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Network Neutrality Threatened In Norway
eirikso writes, "In June 2006 NextGenTel, one of the biggest broadband providers in Norway, decided to deliberately limit the bandwidth from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. The CEO of NextGenTel, Morten Ågnes, told the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that they will give priority to the content providers who pay for better bandwidth. The Consumer Council of Norway takes this as a serious threat to network neutrality in Norway and wants to call a meeting with the biggest broadband providers in Norway to find a solution."
It's not news anymore, if you read the fine article (blog, whatever). There has been an update to the text that says that the broadband provider caved in to pressure to stop the throttling.
Slashdotters in Norway should call NextGenTel and ask if they give equal bandwidth to all hosts on the Internet. If they say no, say no thanks, wait an hour, and call again with the same question.
Then repeat until you believe the message has been delivered. Bad luck if this crowd are a (near) monopoly.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I realize there are arguments in favor of network neutrality, but as a huge fan of alliteration, I'm really looking forward to reading the headline "Network Neutrality Nixed in Norway."
I'm glad to see that the bad publicity was enough to prevent it from sticking. Hopefully that's enough on this side of the world as well.
As a side note, that update was the first thing in the article (second, counting the disclaimer). You'd think the poster/editor would've noticed that...
No! Next thing they'll be doing the throttling my Norwegian p0rn!
Look, increasing the costs of your bandwidth isn't stable proposition in a free market. Someone will come along and be cheaper. The governments should be doing their job to make sure there is a free market in place rather than a cartel. Make sure that anyone who does want to charge more has to make their exchange available to competitors.
Deleted
I think this is a trend that we'll have to get used to. When someone realises that they're in a position of power as an intermidary, they can, and often do, play both ends against each other for their own profit. It's a model employed by super-markets and record companies, price fixing by controlling supply and demand.
ISPs already employ charging models based on usage per month for their customers(consumers), charging (content)suppliers based on usage is trivial for them.
It's not like Telia doesn't do the same....
Although not as open about it as NextGenTel.
Telia has a serious marketdominance in the ADSL-field and refuses to let smaller operators in to use the infrastructure without having to pay insane amounts of money.
Peering is also a thing which Telia is abusing to their own ends. If you're not a big provider you can't get a peering to Telia (unless you pay insane amounts of money or know someone high up at Telia-sales).
The way other operators have to go about and do is to buy traffic exchange with operators who are big enough to be able to buy the amount of traffic required from telia to get the low prices and still resell at more humane levels (although still "reselling").
If the operator you're on is trying to get to Telias network without Internetexchange in sweden you'll have to go over international carrier... Which in return results that going from sweden to holland and back will give additional delays.
When big companies can hoard the good peer-points the market for small operators will be dampened unless your small company has a deal with an operator big enough to get tier2 access to the likes of Telia.
I posted this to Slashdot yesterday and updated it minutes ago, just before it went live here on Slashdot. I think the example and story still is important. It took three months and a lot of bad publicity before they changed their mind.
.. for those that do not pay extra is sort of similar to a gas station demanding a higher price for cars that are fuel effective.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
See how things work out:
1. isp limits availability of site X
2. people complain to site X
3. X blows the horns that it's in fact isp's fault and everybody should contact the isp and nag 'em
4. people nag isp
5. isp caves in and removes the limit
when the objective reason for the bad service is not in the provider and people are told this, they'll understand. They can still read and comprehend written text.
so, what now: pro-neutrality or anti-neutrality? The truth is in the middle as always.
as the Internet grows, we'll definitely see some more intelligent traffic allocation to allow for more varied scenarios to be implemented directly on the Internet,versus specialized networks.
but blackmailing sites to pay every single ISP out there and their own hosting provider: it simply won't fly.
watch them fail again and again.
Surely giving customers what they pay for is not only reasonable but the only sane way to run a business? The basic problem here is the expectation that domestic broadband should be able to run at peak throughput, 24/7, for an attractive flat-rate price. That just isn't viable: the only reason it works is because most broadband users don't generate much traffic, yet.
The two obvious solutions to this are to bill bandwidth-hogging consumers for the bandwidth they consume, or to increase the flat-rate cost to a point where it covers a much lower contention rate than at present. Both those options are desperately unpopular, so it looks like the ISP tried making the figures add up another way.
And there won't always be a cheaper solution around the corner, not if you care about reliability and actual (rather than published peak) bandwidth. One of my broadband connections is astoundingly cheap 10MBit cable, and I think I've managed to get it close to 10MBits about once in the past year. (This is connecting to my own remote servers that clock ten times that speed when transferring data to other remote data parks, so the bottleneck is definitely nearer the broadband end of the connection.)
Virtually serving coffee
This idea is dildos.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
What is it with these neo-communists on /. who think that people shouldn't be allowed to pay for higher quality service if they want it? Do you guys picket the airlines for offerring first class and coach?
Cheney/Bush '08
-- I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Was the ISP throttling all audio/video broadcasting or just Norwegian sources or just NRK? It'd be an easy way to steer what information people get by limiting access to certain sources or views.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Just NRK apparently. Other Norwegian sites, such as newspapers, were not affected.
Just as well that they did stop this throttling practice.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
NextGenTel is not the only ISP in Norway that theatens network neutrality.
The ISP CanalDigital give a lower priority to p2p-packets between 5pm and 11pm.
Norwegain link: http://www.itavisen.no/php/art.php?id=340607
Forget Norway!
We're goin' to Kenya.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
Dammit, I get mod points all the time, and when someone finally posts what the Network Neutrality debate is really all about, I don't have any.
-Q
Mostly because the internet isn't a dump truck its a series of tubes. Republicans are in hot water it seems like everyday you turn another one did something wrong just today on the radio Mark Green, a candidate for governor of Wisconsin was order to get rid of more campaign money because he obtained it from out of state special intrest groups. Foley is also in alot of trouble. I admire his ablity to think that people are completly stupid. Alot of people have been drunk none of those people write sexually explicit emails to children. If all drunk people did that colleges wouldn't exist. My point is if we're lucky the republicans won't have enough time to do what they want to do.
" I think that freedom is Americas biggest export. Atleast untill China can stamp it out for 20 cents a unit."
I wonder how many Slashdotters thought this when they see the editors screw up: "damn it, if you can run a blog with that much nonsense and be successfull, I can run one too!" and parted on their way to glory.
If by "glory" you mean "Digg," then at least a few.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Think about it and you'll realize the fallacy of your logic. If you allow the user to route anything as high priority, and limit the high priority bandwidth, you get precisely what we have now.
I don't think this is the case.
Suppose your connection was a 5Mb/s burst pipe, but had a high-QoS component of 128kb/s. The system would only allow you to send a certain amount of high-priority packets per second -- if you exceeded that, it would start throwing them away or just strip the QoS flag and send them as normal packets. The network backhauls would be built to allow simultaneous use of the high-QoS bandwidth, or at least build it to phone-company like standards. The rest of the 5Mb pipe would be shared and prone to degradation based on network conditions.
It would be up to you, the consumer, to decide what you want to use your 128k allocation of high-QoS for. If you want VoIP, one assumes that's what you'll want to do first. But if you want to make your porn download faster, good for you. It's your bandwidth, you can do what you want with it.
Just like now, where you can get a higher burst speed by paying more, you'd be able to buy more high-QoS packets by paying more too.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is how the market is supposed to work.
The only problem that I see, if the ISPs there are anything like the ISPs in the U.S., is that they engage in what I consider to be the razor's edge of false advertising. By selling you a 10Mb* pipe, they actually oversell their network. They don't have nearly the capacity it would take to let everyone use what they've sold them.
We need to stop this behavior. Yes, in the short run it might lead to prices increasing, but it would only be increasing back to the level of what they actually cost -- you don't get a 3Mb sustained transfer connection for $40 a month. You just don't.
A whole lot of problems would be solved if we just got rid of this basic misunderstanding, and forced companies to use a realistic measurement of throughput in their advertising. Then we'd start to see real competition for price and service.
* (very small type) Burst speed
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So what stops NextGenTel from deciding to throttle bandwidth NKR (or any content provider) again, but the next time, only in a more subtle way? Like, throttling only during Internet rush hour, or routing that content provider's packets at a lower preference to other packets? How can you prove that NextTelGen is behind the lower performance, and not "Internet congestion at rush hour"?
Respect the laws of physics, for the laws of physics have no respect for you.
Someone please explain why they think the net is, or can ever be truely neutral. In my area AT&T Yahoo offers small businesses 3 connections 384K-786K, 1.5M-3M, and 3M-6M; for enterprise customers they offer OC-48 to OC-192... you get what you pay for. Every connection is a consumer and any connection can be a "Content Provider", there is no way to guarantee equal access to every content provider. The alternative is the least-common-denominator and have dial-up only, then it would just depend on how good a modem you can afford and how many phone lines you can bring in to your facility. Ah...but then that is not neutral either.
Proceed @ 11.5740741uHz
This isn't a net neutrality issue. The content provider is simply being asked to pay for their bandwidth. If the content provider doesn't want to pay for the bandwidth their using, it creates a bottle neck. Currently Google and Yahoo are expected to pay for their bandwidth, and if they don't the same thing will happen. This has always been the case. Currently consumers have the option of paying more for various levels of bandwidth, and it is reasonable to assume the same is true for content providers.
Net neutrality is about paying for latency, not about paying for bandwidth.
"Net Neutrality" isn't about paying more for more bandwidth from a service provider. It's about making people who aren't connected to your network pay for you to transfer data at normal speed through your network to your subscribers, who are themselves paying to use the bandwidth. It's like the post office offering to a business the option to pay an annual fee - or have all their mail delivered two weeks later than it should be.
Maybe the solution will have to have some sort of financial incentive for those broadband companies to remain neutral.
For instance, since in this case, NextGenTel-whatever is getting paid by other companies to prioritize their data, why not apply a special tax (as well as reduction or inelligibility for govt grants and assistance programs) on it....such much so that it would cost NextGenTel more to unneutral than to be neutral even with the higher cost of the extra bandwidth needed.
Or maybe just the threat/idea of such a tax coming into effect might scare them back into neutrality. (hey, why do you think gas prices have drop significantly as of late? It's not because of the war in Iraq...)
Just remember, companies that aren't into net neutrality will at least understand one thing.....money.
Impose bandwidth and download limits.
Way back when 9600 was "high speed" data access, you could lease a 9600bps line with varying levels of utilisation. For example, that line leased at 20% utilisation was charged at about one third the price of a 40% utilisation contract.
The modern equivalent is data volume quotas split up into peak/offpeak times. If you exceed the quota, you get charged more (but keep the speed), or have your bandwidth shaped (eg: 1.5Mbps normally, 70kbps shaped) in order to allow other users of that service to have some utility from it.
The real problem here is the pervasiveness of "all you can eat" (aka "unlimited") ISP contracts which aren't priced at a rate that will allow the ISP to maintain their infrastructure to service the bandwidth demand of their customers.
Some people pay a little bit for dial up. Others pay a little more for DSL which is faster. Still others pay for cable modem service - yep - still costs more. So why shouldn't the "big boys" pay big bucks for their bigger faster pipes? Why should my cable rates be raised to pay for Google's light pipes?
Yeah, but the content provider is NOT a customer of the consumer ISP in question!
Folks
I wrote a strong article following up this story but after talking with the CEO decided to hold it back. I believe strongly in the open net, and have publicly debated against Verizon and AT&T on Net Neutrality. I urge caution in this case. Besides the update that NRK and NextGenTel had resolved all differences and are peering at a gigabit, Stokke provided numerous details of his open video peering policy. There is ambiguity in their official statement about peering and commercial arrangements that I need to clear up and other details. Although Stokke directly supported Net Neutrality in what he said, the concept are easy to confuse. I'm witholding judgment until more facts are clearly available in English and the full situation explained.
Here's how I wrote it.
5 a.m. New York, Olav Stokke, the CEO of NextGenTel called and told me the Slashdot story "Network Neutrality Threatened In Norway" was substantially inaccurate. So I held my story, "Norway Nixes Net Neutrality TeliaSonera Degrades Norwegian Broadcasting" and hope this proves a false alarm. Stokke tells me they've resolved a peering difficulty with the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) and gave me assurances that NextGenTel was completely open to outside video. Thanks to Stokke and Birgitta Grafstrom of parent company TeliaSonera for working with me on a tough deadline, and I'll have more info next week.
------- Again, I cannot confirm the details of what he claimed, but they were consistent enough I need further research.
db
daveb at dslprime.com