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Broadband In Australia Just Got Slower
liquidx writes: "Seems like broadband Down Under is getting more and more restrictive. First we had our _unlimited_ plans changed to capped usage plans, then incoming port 80 traffic was blocked (due to Code Red/Nmida worms) and now file-sharing protocol ports are filtered due to 'load balancing issues'! Whirlpool reports that Optus@Home throttled traffic to ports 6700-6702 (ex-Napster ports) without telling its users. Read the letter and article here. Are there any other broadband services, other than the ones in Australia, continually degrading their service to customers? When will this stop?"
And yet all us Americans complain about is having to change to a new email address..
First #Us post!
the proof is: 5 dvds for 20 bucks! Thats a fucking spam ad, hypocrites
and why hasnt katz apologized yet
Yeah, p2p is great, but when you have applications abusing the basics of tcp/ip bandwidth sharing, you need to retalliate with evil things.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
They restrict bandwidth on peer-to-peer and common service ports, presumably using prioritisation on their routers. I understand restrictions on ports 21,80 etc. But surely the telcos stand to benefit from more widespread adoption of broadband based on the demand for the peer-to-peer stuff.
Did it ever occur to you people that these residential broadband connections for $40 might actually have some controls on them? Especially now that it's crunch time in the board rooms of the telcos and cable companies?
Get over dot com days of thinking the world is wired with 10/100 for $50 a month. It's kaput.
What's happening down under will happen in the US soon enough. Sorry you can't download 200 gigs of warez, pr0n and mp3's per month...party's over. Deal with it.
as I understood it, bandwidth is at least 3 times more expensive in australia then the US.. yet they try to sell "broadband" that is on par with the US @home providers...
so I can see how they want to do everything possible to limit "massive bandwidth usage".. hmm, switch to DSL!
It will stop when you and your peers start using IP Security with the Encapsulated Security Protocol (ESP) where in all data in the packets except for the IP header are encrypted. If you do this, the ISP will only be able to tell where your packets are going. They can't see your transport protocol (TCP, UDP, etc), let alone what application protocol you're using, so they won't be able to filter.
all cable companies suck, what i'd like to know is if they DO have a oc3, or a oc12 what ever they have why they dont let download and upstream, speeds be the same, isnt a oc3 155mbit/155mbit, if they can afford to give you 1.5mbs down why only 15k up?
Hi, I just wanna say that Sympatico downgraded its package from DSL static IP with 110K/260K to PPoPe dynamic IP with 15K/100K . Nearly the same thing from videotron.
This is not serious(You cannot run any server from your home with this kind of bandwith.
If we pay to get on the Net, we should be full nodes, no caps, no limits. The only things that should restrict that are our hardware components, not theirs. My ISP restricts upload speeds, but I have yet to hear a cogent argument as to why. I fork over for the privilege. I should get to use it. Period.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Somewhere in the netherlands a cable company throttled the ports that edonkey was using to like 14.4 speeds and caused quite a ruckus. However edonkey is robost enough to be able to change the ports it uses. Wouldn't other p2p systems evolve like this to solve this problem if it ever became widespread enough?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Dudes, I run linux on a bigpond/cable and it works fine, all protocols work sweet, OPTUS sucks because its now owned by Signapores SINGTEL.
So stop your bashing of our systems, at least we have GSM , with GPRS too.
As far as im concerned, the net hasnt changed in 5 years, its still full force free for all, zero restrictions.
rrrggggghhhhhh. I *know* you read slashdot, you
lazy verizon managers!!! I *know* you're hoarding IP addresses!
Broadband cable in the UK dropped to 25 pounds a month ($33) a few months ago, which was about the same time a lot of prices went up in the US, the price is around the same now if not a little cheaper in the UK, it's only 512kbps though but without any limits or thottling, I'm sure the bandwidth in the US is greater.
;) I think BT implemented some throttelling of their ADSL services, it caused a hell of a stink, but their service is nothing but a over priced under performing piece of crap like everything BT has to offer. Thank god I have cable!
What is happening in Oz sucks... and I thought you guys had everything with all that sun and questionable immigration policy
They will keep downgrading until their businesses are either profitable or out of business (can't go lower than zero).
In the last days of @home, my services were serverly hampered. At first it was just port 80, and they claimed it was because of code red. Then port 23 was blocked, obviously because they were trying to cut down on servers (I believe port 23 is for mail servers). They also blocked a few other ports, I believe including the default port for FTP.
Now that @home is being removed in my area, I wonder if my new service provider will unblock the ports. Until then I won't know if this was a dying effort from @home, or a long-lasting change that will always be with me.
I've been a subscriber of the same awful service for years now. Only because DSL isn't available in my area (knowing the way my town works, it never will be). I've had to deal with horrid speeds, disconnections, non-existant tech support, and DNS errors galor. Well, at least it beats Dail-up, sort of.
Various satellite providers (DirecTV's systems and StarBand) offer broadband that to the best of my knowledge doesn't curtail your bandwidth. I don't think they plan to do so in the future either, because of the next generation higher-speed 2-way (1.5Mbit upstream & downstream) service coming down the pipe. Is satellite broadband available in Australia? There are latency issues (I fiddle with them at work), but they're pretty speedy on the downstream. Generally you can expect 80-100kbps upstream (128k potential), and up to 1.5Mbit downstream (1.4Mbit at work). The setup is expensive (US$600-US$700 + installation US$99-US$199 + US$70 per month) - too much if you have decent/reliable broadband available in your area. I've found satellite service pretty reliable and yes, you can network it and run a server on it but . . . latency. Another minus for /.ers is that you'll need a Windows box to host your satellite hardware b/c there are no Linux drivers I'm aware of.
What does it cost to get your own T1 to
your house? Who provides good service
and give you real T1 bandwidth and doesn't
do you *any* favors?
we have been asking about DirecTVDSL. They have been playing games with us concerning the news server. Check it out here (http://www.dslreports.com/forum/telocity~root=tel ocity~parent=telocity~mode=shut). The limit is now 200MB/day, but it has been constantly changing for a few months. It started with a powerful new server which overloaded the line into their building. For these past months, they have been trying different ideas on how to cap their customers. It has been quite annoying. Others can probably tell it better.
Geez! Some of us can't even get broadband at all... Comcast seems to be perpetually "upgrading its cable network" here and Verizon just refuses to allow DSL to be available here. Getting high speed access is a good thing, stop whining about it. If you don't like it, you can always switch to unrestricted dialup access.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
They're restricting the amount of water that flows clockwise! That darn Australian government!
Why is everyone so up-in-arms? The broadband providers are going out of business, folks! They aren't growing money on network trees, they're going bust building infrastructure! Maybe someday we'll all have 100-megabit constant connections to the Internet for a dollar a month, but even then, a dozen Napster clients will be more expensive to serve than a thousand casual browsers. As a matter of fact, I'd wager that full-pipe users represent a net loss to most broadband providers.
That's why they don't want Napster clones to be popular, because they can't afford them. Maybe when Napster users are willing to pay $150 a month for high-cap service, they'll be profitable, but come on. If Napsterites would be willing to do that, wouldn't they be buying the music in the first place?
Sorry, folks, but you're all out of college now, and broadband is expensive in the real world, especially if you want the whole, big, fat pipe all to yourself.
Seems I'm constantly seeing articles of bombast and outright stupidity by those who hold the reigns of the net in .au Are aussies just sitting still for this crap or are they actually up in arms and taking their MPs or whatever they are to task? Is there anything particularly good to say about the net in Australia, or is it just going to drive people back to the telly?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So let me get this right? O@H restricted traffic for a service that is legally no longer running and hasn't been running legally for a while, thereby only effecting the three remaining people using Napster to go to unofficial servers? And even if they were running, the cap could easially be worked around by changing the port preferences in Napster.
As an O@H user, I don't exactly care, especially when the competition is much worse (BigPond, our only other broadband choice besides O@H, has a 3gb/month limit and a 50kbit/sec cap). Wake me up when something interesting happens.
What is up with Australiam IT companies. All they want is profit now.
OMG what a catastrophe! I guess this is what you were taught in buissness 101? People like you needs to be smacked up side the head.
Here in Canada our @HOME crap fell, so Shaw took over completly. My service has been great, with transfer speeds of upwards of 700k/s. Upload speeds are slower, but acceptable, in the 100k/s range. So not all companies suck. Maybe they're regulated so that what I get is required, but still.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
- Cost. With our traffic levels at the time, we were on the
verge of ordering three new T1 lines for a moderately sized (pop. 80,000)
suburb. Those lines would have cost us about $2000/month for service and
support.
- Service quality. Since the rise of KaZaA and Morpheus, our
traffic has doubled from what it was during peak Napster season.
Our upstream was especially swamped.
- Maintenance. Many file sharing clients install spyware, "ad
gators," and other software that does a splendid job of screwing up their
network stacks. These customers then required site visits for us to fix
their systems.
- Copyright violation. As a small company, we had serious
reservations about knowingly allowing such serious ethical lapses to take
place on our network.
As it turned out, we had no other choice than to start limiting service. I came up with the following plan, which the managers approved:- Block all file sharing ports at the router level. 1214, 6699,
6346, 40000-42000, and all of their cousins were history.
- Block all incoming connections to our users, so that they could not
become servers. We allowed SSH as long as it is OpenSSH >= 2.5.2.
- Block all known VPN clients. These were sucking up tremendous amounts
of bandwidth, since we are in a rural area and many people liked to
telecommute using our service.
- Cancel three of our T1 circuits.
- Institute a "one strike you're out policy" on Nimda, email virii,
spamming, and piracy. So far we have only had three disconnections.
- Charge a $209 service fee to users who have crippled their internet
access through a fault of their own.
- And, the silver lining on the cloud: Cut rates by 33%.
The result? Profits are up by 7.5%; from the $209 service charge alone, we have collected several thousand dollars. Most users report much better latencies to major sites and very good burst bandwidth. We lost a couple of users from the VPN ban but they were all above-average bandwidth hogs so we don't miss them. All is right in the world, and I'm very satisfied with how things worked out.-all dead homiez
After all, the cable services don't prohibit servers because they're morally opposed to the idea of serving files--they do it because servers take up their bandwidth. And bandwidth is expensive, as we're learning when companies cut back on their streaming video or even (as in the case of AdAware) fall off the 'net entirely.
So, without servers, what's using bandwidth now? Seems obvious--peer to peer. Which, in itself, is technically as much a "server" as any FTP or website. Heck, running your own Half-Life multiplayer game is technically a "server" too.
And so they cap bandwidth and try to chip away at these things however they can. It's annoying . . . but it's hardly surprising.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
They'll get a clue and just block IP protocol 50 and 51 and your secure encrypted VPN links are kaput. In fact, I would imagine they'll start doing this very soon now unless you're a "business" customer since as we know, only business customers use VPNs and they should be charged accordingly. ;-)
Did it ever occur to anyone that there should be a contract specifying terms of service, and if such restritions at the will of the provider are not in writing accepted by the client than it's a breach of contract? I'd look that sucker over before I accepted something for the good of the ISP, after all, they already got their golden parachutes.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Most of the threads I've been reading have an overtone of how one *deserves* good bandwidth or that the telcos are just greedy. The truth of the matter is that alot of folks tried to supply fantastic bandwidth on razor-thin margins and they went out of business.
There is good service out there but you have to pay...end of story.
Yeah... but who needs broadband in Oz, look outside, have you seen the fucking animals? How entertaining are they, I could watch them for hours. It's like gods alpha and beta testing ground, loads of weird and wonderful animals.
Take the koala bear for instance, they're pretty neat, but they're lazy bastards that sleep for 23 hours a day, what a life, they're pretty vicious if you wake up also.
Also, what's that animal with the long tail that can't tell the difference between trees and power lines with drastic consequences? They only make that mistake once. Mind you, they have been jumping around the place for millions of years and we go a put up a fucking great electricity cable, who's to blame?
I'd pay $150 for 1.5Mb/s download and at least 512Kb/s upload speeds without a doubt. Hell, I'm paying $130 a month for dedicated ISDN plus $58/month for the ISDN line from the telco right now because I can't get DSL at my current location. (too far my ass.. I had 384Kb/s SDSL from Northpoint before they went bust but suddenly I'm too far to get replacement DSL. amazing). Anyway, I'm moving soon and I can't wait to sign up for $90/month 1.5Mb/256Kb ADSL. :-)
With any luck, however, people will soon get wise to this. You might find that you can take advantage of uneducated consumers in the short term, but in the longer term expect people to start caring whether their ISP is crippling their Internet access.
Remember that much of the motivation for people to spend the extra money on broadband is created by P2P file-sharing applications. It will only be a matter of time before ISPs which haven't opted to cripple their user's Internet access will start to educate consumers about these issues.
Here in NZ, for fast connections (except in wellington where they have cable), we have two choices, an unreliable satellite down, dialup up thing, or ADSL. The only flat rate ADSL available is 128k, so I'm on that.
The service is advertised as 'unlimited', and when we signed up we steered clear of the slightly cheaper ISPs that had Terms + conditions saying 'excessive use == grounds for disconnection' type things. Recently, our ISP suddenly added such a condition to our terms and conditions. We could easily switch, but my parents didn't heed my advice about setting up a forwarding email, and a change in email would be a bit painful.
I thought the 128k cap would get us out of this. The cap is ~1.3G/day if totally utilised, we probably use about half that.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Here in new england they've capped our outgoing to 30k/sec... takes forever to transfer shit. The incomming seems to be uncapped (at the moment) and I've heard that AT&T's new broadband service has both up and down stream caps. Seems there aren't enough options with broadband, mainly because one company owns the fiber... oh well, its still beats the hell out of a dial up.
However, with volume-based pricing, the provider should remove any additional restrictions ("business use", "servers", etc.). While before, arguably, people weren't paying their fair share, with volume-based pricing, you pay what you use, and there is no excuse for providers to divide their users into classes.
We have had a lot of problems with our ISP. These m0r0ns blocked SSH and told us that it was for security. Then they blocked all incoming traffic and told us that it was for our own security. In the end we threatened the company into enabling these (cause it's a small company). But I don't think we could browbeat a Multinational provider
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Broads providers dug themselves into a smelly hole. They cultured this sneaky pleasure of charging ridiculous prices for transferts over caps made by unsuspecting client. The creativity they deployed to make it nearly impossible to monitor your transferts yourself was delicious. You know, it does not take you many surprise 1000$-scaled montly bills to get the message and switch to an unlimited service.
Because of such innescusable unethical behavior, no client of the industry wants to hear a thing of caps, or of the concept of "paying for what you use" - the most natural thing anywhere else.
sad really.
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
180 Kbyte/second data transfer rate per T1 x 3600 seconds/hour x 24 hours/day x 30.5 days/month = 452 gigabytes/month. So, they need a T1 for every 452 gigabytes of data their customers try to download each month.
A T1 is about $700/month.
So, ballpark figure, it costs them $1.55 for every gigabyte of data their customers download.
At $40/month, this means that even if they had zero costs other than paying for bandwidth to the internet, they would lose money on any customer who downloads more than 25 gigs a month.
TANSTAAFL applies to internet bandwidth.
Are there any other broadband services, other than the ones in Australia, continually degrading their service to customers?
Yes--nearly all ISPs do this.
When will this stop?"
Probably never! Most subscribers will keep paying even if they dislike the restrictions.
This situation is a neat example of SYRiNX's Golden Rule of Business: Only the sales matter. This is a simple restatement of an old adage: Actions speak more loudly than words. Let customers complain profusely as long as they keep paying!
Businesses that play by this rule nearly always succeed. For example: Microsoft and AOL ignore overwhelming animosity and focus exclusively on sales, and this has brought them financial success. Businesses that make other tasks a higher priority nearly always fail or struggle. For example, Apple focuses on product quality; Amiga focuses on popularity; and Sun focuses on developing a friendly image.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
(For the record, we do not block porn sites, but we keep a close eye on them to make sure users are not distributing or accessing images that are illegal under current laws.)
From what I understand, it is fairly common for others in our industry to keep their finger on the pulse and maintain good logs on what their users are up to.
-all dead homiez
please dont forget regional users. I live on kangaroo island, off the coast of south australia, and we dont have access to anything except dialup. 2-way sattelite is a new option just emerging, but looking at the prices here you can see that this is indeed not an option at all.
/. posts about our shit telecommunications if this happens.
$AU450/month for 3gb, ADSL costs $89 a month for exactly the same service (without shit latency too).
You can see that telstra in australia screws just about everybody. For those that dont know, 2/3 of telstra has been privatised and the other 1/3 is going to be shortly. We will see many more
I guess I'm stuck with this shit dialup for another 10 years - at least you have a half-reasonable choice.
Dear Aussie,
We share the same fate as you. I am talking about the one which offers broadband via "satellite" disks (in fact, it is kind of asynchronise WLAN, fast download-2Mbps, slow upload 28kbps).
It initially gave us unlimited data downland in exchange for capped transfer speed (2Mbps capped to 256kbps). Then, they blamed Napster and capped the data to 2GB per month.
Then, they redefine this product design (what a nice term). They meter each single MB of data. The new customers basically will need to pay 3 times more than what I paid if they want to d/l 2GB per month... Existing customers are not affected so far... But god knows when will they change their mind. The price for the new customers is now comparable (within 100% price difference) to a delicated 256kbps line...
When all potential players are gone, I am quite sure they will squeeze us further. Welcome to monopoly world!
A wired Kiwi....
Well, it's minimizing costs without sacrificing quality. That's what I was taught in microeconomics. But if they want still more profit, they sacrifice quality, and that's what he's complaining about.
Here's the situation:
Telstra costs per month costs are higher than yours for what we pay for.. The monthly fee schedule may look similar, but here's the killer: While Optus has an Acceptable Usage policy of 10 times the average use...you guys are probably are allowed to go up to 20GB per month! At Tel$tra, customers are CAPPED at 3GB a month! What happens if we go over 3GB? Telstra charges you A$0.18 (US$0.09) per meg if you go over!! Imagine that...if you clock an extra 3GB over your limit, ontop of your monthly service fee you would be looking about over $500 (US$250) per month!! I'm sure our international counterparts are probably wetting their paints, laughing and saying what a joke this is... here's the link for your confirmation: (Prices are in $A. You can roughly divide by 2 to get the US dollar equivalent.
By the way costs is one thing, what about service? I tell you for your monthly fee OPTUS does not throttle limit your downloads (with exception of this post, ie port specific). At Tel$tra, for the same monthly fee, you would only get 256kbps down and 64kpbs upload!
That's not all, lets just say you require extra speed (hey, isn't this what broadband is all about?), you have to pay extra on top of your service fee!!! Get this, your cap remains at 3GB! So you are in fact paying more for a faster connnection that makes it easier for you to exceed your 3GB cap and from there its $$$ -> Tel$tra!
But wait there's more....you are probably thinking why there is not higher cap plan available? Well the situation is if you went to the link I provided above there is a 5GB cap plan (no speed limit)...look at the price... A$209 ($US100) per month!!!!
What really amazes me is that it would be cheaper (but not possible in this case) to set up 2 x 3GB cap cable accounts and it would be still cheaper than the 5GB plan. I just don't get how Tel$tra has come up with their pricing models! Let's just say you wanted 10GB Cap, $US 200 per month!!! What do ordinary Optus customers pay for this competing service? Approx $70 ($US35) per month. Only 17% of the Telstra cost!!!
According to Telstra, the customers have to "MANAGE" their usage to ensure they don't go over their cap...so what tools have Telstra given to its customer's? A an online usage meter that does not work! Check this link to see why customers a very angry. I wish I could switch over to Optus, but where I live, Telstra is the only broadband provider. Talk about monopoly.
Optus customers have it good and I wish I could join you guys. I think the broadband broadband offered overseas kick butt.
Maybe I should relocate (I can not see myself going back to dialup). Btw, Telstra have recently introduced these new restrictions so I did not know about them until after I signed the contract months before.
Here's a link that mentions the first customer hit with the 3G cap.
he makes a lot of sense.
I agree with everything you said, but I have to point out the the telcos/ISPs have only themselves to blaim for creating this situation. They market DSL/cable in a way which gives people the impression that they can do anything with their bandwidth. Thier comercials emphasize that they offer a always on (and in DSL's case they often claim dedicated) high speed connect when in reality they can't afford the service they lead consumers to beleive they are offering. As a result they have had to implement all these restrictions because they tried to sell people on a service they couldn't afford to provide. When you look at their advertizing the "bandwidth hog" argument kinda falls appart. One of their major selling points is the ability to stream high quality media and download large files quickly ("no limits but your imagination!" seems to be a big one).
Now that the ISPs have convinced people they can get 1.5+ Mbps of "unlimited" bandwidth for $40/mon it's understanble that their's going to be some frustration when reality sets in and people realize that getting real unlimited broadband is prohibativly expensive.
Well I wouldn't be too quick to claim that. I'm currently attending Penn State University, one of the largest Universities on the east coast, and we have an OC3 connection to the Internet. (Not sure what our Internet2 connection is, but it's blazing fast...)
Anyways, We've been having a problem on campus here. There are 12,000 some students living on campus, and there are around 80,000 students in the Entire Penn State system. (This is including the campuses around the state of Pennsylvania, because they share the bandwith from us too) Recently they've needed to implement a cap on the connections to 20mb from 7am to 7pm and other times at 50mb. The reason for this cap has been because that those 12,000 students were using OVER 60% of the total bandwith for the entire system...
I work for the Residential computing on campus and I do room calls. When I'm at these rooms I see a lot of people using morpheous and kazaa (even some of the clueless ones running both at the same time!) ... I don't have anything against p2p systems in general, but to be frankly honest, my viewpoint has been changing a lot. I came to college to get a degree in Computing. I've read and talked to many people in the past and have been jealous of what they've been able to do with the computer systems. I used to hate the idea of them blocking such software, but realistically it's possibly the best solution.
I think maybe some people should reconsider using these systems, it wont happen, but if people atleast turned them off when they wern't around, there would be a lot less of a bandwith problem going around...
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
...which is get high speed access (RR in Milw., WI is super)
for a low price. It's not my fault that they pay too much for
bandwidth but yet advertise to me how my connection might be
up to 100 times faster than dialup. I hope they didn't mean
my old 300 baud modem on my C64.
So, really, maybe the problem is with the prices THEY pay.
Here before all but 8486 of you.
a heads up to anybody who hasn't seen it too many times already--but can you really see the 20-yr old angelina jolie hacker too many times? It began at 10:30 on the west coast. Joey's just about to get arrested.
1) Sure, Broadband costs a fortune here, I once squeezed 8.3k/sec out of my 56k modem which was actually running at 115.200k/sec. I can tell you, if you want a broadband connection down under, you have to pay $299 Australian. I however hate users that use broadband, why? They steal my bandwith, yes, on average we can get 5.6k/sec/24hr yet at times you would'nt suspect them to be surfin' the net, the ISP let's em take the lot! I'm quite happy on my Iprimus (www.iprimus.com.au) Infinity plan for $101/3months and I don't see myself changing. 2) The goverment is on Telstra's (www.telstra.com) back to get broadband services in the bush. Yet the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commision) Is suing them for lots of things, including the Download caps on $75 DSL plans. Who said capping download on $75 DSL plans is a effective customer service measure
They'll get a clue and just block IP protocol 50 and 51 and your secure encrypted VPN links are kaput.
There's no such thing as "protocol 50 and 51."
Port blocking is possible due only to the unfortunate fact that port numbers are not part of the encrypted payload as they should be. In a secure Internet, to be layered over the current Internet, the port number visible to routers should just be some arbitrary made-up number (say, 80) while the real port number is encrypted.
The SETI@blofg project has finally hit paydirt after many stellar orbits of work by countless 7777s of computers. Dr. Bglorf has spotted an unmistakeable radio emmission in the microwave band coming from near the edge of an average spiral galaxy. By ffdki, we are not alone in the universe!!
Dr. Bglorf's analysis shows that the radio transmission seems to be a digital encoding of an advanced temporal image compression algorithm, using discrete cosine tranforms and dictionary-based compression. He and his associates reverse engineer the alien protocol to find what messages it contains.
Finally, with the entire planet watching, the message is decoded and played. It is a strange alien greeting: two pinkish creatures, one on top of the other, bouncing up and down rythmically for several 77s of cycles. Finally, the top creature expels some kind of white fluid onto the lower one. At this point the alien transmission ends.
Many other transmissions were detected from the same area, but they were all very similar to the first one.
The perplexed Dr. Bglorf begins to suspect that this transmission was not an intentional attempt to contact his civilization, after all.
Haven't you ever wondered why some intelligent joe.user just doesn't try making some high-speed wireless connections via Linux kernel's Bonding/Trunking/Line balancing IP networking communication outside your Telstra-dominated area and to the main switch-a-roonie? Even if joe.user's service isn't near the possible performance, it is at the verry least less restricted and less expensive. Haven't you ever wondered why another ISP doesn't see Telstra screwing everyone and so an ISP doesn't come out of nowhere and open shop; converting all of Telstra's accounts over to the friendly ISP? It is all a-political. And best guess is Telstra is Optus in disguise, making all their bucks in your area by gouging you because nobody else can feasibly service your area. So, this is a gold mine for ISP's; they look around the world for unforseen Internet Access areas, setup their damn hut, advertise their service, and everyone wants the service no matter what price and will always be unhappy. You are making Telstra(Optus) rich hehe.
My local ISP is sitting ontop of Mindspring's networks. They charge twice as much as vanilla Mindspring, but they are mom-and-pop people and that's the only way to make money. They provide tech service conservatively five times better than mindspring, but can't realistcally compete with only their own internet access. It all makes me wonder what all this damned giant ISPs are sitting ontop of and what picture we aren't seeing... The evolution of piss-poor internet access from sand, into dirt, into mud, into shit. All the consumer knows is it's "The Internet". Look at AOL. They are dinosaurs and people eat that shit up with a shovel!
Oh boy, this is not going to be popular.
I frankly could NOT give a rats-ass if ISPs throttle P2P software. Do you really want me to believe you guys are using it legitimately? Do you REALLY want me to believe that mostly everything on there does NOT violate a copyright of some sort?!
I totally believe in freedom (of speech), and as such I totally hate the DMCA, RIAA AND MPAA.
But fuck it, MY internet connection gets slow because of people exchanging software (music, computer, whatever) illegaly. And my prices don't drop or my ISP goes out of business.
I don't think ISPs have the right to block just anything the want, but you sure make their case a lot more palettable when you don't use the internet responsibly. You can cry bloody murder about people taking away your ability to get your MP3s, but in the meantime your behaviour hurts everyone.
That's why I say I don't give a damn.
Slashdot complaint: I pay $50/mo for access, it should be unlimited (no caps, no port filtering). All we're seeing is Reality winning out over the La-La Land dream of unlimited bandwidth for a low fixed price. I hate Reality! OTOH, the agreements are pretty shady: "we can change whatever we want, whenever we want to."
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
when you sign up with a comsumer ISP, you do not have an inalienable right to use as much bandwidth as you possibly can. every ISP in the world has less bandwidth connecting them to the rest of the internet than the aggregrate bandwidth of all their customer`s connections to them. were everyone to max out throughput to the ISP, the ISP would be unable to pass all the traffic out to the internet, and EVERYONE`s connection suffers as a result.
The ISPs bandwidth is a resource that is SHARED between all of the ISPs customers. the ISP bases pricing structures and bandwidth requirements on average use by their customers. if, on average, people use a small amount of bandwidth, the ISP can afford to have less upstream bandwidth, and PASS ON the savings to the customer (ie, your $50 a month cable connection).
if, however, a minority of users ABUSES the shared resource, in effect degrading the service for all of their fellow users by overusing bandwidth capacity, then the ISP is left with some hard choices:
- aquire additional upstream bandwidth for an additional cost, and pass the cost onto all their users. everyone goes from $50 per month to $60 per month, with the low bandwidth majority subsidizing the high bandwidth majority
- aquire additional upstream bandwidth for an additional cost, and pass on the cost to the users who are using the network most heavily, ie tiered pricing (which is what at&t is considering)
- do not aquire additional bandwidth, and cap users to prevent them from abusing the network and degrading their fellow customer`s service
- kick off any user who is using too much bandwidth
noone wants to pay more for their existing service, and noone wants to pay extra to subsidize someone else (although by the nature of the situation, they already are subsidizing fellow subscribers) more than they already are.
kicking people off for using their service is something ISPs cannot, and will not do.
therefor, they are left with an obvious solution: cap bandwidth, and offer tiered service for people who are greatly affected by the cap.
it is a very clear problem, and a very clear solution. it should not be brought up over and over on slashdot.
if you want to bitch, then you have two options: bitch about the people who are using so much bandwidth that they are forcing the ISPs to implement these changes (and it IS the minority of users ruining it for the majority), or pony up the dough for a network connection that comes with guaranteed bandwidth (ie, a t1, or other business class service)
you pay for what you get. as pointed out, you can`t pay $50 for bandwidth that costs $500+ (T1, etc).
Seriously, Normal webbrowsing, chatting, and email can be done flawlessly with a 56K modem. All the other things that people do with the internet use broadband.
Send your parents a X-Mas video as an email attachment. Well Hell that alone is going to be 10 - 100 megs (depends how stupid you are about compressiong *grin*). Then there's getting that X-Mas music to pop into the background ... yup gunna pull out my p2p to grab a copy of crosby's jingle bells ... why ... well because I know somewhere downstairs I have it sitting on record somewhere that I bought in a stack of records for $5 at a garage sale.
So that's a decent point. I have yet to see a real legal reason for broadband .... and you know what??? it's all that bad illegal stuff that makes broadband sell. You really think ads about how you can see a webpage faster make joe-surfer-internet want to pay between 2 - 4 times more for the internet? Hell no ... it's seeing the neighbors with their new CD-Burner making mix CD's in a matter of minutes via KaZaa (or whatever) then burning it to a $.50 CD-R and bragging about how you just paid $13 for what they paid $.50 for ...
Then there's open source funness. Are you going to run out and buy the latest greatest $80 copy of redhat when you can pop over to linuxiso.org and just burn a copy??? We're talking $2.00 for the three CD set (and I'm counting the sticky labels as well) ...
Broadband was made for downloads to be fast ...
Then there's gaming ... When I'm playing Q3 on the net ... do you really think I'll settle for anything more than a 45 PING??? ohhh hell no ... and do you think that me playing on the uberfast server doesn't take up bandwidth? OF COURSE IT DOES ... but you know what ... that's what I'm forking $52 out a month for ... the ability to do just that ...
So in all seriousness ... if you don't like broadband ... go to your 56K modem and leave us all alone ... because we waited for the day of 2 mb/s downloads ... and now that the day is here ... we consider that a right ... a right that we will fight to keep...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Seems to me the time is right to portless protocols. In other words the port is an extention of the ip. Most likely chosen at random.
And since they will then resort to filtering protocols it will require the protocol to have an a tunneling encryption module. There are algorythms for setting up two party encryption with a third party evesdroper. Fortunetly it wouldn't require strong encryption. Too impractical to break simple encryption on lots of users but probably best to use a plug in tunnel encryption module so that the internal protocal wouldn't be dependent.
Sensoring does not work.
Oh, they've blocked napster. dear. shut down that hot item before most of the world even knew about ... wha? you say napster's already turned off? well it goes to show you what happens to a company when we block their ports
closed minded is as closed minded does
If people turned them off when they weren't around, there would be a lot less filesharing too. A lot of people leave their computers on all the time sharing files on irc, WinMX, Morpheus/Kazaa, it is the basis of the system. If everyone turned the stuff off as soon as they downloaded whatever they wanted, pretty soon no one would be able to get anything...
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
This is a business decision from the broadband provider. You do NOT have the right for broadband access to your hous and you do NOT have the right to demand your provided gives you an unfiltered service. The facts are that they are providing a service which you pay for - your sole rights are in the contract you signed with them, most of which pretty much dictate that they can do whatever they damn well please.
If you really want an unfiltered service with high bandwidth then get your own T1, or are you really just bitching because you can't get everything you want for only $60/month?
Want some cheese with your whine?
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
As AT&T transistions to Comcast, my email address will change from alias@mediaone.net to FirstInitialLastNameAccountNumberStateInitial@comc ast.net.
:P
For instance, if my name is David Smith and my account number is 123456, and I live in Michigan, my new email address will be dsmith123456MI@comcast.net. Now if that doesn't fly in the face of privacy!
Also, Comcast is dropping all Newsgroups after the transition. I guess all those geeks downloading all that ASCI is slowing down the KaZaA downloads and Comcast won't stand for that kind of abuse
I disagree that Australians rights are being volilated. In the strict legal sense, a sample document defined by the UN lists rights at the end of this post. I enjoy my high speed access as much as anyone else, but I realize that my ISP is in business to make money. Being a rational entity, it will maximize it's profits to the best of it's ability based on the information available.
Here is an excerpt of the document defining human rights from the UN.
http://www.hrweb.org/legal/undocs.html
This covenant details the basic civil and political rights of individuals and nations. Among the rights of nations are:
the right to self determination
the right to own, trade, and dispose of their property freely, and not be deprived of their means of subsistence
Among the rights of individuals are:
the right to legal recourse when their rights have been violated, even if the violator was acting in an official capacity
the right to life
the right to liberty and freedom of movement
the right to equality before the law
the right to presumption of innocence til proven guilty
the right to appeal a conviction
the right to be recognized as a person before the law
the right to privacy and protection of that privacy by law
freedom of thought, conscience, and religion
freedom of opinion and expression
freedom of assembly and association
The covenant forbids torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, slavery or involuntary servitude, arbitrary arrest and detention, and debtor's prisons. It forbids propaganda advocating either war or hatred based on race, religion, national origin, or language.
It provides for the right of people to choose freely whom they will marry and to found a family, and requires that the duties and obligations of marriage and family be shared equally between partners. It guarantees the rights of children and prohibits discrimination based on race, sex, color, national origin, or language.
It also restricts the death penalty to the most serious of crimes, guarantees condemned people the right to appeal for commutation to a lesser penalty, and forbids the death penalty entirely for people under 18 years of age.
The covenant permits governments to temporarily suspend some of these rights in cases of civil emergency only, and lists those rights which cannot be suspended for any reason. It also establishes the UN Human Rights Commission.
After almost two decades of negotiations and rewriting, the text of the Universal Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was agreed upon in 1966. In 1976, after being ratified by the required 35 states, it became international law.
Any ISP not charging $5/GB will go out of business...
Any ISP not charging $5/GB will go out of business...
Speeds dont matter, amounts transfered do. THEY have bills to pay.
Now, in the bigger picture, the fact that ISP dont do this, they rely on HOSTING to make their money on the bandwidth, means that eventually, all the content providers but AOL/TW and friends are going to be forced out, noone can survive on ads, because content sites ARE paying $5/GB
So, either we need consumers paying $5/GB for BIDIRECTIONAL urestricted bandwidth, or it's going to be a very boring internet soon.
But that wont change. We're doomed. Consumers are cheap bastards and cant comprehend the big picture.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Well not free but the infostructure for cable is a lot less for DSL and T1 lines. A lot less because thay have been building high speed data lines for the last 10 years. I get my cable through coxial cabel not a new DSL switch or a T1 line ran to my house. the cable companys can afford to offer Cable service for $40 a month and make a shit load more mony then if thay sold it for 100/150(buisness Cable) a month. Also I wish thay wold have a no support plan that would be cheaper. With buisness your basicly paying for better support.
Most of this is true for Time warner.
Oh yeah my city(taxes out the ass) payed for fiber optics to be put in every where. I still don't know what is is used for.
marry p2p with wireless. Cut corporate out of the loop. Only thing left is electricity to supply the power & you could cut that tether off too. Imagine if you will, if everyone that's on the internet now having a wirless node/bridge.
Start your own free network. Setup/serve your own websites/content. & if you wanted to maintain a link to 'the internet', you could cache those sites on the freenet there by stop from having to funnel packets to and fro through your restricted, monitored, pipe. Just a thought. Wishfull thinking?
Australia's largest telco, Telstra has a nice monopoly over the entire ADSL market.
Actually Rob, whilst Telstra has a monopoly over the local loop, they don't have a monopoly over ADSL as such. At work, we have a connection through Connexus, the service is awsome. We really have only had one significant outage, (this was when a Telstra tech accidently pulled the wrong card out of the exchange, and knocked us offline for a week - NOT happy Jan!) - There is also no filtering - this is because you pay per mb over your monthly allowance, which seems to be a good way to go.
There are several other people out there doing ADSL in .au
Stop buying australian products, stop going there for holidays, stop giving their government money.
But be prepared. Poor legislation and practices might pass in any country.
My only problem with Satellite Broadband...lets say some technical issues come up, heh it'll be a lil while before then get someone up there to fix it....its not exactly across town is it, hmmmm Time Warner usually gives a 3 hour window, I wonder what the window would be like for a satellite fix
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ive said this before, and I'll say it again:
You get what you pay for!
Your paying just a tad more then most dialup providers still charge, and you expect unlimited bandwidth, and mind numbing speeds, with no limitations?
Come on now, I know you guys are smarter then that! Seriously, if a customer paid you $30 a month, and expected unlimited bandwidth, and to turn the other way when you abuse their service? Thats never going to happen.
This isnt even a sotry.
Brent Jones
One of the large ISP's in sweden, Telenordia, are also doing this for their 10mbit fiber customers. They have capped the popular ports for file sharing like Kazaa and Direct Connect.
When changing from the standard port to a user defined randomly choosed port I observed a ten time increase in capacity.
Give yourself ISP independance.
HTH.
Deleted
In a nutshell, broadband providers have a lot to gain by restricting users' access, and users have a lot to lose if they let the industry move toward new usage models.
[Background info - I live in a flat in Brisbane (in Queensland, Australia)]
Optus for a long time would not put in cable to a flat or "Multi-Dwelling Units" as they called them. Damn annoying.
Telstra will but their offerings are a pittance compared compared to dial-up (in terms of service) and Optus in terms of bandwidth.
And for those who think Telstra's so shit cause they're running out of money - Telstra reported their biggest earnings this year at $4 Billion dollars. That's right 4 Billion (and then some).
And no, most people in here Oz don't bitch and moan except to each other. I don't think much more would happen even if we did "do something about it". Have a look at our Minister for Communications and IT, the "World's Biggest Luddite", Senator Richard Alston.
Thank you and Good Night.
Zero Kelvin
neux.org
BTO, the most popular adsl provider in the uk (if your not familiar with our corrupt telecommunications infrastructure they basically own a monopoly over everything) used traffic shaping on several ports used for file sharing programs. This meant that alot of people dropped from 50k/sec+ downloads to around 2k/sec downloads. They of course denied it for a while until enough evidence was gathered (mainly from forums at adslguide.org.uk) and presented to Watchdog among other things. They backed down and as far as i know the traffic shaping measures are no longer implemented. They are slowly upgrading all out home gateways from 34mbps to 155mbps aswell as a few other updates so things are getting better...at £40/month its not particularly cheap (although unfortunately cheapest in the uk if your not one of the lucky few within reach of cable...) and it has to be said that theyre support guys are worse than useless. a
In cable modem, there are physically 12 or so downstream frequencies and 4 upstream frequencies. On any given cable modem segment, you can get about 10-12 mbps down and only 2 mbps up.
Cable companies don't limit you because they want to eliminate servers, they limit upstream because they *have* to.
Read up.
If (big if I realise) these materials were freely available to share, then much saner libraries of s/w could be built and cut bandwidth usage dramatically. For example, when downloading a DIVX movie file, most users with bandwidth will try and download two or three different versions at the same time - since one will inevitably be of poor quality, another will be corrupted and the other one will take resumes from different users when people go off-line.
If there was a on-site (in the Uni example) site which contained various movies, software, etc. then people would only have to utilise the downstream to get more unusual choices, etc. The warez/mp3/divx scenes are horrifically inefficient from a bandwidth point of view. Yes, yes I know...unreconstructed anarchist fantasy.
I can fully understand ISPs throttling people's P2P transfers to save some Internet bandwidth. But I also think they ought to be more selective and allow full bandwidth between customers of their own network since this essentially doesn't cost them anything.
I mean, think about it... Everybody in your city connects back to the cable company's head end office where they are all trunked together using the cable company's high speed local area network equipment. Traffic that only goes between people in the same city doesn't need to go through the Internet at all.
People SHOULD be running servers on their home systems -- providing services that are for use by other users inside their ISP's network. It's content without the cost of Internet bandwidth! ISPs should be ENCOURAGING this type of network usage.
This assumes that proper routing is being done by the ISP. Your customers in the city need to be able to talk to each other. My current cable ISP by gives you a NATed private IP address instead of a real Internet routable IP address. This is incredibly stupid because now all of the P2P clients running on their network can only transport files to/from users that have a real IP. And since none of their own users have real IPs, guess where all the P2P traffic HAS to go? Yep, through the Internet to other cities.
By saving a little money on buying fewer IP addresses, they waste who knows how much on extra Internet backbone traffic costs.
P2P has the potential to be the most bandwidth efficient system of distributing large files. In an ideal world, when the next release of my favorite Linux distribution is put online, ONE copy of it gets downloaded through the Internet backbone to my city. From there, people inside the city copy it from each other, wasting no Internet bandwidth at all. Simple P2P systems like gnutella probably couldn't pull this off very well, but something like the mftp based edonkey2000.com could do it IMHO (with proper routing in place).
Throttle the Internet P2P data streams. Route internal P2P data streams properly so they don't use the Internet. Try to expand your coverage area to the as much of the city as you can.
Just my 2 cents on the stupid ISP management going on.
BT Openworld in the UK has been blocking access to Gnutella, eDonkey and Kazaa (and presumably Morpheus) since October on their Broadband (ADSL) service. (someone please respond if these blocks have been since lifted). They also went through a phase of emailing out the Badtrans-B Virus to their customers as well, to keep things interesting, and evicting or restricting customers who have paid for their 24/7 unmetered dial-up service and actually attempt to use it 24/7. Apart from that, it's a great service ;-)
If you need to forward any port, use ... available for UNIX and Windows:
explanation [taken from their page]
[If] you have a firewall that does not allow telnet (23), but it does allow http (80). Set leapfrog up on the other side of the firewall to listen on port 80 and send to 23, then telnet to port 80 of the leapfrog machine and you will ricochet to the machine you wish to connect. You will have the Leapfrog machines' IP and MAC addresses. It supports unlimited users (well, limited by memory).
I have to say that on the whole I've been very impressed with the service. Although there were a few throughput issues when I initially joined, I've been on the whole very impressed with the service. They even allow servers (with suitable resitrctions, max 10 connections per cable modem and it must be private, password protected), and the only limits they place on normal traffic is a transparent proxy for all port 80 traffic (which I am sure actually speeds up the service rather than slowing it down). I get a constant 64kb/sec transfer rate downloading where possible (and thanks to the transparent caches this is relativly often). The only thing I can say against them is that their mail server often (once a month or so) gets backed up and takes three or four hours to send emails - but they're running some Microsoft SMTP solution at the moment, so perhaps that's to be expected ;) Oh, that and they're part owned by Microsoft. But they don't mind that I only have linux boxen connected to their CM..
So basically, to all those who have replied 'well what do you expect, the economic model isn't viable!', I beg to differ.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
The broadband providers are going out of business, folks! They aren't growing money on network trees, they're going bust building infrastructure!
THERE ARE NO PROGRAMMING COSTS ASSOCIATED WITH BROADBAND CABLE! If the cable companies make the citizens BUY and support their own cable modems, email/news servers (Yahoo/Google, AOL, etc..), then the ENTIRE cost of the network comes down to head-end gear, provisioning/operations and NAP-connections --none of which are very expensive.
Each local government should consider the amount of bandwidth that a cable company proposes to supply to its neighborhoods in awarding/renewing franchise licenses. This is the way it should have been at Day One (and I was in the first major metropolitan area of the USA to get broadband), but the @HOME people, like Microsoft and AOL in their early days, were able to completely pull the wool over the eyes of John Q. Public. Nowadays, they could never get away with that and with the end of the "@HOME made us do it" excuse, we can begin to hold the cable companies accountable for how they're blowing our high-speed-data subscription money. Fast connections, or we vote you ouddaheah...
Napster is *so* pase'
That's why I use MyNapster set to port 443... after all nobody should be peeking on that port; it's a violation of the DMCA.
Seriously though... after having spent some time in Australia, I can truely say that they have all but shunned the internet and are pertty much happy just to shear and fsck their sheep while living off the dole.
...would you really expect anything more from a bunch of exported convicts with liberal immigration policies?
Get a Modem Bank, 10 pieces of them, and run them in parallel...
You'll get all the speed you want
+
You 'll get some respect from thge old IT guys, who used the same sort of solution, back in 1985 8)
Of course, 10 dialup access + 10 modem might be costly, but then, broadband has no price 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
A WLAN connected to what exactly?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The true cost of cable over here is hard to work out, due to all of the internal charging within the two telecommunications companies.
The real problem is that the ex-monopoly provider of all of the main pipes in Australia charges monopolistic amounts for bandwidth. Want ADSL with a 20GB monthly quota? That will be US$1500, thanks... And that's the wholesale price!
h tm for Australian pricing.
In the US it is easy to get bandwidth for under US$2 per month, which is about 30x cheaper!See http://telstra.com.au/bigpond/direct/adslpricing.
I have Telstra cable in Australia, and the service is OK. The contract stated that they could change the terms, and then they did so by putting a cap on. THe cap is pretty reasonable, and allows you to download quite a bit each month. The reason for the cap was that some people on residental plans were downloads gigabytes of files per day. I'm not sure if there are too many legal uses that would require that kind of transfer rates, and I'm pretty sure they were just downloading DivX's.
So I think that this is pretty fair, and the people who are complaining are just the people who are downloading all the illegal crap, and just sucking up the service and making everyone's accounts more expensive.
I've seen a lot of people post about how this is perfectly legitimate network management, and I can accept that, although it must be asked where heavy use ends and abuse begins (do compulsive downloading of the latest ISO of your favourite dozen distros and constant apt-gets count).
I've also seen a lot of posts saying, in effect, "Why care? It's their network, they can do what they like." But remember, people, cable access in Australia is a monopoly (or rather, an oligopoly) where the only players are the two big telcos, Telstra and Optus. It's not as if you can go somewhere else if you feel you're being screwed; they can do what they damn well like and we just have to put up with it. So it is quite important keeping an eye on them and screaming bloody murder if it even looks as if they're trying to shaft someone.
You know nothing about what you're talking about in the Australian situation. I'm currently setting up an ISP that will likely be offering DSL. The costs are horrendus. Because I'm fairly well in charge of it, I'll be setting the policies fairly, so you will pay for your bandwidth, and no one user will be allow to hog all the bandwidth, but I won't be blocking any services except maybe spammers and virus senders.
All you lamers on whirlpool.net know nothing about what you're talking about. Here's a business propisition for you - you buy hot dogs for $2 and sell them for $1.
I'll admit i'm not very up on this, but common since tells me two things:
A. Why does the ISP need to know what transport the client is using, can't they just look at the packet size? isn't that enough?
B. How the hell are you supposed to set this up? wouldn't you need a server on the other side of your isp to decrypt your packets, like a friends box on a unlimited isp, or a box at a local college? i can't just connect to slashdot on port 80 via IPsec, can I?
If there is some way i can i can use IPSec to remove port restrictions or download caps (though time warner cable hasn't done that.. yet) i'm all for it, or ever just to secure my connections, but it doesn't seem like this is something you can just magicly turn on and make it work everywhere.
-Jon
this is my sig.
would it be just too way out to consider for a moment that porn, warez and pirated mp3/vcd is actually *illegal* in pretty much every country?
/. community think they have a basic fucking human right to rip people off?
the sole existance of p2p apps is for this kind of stuff, you know that, i know that, we all know that. it also costs the ISPs a lot of money, so why does the
It is a joke that we pay all this money per month and the teleco's and cable companies complain about their money problems. It's nutty that only a small percentage of the fiber installed is acutally in use. Here in canada, a small community run cable tv operation in the province of ontario was told (about 7 years ago) by the regulating body here in canada that they were not charging their customers enough (at that time they were charging about eqv. of $2-$4 us a month), you see, the two big cable monopolies here complained and the community operation had to raise it's rates to $20 us eqv. or whatever. The thing is, the going rate for telecom services are way too high and are probably going to get higher as more people need to use the internet as a utility like the phone. With the cost of equipment getting cheaper all the time due to ever miniaturazation, the service should get faster and cheaper (same rate of change as computer speed and motherboard intergration etc.)
Has been really bad in the past year when it comes to bandwidth. When I 1st singed up with them I was getting almost 25K upload within the Videotron network and ~21K outside. Now I am luckly to get 15K upload. I called and expressed my extreme dissatifation, and they just stone walled (stone-walled?) me.
But its still the fastest you can get w/o going to a corporate plan from Bell. =p
-nuclearsnake
See the forbiden post Here
Walk outside, and look up. You see those TWO big fat cables slung underneath the phone lines, one black and one grey. (Assuming you're in a covered area, of course.) One belongs to Optus, one to Telstra/Foxtel. Telstra own their own cable backbone.
:)
As for ADSL, ever wondered why there are no competitors, except in CBD areas? That's because TELSTRA would not allow anyone else access to the local exchanges to install equipment. They've since been forced to, but few other companies are offering their own service yet.
You MAY mean the Southern Cross (undersea) Cable, of which Optus is a part owner. Telstra doesn't use this very much at all, and has plenty of other undersea cables of their own. Legacy of being the Telecomms monopoly, dontcha know? Pity they all seem to be in shallow Chinese shipping lanes!
For what it's worth, that "average" cable user on Optus@Home uses around 60 megabytes per day, 1.8 gigabytes per month. For Telstra to start charging 18 cents per megabyte for people who use only around twice the average (given the nature of usage profiles) doesn't seem to make sense for me.
"In person, WAP'ed up and making your life a misery!" BOFH, 2003
That's exactly the concept behind a news server. The university would need to dedicate a lot of bandwidth to downloading a news feed, but once it's on the server, each individual user only needs to use local network traffic, essentially free, to download gigs of any imaginable content.
Too bad most universities block the alt.binaries groups anyway...
You're forgetting the /. 99.99/0.01 rule - that is that /. represents 0.1 % of the people who might see those ads and we're the only ones know what a mega/kilo-bit means and get excited about what we could do with all that bandwidth. The other 99.99% want to know if it works with their fav. apps and is it fast. 500Kbps is plenty fast for someone who's been used to dialup.
The only people being "mislead" are tech-heads, and they should be smarter than to take advertisements at their word.
Nice to see yet another reason not to leave this country, though
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I don't understand why this thread perpetuates or why broadband providers and some users just don't get a clue.
Broadband providers: The web hosting companies have been charging for bandwidth for years. Don't block services. Instead charge for bandwitdh! If some luser wants to run their own ftp site or PTP host make them pay instead of reducing service for everyone else. It's common knowledge in the ISP biz that 5% of the users consume 80% of the resources. I do an occaisional download and use VPN to get e-mail from work. Don't penalize me because some dickhead next door runs a Kazaa server or uses their VPN connection to stream bitmapped X-rays or something.
Broadband users: There ain't no free lunch. You get a consumer grade connection for $40/mo. If you use it at commercial grade levels you should pay accordingly. I don't care what kind of Gigabytes you are moving, you need to pay for what you use. Oh, and you amateur lawyers out there ripping thru the terms of service: quit trying to preach about what your ISP rights to service are. At the end of the day you haven't paid for shit so don't expect to get a $2500 commercial grade pipe for the price of two 56k modem connections.
ISP customers have choices whether they choose to recognize them or not. Before AT&T brought cable to my neighborhood I was paying $80/mo for - get this - metered (200 channel-hours) ISDN plus a $40 ISP account to support 2 channel connections. If I thought 128k was too slow, there was always a half dozen tier 2 providers who would gladly put in a premise router and a CIR set to whatever ceiling I could afford. Even with $40/mo cable and ADSL now, those tier 2 providers are still in business for a reason.
This is just the next iteration of a$$holes that would tie up ISP modem banks with 24/7 dial-up connections. Now they are hogging cable and ADSL backbones and causing regular, low-bandwidth customers to lose service.
If your ISP kills all your Kazaa ports quit yer bitching and get your premise router installed.
Better educated? I guess Microsoft won't be able to push around consumers anymore then since they'll all become better educated and switch to Linux. I guess the oil companies won't be able to push around anyone anymore since consumers will protest for alternative fuels. Yeah right.
What on Earth makes you think the majority of broadband customers will 1, notice whats being done and 2, give enough of a fuck to care? Its a limited population of people who are being affected by this and because of that nothing they bitch about matters.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I don't use this service myself, opting for a much better (in this area at least) DSL provider without the mile long EUA. One of my employees though is forced to use them if he wants broadband. After the @home switchover at the end of november, they stomped VPN, forcing us to upgrade to a much more expensive business service. They have yet to block SSH though, fortunatly. It's pretty sad, but Rogers policies makes Bell Canada's DSL look good.
tinfoilmedia
Copying music/movies/software is "fair use"
Limiting anything that affects Slashdot dorks (ie. bandwidth) is evil in all situations.
Disagreement == troll.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Videotron are just following the trend they're setting: they have been constantly degrading the quality of service since I subscribed with them 4 years ago.
- 1998-1999: pretty much trouble free, but bandwidth constantly decreasing as a result of increased popularity (are they forgetting about upgrading their infrastructure?);
- 2000: They tried to replace *for*free* a cable modem they *I*bought*, with another one that allowed them more control over my bandwidth;
- July? 2001: They blocked port 80 using the CodeRed excuse. At that point, I got angry, deposited a couple of complaints about agents and supervisors who told me blatant lies when I was discussing the situation with them (Not that they kept the complaints - As I checked later I saw that they never were registered), then I registered with their concurrent, Bell Sympatico's HSE.
It's interesting to note that whatever Videotron does, they play both sides: on one hand they tell you their contract doesn't allow any server, but each employee makes a point of finishing the sentence by "Hey, but if you do, nobody's going to complain!".
Until I was the one complaining because all my web sites were down.
All that made me a lot more mefiant about this practice, and allows me to exercise some crualty to the poor sellers that try to promise me something they don't put in writing...
C.
C.
Nearly half the comments on this thread seem to be saying essentially the same thing: "What do you expect? You can't get a T1's worth of unlimited bandwidth for $50 a month." That's true, but neither is the market price of a T1 line really $500+ or whatever they currently charge. They only get away with that because it's a legally enforced monopoly. With competition from cable and satellite Internet services, the price of T1s is dropping; I expect to eventually see it settle in the $200-$300 a month price range. Besides, that TANSTAAFL isn't the point. The point is that the broadband companies say there is a free lunch. Look at some ads for cable or DSL service sometime. You will hear quite a few mentions of terms like "dedicated", "unlimited", or "always-on", but no mentions of "filtered". Broadband companies claim that people can get this kind of Internet access for ONLY $49.99!!! a month, and conveniently "forget" to mention all the restrictions they place on it. If someone complains, and has a need to run a server, use P2P file sharing, or some other application that they forbid, then the companies steer them towards more expensive "business class" plans or leased lines. This is a classic example of bait and switch - promise someone a good product or service at a low price to get them into the store, then deny them that sale and switch them to a more expensive product instead. This is a form of fraud, and it's illegal. But apparently no one seems to care.
Which isn't exactly legit in the US and most other places in the world. And yes, the ads are misleading- if you have to connect via PPoE, it's not an "always on" connection. If they're capping any of the bandwidth inbound or outbound for anything other than an emergency situation (Code Red and Nimda are such a case, the Napster degradation is not) it's not blazing speed to do anything you want. No, it's not a T1- I didn't expect it to be.
Copyright didn't exist as a concept in biblical times, so how can there be a biblical prohibition on software copying? It's "thou shalt not steal" not "thou shalt not copy". Weren't the first Christians actively encouraged to copy their books? I wonder how far Christianity would have gone if the scriptures were copyrighted?
Why are you aussies worrying about bandwidth when prostituion is legal in your country? I think the last thing I would worry about is net connections when I could be getting a Christmas hummer gift certificate from my work!
"No Comm, No Bomb"
"Spending less on buying fewer IP addresses" isn't the real reason for using non-routable blocks for most customers. IPv4 space is running out- slowly but surely. Sure, they can get another class C, possibly a class B block, but that only buys you 254 in the case of the class C and 65534 in the case of the class B- and you're going to pay a premium from the upstream provider for those blocks and justify your usage because there's only a limited number of them available. Right now, if you want the cheap prices, you're going to get a non-routable because the price figure doesn't factor in the cost of having the routable address. Instead of $30-60 per month, expect it to jump to $100-200 per month. In many cases, you are getting what you're paying for.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
As the one in charge of a decent sized ISP network I can say that it is hard to make money on residential broadband. In fact, I've suggested that we no longer do it on many occasions. The residential users are:
1. The one that want to pay the least
2. Complain the loudest and most frequently
3. Abuse the network more than any others
4. Use the most bandwidth
I've had to throttle ports on my Residential DSL interfaces before due to abuse of bandwidth, adn yes, I blocked port 80 incoming during the nimda scare. I don't leave the restrictions on, but I have ABSOLUTELY no problem doing so for residential subscribers. The days of sub $50 a month broadband are coming to a painfull end.
Don't get me wrong, I abused my verizon DSL years ago when I was part of the initial rollout, I abused it like nobodys buisness. Now that I manage the network and am on the other side of the fence I can appreciate the people that don't.
nb
Note that they can use a transparent proxy to log all of your (port 80) website visits. *breaks out tinfoil hat*
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Move to Adelaide? Come on! It isn't far :)
:)
Heheh, I'm sorry
good. fucking good. then maybe I can use my fucking internet connection here at umass.
The reason the broadband providers are finding the Internet expensive is that they're doing something that other comm providers don't: They are filtering and censoring the traffic. Just providing bandwidth (including a per-subscriber cap) isn't all that expensive. But if you also try to provide the software and management layers that examing the packets and filter, it rapidly becomes very costly.
Imagine if the phone company or the postal service were to try to do something similar. They'd have to hire people to monitor all your calls and letters, to make sure you weren't violating any local ordinances. This would cost hundreds or thousands of time what the basic service costs. The Internet isn't really any different.
"But we can't let things like CodeRed or Nimda bring down the traffic." Nonsense. You just do what the phone system does. You limit each subscriber to a certain bandwidth, and charge a lot more when they go over. Give people pointers to security-related web sites and let them fix the problems themselves. If they refuse, you don't need to block everyone's port 80; you just throttle the few machines that are flooding the wire with their traffic.
For that matter, why do ISPs provide email service? This has nothing to do with basic IP service. With an always-on connection, it's easy to do direct point-to point email. I can't get cable Internet service without email bundled, though I don't use it. This is yet one more reason that the cable companies are finding the Internet very expensive.
Why don't any of them offer just basic IP service, with none of the higher-level junk that my machine can very well do itself? If they did this, and billed separately for services like port blocking, they'd find that the Internet can be provided at a good profit. But it's those add-on "free" services that they provide whether you want them or not that are dragging them down.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
i think software developers should counter these type of ISP manuevers by simply implementing features in their programs that allow you to use any port you wish.
after all, there is no way they can filter every incoming port.
or perhaps simliar to phones which autoswitch channels [ports] when interference gets too heavy.
is there any current software that does port hopping?
Subject says it all.. It wont end till everything is content filtered.. wonder who is next.. US? UK?.. Grab those files while you can..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Are there any other broadband services, other than the ones in Australia, continually degrading their service to customers? "
Broadband services? No
But this past year at work our network admins blocked ports after finding 3 PCs in the company were consuming 1/3rd of the bandwidth of our corporate T3 with Napster.
So not broadband services, but Napster is responsible for degrading the service of thousands of persons at my company. I would imagine the same is true for DSL and cable users as well which is why they are throttling it's usage.
Oh, you didn't want to hear that Napster is evil, did you? Too bad.
If you want leased line services get a leased line, until then realize that you get what you pay for.
It'll stop when the current John and Jane Q Fewer become the majority and do some of that old hardcore non-arguable logical complaint type stuff.
Until then, John and Jane Doe will use their AOL over Cable Modem services and be happy as Oprah in her kitchen with a hot applie pie.
It'll stop when the packetloss stops.
I'm sick of half of my fucking traffic going into oblivion because all P2P people leaving 5 different P2P clients running all the time.
I don't have anything against P2P, and I could care less what people do with it... right up until it starts to effect the quality of my service. Sure I can bitch and moan that the ISP's aren't adding more bandwidth as it's needed, but I'm sure that no matter how much was added the P2P monkeys would just suck it all up anyway. As it is, running at 50% PL nonstop all day is fucking bs, and if they have to block all P2P software to get that to stop then I'll live with it. I can go back to getting my porn and mp3s from usenet and irc.
Back in my day, we didn't have any fancy assed Napster or Morpheus, we had to use rn to save the files then stitch them together and pipe it to uudecode, so don't come bitching to me when you have to scan Usenet for your porn using your automagic binary grabber/combiner/decoder, because you don't know how good you have it.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Virtually all services we share with others are engineered statistically to provide an acceptable level of service at peak load (or not). Whether we are talking about roads, cell phone capacity, ability to get a dial tone, toilet flushing capacity, or dial up internet usage -- unmetered usage requires an average usage which has a cost that is acceptable to the majority of the users.
If these assumptions change, the costs must change, you must go to variable pricing, or you must cap. This is simply an engineering reality--
whether we are talking about mailing letters to small villages in alaska, or all videoconferencing at dinner time on our broadband connection.
P to P applications, work from home users, and servers use a disappropriate amount of bandwidth. The broadband providers have a finite amount of bandwidth at several layers, the local area, the upstream and downstream connections etc. Some usage patterns are 10 x the typical users -- at what point should the burden go onto the users which actually represent far disaproprate amount of actual capacity costs.
There are only four basic choices:
1. Tragedy of the commons: allow all users to degrade. All users are unhappy, but no increase in cost. This was AOLs initial dial strategy when they instituted "unlimited usage".
2. Control the type of usage: This permits the provider to reduce or eliminate certain kind of heavy bandwidth usage--a hidden bandwidth charge--infinite for some types of bandwidth usage. Makes the unaffected users happy at no extra cost. The affected users are totally disenfranchised.
3. Allow unlimited usage without usage controls: This requires adding infrastructure indefinitely. When videos get common swapped, including the live feeds from all the day's soap operas etc, the costs could go through the roof.
4. Price for usage: This is straightforward in principle, but would be painful for many. There would be no need to control the type of usage. There would probably be a peak set of hours with a higher rate, and certainly a different upstream rate than downstream rate. You might have a initial quota that was "free" or included in the base cost. You could do anything you damn well please with the bandwidth, but you might find P-P apps and downloading movies more expensive than buying the content, at least during peak hours. This is also wretchedly difficult to explain to the typically internet user, much less the newby, and you'd likely want to have a $ meter in the corner of your screen so you could quickly kill a "bad" app or a useless download.
All systems have to be engineered to handle a peak load. There is a cost to that load, and you have cover the true cost someway, either by charging proportionally or overcharging the lighter users!
Does anyone realistically have a solution that makes everyone happy and doesn't result in some sort of limitation to heavy users?
I must say that I was pretty close to fed up with the level of service last summer. I used to play UT a lot with friends in other states, and the network was almost unusably slow in the evenings. When I called to complain, the customer service department was always very courteous and quick to respond, but they did say that capacity was starting to grow exponentially.
Since the policy changes were implemented, I have received zero (0) warning letters or disconnections. I run apt-get upgrade from a cron job every morning and all of my favorite games (UT and Half-Life especially) work perfectly. I have downloaded many large files and the ISP has no problem with it.
Folks, these are reasonable people and I'd take them over Verizon any day. Most of my friends would as well. Having a broadband connection isn't all about stealing other peoples' stuff and trying to cheat your ISP out of bandwidth.
I dont know about elsewhere, but UPC Norway is doing similar things to their customers, including forcing everyone to be behind transparent proxies which are set up by amateurs, making web browsing anything but a pleasant experience.
I have a problem with *dial-up* ISPs (never mind broadband ones) blocking *outbound* PPTP so I can't get to my own server sitting on a C$250/month server park. Do you try to block people using VPNs to run pirate networks or just want to make sure your connections aren't used for work?
And why ban PPTP when you don't ban SSH? You can use SCP to share files over SSH, or for that matter, port-forward all the P2P ports!
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
.....from a country where the people pissed away their right to bear arms? Unlike the US where the first and second amendments help protect the foolish from the unscrupulous and just plain gullible, in Australia freedom of speech is an indulgence on the part of the government and if you want to protect yourself and your family then you're S-O-L.
What does this have to do with restrictive bandwith? Nothing much except that all of the above are evidence that the people there do what they are told and are willing to put up with crap from a percieved source of power or authority. Kind of makes you wonder if things would have changed much had Japan suceeded in their invasion and conquest of the country.
Blocking all traffic of any sort isn't good. It's pretty easy to set asside chunks of bandwidth for 'important' stuff (port 80, games), set asside another chunk of bandwidth for unimportant stuff (kakazaa, napster), and say ok under no circumstances may the unimportant traffic impact the important traffic.
I fire up Quake, your kakazaa download goes a little slower. Thats the way this should work. I don't care how much bandwidth you use, 'cause when I mash refresh on my web browser, it gets priority over your napster traffic. This is how traffic shaping works and it DOES work if an organization has the (rare) budget and (even more rare) staff capable of doing it.
"When will this stop?"
When all you cheap bastards start buying CDs and going to the movies, instead of "sharing" ripped versions with each other 24/7.
I was running web services from my ATT broadband connection until they blocked port 80. I wasn't running a 'web site' per se, as it was used only to display some of my example work to employers. The server was only running when I knew they would need to look at my stuff (I have a lot of active scripting where I need control of the box). It was even a dynamic IP, so you know it wasn't too useful. I wasn't violating their EULA, but they decided it was necessary to start blocking ports. Very disappointing.
Now I play a cat and mouse game with them as I direct apache to different ports which are eventually blocked. Everything incoming from ports above 1000 seems to be blocked. Has anyone else noticed this with ATT?
Where in the service agreement do they say that they can do this? I am not just paying for incoming HTTP traffic when I buy a broadband internet connection! arg.
BC Shaw only allows 60kb/s MAX upload and download between 30kb/s and 100kb/s, although on crazy fast servers I have seen 700kb/s too. The higher speeds you see are probably due to lower populations in Sask/Alberta.
The thing that makes me mad is that Shaw will advertize "unlimited internet access and the ability to download music and full-motion video", all the while peer-to-peer services, and IRC f-serves, violate the AUP. The max uploads per month are not explictitly set in the AUP allowing them to arbitrarily define them when ever they want. So in effect the more users that sign up the lower your download and upload rates can be manipulated.
If your an extensive bandwidth user, especially in the outgoing direction, expect an email telling you to stop, then a phone call, then a week long ban from the service if you didn't comply.
Check out the RBUA for more griping and Shaw/Rogers news.
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. --Robert Benchley
Too bad it was a bit too obvious.
Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
limiting p2p software by the ISPs strikes me as ironic. what other uses / application does the average-Joe-just-bought-the-best-computer-running- xp
has for broadband connection besides downloading mp3s/divx/warez ?
sooner or later the ISPs will discover that nobody will pay as much as 50$ to a service that blocks kazza,
and by all means doesn't offer any other significant advantage ,
surfing is _not_ strikingly faster using ADSL when compared to 56k modem.
IMHO ISPs should take the opposite approach and optimize the p2p connection -- it will server their own interest.
the content industry (RIAA and friends) might be losing money from the p2p sw, but the ISP most definitely not!, on the contrary many people purchase broadband service only for that.
this is basicly money going from one industry pocket to the other's.
who says micros~1 standards are bad?
That is much of an excuse. ISPs should start pushing for more IPv6 adoption if this is their real limitation.
Besides, I don't buy your assertion that IPv4 space is THAT tight. My ISP does provide real routable IP addresses as an option for $10/month extra. Its just that most people aren't gonna understand the issues and never bother to sign up for real IPs.
On their webpage they specifically state that "The Optus@Home service does not place a cap or limit on download speeds"
This appears to be false advertising.
http://www.optushome.excite.com.au/speed.html
It will stop when you start paying the broadband companies enough money for them to be able to offer the service you want. Remember, they have to pay for bandwidth, too, in addition to staff, electricity, and numerous other expenses. Since the whole point of a business is to be profitable, they must first fix prices to cover operating expenses, then raise them slightly to create a profit.
Really, it's not that bad. Pay $AU80/month? Expect $AU80/month worth of service, speed, and included downloads. Pay $300/month like me? It's faster, I can have a technical support person in at my premesis trouble shooting the problem within an hour, there are no restrictions on the services I use or run, and I can download as much as I want (so long as I pay for it). It makes sense to me - you can't expect something for nothing.
Why do you think broadband is so cheap and pervasive now? Take a minute and get off your high horse to realize the only reason you HAVE your cheap broadband is because of things like napster.
You're absolutely wrong. The only reason broadband even exists is because the providers think they can make money off it. It has nothing to do with Napster, P2P, trading illegal stuff. Its all about the almighty buck. If broadband didn't exist, people would be doing the swapping over 56K lines.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
That's the deal, folks. They're pulling the wool over your gullible eyes. This really isn't about extra costs of servers being run on consumer broadband networks. It's about controlling the market for those services. If they stamp out Napster and Limewire now, they control the channels of distribution for that stuff in the future. Wanna run a web server? How much are you *willing to pay*? Wanna be able to connect to your home computer from elsewhere? How much is that worth to you? Maybe your company will pick up the tab...
8===D~~~ this one is better
Funny that all these broadband providers are going out of business because they can't afford to pay the bills for the expensive bandwidth... and at the same time, all these telco companies going out of business because they built these huge fiber networks that no one is using.
I know here in South Africa internet is expensive mostly because of our Telco monopoly. But where does the problem lie in various other parts of the world? Who's overcharging?
haha you're a fag
I don't entirely agree but you make an excellent point.
There has been a proposal in Canada to place a TARRIFF on the content that users download. I think this idea has a lot of merit and it can solve a lot of problems.
Generally speaking, content providers have much less market clout than the businesses they deal with. In many respects, a natural monopoly exists and the only realistic way to get website content available is to deal with a telco.
Also, in general (but not in all cases), the telco side of this equation, as you point out, charges $5/GB. And since advertising is not going to cover this in most case, not only is additional bandwidth wasted, the content is slowly drying up.
A solution to this is a tarriff paid back to those who provide internet content. This tarriff does not have to be particularly high and certainly will not be a financial burden.
Now... I doubt anyone will argue that content is not valuable. It is more valuable than the delivery system. AOL/TW is a prime example of this. In this case, we have an alignment of the delivery system and the content creation. The content creation side of this equation makes money and thus produces content. Since they _also_ decide who to deliver this to, IE their own customer base, they make money from the delivery side as well.
ISP's who rely on HOSTING are not going to be able to compete. The reason is that these ISP's customers will desert them in droves.
IMHO, correct me if I'm wrong, the @home people bought excite because they wanted to play the AOL/TM game. So AOL/TM grabbed the excite content. The @home people found they really didn't have much competitive advantage... certainly not enough to justify the support of excite. So Excite was dumped. But in the middle of this the carriers that were running the delivery systems that the @home/excite content steamed over found that really, @home wasn't providing much either. So that whole house of cards came crashing down.
Meanwhile, AOL/TW ticks along just fine. By controlling the content AOL/TW provides to their customer base they gain a competitive advantage over most non-vertially integrated competitors.
United they stand and divided we will fall.
The solution is to apply a tarriff to the content delivered in the same way that tarriffs are applied to TV signals. In TV land, broadcasters generally have the right to distribute whatever they want, and a pool is created of a certain percent (I heard 6%) of the advertising revenues. The Neilson ratings then are employed to distribute this money to the producers.
In the ISP world, apply a tax - perhaps based on volume downloaded - but the formula certainly can be more sophisticated than this - and remit it back to the content creation sector.
This will create a revenue pool that will actually support the $5/GB upload fees the ISP/Telco side of the equation likes to bill.
It also neatly solves the "duplication" issue. Presently duplicating compyrighted material for distribution is ILLEGAL regardless what tecgnology is used for the duplication. AOL sends in their caching proxies into webservers and rips them clean whenever they choose - adn then delivers this "cached" content to their 20 million odd customers. IMHO, this is illegal. But - place a tarriff at the point of delivery which remits back to the people who own this intellectual property, and who cares how they deliver it...
What is at issue is that at present, there is no revenue source for the content creation sector except in the occational situation where a large ISP interest has decided to "team up". One example of this is the Convergence of publishers with ISP's as in the case of Thompson Newspapers and Sympatico in Canada. Another example is the AOL/TW combination.
It is simply not fair for these groups to expect to obtain +90% of their content from website developers who naively think they can make a buck while subsidzing what they develop, and what the surfing public wants, while being barred 100% from the revenue side of the equation. I'll go farther, not only is this unfair, it is illegal as well. It breaches copyright law. It breaches fair trade practices.
It also is not in the general public's interest because as you say, It may become a very boring internet soon.
DirecTVDSL turned off alt.binanries for me... ouch
The ISP is trying to provide enough bandwidth to cover all customers at peak demand times. Their costs are driven largely by the *highest total bandwidth* provided. The fact that their load may be 10% of capacity at 1am doesn't help them if it's 150% at 7pm. Demand is not flat, so all GB don't incur the same costs.
Some alternatives:
- Set different bandwidth limits for prime time and off-peak (same as a cell phone company offering peak vs. weekend minutes).
- Throttle back bandwidth for *all* activity when the system is overloaded. Port-specific limits merely encourages use of another port that isn't blocked (yet).
- Allocate a guaranteed bandwidth per customer. When the load permits, make the remainder available on a first-come, first-served basis. This limits the demand any customer can make at prime time, and encourages big users to use off-peak hours.
- For purposes of bandwidth allocation, ignore the (presumed) content and application type. Want to run a server? Fine, but you get no more KB/sec and MB/hr than anybody else. If you want a faster server, pay for a premium connection.
Welcome a new state to the digital third world.
Once the initial business surge is over, providers are going to be reluctant to fork over the bandwidth.
If customers aren't careful, we're going to end up back on 53k modems.
yes, thats correct, We are a country which has a reputation to destroy Analog. We killed Analog Mobile Phone and replaced it with GSM and CDMA We're killing off Analouge TV in 2008 for Free-To-Air Widescreen Digital (We already have it). Take that Britan! We have heaps of Computer tallent, our classroms have Computers and the list goes on. So good for the Howard Goverment!!!!!!!!
No! Don't go to
..... no! Just
Wicked Weasel.
Do NOT go there!!
We do NOT want you flocking to our beaches
and crowding our bikinigirls.
Just don't come to Australia, its horrible here!
The beer is TOO cold! The
forget coming here!!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
No! Correction !Don't go to
Not here.
Do NOT go there!!
I just had to tell you correctly where
not to go!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Before the GST (a new tax system) was brought in in Australia, it cost $60 per month for Telstra igpond cable, plus $90 initial set up costs. After the GST came in, I got a quote for setting up the same service, the monthly fee has jumped to $67 (a rise of more than the tax of 10 per cent) while the installation fee has leapt to $360. You can't say broadband in Australia is cheap, if you take into consideration all the other costs. This article explains that at the beginning of the year Microsoft was complaining about the cost of broadband in Australia. The price has not fallen.