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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."
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.
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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 you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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...
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.
I dont read
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?
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
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.
/. crowd for some respectable recommendations.
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
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.
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.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
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
"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
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
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.
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.
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
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
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??
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.
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.
You're not getting it, are you?
:\ 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.
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.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
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.
You forgot ESS. Yes, Bell Labs was responsible for a lot of groundbreaking stuff.
... 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.)
... what we lost was the world's most reliable phone system.
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
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
Yeah, sure. The breakup was a great thing.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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...
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.
You may work for TW - but did you read the DSL Reports thread? Several people contacted TW and received replies to this effect.
Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
Destroyer of Mercatur.Net
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.)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
So, we need to convert our traffic into bloated HTML code or something. Would use even more bandwidth, but that's what they get.
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
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:
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.
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:
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.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!