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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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

[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?

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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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?

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

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.

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...

[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...

[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.

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.

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: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: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: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.

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.

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 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: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: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.

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.

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"