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."

Comments

Why not just let us pay for the damn bandwidth?

[Ckwop]

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

Re:Why not just let us pay for the damn bandwidth?

[BHearsum]

The reason people get so angry is because for years "unlimited" bandwidth has been advertised.

Re:Why not just let us pay for the damn bandwidth?

[segfaultcoredump]

If you charge customers for using more than X, then it is hard to tell them that their service is "unlimited". (you would then open yourself to being sued for false advertising)

Now, if the ISP would just admit to how much they are willing to sell you (think cell phones), then maybe this will work.

Re:Why not just let us pay for the damn bandwidth?

[jonwil]

A large part of the issue is that ISPs don't have and aren't willing to invest in links to the internet at large. So there just isn't the bandwidth to handle all this new traffic (YouTube, BitTorrent etc etc)

The obvious question is why don't the ISPs go and buy more upstream bandwidth (funded by people who are willing to pay extra for more downloads each month)

Re:Why not just let us pay for the damn bandwidth?

[Aladrin]

A minor correction to that statement: They advertise unlimited data transfer. The bandwidth is limited and is -always- advertised as such.

For instance, my current cable connection is advertised as 6 Mbit, but there is no limit, except the max speed, to how much data I can transfer in a month.

Internet is not the only thing sold in this way. Anything that many people use, but only a small amount use at a given time, is sold this way. There isn't enough roadway for everyone in New York to drive their car at the same time. There aren't enough cell phone towers for everyone to talk on the phone at the same time. I'm sure there are plenty more examples.

The problem here is that usage patterns are changing, and more people are going to want to use the service at the same time now. (By use I mean use 100%, instead of the small % that is typical.) Somehow, I think we'll survive this crisis. Sweden has internet connections to the house that are over 10x the bandwidth that mine is. ISPs will simply have to upgrade their infrastructure to handle it if they want to survive. If they don't, someone else will.

And let's not forget all the 'dark fiber' out there and wireless technologies that have been showing up lately. It could very well be that we decide not to use physical connections at all, and instead relay through a satellite or cell-towers for internet.

This article is either scaremongering or just plain boredom speaking. Someone recently found out about this situation and suddenly thinks they know more than everyone else in the industry, and decided to tell us the sky is falling. -yawn-

Re:Why not just let us pay for the damn bandwidth?

[iONiUM]

The bandwidth IS "unlimited", so long as only one person uses the "unlimited" bandwidth and everyone else is a grandma: just checking their e-mail. They played the odds, and soon they're going to lose.

Re:Why not just let us pay for the damn bandwidth?

[laffer1]

Squid doesn't proxy everything. Most large scale bandwidth issues are related to streamed multimedia content and P2P traffic. ISPs always oversell their connections. That will never change.

Re:Why not just let us pay for the damn bandwidth?

[SanityInAnarchy]

A minor correction to that statement: They advertise unlimited data transfer. The bandwidth is limited and is -always- advertised as such.

Not true. In fact, the only place where I see bandwidth advertised clearly and truthfully is in web hosting, where you simply buy a fixed amount of data transfer, usually on a 10 or 100 mbit pipe. No way you'll saturate the thing with whatever you're paying for monthly, but at least you know exactly what you're paying for.

My ISP, and maybe your ISP, are likely exceptions. I pretty much have 1 Mbit, pretty much all the time. I can usually saturate it for weeks at a time with BitTorrent, and the worst I ever slow down to is half.

But most ISPs aren't as honest. They sell "burst bandwidth", which is their way of weaseling out of any responsibility. They'll claim "UNLIMITED", but what they mean by that is, you can stay connected as long as you want, and transfer as much as you can, without paying extra. They don't mean that you'll be able to saturate the 6 Mbits 24/7, unless no one else is connected.

There isn't enough roadway for everyone in New York to drive their car at the same time.

And there are occasionally traffic jams, which suggests the infrastructure there could be improved. But whatever, I'm not paying a monthly fee specifically for the purpose of driving on roads in New York. You could argue that I'm paying my taxes there (I live in Iowa, but that's not the point), but the tax forms don't come with a glossy flier with big bold letters saying "UNLIMITED driving!"

There aren't enough cell phone towers for everyone to talk on the phone at the same time. I'm sure there are plenty more examples.

I'm not sure how it works with cell phone towers, but I honestly cannot think of anything else that is sold by claiming you get UNLIMITED service, and then not delivering. The only thing that comes close is overbooking, which seems deceptive to me anyway.

Someone recently found out about this situation and suddenly thinks they know more than everyone else in the industry, and decided to tell us the sky is falling.

More likely, us geeks have known about this all along, and any publicity about the situation might help encourage ISPs to go light up that dark fiber, research that wireless, and actually deliver the bandwidth they've been selling us. It's kind of like, most articles about DRM read to Slashdotters as "Well, duh!", but not everyone even knows DRM exists.

Re:Why not just let us pay for the damn bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet is not the only thing sold in this way.

And in case anyone thinks this is evil, basically all of life and certainly all of the economy is based on this principle.

Your bank does not have enough money to cover all of the accounts there. If everyone with an account simultaneously withdrew their funds, the bank would collapse.

Your local grocery store does not have enough stock to cover their customers if everyone who frequents their store simultaneously decided to buy bread.

If everyone in your city simultaneously picked up their phone (land-line or portable), most of them would not be able to complete a call.

If everyone in your city simultaneously turned on all of their large electrical appliances, the electric grid would explode.

Oversubscribing your services is not some nefarious plan but good business sense. You figure out the expected use per customer on a large scale, multiply it by the number of customers, then pad it a little to have some extra capacity. People are variable individually but in aggregate behave nicely and this works out fine.

The problem is that the ISPs' original estimations of the bandwidth used per customer is no longer correct. But rather than install additional capacity like any of the other examples would do, they're trying to force their customers to conform back to their original statistical models.

Oversubscription is not the cause or even a contributor to these problems, it's just a fact of life. The cause of the problem is their unwillingness to handle oversubscription properly.

Note that in the other examples above the provider either doesn't care about individual overuse or will actually enjoy it when you do it, because you give them more money. Places that meter your usage (grocery stores, electricity, some phone usage, etc.) will adore you for being such a mega-customer. Places that don't (local phone calls, some providers' long distance) will tolerate you, because after all that is what they promised.

Try leaving your "unlimited long distance" phone off the hook to your friend on the other side of the country. Your phone company won't say a thing. But try the equivalent with your internet service and suddenly the Swiift Hand of God descends upon you, even though both services are oversubscribed and run along similar principles.

And there is bandwidth limiting

[RotateLeftByte]

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

It's called marketing

[voislav98]

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.

you get the ISPs you deserve

[iritant]

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.

Re:you get the ISPs you deserve

[antdude]

So what happens if you only have one ISP in your area due to monopoly? For example, I can't get DSL because I am about 20K ft. from the CO. Cable is the monopoly here. No WISPs. Forget ISDN, T1+, satellite Internet, etc. due to slowness or/and prices.

Its a lie to control the price

[palewook]

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

Easy

[gilesjuk]

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.

R E A D

[Guppy06]

the service agreement you signed when you started with your ISP. Fine print exists for a reason.

Re:R E A D

[Kjella]

Fine print exists so you can spell things out in detail over many pages. Fine print can't say "Forget everything we ever told you, even if it's in direct contradiction to these terms." Even with all the asscovering in the world, courts can still slam them on reasonable expectations. If you promised them a car that would go up to 150MPH and the only way it'd do that is to run it off a cliff, you'd have a pretty good case.

Internet not ready

[pcjunky]

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.

It'll sort itself out...

[Kjella]

...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.

Pitfalls of unregulated markets.

[TerranFury]

but this can never happen unless the gov't fully deregulates the market itself and we all know this will never happen.

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.

False advertising - illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Scarcity...

[RexRhino]

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).

$200 Billion

[Todamont]

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...

Unlocked Bandwidth

[Doc Ruby]

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".

Re:This is marketing fallout, plain and simple

[ScrewMaster]

That would allow ISP's to present customers with clear service choices in an economically viable model.

You're assuming that ISPs have a recognizable business ethic. They don't. You're further assuming that they are interested in providing the best possible service scenario for the fees they charge. They aren't. Worse yet, your fundamental assumption that criminalizing encryption and giving ISPs total control of the type of traffic crossing their networks would do anything but trigger yet another round of price increases and lowered service levels. These simply aren't people that can be trusted with that kind of power, and ultimately that is what the Net Neutrality controversy is all about.

Look up the term "common carrier", realize that ISPs (even those that are also phone companies) are generally not common carriers, and maybe you'll grasp what your proposal actually means to the consumer. In any event, your thoughts are local in scope: the Internet has been a global phenomenon for some time and all outlawing encryption in one nation will do is help competing nations, one way or another. Bad idea.

Also, I have no idea where you get the flawed idea that my being able to encrypt my own communications to prevent anyone from reading it has anything to do with "avoiding security" or "hacking". You need to understand what those words mean first. I'm sure there are any number of Slashdotters that would be happy to fill in your knowledge gaps for you.