Slashdot Mirror
Will ISPs Spoil Online Video?
mrspin writes "last100 writes: "With an ever greater amount of video being consumed online, many Internet users are in for a shock. There's a dirty little secret in the broadband industry: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don't have the capacity to deliver the bandwidth that they claim to offer. One way ISPs attempt to conceal this problem is to place a cap of say 1GB per-month per user, something which is common in the UK for many of the lower-cost broadband packages on the market. Considering that a mere three hours viewing of Joost (the new online video service from the founders of Skype) would all but use up this monthly allowance, it's clear that lots of Internet users aren't invited to the party. But what about those who (like me) pay more for 'unlimited' broadband access? There shouldn't be a problem, right? Wrong." The article then goes on to discuss the recent trend of bandwidth throttling based on techniques such as packet shaping which punishes p2p traffic whether it's legitimate or not."
I'm with Zen Internet, based in the UK. I get x amount of bandwidth a month and when that runs out I pay for a top-up.
What's wrong with paying for what you use? Why deliberately degrade your service when you can simply get the customer to pay the difference?
Simon
Demand goes up, supply stays the same: prices will rise. People will either pay a bit more for a good service (I would) or save and stay with the lower-bandwidth plans (most people would). Of course there's also the scenario where supply grows because suddenly the market is more profitable, so new investors enter it and drive the price down to where it was before; but this can never happen unless the gov't fully deregulates the market itself and we all know this will never happen.
Global warming is a cube.
There seem to be a number of ISP's now doing this at peak times. Again this is probably due to the lack of capacity in their infrastructure.
Now we see BT (here in the UK), AT&T(USA) and many others starting to offer IPTV. If there is one thing that is guaranteed to burn bandwidth then it is broadcasting TV this way. Other ISP's will sure follow this but win't have the kit in place to handle the traffic.
Therefore, on one hand we have ISP's promoting 'new' services and on the other limiting the amount of data they will let you receive.
In the words of a UK Politician, they are most likely "Not Fit for Service"
Bah Humbug
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Bad math alert. An 80% restriction would be more like it. A 100% restriction would be a total cut-off. What would 500% be - take back the bits you already downloaded?
Kevin Smith on Prince
for deceiving advertisement & sale of products and services.
if they hadnt the capacity, they shouldnt have advertised and sold that nonexistent capacity.
Read radical news here
Wouldn't this just make economically viable all that dot-com dark fiber we used to hear about? With 3G (EVDO, etc.) in the competitive mix with DSL and cable, I find it unlikely there will be cooperation amongst the competitors to withhold bandwidth from customers.
Hey, ISPs are just doing what they are able to get away with. The question we should be asking is why are they able to get away with marketing 10 MB/s and hide 1GB cap in the fine print.
It should come as no shock that ISPs are shaping traffic. They're out to make money and they only have so much bandwidth, now that the glut has been absorbed. That's not unreasonable. What would be unreasonable is if they advertise video access and then do something like this.
If you're not getting the service you expect form your ISP, you should call them (which by the way, really costs them quite a bit of money), and complain. If they can't or won't satisfy you, you should find another SP who will. Competition is important, and while it's difficult to find in the US and perhaps even moreso in the UK, alternatives should be encouraged. Just remember that you can't get something for nothing. That bandwidth does cost money.
The ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc) see P2P as competition for services that they offer, either currently, or in the future. Why get video or other data for free (after having payed your ISP for access) when they can charge you for it, control what you get access to, and charge a premium for premium content? The ISPs by law can not examine what data is being transmitted without loosing common carrier status (at which point, they get a lot more government regulation). So they do the traffic shaping to get around the regulation issue while degrading any possible competition to their own premium services. This is what the whole net neutrality fight is really about. The ISPs want more money for selling you content. Claiming that they don't have enough bandwidth is just an excuse.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
dark fiber optics sit unused in over 90% of the usa. europe supplements its existing fiber/phone/cable with data over power lines (BPL). there is no shortage of broadband, just a collusion of lies. much like the diamond industry does to keep wholesale/retail costs high. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dark+fiber+op tic&btnG=Google+Search
Just send out the header "Cache-Control: proxy-revalidate,s-maxage=0".
It is the drive to replace dialup with broadband that has ruined the broadband market. ISPs battling to offer cheap prices that are no more expensive than dialup prices were.
Some companies even offer free broadband with their phone line packages.
It's this drive for cheapness at the expensive of service quality that is ruining broadband for those who see it as mainstream entertainment, not something to shop online with and check email.
I still pay a premium price for my service £35 a month for 2MB ADSL. Yet I have had a download cap applied retrospectively.
This article is bullshit fear mongering. Cox Cable of Hampton Roads (Virginia Beach) recently made a configuration error for their internet customers, granting _all_ users 20Mbs, even if only paying for 768kbs, 5Mbs, or 15Mbs. No traffic shaping was taking place (verified with bittorrent and gnutella -- fasted download of a linux ISO ever for me =), and the load was handled just fine until the problem was fixed. There are some ISPs out there that do have the capacity for what they offer. And to suggest a 1GB/month cap (for us here in the US) is absurd... I regularly go through that _daily_. Not an advertisement for Cox Cable HSI... but the facts are as they are.
Its because the ISP cant handle the use, regardless of the user paying extra fees. They have oversold what they can do.
I have the same problem here. Recently they 'increased' bandwidth to us for our *unlimited* useage, but complained when we used it: 'its effecting our other customers '. WTF?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
the service agreement you signed when you started with your ISP. Fine print exists for a reason.
uses peer-to-peer technology similar to that used by 'illegal' file sharing networks..
There are no illegal networks, we have enough FUD as the MAFIAA cartels say they are illegal, we do not need the blogger community to call them that... and btw WTF is it with posting a blog entry as a story? when did Digg acquired slashdot?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I've never seen an ISP agreement that didn't specifically prohibit reselling the service, which is exactly what Joost is doing. Private use p2p is one thing, but it's a whole different ballgame when you start selling your upstream bandwidth to a for profit corporation.
No broadband ISP has the bandwidth needed to deliver the advertised speed to every user on their networks simultaneously, not even the mighty Comcast (AT&T). The Internet backbone couldn't handle it either. I own a very old ISP here in FL and have been buying unlimited bandwidth for many years now and the cost of this type of connection is 20 times higher than most broadband connections.
The cheapest bandwidth in this area still costs around $100 per meg (OC-3, 155Mbps). Users on Comcast get 6 megs for half this. Broadband ISPs deliver the product most users want, intermittent very high download speed without sustained bandwidth use.
All ISP and even phone companies are based on what is called over subscription. ISPs buy bandwidth based on actual demand not theoretical maximum demand. Phone companies have infrastructure to support around 1 in 20 people making a phone call at the same time.
What is needed is for the ISP to be more forthcoming in there product descriptions. We sell a wireless broadband connection for around $38 per month and advertise 2meg download speeds. We are also up front that excessive p2p usage may result in throttling and or account suspension. This is explained before service is installed not just buried in the terms on service. Comcast terminates accounts without any warning and even deny there is any bandwidth cap on users accounts. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Is web caching at the ISP not generally accepted? It would seem sites like YouTube would be very interested in caching their data remotely so their bandwidth can take a breather. If they're worried about statistics then perhaps just the video files are cached locally but the html and db requests are all going to YouTube's servers. Companies like YouTube and AOL or Comcast could both benefit greatly from such technology.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I pretty much represent a small ISP in rural Washington state. Bandwidth prices for us are so outrageous, $300 per mb, and this is only because there is one major seller of bandwidth in our area, NOANET. So we have to throttle types of connections, Bit-Torrent is the major one. We would love to open the net to what it should be but its just not possible with the price gouging that happens every place but the cities.
So as an ISP I'm saying we could do it if we didn't get bent over all the time for bandwidth.
It costs quite a lot to do the accounting. You have to handle complaints, etc.
... wrong?
Plus users can get nasty surprises: someone hijacks your wifi and downloads pr0n, that kind of shit.
By going flat rate you don't have to deal with this, and instead of spending money on administrative & police costs, you just spend the cash on actual bandwidth. I know, that's just
2 MB/s guaranted bandwidth, backed up, /unlimited traffic/ ... in a datacenter is a few hundred .
At least that's what my hosting service charges.
Here in germany you can have slightly cheaper ISP that suck.
Or the slightly more expensive Telekom (T-Com) which rules.
According to my logs I never had bw issues and I'm leeching with the whole 6Mbit for at least 90% of 18 months straight now.
A friend is Arcor customer and everything sucks.
The problem isn't your ISP. It's your misguided sense for saving money. You have to invest sometimes or things will turn out to be cheap ans shitty.
...once you get a reasonably broad number of people using reasonably known services for legitimate video. Even if you throw in the latest Linux distro, WoW patches and whatnot it's not exactly a massive amount of mainstream media. Your complaints will land on deaf ears. Once people start complaining that they can't watch full episodes from ABC and similar services, the tone will be different. "ABC, you say... you mean I can watch the latest episode of Lost online, but the ISP is throttling me?" You'll get a helluva lot more people who'd a) understand WTF you're talking abou, b) would like to do it themselves and c) can unite around.
Besides, I'd think the P2P hogs should have pushed the envelope far enough that they can't really stop people starting to use these services a little - and that's what they're concerned about anyway, the masses moving. That guy who wants to watch IPTV 24/7 is more of the exception.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As with most things, you tend to get what you pay for. If you go with the most cut rate ISP or package, don't be surprised if the speed is less than stellar. If you want more, shell out some more dough. Personally, I've bought business class service for the last several years. Yes, it does cost more, but then I get a few static IPs and I've never heard a peep out of the ISP about upstream or downstream usage. Not saying everyone should go for service of that level, just consider that if the ISP has a $20 "Ultra super mega value" plan, that maybe it won't get the same level of bandwidth as the $50 regular plan.
in no country, items in contracts that contradict with the existing law are tolerated. even in turkey, if you have such an item in the contract, and you dont explicitly state in an item that says "in case one of the items in this contract is contradictory with law, this will not nullify the whole contract, but just the item itself".
providing false advertising is fraud. selling it is fraud.
Read radical news here
Sorry just thought these post titles were darn annoying.
Is that $300 per megabyte or per millibit?
im reposting :
"in no country, items in contracts that contradict with the existing law are tolerated. even in turkey, if you have such an item in the contract, and you dont explicitly state in an item that says "in case one of the items in this contract is contradictory with law, this will not nullify the whole contract, but just the item itself".
providing false advertising is fraud. selling it is fraud."
even being "subject to change without notice" cant cover an arse. they are still advertising those as they did earlier, so any client who got blown out due to bandwidth usage now can sue them now, since they are probably advertising the same package as of now with the same stats.
Read radical news here
I pay 29 EUR a month for 24 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up. Plus free international phone. Plus wifi. Plus TV. Free PVR which I don't even use for lack of a TV. Also 1 GB of hosting space, unmetered.
Within a year I should get 50 Mbps (symmetrical) FTTH.
http://www.free.fr
Some of the most successful rollouts of high-speed broadband have happened with significant government regulation and involvement: South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, among others. Conversely, in the United States where there was less regulation to begin with (and a steady push towards even less), we have seen much less broadband growth, and we are behind other countries.
[The U.S. government actually did invest in broadband (during the Clinton administration) but since effective regulatory oversight did not accompany the money, we didn't get what we'd hoped for from the Baby Bells.]
Some argue that this is because the US has a low population density: This argument ignores the fact that there still exist within the US large, dense markets on the coasts (the Northeast corridor, from Boston to Washington, for instance), that are surely as profitable as, say, South Korea, which have remained underdeveloped. Why?
There are some things that monopolies, like governments, can better provide than many smaller competing companies; infrastructure and technology research are two of the most important ones. The simple reason for this is that monopolies can be relatively sure that they will be around in many years' time to reap the benefits of their investments, whereas in a hypercompetitive market, risk is higher and the "rational" investor will focus on smaller, shorter-term investments; this maximizes his expected return.
Full deregulation in electricity caused blackouts across California in 2001. Our deregulation so far has not produced an American broadband market comparable to other countries'. So no, the evidence I see does not lead me to blind faith in 100% laissez-faire economic policies.
See The Liberal Paradox: Markets by themselves are not sufficient to create a Pareto-optimal society.
Occasional government involvement, and well-designed, unencumbering regulation are useful and promote growth. The world is full of prisoners' dilemmas and tragedies of the commons: Markets cannot solve these problems by themselves, which is why we need government.
When broadband became widely available, it worked for them to push speed and ignore the issue of traffic volume as only a small minority of subscribers were capable of using large amounts of bandwidth. Safe to advertise the unlimited abyss Internet service as it appeared that way for all intents and purposes to the subscribers.
The explosion of Internet video (and other rich content) has now provided the catalyst for the "average user" to generate significant data transfer volume, and it was never the case that they could actually provide unlimited access to everyone all the time. It was a statistical game really =).
What would interest me is what effect this is going to have on the cost of broadband in the near future. This is my living so I'm content paying more for a better quality connection; however, what kind of service can the "average user" realistically expect for $30/mo. or whatever. A marketing faux pas if they end up hurting their own business getting users used to the idea that unlimited data volume in and out of your home was actually something you can get cheaply.
--
~AC
If a plan claims to be "unlimited," it should be unlimited. As I see it, caps on "unlimited" plans are false advertising and firms that do this should be prosecuted. That doesn't look likely though -- low-cost dial-up providers have been getting away with doing this for years. (Net-Zero anyone?)
However, I have no problem with throttling users on the basis of the amount of bandwidth they use, provided that this practice is adequately disclosed to the consumer. Heavy broadband users should be prepared to pay extra (where available) or see some degradation in service during the peak hours when light users are online to check their e-mail and the news. I don't even mind "packet shaping" as long it is disclosed to the consumer. Although there are some legitimate uses of P2P, we all know that the primary use is to steal copyrighted music, movies, and porn, and as an honest broadband user I'd just assume not have my legitimate traffic slowed down because Joe Blow down the street wants to watch "Batman Returns" without paying for it.
This problem pops up regularly on the web. I feel sorry for you people that actually encounter it IRL, because in Sweden, and I'm sure in many other countries aswell, this is not an issue.
24/1 or 21/3 Mbps DSL lines in Sweden go off for ~25/mo. If fiber is available 100/10 Mbps go for the same price. It's been this way for the last five years, and people have been playing online games, sharing files et.c. like crazy. I've never heard of anybody that had problems with their ISPs for too heavy traffic, not even with the cheaper plans.
And right now, the good old bastards at ComHem is digging to provide 4 Gbps bandwidth for every household in my neighborhood. Granted, the plan is supposed to include TV, internet and phone lines in it, but still.
What kind of crappy ISPs do you have that limit your internet access in this way? And why the hell do you accept it? Start rioting!
Most major UK ISPs that advertise unlimited broadband do so with an asterisk right next to the word unlimited, that little get-out clause which enables them to have something called a "fair use policy", which in the case of Pipex (and probably several others) is an "unfair use policy".
I'm an ex-Pipex user because they kicked me off for over-use of an ADSL package sold as unlimited, when I phoned up to complain about the situation of paying for an unlimited package but being told my account was to be suspended for using it too much I asked what the monthly limit is - they couldn't/wouldn't tell me, saying that each individual user has a different upper limit which is determined by the amount of users in my area and how much they were downloading.
They oversold their service so they're making up the rules as they go along.
During the 'conversation' with the support monkey at Pipex I asked that if they won't tell me how much is too much then how can they determine I've used too much, and will they give me stats on how much I've transferred, they wouldn't give stats and their suggestion was to install a Windows program that monitors bandwidth usage, which is a fat lot of good if there are several computers using the same ADSL connection, but more importantly what's the point of telling me to install a bandwidth logging program if they won't tell you how much is too much? Un-fucking believable.
This farce of a service Pipex are offering and the subsequent suspension of 'heavy users' is a reason why some long-term subscribers to the service, who haven't been told they've downloaded too much, have also left for pastures greener.
So basically if you're on Pipex ADSL with an "unlimited" package then you have absolutely no idea how much you can download/upload before they send you a letter saying bye-bye.
As much as Comcast has both a terrible service department and a terrible PR department, how they do it is correct.
You pay a "high" price for service ($45-60) per month, depending on the plan, and you can have as much bandwidth as you want, as long as you aren't adversely affecting the node that you are on.
This means be reasonable. Right now, their "flexible" bandwidth cap is 200 GB. Even better, it's not like that boot you after one month of 200 GB usage; and they don't charge you again, either. They monitor your usage over a couple months, and if you're over 200 GB on average, they send you a warning, and then boot you.
It's also notable that this number has gone up significantly as they've upgraded their network, and I suspect it will continue to go up.
At my office we pay approximately $275 for a dual T1. This gets us, at most, 900 GB per month (that's maxing out the connection 24/7/365). I'm happy to pay 18% of that for 22% of the bandwidth, with burst speeds vastly in excess of that (my cable modem bursts at 24 Mbps for up to 10 minutes).
As I said; their PR doesn't explain this well, and their service people (both on the ground and at their call centers) tend to be not up to part with their competitors. However, the companies polices are more than reasonable, and they do an excellent job upgrading their network. I would have never thought that the cable cos would be competitive with FTTN or FTTP, but Comcast is beating the crap out of AT&T's U-verse, and is approaching the speeds of Verizon's FTTP network.
You guys really should stop whinning. 200 GB a month is plenty in this day and age, and I pity the people who pay $15,$30, or more for 1-70 GB a month.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Perhaps they can't deliver. But then they shouldn't be allowed to advertise as if they can, and then say "we didn't mean it" in the small print.
One of the posters was a small ISP owner. He can't provide it, either. He says that there is price-gouging. Could well be.
But the answer isn't to let everyone lie, but to forbid any of them from lying.
That might actually get some action.
Arguably the dark fiber, and other bandwidth, should be seen as a utility, anyway, and be operated as such.
With the exception of a very few high-priced services, no ISP has as much back-end bandwidth as they have customers. Instead, they have enough to guarantee a certain level of service on average, plus some extra for bursts of load.
This has been true since the days of the 300-baud acoustic coupler, and isn't going to change. Unless, of course, everyone hits the lottery jackpot at once and decides to give a million or two to their favorite ISP.
What one does to deal with finite bandwidth is to prioritize interactive traffic over file transfer, which is a variant of what we're seeing here. The problem is that the mechanisms used to tell interactive from batch gets the wrong answer right now.
So we (::= the IETF) improve the technology and prioritize video streams tagged "real-time" over streams tagged "on my way to Dave's PVR"
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
A fundamental concept of packet switching is that there will be a statistical use pattern that allows more efficient use of available bandwidth than a dedicated circuit switched network would provide. If you actually want to force the allocation of dedicated bandwidth to each subscriber you need a circuit switched network or some equivalent over IP like the old PSTN. Costs and scalability of this sort of service would be far less attractive than packet switched networks.
Use of p2p 24x7 continuously by a customer has to be traffic shaped for the economics of packet switching to work. If you want guaranteed bandwidth for your p2p use you had better be prepared to pay a lot more for your service.
This is one thing I don't get about IPTV - the economics of this sort of service over packet switching don't make a lot of sense unless it is not a large fraction of the total traffic. That doesn't appear to be true.
It looks like major players are paying $10 USD / Mbps for backbone access.[1] (Yes that paper predicts a short term backbone supply problem.) In my case, that's actually the same rate I'm paying my ISP for 2.5 Mbps. And from the sounds of it, Americans get gouged a lot worse.
Next, I max out at 60 gigs of video in a month (and that means I would have spent all my spare time watching high-quality p2p movies and television and also downloaded a few entire seasons of tv shows and then decided not to watch them, or saved them for later) which averages to 185.19 Kbps.[2] So even as an absolute and total bandwidth whore, I'm using less than 10% of what I'm paying for in terms of backbone costs. This means the money is easily there to pay for building additional backbone capacity, and the ISP doesn't have a fundamental business model problem.
Of course the ISP has "last mile" infrastructure costs but that is something already need to have in place to meet their peak rate guarantees on a Sunday afternoon, and doesn't have additional utilization costs associated with it.
Frankly I think traffic shaping ISPs are just being greedy. At the scale they are operating at it is worthwhile trying to rip off their customers to save a small percentage of what they are raking in.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/media/InternetV ideo0.91.pdf
[2] http://web.forret.com/tools/bandwidth.asp
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
The problem isn't the install cost, that can be spread over the lifetime of the service. The problem is that (here in the UK) providers charge too much for rental and transit. We'd expect their margins to be higher because providers won't have the volume of oversold consumer DSL services but they're set too high to grow the market.
:-(
We're being condemned to cheap oversold ADSL
I don't think you're disagreeing with the GP's point that the business model of the major telcos relies on restricting capacity to inflate the price?
Bandwith is one of the most overpriced things on the planet - its not like oil, there isn't a limited amount. There is an infite amount - you only need money to maintain the structure and people to run it - you don't need to be able to buy a new rolls royce every day.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I've never seen an ISP agreement that didn't specifically prohibit reselling the service, which is exactly what Joost is doing. Private use p2p is one thing, but it's a whole different ballgame when you start selling your upstream bandwidth to a for profit corporation.
The bandwidth? Or the CONTENT?
It's like a celluloid film manufacturer threatening a movie studio for re-selling their celluloid film... come on. If it's sold, its NOT YOURS ANYMORE. No amount of fine print will change that.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Uh. . .What? The beast doesn't exist. There is no such thing as an unlimited amount of data transfer. Let's just consider an Ethernet LAN here, because most are familiar with the how it works. If you have a FastEthernet link to a switch, your bandwidth between you and the switch is 100Mb/s. If 23 other people also have a FastEthernet connection to that switch, each person also has 100Mb/s between their NIC and the switch. However, the switch probably has a GigabitEthernet or maybe even just a FastEthernet uplink port to either a distribution layer switch(we're not talking OSI, here. Just a corporate network) or directly to a router if it's a small network. So, how does anyone claim to offer 'unlimited' bandwidth? Are we really talking about throughput here? Even then, it's not really true. Throughput is the rate of data transfer over a given link at a given time. It is theoretically limited by bandwidth, but practically, it becomes slower. Why can't we just call it 'amount of data transferred' since that is what everyone is talking about?
I guess that another way of looking at this is the idea that people are clogging up links with all of this transfer. If that's the case, it's just a matter that there isn't enough bandwidth for everyone, and a higher capacity link is required. There is still no such thing as unlimited bandwidth.
The business model for cheap consumer grade DSL doesn't allow for piss takers maxing out their bandwidth with P2P 24/7. If you offered 'unlimited' customer support for an item you resold, would you expect or could you even afford to be on the phone 24/7 for the rest of your life?
Pay for a business class service if you're going to use it heavily. The cheaper business class services are just as bad as cheap consumer DSL, so you'll want a mid-range product. Then you might be eligible to have your complaint taken seriously - if you're not busted for copyright infringement first.
If that sounds harsh, understand I'm not making any direct accusations - only attempting to put your complaint in perspective. I use BT for the occasional ISO but I've no sympathy for the hardcore P2P crowd at all - they're just fucking it up for the rest of us.
I just looked over Comcast's marketing materials for broadband Internet, and I never once saw even an implication of unlimited transfer.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Its more likely that online video will spoil (dumb) ISPs.
The movie studio wouldn't be entering into any contract beyond the immediate sale. When you subscribe to an ISP, you *do* bind yourself to a contract, prohibiting certain things, like spamming, DoS shenanigans, and reselling the service.
Telewest alas is no more.
First is got swalloed up by NTL and now is part of Virgin Media.
NTL has an awful reputation for its DSL service here in the UK. My neighbour is on NTL/Virgin. They are luck to get 250Kb dowloads in the evening.Many times their connections time out. Just recently they were without service (Cable TV, Phone and Internet) for three days. No one at the Virgin help desk could help. They just went through a prepared script which assumed that only ONE service was down.
Eventually, I took over and demanded to speak to a supervisor. He was not much better. He asked if your phone is down how come you are calling me from a landline?
Duh. I ran an extension cable over the fence into next door.
After an hour on the phone, and apparently getting nowhere, suddenly everything started working again. Coincidence or conspiracy theory.
I get called asking me to signup with Cable quite regularly. The callers are often quite offended when I say yes, I don't mind spending more money than you want to charge. At least my service works every day without problem. If there is, then I can dialup using a toll free number until it comes back.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Advertised 4Mb/s download. That's the real speed for things like http, that's ok. But for p2p the speeds go down to 30Kb/s max. That's pathetic. I don't think there's any mention of that in the contract either.
I understand them, but I'd like them to tell you that upfront.
I'd be good it they made several packages: One with the current conditions and with the p2p limitations clearly specified and another that, more expensive, without those limits. Who can argue with that? They'd earn more money than now.
and stop whining.
> At my office we pay approximately $275 for a dual T1.
> This gets us, at most, 900 GB per month (that's maxing out the connection 24/7/365).
For the equivilent of $600 in the UK you can get a 1:1 2Mbps SDSL service if you're lucky enough to be connected through a LLU exchange. We pay roughly $120 a month for a decent business ADSL.
Let's put it this way - youtube would never have been started in the UK, Australia or NZ and it's not because the skills are lacking.
The government is what protects us from false advertising. Net neutrality, in particular, should be required by anything that wants to claim it is an ISP -- otherwise, it should not be able to call it "Internet access".
Also, remember that plenty of ISPs receive government funding to build the network infrastructure (which they haven't been doing), and often, there's only one or two in an area. So, everything you just suggested is something customers should do, but none of it excuses asshatry from any ISP, for any reason.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you say that ISPs should not advertise "unlimited" internet access, then I agree. That is correct. The ISPs are definitly engaging in deceptive practices, and should stop.
But there isn't some big conspiracy by ISPs to kill internet video. There is actually SCARCE BANDWIDTH!!! There simply isn't enough bandwidth for everyone to be watching high-def streaming video, or sharing multi-gig video files, legit or not. Thus far, people have gotten away with that sort of thing because only a handful of users actually used that kind of bandwidth... it was easy enough for the ISP to allow a few "power users" to hog the bandwidth, because the vast majority of people used so little. With the popularity of video with common users, that is all changing.
While ISPs should be more honest about their policies to restrict bandwidth, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't restrict bandwidth. If the ISPs don't intentionally throttle bandwidth on hogs like P2P and streaming video, it means that bandwidth will be restricted randomly (like when you need to send an important email, or when you are trying to telnet into your server).
In the old days of dialup our biggest problem were USENET pornsters just staying connected 24x7 downloading part x/y of god knows what, essentially taking an entire phone port out of service.
In anycase, I don't know why people believe that a few bucks a month guarentees them unlimited bandwidth. If you want guarentees, or you can't sleep at night, pay for commercial service.
-Matt
Telus
Down/Up/Cap/Cost
6Mbps/1Mbps/60GB/$51
3Mbps/640Kbps/60GB/$46
1.5Mbps/512Kbps/30GB/$37
256Kbps/128Kbps/10GB/$22
Shaw
Down/Up/Cap/Cost
25/1/150/$100
10/1/100/$49
5/512/60/$39
256/128/10/$30
I believe I have the prices without any bundling. If you buy other services, then it can be a bit cheaper.
Right now I have 5mbit service and have considered moving to 10mbit. I am about to start using a Tivo and it has a builtin ethernet port for downloading movies and podcast off the net. This is a legit use and not p2p, etc of illegal content. If my isp is now going to start putting caps on the "unlimited" usage I would rather they just come out and say for 50.00 a month you get 200GB of usage. I would rather know upfront than have to worry with exceeding my so-called unlimited account. If they can't provide the bandwidth then they need to get out of the way and let another provider in who can.
In theory, you are right. Most people are not power users, so most people would benefit from metered bandwidth.
Seemingly paradoxically, most people prefer to pay a higher price for unlimited service.
This isn't a paradox, nor is it irrational. People know they can't predict how their Internet use will change. Nor do they have good visibility into bandwidth used by various applications. So they "insure" themselves against unexpected costs by buying unlimited bandwidth.
Rightly, they are calling their ISPs frauds for selling "unlimited" and delivering only the illusion of unlimited. Kind of like flood insurance that excludes being flooded by water. "Well, had you been flooded by beer, at night, (excluding the foam, of course), you would have been covered."
I wrote parts of this stuff
Because the Internet is not something you can just dump something on
Maybe we could just give the telcos like $200 billion dollars and have them built new hardware that would keep us competitive and stop the outflow of our tech industry to countries like Korea... Oh, wait... Seriously, why hasn't something been done to hold the telcos responsible for what I see as a MASSIVE fleecing of the american public? As I see it I already paid for my unlimited bancwidth for the next couple years...
Kharma is like a boomerang. Mine is broken.
My "digital cable" TV coax has at least enough bandwidth to push at least 2 or 3 MPEG-2 movies to my TVs at 4Mbps each, plus 8Mbps download on the segregated Internet bandwidth. I'd gladly take the total 20Mbps as download, especially when the TV is off (which would be most of the time with that bandwidth available).
DSL and telco fiber has to compete with that, or install their own coax (plus fiber, probably). Verizon has FiOS for 20-30-50Mbps, but Optimum cablemodems deliver 30Mbps (plus the 4Mbps TV channels).
In other words, ISPs have the bandwidth (or their bizmodels and net infrastructure is too 1990s to survive to satisfy modern consumers). They're just screaming as usual to get exceptions to market demand, while they build cartels and monopolies on government subsidized infrastructure. It was all BS when 9600bps, then 19.2Kbps, then 33.6Kbps, then 56Kbps, then the jump to 1.5Mbps they said was impossible, now the 3-6-8-20-30Mbps. The fact is that these bandwidth investments not only get cheaper every time the market demands it, at higher prices, to many more customers. The bigger bandwidth makes more apps possible, apps closer to the ease and appeal of watching movies, without even the infrastructure and licensing investments to produce/buy more TV channels to sell people. Plus it gives the ISP the infrastructure to deliver on-demand movies and live events that are wildly profitable, and sell even more subscriptions, plus the "triple play" including telephone.
ISPs want all that, plus exceptions to further subsidize them when they do provide the bandwidth. Every time, it's the same. But this time, we can google for their whining the last time it was "impossible".
--
make install -not war
Speakeasy specifically allows giving away or reselling bandwidth. If you sell bandwidth, then you have to give them a cut.
MAYBE, WITH THE INCREASE OF DEMAND, POSSIBLY UPGRADE YOUR SERVICE IN HIGH DEMAND AREAS?!
It isn't like these people AREN'T getting paid for their efforts, I love how most of the big ISPs are bitching because "all of this is hard to come by and we need extra money" as if they're doing this all for free and all the paid subscribers are on there for free. No, where is all of our money going? Maybe if they invested our money into rolling out more fiber and copper and upgrading their access to the major backbones and as a result, the backbones would upgrade to follow demand.
The problem is they would rather not do that, hell we were supposed to have fiber internet 10 years ago. The Telcos were GIVEN THAT MONEY BY THE GOVERNMENT to upgrade the national infrastructure and instead misused the money and now want us to foot the bill again directly out of our pockets because they managed to blow $200,000,000,000 on themselves that was meant for something else. Yet I bet if they raised the prices of the average internet connection and put limits on it, they STILL would refuse to do another upgrade until 10 to 20 years from now, even if it means we'll be on 512k equivalent broadband with insanely restricted bandwidth measures in place, while all the big money makers get all the bwidth they want. Yeah, I'm saying they'll eventually have something to impose tiered internet on us, an actual reason. Which will make them more money and every large power will be happy.
Theres also latency, uncapped i can download close to 4 gigs in an hour.
with restrictions..towards the end of a month, it can take 4-5 hours.
Latency also spikes for online games, normally 27ms for servers i play regularly,
150-250ms when restrictions enabled.
*BEEP* Wrong Answer
As demand goes up and supply stays the same, both quantity and price rise.
Then, suppliers see the economic profit, new firms enter, and supply expands, lowering prices and increasing the quantity.
Why isn't that happening? Market failures. Monopolies/monopolistic competition, regulation, rapid technological change... there are a million factors leading to it, but we let our information distribution industry grow badly, and now we're paying for it with bad service.
But don't worry, our legislators have expert knowledge about this series of tubes, so they should fix it soon.
I think he has a point there.
Customer response: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck...ummm...Fuck?
What they usually advertise is some like an (up to) 3MB/s connection with "unlimited" transfer limits, sometimes all packaged as bandwidth.
The thing is, of course, that most advertise as "up to", and you generally don't get very close to 3MB/s for any sustained amount of time, especially if you're getting throttled for using anything that could actually hit that limit on a sustained basis.
Still, I'm in Canada, and all things considered I'm pretty happy with my ISP (Shaw). Sometimes my connection is slower than others, but I've never had it be so slow that it has affected my ability to utilize it. My roommate can be downloading craploads of movies/music/whatever, and I still have enough bandwidth for my own comfortable downloading, browsing, or such things as VOIP etc with nary a hiccup. I've had a phone-call once about excessive usage, at which point I asked him to tune it down a bit, and other than that no complaints from the ISP.
Long answer : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/08/vigin_nati onwide_throttling/
(virgin had previously bought out NTL cable, the largest cable provider in the UK)
It's 'grammar' not 'grammer'.
Funny you should mention those. Cheers.
g eNum_Recordset2=346
http://www.mitchclem.com/nothingnice/index.php?pa
Many of the same ISPs which are complaining about the high costs of bandwidth are the same ISPs that balk at settlement free peering. Can't have it both ways. Either have an open peering policy or expect bandwidth costs to rise.
SSL Certificate
That would be a funny April fools prank to play on your local bank, as long as everyone put their money back later that day. "April fools!"
You are reading a sig. Cancel or allow?
So basically what you're saying is... if we don't throttle bandwidth, I'm going to ask my secretary for an internet, only to find the tubes are clogged?
Dammit! Why has the art of the funnel been lost in the annals of history?!?
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
I wonder if this news was an attempt by Joost people as a free advertisement? How many of you clicked on Joost.com because of this?
Per what? That seems, um, expensive.
Seems like broadband isn't much of a winning proposition for your customers, though, if you're throttling so harshly. Why would they want to pick it over dialup?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
So where is all that profit you ISPs make going? I mean, does the CEO really need an extra house?
Spend some of it to upgrade the infrastructure so that it IS unlimited bandwidth. It's not the consumers fault for taking you up on your offer of "unlimited" bandwidth, it's yours.
Sorry comcast (okay, not really sorry), the day FiOS is available here, I'm switching.
I don't see what you are talking about. I have Comcast high speed internet and HD. The on demand quality is great and in fact works well with my Sling Box Pro. "On Demand" is a fantastic service. What is more fun than a DVR? Video on demand. :-)
I recently came across my upper cap on my 6Mbit line, from Demon as my ISP. They throttled me for 30 days as a result. I did some phoning around at that point with a view to changing to a more generous ISP and found that Demon was actually one of the best. They begin to throttle at 50GB per month download, and don't measure upload at all. Virgin Unlimited was 40GB and others lower than that. Most companies seemed willing to tell me the cap on the 'unlimited' service, so I'd simply ask before you sign up. Demon were good enough to email me my data usage as well in cvs format after I reached the 50GB cap which is apparently where they begin taking permanent records.
I was shocked that there is nothing higher than a 50GB cap for 'unlimited' as far as I could see. These days I think 100GB per month is a bit more suitable.
In Ohio we have Time-Warner digital cable service, but the on-demand videos don't even compare to analog cable, they look worse than flash in some cases. This is the best example I have seen of telecommunications companies using substandard video quality to counter for a relative lack of bandwidth to their tier 1/2/3 provider.
If I were managing the IT side of a cable company I would install at least one content server in the local node of a cable system, this way requests can be cached and obtained as needed. If the content is local, serve it, if not grab it at extremely high speed from the central server, store it, and begin streaming as soon as capable.
Obviously IPTV is totally different from the tiered "LAN" cable distribution model, but the same holds true, these companies need to start distributing content so that it can be delivered from a closer point to the customer, it really shouldn't be that hard and would save the ISP quite a bit of bandwidth in a large market. Akamai does this in a somewhat unrelated manner and companies already utilize this advantage to a great degree for web services.
Not all On Demand shows I watch are HD, but I enjoy the ability to choose from a large menu of available selections any hour of the day or night.
Your 1GB/month figure is not even on the map.
It is true though that internet video is using fistfulls of bandwidth, but it isn't the fist large spike in bandwidth usage they have had to deal with, and it looks like they will be able to weather the storm.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Not all On Demand shows I watch are HD, but I enjoy the ability to choose from a large menu of available selections any hour of the day or night.
Interesting. But what about the extra $$$ they charge you for each "ON DEMAND!" show?I subscribe to premium channels, so in addition to the free movies, I have a large selection of premium on demand movies that I receive without additional charge. While there are "pay per view, on demand" movies available, I don't often order them as there are enough gratis premiums available to keep me entertained. That is a very good question though :-) I think letting HBO, Showtime, Starz, Cinemax users get non-pay-per-view access to H/S/S/C on demand programming is a nice benefit for siging up for the premium channels. This all contributes to my overall happiness with Comcast. My high speed Internet access is superb (8Gb/2Gb)+power boost, the dual receiver HD DVR hardware seems reliable, and support is good. I am much happier than I was with Dish Network.
There's already an inconsistency there ("Unlimited" local calls really is unlimited, but "Unlimited" Internet access very rarely is). But even ignoring that, law should be close to ethics. That's why it exists in the first place.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I have over a hundred movies a month on On Demand that cost nothing at all. Over the past couple of years my daughter has been exposed to a wide variety of excellent movies from directors like Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, etc., that has expanded her experience with film. It's one of our most-viewed services on Comcast (along with Red Sox baseball, of course!).