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Will Providers Provide Equally?
theodp writes "Imagine the chaos if your power company could take money from Sony so that its appliances got a higher quality of juice - and thus worked a tad better - than those of Mitsubishi. The power system wasn't built that way, but ISPs have that very capability. It may seem like a dodgy competitive tactic, but Yankee Group analysts envision that broadband network providers could give precedence to their own revenue-generating services, possibly leading to the demise of the biggest VoIP player today, Vonage."
It seems to me that all one would have to do to get around this is to use SSL. ISPs wouldn't be able to lower the priority of such communications without affecting many other applications, such as VPNs. They could still do it based on IP, but not if the providers of a service used some large provider like Akamai.
Anyway, regardless of whether it could be circumvented, and at what cost, the implication is still a further push away from the original spirit of the internet towards a network that is solely a means of extracting as much revenue from consumers as possible. I just wish it were more realisitc to create an ad-hoc network with all my friends...and their friends, etc. I think some day that is what the tech community will be forced to turn to someday, in order to retain the usability we have come to cherish.
Of couse keeping this theoretical peer network free and uncommercial would be very tough, if it got popular. Call me paranoid, but I'm looking into affordable methods of connecting my friends directly together, using wireless technology and encryption.
Integrating IE with windows. Ofcourse buisnesses are going to do this, and why shouldn't they ? It's not good for the consumer, but then again they are out to make money, not win friends.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
...would NEVER do that.
Besides, if they do try that, their competitors won't.
Encryption! and P2P!
Decentralise everything, encrypt everything. Your ISP will just see random packets going to random IPs with random data inside them - distributed filesharing, voip etc etc and on the plus side the pigs cant track you either.
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They'll never do this. As much money is dangled in front of them, there's a bigger trap door.
Right now, ISPs stay out of the RIAA/MPAA lawsuit fights because they are common carriers. The moment they stop being able to claim that by giving disadvantages to those who they choose to spite, the RIAA/MPAA will demand that the P2P client of the week be spited as well...
That's just too much of a headache for them. They don't want to become liable for their user's usage. They'd rather that users keep using without them being bothered. They're not going to open themselves up to such exposure.
Of course, this is the Yankee Group we're talking about, so logical analysis is not to be expected. This is the same bunch of boneheads that has Didio doing their "analysis" of the SCO lawsuits.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
It seems like everything these days is self serving and dishonest.
So sad, so sad.
Would be to declare ISP (and the internet) as an 'essential service' or utility. And as such the ISP would have rules governing thier behavior, including anti-trust laws.
Wouldn't such tactic actually drive customers away?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
...companies are looking for a profit, not to make you there best friend. As long as they can keep the profits coming, they could care less what you think of them.
Unless Vonage pays fees to the network provider, there is no reason the operator should not make the service a lower priority on the network.
Oh yeah, no reason at all -- except that if they do that, it's not the internet any more. And if they call themselves "internet providers," they're lying.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Apart from poor bandwiths such pseudo "g" cards work only with propietary windows drivers. I tried using some Br chipset cards with linux and they did not work! It was the early days when g just came out.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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The idea is not that they lower the priority on the packets to their competitors, but that the raise the priority on packets to their own services. This has a slight effect by lowering priority to everything not theirs, but the point is that their stuff would work top-notch on their own networks, while competitors wouldn't get such a boost.
If you used encryption and decentralization, it doesn't help you, because they're giving their stuff a boost, not directly giving other stuff a kick in the teeth.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
In her view, Internet service providers will begin to provide add-on services, such as higher speed movie downloads, or enhanced online gaming, for additional fees paid by consumers.
Aha, the expert is talking.
My 'provider' (hansenet) does this already.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
As time passes, I'm thinking about just switching to commercial DSL service. Current broadband offerings for the most part are targeted to the uneducated masses, and are cheap for that reason. My ISP had the nerve to tell me that my connection was "For entertainment purposes only" when I asked why the windows file sharing port was blocked (I have a static IP and I needed to share some files with some non-Mac friends of mine). So instead of bitching, the easier solution seems to be to pay for quality. The same applies to every other consumer product out there.
How is this any different than mega supermarkets that give shelf space preference to various brands with respect to location and quantity?
I choose to use a small ISP. They have their own problems, but this kind of behaviour isn't one of them. I can almost do what the hell I like with my connection and it's only their peer connections and BGP issues that ever screw me up. I have a choice of other ISPs too who also don't behave like this. Thank goodness for competition!
IP Security in transport mode - so that your ISP has no idea what the heck you're doing, and thus cannot "prefer" or "degrade" any particular application.
Here in Southeastern Virginia / Hampton Roads Cox run's a portal that competes with the local paper's portal. Cox has a captive audience, setting the homepage of all the cable modem customers to their local portal.
It has always been a fight for the homepage. The local paper used to have an ISP tied to it (infi.net) that ran dialup and hosting services for 100+ newspapers across the country (infi.net was owned by Landmark, Gannet and Knight-Ridder). Supposidly the big push from the papers wasn't that the ISP functions were really profitable, they just wanted their content on the homepage.
It is a bit monopolistic in a way, but I think everyone understands. More viewers, the more you can charge for banner ads.
The downside is none of the community sites are really innovative. In the case of Cox's, it is identical to every market they are in. Cookie cutter crap.
AOL probably has the biggest advantage, as normal netziens cannot access the content on their network. This is a major selling point for some of the AOL subscribers, even.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
That'd solve nothing. Bouncing packets through extra hops to hide their identity will delay them just as much as the ISP would be...
I'm thinking before too long, ISPs will try to force one too many onerous terms and people will respond by dropping their ISPs and freeing their wireless hubs forming a decentralized network. This will be the real Internet2.
Vonage's device they send you doesn't adjust the TOS value in the IP packet. I checked with a hub and ethereal. I have the Cisco device, newer customers are getting the Motorola. Don't know about that.
So, it's at the class of service level of everything else. Which doesn't have any packet loss and has low latency. In order to give themselves competitive advantage, Comcast could only trust the TOS and DSCP values in VOIP flows coming from their equipment, but the ENTIRE CONCEPT OF QOS is predicated on the idea of congestion!
Now, if they deliberately threw competing VOIP flows into a low queue and INDUCED loss, well - that's actionable as anti-competitive behavior. And in the standard IANAL disclaimer, I have no idea what the remedies available are.
Also, as another posted that got modded up pointed out, Vonage could use VPN or otherwise mask the RTSP stream. But that's silly. It's also counter productive long term.
I think the parent article is kind of a troll to get legislation by the FCC and others regarding QOS. It's a tactic to cause dissention because of the pass the FCC took on regulating companies like Vonage.
You're damn right they will. They've already started blocking port 25 outbound (one thing that I might be okay with) along with a variety of inbound ports. They've taken complaints again and again. They respond with a resounding "We don't care."
And why should they? Joe Schmoe customer doesn't care. He doesn't know if it's his ISP that broke it or the client or somebody else. If he calls someone for support, it's almost certainly not going to be his ISP. After all, he's using someone elses services. His VoIP connection is slow? Why would he blame his ISP? Everything else is fast.
Will they lose a few customers (i.e. the Slashdot crowd)? Yes, but they don't care. Our money isn't worth that much to them. And since we're the only crowd opposed, there's not enough business to start-up competitive ISPs.
"Imagine the chaos if your power company could take money from Sony so that its appliances got a higher quality of juice - and thus worked a tad better - than those of Mitsubishi"
Actually, our local utility, BC Hydro does this already. They have lower rate schedules if you are a customer willing to be interruptible during peak demand. So, some commercial and industrial customers here do indeed have a "higher quality of juice" than others.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
Random packets time-wise, as well? That would cause latency in the audio stream.
Given enough time to study the implementation, I could probably tell you what kind a service a data stream was carrying based on the frequency and individual spacing, not to mention quantity of payload, of packets.
A similar means of study could probably tell you, for example, approximately how many people were using the same HTTP proxy. Even things like tabbed browsing could be taken into account.
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What so a company would give their own brand products priority over the competition ?
You mean like in Walmart, Albertsons etc etc where their own brand elements have prime positions ? Or do you me like the Adidas section in NikeTown.
Welcome to Captialism...
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
What is likely is that the cable companies phone service will work better anyways.
While their phone service is going to be IP based, it isn't going to be Internet based.
I live in an area where it is being beta tested, and I understand they are using an ATA with an integrated cable modem that installs at the phone box. This would allow them to tie into your wiring, provide real 911 service (the box isn't portable enought that you are likely to take it anywhere) etc.. It will use a diferent private addressing scheem and QOS end to end on their own gateway. Chances are it will use bandwith allocated seperately from the actual cable modems, so there should be no impact to other services such as Vonage or Broadvoice.
For them not to do this would be crazy. They are going to be trying to take on the Bells, and while Vonage is great for geeks, I can cause it to break up with heavy file transfers.
On the other side, the cable companies service which is currently being advertised is somewhere well in between the Vonage and SBC pricing.
You really belief this wouldn't happen. Well guess what, it already happens. In the Netherlands we had a case where an ISP didn't want to stream the data they got from a radio station. So they blocked it. They wanted to get paid. Their argument was that the data would take up too much bandwidth. Fact is that the internet business model is build on the fact that everybody pays his end of the network. A simple peering would have helped them alot.
Use Adsense for Charity
that Da ISH is built from, and there will be more classifications. you want higher priority, you pay more. there are multiple names for service priority, MPLS on ethernet, CBR/VBR/VBRnt on ATM, service levels on frame relay if a carrier implements them -- but it's real.
ISPs buy what they want, and if it's not a dedicated point-to-point circuit, they are usually buying traffic-interruptable service like VBRnt or frame. remember, the Internet is best-attempt by definition already, and YOUR software has to deal with anything other than sequential packets sent at a constant rate of speed. you don't like that, stay on POTS, or upgrade your software.
if you want PRIORITY service, with MPLS on the switching/routing end and higher classes of service like CBR availiable for a sub-circuit of an ISP's T3 to an upline, for instance, that can become possible quite easily. it gets more complicated if you want it beyond an ISP's reach, but it can be done sometime as soon as agreements are reached to allow it.
the Bells are offering or tarriffing to offer such priority VoIP services now. for the Internet to offer it, you will need to have a protocol approved by IETF for it. propose or lobby against over there.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It would be simple to prove, easy to sue over, and the providers have deep enough pockets to make it worth suing over. Didn't this occur to you?
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
1000ms all by itself would effectively kill most use of VoIP, as the noticable delays for some reason causes really annoying conversations... you don't know whether to start respond to what the other person just said, or whether they're going to follow it up with something else, causing you to accidentally start talking over them. Latency is so important to voice calls that the International Telecommunications Union recommends latency no greater than 150ms.
So is this just my conspiracy theory that T-Mobile GPRS provides way worse than 150ms for data, while providing better than 150ms latency for the voice side of things?
Somebody, sometime, is going to offer an ISP a boatload of money to do this, and the ISP is going to calculate that the probable cost of interfering in connection usage (P2P monitoring or whatever it is) is dwarfed by the amount of revenue they're getting for a sweetheart deal like this.
If the ISP is a major nationwide network, the monitoring could be a huge burden, but the cash rewards could be just as huge.
At least it'll create a few hundred IT jobs.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
There one good thing about the idea to have the FCC regulate VoIP communications, it would be a federal offense for Comcast to reduce the quality of their service or to restrict access. I am sure that Anti-Trust legislation would apply as well.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
That said, I find it generally unlikely that ISPs would do any type of overt targeted network shaping. They make their money by moving packets, and for more and more contracts these days, the more packets you move the more money you make.
The benefit of ISPs getting into the VOIP, streaming, and other services where network properties matter is that those are exactly the kind of people who can optimize their networks to give the customer the best experience. ISPs want to displace Vonage because Vonage isn't their customer, but they have to deal with all the network issues generated by customers that use Vonage. It is cheaper to offer an optimized solution designed and tested to work beautifully on your network for free or nearly free than to support the problems caused when people use whatever random VOIP software suits their fancy.
Not all networks are created equal, and this really starts to become apparent when using QoS sensitive services. It is cheaper and generally gives better results for the ISP to integrate those services vertically, which ultimately will be a win for the customer.
And how is this different than what Microsoft does with Internet Exploder and IIS vs Apache and Mozilla? Or any other Microsoft product vs a comparable product?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The answer is easy. Power companies are monopolies. I don't have a choice with whom I do business. The reality is that you only get a choice of one power company, one local telephone service, and one local cable company, simply because there is only one set of lines coming into your home.
Internet connections, at least in the US, or different. You have an extensive choice of providers. I live in a metropolitan area, and I have a choice of about two dozen providers. A friend who lives in a rural agricultural area still has a choice of four providers, two of which are high speed. You might have to pay a tiny surcharge to your local telco monopoly, but the choice is there.
A provider that gives one person preferential treatment over another for the same fees is going to be at a competitive disadvantage.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Currently, the major backbone providers like Sprint et al are already providing QOS for VOIP services currently used by major corporations (i.e. Cisco) to communicate between offices. This hasn't propogated down to the ISP level yet but there's no reason it couldn't.
Also, at the ISP level, Speakeasy already has a package that preferentially routes online game packets, providing better performance for subscribers. In fact Speakeasy toutes itself as the "gamer's ISP".
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Apparently, comcast has been doing some Very Nasty Stuff with vonage, such as not resolving DNS addresses to vonage. A vonage tech commented that it looks like the only way this is going to get solved is through the courts.
This has been an ongoing issue since comcast entered the voip market.
Any vonage (or comcast) moles want to comment?
As an employee at an University that is restriction Internet through-put for P2P protocols, I would like to point out that such restrictions are only desirable when resources are tight. The restriction was placed because the cost of adding another T3 to the Internet was prohibitive in comparison of the cost involved in doing Quality of Service. For the University's connection to I2, the reverse is true. The cost of doing QoS on a gigabit connection is prohibitive and it is desirable to just allow the resource utilitization to more "naturally" handle itself.
One thing that I believe would help third party companies provide several interesting services (pay-per-view over IP, party-line VoIP, etc.) would be multicast. It seems to me that there is a conflict of interest with most Cable/DSL providers in regards to providing multicast support on their networks since it benefits external companies more than themselves.
... hasn't Microsoft been doing this trick for the past 15 years? Bah, after all Bill isn't a bad guy at all: he could have patented this business model and sued the juice out of these upstart greedy critters! Har, har...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Anyway it doesn't take any protocol, you just use queueing algorithms to prioritize traffic. Linux has a flexible packet scheduler designed to do just this sort of thing so you can make interactive traffic more interactive, or dedicate a certain transfer rate to a given application, et cetera. Clearly Linux is not the only place to get this functionality...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You buy some stock in them, which then makes you an owner and entitles you to look over all their financial and operational information. Be easy then to find out.
Tm
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Who the fuck is Mercatur?
IF history is any guide, we will see the cable companies totally abuse this until Uncle Sam is forced to make them play nice (after first letting them suck us dry in exchange for superior campaign contributions). Can anyone imagine Charles Dolan (Cablevision Systems) NOT taking advantage of something like this. Bon Vonage!
No...it's okay...I wasn't using my Civil Liberties anyway
You're describing load control, which is where the powerco will give you a break if you let them cut the power to your water heater during peak demand time. This is done without regard to the make and model of your water heater. What the article describes is the powerco somehow finding a way to provide better quality electricity (there is a difference) to a particular manufacturer's appliance. This would make the appliance run smoother, and improve that brand's preception of quality.
The Pigs?? Nice to know Charles Manson is being allowed to post to Slashdot
From beyond the grave too...
Or the other way around. Vonage may have (and I think already has) such an agreement with certain ISPs that Vonage will have better bandwidth if your Internet was from that provider.
Alternatively, Vonage will be the OEM provider of the ISP branded VoIP, like in case of Earthlink VoIP. I am sure I don't need to worry about Vonage.
Didn't decnet compute the MAC address as a function of the decnet address? My memory of decnet is getting fuzzy.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I've noticed some interesting things about my access:
Conspiracy!
Why would we expect a cable companies VOIP be any different?
Declaring a service as 'essential' or 'utility' tends to lead to a local (and in the case of AT&T national) monopoly. That will only remove the likely-hood of competing ISPs for certain areas, assuming you could even craft a scenario where one ISP could be declared a utility. Do you use a dial-up, dsl, cable based, or fiber optic only as a basis for the service? Nor does this offer any sort of grantee that you prevent utility from favoring their own products, in fact you encourage the opposite by way of bundling.
Nor does the government have to declare and ISP a utility for it to regulate it, they already regulate ISPs. The 'simple' step is to make it illegal for an ISP to use packet shaping or throttling ports; however, that isnt so simple when you know ISPs need to be able to control the traffic to certain ports.
Isn't it essentially the same case of "bundling" (binding one service/product to another), like with Media Player and Windows?
And don't you think it's okay, until we have no monopolies?
Most ISPs would not qualify as common carriers. Part of being a common carrier is offering a service to the public in a non-discriminatory manner. That means that you can't say "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone". If the New Hitler Youth for Nuking Gay Whales orders service, you have to give it to them. You can't disconnect them for being controversial, as long as they pay their bills and do not violate the law.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The same analysts who never have anything worth reading, who are consistently wrong and this is on slashdot? It's bunk.. Next.
Can I can have a faster dial up account as "network providers could give precedence to their own revenue-generating services" ? :-)
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Nice troll, unless "the grave" is new slang for prison.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Nice to know there's still people who buy into the "law enforcement has good intentions" myth.
My ISP already do.
They only provide technical support for Windoze and Mac. They will not answer any technical questions if you have a Linux box, even if the problem has nothing to do with the fact that it is a Linux box.
Case in point: a while back they "upgraded" their DHCP server, so it suddenly refused to give my ADSL-connected Linux box an IP address. Rebooting as Windoze 98 (yeah, I know...) provided an IP address. I found, quickly, that there was an update to the Linux DHCP client that was only a couple of days old - apparently the new Microsoft DHCP server had odd notions about what were valid parameters in a DHCP request.
I installed the update and was back on the air. After a couple of weeks of telephone tag the 2nd level tech support people finally admitted that it was indeed their server.
Apologize? Of course not. They only support Windows and Mac. But they are always happy to take my money.
...laura
Prof. Lawrence Lessig actually discusses this topic quite thoroughly in his book The Future of Ideas. For anybody interested, I would highly recommend that book.
I used to work for an ISP that had about a dozen T1 lines for dialup users terminating in four different cities back when BellSouth got the go-ahead to open up it's own ISP. Within that very same month, the T1 lines which had behaved fine until then started suffering "mysterious failures" to the extent that of my 50-60 hour work week, I had to spend about 20-30 of it on the phone with BellSouth arguing with them so they would fix the T1's. For the four months after that (until I changed jobs) literally no three day period went by when at least one of the T1's (each handling 93 dialin lines) wasn't down.
The overall customer experience was that their ISP suddenly seemed a lot less reliable, since we wound up having to assign extra B channels and extra hunt numbers to each POP just to ensure BellSouth couldn't take out an entire POP just by "accidentally deleting" the lead hunt group's T1.
My oh my how fortunate it was that BellSouth had their own ISP so that customers could get someone "reliable" to provide them connectivity.
Of course our legal recourse was little to none. There's not exactly a way to sue a telco for incompetence, even though none of the nonsense started until _after_ BellSouth opened their own ISP. We could only thank our lucky stars that we already had a bunch of T1's, unlike another ISP that was working a city just a bit north of us who only had a single T1, and who was _completely_ down slightly more often than every other day of the week.
I used to run a small ISP in Chicago. One day some guys came into our office and said that if we didn't move downtown and plug into a fiber ring they were building, we'd be out of business, that no one would peer to us.
The reality is that our upstream provider was selling bandwidth, and if they didn't do a good job, they'd lose customers, and it's in their interests to keep that bandwidth running as well as possible.
If there was a monopoly on the net, something like this could happen. But in a competive market, as soon as one provider starts to screw people, they'll just move.
Why not take this one step further and introduce computerized money that the consumer can put arbitrary restrictions on? That is, RIAA is not allowed to use your money to invest in the tobacco industry/polluting companies/Burma/whatever. That would only be fair since they're trying to tell us in which CD player a disc can be played. See how they like that...
Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
Unless Vonage pays fees to the network provider, there is no reason the operator should not make the service a lower priority on the network.
How about this. I pay for my internet account. In fact, in comparison to most people, I pay a fair bit (business connection). If the ISP is curtailing my service to a particular company, or raising their own above, they're impacting the service that I paid for.
So really, the reaction from another company (such as say, "Vonage" wouldn't have as much impact as a bunch of customers getting really pissed off because their ISP messed with their Vonage connection.
VOIP companies that specialize in residential service are not major players anyway. It's VIOP at businesses (where up to millions can be saved over traditional phone networks) were the real market is. Companies like comcast that would pull this junk aren't providing those large businesses with a connection anyway.
Open Source Sushi
Current ubiquitous routing technology allows differentiating on the basis of simple parameters like source and destination. This is fine when a customer negotiates with their ISP a preferential service (say lower latency or higher throughput). But to distinguish on traffic based on the session or application layer protocols (eg HTTP) requires a huge amount of extra intelligence in the routers and this is not currently done AFAIK. :) -- but it still requires a relatively large amount of processing power and a huge amount of state to inspect each packet and track flows.
Such differentiation is done at the point of entry into the ISP so it isn't a matter of upgrading large central routers -- like the one CISCO recently announce
Call me a cynic but I think this is pie in the sky stuff.
You should have linked here: http://24.125.12.101/meta2.html
Either the FCC or the courts have to define the internet aspect of cable companies as common carriers.
Currently phone companies are defined as such, and they have to carry all calls. They cannot exclude fax transmission, modem connections, or any voice connections. They must carry them all.
Current the ISP side of the cable industry is NOT defined in that way. They have every legal right to block content.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Read your TOS before whining like a child
When re-upping a service contract, how can a residential customer have a chance to negotiate "no server" rules out of the AUP?
This reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago. There used to be a company called 555-NEED that provided free business directory information. I think the way they made money was that they charged businesses to be the first recommended - so if you called and asked for a dry cleaner they would first give you the number of one of their clients. But if they did not have client in that category they just looked something up in the regular phone book. Since my cell phone company - Sprint I think - charged a buck per telephone number, I tried 555-NEED from my cell phone. That was essentially a free call as long as I stayed under my minutes, and even if I was over it was less than what Sprint would charge for the airtime. But when I dialed the 555-NEED number I got Sprint information; I tried again and the same thing happened. And when my bill arrived they charged me for those information calls. I don't remember what their support people said, but I did file a complaint with the FCC. It seemed to me that it should be illegal for a phone company to redirect your call from the number you dialed to some number that they make money off of. I never heard from the FCC - but I did get a call from some suit at Sprint. I guess the FCC forwarded my complaint to them, and gave them my phone number (which is inappropriate in itself). This person said something to the effect that they were not in the business of making money for the other company and that they were within their rights to do this. I don't know if this still goes on, but I remember thinking that it would not be long before I dialed my dentist and got a sprint prefered dentist.
There one good thing about the idea to have the FCC regulate VoIP communications, it would be a federal offense for Comcast to reduce the quality of their service or to restrict access.
Or if Comcast downgrades QoS on VoIP and SBC (or "Alternative Internet and Cable TV", or Direcwave, or "Joe's 802.11g ISP and grill") doesn't, switch ISPs. (And complain to the FTC that Comcast didn't deliver their promised internet connection - or start a class-action suit.) See how long Comcast stays in business. B-)
I am sure that Anti-Trust legislation would apply as well.
If they downgraded QoS on Vonage's VoIP streams and left their OWN sip streams running hot, you betcha! Giving different priority to the same service by competing third parties is using market dominance in one product to compete unfairly (and thus illegally) in another.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
No, that's just laziness. Enlightened Self Interest would be the ISPs realizing that churn (customer turnover) is a reducable cost, i.e., it's cheaper to keep a customer than it is to get a new customer, and spend a little money keeping their customers happy.
Old fashoned business ethics is a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the busness schools are totally oblivious to this.
Vonage's device they send you doesn't adjust the TOS value in the IP packet. I checked with a hub and ethereal. I have the Cisco device, newer customers are getting the Motorola. Don't know about that.
So, it's at the class of service level of everything else. Which doesn't have any packet loss and has low latency. In order to give themselves competitive advantage, Comcast could only trust the TOS and DSCP values in VOIP flows coming from their equipment [...]
QoS labeling on the internet currently can't be trusted - because Microsoft some time back "improved" their network stack by demanding unnecessarily high QoS for their packets.
It's come around to bite them now. Because Microsoft systems cry wolf on QoS, the WAN doesn't trust user-supplied QoS labeling and either ignores or rewrites it. This is why QoS isn't generally deployed in the WAN.
In the enterprise LAN, VoIP applications (at least when using Cisco equipment) works around it thus: The LAN is partitioned into multiple VLANs, with the VLAN containing the VoiP (and other streaming devices) receiving priority over the ones containing workstations.
Also: I hear that the Cisco desk phones with the internet extension jack (for expanding your cube's single network connection by plugging the phone into it and plugging your workstation into the phone) rewrite the QoS on packets they receive from the workstation jack.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
ISPs in India, like icenet.net, Satyam and possibly others already do this. All the servers of the VOIP provider iconnecthere.com are blocked by these ISPS. The only ones that I have been able to reach are the VOIP services that these ISPs themselves offer. What a bunch of thieving bastards!! I haven't tried accessing other VOIP providers, but I suspect they would be unreachable as well.
Hasn't something like this been going on for quite some time already with ISP's? I can't enumerate how many times I've heard a radio ad for an ISP offering broadband ... to Windows users, only.
Yahoo!SBC DSL, a large baby-bell provider in Houston, for a long time didn't offer anything for Macintosh. I believe they still don't.
There is, after all, a reason one finds Macintosh ISP's out there ...
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
This is exactly what he's warning about in his book. I highly recommend it.
The Internet was designed with the intelligence at the edge for a reason-- to prevent this kind of nonsense.
-- Cerebus
Many ISP's do silly things like block port 80 access they say, port 80 is a server, your not a buisness account you dont get to use port 80. Whats the differnce between that and running QoS so that Vonage gets slammed but other (selected) systems get better quailty? I would say not much. There are two things. First it will start an arms race which will could go one of two ways. The providers getting slammed will allow you to configure around these things aka port blocking, switching ports, protocol inspection protocol obsufcation. The other way this could go is that vonage and the other implenent their protocols to be so similar that the ISP cant tell the differnce , there is a end user win, in that this would almost insure better interoprability. Thats how the Companys will react, and as we can see its an arms race the ISP's will loose at. Customers and endusers like me will just choose a ISP like speakeasy that doesnt play any of these games, and let the unwashed masses go to earthlinke and be punished for it. The good news is that good isps that dont take part in this payloa will offer better services, and thus customers will seek them out, they will even be able to charge more which will help compenstate for the payloa. In the end this just a short sided, Bad Idea(tm) from a worse marketing deparment. Who ever came up with it should be shot, and we should move on.
"National Cable Television Association spokesman Brian Dietz said it is hardly in cable's interest to meddle with VoIP quality, because more VoIP users means more broadband customers."
This may be true, but even still that just means that they won't mess with VoIP unless they offer their own replacement service. Losing a few customers to DSL might be worth the added VoIP revenue.
Metanet is a sting operation being conducted by a number of European and Asian countries. The main nodes are owned by this coalition and keep careful track of where the data is coming from and where it's going to. Freenet isn't vulnerable to this sort of thing which is why Metanet had to be formed.
The guy has to turn down Americans because of laws that don't allow foreign countries to conduct this sort of surveillance against American citizens. It's laws against this sort of thing in Europe that caused the base of Metanet to be set up in the USA.
All the major carriers are moving towards this model. The new requirements coming out of the DSL forum require equipment makers have the ability to do all kinds of fancy traffic shaping and quality of service.
The company I work for makes equipment that does this. We set it up so an ISP can create a portal where a subscriber can select services and the network will automatically adjust the shaping and priority settings so the subscriber gets that service while allowing the provider to charge for it.
If Jane Doe wants to watch a certain movie, our box will guarantee the bandwidth between the video server and her DSL line while still limiting other traffic to the normal rates. Or if John Smith wants to download a huge ISO and doesn't want to wait, he can click to up his bandwidth to download it and lower it back down when he's done and gets charged extra for the amount of time he has the higher bandwidth.
Anyone can provide a pipe, but it's not real profitable for the providers. They want to make money off of things like pay-per-view or other special services.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
If nutcases are ranting against me, I must be doing something right. Thanks Mr. Nutcase, but can you work in a Roswell/space alien angle too?
I myself am in the USA, a direct connection to me would allow for warrant hopping. Read about it.
... is there a whole lot of whining going on here. The ISP's create value by providing internet access. People pay them for this access and if it sucks, they go to someone else. If you don't like the way your ISP is treating you, go somewhere else. If that is not an option, I haven't found the article in the Constitution that guarantees the right to broadband access.
"Why not take this one step further and introduce computerized money that the consumer can put arbitrary restrictions on?"
Responding to this understandibly angry but misguided individual, this already exists. Its called stock. If you don't like what a firm is doing, don't invest in it. If it is a privately held firm, tough!
Macintoshes use Ethernet, TCP/IP and DHCP just like any other computer out there, Windows or otherwise. They can connect to the Internet through any TCP network that Windows machines can, that's the great thing about standards.
What these ads mean is that Macs are unsupported, as in if you call their customer support line and say "I have a Mac" they'll say "Sorry, we dunno jack about Macs" and hang up. It does not mean incompatability, or lack of QoS.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I know I'm gonna catch shit for posting drunk (again, FU)
,br>
I meant to say something else but I forgot what it was.
Thats the only hope ordinary folk have.
You're posting too late, the mods are asleep.(prolly)
No, I think we can safly take refuge in the whatsamagigger amendment here .
The ability to find an alternative. It's a feedback system. As the big money folk gain more influance they can but gain more influance.
This is actually a business opertunity, If you are in an area, for instance, where Hi Speed access isn't available, Sell Those Folk Bandwidth! This is NOT rocket science.)
Well ok so it is.
ROFL!
It took me far too long to figure this out, and lots of people who would fit in very well on this site have this problem, but here you go. Both "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" are "right", and work fine. The former is just being sarcastic about it.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
As a vonage & comcast customer, i can confirm that outgoing calls to Canada at the moment are not working. Havent tried in the us. was working earlier today.
Then again, I could be grossly wrong and am merely pointing out my ignorance ... I've never used any kind of DSL before (cable modem=my preference).
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
Well, I've known all DSL providers to provide a software kit but to my knowledge I've never heard of any of them implementing their own TCP/IP stack (except for AOL, but they work cross-platform), which would probably be the preferred way to do something of the sort. You never see that kind of thing with cable however, and since I've been a happy RoadRunner customer for a few years now, I haven't paid much attention to this.
I'm not saying there is a shift in what is actually going on, but the thing that really gets me is that it would cost them extra money to do this, why not save the development costs and let the built-in software take care of itself? More platforms = more customers, although this ensures that the machines run specific OSes and services on their network,a nd can serve ads/"AOL" style exclusive content delivery...
On second thought, I'm sure they'll get hungry just like the music industry did and go for something like this. I'd be wary of any company that can't provide internet service to any computer with a NIC...what's to stop them from getting stingy with bandwith for specific things? That's not the reason we're designing traffic priority systems, which I think are a bad idea anyways (Imagine Kazaa downloads labeling themselves as video streams or something, suddenly you're pirating Windows at your max pipe speed with all hop points stalling every other connection in your way...imagine a modified sendmail spewing spam at highest priority!)
Such a tangled web we weave (pun slightly intended)...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?