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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."
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.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
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.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'm just waiting for the jerks to declare any use of IPSEC as a violation of their TOS.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
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
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.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
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.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
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.
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"
+5, Truth