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

Class action?

[jcr]

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

-jcr

Re:Class action?

[flyboy974]

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

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

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

So they are not liable.

Re:If you don't get

[phoenix321]

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

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

and

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

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

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

Re:The only option

[Phil246]

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

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

[zotz]

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

No thanks.

Here is something I would buy...

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

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

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

all the best,

drew

Re:choice four

[Sunburnt]

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

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

Re:depends on the application of this

[numbski]

You're not getting it, are you?

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

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

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

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

[ScrewMaster]

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

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

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

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

Yeah, sure. The breakup was a great thing.

Re:If you don't get

[aaarrrgggh]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:It's basically a known value

[QuoteMstr]

Bullshit. First, it should be advertised as "up to X on the web" or somesuch, not overall. It needs to be obvious that some capping is performed.

If the system really can't cope with capacity, there is a very fair, reasonable policy for dealing with the system. It has two parts:

• Using QoS to give HTTP, VOIP and other traffic higher priority. That means that when the pipe isn't being used, lower-priority traffic can use the full pipe.
• A real-time network status display that indicates roughly what portion of an ISP's network is being used for what type of traffic at a given time. Using this, the client can be reassured that the ISP isn't capping traffic for other, nefarious reasons.

Anything else is just your usual corporate scum work. I can't stomach living in a society like this sometimes. Where is the outrage? Where are the regulations? This is greed, not necessity.