you personally don't use newsgroups, P2P networks and so on does not mean that someday the kind of traffic you enjoy won't be throttled as well. It harms everybody. Comparing that traffic to spam is disingenuous to the point of fraud. Spam is sent uninvited; newsgroup traffic, on the other hand, is initiated by the customer doing exactly what it is that he signed up for.
Why the hell would you promote a company that limits your access to what you paid for, and gives you nothing in return, unless you were being paid to do it? Get the fuck out.
VOIP is high bandwidth? (Score:5, Insightful)
dom
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Yes, VOIP is high bandwidth (Score:5, Informative)
Going back to the original topic. Skype, Vonage and VoIP offerings built into IM clients, FPS and role-playing games (or the addons) consume between 32 and 64kps, depending on the codec and utilization of the voice frequencies (ie, my phone calls consume around 32kbps but a call between my aunt and mother run much closer to 64kbps). Contrary to popular misbelief just because an audio codec like G.711 claims to only use up to 64kbps does not mean it won't consume more bandwidth with more voice traffic, ie both people talking simultaneously. The voice traffic is many times the average transfer rate of most consumers. While surfing the web and checking email most users will barely make a blip on a I/O graph of their CM or their DSL modem. Most of the VoIP apps I've worked with use G.711 by default instead of G.729 or some other less demanding codec. I haven't even touched on IP/UDP overhead for VoIP traffic. A G.711 64kbps stream is around 84kbps with IP/UDP overhead. This overhead is even greater if you're putting the traffic onto a VPN tunnel of some sort. GRE adds 24; IPSec adds 40 IIRC. Depending on your method VPN implementation you could even be pushing IPSec over TCP adds another 20+, depending on header options. Your VoIP call could be close to the upstream limits of your b-band connection and you don't even realize it, depending on your setup of course.
So in short, yes, VoIP is considered a high bandwidth application when compared to the atypical "95%" user. These are the users that we base on bandwidth allotments on. P2P, NNTP, and porn downloaders fall into the "5%" category. The unused excess from the "95%" users generally takes care of these users. We also run with a fairly substantial buffer, just in case. We have now decided to push for up to 100Mbps to the doorstep over the course of the next 3-5 years. We're rolling out ADSL2+ in some areas as a stop-gap measure and have started on a FTTH project for the remaining areas. We anticipate that more of the "95%" users will be become bandwidth consumers as IPTV, video-on-demand and online movie rental products become more prevalent. The trick is to not overbuild the network before users are ready to use it. We can't pass along the increased costs until they're ready for improved service. Raising cable bills by $5/month will piss alot of people off, even when we've deployed $50mil of plant and network upgrades.
Re:NO, VOIP is low latency! (Score:3, Informative)
If you are reselling a 1000/1000 con
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In other words, 30kbps doesn't sound too excessive to me (although I'm not a networking or VoIP specialist). Given that even my crappy ADSL over a poor phone line manages 440kbps upstream, I really don't see that as a problem. In fact, even if it wasn't compressed at all, my connection should theoretically be able to handle at least 6 simultaneous connections (allowing for overhead
You should not be surprised or indignant (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion un-metered plans should not be offered at all, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You pay for an upload/download capability, then pay for brackets of monthly bandwidth, and you should get a break on packets transfered during off-peak hours.
Do we really want or need government regulation of ISP capacity marketing? If that's the case I guess the free market economy doesn't work as well a some folks think.
quite wrong to blame the users (Score:2)
also, where i live the providers have more or less kept up with capacity increase partly because the government in
Re:You should not be surprised or indignant (Score:5, Interesting)
No thanks.
Here is something I would buy...
Flat rate. Guaranteed X up / Y down (preferably X = Y) with ability to go up to a.X up and b.Y down when the network loading can handle it. (a and b are greater than 1!)
Over selling is cool down at the home level, just sell and manage it honestly.
Don't give me this per byte game though. And I dont want to pay by the word for my phone calls either.
all the best,
drew
Their experience with AOL is showing (Score:3, Funny)
"flat rate" makes littl sense for broadband speeds (Score:2)
For broadband, flat rates don't make any sense yet. What you get is either volume-capped flat rates, traffic shaping, or some kind of nebulous enforcement. Since those tend to be not very transparent to customers and hard to compare between providers, those kind
Why this happens in North America... (Score:2, Insightful)
In general, the population density is far too low in North America to make it financially feasible for ISPs to lay out improved infrastructure as they become available. In the US of A, the average population density is 31 per square km. In Canada, it's a paltry 3.2 per square km. South Korea, on the other hand, has a population density of 480!!! per square km. Over 15 times that of the U.S., and over 150 times that of Canada. This makes it a lot easier for ISPs to roll out improved i
That's not the whole explanation (Score:5, Informative)
Here in Europe, for example -- Belgium, with a population density of 343 people/km^2, has realtively crappy broadband, with bandwidth caps of a few tens of gigabytes per month being prevalent with most ISPs. At least, last time I checked. I might be out of date.
Sweden, however, with a population density of just 22 people/km^2, has great broadband. I have uncapped cable at 24 Mbit/s down and 8 Mbit/s up, and I do use it rather heavilly, although I use far less than my total theoretical capacity. I haven't received any nastygrams from my ISP about this either. The very young wireless 3G broadband market, which used to have an industry standard of a 1 GB/month cap, has under the last few months come under competition, with most providers giving uncapped access. Broadband in rural areas is less spectacular, but ADSL is available in many areas, if you're lucky enough to have bought in before they ran out of space for equipment in your local telephone station. (A widespread problem right now, it seems.)
The most important piece of the puzzle is working competition between providers. Sure, a dense population helps, but it's in no way so significant as you make it out to be.
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The Dutch government has forced the owners of the biggest telephony and data networks to open their
Re:Why this happens in North America... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an old, tired and worn-out and patently absurd canard, which is being spread by apologists of the US telecommunication oligopolies since the beginning of the Internet. The truth is that in much of the US the population density in major metropolitan centres is as great or greater then the average Korean, Swedish or Japanese ones and yet, in those same very areas, which in your reasoning shoud be extremely suitable for deployment of 100mb Internet connections comparable to those being deployed en-masse in those other countries, you get .... 1.5 mb DSL. If you are lucky that is.
In short, the problem is the ever expanding culture of corporate avarice, corruption, attempts to make a quick buck and wholesale deterioration of marketplace ethic in the USA, which then spreads via USA-based multinationals to other nations where those same multinationals and their CEOs have influence. Get rich quick at any cost to everybody else is the new "motto" of Corporate America. "Work hard and make a good product" is sooo early 20th century!
Large businesses need to fear their customers, but because they essentially run and control the US government -- the only force capable of opposing and controlling them -- they are in a position to longer care about the supposed "invisible hand" of the marketplace. Now they can do whatever they want, and the "consumers" (the most derogatory term for a "person" ever invented) have to just take it.
And that is the truth of the matter, in affairs ranging from the Internet service to cell phone service to motor vehicle fuel consumption and so on.
My experience / are there good alternatives? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anybody have a link to a list of ISPs or non-business plans that are not traffic shaping? If a 16x drop in performance is going to become a frequent occurrence I aim to leave RoadRunner quickly. I'll look to the
Re:My experience / are there good alternatives? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only option (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The only option (Score:5, Interesting)
They're throttling all encrypted traffic, just incase that its used to bypass the traffic throttling they imposed.
see http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1859/125/ [michaelgeist.ca] for details
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So, we need to convert our traffic into bloated HTML code or something. Would use even more bandwidth, but that's what they get.
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Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps (Score:3, Interesting)
(Strangely, just uploading with wget doesn't do it, but rsync over scp gets the full 10Mbps instead of the old 0.6Mbps.)
The jumps happen suddenly, but what's strange is that Time Warner doesn't promote the increases. I'd expect them to put ads screaming about how I'm paying the same, but getting so much more, steadily for years. I'm pretty cynical, but I can't keep up with that mystery.
encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
I just don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
But before you blast me with the "Japan is a smaller country and easier to get 100Mbps in urban areas", hear me through. I now live in Hokkaido, the northern most island in Japan, which accounts for over 23% of land mass, with a fraction of the population of the main island. This is closer to Canada or Alaska in terms of landmass/person. Next door neighbors may be several miles away. I live in a sleepy little town, and I don't have fiber, and I don't suspect we'll get it for a few more years minimum. But we do have ADSL, and I have it at about 45Mbps throughput (downstream) right now. Not bad at all. And again, no traffic shaping or false "unlimited" gimmicks. (For what it's worth, I don't think there are ANY providers left in Japan that have a cap on total trafffic per month anymore.)
It sounds to me like the FCC should start kicking some telecom butt right about now, and tell the telecoms that they need to advertise what they're offering, and not something they want people to THINK they're providing. If the costs just can't justify true unlimited access, why not advertise it as being "limited" and offer a more expensive "truly unlimited" account? Over here in Japan there are residential and business lines. The business lines cost about 3 times as much, but there is a difference. Business lines have multiple static IP addresses. And if you pay even more, you get a "guaranteed" throughput speed, and an SLA with five-9 uptime guarantees.
Each time I hear about these things, it just makes my eyes roll. WTF???? It is just insane that ISPs can actually get away with this. What they're doing is pretty much the same as an airline selling the same seat 3 times, and telling 2 out of 3 passengers that the flight was overbooked and they're SOL.
This story is fake. (Score:5, Insightful)
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The company I work for manages the property, but does not own it. One day, I went in - on rent day - and the phones were ringing off the hook. Nobody could pay online - it said we no longer supported that "amenity" at our location.
For about 20 calls, I just directed people to try again a little later, until I tried to get our maintenance reports for the day, and found that our property's login had been dis
My favorite justification... (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, assume that's true. Cancel the top one percent. Now you have a new top one percent. Cancel them. Now...
Pretty soon they'll have a lot of bandwidth freed up, and it'll be fair for everyone.
What do you expect from cable companies (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why I have no loyalty (Score:3, Insightful)
Earthlink doesn't think it affects them (Score:4, Informative)
Andy P.: Thank you for using EarthLink's live Sales chat. How can I help you today?
Scott: I'm considering switching to Earthlink Cable from Time Warner Cable, but I'm wondering if TWC's newly announced packet shaping policy will be affecting Earthlink customers? See http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,18468495~d
Andy P.: One moment while I get that information for you.
Andy P.: No, this does not affect us.
Scott: How sure of of that answer are you? No offense, but I don't want to subscribe, then later find out you were wrong.
Andy P.: The Topic on the Forum itself says "TW Officially Announces Packet Shaping for All RR User" It does not mention EarthLink and If this was the case with us we would definitely have received an update on this by now.
Scott: Thanks! Appreciate your time.
Could be the news hasn't trickled down to Sales, but I guess I'm hopeful. Only other option here is DSL, which has a higher total cost if you don't already have a phone line.
I just noticed this issue... (Score:4, Informative)
Their traffic shaping seems to only be port based. Another example is that my upload is 512 Kbps. However, I tried to set up a small website for family and friends and noticed that upload from my port 80 was dog slow. So I setup a free DynDNS.org [dyndns.com] WebHop service which sends all HTTP traffic to a different port. Wham, back to my full upload bandwidth. I also set Apache on my Mac to have a VHost on *:80 and *:5090. *:80 just redirects everything to *:5090.
I noticed the shaping for Bitorrent as well. I just use a client that doesn't use the traditional ports and now I can download Linux ISO's at a good speed again. Though personally I don't use Bitorrent much. Usenet is much safer if you want to "try before you buy". With Usenet, you are not uploading, no one has ever been sued for downloading only. Copyright right restricts distribution (uploading), not downloading.
I don't really see the reason for this shaping crap. Any some what technical user can bypass it by changing from the standard ports.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Where I work we have a similar business connection which used to be 24Meg / 1Meg. Part of my job involves uploading content to our offsite servers. This would usually involve files a few Gb in size. After we would regularly leave work at 5pm and leave it uploading through their busiest evening period they got back to use to ask if we wanted to upgrade our upstream speed at the expense of downstream. We did and now we have 2 or 3 Meg depending on how busy th
Re:Heh. (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a link describing this better than I:
http://www.getonlinebroadband.com/faqs/faq02.html [getonlinebroadband.com]