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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."
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.
Most ISPs are not common carriers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Wishing that wasn't the way it works doesn't make it so.
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.
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
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 I might be out of date.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.
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)
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.
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
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
I dont read
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.
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.
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
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.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But, see, that's not what these guys are doing. What they're doing is forcibly idling bandwidth.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
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.
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.)
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.
Just chatted with an Earthlink Sales-Bot:
a ys=9999~start=100 for some details regarding their announcement.
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~d
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.
Scott Severtson
Senior Architect, Digital Measures
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.
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.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.