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HD Video Could 'Choke the Internet'?
richdun writes "Yahoo! is carrying an AP story explaining how ISPs are worried large streaming videos could 'choke the Internet.' This is used as a yet another reason for tiered pricing for access to content providers." From the article: "Most home Internet use is in brief bursts -- an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV -- for hours at a time -- that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet's capacity to prevent that will be expensive. To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example."
Please. As if Bittorrent and P2P isn't already boosting internet traffic. Either people will watch the streaming downloads, or they'll download the movies another way. Looks like yet another cash grab.
I own a dedicated server and I have to pay per gig for bandwidth... So I have to ask how is this any different than what is already happening?
Are they just asking for more per gig? Or are they asking for money to flow up a chain (from hosts to network operators)?
Serious though where did my bandwidth go?
Slooooooow (first p0st)
Sometimes even my a/v chokes the internet. Now voip, and HD video!
The internet was only designed for transmission of '0's and '1's, but HD video uses a lot of '2's.
Actually I do believe we've been 'choking the internet' ever since porn first appeared on the 'net
This is preaching to the choir, but bits is bits.
What the providers really fear is that people will actually start using what they've been told they already have.
They've got giant pipes running into everyone's houses, and business models predicated on the fact that most people don't use them. So they tell everyone 'unlimited bandwidth!' when in fact they cannot provide this.
The tiered-internet thing is just a way to punish the people who actually use the bandwidth they were already sold. And an attempt to enact a tax on those who dare to actually provide data that's interesting enough that lots of their customers want it, all at the same time.
Thank you for your concern. I'll risk it. Please remove your greedy paws from my content provider's pocket.
Disgustedly yours,
Cash cow 9463450.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
...Pull the other one.
End users have been downloading large content for years now; starting with small music media (3-5meg), then moving onto small games and similar (150-400meg), jumping up to good old linux isos (650-700meg) as well as dvd media (4.7gig), and most recently bit torrent which can include series of data not just one or two files (upto 20gig).
So while ipv4 may have routing issues with such large long term streaming it isn't like we haven't been hammering the internet with large data transfers before and I highly doubt HD streaming will bring many more to the fold of heavy net usage than already exists. Besides bit torrent by nature should be more painful for isps than streaming; so get over it or charge us more to upgrade your networks to handle the load like you should be.
I ate your fish.
There is already so much Dark fiber overcapacity that I think the ISP could easily supply bandwidth to grow with the demand.
Roads essentially have, or have had, the same issues. These are funded by state/federal taxes and/or toll roads or some other per-use charges. Perhaps a model like this could work for the internet too.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So, the bandwidth providers have finally found an actual reason for wanting to charge content owners for content delivery to the consumer. They still have not figured out that the people who should be paying for more bandwidth are the consumers.
Either way--and I say this all the time when someone raises the issue of network neutrality--the Internet was designed to route around troubled, undesirable routes; should bandwidth providers choose to raise the cost of their lines, the Internet will simply route around them. It's as simple as that.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Simple solution.. using existing business plan
Slow internet is not fast enough to stream HD video. Fast internet is.
Increase the cost of fast enough internet. People don't stream movies over dialup because they cant. The exact same thing that happened in the late 90s would happen once again.
Yes, you'll lose customers to other ISPs from increasing the cost of your faster internet. This is their own fault. Advertising unlimited connectivity and poor infrastructure is what is really keeping them from being able to support tons of people streaming movies.
Maybe I'm just silly, but I'd think that this would have a sort of self-limiting effect, much like supply and demand in economic markets. My logic is that as HD video slows down the internet, the incentive to use the internet to watch this kind of stuff will diminish, thus alleviating the pressure. This balance between availability of bandwidth and demand for it, expressed as "cost," or rather, speed of downloads, would make the problem disappear by forcing usage to level out at a point acceptable to all.
And anyway, isn't there tons of dark fibre around?
Of course, I may be insane, and no, I did not RTFA.
So, The large corporations are now backstepping. Wait
when we ran all of those small companies out of business by
undercutting them and promising the world (and providing something much less) we were actually ruining another business model?
They are in year long contracts now with people who had a expectation of a service. Since most isp's haven't constantly been upgrading capacity as their client base grows, there is going to be a huge thunk when people realize
that there has been a lot of pocketing profits. Profits that should have gone
into improving the network.
The thunk is comming
Wasn't multicast (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6552/produc ts_ios_technology_home.html) supposed to take care of this?
What about all that dark fiber that was laid during the Internet glory days before the stock market went kaboom?
multicast. Why oh why don't more ISPs support multicast?
Where I work, which is a Canadian telco and ISP, we're doing a major infrastructure upgrade to transmit HD media over our backbone to our DSL subscribers to get IPTV. In October the system is supposed to go live, with 40 meg streams to the house, with a future of 120 meg, and then on to fibre. Quit bitching and develop the infrastructure. It's going to happen sometime anyway.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
I agree HDTV on the wire could be a serious problem. But, what I've seen from Comcast (my only experience so far) it appears they're introducing extra compression, and the HDTV of a friend gives a status showing a transfer rate of 6MBs. But, this article shows HDTV needing aroudn 20MBs for streaming. To move to a world of on-demand HDTV for the masses would seem to (as they're claiming) require not only some prioritization of the network, but I would think it would also require a more capable internet, i.e., bigger pipes almost everywhere.
In addition, at my friend's, we found that HDTV streams could grind the house network to a crawl, I don't know if it's related (since it really isn't part of the network, but it is coming in on the same coax). Considering everything I've seen and experienced (hiccups in the picture, sometimes outright halting) I don't think HDTV over the wire is ready for prime time yet.
However, if I were a provider, I would have to consider that all of a sudden even a small percentage of my customers could consume all of my bandwidth and would have to come up with some approach to keep the pipes working.
That is, on the ISPs' customer side business, there are different speeds you could connect to the internet, from dial-up to DSL, from Cable to the Tx connections. If a user wants to be streaming big media in a constant stream over their cable lines, they could subscribe to a more expensive, higher speed connection. And the ISPs need to keep upgrading their bandwidth to allow for these people who want access to streaming big media.
This "choking the internet" complaint seems to be a cop-out for the laziness of the ISPs toward getting off their butts and really competing to bring a smooth connection to its subscribers.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card
...proclaiming what could "kill" the Internet... sigh.
From TFA: "The solution, of course, is to make the pipes connecting to the Internet fatter."
No, no, no. The solution is solid multicasting. So what if everyone is watching American Idol and Survivor and Lost and whatever other crap is on TV at once. Content should be limited by the pipe/hardware itself (something that's measurable and predictable), not the erratic behavior of customer.
sig
The boiviosu question.. The equipment they are refrring to is located in Telcom substatiosn and is often telecom equipment or fiber.. In the mid 1990s telcoms invested in updating said equipment.. Who paid for that? Hint: It was not the ISPs or thorugh ISP fees. It was our own telcombills that paid for that huge investment.. Even if we sue Cable and or Satellite to connect to internet we are indirectly still paying for the internet infrastructure through our telecom bill already.. Why do telecoms have the unabridged right to double charges?
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
Think of local cacheing farms. You can download the content, then when it's time to broadcast, it emerges from a local/home cache to be played.
Otherwise, there just isn't a way to do IPTV unless broadcasters (think the guys with antennas) figure out an alternate method.
The backpressure put on the Internet will one day be able to handle it. But until multiple lambda inter-regional distribution networks using SDH or equivalent methods become available, even OC192 becomes a bottleneck.
Think regional cache. Google, RU listening???
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
It's very telling they want to charge the content providers and not the consumers
who would be utilizing this bandwidth (as they charge consumers and providers for their
bandwidth now). Why charge producers?
Also, it's the notorious three: Verizon's top lobbyist, Bell South and AT&T making a statement on how they aren't prepared for people downloading more content.
Gotta love those companies for turning over all subscriber phone records without a peep of protest.
They mentioned a video of Colbert heckling the president. Would they still feel this way if Colbert
praised the president?
So what you see on TV is 25 megabits per second - yeah that would put a crimp on things since most ISP's in the US suck - but its really not that much bandwidth.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As someone who is well informed as to how the Internet operates, I'm not even going to bother yelling "bullshit!" It's obvious. I'm sure there will be a hundred posts here going into great detail as to why this latest little ploy the telcos are trying is based on flawed logic.
The real issue is that these big companies will be whispering these ideas to the politicians, who of course have no clue about how the Internet works.
Even non-US citizens should bring this issue up with their government representative and inform about the real facts, and what your views as a voting citizen are. Make insistent phone-calls. Mail well-worded letters.
And something anyone can do instead of talking about the Net Neutrality issue to their fellow nerds, is bring the issue to the non-tech public. Tell the E-mailing Moms and Pops what could happen when they try to download photos their family members have sent, tell the teenagers what could happen to their MySpace access or their Skype connection.
The future of the Internet is at stake, dammit, and no citizen of any country is safe until we have widely recognized, firm laws that make sure the public, global Internet belongs to the people and their free speech!
It may not choke the big pipes. But the smaller ones are the ones that ISPs are likely worried about. What if a whole neighborhood where to try to download HD content at the same time? DLS likely will do a lot better then cable will.
What the telcos don't want you to realize is that they are already paid for the use of their wires on a per-packet basis by the owners of the routers that connect to them! Everybody but the consumer pays for the bandwidth they actually use. Today, if an ISP starts sucking down lots of bandwidth because its customers are watching HD TV, the ISP has to shoulder the larger bandwidth bill from the telco. They then pass the costs along to the customers who are using the most bandwidth.
Google and Joe Webclicker are NOT the telcos' customers! They already pay their ISPs for service. Nobody is getting a free ride.
The market should drive this process! ISPs that want more bandwidth (so they can deliver hi-def video to their customers) will look for the most bandwidth at the lowest price, and the backbones compete to upgrade their networks so that those ISPs sign up with them.
Why won't anyone stand up in Congress and say, "but Mr. Verizon, Mr. AT&T, aren't you just trying to charge twice for the same service?"
On the other side of things, cost per gigabyte of bandwidth has dropped markedly and will continue to fall.
But in the short to mid-term, perhaps a case can be made that consumer demand for bandwidth will reach levels that current subscription fees can't cover. This is a reasonable argument, but there's nothing to this argument that requires these costs be offset by content providers.
Right now I'm getting about a half a MB a second over my cable modem. Maybe it will turn out that there are HD audio applications I really want, that will require greater bandwidth. Fine. I'm the one consuming this bandwidth. So let me shop around and find the cheapest provider of super-broadband.
But there's nothing in this article, and no argument I've yet seen, that gives any clear reason why content providers ought to be the one ponying up to cover these extra bandwidth costs. This whole argument is being made by large incumbent ISPs who are looking to extort content providers. It has nothing to do with charging people for what they consume. Those costs have traditionally be borne by Internet users, and they should continue to be.
If I find out that my ISP is charging content providers a toll to reach me, I'll immediately do everything possible to change ISPs.
On another matter, it's telling that this article quotes nobody who says that this is a bad faith argument. The reporting in this article is either inept or corrupt.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Obviously they can't do this with illegal content, but there's plenty of scope to get everyone else on board - from the TV networks to San Fernando's finest!
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
The Internet was also designed for the transmission of breasts, but there's a lot of penises too.
Get a grip. There is no two.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The ISP i'm currently with is doing a HD video service - but it doesn't "choke the internet" as such It actually uses a seperate PVC on an ADSL2 Service so the only strain on bandwidth is from the CO back to the main DC.
Let's review: The ILECs have been salivating for decades over the idea of becoming "cable companies," and distributing television content over the telephone infrastructure. (They wanted to be able to force customers to go only to their servers, but Judge Harold Greene said, "No, you don't get to control both content and carriage, because you'll abuse that position.") For the past several decades, it has been no secret just how much bandwidth video broadcasting requires, even with compression. It has also been no secret that the broadcasting industry has been moving in fits and starts toward hi-def.
Now here we are on the eve of large-scale HD rollout, and the ILECs are whining that the network backbone may not be able to handle the load. Well, kee-ryst on toast, what the fsck have you been doing the last twenty years? You knew Internet "television" was coming, you knew hi-def was coming, you knew it was going to be a bandwidth hog, you had at least twenty years warning, and you're telling us with a straight face that you didn't prepare for it??
And by the way, who else here is old enough to remember a few years ago when the same ILECs were complaining that all those modem users phoning ISPs were overloading their switches, and wanted to start charging a premium for data calls? My response then was as it is now: Why the hell aren't you building out your network?
Sympathy factor zero, Captain. You either get to work and build out the network like you were supposed to be doing, or stand aside and let the CableCos eat your lunch.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The obvious solution is to charge content providers for bandwidth utilization.
So, for example, a streaming content company can pay ISPs for their high-bandwidth utilization. Those that refuse to pay this nominal fee can still stream their content, but at perhaps a more reasonable 56 kbit/sec using a sanctioned proprietary protocol.
This way access can remain open to all, but the truly awesome Verizon-quality HD video will be available to all for just a small additional monthly fee!
[/sarcasm]
What is this entity "Internet" that will choke? Where is it, is it a computer?
That statement is a nonsense, looks more like ISP-s running away freaked out that people will start using what they've been sold.
Before "Internet" is choked, the service provider's servers will choke. To which the provider will either adapt or stop providing the service as simple as that.
But reading further reveals that it's just Yet Another Excuse (tm) for the ISP-s to charge providers, which I believe all providers and Internet users have agreed is a nonsense. Apparently the only ones who believe themselves it makes sense is the friggin greedy ISP-s.
Anyone else getting pissed off? Anyone tired of this non-sense?
Let them just try and limit the availability of their clients to a popular media site and see their clients become someone else's clients.
Retards.
You mean the telcos might have to invest their huge profits into improving their infrastructure, instead of just giving their executives huge bonuses?
Oh, the horror!
The nerve of those pesky customers, trying to make full use of the "unlimited" bandwidth their ISP promised them!
RTFAing ...
No... they should be charging their own customers. The content provider's ISP should be charging the content provider.
This is just another ploy for certain ISPs to try to drive away competetive content providers so they can be the exclusive gatekeeper to people's homes.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I think many /. readers will be thinking that you pay for your bandwidth, so you can pay more, and get more bandwidth. But the reality is that pipes are physically/technically limited. You pay for your water, and if you leave your faucet on you'll get more water and pay more. But you can only get so much; there is a maximum limit that the pipes going to your home will carry. It is the same way for serving massive video content.
Let's say you want to serve content to 100 customers, each of whom has a 3Mbps downlink. So that's 300Mbps. Easy enough to get that at a hosting center. But now let's say you want to serve content to 1,000,000 customers. You need 3,000,000Mbps, or 3Tbps sustained bandwidth. Where can you buy that, no matter what the price? Do you think providing 3Tbps of bandwidth is as simple or as cheap as 1,000,000 x 3Mbps? If that sort of thing were true, you could buy a Petabyte of disk space for a linear increase in cost as well.
"Either people will watch the streaming downloads, or they'll download the movies another way. "
Wow! Someone should invent a mass produced and mass marketed plastic disc that holds video and sound.
...and want their "Napster" arguments back. Suddenly everyone was on P2P and the world would collapse, right? No wait, didn't happen. Time and time again we've seen that the content is lagging behind the bandwidth. By the time content providers are ready to provide HDTV over Internet, it'll long since be a moot point.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Then they are engaging in false advertising if what they really mean is 1.5/mb/s only if you use 750k/bps two hours a day then that's what I want as the advertised capacity. If I went to the bank to withdrawal my money and I was told it wasn't there I'd be pissed. Similarly if my bandwidth isn't really there I'll be pissed too. We need something like FDIC for bandwidth, or to sue the telecoms for false advertising.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Remember when images came along and the Internet hung because it was designed for text? And then, only a few years later, music crashed all the transoceanic links? That sucked.
... I don't know ... lay new cables? Is that even possible?
If the anti-video-watching PSAs fail, the only solution will be paying somewhat higher monthly fees for somewhat better service. And that just wouldn't make sense. Telcos would have to
Big surprise... The ISPs encouraged the unwashed masses to upgrade from dialup to DSL/Broadband. Next the unwashed masses were encouraged to upgrade their old spyware laden PCs to new shiny PCs.
Now the simple masses want to use what they paid for and the ISPs are panicing because they have way oversold their bandwidth. Maybe the ISPs should have considered that before they sold my dad a 5MB/s connection and encouraged him to go watch videos.
As a ex-SysAdmin/DBA I know that users will eventually consume all CPU, disk space, and network bandwidth. I think the ISPs need to quit whining and UPGRADE! This is what the rest of us do.
Perhaps, but HD video will certainly cause a few slashdotters to 'choke the chicken.'
POKE 36879,8
We've had DVD and higher quality video for a long long time, and yet we still have what I like to call "postage stamp sized" video transferring around the 'net. Granted the number of users will only increase, but I think when all is said and done, new HD codecs will be a drop in the bandwidth bucket.
http://siokaos.org/
Here in Japan, the ISPs still oversell. But at least they give you the option of how much oversell you get screwed on.
When you buy FTTH service from NTT, they have a high-speed and low-speed option. The HS option is twice the price. However, if you look at the systems, both give you 100mbps over single-mode fiber.
What's the difference?
Well, the HS option has 16 customers per DSLAM; the LS option has 32 per.
As US customers become better educated about their line capabilities, expect more ISPs to cater to their needs. But, you better be prepared to pay for it.
Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different? People need to be prepared to pay, per MB or GB, if they want quality service.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I recommend upgrading your version of Netscape 4.7 to something a little bit more robust
I volunteer to reboot Internet if it gets choked, just tell me where it is.
640k ought to be enough for everyone!
I'm a Network Engineer for a major US cable company and for about 15 months or so we've been moving our HD streams as IP multicast across our internal fiber network. It's not really that much bandwidth internally to our facilities, about 30 Mbit per channel. Once it reaches our facilities it's converted to QAM and can be streamed across the RF cable plant. Where this could/will pose a problem is for network rider services (ala Vonage) where this traffic needs to cross the egress POP. Anyone involved with carrier level services is well aware that bandwidth is oversold. It has to be due to the insane prices an OC-48 costs. It relies on the assumptions that 1.) Maybe 20-50% of your users will be using the service at any given time. 2.) Even if 100% of your user base is using the service they aren't all using the maximum speed available (ie web browsing versus running Bittorrent). So to sum up, yeah it's not a big deal for a few people to stream HD at 6~10Mbit through an egress point however if a killer service takes off and everybody starts using it in this way it could seriously impact service. In fact it could force a paradigm shift in the industry.
There is if you use trinary numbers.
I have nothing to say.
Get a grip. There is no two.
Of course there is, check it out: 2
(One of the reasons I use Qwest DSL instead of Cable, actually--my connection is slower on paper, but I always have all of the bandwidth I'm paying for.)
Making that general statement does not sum up the conditions of the providers in all areas. A bottleneck could be at your CO (or the cable company equivelent) or an entire geographical region and anywhere in between those two. I have cable and in my area, I can always get my full bandwidth (8mb/s) any time of the day and any day of the week. Not all cable users are that lucky just as some of the Quest users are not that lucky. There may even be a much larger percentage of users of one service that does not get full speed compared to another but again, the blanket statement still does not apply.
Last time I checked AT&T is on and going about there project "Lightspeed" for basically FTTH. Covad & Earthlink are moving to ADSL2+. As well as Verizon FIOS.
Also by what means are we talking on how TV channels are distributed? By inside the ISP itself or some other provider where it's peered?
1. If it's ISP to consumer this is done internally so the only congestion will be the congestion at the ISP not through some peer point.
2. We pay you monthly for our broadband connections, as well as when TV services are launched. So you have no excuse on why not to upgrade your own networks. Got to lose money to make money.
3. Content providers pay for there connections of course you just want more but instead of raising prices where everyone would bite you in the ass for it, you want to regulate how fast people go across your network. Oops google did not pay the extra fee so let me slow down there peer connection speed to 5kbps. Oh but yahoo has paid the fee, let me put them on full speed.
Another charge, another tax, another 2 year contract, all coming straight from your own ass.
All they want to do is charge in full but give you half of what you pay for unless you pay even more for it.
Let us not forget that telecoms are ready to jump into the IP TV market themselves. By using teired networks, they can still benefit from owning the network lines, while overcharging any other competitors in the IPTV market. Could this be a ploy to eliminate their competition before it starts?
Huh ?
Wasnt the telecom industry & isp providers were looking for new areas to expand into ? there it is ? broadband - this time fully utilized.
Werent they already basking in the joy of low usage as very little percentage of their users were utilizing their allocated bandwidth in full ?
So when it comes to providing all the contracted bandwidth, is it too painful for the eyes ? Why did they sell internet connectivity for those prices then ? If the service and bw promised can not be provided if everybody demanded them in full, then it means that all this time they were selling us hot air, some product that is not guaranteeable. is THIS legal ? I guess not ? If they were not, then whats the problem ?
Read radical news here
First, the fiber network that was laid out during the .com boom globally by companies like global crossing currently contains a lot of dark fiber. So that part is cheap.
The capacity of a fiber is easily 10Gb/s per color times 125 colors or 1Tb/s, and a cable is easily 700 fibers, so a total of 1Eb/s. Order of magnitude less for ocean fibers.
*Very* HD is 20Mb/s, so a cable will handle 50 million channels.
Cisco's high end router handles up to 70Tb/s.
Lets take the olympics as a scenario:
You are broadcasting 500 concurrent HD channels at 20Mb/s each channel. This is 10Gb/s.
This fills less than 1% of one fiber in the cable.
Now, Every family member in the house watch their own event, so this is 100Mb/s
The Router handles 70Tb/s, so one router supports 700,000 households. So you need 1 router for Seattle, 1 for London etc.
The only clamp on this whole thing is all the ISP whining about problems and clamping down on bandwidth to try to maximize their revenue.
Like DeBeers and diamonds, it is actually a bandwidth glut, and the ISP's are creating an artificially high price for it by limiting supply.
"Fix it"
To deal with that, Kafka said says BellSouth might put caps on the amount of data that a residential user gets for free, and charge extra if the user goes over, much like cell phone users pay overages.
I don't remember getting my internet access for free, but it sure would be nice to keep the bandwith I paid for.
I heard it used a couple of "P"'s too
Normal phone service isn't metered in the USA.
The telco's problem with VOIP is that it kills their local monopoly. The cable people love VOIP -- but only if your using their service and not a 3rd party like Vonage or doing it yourself through Astrisk.
But long distance is. If you were grabbing everything from a local cache, then your ISP wouldn't have a problem.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
And if EVERYONE went to the bank together to withdraw their savings- would you expect the bank to have it on hand for EVERYONE in cash?
BTW, if a run occurs on the bank, what do you think the FDIC does? sends over an armored car?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
guys this isn't what the isp's designed the internet for.
if you upgrade to internet 2.0 for 39.99 extra per month you'll be able to do it.
-- lol pwned
It's only the large, money hungry ISPs doing this. MOST of the ISPs I work with (I'm a board member of CISPA or California ISP Association which ever you prefer) don't like, nor will they practice this kind of crap.
Personally, the way _I_ see it, I hope they do start doing this. Customers will get angry and find other providers that don't do this. Which means people will go to the better providers anyway.
Doesn't that only apply to local phone service.
phone service: 64kbit unmetered to people within a relatively small area.
broadband internet service: usually at least several times that and often more unmetered to anywhere in the word.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I believe you're referring to 10...
You're nothing; like me.
I wonder if this scenario will hasten a return to the "old" days of low-bandwidth, text-only delivery of information, such as (dare I say the Protocol-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named) gopher? Especially if we start moving towards a model of tiered bandwidth costs, who in their right mind will want to wait 10-15 seconds for a webpage to load when they can simply bring up a gopherized version with the same information but at a fraction of the size and cost?
Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different?
Very inapropriate example, not all trash is the same yet it's generally all treated the same, even though it shouldn't be because some of it is easier to dispose of properly and some of it harder. But all bandwith is the same, it's all just ones and zeros, so their excuses for trying to charge differently for different types of content are pure horseshit.
And we all know it, but it works for all these great technologies. They said years ago the Internet would collapse because of viruses and streams, and it did not happen. Never really seen a problem with my hosting companies and the bandwidth, because the bandwidth is so cheap.
I use DSL to watch streaming video, bittorrent, email, everything. I pay dearly, because it is a business account. If I were offered fiber, I would gladly pay for it. I just don't have many other options.
DISCLAIMER:
I don't believe what I write, and neither should you.
Plain old video did kill the radio star.
What's this? We can't just sit on our butts and watch the money roll in? Looks like not. Too bad - I'll bet lots of folks bet their whole business plan on the average bandwidth per person of what a small toaster will use in 10 years.
Whatever happened to all the dark fiber and the last mile bit the Baby bells promised? Get to work slackers! Maybe you're going to have to upgrade your setup to cater to your customers.. or else they'll so be someone else's.
Don't worry - the early adopter will tolerate waiting over night for a rental to download for a little while, but soon enough its going to be a selling point how soon your movie from Blockbuster is watchable. You don't really want to be the slower option now do you?
The day I turn 16, I'm gonna get the highest-paying job I can. When I'm in college I'll fix people's computers for $20. Then I'll get the highest-paying job I can at like AT&T or wherever. I'll slowly save... and then I'll Buy a bunch of Cisco routers. I will then tap into peering points and build a fair ISP, Stabbing my employer in the back.
You May laugh now, but AT&T is going down.
Imagine Skype on a 10/10Gbit Connection. Better than CDs.
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
I believe you're referring to 10...
Nope. I was referring to 110010, which is 50, the ASCII code for "2".
Unlike TCP, where the end-points do all the thinking, multicast requires that the routers are involved in the transactions. They are the ones who have to make decisions like, "does this address get bits, or not?"
The session management protocols of multicast are defined, but there are a few to choose some, and most have some kind of serious drawback associated with them. One of the ones that sticks out in my mind is the one where there's no way to "detect" if a multicast IP is taken, or any more security/authentication than knowing what the address is.
To properly support multicast, we need a session leader, and every router involved in the minimum-cost spanning tree must also know who else is involved. This means the routers have to be able to build the tree, and tear it down as clients join and leave.
Replacing or upgrading routers is hard because a lot of them are fire and forget. They'll place a router in a wall with PoE, and then leave it inside. They'll be on the bottom of the ocean, repeating traffic that goes along a trans-oceanic link. They'll be on top of wireless towers, miles from other people. Most of them were not designed to be remotely upgradable via software, because routers were always meant to be as cheap to produce as possible.
This is also who IPv6 is only really deployed in places where IP space ran out a long time ago (such as Japan). Until it really starts to break, traditional structure will be "good enough" for most people.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Multiple concurrent instances, even multicast, will choke the backhaul.
I want this show, someone wants to watch another, and someone ordered a movie upstairs. So perhaps there are five instances in my home all by itself. Wireless won't support, that, not even MIMO. Broadcast can, but not full res (or even close) DTV broadcases-- even with the best CODECs.
Then take my neighborhood, and start multiplying the instances. Do the math. It's pretty easy. Along about the tenth home or so, you start filling up an OC12-- even if there were distribution boxes that understood multicasting protocols. Take my block, add up all the other blocks in the city. Make it 9PM, prime time. Mulitple OC192 lambdas running on the best fiber today is going to cave. The backhaul will become clogged, and then the lights go out, running from green to red on somebody's Cisco 12000 in a NOC. Then they start to throttle back traffic by protocol type.
Ok, Mr Wizard-- which ones get throttled? Mail? Port 80? Oh-- IPTV-- it's not critical.
Wait, my set's blooming. All pixelated. Bummer.
For a fact, the implementations-- no matter what the last 100 yards are (even fiber) will clog the backhaul. The only solution is local/regional cacheing.... or using a different way of thinking for broadcasters. The numbers don't work. You either limit raster size, color spectrum, frame rate, or start losing information in the CODEC method, or you have data rates that are huge or are substandard compared to broadcast HDTV (US standard). IPTV has that to compete with. If it can't do it, and must forever mime something ugly like NTSC, PAL, or SECAM, then the game is over and IPTV loses. If, however, you can compete with advanced (and advancing HDTV methods) then there's a chance. To do that, given an isochronous data transport need, requires method that doesn't crack the time domain encapsulating the data stream. Multicasting can't do that but for a few channels at a time. Add VOD and other instances, and the backbone collapses or becomes throttled, impeding the streams-- and blowing their quality to shreds.
Local/regional cacheing is the only solution until everything becomes re-thought in terms of infrastructure-- and the economics are behind it. Until then, IPTV will have ugly, postage-stamp sized rasters at frame rates that can be measured in furlongs per fortnight.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
"Say there, Mister Content Provider, that's sure a nice video you tryin' to send. Be a shame if anything was to, you know, happen to it...
If the Elecricity COmpanies Went into congress and said that plug-in hybrid cars would "destry the US power distribution grid" Would nobody in congress call bullshitsies?
Vint For FCC Chairman!
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
There is only one wire coming to my house. It already carries the HD signal to my TV and the internet to my computer. But let's see, if it carries the HD signal to my computer then I'll need to pay more money? No, wait, the problem must be upstream of the of the cable provider office, where internet signals have to travel from satellite dish to satellite dish, just like... just like my HD broadcast already does. No, wait...
What I don't understand about the Telecoms is why they would want the gross legal responsibility they would pull upon themselves if "net neutrality" were implemented.
As it stands, Telecoms come under only the slightest legal obligations to monitor their clients' viewed content. They stand constitutionally protected as "common carriers" under the same respects that the post office is not to blame if they deliver a bomb, the Telecoms are not to blame if viruses or illegal content are run through their pipes.
If, however, Telecoms decide it's their right to pick and choose what content goes through and what content does not in order to tier their pricing, that puts them under the responsibility to filter all illegal information, viruses, or anything else harmful to an end user.
Napster was under no obligation to scan or filter their content, yet the supreme courts ruled that they were still liable for the content being passed (saying Napster did not fall under the protection of "common carrier") and they stood vulnerable to the legal consequences generated through end users that were unmonitored and had little-to-no direct communication with Napster itself. Less than the post office, less than an ISP.
Though ISP's can/are currently be prosecuted in civil court for allowing for copyright infringement committed through piracy, it usually comes down to asking their clients to remove such media from their computers, threats, and bulldancing.
If the net neutrality action passes, however, the blurry lines between common carrier and filtered information will be defined, and the telecoms will be damned to babysitter status for every user they have. If napster can be sued for letting Joe A and Jane B trade music, even under pretenses that could possibly fall into the home recording act, then the CEO's of telecoms should be ready for jailtime for the first time Joe A is redirected to a kiddie porn site when he's searching for a new mp3 player mod.
Grats, Telecoms, you'll need to be hiring a lot of cheap work in order to go through every single website before it can be sent to its enduser, every time they request a non-cached version of a site. (As soon as they let their guard down, you can BET that angry techies, hackers, and users will exploit their security responsibilities out of spite for their shady business practices)
Instead, I'll choose a telecom to go through that decides not to tier its pricing and keep a "common carrier" image. It will be faster, easier, and less expensive because they won't be paying anyone to read my websites for me before I read them.
Not true. VoIP traffic is more time sensitive than FTP traffic. A SSH session needs better response than bittorrent. And video on demand needs to be processed before a /. page reload.
Sure, it's all 1s and 0s, but those 1s and 0s are arranged into headers and payload. Headers can be analyzed and tagged for prority. All this takes processing power and memory.
It's simple: if you want your VoD to play seamlessly and you want your VoIP to be a clear as a land-line call, you pay more for tagging.
If not, then your 1s and 0s can get lumped in with all the others. Your phone call to mom will be lumped in with my pr0n download.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
You know, when you buy a guaranteed amount of bandwidth.
For the 9x% of net users not in a business environment, it isn't worth it to pay for guaranteed service levels. Especially when the premium is a significant jump over the 'normal' prices.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I believe that multicast support is turned off on most routers... and that you'd need end to end multicast for it to work any more efficiently than the current system.
Also, multicast would only really help on the content provider end of things... which might actually hurt the isps, since it would allow broadcasting to however many users on your dsl connection.
Is there anyone more familiar with multicasting that can comment more intelligently? This seems like an interesting question to me, but I fear I don't have all the facts.
*WHOOOOSH!*
No, despite what you think, slashdotters, yourself included do not know that current model is not sustainable. While a case can be made for this general notion, none of us have all the data to reach a firm conclusion. Furthermore, the current model is continuously undergoing changes, so the information you are using is already out of date. Companies are seeing that it is feasable to run fiber to the home, for example.
I don't have a problem with my ISP charging me for the bandwidth I use. And if they want to break their users down into multiple packages (i.e. ultra-lite, lite, high-speed, and ultra) then thats fine. Just don't you dare try to setup subscriptions based on the types of internet services I consume. i.e. block all bittorrent downloads unless I pay for a bittorrent package, or try to charge me a different price for downloading HD videos than for web browsing. Thats where I get very concerned.
Where do you live exactly? This is a relatively new concept for me? How exactly do they meter it? I live in New Castle, Indiana currently.
Well I'm not in favor of the whole scheme to try to double dip, but all content is not the same.. There are reasons why you have different QOS requirements for different programs.. There are reasons why you need SLA's when getting a contract for your internet service connections.
Email, Ftp, and video all have different requirements. So at the end of the day yes, they're all being transmitted as bits, but the time requirements to transfer those bits and the bandwidth required to transmit them in a timely fashion vary..
So like with trash, there is a difference in the bits being transmitted.
I have to agree that it is an attack because it comes at this point in time. We seem to be at least 5+ years away from widespread HDTV usage over the internet. HDTVs are owned by about 25% of the population. TIVO series-3 isn't out yet. There is also still some confusion over what you will need to be able to play HD video in VISTA and we already know from next gen DVD players that some people who have an HDTV will not be able to see their content in HD because of hollywood's paranoia. If the broadcast flag is reinstated, I see Time Warner and Comcast restricting their HDTV broadcasts of the stations that they own (CNN etc.) to save themselves on 2 fronts.
It is my limited understanding all but US carriers are selling serious pipe to customers for about what the US consumer pays for limited 256/64 or less IDSL or DSL? This seems to be a marketing gimmick to delay the dialup/migration to broadband, or the extinction of the old-school-isp. The big companies, particularly AOL, DarthLink and others seem to have some lock on the US consumer. Its sick IMHO that folks in the US think paying 19.95 for dialup is acceptable, and 199.00 for 'broadband' is typical.
This sounds similar to the arguments the phone company used when the Internet was just starting to taking off. That their networks were designed for quick calls, not the hour after hour of downloading pr0n that you guys all did every night... :) But after a while they got it figured out upgraded the correct parts of their network and the world once again failed to end.
Well, lots of cities have a limit to the number of bags of trash they'll pick up. The city of St. Catharines, in Ontario Canada, even bills you for each extra bag of trash IIRC.
Let them just try and limit the availability of their clients to a popular media site and see their clients become someone else's clients.
The problem is that in this market there are only a few large providers and there are strong economies of scale. If all of the providers do it at the same time, the consumers are screwed.
Now if the providers all sit down together and discuss this move, it's collusion - a big no-no in the US. If they do not explicitly discuss this, then they have not committed collusion and are not guilty of trust activities.
Consider the case of the breakfast cereal industry in the US in the 50s to 80s. They operated in a competitive market for decades; it's just that none of the firms were competing very hard. Consequently, all of the big names were able to rake in crazy profits for years. They were displaying what is called "mutual forbearance." Nobody was trying to rock the boat. There was a huge anti-trust investigation that just went on and on for years. Reagan killed it when he came into office by de-funding it (sound familiar?)
It is in the nature of a cartel to successfully increase profits for all members as long as no member of the cartel breaks ranks and offers a better deal to the customers. This is much easier to achieve if there are only a few providers and significant barriers to entry.
Mutual forbearance in this case will probably look like all of the ISPs saying at the same time that they need to charge more. They will all raise their prices (or charge the content providers, forcing them to charge more) and there won't be an alternative provider. The consumer will get screwed, the market will suffer, and people will look back in 30 years and say "well, that sucked." This is how the US is experiencing the Internet right now. There are an awful lot of non-english speaking countries in the world with better broadband availabilities than in the US, for better prices, leading to more widespread adoption. Dang it.
[sarcasm]
How is streaming HD video any different from the gajillion people playing WoW for hours on end? And ISPs don't charge WoW players anymore, now do they?
[/sarcasm]
You know, in this case I almost wish you'd mention your employer. I've been looking at switching my ISP's recently and it would be nice to have one that is looking ahead rather than peering deep into their own asses...
Doesn't spam account for most of the internet traffic? I'd be more concerned about that before HD.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
What for? My connection (2.4mbps actual downstream) can barely handle streaming standard video clips encoded with the biggest, greasiest WMV artifacts you've ever seen in your life.
If we start encoding all those millions of 10 second clips at 5mbps WMV / 1920x1080@60fps with 7.1 FLAC audio, subtitles and ten different language tracks, I think the servers would choke out first. ISP's don't know how good they've got it compared to a server trying to stream that stuff.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Due to heavy traffic caused by your subscribers, you choke our services. Please pay the attached invoice promptly. Failure to do so will cause the following error message:
"404: Please contact your ISP".
Sincerely Yours,
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft
The internet was only designed for transmission of '0's and '1's, but HD video uses a lot of '2's.
Bender: Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere...[shudder] and I thought I saw a two.
Fry: It was just a dream, Bender. There's no such thing as two.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
The last mile is a tiny fraction of the problem. Your ISP could probably uncap your like with no real problems; until they try and send your traffic somewhere. The top-level ISPs charge a lot for moving traffic across the country. Until the ISPs come up with a model to provide unlimited bandwidth to eash other, then the last mile is inconsequential.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Go back a mere 10 years or so and it was the Internet users that were going to kill the switched telephone network. Instead of brief calls, Internet users got online and stayed on line for hours, if not days at a time. The telephone system was predicted to collapse soon from the overload of all those pesky computer users.
Do you remember the telephone network collapsing? Me neither. And the Internet doesn't collapse nearly so much as degrade somewhat gracefully as load increases. And besides, all those illegal P2P and BT users will all be switching to legal downloads now the moment they become reasonable, which will mean less of a predicted increase in overall traffic. Aren't there something like 60M P2P users in the USA alone right now?
*Yawn* Here I was all set to get excited over this, until realized I've seen it all before and not much of anything comes out of it.
Was there once a threat to overload the telegraph lines? Can't recall for sure, but wouldn't be surprised if it once happened too.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
How do they meter what? I have a water meter, a gas meter, and I pay a hefty fee for trash removal. If I need a couch or other large thing carried away, I pay extra.
An ISP could throw MRTG on your line and easily monitor how many packets they sent to you and you sent to them. At the end of the month, they bill you $30 for the basic service and $1 per GB for everything over 30GB. Or something like that.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
NERD ALERT
Suck a lemon?
*** Call Not Completed as Dialed (number: 911): Family Guy is on, and Vonage can't pay us as much as Fox. Sorry!!
*** P.S. - Hope you enjoy you're UNLIMITED INTERNET!!
OK, if the telcos can't handle the bulk bandwidth from the central office to the server, I want to switch to a non-telco ISP for my DSL line. Covad, for example. Don't let the telecom monopolies prevent that. If they want to offer tiered services, they must be required to offer connectivity to DSL services other than their own.
Uh, you said your trash was metered. Nice tidbit on what an ISP could do, but you were using the trash example as part of a larger example for the near-ubiquitous desirablity of metering.
This is just another excuse for two tiered internet, which is just an excuse for them making extra money they don't need.
Didn't they try this 10 years ago?
The phone system is only designed to handle short conversations, not 3 hour long dialup internet connections.
What company advertises "unlimited bandwidth"? I want to sign up!
Methinks you are pulling manure out of your arse.
It is simple, folks. You are going to pay for your bandwidth one way or the other. Get over it.
Only Chuck Norris could "choke the internet".
Ah, "NERD ALERT", nice one.
Or in binary form: 1001110 1000101 1010010 1000100 100000 1000001 1001100 1000101 1010010 1010100.
And for a future reference, here's the script I just wrote to produce this sequence:
You pay for unlimited Bandwidth, but not unlimited Data Transfer. If you don't understand the difference, then please read up on it.
To be fair, I didn't have the quote down quite right. It took me a while to find it
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
does anyone have a HD rip of someone reading the article? At least something that will take up some of all this idle bandwith I have?
This is stupid. My telco (Shaw Communications) gives me 5 MB/s down and 60 GB traffic a month. If all I did was send the occasionally email or view web pages once in a while, I would use a fraction of a fraction of that amount. So now that I wish to use exactly what Shaw sold me 3 years ago, and what I have been paying for for 3 years, Shaw should be able to double-dip and charge someone else? (I'm just using Shaw as an example btw).
If the telcos don't have the infrastructure to deal with 60 GB transfer for every single one of their customers a month and a certain speed up and down, then *gasp* don't fucking advertise those numbers as benefits of your service.
Translation : Wahhh!!! We were using false advertising to get people to buy our services, and now we can't come through on our promises....Give us money!!!!
Charge your damn customers if they abuse your service, and then watch as the class actions for false advertising come flying in. And watch as the customers who have a choice in ISP's flee your service. Of course, the telcos know that this is what will happen, so they are instead trying to use the American government to allow them to hit third parties up for money. Truly pathetic indeed.
FTFA
If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV -- for hours at a time -- that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for
WTF, and charging more money from content providers will change the design of internet.
I live on a tropical island in the middle of the pacific (Okinawa) and have residential Gigabit fiber for about $70 a month (including land phone). I routinely get 4MB upload and 3MB download simultaneously. There is a business model that works because Japan is using it right now. So, why can't the US figure it out?
Bandwidth is not a damned finite natural resource like crude oil. You're supposed to work with your 'vendors' to meet CUSTOMER expectations... if that's not too much for us CUSTOMERS to ask.
It's pitiful that the Telcos' business model is still the same as the typical mobster and politician- get people to believe they are dependent on them.
Go ahead and raise the prices. Raise them too much and people won't use your service anymore.
Now just hold on a minute. A big fat part of the bubble that burst in the tech sector in 1999-2004 was the unknown profit model. A thinner but still big part was that network harware companies (Cisco, Nortel, 360 Networks, etc.) was that the hardware got 20 times as fast as data compression got 50 times as efficient. Suddenly there was miles more fibre in the ground than anyone had any chance of using (resulting in much redundant dark fibre). Now ISP's are yelping that the bandwidth should be taxed because actually using the fibre as designed is somehow wrong? Come on! ISP's have been making loads on users who only occasionally use the 'net. TV is a one-way medium (true), but the coax it comes on carries much less data than fibre.
They just want to misuse the infrastructure they already have because by keeping you dependent on the streaming hosts, they effectively lock you out of the asynchronous capabilities that are inherent in the internet.
Just download an MP3 or even something off of iTunes, play it whenever you want and you can get those benefits.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The Economics:
Myth: Companies should have to pay for the bandwidth they use.
Facts:
Bandwidth is already paid for on both the outgoing and consuming ends, and there are contractual agreements for each network segment the packets pass through on their way from point A to point B. All bandwidth is already paid for. The telcos are proposing to add a THIRD layer of charges onto the Internet, one they can control and manipulate at will and can charge whatever they want for. Even worse, if a packet crosses through 3 networks on its way from from Point A to Point B that would be 3 additional charges. As everyone knows, these charges will be passed directly onto the consumers in one form or another.
Imagine the packet passes through 12 networks to reach you, if any one isn't being paid and blocks or degrades the packet YOU the consumer lose. There is no way to ensure that a packet gets priority unless the company is paying every single possible network that packet might pass through.
Freedom and Censorship:
Since companies would be controlling the flow of information through their networks based on how much they are being paid or any other uncontrolled criteria, they have great incentive to limit, or stop certain bits of information that is in conflict with their new data "Sponsors". Maybe you couldn't read a blog about lawysuits against the telco. Maybe you couldn't reach a news site that contained a story that exposed problems with a company that is paying the telco a lot of money. That is just the tip of the iceberg.
China is a perfect example of a country that does not allow Net Neutrality.
Net Neutrality is not only fair, and a key component in net freedom, it is the only model that will support innovation in a balanced way.
Don't give the Telcos a license to rob us all blind and restrict our freedoms.
You're thinking Broadcast, not Multicast.
..." You provide a list of ips it's supposed to go to.
Multicast means... Think of a packet as being like an email. It has a To and a From header (sort of). Multicast lets you say "To: 1.2.3.4, 4.3.2.1, 5.1.8.3,
If a lot of those can be reached through the same router, you just send one packet to that router, it splits it up whenever it has to. So, if you have router A connected to routers B and C, you send one packet to router A, it sends one each to routers B and C, and routers B and C split them between whatever clients are requesting it. If no one on router C is requesting it, router A only sends a packet to router B.
Anyway, look it up, I'm done explaining for now.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
A cable company can supply 200 or so channels on a single wire, and each of those channels is constantly carrying a TV show whether you're watching it or not. They know how to do this, but they don't know how to supply a single show on the single channel that carries your internet feed. If you want to watch a video on your internet channel, they can't supply it to you unless you pay them more money; that money somehow makes the internet channel capable of carrying the show.
;-)
Something doesn't quite add up here. Can someone explain to a dummy like me why the internet channel can't carry a show that each of the other 200 channels carries routinely? And can you also explain why giving them more money suddenly makes that channel able to carry the show?
It seems that the obvious thing to do would be to switch the internet service (or maybe just the one show) to one of those other more capable channels that I'm not watching at the moment. Since I'm already paying for the other channels whether I watch them or not, this oughta work.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Actually many (most?) have unmetred long distance as well these days. The cost of metering is often higher than the cost of providing the service.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
For the record, I live in Canada. I haven't heard any of our ISPs ask for the disapearance of net neutrality either (but maybe I wasn't paying attention, who knows...)
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
Actually, most telcos offer an unlimited long distance plan as well. It's not as well-advertised as other plans, but is available. Usually costs about $30/month.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
When I lived on campus our university had a system for the residential networks that limited everyone to 4G/week. They raised this to 5.2 later on, but even the 4 was plenty for most people. The time frame was a rolling week, and you could check how much you had used at any time. Once you went over that limit, you were dropped into the low priority connection pool, which basically limited you to 10-15k until you had some available bandwidth back. It was still better than dial up, and if nobody else was using the network (rare on the residential side, but over breaks and middle of the night), you could still use higher bandwidth. The more you used, the deeper your debt went and the longer it would likely take before you got normal bandwidth back, but it worked.
Seriously, the only people that complained about this were people running a lot of illegal file sharing. 90% of the students never even knew the system existed, but it made the network substantially faster for everyone. I ran a small web server with a collection of funny videos, class resources, and other free tools and utilities, and even during my peak bandwidth usage I never went over this limit. Personally, I think a system like this is entirely fair, because the only person it really punishes are the ones that are leeching all the bandwidth for usually illegal activities anyway. Of course, this should be stated in the contract and they couldn't just add it now, but they could for all new contracts, or even pull one of the marketing "UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH*" fine print with the asterick moves. Technically it was unlimited since I could continue using it even after my quota was up. If people want to run higher grade servers, upgrade to a costlier plan. We don't all drive as far as we want for the same price per month.
Maybe not the perfect solution, but it cured most of the bandwidth troubles for us.
There are three quality of service models for the IP protocol. We currently use a best effort internet; "Hail Mary, full of grace, may this packet arrive at its appointed place within its appointed time window". This is like ethernet - an unworkable theory that is just fine in practice
Differentiated services are the next step. Some traffic is more important than other traffic. If all ISPs did were to priority queue RDP (realtime data protocol) VoIP would work most everywhere and life would be good. I'd award bonus points and spend money with an ISP that would allow me to set the traffic to be accelerated from their side. I don't think this is workable at the DSL/cable scale, but it already happens if you've got enough traffic to justify an MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) T1.
Integrated services actually let you use RSVP to reserve bandwidth for given applications. This is complex to implement and it doesn't scale well. Some carriers are starting to use this in conjunction with something called pseudowire to allow legacy TDM and ATM transport across on IP cloud. Again this is a big ticket purchase and transparent to the end user.
I'm very willing to deal with an ISP that charges more for a differentiated connection
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Yeah, the bandwidth you pay for (which drops the further you get from the C.O.) from your house/office to the telco premise is dedicated. But I'll bet'cha you are still oversubscribed at the DSLAM. Just like AOL dial-up modem vendors/leasors oversubscribe the edge routers. Cable only *really* differs in that it is like a LAN where you fight with your neighbors immediately for that bandwidth, instead of fighting them upstream like you're doing now.
{ - Generic Guy - }
In many places, such as my flat, they issue you a trash container, and that's all they'll pick up.
More trash? Drive it to the dump yourself and pay them to take it.
I agree. Koreans have been enjoying **full-length** feature films, TV shows on-line for several years and ISPs in Korea has had no problem coping with the traffic. Note that all four major networks of Korea (KBS, MBC, SBS and EBS) have been streaming their contents both live and on-demand (for the former, it's free. while for the latter, they charge modest fee). On-demand contents usually come in 100kbps, 300kbps, 700kbps and 1Mbps.
People. One of my first jobs in the industry was with a streaming real time video company that was doing real time porn videos to 56k modems! Give me a freaking break. The load is on the server serving the video nothing else. To the rest of the path it's just a data stream and it doesn't care what the content. Is. On a BS scale of 1 to 10 this is a 12 for sure.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
The top-level ISPs charge a lot for moving traffic across the country.
Actually, no they don't. For two reasons, mainly. One, big ISPs enter into BGP peering agreements in which no money changes hands. This is the whole "moving traffic across the country." That reason is somewhat circumstantial, however, as it depends on who your ISP is and whom they cater to. Two, bandwidth is much cheaper in bulk. The cost of upstream bandwidth is simply less than the cost of providing bandwidth to users. (The difference of the two is a key to profit.)
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
hahahahah
Pshaw! Hogwash! Biggest F.U.D. I've read since Al Gore invented the internet!
Here's why...
ISP CANNOT AFFORD to pass-the-buck. The competition is intense. Besides, smart ISPs will simply pick a cheaper backbone provider. That is where the real competition is. The Backbone, it is.
The 100 thousands of peering arrangements is working out just fine and are profiting nicely.
Rollouts of 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps are ramping up like crazy, but the load is ridiculously low, not even over 10% bandwidth utilization yet in the majority of these links. (Source: CAIDA)
The cost of bandwidth is actually dropping like flies. This causes many peering arrangements to be broken, and mostly created as pricing dynamic hits them.
Millions of dark fibers are awaiting to be deployed (legacy of Dot-Com days). I'm betting heavy money on these dark horses.
Relax...
ISP has good days ahead of them. Heck, it is even a good time to start an ISP.
I agree on both points. However, there is a signifigant cost involved with moving a lot of traffic. As I have said before, Cisco, Juniper, and Bay are not cheap. Especially for equipment capable of moving data at OC-48 and up.
While the ISPs may not charge for peering, they both have to buy additional blades and pay techs to update and maintain those systems.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Electricity is metered because the cost of producing the electricity is directly proportional to use.
Water is metered for the same reason: the more water that's produced, the more in the way of intermediate resources are needed.
But the cost of bits isn't proportional to the number of bits transferred, it's proportional to the rate, and only because the price of the routing equipment is roughly proportional to the speed of the equipment.
But even that relationship is tenuous at best.
You see, thanks to Moore's law, the price of the equipment needed to handle a given amount of bandwidth should continuously drop over time, which means that eventually the expense of providing that bandwidth should be dominated by two things:
So any ISP which charges based on the amount of bandwidth being consumed is likely overcharging the high-bandwidth subscribers so they can undercharge the low-bandwidth subscribers, which they all should be charged the same flat fee.
And any really smart ISP will build infrastructure that's by design as fast as it can be (thus, they would be running fiber and not copper) because in the end, the cost of building out the infrastructure is almost certainly dominated by the cost of the labor to put it in place, or perhaps the cost of the right-of-ways (which is proportional to the distance, not the bandwidth), and not the equipment itself.
We've known since the 80s that fiber would be the fastest transport medium available, simply based on the fact that light has more bandwidth than any other conventional signal. Any bandwidth provider that has built out infrastructure using anything else is an idiot for doing so.
There are a lot of idiot providers in the U.S., thanks to the typical company's inability or unwillingness to look ahead more than a couple of months.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Where I live, businesses are charged for local calls, households get them free, unless you go on some lower monthly fee plan and pay for local calls per minute.
A Telco I worked for about 6 months ago was already ramping up their infrastructure to handle the bandwidth of Content delivery. The Downfall? They were rolling it out using DSL2 as the deliver model. So if you have coper to your house, you get a DSL2 modem with a video switch and Ethernet Cable for DSL AND you're still charged for DSL through the nose (3MB/512Kb is 89$ a month in most markets they serve)
Since they are a small dog with only about 2.5 million lines, but they are all about the ability to selling their customers "Priority Service"
What is even better is there are a few emerging markets that are All Fiber to the home and because of a mix of greed and government regulation. You can get Ethernet over DSL over Fiber ATM over CO DSL over Backbone ATM at blazing speeds of 3MB/512Kb with no plan to upgrade. There is a 600Mbit pipe (Mostly setup for Video Delivery) on the side of someone's house and they sell "DSL" Service over it.
On a side note, it is REALLY funny listening to people from a PSTN background talk about Video and Internet delivery. Most of them have absolutely no knowledge of packet data. And when fiber comes in to newly developed markets (Read Suburbs) existing techs are simply too expensive to retrain.
Hear ends unformatted rant.
They're asking for more from anyone who actually
makes use of the bandwidth. What they've sold you
is a pipe, but now they want to sell you the right
to transmit or receive anything along it. (Since
both sides get charged, the ISP now earns three
times as much for no extra effort.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They're billing the content provider AND you. They
can slow the stream down at either end, so they
are implicitly charging twice per packet. (At
least. Possibly once each and every hop that the
packet traverses.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"broadcasts" would consume only a tiny fraction
of the bandwidth. (You only need one copy per
segment of network, not one copy per receiving
user.) They'd also be installing web proxies
(such as Squid), caching popular "personally
streamed" content on the ISP's servers, etc.
These methods cost nothing to implement, are
largely already present and only need to be activated. What we see, instead, is an attempt to triple their already excessive charges, whilst providing a downgraded service. The sad thing is, people are stupid enough that they'll pay more to get less AND think they got a good deal in the process.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Totally agree, but don't forget about products that already work, such as Red Swoosh (http://www.redswoosh.net/). Centralized video streaming is so '98; the costs are astronomical and the quality sucks. I mean, we can't get DVD quality to stream well; HD is not even worth discussing.
-david
Well, I'd rather see them sued (class action or federal prosecutor, I don't care, but I like the idea of class action under RICO, and yes, this is possible now, there are a couple of cases out that that used RICO in private suits) into actually providing what they ALREADY got paid to do in the 90s, universal good quality high speed access with fiber. This was covered before on slashdot not too long ago. The telcos got over 200 BILLION dollars in price rate hikes, tax relief "deregulation" and so on in order for them to beef up the infrastructure-which they only did 1/4 ass at best and only in some areas. Where did the loot go? We already PAID for them to have it beefed up enough to provide this sort of service. This is bigger in terms of dollars than the Enron scam.
refresh memory
http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
They aren't much better than the oil companies. Sucking us dry and holding us back, their short term greed will be our demise. It won't long before we fall to the wayside wondering what the fuck happened.
The digital revolution is upon us, adapt or be destroyed!
"Dinasours must die."
-NOFX
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
And you know why, don't you? They're the only one's large enough to think that they might come out on top if ISP's were allowed to do this. You get big enough to not have to play fair, you lose some humility.
No single raindrop believes that it is responsible for the storm.
That's the real problem. This notion of over selling bandwidth on the plan that people aren't going to use it anyways. Some ISPs have a horrific track record of doing this and it's inexcusable. If you're going to sell me 24/7, 6MB down/1MB up, then god damn it, I expect to get just that. If that's not what I'm getting then don't call it that, and don't promise it!
If the ISPs are really short on money, I'd rather pay $5 extra per month then have ISPs write down everything I download. But, honestly, I think there is more then enough capacity in fiber optic cables that are already installed.
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0
...just Ask A Ninja about the Net Neutrality issue!
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
YahooBB offers set-top boxes (BBtv) to their ADSL customers giving them streaming video channels (discovery, espn, hbo etc etc) over their ADSL connection.
;)
Granted you do have to pay money, but that is for the actual tv content provided, the bandwidth used is from your standard all-you-can-eat DSL package (3mbit+ connection speed required). I could watch streaming TV, whilst surfing the net, downloading some torrents, and chatting on the VOIP phone (that plugged directly into the router) with no hitch. I could break BBtv if I swamp the connection with too many torrents though...
Point is, the infrastructure is already handling it, so stop scaremongering for dollars...
>>You see, thanks to Moore's law
Not really applicable here. Moore states that the number of transistors will double every 18 months. He states nothing about processor speed, bandwidth, or utilization.
However, let's both agree that the cost of tech is going down. A T1 today costs a lot less than a T1 10 years ago. I remember paying thousands in install fees and hundreds for monthly fees. Costs are dropping.
But, I think we can also agree that the customer demand is rapidly outstripping capabilities. ISPs are not structured to give every customer 100% utilization 24/7. Yes, they sold "unlimited bandwidth". Yes, they sold "always on". However, a lot of the fine print advised customers agianst 100% utilization. They just can't get upstream bandwidth cheap enough to resell to customers and still make a profit.
>>The amount of labor required to run fiber is roughly the same as the amount required to run twisted pair.
That's complete bullshit. I have installed fiber and copper. I have run "house cable" from comms closets to the customers' desktops. I have also been in manholes running cable between buildings. Fiber takes a lot more time to install. You need a lot of expensive, specialized tools to install it. You have to be a lot more anal about QA after the install.
>>The amount of labor required to add routes is the same no matter how fast or slow the links in question are.
That's BS too. OSPF and EIGRP are nice, but not perfect. You have to have people qualified to analyze the network before you upgrade. They have to examine every possible reason for the lack of performance. And, after install, they have to go back to find and fix the next bottleneck.
It isn't as easy as letting MRTG graphs show overutilized lines. You can't just take a OC-48 at 80% utilization and upgrade it to a OC-192. A lot of times, telcos save money by finding low utilization backdoors into overtaxed areas.
Cisco and Juniper are not cheap. Neither are the certified techs who really know how to herd them cats like a mofo.
>>And material cost doesn't vary much with the speed of the link, either.
Yet another misleading statement. The tools neede to diagnose noise on a voice line (i.e. a lineman's handset) are a lot less expensive than the tools needed to diagnose malformed cells on a OC-192.
Furthermore, the techs qualified to operate these tools get paid a *shitload* of money. It is not uncommon for a tech holding a Acterna TestPad to earn 4x what the lineman earns.
On top of that, the more lines you have, the more techs you need. You also need a lot more sophistication in the NOC to predict, diagnose, and reroute around broken lines. When an OC-192 drops, networks reel trying to automatically reroute. Well-paid NOC staff can identify low-priority customers (read, residential ISPs and cable ISPs) and disconnect them to perserve customers who would actually notice (and, more to the point, demand a chargeback for the outage). Sure, you could trust a computer or routing table to do that, but paid staff can do a much better job.
>>And any really smart ISP will build infrastructure that's by design as fast as it can be
No residential ISP will start off by hiring a team of CCIEs to install and configure enterprise-class routers. They start off by installing a few DSLAMs and some Cisco 2600s. They link the whole thing together with stickytape, rust, and T1s. Then, as the customer base grows, they start an endless cycle of upgrades.
It'd be nice to have a network designed from the ground up to provide 100mbps FTTD/FTTC/FTTH. Look at Japan and NTT for an example. The problem with that is that there is no room for the "little fish" in that equation. While a lot of Mom&Pop ISPs are gone, their equipment still serves the same customers. The bills just go to AT&T vice Vicki and Kenniths' ISP and resturant.
>>We've known since the 80s that fiber would be the fastest tran
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
if the some company finds it profitable to stream HD tv, then shouldn't they be paying cash money for 50 gazillion terabytes of bandwidth per month? and probably my ISP would have to pay some for the bandwidth I use downloading the HD shows. I assume my ISP is paying for it now if I download 500GB of crap this week. why not enstate limits like webhosts do that are a hard amount users can receive/send? I know there are many reasons why they don't want to, including that they don't want to limit their customers from the internet if they could instead get more money per customer.
bah humbug.
As US customers become better educated about their line capabilities, expect more ISPs to cater to their needs. But, you better be prepared to pay for it. Already here. My Mom has low-speed cable internet from Cox. Her total cable TV (basic channels only)+internet is $40.
http://www.askaninja.com/news/2006/05/11/ask-a-nin ja-special-delivery-4-net-neutrality
The ______ Agenda
HD video won't choke anything, execpt for the lines your Cable/Telco has put off upgrading for the past 6 years. Why put it off? Because you are making a profit. Or in other words, Telcos are now whining that they are choking because of increased traffic loads. Solution? No, not tiered pricing. UPGRADE!
How fitting.
Packet switching wasn't designed for a different workload than circuit switching. It was designed to virtualize circuit switching in a more robust manner. TCP is designed to have an expensive connection setup followed by an efficient sustained session. The only catch there is that ISPs generally work with things at the IP level, but this doesn't really change things. What's easier to provide quality of service for, a consistent sustained stream, or a wildly bursty and unpredictable usage pattern? The only downside of streaming media and bursty traffic sharing the same connection is to the streaming media.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Actually, they want support for their plan to triple-dip. Each packet that gets transmitted across the Internet has already been paid for twice-once by the guy who paid for the upload bandwidth, once by the guy who paid for the download.
Of course, it could turn out to be even more then triple. How many "intermediate" providers are there? If I run a website, will I have to slip all of them a bribe to make sure they don't "accidentally" lose my traffic?
The part about "using the network for free" is utter bullshit. In fact, we could eliminate paying for upload or download bandwidth tomorrow (take your pick of either) and every packet transmitted would STILL have a dollar sign behind it. As it stands, each is paid for TWICE. For a utility built largely with public money and other public benefits (such as easements and right-of-ways), that's QUITE enough.
Can't handle the bandwidth YOU promised, and YOU chose to oversell? I've got a suggestion. Start running fiber! You know, like you promised to do years ago, got paid to do years ago, and haven't done yet?
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
What they need to worry about is when high-def gets onto P2P.
Then again, P2P is already saturated so what difference will high-def make?
No sig today...
THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.
i think the problem is not with broadcast streams of video but individual streams. the traditional tv allows all to watch the same show at the same time with just a small allocation of bandwidth. this will easily be solved since broadcast points can be placed at the edge (like what cdn networks are doing right now.) in addition, multicast streams can be used.
now, content providers are pushing for on-demand streams. so if i watch a particular show and someone else watches it one minute after, then you cannot use the same stream (and add to the pausing of video in the middle.) the edge servers will definitely not be able to cache a lot of videos (hd videos will take a lot of space.) that might not be practical in placing a lot of those around (compared to like akamai where you can put it in multiple parts of the network because of the cheap server cost.)
common sense will tell you that the cost of a full direct pipe, let say an ethernet 10mbps will definitely cost more than a 10mbps dsl line. so i guess, everybody will just have to get those big fat leased pipes to accommodate their bandwidth requirements of streaming hd. with the current infrastructure, i believe it will be cheaper to give out hd-dvds and blu-ray than stream everything over the net. but when infrastructure has matured (like backbone will be 100gbps with a full mpls netowrk) enough, then live streaming will probably be a "standard feature".
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
The Pope had more concurrent viewers - for 2 hours - hooray!!!
;)
We've been streaming to more than 10,000 people for more than 2 months
google "eagle nest hornby" for what I'm talking about.
I've been around the Internet for longer than most people have known it existed - first Canadian ISP's CEO, etc... (that and $1.50 will get you a coffee, but I digress
It costs a lot to push 10,000+ 384kbps streams out the door. The servers are about as close to "the Gods" as they can be as far as getting good prices is concerned (for companies with less than $1billion in fibre assets)
If multicast worked as advertised (ok, it works - just nobody seems to allow it to work) then our costs would be next to nothing and most ISPs would carry the bulk of the bandwidth on their own infrastructure - at the amortized value of their hardware investment. They'd get one stream and hand it off to as many as necessary to make their customers happy.
The ISPs want to have a "walled garden" - where they provide all (or a substantial part of) the content - and the services. The problem is that they don't have the talent (they don't create TV programs/movies etc, or have the ability to index the rest of the world the way that the likes of Google does)
They don't understand which end of the stick they hold. They hold the delivery end, not the content end. They don't hold the end that holds the customer - they just think they do. The customer will find a way to get the content they want if their current ISP doesn't "get it" and provide what the customer wants.
I hate to repeat what the "experts" have said for the past 10+ years (and some consider me one of those experts) but... this is a new paradigm. It is not built upon scarcity - it is built upon access. The ISPs (and the RIAA and MPAA - but again, that is another story) can't create scarcity - they can only suffer because they think they are in control. The consumers are in control and the providers of content are trying to find ways to get the content they demand to them at a reasonable price (or with a reasonable profit all along the way)
The thing to recognize is that the INCREMENTAL COST of providing the next bit (or megabit) to the consumer is not enough to be worth accounting for if the technologies we have today are used in a sane and reasonable fashion. The incumbents (mostly telcos) are used to charging on a usage basis instead of on just a "connectivity" basis - and they want to keep this going even though their costs are mostly on a connectivity basis and usage hardly enters into the equation.
The final thought is... if it were not for the "other things" out on the rest of the Internet (when viewed from your ISP's network) it really wouldn't be worth getting connected at all. Their product is the connection to the rest of the world, not the connection to the rest of their own customers. Heck, I can talk to my neighbours over the back fence (or at the local bottle store where I met my neighbour tonight as we both picked up some booze) any time I want - why do I need my ISP?
On the other hand, I couldn't possibly have met all the eagleholics I've met in the past couple of months any other way than if my ISP connected to the rest of the Internet.
Redundant but necessary: The Internet is not your ISP - it is the fact that your ISP connects to all the other ISPs. Kick your ISP in the face (or other tender areas) until they understand this!!!
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
In this case, people will be pushing that pr0n download masqueraded as VoIP traffic to get better speeds.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
so im not an network engineer, but i have ... ...
... nutshell.
:))) there's
:))) (same goes for shareholders thak you).
been surfing the the web long enough to pickup
some networking concepts
the solution is simple: multicast
if i understand correctly, this greatly reduces
redundant traffic across a network.
imagine this:
we have a small village with 1000 people living
in it. they all have to drive 20 kilometers to
the nearest wal-mart or what not for their
groceries. so every friday -and/or- saturday
the tiny road from 1k-vil is congested stupid.
their are rumours some people acctually commit
suicide being stuck in this congestion
anyway, some smart guy at wal-mart or what not,
decides to poll the villagers for their most
bought items and TADA opens a smaller outlet
for those items in 1k-vil. so instead
of every villager having to make the long try to
1000k-vil they can use a bicycle or whatnot to the
outlet in their village. of course not ALL items are
available but they dont have to make the run EVERY weekend.
so this is how multicast works, i think.
instead of everybody in the world requesting the data
from the main netflix whatnot server, netflix opens
a smaller outlet near to the requesting party. this is done
thru routers that are multicast enabled.
so if 1k-vil people want to watch a movie say "rise and
fall of the internet" the main server only sends ONE packet
to the local multicast router in 1k-vil which then will
clone that one packet locally in 1k-vil and send it to
each villager. multicast in a
of course this will not work all the time, since
it is possible for 1k people to have 1k different
movies. but again in this case it just means that netflix
whatnot needs to open an "outlet" nearer to the customer,
my guess is that is how akamai works.
it's sad that BAD headlines still are read more then GOOD
ones, and i think acctually, the future looks very bright
for any comany in the network hardware business
alot of infrastructure to be upgraded / expanded. the internet
will not collapse it will cotinue to grow (but that's just a boring
headline).
oh and the best way to convince decision makers (the head honchos)
to an idea is to show it to them, make them like it (addicted)
and once the BOSS of AT&T or whatnot CANT watch his favourit
what-not series on his notebook in hongkok or whatnot, we will see
network expansion
Now that AT&T and BS have merged, it's obvious they are determined to resurrect the same mafia style business model they used for decades before they were broken up.
I have always been a political conservative for most of my life concerning monopolies, but seeing this kind of bile coming from these companies, it has taught me what facist really means and how dangerous they can are.
The only way they can get away with this is with the blessing of our wonderful leaders and the apathy of the average person- (not just Americans)
After all these years of hearing the horrors of China controlling information, these companies are hell bent to do the same.
And everyone thought Microsoft was evil.
($_ = unpack("B*", "NERD ALERT")) =~ s/(........)/\1 /g;
print;
But does that "low speed" connection have the QoS to support VoIP and video on demand? How will she react when, during en episode of ER, the stream pauses? Will she call you? The cable company? Or, will she just expect the hiccups as a condition of the line?
I really expect to see the cable companies lean hard on VoD. YouTube and Google Video is, in essence, competing with the cable company for eyeballs. If you don't expect them to try to impose delays and skips in an off-site video stream, then you are just niave.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Outside the U.S., though, we see a number of countries with extremely high bandwidth available at extremely low cost.
Try living in the heart of a city of 4 million people and having a maximum internet connection speed of 1.5Mbits which drops out 5-6 times per day, costs a third of the average income and only has anywhere near the necessary bandwidth because my home country is close to New Zealand with a total population of under half the size of the city I live in.
And no, I'm not Indonesian.
Too true.
But, NOC operators are smart. A lot smarter than most people belive. Most NOCs have already identified people connecting Linksys routers to their "single computer" DSL. When you call and claim that there is no router, they *know* you are lying. Hint: MACs are usually company specific.
Most NOCs know when you run bittorrent. They can see your utilization. They can tell if you are connecting to trackers for Linux distros and they can also tell when you connect to trackers for pr0n.
Bored NOCs read your email and watch you surf like it's some kind of reality show.
When you use TOR to encrypt bittorrent, you are not fooling anyone.
When you spoof the headers, they *will* be able to see it.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
My roomate's comment about my pr0n connection: "You chat with your mom on that line?"
Kinda a take on the old "you kiss your mom with that mouth" exclamation.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
"Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different? People need to be prepared to pay, per MB or GB, if they want quality service."
Well, that's just the thing. They're not even trying to do that, they're trying to extort money out of Google and MS instead.
See, it's one of those cases where everyone sold what they can't possibly deliver, and now they're tripping on each other's lies. Everyone promised "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!" based on the idea that, nah, you're not actually gonna use it. They figured that, yes, you're gonna see a web site or two, send a couple of emails, maybe even download a MB or two of short pixelated movies, but that on the whole you wouldn't actually _use_ 99.999% of that capacity.
Unfortunately it turns out it's as unsustainable as promising "FREE UNLIMITED ELECTRICITY!!!" and thinking people won't use more of it.
And the problem isn't just one of wishful thinking and creative marketting, but it's always been an outright lie. E.g., there was always some clause hidden in the fine print, or not even there, saying they can kick you out if you use "too much" of that "unlimited" thing you've bought. And for a while it worked to villify those who actually use the unlimited bandwidth they bought, and present them as some predators leeching off the rest of the society, because there were few of them, and everyone else didn't give a rat's arse.
But now it's more and more of them, and there's increasing resistance to buying "FREE UNLIMITED DSL" and then being treated like some kind of heinous criminal if you actually use what you've bought. It worked when those "villains" were some lone nerds running a server at home, but it gets people writing to the relevant authorities when their mom gets mis-treated for spending too much time talking to them on VOIP. Or when they themselves get a nasty letter because little Billy played too much World Of Warcraft. (But more likely, they don't even know why. It just says you've used too much bandwidth.)
No matter how you want to look at it, it's a scam. I'm not even opposed to mettered access as such, but I _am_ opposed to selling something and then villifying the people who use just what they've bought. If they sell something as unlimited, then it damn better be just that. It's like selling monthly bus cards on the explicit claim that you can ride the bus as often as you want to with that card, and then tarring and feathering some retired grandma for riding the bus 6 times a day instead of the 2 times a day your marketroids estimated when they priced that card. It's that sick and dishonest.
And the problem is that now getting out of that losing proposition is a bit of a prisoner's dillema, except the losing move is to confess the truth. Anyone trying to sell a service honestly, a la "ok, guys, it costs X dollars per gigabyte" is losing their customers to those promising "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!"
So now the plan is basically "I know!!! Google has money, right? Let's extort some protection money out of Google instead." The ISPs would now like to have their cake and eat it. They'd like to continue to scream "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!" all over the place, but be allowed to extort someone else to pay the bill. That's all.
It's not even that Google's search even costs the ISPs that much bandwidth. FFS, it's a simple text page, with no graphics other than the "Gooooogle" letters. Even the Google ads are actually using _much_ less bandwidth than the more traditional ads, which in the meantime have inflated to be hideously huge animated popups or overlays. And certainly Google isn't responsible for P2P file swaps and P2P VOIP traffic.
But Google has money, and the ISP would like to be legally allowed to extort some money from Google. And for that matter, from everyone else doing any business on the Internet.
And the stupidity of it all is that all those sites already paid per gigabyte to their uplink. Having to pay extra so the users of some ISP can see your site -- or can see it without it taking 5 minutes to load -- is nothing short of extortion.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually many (most?) have unmetred long distance as well these days. The cost of metering is often higher than the cost of providing the service.
Actually, it is not unmetered. When you read the fine print there is a maximum number of minutes per month. The fact is, long distance costs money, so the all you talk long distance plans simply average the typical users and charge a set price. If you use too many minutes of long distance your service will be disconnected--just like an "over-used" cable modem.
What the hell are we paying for if not infrastructure improvements? This isn't water, or electricity where you have to generate the resource - unlike resources, marginal cost of an extra bit is trivial. You just need to make sure your pipes are big enough. And lets not forget that the pipes are getting cheaper.
Rather off-topic, but BART was indeed originally intended to go to Marin. However, Marin residents voted it down, fearing an influx of riff-raff from Oakland or SF, and also concerns about development. This was before Prop. 13 passed, before which towns had a major financial incentive to build massive housing tracts, much moreso than today. Marin didn't want the crime (yeah, like someone's going to steal a TV in Marin and take it home on BART), and they didn't want the development. It had nothing to do with elites protecting the percieved interests of the public over practicality - it was the public preferring to take the bus and drive than take the 'risks' of BART.
What's this? Another weblog? On transit?
The arguments about the cost of ISP (or university) upstream feeds for videos or other large files moved around by P2P can be taken care of by making sure the P2P users get most of their data from within the same ISP (or university.) Napster was able to do this early on when it started getting complaints from universities that had big fat LAN connections but relatively small outside connections, but it could do it because it had a relatively centralized database it could use to control neighbor connections, and of course preferring short ping times helped.
BitTorrent doesn't really do that, but it does try to use faster connections when possible. This has somewhat the same effect, though it's much more pronounced for universities than for big ISPs, which have big fat fast pipes that are bigger than they want to pay for. Sounds like there's an obvious market for the telcos to pay Bram to tweak his algorithms some more...
The other scalability tool, which can help for broadcast-style TV, is multicast. Most ISPs could just turn it on if they wanted, but they don't have a good business model for the stuff, much less one that supports peering multicast with other ISPs, and most of the obvious uses look like something that people would pay money for, so you mainly see it inside private networks. Think about the scalability of 10,000 households behind one small-medium telco office watching HDTV at primetime. That's about 9 Mbps per user, which is ok on the line side if you've got the right flavors of DSL, but that's almost 100 Gbps of upstream even though most of the people are watching the same thing. If the telco feeds a multicast down to their office, a Gig Ether can handle about 200 channels and then split it out to the individual subscribers. Sure, the telcos would like to control content so they can charge subscribers more money and compete against the cable TV companies, but a lot of the net neutrality nonsense has been because telco officials are doing the regulatory bonehead thing instead of talking about the real technical issues.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Look at it this way. You're trying to funnel bits from A to M, where A is supplied by B and C, and M then forwards them on to N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, and V. (Okay, this is getting a little unwieldy, but bear with me.)
Suppose B is supplying streaming media. One of the characteristics of that is that any packet delayed by more than a second (say) is worthless and shoud be dropped, and your customers will be annoyed. And suppose C is supplying web or file transfers; of similar traffic but no time-dependence.
Who should you give priority to? If you let C's packets override B's, then the file transfer folk will get slightly faster transfers, but the streaming folk will get lots of dropouts and stuff. Bad news. However, if you give B's packets priority, then the streaming folk will get good results, and the file transfer folk will only get slightly slower downloads, which is still very usable. Good news all round. So if you can identify streaming packets and give them priority, then everyone's happy!
Now, in the real world, of course, things are never that simple. And the knock-on effects of this (apart from giving the telcos a new revenue stream) seem highly undesirable. But I can see where the telcos are coming from here, at least.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
They never did understand Internet users, even back in ISDN days. They didn't get the concept that somebody would want a whole 2 Mbps E1 line for one connection as opposed to 30 channels of 64kbps, for instance, and back when bandwidth to Australia was fairly limited, they didn't want anybody to actually use any of it. They're the main inventors of the usage cap, and the US bonehead cable companies, particularly Comcast, have been pushing the ban-all-servers rules, and unfortunately their flavors of Koolaid mix pretty well together.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
and not enough payoff. yeah, that would be damn cool. streaming video to tons of people and still being able to use my internet connection for other stuff... but the ISP's don't give a crap about that. They want money. They don't like spending it without getting something back. not all of their current equipment already supports multicast. every last router has to for it to work. upgrading them costs money. a lot of it. and they don't gain so much by being able to do multicasting.
No single raindrop believes that it is responsible for the storm.
Go back to playing football, jock. Real nerds write their throwaway scripts in real languages:
/g;
:P just, you know, parties, girlfriends, going out... It kinda got in my way so I never learned a real language :(
($_ = unpack("B*", "NERD ALERT")) =~ s/(........)/\1
print;
Yea, sorry
I was discussing this with a colleague, who insisted it could be done by combining streaming protocols with a swarming protocol like BitTorrent. I was skeptical, and pointed to the lack of success of multicast protocols as indicative that the technology to stream to large numbers of consumers already existed, but wasn't supported by the ISPs or by client software.
After thinking about it, I realized he was right. Multicasting will never work due to apathy of the ISPs, so it will have to be built into the application. Take a HD stream, and introduce a fixed delay that would be acceptable to consumers -- such as 10 minutes. Begin a swarming protocol like BitTorrent, but with a statistical weighting so that packets near the beginning of the stream earn a higher priority than those near the end (of the 10 minute window.)
In theory (according to some back of the envelope queueing theory calculations), it should be possible to ensure that 97% of the packets are there within 10 minutes with an average swarm size and typical xDSL bandwidth -- and if you're running a lossy protocol based on UDP, it won't matter too much about the occasional artefact occurring in the stream if the client player interpolates well.
The benefits of this approach for media providers is if they use a signing system with closed source client (both for Windows and Linux), then they could introduce non-skippable adverts and limited DRM, whilst also saving hugely on bandwidth by leveraging from BitTorrent's advantages.
I hereby release the above idea into the Public Domain, but retain the right to be credited as its originator (unless someone can demonstrate prior art.)
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
This charging content providers for delivery of content stuff is crap. Content providers ALREADY pay for hosting (and bandwidth charges for said hosting too) - and service providers ALREADY charge for provision of bandwidth to their clients.
Fix your pricing, don't try to go for 2 (or hell, 3 or more) bites of the cherry that you aren't entitled to.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Maybe they should have thought more before giving everyone 3mbit+ in the home if they cant sustain it! I guess its like an all you can eat buffet, everythings fine until the coach full of weight watchers failures turns up to test the claim...
I say it is about time they start owning up to offering lots of bandwidth without really being able to handle it. ISPs are constantly offering sh!tloads of bandwidth at a high price and never really giving the user that bandwidth. First give me what I pay for then we will talk about a tiered level.
This problem was solved years ago - "high speed" lines (9600bps) in my area used to be sold at various "utilization" brackets - if you wanted 10% utilization, you got a cheap rate. If you wanted 90% utilization you paid a lot more.
Part of me hopes that some ISPs actually try to tier things out this way. I wonder how long it would take for them to lose all of their customers to a Google page reading, "your ISP is slowing down your connection in attempt to extort more money from you and from us."
Probably it will be some preference in the google video interface like:
[x] Low-quality video
[ ] High-quality video (not available on Comcast)
People will be blaming comcast instead of google.
to back or refute your claim.. can you?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I don't think you are adding the cost of digging roads in there. If you do it will immediately outstrip all the other costs immediately. You must also factor in the cost and uncertainities of dealing with the government for the digging.
Also the tech costs are dropping like hell including the technicians cost as well, as the tech becomes commoditized and automated detection becomes possible.
I also do not agree with wireless as it is good only for sparse areas like the US suburbs but not for either Europe or Asia, which have high population desities almost everywhere.
The question whether HD - or any high bandwidth content for that matter - is choking the *internet* is probably true.
But the matter is more delicate than posed here:
Many ISP's are partnering up with content providers to actually offer streaming TV to their customers. This is an end-to-end solution, in that the ISP is directly hosting the content more or less. No backbones, other than the ISP's, are included. Thus, the ISP does not have to pay a third party (backbone) for this content, other than paying for the infrastructure to the customer. The high-bandwidth occuring through the streaming of video content is thus not putting a strain on the *internet*, and charging extra for this bandwidth to any party would be absurd (the content provider is already a partner, the customer already pays for the infrastructure).
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
they probably log every call made even if not for billing.
That's pretty far fetched!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Wasn't there a study saying something like 60% of traffic was bittorrent?
Do you end up having all the big downloaders downloading twice as much and going on the faster plan, making it the same speed as the slow one?
Put it on 'the video net'. The HDTV creaters can go create their own damn protocol and network with all the DRM they want.
I don't have to pay for it in ANY way that way, and the market can tell us all how important DRMed HDTV is.
"While I don't look forward to a tiered system, I have no problem paying for my use of the internet as long as I get what was advertised."
The irony of a forum that can't be bothered to read EULAs, but pays attention to advertising that's in their self-interest is truely intense.
The problem is, you can't really "broadcast" anything over the internet. It wasn't designed for that, it was designed for point-to-point transmission. You can try various ways to simulate a broadcast. . . You can send the same data multiple times, to multiple destinations, or you can even set up some peer-to-peer system like Bit Torrent. But in the end, it can't be as efficient as a true broadcast system where you send out ONE signal and it's picked up by thousands (or millions) of people.
Want to distribute HD video? We have a system already in place which can do that well, it's called Direct Broadcast Satellite.
The only problem with DBS is that, obviously, you are always sending the same signal to everybody. You can have lots of different channels, but still when you turn on the TV set you are still getting something that some broadcaster decided to put on at that time -- as opposed to something you asked for.
While a lot of smart people are trying to figure out how they can make the Internet more like a broadcast system, the DBS providers have been figuring out how to make their broadcasts more like the internet -- more personalized. Thus the ever-expanding number of channels. . . profusion of different subscription packages. . . pay-per-view events. . . all intended to disguise the fact that the same data stream is available to each DBS receiver. The expansion to multiple satellites and spot-beam transmission (for local channels) are also moves in this direction. And most of all, they've been putting DVRs into their receivers. This makes a huge difference to the user experience.
A T1 today costs a lot less than a T1 10 years ago. I remember paying thousands in install fees and hundreds for monthly fees. Costs are dropping.
Wrong.
A T1 from 10 years ago cost me $1000.00 per month for in state point to point. Today it costs me $785.00 for a T1 point to point or $598 for a frame relay. Problem is Frame relay has the potential to lose much of it's bandwidth because it is shared bandwidth. my point to point T1 can be saturated 100% 24/7 and it will be there.
T1 costs HAVE not dropped drastically. they have dropped slightly but mostly because of competition from cable modem and DSL operators.
Problem is that no cable modem or DSL line can actually touch the reliability and bandwidth availability of a real point to point T1 line. And many companies trying to replace point to point T1's are going to learn that their systems will not work as well if they rely on more than 50% of that bandwidth to be available at any one time.
I know we tried that with 2 circuits. we were sold 3Mbit DSL at each end, real performance was max 512K... MAX in the middle of the night.
it was not worth it to us when we are sending video down the line (30 second mpeg 2 commercials to playback devices.)
frame relay was better but still had it's problems and when you buy it at the 1.5Mbps guarenteed level it is about $700.00 a month, so not worth spending cash to buy new Wic Cards to switch to frame relay.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
People will be blaming comcast instead of google.
And rightly so.
Whilst true, I can't understand why the companies care. It's not like you're suddenly taking two lines, you have exactly the same line in - it's just shared.
"£19.99 for one PC, add another for only £4.99" is just nonsense IMHO. Windows XP will even offer to share internet connections for you if you set up a network.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
"Most home Internet use is in brief bursts -- an e-mail here, a Web page there."
If all I need is to get an email here and a web page there, I can drop cable and go back to dialup. Right?
Come on guys, make up your minds, get you ad agencies on the right page.
'I expect to get just that. If that's not what I'm getting then don't call it that, and don't promise it!'
Bingo!!! Spot on. Oversell all you can, just manage your bandwidth well enough so that everyone gets what you advertised / agreed to when they want it.
all the best,
drew
-----
http://www.ourmedia.org/user/17145
Some funky stuff mixed in there...
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
can yuou show me an ad for consumer broadband that contains "unlimited"?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
You can get metered local service. It's just that most people prefer to pay more to not have to worry about how much they're calling. Sound familiar?
So if the ISP backbone data costs a lot of money and the ISP customer costs little, why don't ISPs have local caches of large files, things like popular free TV show downloads, a Linux distro mirror and cached copies of Windows updates?
I'll tell you why: it costs money to host data servers, and it is simply easier and cheaper to try to get the customers and now the sites they visit to pay the ISP than for the ISP to host legal files on their own. However, if the Net neutrality bills all pass, I betcha you will see ISP FTP/HTTP download mirrors all stocked with this kind of thing.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Bull!
This is the same problem we faced with the switch from dial-up to broad-band. The cry back then was that the phone system wasn't set up for constant data communication. The phone system design was built around sporadic 3 minute phone calls... not four hour download sessions! Yikes! The internet will destroy the telephone's infrastructure!
I call bull I say that what will happen is that as the internet begins to "beef up" and stream more data that we will either find ways to make bigger data "pipes" or we will find new ways to distribute data as in Peer to Peer.
Imagine, internet companies getting upset because people use the internet. Sheesh.
[signature]
If you want to charge extra, provide additional service beyond what you already advertise.
Hint: Multicast will solve many of the problems you complain about. There's been a standard for it for HOW long without you implementing it?
(I'm not sure, but I have a feeling a multicast-enabled BitTorrent would use less than a tenth of the bandwidth it currently does for most swarms, if not less.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I would imagine that people are getting much more use of their broadband connection than was intended.
When a company pays for a DS3, OC64, or an OC128 that is the bandwidth they get to use as they see fit. Now according to SLA any failure in delivery will result in charges for the telco for a violation of the service level agreement.
on the flip side, consumers always get "Best Effort" - so...
The people who pay the most for their service are going to get charged for providing the service and you the consumer feel we should try to upgrade the existing infastructure. Well you are not even using 1/2 of your given pipeline most of the time on top of oversubscribibg. The internet is fine to stream this kind of content, the providers are just pissed because it will no longer be viable to oversubscribe the line.
P.S. There is one hell of a difference between the burst ratio of a PVC and an oversubscribed line by the way, so if you are going to argue that point, please bother to look at the definitions.
Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different? People need to be prepared to pay, per MB or GB, if they want quality service.
For one, bandwidth is not a limited natural ressource.
The quickest way to become an atheist is to study the Bible thoroughly.
The telephone companies have been grossly overcharging their customers for T1 lines for many years, even as the cost of providing the service has declined. How much of the quoted T1 cost is for the T1 line and how much is for an Internet connection at T1 rates?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I hear so many people talk about the "Dark fiber" that is running from sea to shining sea, I say that if the telcos dont use them, the government should take them by eminant domain and light that stuff up! as for the last mile; fiber to the curb installed in any new construction, road repaves, ect. and the rest; public WIMAX as a utility, like water and sewage
if certain isp's, who are also telco's, and may also be backbone providers (read: at&t, et.al), would quit routing all the packets through nsa's sniffers, maybe things would speed up a bit...
Last week was E3. I'm pretty sure that between all the video streams, blogs, previews, hands-on impressions, interviews, etc. that we would have stressed the infrastructure a bit wouldn't you think? Sure it's not ALL high def, but it had to have been a heck of a spike in someone's metrics.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
They have face to say this crap while there is a technology like Multicast existing for ages.
Why not implemented on regular ISP? OK no conspiracy theories.
Unless extremely high capacity storage devices with much higher bandwidth transfers aren't developed the prediction will come true.
Today's disk drive, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and Inphase Holographic Storage are
too small in data capacity and stagnant in their data transfers.
We new some new evolutionary or revolutionary storage technology.
http://colossalstorage.net/
This is just none of the more visable of the propaganda pieces being scattered about by the various net inrastructure holders in an attempt to sway opinion and to garner support for their desire to channelise the net.
The internet(s) should be viewed as a "common carrier" analogous to railroads See the Hepburn Act (1906) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_Act The paralells are compelling
I pay for my bandwidth--granted, it's not dedicated, but I have a certain max bandwidth. Meanwhile, content providers usually pay for dedicated lines to server their customers and that's usually priced on total data transferred and bandwidth. So a provider sending tons of streaming HD content is going to be paying much more for hosting and their connection than a smallish blog host or something.
If the telcos want to add surcharges to end users, (or the content providers, which will only be passed on to end users--plus a modest mark up, of course) they're double-dipping.
Talk about your obfuscartion
http://www.dontregulate.org/(flash)
http://www.handsoff.org/
But what you conveniently leave out is that the providers are trying to create a fastlane so the net doesn't get choked off. Prioritize the packets, and the time-critical voice and video packets will come through just fine. Pass legislation that prevents them from doing this, and well, guess you'll have to watch Colbert at 11:30.
Over the long term, you're right. Over the short term, it's going to be limited. For the purposes of the above analogy, water, electricity and trash pickup are no more unlimited than broadband access. Especially trash pickup -- you can always send more people out, but you know, you actually have to do it first.
If the ISPs are worried about streaming, then they should flag the need for a media proxy solution. Certain shows are popular and will amount to a big percentage of the traffic. If they ISP stuck a smart media proxy that knows what most customers watch in between the customers and the backbone, then the customers would not choke the internet.
Problem managed!
Stop the brainwash
So any ISP which charges based on the amount of bandwidth being consumed is likely overcharging the high-bandwidth subscribers so they can undercharge the low-bandwidth subscribers, which they all should be charged the same flat fee.
Also, candy and cupcakes SHOULD be free. But that's not how it works.
An ISP's business goal is to maximize profits. If they can attract more low-bandwidth customers (and therefore bring in more money) by charging them a lower rate than they charge their high-bandwidth customers (who generally have deeper pockets anyway), compared to charging a flat fee to every customer, that is what they will do. I don't see any reason why it SHOULD be any other way.
Then the 'content provider' and the ISP that they choose to get their connectivity from need to negotiate terms acceptable to each.
End users and the ISP's that they choose (cough, where any choice exists, that is) need to negotiate (more cough) their terms as well.
The end user's ISP and the content provider have no need to be involved in any transactions if that ISP is not also the 'content providers'.
Inter-ISP and inter-backbone peering is something they have to work out.
If an end-user ISP wants to offer some sort of special delivery service to on-demand video providers that is desirable to them thats fine (and I would suggest it should involve a direct connection between them) as long as its an *adding* concept, as opposed to *subtracting* from others.
Whenever I see the letters HD together, I first think of Harley-Davidson (definitely more fun than High Definition), secondly I think of Hard Drive, lastly and usually not at all, I think of High Definition.
Simple solution for the telecom industry:
Stop putting profits in your CEO's pocket and invest to add capacity.
I am so tired of becoming better educated about things. I recently attended a meeting at work where I learned about our new health care plan in which they told us that we need to be "better educated." I wish someone would start providing some deals where I can be less educated. I don't need to know how a transistor works to use a computer. I don't need to understand physics to drive a car. Sure it helps, but it isn't necessary. I don't have time to become better educated about everything in my life. I would rather spend my time becoming better educated about my profession and my family. As every year passes, the cannon of human knowledge expands at an ever increasing rate. Whereas it was once possible to be educated about everything in your universe, it no longer is. So, stop asking me to be better educated and just provide me with a good deal from your wealth of knowledge. I'll try to do the same in the areas where I am proficient. It's called specialization.
"But I can see where the telcos are coming from here, at least."
Unfortunately, I can't. If that were the problem, they should hike my bill to make me think twice about using that much bandwidth - not try to extort the content providers for providing content in the first place.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
HD Video could make the internet choke it's chicken.
'Dis shore is sum nice data ya got dere.
Hate to see something happen to it.
You're in luck. We sell insurance.
Exactly. That's a good way to put it, that's for sure. What I don't get is why people put up with it. I can't tell you how many times I hear people complaining about...whatever it may be.
"I had to talk to someone who could barely speak english"
"It took me 2 hours on hold before I even talked to someone"
"I've had to send my computer back 4 times and it's still not fixed"
"They've over billed me 10 times. When I refused to pay the turned me off"
"My internet quits working every 4 weeks and I have to work on it for hours to get it working again"
You get the idea. But because they are $2/mth cheaper for the initial period..."you are just too expensive". Or "but this is a Dell. What do you have that's better than them?" For starters, 2 year warranty vs. 90 day should tell you something...
I'll just never understand the mentality, I guess. I was always taught that you get what you pay for and if you go cheap you have very little right to complain about lack of quality. Kind of like buying a Suzuki Samuri and complaining that it won't go faster than 65. It's got a modified motorcycle engine in it for pete's sake.
With our paultry download speeds in the U.S. I'd say the big issue is at the consumer end. It's pretty sad that the big comm companies want to charge more for Google content but won't give me more the 2.5mb down and 384k up. I can change providers and get 6mb down and 512k up...woo...frickin' hoo when I read about 100mb overseas.
If it's all a big conspiracy or incompetence, then it seems like the market is right for the picking. You should offer this service in Manhattan. If you're correct, you'll make money hand over fist.
So have at it!
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
There is so much unlit fiber in thr ground the actual number would be alarming. The fact is that these dam telcos are making a crapload of money just look at some of the earnings reports from some of them. If a fraction of that money was put into the infra and personel there would be little issues regarding the ability for them to provide service.
The fact is that the net needs to be neurtal because If the Telco is billing the end user for their limited pipe and is also billing the person they are trying to get to. Then they should have no right to bill the points in between Thats just like saying if I get off at a rest stop to graab some gas and food I need to pay a toll to get back on the dam highway which I have to pay a toll to get on and get off. Who ever heard of that. With so much underutilized capactiy and healthy margins in the business as it is they should not be entitled to anything more. If they run into hard times they can go cry to the government and get a bail out. Content providers and other web based companies service or sales don't have that ability. If anything the Infrastructure should be managed by a neutral thrid party but guess what there is no such thing just look at ICANN.
Let's look at HD
we all have SD right now.
Then congress says we need HD everywhere.
(Early ON)
They can't decide on a standard.
The TV's that say their HD ready -- are not ready.
They still cost $6000
SD users need a converter box
There are no converter boxes
Oh the boxes will be only $100
Then look at the cable companies
It costs more for HD shows.
(then lets look at the rest of the spectrum)
BPL gets rolled out.
It causes interference to HAM RADIO
It causes interference to AM Radio
It causes interference to VHF TV
It causes interference to (insert your favorite frequency)
All this HD crap just costs more money, and leaves small content providers up the creek
Look at the telco's trying to kill Public Access TV (They don't wan't franchises)
Look at the telco's trying to get net-nutrality killed.
It's simple people, the government is allowing the telco's to walk over everyone everywhere.
The FCC is ran by Bush Appointees.
You have nowhere to go now.
And they control all the "public Frequencies" (sic)
It's to KILL FREE SPEECH!! They don't want us to communicate, unless it comes out the mouth of the Whithouse press secretary.
They don't want us blogging, or running our Gorilla Journalism.
They want to control everything and disrupt everything else.
Call me paranoid, but follow the money, before you do.
Look at the history, you will see what I say is true.
If you make more than $100,000 a year you get news, if not your in the internet poor house, on dialup or just un-informed
All Corporate TV spin's the news.
This the way they want it in our prison planet.
Meanwhile you get to get bombarded by their electomagnetic sea of death, regardless if you subscribe or not. Look at all the cell towers, hell just turn on a spectrum analyzer.
They waste more bandwith and money with encryption of their precious HD movies. Also making Joe 6-pack un-able to tap in on rabbit ears.
Even Shortwave is fucked. Try to pick up Radio Moscow with a Shortwave, hear all the noise.
Then you have the DOT, and others who have video survelilance cameras , they all have their networks 24/7.
They want to watch you, Tap your phones, do pattern recognition and control your news from all sources.
Perhaps you just had the wrong ISP. I've heard many complaints like that about DSL with many ISPs, but with my ISP, Speakeasy, I have consistently gotten at or above the rated speed. Of course, mine is just a 1.5Mb/768kb consumer grade service, so YMMV, but I don't have any reason to expect that it will. Whenever I have download large files (e.g. Linux distros or video) I get something at least comparable to the rated speed, day or night. I would only expect the busines class connections to be better.
Actually I think this underscores a lot of the problem with this whole issue. Some ISPs make deceptive or downright false claims about their service or fail to live up to their obligations, but as a result of the poor service, they can offer dirt cheap prices. Then there are ISPs like mine that are honest, live up to their obligations, and offer good service, but as a result they can't offer the cheapest prices. As long as many consumers are complacent or ill-informed, the bad behavior of many ISPs will be rewarded, and I fear the good and honest ones will be driven out of business. It may be a race to the bottom, so to speak.
If more ISPs would be honest about what they're really selling, good service would be rewarded, and prices could actually correspond to service offered. Any costs for increased bandwidth on the net would just come from those prices, exactly as it should. Short of a lot of fraud or false advertising lawsuits, I'm not sure that will ever happen.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
The police have been able to get suspects' phone records from the phone companies for years. If we're to believe the writers at Law & Order and people recently defending the NSA program, they don't even need a warrant if the content of the communications isn't being revealed.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
If they are calling it / advertising it as bandwidth, they oughta offer the bandwidth to those that buy it for the bandwidth.
/per/ /se/, are not evil: in a sense, I pay tiered when I pay $35/month for my fat pipe, while a dialup user pays $5/month. The evil is in false advertising, and, from the moment you use a _bandwidth_ measure and an _availability_ measure to advertise, you better deliver.
If they say: "buy our 24/7 7 _megabits_ _per_ _second_ for US$ 20", they MUST NOT complain if I want to download four torrents 24/7, saturating my 7Mbps link at all times. If they complain, they are advertising falsely. Period.
Tiered services,
The whole "kick the user out" or "throttle the user" will not fly with me, either. You promised me -- on TV no less -- you must deliver or PAY ME BACK everything I already paid, plus damages.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
In my city (Provo, Utah), the city has declared the data delivery infrastructure to be a city utility, and is running fiber to all of the homes in the city. They do not, however, provide an ISP service; licenses for that have been granted to a couple of local (competing) ISPs. VoIP and television service are also available over the same line, each provided by private (licensed) contractors. This seems to be a workable arrangement; the city makes sure that the infrastructure works, and the service providers sell the bandwidth. I'm getting it installed at my house today and ditching the cable modem I've been using for Internet access. =)
My point is, it's possible for government to be involved positively in this business without censorship. My tax dollars aren't going to pay for my neighbor's pr0n downloads, they're going to make sure that the wires stay hung. What my neighbor downloads is between him and his ISP, as far as the city is concerned it's just delivering the bits, just like it delivers the power that's running the computer.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
That cable television is over the net anyway. My cable box has a mac address, it connects down the same line as my cable internet goes down. We have 1 big bandwidth pipe going into our house, and when we want to strip a line off with, whether it's cable internet or cable TV, we just cut it off that line. We currently have 3 dedicated cable TV streams, and 1 cable internet line, but it's the same thing essentially, it's just 1 of them is connected to a modem and router, while the second is connected to a modem and a dedicated media centre, known as a cable box. The only real difference is the plans outline above involve more hops between provider and receiver, making it harder to price
Granted China is an extreme example. By censoring certain information from reaching its subscribers it is an example of non net neutrality. Instead of money being the motivation, control and cohesion are.
Perhaps instead you could offer an example you feel is "classic"?
Hmmm, isn't that cable TV nowadays?
...from http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/dsl.htm
"Fiber-optic cables - ADSL signals can't pass through the conversion from analog to digital and back to analog that occurs if a portion of your telephone circuit comes through fiber-optic cables."
It seems these telco's are spreading FUD that HD TV will make the internet usless unless we get rid of Net Neutrality. These same telco's all have plans of rolling out HD IPTV to the masses. So which is it?
Sue for false advertising.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Quality of Service is great. BUT THE ISPs ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT QOS, so it's just a distraction.
VoIP with poor bandwidth will behave worse than many other things with poor bandwidth.
For an ISP to say "Vonage, will you pay $X if we guarantee exceptional QoS to your packets" I would not object to that. In fact, I'm sure this already goes on and partner providers are already faster in some cases. Nor would I object if they said "customer, for $X you can upgrade to a high QoS service. This has the same peak bandwidth, but your VoIP will work better"
This is NOT what they're saying. What Net Neutrality is fighting against is very different. It is the ISP saying: "we realize Vonage packets are competing with services we would like to offer or might like to offer. So we will institute QoS rules to specifically make Vonage packets much WORSE - or totally blocked - than your typical internet packet, unless they pay us a fee not to worsen their connection."
The reason this is a big difference is that there is no way they are going to have agreements with the vast majority of internet sites. So the ability to selectively block things amounts to them being able to send a bill to anyone they want and break up the internet into little fiefdoms again.
This makes a big difference to customers: If their connection just sux, then almost all high-speed stuff is going to be slow. Either they'll be ok with that or not (and leave) But if everywhere but _1_ is slow, they'll think it's that one place...
Personally, I hope that no website ever pays these fees out of pocket. A sane position for a content provider would be to tell their customers "your ISP is blocking us; you may pay $X to have access. Try these other great ISPs instead." This strategy might have short-term problems, but it would result in a significant flight away from the bad ISPs.
Somebody clearly needs to start a coalition of broadband ISPs that agree to support net neutrality - and the content providers need to start giving them props.
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If I put up a video, I would have to pay for all the bandwidth, so that ISP's are already making money on the bandwidth. They make money on both sides!
These tiered ISP advocates are searching desperately for some kind of "save the children and old people" arguement to support their monopoly pricing.
Ironic that the service is so much better for so much less in so many countries around the world.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
With multicasting techniques, one stream is shared to all viewers,thereby reducing the required bandwidth.
There's a huge shift underway in how we get media and other forms of data delievered to us. While we'll probably still want to buy personal copies of some movies, books and other works, a lot of that content will probably be stored centrally and delivered on demand.
That's already been happening on dedicated networks such as cable and satellite but this can only happen in highly regimented ways. For this to truly meet customer demand, we have to go through a massive build-out in network infrastructure. That's already started happening with some of the providers.
However, that buildout has it's risks. There's multiple players in backbone and endpoint delivery so it's likely that some will lose out. Their infrastructure buildout won't pay at an acceptable rate of return or, worse, they'll get stuck in a rate war like the long distance carriers have been. That's a very up-close and personal concern as most of the big players in the internet are the survivors of that war.
Their primary answers are differentiation of offerings and shifting of the costs of the buildout. I can certainly understand the pressure to reduce risk and am really in favor of the transition. However, I think a better model than service-specific pricing can be developed.
In fact, I think the carriers are chewing off their own foot in going this route. They'll actually be slowing down the public adoption of such services by spotlighting the cost to consumers. If I have to pay for the movie and for the privilege of downloading it, I'm much more inclined to just go rent or buy it at a physical store.
One alternative is to blur the line between service and content provider. By offering a single price, the customer resistance is lower. I see Google, Yahoo and a few others going that route.
One proposal floated by the industry is a backdoor attempt at doing this. By charging content providers a service premium, consumers don't see a separate cost - just a slightly higher cost per item downloaded. The advantage it has over the other model is it spreads the cost further and allows their own content offerings to compete more effectively.
I think the key problem is that everyone wants both utility-style and commercial style benefits, we just can't agree on what those should be. The service providers want the latitude to do some price fixing while still being able to compete in each other's markets. The cutomers want the competition but with controls over how services are offered.
It's time we started focusing on commonalities as a starting point in negotiations. The first of those is the desirability of the buildout. We all want that to happen in a reasonably controlled way. Some sort of framework for guaranteed return on investment does make sense. It would be nice if the framework did a decent job of mediating public interests as well as the industry's.
They are not simply talking QoS or a premium service, both of which are already available in the Net Neutrailty we enjoy today.
It's just a few monopoly carriers trying to blow smoke to cover their attempted change of the ruleset that has allowed the Internet to grow, not a wide set of ISPs saying this.
I wrote a long post that explains network neutrality issues in detail. The truth is that ISPs are already charging for and being paid for the network they're providing. If they need to raise fees on broadband users to support higher bandwidth consumption, they can and do.
It's important, though, that they not be allowed to change the rules to try and also collect from content providers. These monopolies are being foolish, of course, because if the rules changed, there'd almost certainly be less of an Internet economy to collect bandwidth fees from.
More at http://www.centristcoalition.com/blog/archives/003 270.html
I pay out the nose for 6 100Mbps lines direct from SBC, LVLT,MCI,qwest,cogent, and XHoe. That cost alone is to provide my end users with access to my content ( Various business sites) All of the above carriers provide my customers with internet access so where is there room for them to step in and charge more? They already do peering in areas they can't get to so what the hell. How the hell are you gonna put a toll on a road that says do not pay tolls. If these dam telco would recycle the money into paying off their debts and providing better service then they could justify any increase or QOS gurantee. But the fact is they don't. Try getting credit for an SLA failure and you would know what I am talking about. The carriers and other ISP's are in a business of selling short of delivering. Look at what happened with DSL's Roll out. DSL is a far better technology than what the cable systems have currently yet cable trumps dsl in most areas in terms of preformance and reliability. So I say screw the telco BS and I bet if the general public starting lobying against them the rates we pay for internet access would be similar to everywhere else in the world which has better speeds and better service. Go figure elsewhere companies make less but have stable customer bases here companies make a bunch and pisses off the end user so much that it forces the end user to go elsewhere.
Maybe I'm being naive here, but isn't that a problem because of the usage pattern of the USERS, not the content PROVIDERS? And don't we already (as users AND providers) pay based on those patterns?
For instance, I have the choice to purchase either a slow dial up connection, a low DSL, a high DSL, or a T1 line for my home, and I select which to purchase based on how much content I wish to transfer and how fast I need it. And I pay more to get a faster connection.
Likewise, don't companies like Google and Amazon and such have to pay for either hosting and/or bandwidth use already? Ie, they pay their service providers per MB of data transfered. If they use more, they pay more.
So explain to me WHY we need a tiered pay structure and performance structure on the internet then? We're already in a tiered payment structure on both ends?
This is yet another case of companies wanting to find a way to extort more $$$ for services that they they've made too cheap through competition with others in the industry. If small cable companies have a problem with supporting the bandwidth needs of their subscribers, they should either cap the bandwidth they give the subscribers, make the heavy users pay more for higher service limits, or get the heck out of the business and sell it to somebody who can handle it. I don't see how screwing content providers into paying more for something the consumer does is fair.
Just my $0.02
--Ledfoot
"Video killed the internet bar..." No? Just me? Okayyyyy then
It's not the metering that's expensive. It's the billing infrastructure. Metered anything requires more customer service people and billing people.
Metered means you have to deal with disputes about usage and such.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
Is that what you kids are calling it nowadays? Excuse me, I have to go choke the Internet...
They want an additional charge on Video and iTunes. .25 for each tune, Apple laughed at them. Now they have refined the pitch. They can also slow down the network and blame the video downloaders. What I don't want is a bill with extra add-ons when my kids pull down a bunch of 'free' videos. Pay for pipe size, not content. They want to get more for first
This concept started when they saw how much Apple was getting from iTunes.
They looked for a way to get a piece of that. They asked for
run movies, but not hammer you for virus updates.
The better solution is to offer flex-time pipe sizes. Download your flix over night and save bandwidth during the day.
The CEO of Verison was on NPR this morning talking about how the Verison Network is under utilized and the only thing holding users up from really using the capability of the network is the famous "last mile", which he says Verison is going to upgrade. If the "choke point" is the last mile, not the "network" itself....?
I receive the PACKET magazine (or I did, when it was free. I'm not going to pay for a subscription to a cisco catalog, damn it), and already in 2004 they advertised the CRS-1 CARRIER ROUTER SYSTEM, with the tagline "What would you do with 92 terabits per second?". Damn! I think that should be enough for a more than a few HD videos. The ISPs don't wanna spend more money in infrastructure? Though shit. TV broadcasters had to upgrade to HD, the consumer had to upgrade, well it's their turn too. I've heard enough bullshit about "triple play", and I know ISPs will make enough money out of it. They just want to delay it as much as they can...
lookout, pornographic hd video could 'choke the chicken'
They were saying the same thing about streaming audio 12 years ago.
I believe that selling more than you can deliver is known by a cute little technical name - "Fraud". If they overpromise, that's their damn problem, not mine. I pays my money, they takes their chances.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Quota ideas sound fine at first blush, but the equipment for delivery though would require a great deal of either manual entries for QoS metering of this type or the construction of a very sophisticated apparatus.
The later would add more possiblities of problems, i. e. another point of failure.
So the real answer is to guarantee every one a 100 megabit with all services providers getting atleast 10 gigabits of feed and all tier 1 operating at 1 or more terabits to start with then scale up from that of course.
Now you see the problem, it is not possible to get the telco./cable establishment to not want to get the bills paid on all of that slower gear they have with no real dynamic service platform resource allocation. It is a capital cost issue, pure and simple. No one wants to pay for the limiters, to get higher sustained peaks will make home broadband go from a base price of $30.00 roughly to a new base at about $200 because the applications demand heavy resources.
WiMax for instance is DOA before it arrives in the video world with its limited spectrum.
54 megabits, well in the high def. world, 19 megabits for full quality video compressed mind you, you only get a few channels and not much data left over.
WiMax is now so dead!
Good riddance, it was lame from day one with so little spectrum allocated in the first instance!
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Interesting logic. The internet has handled everything we've thrown at it, therefore the internet always will handle everything we will every throw at it!
I, for one, don't care about live feeds. I just want my home machine to tell me when it's acquired the latest Battlestar Galactica or whatever. It doesn't matter to me whether I watch it on Wednesdays or Thursdays. Should the ISP really be running two completely independent streams because I wanted to watch the evening news at 6 and my neighbor wants it at 6:10 ?
Between the NNTP model and router-based multicasting, surely we can solve this. Unless the ISPs' real problem is wanting to reach deeper into our pockets.
Streaming, No!
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
Don't cable companies already send out tons of TV content out over their fibre in the form of Cable TV? If TV over IP replaces conventional cable TV, won't the bandwidth previously used for cable TV be freed up for internet use?
Am I right or just naively mistaken?
I've read Grocklaw. BoycottNovell, you're no Grocklaw
Some people are into that kinda thing.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Electricity is neither limited nor natural.
Water may be natural, but it isn't limited. There is just as much water on the planet today as there was 500 years ago. 500 years from now, there will still be the same ammount of water. The water might not be potable, but it'll still be here.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
So of course there is a financial intereest to lie to satisfy their shareholders willingness to rape us
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Reminds me of an old quote:
To paraphrase Jack Valenti: I say to you that HD video is to the internet as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
It was just local. Now it often isn't.
Some major ISPs at least here in the uk do either use a proxy by default in thier client setup or use forced proxying.
As for linux distros they are mostly mirrored in the uk anyway so our ISPs can just push the data over a peering point which is cheap.
Are there many popular free and 100% legal (e.g. not fanfiction or pirate japaneese anime) TV shows yet?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
And if you're not streaming, and instead, just serving files, then there there's a technological solution to the "lots of users download the same huge data files" problem that ought to leap out at you: caching.
Your ISP should be caching just about anything that is popular. It should get transmitted over the wire from their ISP approximate 1.0 times. That is a level of traffic that The Internet can easily handle.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
She is using VOIP. Has been for months.
I doubt she'll ever using VoD personally. I just hooked up her fancy new DVD player. The VOIP thing I could do because it seemed just the same to her.