Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector 198
bigwophh writes "Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt — Senior Policy Director for Google — announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs."
How convenient (Score:5, Insightful)
let me guess (Score:2)
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Re:let me guess (Score:4, Funny)
Re:let me guess (Score:5, Funny)
Re:let me guess (Score:4, Funny)
Or flush the streams...
eh... I'm tired of all these shitty jokes.
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This to be followed by googles entry into the ISP market?
Google was in the ISP business, offering WiFi, but got out or is getting out of it. Just as Earthlink [telegeography.com] and others have found out it's hard to make money with free muni-wifi.
FalconWhat, where, why, how? (when?) (Score:5, Funny)
What:
Throttling detector
Where:
The interwho
Why:
Because ISPs like to throttle to give Papa Joe and his daughters a healthy feed of myspace and rain hellfire upon Torrenting Sam and his goon squad of seeders
How:
No details
When:
Who knows?
Is there an award for understatements? (Score:5, Funny)
Still, good on them for coming to a fork in the road - one to eviltown and the other to goodville - and choosing wisely.
Re:Is there an award for understatements? (Score:5, Funny)
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ISP throttling (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm not buying a new router, damnit!
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And no, I was not being sarcastic. I genuinely think that the the poster to whom I replied does not understand the networking concepts.
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"fractions of bits"? Come on...
Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Google is afraid it's youtube dreams are being squashed by evil ISP's. Google more than sure doesn't give a cent about P2P applications, so their app probably will only work for http throttling, namely flv streaming/youtube.
Sorry for the google bashing, but this doesn't seem like google is as much interested in defending the poor customers against the evil ISP's as it's trying to defend it's own commercial interests.
Something else, I don't think there will be a big success in bateling the big ISP's, as trafic rises, there is no way they can maintain the current bandwidth/price ratio, even with massive profit cuts and investments in infrastructure. ISP's are overselling at a massive scale, more than 100 times their banwidth capacity. (well, in the US it's possible to maintain current prices since it's one of the most overpriced countries in this domain).
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
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Charter Cable (Score:2)
i'm convinced that my ISP (charter) is throttling youtube specifically.
Know why? Paul Allen [wikipedia.org], cofounder of Microsoft, owns a controlling interest in Charter Cable [wikipedia.org] (;-
FalconPaul Allen (Score:2)
ah. the evil thickens. i literally have only one other option for my area, and that's clearwire, which is just unacceptably slow and overpriced. color me depressed.
You probably won't like this either then, Paul Allen also kicked in $500 million to start DreamWorks SKG [wikipedia.org]. Don't let it get too down though, DreamWorks uses Linux [linux.com].
Falcon
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:4, Insightful)
David
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What makes Comcast incredibly underhanded is that they advertise the wonders of their fiber optic network...and falsely imply FTTH service with lines like "I actually feel the fiber optic light from Comcast."
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
That's when you know when you can really trust someone, when both parties' interests are aligned. Trusting someone's good intentions has a long history of disappointment.
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
Net neutrality is not about giving all types of traffic the same priority. You can have a neutral net in which VOIP packets have a very high priority, HTTP packets a slightly lower priority, and bit torrent packets are bottom of the pile.
Network neutrality is about giving all traffic of the same type the same priority regardless of its source. In other words, in a neutral net ISPs would not make deals with certain content providers to prioritise their traffic.
It is really important that everyone understands this. Some of the organisations who are against net neutrality are using the argument that it is only sensible to prioritise protocols such as VOIP (prioritisation by type, which most people would agree with), when what they really want is to extract money out of the content providers by prioritising traffic by source.
Why is prioritisation by source such a bad thing? Because it turns the 'old internet' on its head. Whereas at present anyone can be a content provider, in the brave new world of a non-neutral net only large organisations can afford to pay the ISPs to deliver their content at an acceptable speed.
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Google is very much opposed any kind of tempering, not just tampering which affects them.
Also keep in mind that they have the some of the smartest brains on the planet (outside of the NSA) and it is possible to check for many different kinds of tampering.
Its a very safe bet that the tool will do a extremely good job.
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Google more than sure doesn't give a cent about P2P applications, so their app probably will only work for http throttling, namely flv streaming/youtube.
Why wouldn't they care about P2P? If they can keep P2P tech evolving until it's mature enough to distribute Youtube videos on them, that translates into free bandwidth and service. I think there's already a lot of movement towards this - see P4P [wikipedia.org], Vuze [wikipedia.org], even NASA TV [digimeld.com] is piloting peer-to-peer distribution of its broadcast.
Potential money loss for Google (Score:5, Interesting)
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And I need help detecting the infringement.
Why not caps? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I will accept that I can download the equivalent of any 4 digit number of this song per month. (~3MB/min for CBR 320Kbps MP3 * 42min = 126megs/song *1000(min 4 digit positive number)=126GB/month)
I would consider Chew and Hiccup by Book Oven. The "song" is 240 minutes long, but I am concerned that it may compress fairly well...
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Or worse. After exceeding your limit, you'll be stuck with 4KB/s for the rest of the month.
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Don't like it? There's always dial-up at 25$/month with no monthly cap.
The upside? The nice little notice at the bottom of the monthly usage page:
"Please note that at night time (00:00 to 07:59), traffic isn't calculated so you can do your massive downloads without risking going over your monthly cap."
Re:Why not caps? (Score:4, Funny)
Free market capitalism, eh? It's just crazy enough to work. We should try that here.
Re:Why not caps? (Score:5, Informative)
Free market capitalism, eh? It's just crazy enough to work. We should try that here.
Seriously, the biggest provider (a partially state-owned company, which has the entire nation's telephone net infastructure) charges 41 euros (61 usd) for 12 Gigabytes of traffic per month. Twelve, that's nothing! If you want to buy an extra pack of 5 Gb, it costs another 5 euros. Our internet providers would make a terrible model to follow, capped internet is almost just as terrible as a non-neutral net.
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But 25GB a week? ~4GB a day? That's 10 hours of TV download (350MB epidodes)each day. I would say that was quite a lot.
Actually 8 hours. A "1 hour" tv show is actually 42 minutes.
If you are using p2p, half that to account for upload (1:1 ratio as a good netizen) and you are down to 4 hours. God forbid if you watch HD at double the size. That leaves you with 2 hours of tv per day.
And that is just TV for one single week for one person in the household (although the grandparent did say university so it is likely a one person household).
Easy to avoid.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Easy to avoid.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, as has been said earlier in the discussion, Google's likely most interested in the effects of throttling on their own applications, notably Youtube. So if they only test connections to Youtube, then it either forces ISPs to be caught red-handed or unthrottle youtube, a win-win situation for Google.
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Wouldn't this be easy for ISPs to avoid? Just un-throttle any connections to Google's servers? Just figure out where the test is being done and don't throttle that site. Easy.
If the ISPs take that approach, and Google then releases their method & code, problem solved: we just all start testing and have our connections not throttled.
Without knowing just what Google is going to produce, we need more information before deciding on how effective it's going to be one way or the other.
Re:Easy to avoid.... (Score:4, Interesting)
If it is as simple as what you suggest it would be a great move for Google as the ISP's could unthrottle Google and Google would get superior network traffic over all of the smaller sites that don't have their own well used network-throttling-detectors.
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not necessary... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, funny thing then that when my bittorrent client inched above 45-50kB/sec (less than half of the new limit, which is 125kB/sec), shortly thereafter ping times exploded from 20-25ms to 300-500ms. On a second occasion, it went up to 1000ms to 3000ms. Even if you throttle back to, say, 20kB/sec, ping times stay the same. They don't drop until you stop the client completely. Seems to take about 10 minutes for the throttling to kick in. It's so bad that ssh latency goes up to 5-10 seconds, and the web interface to my p2p client completely stopped working.
The same thing happened with eDonkey, so either they're going off traffic volume, or they're detecting any p2p traffic.
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Comcast recently announced they bumped upstream bandwidth from 384kbit to 1mbit...
Wow, I actually learned something on Slashdot today! After reading this, I went to Speakeasy's Speed Test [speakeasy.net] and tried it out. Sure enough, my upload speed is now 1 megabit/sec.
This is great news. For quite a while Comcast would keep bumping their download speed cuz it makes for better marketing - but anything above 4mbps doesn't make a significant difference for me (most of the time). But when I have to work from home, being able to upload at 1mbsp instead of 384kbps makes a HUGE difference.
It's also great i
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[citation needed]
> and during a download I haven't seen it go below the cap
and no original research. Shame on you.
Check it, your ISP throttles!... (Score:4, Funny)
And the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, you find out for sure, and and then what? In a lot of areas the 'hi-speed market' is a monopoly.
Why Should An ISP Care If You Use Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
If you use encryption on your torrent connection you'd think that would be good for an ISP, if they're required by law to block people from downloading movies and songs but they can't see it since you're encrypting everything that should get them off the hook.
Bell Canada just seemed to just say screw this and started to throttle all encrypted traffic. Although they said it was because of bandwidth issues.
I say for an ISP ignorance is bliss!
Google is funny that way (Score:2)
How will Google implement this? (Score:3, Interesting)
FCC needs to step in (Score:2, Interesting)
Dont think this is going to happen (Score:3, Interesting)
First, you can bet your ass this is pretty damned hard not to get false positives, however I will admit before someone does it for me that the collective mind of Google is much smarter than I. I will not say it cannot be done. Its just unlikely ( still nothing technical ).
I work for a company that provides software ( and firmware ) for the largest ( physically, and capacity wise ) commercial satellite in the world. It only moves IP packets ( plus meta ). I am not a sales person, I design, prototype, sometimes build the software that controls the flows. I certainly maintain a heavy hand in in it all technically, I have nothing to do with service level policies, other than providing feasible solutions.I feel somewhat qualified to tell you strait up that this 'net neutrality' thing is both a bunch of bullshit and that its prompted by "Board Room" level jealousy of profits.
Before I get into the heavy of it I want to tell you that I feel that if you buy 1mbps you should get 1mbps. None of this "until you reach 15GB" crap... unless thats what you paid for.Unlimited should be without qualification unless they qualify it up front ( meaning its not "unlimited" ). Truth in advertising is the key here.
But on the other hand, you want your VOIP calls to be clear, you want your game session to be non-choppy. You want your web pages to take temporary priority over your FTP session, oh yes you do.
Likewise, you do not want the guy in the next cubicle to take up all of available bandwidth downloading [insert something big] over P2P or whatever you kids do these days to defeat fairness controls.Some of the legislation put forth in the name of neutrality would make it illegal for me to make it fair.
When I first got into this business it was common practice to oversell by five times, I recently have had documents cross my desk that suggest it is common practice to sell it 80 times over. Given that providers like TimeWarner want to jack the max speed to 15mb for an extra 5 bucks, its no wonder that they then want to put into place caps on usage ( they didn't mean you should use it ).
Oh wait, we were talking about neutrality. Right. So anyhow, you have groups trying to prioritize traffic, and then you have groups trying to tell the googles and the ebays in the world that they need to pony up some cash if they want fair access to the customers. This has nothing to do with QoS, this is extortion. We already have laws that cover this. Google is taking the wrong tact in the sense that they are trying to rally people behind them in demanding fair access, and I think they should be pressing criminal charges.
Do not get me wrong, my satellite covers a large portion of Asia, it has nothing to do with what is being proposed right here with Net Neutrality, other than the fact that my Internet is getting messed with by largish companies and politicians that do not know much about the problems.
Please... understand what you are proposing before you start pushing the badwagon.
I want to be clear, I feel that legislated "Net Neutrality" is bad, it will not work out well. I feel that there are plenty of laws in place that should incarcerate corporations ( if only we could ) for the obvious laws they are breaking by trying to force popular internet sites to pay them for access to customers that are already paying them. I would like to get into honesty in advertising, and why its really up to you guys to fix this, but it would rather go in a book for I am long winded.
Really guys and gals, we need some perspective on this, no one wants our internet messed with like this and if you leave it up to the corps and the elected, its going to get messed up. I am not sure what you expect to gain by this, but I am sure what you end up with is a pile of crap if it continues for too long. Please, we can apply laws that have been enforced for decades to cover this, its not mystery to us, its time we demystify it to everyone else.
P.S. Isnt the posting editing window really small now?
--dant
We need a car analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
The next day 3 customers show up to pick up their Ferraris, clearly the car dealer is outraged!
3 showing up when he only expected 2 even though he sold 3?! Unbelievable!
But the solution is simple, since the evil customers expected to get what they payed for, it's clearly all their fault,
and hence it is only fair to the car dealer that he be fully paid and the customers will have to timeshare.
Of course if the customers drive in California, the car dealer will have to be paid an additional $100/day since
driving in such a high traffic area it just completely unfair to the car dealer who only expected costumers to drive in rural, desolate areas of Idaho.
And in case some people don't know how to make the connection here, just replace "Ferrari" with "GB bandwidth" and "car dealer" with "ISP" (and what ever else needed to make perfect sense
If we let's ISP's get away with any of it, they won't just stop with throttling BitTorrent, they will oversell their bandwidth 1000-10,000x instead of just 10-30x and then throttle absolutely everything to make it all meet. Suddenly you downloading your 500kb Email attachment is an overuse of bandwidth and deserves to be cut down to 3kb/s. But don't worry, that annoying 1.2MB Flash commercial with be subsidized so it won't count and will stream with 10MB(yte)/s over your fiber connection to annoy you instantly. But you can't complain, after all you are getting your full bandwidth worth on SOME content.
In my overly optimistic way, i would hope that it doesn't really matter who releases such a tool and weather it works or not, just that the greedy ISP think there might be something to nail them down or at least make their unethical misdeeds visible might be enough for them to be not quite as bold, maybe even start campaigning with 'no throttling, test it yourself'. But i forgot that in the US there isn't really any ISP Broadband competition, i mean in the areas i lived in there was only once choice, first it was either Cable or nothing... then we moved, now we had the choice of At&t DSL or.... nothing.... yay. And even in those areas where people are lucky enough to have TWO offerings, chances are very good that both are evil bastards and already throttling
Now that i have been living in Germany for a while, i almost get weekly adds from some ISP i have never heard of supposedly being cheaper then my current isp. My 16MBit/s connection combined with some unlimited call package is cheap enough though (compared to the us) but it makes me feel good that if there is ever even the hint of throttling that i can simply switch one of the many other isp's.
Throttling? Re-writing is worse for them. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Legality Question (Score:4, Insightful)
More like:
on the bandwidth thing (Score:3, Interesting)
We currently have an 8Mb line, and I do mean 8, it gets to that speed quite often, especially in transfers from my university machines, other Janet sites, and other good download locations.
Otherwise we get around 4Mb.
Ok, all fine, but now UK ISP have started talking about max 2Mb lines in my area, and several have 'tested' my line and found it cannot go above 2mb, even when I clearly can get much greater speeds then this, and have before and after their 't
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Re:on the bandwidth thing (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Interesting)
When it comes to bandwidth the total amount really doesn't matter (despite what the ISPs would have you believe). It's the amount per second, or, more reasonably, minute, that is the real determining factor. If I use 300 Gigs of bandwidth, but do so in 10 gigs a night, at the times when every normal person is asleep, over the course of the entire month that's going to have far less of an impact on my neighbors than if I used 30 Gigs on the first of the month during the waking hours.
Hmm...anyone else getting visions of power company like pricing? You pay per gig (or something) a reasonable fee (such that the average person pays the same then as now), but if you use it during off hours you pay less. It's probably been thought of before but it might help, those torrents would be a lot cheaper to run during off hours, making normal usage faster during on hours.
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This pricing model would make sense; bandwidth is priced according to the actual laws of supply and demand, rather than whatever the ISP feels like charging.
That
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Informative)
That's why ISPs won't do it.
Because most customers are doing just fine the way it is. The customers getting 'screwed' are the ones that want to transfer 1000s of GB per month for 35$ flat rate.
If the ISPs ever actually switched to a supply/demand pricing model, with tiered bandwidth, guess what, the same customers that are moaning about getting 'screwed' now by throttling, are going to be moaning that their internet costs $1500/mo when they they run torrents at 25down:2up Mbps 24x7.
Meanwhile 'regular' people will be complaining because they don't understand their up/down ratios, why bandwidth costs more going in one direction than the other, why they had to pay $5 extra one month when they didn't do anything out of the ordinary.... except update windows to sp3... and according to the MS page, thats only a 97kb download.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=68C48DAD-BC34-40BE-8D85-6BB4F56F5110&displaylang=en#filelist [microsoft.com]
In effect: everybody loses.
Re:Legality Question (Score:4, Interesting)
You pay a flat fee and you can download as much as you want.
The catch is either in the fine print or its omitted completely.
Its illegal in Australia but legal in the US to do that.
Thats why nearly all our net plans have fixed quotas (sometimes with on and off peak) and your shaped after reaching the limit.
It is the next simplest solution and its extremely fair for consumers.
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Of course, you won't see that on any of the advertisement. Or be told, unless you request a copy of the contract (it is called a publically registered contract, or something like that, and they are not
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Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Insightful)
The ones really being "screwed" under the current model are the light users, who push a good 2 or 3 megabytes a day to check their email and the weather report, don't call tech support very often, and are paying $60 a month to subsidize us compulsive downloaders.
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You've never actually worked in ISP tech support (or any in general), have you?
The worst, most annoying customers are the ones that barely use the service. The ones that use it a lot (and therefore KNOW how to use it PROPERLY) are the ones that
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Just be aware that you are probably paying for your bandwidth through very hard to upgrade pipes, that are already near saturation. The price you pay per GB will be MUCH higher than the price you pay per GB for a server colocated in a NOC where it is comparatively easy to attach more fibre.
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I will happy pay for my bandwidth by the gigabyte if it is sold at market value
And that is your mistake. Believing that they will sell something like that at market value. You are lucky if you manage to get a markup of less than 1000%.
The ones really being "screwed" under the current model are the light users, who push a good 2 or 3 megabytes a day to check their email and the weather report, don't call tech support very often, and are paying $60 a month to subsidize us compulsive downloaders.
Umm $60? Why would someone like that have such an expensive subscription? I would expect them to have the cheapest subscription.
And if you think that those cheapest subscriptions are too expensive. Consider the fact that even though they only use 2-3 megabytes per day, there still has to be the last mile infrastructure built to support them being a hea
guess what (Score:2)
If the ISPs ever actually switched to a supply/demand pricing model, with tiered bandwidth
If ISP actually moved to a free market they'd have to pay back the billions of dollars the government gave them to build out their networks.
FalconRe: (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile 'regular' people will be complaining because they don't understand their up/down ratios, why bandwidth costs more going in one direction than the other, why they had to pay $5 extra one month when they didn't do anything out of the ordinary.... except update windows to sp3... and according to the MS page, thats only a 97kb download.
as pointed out in another comment, this is how we already roll in Australia. It took a while, but most people understand now that bandwidth is a limited resource and "unlimited" is not something that exists.
The crux of the problem is that US ISPs are advertising unlimited and don't want to deliver it. We in Australia went through that already, the ISPs got told to stop being jerks, and now they can't do that anymore.
The sooner the US ISPs start doing that the better - there's an adjustment period as peopl
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Most of Europe doesn't have any throttling or any caps. In Sweden I only ever heard of one guy that had a cap and he had 100/100 fiber just one or two hops from the backbone. This was three years ago and I think his cap was 200GB and he could buy more in 100GB increments for a fairly low sum.
The fastest pipe I
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The pricing model used by most broadband providers is designed for simplicity, rather than any real representation of value.
The current pricing regime exists because there was no (affordable) way to measure traffic to the individual customer when the Internet first 'rolled out', although routing technology at the time did support capped speeds to customers.
Not any more. That is why countries late to the Internet were able to put a structure in place that allowed measurement of traffic (monthly GB) and charge you accordingly. This happens to be normal in many countries, though the US customer base has had a hard time s
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how this can be. when they're charging per gigabyte, then the more gigabytes they can deliver the more dollars they get!
If you're paying a flat rate for your connection, they've already got their money for the month, regardless of how much downloading you do. To maximize revenue, they have an incentive to discourage downloading, as this allows them to cram more flat-rate subscribers onto less infrastructure.
If instead they can levy a charge on every packet they deliver, then they'll want to facilitate your bandwidth consumption however they can.
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Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Interesting)
How ironic that my feelings on the matter so closely match the quote "What we've got here is failure to communicate... Now I don't like this any more than you do."
Re:Legality Question (Score:4, Informative)
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However before we call all ISPs evil for throttling bandwidth, lets look at the facts. 5% of the userbase on average for an ISP provides for (usually) over 80% of the usage. Now, cables have a maximum capacity of bandwidth (that copper going out your wall? Yeah, theres a limit). If your ISP did not perform any form of traffic shaping you wouldn't ever reach your 5Mb speed, not even in bursts.
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Yes! this old CAT5K I have sitting here not using it because it finally shit its self (any one have a fan module or need parts?)
Funny thing, before my local ISP got Sodomized By Cowboys I plugged this thing into my DSL modem (no integrated router) and behold they had not turned off RIP on their customer ports... Since I was admin on my local box, with little effort I was able to map their network, from DSLAM to switch to routers. Called their tech support to be f
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, they can't possibly guarantee you a certain speed. Try explaining to Joe Perv that even though he has the capability of 20 MbPS, the server that has his Chinese industrial accident porn can only deliver at 20 bPS.
There's enough reasons to sling vitriol at unethical ISPs, but advertising "up to [speed]" isn't one of them.
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Funny)
You have made this entire thread worthwhile.
Re:Legality Question (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Informative)
How would you feel if hard drive manufacturers didn't give you all the drive space they advertised or if your new sports car couldn't really run at the advertised max speed all the time? oh, wait...
Seriously though, living in the UK where we have ADSL max and I get advertised as being allowed up to 8mbps broadband but living in an area I can only get 2mbps is one thing. When the ISP then only lets me have 512kbps if I'm lucky half the time despite me getting shafted harder than most people the rest of the time it's a whole different matter, it's a kick in the nads. They really need to rethink their business plan if not only can they not supply what they're selling, but if they then can't even supply 1/4th and can in fact only supply 1/16th of what they're selling and even less than that with some ISPs.
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Ultimately, my point is that it would be impossible to run an ISP and not say that.
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HOT
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What a wanker - whoever AC is.