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Cable Packet Shaping Causing Slowdowns
knorthern knight writes "To counter P2P programs that encrypt their traffic to evade detection, Rogers Cable in Canada has apparently started degrading all encrypted IP traffic, according to a post on Michael Geist's blog. How many of you log in to work over a VPN or ssh-tunnel? How many get usenet news or email over an encrypted connection? This could be a problem for Rogers Cable customers. Geist, who teaches at U of Ottawa, has 'been advised that the University computer help desk has received a steady stream of complaints from Rogers customers about off-campus email service.'"
I often use ssh/x to connect to work with p2p downloading at the same time. The ssh/x response is horrible. I'd like to be able to shape the traffic so my ssh/x connection gets absolute priority with p2p using whatever is left. I wonder how other people are doing this.
These days, after all the time to perfect technology and awareness of identity theft and industrial espionage, non-encryped traffic should be banned from Internet at backbone routers. Every ISP can issue you an SSL certificate that indicates the level of verification (possibly none) they performed on your identity. Even with multicast, data can be encrypted with server's private key for which the public key is available to intended recipients, or public. The only exception would be very low powered dumb devices, but those shouldn't be connected to public Internet anyway.
Use "brownouts" to shape traffic for "fair load" during peak times.
During non-peak times, when you can carry every bit at maximum speed, do it.
During peak times when you can't, then, for the next few minutes or hours, cap everyone at X bits per second, Y bits per minute, Z bits per 5 minutes, and so on so the leeches-of-the-moment get throttled down and people putting less immediate demand on the system don't notice any change. X should be as close to the normal maximum as possible. Y should be less than 60X or Z should be less than 300X, or both. This way, people just doing normal web browsing won't be impacted but I'll be slowed down if I dare to download all of kernel.org during a busy period.
If you combine charging extra for minimum guaranteed per-second bandwidth and charging extra for high-volume-per-month users with peak-demand throttling, then you can raise revenue and/or discourage people from demanding all-you-can-eat lobster buffet service at cup-o-noodles price.
Do NOT discriminate based on the content of the traffic, especially if you do not know what kind of content that is, i.e. because it is encrypted. That encrypted connection is probably me working from home thank you very much.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
When people complain about anything related to ISP surveillance, I always wonder how bothered they really are about security. If you're truly interested, you'll use an encrypted network, preferably an onion routing network, because you never know who is watching. My branch of civil rights activism is highly controversial and generally misinterpreted, so I always make sure that I route my traffic in an encrypted form through my ISP's routers
Sadly, some people really don't understand that the internet is NOT anonymous and that you must use other measures to achieve a reasonable degree of security.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
And if they slow it all down, sue them for not providing the level of service they promised when you signed up. The whole unlimited, high-speed broadband thing is such a fraud anyway, it deserves to land in court -- preferably sooner, rather than later.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If anything, ssh and https should be the highest priority.
No, streaming UDP based protocols have to be the highest priority, otherwise VoIP and similar applications won't work.
Ultimately the only logical way to handle this sort of thing is going to be through service tiers or other non-Net neutral mechanisms.
The deceitful cable advertising needs to stop.
These guys need to be sued.
DSL companies should use it in their ads.
So why not offer GRADUATED pricing levels? 2 GB/month for $x. 5 GB/month for $2x. 10 GB/month for $10x.
Why not just pay directly for the bits themselves?
$1 per GB per month [say].
So that if you used 17.79 GB for that month, then your bill would be precisely $17.79.
It's pretty much the way the long distance companies have being doing it since time immemorial.
And if upstream bits are more precious than downstream bits, then bill accordingly: Say, $2 per upstream GB per month, and $0.50 per downstream GB per month [or whatever].
It's not at all clear to me why the free market [in the form of PRICING] can't take care of this stuff naturally.
You answered your own question.
The entire telecom industry is an absolute scam. Nothing comes close.
Go work in telecom for a while and you will be amazed. The focus is never on providing service or creating new products. It's always "how can we maximize return on our existing customers and infrastructure" and "how much can we leverage this incremental improvement"?
Invent something that costs 1/1000th of a cent to deploy and use? Let's price it at 10cents per use.
Handheld makers invent a technology that lets customers play music on their phones? How can we block them from loading their own music so that they must buy it through our storefront?
Convert your network to be digital, so now you can carry data as well as voice? Oh.. hold on there. It costs us less to move data than voice, but we should be charging 100-200 times more for this great new feature.
Don't let any ISVs run a service over your network. That's revenue that you should be getting from your customers directly. Yes, it would make our service more useful, but you can't have anyone else interacting with your customers.
I could go on and on for days (and I was only in it for four months!) It's an absolute scam.
Heath-care and banking are just blips on the radar compared to the telecom scam Goliath.
That's pretty much the way every ISP in Australia works. I'm on a 20GB a month plan, and if I exceed that, my speed drops to dialup speeds until the end of my billing cycle. You can also choose other options that let you pay for excess data at a per-GB rate, if you prefer it that way. Some ISPs have peering discounts, where transfers between others on the same ISP (or other ISPs in a peering agreement) don't count towards the totals, or where using mirrors provided by the ISP themselves don't count (My ISP mirrors a whole ton of software patches that you can download without impacting your quota, including many Linux distros and packages). Some ISPs even have peak/off-peak plans, where you have, say 10GB of data to use during peak times, and 20GB to use during off-peak.
That said, a lot of the more complicated plans (especially the peak/off-peak) are being phased out as the consumer-base of broadband becomes less and less technically knowledgeable. It turns out consumers generally want the plain and simple plans as opposed to all these complicated choices.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
What's weird is I predicted this EXACT thing about 6 months ago, here on Slashdot:
5 02121
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=187990&cid=15
Guess I was right this time. What will be neat a couple of years down the road now is the slow conversion of all traffic to encrypted streams, and I guess we'll see how the ISPs react to this. Maybe *gasp* actually not lie and sell guaranteed bandwidth?
The digital phone offered by Shaw is not VoIP, it is a digital phone signal sent over their existing cable infrastructure, instead of using the Telus telco service at an ungodly price. And because Shaw is part of the Rogers network, and Rogers has their own telco service, Shaw can offer digital phone service at a much reduced rate.
Dont believe me that Shaw isn't VoIP... The next time your Shaw internet stops working, try using your Shaw digital phone... IT STILL WORKS.
Here is our new pricing plan for home and small-business customers, effective May 1, 2007:
Additional usage is available for $3 per 50GB. Additional blocks must be pre-paid or can be paid for as needed from our customer service web site.
All packages include all the same services you are used to plus free "action alerts" when your prepaid usage is almost up.
When the built-in usage and any additional usage is used up, your connection will be limited to Economy speeds.
We are pleased to announce that as of May 1, 2007, we are eliminating the restrictions on servers. You may now run servers on your systems provided they do not violate any other terms of service, such as hosting illegal content.
We are also changing the way we deal with very high volume users. In the past, we have warned high-volume users to limit their usage and terminate service to those who do not. Now, where possible, we will allow unlimited usage. In neighborhoods where this is not possible, we will impose lower-than-normal speed limit on high-volume customers during peak usage hours.
Sincerely,
Your Cable Internet Provider The numbers I don't care about as long as they are reasonable and continue to drop as technology improves. It's the principle of "pay for what you use" that I like.
Note:
A 30-month has 2592000 seconds in it.
That's 48.6GB maximum at 128Mb/sec,
486GB maximum at 1.5Mb/sec,
1944GB maximum at 6.0Mb/sec, and
7776GB maximum at 24.0Mb/sec.
A maxed-out connection at 24.0Mb/sec will be $466.56, or $468 in $3 increments.
1 hour at 24.0Mb/sec is 10.8GB, or $0.648.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The reason for this is because they want to sell an "unlimited" package to people who will only use 2GB/month. Most people want to have unlimited traffic even if they have no concept of the amount of traffic they need. In Uruguay, we have 2 ISPs: the state-run AntelData, and privately owned Dedicado (thanks to some shady 3rd world deals that created a duopoly).
The state run company is now advertising some tiered service levels (I'm writing this on the 1 Mbps ADSL with a 10 Gb/month soft cap with a surcharge if you go over that), and have some pretty good advertising detailing the amounts of stuff you can do with each service (the 1 Gb/month, 3 Gb/month, 10 Gb/month and 256 kbps and 1 Mbps unlimited services)
The privately owned company has some advertisements making fun of the "Gigamometer" (the page you have to check to see your traffic for the month) and sells far better despite having a vastly inferior service and some false advertising (they advertise 1 Mbps when they have 736/384 kbps service and then claim "but add both and you get 1 Mbps!", plus some very bad contracts and poor customer service - I almost took them to court until my father talked some sense into me, never go to court in a 3rd worlrd country
So, ranting aside, my anecdote went to say that whomever does that risks being ripped apart by their competition on the advertising front, using against them the fear and ignorance the parent speaks of (most users don't know how much bandwidth they need).
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.