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

[tgd]

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.

Re:If you don't get

[timmarhy]

when you sign up for an account advertised as a 20mbit service, 20mbit is what you are entitled to. fine print doesn't trump that later on. you could probably use this to weasle out of your contract easily enough.

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.

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:If you don't get

[tgd]

when you sign up for an account advertised as a 20mbit service, 20mbit is what you are entitled to. fine print doesn't trump that later on. Um... Yes it does. If you didn't read the contract thats not their problem.

Wishing that wasn't the way it works doesn't make it so.

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

[Xiph]

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?

Re:If you don't get

[l3v1]

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.
 

Re:If you don't get

[TomQ]

You need to understand the basic principles of modern contracts:

"What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away."

Re:If you don't get

[smittyoneeach]

Now, if a bunch of /.ers got together and started an ISP (grafting on the significant marketing, legal, HR, and executive chops you'd need), who here really thinks the final company, Applied Slashdot Superiority, would offer a significantly less evil/more reliable offering to the public?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Even mafia hitmen have more customer friendly terms, I think I can confirm this.
Posting AC for obvious reasons.

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

[timmarhy]

Not up on contract law? so then you'd be aware that in most contract law, if one party has the ability to change the contract terms to the detriment of the other, it has to allow the other party an "out" so the speak. always remmeber that the spirit of contracts is to lean towards fairness on both parties. contracts that don't always get trounced in any court

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.

Re:If you don't get

[jotok]

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.

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

[mikkelm]

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.

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: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

[mkcmkc]

As a veteran of many a math logic class, I can assure you that "up to" means "not more than"--exactly that and nothing else. So, if your provider advertises "up to 1.5 Mb/s", 0 Mb/s would satisfy their claim, whereas 2.5 Mb/s would not.

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.)

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

[eonlabs]

There clearly need to be more ISP providers out there for cable. It's either Time Warner or Dial-up in many areas. I don't like it either, but if you can't break the monopoly, what are you going to do about it?

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.

Re:If you don't get

[FlyingGuy]

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:

• AT&T owns the copper ( the last mile ) to just about every residence is the US these days.
• Unless you can raise BILLIONS of dollars in capitol, you are not going to replace the last mile.
• The big fiber backbones that stretch across the country are owned by AT&T, Verizon, GOOGLE and just a couple of other lesser deities, and if you want to peer with them, you are going to have to play their game Unless you can raise BILLIONS of dollars in capitol and build your own backbone(s) to escape their game, which is not going to happen because they have pretty much all the right-of-ways and have the congressmen and senators in their pockets to prevent you from getting them even if you DID have the money, which you don't.

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.

Fradulent advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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:Class action?

[Detritus]

Most ISPs are not common carriers.

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.

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.

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:depends on the application of this

[jthill]

Priority goes (roughly) VOIP, Video, SSH/RDC, Web, P2P. In that order.

But, see, that's not what these guys are doing. What they're doing is forcibly idling bandwidth.

Re:depends on the application of this

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

Re:Conflict of Interest

[JPriest]

I have worked tech support for an ISP in the past and I can understand why the agreement is basically "You will get a bill, we will try to provide a working service but promise nothing".

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.

Re:Conflict of Interest

[QuoteMstr]

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.

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...

[DigitAl56K]

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.

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

Re:Heh.

[Ash Vince]

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.

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.

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:You should not be surprised or indignant

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Their experience with AOL is showing

[ColeonyxOnline]

Time Warner Cable is showing just how much they learned from AOL during the AOL/Timer Warner days.

It's not that easy.

[superbus1929]

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.

Re:It's not that easy.

[quonsar]

3) go fuck yourself.

DickTel, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CheneyComm

My experience / are there good alternatives?

[DigitAl56K]

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.

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 /. crowd for some respectable recommendations.

Re:My experience / are there good alternatives?

[MikeyVB]

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)

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.

choice four

[poptones]

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.

Re:choice four

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:choice four

[flipper65]

We in Georgia enjoy the fruits of all of your USF payments in the form of outstanding rural DSL availability. As for those of you comparing T1 to 5Mbps keep in mind that the T's only real advantage is the guaranteed speed and uptime. Let's face it, it's slower down and as for the up speed, what do I care how fast my request for porn gets to the server as long as it's delivered at a decent rate.

Re:choice four

[haibijon]

Born and raised in the south, and recently moved to the north. Never been happier, and I'm never going back. A salary more than 2x what I made in the south, and actually having constitutional rights really helps too. And, as for this so-called New England animosity, you might want to actually take a look at the south. The south has never been a great place filled with "shiny happy people", when in reality the south is simply filled with a dying breed of trigger-happy hypocritical egocentric bigoted racists.

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: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:choice four

[Vengie]

Never trust anyone from a state with corners.

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.

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:The only option

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The only option

[noidentity]

They're throttling all encrypted traffic, just incase that its used to bypass the traffic throttling they imposed.

So, we need to convert our traffic into bloated HTML code or something. Would use even more bandwidth, but that's what they get.

That's not the whole explanation

[pv2b]

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.

Re:That's not the whole explanation

[swilver]

Or just look at your Dutch neighbours, they have a lot of competing ISP's while Belgium only has a few (and I believe all of them are using the same network which charges very high rates). A little competition goes a long way, because in the Netherlands, ISP's not only offer cheaper service, they offer faster service without data limits (my ISP doesn't even blink when I download 200 GB+ for months in a row).

The Dutch government has forced the owners of the biggest telephony and data networks to open their networks up and offer the use of their network (for reasonable rates) to any other telephony/ISP company that cares for using it.

There's also a government mandated group that keeps an eye on telecom providers making sure everyone behaves (no price fixing, reasonable network pricing, no tricks to keep networks closed or other anti-competitive practices), and they have the power to hand out severe fines when they're in violation and have done often enough in the past.

Re:Heh.

[palmersperry]

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.

Good providers

[Ilex]

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

Re:Heh.

[Ash Vince]

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

Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

[Doc Ruby]

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.

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

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:Remembering Mama Bell

[Cadallin]

Nice Try.

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.

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: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.

Comcast is doing this too

[Manzanita]

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

encryption

[Danathar]

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.

Re:Congratulations!

[phoenix321]

In your view:

Removal of anti-trust enforcement = bad
Splitting Ma Bell (a monopolist service provider) = bad

Does not compute. Please re-phrase your statement and bring some coherent standpoint before proceeding.

One question out of curiosity: can you say "functioning government controlled monopolies" with a straight face? I always have to giggle a bit when reading that. But it wasn't until I read "customer hostile corporate policy" that I broke out in tears of joy.

"Functioning government controlled monopolies" that are not "customer hostile". Yeah. I still have that bridge for sale and the Eiffel tower on special offers, you know? :)

Free The Net |Time for CommunNet

[ChronoFish]

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

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.

Re:Congratulations!

[that this is not und]

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??

I just don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:This story is fake.

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

You may work for TW - but did you read the DSL Reports thread? Several people contacted TW and received replies to this effect.

Re:This story is fake.

[lysacor]

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.)

Re:This story is fake.

[Vegeta99]

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.

Yes, VOIP is high bandwidth

[macdaddy]

I think something needs to be explained here. Apparently from the threads I've been reading in the article most people do not realize that VoIP is a high bandwidth application. It's true. Consider this, we allot 8kbps per user for our b-band offering which is 125:1 if you're a network person or 128:1 if you're a retarded systems administrator. This typically leaves us with a surplus of bandwidth. For businesses it all depends on the SLA. If they want 1:1 then they'll be paying about $100/meg. Our cheapest upstream is $75/meg plus our own network costs (we just sunk $750k in a new core in one POP and we only replaced 2 devices). How do I know this? I run an ISP.

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.

Contracts

[GottliebPins]

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.

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.

What do you expect from cable companies

[mabu]

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.

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"

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.

Re:NO, VOIP is low latency!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Earthlink doesn't think it affects them

[scottsevertson]

Just chatted with an Earthlink Sales-Bot:

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~da ys=9999~start=100 for some details regarding their announcement.
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.

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.

Re:It's basically a known value

[afidel]

The problem is that without that 5-10% there really isn't any NEED for the higher bandwidth, the other 90-95% are idle or just web browsing/checking email. I have very bursty patterns, I will download an entire season of a show to watch, then not download much of anything else for quite a while. I like my max available speed to be there so that I can get those episodes in faster than real time, I'm impulsive that way. If my bittorrent downloads were throttled to modem speed I would use the same amount of bandwidth, it would just take much longer and would probably lead me to seek another ISP, probably FIOS with a more modern design and a backbone that's been touched in the last 5 years. Cable is capable of competing with FIOS, just look at DOCSIS 3, but it will require physical plant upgrades and possibly redesigns of some oversaturated segments. The big three are so worried about milking every dime for the customers that they've spent the last 5 years overpaying for that they don't even want to think about spending more dough. Also this kind of traffic shaping crushes any new innovative technology that needs bandwidth and doesn't reuse HTTPS for its transport.

I just noticed this issue...

[JimDaGeek]

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.

Re:Congratulations!

[SilentUrbanFox]

Slightly OT, but...

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. Emphasis mine.
Gee, this sounds an AWFUL lot like cellular service as it stands. When will THAT be fixed?

Re:Obligatory...

[Tsagadai]

I can't wait to get behind the Applied Slashdot Superiority VIOP division. We could have ads about talking through you ASS connection and talking out your ASS to other clients in your corporate WAN as well as ASS to ASS for optimal quality and a satisfaction that no other service can offer.