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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?"
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.
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!
"unlimited" broadband in Australia via Telstra and Optus is ~60-80 AUD / month. That's US$ 30-45.
How much do you guys pay?
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.
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Dude! NOT cool! If my ISP blocked incoming ports I would immediatly cancel my service and switch from cable to adsl (both are available in my area). A better solution would be to throttle the file sharing ports and keep fares exactly where they were. It is people like you who give the ISP biz a bad name
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
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
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.
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...
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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.
Did it ever occur to you people that these residential broadband connections for $40 might actually have some controls on them?
Did it ever occur to you that the Australian telecommunications market is dominated by an ex-wholly-Government-owned (and still 51% in public hands) corporation which continually jacks up its prices yet returns none of this revenue in tax dollars or as increased benefits to its customers? No crunch time there -- except for the current CEO, whose institutional shareholders aren't happy with soaking the Australian public, but think they should have similar powers over most of Asia as well. They won't have any luck there, I'm afraid...
US$40/month -- you'd be lucky to get a severely limited connection for that much here. Last I saw unmetered broadband here was running A$800 a month, and that was pretty slow and from a company at the, erm, "dodgier" end of the market.
deus does not exist but if he does
The whole point of broadband is _not_ to download websites faster.
This is true, but the whole economics of broadband relies on it being used to download websites faster. Websites, E-Mail and NNTP.
The $52/month you're forking is chump change compaired to what the ISPs are paying for that bandwidth.
It's time some of you had a little bit of insight on how they can give you that bandwidth and still make money.
NNTP and E-Mail are easy, you're not actually using the ISP's bandwidth to download these. You're only using the link to your ISP. We all know local network speed is cheap. You're using their local network for these protocols (As long as you are using their news/mail servers). The web part of your bandwidth usage is a little bit harder to handle, but not much. One of the biggest helpers, and a company that has made high speed access for what we are paying possible, is Akamai. They've given some nice 1U rack mount content servers to almost every ISP out there already. Even small local ISPs will have some 1U servers in their server room. Symantec, (ping liveupdate.symantec.com , you'll see it's probably one of your ISP's IP addresses) Best Buy, Washington Post, Trend Micro and Barnes and Noble are just a few examples of their customers, and sites that will be using mostly your ISP's local network. (Taken from Akamai's site.
The next step to save even more of your traffic from hitting the ISP's big fat expensive pipe is caching servers. Inktomi and Compaq teamed up to give a nice setup. It's expensive (Somewhere in the neighbourhood of $75,000) but you save that in bandwidth pretty quickly. It's going to cache any semi to frequently viewed pages, and alot of the streamed media you watch. Five hits to ESPN.com just becomes one, and four local requests. The sites you hit and the files you download that are not cached or served from the content servers are a small matter, because a good setup and alot of "normal" internet users will actually be hitting the local servers about 80% of the time.
But you cannot cache P2P traffic, you cannot cache internet gaming traffic, and you cannot cache incoming traffic (Hence why that $52 is not enough for you to be serving up content.) The things you cannot cache are the things that will run an ISP out of business. Everyone here has heard the price of T1s in previous broadband articles or has priced them out themselves. Most realize the economics don't work. This is the only way to make it work. Traffic on alot of protocols just isn't cost effective to be given at high speeds.
I hope this clears up alot of peoples views on broadband access and how it can all work. I can't say if it's right or not, it's just the way things right now have to work. The only thing I can say is if you want a fast connection that you can use for Internet Access and not a fast connection to your ISP, you are going have to pay for it, and it's going to be alot more then $52/month.
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