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Excite@Home To Change Routing Priorities For $$
" I am expecially troubled by this because it would mean that sites and companies that have gobs of cash could in essence pay excite to guarantee a better experience than a competitor. It's not clear from the article, but for excite to specifically give higher priority to one than that would by default reduce the priority of competitors.
The question then becomes, how long until someone can literally pay to make it impossible to reach a competitors site. Say how would cnn reader feel if they could no longer reach cnn , but msnbc always came up super fast?
It's a surprise that the same company that appears to be for open access for cable lines would take this approach to cash for network routing. Excite is definately doing the right thing through it's support of open access (imho), but a very wrong thing in pursuing this line of business. "
Hey, they are free to do it, but we are also free to talk or complain about it.
As customers (at least I am) it's nice to know these things. It's not like @HOME is going to e-mail all their customers and tell them this. Also, this is the first time I've heard anyone doing this. I'd be interested to know if this is going to start a trend.
I swear, some people are just here to whine and complain. I don't mind if you have some masochistic urge to read news you hate on a site you don't like, but do you have to complain about it too?
Finkployd
Isn't the next step, say a year from now, to be offering the customers access to peered routing for a premium? Say a pricing agreement whereby you pay $x/month to have premium access Financial Services online services, etc?
Besides, it appeared that the companies signing up (well, at least one that I am aware of, Akamai) distribute content, rather than provide it. They don't create or provide the content. They get paid by companies that want to have the ability to distribute their own high-bandwidth streaming media content. The content distributors have various mechanisms to achieve this, and one of the tools they need is, naturally, high bandwidth. What this means, is that companies that wish to pay more to get their own content out there will be able to do so because of this. If you cannot or don't want to pay to get the bandwidth for distribution, why should you have it?
Instead of getting angry, let's see if we can convince them to take this approach instead.
Want to work at Transmeta? MicronPC? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Can your IM do this?
I can't believe that the open spirit of the
Internet has been sullied by this obvious attempt
at crass commercialization. The Internet has
survived for the past 2 decades without charging
any money for access and providing equal levels
of service to everyone based on merit. This
could change all that.
What's next, having Internet access facilitated
by telecommunications carriers that will charge
$13,000 a month for DS3 access that is currently
provided for free?
I am shocked. We should all boycott Excite@Home.
What is the controversy here? According to the article, "those companies had agreed to pay an undisclosed amount per megabit per second in order to plug into the high-speed network." In other words, they are selling bandwidth. If anything, it is less troubling than the many 'preferred vendor' arrangements that have been on commercial networks (e.g. Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy) since the 80's.
By buying bandwidth directly to a network segment, these providers will get better throughput. If you look at the buyers (Akamai, iBeam and Microcast) in the article, you'd see that they defintely have an interest in eliminating netlag and other delays to cablemodem users (who can make best use of their services). I expect other 'wide pipe' providers to follow suit, and consider it both prudent, and a service to all customers. (The revenue stream is welcome, too: Excite@Home lost $1.5 billion on revenues of $337 mill last year. How long do you think they can afford to keep supplying service at current prices at his rate?)
There is a huge distinction between *providing* service* and *denying* it.
You might as well argue that high-bandwidth users are 'crowding everyone else off the Internet' (which has been argued). Howver, this doesn't have that nice conspiratorial anti-business ring, does it?
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
This is NO different from doing a CoLo (Co-Location) or an ISP doing peering. It's not news at all.
Why not make an announcement that "Search Engine X" or "E-Commerce Book Store Y" also has multiple connections to the internet? It's absolutely NO DIFFERENT.
This just some lame-o marketdroids attempt to get publicity, and somebody fell for it.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
This isn't new at all.
You seem surprised that ISPs provide you with a better service if you pay more money. This has always been the case.
Typically, it's the "Pay more for more bandwidth" scenario, which will make your site appear "faster" to the end users. Try and go over your allocation, and you get throttled. Nice.
It was only a matter of time before this was extended to routing.
Internet hosting is a business. Deal with it.
Exactly. The poster might as well have said "it's unfair that some sites can afford better graphic designers" or "better servers" or "to publish more content". If Excite users don't like it, they'll vote with their feet. If rivals to content providers don't like it, then they have to either make their content more compelling, or pay for similar services.
Either way, the consumer gets a better deal. That's why it's called the free market.
This goes under the heading, "you get what you pay for!" I routinely pay a toll on a toll road to get to work faster every day than if I took the parallel "free" road. It saves me hours every week. I think this is a great idea. You get premium service for extra money. It's like flying first class.
Although I know AOL does this, I don't consider AOL an ISP. They are a dialup content provider, and the only reason they have ever offered access to competitor and non-partner content is because their clueless users would bitch. 'But my freind has that cool Altavista thing on his AOL!!', the same reason they started to offer AOL users outbound connects at all..
Yeah, they kind of lumped onto the bandwagon when it became clear that AT&T, etc, were not about to just give them the same sweetheart deal twice. After all, if you can't have it to yourself you'de better make sure your competition can't either.
.sig: Now legally binding!
So long as Excite continues to maintain it's public Internet lines as well, I see no problem with this. Of course, if they don't maintain those lines to a reasonable level, all of a sudden their customers will suffer when tempting to get to 95+% of the internet - a sure fire way of losing customers.
You put your finger on the crux of the issue. Given lively competition among service providers to end users this is not a concern. However, what's more valuable at this point, 95% of Internet content or consumers connected at high speed? The value of the Internet to the big money forces now is not in current content, its future markets. This is why Excite@home can lose $1B, as the article says, right now the game is to jockey for position in future markets.
If E@h (or any other high speed provider) can obtain a dominant market position they can dictate terms to content providers. More insidious, if a content provider owns a service provider they can exclude other content providers. Aol/TimeWarner? Didn't TimeWarner try to play hardball with Disney?
This is what Aol would have like to have done with the dialup crowd but all phone lines being equal it wasn't very compelling to content providers in the way that high speed access to consumers could be.
We need a vigilant FTC. Check out The Media Access Project, they are part of a coalition that filed with the FTC to block the Aol/TimeWarner merger.
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
Paying based on usage of private peering links is nothing new. Most of the large colo/ISPs have had to do this for quite some time (e.g. Digex, Exodus, etc.)
I think the client should always pay for the bandwidth. If the servers pay for the bandwidth, that takes control over what can be downloaded efficiently away from the end user.
If the client pays, then it makes sense for the pipe owners to upgrade the server's connection whenever it's needed. If the server pays, then a free site that gets too popular will be shut down by the bandwidth requirements.
Every move further toward making the servers pay for bandwidth creates greater pressure to make websites profitable, rather than merely useful or entertaining.
This sounds an awful lot like what most people running ATM networks do. They charge more money for guaranteed quality of service.
This is nothing new and has been happening for a long time. There is nothing wrong here.
It takes money to run a network, and it costs more money to guarantee service which is reflected in the price. It's just that simple.
I don't see anything at all wrong with this, and as an @Home user, I'm very happy with it. There is also a tremendous advantage here for large web sites.
Face it - @Home is massive. With well over a million people with multimegabit per second connections, you can believe that @Home generates a LOT of traffic (I did the math once, and they have over 5Gbps of peering alone). Now, let's say for arguements sake that at any given time, 30Mbps is moving between Yahoo! and @Home. When Yahoo! realizes that they can in essense, colocate a server within @Home, and save that extra 30Mbps, it may be much cheaper to do that than to use up their external peering.
There is an advantage for @Home as well - not only do they save money on peering since they need fewer external links, but also now @Home users have access to this content over much faster connections.
I see how you are saying that companies are paying for performance, but I don't see how that's any different from the current situation. Some companies can afford an OC-3 and can send 300KB/s to an @Home user, while some companies can afford a T1 and can send 20KB/s to an @Home user. Nothing's changing. @Home's peering will not cease to exist when this new service is being offered, so people who cannot afford to place servers on @Home will still be able to send content to @Home users at the same speed as they can now. Since @Home's peering is actually quite nice to most networks (most notable exception is UUNet), their end of the connection can handle as fast as yours can send it.
----
Bryan Samis
http://www.thesamis.net
Ok, so they have extremely fast connections to pass content through. How does this slow everyone else's access down? In fact, it theoretically cuts down on conjestion by taking some of the streaming bandwidth off of the Internet.
Here's another point: How much of the internet can they speed up? Is this just the connections to their subscribers? Also, I'm certain that this will decrease conjestion slowdowns, but they still have to pass the data through the last mile.
No, I don't see how this will allow them to SLOW DOWN other's connections, nor do I see a significant increase in the time it takes a customer to download the information. Just an increase in the availability of the information. Many thinks to Excite@Home, though, for getting them out of our way.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
If I were to guess, I'd say that their crackdown on unauthorized NNTP servers is a direct result of the UDP (usenet death penalty) imposed on them earlier this year. I wouldn't be too annoyed with them if they checked for unsecured SMTP servers too, and LARTed the guilty parties. I'm willing to put up with a little portscanning if it helps stop spam. I'm not crazy about being portscanned by anyone -- but then, that's why I have a firewall.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
State College is a city in PA. Penn State's main campus is in it.
Finkployd
I just don't see it that way. I see this agreement as akin to the movie theatre leasing lobby space at $100/square foot to Burger King, who previously was renting $20/square foot space at the same distance away as McDonalds.
How long will it be before the movie theatre denies entry to people carrying McDonalds in an effort to ensure that they can keep raping the Burger King for rent?
.sig: Now legally binding!
For years, services like AOL, Compuserve (before it was bought by AOL), and "Classic" Prodigy had content partners. When you wanted weather reports, stock quotes, or sports scores, you had two options: either seek out the information from the source of your choice (assuming you had Internet access with your on-line service) or use the content provider that won the bidding war with your service. For things like weather and sports, this is no big deal -- you get the same info with different presentation, and the cost is the same.
So now Excite@Home is doing this with audio/video services. Big whoop. You saw how miserably they've been doing financially: $1.5 billion in losses against $377 million in revenue. Hopefully these deals will encourage them not to go bankrupt and still provide Internet access. You don't _have_ to use their services, but they'll be made accessible to you as an instant-gratification option.
For more information, click here.
Your only hope is to vote for Ralph Nader. Go ahead and do it. Along with the rest of your ten percent.
You wouldn't try to insult us if you thought that our opinion doesn't matter in politics.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Personally, I can't imagine why in the hell any of you people care whether or not Excite up's somebody's 802.1p byte between two locations on their internal network for stuff like VoIP that's really crappy without this service. It's cheaper than buying dedicated bandwidth and more efficient in the long run.
Your argument can be applied directly to other things that are already in place: Why should slashdot get a (zippy fast loading) 100K+ server setup and gobs of bandwidth when I have to host a pretty good website off a virtual hosted (slow dodgy) piece of junk behind an ISDN line? You janus-faced goons over at Andover would (and probably do) buy priority routing and dedicated bandwidth from your provider so as far as I'm concerned, you can take your whining story and shove it. If you have more money you buy more bandwidth; more priority; more promised uptime; more protection against D/DoS; more redundancy; more security. Is THIS FAIR? Put slashdot back on the old machine from which it was born and see how it holds up. Then eat your words.
What If some company goes out and buys so much bandwidth from a major provider that they dont even have bandwidth to sell to other people? Same thing only it's actually much much less likely to happen when a network is selling 802.1p bits.
Think! For the love of God, please!
~GoRK
Anyone remember the Italian ISP called VOL (Video Online) www.vol.it that implemented intercontinental QoS on the Internet back in like 1993?! I think they are now defunct, but this is definately not a new idea. I run this stuff over my LAN all day with good reason and little to no consequences.
~GoRK
That question is: When the content provider pays the ISP money, does the ISP use the money to create additional connectivity to that content provider, or does it merely allocate a greater percentage of its existing connectivity to that content provider? That's the million dollar question here.
There's nothing wrong if the money is used to buy *additional* infrastructure, so that connections to other providers are still 100% as good as they used to be, and connections to the paying provider are, say, 150% as good as they used to be.
On the other hand, it's highly unethical if what they are doing is taking resources *away* from non-paying providers and allocating them to the paying providers, without actually building anything new. (So the network responsiveness of the non-paying providers is less than 100% of what it used to be.) I say this is unethical because they are essentially opening up an auction where providers pay money whose only purpose is to hinder their competitors. ("Better pay us more money or we'll take away more of the bandwith to your site and give it to your competitor's site.")
Paying money for new bandwith is great. But holding the existing bandwith up for ransom is evil.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
They aren't "[paying] to cut out a competitor's access." Foo, Inc. buying a direct connection into the @Home network isn't going to prevent Bar, Inc. from being accessable. The only difference is speed and latency. This is no different from what many ISPs already do -- how many ISPs have private peering between each other? between themselves and Microsoft? The only thing is, they usually don't actively promote it -- and both sides are paying for it.
I applaud @Home's inventiveness. Might I suggest selling web proxies as well?
A DoS attack is a DoS attack, and IS a criminal offence in many countries. IMHO, it is IRRELEVENT as to whether that attack is through fake packets or adjusted queues. It is STILL a malicious attempt to attack a service, via access.
If Smurfing, or a DDOS campaign can result in years in prison, then bribing the network managers to block legitamate access should do likewise.
If you don't like that, tough. It's either one law for all, or no law at all.
Now, there's nothing wrong with guaranteeing a minimum QoS, PROVIDED it does not inhibit anyone else's QoS. As soon as QoS controls are used for malicious reasons, to harm others, that should be grounds for immediate arrest and inprisonment for all involved, and a sentance of up to life.
(After all, that's what these same large companies want for teenage geeks who DDoS their systems, or even posess the tools with which to do so.)
Last, but not least, DON'T blame some faceless "Slashdot". There is no "Great THEM" out there, just a bunch of guys, like any other bunch of guys, who hit on a cool way to read and debate the news. Whining about "Slashdot Journalism" (as if the "They" wrote the stories) is childish and immature. If you want to behave like a 5 year old, go run a Baby Bill. But if you want to be on a site aimed at readers with IQ's in at least double digits, act with the maturity you are (in theory) capable of.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I like to think of the "old west" in America as kind of a metaphor to what is happening with the internet in the past, present and future.
At first the internet was only available to the researchers and the educational facilities that were instrumental to the building of the protocols and basic infrastructure - they were the natives.
As home computers became more and more affordable, and ISPs became widely available, these new users began the migration to the internet - from places like AOL, CompuServ, Prodigy, etc. These were the settlers... people who often found themselves in huge "flame wars" with the aboriginal internet community.
Right now, we are in the "California Gold Rush" stage of the internet... everyone and every business is eyeing the internet as the great cash cow of the 21st Century.
What this article is pointing to is a opening up of the internet to broadband access, much like the first highways - often marked with toll roads and bridges. If you can't pay to take the shortcut to get the information you are looking for, you are going to have to go around.
I think we're going to see a major corporatization of the internet, with major ISPs creating VPNs that will only allow their customers access to their own resources. And the AOL mentality of the masses is going to prefer this to today's free-for-all.
Of course, I'm no psychic. Call Dionne Warwick for that. With any luck, I'm totally wrong.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
crap, thanks, I knew I'd make that mistake.
Providing "enhanced" service to some doesn't mean you have to reduce service to everyone else. It's called adding an extra T3 line on the content provider's bill. (That's how I interpret this.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Folks,
There is no news here. @Home has always had
a commercial ISP business (@Work) that sells
lease-line connectivity. All that is happening
here is that @Work is selling more circuits by
marketing the fact that @Home and @Work share
the same 5 Gbps nationwide backbone, so any
@Work customer has good access to @Home customers.
@Home isn't blocking access to any content and
isn't slowing down other content. So no issue.
As to the claim that Cox@Home has a mandatory
proxy, this is flat wrong. In all markets,
@Home has optional proxy servers deployed. In
all cases, all one has to do is go into
Netscape/IE and disable use of the proxy
if one doesn't want to use it. Because 99%
of @Home customers are not geeks, the installers
are trained to configure this by default.
Geeks can just turn it off after the installer
departs the house, if they care. In many
situations, performance is improved by the
Inktomi proxys.
(former employee of @Home Engineering;
now working for another firm)
In one respect.. it's nothing new... none of us 'own' the internet, and private networks are free to set routing policy however they want for whatever reason they want. And none of us should have any problem with that.
What we SHOULD have a problem with is places that offer 'Internet' access, but then proceed to screw people over based on bandwidth usage and/or content usage. If joe average purchases a connection, he should have a fair idea of what that means, not simply 'oh.. it's so I can surf the web'.
I'm tired of @HOME's 'no server' policy. If it's bandwidth they are worried about, put a surcharge on the bandwidth in question. THAT is fair. THAT let's people undersand the resources in volved, and ultimately, what they are paying for. Joe average doesn't understand? He damn well SHOULD! Network technology is the way of the future.. it's better that the public gets involved and leaves their ignorance behind.
Wow, someone actually gets the clue here... QoS features aren't being developed just because they are really neat. They are being developed because someday they are going to enable certain companies to more efficiently sell their network service. go read a goddamn book on ATM and learn what GBR, ABR, UBR, and suchlike mean. and understand why if you read the fine print on your DSL contract, your 1.5M/384K connection really only guarantees 128K/64K.
please, please, as relatively enlightened users of technology, understand the meshing of technological capabilities and market forces. don't just fear it, understand it.
Paid QoS makes a great deal of sense, from a capitalist perspective, as much as it might suck in terms of closing down avenues of communication for the less monied aspiring broadcaster/publisher. understandy why. understand how. then coherently assemble an argument as to why it's wrong, and how we can change it.
otherwise, shut your festering gob. you tit. your type makes me... oh you know the rest.
nathan
*urp!*
And that my friends, is capitalism in all it's glory. If I don't care for all the crap, the three major TV networks are still free to anyone who puts up a big antenna. Same on the net...get a free account at NetZero and use it to your hearts' content or get high-speed access and take the good with the bad for a price. They call that a "FREE MARKET ECONOMY." Live with it, or move to a socialist country...those are the choices.
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
why shouldn't they be able to do this? who said that the internet has to the same speed for everyone. Certain people pay top $$$ per month to their ISP for high speed connections, while other people are willing to pay nickels and dimes and get shitty service. I think it is a good idea, and a good revune stream for them
Case in point, Salon.com and their old days of subscriber-based content, which went the way of the do-do.
tcd004
Here's my Microsoft Parody, where's yours?
Before the telcos were deregulated in 96 we had one local monopoly (ATU) two competing LD carries (GCI and ATT/Alascom) and one second rate cable company. Service sucked, it was an exercise in pain to get an ISDN to your home or business. Since deregulation both LD's bought switches and entered the local market, ATU entered the LD market, was sold and changed it's name to ACS. GCI bought the cable company and about two years ago gave us cable modems. In the last year ACS has gotten it's act together and started offering DSL. GCI appears to be rolling out cable modems to any town with more than about 500 people everywhere in the state they have cable. They just laid a new fiber to Seatle, greatly improving latency (my ping time to
The point that I promised is just around the corner. This seems to me to be the best way to run a broadband business, cable modems are already turning a profit for GCI, consumers are very happy and flocking to the new services in droves, and no one is getting censored or screwed in anyway. I don't know precisly how everything managed to come together in such an ideal libertarain way up here, but from my point of view the broadband situation in the "lower 48" is pretty broken and mired in troublesome politics.
Just thought I'd share one free market success story with everyone.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
One person said that it was a case of installing a faster dedicated pipe. (A bit like the old Local Bus scheme.) Sure, that makes things faster up-stream, but it does NOTHING to the pipe down-stream. So, either they have to prioritize the faster pipe, for any of the benefit to be seen, (in short, squeezing the smaller pipe by creating an artificial log-jam), OR they are going to end up fraudulantly selling bandwidth they don't have to sell.
(For those new to networks, think of a major 3-lane highway as the backbone. Now, at a junction, they have two roads leading off. So far, so good. Nobody is causing any problems. What happens if you now upgrade one of those roads also to a 3-lane highway. The traffic flow will all but shut the smaller road down.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Not just with us Geeks, who watch stuff like this, but the general public.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to come to the conclusion that in order to give "priority" to a site, then something must be taken away from another. In a time when cable must compete against the faster xDSL services, you would think they would not want to criple ANYTHING. Or even give the illusion that are slowing something down.
Or perhaps they are doing this on purpose. Maybe they are going after the computer illiterate who only uses the internet for stocks, news and mainstream stuff. They could pull bandwidth from the hardcore internet users (many of who are probably only using cable while waiting for DSL in their area) by yaking it from anything non mainstream, and giving it to the "big" sites. Giving the regular Joe Customer a faster net experience at the expense of anyone not using mainstream sites.
Wierd stuff
Finkployd
I don't think this has the evil portents - I read the article and what I get is this:
Everyone on Excite has equal access to all sites (through the regular internet backbones) with some latency and bandwidth determined by that pipe.
Excite is getting companies to pay them for the privalege of hooking high-speed pipes directly from their servers to Excite's routers.
Request for them don't go to the internet backbone - they are routed over these new, direct lines. Faster performance to those sites (less latency, more data/sec., etc.)
Noone is given priority over another. No competitor's service is reduced - in fact it would also be enhanced, since some of the traffic is not going to that common backbone (at least a little).
Put away the pitchforks and torches for now.
I don't see a difference...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Both their push for 'open-access' and 'pay-us-for-routing' are nothing more than trying to protect their bottom line. Their contract with several of the cable providers is up soon, and there is little incentive to go with them again.
This smells rather funny though. No ISP has tried this in the past, so there must be a rather good reason. I'm guessing everyone is afraid when the 'competition' starts screaming to Congress, Congress will hand down far more 'Thou shalt nots' than are needed to rectify the situation.
Congress has shown historically that it not like this sort of thing amongst the telephony and satelite data providers; Why should it like it when e@h does it?
The result? e@h makes a quick buck, and those that paid for 5 years of 'special' routing are going to lose it in a round of regulation.. e@h and the honest ISPs alike are going to have to deal with additional regulation laden on by every SIG waiting for the first ISP regulation test bill to show it's face..
.sig: Now legally binding!
It's availible at http://z.trapezoid.com in the top news article. Ignore the username and password, that's for user prefs (if it's annoying, hit 'Login/out'.)
-------
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
I'm currently an @Home subscriber, and lately I've been paying attention to their routing patterns. Simply put, @Home does some wacky things as far as routing. I try to reach servers on the east coast, and get routed through L.A. and San Francisco first. Yet, I try to reach servers on the west coast, and I'll frequently get routed through Chicago and MAE-East first. To reach another local ISP, I go through Dallas then Chicago first.
My suspicion is that they are choosing these routes over more efficient, low-latency ones because of high-bandwidth peering agreements. i.e. At exchanges, packets will ignore more direct routes in favor of links which can provide greater throughput. (This is unsurprising considering the purposes for which they advertise their service, such as streaming/multimedia content, although it strikes me as flaunting convention a bit.)
Not directly related to the article at hand, but I believe it provides some useful background...
I work for a medium/large size ISP which now has a unique piece of technology in place. It is a giant web cache server, works kind of like a proxy, but is invisible to all our users. It works in conjunction with a switch that does layer 4 IP switching/routing/intercepting/redirecting. *ALL* our user's http requests on port 80 are intercepted by the switch and routed thru the proxy to see if they are in cache first, before they go out the main routers to the rest of the real internet. The cache's disk space is a few hundred gigabytes on a raid array and is getting quite full now. The initial purpose of this technology was to give the illusion of bigger backbone feeds and speed up user's web access, which it does well. Now the suits & beancounters have a brilliant idea: sell ads on our own portals and deliberately slow down/throttle bandwith to competing portals. Not only does the technology let us do this quite easily, but we can also just as easily compile and generate traffic profile reports to see where our users surf most frequently and use that info to our marketing advantage. Our biggest advertisement clients don't really care where their ads are served from just as long as lots of users see them and we give them a cheaper price to host their ads and steal their business away from our competitors (like selling tons of 99 cent hamburgers). We're not big enough (yet) to play this game with actual network routes via high-level peering agreements, but we can certainly play the same game with artificially speed up or slowed down access for all of our many tens of thousands of dialup, isdn, dsl and other dedicated connection subscribers.
I designed and built a frankenstein monster that is now running amok out of control and I don't know whether I should be proud or ashamed. Anyway, he's made me a lot wealthier that I was before.
ISPs have been doing this amongst themselves for a long time. Companies like above.net do this every day, albeit they host the servers on their site. On the surface, it simply looks like they're making their routing tables more efficient for customers willing to pay for the privilege. Certain companies that make caching servers employ similiar techniques for streaming media (i.e. cache those who pay the piper for the privilege).
Since it gets the content "closer" to the end user's (albeit of @Home), and doesn't negatively affect everyone else out there, I can't necessarily see this as a bad thing.
-- PhoneBoy
The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of anyone, including the poster.
Considering that Excite, like most national ISPs, are investing in content caching systems I doubt the tool booth is going to be a big deal.
CNN and MSNBC will load off the cache server just as fast. When it comes to streaming audio and video then you're going to see issues. Maybe Real won't work as fast as MS.
On the other hand this isn't anything all that new. PSInet has been offering peering arrangements for some time. And ISP can have a direct connection to PSInet sites, and PSInet has a direct connection to the ISP. Depending on traffic considerations it may not be that bad of a deal. Then again PSInet hosts a lot of servers and T's. Excite really doesn't.
I think this is a pretty big non-issue. Excite is obviously trying to make a dime off high bandwidth video streaming. Somehow I doubt the Opensoure, GNU, FreeWare, Freedom of speech market is going to be hurt. Maybe one porno site will load quicker than another. More power to them.
How many times have we seen companies offer a standard version as well as a "gold edition"? If Excite@Home was intentionally slowing the connections to sites belonging to competitors of their clients, then we would raise a stink. A while ago, I know that somebody (Cisco?) was mentioning this in marketing materials so it is quite possible.
Also something you have to look at is the line "Excite@Home lost $1.5 billion on sales of $337 million." Those are some hefty losses, even for a tech company. They have to make money somehow.
-B
I hope I'm not playing devil's advocate here, but it seems like this isn't a very horrible thing to do. While it does suck that they're giving priority to those that pay, most of them seem to be those that need the high bandwidth. Akamai, for instance.
Personally, I don't mind that my access speeds up when I go to download that 150MB file. Of course, this all depending on where they're getting the bandwidth.
If it means I have to put up with pages loading slower than than they normally would, yes it's a bad thing. But if it simply gives major content providers extra needed bandwidth that nobody's using, then so be it.