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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?"
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.
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.
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..
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.
Simple 1 oc3 for upstream and 10 bridged oc3s for downstream. They are built asynch no one would be that foolish to build something more robust and therefore expensive then needs be.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 $209 service charge alone, we have collected several thousand dollars. Most users report much better latencies to major sites and very good burst bandwidth. We lost a couple of users from the VPN ban but they were all above-average bandwidth hogs so we don't miss them. All is right in the world, and I'm very satisfied with how things worked out.-all dead homiez
After all, the cable services don't prohibit servers because they're morally opposed to the idea of serving files--they do it because servers take up their bandwidth. And bandwidth is expensive, as we're learning when companies cut back on their streaming video or even (as in the case of AdAware) fall off the 'net entirely.
So, without servers, what's using bandwidth now? Seems obvious--peer to peer. Which, in itself, is technically as much a "server" as any FTP or website. Heck, running your own Half-Life multiplayer game is technically a "server" too.
And so they cap bandwidth and try to chip away at these things however they can. It's annoying . . . but it's hardly surprising.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
"unlimited" broadband in Australia via Telstra and Optus is ~60-80 AUD / month. That's US$ 30-45.
How much do you guys pay?
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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
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....
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.
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?
I shouldn't worry... all good soviet governments started off like that.
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.
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
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.
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
In your original post, you clinically described how you crippled your network, instead of honestly raising flat prices to meet demand (or even considering to charge fairly for overages), and pocketed the screw-profit difference (minus the 33% "gift").
Then I infer from what you say next, that your ultra-Christian paymasters have a higher than usual 'moral obligation' to spy on their users; and you probably love every minute of it too... you closet-pederass control freak. I bet the Chinese network admins would love your job; they're probably getting bored of monitoring pro-freedom politcal speech in chatrooms.
Most ISPs state in their Terms and Conditions something like "...shall have the right, but not the obligation, to monitor all content..." In practice, they don't really care what their users are up to, and that's the way it should be. It's nosy goody-goody's like you who do the spying in the name of moral policing. Just provide the fucking pipe and stay out of the way.
Man... just imagine how boring your job would be if everyone had been running secure IP from the start.
I know... I know... you've got to eat, and you just work there, etc. And "you were just following orders", etc., etc.
Hmm. Maybe I should scrap this post--it turned out pretty mean spirited. Nah, post I must, so don't take it too personally. My present to you is some lost karma, so, Merry X-mas!... er... Christmas! (the Xmas abbreviation demeans the Christ in the Christ-mas brandname)! ... Ack... I did it again. :-) Don't take it personally. Happy Generic Holidays!
--
Power to the Peaceful
Give yourself ISP independance.
HTH.
Deleted
So these devout Christian morals don't have a problem with spying on people then?
Just for the record.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
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 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.
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.
It's not port numbers, it's protocol numbers. TCP is protocol number 6. UDP is protocol number 17. ESP is protocol number 50. AH is protocol 51. While visiting the RFCs for ESP and AH take note of the domain of the 2nd author of both.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
I wouldn't even classify that as thinking. How are you going to cache sites off the internet without a connection to it provided by somebody? Are you magically going to get one of your nodes added to a routing table somewhere? Man I can't wait to see whut my fucking naighbors who live next door to me and I could go to their fucking house and talk to them have to put on their website. I also bet that nobody will balk at paying for their own access equipment and they will all magically learn to use it because it is easier than subscribing to AOL.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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'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.
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.
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.
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
I think what has Whirlpool readers pissed is that Telstra suckered them into unlimited internet and then changed the contract on them to a VERY limited service. It's unheard of in telecommunications -- I mean, you wouldn't expect to sign up to a mobile/cell phone contract for 24 months only to find that three months later the telco ups the prices and says "like it or leave". In my experience, in this case, cell phone companies honor the original contract at least until the expiration of the contract -- and then ask you to move to a different plan if at all.
"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
Which is why https should be used for secure transactions.. :)
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
"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.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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?
Let's see what else Comcast/@Home has done since I signed up three years ago:
-Added upload speed caps, after they discovered that all of us who paid for the high speed connection they advertised, actually wanted to *use it for something*! The horror!
-Ran mailservers that, for long periods, were the poster children for the term "unreliable."
-Shut down their irc server because they were too incompetent to maintain it and lock out the assholes who were abusing it.
-Blocked port 80 across the board, instead of cracking down on only their idiot customers who don't know how to maintain their own machines and got socked by Nimda/Code Red.
-And yes, dropping Usenet when they transition to their @Home-independent service.
Once this AT&T/Comcast merger is approved, I expect rates to go up, my existing services to be pruned even further, and the "Acceptable Use" guidelines to be vigorously enforced once they try to foist that 'tiered' service crap on us (and you know they will).
This, friends, is why I plan to switch to DSL in the very near future, hopefully before Comcast switches me over to their own service. [rant] I want someone who will sell me bandwidth and a few services, period, not someone who will sell me high speed and then pout and eventually restrict me when I don't do only what they want me to do with it. I want static IPs, I want to run servers, and I want reliable mail, even if it means running my own mailserver to get it. I'm not interested in your "portal," your stupid, bland, corporate idea of what my "Internet Experience" should be. So f off! [end rant]
~Philly
"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.
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.
Using your example, the girl's actual age doesn't matter. If it's directly represented as, or even just suggested to be, child pornography, then it is illegal in the US.
Likewise, photoshopped images and even renderings and drawings are illegal. ADH's steps to stop criminals from abusing his ISP are quite justified.
BiNG! Lose a point bro. It depends on the pipe one gets. At least around this neck of the woods, you can get a 2meg (or better:) pipe or whatever and possibly be paying flat for the switched carrier , but as far as I have seen the chumps upstream will still whack you on a byte charge.
It all depends on where you are I guess.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Which is of course why you can configure your server to need a machine specific hash. Thereby eliminating the spoofable haxorable IP addy stealable notreally a protection at allable IP lock and make it a machine lock.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.