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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?"
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
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!
- 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
You get what you pay for. Right on, sir. This also explains why Linux is such a piss-poor operating system.
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.
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.