Time Warner Cable Implements Packet Shaping

RFC writes "In a move that may be indicative of modern ISP customer service, Time Warner has announced the introduction of packet shaping technology to its network. 'Packet shaping technology has been implemented for newsgroup applications, regardless of the provider, and all peer-to-peer networks and certain other high bandwidth applications not necessarily limited to audio, video, and voice over IP telephony.' As the poster observes, this essentially renders premium service useless. The company is already warning users that attempts to circumvent these measures is a violation of their Terms of Service."

Comments

If you don't get

[Xiph]

what you pay for then stop paying for it.

in the contract or at very least in the sale, they promise you a certain bandwidth, if they can't deliver what they promise you don't need to pay what you promised.

Re:If you don't get

[tgd]

All of those contracts clearly state "up to" a certain speed. No consumer service I've ever seen has a guaranteed speed claim.

There's probably not much the consumer can do except vote with their money and cancel the service.

This is why net neutrality laws are important -- because existing service contracts do NOT protect the consumer from this sort of action.

Re:If you don't get

[Detritus]

If you read the fine print, they don't promise diddly-squat. They will be more than happy to take your money. As far as delivering a service, you'll take what your given and like it.

Re:If you don't get

[timmarhy]

when you sign up for an account advertised as a 20mbit service, 20mbit is what you are entitled to. fine print doesn't trump that later on. you could probably use this to weasle out of your contract easily enough.

if i sold you a car, then ripped out the seats before you picked it up and claimed i didn't guarantee seats in the sale contract, it just wouldn't fly and neither would this.

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to miss the point. If the advertising says 'up to', then that means exactly what it says. A lot of times, especially in the case of DSL, it is not possible to guarantee a specified rate because of factors like distance from the CO.

Re:If you don't get

[phoenix321]

Of course they can't promise a certain bandwidth, because they'd otherwise be swamped with lawsuits. Every dimwit customer would be complaining about the occasional download from Zambia or India creeping along at modem speeds.

But there's clearly a difference between
"line speed 6mbit/sec and from there as fast as the target server allows",
"line speed UP TO 6mbit/sec depending on what your neighborhood does and how much we overbooked our DSLAM"

and

"line speed 6mbit/sec but we're turning it down to modem speed if we don't like your face" or
"line speed 6mbit/sec, but we turn it down for every activity that could actually need that bandwidth"

Home contracts used to promise at least the company's best efforts to maintain a certain service level - and now they're effectively promising nothing at all.

Why anyone would enter a contract that states "You pay me every month full and in advance and I promise you nothing" is beyond me. Even mafia hitmen have more customer friendly terms, I think. But if you think that's fair trade practice, you may like to view that bridge I have on sale here...

Re:If you don't get

[tgd]

when you sign up for an account advertised as a 20mbit service, 20mbit is what you are entitled to. fine print doesn't trump that later on. Um... Yes it does. If you didn't read the contract thats not their problem.

Wishing that wasn't the way it works doesn't make it so.

Re:If you don't get

[Timesprout]

Contract law just isn't your thing really is it. No ISPs advertise guaranteed rates there is always a little * somewhere that says this is best case scenario and your rates may vary due to various factors. The fine print in your contract will also state this and you will have very little room for 'weaseling'.

In fact attempting to cancel without being able so show your service has seriously degraded because of the ISPs actions will probably be treated as a breach of contract and trigger the usual attempt by the ISP to penalise you with a fee for the remainder of your contract.

Re:If you don't get

[Xiph]

Just for shits and giggles, i just went to time warner to read the contracts(different for cali and rest of the us)...
I'm glad that i don't have to put up with the crap that you guys do.

Seriously, i think contracts like this would be made more humane,
If consumers took the time to call them and ask, what each clause of a contract meant, before purchase.

I'm curious as to how much, of the stuff they put in the contract, would be thrown out in a courtroom?

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

Unsubscribe in some places and the *ONLY* option is satellite at 100+ a month.

Re:If you don't get

[l3v1]

No consumer service I've ever seen has a guaranteed speed claim

Well, you've seen the wrong contracts then. The contract I have has a minimum bandwidth clause and also a maximum out-of-service period limit. But then again, this is not the U.S. here.
 

Re:If you don't get

[TomQ]

You need to understand the basic principles of modern contracts:

"What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away."

Re:If you don't get

[KDR_11k]

if they can't deliver what they promise you don't need to pay what you promised.

No. Breach of contract does not mean you don't have to fulfill your obligations unless the contract explicitely states so. It does give you legal recourse and probably the option to delay your obligations until the problem is sorted out. Of course the judge can decide that you don't have to pay but it's not your job to decide that.

Re:If you don't get

[NoTheory]

Sale? I'll do you one better. I've got some land for lease! Guaranteed Prime Florida Coastline! *#%

depending on parcel, may be any or all of the following:
* Protected Wetlands
# Under Water
% On Fire

(sigh, this would be funnier if i could style my text, stupid slashdot.)

Re:If you don't get

[TheSloth2001ca]

"Why anyone would enter a contract that states "You pay me every month full and in advance and I promise you nothing" is beyond me."

Because people should have to be contract lawyers to get internet access, and because most ISPs have similar conditions.

Re:If you don't get

[smittyoneeach]

Now, if a bunch of /.ers got together and started an ISP (grafting on the significant marketing, legal, HR, and executive chops you'd need), who here really thinks the final company, Applied Slashdot Superiority, would offer a significantly less evil/more reliable offering to the public?

Re:If you don't get

[DMNT]

Home contracts used to promise at least the company's best efforts to maintain a certain service level - and now they're effectively promising nothing at all.

You know there is a market price for buying guaranteed bandwidth - at least here in North Europe - but I bet you can't afford it. Neither can I. Neither does the company I work for. Buying a reserved and guaranteed bandwidth means that you can't "overbook" that amount and you have to pay it in full.

Statistically speaking a normal use of a computer isn't pushing the data both ways at 100% capability. Therefore putting in more hardware to do so will alienate the customers, who want everything and don't want to pay for anything they don't need. So, the average user opens a web page, reads it, then proceeds to another page and reads it and so forth. He wants the page to open up fast, but has no use for the surplus bandwidth. They want fast internet connection for one second in a minute. The network usage becomes a Poisson distribution and combined the usage starts to resemble normal distribution. That's what the ISPs want, it's statistically well defined and most of the time it's fast, congestion is just occasional.

Enter "Pete the Pirate". He's using the bandwidth in full and he won't fit in that normal distribution. The nice normal distribution turns skewed to the right, everyone gets worse response times and less bandwidth on average. The solution? Sell everyone guaranteed 10M/512k or what? Most of the people don't want to pay 60 times as much as they do because they don't have the need for guaranteed bandwidth. ISDN was about fixed bandwidth and it sucked. Nobody needed that bandwidth that much and therefore the costs were significantly higher than with ADSL technologies.

Solution: Transfer based billing. I think the sender should pay for the bandwidth as it is with the web sites as well. Your incoming traffic requires also outgoing traffic and you attach the interest of the company (build as little infrastructure as economically feasible) with the interest of the client (use that infrastructure as little as economically feasible).

Re:If you don't get

[drgonzo59]

Except that if when you sell me the car, you make me sign a contract that is 100 pages long in 6pt. font where at the end, after I have signed off to you all my property and first born child I also happen to agree to the fact that the seats in the car may or may not be there when I the car.

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

Even mafia hitmen have more customer friendly terms, I think I can confirm this.
Posting AC for obvious reasons.

Re:If you don't get

[tgd]

Its very different outside of the US. Because there is largely no competition in any broadband market, there's no reason for them to do that.

The fine print kills you on all of them. Another good example. Verizon Wireless sells pseudo-3G internet access across the country. Its actually pretty nice -- almost everywhere you can get 500+kb/sec internet and a lot of laptops have it built-in these days.

The fine print though caps you at 5 gigabytes a month. Go over it and its a $250 fee per additional 5G. I know a few people who learned to read the contract carefully the hard way.

Re:If you don't get

[Yez70]

My Time Warner 'bundle' contract existed of me saying Yes 3 times to a computer and stating my social security number's last 4 digits to verify my identity. If I cancel within 15 months, it's $250.

I happen to be buying a house in an area without Time Warner service, and it's only been 10 months since I agreed to the bundle on the phone. I fully intend to use this 'packet shaping' BS as my out to avoid the $250 cancellation fee.

I paid for 7Mbit service, not 7Mbit service when they see fit. What I was led to believe was this was dependent on my neighborhood node, which has always been able to give me 6-7Mbits without fail. Now, my Joost service is jittery, my peer to peer speeds are dropping and Skype is giving me that echo I used to hat one VOIP again.

This is NOT what I paid for, and I WILL NOT pay a cancellation fee.

Re:If you don't get

[quixote9]

So now the "free" market gets us a WORSE deal? Wow. Who'da thunk it?

Re:If you don't get

[Gablar]

IANAL, but, the contract applies both ways right? Are they not obligated to keep their part? I can understand technical issues or a large number of users may slow down the service, but to slow it down on purpose seems like a breach of contract on their part. If I had a business that was directly affected by this change, couldn't I sue for breach of contract. True that I could only depend on it for however long is my contract, but still...

Re:If you don't get

[timmarhy]

Not up on contract law? so then you'd be aware that in most contract law, if one party has the ability to change the contract terms to the detriment of the other, it has to allow the other party an "out" so the speak. always remmeber that the spirit of contracts is to lean towards fairness on both parties. contracts that don't always get trounced in any court

i can only speak from experience here in australia, if this happens the ISP will usually let you off, if they don't you get the TIO involved they will back down.

not to mention that if one clause contridicts another in the same contract the whole thing generally gets voided

"somewhere that says this is best case scenario and your rates may vary due to various factors"

correct, for factors OUTSIDE THEIR CONTROL.

Re:If you don't get

[azrider]

The fine print though caps you at 5 gigabytes a month. Go over it and its a $250 fee per additional 5G.

Then you a) got it at the wrong time; b) didn't look or c) went with the wrong carrier. I use Sprint (mainly because their is on location I am at a lot where Sprint is the only game in town). My EVDO works at bet 500k and 750k unlimited usage. The card also works seamlessly with Linux.

Re:If you don't get

[jotok]

The network usage becomes a Poisson distribution and combined the usage starts to resemble normal distribution.

Citation? I've only seen a few studies on this but so far as I know "bursty" traffic doesn't approach a normal distribution, ever, over any large time frame.

Re:If you don't get

[phoenix321]

Please re-read my post: I'm not talking about guaranteed bandwidth, I'm talking about guaranteed *best efforts*.

Nobody expects home DSL connections to have more than 90% uptime or the transfer bandwidth set in stone. That's what T1, SDSL and enterprise-grade SLA's are for. But I expect my ISP to maintain his contractual obligations in at least *trying* to give the best connection that is feasible from an economical and whatnot point of view.

Traffic shaping and intentionally throttling traffic in applications where sheer bandwidth (not latency) is important is NOT honoring the contract.

To be short: I don't expect my ISP to have 24/7 onsite rapid-response teams, multiple backup lines and .99+ uptime. - But I sure as hell don't want my ISP to actively hamper my connection. Not helping is a whole lot better than intentionally blocking the way...

Re:If you don't get

[tepples]

If you don't get what you pay for then stop paying for it. Then which provider offers what I pay for?

Re:If you don't get

[MrWarMage]

In simplest terms.... No. The contract is to bind the consumer to the fee structure and other terms. Anything more than that is very unusual, because it's not that sort of business.

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

It is just math and an application of the central limit theorem which applies to the distribution of aggregate bandwidth. All that is required for the application in this case is that each individual user is iid (independently and identically distributed - a reasonable approximation without 'Pete the p2p power user'). Then the distribution of aggregate bandwidth demanded over time will be normally distributed.

Re:If you don't get

[pla]

in the contract or at very least in the sale, they promise you a certain bandwidth, if they can't deliver what they promise you don't need to pay what you promised.

Okay, I have a situation for you...

I currently have TW RR, but never signed a contract (with TW). I originally had it through Adelphia, which went under and TW bought them out. But my Adelphia TOS actually looks pretty sweet compared to TWs...

So, if I actually cared enough to take them to court over this, would I have a leg to stand on, or should I just presume that as a mere human TW has the right to fuck me however hard they want?



Anyway, moves like this on the part of broadband provider will just accellerate a trend that we've already seen for the past decade - Every protocol will eventually just use encrypted communications wrapped in bogus HTTP packets. At which point, if the ISPs want to "shape" traffic, it will amount to flat out throttling your pipe. Let's see the backlash then, when even Grandma can't watch cheesy content on YouTube because the throttling makes it lag so badly.

Re:If you don't get

[mikkelm]

If you're selling a connection with bandwidth "up to", say, 10Mbps, you have to prove that it is possible, within the realm of practicality, to attain that kind of bandwidth on a typical connection.

If a car manufacturer claims that the top speed of a vehicle they're selling is 200mph, it has to be able to reach 200mph in a plausible situation. If the car can only attain 200mph going downhill with a hurricane behind it, it's deceptive marketing.

When you market a product as going "up to" a certain level of performance, it has to actually be able to attain it. The clause in their contracts saying that they cannot be held responsible for the impact on performance on situations or events that are out of their control covers the degraded performance that Joe Dirt Farmer would get at 5 miles from the CO, but in a typical scenario with typical quality copper, 0.5-1 mile from the CO, your connection has to be able to get within reasonable proximity of the advertised bandwidth.

Re:If you don't get

[jZnat]

Well, since it's a contract, you could strike out the sections you don't like, sign it, and then let them sign it (they probably won't even read the new contract). If they violate the modified contract, you've got a case. Sounds like an easier way to bring this to light rather than trying to get the courts to strike down parts of the contract.

Re:If you don't get

[antdude]

Of course, this cancellation of service doesn't work if the broadband provider is monopoly where you can't get anything else for decent prices and speeds.

For example with me, TWC (used to be Adelphia) is the monopoly broadband service here. The only other options are: Dial-up (3 KB/sec max. even on 56K modems), satellite Internet (slow and expensive), ISDN (slow and expensive, IDSL (slow and expensive, T1+ (uh huh, would you like to pay for it?), Verizon has no FIOS service here, and DSL is unavailable (20+K ft. from CO). And I live in a small city that has a lot of small computer/high-tech companies.

Re:If you don't get

[aaarrrgggh]

Enter "Pete the Pirate". He's using the bandwidth in full and he won't fit in that normal distribution. The nice normal distribution turns skewed to the right, everyone gets worse response times and less bandwidth on average. The solution? Sell everyone guaranteed 10M/512k or what? Most of the people don't want to pay 60 times as much as they do because they don't have the need for guaranteed bandwidth. ISDN was about fixed bandwidth and it sucked. Nobody needed that bandwidth that much and therefore the costs were significantly higher than with ADSL technologies.

Solution: Transfer based billing. I think the sender should pay for the bandwidth as it is with the web sites as well. Your incoming traffic requires also outgoing traffic and you attach the interest of the company (build as little infrastructure as economically feasible) with the interest of the client (use that infrastructure as little as economically feasible).

The problem with that logic is that the statistical average of all users is pushed up by "Peter." He might not fit into the old distribution, but he is a part of the new one. As Quincy, Robert, Sam and Tom all begin to have similar usage patterns, the average usage begins to fit more closely Peter's usage.

The ISP needs to adjust their models to reflect these changes over time.

Personally, I would prefer for an ISP to tier levels of service and commit to a contention ratio they can afford. If a user exceeds the preset contention ratio for their package over a 7 or 30 day period, they are bumped into the next tier after a warning. Start out with a 512k, 1% contention which should be adequate for most users (ends up at 1.5G/month), then go to a 1.024M, 2% (6G/month), 2M, 5% (30GB/month), 6M, 10%...

Tie the sense of value (bandwidth) into the true cost (transfer), and give the ISP the incentive to improve over time as well as give the customer an incentive to buy into a higher package. If internet TV takes off (for example), over time a market is created for improvements...

Re:If you don't get

[foniksonik]

Solution: Transfer based billing. I think the sender should pay for the bandwidth as it is with the web sites as well. Your incoming traffic requires also outgoing traffic and you attach the interest of the company (build as little infrastructure as economically feasible) with the interest of the client (use that infrastructure as little as economically feasible).

You need to add something to this for it to work. Clients, you and i at home, should pay a minimal access fee to pay for customer support, say $100 a year. You get 2 free visits, unlimited phone calls, with additional visits at an hourly rate. Clients also have an account via their access ISP, whom manages said account which consists of a credit/debit system attached to some electronic fund (bank account, credit card, other)... and which is debited by the Server at some rate the Server deems viable for their service.

The Server is charged some rate by their Network Provider in line with what they deem as a viable rate for said service.

So here we have the Server paying for bandwidth, the Client pays a nominal access fee... then the Server bills the Client for access to their Bandwidth.... which for most sites would be the same as what they pay but some sites with exclusive content could charge more if their visitors were willing to pay or because they (Server) could not find a cheaper Network Provider for their service (porn comes to mind)

This is an ideal situation IMHO... truly free market and competitive... also it provides a means for websites with quality content to prosper without having to dilute their offering with advertising.

.

Re:If you don't get

[pregister]

Enter "Pete the Pirate". Har, me name be Pete, ye land-lubbing, milk-drinking, insensitive clod. Avast.

Re:If you don't get

[u-235-sentinel]

what you pay for then stop paying for it.

in the contract or at very least in the sale, they promise you a certain bandwidth, if they can't deliver what they promise you don't need to pay what you promised.

Unfortunately it doesn't matter. I've gone through this issue over and over again. They simply don't care. I've created a blog to help other's learn exactly what to expect from companies such as this. BTW, my contract said "unlimited use for a flat monthly fee". It's very clear they don't intend to honor that part since they are terminating customers who "abuse their network". Pathetic.

Basically if you use more than 9% of a 6 meg residential service then you are an offender and they can terminate your service up to a year. Time Warner isn't much different from what I'm told.

This is why we need a public infrastructure such as Utopianet. This way if a company abuses it's customers they can switch to another provider and keep their infrastructure.

Time Warner and Comcast simply don't care about the customer or investing in the infrastructure. They are in business to make money. Period.

Re:If you don't get

[u-235-sentinel]

Why anyone would enter a contract that states "You pay me every month full and in advance and I promise you nothing" is beyond me. Even mafia hitmen have more customer friendly terms, I think. But if you think that's fair trade practice, you may like to view that bridge I have on sale here...

They know they can get away with it. Look at the company TOS and AUP. It's a lot like Comcast's (which I used to be a customer over 4 years). You simply can't trust these guys. I'm pushing we go with something like Utopianet and basically build our own fiber infrastructure. It's like public roads and the service can be provided by another entity.

Hopefully if enough people complain about it we'll have our country follow the tech leaders like South Korea and start building a public infrastructure that will provide everyone's Internet needs.

Re:If you don't get

[Agelmar]

The distribution of the sum will be normally distributed by the CLT, but that turns out to be absolutely useless for modeling. That's why people usually use fractals to generate reasonable datasets to do modeling when it comes to disk / network traffic. (i.e. use something like an 80/20 multifractal). The sum might tell you how much bandwidth you can expect to need in a month, but at any given time? Or for any real modeling purposes? no way. Fractals are very reasonable for simulating network traffic, they have similar propreties (i.e. self similarity at different granularity). So, in short, while you are correct that the CLT does apply to the sum, it's pretty useless in reality.

Re:If you don't get

[Lonewolf666]

Solution: Transfer based billing. I think the sender should pay for the bandwidth as it is with the web sites as well. Your incoming traffic requires also outgoing traffic and you attach the interest of the company (build as little infrastructure as economically feasible) with the interest of the client (use that infrastructure as little as economically feasible).

Transfer based as in "20 GBytes per month included, after that we charge extra"?

That would make sense, but where I live (Germany), such offers have become rare. The few you can still find outside the mobile market tend to have a pretty low data volume (2-5 GByte/month), and the price for extra volume is very steep.

Instead, most vendors sell "flatrates" (supposedly unlimited traffic) and then try to get rid of the "Petes" by throttling their traffic and sometimes cutting off their service. Which obviously causes all kinds of legal and PR risks. Stupid gits...

Re:If you don't get

[Score Whore]

But it's not about just you. It's about all of their customers. Their best efforts will not be focused on making sure that you personally have triply redundant DS3 to the pole outside of your house. Their supposed to make sure that everybody gets good service. If one schmuck has kicked off thirteen downloads of the latest hidef burqa and horse porn from northern africa, then pummeling his bandwidth into the floor is best effort for their customers.

Stop being selfish and think about how these networks are used by all users and stop thinking about how you personally will be able to make the most copies of the latest software, music, porn, television, and movies for your $24.95/mo.

Re:If you don't get

[fm6]

YAAL (Yet Another Amateur Lawyer). This one is particularly choice. Not only is his theory lame (show me a residential ISP that guarantees bandwidth!) it doesn't really get him anywhere. Stop paying and they'll stop providing you with service. Then where are you?

Re:If you don't get

[ehrichweiss]

"not to mention that if one clause contridicts another in the same contract the whole thing generally gets voided"

That won't work with many contracts these days if the contract is severable, which simply means that you're in essence signing to a series of contracts in a single work and proving one of the agreements is void does not necessarily affect the others though there are exceptions.

Re:If you don't get

[zippthorne]

"Up to" should mean that it's at least possible to get that speed. If they're doing some kind of rate-limiting to make sure you never get up to the "up to" advertised, I'd say that's pretty well false advertising.

I know it may be splitting hairs, and someone who's getting 56k isn't going to care either way, but if they advertise "Up to " 20 mbps, there shouldn't be any fundamental limitation preventing you from ever achieving that rate.

Re:If you don't get

[s4m7]

if i sold you a car, then ripped out the seats before you picked it up and claimed i didn't guarantee seats in the sale contract, it just wouldn't fly and neither would this.

If I had signed a contract with you that stated explicitly that seats were not included, then it damn well would fly. Because people are expected to *gasp* read what they sign. Unfortunately "it's boring" and "I can't understand it" are not reasonable defences in this type of case.

Re:If you don't get

[k1e0x]

All of those contracts clearly state "up to" a certain speed. No consumer service I've ever seen has a guaranteed speed claim.

There's probably not much the consumer can do except vote with their money and cancel the service.

This is why net neutrality laws are important -- because existing service contracts do NOT protect the consumer from this sort of action. You seem a little confused here. You say new laws are important because private contracts between private parties do not say something you would like it to?

In the US you have an unlimited right to contract, you can agree to pay for internet service where as the other company agrees to provide it. The terms of this contract are voluntarily agreed upon by the people involved, laws are opposite of this.. they are mandatory. The simple solution here (as you pointed out) is, if you don't like the contract details, don't agree to it.

The trouble is when government gets involved. The reason you are limited in the number of ISP's is because of state and federal government regulations and city governments renting their property to telecom's. Now the limited amount of choice that is caused by government sponsored monopolies is causing business to present unfair contracts and you want to ahem.. fix ..this with even more government regulation?

That's not the answer.. just stop paying for it. Some people have found a way around government regulations though and done something we desperately need.. they have started there own ISP's, Clearwire is an example of the market fighting against government regulation.

Re:If you don't get

[Original Replica]

"because most ISPs have similar conditions."

So could this be seen as a form of price fixing? The major ISPs all having the same ridiculously one-sided contracts offers the consumer no viable alternatives. Isn't that what price fixing laws and anti-trust laws are meant to protect us from?

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

>it just wouldn't fly
Um, I doubt the car would fly even it if did have seats.

Re:If you don't get

[Original Replica]

If they don't want their service to be used for "blazing fast downloads" and "streaming video at the click of a button" why are they being advertised that way? It didn't say "blazing fast text-only" or "monitored traffic" in the ad, when I signed up.

Re:If you don't get

[NormalVisual]

IANAL, but it sounds to me like TW is making a clear "material change" to their service that works to their customers' detriment, and as I understand it that should be reason enough for cancellation. Your lawyer could give you better info than Slashdot in any case.

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being selfish and think about how these networks are used by all users and stop thinking about how you personally will be able to make the most copies of the latest software, music, porn, television, and movies for your $24.95/mo.

OK, first of all, I don't know how you're getting TWC roadrunner for 24.95/mo. The rate is 44.95 for "standard service" advertised at 6-8 mb/s. (24.95 is an "introductory offer" that expires after a few months.

Second of all, they advertised the service as "broadband", defined by 6-8 mb/s download speeds. Now if I want to download the latest Ubuntu distribution and actually use the "broadband" speeds they advertised and I paid for, and expect to get it in less than one hour, you're going call that "selfish"???

Now to be fair, from reading TFA, it doesn't look like my example of normal ftp/http downloading will be effected by the traffic shaping, as defined *right now* (and it had better stay that way or I'll quit paying such high prices for "broadband"). But consider this: VOIP traffic *is* on their list of traffic subject to restriction, yet TWC offers their own VOIP service and aggressively advertises it. Do you suppose that restriction will apply "regardless of the provider", or do you think they will exempt their own service from traffic-shaping restrictions, rendering all others inferior in the process? Now which entity is the one being "selfish"?

My point is this: Not everybody who actually uses large volumes of high bandwidth that was advertised to them and they have paid for, is a "pirate" who just wants to download all the "horse porn" they can, and even those who are, aren't the only ones being "selfish".

Re:If you don't get

[azuretek]

Now would be a good time to cancel, their policy/service has changed and that's a breach of contract. Even if the contract you originally signed states you agree to future contracts/service/whatever, you can't agree to conditions you haven't seen yet.

Re:If you don't get

[mkcmkc]

As a veteran of many a math logic class, I can assure you that "up to" means "not more than"--exactly that and nothing else. So, if your provider advertises "up to 1.5 Mb/s", 0 Mb/s would satisfy their claim, whereas 2.5 Mb/s would not.

Perhaps they're capping their rates because their customers claimed that they were not actually getting "not more than" the claimed rate. :-)

(I don't know what we're all complaining about--this is exactly how capitalism (which we love) is supposed to work.)

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, what is wrong with the sender paying?

Uhh....how about:
Malicious variation of DOS attack whereby you suck millions of dollars out of anyone you care to target (Democrat, Republican, M$, the guy down the street whose dog keeps craping on your lawn). Bad idea? In spades!

Re:If you don't get

[hjf]

Ha! You find ISP contracts outrageous? Don't even think of reading your insurance policy then. I find those things amusing.

Re:If you don't get

[ocelotbob]

I sure as fuck expect my provider to offer such things. I mean, the phone company offers damn near 100% uptime; if I don't get a dial tone, I am finding a phone and calling the operator to ask what the hell is up. This includes with doing things like having the phone connected 24/7, etc. Why should an internet connection be any different?

Re:If you don't get

[pklinken]

It would be very tempting for **AA to demand a 'share' once ISPs start to do 'transfer based billing'

Re:If you don't get

[vux984]

Home contracts used to promise at least the company's best efforts to maintain a certain service level - and now they're effectively promising nothing at all.

Neither am I. I pay to use their service from month to month, and I can cancel service anytime I want. If I cancel tomorrow my bill stops tomorrow.

A lot of people out there think they have a 'contract' but they don't. Plain an simple.

Re:If you don't get

[loxosceles]

That's a great idea. Let's give every packet kiddie out there the ability to get our monthly DSL costs doubled or tripled.

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need a refresher course on Truth in Advertising laws.

If you advertise a car up to a Corvette will be offered for $10k and then find there is actually no vet for sale at $10k
Then its called bait and switch and its illegal.

Doesn't matter if there is small text in the add saying all statements using above 8pt font is invalid etc.

Re:If you don't get

[qualhiveldorf]

You could always negotiate your contract, unfortunately most people are too apathetic to do so.

Re:If you don't get

[644bd346996]

You're pretty much right, except for one thing: consumer connections are sold as a "best effort" service. That means the ISP cannot legally do anything to prevent you from achieving the advertised speed, because that would not qualify as a "best effort". The advertised speed cannot be above the maximum attainable speed (which means they can't advertise an arbitrary upper bound).

Re:If you don't get

[zurtle]

There was only one logic class at my university. I assume you're either a lecturer or a persistent failure :P

For what it's worth, I'm staying with my trusty 56k connection. It rocks my socks.

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Saying "up to x", when x is impossible to achieve under any circumstances is false advertisement. Otherwise, all connections would be advertised as "up to infinite speed".

On the other hand advertising something as "up to x", when it really means "x when browsing Time Warner website at 3am, and much slower otherwise" is probably legal.

Re:If you don't get

[arivanov]

Absolutely.

Nildram pulled this one on me in the UK 20 days ago. The only thing is that they were also rash enough to claim that they are doing it to "help VOIP and other business applications". Guess what the QoS on all of my non-Nildram VOIP links went to hell straight away. And as you rightly pointed - I am not paying. Any more. Got my service migrated to someone else.

As someone who has done QoS for a living for 10 years at all levels from a SOHO to an international Telco I can say that the problem is not with implementing QoS, the problem is with implementing it badly.

There are ways to roll QoS out in a manner that will keep all users happy using either internal software development or by buying off the shelf software (there are at lest 2 companies in this space which have a long list of successful telco deployments). Unfortunately deploying it this way requires competence and understanding of how to productize QoS and bill for it. This is something which the current generation of network engineers and product managers in most telcos have very little clue about (with very few exemtptions).

Re:If you don't get

[nanowired]

Being a former employee of an ISP, the "up to" a certain speed is in there to protect the company from complaints about their slow service due to line quality.

Re:If you don't get

[JimXugle]

Net Neutrality is a misguided step to

Imagine if Time Warner had to compete with Verizon, Comcast, Windstream, and Cox in all of their service area... would they be putting this traffic shaping system on their network?

Re:If you don't get

[yahurd]

great idea!, ya know im and at its always

Re:If you don't get

[JimXugle]

Damn. Accidentally hit the submit button.

Net Neutrality is a misguided step that would just be a patch on the root problem... lack of last-mile telecom competition.

Imagine if Time Warner had to compete with Verizon, Comcast, Windstream, and Cox in all of their service area... would they be putting this traffic shaping system on their network?

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

No, its not. The way capitalism is supposed to work is when this company does this, everyone is supposed to be able to go to another provider and get much faster rates, usually for around the same price, without this asanine restriction. Unfortunately, this is a monopoly we're talking about, and a government mandated one at that.

Re:If you don't get

[eonlabs]

There clearly need to be more ISP providers out there for cable. It's either Time Warner or Dial-up in many areas. I don't like it either, but if you can't break the monopoly, what are you going to do about it?

Re:If you don't get

[evilneko]

"Nobody expects home DSL connections to have more than 90% uptime or the transfer bandwidth set in stone."

You've never done tech support for an ISP.

Re:If you don't get

[The One and Only]

Yeah, it's the same for commercial mailings: "depending on the contents of this envelope and the results of our random number generator, YOU may HAVE WON 100 MILLION DOLLARS!

Re:If you don't get

[PyroMosh]

That's a horrible analogy.

What if it was a car for sale "up to" 400 HP?

and it did indeed generate 400HP between 3100 and 3110 RPM.

But at 3000 and 3200 RPM you're down to 250 HP?

The ad is true. It's peak HP. This is done all the time. Look at any car's power band. The advertised HP is under ideal conditions at peak engine RPM. Most of the tiem you get a fraction of that.

This is not a lot diffrent.

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

What city do you live in and who is your ISP?

Re:If you don't get

[The Rizz]

Nobody expects home DSL connections to have more than 90% uptime or the transfer bandwidth set in stone. Well, I sure as fuck do.

The contract I signed said that I got a service, not that I got a service when it was convenient for them. 90% uptime is 9.99% less than I expect from any service that advertises itself as "always on".

Also, the transfer bandwidth is set in stone as far as I'm concerned; the bandwidth is what I'm paying for, and I expect to get it. The whole "maximum speed may not be achieved" thing is only supposed to come into play when there is either (1) slowdowns/downtime due to repairs or maintenance, (2) an unexpected spike in usage that saturates the network's connection, or (3) beyond my ISP's control (i.e. problems outside their network). Purposefully dropping my speed for other than one of those reasons is not acceptable.

I remember lawsuits against several ISPs a few years back due to them advertising a particular speed, but not having anywhere near the bandwidth needed to deliver that to the number of customers signed up for their service. The whole "maximum bandwidth cannot be guaranteed" clause was not considered to cover "because we don't even try to deliver".

Re:If you don't get

[wirelessbuzzers]

Well, since it's a contract, you could strike out the sections you don't like, sign it, and then let them instantly refuse to sign it (they probably won't even read the new contract). There, fixed that for you. You really should use the "preview" button, you know?

Re:If you don't get

[datapharmer]

Tom Waits? Is that you?

Re:If you don't get

[Propaganda13]

"Up to" should mean that it's at least possible to get that speed. If they're doing some kind of rate-limiting to make sure you never get up to the "up to" advertised, I'd say that's pretty well false advertising.

Yes, it is possible to get "up to" the advertised speed with certain protocols. They're not lying just because they didn't tell you the whole truth.

Re:If you don't get

[pimpimpim]

In germany for DSL it was only possible to pay separately for bandwith and for traffic. Now, flatrate is the most common, but still these things are seen as separated.

As far as false advertizing is concerned, in the case of mobile internet (GPRS) the providers seem to have very flexible interpretations of 'flatrate', e.g. 300 MB per month or something. Again: that is only in the small print.

Re:If you don't get

[PMBjornerud]

Enter "Pete the Pirate". He's using the bandwidth in full and he won't fit in that normal distribution. The nice normal distribution turns skewed to the right, everyone gets worse response times and less bandwidth on average. The solution? Sell everyone guaranteed 10M/512k or what? Most of the people don't want to pay 60 times as much as they do because they don't have the need for guaranteed bandwidth. ISDN was about fixed bandwidth and it sucked. Nobody needed that bandwidth that much and therefore the costs were significantly higher than with ADSL technologies. The solution?
Stop marketing your service as "infinite" usage if it's going to screw up your model.

No need to bring average users into it. If all you do is reading web pages, there is actually not that much difference between 512k and 100M. Higher speeds are a service you buy for the purpose of moving big files fast.

The real issue here is that IPSs want to market their service as "infinite", but redefine the term so there is no way you can use more bandwith than they want you to. why not sell their service as, say "up to 10M for the first 5GB, then 512k."? Then add higher GB tiers, and people will pay for the actual bandwith instead of an infinte usage fairy tale.

Re:If you don't get

[swilver]

...or you get some ISP's to compete with each other. Where I live, I can get broadband from a dozen different providers (and that's just DSL) and they compete for their customers. My ISP used to have a "fair use policy", which effectively meant that they would start whining if you used too much bandwidth (apparently using 200 GB/month was not enough to trigger this). Two years ago they discontinued the fair use policy and basically claim there are no limits.

In all the time I have been their customer, I've had almost no downtime (I'm connected 24/7), never even suspected they might be throttling (they're not), and never have I had a reason to think that I may not be getting the full bandwidth while I was downloading something because the line was overbooked.

On top of that, over the years, my bandwidth has doubled several times and the price has declined, paying about $40 for 5mbit/1mbit. For me, this is effectively unlimited as I can't think of ways anymore to use it all up (although I still use about 80 GB up + 80 GB down every month)... What I think is that my ISP has realized what apparently some ISP's haven't yet, at some point, harddisks are full. At 200 GB/month that's pretty fast.

Re:If you don't get

[mkcmkc]

Well, I was a persistent failure as a lecturer, but not in math logic. In my undergrad program, there were a number of redundant math logic courses taught by the math, CS, and philosophy departments. By taking several, I managed to get out of a number of requirements without being forced to learn a lot. :-)

Re:If you don't get

[lessthan]

Where, WHERE do you live? I am immediately packing all my things and moving to your neighborhood. Monopoly is the name of the game everywhere I go. I thought it was like that everywhere.

Re:If you don't get

[fluffy99]

If you sold me a car without seats, I could go after you under the law of merchantability (ie the item is suitable for the function implied - driving in the case). If TW Cable advertised the service as suitable for downloading vidoes, doing VOIP and then throttled it so that didn't work then you'd have grounds to sue them. In any case, the remedy is usually limited by the courts and state laws to a refund or cancellation of the contract.

Re:If you don't get

[FlyingGuy]

This is simply a fabulous idea... Uhmmm right up to the point were you deliver the last mile, or have to peer with someone else to get anywhere. Here are the problems:

• AT&T owns the copper ( the last mile ) to just about every residence is the US these days.
• Unless you can raise BILLIONS of dollars in capitol, you are not going to replace the last mile.
• The big fiber backbones that stretch across the country are owned by AT&T, Verizon, GOOGLE and just a couple of other lesser deities, and if you want to peer with them, you are going to have to play their game Unless you can raise BILLIONS of dollars in capitol and build your own backbone(s) to escape their game, which is not going to happen because they have pretty much all the right-of-ways and have the congressmen and senators in their pockets to prevent you from getting them even if you DID have the money, which you don't.

But you are certainly welcome to try. Then you can deal with the torrent's, the P2P's the News Groups with HUGE amounts of porn in them, not to mention the SPAM that currently clog the living shit out of the existing infrastructure. Guess what you haven't even gone to Europe or ASIA yet on the trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific cables that, you guessed it, are owned by AT&T & Verizon.

Re:If you don't get

[MobyTurbo]

512k, 1% contention which should be adequate for most users (ends up at 1.5G/month) You can easily use that up by downloading a Linux CD and apt-getting a few programs. In Australia, it's limited that way already - and people can't download a distro there or use youtube without getting their bandwidth throttled to dial-up speeds for the rest of the month.

Re:If you don't get

[Workaphobia]

Neglecting the fact that they do not actually promise bandwidth in the contract:

I see. So which alternative are you suggesting, in particular? Should I abandon the Internet altogether or just revert to dialup? Why are these alternatives better than dealing with a dishonest company that at least gives me better than nothing?

Re:If you don't get

[Workaphobia]

I actually spent several hours over the past couple of days researching the idea of customer owned dark fiber as an alternative to traditional ISPs. Of course I knew it'd be financially ludicrous, but it's fun to dream. Anyway, without community or customer owned connections, what do you expect us to do? Revert to dialup? Until the government wakes up and realizes that monopoly and competition are antonyms, we may be stuck with these terms.

If that bridge you have goes somewhere I need to go, and only you can get me there, then I'll pay any price I can afford.

Off topic question: What's the general limit on the speed I can expect to get between two end points that have essentially unlimited bandwidth on their local loops? That is, what's the approximate limit to what I can get from the Internet "backbone".

Re:If you don't get

[cibyr]

But this situation is more like them selling you a car with an engine that will generate 400HP if and only if you're driving down a street that they like.

Re:If you don't get

[uvajed_ekil]

Now, if a bunch of /.ers got together and started an ISP (grafting on the significant marketing, legal, HR, and executive chops you'd need), who here really thinks the final company, Applied Slashdot Superiority, would offer a significantly less evil/more reliable offering to the public?

I propose a vote on what the /. community does about this.

My vote on Applied Slashdot Superiority: I love ASS! I can't wait to get ASS around here and have it on a regular basis. ASS is just about the best thing ever. Not getting ASS is making me angry, but I'm sure that, in the end, that ASS will be worth the wait. But if I were in charge, I'd be pretty upset if someone penetrated my ASS and had their way with it without my approval. Everyone should vote for something as reliable as openASS or ASS being offered-up to the public.

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny. I live in northern Europe and my consumer level contract says the floor is 1.5 mbit and the roof is 10 mbit. Guaranteed. Only caveat is force majeure.

Re:If you don't get

[bakana]

Reality: Time Warner is not preventing you from ever achieving that rate, they are capping you from every achieving that rate if you are doing things besides surfing the internet that cause a strain on the network and affects the performance of that service for others around you. That means if you have good signal, have a decent computer, and are surfing the internet; you will be able to achieve those speeds. Monopoly?: I love it when people use this word together with cable companies. It is even funnier when they use it and then say federally backed or governmentally backed monopoly. I guess none one of you have heard of franchises or the new bills that have been passed by Telco bought politicians as of late. As much as people want to categorize cable and satellite apart, according to the government they are the same category; entertainment providers that rebroadcast TV signals and can provide internet and now phone bundles as well. So the truth of the matter is you have choices within that entertainment category. You can choose to buy rabbit ears, a satellite dish, purchase cable service, or have nothing. Hell if you wanted to start up your own entertainment providing company all you would have to do is apply for a franchise. They only places where I have seen any kind of entertainment providing monopoly would be on military bases. They usually strike a deal with one provider and lock all others out, but guess what, on those grounds normal laws do not apply. I would look up the definition of monopoly before throwing it around so freely. I have provided the definition below for those... Choice: If you believe you should be able to hit advertised speeds regardless of how you are affecting others around you, you have choices. Every area has dialup, or satellite, DSL, or other cable providers. Choice with your wallet to say, I'm not going to take it anymore. Otherwise, shut the fuck up. From Websters Dictionary Pronunciation: m&-'nä-p(&-)lE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -lies Etymology: Latin monopolium, from Greek monopOlion, from mon- + pOlein to sell 1 : exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action 2 : exclusive possession or control 3 : a commodity controlled by one party 4 : one that has a monopoly

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

Utopia is nice but I prefer the Stokab model.

Re:If you don't get

[wannabgeek]

Where, WHERE do you live? I am immediately packing all my things and moving to your neighborhood. Monopoly is the name of the game everywhere I go. I thought it was like that everywhere. Utopia, I guess.

Re:If you don't get

[dintech]

This is similar to the monthly bandwith limits in the UK. You see it less often now as people have voted with their feet and moved to unlimited providers. There's always a good economic niche for doing what the majority of people want you to.

Re:If you don't get

[heinousjay]

You'd better learn to love disappointment.

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't mind me asking, which two companies ?

Re:If you don't get

[djh101010]

All of those contracts clearly state "up to" a certain speed. No consumer service I've ever seen has a guaranteed speed claim.
There's probably not much the consumer can do except vote with their money and cancel the service. This is why net neutrality laws are important -- because existing service contracts do NOT protect the consumer from this sort of action. That is probably the best summary of net neutrality I've ever seen. I'm going to save this for when people give me that glazed "I don't understand, why is that bad, I mean good, again?" look.

Re:If you don't get

[phoenix321]

It has nothing to do with selfishness or greed, it's simply the customer's side of the contract.

"I pay for it, therefore I am entitled to use it." Selfishness is abusing or misusing others and their resources, like parking on the left lane on the freeway.

Selfishness is breaking social contracts - but in the home DSL example, you don't have that kind of (informal) social contract with everyone but your ISP. And the "net health" overall, meaning you shouldn't send spam, malware and ddos packets around and/or disable your heavy downloading in cases of national or local emergencies.

Protecting and realizing your interests and investments is not "selfishness", it's normal and reasonable (outside of North Korea) behavior. And nobody can be able to judge the importance of your interests, except for YOU and cases of real emergencies. Be it the newest Ubuntu, gigabytes of Windows-patches or the sickest, filthies horse porn exports from rogue states. You pay for it, you can use it. I don't advocate the "customer is always right"-mantra that's driving our shopping clerks insane - but I think it's ridiculous to demand that other 30-80$/month customers refrain from using their bandwidth. That's what I would call selfish, but that's just me.

Imagine the situation where A is selling its services to its customers C1 through C10. All customers pay a monthly fee of 10$ for the privilege of having A's services. Circumstances make it possible to "overbook" A by a factor of 2x, because most customers seriously underutilize A's services, making it possible to split the service price among more customers and/or making more money for A.

When C3 sometimes utilizes the full potential of their service contract, A is suddenly calling foul and restricting their access, citing the protection of all other customers' interests.

Which possibility do you think is right:

[ ] A just overbooked its service capabilities wayyy too much and now depending on (instead of profiteering from) expected customer behavior
[ ] A *tries* to earn more money through more overbooking
[ ] A is not overloaded but lazy and simply *claims* C3 is overusing "shared" resources.
[ ] A's services is not a shared resource like a public road, but a paid-for service by a private company
[ ] A is selfish
[ ] C3 is selfish
[ ] all other customers are selfish
[ ] C3 should have different contract than the others

And please keep in mind that everyone of us is a member of a minority im some way. Don't even try to judge other's use of resources as useless, unethical or filthy. That's what freedom and privacy are there to protect against. ("Gay porn, ewwwwwwwwwwww, you're clogging my Ubuntu download!" - "Ubuntu what?! Why on earth do you *need* the newest Ubuntu ISO every month? I work on Windows 2000 and I'm fine with that!")

I don't think any content is more important or legitimate as any other content. Emergencies, infrastructure and security updates aside, but everything else is not my business to judge. And it shouldn't be anyone's business at all.

(Just imagine "the people's council", "the people's army" or whatever stopping, questioning and inspecting vehicle traffic for valid "reasons" for travel...)

Re:If you don't get

[Shakrai]

Isn't that what price fixing laws and anti-trust laws are meant to protect us from?

You must be new here.....

Seriously though. This is hardly news. Ever actually read your cell phone contract? They promise you nothing. You aren't even promised service if you are standing directly below one of their towers absorbing enough RF to melt that candy bar in your pocket.

Don't like it? Don't have a cell phone. They all do this. Ditto for ISPs. The only solution is to classify internet access and cellular phones as a utility (they are the utilities of the 21st century) and regulate them. Good luck making that happen though when they own our elected officials.

Re:If you don't get

[kalirion]

Not only that, but we'd also have blackjack, and hookers!

Re:If you don't get

[kalirion]

It's called "Bait and Switch", and is a proven and time (warner) honored marketing strategy.

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just throttle based on the immediate conditions; pay for more to get higher priority, but if there's spare capacity, then no one gets throttled, everyone gets max rate.

Use a decaying average over the last 30 seconds or so. If there's too much total demand, start throttling only the highest-bandwidth users (as modified by their paid-for priority) so that queuing delay is brought down to some preset level. If you're currently using less than the current cutoff, you wouldn't be affected in the slightest.

This allows the typical user to get very high bandwidth for a short period of time, which then smoothly throttles back if it keeps up for any length of time down to a sustainable rate. Thirty seconds of that and you're being throttled, but only down to whatever the current sustainable rate is. Thirty more seconds of complete inactivity and your slate is wiped clean. The algorithm would need to be tuned so that doing bursts of activity intermixed with inactivity doesn't gain you an advantage.

The only drawback I can see is an interaction with the TCP rate/contention limiting mechanism.

Re:If you don't get

[drinkypoo]

Why anyone would enter a contract that states "You pay me every month full and in advance and I promise you nothing" is beyond me.

Because I do that and maybe get something, as opposed to not doing that, and getting nothing.

I have precisely one option for broadband internet where I live - Hughes satellite. (Directwhatever and Skyblue are both oversubscribed and not selling to my area.) The phone lines out to our part of town are complete shit and I get 21kbps connections on the modem. What do you suggest that I do? Go around rubbing lamps and seeing if djinnis pop out so that I can wish myself a high-speed internet connection with a service level agreement?

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

...ugly midget hookers....

Re:If you don't get

[KUHurdler]

Actually I think they are usually worded even worse:

YOU HAVE ALREADY WON 100 MILLION DOLLARS,
if number you are holding is the winning ticket

There oughta be a law.

Re:If you don't get

[Anonymous Coward]

And lies of omission aren't really lies at all.

Re:If you don't get

[KUHurdler]

"it has to be able to reach 200mph in a plausible situation."

I can think of a plausible one. So what exactly IS the terminal velocity of a volkswagon in freefall?

Re:If you don't get

[phoenix321]

I would be satisfied when my modem gets 21*k*bps :) just kidding...

When there's only one ISP and a satellite one at that, I think your outlook for getting decent broadband is dim. Network latency actually matters for perceived browsing. Not the make-or-break thing it is for Counter-strike et al., but a bit annoying I think.

The only options left are maybe hoping for a 3G cellphone data flatrates (UMTS, GPRS etc.) or moving to a larger city. Other than that, you're pretty much bound to whatever Hughes satellite dictates and demands, if you need broadband. I'm sure your house there is all nice and there's forests and fields all around in a cozy rolling hillside - but I don't know if I would trade homes with you...

Re:If you don't get

[drinkypoo]

I would be satisfied when my modem gets 21*k*bps :) just kidding...

I hope you are kidding. Because 21kbps is maybe 2.2kBps, which is almost certainly what you thought I wrote.

kb is kilobits. kB is kilobytes.

The only options left are maybe hoping for a 3G cellphone data flatrates

No, you cannot get a 3G cellular signal at my house.

or moving to a larger city

Yeah, I'm going to pack up and move to another city so I can get high-speed internet. Let me get right on that.

Re:If you don't get

[andphi]

And just as a guess, the techs would all be SmartASSes?

Re:If you don't get

[Harik]

Without money as an option? 9.08 gigabits/second. For internet1 apps, quite a bit less. I can trivially saturate 10mb from my dedicated server to my cablemodem. Two 100meg-linked boxes can transfer at 100meg point-to-point (not just point-to->many). If you had dark fiber, you could do whatever signalling you could support on it.

It won't be cheap, though.

Re:If you don't get

[Darby]

Yeah, I'm going to pack up and move to another city so I can get high-speed internet. Let me get right on that.

You might want to recheck what site you're on or add your own sarcasm tags before typing something like that here again ;-)
Hell, my girlfriend (wife now) moved from La Jolla to Pacific Beach to move in with me because I had cable and she had dial up :-)

Re:If you don't get

[phoenix321]

Moving to a larger city for broadband internet seems silly?

People and companies that need a certain infrastructure usually move where this infrastructure is already in place OR build it when feasible OR substitute it.

Nobody would consider moving near a railway center, airport or seaport ridiculous if they needed that. (Like moving where theaters, libraries and other entertainment are) Why should broadband network be that much different? "If the mountain will not go to Mahomet, let Mahomet go to the mountain" or so they say, depending on how important fast internet access is to you.

Re:If you don't get

[Workaphobia]

The second case you described, the 10mb between a dedicated server and a client, is the one I'm talking about. But suppose that you weren't operating on a cable modem, but had as fast a link with your home provider as possible. What would the limit be then?

To state it in an alternate form, pick two random ISPs in the world, and pick the highest available service from both of them; what's the highest speed you can obtain between those two networks, without specifically contracting for a link between those points? How does the answer change depending on if we're talking Tier 3 or strictly Tier 1 or 2?

Re:If you don't get

[Yartrebo]

The problem is that there aren't a gazillion broadband providers to choose from. I have two: Verizon (digital subscriber line) and Time Warner (cable). In industries that are natural monopolies (or duopolies in this case), you need government regulation if not outright nationalization to prevent rampant gouging. Internet access is quickly moving from a luxury to a near necessity as more and more stuff is internet only, and when you have an unregulated monopoly on a necessity or basic luxury such as electricity in California, you get massive price hikes and deterioration of service.

In a monopoly environment, even the few people (like me) who do read the fine print have no recourse other than not to buy the service, which isn't a reasonable option since even at many times cost it's still better to have web-only internet service than to go without, especially as the government and employers put more and more on the internet.

Regulation (is net neutrality that?) is really badly needed.

Re:If you don't get

[tgd]

Actually, I suspect you just have poor reading skills.

But thanks for your reply.

Re:If you don't get

[drinkypoo]

People and companies that need a certain infrastructure usually move where this infrastructure is already in place OR build it when feasible OR substitute it.

Actually, I do my main downloading at work, where we have a T1 (for work) and a cable modem (for the hotel). We suffer with a modem on a bad line at home. It's not the copper from the TNI to the jack, because I just slapped cat6 in there - but I live in the boonies. And pacific bell was always bad about maintaining copper.

My point is that often there is only one choice for high speed access. Not that I am suffering so badly.

Re:If you don't get

[jZnat]

Note the "they probably won't even read the modified contract" bit. Companies only care about larger contracts that cost them a sizeable amount of money...

Re:If you don't get

[wirelessbuzzers]

Note the "they probably won't even read the modified contract" bit. True, but they won't sign it either. Company policy is almost always to refuse to sign it no matter what the changes are. In fact, since the contract is between you and the company, not between you and the employee, they probably don't have the authority to agree to whatever changes you made.

There's an obvious reason for this: even if the salesperson reads the contract, he doesn't understand it except at a very high level. Hacking out paragraphs from the contract (particularly at the request of the customer) could lead to the contract being unenforceable, customer not paying, or even a lawsuit the company. Consider the situation we're discussing: OP suggested that you modify the contract to take out the "we make no guarantees, we might packet-shape, bandwidths are peak, you can't sue us" section, then suing if they packet-shape.

Companies only care about larger contracts that cost them a sizeable amount of money... Also true. So if your business is worth their lawyer's time to approve a modified contract, you have a shot.

Fradulent advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the 'technical solution' to a typical case of selling a product that you can't actually deliver.
NTL in the UK has just started to institute a similar policy, and is reputed to be haemorrhaging subscribers at an alarming rate (at least if you are a shareholder). It really defeats the point in having broadband to slap an arbitrarily low usage cap on a service that is expected to be used to transfer rich media content - which is by nature very large.
Either these companies can invest in their network sufficiently to deliver this type of service, or they should withdraw from this business completely.
Usage caps will only buy them a small amount of time, before proper investment in their networks must resume.

Re:Fradulent advertising

[jez9999]

NTL in the UK has just started to institute a similar policy

By the way, they're called Virgin Media now.

Is it really a similar policy? They take some users down to 1mb down, 128kb up after 350MB usage at peak times. It still seems fast enough (although I do hate the utter asynchronousness of it, I like my upstream dmanit!)

If anything, what will make me go for Be Unlimited w/ Sky at my next property will be the truly terrible Indian-based 'customer service' call centres they seem to have switched to since their takeover of NTL. And that's after waiting literally 30 minutes on hold.

Re:Fradulent advertising

[Shemmie]

There are good UK ISP's out there. I've just moved to one that stresses they sell you a bandwidth package - in my case, 30 gig peak, 300 gig off-peak. What you do with that bandwidth is your call.

If a market demands it (And considering the UK market is near-enough completely traffic-management / FUP - certainly amongst the big players), then services willing to take your money to provide the service you want will spring up.

Re:Fradulent advertising

[TimberManiac]

Care to share a name? ;-) I'm always on the lookout for a more reliable ISP.

Re:Fradulent advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this is the one the parent was talking about, but Andrews & Arnolds (www.aaisp.net.uk) is really good. If you use a lot of bandwidth during peak hours (I don't) it is expensive, but their customer support is great. When you call, the person that picks up the phone will be the one to help you. I've never been on hold with them, and they don't read from a script! They even have an IRC room.

I have an 8mb/800k package, with 8 static IP addresses. I don't work for the company (honestly), I'm just a happy customer. I used to have NTL who was completely useless. The bastards still owe me about £80 because they kept charging me after I moved and canceled, but I've given up trying to reclaim it.

Re:Fradulent advertising

[jez9999]

Why the hell would you put up with a crappy 30GB cap when you could go with Be Unlimited and get an uncapped connection? Sorry, but I'm very intolerant of caps. I think they suck, and anyone who imposes them sucks.

Re:Fradulent advertising

[Soruk]

Not sure who they are - but this might interest you: UKFSN's home offerings.

Re:Fradulent advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but even Be Unlimited still has a 'Fair Use Policy' - in other words, if you use too much, you'll get a written warning, ignore it and you're gone.

Like most other FUPs, it doesn't actually say how much.

At least VM is clear about it - you can attempt to use your full bandwidth 100% of the time, but you will be bandwidth limited for a period after a certain amount of downloading during peak hours.

So on the XL (20Mb) service, that means you can 'only' download 150GB a day. Every day.

Try downloading 4500GB a month (30 days * 150GB) with 'Be Unlimited' or any other FUP'ed service and see if the FUP kicks in... want to bet it will?

Re:Fradulent advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

NTL's network is fibre, the only time you reach coax is when they run the like from the road to your house. Why then, the silly bandwidth limits? You people should be looking at 100/100mbps services. The technology is already in place. The question is, why isn't it available?

Re:Fradulent advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two nice tricks with NTL. You can traffic shape your way out of the slow uplink speed by prioritising acks before uploads -- Linux and the BSDs are able to do this and it gives solid performance. I've also repeatably noticed that bittorrent speed goes ballistic when I start streaming MP3s from internet radio stations. I have no idea why that could be though.

Re:God Smack Your Ass !!

[Xiph]

a shame parent didn't make it to first post...

Class action?

[jcr]

Ok, so I take this as an admission that they're not willing or able to deliver as advertised. Sounds like a lot of people are owed a refund.

-jcr

Re:Class action?

[flyboy974]

I agree. The FCC has repeatedly denied ISP's the right to shape and/or filter traffic based on the common carrier laws.

To do otherwise would cause the ISP to lose their status as a common carrier, and thus, for all legal matters, lose their "Internet Service Provider" status as well as far as the DMCA is concerned. At this point they start to filter and/or interact with the traffic, they are no longer a bipartisan, rather a willing participant in deciding upon the traffic of which they are choosing to send.

Thus, any illegal content, they have chosen to allow. Regardless of protocol, technology, etc.

So they are not liable.

Re:Class action?

[Detritus]

Most ISPs are not common carriers.

Re:Class action?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, my ISP already blocks certain ports, like port 25 traffic (all port 25 traffic is blocked on my connection except traffic to my specific mail server).

Re:Class action?

[jZnat]

So could we get them in trouble for hosting kiddie porn and tons of other illegal activity? I mean, they're obviously not filtering out all the illegal stuff, and not being a common carrier, they should be responsible for all the traffic on their network...

Re:Class action?

[mother_reincarnated]

they are no longer a bipartisan

I don't think that word means what you think it means...

And as another poster already mentioned- your ISP prolly isn't a common carrier.

Re:Class action?

[essh10151]

You are correct on that point but I think what the poster was saying is a valid point -- specifically: Why is it that ISPs can avoid being sued for delivering contraband via their networks but can, when the delivery of the contraband causes them inconvenience, suddenly shape delivery?

It is not a hard case of a law being violated, to be sure, but it would, I think, be a valid, rhetorical, question to be asked in a **AA vs. Telco lawsuit. It could be used to show that the ISPs were aware of the content and had the means to shape it to their own needs but refused to do so to the needs of the suing **AA.

Re:Class action?

[StikyPad]

At this point they start to filter and/or interact with the traffic, they are no longer a bipartisan

And it's about fscking time! I'm so sick of these two-party ISPs with more loyalty to the party than the public interface. There's absolutely no room for modulation when a potential ISP has to conform to one of two platforms. That's why I use an independant ISP whenever possible. I'd love to see more joint efforts between DSL and Cable to provide voters with salutations that actually work.

To my fellow broadsword users, I say God luck, and good speed!

depends on the application of this

[timmarhy]

In terms of QOS i agree with this. if for example you are downloading 100gig of porn from torrents then shaping that when you make a phone call in order to make sure the phone call gets through ok is GOOD. shaping however should NEVER prevent you reaching your maxium speed your line is capable of. what you spend your bandwidth on is none of their business, isp's have repeatedly stated they aren't responsible for your downloading habits, so they can't turn around and control them to suit themselfs and not be liable for it.

Re:depends on the application of this

[Rosyna]

In terms of QOS i agree with this. if for example you are downloading 100gig of porn from torrents then shaping that when you make a phone call in order to make sure the phone call gets through ok is GOOD.

Alternatively, the broadband provider could actually improve its infrastructure so it supports advertised speeds for all users.

Packet shaping looks like a method for ISPs to have higher advertised speeds without actually increasing the capacity of their network as they should.

Re:depends on the application of this

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want cheap broadband, then this is the catch.

Re:depends on the application of this

[15Bit]

> Packet shaping looks like a method for ISPs to have higher

> advertised speeds without actually increasing the capacity
> of their network as they should.

There seems to be an automatic assumption that ISP level QOS equals bandwidth/download capping. That isn't necessarily true. I run QOS on my home connection and it means that when i'm downloading large quantities of data i can still talk ok on the VOIP. I haven't seen my bandwidth being reduced though - I just get to use what i have more effectively. Correspondingly, it would be negligent for an ISP *NOT* to use their resources efficiently, as excess infrastructure is paid for by their subscribers. Indeed, perhaps the users of TW should be complaining less about the traffic shaping now and more about how long its taken to implement...

Re:depends on the application of this

[Barny]

Yeah, but what they are doing is, say, capping all usenet and P2P (probably the 2 biggest uses for all that bandwidth) to 1mb/s on your fat 6mb/s pipe.

The way to sue them of course (IANAL) would be to claim that this capping represents a break in the "best effort" most contracts are based on, they are clearly not offering their best effort if they are capping everyone.

On a side note, thankfully they are not touching port 59 (or so it seems) :)

Re:depends on the application of this

[NMerriam]

Alternatively, the broadband provider could actually improve its infrastructure so it supports advertised speeds for all users.

Well, there will always be a compromise between mean capacity and peak capacity. Expecting everyone with RR to be able to download NNTP feeds at full-speed at prime-time is not reasonable for any consumer service that will be affordable. But if I'm downloading at 3am and there is plenty of unused capacity that i'm capable of having, I certainly expect it not to be slowed down by RoadRunner just because they like the idea of slowing down bandwidth-intensive stuff.

Re:depends on the application of this

[Anonymous Coward]

If you buy a 3 GHz computer, is it ok if it can only run at 1.5 GHz without overheating, just because you only paid the advertised price?

Re:depends on the application of this

[numbski]

You're not getting it, are you?

I do this on my own networks, and I don't get complaints about it. Yes I'm an ISP. No, I'm not evil. I make every effort not to be evil. When it comes to transport out to the internet, YES, I do shape traffic. Priority goes (roughly) VOIP, Video, SSH/RDC, Web, P2P. In that order. Now, that doesn't mean you don't get the full bandwidth you're paying for with P2P. What happens is that packets get dropped and re-sent (as per TCP specs) and the result is additional LATENCY, not a drop in overall throughput. That only occurs if I'm horribly over-subscribed, which just won't happen, because if I'm paying wholesaler rates, there's really no way I'd allow it to happen. Bought in appropriate quantities bandwidth is cheap. TRANSPORT of that bandwidth is what is expensive. I can buy up all the bandwidth I want from the right location for next to nothing. Getting it to you is what costs me big time. If you build the infrastructure to me, support it, and don't whine at me when it's down, I can sell it to you cheaply, too.

No, I don't like the big media conglomerates any more than you do, but being in the business I can tell you that this isn't wholly evil. What I would like to see from them is a release of HOW they're shaping it. That release makes it look to me more like they're doing Web > Everything Else, or putting hard caps on VOIP, Video, P2P, etc, which would be evil as well. I don't hard cap bandwidth below what you're paying for. Now, that said, our service contracts are worded such that you know up front that you're buying burstable service. We offer 10MBit symmetrical connection, but the contract states that we only guarantee 256k symmetrical dedicated. Anything above that is burst, which means that you have no right to saturate the connection full time more than 256k, but you're more than welcome to burst up to that for periods. To me this is fair. If you have a big download, burst away, that's what you've paid for. Running a warez FTP isn't. Running a (high bandwidth) website isn't. We don't have language that says you can't run a server. You can, but you're not allowed to saturate your connection 24/7. If we see that, you get a phone call asking you to purchase a dedicated connection rather than a burstable one. The problem with the cable companies is that they don't offer dedicated connections, because they CAN'T. You're on the same node as your neighbors, and whether you pay for a dedicated connection or not, you degrade the service of your neighbors when you saturate the line, end of story.

I wish I could grow out faster, but I can't. I am try to get some investors to get more infrastructure out there, but Ma Bell isn't too happy about my existence right now. :\ I've tried to avoid doing business with "Mom" as I've taking to call them, but it's hard. Anyhoo...that's off-topic. Point is, don't bust their chops for shaping. Bust them for not telling you *how* they're shaping, and "ask" with your money for them to do it right, and not be greedy. If not, make sure your neighbors know what is up too, and if they don't initially care ("we just browse the web and check e-mail"), make them aware of the impact this sort of behavior could have on them down the road, and get them to at least make phone calls and case a ruckus. If they really are your only broadband choice, call the local newspaper, or tv station. They usually have investigative reporters on-hand, and if you can explain in layman's terms what's going on, guaranteed you might get them to re-think their policy. Companies hate bad PR, it hurts the revenue stream, and I know first hand that lost revenue HURTS.

Re:depends on the application of this

[notabaggins]

Alternatively, the broadband provider could actually improve its infrastructure so it supports advertised speeds for all users. What??? Spend money? But the CEO wants a new yacht!

How could you be so cruel???

Re:depends on the application of this

[mc6809e]

Alternatively, the broadband provider could actually improve its infrastructure so it supports advertised speeds for all users.

No they couldn't. Not without charging customers much more.

A T1 with a guaranteed 1.5Mbps, for example, is about $300/month. You really think the public are going to pay that much?

Re:depends on the application of this

[jthill]

Priority goes (roughly) VOIP, Video, SSH/RDC, Web, P2P. In that order.

But, see, that's not what these guys are doing. What they're doing is forcibly idling bandwidth.

Re:depends on the application of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets take you at your wird, that internet bandwidth is cheap. Then there are two other major costs, the customer's line to your network and the switching in your network. Now you also say that if a customer has paid for the line size by a portion the contract, there is only one major cost left, your network switching connecting ther paid for line to the cheap internet connection. Then the major decision is how much do you pay for dumb common carrier type switching versus smart packet shaping switching.

From my experience, dumb common carrier type switching is very cheap compared to smart packet shaping. You can easily get three to five times the packet switching capability with dumb versus smart for the same investment. The only real difference is the average and maximum latency between them. As you stated, most of the ways people use the overall connection are highly tolerant of latency so long as the flow is high and the error rates of what gets through is very small. That takes care of those that do home office, P2P, web surf, download, upload, email, etc.

The only ones who care is the interactive users and the streaming users. These were never really a part of the internet connection except by artifacts of the implementation of the early internet. These artifacts were that 99.999% of the packets got through error free and that the latency of a packet transit stayed relatively constant, ie the time for a given packet is nearly the same as the previous packets and successive ones. Now in that environment it was easy to use a small buffer and give the appearence of a dedicated unswitched connection suitable for real time audio, or later, video. It also helped gamers who needed fast low latency connections to play their multiplayer FPS games.

Now no ISP needed to guarantee low latency, just that it would allow x Kbps towards the customer and y Kbps from the customer and like most resources, reading was far more likely than writing. Only sources were the other way where there was mostly writing compared to reading. So later internet sold mostly on the basis of clients got asymmetric towards reading, vendors got symmetric or in few cases, reverse asymmetric paying far higher rates. Rates were fairly close to the amount of uploading going on plus a small constant for connection size. That way vendors subsidized the major costs of the network. This too is an artifact. One that you promote by charging more for "dedicated" connections than user "burst" connections.

Now these classic internet connections are well served by dumb common carrier network neutral packet switching. But like ethernet, they work well for the streaming users when actual usage was well under 50%. Above that packets had a higher likely hood of being lost and the effect goes exponential quickly above 90% usage. Still 99% of the packets went through so all the normal latency tolerant traffic saw little efficiency decline and throughput loss was not likely tpo be noticed except by keepers of that information. Latency sensitive traffic really sensed the difference. That 1% of packets that were lost required 10 times the latency due to the retransmission. Its that high because it takes time for it to be noticed, usually when the next packet shows up and then the retransmission request, its acknowledgement and the retransmission itself. By that time, 10 or more packets are received. Now on small buffered connections, the audio has a blank spot or a burst of noise and the video has a stutter or breakup. The gamers saw that as a point where the system stops responding to their input. Cheap applications used small numbers of large packets to move the traffic while better ones used lots of small packets. The former were greatly impacted when a retransmission occurs as a second of sound or a couple of seconds of video is just hash and it takes 2 seconds for most codecs to throw another key frame to correct the problem.

Now if all of your assertions were correct, you could solve the VOIP, video and gamers

Re:depends on the application of this

[Anonymous Coward]

"What happens is that packets get dropped and re-sent (as per TCP specs) and the result is additional LATENCY, not a drop in overall throughput."

When talking about a stream-based protocol, latency is the amount of time it takes for the first packet of the stream to go across the wire. Throughput is the rate at which those packets then continue to come. If you are dropping packets you are causing the TCP window size to decrease and also requiring the client to wait for the packets to time out before resending. You are therefore BOTH increasing latency AND decreasing throughput.

Re:depends on the application of this

[numbski]

Key words - stream based protocol. I'm talking TCP, not UDP. UDP protocols have issues, which I address separately.

Re:depends on the application of this

[Dachannien]

What happens is that packets get dropped and re-sent (as per TCP specs) and the result is additional LATENCY, not a drop in overall throughput.

Of course you're reducing your customers' overall throughput. That's the whole point of doing packet shaping.

Re:depends on the application of this

[Workaphobia]

> "We offer 10MBit symmetrical connection, but the contract states that we only guarantee 256k symmetrical dedicated. Anything above that is burst, which means that you have no right to saturate the connection full time more than 256k, but you're more than welcome to burst up to that for periods. To me this is fair."

I really, really, really wish service providers would make such a designation in the contract. But I guess that goes right next to the entire point you just made. Instead of giving us contractual bandwidth limitations, they tell us how to use the network and specifically forbid running any kind of server (including but not limited to a laundry list of protocol names), no matter how much or little of their network's resources are actually being used. That's the problem, they're not selling a technical solution that's application neutral, they're selling a service oriented to home users and they'll nickle and dime anything else. They're just slightly less horrendous than cellular companies, and that's just because they don't control anywhere near as much of the network.

Re:depends on the application of this

[AK Marc]

Lets take you at your wird, that internet bandwidth is cheap.

At the proper meet-me point, bandwidth is about $7000 or so for an OC3. That's $45 per person with 1Mbps connections and no oversubscriptions, or more likely $4.50 per person with 1550 people sharing it with higher line speed. 10-1 isn't out of line for an oversubscription rate. That's cheap. I could probably get it for $5000 at the Westin building in Seattle. However, for me, to get bandwidth to my serving area is expensive. I could get a 100 Mb port for $2000, and the DS-3 to get 45 Mbps to my serving area would cost me $55,000 per month. Right now, I'm paying $6000 per Mbps to get bandwidth to some of the more remote areas. My Internet costs are dirt cheap when I run dedicated lines to major cities. I could lay my own lines there for about $40,000,000 or pay the above rates to get the bandwidth from the POP to my serving area.

"The Internet" is cheap. Getting to one of those cheap places can be very very expensive.

oops

[wizardforce]

The packet shaping they talk about doesnt seem to have any concrete cut offs for when it is used, just a vague reference to "excessive bandwidth usage." [what exactly do they think is excessive?] what is going to end up happening is the broadband users that know enough about it will either leave or try to go around the packet shaping. in the latter case, if they got caught they would likely have their account trashed which would quickly lead to a lot of people knowing about it. seems like an awful efficient way for Time Warner to shoot themselves in the foot. Ready. Aim. Fire

Re:oops

[wizardforce]

Oh I see.. so if they screw over every smart customer they have and make them leave their bandidth requirements would decrease drastically thus allowing them to overbook their service like they wanted to in the first place. BRILLIANT!

Re:oops

[Anonymous Coward]

the only problem is those 10% probably have sway with their company and friends/family when they get asked to who to go with etc

Re:oops

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell is wrong with this mythical 10% that they wouldn't realize that their behavior is disruptive to the network and not knowing that their relatives would not have a problem with this type of packet shaping?

Sounds like some pretty scummy people of low character.

Re:oops

[budgenator]

They may have been aiming for their foot, but they may have hit their left testicle instead. It may surprise TW and Comcast that a few subscribers use the service almost exclusively for high bandwidth services, but significant number of their subscribers get the service primarily because they occasionally use a high bandwidth service. The case may be that the high users are the ISP's trend-setters, the ones that make have high-speed internet access "cool" enough to attract the profitable masses.

Re:oops

[pak9rabid]

I work at an ISP that implements bandwidth shaping on "excessive bandwidth usage" customers. Basically, it means if you're using so much bandwidth that it's causing problems (other customers complain, the ISP cannot shell into locations to get work done because someone's using too much bandwidth, etc) consistently, then they get capped or blocked. It doesn't really matter what they're doing. Granted we tend not to block people doing legitimate work, but we'll sure as hell put a cap on them so the service doesn't suck for everyone else. My advice, try to find an ISP who's AUP isn't worded in such a way that they can do whatever they want (yea, I know, easier said than done). With a little work and being in the right location, you might be able to find a small ISP with decent service that hasn't completely saturated it's network yet to where they have to put these clauses in their AUPs that complete rape you of the bandwidth you're paying for.

Conflict of Interest

[Detritus]

Oops, we broke your third-party VOIP service. Why not sign up for Time-Warner VOIP, which works much better?

I'm just waiting for the jerks to declare any use of IPSEC as a violation of their TOS.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[nurb432]

Some already state you cant do any 'commercial activity' with your lines unless you upgrade, so VPN back to the office could be techicnally a violation.

Someday unbreakable encryption will be banned by the Feds anyway.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[DigitAl56K]

Not only that, but perhaps more significantly TW is a media/content company. The moment that they start shaping traffic to Internet media sites of various kinds (e.g. online video), which is more likely due to higher bandwidth consumption, aren't they being anti-competitive?

Re:Conflict of Interest

[JPriest]

So during peak hours they throttle P2P, newsgroup binaries, and spyware to ensure things like VoIP have room. Big deal.

The alternative would be to add much more capacity to accommodate just a couple hours of the day and traffic shaping is cheaper. ISP's are already filtering something like 90% of all email because it's spam. The same technology being used for traffic shaping also gives the ability to suppress malicious traffic, so there is another layer of protection from all of the zombied PC's out there on the internet just packeting away.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[JPriest]

I think 'commercial activity' is more like using a residential account to connect your business or hosting an ecommerce from behind your cable modem. I really don't think TWC cares when you VPN to your work or telecommute through a residential account.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[nurb432]

While personally i agree, and interpret it the same way as you, they *could* interpret just the opposite if they wanted and if it suited their need. The rules are intentionally written vague enough so they have the advantage.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[JPriest]

I have worked tech support for an ISP in the past and I can understand why the agreement is basically "You will get a bill, we will try to provide a working service but promise nothing".

I remember talking to day traders that threatened to sue me for thousands of dollars of lost profits in the stock market over 1 or 2 hour outages. Our conversations went like this:
Them "I make more in one day of trading than you make in a month! I am going to sue you for the money I lost!"
Me "So get a backup in case your connection goes down"
Them "I shouldn't need one, you are my ISP!"
Me "We don't guarantee 100% uptime and you just told me you are losing thousands and backup dialup account would cost you about $10/mo. BTW, I see this is a residential account which in our agreement states is for entertainment use only."

We never billed any of these people for business use, but these terms of the agreement were necessary to protect from people like that.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[Lehk228]

they "could" but they won't. they don't even care if you run a business off your residential line.

it's a club to smack you with if you call tech support demanding 'compensation' for all the 'money you are losing due to this outage'

Re:Conflict of Interest

[dknj]

JPRES!

i want to use my voip during peak hours too, i get a better rate than what comcast charges me.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[QuoteMstr]

You're a fucking shill. Now, I'm ordinarily a little more civil than that, but I think it's warranted here. Why would any ordinary person so consistently defend the huge corporate conglomerate and its anti-consumer practices? What does the ordinary user gain from what TW is doing?

Time Warner has a legal, natural monopoly on internet access in many areas. In exchange for that privilege, it needs to serve the public interest. Just as the electric company is not allowed to suddenly increase rates 200% and only provide power during peak hours to people who pay an extra fee, cable modem companies should not be able to discriminate like this.

Just because you personally don't use newsgroups, P2P networks and so on does not mean that someday the kind of traffic you enjoy won't be throttled as well. It harms everybody. Comparing that traffic to spam is disingenuous to the point of fraud. Spam is sent uninvited; newsgroup traffic, on the other hand, is initiated by the customer doing exactly what it is that he signed up for.

Why the hell would you promote a company that limits your access to what you paid for, and gives you nothing in return, unless you were being paid to do it? Get the fuck out.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[mc6809e]

You're a fucking shill. Now, I'm ordinarily a little more civil than that, but I think it's warranted here. Why would any ordinary person so consistently defend the huge corporate conglomerate and its anti-consumer practices? What does the ordinary user gain from what TW is doing?

The ordinary user sees an increase in interactivity and lower latency.

Time Warner has a legal, natural monopoly on internet access in many areas. In exchange for that privilege, it needs to serve the public interest.

I guess "the public interest" really just means your interest, right?

The 10% of the public that create P2P traffic, torrents, etc, crowd out all kinds of other traffic and ruin the online experience for the other 90% of the people that just want simple web browsing. Aren't they "the public", too?

Re:Conflict of Interest

[DigiShaman]

Every week, I've been renting movies from MovieLink.com. It's always been blistering fast. Last Thursday however, it was slow as hell. It was downloading less than 1 Mbit/s and not the full 4.5 I've been used too.

It could have been a problem with MovieLink's connection, but I'll try it again next week.

It does make me wonder...

Re:Conflict of Interest

[JPriest]

fucking shill? defend the huge corporate conglomerate?

I already said in a post under this same story I can identify with ISP's because I worked for one. They deployed packet shaping long before TWC did. As mc6809e already pointed out, most traffic comes from only a few users. I am not saying P2P is bad, just that limiting it during peak hours allows for better QoS for VoIP, streaming vid etc.

I was responding to Detritus who implied the technology would be used to crush 3rd party VoIP, when the reality is just the opposite.

The comment about spam was not meant to imply file traders and spammers are one in the same, but there is crap like worms, spyware, DDoS networks of zombied PC's etc. that can also be mitigated through the same devices that are packet shaping.

Sue them for false advertising?

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAL, but I think that it would be false to advertise this as "internet access" now. Maybe something like "bastardized crippled internet access" or "Pull the rug out from under our customers internet" but not "internet". Heres hoping theres a class action lawsuit in it.

Heh.

[dosius]

Good thing I didn't switch to Road Runner when they tried to pressure me into doing so. I'm just fine with my slightly-less-downlink-than-RR-but-twice-the-uplin k Verizon business DSL connection. (Until they evil me out just as well, in which case I'm fucked x.x)

-uso.

Re:Heh.

[Ash Vince]

On a business connection you should be fairly safe.

Where I work we have a similar business connection which used to be 24Meg / 1Meg. Part of my job involves uploading content to our offsite servers. This would usually involve files a few Gb in size. After we would regularly leave work at 5pm and leave it uploading through their busiest evening period they got back to use to ask if we wanted to upgrade our upstream speed at the expense of downstream. We did and now we have 2 or 3 Meg depending on how busy they are. The downstream speed is pretty irrelevant to us as we rarely use it to its full capacity.

Most business ISP's expect this. Certainly here in britain a business account usually comes with 20:1 contention ratio instead of 50:1 which most home users get. A business is also expected to be sharing a single DSL line amongst an entire office so they expect higher levels of constant usage.

Re:Heh.

[Kjella]

Certainly here in britain a business account usually comes with 20:1 contention ratio instead of 50:1 which most home users get

What the f.... kind of ratio is that? Here's the two biggest providers in Norway, ranging from 2.5:1 (2500/1000 at NGT) to 23:1 (16000/700 at Telenor) with most in the 5:1-10:1 range. 50:1 would be completely ridiculous and useless for anything but web browsing! And yes, they prerty much deliver that too.

Telenor:
Mini 1500/300 kbps
Basis 2500/350 kbps
Pluss 4000/400 kbps
Ekstra 6000/500 kbps
Max 16000/700 kbps
 
NextGenTel:
ADSL 1800: 1800/350
ADSL 2500: 2500/500
ADSL 6500: 6500/750
ADSL Mega 2500: 2500/1000
ADSL Mega 3000: 3000/1000
ADSL Mega 3500: 3500/1000
ADSL Mega 4000: 4000/1000
ADSL Mega 4500: 4500/1000
ADSL Mega 5000: 5000/1000
ADSL Mega 20000: 20000/1000
Bredbånd Langdistanse: 1800/350

Re:Heh.

[palmersperry]

Contention ratio isn't the ratio of downstream/upstream bandwidth. It's the ratio of how 'oversold' the bandwidth is, thus the worst case scenario for 50:1 is that you'll be sharing your 2Mb (or whatever) bandwidth with 49 over users.

Re:Heh.

[palmersperry]

Contention ratio isn't the ratio of downstream:upstream bandwidth. It's the ratio of how 'oversold' the bandwidth is, with 2Mb 50:1 ADSL you're sharing your 2Mbs with 49 other users (who are, hopefully, not all trying to use it at once).

Re:Heh.

[Ash Vince]

You seem to be a little confused. The contention ratio of a broadband account is how many times thet sell the same bandwidth. So if you buy a 5000/1000 account, they sell the same 5000 to 50 (or 20) other people on the basis that you wont all try and use it at the same time.

Here is a link describing this better than I:

http://www.getonlinebroadband.com/faqs/faq02.html

Re:Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

or worse, you live in a dualopoly area, where verizon tells me literally to go fuck myself (their tech support did this to me! I'm not kidding either. I asked about dsl because we were just eligible, and when we ordered it over the phone, the guy sounded very disinterested with helping us, then claimed after telling us we were eligible, that we could no longer get it, I asked why, and he said: "Sir, I dont care. okay? it's not like it matters anyway, stick with dialup and go fuck yourself." *hang up* and suddenly our eligibility went away, we're also ineligible for fios, and calling customer support to get this resolved is hopeless. they will continue blowing us off.) and then you have a cable monopoly like this. hell almost ALL of southern california is time warner, adelphia and comcast customers got switched over.

my only other options are using neighbors' open connections and dialup.

Re:Heh.

[dosius]

Ouch. And Verizon and TW *are* my only options, devil you do know is better than the devil you don't so I stuck with VZ when I moved back in November. I pay a bit for my package, they KNOW I run servers on my connection, hell I told them outright I was doing it, and I paid for a connection which was best designed *for* that purpose, that said right on it that that was its purpose.

-uso.

A cunning plan...

[sam0ht]

TW are probably HOPING to lose 10% of their customers... the 10% who use 90% of the bandwidth. By biasing their customer base towards those who just want to read their email and check CNN online, they can carry on collecting the fees and not bother with the costs of providing greater bandwidth.

Re:A cunning plan...

[Kaitnieks]

Unfortunately these 10% are also usually the loudest ones and they definitely won't recommend TW to their friends.

Re:A cunning plan...

[etymxris]

Sounds good from a business perspective, except those heavy downloaders are often "tech experts" for their friends and family. And when those friends and family try to get advice from the tech experts, they won't be recommended broadband that does traffic shaping. Word of mouth can really make or break a business, and when flip the bird to 10% of your customers, you'll probably end up regretting it.

Re:A cunning plan...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Word of mouth can really make or break a business, and when flip the bird to 10% of your customers, you'll probably end up regretting it. Unless of course your business is a monopoly, or a duopoly where both 'competitors' treat their customers equally poorly. Then you can flip the bird to 100% of your customers and still run a bloated, inefficient business.

PS - once traffic shaping has been turned on, look for Time Warner to start soliciting companies like Google/youtube to 'sponsor' speed zones on TW's network.

Re:A cunning plan...

[revengebomber]

Great analysis, except for one thing. With sites like YouTube, and widespread use of Gnutella, that's not 10% but around 50%.

I'm making numbers up, but from what I've seen everyone at the local high school uses youtube, downloads songs off limewire/bearshare, and a lot of them even know about bittorent.

And actually, this will just make matters worse - uTorrent (and probably other BT clients) supports protocol encryption to avoid this, and BT users draw way more bandwidth than other P2P services.

Re:A cunning plan...

[bizzyjb]

Ok give me a break man, do you work for Comcast or something? The fact of the matter is, if cable wasn't shared bandwidth this wouldn't be an issue. I've never had any speed problems on DSL, never, and that's because it's guaranteed bandwidth. If I pay for 3mbps and they can't provide it then I switch to a lower service that they CAN provide. But, given good phone lines and optimal distance I get my 3mbps, rain, snow, sun...wtfever.

The fact of the matter is, email users should be paying for the lowest package ($15/month?) and the people that want the speed, pay for the bigger packages. Imagine Verizon FIOS service, is some mangler who only checks email going to pay for 15mbps/2mbps? If they do then they're wasting their money anyway. No, if I pay for a certain bandwidth, I should get that whether I'm playing a game, talking on the phone, downloading porn, browsing the web or checking my damn email.

Greedy has nothing to do with it...it's about paying for a service and getting that service. Would you pay $70 for unlimited minutes on your cell phone only to have them say "yeah....we're gonna limit you to 1000 because you're using too many", come on...

Besides that, the bottom line is this: The power users don't use an infinite amount of bandwidth, in actuality we use as much as we are allowed to...i.e. what we're paying for. The package I pay for is, 3mbps. That means if they want to provide 3mbps to me, they need to set aside that much bandwidth and that's how much I get...maximum. So, like someone else said...if they aren't comfortable providing 3mbps to me and all the other customers that are paying for it, they shouldn't even offer it...right? RIGHT.

Re:A cunning plan...

[DigitAl56K]

Oh come on now,

If this is the reason that TW want to lose these customers then they should not be promoting a high-speed service and hoping that the majority of users will only use low bandwidth applications. I don't use a lot of always on high-bandwidth apps, but on the occasions I do I expect the experience I'm paying $50/month for.

If there is some kind of monthly "bandwidth cap" after which point your service will be degraded that is one thing. To simply degrade the service for anyone using certain types of applications and services is completely unacceptable, and I hope that someone files a class action over it. To make matters worse, assuming TFA shows the pertinent information, it is not even clear to current subscribers or prospective customers which exact services and/or sites may have degraded performance.

Re:A cunning plan...

[zotz]

Free tech help only to those who don't use company X. If you use them, you can pay me for help so I at least can better afford not to use them.

???

all the best,

drew

Re:A cunning plan...

[Hal_Porter]

Ok give me a break man, do you work for Comcast or something?

No, I was just annoyed by the slanted coverage.

Greedy has nothing to do with it...it's about paying for a service and getting that service. Would you pay $70 for unlimited minutes on your cell phone only to have them say "yeah....we're gonna limit you to 1000 because you're using too many", come on...

As I said, some things can be unlimited like the salad bar. If the ratio of the resources used by the high consuming users to the low consuming users is low then it doesn't matter. If it's very high and the high consuming users are a small minority then it makes sense to add limits that only affect them.

E.g. if 90% of the minutes on a cell phone network were used by 10% of the users, they'd start to limit too. And it is greed too. Gluttony is a sin for a reason.

The power users don't use an infinite amount of bandwidth, in actuality we use as much as we are allowed to...i.e. what we're paying for. The package I pay for is, 3mbps. That means if they want to provide 3mbps to me, they need to set aside that much bandwidth and that's how much I get...maximum.

So they need 3mpbs * (number of users) total bandwidth to the outside world. And at any point in the network they need to guarantee that there is enough bandwidth for all users to max out their connection?

I think you could buy a service like that but it would cost a lot more than one where they assume that people don't use anywhere near 100% of peak bandwidth on average. T1 lines for example are designed to be maxed out as far as I know. But consumer stuff isn't, hence the lower costs and all the jargon about contention and usage ratios. They basically bet on the fact that people will only use a small percentage of the bandwidth they buy. For the 90% case that's true and for the 10% case it isn't.

So, like someone else said...if they aren't comfortable providing 3mbps to me and all the other customers that are paying for it, they shouldn't even offer it...right? RIGHT.

If you made an attempt to see it from their point of view, you'd be a lot less angry. And you'd also know that they probably don't want people maxing out their consumer service 24/7. You can rant and rave on the internet as much as you want, it doesn't change the economics of a situation.

Which is this. Their 3mbps service makes a profit for 90% of users but without traffic shaping it makes a loss for the greedy 10%. When they put in traffic shaping they probably budgetted on losing a minority of that 10%. The rest of them will just rant about it until they find something more important to complain about. But either way it solves the problem of a greedy minority. And sooner or later their competitors will make the same decision too.

Re:A cunning plan...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gluttony is a sin for a reason.

Because it says so in a book?

If you don't want your customers to eat an infinite amount of salad at that 'all-you-can-eat' salad bar of yours, don't offer that service. Just sell 'All you can eat, up to a maximum of 50 pounds of salad.'. That way you can still make 90% of your customers happy, and you don't have to lie about 10% of your users.

Re:A cunning plan...

[DigitAl56K]

PS - once traffic shaping has been turned on, look for Time Warner to start soliciting companies like Google/youtube to 'sponsor' speed zones on TW's network.

If that happens hopefully Google will be smart enough to turn around and sue Time Warner for effectively charging a ransom for a service which is not artificially degraded. In fact, even if Time Warner does not do this, I hope that their traffic shaping is sufficiently targeted against certain well-funded sites or services who could sue for damages due to degraded customer experience.

It would be perfect if TW actually restricted bandwidth to any online video/media service because IMO (IANAL) this would be directly anti-competitive behavior from Time Warner.

Re:A cunning plan...

[Soruk]

I wouldn't be surprised if Windows Update is the cause of a lot of traffic spikes. I can almost see that getting traffic-shaped into a 14k4 modem bandwidth. Shared amongst all their subscribers....

Re:A cunning plan...

[Hal_Porter]

If you don't want your customers to eat an infinite amount of salad at that 'all-you-can-eat' salad bar of yours, don't offer that service. Just sell 'All you can eat, up to a maximum of 50 pounds of salad.'. That way you can still make 90% of your customers happy, and you don't have to lie about 10% of your users.

That's what ISPs are doing as far as I can tell. TW seem to be capping high bandwidth applications, so Torrents and NNTP downloads are slower. I'm not sure if the cap kicks in after you have downloaded some threshold.

Of course most of the bandwidth used by high bandwidth users is actually used to to download pirated stuff too, and the ISPs might get forced by the RIAA/MPAA to block that, but that's a separate issue.

Re:A cunning plan...

[funfail]

Why don't they (TW) have an agreement with MS and mirror the Windows Update site (and tweak their DNS to redirect update requests to their own servers)? I have a dedicated Linux server and they mirror all the RHEL repositories, hence no bandwidth is used for updates.

Re:A cunning plan...

[TheRaven64]

The fact of the matter is, if cable wasn't shared bandwidth this wouldn't be an issue. I've never had any speed problems on DSL, never, and that's because it's guaranteed bandwidth. If you are talking consumer DSL, then you are wrong; you may have dedicated bandwidth for the very last hop, but you don't past the DSLAM. UK DSL ISPs used to advertise a contention ratio, with between 20:1 and 50:1 being common for consumer ADSL, but they've stopped recently.

Cable is shared bandwidth... kind of. The last hop of a cable network is a bus network, that's true. However, the speed of the bus is faster that the speed of the individual connections. I'm not sure what the speed is now, but before the last upgrade my ISP's cable was rated to 34Mb/s and they provided 4Mb/s to each customer. They would re-segment their network if enough people were using a particular bus that they were unable to deliver the bandwidth by a margin that people were likely to notice (they also jigged things around a bit to try to put people who used the network most at different times on the same segment).

These days, the technology used to deliver your broadband has much less of an impact on the bandwidth you get than your SLA. If you're using a consumer-grade connection, then you're likely to get a pretty poor SLA on any technology (I've never had any problems saturating my advertised bandwidth, but this is not guaranteed).

Re:A cunning plan...

[dfghjk]

They don't need a 50 pound limit, all they need is small plates. This is exactly how they deal with this problem. Packet shaping isn't all that different.

You've got to be really juvenile to not understand this. If you want a line with full bandwidth 24/7, go out and buy a T3. That's what they have to provide upstream in order to deliver what you expect with your cheap cable line after all.

Re:A cunning plan...

[Wildclaw]

I have no problem with bandwidth shaping, which makes sure that everyone gets their fair share of the cake (bandwidth). I do however have a big problem with packet shaping. Packet shaping gives more of the cake to those who use "approved protocols", or talk with "approved services".

Of course someone will undoubtably think to mention VoiP to which I will pre-emptivly respond client QoS-shaping. It is a simple solution that has existed for ages and doesn't involve the ISP deciding what is good and bad content.

Re:A cunning plan...

[bizzyjb]

No one says we're using the bandwidth 24/7, but when I want to use it, it should be there. If an ISP wants to prevent users from using 100% of their bandwidth, then they need to offer less bandwidth per user and reflect the cost accordingly. I mean for god's sake, does anyone here really have the illusion that these companies are losing money? Look at how much they save on customer support (or rather the lack of it). The fact of the matter is consumers are the ones that drive the economy and companies need to respect us.

Just because they decide we are using too much bandwidth it's completely immoral for them to just up and say "yeah, we're going to limit certain traffic because you're using too much bandwidth". That is total bullshit. Yeah, if I wanted T1 speed I could pay for it, but is it reasonable for me to spend $600/month on download speeds half of what I get now? I don't download 24/7, nor do I plan to...but yeah, if I decide I need to download 5 Linux ISOs and it maxs my bandwidth for 6 hours, that's my choice - because I'm paying for the Internet.

"Juvenile", why is it so hard for you to understand that I should get what I pay for. If they offer a service, and I pay for that service, I want to get that service...is that wrong? Am I juvenile for paying for something and wishing to get what I'm paying for?

Re:A cunning plan...

[bizzyjb]

First off let me just say that your bible has no place in this conversation, I don't know why you would even bring up "sins". Do you know anything about corporations? They probably commit several of YOUR sins on a daily basis, so why are you defending them? I'm a moral human being, I don't take what I don't pay for, I don't hurt anyone that doesn't have it coming, and I enjoy everything in moderation (i.e. I am not a glutton).

The service I pay for is what they offered me, for them to completely switch gears now and say "well, we know we offered that to you, but now we're going to limit it", is only a ploy so that they can then offer a new service that is the same speed, or maybe faster, for more money. The reality is that they make money hand over fist, and this is just going to be another way to make more.

In fact, it sounds a lot like the start of big corporations taking advantage of the new LACK of net neutrality. I suppose you think that net neutrality is BS too huh?

Whatever you say, it makes no difference...if I max out the service level that they give me, that is my right that I pay for. Economics I understand, and that is what drives 99% of companies, and that obviously makes sense. But their is a fine balance that needs to be met. I've already given up my right to good customer support with my Internet service, doesn't that save them tons of money? I don't have much of an upload rate, so doesn't that save them some money? I mean hell, if I want to talk to a human being I have to call someone in another country, I can't just walk into my local Verizon office and say "hey Chuck, how you doin' man, how are the wife and kids?"...nah, I have to talk to "Charles" who is reading from a script in a thick accent that I can't understand and likely not get my problems ever fixed.

I don't care what you say, the reason they have different levels of service is to provide different people with different speeds at different costs, obviously. If they want me to pay more money for better service, that's fine...give me good tech support, more bandwidth and I'll gladly pay the extra cash. Consumers get PUNISHED on a daily basis by companies, and the reality is that WE are the ones that make THEM rich...not the other way around. They should fucking RESPECT us and not attempt to make even MORE money off of us because we are using the service the way they represented we could.

Re:A cunning plan...

[Billly Gates]

I assumed because of net neutrality that they can legally do this now and Google has to suck it up.

Re:A cunning plan...

[fredklein]

All you can eat, up to a maximum of 50 pounds of salad.'.
That's what ISPs are doing as far as I can tell.

Um, No.

ISPs who offer "unlimited" service and them cap you if you use 'too much' outright REFUSE to set a limit on how much is too much. It's more like "All you can eat, up to whatever we think is reasonable (but we won't tell you what that is)."

Re:A cunning plan...

[AmiMoJo]

This sort of thing will ultimately fail, because even the average user is now starting to use a lot of bandwidth.

IPTV services like Joost are just taking off, as are legal TV/movie download services like BitTorrent. I imagine YouTube will need to increase the quality of their videos to compete in the near future too. Slingboxes are starting to become more popular. People email video taken on their phone already, and quality is getting better. HD movie trailers. HD porn sites.

The Average Joe is starting to want serious bandwidth, all at peek times. It's no longer about the 10%.

Re:A cunning plan...

[Hal_Porter]

Because it says so in a book?

Not at all. I'm no Christian but it seems like gluttony is a sin because it's a lack of self control. I used to worry about things like this being sins because they don't directly harm other people and there is certainly an element of self righteousness about criticising them. And I still think that unlike other sins which do directly harm others they should not be criminalized. But then again, Christians use sin in a different way from the secular golden rule violations that I think laws should be based on. It's more like "doing these things will make you a bad person". Now the secular left will bitch and moan about how the church is full of hypocrites about this and they'd be right,but hypocrisy doesn't change the fact that it is selfish and therfore bad to be a glutton. And pointing out hypocrisy as a way to invalidate arguments is an example of the tu quoque fallacy.

In fact I think you can argue that hogging what is essentially a shared and limited resource does harm other people in this case. But all that is a bit abstract. I think if you look at the business case and the effect it had on other users, you can see the reason for the cap. If you read through a few pages of the link you can see that Time Warner essentially sells a cheap connection based on low average usage. If people max out their connections, if affects the other users in their neighbourhood which is why the cap is in place.

Now don't get me wrong I hate telcos and organized religion as much as the next geek and have maxed out a few connections in my time, but the way this issue is being covered here is incredibly obnoxious. If you spend your whole life downloading pirated stuff as fast as you can, don't be surprised if the RIAA/MPAA, the telcos and the other telco users around you start to complain and/or plot to stop you.

I used the metaphor of the salad bar and the word sin for a reason. Most people here would be critical of people that insist they are in the right when they eat so much at the salad bar that other diners have no salad, but for some reason believe that they have a right to do the online equivalent.

Re:A cunning plan...

[Faylone]

The twisted version of network neutrality where black is white and up is down, the one that was advertised an attempt to keep real network neutrality from happening.

Re:A cunning plan...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Microsoft uses akamai for caching and akamai probably pays AT&T for the bandwidth. Why offer something for free that you can charge sweet, sweet money for ?

Re:A cunning plan...

[funfail]

I had no idea that Windows Update used Akamai. If AT&T hosts some Akamai servers, updates are already mirrored inside the network.

Re:A cunning plan...

[dfghjk]

What does an ISP making or losing money have to do with it? Do you feel they owe you something because they are profitable?

There's a vast difference between full speed for one packet and full saturation 24/7, and your attempt to color the argument in your favor doesn't fly. You aren't getting throttled back on each and every packet you use. If you were, you really would be getting a slower service.

Consumer services do not promise sustained rates equal to peak rates. That's what business services do. You ARE getting what you pay for, you just refuse to admit it.

Re:A cunning plan...

[bizzyjb]

Oh well since you put it that way I completely see your point of view and now totally agree with you. Thank you so much!

VOIP is high bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is voice a high-bandwidth application? A telephone call only uses 56kbps (that's bits per second), and that's without good compression. I can't imagine how a call made with a good codec could be considered enough of a problem to be throttled.

dom

Re:VOIP is high bandwidth?

[Loconut1389]

I've often had the upstream on VOIP calls from my Cisco 7960 take up 30kb/s- maybe I've got a bad codec setup somewhere, but I found that if I did much of anything, I'd get jitter and dropouts.

Re:VOIP is high bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Change codecs to something like G729 or GSM

Re:VOIP is high bandwidth?

[Tim C]

Well, the OP did say they take up 56kbps; getting that down to 30kbps is roughly a factor of 2 compression which isn't that bad.

In other words, 30kbps doesn't sound too excessive to me (although I'm not a networking or VoIP specialist). Given that even my crappy ADSL over a poor phone line manages 440kbps upstream, I really don't see that as a problem. In fact, even if it wasn't compressed at all, my connection should theoretically be able to handle at least 6 simultaneous connections (allowing for overhead).

You'd packet shape to reduce the impact of other apps on VoIP, not to reduce the impact of VoIP on the network. Of course, you might packet shape to reduce the impact of VoIP on your profits...

Re:VOIP is high bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

A telephone call only uses 56kbps (that's bits per second)

I thought it was 64kbps, which is how ISDN managed that speed ove the POTS network, and the extra 8kbps was due to a limitation with modems.

Re:VOIP is high bandwidth?

[evanbd]

That should be obvious. TWC sells VOIP phone service last I checked; of course they'll "shape" other VOIP traffic.

Re:VOIP is high bandwidth?

[fnord_uk]

An ISDN B-channel is 64kb/s, with 8-bit samples at 8kHz.

Re:VOIP is high bandwidth?

[Lehk228]

i doubt TW will interfere with people's warezing too much, at least here in NY Verizon is much cheaper with DSL and FIOS but Verizon is more agressive about filtering and throttling. i suspect this is meant to ensure web, voip, and email get priority over warez and porn-- not to cut off the warez and porn.

Re:VOIP is high bandwidth?

[NormalVisual]

VoIP isn't terribly bandwidth-hungry (about 80K or so per sec/channel for G.711 and much less for other codecs), but it's extremely sensitive to latency and packet jitter, and that's where the problems arise.

Re:VOIP is high bandwidth?

[Loconut1389]

correction that was supposed to be in KBytes/second, not kilobits/second. With mediacom before their somewhat recent upgrade, that was my entire pipe, now i've got closer to 60KB/s.

You should not be surprised or indignant

[bhima]

This is the problem with these 'unlimited' plans, there no way all users can consume the peak bandwidth advertised and we all know it. Many 'enthusiast' users signed up for such plans thinking their providers were fools for offering such plans. Well who's the fool? The guy that oversells a product by an order of magnitude or the guy that bought into it knowing that it was?

In my opinion un-metered plans should not be offered at all, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You pay for an upload/download capability, then pay for brackets of monthly bandwidth, and you should get a break on packets transfered during off-peak hours.

Do we really want or need government regulation of ISP capacity marketing? If that's the case I guess the free market economy doesn't work as well a some folks think.

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's not just a question of marketing unlimited. I think that it's a question of reining in the 24/7 movie downloaders that make service slow for everone in the neighborhood, especially around dinnertime as the article states.

If enough people are really upset about this, they need to get together and push for fiber into every home.

We should be doing this anyway.

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[revengebomber]

Do we really want or need government regulation of ISP capacity marketing? If that's the case I guess the free market economy doesn't work as well a some folks think. If I buy "pork", I want it to be "pork". If I buy "10mbps down / 1mbps up internet access", I want it to be "10mbps down / 1mbps up internet access".

If I can't go out on whatever protocol I want and get that speed between me, then my ISP, then the outside world (or the first step thereof)... someone's lying.

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[l3v1]

In my opinion un-metered plans should not be offered at all, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Hey, please send in your resume to one of these companies, you're their dream employee. Other than that, when you've paid for it, it's not free anymore, even if the meaning of "free" is fairly volatile these days.

You pay for an upload/download capability
I do.
then pay for brackets of monthly bandwidth
No, I don't. For one, I would never jump into a capped contract (thankfully we have many options). Then, my off peak hours are not others' off peak hours. I want to use my connection whenever I want for however long I want and for however much data I want. So far, my provider has kept offering such a plan, for 5 years now, with increasing bandwidth.

You want to get a capped connection ? I don't think there's a problem, we can probably find fairly many ISPs that you'd be happy with.

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[zotz]

"In my opinion un-metered plans should not be offered at all, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You pay for an upload/download capability, then pay for brackets of monthly bandwidth, and you should get a break on packets transfered during off-peak hours."

No thanks.

Here is something I would buy...

Flat rate. Guaranteed X up / Y down (preferably X = Y) with ability to go up to a.X up and b.Y down when the network loading can handle it. (a and b are greater than 1!)

Over selling is cool down at the home level, just sell and manage it honestly.

Don't give me this per byte game though. And I dont want to pay by the word for my phone calls either.

all the best,

drew

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[Anonymous Coward]

get that speed between me, then my ISP, then the outside world (or the first step thereof)

That's not how it works. The advertised bandwidth is always the local link bandwidth, the first hop of your view of the Internet. Sometimes even that is a statistical approximation (cable is a shared medium). The problem is something else: Traffic shaping necessarily puts some packets before others, which implies a valuation. That is none of the ISPs business. If the uplink is saturated, it is OK for the ISP to say that you can't get the same speed to other networks as you get on your local link, because other people want their share of the bandwidth too. That's just how the network of networks is constructed. It is not OK for the ISP to say that your favorite application doesn't get the same bandwidth through the uplink as your neighbor's favorite application because the ISP deems your application less worthy. It is not OK for the ISP to say that your connections get less bandwidth through the same external link because they are with less worthy communication partners than your neighbor's.

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sorry -- here in Spain we have had unmetered plans for years and nobody complained.

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's the case I guess the free market economy doesn't work as well a some folks think.

The fact is, the free market and capitalism simply do not mix. A true free market denies profits, capitalism thrives on profits gained by hook or by crook.

All of the regulations, patents, and so on point straight to that fact: capitalism cannot live without something banning people from infringing on profits.

So now what do we have? Companies advertising their products in ways that are fraudulent(*,++, not valid in CA, MO, TX, or where otherwise prohibited by law, see fine print shown only in a single half frame, interlaced) in order to profit off of incomplete work. Companies refusing to make capital investments in infrastructure because for $0 outlay they can make more cash with what they have, and it's all profit (this goes beyond DSL, take a look at gasoline prices. Sure there's no "gouging", after all, there really is a shortage of gasoline production, but the massive profits being made aren't going in to building new refineries, so for $0 capital outlay, the companies get to enjoy rising profits. I'm sure someone will jump in here and tell me all about how it's so hard to build a refinery that will meet government standards of not blowing up and leaking all over the place, given BP Amaco's recent performances, I might be inclined to agree.)

Capitalism's days are numbered. Faced with market choices, it seems that it is increasingly choosing to manufacture scarcity instead of product. I'm not sure what will replace it, but that day is approaching.

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[Anonymous Coward]

This is absolutely the type of attitude we want to avoid. I for one, do not want to pay a per anything charge. I want a flat rate, if you want to a per/ charge fine let them offer a cheeper connection to you at with that kind of contract, but do not force the rest of us to follow suit. I am not into downloading massive amounts of porn, or pirated movies, but when i want to download some iso, or stream some media, I do not want to get charged extra, nor do i want to be capped. If the network is overloaded fine, do what you must to provide service to everyone, but if the bandwidth is there, let me use it. It is that simple. Now if the network becomes constantly saturated with, and can no longer provide the bandwidth sold anymore, then it is time to upgrade their networks. In other words it is simple, i do not expect the bandwidth 100% of the time, but i do expect it at least 90% of the time, and since i only use it maybe 10% of the time, I do not think that is to much to ask for. I refuse to abide by protocol bans either, I run a mail server, and a dns server (With permission from my ISP) I pay for it too, which is fine by me. I pay twice the amount 90% of you probably pay for your 10 meg connections, and I only get 1.5, but it is not hampered by limitations, so I am fine with that. Heres the msg for you, I do not mind paying extra (within reason) for unencumbered service, if 95% of your customer base wants to pay 30$or 40$ a month for a service that is capped, limited, and restricted on what you do with it. Fine, i have no problem with it, I will be happy to pay extra for the premium service that is not capped, not restricted on what i can do with it. But you better offer that service to me, and not force me to take the other option. Easy enough, then 100% of your customer base is happy and if you can not provide service to me then you have more problems than capping can solve. Hell my systems even properly filter out any virus traffic, potential hijacked systems, or any unauthorized P2P coming out of my network. In other words, I am a good net citizen. Don't punish me for the morons out their.

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[bhima]

You are exactly the whiny fool I was referring to.

You're promoting (and probably signed up for) a falsely unlimited contract. Promoting such a mutually dishonest contract encourages the ISP to do traffic shaping. I do not want my ISP to care enough about my data to know enough to shape it. I don't want them to short my VOIP data because they've got their own VOIP service. I don't want them short my Video traffic because they have their own Video on Demand. And I don't want them to block data that is not to their liking... I want to decide what what bandwidth I want and when I want it... and entering into a *mutually honest* contract with an ISP is the way to do this.

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[bhima]

Unless all of the websites you visit are within your local calling area your comparison is invalid... or you use your cell only on weekend nights...

I don't need equal up and down transfer speeds, nor do most people. I want a low latency / high speed connection and I'm willing to schedule my large downloads to off peak hours.

Over selling is not cool, in fact it's annoying as hell. I think the very existence of unlimited contracts demonstrates the vast majority of ISP are not to be trusted to sell or manage bandwidth honestly.

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[zotz]

Over selling with proper bandwidth management is cool.

But, the example I gave was one of not over selling. You will notice that I said I would be willing to pay for guaranteed X up / Y down (preferably X = Y). I can live with Y greater than X. So far no overselling.

With ability to go up to a.X up and b.Y down when the network loading can handle it. (a and b are greater than 1!)

And here we have the overselling.

And a and b can be quite a bit greater than 1. Statistics will allow for overselling. If properly managed, customers benefit from it.

I don't have a cell phone. I don't want to pay by the minute for incoming calls. Not at the rates the monopoly down here likes to charge. I don't even want to pay by the minute for outgoing calls for that matter.

But, I said I don't want to pay by the word for my phone calls. I don't want to pay by the byte for my net connections either.

Build the infrastructure to handle what you sell plus some more.

However, I am interested in your opinion. If we pay by the byte, where up the chain of interconnections should this end?

all the best,

drew

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[NormalVisual]

I think what the parent poster was trying to say is that if an ISP has no intention of offering a truly unmetered service, then they shouldn't advertise it as such - not that they shouldn't make a real one available in their offerings. The problem isn't that the offered services are metered or un-metered, it's that what's being sold isn't what's being delivered to the customer, and the customer has no way of knowing exactly what it is he's bought. The major ISPs won't even divulge their true usage limits, which makes it impossible for the customer to make fair comparisons between providers.

I agree with the parent poster that unmetered plans shouldn't be offered, since the ISPs have absolutely no intention of providing unmetered service. In the absence of an unmetered service, customers should be allowed to choose a plan that most closely meets their needs. I can choose and pay for an appropriate amount of bandwidth for my server at the colo, why not for my home?

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[Anonymous Coward]

So in your book vendors can commit FRAUD at any time they damn well please. Sorry, that just doesn't cut it.

The problem is not the incremental cost of transmitting another byte across the network, its the capacity of the network. And that is due to the high initial costs. The operating costs are so much lower than the capital costs, that most of the charges to customers are payments for already incurred capital costs. And most of those costs are for the switching equipment. Dumb common carrier packet switchers are cheap. You can get 3-5 times the packet throughput with dumb switchers than packet shaping smart switchers. So sellers just sold what their switchers could handle to users. Knowing that over time, they could upgrade what the customers got for their dollar and/or reduce prices getting more users and still make a reasonable amount of profits. Their reliability was good because the ISP never sold all of true capacity for just in case emergencies. Users also didn't push their usages. They didn't because a network with 10% spare capacity was far more reliable and has low packet rejection and error rates. 50% spare also looked like a low latency virtual circuit to applications (easier to code and maintain).

The trouble is that many unscruplous saw a cash cow in all that spare dumb switching capacity. Thay could sell it to others and make 100% profit on it. So long as no large group noticed, they could get away with it. But they live on borrowed time. Sooner or later, a large group would attempt to pare that capacity back to save money (bad economic times), and use nearly 100% of what they bought instead of upgrading as they used to do. All of a sudden they notice that packets were rejected at high rates and/or error rates went through the roof. Either way they complain. And if it goes on long enough, they will compare notes and either sue them or leave for others in mass. And publically making them out to be the crooks that they are.

All your complaining about is that you got caught red handed. You sold 8/8 connections as 1000/1000 ones. They could get 256/256 for $10/mo, 1500/256 connnections for $17/mo and 6000/768 for $39/mo from those vendors in the first case. You would claim fraud and breach of contract if your internet access provider sold you 100/100Mbps symmetric and only delivered 800/800Kbps. Your customers should expect no less of you.

In that case....

[DeltaQH]

"The company is already warning users that attempts to circumvent these measures is a violation of their Terms of Service."
In that case, just terminate the service. ;-)

Their experience with AOL is showing

[ColeonyxOnline]

Time Warner Cable is showing just how much they learned from AOL during the AOL/Timer Warner days.

"flat rate" makes littl sense for broadband speeds

[nanosquid]

Flat rate makes sense when available capacity is so high compared to common usage that accounting for usage is more expensive than simply letting everybody just use the service at a fixed fee. That's true for voice, dial-up, and maybe ISDN speeds.

For broadband, flat rates don't make any sense yet. What you get is either volume-capped flat rates, traffic shaping, or some kind of nebulous enforcement. Since those tend to be not very transparent to customers and hard to compare between providers, those kinds of models are probably bad for users.

ISPs should find a simple pricing model for broadband, like charging a few bucks per gigabyte of volume, plus some base fee (possibly with different rates for peak/off-peak usage). Based on that, people could more reasonably compare what they're actually getting for their money.

Of course, ISPs prefer a confusopoly, and users foolishly think they're getting a good deal with "all you can eat" bandwidth buffets.

It's not that easy.

[superbus1929]

You can't just "cancel" your contract in a lot of cases. I know in my area, you have three choices: 1) use the cable provider (Comcast), 2) use dial-up, 3) go fuck yourself. It's a selective monopoly, and it seriously hurts a lot of consumers in a lot of less urban areas.

Re:It's not that easy.

[s-whs]

3) go fuck yourself.

Not a viable option. Most people aren't that lithe.

Re:It's not that easy.

[quonsar]

3) go fuck yourself.

DickTel, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CheneyComm

Re:It's not that easy.

[Lashat]

----3) go fuck yourself.

----Not a viable option. Most people aren't that lithe.

Thanks for making me look up "lithe".

lithe (lTH)
adj., lither, lithest.

      1. Readily bent; supple: lithe birch branches.
      2. Marked by effortless grace: a lithe ballet dancer.

Re:It's not that easy.

[djmcmath]

This is true virtually everywhere I've lived in the last 10 years. I have the dubious good fortune right now of living in one of the few locations that has choice -- Cox or Verizon. Wow, that's like choosing between losing my left nut or my right. Behind door number 3, of course, lies the variety of so-called "alternatives": dial-up, satellite, bumming wireless from free hotspots ...

The frustration for a military member is particularly intense: you spend months out of the country making some god-forsaken place safe for democracy and capitalism, then return home to find that capitalism is dead here. When do we send troops to DC to make our own country safe for capitalism?

Re:It's not that easy.

[wasabii]

Hmm. You're entitled to an internet connection? When did /. become a basic human right?

3) go fuck yourself is a perfectly acceptable position to be in. You don't like it, go change it.

Re:It's not that easy.

[colinrichardday]

3) go fuck yourself.

Not a viable option. Most people aren't that lithe.

Most adults are women, and how many of them have a clitoris that
is long enough?

Re:It's not that easy.

[Washington Irving]

you have three choices: 1) use the cable provider (Comcast), 2) use dial-up, 3) go fuck yourself

Would someone please explain to me the difference between options 2) and 3)?

Re:It's not that easy.

[deltatype0]

That was my biggest problem when I lived outside of Springfield, MA years ago, the town I lived in only offered Comcast (then ATT) and dial-up. No DSL, no anything unless you wanted satalite. What makes the difference between Comcast there and Comcast I have here in CT, is that there without anyone else to compete against, they literally do not give a shit what you get or even how your service runs. I talked to probably 3 different techs and customer service once because my connection was lagging a lot and dropping, and it wasn't my equipment. Even buying a new router and using a different modem (another call in itself since they didn't seem to understand that concept) did not fix the problem, and it ended up being the worst ~50/mo I had ever gone through. Since coming back to CT I've been on COX, which I have to say has probably the best service and speed for the price in what I've used, but sadly does not control the town I live in now, which is Comcast, and while Comcast here is much better than previously in MA, the upload is pretty shallow compared to the download. The very least you'd think they could do is match COX's ~1.5mbps upload for competative sake, least then I can torrent without choking the rest of my internet. But you get what you pay for, and right now I can't afford something better like Speakeasy.. well I could if Sprint would build a freaking tower to cover this gap I'm in so I wouldn't have to pay for landline service.

Re:It's not that easy.

[Minstrel Boy]

Well, that's just because they're making the wrong choice! :)

KeS

Re:It's not that easy.

[skeeterbug]

You can't just "cancel" your contract in a lot of cases. I know in my area, you have three choices: 1) use the cable provider (Comcast), 2) use dial-up, 3) go fuck yourself. It's a selective monopoly, and it seriously hurts a lot of consumers in a lot of less urban areas.

you obviously haven't thought this through. this is 2007. 3 isn't a valid option unless you have either 1 or 2.

Re:It's not that easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's a selective monopoly, and it seriously hurts a lot of consumers in a lot of less urban areas."

It's worse than you think.
Time Warner has a monopoly here and I live in the middle of Los Angeles

Why this happens in North America...

[SpeedyDX]

... and not South Korea.

In general, the population density is far too low in North America to make it financially feasible for ISPs to lay out improved infrastructure as they become available. In the US of A, the average population density is 31 per square km. In Canada, it's a paltry 3.2 per square km. South Korea, on the other hand, has a population density of 480!!! per square km. Over 15 times that of the U.S., and over 150 times that of Canada. This makes it a lot easier for ISPs to roll out improved infrastructure for the country.

Re:Why this happens in North America...

[Ant P.]

The more likely explanation is that South Korean ISPs simply aren't as retarded and greedy as US ones.

Re:Why this happens in North America...

[Wildclaw]

I have never understood the density argument. A lower population density should mostly affect the base cost of connecting someone to the internet, as well as the connection quality.

Packet shaping however is about ISPs don't wanting to upgrade upstream routers to handle the higher bandwidth (Atleast I assume ISPs were intelligent enough to dig enough bandwidth into the ground the first time they dug. If they weren't, they deserve to die a painful death). The cost difference of upgrading routers between a low population and a high population area should be far less than the cost difference of digging in the first place.

Of course, I am not a network expert, so if someone wants to correct me, please do.

Re:Why this happens in North America...

[IgnoramusMaximus]

In general, the population density is far too low in North America to make it financially feasible for ISPs to lay out improved infrastructure as they become available.

This is an old, tired and worn-out and patently absurd canard, which is being spread by apologists of the US telecommunication oligopolies since the beginning of the Internet. The truth is that in much of the US the population density in major metropolitan centres is as great or greater then the average Korean, Swedish or Japanese ones and yet, in those same very areas, which in your reasoning shoud be extremely suitable for deployment of 100mb Internet connections comparable to those being deployed en-masse in those other countries, you get .... 1.5 mb DSL. If you are lucky that is.

In short, the problem is the ever expanding culture of corporate avarice, corruption, attempts to make a quick buck and wholesale deterioration of marketplace ethic in the USA, which then spreads via USA-based multinationals to other nations where those same multinationals and their CEOs have influence. Get rich quick at any cost to everybody else is the new "motto" of Corporate America. "Work hard and make a good product" is sooo early 20th century!

Large businesses need to fear their customers, but because they essentially run and control the US government -- the only force capable of opposing and controlling them -- they are in a position to longer care about the supposed "invisible hand" of the marketplace. Now they can do whatever they want, and the "consumers" (the most derogatory term for a "person" ever invented) have to just take it.

And that is the truth of the matter, in affairs ranging from the Internet service to cell phone service to motor vehicle fuel consumption and so on.

Re:Why this happens in North America...

[Anonymous Coward]

Population Density is horse shit.

Here is why...

Broadband is really only targeted at cities, the density formula is
including some cow pasture in Kansas.

Giant blank empty damn spaces with no people, should not factor
into the equation.

Broadband is truly only needed in population centers, and rural
areas can go Wifi/WiMAX or equivalent.

DSL is over copper for up to approx. 4 miles from Local Office.

Any place there is a cell tower there is fiber 90+% of the time.

80+% of fiber in the ground is dark fiber:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fiber

The cost of sending a pulse of light down the line cycling 10 mil times
a second vs. 100 million times a second does not cost them 10 times as much.

Their profits point to this.

We already paid for a nation wide broadband upgrade to the tune of $200 billion USD.

http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm

Re:Why this happens in North America...

[M. Baranczak]

the population density is far too low in North America to make it financially feasible for ISPs to lay out improved infrastructure as they become available. Yeah, the average density is lower. But most people don't live in average areas. There are large chunks of the US which are very densely populated; but from what I've seen, the quality of ISPs in those areas isn't any better. Why do you think that is?

Re:Why this happens in North America...

[mc6809e]

In general, the population density is far too low in North America to make it financially feasible for ISPs to lay out improved infrastructure as they become available. In the US of A, the average population density is 31 per square km. In Canada, it's a paltry 3.2 per square km. South Korea, on the other hand, has a population density of 480!!! per square km. Over 15 times that of the U.S., and over 150 times that of Canada. This makes it a lot easier for ISPs to roll out improved infrastructure for the country.

It's not just average density, but also the skew. Those 31 per square km are fairly spread out. If all 300 million Americans lived in one state, the average density for the nation would be the same, but the skew would not and it would be much easier to deliver service.

Re:Why this happens in North America...

[SpeedyDX]

If you really wanted to compare apples to oranges, NYC has a population density of 10,300+, and Seoul has a density of 17,100+.

I think you neglect the effect that tax (which is deeply affected by population density) has on this issue. NY State gets 5-8% income tax, and NYC only gets less than 3.7%. Most of that goes to municipal services, construction, and other such costs. The rest of the 20-35% income tax goes straight to the federal government which has little interest in helping roll out new infrastructure. With South Korea, on the other hand, most of the 20-34% tax goes to economic and technological areas of spending. This allows the South Korean government to spend more cash on helping telecom corporations roll out new infrastructure.

Re:Why this happens in North America...

[IgnoramusMaximus]

If you really wanted to compare apples to oranges, NYC has a population density of 10,300+, and Seoul has a density of 17,100+.

You mean to say that 10000+ population density is insufficient to warrant sane internet service?! Just moments ago the GP poster was trying to pretend that the poor, downtrotten ISPs are stuck with population density of 31! Now 10000+ is not good enough! And of course there is another apple to apple comparison: Stockholm in Sweden, that other place where 100mb (going on 1000mb these days) service is standard. Their density is ... 4160/km2 !!!

I think you neglect the effect that tax (which is deeply affected by population density) has on this issue. NY State gets 5-8% income tax, and NYC only gets less than 3.7%. Most of that goes to municipal services, construction, and other such costs. The rest of the 20-35% income tax goes straight to the federal government which has little interest in helping roll out new infrastructure. With South Korea, on the other hand, most of the 20-34% tax goes to economic and technological areas of spending. This allows the South Korean government to spend more cash on helping telecom corporations roll out new infrastructure.

Wait, wait, wait there a second! Weren't we told, over and over again, that any governmental interference and taxation are communist, socialist plots and that the best service and the best deal for consumers will be achieved only, and only if the de-regulated mega-neo-feudal-klaptocratic-corporations are allowed to run amok, unchecked, guided only by their sole instinct: boundless greed?! Isn't this the whole economic platform of the Republicans and in the large part the practical platform of the Democrats?!

And now you are here telling us these revelations that those lazy socialist Swedes are way ahead because of their "government helping in rolling out infrastructure" all funded by, oh gasp!, taxes?! Are you some kind of free market heretic or something?! Pining for the return of the Soviet Union?!

Also speaking of cash handouts, the US telecommunications corporations DID get MULTI BILLION handouts from the Feds during the dot-com boom. Which promptly went ... no one knows where, although the mega-luxury yacht builders and corporate jet manufacturers did report a sharp increase in sales at that time. It could be just me, but there could be some kind of corelation.

Re:Why this happens in North America...

[The Conductor]

I think the reason for that, as far as demographics go, and leaving out the historical and regulatory factors (beyond the scope of this post), is that high population-density areas in the US typically contian low-income people, whereas the higher income groups--the ones who buy broadband--live in exurban McManisons. The European cities I have seen seem to have the reverse pattern, swanky condos in the city and prosaic block housing at the city edges.

There are exceptions both ways though, I wonder how good broadband service is in American urban boutique neighborhoods (like Bexley or Shaker Heights, OH), or in the Islamic slums of Europe. Information on that would test my little theory.

My experience / are there good alternatives?

[DigitAl56K]

On June 7th I experienced a drop in bandwidth to certain online video sites down to only 300Kbps, where usually I can get a full 5Mbps downstream. I can't say for sure that this was 'traffic shaping', but it's quite a co-incidence that TWC made this announcement one day earlier.

Does anybody have a link to a list of ISPs or non-business plans that are not traffic shaping? If a 16x drop in performance is going to become a frequent occurrence I aim to leave RoadRunner quickly. I'll look to the /. crowd for some respectable recommendations.

Re:My experience / are there good alternatives?

[MikeyVB]

The Azureus BitTorrent client online support wiki maintains a list. Quite handy for trouble shooting download speed problems and which ISPs to avoid if you intend to use BitTorrent (even for legitimate purposes)

The link: http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs

Time Warner is not in the U.S. list, but since it is a wiki, we could just add it. (Unless it is listed under a different name I don't know about)

Re:My experience / are there good alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll look to the /. crowd for some respectable recommendations.

Expect DSL providers to use cable restrictions in their advertising soon. DSL is not as limited to the number of connections.

Re:My experience / are there good alternatives?

[pnaro]

Shit. And I got all excited because some property I am looking to buying has a *CHANCE* to get 256k ethernet over power.

Re:My experience / are there good alternatives?

[Aranykai]

Im not on TWC or RR, but a small(most likely a reseller) Cablelynx. I have noticed the same thing over the last 3 weeks. Absurdly slow traffic to youtube/google video, while other flash video streams seem to work fine. I used to pull a strong 800-900k down on bittorrent, suddenly can only get about 300k. Its ridiculous... I used to have a ping of 22 to my hosted server @ the planet in Dallas TX. Now its about 80 at best. Sickening.

Re:My experience / are there good alternatives?

[M. Baranczak]

Actually, I'm a little suspicious of this story. I googled it and all I could find was this Slashdot story and the source it links to - which is a forum posting that reproduces an email which was supposedly received by a Time Warner customer. There's nothing about this on TW's official site, and no other news sites have written anything. I'm not saying it's not true, it's just a little unusual for Slashdot to publish breaking news like that.

Re:My experience / are there good alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous Coward, I know, I know.

I agree with you on questioning if this is true based on the lack of concrete source, however it was some time in mid-May when I was at a birthday party for a former co-worker. One of our mutual friends works for TimeWarner, but they said nothing concerning this. However, one of his relatives had been recounting a story about trying to work with technical support because his speed to newsgroup access had dropped off dramatically, and nothing he tried could correct it.

I wasn't paying too much attention to the conversation, but I think he had tried other services with no luck. So this story about TimeWarner using packet shaping follows that same established precident in my mind. And having seen some of the stunts that Time Warner in this area pulls, I don't see any reason to disbelieve this, either.

It's all word of mouth though, so take it as you will.

Re:My experience / are there good alternatives?

[tepples]

The Azureus BitTorrent client online support wiki maintains a list. Quite handy for trouble shooting download speed problems and which ISPs to avoid if you intend to use BitTorrent (even for legitimate purposes) If both the cable company and the phone company are bad ISPs, or if the cable company is a bad ISP and the phone company hasn't built an office within 2.5 kilometers of your house, would moving be recommended?

Time Warner is not in the U.S. list, but since it is a wiki, we could just add it. (Unless it is listed under a different name I don't know about) Time Warner has operated under the name "Road Runner".

Re:My experience / are there good alternatives?

[sys_mast]

I'd say mod parent up but it is already. I find this very suspicious, not just a little. TFA states that TW has announced, if they have announced it there would be something more, like a posting of the info on their press page. http://www.timewarnercable.com/InvestorRelations/P ressReleases/TWCPressReleaseList.ashx

I really don't think they would announce it in one email to one person, not something like this.

Just my $0.02

choice four

[poptones]

Move to a country home in the deep south and get DSL. I live 7 miles from a town with a population of about 1000 people, a mile off the highway on a dirt road and I have 3Mbit dsl service that's pretty darn reliable. How someone can live in the city and not have dsl or high speed wireless service available amazes me. Heck, you should at least be able to get cheap fractional T1. If no one else has decent service and you live in a populated area stick up a wifi gateway and offer it yourself. If the cable service really does suck that bad it shouldn't be hard at all to find customers to help defray the cost of that shared T1.

Re:choice four

[superbus1929]

I wouldn't live in the Deep South if someone doubled my pay to go. Hard to believe that's possible, considering I live in Connecticut, but that's where I stand on that.

I live in a rural area of Connecticut that's in a fairly deep recess; wireless is a bitch to get consistently here (I'm out of cell phone range), and the idea of getting my neighbours - all standard lusers - to buy into a T1 line is sardonically humourous.

We have people trying to get Yahoo DSL in my neck of the woods (it's laughable; my Uncle has Yahoo DSL, and we're "out of range". He lives DIRECTLY ACROSS THE STREET), but the thought of switching from Comcast to Yahoo because it's "better" makes me laugh out loud. That's much akin to getting fucked in the ass, but choosing the dildo beforehand that does the deed.

Re:choice four

[Mr2001]

3 Mbps is pretty weak these days, and fractional T1 would be almost intolerable if you actually use any high-bandwidth applications. I have DSL advertised at 7 Mbps (5 Mbps in real life), and when I had Comcast I had a reliable 6 Mbps for about the same price.

Re:choice four

[echucker]

You're screwed if you switch to DSL where I live - mandatory 2 year contract with Frontier, with penalties for early cancellation.

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

Move to a country home in the deep south and get DSL. I live 7 miles from a town with a population of about 1000 people, a mile off the highway on a dirt road and I have 3Mbit dsl service that's pretty darn reliable. How someone can live in the city and not have dsl or high speed wireless service available amazes me. Heck, you should at least be able to get cheap fractional T1. If no one else has decent service and you live in a populated area stick up a wifi gateway and offer it yourself. If the cable service really does suck that bad it shouldn't be hard at all to find customers to help defray the cost of that shared T1.

Your provider is obviously operating at a loss in your area. The only explanation is that there is a high ranking company employee who lives in your area.

I live five kilometers from a town of about 500 people on a paved road. The best connection avaialble is 28.8Kbps dial-up. You are aware that DSL signals are only good to about 2500 meters from the switch? To provide you with DSL there must be at least four pieces of expensive signal boosting equipment between you and town. It is pretty much guaranteed there are not enough subscribers to pay for it. (Thus my conclusion that an executive of the the ISP you use lives nearby.) Neither DSL or cable will be available in my area until the population grows large enough to make it profitable, at which point I will move farther out because there will be too many people. (Satellite is laughable for internet service and wifi is almost as bad.)

Most modern cable internet service is far superior to T1. (Especially Eastlink in eastern Canada, the industry leaders for over a decade.) Eastlink can provide me a 10Mbit up and down connection for a fraction of the cost of a T1 with 6.6 times the capacity. Cable is superior to DSL. Why? Simple physics. Coaxial cable is a far superior signal conductor to the phone lines used by DSL. Look it up, or take a basic physics course.

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

What's hard to believe is how much ignorance and fear there is in the New England about the rest of the world. Give the South a chance - maybe you'll outgrow your parochial animosity.

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

| You are aware that DSL signals are only good to about 2500 meters from the switch?

This isn't true. I'm over that distance and sync at 6 Mb/s. Further out you'll get lower speeds but I've never heard 2.5 km as an absolute limit for DSL.

Wikipedia claims that 8 Mb/s (and 24 Mb/s for ADSL2+) is possible at 2 km.

Of course your local telephone company can set any distance limits it wants for actually selling you the service.

Re:choice four

[flipper65]

We in Georgia enjoy the fruits of all of your USF payments in the form of outstanding rural DSL availability. As for those of you comparing T1 to 5Mbps keep in mind that the T's only real advantage is the guaranteed speed and uptime. Let's face it, it's slower down and as for the up speed, what do I care how fast my request for porn gets to the server as long as it's delivered at a decent rate.

Re:choice four

[haibijon]

Born and raised in the south, and recently moved to the north. Never been happier, and I'm never going back. A salary more than 2x what I made in the south, and actually having constitutional rights really helps too. And, as for this so-called New England animosity, you might want to actually take a look at the south. The south has never been a great place filled with "shiny happy people", when in reality the south is simply filled with a dying breed of trigger-happy hypocritical egocentric bigoted racists.

Re:choice four

[mikiN]

I know that putting a question to an AC is for all practical purposes identical to sending the thing to /dev/null , but anyway.

First you state that cable and DSL won't hit your area until they become profitable, then you state that Eastlink can set you up with 10Mbit bidi? How is that possible?

Re:choice four

[Sunburnt]

Having grown, lived, and worked in many parts of the South (MD, AL, MS, GA, FL) before moving to New England in my later twenties, I can completely understand the GP's unwillingness. Unless one is predisposed to miserable summer heat, far poorer working conditions, and pervasive bigotry that, while probably no greater in quantity than in much of rural New England, is certainly more confrontational and institutionalized, there is little to recommend leaving New England for the South.

I do recommend it to New England conservatives of my acquaintance, though. What better place to experience the actual results of "limited government," "minimal interference" in labor and health regulation, and gutted systems of public education than dear ol' Dixie?

Re:choice four

[Sunburnt]

Hilarious that two of us Southern expats in the North posted within minutes of each other. I guess I'm not the only one who gets sick of assumptions that everyone who's "down on Dixie" is just being a bigot.

This myth of the South as a welcoming heartland of wholesome values is a tired bit of irresponsible fluffery whose time is way past due.

Re:choice four

[lazyforker]

I live in Manhattan (New York City, not Kansas) and we are consistently behind the rest of the country. It's hard for anyone to dig up the roads to lay new cables etc. So while my friends in Bumfuck, New Jersey and Armpit, Pennsylvania are singing the joys of FIOS I am locked into Time Warner - a de facto monopoly.

I actually have both cable modem (Time Warner bastards) and DSL (Verizon sons of bitches). They are both capricious - showing odd variations in bandwidth throughout the day - but overall the cable modem gives me significantly higher bandwidth. Hence I am particularly worried about this - I have no recourse and no alternative (except maybe buying more DSL lines and aggregating them!).

Re:choice four

[mikael_j]

You are aware that DSL signals are only good to about 2500 meters from the switch?

Actually, the ISP I work for has no upper limit on distance from the DSLAM for the customers, but at distances longer than about 5 km we generally inform potential customers that their connection speed will be not much better than 128kbps ISDN if they want a stable connection.

/Mikael

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'm living proof that more than double your 2.5 km number is wrong. The speed must be set slower, but my 1728/384 kbit link is working dandy at about 5.6 km, TYVM. No remotes, either.

Also, in Ontario/Quebec, you will sometimes find DSL in very remote areas nowadays, areas that may serve fewer than 100 homes! I suppose Bell is losing money on that, but I highly doubt it considering how much pull they have with the CRTC to *not* service areas. That and providers offer service for $29.95 a month (Velcom, Teksavvy, plenty of others) with 5 mbit speeds and unlimited unshaped bandwidth anywhere in Ontario/Quebec. I suppose they could be losing money, but that makes no sense, because some of those ISPs don't even offer colocation, so that would mean they are losing money on the only service they offer.

>Coaxial cable is a far superior signal conductor to the phone lines used by DSL. Look it up, or take a basic physics course.

Yes, it's also a shared medium. Hands up on slashdotter's personal preference:

  - A connection to a 100 mbit hub that leads to the ISPs router with 1,000 other people connected to the same hub.
  - A 5 mbit direct connection to the ISPs router.

If those 1,000 other people use the network a lot, personally I'd go for the 5 mbit direct connection. But to each his own. I've seen cable be very fast for some (25 mbits!) when I see lots of satellite dishes in the area. I've seen cable be very slow for others (250 kbits!) in areas that have several high-rise apartment buildings (it's legal for landlords to ban satellites dishes in Canada, still). Choose your poison wisely. Of course, in Canada, Rogers performs incredible packet shaping (to the point BitTorrent runs at 5 kbits, and *ALL* encrypted traffic at similar speeds) and they give you the boot at 60 Gigs (They offer 100 Gigs, the only catch is the service costs $100 a month, whereas their 60 Gigs service is $44.95. More than twice the price for less than half the service! LOL!).

I think I'll stick with unlimited DSL considering I usually average 1 mbit of torrent at any time of day. It's still faster, even though the line speed is slower. And nobody gives me the boot. :-)

Re:choice four

[tacocat]

Detroit DSL coverage resembles swiss cheese. T1 costs $100/month. It's the previous posters options of Pay, Dial, Fuck Yourself.

And we're supposed to act surprised that America is trailing in internet connectivity and bandwidth? Between the lack of free market and the government manipulations of the entire industry I suspect we'll quickly fall behind everyone and then go on a spree of "regime change".

Maybe we would have been better off if the Constitution called for a seperation of Corporate and State instead of a seperation of Church and State. Or maybe we need both...

Re:choice four

[antdude]

The problem is cost, time, etc. of hosting that. Sure, I can have someone else do it, but that will add costs even more. I don't want to have to deal with that. I can't even manage my own little network at home. :)

And yes, I live in a city with a cable monopoly. DSL is too far (20K ft.) and other options are either too slow and/or too expensive (e.g., 100+ bucks for IDSL 144Kb/sec speeds per month).

Re:choice four

[djdavetrouble]

(it's laughable; my Uncle has Yahoo DSL, and we're "out of range". He lives DIRECTLY ACROSS THE STREET)

I live smackdab in the middle of the island of Manhattan, in New York City, and I can't get dsl because
the circuit is full or some such bullshit. Basically I think they don't want to add dsl infrastructure because they are busy building
the fiber network. I have Time Warner and would drop it in a second. I was just wishing I could drop it as I read this
article.

Re:choice four

[transporter_ii]

What a great ISP you work for. Sprint won't turn on DSL for anyone in our town if it is an inch over the limit. And I know it would work, and do so exactly as you stated, just not as fast. On dial-up, I get 24,000 connects almost every single time. To get 128k would be like some freaking high-speed-broadband-a-palooza for me. Transporter_ii

Re:choice four

[uolamer]

I am in the 'Deep South'. Where I am the 2 good cheap choices were/are Road Runner and AT&T DSL (if you are close enough to whatever). I never had any terms of just quitting my contract with RR here, just had to return the equipment, that was one of their selling points vs satellite tv, no contracts. I would recommend people switch to DSL IF they have problems down here and dont have another choice. The slightly higher packages on DSL here was the best internet I ever had at some points. However here we dont have the option to switch to cable company #2, and a T1 is only around 1.54mbit up/down, still a good service but quite expensive compared to dsl/cable. (i have a T1 atm, im out of range for dsl or cable).
What would be cool is if they started offering a T3 or something similar for a reasonable price lol. You can run them to more or less anywhere and distance isnt that big of an issue.

Re:choice four

[mrbooze]

And yet a place like Boston is one of the most racist cities in the country. It's almost like you have assholes everywhere.

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

Har. Up until the two or three years, you could live in a sizeable city in the deep south (20K people or more) and *still* not be able to get DSL or cable modem service.

Frankly sir, I scoff at your attempts to make the South appear to be this overlooked bastion of technological freedom. You're just plain lucky is all.

As for your "If the cable service really does suck that bad it shouldn't be hard at all to find customers to help defray the cost of that shared T1."...you really *don't* live in the South, do you? if you're living in that remote of a place, then nobody is going to want to pay you $5 for anything, let alone "working together to make a community ISP". They could give a damn about how fast they access the Internet, if they even have a computer at all.

Re:choice four

[andymadigan]

You live in Rochester, too? Sucks doesn't it.

Re:choice four

[runner_one]

Ah... No, my provider operates at a profit supplying people as far as 18 miles from the main switch for 9 years now.
I've seen how they do it and can say that any provider could do so IF they wanted to. The reasons is that for most providers the profit margins are not good enough to make them want to. My provider is a Coop and operates at a narrower margin.

Re:choice four

[Vengie]

Never trust anyone from a state with corners.

Re:choice four

[Maestro4k]

Move to a country home in the deep south and get DSL. I live 7 miles from a town with a population of about 1000 people, a mile off the highway on a dirt road and I have 3Mbit dsl service that's pretty darn reliable. How someone can live in the city and not have dsl or high speed wireless service available amazes me.

You are very, very very lucky where you're located. I'm in the south, in a much less rural area than you (subdivision outside a town much larger than the one you're close to), and the subdivision's been here since the 1970s. Bellsouth has yet to make DSL available for us. Drive up the road about 5 miles and it's available, here, not a chance in hell. It's been this way since 2002 when I first went to get broadband here, Bellsouth's site then told me it wasn't available and it was coming soon. I went to check Comcast and they already had our area covered. We got Comcast back in 2002 and have seen our speeds upgraded for free 3 times since. Bellsouth still hasn't bothered, and I don't expect they ever will even though there are enough subdivisions close together here to make it more than worth their while.

So be thankful you have DSL where you're at. To be quite honest I doubt you could even get a T1 installed at this location from Bellsouth, and who'd want to go in on one when Comcast's current download speeds are four times faster?

Re:choice four

[uolamer]

To be quite honest I doubt you could even get a T1 installed at this location from Bellsouth...

I have a T1. I live in the middle of the woods, where i am there is no option for cable modem, dsl, etc. The few choices i can think of are 56k modem, ISDN, or some satellite (or some verizon wireless card when it works out here). You can get a T1/T3/etc pretty much anywhere, if it is that far outside the city, you can expect to pay a bit more a month. Mine is through AT&T. But the price of a T1 in the area I am in, being around ~30 miles from a real city, makes the price too high for most people to justify.. ~ more than $400/mo.

Re:choice four

[AgentPaper]

Amen to that. Cable coverage isn't any better, and abandon all hope once you get more than 20 miles or so from downtown. People in north Oakland, north Macomb, western Wayne and Washtenaw are basically restricted to options 2 and 3 (dial or fsck yourself). Even in Bloomfield Hills, we weren't eligible for anything above 56K dial-up (which was actually 19.2 because the phone lines out here date to the Eisenhower administration and the company formerly known as Michigan Bell/Ameritech/SBC/AT&T repeatedly refused to replace them) until 2003.

And we wonder why all those dot-com era projects that promised to turn the tri-county area into a tech Mecca fell on their faces...

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like SBC (SWBell?) in Plano about 7 years ago. At one point I briefly considered moving there. I found an awesome apartment. Then I checked for DSL availability: none. At least, not from the phone company. One of the CLECs said I could get somewhere between 240 and 470 kbps... at some outrageous price well in excess of $200/month, with 2 year contract and $1,000+ installation fee. I called the ILEC and asked why I couldn't get the same thing from them. His answer was that they didn't want to deal with people complaining that they couldn't get the full advertised rate, so they didn't allow people who were beyond the limit to get DSL at all. I later discovered that DSL wasn't available AT ALL in most of southern Plano, and if you lived in an apartment, most of the phone lines wouldn't connect at anything faster than 33.4 (usually 28.8) because the ILEC apparently was running a fairly dense (by suburban standards) area off of the limited copper laid decades earlier for farmhouses and 5-acre estate homes, and didn't want to spend the money laying more (trivia: I also found out that the sprawling acres of greenery surrounding the mansion in "Dallas's" intro were actually less than 5 miles away... now across the street from a huge regional mall and veritable ocean of apartment complexes and single-family homes).

Re:choice four

[superbus1929]

I've been stationed in the South, so I know what I'm talking about. If anything, I'd rather go farther up NORTH (I'm originally from Canada).

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

You're implying that your provider can run DSL over a distance of 18 miles using some method other providers don't. How do they do this? What speeds do you and others in your coop get and at what price?

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm originally from Finland. I know about the fucking north.

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because being perceived as excessively progressive is exactly the image problem we have.

Re:choice four

[Workaphobia]

I was reading about dark fiber the other day and the possible scenarios under which it'd make sense to deploy it. And it wouldn't make sense in my area, as I live close to New York City and therefore get excellent speeds compared to most of the country, through either Cablevision's 30 Mb/s plan or Verizon FIOS. The availability of that kind of service, regardless of the fine print, pretty much eliminates almost all incentive to find a custom solution. In addition, the county is planning for free public wifi soon. Fighting a few crappy contractual terms just isn't worth it.

But I don't understand why communities like yours wouldn't do that. Have the town, or a group of individuals who care enough to shell out some dough, pay for a fiber trunk, and take it from there. Well, at 500 people I suppose that's still a stretch, but the point still stands for slightly larger populations who are isolated from major high-speed providers.

Re:choice four

[Workaphobia]

$100/month for a T1? That's like 3x-5x cheaper than what I understood it to generally cost, and a quick google search confirms. Why are you complaining, if that is indeed dedicated, non-oversubscribed bandwidth? Especially if that includes internet service and not just a line to a colocation center?

Of course there's no reason any home user would want dedicated bandwidth rather than a much, much higher shared bandwidth for the same cost.

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, that could easily be solved by semi-municipal broadband like in the Stokab model. Basically a city owned corporation pulls the fibre in every waterpipe, subway tunnel, sewer etc they can. Since it's the city seeking permission from the city to lay the fiber in city owned ducts, the red tape is minimized and by utilizing existent facilities, digging is kept at a bare minimum. This reduces costs significantly. They are operator-neutral and lease out dark fiber at cost to any ISP that want to participate (In Stockolm there are over 40 operators on Stokabs network.)

See URL:"http://www.stokab.se/templates/StandardPage.a spx?id=773"

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

"Satellite is laughable for internet service and wifi is almost as bad."

I've recently subscribed to a wi-fi service. I've been impressed. Good speeds and good latency, and cheaper month-to-month than I expected.

Re:choice four

[Mike Van Pelt]

Though there's also the experience of a guy I knew in college in Alabama back in the late 70s -- An African-American man with a white wife, working as a systems administrator in the campus computer center. He moved to a "oh-so-very-superior-pat-ourselves-on-the-back-for -being-so-very-tolerant-and-progressive" part of the country. He moved back to Alabama. He said that the percentage of racists and bigots was no less in the self-proclaimed "progressive" parts of the country. The racists and bigots there, though, would smile to your face and shake your hand, then knife you in the back when you least expected it. He said in Alabama, where the same percentage of bigots were up-front about it, they could be avoided. The majority who were friendly and shook your hand were being honest.

Re:choice four

[KUHurdler]

Actually, how about we start by adding "seperation of Church and State" to the constitution. Then we can talk about adding "Corporate".

The only option

[javilon]

Is to encrypt every protocol so it looks like IPSEC or ssh and use random ports. This is going to be defeating the point of network management, firewalls, etc, but it is the only option they allow us to get information across without it being cataloged, censored and billed according to whatever criteria they want to impose.

Re:The only option

[Phil246]

tell that to Rogers in canada.
They're throttling all encrypted traffic, just incase that its used to bypass the traffic throttling they imposed.
see http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1859/125/ for details

Re:The only option

[nurb432]

So then they clamp down on ALL traffic coming out of your house, regardless of protocol, port or destination. Problem solved. Or, they just claim you are trying to circumvent and cancel you on the spot ( and you have no recourse, they retain the right to cancel at any point for any reason ).

I wonder if in time ISPs will refuse to take you on if you have been cancelled from another, sort of a virtual blacklist. Since there isnt really any regulation at this point, they could do this.

And just for the record, a private company really cant censor, thats a governments job. I doubt anyone would agree that a reduction in bandwidth is censorship anyway. ( not saying that Governments arent trying to do that, just that it doesn't apply in THIS case )

Sounds more to me like we are just returning to the old days were things were slower but still worked. The ISPs oversold and underestimated our future use.

Re:The only option

[interiot]

Mod parent up! So what's the next step? Try to make P2P look like something normal? (eg. HTTP, or FTP, or something like that?) I suppose most protocols don't have nearly the same persistent upstream or numerous simultaneous and long-lived connections as bit-torrent does... Do any ISP's throttle customers whenever they upload for too long of a period?

Re:The only option

[N!k0N]

Regardless of how they want to do things, packet shapers are pretty useless. About three days after the one that was installed at the university I attend was installed, it was circumvented by one of my friends and myself. All we needed to do was turn on the port randomization and "encryption" in the torrent client, and there was nothing the shaper could do about the packets (AFAIK they look like SSH packets). TW is about 6 months behind the curve... the client I'm using is about that old and it still had the necessary features (if you want to call them that) to circumvent packet shaping...

Re:The only option

[Anonymous Coward]

The next step is to try to standardize QoS tagging, claims, and guarantees. If I have an encrypted VOIP connection, I should be able to tag the packets with something that means "This is latency sensitive; I want to get each packet through the network as quickly as possible, and I agree not to exceed 10kbps." For some big downloads I should be able to tag with "This is a bulk transfer in that direction, I want as much bandwidth as possible, but I don't mind individual packets being delayed." The one thing you can't ask for is all the bandwidth and none of the latency. (Well, you can ask for it, but it is unlikely to be granted.) If I ask for low latency and claim not to exceed a certain throughput, the ISP will honor my request unless I break my end of the bargain. Possibly there could be a mechanism for the ISP to tell me whether or not my request is being honored.

Re:The only option

[Anonymous Coward]

...only option they allow us to get information across...

You call a torrent of snakes on a plane in high def information? That's stretching it quite a bit if you ask me.

Re:The only option

[noidentity]

They're throttling all encrypted traffic, just incase that its used to bypass the traffic throttling they imposed.

So, we need to convert our traffic into bloated HTML code or something. Would use even more bandwidth, but that's what they get.

Re:The only option

[IamTheRealMike]

Er, no. The fucking kiddies who decided to encrypt P2P traffic so they could get free tunes have unsurprisingly managed to degrade encrypted traffic for everyone, the LAST thing we want is for them to do the same for web traffic as well.

Now I'm not going to pretend companies like Rogers or Time Warner are misty eyed innocents in all of this, but I also don't believe they have sysadmins there cackling and rubbing their hands with evil glee at the prospect of throttling all encrypted traffic. A far simpler explanation is that it's the only way to avoid their network being overloaded by P2P traffic. If you must sit on torrents 24/7 then pony up the cash for a T3 to your house, don't start dicking around with the fundamentals of TCP/IP - the majority of people who aren't like you won't appreciate it.

Re:The only option

[tepples]

All we needed to do was turn on the port randomization and "encryption" in the torrent client, and there was nothing the shaper could do about the packets (AFAIK they look like SSH packets). Then they throttle SSH and SSL. Do you really need a lot of bandwidth to submit a credit card number (most common use for SSL) or to log into a shell account (most common use for SSH)? Those are low-latency applications, not high-bandwidth applications.

Re:The only option

[mechapants]

They sure are! Even if you encrypt your BT traffic you still won't see the speeds of 2005. Good thing usenet is still rockin.

Not so Monkey Brains !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Canadida is all huddled next to the great US of A. Dentistry is packed in to a few citys, particulery Tomato, Belvidere, and Montyall.

If you sold TV packages, you'd limit TV/IP too

[Anonymous Coward]

But don't worry...the phone companies will do what they can to ruin any ability to deliver Phone service over cable,
so it'll all work out...

Re:"flat rate" makes littl sense for broadband spe

[Anonymous Coward]

ISPs should find a simple pricing model for broadband, like charging a few bucks per gigabyte of volume, plus some base fee (possibly with different rates for peak/off-peak usage). Based on that, people could more reasonably compare what they're actually getting for their money. Just that that way without competition you'll end up paying 10000% more than you should per megabyte. The average amount of what people pay doesn't rise, but the usage is going to be limited to websurfing. Cool, eh?

quite wrong to blame the users

[siddesu]

the problem is not with the users. any user who buys a plan marketed as 20mbps has the right to assume that is the speed they are entitled to. the "up to" clause, at least in most contracts I have seen, is there to allow for the rare case where due to technical problems or other temporary circumstances the company can't guarantee the speed, not as a device to systematically oversell the service.

also, where i live the providers have more or less kept up with capacity increase partly because the government invested in infrastructure and technology on the last mile -- so that now even in the resort village that i reside I can choose between several ISPs that provide 100mbps for roughly $30-40 a month.

in other words, with the correct priorities and enough pressure, the companies can be made to go at least partly in the direction that is "right" for users.

The facade

[Envy Life]

Good thing I didn't switch to Road Runner You're assuming that Verizon doesn't or won't do the same? Gotta love the naive.

Let's see here, if packet shaping is going on with newsgroup applications, P2P, audio, video, VoIP, and on-demand web sites (remember "net neutrality" ?), then what's left? The Internet is no longer open and free folks, regardless of ISP.

Re:The facade

[CajunArson]

Once again someone who does not understand "net neutrality". Note the regardless of provider in the summary. Unless Time Warner is actively degrading service from other providers while simultaneously not doing anyything to degrade its own services, this is not a violation of net neutrality. Remember kids, net neutrality doesn't mean you get everything you want for free, it means the people who own the pipes cannot leverage there monopoly/oligopoly to advantage their own higher-level services against other players who have already paid for access.

That's not the whole explanation

[pv2b]

Population density isn't the whole explanation though.

Here in Europe, for example -- Belgium, with a population density of 343 people/km^2, has realtively crappy broadband, with bandwidth caps of a few tens of gigabytes per month being prevalent with most ISPs. At least, last time I checked. I might be out of date.

Sweden, however, with a population density of just 22 people/km^2, has great broadband. I have uncapped cable at 24 Mbit/s down and 8 Mbit/s up, and I do use it rather heavilly, although I use far less than my total theoretical capacity. I haven't received any nastygrams from my ISP about this either. The very young wireless 3G broadband market, which used to have an industry standard of a 1 GB/month cap, has under the last few months come under competition, with most providers giving uncapped access. Broadband in rural areas is less spectacular, but ADSL is available in many areas, if you're lucky enough to have bought in before they ran out of space for equipment in your local telephone station. (A widespread problem right now, it seems.)

The most important piece of the puzzle is working competition between providers. Sure, a dense population helps, but it's in no way so significant as you make it out to be.

Re:That's not the whole explanation

[revengebomber]

Pfft, Sweden. Stupid, backwards luddites. Everything is so much better over here in the New World. Why don't you pirat^H^H^H^H^H nice people come over here and take a look at our justice system?

Re:That's not the whole explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

Justice: as in, if big business doesn't like what you're doing, you get to take a long holiday at Guantanamo Bay.

Re:That's not the whole explanation

[westlake]

Sweden, however, with a population density of just 22 people/km^2, has great broadband

Is this "great broadband" concentrated in a handful of cities or along narrow [relatively] densely populated service corridors?

Distances in the states, sudden shifts in the shape and scale of urban, suburban, and rural development can be disorienting for a European.

Re:That's not the whole explanation

[SpeedyDX]

I think that population density deeply affects another issue: tax. Sweden has a higher income tax than Belgium, so the government is able to help provide the necessary funds to telecom companies to roll out the infrastructure. Sweden also has a lower tax rate for corporations, which allows corporations to retain more of their revenue, thus making it more financially feasible to roll out new infrastructure.

Re:That's not the whole explanation

[swilver]

Or just look at your Dutch neighbours, they have a lot of competing ISP's while Belgium only has a few (and I believe all of them are using the same network which charges very high rates). A little competition goes a long way, because in the Netherlands, ISP's not only offer cheaper service, they offer faster service without data limits (my ISP doesn't even blink when I download 200 GB+ for months in a row).

The Dutch government has forced the owners of the biggest telephony and data networks to open their networks up and offer the use of their network (for reasonable rates) to any other telephony/ISP company that cares for using it.

There's also a government mandated group that keeps an eye on telecom providers making sure everyone behaves (no price fixing, reasonable network pricing, no tricks to keep networks closed or other anti-competitive practices), and they have the power to hand out severe fines when they're in violation and have done often enough in the past.

Re:That's not the whole explanation

[Kattspya]

I live in the archipelago just outside of Stockholm and I currently have 8/1 ADSL and could get 24/1 if I wanted to. It's a fairly small island with about 200 permanent families but with lots of summer homes. If you live in some serious backwaters I don't think you could get ADSL. In the suburbs (more like sprawl) around Stockholm broad band penetration is good.

This is all anecdotal as I haven't seen any numbers. But I was the last person to get ADSL in my social circle. I think we got ADSL out here in 2003 which is pretty goddamn late.

The Island located between Vaxholm and Varmdö. I'm not sure if you can find it with a text search on google maps or whatever.

Welcome to corporate greed

[node159]

Living in a backwater where packet shaping and other shenanigans (like providing 8Mbps line with 300MB allowance per month), I'd like to say... welcome to corporate greed.

PS: Best bit of advice, make them bleed while you can, and then change your service stating why you changed, It won't achieve much, but its about the best you can do.

Re:Welcome to corporate greed

[VoltageX]

You're describing Australia's situation pretty well there. Except for the 8mbit - that's high end - no joke!

Re:"flat rate" makes littl sense for broadband spe

[Anonymous Coward]

a few bucks per gigabyte of volume

You would have to invent a time machine and go back to the nineties first to get away with that.

Re:"flat rate" makes littl sense for broadband spe

[nanosquid]

That's what you think. That's probably what broadband users are actually paying on average. It's just that people like you are downloading hundreds of gigabytes while people like my mother are reading their E-mail and only want broadband for the convenience and fast load times.

already experienced it

[palewook]

normal connect speed is 6000 kbps, last week downloading newsgroup headers started dropping to 40 kbps. nice thing is during shaping, if you have voip with TW, your phone gets hit too. vonage nows sounds better than TW which sounds more like skype if you happen to get shaped, during a call.

Re:already experienced it

[fimbulvetr]

Giganews offers encrypted connections over the standard https port. It would be pretty difficult for TW, et. al. to tell the difference between https html and https data.

Good providers

[Ilex]

Sounds like one the Entanet resellers like UKFSN or ADSL24. They still ultimately use the BT DSL network but unlike the US each ISP can choose the type of service level they provide, BT just provide the infrastructure and is Net Neutral to the type of traffic that is sent across it. Entanet and their resellers also have a Network Neutrality policy. The only traffic management they have is an anti loss tool which reduces load on the pipes during periods of high demand. Even when the network is heavily congested you should still be able to get 2Mbs and they're pretty quick in expanding their capacity too.

There are very few ISP's now that won't manage their traffic in some way and they'll be using LLU not BT.

Be unlimited is probably the best provider for heavier downloaders. I recently switched to them from Entanet and now get 11Mbs at the port with a nearly 14Mbs line speed. On a BT provider you're lucky if your actual data rate hits 6Mbs

Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

[Doc Ruby]

A Time Warner cablemodem account (really RoadRunner sold by Time Warner) I've been using has grown suprisingly fast in bandwidth. Every 12-18 months it approximately doubles, from 2Mbps to 10Mbps over the past 4 years. Its upload was about 600Kbps until last week, but one day it went symmetric, 10Mbps in each direction or both simultaneously.

(Strangely, just uploading with wget doesn't do it, but rsync over scp gets the full 10Mbps instead of the old 0.6Mbps.)

The jumps happen suddenly, but what's strange is that Time Warner doesn't promote the increases. I'd expect them to put ads screaming about how I'm paying the same, but getting so much more, steadily for years. I'm pretty cynical, but I can't keep up with that mystery.

Re:Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

[beavis88]

but rsync over scp gets the full 10Mbps instead of the old 0.6Mbps

They probably can't "shape" your encrypted connection...

Re:Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

[ChronoFish]

Just guessing here, but it's possible that TW doesn't want to put themselves on the hook for the higher bandwidth. Cable speed is dependent on the number of users in the neighborhood. Early adopters get to see the bandwidth in all its glory until everyone on the block is downloading DVDs.

-CF

Re:Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

[Doc Ruby]

I'd think so, too. But testing scp (not wget) without rsync gets the slower 60Kbps, while wrapping it in rsync gets the faster 10Mbps. Somehow the higher bandwidth is negotiated by rsync, not scp, unless scp goes into some other mode when called by rsync.

Also, I forgot to mention (because doing it has become automatic) that "rsync scp" initially gets the slow rate. But if I cancel the initial invocation, then reinvoke with --partial (even if practically nothing has been sent), then I get the fast speed.

There's extra negotiation overhead to rsync, or I'd just symlink "scp" to an "rsync scp" script that starts, cancels, and restarts.

Re:Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

[Doc Ruby]

Or, in this case, uploading DVDs - or operating a server from home.

10Mbps is fast enough to stream 2.5 realtime SD cable-quality MPEG-2 videostreams. So it's more than I'd need to "place shift" my TiVo or DVD collection from home storage to, say, some hotel in Tokyo or Seoul (or other actually modern bandwidth locale) where I want to consume the content I own. But not much more - in fact, probably just enough to placeshift my DVD and monitor my home security camera, with enough bandwidth for other telemetry, including fire, utility and other alarms, as well as URL requests from someone browsing or some other SW legitimately downloading in the other channel.

However, 10Mbps isn't enough for even a single DVD or HD channel, which is 15-80-300Mbps. And it's certainly not enough to stream commercially to enough viewers to compete with Time Warner. Except maybe in a highly efficient P2P swarm - but not for realtime streaming.

It's an interesting scenario. Because targeting the P2P or DVD traffic will drive it "underground", always encrypted and proxied, so it can't be detected. Instead, Time Warner will just enforce fine-print (or secret & unilaterally "agreed") bandwidth quotas, or service dropouts.

All because Time Warner is both a bandwidth ISP and a content and services seller. If the network layers were prohibited from being stacked into vertical monopolies, the bandwidth ISP wouldn't have any vested interest except delivering better bandwidth per dollar.

Net Neutrality is everywhere. Unfortunately, the telcos/cablecos got everywhere with their lawyers, marketers and lobbyists first.

Re:Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

[beavis88]

Hmm, that is damn strange, to be sure. Whatever the real cause, it seems like traffic shaping is probably at the root - maybe you've stumbled upon the secret code to bypass upload restrictions. Like the Time Warner version of "Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start" :)

Re:Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

[Doc Ruby]

Hmm, then I guess I shouldn't have disclosed it so casually on Slashdot. Now it'll take years to figure out that I have to "rsync --UUDDLRLRABStart scp" ;).

Re:Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

[TheoMurpse]

I'm in Austin and have an Easynews account. My download seems to have gone up if I get my files from the web-based interface. I used to be able to download a 174MB file at around 500KBps, but beginning recently, I now max out at over 750KBps. It's quite amazing to realize that I'm 50% closer to downloading from a single site at 1MBps.

Now, I realize that the stated speed may not amaze many of my friends on /., but a 50%, unannounced increase in speed is pretty awesome as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

[citizenr]

Cable modem with 10Mbit upload? nice lie

Re:Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

[Doc Ruby]

It's true, as I further explained in that thread. Pretty stupid denial you've got. And worthless in face of my truly fast connection. What do I care if you believe me? Jerkoff.

Remembering Mama Bell

[drgonzo59]

Remember Ma Bell?

Are you just trolling or are you serious?

Let's assume that you are serious....

There was a reason M.B. was broken up.

Imagine for a second that Time Warner was the "Internet" and immediately decided that access to the Internet was $200/month minimum and you had to rent your computer from them for $199.99/month and you couldn't buy any computer to use with their service except through them. If you were late paying your service would be shut off immediately and you would forfeit the "great privilege" of being their customer in the future unless you payed a reasonable $2000 re-connection fee.

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

[Watson Ladd]

Before Bell got busted they stopped forcing you to rent phones due to a lawsuit they lost.

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

[JDevers]

You forgot that the customer service was still just as bad as what we have now... The only difference is that on the other end of the phone was an American that could care less about your complaint instead of an Indian that could care less about your complaint.

When large cities or states as a whole complained about things, Ma Bell fixed them when YOU complained about things they told you to stick it and deal with it, they did it with a smile and a thank you but they still did it.

I would rather pay $20 a month for my phone service and get shitty service than pay $100 a month (or more) for my phone service and get shitty service and also know that under no circumstances will I ever be given a chance to change.

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

[Cadallin]

Nice Try.

Yes, there was a reason, namely greed. By the time Bell was broken up, you had been able to hook anything you wanted up to the phone system, with the sole provision that it didn't interfere with the operation of the system, for over a decade.. See the 1968 Carterfone ruling by the FCC. Relative pricing was, by and large, and artifact of the time and the relative level of technology. Bell provided immaculate professional level service to all its customers. Equivalent to having a guaranteed mainframe service contracts from a company like IBM then, or now.

You also completely ignore the enormous good Bell did (admittedly because they were forced by Congress) in the Form of Bell Labs. Want to even guess what the computer you're using right now would cost without Bell Labs? Sure, engineers at Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit. But Bell Labs developed the transistor out of basic research into quantum mechanics. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs. The Transistor, the discovery of Cosmic Background Radiation, the development of the C Programming Language, UNIX, incredible advances in LASER tech, are just the highlights.

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a reason M.B. was broken up.

And all that did was make a lot of little bells that in the end, behaved just as badly. But hey, it wasn't a monopoly anymore, and if you didn't like the service... well, I hear the other side of the country from you has nice weather these days.

The regulations like allowing you to buy and use your own phone was a good thing though.

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

[ScrewMaster]

You forgot ESS. Yes, Bell Labs was responsible for a lot of groundbreaking stuff.

I have to say, though, I agree. There were a lot of legitimate complaints registered about the Bell System at the time, but customer support wasn't one of them. They had quality of service standards they had to live with, and by and large they did. I ran a good-sized multi-node BBS in the mid-to-late eighties (16 or so lines) and I have to tell you, the technical support I got from our local RBOC was stellar. They had a nominal charge of $40/quarter hour at the time, but I had a guy come out and install 18 phone lines at my home. He spent two days running cables around the place (because of the way the place was built he couldn't drill through the floors) and only charged me a hundred bucks. All solid, quality work, and the installer actually had considerable training in general electronics and telephone theory. Knew what he was talking about, let me tell you, and he told me that he got all that training from the company school. As an engineer myself, I was impressed. But hey, AT&T expected to be around and they expected their employees to stick around, and it was worth the investment. Hell, once he had it all in place he said, "you're gonna want at least one hunt group for this: if you have me set it up for you now it won't cost you anything." Cool.

Contrast that to what I've received from Comcast and SBC in the past fifteen years or so ... shoddy work, ignorant installers that barely speak English, and when they're all said and done what I get is a ball of twisted pairs floating in midair over my basement floor without so much as a wire nut. Kind of a third-world flavor, really. Then they ARGUE with me when I try to tell them that they have ring and tip backwards or no, you have lines one and two reversed. Bare wires everywhere. I complained but the "technical support" people I spoke to couldn't understand me either and only cared about whether I had working phone service or not. So I had to go get a block and a punchdown tool and do it properly myself. And this for double what the old Bell System used to charge me every month (Comcast had me up to $95/month for two phone lines before I switched to VoIP.)

The reality is that presiding Judge Green (who was oh-so-concerned about unspecified additional "services" that weren't available to the consumer because of the AT&T monopoly) was just too impatient. The Internet came along and we got all those things anyway ... what we lost was the world's most reliable phone system.

Yeah, sure. The breakup was a great thing.

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

[Cadallin]

Thank you, its good to hear from people who don't think I'm completely crazy from time to time.

I'm going to have to remember to my phrase arguments in favor of the old Government controlled Bell Telephone system this way: Fundamentally, regardless of whatever other complaints you want to make about the old Bell Telephone system, they provided a level of service and support that has remained absolutely unmatched in the United States telecommunications industry to this day. That gold standard of quality is what made it worth the flaws.

I wonder what happened to that exquisitely trained installation tech from your story. How did he fare in the Telecommunications merger/split circus that has characterized the last 20 years of the industry?

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

[Mattintosh]

I wonder what happened to that exquisitely trained installation tech from your story. How did he fare in the Telecommunications merger/split circus that has characterized the last 20 years of the industry?

I hope he took a retirement package and is living well on a pension that the greed-inhibited jackasses now in charge have to keep going for fear of getting their asses sued to kingdom come.

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

[Kisil]

In theory, the low quality work and uneducated workers still produce "good enough" results (your phones work), and the companies cut expenses.

Unfortunately, most of the time it really IS cheaper to get the job done right the first time - the costs of correcting your mistakes are hidden as "repairs," which don't go on the balance sheets for at least a couple of quarters. Since CEOs are under enormous pressure to keep the stock price rising on a day to day basis, they're willing to accept the shittier service and long term costs as a trade-off for nominal short-term profits.

They get away with it because most people don't complain when their phones cut out, as long as it's only once in a while, so the costs actually end up staying down.

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

[Cadallin]

Your point about the economics of providing high quality service is, in my opinion, why a government controlled monopoly with enforced quality standards is the correct course when you're talking about vital infrastructure.

In my opinion, they shouldn't be allowed to get away it. They do, but is it a good idea to allow it when we're talking about infrastructure vital to a nation? Communications infrastructure affects everything, from business, and government, to the military, and our personal lives. I feel the same way about energy and transportation as well. Leaving entertainment up to the whims of the marketplace is one thing, having the lights go out because of Corporate shenanigans (Enron, rolling blackouts, remember?) is quite another.

What infuriates me is Neocon economists like Milton Friedman was, waving their hands and saying its impossible for those things to happen in their perfect little ideal theories. Sorry, but theories are supposed to explain the data, and if your theory ain't consistent with the data, then it is a load of shit. Say what you want about John Maynard Keynes, but he advocated analysis of historical data to derive hypotheses to shape policy. In short, he advocated Economics as an actual science, not just some idealistic philosophical fantasy.

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

[CodyJackson]

This is one of my favorites! What would cell phone technology and service be like if AT&T had remained intact? And, carried one step further, what about bluetooth?

Re:"flat rate" makes littl sense for broadband spe

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

The problem is that the word "unlimited" sells, because people like fixed costs.

The only option that's likely to work is for consumer rights legislation to legislate what words like "unlimited" mean. This should create a level playing field for all providers - similar EPA miles-per-gallon figures.

Comcast is doing this too

[Manzanita]

I am in the Bay Area and noticed that Comcast is doing this also with newsgroup traffic. When I discontinued service in January I would get a sustained 12Mbps download. Now I see that it will jump up to 12 for a second then down to 6Mbps. It doesn't really bother me though. I used to rate limit myself anyway so there would be bandwidth left over for other things and other people within my home. I prefer this solution to having Comcast suddenly terminate my service like some other people reported happening for heavy usage.

-Dan

Re:Comcast is doing this too

[MikeTheMan]

I'm not sure if it's throttling or not, but lately my Comcast access has been dreadfully slow, intermittently, and only for web pages. As in, I can download at 500kb/sec from FileShack by I cannot get to Gmail without waiting 60 seconds for the page to load. Talking to Comcast hasn't helped, as they insist that the problem is on our end, even though it's been fine for the 8 months since we got it, and we haven't changed any setup on our end.

It is terribly annoying, but then, we have no choice, because we can't get service from any other providers in our apartment.

Time Warner == Fake News ,So Stop Funding them!

[Anonymous Coward]

DUH.
Quit funding corporate fascists!
When was the last time you heard time warner talk about electronic voting machine failures?
Pick up a mom and pop DSL and support them! What good is your connection, if you can't use your fucking ports?

Re:Music and Video Stores.

[Dunbal]

Build your own fucking retarded movie sharing network and stop crippling ours.

      Al Gore, is that you?

      Seriously, your complaint is about as effective as the luddite who wanted to halt the industrial revolution by tying himself to the railroad tracks. The people have spoken, and what they have said they want is precisely a high resolution video distribution service. Instead of complaining, why don't you try and give it to them? You'll find it works out better for everyone and you'll even make a profit.

Re:Music and Video Stores.

[LostIt1278]

"The internet is meant for exchange of INFORMATION not fucking snakes on a plane in high def, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Lord help us and save us." Tell that to M$ and their Live service. I have rented at least a dozen movies (including Snakes on a Plane) and bought well over a dozen episodes of various shows on Live. "How fucking stupid can you people be? No, don't answer that, its pretty obvious." Shouldn't you be welcoming us to your world? Obviously you don't know how to use contractions. Get a life Troll. :)

encryption

[Danathar]

Bittorrent currently only encrypts the headers of it's packets. I predict that developers who make those applications affected will do everything they can to make their packets look like https or VPN by using SSL or similar technology.

Re:encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and the ISP just throttles all encrypted traffic.

Re:encryption

[mombodog]

Just use this companies software, you can change the language at the top of the page if needed. https://www.relakks.com/?lang=en/

Re:encryption

[chmod a x mojo]

they wouldn't be that drastic, it would cut their own business. ALL encryption would throttle banksites.... not to mention a lot of the ISPs' own FAQ pages are SSL / HTTPS ..... so you think they would throttle theur own users to the FAQ pages.... forcing the user to call in for tech support that most of the time ( not if the network is unreachable, of course) could be answered from the FAQ?

Re:encryption

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

Um, webpages are incredibly low bandwidth. I doubt if they care that their users will wait a tiny fraction of a second longer to load their web pages. Even so, they could just put an exception for their websites anyway.

Anyway, people are jumping to conclusions about this story. We need to wait and see what is going to happen. It might just be totally benign.

Re:encryption

[Slashcrap]

Bittorrent currently only encrypts the headers of it's packets. I predict that developers who make those applications affected will do everything they can to make their packets look like https or VPN by using SSL or similar technology.

It doesn't matter two shits whether you make the traffic look like SSL or IPSEC or whatever. If you're making connections to tens or hundreds of other hosts on other DSL networks and transferring large chunks of data back and forth then it's pretty obviously Bittorrent.

That's what they'll look for instead.

Re:encryption

[Danathar]

Umm...web pages are not the only thing that uses SSL.

VPN connections are used by a LOT of business users that work from home. Start throttling them and listen to people start to yell.

similar to canada

[Anonymous Coward]

For years the cable companies have been overselling their bandwidth, reaping the profits and doing dick to improve their network. This has been the case in Canada with Rogers cable and Shaw cable implementing a packet-shaping system that cripples bittorrent p2p for months now. Now that users are maximizing bandwidth usage, the cable companies need a way to cull the highest bandwidth users while keeping the rest on a short leash.

Re:Congratulations!

[phoenix321]

In your view:

Removal of anti-trust enforcement = bad
Splitting Ma Bell (a monopolist service provider) = bad

Does not compute. Please re-phrase your statement and bring some coherent standpoint before proceeding.

One question out of curiosity: can you say "functioning government controlled monopolies" with a straight face? I always have to giggle a bit when reading that. But it wasn't until I read "customer hostile corporate policy" that I broke out in tears of joy.

"Functioning government controlled monopolies" that are not "customer hostile". Yeah. I still have that bridge for sale and the Eiffel tower on special offers, you know? :)

Free The Net |Time for CommunNet

[ChronoFish]

Since cable is based on community shared access, why not turn this around and have communities start building wireless/mesh networks with a [single big pipe/multiple small pipe/multi-vendor] connection? Net access can be loaned or purchased with donations/ significantly reduced rates.

Low infrastructure/maintenance/overhead costs will allow a community net to easily compete. Even if the the local ISP fights back with reduced fees or opens up their access, it's still a win!

-CF

Hey, remember??

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, I could be the only one posting on /. who was working in telcom about 5~6 years ago...

But doesn't anybody remember how hard the whole sector was hit with accusations of overinvesting in infrastructure? Remember what happened to Nortel, Lucent, Marconi, Level3 to name but a small few? At the time, could you think of anybody who was 'short on bandwidth'?

So now, after everybody stopped investing for 5 years, demand catches up, and the providers are in a spot -again-. What else are they going to do but things like packet shaping to try and squeeze a little extra capacity out, in terms of users.

Financially speaking, we're just coming out of that spot of industry-wide overcapacity. Now these companies have got to turn around and convince their shareholders that its okay to pour money back into network hardware-- which is exactly what got these people into trouble the last time. This hardware doesn't come cheap, and it gets outdated fast. I'd be surprised to hear that the boxes already deployed by any given service provider have even paid themselves off yet.

So it looks like a cyclical market to me. Expect more problems.

Cartel

[tepples]

Why anyone would enter a contract that states "You pay me every month full and in advance and I promise you nothing" is beyond me. Because all providers that offer service at your location have the same limitation in their contracts as well.

Re:Congratulations!

[Qzukk]

Splitting Ma Bell (a monopolist service provider)

Except that splitting Ma Bell didn't do a single thing about its monopoly status.

Oh, sure, if you didn't like your service, you could quit your job, sell your house, and move three or four states away so that you could buy service from a "competitor", but as far as anti-trust issues go, things like regulations forcing the phone company to let you buy and use your own phones went miles farther than the breakup.

Re:Congratulations!

[that this is not und]

Remember Ma Bell? If, like the average Slashdotter, you don't, imagine a time in which the phone company had to actually make your service work.

I remember Ma Bell, and you are distorting the history as wildly as anybody I have ever seen.

Under the Bell monopoly, customers were prohibited from connecting any non-Bell equipment to their telephone lines. Telephones were attached to the service with screw terminals, not plug-ins, and a phone technician came out to attach it.

Digital communications, except for radically expensive data services, consisted of the Bell 103 modem, which at 110 baud allowed you to communicate at 10 characters per second. Again, to get a Bell 103 set installed, you had to have the technician come out and screwdriver it onto your line.

There was no competition whatsoever for telephone equipment. All equipment connected to the service was owned by the phone company and customers paid rent for it.

All of these restrictions are a big part of why the phone company was able to offer the level of service that you are lauding. Slow, customer-hostile, but generally reliable. Similar in many regards to the way the Internal Revenue Service or the US Postal Service is operate.

It sucked, unless you were one of the bureaucrats within the Bell System, or a featherbedding employee. It's beyond me to understand why you are spreading mistruths about it? Nostalgic for the Cold War era for some reason??

I just don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do U.S. ISPs do this?? I'm and expat living in Japan, and we get what we're told we get. I had 100Mbps fiber for about US$60/mo. They say it's a best effort and not a guaranteed connection, but they must be putting a lot of effort into it because I certainly got over 65Mbps throughput. The other 35Mbps may actually be my computer not keeping up with things, and not the network itself, for all I can tell. We don't have packet shaping. We don't have "fake unlimited" accounts, but real unlimited accounts. This sounds fair, we get what they providers advertise. Why isn't this the case in the U.S.? Sounds like unfair and deceptive practices, especially since "voting with your wallet" doesn't always work, since the alternative is just as bad.

But before you blast me with the "Japan is a smaller country and easier to get 100Mbps in urban areas", hear me through. I now live in Hokkaido, the northern most island in Japan, which accounts for over 23% of land mass, with a fraction of the population of the main island. This is closer to Canada or Alaska in terms of landmass/person. Next door neighbors may be several miles away. I live in a sleepy little town, and I don't have fiber, and I don't suspect we'll get it for a few more years minimum. But we do have ADSL, and I have it at about 45Mbps throughput (downstream) right now. Not bad at all. And again, no traffic shaping or false "unlimited" gimmicks. (For what it's worth, I don't think there are ANY providers left in Japan that have a cap on total trafffic per month anymore.)

It sounds to me like the FCC should start kicking some telecom butt right about now, and tell the telecoms that they need to advertise what they're offering, and not something they want people to THINK they're providing. If the costs just can't justify true unlimited access, why not advertise it as being "limited" and offer a more expensive "truly unlimited" account? Over here in Japan there are residential and business lines. The business lines cost about 3 times as much, but there is a difference. Business lines have multiple static IP addresses. And if you pay even more, you get a "guaranteed" throughput speed, and an SLA with five-9 uptime guarantees.

Each time I hear about these things, it just makes my eyes roll. WTF???? It is just insane that ISPs can actually get away with this. What they're doing is pretty much the same as an airline selling the same seat 3 times, and telling 2 out of 3 passengers that the flight was overbooked and they're SOL.

Re:I just don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed! I used to live in the mountains of Hiroshima prefecture, on the outskirts of town with a population of 5000, most of whom had very low disposable income. My 55Mbps adsl 2+ line used to sync at 30, and I could make full use of that. That was with YahooBB.

Now I'm back in the UK where I have a 24Mbps ADSL 2+ connection. It only syncs at 6Mbps down (and 1Mb up) because I'm 5km from the exchange, but I regularly max that out for extended periods. I'm subscribed to Be*.

Why is the US so far behind the rest of the world in internet access?

Re:I just don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they can charge more and give less. It's the American Dream. Make a lot of money while screwing people over.

Re:A cunning plan... Backfires. Please help.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an Earthlink cable subscriber, but I live in a TWC controlled area so I pay them and get my email and such from Earthlink. About a week before this "announcement" my cable modem would desync between the hours of 8am-8pm. During this time I could power-cycle my modem as much as I liked but I could never sustain a connection for more than 5 mins and when I did connect for those few minutes i would DL pages at 5kbps...

I called them, replaced my modem, had them come check the lines and rewire the cable to my house, and called tech support numerous times. Each time I called them I was sure to ask if they used packet shaping technology or bandwidth throttling, they said "No we do not." Funny thing is they said if it was a problem like that, more people would be calling them, but guess what. I have a vonage phone, and I had to borrow my neighbors phone each time I had to call them also as a test since yesterday I have stopped running my modem as pass-though on my vonage box and disconnectd it temporarily and now my connection has been stable for that one day.

I dont use torrents at all, the last time i used newsgroups was to DL the LOTRO beta client a few months ago(much faster than their site),and im only watch the occasional video on youtube(weekly if that often). My bandwidth is not just being shaped, it is effectivly being shut off durring peak business hours.

I wouldnt usually say this but is there any way to take my modem off their radar? I wont pay for shit service and the only other alternative from my 8000/786 is ATT's 786/256 DSL (Vomit).

I find it hard to beleive a company would just come out and annuonce this without people complaining first.. Ohh yeah thats why you cant connect, your a vonage customer come pay $20 more a month for our same shit VOIP service. How many 3rd party VOIP customers cant even call them to report problems?
Slashdot Help!

Shaping is rife

[Anonymous Coward]

At least TW has the decency to inform its customers that it's doing this. How many other large cable companies have bothered to tell their customers?

How I long for the days of Comcast

[SQLz]

Man, every since Time Warner has taken over my cable service its been shockingly bad. Internet is down constantly and for days. I've called support a couple times, apparently it went down because they don't support Linux. They are also doing something to the channel lineup, changing channels around a lot, that renders my Tivo useless for a lot of stuff.

Re:How I long for the days of Comcast

[Howitzer86]

They don't support Linux? How is that possible?

This story is fake.

[CheSera]

I work in one of the 5 TWC Regional Data Centers. There was no memo like this on Wednesday, nor have I ever seen such a memo. Reading it, you can clearly see that its a faked up story, as it mentions applications that take "lots of bandwidth". I'm sorry, but the people who write our memos wouldn't use verbage like this. Excessive maybe, considerable surely, but not "lots". On top of that, do you really think that TWC Corporate would send out a memo to announce this? I can guarantee you that if and when we do start packet shaping your traffic, it won't be announced to the world. And finally, the story itself is false. We haven't, nor have we any plans what so ever to start doing this. And come on, newsgroups? You think newsgroups are killing our bandwidth? That's just silly.

Re:This story is fake.

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

You may work for TW - but did you read the DSL Reports thread? Several people contacted TW and received replies to this effect.

Re:This story is fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a janitor there? Usenet is the preferred method du jour of "sophisticated" users to distribute movies, warez, etc. Not Google Groups, but subscription Usenet services that claim not to keep access logs. Files are uuencoded across multiple posts; clients download, decode, and reassemble the fragments in those posts, and voila: free movies, games, etc. P2P not required. This isn't new. People were using the binary newsgroups for this at least fifteen years ago. Where were you? Oh, you missed a spot over there.

Re:This story is fake.

[dkf]

FYI, it's entirely up to the ISP (or whoever is running the particular newsserver) which groups to carry. It always was. A lot of them block binaries groups, usually on the grounds that they're more trouble than they're worth. (If you've got a binary you want to distribute, put it on an FTP server or a website; those protocols are much better designed for bulk data transfer.)

Re:This story is fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

I did say "subscription Usenet services" that claim not to keep access logs. If you want the binaries groups, you wouldn't pay to access a news server that didn't carry them. If you put (or download) binaries on an FTP server or website, you have to worry about their logs (which you could get around with an anonymous proxy that doesn't log), and they have to worry about the uploaded content, etc. If the goal's anonymity, whether or not a protocol's better designed for bulk data transfer is a moot point.

Re:This story is fake.

[Anonymous Coward]

The email may be "fake", but the packet shaping is NOT. I started to experience it over a week ago here in Cincinnati. My newsgroup downloads used to be in the 6.0 - 6.5 Mbps range and dropped to 3.0 - 3.2 Mbps range. I did some reading and found the "fake" notice about the speeds. I checked my Usenet provider and found some additional ports they had for use other then port 119. The ports they had included 119, 23, 25, 80, 3128 as the "standard" ports. I tried all of these without any speed change. I'm not going to mention the other ones they have just in case you really DO work for TWC, I don't want to have the other ports blocked. ;-) Once I switched to one of those additional ports my speed jacked right back up to 6.0 - 6.5 Mbps.

Tell me how that would not be some sort of shaping? Same server, different port, different speeds.

Re:This story is fake.

[lysacor]

Then try explaning the fact that I have nailed your statement by a few facts:

My brother and myself lease a server and colocation space out of a major colocation facility in Dallas, TX. My brother used to work at this facility, and knows that it uses multiple POPs, with high multi-gigabit sustained links.

In testing, we are on a gig link into one of many cisco switches at the facility, with fiber connections to the core router in the network (pretty standard for most datacenters wouldn't you think?). This server has average usage of 1.5 to 3.0 mbps transfer sustained at any given time due to various game servers, and voip servers running on it.

As of May 31st my brother executed an FTP transfer from the server to his local machine here at the house on the RR connection. He was getting between 650-900KBps (no not Kbps), which is right around the download speed quoted as the possible maximum for service plan.

This afternoon, after reading about the information I attempted to test to see if the market in which I am subscribed is subject, or being routed through a packet shaping device, or server performing packet analysis for prioritization. When I ran the general speed tests on various sites (speakeasy, the various tests on broadbandreports, pcpitstop, and even the RR houston test server) I found that my overall download speed was about half of what it should be. No big deal, I checked the signals on my cable modem, and removed all devices in line with it just in case there was something causing signal loss on the line. After the modem regained block sync, I checked again with the speed tests. This time my speeds were hovering in the 6mbps to 8mbps range, right around where they should be. But when we attempted to test the FTP link to my brother's server (as a secondary test, ensuring that specific protocols were unaffected) we found that his relatively high speed link to his server, had dropped to 200KBps... less than a quarter than we got about 10 days ago...

So to say this is a fake release, is a bold statement that cannot be proven except by your corporate officers. And regardless of the genuity of the release, I am seeing the effects of possible packet prioritization already, and I am reasonably certain that I can make a case in that regard. I can do more testing, and check, and recheck everything, but I know without a doubt, the Dallas area of the Time Warner network has already been changed in some way.

Also, I was on the line with one of your "level 2" technicians at one point, and he apparently has heard of one other person with the very same problems, and we will apparently be on a conference call with a manager from their support center, and whomever else at time warner that would matter in this regard (hopefully someone with the ability to modify whatever is necessary to correct this alarming problem.)

Re:This story is fake.

[Vegeta99]

I work in real estate, the same situation as you - in a satellite site, away from the corporate office.

The company I work for manages the property, but does not own it. One day, I went in - on rent day - and the phones were ringing off the hook. Nobody could pay online - it said we no longer supported that "amenity" at our location.

For about 20 calls, I just directed people to try again a little later, until I tried to get our maintenance reports for the day, and found that our property's login had been disabled. Turns out that the property itself had been sold, and the new owner told our management company that he did not intend to pay for online credit card and maintenance request transactions. In the mess, probably 150 or so of our residents ended up being charged late fees, that the managers later had to go in and waive due to the change.

Never, EVER underestimate the power of a large corporate entity to forget to inform its own employees of a policy change. Where I work, you simply have to roll with the changes - you never know what a customer is going to say to you on the phone.

Re:This story is fake.

[CheSera]

I'm not saying you can't download illegal files off of newsgroups. I'm telling you its an insignificant amount of bandwidth, so why should we care? P2P we might care about, but newsgroups? That isn't anything we're concerned about from a traffic standpoint.

Re:This story is fake.

[CheSera]

Ok, so now in addition to Newsgroups, P2P, and streaming video, we're supposedly packet shaping FTP as well? People, seriously here, if we were to packet shape something, it would be because the service in question is killing our bandwidth capacity. FTP, like newsgroups, doesn't even come close to hurting our capacity. P2P does. Video might someday. Its the inclusion of these other services that screams "fake" to me in this whole story. I'm sorry your speeds dropped lysacor, and it probably is a legitimate problem, either on our side, or somewhere inbetween, but I can guarantee you that it isn't an intentional packet shaping policy. And yes, the Dallas area of TWC has been changing. There has been a large amount of work since the Comcast transition, and some of it has likely resulted in your current issues.

About the "level 2" technician, and the other comments saying "Well the call center told me so!", I'm sorry, but you got fed a line. "Packet shaping" is a good enough way to get a caller off the line without troubleshooting a problem. Its a crap way to help a customer, but its a call center, and it is going to happen. Trust me, this is the kind of thing that I would have to know about if it was to happen.

Re:This story is fake.

[lysacor]

Regardless of the story being fake or not, the failure is definitely on the side of Time Warner. We have checked the colocation facility, and their policies have not changed, nor the PoP we route through to them after your network.

Recently speeds, routing, and page loads have been awful as well... sustained downloads from sites have not been affected, but general web browsing is awful and extraordinarily slow.

I have tried everything from swapping out my router, to changing to an alternative DNS server to ensure that it isn't the TW DNS systems that are overloaded (which happens more often than not).

Something has gone really bad at TW, and there is serious discussion about nixing TW services altogether, as the primary service we use is internet. Keeping the TV service is counter-productive, as expensive as it is.

DSL will get worse I am sure, but I am positive that somewhere, somehow, someday I will get better service overall.

Thanks for the reply though.

10 megabit Turbo, doesn't translate to me as I will get a 10mb link to sustained downloads, and awful latency to major sites such as ign and others on a consistent basis.

Yes, VOIP is high bandwidth

[macdaddy]

I think something needs to be explained here. Apparently from the threads I've been reading in the article most people do not realize that VoIP is a high bandwidth application. It's true. Consider this, we allot 8kbps per user for our b-band offering which is 125:1 if you're a network person or 128:1 if you're a retarded systems administrator. This typically leaves us with a surplus of bandwidth. For businesses it all depends on the SLA. If they want 1:1 then they'll be paying about $100/meg. Our cheapest upstream is $75/meg plus our own network costs (we just sunk $750k in a new core in one POP and we only replaced 2 devices). How do I know this? I run an ISP.

Going back to the original topic. Skype, Vonage and VoIP offerings built into IM clients, FPS and role-playing games (or the addons) consume between 32 and 64kps, depending on the codec and utilization of the voice frequencies (ie, my phone calls consume around 32kbps but a call between my aunt and mother run much closer to 64kbps). Contrary to popular misbelief just because an audio codec like G.711 claims to only use up to 64kbps does not mean it won't consume more bandwidth with more voice traffic, ie both people talking simultaneously. The voice traffic is many times the average transfer rate of most consumers. While surfing the web and checking email most users will barely make a blip on a I/O graph of their CM or their DSL modem. Most of the VoIP apps I've worked with use G.711 by default instead of G.729 or some other less demanding codec. I haven't even touched on IP/UDP overhead for VoIP traffic. A G.711 64kbps stream is around 84kbps with IP/UDP overhead. This overhead is even greater if you're putting the traffic onto a VPN tunnel of some sort. GRE adds 24; IPSec adds 40 IIRC. Depending on your method VPN implementation you could even be pushing IPSec over TCP adds another 20+, depending on header options. Your VoIP call could be close to the upstream limits of your b-band connection and you don't even realize it, depending on your setup of course.

So in short, yes, VoIP is considered a high bandwidth application when compared to the atypical "95%" user. These are the users that we base on bandwidth allotments on. P2P, NNTP, and porn downloaders fall into the "5%" category. The unused excess from the "95%" users generally takes care of these users. We also run with a fairly substantial buffer, just in case. We have now decided to push for up to 100Mbps to the doorstep over the course of the next 3-5 years. We're rolling out ADSL2+ in some areas as a stop-gap measure and have started on a FTTH project for the remaining areas. We anticipate that more of the "95%" users will be become bandwidth consumers as IPTV, video-on-demand and online movie rental products become more prevalent. The trick is to not overbuild the network before users are ready to use it. We can't pass along the increased costs until they're ready for improved service. Raising cable bills by $5/month will piss alot of people off, even when we've deployed $50mil of plant and network upgrades.

Contracts

[GottliebPins]

If they agree to provide speeds Up To Xgb then I should agree to pay Up To $N a month. Where N is whatever I feel the service is worth.

My favorite justification...

[straponego]

The cable companies claim that they don't have a published or even fixed usage cap, but they are just cancelling the accounts of those who use more than the other 99% of the users. The justification for cancelling them: they use more than the rest.

Okay, assume that's true. Cancel the top one percent. Now you have a new top one percent. Cancel them. Now...

Pretty soon they'll have a lot of bandwidth freed up, and it'll be fair for everyone.

Re:My favorite justification...

[IamTheRealMike]

You wouldn't do it over and over again because at some point the top 1% won't be using significantly more bandwidth than the next 1%. You want to chop off the spike at the end of the graph, eliminating the top 2% doesn't mean eliminating the next 2% frees up as much bandwidth, obviously.

Bandwidth tradeoffs make some sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason providers advertise a single number (actually two: upload and download) is that anything more complicated would be impossible to communicate to the vast majority of American consumers whose general level of technology understanding seems to be about at the level of 'it has 4/6/8 cylinders'. What does make sense to me is to guarantee bandwidth for the first X mb and a lower bandwidth for the next Y mb and so on. It does not discriminate by content and it solves the 90/10 problem. Hard bandwidth guarantees may be difficult and expensive which means some sort of priority scheduling -- shaping -- based on the total bw usage in the past Z days (or perhaps with exponential decay). That is pretty much the netflix solution -- give fastest service to those that use it the least.

Dear TWNYC

[Anonymous Coward]

When my slingbox no longer slings, my torrent slows to a crawl and my friend and i can no longer play games and voice chat
you no longer get my $140 a month, the Soprano's are over tonight so watch your ass our i'll drop that 2!!!

I don't see them killing there own bandwidth though.

Brilliant

[twitter]

TW are probably HOPING to lose 10% of their customers... the 10% who use 90% of the bandwidth.

Intentionally slowing 90% of your network's traffic, regardless of actual capacity, has got to be one of the dumbest plans ever. Your 10% bandwith hogs are always just the tip of the iceberg. They are doing today what others want to do with their network but can't because they lack the software or because the dominant goods and service providers won't meet their needs. Everyone wants a video phone. Packet shaping is waste of money that will later be abused to stifle service competition.

Time for a new government. This one has drifted a long way since Ronald Reagan was extolling the virtues of small business as innovators and employers back in the 1980s.

The fools.

[twitter]

Well who's the fool? The guy that oversells a product by an order of magnitude or the guy that bought into it knowing that it was?

The FCC, which allowed the market to collapse down to a single cable and a single dsl provider with service areas that don't fully overlap. That's not competition, that's government approved monopolies. The costs are tremendous and will hobble every other sector of the the US economy. Countries with better networks, software will have a great competitive advantage.

What do you expect from cable companies

[mabu]

I know many of you may not have choices for broadband, but this isn't surprising when you compare the legacy of telephone with cable companies. The former has been considered a common carrier and respected the data as autonomous. The latter, cable, has made as part of its business model, controlling data and limiting access to it. This is in-effect the fundamental difference between these two types of companies. If you care about data being free, you should not get your broadband service from a company who makes its money by feeding you little bits of traffic a la carte.

What happend to DSL 2.0?

[transporter_ii]

What ever happened to DSL 2.0? It was supposed to have doubled the distance DSL was supposed to have worked from the dslam. And this isn't something cutting edge, they were coming out with this four or five years ago. There was also another technology that was supposed to work like DSL, but much further than DSL as well. Don't remember the name of it at the time, but I found it one time while looking for information on DSL 2.0.

Transporter_ii

Ma Bell is BACK

[zoomshorts]

It is disguised as the 'new' AT&T. Bush appointed cronies on the SEC
allowed the beginning of re-monopolization to begin. Pay attention !!!

Oh, come on, guys... You know what it's about.

[SadGeekHermit]

Time Warner is primarily a MEDIA COMPANY. They make and sell movies. I believe they also own music collections that they sell.

I'll bet you anything that this whole "packet shaping" thing is MAINLY about one specific issue: slowing down the trading of illegally copied music and movies via P2P systems. This trading affects Time Warner's core business, and packet shaping is an easy step they can take to make it much more difficult to trade movies and music on their networks.

As a less important side issue, Time Warner has been trying (without much success I suspect) to sell their own VOIP system. Maybe as a side benefit to the main goal, they think they can reduce competition for their VOIP product.

It's not that they're going to promise you one bandwidth and pull a bait and switch on you. If you're just doing normal browsing and maybe YouTube, you probably won't notice anything different.

But if they perceive you as screwing around with their core business, then as far as they're concerned you're probably fair game.

It's not THAT unreasonable. They just want to put the kibosh on behavior that is, technically, still illegal and takes bread out of their mouths.

Re:Oh, come on, guys... You know what it's about.

[Anonymous Coward]

We haven't even confirmed the nature of the packet shaping yet and here we got bozos like you jumping to all sorts of conclusions.

Re:Oh, come on, guys... You know what it's about.

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU haven't confirmed the nature of the packet shaping because YOU didn't RTFA.

Run along and RTFA.

Then feel silly.

Re:Oh, come on, guys... You know what it's about.

[Anonymous Coward]

They just want to put the kibosh on behavior that is, technically, still illegal and takes bread out of their mouths.

:s/bread/caviar
 
There. Your point remains perfectly valid (it's still illegal), but once you change the wording and turn down the violins playing in the background, it's suddenly not the same moral dillema as punching a child in the stomach and stealing their lollipop.

Re:Oh, come on, guys... You know what it's about.

[martymefurst]

Time Warner has been out of the (unprofitable) music business for a few years, the division was sold to a group of investors led by Edgar Bronfman.

Re:Oh, come on, guys... You know what it's about.

[SadGeekHermit]

Yes, but they probably still have "interests" there.

Re:Congratulations!

[notabaggins]

Remember Ma Bell? Ah yes. I remember the $2/month charge for a "color" phone when the actual dye was no more expensive than the old black dye they used to use universally. Or the charge for touch tone when electronic switching systems saved them money. Or the time the local Bell office responded to a problem with--and I am NOT making this up--"if you don't like it, go to the competition" and a sneer.

And then there's the legacy of SouthWestern Bell (now SBC, now AT&T, now "We're baaaaaaaack") where you can live thirty minutes outside the capitol of the state of Texas and have phone lines and equipment last worked on by your grandfather. Or my personal favorite; there are actual phone numbers I cannot dial. Dial 1+, area code, and number, you get "you do not have to dial a one or the area code" message (okay, but which is it, the one or the area code or both?). Dial sans the 1+ (which some numbers in that same area code require) and you get "your call cannot be completed as dialed." So you try 1+ sans area code. You get "cannot be completed as dialed" So you try just the seven digit number but get interrupted three digits in with "cannot be completed as dialed".

To call my mom, I have to remember that one number in her house requires 1+ dialing but the other requires the area code but NOT the 1+. In the same freaking house. And her husband's number is one of the ones I cannot dial at all. Not just same area code, same house.

SWB was known for letting equipment go for as long as they could manage to duct tape it together but charging for everything in site. Now, years later, the Texas telephone infrastructure is only barely better than the old Soviet Union's.

Though growing up under the SWB monopoly was at least entertaining. Dialing a number was a lot like playing slots or something. You never quite knew what was going to happen or who you'd be connected to. Great way to meet the neighbors I suppose as, quite often, two people dialing at the same time were connected together for no apparent reason...

This is why I have no loyalty

[grapeape]

I switch back and forth between providers as soon as my contracts run out. I go to the lowest price...all the service is equally shitty in one way or another so its really just a matter of who gets the least amount of money from me. This crap actually started a long time ago with certain applications. My latest move was to drop from the highspeed $75 a month package to their dirt cheap $19 one because there was virtually no difference at all with caps in place.

Packet shaping technology

[rcarovano]

Anyone know who's packet shaping technology is being implemented (e.g., Cisco, F5, Radware)?

Not a reliable source!

[tedhiltonhead]

We're getting our news from random forum postings now?? I can't find "packet shaping" on TW's press releases site, although the forum post seems to be formatted as such. Anybody have a more reliable source?

Re:Not a reliable source!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just contacted TW myself. I first tried chatting with someone online who said they couldn't help me. Then I called the number they gave and the tier 1 rep had no idea what I was talking about. I had to actually spell "packet shaping" to her. She said she would put me on hold, check with a level 2, and either tell me the info the level 2 had or transfer me. So she comes back and says "yes, packet shaping has started in NY today, but it will not be available to the Buffalo area just yet." I live just outside of Buffalo. She actually seemed to think that this was a good thing coming down.

So I proceeded to find out the exact amount I'm paying for cable alone (I'm in a cable/digital tv package - and an old one at that). She was really pleasant with me, giving me the run downs of the channels I'll receive if I switch to their new package (Buffalo used to be Adelphia territory until they were bought or whatever, and I'm still under an Adelphia package). She seemed very helpful and eager to help me until I mentioned "ok, well that's great - thanks. That gives me a really good idea of what I'll be paying when I switch to dsl soon. I'll just use the tv part until Fios is available here." Her response "uhhh.... umm.... ok....". Man I love to make them sweat....

I have earthlink over Time Warner's lines

[scourfish]

I don't mean to sound like an advertising whore or anything, but I've used earthlink's broadband service for years, the connection is over time warner's cable lines, however earthlink supplies the badwidth. I haven't really had the problems that I hear time warner customers having over the years, and earthlink is somewhat better about packet shaping policies, especially when you consider old news about them and file sharing. The speed is capped slower than RR's lines (I've only gotten a max of 450 kilobytes down and 40 kilobytes up) but for $10/mo less than RR, who cares.

Re:God Smack Your Ass !!

[utopianfiat]

The Road Runner service may not be used to engage in any conduct that
interferes with Road Runner's ability to provide service to others,
including the use of excessive bandwidth.

"Using internet service is against the terms of your internet service provider's contract"

A (very) few reasons to like Cincinnati:

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of data choices
1) Cincinnati Bell DSL 5mbit/768kb $20/mo no contract
2) Time Warner 6? 10? mbit/? $20/mo no contract
3) Duke Energy ?/? ?/mo yes, the power company
4) Cincinnati Bell Wireless ?/? $30/mo

Plus Cincinnati bell cell phones have no contract and can connect to any wifi network (home or work). Gotta go, they are offering a Razor for $20 bucks (no contract) this weekend.

just a question?

[Anonymous Coward]

how far is the technology gap between,
analyzing packets and prioritizing them (shaping) to
analyzing packets (spying)?

anyway, i think it's like with roads (but it shouldn't be).
it says max "80 miles per hour", but sometimes there's
a traffic jam.
i think most isp "get away with it(tm)" because majority
of customer is ... is ... is ... er ... ehm ... supporting them(*).
yeah that's what i wanted to say.
majority customer supports this ... err ... "fine print technolgy"(**).

anyway, if u get more then 1mbit full-duplex FOR ONE COMPUTER AT HOME,
you deserve to be shaped. sheesh ... internet obesity.

(*) dumb
(**) lying

Re:NO, VOIP is low latency!

[Anonymous Coward]

No VOIP is not high bandwidth. Cellphone users transmit only 9-12Kbps each way and that is good enough for most so long as latency remaions low. VOIP, like most interactive applications, needs low latency and streaming needs relatively constant latency. To get that low latency, which is an artifact of a low usage packet switched network, requires either a dedicated virtual circuit or plenty of spare capacity. That sparseness is what you call "higher BW needs" of VOIP.

If you are reselling a 1000/1000 connection 125 times, you are commiting FRAUD, plain and simple. Even during the Ma Bell days, phones were assumed to be used 4% of the time, thats only 25 times capacity and they let the user know, if they couldn't use it (busy signal or "the lines are down" message). Once connected, it rarely ever dropped. And that was for long distance. Local was planned at higher utilization rates, 10% or higher (residences with teenage girls were heavy users). 8Kbps is only 2.5GB/month. That's even lower than 56K dial up (15GBpmo down/7.5GBpmo up) and in the old days, the local ISP dedicated a computer (PC) to each modem and was able to make money doing it. IDSN at $10/month gives you 16 times that (40GB/mo), gauranteed. A local ISP here charges only $10/mo for a 1.5/0.25 ADSL connection and uses a dumb packet switched network. Its not unusual for users to download 320GB/mo and upload 50GB/mo using P2Ps and many do.

I live in Brooklyn, so I'm practically screwed

[falloutboy]

I live in Brooklyn and currently have Time Warner cable modem service (although not cable tv -- Dish Network for that). The speed I get is usually pretty good, although streaming video is frequently jittery, even during far off-peak hours. Unfortunately the only other consumer-class services that is available to my apartment is Earthlink cable modem, 5 megabit down. I'm pretty sure I'm going to switch to that soon, largely because Time Warner customer support sucks so badly. After Earthlink, though, I'm pretty much out of options. Doh.

Translation

[Nom du Keyboard]

You no longer get the bandwidth you're paying for.

And because our system is beatable, when you do beat it, we beat you!

Obligatory...

[SuluSulu]

I for one welcome our new ASS overlords!

Re:Obligatory...

[Tsagadai]

I can't wait to get behind the Applied Slashdot Superiority VIOP division. We could have ads about talking through you ASS connection and talking out your ASS to other clients in your corporate WAN as well as ASS to ASS for optimal quality and a satisfaction that no other service can offer.

Re:Obligatory...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will your Voice Internet Over Protocol be covered by the Digital Copyright Millennium Act?

Re:Obligatory...

[Mister Whirly]

Lets just hope they don't branch into cash machines. I'm not sure if I want to use the ASS branded ATM - ATM could have a whole new meaning here...

FRAUD AND LIES!

[Nom du Keyboard]

Time Warner today implemented a network management tool to improve the operation of the network for all subscribers. As a result, a small minority of users may experience slower speeds during peak hours when using certain applications that consume lots of bandwidth.

What outright B.S. It certainly doesn't help all subscribers from the start. It doesn't help at all the ones who actually use the network they were promised.

The Road Runner service may not be used to engage in any conduct that interferes with Road Runner's ability to provide service to others, including the use of excessive bandwidth.

That could apply to anybody who uses the network at all!

These people should be sued for consumer fraud, and into Specific Performance. If you give me 6MBs, and charge me for 6MBs, I'd damn well better be able to get 6MBs most of the time on any application I choose to run!

Re:Congratulations!

[The One and Only]

One question out of curiosity: can you say "functioning government controlled monopolies" with a straight face?

The postal service doesn't work? I thought "functioning government controlled monopolies" were everyone's solution to the health care crisis nowadays.

WhereTF do you live?

[The Rizz]

Strange... For years I have had the option of choosing from a few different local phone companies (non-VoIP), and many different long distance companies.

Re:WhereTF do you live?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many telephone wires owned by different companies do you have running to your house? To your street? Is such overbuilding typical in the United States?

Re:WhereTF do you live?

[The Rizz]

How many telephone wires owned by different companies do you have running to your house? To your street? Is such overbuilding typical in the United States? I have the typical lines that come into the average modern house. Law requires the company that owns the lines to offer reasonable access rates to competing phone companies. Each line can be switched to any of the local carriers. No overbuilding, just good switching design and anti-trust laws.

Re:WhereTF do you live?

[Anonymous Coward]

No idea where YOU live, but in the US, the FCC "deregulated" that particular law, and now around here there's only AT&T.

X = 0.02 Mbit/s and Y = 0.04 Mbit/s

[tepples]

Flat rate. Guaranteed X up / Y down (preferably X = Y) with ability to go up to a.X up and b.Y down when the network loading can handle it. (a and b are greater than 1!) Would you accept X = 0.02 Mbit/s and Y = 0.04 Mbit/s? Because that's the only way that an ISP can afford to offer your deal structure at residential prices. Set a and b to 30 and 150, and you end up with the exact deal that residential ISPs in the United States appear to offer.

Re:X = 0.02 Mbit/s and Y = 0.04 Mbit/s

[zotz]

Where are you getting these numbers from?

BTW - basically I pay $100 per month for my connection.

all the best,

drew

Re:X = 0.02 Mbit/s and Y = 0.04 Mbit/s

[tepples]

Where are you getting these numbers from? The "0.02 Mbit" is the upstream throughput of V.90 dial-up, and "0.04 Mbit" is its downstream. The rest of the numbers are kinda-sorta made up, as an extrapolation from contention ratios that I have read about in comments to this article.

BTW - basically I pay $100 per month for my connection. Discussion in comments to this article turned very international very quickly. Hong Kong dollars or even Australian dollars are much cheaper than United States or Canadian dollars.

Re:X = 0.02 Mbit/s and Y = 0.04 Mbit/s

[zotz]

Well, in my case dollars is Bahamian dollars which are 1 to 1 with American dollars.

Made up numbers don't actually help us. (I say this kindly.)

Let's say you oversell but watch your bandwidth and buy more whenever usage gets to 80%. Or say you oversell but are up front that at heavy usage times, customers may only get half of the advertised speed but that if these times ever get to be more than x% (say x is 10 or 20) of any day in a month you will buy more upstream.

There are ways to do this and not go to a per byte model. I seariously doubt that at the top of the game they operate on a per byte model. (Anyone care to correct me with facts I am unaware of?)

all the best,

drew

Re:X = 0.02 Mbit/s and Y = 0.04 Mbit/s

[tepples]

Or say you oversell but are up front that at heavy usage times, customers may only get half of the advertised speed but that if these times ever get to be more than x% (say x is 10 or 20) of any day in a month you will buy more upstream. Where is your evidence that such a guarantee can be satisfied while charging the customers competitive residential prices?

Re:X = 0.02 Mbit/s and Y = 0.04 Mbit/s

[zotz]

I am not saying what you can sell such a package for. I am just saying that I want you to give me a bandwidth, and tell me how much it costs. I will use as much or as little as I choose. I don't want a per byte charge.

Do you maintain that the boys at the top are doing the per byte game?

all the best,

drew

Making it so you'd have to steg your data

[tepples]

So what's the next step? Try to make P2P look like something normal? (eg. HTTP, or FTP, or something like that?) HTTP over SSL and FTP over SSL can be throttled on grounds that they are encrypted: "How much bandwidth does it take to send a credit card number?" As for running a VPN over an unencrypted HTTP tunnel, the most stateful packet filters can examine the object content to make sure that things look like well-formed XML, valid HTML, valid CSS, valid ECMAScript, valid GIF, valid PNG, valid JPEG, or other valid file types. Once you try to circumvent that using steganography, they have enough evidence to pull your plug.

Earthlink doesn't think it affects them

[scottsevertson]

Just chatted with an Earthlink Sales-Bot:

Andy P.: Thank you for using EarthLink's live Sales chat. How can I help you today?
Scott: I'm considering switching to Earthlink Cable from Time Warner Cable, but I'm wondering if TWC's newly announced packet shaping policy will be affecting Earthlink customers? See http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,18468495~da ys=9999~start=100 for some details regarding their announcement.
Andy P.: One moment while I get that information for you.
Andy P.: No, this does not affect us.
Scott: How sure of of that answer are you? No offense, but I don't want to subscribe, then later find out you were wrong.
Andy P.: The Topic on the Forum itself says "TW Officially Announces Packet Shaping for All RR User" It does not mention EarthLink and If this was the case with us we would definitely have received an update on this by now.
Scott: Thanks! Appreciate your time.

Could be the news hasn't trickled down to Sales, but I guess I'm hopeful. Only other option here is DSL, which has a higher total cost if you don't already have a phone line.

It's basically a known value

[kardar]

Pretty much everywhere you go, any ISP, any newsgroups provider, etc... it's all the same.

You've got pretty much something like 5-10% of the subscribers using 50% of the bandwidth.

This is more or less a known fact. This is "the way it is".

Cable and sat, some less-well connected DSL providers have no choice but to do something about it. There's no way you can advertise 8 or 16 or more megabit service that's essentially a TV channel that can handle 36 or megs which is shared by many people (perhaps hundreds) and not implement some way to keep usage down.

Without TW's shaping, without Comcast's strange termination policies, without Cox's selectively enforced official caps, the speeds wouldn't be there. At least not the faster speeds that are trying to compete with Verizon's fiber.

Any ISP that can be called an ISP more than likely has someone who knows what the numbers are. 50% of the bandwidth by 5-10% of the customers. That's life. That's the way "it is". You either leave it that way, and see the glass as half full, or try to change it. If cable is going to offer these faster speeds, they HAVE to do something about it.

Seems kind of silly, you know - you've got customers who want bandwidth (data transfer), you're in the business of providing data transfer services, there's more demand than you can reasonably fulfill, so you view it as customers misbehaving or something along those lines.

The answer is the cable co's are incapable of providing the bandwidth that the customers want (at the present time with the present technology at the present speeds they need to compete). They know this. Everyone knows - 50% of the bandwidth is used by... etc...

Maybe someday more ISP will figure out ways to use new technology to deliver the bandwidth to the customers that the customers want. Perhaps those customers are also willing to pay more, so it could actually be a win-win situation. But at the present time, it's basically just a technical limitation.

The numbers are known, and are relatively static. Cable companies have no choice. They have to do something. The majority of the customers want speed, not quantity. No solution is perfect, every solution has its pros and cons.

Re:It's basically a known value

[QuoteMstr]

Bullshit. First, it should be advertised as "up to X on the web" or somesuch, not overall. It needs to be obvious that some capping is performed.

If the system really can't cope with capacity, there is a very fair, reasonable policy for dealing with the system. It has two parts:

• Using QoS to give HTTP, VOIP and other traffic higher priority. That means that when the pipe isn't being used, lower-priority traffic can use the full pipe.
• A real-time network status display that indicates roughly what portion of an ISP's network is being used for what type of traffic at a given time. Using this, the client can be reassured that the ISP isn't capping traffic for other, nefarious reasons.

Anything else is just your usual corporate scum work. I can't stomach living in a society like this sometimes. Where is the outrage? Where are the regulations? This is greed, not necessity.

Re:It's basically a known value

[afidel]

The problem is that without that 5-10% there really isn't any NEED for the higher bandwidth, the other 90-95% are idle or just web browsing/checking email. I have very bursty patterns, I will download an entire season of a show to watch, then not download much of anything else for quite a while. I like my max available speed to be there so that I can get those episodes in faster than real time, I'm impulsive that way. If my bittorrent downloads were throttled to modem speed I would use the same amount of bandwidth, it would just take much longer and would probably lead me to seek another ISP, probably FIOS with a more modern design and a backbone that's been touched in the last 5 years. Cable is capable of competing with FIOS, just look at DOCSIS 3, but it will require physical plant upgrades and possibly redesigns of some oversaturated segments. The big three are so worried about milking every dime for the customers that they've spent the last 5 years overpaying for that they don't even want to think about spending more dough. Also this kind of traffic shaping crushes any new innovative technology that needs bandwidth and doesn't reuse HTTPS for its transport.

Re:It's basically a known value

[Fifty Points]

If my bittorrent downloads were throttled to modem speed I would use the same amount of bandwidth, it would just take much longer...

No you wouldn't. You would transfer the same amount of data, but stretched over a larger time frame, you're still using less bandwidth.

Property enforcement makes it censorship

[tepples]

a private company really cant censor, thats a governments job. Except to the extent that a government enforces the property rights of members of the censoring cartel.

Re:"flat rate" makes more sense for broadband

[Anonymous Coward]

Since upfront costs for the ISPs are so high, once a rate covers that, very little more is needed to allow common carrier service for the entire BW of that connection.

Considering that a guaranteed OC3 (155M/155Mbps) connection from a tier one supplier is about $3600/mo which guarantees 40ms latencies, 99.99% uptimes, 0.1% packet loss and 200% BW capacity, 1000/1000Kbps dedicated connection shouldn't cost more than $24 with the same as above SLA metrics. With the typical tier three ISP that a customer sees and the SLA difference, it shouldn't be more than a fourth of that, $6/mo. 8/8Kbps guaranteed shouldn't cost more than $0.20/mo. So you are charging $10 for $0.20 of service and have the audacity to call that as not being a total ripoff! 10/10Mbps 10baseT ethernet should cost about $60/mo and have a typical max capacity used of 8Mbps combined (notice I didn't say full duplex). 80 of them could be sold with tier three SLAs for $60/mo netting about $1K/mo profit.

Guaranteed DS3 (45/45Mbps) goes for $1,400 ($32/mo per 1/1Mbps conn), OC12 (620/620Mbps) goes for $7,500 ($12.10/mo per 1/1Mbps conn) and OC48 (2.5/2.5Gbps) goes for $16,000 ($6.40/mo per 1/1Mbps conn). So the larger the pipe, the cheaper it gets. 300 10BaseT connections for $60/mo each yields about 2K/mo profit with no chance that any packet would be lost as all of them could upload or download simulataneously and still not use all the capacity. 600 could be sold with a low chance of most using P2P simultaneously and not locally being satisfied. That nets $18K/mo in gross profit and even if it was widely known among them what was being done, they likely would be satisfied as 8 goes into 5,000 (2500 each way), 625 times. 4% spare is allowable given the tier three ISP SLA. But if you sold 37,500 of those, 62.5 times capacity (125 times each way), you will be found out and they will, rightly, crucify you. $2.234 million a month gross profits on $2.25 million a month revenue will always seem excessive.

And these rates fall over time. The same $3,600 for OC3 cost $20,000 in 2002. By 2012, OC48 likely will cost just $3,600/mo so 600 10BaseT users shouldn't pay more than $10/mo then. So as time goes on, the rates being charged by that ISP will become more ridiculus.

Recently I talked to a TWC rep

[pair-a-noyd]

concerning a billing issue. I also took the opportunity to complain about their unfair practice of charging a penalty for NOT having cable TV service, the normal RR fee is $45 a month, if you do not have TV service they charge you $55 a month, plus taxes. That sucks.

Anyway, I asked her about the recent adoption of the DOCSIS 3.0 standard and how that was going to impact my service, what does the future hold?

She told me, "Before the end of 07 you will notice a SIGNIFICANT speed increase."

I informed her that would not hurt my feelings one bit.
About 3 years ago TWC bumped up our speed by a few megs without notice. It's like one day all of a sudden things were coming down WAY faster. I ran some speed tests and was shocked to find it had almost doubled.
There was NO price increase on my bill. I called them to find out what the deal was and they just told me "Yes, we doubled everyones speed. Enjoy!"

I am looking forward to the next six months and what it may bring..

Thats why the good lord gave us tunnels...

[DirtyShaman]

If the internet gods had intended us to not to encapsulate our packets, then we wouldn't have GRE/PPTP/IPSEC..

Earthlink

[NickCatal]

I wonder if Earthlink subscribers on the Time Warner network will be impacted...

Re:God Smack Your Ass !!

[westlake]

"Using internet service is against the terms of your internet service provider's contract"

if you share the connection, you learn to work and play well with others. The rules haven't haven't changed since the days of the party line and the candlestick phone.

I just noticed this issue...

[JimDaGeek]

I have been a digital cable, digital phone and digital roadrunner user for at least 8 years now. I just noticed this "issue" recently. I pay for Usenet access and noticed that downloads were going way slower then the 8 Mbps I pay Time Warner for (I pay an extra $9.95 a month to go from 5 Mbps to 8 Mbps). However, the "fix" is easy, just change ports for your Usenet client. The Usenet server I use NewsDemon offers many ports, just try each one until you get your speed back. I just switch to port 80, and wham, I am back to 8 Mbps goodness.

Their traffic shaping seems to only be port based. Another example is that my upload is 512 Kbps. However, I tried to set up a small website for family and friends and noticed that upload from my port 80 was dog slow. So I setup a free DynDNS.org WebHop service which sends all HTTP traffic to a different port. Wham, back to my full upload bandwidth. I also set Apache on my Mac to have a VHost on *:80 and *:5090. *:80 just redirects everything to *:5090.

I noticed the shaping for Bitorrent as well. I just use a client that doesn't use the traditional ports and now I can download Linux ISO's at a good speed again. Though personally I don't use Bitorrent much. Usenet is much safer if you want to "try before you buy". With Usenet, you are not uploading, no one has ever been sued for downloading only. Copyright right restricts distribution (uploading), not downloading.

I don't really see the reason for this shaping crap. Any some what technical user can bypass it by changing from the standard ports.

Re:I just noticed this issue...

[/dev/trash]

you're violating the TOS

Too bad for them

[Interfect]

I'm not buying their service. I'm opting for one that doesn't do traffic shaping. Nothing that comes out of AOL/Time Warner is ever much good, anyway.

Re:Congratulations!

[SilentUrbanFox]

Slightly OT, but...

Under the Bell monopoly, customers were prohibited from connecting any non-Bell equipment to their telephone lines. Telephones were attached to the service with screw terminals, not plug-ins, and a phone technician came out to attach it. Emphasis mine.
Gee, this sounds an AWFUL lot like cellular service as it stands. When will THAT be fixed?

I'm calling knology tomorrow.

[thegnu]

No, not a knology shill. But I've been supporting RR for a while now, and I think I'll stop. And call my brother. My mom probably isn't getting shafted, and probably wouldn't care that much anyway. Oh, and not recommend RR to any of my clients anymore. And call my client that's on Knology that suggested 2 weeks ago that she might be considering switching to RR, and tell her not to, please.

And then I'm going to send RR an angry letter. AAAARRRRRGHHH!!!! Oh, and be rude while I'm canceling my service. I'll be like, "Hey asshole, why are you shaping my packets?" and the support man/lady will be like, "What?" And I'll be like, "Fuck this shit, send me a customer satisfaction survey."

And then I'm marking it AAAALLLLL zeros. Because I can. And I am super-consumer.

Re:I'm calling knology tomorrow.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> My mom probably isn't getting shafted

Oh, I wouldn't know about that, if ya know what I mean...

Don't know about YOUR ISP agreement

[Khyber]

My Business SLA on my Business-class DSL has guaranteed speeds and uptime levels, and if I don't get what I'm asking for, all it takes is one phone call and I've got a free month tacked on.

Thank goodnes they haven't renegged on the free service, because I'm practically not paying my DSL bill anymore.

So that explains it...

[TheGrumpster]

I guess this is why my usenet service from Roadrunner here in Nebraska dropped from about 4Mbps to about 300Kbps a week ago. It is altogether useless now. What, I'm supposed to pay $45 a month just so I can browse sites and use email? I don't think so. Let's face it, the only use for broadband is downloading shitloads of mp3z, warez, pron, etc. Take that away and the internet is pretty much useless.

RoadRunner - an ISP, or....

[whitroth]

Yeah, well, I just relocated from FL to Chi, and I've got a major beef with ToadRunner: no RR's convenient around here, and I'm on the local cable co's broadband. However, unlike *any* ISP I've ever dealt with, RoadRunner absolutely *refuses* to put a permanent mail forwarding on a closed account. "Pay or die" seems to be their attitude.

So, no more forwarding from my accounts from the accounts I closed 4.5 years ago (another ISP's *real* service, which I appreciated).

            mark

Not Surprising, Time Warner is the Worst

[skeptictank]

Of all of the HS Internet or cable TV providers I have had over the years, Time Warner was worst - by a substantial margin. The Internet connection would be down 24 hours every week and the UI on the set top boxes were so laggy that the remote control was unusable. It would take 2 or 3 minutes for the cable box to register a button push on the remote.

Re:Congratulations!

[Fifty Points]

Really? I just bought my Motorola phone on ebay, plugged my existing SIM card into it and it automagically worked. Perhaps you are on the Sprint/Verizon/Nextel(IIRC) CDMA network?

Re:Congratulations!

[phoenix321]

The postal service is not the same as the telephone service: it's much easier to drive a delivery van around than bury cable lines to thousands of homes. And then there's parcel services like UPS et al., which have been around for some decades, letting you keep tabs on the postal service.

If we talk about governmental control, I'm biased for it, although I know of the dangers to free enterprise and stuff - but all is well with me as long it's not exclusive (no competitors) and state-owned. It could work, like the US Postal service (minus its Vietnam vets), but if it doesn't, you're screwed.

Monopolies should be under control of the law and the public, but not on a tight leash and not state-owned. Political goals and corporate profitability are often mutually exclusive, and while I don't like greedy corporations I absolutely despise governmental waste of money. That's because greedy corporations just try to get my money where wasteful governments simply send the IRS and the police to take it.

Time Warner screws over their customers

[Kupotek]

Wow I think i might drop Time Warner now that theyre packet shaping. They say they've upgraded our service but through packet shaping it's actually a huge downgrade in service performance. I was getting 1.5mb/s on my downloads, now I am getting 1/3 that on torrents. Yet I'm being charged the same amount. This is unacceptable. Premier package was 8mb/768k and i still downlaoded from known sources at 800kb/s then they upped to 15mb/2mb and iw as getting 1.5mb/s -- then they setup packet shaping and im back down to 400-500 kb/s Might be time to look for a new ISP.

(Enter asinine subject you think is witty here.)

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> "The company is already warning users that attempts to circumvent these measures is a violation of their Terms of Service."

You know how to get around this, don't you? Enough people start informing Time/Warner that doing such stuff is "a violation of money coming out of my pocket into yours."

I recall buying a Gateway years ago. Upon finding out Doom didn't run on it, the technical person at the other end of the phone stated, "We don't consider Doom to be a necessary application." Back it went. I assure you they quickly changed their tune.

Re: Another car analogy

[Douglas Goodall]

If you sold me a car with a stated MPG, and it usually got that amount, ok. If you sold me a car, and it dumped gas and got terrible MPG if I happened to drive to the whorehouse, because you don't like the idea, that would be unfair. When you pay for premium internet service, you expect best effort throughput. The best your ISP can do, of course limited by the best your target server can do. On the other hand, slowing down email might not bother me as much as it would bother the power spammers.

You don't get it, do you

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC because there might still be an NDA out there someplace with my signature on it that hasn't yet expired.

TWC is taking a network it owns, identifying the traffic on it, and *prioritizing* the traffic. They aren't limiting anything. There's no advantage to them to not use 100% of their network at all times: they paid for it, after all. The only thing they might want to do is reduce cross-network traffic, but the transfer costs for that are essentially nil (everyone's in each other's pockets in the ISP game in NA).

So what are they doing? They're saying that the guy who's using a service that needs a quick response time gets his quick response time, prioritized for lower bandwidth costs. What do we know that's low bandwidth and high response time? Web Surfing. Online Gaming. VoIP comes next, with higher bandwidth costs. Streaming video comes last. These are all sensitive to latency and jitter and will be prioritized because of it. E-mail will also be prioritized, but that's because they can make the majority happy that way, not because it has special latency or bandwidth needs.

What will be lower on the totem pole? Usenet and P2P, of course. If TWC is evil (i.e. smart) they'll lump non-in-house VoIP in here too. They'll only 'get what is left' of the bandwidth pipe (i.e. tube). On peak hours, there will be a slowdown of P2P while everyone's dog checks their personal e-mail and visits personal sites that they're forbidden from viewing at work because of draconian IT policies. When they log off, everything's back to normal.

So... what makes this worse than the previous regime? P2P will no longer be able to muscle out online gaming. VoIP 911 calls will have a higher quality at the expense of your 2hr download taking 2hr25min.

What makes this better? They can block malignant traffic from bot computers (idiots) trafficking in spam and virii and remove that traffic from the network altogether. They can inform users that they're infected and monitor and limit the scope of the infection. They can slow down e-mails from known spammers. They can warn simpletons that bankofamerica.ru likely does not belong to their financial institution.

Wake up, alarmists. This is good.

The only better thing would be to increase the size of the pipe, and they'd have to charge you a lot more than they are in order to do that.

Re:You don't get it, do you

[Rudd-O]

You are a moron. How can you NOT see the implications of this? Don't you fucking understand that Big Media and Big Telco don't want you using all the killer apps that made the Internet what it is today?

Shaping today, filtering tomorrow. Wait... wait... yes, shaping a week ago, filtering today. Read today's Slashdot.

Re:Congratulations!

[Maxo-Texas]

One minor change I would make...

Anyone without insurance would get the best "negotiated" rate that the health provider offers.

It is twisted to charge a person people without insurance $1800 and a person with insurance $75.

I'd say it almost qualifies as downright evil.

Local "Upgrades"

[PPalmgren]

About 4 months ago, Time Warner (Road Runner) started to throttle my connection between 12 and 6 AM, and by throttle I mean completely cut it off. I'd call and they would say they are upgrading the network between 12 and 6 AM, and 2 days later it would stop. It would then resume after I made a substantial download and I'd have to call again. When they had a service rep come out to my house, he said it was "node recertification" and that they were checking and upgrading all the nodes in the area to a higher standard. Conveniently, the "increase your Road Runner power" commercials for their $55 service started to come out 4 months ago. Does anyone else have any "I smell the bullshit" stories about Time Warner relating to the past four months?

Oh, the irony...

[poptones]

I just love it when yankees (converted or otherwise) go around spewing hatred toward southerners as if we were a homogenous "breed" of redneck, gun toting hillbillies. Bigots? When are you bleeding heart "liberal elites" going to wake up and smell the irony?

BTW I'm an admin and I work from home. That's right: I make what you yankees do and my expenses are almost nothing. So far as constitutional rights... seems to me its the northerners who incessantly demand to tell the rest of us what's right and wrong. Seems the notion of state's rights is lost on anyone north of the mason-dixon line.

confrontational?

[poptones]

The population down here is pretty well divided. My best friend is pretty much a racist, but he's up front about it - as opposed to the mess you get up north where people are rude, think nothing of lieing about the most trivial matters and seem to me, on the average, to be far more racist than down here. I have many cousins from up there, a few friends left over from my youth (I was born in ann arbor) and I can count on one hand the number among them who AREN'T racists - mostly of the most hateful variety - on one hand.

I've dated many black women. It's never been a problem except when I lived in LA. Even people in shopping malls would give us stares and mutterings under their breath. My cousin by marriage who is from south central insists he will never go back to LA, what he calls the most racist place he's ever lived.

Amazing, isn't it, how communities in the "racist south" of Alabama and Georgia are attracting so very many middle class black folk? "Stupid niggers" must just be too ignorant to know better, huh?

wild blue yonder

[poptones]

You can get satellite service anywhere. Small dish on your rooftop, $249 investment and about 60 bucks a month and you got high speed service. It aint unlimited but you can still download in an 8 hour period more than you could grab in a week of dialup.

If you live in the continental US, there ARE alternatives. You may not like them, but the do exist.

Re:wild blue yonder

[antdude]

Another problem is the latencies. Forget gaming like WoW on it. I know people who WoW on 56k modems.