ISP Breaking Net Neutrality? The FCC's Got a Complaint Form For That 99
Presto Vivace writes with news from The Consumerist that the FCC has updated its consumer help center with a revamped form for complaining about an unsatisfactory ISP. From the article: Among the issues concerned consumers can complain about, the form now contains "open internet/net neutrality," right there alphabetically between "interference" and "privacy." So what, specifically, qualifies as a net neutrality violation you can complain about? The FCC has guidance for that, too. In general, paraphrased, it's a problem if there's:
Blocking: ISPs may not block access to any lawful content, apps, services, or devices.
Throttling: ISPs may not slow down or degrade lawful internet traffic from any content, apps, sites, services, or devices.
Paid prioritization: ISPs may not enter into agreements to prioritize and benefit some lawful internet traffic over the rest of it on their networks.
Blocking: ISPs may not block access to any lawful content, apps, services, or devices.
Throttling: ISPs may not slow down or degrade lawful internet traffic from any content, apps, sites, services, or devices.
Paid prioritization: ISPs may not enter into agreements to prioritize and benefit some lawful internet traffic over the rest of it on their networks.
Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? (Score:5, Interesting)
What is the best list of ISP monitoring software, services, or related techniques to detect, collect information on, and work around these kinds of problems?
Has anyone created an automated test, detection, and complain system that uses minimal resources?
Re: Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with having a single such tool is that the ISPs will prioritize traffic generated by it, just like they do with speedtest.net etc.
How would you work around that without implementing measures that make the measurement of net neutrality related parameters impossible? VPN, for instance, would stop the ISP from prioritizing the measurement tool's data, but it would also prevent any of the potentially Net Neutrality threatening QoS/Blocking you're trying to measure in the first place. Any ideas?
Re: Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? (Score:4, Informative)
The good news is most decent traffic shaping algorithms are very CPU intensive relative to the amount of bandwidth an ISP's core network must handle and the algorithms do not scale well with the number isolated groups. In other words, you should be able to detect jitter and avg ping increases.
Re:Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I just wait for an ISP to spoof that form and make sure that any filed complaints "get lost".
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So is there a form for the ISP (Score:5, Informative)
I really want to know so I can get people flagged for making false statements to that effect. We don't have a firewall at all on our internet customers. Its wide open and has been for years. We found throttling ports was self defeating in that the torrent hoarders used encryption and other means to hide their activity anyway. The filter we had was actually causing an additional 30ms of latency and I have missed it at all.
Re:So is there a form for the ISP (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you be throttling ports? There's nothing illegal about using torrents.
Sounds like these people are simply using the service they paid for.
Re:So is there a form for the ISP (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you be throttling ports? There's nothing illegal about using torrents.
Sounds like these people are simply using the service they paid for.
Assume you have more demand for bandwidth than you have bandwidth.
Now assume person A is trying to look up the calendar at the local courthouse and person B is downloading an iso.
Person A should be prioritized over person B both on a theoretical shortest-job-first basis and on a human court-is-more-important-than-porn level.
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Then Maybe you shouldn't have Oversold your Capacity?
Re: So is there a form for the ISP (Score:2)
So, net netrality will result in price increases or degraded services across the board. And non-leachers will subsidise leachers.
Doesn't sound very neutral to me, seems biased against non-leachers.
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Net neutrality doesn't mean ISPs have to sell "unlimited data" deals. Put a 30 GB monthly cap on the lower priced service plan and let the people just looking for court information use that while the guy downloading ISOs all the time pays for a premium plan.
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So now you are in the hands of all the Ad spammers instead and other malicious people spamming your IP with traffic. Of course - the ISP will not block that because it means that they can "upsell" their services.
Paying for bandwidth is a different way of solving this. As long as it is equal regardless of accessed service it's not a problem with net neutrality. Then customers requesting high bandwidth can pay for it.
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Cost wise, a customer consuming 1TB via torrent is about the same as one consuming 100Gb via Netflix.
This may have been the case before Net neutrality.
Most high speed dedicated links are billed based on 95th percentile, which means the peak 1.5hours.
Before net neutrality, it was feasible to limit the peak, and have torrents consume the unused capacity off-peak. With net neutrality, this isn't as practical.
(I work for an ISP in a region that doesn't have 95th-percentile billing, we have to provision/pay capacity for peak demand, even if that is the 8 hours per quarter of iOS release day, or 2 hours per month of Patch Tuesday).
Re: So is there a form for the ISP (Score:4, Informative)
95th-percentile billing, we have to provision/pay capacity for peak demand
My ISP has roughly 6x peak bandwidth and all traffic is transit via Level 3, no CDNs or peering. 100/100 for $90. No caps, ISP claims you should get 100% of your bandwidth 100% of the time, which is why they have 6x peak. Technically 3x peak as live links and 6x because each of those links has a fail over that can be teamed to double bandwidth on request.
A lot of small ISPs complain about similar things as you. Is it a scale thing or a lack of competition? Maybe my ISP is lucky and has access to several trunk options, even out here in the middle of farm land. our first hop is about 250 miles, but takes a 400 mile route. Do you not have access to a decent hub within 250 miles?
Re:So is there a form for the ISP (Score:5, Insightful)
"Assume you have more demand for bandwidth than you have bandwidth."
Translation; Company horribly oversold the bandwidth and is too cheap to buy a bigger pipe.
Re:So is there a form for the ISP (Score:4, Informative)
"Assume you have more demand for bandwidth than you have bandwidth."
Translation; Company horribly oversold the bandwidth and is too cheap to buy a bigger pipe.
Not necessarily. TCP/IP is designed to do congestion control and bandwidth between providers is expensive. You size your pipes to meet your need, but also so that you're not paying for unused bandwidth all the time. The result is that at peak usage your pipes are full, and how much of the time they're full off-peak depends on how you decided to allocate money. It doesn't necessarily make you cheap, but it does mean yeah, money matters to you.
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In this day and age, 100Gb trunks are becoming c
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You are right in some completely asinine and idiotic sense, in that a synchronous interface is always either sending a user payload frame or a pad frame
I was actually going for this, but I didn't get the reason why across very well, but I attempted to explain in the last paragraph. At some really small time frames the link is always at 100% or 0%. The reason I went to this extreme is to make a point that it's only once you start to get to macro level time scales, like milliseconds, that all you care about is averages. At some point you can say "I never have more than 1ms of buffer latency over this link", and that is what you're goal is. You want the laten
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If your 100% full you need more capacity, basic redundancy should allow one edge router to fail at any given time. This is part of the point of 95th percentile billing if you have say 2 providers with the same sized pipe your peak utilization should never exceed 100% of a link, money wise your paying the difference in the per mbs rate and the port cost.
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> Translation; Company horribly oversold the bandwidth and is too cheap to buy a bigger pipe.
Please try again. It's quite common for companies to make very reasonable assumptions that most of their customers will not be using their full bandwidth, unattended, 24x7. So they buy bandwdth from upstream and connecting to the core "tier 3" fiber optic backbones of our country. Then a modest number of Bittorrent users show up, each with 5 TB external drives, filling them 24x7 with thousands of hours of music a
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Topology: My Firewall - ONT - Aggregation switch with zero oversubscription - Core Router - 3 links to Level 3 each pair with a failover. My trace route looks lik
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It's quite common for companies to make very reasonable assumptions that most of their customers will not be using their full bandwidth, unattended, 24x7.
Those assumptions aren't reasonable if they then start complaining about that too many of their customers do exactly that.
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What customers are complaining about is not the inability to to use their full bandwidth 24x7, but the inability to use it for the (relatively short) periods when they want to. The problem is not people using the full bandwidth 24x7, but that there are times (peak period) when more people want to use it than the ISP has provisioned the bandwidth for.
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Reasonable.. you are hilarious.
Overselling 1000 to 1 IS NOT REASONABLE to anyone but a Low IQ MBA.
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"Assume you have more demand for bandwidth than you have bandwidth."
Translation; Company horribly oversold the bandwidth and is too cheap to buy a bigger pipe.
Its not a question of cheapness, or under capacity. If the peak occurs for 5 minutes in the day, and then there is only 40% utilisation of the network, do you add 50% capacity for the 5 minutes per day. Consider the slowdown during the 5 minutes as being a factor of 5 or 10 versus normal non peak response times.
I think that the dowloading of an iso file should be throttled. Perhaps in place of x bits per second download, it is x/2 per second. or perhaps the wget, curl, or other download fire transfer sy
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Um... no.
If bandwidth is contended, then you should just use fair queuing. If you have N customers, everyone gets at least 1/N of the total, what's left over is shared equally, repeat until it's all used.
You shouldn't get to decide that one customer's usage is more "important" than another's. If the customer thinks their usage is more important, they should upgrade their plan.
Remember: the internet is based around IP, which doesn't have "ports". TCP and UDP only exist if you're an endpoint, otherwise everyt
Re:So is there a form for the ISP (Score:4, Insightful)
Um... no.
If bandwidth is contended, then you should just use fair queuing. If you have N customers, everyone gets at least 1/N of the total, what's left over is shared equally, repeat until it's all used.
You shouldn't get to decide that one customer's usage is more "important" than another's. If the customer thinks their usage is more important, they should upgrade their plan.
Remember: the internet is based around IP, which doesn't have "ports". TCP and UDP only exist if you're an endpoint, otherwise everything past the IP header is just "payload".
I disagree. I think a system like what you describe is mostly appropriate *after* you provide a certain base level of service to everyone. The person with very-low-bandwidth need should rarely if ever have to wait for the person with the very-high-bandwidth-need, because otherwise you have two people paying the same absolute amount for a service but the one who is using it more is being prioritized. If I pay $20 for as many bagels a week as I want and you pay $20 for as many bagels a week as you want, and I take one bagel a day and you take five hundred, the store should make sure I get my one before you get your five hundredth.
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No its more like you pay $20 a week to be able to get 5 bagels an hour and then someone else pays $20 for 5 an hour as well. That means at minimum the bagel shop should be making 10 bagels an hour to supply what they promised to both customers even if you usually only get 1/hr and only rarely 5 and the other guy uses his full 5/hr most of the time. ( we aren't taking into account the fact bagels go bad this is bandwidth nor food) If they can't make enough bagels they shouldn't promise that many.
Re:So is there a form for the ISP (Score:4, Insightful)
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If bandwidth is contended, then you should just use fair queuing. If you have N customers, everyone gets at least 1/N of the total, what's left over is shared equally, repeat until it's all used.
I disagree. I think a system like what you describe is mostly appropriate *after* you provide a certain base level of service to everyone. The person with very-low-bandwidth need should rarely if ever have to wait for the person with the very-high-bandwidth-need, because otherwise you have two people paying the same absolute amount for a service but the one who is using it more is being prioritized. If I pay $20 for as many bagels a week as I want and you pay $20 for as many bagels a week as you want, and I take one bagel a day and you take five hundred, the store should make sure I get my one before you get your five hundredth.
You are missing one major variable.
You're bagel shop analogy has no rate, if instead each customer is only allowed to buy one bagel per minute and the bagel shop has sold the unlimited bagels package to 100 people... then they know that the maximum capacity they must be able to provide is 100 bagels per minute.
Of course It's not reasonable to expect an ISP would ever buy their maximum possible required capacity because they would quickly be out-competed, but if their peak load requires more capacity then us
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Remember: the internet is based around IP, which doesn't have "ports". TCP and UDP only exist if you're an endpoint, otherwise everything past the IP header is just "payload".
No. because then TCP wouldn't work. TCP is a "losering" protocol, and if you mix it with a bunch of other protocols on a network, it intentionally throttles back "losers" to the other traffic on the network, until the congestion is resolved. To avoid excessive losering, ISPs break up traffic into TE classes (Traffic engineering classes), by port, src and dst ip and protocol. We then take each TE class and insert it into an LSP (label switched path), to it's intended exit from our network; from then until it
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sounds like the business should allocate more resources to support both customers equally for the services they paid for.
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Just keep re reading what I posted until you understand what I said. Reading comprehension, how does it work?
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You said something about people getting flags for amusement parks with special effects, something about firing some of your customers but being open about it for years, something about defeating the hordes with the necronomicon and other hideous activities and that your coffee filter was removing 30mg of lipides but you're not missing it at all.
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If people are claiming that you're throttling their torrents they may be having an issue with their service in general that is keeping them from utilizing the connection to the full potential. These issues may be with the customer's own equipment or networking, or indicative of an issue with the service itself.
What is the result of your technical support department's investigations into these issues?
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Because the ISP model (at least in the majority of the US) is to oversubscribe their bandwidth based on the assumption that not everyone will be using it at once. Throttling ports gets around the problem in this model where services run in the absence of users and use as much bandwidth as possible. It ensures a reasonable experience for users actually on line. It's mostly employed in saturated markets and does sometimes decrease speeds to below purchased rates.
I have very limited experience on the ISP side
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Because the ISP model (at least in the majority of the US) is to oversubscribe their bandwidth based on the assumption that not everyone will be using it at once
The entire internet is that way, even dedicated connections. The difference is the amount of oversubscription.
Re: So is there a form for the ISP (Score:2)
Anyone know if this applies to free Wi-Fi? (Score:1)
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I'm pretty sure the end user can filter anything they want. We still maintain a filter on the public parks around here. After all you don't want little johnny to have to ask mommy what the strange man with doing with his thing out on a park bench.
Re: Anyone know if this applies to free Wi-Fi? (Score:2)
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These places are not ISPs, and shouldn't be treated as such. They're businesses offering a service in addition to whatever it was you purchased, so don't be a leach. It costs them money, and if you're one to even think of reporting an establishment offering free WiFi for cutting you off from or throttling your torrent, then fuck you. Go pay for your own connection.
Public libraries may be a different story, however, but I don't think they'd fall under ISP either. They are tax payer funded though, so leac
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Backstory: I'm currently in an apartment building that has one connection for all the residents. When one person gets caught pirating something, it cuts off the connection for everyone
Time to test Comcast (Score:3)
What about Netflix? (Score:1, Interesting)
Does this mean they can stop paying Comcast and others, or demand refunds for the money they extorted from them ?
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I was about to post something about Netflix too, I'm really wondering if Netflix can get back the extortion money they "had" to pay to some ISPs.
Most common response (Score:2, Insightful)
The item you have filed a complaint for was in fact explicitly authorized by "Net Neutrality". Have a nice day.
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Since when was Riot Games an ISP?
The isps are violating (Score:2)
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You mean they're culpable because they initiated a deal like this, before it was against FCC rules?
Is Netflix a bad guy too, because ISP's extorted them into paying for bandwidth their customers are already paying for?
Good Luck with That (Score:2)
report this (Score:1)
Unlawful content? (Score:2, Funny)
It's not very "neutral" if only the lawful content is protected.
I wonder if this can force t-mobile to unfilter me (Score:3)
I'm on t-mobile pay-as-you-go (prepaid, since I hate contracts). unless you 'prove to them you are not a child' (sigh) they treat you like a child and refuse to let you access any non-pg13 site (or whatever they call it). I don't want to have to 'identify' myself and I buy airtime for cash to keep what little is still left of my anon.
to get full web access I'd have to give up my anon. this seems unfair. I'm a paying customer. what business is it of theirs who I am? the bill gets paid and no one complains, I don't see why they feel the need to be a nanny.
so, can I report t-mobile for not allowing me full web access under such stupid 'prove it first!' conditions?
its the only thing that annoys me about tmobile, really.
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I don't know about T-Mobile but I'm on the Boost mobile which is similar. I just installed a different browser and turned the safe search filters off on Google and do not have any restrictions. Dolphin and an add on can even act like a desktop browser and play flash videos. Might be worth a try.
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Report them!
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What site? (Score:5, Funny)
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Use TOR :)
It's never been in the news, but (Score:3)
Comcast in the Bay Area disables routers when you torrent. You have to go unplug the router and plug it back in. It has nothing to do with legality, I've had it happen when torrenting Linux distributions.
Since I shared a router and didn't have access to unplug it, I had to rent a vpn proxy so I could torrent without tripping this.
Re: It's never been in the news, but (Score:3)
You sure you aren't just overloading the crappy router's buffer with too many open TCP connections? I've seen that problem with a lot of routers and lowering the limit solves the issue.
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It was
Re: It's never been in the news, but (Score:2)
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That isn't necessarily a net neutrality issue. ISPs block port 25 because idiots run open proxies (or get owned by the latest Bonzi Buddy clone) and spam flows like water over the falls. It's a QoS/abuse issue.
I haven't looked at my ISP contract lately, but I would be surprised if there isn't a clause in there that says "no servers". They'd want you to upgrade to their "business class" service, which is basically the same shitty service with a slightly lower SLA at twice the price.
FCC has no authority (Score:1)
"Lawful" content. The arrogance of such a generic statement and the idea that the FCC can self appoint themselves the ones to decide such a thing makes my guts wrench in anger.
The FCC has no authority whatsoever, and the ISP can't block anything, at least not in America. Censorship is contrary to freedom, and all the people I and others have talked to have indicated they support a military response against any entity that infringes on their freedoms.
I hope they remain peaceful, but preliminary indication
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Come on People, Let's Get Port 25 Opened! (Score:1)
I just used the form to complain about this. Join in!
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:k8CUNcUTddwJ:customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/list-of-blocked-ports+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us [googleusercontent.com]