Slashdot Mirror

1. Distance of your telephone line from a Verizon Central Office
2. Condition of telephone wiring inside and outside your location
3. Computer configuration
4. Network or Internet congestion
5. Server and router speeds of the Web sites you access
6. Other factors

There are these problems when testing speeds to your neighbor.

• Upload speeds are lower than download. So you can only test upload speeds this way.
• Your neighbor needs to be using the same ISP.

Maybe one day we'll see a class action lawsuit on various ISPs that claims they intentionally lied about the average speeds customers should see, But I'm not holding my breath.

See http://www.dslreports.com/forum/sympat and search for throttling
It began in the last couple of months, so ignore threads older than say November 2007 or so.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19634497-Non-P2P-SSL-Protocols-now-being-throttled
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19856107-ThrottlingShaping-Supposedly-Non-Existant-On-Bells-Network
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19691840-Traffic-shaping-timeline-graph

See http://www.dslreports.com/forum/sympat and search for throttling
It began in the last couple of months, so ignore threads older than say November 2007 or so.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19634497-Non-P2P-SSL-Protocols-now-being-throttled
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19856107-ThrottlingShaping-Supposedly-Non-Existant-On-Bells-Network
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19691840-Traffic-shaping-timeline-graph

See http://www.dslreports.com/forum/sympat and search for throttling
It began in the last couple of months, so ignore threads older than say November 2007 or so.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19634497-Non-P2P-SSL-Protocols-now-being-throttled
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19856107-ThrottlingShaping-Supposedly-Non-Existant-On-Bells-Network
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19691840-Traffic-shaping-timeline-graph

See http://www.dslreports.com/forum/sympat and search for throttling
It began in the last couple of months, so ignore threads older than say November 2007 or so.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19634497-Non-P2P-SSL-Protocols-now-being-throttled
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19856107-ThrottlingShaping-Supposedly-Non-Existant-On-Bells-Network
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19691840-Traffic-shaping-timeline-graph

Alot of them sat down and went to sleep...

Sure, they may find some niche markets, but honestly it won't work (at least in the US) with the outdated infrastructure most of us are used to dealing with. Anyone on bandwidth restriction, or dealing with ISPs that do packet shaping of one kind or another, or still on dialup (many areas in the US can not get broadband thanks to various factors).

So what to do, what to do? I personally would love to have FIOS or some other level of service that would allow me to migrate partially online, but honestly at the rate things are going I don't expect this stuff to gain any momentum anytime soon, at least not in the US.

>Nobody's going to pay upwards of $35 for a glorified USB cable. The point here, is you pay $10 per device for connection to everything else. The device is part of a network, not a point-to-point link. I'll certainly keep my Gigabit-connected devices within 10m of each other when it suits me. Time for Roadrunner would quit screwing w/ DNS (http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20016620-TWC-Austin-with-domain-redirect-now) and focus on increasing their speed to 100Mbps.

here is the best report of how they do it in details that are more satisfactory to me. tag: Sandvine.

After reading and commenting on Slashdot for some time, I stopped reading it months ago due to dumb stories like this. I only came over here because Broadband Reports was making fun of Slashdot:

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Slashdot-Keeps-Rediscovering-Comcast-Powerboost-91976

kdawson continually posts garbage like this. s/he clearly has no clue. Get rid of kdawson and maybe I'll come back here.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Slashdot-Keeps-Rediscovering-Comcast-Powerboost-91976

Sure

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18323368-Comcast-is-using-Sandvine-to-manage-P2P-Connections

http://www.secguru.com/link/comcast_forging_packets_filter_torrents_using_rst_packets

http://www.vgamin.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=279987&sid=39c4843f2be3b4bb0aded7164eed6cab

http://www.eff.org/wp/packet-forgery-isps-report-comcast-affair

a) Development focus. The telcoms in the U.S. are not just developing for NYC. They have to accommodate that vastness that is the U.S. moderately populated area. Often the case, there is a balance to be struck between high performance and range. The telcoms in the U.S. usually focus on extending the range, so they can reach more of that moderately covered area versus pushing for max bandwidth.

Oh really? Is that why they fight municipalities who want to build up their own broadband services when the telecos won't? Because the Broadband Utopia a group of communities in northeastern Utah setup Comcast was forced by market pressure to offer a bundled package for $90. When the project was proposed broadband providers pushed for a Utah law to stop it. Instead a law was passed that required any such project to allow open access, which is what UTOPIA does. Anyone who wants to offer any service it is capable of, broadband access, HDTV, and or phone service and use the system to offer them can use it.

Do you really think a telco or cableco would pay to build such a system? The only way they would is if they were paid to and were held liable. They have already been paid hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to do so but they haven't.

A similar thing happened with Rogers in Canada a few years ago, except in that case the connections were completely killed. Encrypted https connections to the store worked OK. It seems likely that they're packet shaping for bittorrent & the device they're using also manages to throttle iTunes connections. Here's the ehmac.ca thread and the dslreports thread. Then it was a P-cube box (pdf) that was causing the problem & Rogers managed to reconfigure it (through Cisco) to fix the problem. The best way to speed up the solution was to complain to the ISP.

We're planning to follow this process over the coming weekend to get more info about what we're seeing. I don't think Covad is providing anything but the DSL over the local loop from PacBell, and as far as I know they don't offer direct ISP services. The other high speed provider is Comcast, so no joy there.

I actually don't mind those brute force bots. It makes for a good laugh once in awhile.

Looks like Ars found the link first via a story on the front page of Broadband Reports that was posted before theirs:

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Time-Warner-Cable-Eyeing-Overage-Charges-91047

Only SOUTH Koreans of all ages and certain others in high-density areas will see these speeds any time soon.

No, there's a place in the US who will soon be able to get these speeds if they can't get them today. It's a little place in northeastern Utah called Broadband Utopia. Because of the competition Comcast was "Forced to offer $90 bundle in fiber-fed region".

Anything around here that allows you to hook up to a PC is ridiculously expensive and works like crap, and they still reserve the right to mysteriously cap your "unlimited" usage or to bill you extra if you go over that limit. That's the plans that do allow hooking up to a PC at all. Mine, like many, is "unlimited" for the phone, but I still have to pay per kB to hook it to another device and let that use the connection.

There was a news story not long ago about a guy on a plan like mine in Canada who ran up an $85,000 phone bill because he didn't see the distinction in the fine print. Yahoo, DSL Reports, The Huffington Post, CNet UK, Canada.com, Geek.com, and /.'s own Firehose have had the story, among many other sources.

I can get Sprint, AT&T, or possibly Verizon (haven't check on their coverage and plans here lately for data) here that will allow me to hook up to my PC for "unlimited" data transfer, but it runs about $100 a month on top of a required voice plan, and although most phones will do it only certain phones or a dedicated cell modem is allowed to have the plan. Sprint says theirs is both "unlimited" and "broadband", but they also say it's not to be used to replace a leased line Internet service. So which is it?

Does anything like that exist in the U.S.?

---

http://www.dslreports.com/

Two sources:

1. http://www.dslreports.com/. Their Verizon Fiber Optics forum is usually updated with information about the latest rollout areas and they also have a Google Maps application where users with FiOS service "pin" their location on the map and offer a user review in some instances. The forums also include some info on overall deployment, but it's usually secondhand info so take it for what it's worth.
2. The Verizon website for your state at http://www22.verizon.com/about/community/. For instance, Verizon Virginia has a monthly FTTP construction list in PDF format.

Most connections are a lot faster at downloading than uploading.

It's my understanding, which may be wrong, that net speeds are asymmetric with download speeds being faster because when the web became open to the populace most people downloaded a lot more than they uploaded. Most uploading was done by browsers requesting connections to websites, sending email, and posting in newsgroups. Many people didn't even create and post their own websites, now however even children post websites, or at least webpages, on social networking websites. Dialup connections being slow, this was fine but with broadband available more people are uploading as well as downloading. Heck my niece, who's almost 4 years old, have her own website registered in her own name. Of course it's her parents who actually create, upload, and maintain it.

Fact is though is that connection speeds can boosted quite a lot if the FCC got out of the way and the cablecos and telcos either build out broadband they have already been paid to build out or got out of the way of others building out the infrastructure. One region in the US is working on an infrastructure that could offer speeds of 100Mbs. In Northeastern Utah a group of cities and communities have joined together to create a Broadband Utopia. While it's being build by the local governments that's all they are doing basically. They allow any entity, whether a business or not, to sale services it is capable of delivering whether it be net access, cable tv, or phone service. As of April 2006 "users can get 8-15Mbps symmetrical fiber for $35-$45 dollars through AT&T or providers like MStar." Because of the competition Comcast was forced to offer "broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month".

So speeds are not so much a limiting factor anymore as the lack of competition is the limiting factor.

Perhaps I should qualify my statement: I sell computers for Best Buy. I'm frequently asked if XP is available or if it's possible to load XP on the notebooks we have in place of Vista. Aside from the various calls I've received from customers needing help once their notebook was hosed by loading XP, I decided to do my own research to have a definitive answer when asked by customers (no, I'm not the typical salesperson). The particular laptop I checked on was the HP dv2660se. Aside from the difficulty of loading XP to a SATA drive when you don't have a floppy drive present (or supplied SATA drivers) if you have the original XP media, it's also a pain to locate drivers once the system is up and running. The primary source I used was this forum along with a mixmatch of other google results.

While I would not argue that it's impossible to use a Vista notebook with XP, I'd say that it's definitely possible that there exists models which will would have questionable functionality under XP and that even the better models for XP are still a far cry from simple to set up, as argued by the parent.

The challenge for ISP's is to figure out how to sell internet service at prices that people will pay (cheap, flat-rate) but prevent the p2p usage from crushing their networks.

Some ISP's are building out more capacity, and provisioning symmetrical instead of asymetrical infrastructure. Verizon FIOS' 20/20 plan is a good example of this.

A better example is Broadband Utopia. According to DSL Reports, Comcast Versus Broadband Utopia, Comcast was "forced to offer $90 bundle in fiber-fed region".

"Utopia is one of the nation's largest wholesale muni-fiber deployments - via which users can get 8-15Mbps symmetrical fiber for $35-$45 dollars through AT&T or providers like MStar. The project has put Comcast in the unfamiliar position of having to truly compete, resulting in rare price reductions. According to this local ad, Comcast is now offering broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month in all of Utopia's footprint."

I think that's about what T1 costs. If you want honest, unlimited, 1.5mbs, then isn't that what you should pay?

Higher speeds can be had for less:

Comcast Versus Broadband Utopia"
"Forced to offer $90 bundle in fiber-fed region"

"Utopia is one of the nation's largest wholesale muni-fiber deployments - via which users can get 8-15Mbps symmetrical fiber for $35-$45 dollars through AT&T or providers like MStar. The project has put Comcast in the unfamiliar position of having to truly compete, resulting in rare price reductions. According to this local ad[.zip], Comcast is now offering broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month in all of Utopia's footprint."

I think that's about what T1 costs. If you want honest, unlimited, 1.5mbs, then isn't that what you should pay?

Higher speeds can be had for less:

Comcast Versus Broadband Utopia"
"Forced to offer $90 bundle in fiber-fed region"

"Utopia is one of the nation's largest wholesale muni-fiber deployments - via which users can get 8-15Mbps symmetrical fiber for $35-$45 dollars through AT&T or providers like MStar. The project has put Comcast in the unfamiliar position of having to truly compete, resulting in rare price reductions. According to this local ad[.zip], Comcast is now offering broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month in all of Utopia's footprint."

My DSL connection is 640/256 and it took 2 days. Here is a good calculator for bandwidth http://www.dslreports.com/calculator

Here's a better one: http://www.google.com. Google Calculator is unit aware so it'll do these sorts of calculations.

My DSL connection is 640/256 and it took 2 days. Here is a good calculator for bandwidth http://www.dslreports.com/calculator

Has nothing to do with Linux servers. Most of AT&T's servers run Unix. AIX Unix. Funny how that works, isn't it?

It is not the OS or hardware that is the issue, it is the software running on them. Most of which is highly customized to handle the volume of customers that AT&T has. However the one notable place where they are not using real enterprise class software or servers is still conspicuous. I wouldn't doubt if that is one of the biggest pain in the asses of their new project.

Most AT&T management seem to suffer from the kind of anoxia caused from having one's head too far up one's ass, and I agree with the GP. The managers will be taking it easy at home. The operations and support staff will be taking a beating as usual. AT&T may have good benefits, but you don't want to have to keep a sleeping bag under your desk like some people there. The bad reputation is there for a reason.

Too late buddy. Cox is already flooring it full speed down that dreadful road. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Cox-Also-Disrupting-P2P-Traffic-89481

I remember years back when I first got DSL and, for a lark, ran a whois lookup on my IP address. I nearly shit my pants when my private customer info with SBC appeared. So much for anonymity on the internet, I thought.

For anyone who does have DSL, or otherwise is spending their time pretending to be a 16yo girl on usenet, this link might be helpful to get yourself a more appropriate "Private Customer" designation. I'm sure cable users have a similar option available to them.

The lesson I took away for the experience is even if you want your own domain and you're just an individual, get a lawyer to set up things for you and have his name and address appear on everything. It may be worth the extra few hundred bucks a year.

Actually, DSLreports.com has a google-maps mashup too. I was wondering (living in NY) if it were available for me...No sauce, looks like Auburn though which I can almost coast to though!

If you're worried about them cutting your copper then just make sure you're there when they do the install. It takes them 3-5 hours for the install.

If you want more information on FiOS check out the forums on http://www.dslreports.com/

I strongly recommend you read the description of what constitutes as a "server". I've touched base on that subject here:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19308963-

Better start injecting TCP RST during IM file transfers, Remote Desktop, and PPTP VPN encap. sessions! Better keep it equal, Comcast! Hell, better yet, why not just filter TCP off your network entirely? Comcast, now UDP-only! Faster than all the other competition, because we do away with stateful protocols!

And stop advocating changing ISPs (some do not have other options available (or the competition is equally horrible)). It's just a matter of time before others do it. Comcast just happens to be the first.

unfortunately, it's not a misconception.

Also the original forum post from DSLreports user funchords = Robb. Notice the stuff said. I helped him investigate and can verify that comcast has been and still does this, via Wireshark. They send RST packets to you and the people you're uploading to on a random 1-18 second timer if the user is not a comcast user themselves. (It used to be an automatic 8 second timer but now they added a small degree of "randomization"...they seem to be exploring it, there was a week where it would block 35% of incoming requests in this fashion instead of 100%, 50% the next week, etc.) Also I know how to monitor but not how to make my router ignore RST flags, so it's not like I had a way to get around it.

However, sandvine doesn't seem to work over encrypted connections so if you force encryption it appears that they can't insert a RST flag.

This story is over a week old.. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/75YearOld-Woman-Takes-Hammer-to-Comcast-Office-88272

Unless latencies are stunningly bad on the 3G networks, I'm not sure that the argument that low latency/low bandwidth beats higher latency/high bandwidth is true.

Consider this. Let's say that EDGE has 50 ms RTT and 200 Kbps bandwidth. And let's say the 3G are running 200 ms RTT and 1000 Kbps bandwidth. Now you hit cnn.com and load the front page. Currently that is 133 KB of just the html. So you get your connection setup in three packets and then send your request and wait to receive your reply.

So for EDGE, your three-way handshake takes 150 ms, then send your request and wait another 50 ms before data starts arriving. Then the time for just the text to load is a little over five seconds. Then, depending on if your browser supports keep-alives, etc. you tear down the connection or not. Anyway the total time from start of the request to receiving the last of the data is about 5.2 seconds.

For 3G, the handshake is about 600 ms, send your request and wait 200 ms before data starts arriving. Now the 133 KB page takes about 1.3 seconds on your 3G network. Total time, about 2 seconds.

If your average webpage is built up of lots of itty bitty images served from lots of different servers, then it's possible that EDGE might be able to game some advantage, but you'd have to have all your objects being no more than 15 or 20 KB before the bandwidth penalty kicks in and the 3G networks stomp all over you.

But if the images are being streamed from a single server, then it's a very different situation since you don't have to keep repeating the handshake. Turn on keep-alives and woot, your handshakes go down by a factor of ten or more. Turn on pipelining and you don't even have the lock step request/response cycle to contend with. In that situation bandwidth is king.

----

Oh hell. I just hit Google to see if the numbers that I pulled out of my ass above are at all attached to reality. And I'm afraid to point out that they're not. EDGE latency is around 500 ms to BBR's test page. My EVDO phone comes in at way less than that. And bandwidth is much higher.

I think the story is pure BS.

Well, the densely populated U.S. cities could have been done. Still could be done. Still are not being done.

http://www22.verizon.com/content/consumerfios/

Coming soon to a densely populated city near you

No, it's nowhere near universal coverage. But it's definitely "being done."

Go here, http://www.dslreports.com/forum/vzfiber

Search for copper. They've been ripping/cutting the copper for years. I'm sure all these people aren't lying. It's mostly to eliminate competition. Reading some of the comments it's amazing how deceptive Verizon can be. Here's one.

I asked Verizon specifically about this issue. Here is the response that I got from a Verizon spokeswoman: "Once we install fiber to a home, it stays there. We aren't going to take down the fiber and reinstall copper, but people can still get their single-line, no-frills Verizon phone service over the fiber network for the same amount as the folks still served by copper, if that's what they want. Our FTTP network is likely to be even more reliable than their already-reliable Verizon copper-based phone service."

Note how they say "no-frills VERIZON" phone service because you can't get anyone else. You're going to pay what they want you to pay.

It's just getting more difficult and expensive. I put a Dish Network dish on my first house back then, too. They'd encourage self-installs. Of course, you only had to aim at one orbital slot, or perhaps two. Now you may need to hit as many as five, depending on what you want to receive, and from who. It can be hard to get certain discounts or agreements directly from the DBS companies without a dealer installation. I am told, for instance, that my DirecTV HD programming will go away soon. They are switching to MPEG 4 and abandoning all HD service on the orbital slots I have dishes aimed at. If I want a new MPEG 4 receiver at a discount, they say I have to have a dealer put it in, and the new 5-slot dish (which won't work on my lot) as well. I have asked two CSRs about doing the install myself and have been given a flat "no" from both. I can still pay full price for the receiver on the aftermarket and roll my own dish solution, but it's expensive.

More on-topic, there's a thread on DSL Reports about doing a HughesNet self installation. It's not impossible, but they really don't encourage it.

FCC
/http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/fcc-sdr-whitepaper.html/
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18623835-FCC-says-freeopen-source-software-radio-drivers-are-OK/

Police don't care. See this recent Broadband/DSL Reports security forum thread about a guy losing his laptop/notebook, trying to see if he can format his HDD remotely since someone was using it online, police not caring, etc.

Based on readings I've made elsewhere, I believe you probably should disable both the Automatic Update SERVICE and the BITS SERVICE to prevent these stealth updates from appearing. There is a very useful batch file posted to DSLreports here:

Re: Updates without my request or is it something else? - dslreports.com
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,17968828

take a look at http://www.dslreports.com/forum/comcast and you will note that plenty of examples of this impersonation exist. They disconnect by impersonation after about 10 seconds of seeding, and it seems to be courtesy of Sandvine. Gotta love lack of net neutrality here, although I am not in favor of extreme net neutrality, some would be, well, nice.

Minor problem: The poles are only powered during the night.

Link

You can benchmark your connection via speed test from dlsreports.com. As for keeping track of your up/down bit count on a monthly bases, I'm not sure. Perhaps there's some utility out there. Let me know if you find one being that I subscribe to Comcast too.

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest