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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?"
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!
If they allowed the same upstream, people would be hosting all types of services.
Why would anyone in their right mind pay for a dedicated line if they could get the same performance from their cable modem at a significantly lower price? You would see a lot more business use on residential accounts.. And that debate has already been fought out here..
Maybe it isn't possible for them to make money on accounts that use these P2P-type services. I wonder how (un)popular it would be if they only filtered/capped the ports outside of their network - most* of their cost comes when traffic leaves their network to peers.
*Not all, of course. There's a limited capacity within their network, too.
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.
> 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.
Get a T-1 or what ever fits your bandwidth needs and pay the money. A lot more than $40 a month isn't it. All companies I've dealt with when ordering T-1's et al don't care what you run if it isn't illegal. If you want to engage in illegal activity then you're out of luck.
Why not be your own provider? Right...because you don't want to spend the money and no one will give it to you for free. I got ya.
Grow up.
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....
In the future, I imagine most peer to peer systems will use node discovery systems like ALPINE to discover nodes listening on any port and possibly even using any of the major layer 4 protocols.
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.
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 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.