Verizon Boosts FiOS Uploads To Match Downloads 234
An anonymous reader writes Verizon is boosting the upload speeds of nearly all its FiOS connections to match the download speeds, greatly shortening the time it takes to send videos and back up files online. All new subscribers will get "symmetrical" connections. If you previously were getting 15 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up, you'll be automatically upgraded for no extra cost to 15/15. Same goes if you were on their 50/25 plan: You'll now be upgraded to 50/50. And if you had 75/35? You guessed it: Now it'll be 75 down, and 75 up.
What about (Score:2, Funny)
The 150/75 plan? What will my upload speed be???
Re:What about (Score:5, Insightful)
Actual: 112/112
Re:What about (Score:5, Funny)
Unless you have netflix.
Then it's the 400k/112MB plan.
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Given that Lvel3 and Verizon are currently holding PR-offs over their peering, this may be related to that. Verizon says "The peering is not symmetrical so L3 should pay us for all the data they are pushing [sic] over our network." L3's response is that Verizon is NOT a symmetrical peer and never can be because their end is full of consumers that pull more data and don't even have upload capability as fast as the download capability.
Verizon's solution? This change, then say "Look! We're symmetrical! Now p
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Sounds like there is a simple solution to that for Netflix.
Have their application send outgoing packets to an IP on their ISP which just get fed to the bit bucket by the border router. So, if you download a movie at 2Mbps, the client sends random data at 4Mbps back. That forces your ISP to upload more than it downloads, and thus they have to negotiate peering.
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This is fiber. I don't have Verizon myself, but in general everything people complain about in regards to ISPs goes away once you're fiber. They'd have to have some pretty serious congestion issues for FiOS to start having trouble.
Along that same line though, I've no idea why they had asymmetric on fiber to begin with. The point to ADSL (Asymmetric DSL) has to do with crosstalk on the copper lines in the DSLAM. This isn't an issue, at all, for Fiber. So it makes little sense to have asymmetric fiber service
Re:What about (Score:5, Informative)
And Verizon customer service is a complete joke. They don't even understand that it is their compression causing the problems, and their only solution when you call to complain is to reboot the cable box. After never less than 35 minutes on hold, then 30-50 minutes working with the idiot in Mumbai, then getting "accidentally" disconnected... makes me want to scream.
But the 75/35 is pretty flash.
Re:What about (Score:4, Insightful)
> The biggest issue I have with Verizon Fios is the TV service. All of the video channels are so compressed that you inevitably get pixelation and tearing. This is particularly infuriating when it happens during playback for video on demand shows that you are paying extra for.
I think this is pretty much true no matter what the medium. We've noticed high compression rates on satellite (both dish and directv), Comcast (awhile back...) and FIOS. We finally dumped cable entirely. For what network TV my family still watches, we have a big antenna pointing at the TV towers on the ridge over there. The signal is head and shoulders over anything I've seen from cable or dish, with the possible exception of sports on dish (for which additional bandwidth is allowed).
I guess my learning from all of this is that traditional real time TV, with the possible exception of direct off-air broadcasts, just haven't moved with the times. There are no doubt business reasons for this, but it calls into question, why cable at all? High cost for low quality? Just say no.
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but it calls into question, why cable at all?
I can think of three reasons:
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> Someone is a fan of a particular talk show host on one of the cable "news" channels.
Depending on which program you're talking about, it might be available via streaming, perhaps for a fee.
> Someone watches sporting events that aren't shown OTA and are blacked out online because they're on cable.
My wife is a football and basketball fanatic. For blacked out shows, she goes to sports bars. The rest she watches either OTA online. One year she got the DirecTV football ticket, and was very upset at the
Go away, you're not 21 (Score:2)
Depending on which program you're talking about, it might be available via streaming, perhaps for a fee.
The programs are Morning Joe, The Rachel Maddow Show, and Monday Night Football. Is there a (legal) live stream of MSNBC and ESPN sold separately from pay TV?
For blacked out shows, she goes to sports bars.
That's great for people with no kids under 21.
This is a leftover from what I call the "tv tray generation", people who watch TV shows on the content provider's schedule, with commercials.
There are plenty of "TV tray generation" people in my family. Some are unwiling to spend an extra $180 per year for TiVo service. But I was referring to things like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, where one may have to actively avoid spoilers that come up in casual conversation at work.
Usually (but admittedly not always) there's a way to get internet without also having to get cable.
Internet without pa
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> But I was referring to things like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, where one may have to actively avoid spoilers that come up in casual conversation at work.
Netflix. (I must be one of the only people on earth who doesn't watch either Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. But I know people who are addicted, and I'm told the experience is much better when binge-watching. Major advantage: No cliff-hangers.)
I mean, Breaking Bad is off the air, isn't it?
>> Usually (but admittedly not always) [...]
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My local OTA channels are just as heavily compressed as the cable channels. Local stations are able to fit multiple subchannels into one regular channel, and to accomplish this, they reduce the bandwidth of the main channel. We're left with an overcompressed main channel and two amateur quality subchannels that show local ads and weather which earns the local station some extra income. It's going to get worse with everyone trying to cram more channels into their transmission medium without adding more he
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Regarding OTA, one's mileage may vary. I watch very little TV, but as a geek I'm interested a bit in the technical side, and observe that our OTA channels are much sharper than any cable/satellite service we've ever had (and we've had everything that's been available, because wife and daughter are pretty much addicted). But I concede that I've not looked everywhere, and it might be different elsewhere.
But you bring up a good point. I felt back when HD was being heavily promoted that there was a really go
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What are you comparing this to? The television signal on FIOS is superior to almost every other cable company since FIOS is one of the only services that sends the original stream and not a recompressed video. If you think the FIOS video signal is bad, you should try Comcast or, even worse, one of the satellite networks.
Re:What about (Score:5, Informative)
This is fiber. I don't have Verizon myself, but in general everything people complain about in regards to ISPs goes away once you're fiber. They'd have to have some pretty serious congestion issues for FiOS to start having trouble.
It matters not how fast your download speed from your ISP is if said ISP's connection to the content [level3.com] you are requesting isn't able to deliver it.
Along that same line though, I've no idea why they had asymmetric on fiber to begin with. The point to ADSL (Asymmetric DSL) has to do with crosstalk on the copper lines in the DSLAM. This isn't an issue, at all, for Fiber. So it makes little sense to have asymmetric fiber service other than for marketing purposes.
Consumer ISP's are all about getting content to you. They don't want you throwing up a server at your house to stream data to the ethers. They want you to stream media from them. So much so most have U NO RUN SERVER clauses in their TOS. An asynchronous connection allows them to advertise higher bandwidth "download" speeds and keeps those nasty server runners with paltry pipes to get their filth up to the internet.
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Symmetrical? (Score:3, Insightful)
But they'll throttle my uploads to Netflix, right?
Re:Symmetrical? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah. Wouldn't be awesome of Netflix enabled a P2P client on the Verizon network? They should do it. The technology exists. It would be glorious.
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Yeah. Wouldn't be awesome of Netflix enabled a P2P client on the Verizon network? They should do it. The technology exists. It would be glorious.
If Netflix won't do it, the hackerites will do it for them sooner or later. They should get on it.
Re:Symmetrical? (Score:5, Interesting)
I built that network (Pando Networks) a few years ago. The content companies were generally pretty slow to adopt p2p technology, but game companies are all over it. One pleasant aspect was that the advantage of p2p wasn't just economics, though those were great, it was performance. Because downloading from dozens of sources is much more resilient, and on good networks more performant, than downloading from one source. And, with an intelligent network, it could connect you with peers that are close to you in the network, reducing network congestion at the interconnects by 80%. When we ran a large scale test across all the major ISPs, we in fact saw that p2p clients were able to reduce inter-ISP data exchanges (for the p2p network) by 80%, simply through intelligent peer selection, which ISPs loved, and download performance was better, which downloaders loved.
And symmetric fiber networks are awesome at p2p.
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I posit that there really is a lot of overlap. I'd be willing to bet that the 80/20 rule applies at the border routers, with 80% of viewers accessing the same 20% of the content. Imagine the days/weeks when a new season of Orange Is The New Black is released, for example.
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Thank Google, not Verizon (Score:3, Interesting)
They still have a long way to go to catch up to gigabit up/down though.
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I don't know about gigabit, but Steam has no problems maxing out my 150Mbps downstream link when I'm downloading games from a nearby server here in Switzerland.
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Start watching movies in HD (Apple TV, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video) and it'll consume any connection. Then have each of your kids watch their own video streams in their rooms...
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Sure you might max it out but not for very long unless you're downloading games 24/7 and even then you would run out of either drive space or games to download.
In in short burst you could max it out but for your everyday average user, it will never be maxed for more than 15 or so minutes.
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>I personally don't see what the point of Gigabit speeds at home are.
Moving data. When I'm moving a 1TB file of binary data, I would prefer I didn't have to leave it running overnight.
I do this every few weeks. As it stands I usually end up using walknet with a hard disk, but that doesn't work when the onward journey is to the other side of the county.
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When I'm moving a 1TB file of binary data, I would prefer I didn't have to leave it running overnight. I do this every few weeks.
What's wrong with having a periodic backup of 1 TB of data run overnight?
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I would be curious how many residential users need to move 1TB of data this often. This doesn't include torrented movies.
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So who pays who? (Score:3)
biggest problem with upload is you send it over free links with Tier 1 networks, or you pay them to take your traffic. with all the user generated stuff now like Twitch, flickr, video calling and other services where you want a fast upload speed that's a lot of data to be paying for.
with the current L3/Verizon dispute i wonder if they struck a deal where verizon will allow the connections to be upgraded for netflix to work on their network in exchange for L3 taking all their uploaded data for free.
Re:So who pays who? (Score:4, Interesting)
biggest problem with upload is you send it over free links with Tier 1 networks, or you pay them to take your traffic. with all the user generated stuff now like Twitch, flickr, video calling and other services where you want a fast upload speed that's a lot of data to be paying for.
with the current L3/Verizon dispute i wonder if they struck a deal where verizon will allow the connections to be upgraded for netflix to work on their network in exchange for L3 taking all their uploaded data for free.
Hmm...that actually makes for an interesting case.
So Level3 basically pointed out the issue with User focused ISP's - that they're asymetric and would never provide the ability for those ISPs to compete in the peering arrangements that back-bone providers have. So now if they go to being symetric, it would allow the users to do more and possibly try to combat what the ISP (e.g Verizon) thinks is a fallacy but they can only prove if they make all their links symetric.
Problem for the ISP is users don't really upload a whole lot any way. So it's not going to change anything for a while. It may get Level3 to drop the "symetric vs asymetric" part of their argument, but it won't change the amount of traffic going from the ISP to back-bone provider.
What will be telling is if they do the same to the DSL customers in the near future as well. Otherwise they are still primarily an asymetric provider as they have more DSL than FiOS customers.
Question is: Will Verizon only do this temporarily as part of an argument with Level3? If so, expect a change in the future when their plan doesn't work out. If not, then hopefully other ISPs will follow in order to "compete".
Cost of physically implementing SHDSL (Score:2)
What will be telling is if they do the same to the DSL customers in the near future as well.
DSL works over high frequencies in existing copper phone lines. Far more physical bandwidth is typically allocated to the downstream than to the upstream. Balancing this out would reduce download speeds in favor of upload speeds. Are you sure implementing SHDSL [wikipedia.org] wouldn't require rolling trucks and mailing modems?
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What will be telling is if they do the same to the DSL customers in the near future as well.
DSL works over high frequencies in existing copper phone lines. Far more physical bandwidth is typically allocated to the downstream than to the upstream. Balancing this out would reduce download speeds in favor of upload speeds. Are you sure implementing SHDSL [wikipedia.org] wouldn't require rolling trucks and mailing modems?
Except Businesses have had access to higher speed symetric DSL for a lot longer; though that's typically a dedicated line instead of one sharing its bandwidth with a voice line.
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For a company like L3 it won't matter much either way as the data providers that they link to the data consumers are spread around thier network and peers. So thier data haluage is probably fairly well balanced. Thier peering with consumer ISPs is highly biased but also distributed pretty well around thier network in most places.
Consumer plans only? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Consumer plans only? (Score:4, Informative)
That's my big question.... I went with a business acct so I could get static IP's instead of playing silly games with dynamic dns hosting crap....
I'm gonna be so pissed if they say "residential only"...
Re:Consumer plans only? (Score:5, Informative)
See the press release here:
http://newscenter.verizon.com/corporate/news-articles/2014/07-21-fios-upload-speed-upgrade/
Short answer: new and existing business customers will be getting it too "later this year".
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That's a useful and informative link and it's being modded down?
Sucks that I get it "later this year" with no real specification on when. Also makes me irritated that I can't upgrade past the 75mbit plan currently. ;)
As a FiOS customer, this would matter to me ... (Score:5, Interesting)
As a FiOS customer this would matter to me if Verizon wasn't actively trying to extort money from Tier 1 providers.
Re:As a FiOS customer, this would matter to me ... (Score:4, Interesting)
As a not-FiOS customer this would matter to me if Verizon was ever planning to expand their build-out past its current boundaries.
Verizon CFO Fran Shammo recently [March 2014] told folks at a Deutsche Bank conference on telecom services that âoeI am not going to build beyond the current LSAs (local service acquistions) that we have built out.â
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Then why keep the L3 pipes flooded?
Oh right, money.
Good for Netflix (Score:5, Funny)
Now all Netflix needs to do is get a FiOS account at their house.
Oh no (Score:2)
When my FiOS went from 25/25 to 50/25, my measured rate went from 25/25 to 60/40! I hope that with this "update", I don't end up being downgraded to 50/50.
While I welcome any increase in bandwidth... (Score:2, Interesting)
A more valuable gift would be continue the lack of symmetry, and bump existing download & upload speeds by some percentage. Until Netflix becomes P2P, most
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How else are they gonna get all the constant live-streaming from your various computer & console webcams & microphones up the pipe without you noticing?
happy users! (Score:2)
Both Verizon FIOS users were reportedly very happy (other than their experience using Netflix).
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This...
Last I heard, Verizon was scaling back / had stopped expanding their FiOS network. Is that still the case?
While this is great news for current FiOS subscribers, it means fuck all to the rest of us who do not, and likely will not ever have, FiOS.
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Both Verizon FIOS users were reportedly very happy (other than their experience using Netflix).
Really? I live outside the city (as in no water or gas infrastructure) and I still have FiOS, here in Northern Virginia.
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Both Verizon FIOS users were reportedly very happy (other than their experience using Netflix).
Really? I live outside the city (as in no water or gas infrastructure) and I still have FiOS, here in Northern Virginia.
Yeah, they apparently weren't able to roll out FIOS to anything other than outlying suburbs across most of the U.S. Not very many people are able to get FIOS, and they stopped expanding their service area a few years ago, and even sold off parts of their fiber network to other companies in certain markets. If you aren't in a FIOS service area now, you probably never will be.
Comcast? Where Are You Comcast? (Score:2)
.
Will Comcast catch up to Verizon? If so, when?
OMG! Competition?! (Score:2)
Wow, I wonder, if my fellow citizens of the command-and-control persuasion still think, the government mandating the higher speeds would've been more effective in delivering the bandwidth to consumers...
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Comcast actually does beat Verizon on residential services, at least when it comes to download speeds. The top FiOS residential plan is 75 down, the top Comcast plan is 100 down.
Last I checked, Verizon's 500mbps download (as part of the 500/500 symmetrical) is larger than the 100mbps download you cite from Comcast.
What about extending FIOS to us DSL users? (Score:3)
Call me when I can get more than 3 Mbps. Bastards.
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Completely agree. FiOS is 1/8th mile away from my house but they won't bring it the last couple hundred feet. I'd be stuck on ADSL, but I am using 100+ GB/month on my unlimited data, symmetrical 30 Mbps LTE, tethering my 5 GHz 802.11ac smartphone (Galaxy S5) to my 5 GHz 802.11ac wifi adapter on my computer. I uploaded an hour-long HD video to youtube yesterday in about an hour. If Verizon Wireless doesn't want me tying up ~40% of the bandwidth on the local tower, they're more than welcome to ask their non-W
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Doesn't your phone provider get cranky about your "unlimited" use of the 4G?
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Sounds like you need to strike up a deal with one of your neighbors, to sign-up for FIOS and host a WiFi AP aimed towards your house for you. Give them free internet access (throttled when you're maxing it out) or just a few dollars more than the bill, and you'll both come out ahead.
Do we want to know why this change breaks Fark? (Score:2)
Still won't play Netflix (Score:4, Informative)
The problem isn't in the upstream, it's in the downstream. Specifically their L3 interconnects.
Can't suck your data fast enough (Score:2)
And if you're in the vast FIOS-free zones... (Score:3)
...you'll be upgraded to pound sand with both hands.
North Carolina was promised FIOS "real soon now" for years. At this point, it's pretty clear that if you don't already have it, you won't be getting it. Google blimps, drones, and sewer lines will bring us high-speed broadband long before Verizon significantly extends their buildout.
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Not true here. It was quite a while after their announced buildout freeze that FIOS became available here. A neighboring city had it for a while, and since then, it has expanded a few cities away, and filled-in all the coverage gaps, too.
Frankly, I hate FIOS, because they immediately take away nice cheap DSL as an option. Why the hell does my mother need to pay $65/month for the slowest FIOS package, when she's ne
No Extra Cost? I doubt it (Score:4, Insightful)
75M upload? (Score:2)
Now my online backup service will smash into my monthly usage cap in the first hour it runs.
What about existing 25/25 (Score:2)
My current plan is 25/25. Looking at the press release, I don't see any upgrade for that plan.
And still no IPv6... (Score:2)
They claimed that residential customers could have IPv6 2 years ago.
My God (Score:2)
I've wanted FiOS for such a long time -- despite the unfortunate circumstance of necessitating becoming a Verizon customer. Now, I may move just so I can have it...
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I.e., it's not available in my area, currently (or likely ever).
Sure enough (Score:2)
Forcing a $5/mo router on you, too. (Score:2)
Whatever price Verizon says it'll give you for FIOS, add $5/mo for the router rental that's forced on you, for absolutely no reason.
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Conditional access in a P2P environment (Score:2)
Imagine if those peoples' Netflix client said "The Verizon gateway to L3 seems congested. Enable P2P?"
And before you start thinking "MPAA would never agree", Netflix could encrypt each frame of video with a different AES key and stream those to the subscribers.
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He should run the VPN in a VM and not on his main host, to avoid this dumb VPN client from hijacking his traffic.
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But the corporate official VPN uses some strange protocol. Once the VPN is connected ALL the traffic from the local machine will go the corporate VPN host.
It's not the VPN protocol, his VPN software changes the default route. He should change it back to the Verizon IP after connecting to the VPN and set an explicit route for the VPN lan (making a script with the settings would be easiest)
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But the corporate official VPN uses some strange protocol. Once the VPN is connected ALL the traffic from the local machine will go the corporate VPN host.
This isn't strange, it is considering SOP for most corporations to ban "split-tunneling", where only traffic to the corporate network are sent over VPN.
It also isn't a protocol, it is just a default route to send all traffic over the VPN.
The theory is that by allowing someone to have unfiltered access at the same time as they are connected to the internal corporate network, they are creating a security risk.
The reality is that the "crunchy outside, warm gooey inside" security model as been broken for some t
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The theory is that by allowing someone to have unfiltered access at the same time as they are connected to the internal corporate network, they are creating a security risk.
Isn't this also true of someone who owns one PC connected to the VPN and one PC with a direct connection?
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All the companies I've worked for didn't allow a split-tunnel VPN from corporate laptops.
Split-tunnel pretty much kills the whole point of using a VPN.
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All the companies I've worked for didn't allow a split-tunnel VPN from corporate laptops.
Split-tunnel pretty much kills the whole point of using a VPN.
Depends on what you're doing. I allow a split-tunnel into my home VPN because I use that VPN connection strictly to access internal resources remotely. I have no need to route all my web traffic through my home connection when all I want to do is SSH into a box, or copy a file off a network share or something like that. When I am on the road and on an untrusted connection, I just VPN into the home network and run RDP and use the remote machine to access online banking, email, or other services.
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All the companies I've worked for didn't allow a split-tunnel VPN from corporate laptops.
Split-tunnel pretty much kills the whole point of using a VPN.
Depends on what you're doing. I allow a split-tunnel into my home VPN because I use that VPN connection strictly to access internal resources remotely. I have no need to route all my web traffic through my home connection when all I want to do is SSH into a box, or copy a file off a network share or something like that. When I am on the road and on an untrusted connection, I just VPN into the home network and run RDP and use the remote machine to access online banking, email, or other services.
Sorry, I thought we were talking about corporate networks and didn't think it was necessary to describe all the different ways in which a VPN might be used.
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All the companies I've worked for didn't allow a split-tunnel VPN from corporate laptops.
Split-tunnel pretty much kills the whole point of using a VPN.
Depends on what you're doing. I allow a split-tunnel into my home VPN because I use that VPN connection strictly to access internal resources remotely. I have no need to route all my web traffic through my home connection when all I want to do is SSH into a box, or copy a file off a network share or something like that. When I am on the road and on an untrusted connection, I just VPN into the home network and run RDP and use the remote machine to access online banking, email, or other services.
Sorry, I thought we were talking about corporate networks and didn't think it was necessary to describe all the different ways in which a VPN might be used.
Well, I suppose the point I am trying to make is there may be corporate edge cases where they want split tunnel. In general, most employees aren't smart enough to realize when to use what, and so the best policy from an IT perspective is to keep the user from shooting themselves in the foot with the VPN. Hell I've known IT people who weren't smart enough to configure the VPN properly to force traffic through the connection, and then failed to properly test whether traffic was leaking out of the tunnel.
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Which is why "split-tunnel pretty much kills the whole point of using a VPN".
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All the companies I've worked for didn't allow a split-tunnel VPN from corporate laptops.
Split-tunnel pretty much kills the whole point of using a VPN.
That's from the corporate IT point of view.
From my own machine point of view, having all my traffic routed to my employer kills the whole point of having a fast Internet connection.
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I hope all Internet service company in the world to adopt this fair service to all their customers. No more upload limit :)
"Fair" is a very subjective word. Who says it is fair to have everyone paying for service that they wont' use? Most people don't need the same upstream speed as they need down. Not even those who are using Netflix or downloading large Linux distributions need the same up as down. Only those sending out large amounts of data will see any difference, and that's only if the transmission is monitored in real-time and not just a background task.
As someone else pointed out, this change will make very little dif
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Only those sending out large amounts of data will see any difference
You mean like video conferencing or video game streaming from a PC or PlayStation family game console? Doing that in high definition takes a lot of upstream throughput.
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"Fair" is a very subjective word. Who says it is fair to have everyone paying for service that they wont' use? Most people don't need the same upstream speed as they need down. Not even those who are using Netflix or downloading large Linux distributions need the same up as down. Only those sending out large amounts of data will see any difference, and that's only if the transmission is monitored in real-time and not just a background task.
As someone else pointed out, this change will make very little difference in the load imbalance at the peering points since most people aren't hitting an upload limit to start with.
It seems to me that providing symmetric high-speed connections is critical to the future of free speech, innovation, creative output and communications the world over.
When I can serve up my documentary on government malfeasance and allow dozens, if not hundreds of other people to pull my content easily -- and those folks can then host it for tens or hundreds of thousands more people, it becomes much harder for the "big lie" to succeed.
When I can host my own "social network" that links to those people I give
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When I can serve up my documentary on government malfeasance and allow dozens, if not hundreds of other people to pull my content easily -- and those folks can then host it for tens or hundreds of thousands more people, it becomes much harder for the "big lie" to succeed.
Then you would not have agreed to a service that prohibits you from running a server, which every residential service I've seen does. However, the point remains, charging me extra for service I don't need so you can have what you claim is critical to your right to free speech doesn't seem to be fair at all.
I could go on, but if you don't get the idea by now, you're probably brain-dead.
I get the idea that you become insulting when someone doesn't value symmetric data service as much as you do. Was there another point, because if there was your insulting tone did a good job of masking
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I went to Verizon's site to check on this for my account. Here's what I got:
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So essentially Verizon tells you to share movies and music to hurt Netflix that way.
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IMO, it's Verizon (finally) getting smart and taking advantage of their superior fiber network, giving their customers symmetric bandwidth that cable providers can't provide. Cable companies built a cheaper infrastructure, that physically can't provide as much uplink as downlink. So if Verizon can get people to value symmetric bandwidth, instead of just downlink, suddenly they have the winning network!
Netflix could go P2P (Score:2)
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$30/month is enough to get me not only a uncapped 100/100mb line, but a dedicated server/seedbox running at high utilization 24/7 too.
"The last mile is expensive", yadda yadda, sure, but there has to be more than a bit of price gouging here.
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This statement just reeks of "noob".
The trolling (and gaming of mod and m2) was VASTLY higher in the early /. days. At certain points, it really was crushing any legitimate discussions. You have no idea how good you've got it, on that account.
Slashdot is dying because of Dice, nothing else.
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6. FiOS TV requires a box.
7. FiOS TV requires a box.
8. All providers offering premium channels have to encrypt. This has been true since the days of analog cable. Blame the channels.
10. You think FiOS boxes run free software?
11. is just 3 restated so we can strike it.
12. The first thing Bell Atlantic did when it became Verizon was buy GTE. Later it bought Alltel.