ISPs Throttling BitTorrent Traffic, Study Finds 228
hypnosec writes "A new report by an open source internet measurement platform, Measurement Lab, sheds light onto throttling of and restriction on BitTorrent traffic by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) across the globe. The report by Measurement Lab reveals that hundreds of ISPs across the globe are involved in the throttling of peer-to-peer traffic, and specifically BitTorrent traffic. The Glasnost application run by the platform helps in detecting whether ISPs shape traffic. Tests can be carried out to check whether the throttling or blocking is carried out 'on email, HTTP or SSH transfer, Flash video, and P2P apps including BitTorrent, eMule and Gnutella.' Going by country, United States has actually seen a drop in throttling compared to what it was back in 2010. Throttling in the U.S. is worst for Cox at 6 per cent and best for Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and others at around 3 per cent. The United Kingdom is seeing a rise in traffic shaping and BT is the worst at 65 per cent. Virgin Media throttles around 22 per cent of the traffic while the least is O2 at 2 per cent. More figures can be found here."
Or have a crap ISP like Eastlink (Score:3)
Verizon FiOS (Score:4, Informative)
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Verizon FiOS isn't doing it...yet. I don't D/L all that often, but I did a few days ago and was not throttled. I can get up to 5.1MB down, but I usually get only 2-3MB on torrents anyway. I have not noticed a change.
I pulled down nearly 2TB last month to test my new upgrade to "quantum" 150/75. I didn't see any performance less than 160/78 during any of that testing. I sure feel bad for those Brits stuck with BT or Virgin. I'd be furious if I was not getting the service I was paying for.
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I do have to agree with getting what you pay for OR at least getting advertised speeds. I test the speed about once, maybe twice a week and I usually get over the 35/35 at 42/38.
When I was at Suddenlink(CABLE) in Tyler or Time Warner(CABLE) here in Dallas, they were slower and even less reliable. time Warner went out about every night for 3 hrs and the 15/2 was more like 12/768k off peak. Suddenlink never went down, but the 10/1 they had was 9/512k off peak
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I quite often see torrents downloading at 2-3MB/s when going full speed which is plenty fast enough. Ultimately, the ISPs know that torrenters are good customers who are willing to pay for greater speeds, so they shoot themselves in their feet i
on my cheap (19€/mo) German 16/1 no throttlin (Score:2)
I will use what I buy (Score:3, Insightful)
If I buy a hamburger and fries with a coke at BK, the chuckle-heads behind the counter don't come out and take back ten fries and half the burger.
If I buy a tank of gas the pump guy doesn't follow me around with a hose and siphon back a couple gallons
When I use water the city doesn't ask me to pay for 5 hundred gallons and then say I can only use 4 hundred gallons because 5 hundred would just be too much
When I buy cable TV no one stops me from watching TV 24/7 because I might use too much.
On my land-line I can make non-stop phone calls to Guam and ask the operator there to connect me to Paris and from there to my next-door neighbor and no one complains that I am tying up a line.
If I buy anything else in the entire world no one says boo if I use it all up or even how I use it as long as I don't ACTIVELY stop other people from using it.
God damn it, if you sell me something and I use it, don't come back and say i can't use it because you didn't plan ahead. Get some more bandwidth or cut my rates.
This is BS! These idiots are just shills for the RIAA and co. No other business in the world works like this.
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I pay outrageous premiums then someone backs into my bumper and causes a small dent. I want this dent fixed so I call my insurance to file a claim and they pull a bitch fit because they have to pay 300$(US) for the dent. Then they demand I pay the 500$ deductible and my rates go up. SO, instead I say 'fuck off' to the insurance company and then pay the 300$ myself to get the dent fixed.
Shall I start in on the medical insurance?
How about the pharmaceutical companies?
I don't use the word 'hero' lightly, (Score:2)
tis' no man, 'tis a remorseless eating machine [ocweekly.com]
Re:I will use what I buy (Score:4, Insightful)
How about the food industry?
The average profit margin for most businesses in the US is around 5.5%. The average profit margin for a grocery store is about 0.8%. They also don't charge you taxes, and due to the small margins, most of the people who pick the food and package it are illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage. It's back breaking work, you're in the sun all day, and your skin is regularly cut up from constantly reaching into bushes, etc., to rip the food from the plant, who has had thousands of years to develop defense strategies to keep animals from doing just that.
As to medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies, you can thank your government for that -- they handed them a monopoly on a silver platter and give them large private police forces to travel worldwide attacking and imprisoning whomever threatens the profit margin. ISPs also have a government-mandated monopoly, thanks to exclusive contracts negotiated with municipalities that guarantee they're the only provider in an area. In other parts of the world, pills you pay hundreds of dollars for cost pennies, and internet flows freely from giant pipes, fed to you all day long by beautiful women.
Your government is the sole party to blame for this state of affairs.
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"The average profit margin for most businesses in the US is around 5.5%. The average profit margin for a grocery store is about 0.8%."
Yes, but percent margin is an inappropriate measure to use in this situation.
One of the reasons for the small grocery margin (and how they can get away with it and stay in business), is that they do vastly higher volume than most other kinds of stores. So while their margin might be 0.8%, give or take (I have seen it reported as high as 2%), what really matters is that a store can still make $30,000 profit per day.
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Yes, but percent margin is an inappropriate measure to use in this situation.
I can only assume you point this out to distract readers from the point; Namely, that the government has created a monopoly which results in massive profits for those companies at the expense of the people consuming those services.
Anyway, not that your point has any merit... if it did, grocery companies would be the darlings of Wall Street, protesters would be outside their headquarters protesting their profiteering ways, and the cover of People magazine would regularly feature The Most Eligible Grocer wit
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>>>When I buy cable TV no one stops me from watching TV 24/7 because I might use too much.
There is a limit to how many channels the cable company can squeeze through the line, so it is self-limiting. How many times have you turned-on the TV and discovered nothing to watch? That's because there's no more room to add an exra channel that you might enjoy (like Space or Horror Channel). It's congestion.
As for phone calls, they only use 4 kbit/s when digitized so that's why there's no restriction. T
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If I buy a hamburger and fries with a coke at BK, the chuckle-heads behind the counter don't come out and take back ten fries and half the burger.
No, but in the US and some other countries, McDonalds does sell you a "quarter-pounder" where the small print says that this is uncooked weight, and the local food regulations allow them to add as much water as they like to their ground meat before cooking it.
What is needed is similar regulation as for the car industry. Where they earlier could say "up to 30 mpg" they now have to be at least slightly more honest, and tell you the typical rate. It should be similar for internet.
Or, even better, not allow "
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His arguments are fine. He's spot on. Throttling and capping is bait and switch, almost fraudulent. Hell, they even lie to the consumer when they buy the service indicating a bandwidth without telling the customer to divide by 8 (as in megabits vs megabytes).
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While we are at it, let's jump the storage manufacturers for doing the same.
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Storage manufacturers aren't doing the same things as ISPs. Most manufacturers do label on their retail boxes indicating the true size of 1 megabyte. The ISP are actually fraudulently selling their offerings. A 12 mb connection is not 12 megabytes, it is 12 megabits, which is a sizable difference in bandwidth. I've had this discussion in my store with many a customer believing they purchased massive bandwidth.
Countermeasures (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always wondered what it would be like to fight back against some of these throttling mechanisms. Since they rely on breaking tcp/ip (Actually forging packets between you and a third party) I think it would be fair game to poke back at some of these systems.
Since these are "carrier grade" monitoring and throttling solutions sold by "enterprise" software developers, we can safely assume that they're crap. I'm sure the developers think they're secure, since they're "invisible" passive monitoring/insertion systems. Why is this important? I bet you could crash any and all of pretty easily. I bet it will be as easy as generating some "interesting" traffic, then inserting lots of invalid/random garbage in fields/payloads that the throttling system might inspect.
This simple "technique" has been known to crash IDS/passive monitoring systems pretty much since they've been around. For whatever reason, nobody thinks that passive monitoring systems can be the targets of attack simply because they're "invisible" and don't respond to direct requests on the network being monitored.
If not outright crashing, you could attempt to bog down said throttling systems. It might not be hard to create a torrent client that generates a lot of noisy garbage that would cause an asymmetric load on said throttling system.
Re:Countermeasures (Score:4, Funny)
yes and when the isp drops you (especially in small us cities where there might be just the one) you can route all your internets through the post system.
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and that is if you have post privileges after dhs gets done with you regarding the "hacking/causing damge"
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What would be there reason for dropping you? They were the ones who's software was snooping, and there software had bugs in it. Your packets are not meant for them anyway. And why are they inspection you packets anyway.
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they can drop you for no reason at all, but certainly if you give them one... :)
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They are forging packets back to a service independent of those that buy. That itself has to be highly illegal.
BT is crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Avoid them like the plague.
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It's impossible to avoid using BT where I am. Even if I pick a different ISP, I'd still be using their infrastructure.
Protocol throttling such as you mention is imposed by BT Retail, not Wholesale. So if you moved to another ISP you would be subject to that ISP's policy, not BT Retail's.
Wholesale just provide connectivity; they do nothing but deliver the stream to the ISP through L2TP.
I suggest you try ID Net; they provide BT Wholesale-based ADSL with no throttling or blocking. I used them a few years ago on a BT-only exchange and they were fine.
Usenet is so much better anyways. (Score:2, Interesting)
Some of you may have used usenet back in the day when there was a lot of work involving downloading a ton of RARs, PARs, and then going through the process of PARing, and unRARing. However newer software greatly simplifies this process. It even goes so far as to calculate how many PARs you actually need before even downloading them.
Look up the following apps (they run on all three major OSes):
Sickbeard, Couchpotato, Headphones, and SABNZBd.
Beats cable, beats netflix, and beats hulu. Not by a little, but by
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Some of you may have used usenet back in the day when there was a lot of work involving downloading a ton of RARs, PARs, and then going through the process of PARing, and unRARing.
Excuse me: some of us actually used USENET back in the day before binary groups were invented!
Actually I still follow a handful of text-only groups and the quarily of discussion is improving again as web fora draw-away the trolls and twits.
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So did I actually. It was kind of ruined by the spammers though. I still remember all of the chain mails "send these people on the list 1 dollar each, and then post again with your name at the top." And then it became just plain stupid to include any form of your email address anywhere, no matter how obfuscated, so nobody could ever contact you outside of usenet without you getting spammed hard in the process.
Trolls don't bother me though.
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I haven't used newsgroups in a long while. How does USENET compare with niche private trackers? Are there newsgroups with cult films, and how does the selection and quality compare with Cinemageddon? Similarly, are there newsgroups that focus on retro games, and how do they compare with UG?
Basically, if I'm not interested in the popular stuff, will I be able to find my niche on USENET?
Re:###### is so much better anyways. (Score:2)
you just broke the first rule of it in saying so
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Well what about the third rule of usenet:
If this is your first time at usenet, you have to fight.
I throttle my own uploads anyhow (Score:2, Interesting)
I limit my total upstream because performance really sucks if you use up more than about 85% or so of your upload speed. The reason is that ACKs will start to get dropped (unless you have a router with a good QoS algorithm). I set my limit to 20KB/sec (I have 6Mb down/~600Kb up, so that's about 33%), and just let it sit longer until I hit my ratio.
I wonder how many people think they're being throttled when actually they don't limit their upload speed and are completely fucking up their connection with lost
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File under "No shit Sherlock" (Score:5, Insightful)
Name another industry in which you pay for an advertised service and then get far far less.
Would you buy a computer that claims 8GB of ram but you could only utilize 3?
Would you buy a camera that claimed it could take 1000 pictures but only could store 100 maximum?
Would you buy a car that advertised 200 HP but could only output 50 HP?
Would you buy a 3 bedroom house that only has 1.5 bedrooms?
Would you buy a food product with printed 350g on the container but the contents only weigh 180g?
Would you pay for a meal if it claimed it would come with sides that you never received?
Would you buy a gallon of gas if you only got a pint?
Would you buy a 24 pack of beer if you only got 16?
So in what FREAKIN reality is it acceptable for ISP's to charge you for an advertised speed and then offer you something far less then that on average.
Interesting: Teksavvy Bad Throttler in Canada (Score:2)
It looks like highly geek touted Teksavvy is one of the worst for throttling in Canada. (disclosure: I use Teksavvy but I don't use bit torrent much if at all, so cannot provide my own observations).
What is VERY interesting is late last year Bell Canada told the CRTC regulator that they would stop throttling. [www.cbc.ca] And here they are, the worst offender according to the data provided on this new list. I'm not surprised that they seem to be a bunch of lying scumbags. In discussions with the federal regulator and in
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I can't seem to find it, but I've read a letter from Teksavvy's CEO about needing to throttle some users in some over-subscribed areas, to the point that they couldn't accept new subscribers anymore and adding people to a waiting list. They had problems leasing more lines to increase capacity or something.
Where do the numbers in the summary come from? (Score:2)
The linked table indicates that in the USA only Clearwire (a wireless provider) does any measurable throttling at all.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
"Chronic torrenters use the bandwidth they purchased. The ISPs greedy oversubscribing of their bandwidth shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for."
Fixed that for you.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
If you would like to pay for dedicated bandwidth, you can definitely do so, however you are taking advantage of the cost of the pipe being spread among many people with the expectation they won't all max it out at once. Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe.
Just keep sticking it to the man though.
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Then the ISP should not sell it as if it does.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't, they sell speeds "up to".
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Then as long as my torrenting doesn't increase your speeds above the "up to" number you're buying from your ISP, you can STFU, you're getting what you're paying for. If my torrenting ever causes your speeds to exceed your purchased "up to" rate, then you can complain about it.
Wait, what? Why are you defending that practice?
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Now they'll sell you "up to 20mb!" in an area fed by a single T1.
Converse Petard (Score:4, Funny)
Next time my speed exceeds what I was promised, I'm suing.
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I wouldn't mind this as long as they didn't charge the extra if you do your downloads during non-peak hours.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
You dont go to an all you can eat buffet and have 1 burger and fries right?? unlimited should be unlimited
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Why should "unlimited be unlimited" and does any ISP ever explicitly state it's "unlimited?" Most major carrier and cableco ISPs have bandwidth caps so by definition there's no such thing as unlimited.
What you're paying for is a very cheap, shared, commodity pipe to your ISP. Beyond that it's a crap shoot. Hopefully they have multiple 10-40gig uplinks to the major carriers, private peering with the largest video web sites (Netflix, Youtube, etc.), and possibly caching to make the "average user" happy th
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If they cant handle it, they should stop selling it. As far as I am concerned, I pay for unlimited bandwidth at 50 down 25 up. If I want to upload all 25 and download all 50 24/7/365, that is what I payed for.
Every ISP I've dealt with in the last ten years has included terms that they can throttle or cap your service at some point, and also do not guarantee a particular rate. As far as I'm concerned, you're getting what you paid for -- unless your ISP's terms say differently.
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
oh no that would mean they would have to invest in infrastructure
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Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
"Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe."
Nonsense, at least here in the U.S. While it might be catching up (hard to say for sure), compared to most "first tier" countries the U.S. has averaged significantly lower bandwidth at much higher cost. Mainly due to insufficient competition.
Bandwidth for ISPs gets cheaper by they year, as they have continued to steadily raise their monthly rates.
They can afford it.
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GPON(2.5Gb) - Assuming all users on a 32 person node max the connection, about 70Mb/s
At this point the end user has an effective dedicated 70Mb/s(78Mb/s but rounded down for safety margin) to the ISP, the ISP can then purchase 1Mb/s of dedicated bandwidth for $1/month and even cheaper if peering.
For $70/month, the ISP can purchase 70Mb/s. Add the cost of infrastructure(connection fee), $15/month. For $100/month, one could expect 70Mb/s of dedicated bandwidth a
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
If you would like to pay for dedicated bandwidth, you can definitely do so, however you are taking advantage of the cost of the pipe being spread among many people with the expectation they won't all max it out at once. Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe.
Just keep sticking it to the man though.
So I guess my euro45/month does not cover the 100/100Mbps fiber link we have at our house? It's a standard domestic service: uncapped, unthrottled, with no blocked ports or other limits. I don't think we've gone past 1TB in a month, but we've certainly exceeded 500GB a few times. Two adults and two teenagers and our own web server add up to a fair amount of traffic. We're not egregious users either, and some others in the area do exceed our throughput. Some ISPs are not as miserly as others, but still manage to make a profit.
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So, you say you are using between 1.5 and 3 Mb/s for a whole family.
Barring peak speeds, this would mean, if you where a typical customer, about 2000 euros a month for 100 Mb/s.
Not unreasonable, just stating what it actually costs.
So to state that you should have a right to 100 Mb/s for 45 euros seems kinda silly.
Of course, I myself pay approximately 7 euros for my 100/100 with static IP and only port 25 blocked.
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Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe.
Why would anyone pay that much for something as a simple uplink? We pay about $30/month for unlimited and unthrottled traffic. Our ISP has been in business for 15 years and they don't seem to make a bad cut.
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$100/mo does buy the equivalent of 7Mbit dedicated at a colo (100Mbit burstable connection). $60/month should be enough to buy 4.2Mbit (1.36 terabytes/mo). If you're paying more for a wired connection, you're being ripped off.
So a colo, where hundreds or thousands of customers convene in one centralized location, with massive amounts of infrastructure coming in at huge scales maps exactly pricewise to getting that same bandwidth and pricing to every single house in america.
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Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
>>>"Chronic torrenters use the bandwidth they purchased. The ISPs greedy oversubscribing of their bandwidth shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for."
And yet if they installed a 200GB cap (with an option to buy another 200GB chunk when the first runs-out), then you would bitch about it. Why? Because you want expensive service AND a cheap bill, at the same time. You don't want to actually pay to cover the expense you are incurring. (Like those who complain a 99 cent ebook is too much money so they go swipe the book for free.) (Or demand the power company give-away unlimited electric for $100/month.)
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I'm with Virgin Media and they will throttle you if you use too much bandwidth during the day, so I set up transmission to run full speed overnight and throttle down during the day.
I'd like to see some kind of QOS that lets torrents be marked as less imort
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
why would fibre becoming standard change the thing at all? you see the same argument applies when you're on 64kbit connection and so is everyone else. it does so on 1mbit, it does so on 10mbit and will apply on 100mbit too.
"something in place" could only be not overselling your bandwidth. if they don't want to do that they could start advertising and contracting it as being base speed of say 0.5mbit/s and a burst speed of 10mbit/s for max of one hour.
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"you see the same argument applies when you're on 64kbit connection and so is everyone else."
But that's not so much the case anymore. Larger ISPs, and many of the smaller ones, have moved to tiered pricing plans, depending on the bandwidth they dole out to you.
If they're going to charge for the extra speed, they had better deliver that extra speed, or else it's fraud.
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>>>why would fibre becoming standard change the thing at all?
Because when you have a 1 Gbit/s line you can torrent a movie in just a few seconds. That means the line will be open most of the time & there will be no contention between neighbors. Contrast that with a line that is only 1 Mbit/s and is busy downloading a single movie for hours, and thus not open for other neighbors to surf the web.
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Actually, it does matter. FiOS isn't oversubscribed.
Yet. The fallacy in your argument is that you assume a system capable of providing 1Gbps to each user at the same time all the time. Hardware doesn't work like that. The fibre may depending on how users are allocated and how it's setup, but the routing system certainly can't.
Then there's the fallacy of assuming free time on the fibre due to peak usage being spread over time. It's not, as any mobile data subscriber can tell you the system typically slows to a crawl at 6pm when people come home from work. So
Re:Good, exactly (Score:2)
That's where dowload caps come in. Maybe the ISP's should respeak and say you get x amount of upload and download up to some g amount of gb per some unit of time and after that your bw is reduced for some period of time to give everyone else some of the bw THEY purchased. Which, "hey hey" is what they are actually doing, but don't tell you.
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Yes they were, in the 90s.
However, they just pocketed the money and ran.
"We cant possibly keep track of every dollar that enters our enterprise!" they proclaim.
So, basically Unckey Sam just gave them a several billion dollar windfall to feed to boardmembers and investors.
But the ISPs are "clearly" victims here. Clearly.
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Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
"They deliberately throttle down traffic they feel is associated to pirating."
I think you mean filesharing, not pirating. They are not the same things. Pirating is a crime, filesharing is not. Look it up. Copyright "pirating" has been a specific legal term for close to 100 years. It's amazing how many people have come to misuse it in just the last few. Of course, we have the "content industry" to thank for that propaganda.
In any case, here's the problem: first off, throttling filesharing requires deep packet inspection, which is very undesirable and may be illegal in some circumstances. Second, throttling regardless of what is being sent or received is illegal in the United States. Comcast has already been chastised by the FCC for that. I don't recall exactly, but I think they made a settlement and agreed not to throttle, in order to stay out of litigation (which Comcast would almost certainly have lost).
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"I haven't seen any evidence that my ISP throttles File Sharing. I can download legit Torrent files very quickly, but try downloading a movie and it's almost impossible..."
Downloading a movie is filesharing. It is NOT "piracy"!!!
"Piracy" is a legal term, and it means copying and distributing copyrighted works for profit.
Close to zero percent of the people uploading and downloading files via P2P are "pirates"... that would defeat their whole purpose.
I'm not picking, this is an important point!!! Filesharing (uploading/downloading via P2P) is a civil infraction. Piracy is a crime. In some cases, a very serious crime.
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Although not always the case, ssh is usually interactive. Lag in typing or editing across a slowed ssh connection is horrible.
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Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
In my country (Slovenia) not a single person has ever received a letter of complaint from the ISP (ISPs got several from US, but they trash it instead to harass their users), no one was ever throttled and the line always, without a single exception, delivers the promised speed.
Only people living in rural areas experience internet problems due to old infrastructure, in towns the downtime are limited to a couple of hours a year and it happens only during the night.
P.S: I live in a town of 10.000 people, so size doesn't matter when it come to Internet prices. So if you pay more and get less you only have to blame the greed of your ISP provider.
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No, you dipshits, if that was the case, some of the provinces east of Ontario wouldn't have 100/100 connections in cities of 1000 people for less than $100/m. If "horrible" population density was really the case, Toronto, which contains 1/6th of the population of Canada in a tiny* city, would have unlimited, unf
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>>> It's no different from the morons who go on about population density in Canada being the reason for ancient speeds and horrible prices.
It makes no sense to compare apples to oranges (a northern continent-spanning country versus a little teeny-tiny Slovenia in the heart of civilization). When you compare the WHOLE of the European Union versus the whole of the Canadian Confederation, you will see that Canada is only 2 Mbit/s slower (average speed). You will also find Canada is faster than Mexic
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"It's no different from the morons who go on about population density in Canada being the reason for ancient speeds and horrible prices."
They're not morons. They are at least partly correct.
The majority of the cost of the infrastructure isn't the backbone (which runs from city to city), but the hubs and the infamous "last mile". And your bandwidth depends on the quality of the infrastructure.
That last mile is far more expensive in sparsely populated, rural areas. THAT is why population density matters. It doesn't matter so much anymore how remote the city is, as long as it's a city.
Throughout the U.S., there are strong correlations
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Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
High bandwidth users encourage infrastructure investment which gets you the speeds you have today. You could have made the same argument about MP3s back in the 56K days, and if it prevailed then we'd all still be on dialup speeds.
We should all pay the same for the same access to the network, and we should all use as much of it as we need. If the network isn't sufficient for that, we should all invest in a faster network.
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>>>Your desire to attain every single movie released in the past 30 years in high def shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for.
Well this was why I support usage-based billing. Say $30 for the first 200GB and then $10 for each additional 200GB bracket. Make them pay for their high use of the lines. (Just as people who use more water or electricity or natural gas pay more.)
BTW verizon has never throttled my torrent download. Of course I'm only using 700k
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on. These ISP are throttling (buying technologies to limit bandwidth in both directions) rather than spending to increase their bandwidth (building out their infrastructure). If the did that they'd be satisfying customers and not restricting everyone. People that torrent and use a lot of bandwidth are doing so because that's what they bought, and they deserve to be able to use it. Because these ISPs sold you a bill of goods that stated your bandwidth is X amount and then set it up to share in your neighborhood, then turned around and started throttling you, doesn't make the torrenter the bad guy.
What does it take to get you guys to understand: They sold you bandwidth, then limited you by sharing that same connection with those in your neighborhood, when you started using it by downloading via torrents they began throttling you because others in your neighborhood couldn't use the bandwidth they sold them, then they capped your usage. Seriously, that's a massive bait and switch. These guys should be held legally liable.
Comcast should not be throttling anything. That was part of their agreement to buy NBC Universal.
It is not the torrenters, it is the ISPs not advancing their technologies and building it out, rather they want to soak up the big bucks by ever increasing the cost of the services that they hobbled (as per above). Look at what Google did: $70.00 (+ $300 connection fee) and you get a gigabit upload and download without caps. Given time we should see more of Google's offerings in other cities. Comcast, et al, you are on notice. And let's not forget what almost every other country in the world has done by offering massive increases in bandwidth and no caps.
Re: (Score:2)
"That was part of their agreement to buy NBC Universal."
That's right. I knew it was an agreement with the FCC, but my memory was not complete. I was thinking that the FCC was threatening litigation. Instead, they wanted to prevent Comcast from discriminating based on where the content was coming from... as they are now doing with their game content.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, they are guaranteed. Google has been able to accomplish this because they have used new technologies that have brought down the cost of implementation significantly. The US's established ISPs have not even begun to re-invest. They want to suck the bucks out of everyone for as long as they can.
The rest of the world offers significantly higher speeds than the US and you don't hear their customer base complaining that their services are being hobbled. And stop muddying the waters with superfluou
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Chronic torrenters use a disproportionately high amount of bandwidth compared to other people. Your desire to attain every single movie released in the past 30 years in high def shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for.
How about your desire to watch movies via Netflix? My typical internet usage doesn't involve watching videos/movies.
Netflix accounts for 24.71 percent of Internet traffic, Add another 9.85% for Youtube. So shouldn't we be throttling all you people who consume obscene amounts of bandwidth watching video on demand? BitTorrent only 17.23 percent.
Re: (Score:3)
The routers should be configured such that when 100 users are moving data at a given moment then each user's data moves through the link at the lesser of 1/100th of total speed of the link or the greatest speed at which the link feeding the user's data into this one is sending it. (Actually, when you consider the links that some of the other 99 users's data is coming in at are probably not coming in at 1/100th the speed of this link the others can be sped up to greater than 1/100th to take a
Re: (Score:2)
Traffic shaping in all regards is a bad thing. A car analogy would be where the manufacturer says that the cars will drive on average 400,000 miles when in reality they hobbled the car so as to only get an average of 100,000 miles, doing so because the roads are too crowded.
Traffic shaping in all regards is a bad thing. These ISPs should be increasing their services and reducing prices. The onus has been passed from the ISP to the consumer. Instead of capping and throttling the ISPs should be building o