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Time Warner Filtering iTunes Traffic?
An anonymous reader writes "Starting on Thursday, January 31st, Time Warner subscribers in Texas starting experiencing connectivity issues to the iTunes store to the point where the service wasn't usable. General internet traffic issues haven't coincided with these problems, and many folks have reported that the store works as normal when they head to the nearest mega-bookstore and use their ISP instead. Time Warner has announced that they're going to begin trials of tiered pricing in one local Texas market, but I'll be darn sure to switch my provider if I hear the slightest hint of destination/content based tiers instead of bandwidth tiers."
I'll be happy to offer you dedicated - unthrottled bandwidth to the internet..
Thank you,
Your ISP
Horray we get to pay more money for DRM content.
Any problem caused by a tank can be solved by a tank.
Note that there is no mention of a 20GB bandwidth usage cap.
BUYERS BEWARE
can you read?
"destination/content based tiers instead of bandwidth tiers"
bandwith throttling we understand, its the content/destination filtering that is bs. They now are deciding what biz survive and which do not.
I am a republican not by choice, but rather by lack there of.
...that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Based on all the comments, I have a sneaky suspicion that it's not an attempt at active filtering, but rather a network screwup somewhere in the Texas routers. I imagine that the Apple guys will be talking to every network admin up the line until they find the one who is responsible for maintaining the malfunctioning routers. Should be back up in a few days, unless I miss my guess.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Not sure if your joking or not, but honestly if they were up front about limits and caps I'd certainly appreciate it.
Its their ISP and if they feel the need to cap bandwidth to certain sites, block sites/ports etc - thats fine - just put it in writing.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
There are also a lot of comments about how it all happened when they upgraded to iTunes 7.6, including this gem (which includes a work-around:
Of the few that claim that they were not using 7.6, a couple of them later came back and said "[oops, I did have 7.6]"
But of course, Apple is the perfect and the evil cable monopoly must be violating net neutrality.
"Time Warner has announced that they're going to begin trials of tiered pricing in one local Texas market, but I'll be darn sure to switch my provider if I hear the slightest hint of destination/content based tiers instead of bandwidth tiers."
May I recommend switching to tiered dialup? 14.4, 33.6 and for the speedster, 56.
I'm in San Antonio TX right now, and Itunes has been so slow since thursday, to the point of being completely unusable. Whereas downloading albums or tv shows would take a few minutes, I'm now looking at an expected wait of 4 hours for a 3mb download. I thought it might have been issues with the itunes servers, but kudos to the article for shedding some light on the issue.
- Aetheral Research -
Errr... They DO pay for it.
"Bandwidth" (data transmission) is paid for by both the sender and the receiver of data. Apple has an ISP at the data center where they are housing the iTunes servers, they pay for the level of service they recieve. You and I also pay our ISPs for the level of service we receive.
Everyone is already paying. Tiered internet is just about making some people pay more for the same level of service then other people do.
Discrimination is bad mmmmmkay ?
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
Yes I can read... there are several products on the market that can throttle traffic based on protocols or destinations... I'm aware of their capabilities and I can tell you the one I have worked with (Packeteer) can throttle Itunes traffic (as well as shoutcast, bitorrent, etc...). It can shape on the protocol itself as a whole, a protocol with a limit and then dynamic allocation within it or on per-connection tracking within a protocol.
Seriously... what?
I understand the words individually. But when strung together they don't seem to make any sense. What it sounds like you're saying is that HD movies willingly delivered by content providers to customers who want to pay for them somehow constitutes a greedy misuse of bandwidth by the content producers?
I could follow that argument if you were at least blaming the consumers. But the producers?
Whiskey.
Tango.
Foxtrot.
Maybe I'm missing something here?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Who says its no cost to them? They have to pay for internet connection too. Servers/Services don't get free bandwidth, they pay for the connection to the internet as well. So no its not "at no cost to them". The internet service providers get paid to connect you and for them to connect.
This is interesting, since whilst you could call it a "net neutrality" issue, it's really a monopoly issue. US cable suppliers really have a monopoly on each geographical area. They can use this to force you to use their music services instead of their competitors since you can't switch suppliers. If the US had stronger anti-monopoly laws then this would only be allowed where consumers have a choice of supplier. An "corporates should be free to be evil" campaigner would tell you that this means that others can enter the market and offer competition. That's not true unfortunately since such barriers are very temporary. If you start trying to sell cable service with music in a particular area, TW could just speed up itunes around there so their customers don't see the problem.
In the end, I think we are back to the times when it makes sense for everybody to start building their own internet connections again and buying a single corporate connection per group. Look up community network on google and start building. You know best how do do it.
Sounds nice in principle, but when you don't have any choice in your area, you are sort of screwed.
Even if you do have choice today as more buy-outs/mergers take place that choice will go up in smoke.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Time for Texas to break from america? I THINK SO. Yeeehaaaaw!!!
I'll see you in court for misleading advertising, since there is no mention of site based filtering. Thank you, Your customers.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
You make a good point about ISPs being upfront about their policies. If they're reasonable and clearly explained so I can make an informed decision I am understanding about many restrictions. My current ISP does have a bandwidth cap, but set at a reasonable 200GB/month with more available for a decent price. They don't rip me off on overages, $0.25/GB, and they average over two months so if I lose track one month overages aren't automatic.
I don't get the paranoia people have with regards to bandwidth caps, the truth is it costs ISPs a certain amount per gigabyte. A heavy user should be paying more, this isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is when ISPs advertise unlimited and then put a cap in the fine print.
I will however disagree the idea that is okay for ISPs to throttle traffic just because they're upfront about it. Network neutrality is what made the internet the force it is today, without it the internet cannot thrive.
(and if anyone's wondering, my ISP is TekSavvy. No this is not a advertisement, if it was I'd ask you to mention me so I get referral credit)
So ask yourself. What ISP would limit a popular service to such a degree that it becomes 100% unusable for their entire user base? That doesn't sound like successful traffic shaping to me. That sounds like a misconfiguration somewhere. If it was traffic shaping, I would expect that the speeds would drop to levels to where it would be impossible to watch a movie real-time (for example), yet possible to download it within the time-frame of a few hours. (Say, 4-8 hours as a reasonable range.)
Outright blocking a popular service like iTunes only invites unhappy customers and bad press.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I would be happy to get the bandwidth I already pay for!
As a Comcast customer, I have tended to get about 1/10th of their advertised "you will get up to..." bandwidth, and sometimes not even that.
And yes, they are STILL throttling BitTorrent traffic, illegally. I have been trying to download perfectly legal but large files, with plenty of peers and seeders, yet my download speed has been between 1k and 30k! This on a multi-megabyte-download-speed cable service. Just about everything else downloads very quickly... but of course would download even more quickly if I got anywhere near the throughput they advertise.
You know it is getting bad when certain traffic (BitTorrent, for example) downloads faster on dialup than it does on cable.
...just smile, sit back, and watch how badly this explodes. This is actually going to be fun. These assholes have no idea the kind of mistake they've just made.
Pass the popcorn!
but TW is changing a lot of things recently. I just noticed starting on this past Friday that TW has their own search page load if you type in an invalid domain name. Similar to how IE would load an MSN (now it loads live.com) search page, TW now loads a search page with the domain of ww23.rr.com. Luckily they let users opt out so that your browser's normal error page is displayed but it is just another way for TW to annoy customers when they think they are trying to help. And of course do this unannounced. Their redirected search page is located here for anyone who is curious what it looks like. I hope the pilot project for tiered pricing falls flat on its face.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Imagine your ISP has 10mbps of traffic for all of their users (suppose for the sake of argument that if they buy any more at their current subscription base, they will bleed money). Suppose they begin to see over 4mbps of that traffic to itunes (now that you can rent there) 2mbps to bittorrent 2mbps of audio/media streaming other than itunes, and a myriad of ftp/smtp(consider spam traffic as part of this)/ssl/ipsec/etc... What does that leave for http traffic - the most common way of browsing the internet? Barely enough, causing slow loading of web sites. If the most common method of browsing becomes slow, what percentage of your users will complain? 99 percent? No suppose you decide to throttle the itunes to no more than 2mbps. Wow, a whole new world just opened up for your 99 percent. This is the way traffic shaping often keeps the majority happy and the business afloat. Many ISPs have to pay quite a bit to the tier one providers for their bandwidth. Keep in mind I'm discussing a third party ISP. Not the major ones. The internet bandwidth model has been broken for years. It was built on the premise that over subscription would ensure enough bandwidth.
Then that ISP shouldn't be selling 1 Mbps 'unlimited' connections to 1000+ customers and then complain when people actually *use* the bandwith *they are paying for*. That's false advertising.
I don't know the specifics here, but this seems like user gripes without a proper troubleshooting. "Waaaah, I can't connect to \$RANDOM_SITE !!" .
Maybe a router was down? Maybe BGP was flapping a bit? Maybe there is just a couple of peering partners between apple's provider and this provider ? And a backhoe took the cable?
Maybe powerloss in a Single Point of Failure?
That conspiracy theories should reach slashdot due to a couple of hours of outage is just insane. I expect more of slashdot. And also I expect more of the slashcrowd.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Time Warner have also been having big issues with routing to certain Blizzard WoW servers. I wonder how many customers they are losing because of routing issues over the past month.
Out of curiosity, who is to blame when a big company like Time Warner has those routing issues, and ISPs from other countries use those some routes within the US, hence affecting services for them as well? The customer in the other country can't deal with their ISP, it's not their fault, and it's hardly the fault of the company providing the service.
Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try. -- Homer J. Simpson
Then iTunes users would see 1/2 the speed they were seeing previously. Unless the routers are extremely poor at traffic management, in which case half of the users would be zipping along while the other half would be dying. Of course, traffic is not constant. So if it was the latter, the speeds would pick up during off peak hours. Thus suddenly "solving" the problem temporarily.
Neither scenario fits. Especially since some of the reports included instances of dropped connections. Which sounds a heck of a lot more like a bad route than a lame attempt at traffic shaping.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I remember an ISP I used a few years ago. The local main DSL provider was bringing in a 30 gig a month cap (that's up and down combined. And it was $45 a month). This new service came in offering UNLIMITED, so a ton of people switched. Their response? To retroactively bring in an even lower cap than the main one, and charge people upwards of $200 for "going over". I went so far as to file fraud charges against them.
It's so utterly ridiculous that ISP's can get away with this shit. I am fairly certain if iTunes started getting nerfed on a wide scale, they would incur the Wrath of the Jobs.
My ISP throttles Bit Torrent. Confirmed this myself the other day when I wound up back using the default port. Down and up sucked. Changed the port, reloaded, speeds increased 4000%.
First, let me say I support net neutrality.
Net neutrality is an illusion. If you want to use different services, you have to pay more RIGHT NOW regardless of who your ISP is. Let me explain. Net neutrality is a concept stating something similar to the following. Your ISP gets bought out by Microsoft. Suddenly, you as a consumer on the "Cheap" internet tier can no longer perform web searches on Google without experience long page loads. Your searches on Microsoft Live are fast as lightning, but you don't like the results. You call your ISP and tell them that you can't access Google properly, and they tell you there's no problem with their "Cheap" service, it's that the cheap service has a Microsoft "Preferred Portal." If you would like to use other "Internet Portals," you have to switch to their "Unlimited Tier," and pay $20 more per month for your "Unlimited" internet access.
If you're like most nerds, and have even a decent understanding of how the internet works, you know that this is a scam in the making. You, of course, are paying for bandwidth and IPv4 connectivity out to the rest of the internet, not "Microsoft Direct Connection Service plus Internet."
Some people don't realize that Net Neutrality doesn't even exist today. Try this: If you have email at, say, your office and you host it on your own domain, Telnet into port 25 on your email server. No response? That's because your ISP is filtering you RIGHT NOW. You can't send packets out on or receive them in on a variety of ports, notably 21, 25, and 80. I figured that there must be filters up on my connection because most consumers don't require service on them, and on Joe Sixpack's connection, it's more secure that way. So I called my ISP and asked them to remove the blocks so that I could test my email server at work, set up a personal FTP, and, god forbid, accept Email. I argued with them for two hours, during which they told me, several times, that I could get Business Class cable internet service (sound anything like the "Unlimited Tier" I mentioned above?) to alleviate my problem, and that the port filtering was in place to protect my ISP's subscribers from viruses and so on. I told them I didn't need that "protection" and would like it removed. They eventually forwarded me to a department that didn't give a shit.
My point is, we all get the idea, but how far fetched is the difference from paying extra for the ability to send and receive SMTP traffic, paying extra to send/receive HTTPS traffic, and, of course, the coup de gras, paying extra to access Google or Yahoo!
Time Warner thinks they can convince the American consumer that they should pay extra to access Google the same way they pay extra to watch HBO or Showtime... The same way we have to pay extra to send and receive SMTP traffic. This isn't the way it is now, and it's not the way it should be.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
A customer pays for a service and the ISP takes payment but dosent deliver.
There is nothing wrong with overselling provided your customer can use what you sell them!
If everyone made a phone call at the sametime the phone network couldent handle it because they oversell the service to produce cheaper rates but I have NEVER had a problem making a phonecall because my service provider has carefully planned things out to make sure this dosent happen.
Overselling makes sense provided its dont intelligently so that the user can use what they pay for.
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
>>Then iTunes users would see 1/2 the speed they were seeing previously. This a common error many people make about bandwidth, throughput and tcp. TCP works on windows (not MS) and acks. No acks equals retries. This lowers throughput because of windowing. It's not an exact science. Most providers in tier 1 likely leave their buffers on routers at fifo. This means if an isp's users are throttled back on itunes from 4 to 2, it doesn't mean you'll get half. While everyone is trying resends and windowing is dropping throughput, invariably there will be just too many connections for all to be maintained, and connections will time out and drop, I've watched it happen. When it does, the client will attempt a new tcp connection and the process begins all over again - this increases the overhead for the 2mbps. At the same time, additional users may decide to do some itunes, streaming or downloading, increasing the load even more. As I stated before, the isp oversubscription model is broken. But there has been no solution to this short of raising prices and charging users more so the isp can afford additional bandwidth.
As an ex-Austin customer of Time-Warner ISP, I would say that the first suspect in any service outage should be TWC's incompetence. I finally switched to their new, local competitor: Grande Communications and have been thoroughly pleased ever since. The final straw for me was a network outage for my entire neighborhood that was identified on wednesday, they sent a guy out thursday, then said it would require a tier-2 tech to fix, who won't come out on the weekends, and friday is all booked up. So our whole neighborhood didn't get back online until monday.
Apple is a significant stockholder of Akamai and uses their distributed load balancing service for iTunes content. Before I'd suspect a server-side problem with Akamai (who knows a little bit about networks), my first go-to for troubleshooting would be TWC (who has demonstrated that networks are hard).
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
"But there has been no solution to this short of raising prices and charging users more so the isp can afford additional bandwidth."
Or perhaps the ISPs could not make record profits and send CEOs to resorts with multimillion dollar bonuses and instead spend some money on the infrastructure that supports their business model. You know, to be in business tomorrow.
Just a thought.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Tiered internet would support oligarchies and monopolies more.
Imagine a world where "the studios" had to pay for all bandwidth usage twice, or suffer degraded performance. What happens to independent projects, then?
Did someone actually try to argue that raising the barrier of entry can do anything at all other than support the existing, entrenched power structures?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
In the UK Tiscali have been 'unintentionally' blocking iTunes traffic during peak periods for some time now. This, again, on 'Unlimited' MAX ADSL connections where p2p regularly slows to a crawl...
Despite having acknowledged the problem recently (they said they're working on it - try turning off your traffic shaping???) they initially ignored it, deleting support forum posts wholesale.
I've walked away.
And what happened?
c++;
Not to mention that Time Warner either owns or has partnered with Rapsody, an Itunes competitor.
These days, how can they not afford 2-3 people being on call after hours to fix things remotely. If they cannot then they are cheaper than a used car sales yard.
Or is all infrastructure in usa falling apart like the soviet union in 85?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The ignorant thing about a strategy like this is that companies don't seem to realize that they are simply creating demand for service offerings other than their own. Ultimately what will happen, considering that internet access is a fairly competitive market, is that they risk ending up losing customers to another service provider... and the SP that *doesn't* throttle, or tier, their services will become the favored alternative. Unthrottled bandwidth becomes a feature that people who use these services will seek out and prefer to spend their hard-earned cash for. It isn't just about raw bandwidth anymore... it's about features and functionality as well.
Why any company would endanger their current *and future* customer base through these type of shenanigans is mind-boggling foolish... and anyone who has invested any sort of money in the corporation should really re-think their investment and get the fuck out (i.e. SELL) while the getting-out is good. All may be good in the initial stages, but believe me it will be short-lived.
You don't invest in a company who creates a market for an alternative to their service. It's that simple.
Wow only 200 GB? How can you survive?
Any dodgy looking ships drop anchor in or around Texas on Jan 31st?
Half Word - Will Double, Wire Palindrome, San Francisco
It may very well wind up being consumers that decide their new Internet plans don't need to "live." There will always be alternatives. Of course, the alternative companies will probably wind up doing something else nasty to piss off their customers, but that's just the nature of progress.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
A similar thing happened with Rogers in Canada a few years ago, except in that case the connections were completely killed. Encrypted https connections to the store worked OK. It seems likely that they're packet shaping for bittorrent & the device they're using also manages to throttle iTunes connections. Here's the ehmac.ca thread and the dslreports thread. Then it was a P-cube box (pdf) that was causing the problem & Rogers managed to reconfigure it (through Cisco) to fix the problem. The best way to speed up the solution was to complain to the ISP.
Why? With a natural monopoly, you only need to be good enough to keep people from moving away.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
This should make sense to everyone that this was coming.
Did anyone find it ironic that the big announcement of tiered testing came at about the same time Apple announced iTunes movie rentals?
It's all very simple. Time Warner does not want Apple to have any ability to infringe on their monopoly for on-demand movies. Time Warner is notorious for charging more than their competitors and restricting the ability for any competitor to use their network. Look at what they have done in the past throttling non-TW VOIP. Their horrid CableCard support pretty much makes you use their crappy overpriced cable boxes.
Now they want to make sure you still have to pay twice as much for their on demand movies.
An ISP owned by a commercial competitor to that popular service might try to degrade their competitors service. Maybe they got the degrading a little too agressive? Remember that in this case, the ISP is owned by a company that is suffering from paranoia, feels its very existence is under threat and doesn't know what to do about it.
You're jesting. This is the US of A, where company bosses get paid with stock, and their main concern is thus the stock price. And investors (including the companies own CEOs and CFOs) don't care about what the stock price will be five or fifty years down the road -- they care about what it will be next week, or, at most, by the end of the fiscal year. Something that gives short term benefits but hurts the business several years down the road is going to win their vote, every time.
The solution: Make dividends tax free, and have a substantial capital gains tax. That, of course, would never pass, but it would reduce short term "pump-and-dump" thinking, and increase long term investments.
This has already been through the courts. Someone tried exactly your argument and failed.
The ISPs successfully argued 'unlimited' means unlimited *access* not unlimited service. As long as they're not saying you can long use the internet at certain times they're safe.
As long as there is no service level agreement, the customer is not entitled to the full speed of the last mile all the way to the destination. The internet protocol is "best effort", which means that the customer is entitled to having his traffic treated like all competing traffic. That is where the false advertising lies. Destination/protocol based throttling violates the "internet access" definition, not the "unlimited" definition.
ISP : "But look, this user could have connected any time he wanted, like, and that's just for last week, monday between 4:15 and 4:17 or thursday between 13:42 and 13:58 !"
Judge : "Indeed, that user is clearly wasting the time of the court. 10 lashes ! Now tell me about how those tubes work again."
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
On February 2nd, users in the discussion group used to create this post reported the issue was resolved. SO.... where dose the poster get off assuming on the 3rd, that time warner is throttling bandwidth? As far as I can tell the whole claim is based solely on circumstantial evidence. The fact that the Austin division, may or may not be conducting tests in throttling is a convenient excuse to even give this play.... As far as I know, (havening worked for time warner for 3 years), When the company tests a product line they don't just UNLEASH it on a whole division and hope it wont fail. There are corporate procedures, and guidelines for rolling out a product that would affect an entire division of customers... I think everybody, Including the original poster might be a bit paranoid about this whole thing; I think what most likely happened, and I can't speak for the company but its just an educated assumption... Is, there was an outage, on this and probably several other less popular ports in the division; at the switching level. Through customer feedback the issue was able to be forwarded to the divisional NOC level, where the problem was isolated and resolved.... end of story. Hopefully this allows some light on the issue for some people. sorry for the anonymous post but company policy prohibits speaking directly to media on issues that impact the company. Slashdot is hardly a traditional media outlet (don't get me wrong I think its valid.) However, this is another example of the kind of thing that gives ignorant people, a reason to put down sites like slashdot as not being a legitimate news source.
The ISPs successfully argued 'unlimited' means unlimited *access* not unlimited service. As long as they're not saying you can long use the internet at certain times they're safe. What does unlimited access mean?
I can access as much content as I want!
But I cant because the ISP wont provide that even if the user paid for it.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Time Warner, whose subsidiaries include numerous entertainment firms and content delivery companies, may at the very least look at a restraint of trade suit in the making.
I hear the saliva splatting on the floor from the lawyers dripping jaws already.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
It doesn't cost an ISP more per Giga-byte. What costs them is bits per second. A heavy user during peak hours costs money. Moving a bunch of bits when no one else wants to should be ok.
If, at a given instant an ISP has regular users and hogs, then maybe what the ISP sould do is push the hogs' packets to a lower priority. Therby giving them higher delay and probability of dropping a packet. It should be on a per subscriber basis, certainly not on a per service basis.
Unless of course the ISP is tired of Comcast getting all the glory being the poster child for net neutrality.
How can you oversell and still have the customer be able to use what you sell them? It only works right now, because you have thousands of grannies with high speep internet who only use the internet for checking email and getting brownie recipies. Once you have everybody downloading a couple movies every week, things will start to get a lot worse.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
This month I might use 100% of my avalible bandwith but next month I might use only 20% but when I want to use it I can.
Overselling is not without risk there is an outside chance that overselling will backfire and the isp may/should have compensation plans in place for IF that happens. With overselling you do need to carefully assess the situation to minimise your chances of failing to provide the customer with what they paid for. It is normally safer for larger ISPs to oversell because they have allot of users and are less likely to have 100% of their user base use up all of their allowance.
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I have a "teleworker" account, which means I get business class service to my house. (I might add, its useful to be able to get them dispatched in the middle of the night with such an account.) I've noticed that using iTunes before 8pm, its useless, right after 8pm though all my iTunes downloads speed up from 1-2 hours for a half hour tv show, to like 10 minutes. Its pretty clear that something is amiss, but I just went to downloading everything after 8 PM.
FWIW, Before 8pm, I've seen no other speed impacts, and have been able to download ISOs at a normal speed. I've only seen it with iTunes.
If everyone made a phone call at the sametime the phone network couldent handle it because they oversell the service to produce cheaper rates but I have NEVER had a problem making a phonecall because my service provider has carefully planned things out to make sure this dosent happen.
You've never heard a fast busy signal or had a bad connection? Have you ever used a phone?
And how about cell phones? I'm so tired of the "system busy, try later" messages my Nextel Blackberry keeps giving me I'm switching to another provider.
I don't get the paranoia people have with regards to bandwidth caps, the truth is it costs ISPs a certain amount per gigabyte. A heavy user should be paying more, this isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is when ISPs advertise unlimited and then put a cap in the fine print.
I disagree. Putting in the data pipes costs ISPs a certain amount of money. Putting in bigger pipes costs ISPs more money than putting in smaller pipes. But ISPs do not pay for their connections to the Internet on a per gigabyte basis. They pay for a pipe capable of sending X amount of data per second, and they're allowed to use up to that limit. So why should we be charged differently? If someone pays for a 7Mb down/1.5Mb up connection they should be able to use 7Mb/1.5Mb. If two people are neighbors and they bother pay for a 7Mb/1.5Mb connection, why should one of them have to pay more for using the connection more often? If I pay to have an analog phone line installed should I pay more if I make twice as many local calls as my neighbor? If my neighbor and I both have cable installed, should I have to pay more if I watch twice as much TV as my neighbor? If I pay for satellite radio, should I have to pay more if I listen to it twice as much as the next guy?
You have already bought into the greedy ISPs way of thinking, that somehow bandwidth is metered. It's not. We are paying for a data connection to be installed. We can pay more or less based on how much data that pipe can transfer in a second. We shouldn't have to pay extra on top of that for actually using the pipe too.
Them overselling their capacity is "NMFP", not my fucking problem. Either don't promise what you can't deliver, or increase capacity. Speaking of "net neutrality", consumers pay for internet access, Apple is paying bandwidth for itunes. Who is getting a free ride? The ISPs just want to bleed you more for a service you're already paying for.
I hate sigs.
Everytime this comes up in slashdot people trot out the argument about the limits on their "unlimited" ISP account. I've heard this argument since the days of dial up when some people took "unlimited" to mean "my isp dedicated a modem just for my use". These people expected to be able to run services on by bolting up a connection via the phone and never hanging up. For the good of the whole everyone should get a clue. The cable ISP's should stop advertising unlimited connections when they really have a bandwidth cap of 200~300Gb per month. And customers should learn to recognize that marketing speech is mostly hype meaning the active word in the phrase "virtually unlimited" is virtually.
They already do that, because they already pay for their bandwidth, and they pay a great deal more than you would pay for the same bandwidth.
Seriously. The only people who should be paying more here are the ISPs and ultimately us, the customers. The ISPs have been overselling bandwidth for years and years, and now that we are starting to use what they claim they have sold us, they can't all of a sudden tell us not to, without either increasing the price a lot, lowering the max speed, or admit to the general public that what they have been selling was not what they claimed it was. Some marketing nightmare there.
c++;
>I don't get the paranoia people have with regards to bandwidth caps, the truth is it costs ISPs a certain amount per gigabyte
:-)
Depending on what top tier provider they use, they pay a flat rate. Cogent does this, for example. Other providers use a percentile system. So no, in fact, very few top tier providers just simply charge by the gigabyte. You'd probably have to search for one that does nowadays. It isn't 1998 anymore.
I wish the myth of providers being billed by the byte would finally vanish, it's about time. They're either billed by average usage (averaged out to about the 95th percentile in m/g/tbits) or they're billed flat-rate for the entire pipe. So, a user that downloads 1 TB per month, but only at night, costs the ISP less than a user that downloads 20 GB a month, but only at 4:00 - 5:00 pm. If your ISP is stuck on the old system, tell them to join the new millennium like all the other ISPs have. Some smarter ISPs do not count transfer outside top percentile hours (whatever they may be, the ISP will usually advertise them as "at night" hours) against any caps they might have. ISPs that do this know their business. ISPs that just have flat caps end up with all their users beating the hell out of the internet during peak hours, because users figure (rightly so) why be arsed to download anything at night when there's no benefit?
Interestingly enough, my ISP is Teksavvy also. Teksavvy offers unlimited usage accounts (what I use, although I rarely use more than 100 GB a month, I like never having to worry about paying more), and those all go through... guess who... COGENT! Why? Because Cogent bills them flat rates. Their other peers work on the percentile system. If you don't believe me, call Teksavvy. It is unfortunate that Teksavvy, while a good ISP, doesn't offer a benefit to users "abusing" the internet during off-peak hours. If they did, they'd probably find they could have stuck with the 100 GB cap rather than the 200 GB cap that they just implemented this month.
$0.25/GB isn't bad, I suppose, but the reason it's so high (be assured, they do make a profit on that) is because Teksavvy doesn't pay for their internet this way. So they have to charge _at least_ the equivalent percentile charge at peak times converted to raw GBytes (would be in GBits/s for them, really) plus admin fees. Of course, this means that if you went "over" at 3:00 am, they are making money hand over fist, since they paid $0.00 for that extra data. If you go over at 4:00 pm, they probably break even, plus a penny or two. Oh well, if anyone in Ontario converts to a reasonable billing system, Teksavvy will probably be the first.
[ Why did I choose 4:00 pm? I work tech support, guess when the queue is 10x heavier than any other time of the day... ]
ISPs are billed by 95th percentile bandwidth. The amount of data does not affect price. The average bandwidth consumption does affect price because it determines what sort of connectivity they need. A gigabit link will easily transmit 200GB, but the ISP will need a new incoming line if everybody downloads something at once, else speed will drop significantly. Charging by GB tends to work though for large userbases.
I know that you're joking but I was recently shocked to discover that my ISP (who I won't name) will offer us a dedicated, unthrottled line for just 50% more. So instead of the current $40 per month for a capped 8Mb line, we are being offered an uncontended 2Mb connection without any restrictions for $65 per month. They are a large reputable ISP, and the only reason that I won't name them is we all know what happens to customer service when an ISP's popularity jumps suddenly. They have also specfically confirms that they will not throttle any kind of traffic on this line and that BitTorrent usage is fine... So I'm looking forward to nearly 800GB a month of download capacity...
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I don't think anyone would complain if they got more bandwidth for http traffic than they paid for. But if you are going to throttle any traffic to 2mps, then you need to sell it as 2mps service.
As insane as it may seem, it would not surprise me if Time Warner were doing just that.
They have been losing customers hand-over-fist here in San Antonio...and it almost seems as though they're are dead set on driving away as many subscribers as possible.
I.E. my parents' last phone call with a Time Warner representative ended with the representative threatening to send a technician out to cut off their service.
My father (a TWC customer for many years) had called to ask about any comparable packages that TW may have had to AT&T's U-Verse.
As you can imagine, my parents' are now AT&T customers.
My wife and I have been using AT&T's services for about year now as well.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
I agree with you on some points, and you're pretty on track on packet shaping. But "throttling" large use services doesn't seem to me to be the answer. If 99% of your traffic is HTTP traffic, then instead of throttling, put a QOS policy in place that guarantees at least 50% of the available bandwidth for HTTP traffic - don't start pointing at specific protocols and especially not at specific content providers.
Additionally, I think that traffic shaping is a big deal and if there is traffic shaping then traffic shaping policies should be publically accessible to the ISP's customers and potential customers, just like you can't sell a can of Chef Boyardee without listing all the ingredients.
Maybe we need an FDA for ISPs.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
Interested. How did it go and how successful were you?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Oh please, no! The last thing we need is the precedent of ISPs charging both ends of a connection or choosing how much to charge a company based on the perceived profit they make (i.e. "how much can we get out of them?"). At best, it would just be another way big companies to produce a barrier to entry for smaller companies.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Fourth option - accept that they'll make less than ten-bajillion dollars this fiscal year and plough some of their profits into developing their infrastructure. I like option four!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
You got me thinking about exactly how much bandwidth do I use? I live in Saskatchewan and use SaskTel for my Phone / Internet / TV over IP provider. I pay for 3 video streams for tv, and 5Mb/sec down Internet, for a total of 15Mb/sec down. We leave the "cable" boxes on, because of a long boot time, so those 3 video streams are constant whether we are watching TV or not. And I'm sure most customers do the same. Anyhow, since my gateway was last reset 15 days ago, I have downloaded about 650GB.
... And no, it does not cost $1,500 / month.
I have not checked to see if the policy is to cap the Internet bandwidth, but they are definitely not throttling the video streams. If every provider were to treat connections like the video streams I am getting, we would all be much better off.
This is why network neutrality is needed. Time Warner probably was paid by another digital media agency to block iTunes so customers would be forced to another service.
And this is coming from the _same_ company that wants to use the tiered Internet buisness model! They just love pissing their customers off!
Seriously, I'm predicting about 6-7 months before they crash and burn (we need time for this to get all over the news, lawsuits to begin piling at the CEOs door, dissatisfied customers switching to other carriers, etc). This is really something I would have suspected Comcast of doing...
Is that you, Randall L. Stephenson?
Why should Apple pay MORE for using bandwidth? I already paid for the bandwidth my connection uses (for iTunes or anything else) on my end and Apple paid for on their end. Why in the world would you suggest there be another fee when we both already paid for what we are using?
Exactly! And is it any coincidence that when people started using the internet instead of their cable tv companies to watch tv that TWC wants to charge more?
This is truly a reason to have more than one cable provider in any area so that they can't pull this crap. We know we are over paying for our bandwidth and we know we will be overpaying even more very soon unless something is done.
Without choice of provider, and I am not talking cable or dsl, I mean comcast, twc att, cablevision, we have to pay what they say.
Elect the FCC, don't appoint them!
~ Ron Fitzgerald
yes but what makes you think that checking the news at CNN is more important than me downloading the latest episode of House? You and I both paid the same amount for the service, why should you get preferential treatment?
See if http://www.grandecom.com/ is available in your area. You won't be disappointed. If they aren't look for the 'alternative' cable offering, TW doesn't have a complete monopoly in all markets.
If bandwidth usage is really an economic issue for ISP's, then there are several ways to deal with that fairly. A bandwidth cap, as long as it's reasonable (20GB seems pretty reasonable to me) would be preferable to throttling iTunes, YouTube, or porn for that matter. Personally, I'd prefer pricing tiers based on traffic, not speed. You pay for some amount of traffic, and then pay more if you go over. Either way, what you access, you get as fast as possible.
The point is to let the customer decide what they want to access. If it costs a dollar or two to download the equivalent of a CD, maybe you should buy the CD and use your bandwidth for something else (or just save the money and pay less for Internet access). Maybe that'd get the RIAA off our backs. In any case, don't tell me what I can access.
I guess there's a flip side to that. If the content's something like on-demand video rental, why shouldn't your ISP be able to provide a cheaper service based on having direct connectivity to you? Or, put another way, if it costs them less to deliver the service to you, why shouldn't you reap some of the savings? There are different aspects to the net neutrality issue. A Netflix isn't providing original content. We may gain in terms of competition based on their having, essentially, a free delivery mechanism though. I guess that's good for us and good for Netflix, but it's obviously not good for our ISP's. Do we care about that? I'm not sure, but there are two sides to the issue.
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>So I'm looking forward to nearly 800GB a month of download capacity...
Wow, that's a lot of Linux distros!
Bad marketing ideas are the cause of problems like this.
They will try to make your internet service as complicated as your cell phone plan.
Good luck with that !
Why do you think we paid off enough senators for not passing a net-neutrality law?
Seriously i think this would expand to many other telcos like comcast, verizon, etc.
This enables them to double-dip both the consumer and the company (google).
Screw the tax-payer funded expansions they got, that money long went to buy yachts, etc.
So, as a home user am screwed. As a business user, i can get some tax deductions.
As a corporate, i don't care.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
maybe itunes was the only high-bandwidth site they visited while on the web?
I'd guess that they start by dropping everyone into the lowest tier, then if you wanted your faster service back you would pay more...
Really? You've never gotten, "We're sorry, all circuits are busy now. Please try your call again later".
I get that maybe 2 or 3 times a year tops. Retrying works. But I don't consider it fraud - just too many people on at once.
Random Musings
Well this was after two months of fighting with them. Filing fraud charges and giving the company a case number (I had warned them I was considering the action) had the effect of an almost IMMEDIATE letter from the CEO deeply apologizing for everything and saying unequivocally that I owed them nothing. I seem to recall they sent me a cheque too, but don't remember exactly why...
See a post above. (No point typing it twice.)
the reason we have broadband is to allow us to download large files quickly. Traffic tiers have the effect of making you not want to download such files, for fear of hitting some limit. Why have high speed if you can't fully use it, without paying out the ass for it? All this does is prevent the ISP's from having to upgrade their networks, and thus save money.
Really? You've never gotten, "We're sorry, all circuits are busy now. Please try your call again later".
Half a dozen times in my life.
And once when I was calling 911. It was on their end, not the phone company.
If you get a T1 or other dedicated circuit, you certainly aren't metered. Why would an ISP be treated any differently?
Virtually ALL telecom infrastructure is oversubscribed. If everyone on a particular central office picked up their phone at the same time, probably only about 50% (made up statistic) would get a dial tone. If enough people were camped on a cell tower and hit 'send' at the same time, some of them would not have their call go through. Do any of these services mention this in their ads?
I'm not saying that this is OK, but it's not just the cable companies that do this. To do otherwise would incur a hugh cost in infrastructure that would be unused 99.99% of the time.
Bandwidth used over time actually works out to Bytes of data, so bytes isn't an unreasonable way to cap.
I don't know what sort of bandwidth a cable carrier actually has, but lets assume for easy numbers it's an OC-12 (~622Mbps, ~77.75MBps)
In 30 days, there are 2,592,000 seconds.
In that 30 days, they can transmit about 200 TB. (77,750,000MBps * 2,592,000s)
I don't know how many customers they might have, so lets assume 20,000.
If everyone was on using it evenly, they could each consume 10GB/mo.
If everyone was using evenly all the time, they could consume about 31kbps of bandwidth.
Factor in some "we have X% heavy users, Y% 'normal' users, and Z% super-heavy-WTF users", and come up with a cap of 200GB, decided by the business folks.
With the above cap, you could use nearly 2 hours a day at 8mbps for 30 days a month, and still be OK.
But at 8mbps*2 hours*30 days, you use up 216GB of the 200TB, and the carrier could only provide that for 925 people, meaning they have to build out capacity, since the have almost 11000 other customers.
If they can ration the left over bandwidth, they can maintain customers while not having to invest more.
At least until some sort of reasonable competition enters the area.
I'm not saying it's right for any given situation or contract/advertisement wording... just saying talking about caps in Bytes is not unreasonable in and of itself.
The ISP that I worked for. They had just started to roll out wireless internet to compete with cable and DSL in the area, with the fastest package they offered 1 megabit/sec. The original wireless equipment (802.11b Lucent equipment) began to choke due to the amount of connections the P2P traffic was generating so a Packeteer was put into place. Kazaa traffic was limited to 512 kilobits/sec for everyone on the ISP, regardless of your throughput package you purchased. Once about 5 people were on, the Kazaa traffic was all used up.
When Bittorrent started to get big, it was an even larger issue as we had more people on wireless broadband. It was laughable how they tried to combat it (at one point all outgoing BT connections were denied by the Packeteer, which effectively shut the service off). Deep-level analysis was being done so changing the port didn't matter. We'd get calls constantly saying WoW wouldn't update, that customers we knew were using it for legitimate purposes couldn't get their software, etc, and we were told to basically waste our time troubleshooting and find a reason to blame it on the customer.
Management didn't want them to know that they were throttling the traffic to the point that it was only usable for 5-10 people (at speeds grossly under what they were paying for) because they needed the business. The highest level service was even sold as a way around issues as those customers that needed to play games were whitelisted to IPs for those games in the Packeteer (if you needed bittorrent for any other reason, like to download a Linux ISO, you were out of luck). But, if for any reason someone complained about throughput issues on a tower where someone was whitelisted, that whitelisted person was blocked.
It sucked, but that was the only way they handled it.
The only bandwidth limit is that in any one second, I cannot download more than 20Mbit. I download a lot of linux liveCD & liveDVD distros, and my kids are on the 'net from their PCs for many hours each week, so we go well beyond 100Gbytes in a month and have never encountered a throttle or slowdown of any sort.
The investment in laying 2½km of fiber to reach the 4 houses in our patch of forest was apparently worth it to one ISP.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The unlimited part of the connection comes from the old dial up days when you were billed per minute of connection time. AOL and other like providers charged each customer for the amount of time they were connected in minutes. Once services began to allow full months of service at one low price, they called these services "unlimited" which now some decades later is being misconstrued as "unlimited bandwidth" which is not true. The speed and the connection times were sold separately. That the bundling of connection speed and connection time have mislead consumers to believe that they have bought an unlimited in any way service is sad, but the logical consequence of bundle marketing done years ago.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
It's been shown over and over that people don't want measured bandwidth.
/. will be in the latter group. Heh.
Before there was widespread DSL there was ISDN, but 144K ISDN was *always* measured by the telcos. NOBODY wanted it, and nobody (well, essentially nobody) deployed it in a home environment.
ADSL and cable modem service have been unmeasured, "unlimited", which is all people will pay for regardless of the reality that at some level *ALL* bandwidth is measured.
The ADSL and Cable modem providers have had high success in obtaining customers who want *unlimited* service. TWC will likely find that though there are some customers who don't care, some will. I expect nearly everyone who reads
The problem here is in many cases because of the attitude of the telcos and the uneconomic realities of trying to compete with them since they own the local copper plant there are few options for most people. You have one cable modem provider, and one ADSL provider (for most of the country AT&T). It's a near monopoly.
If we had more options it would be better but it may turn out for the fleeing TWC customers they have essentially nowhere to go. AT&T is at least as bad in their attitude and business practices as TWC, I would guess.
.
Fuck that- an HDSL circuit (no rules, no caps, ASYMMETRICAL traffic, swift attention to service trouble) is only a few hundred bucks. Just try to live reasonably close to the CO, makes it so much easier to provision.
I can't believe I had to scroll 2/3 down the page before someone made this point. Not only is Rhapsody a competitor, but I'm sure Time Warner is using this as leverage to get "more flexible pricing" (really, higher pricing), for Warner Music and the other record labels when they negotiate for iTunes licensing. This is exactly why net neutrality is such an important issue.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
I found out that the Verizon FIOS service blocks all http traffic, so you can't run a server at your home, or utilize mac web sharing features. How nice of them.
welcome to the end of the internet. thanks for playing. :(
The best way to handle this is to break up TimeWarner and force them to divest of all internet carrier services. This will separate content from carrier ISP services. These internet services then can be regulated to force them to avoid discrimination against specific information or content providers. It would seem this is analogous to Sherman Anti-Trust Act issues. By throttling the services of competitor information providers, TimeWarner is perhaps engaging in a criminal conspiracy to obstruct interstate trade, a Federal violation. The logical thing to do is for the State of Texas Attorney General Office to file for a permanent injunction against TimeWarner in Texas to prevent discrimination against content services. At the same time, it makes sense to file a class action suit against TimeWarner with recovery being the extra costs forced on consumers by its activities, plus punitive damages because TimeWarner's actions are willful and malicious. Such a class action suit would be filed not only on behalf of the users of iTunes services, but also on behalf of the major record and entertainment studies because this malicious action on the part of TimeWarner is interfering with the contract relationship already established between users and the iTunes store, and between Apple and the studios. The damages to the studios would be measured in terms of the lost sales and profits from users who are "throttled" by TimeWarner. Again, punitive damages should be sought because TimeWarner knows of the existing relationship and willfully is interfering with it.
Well, with my cell phone, I keep getting Network busy. For the last two weeks between 4 and 9pm, ever since the kiddies came back to campus. I call Cingelhell and apparently everything is going through one tower. One tower in the whole city. It's been two weeks. My contract didn't say good luck between the hours of 4 and 9. No, no it didn't.
Sure, within reason. But assuming bandwidth is a finite resource it may not be practical to allow everybody to download all the huge files they want for one low price. Maybe it is practical, and the issue is just ISP greed, but I'm assuming for the sake of argument that ISP greed isn't the whole story.
It seems to me that 20GB per month worth of downloading big files fast ought to be plenty for most of us. About a Linux ISO per day, I'd think. And that's my point. We download this stuff because it costs us exactly nothing. If it cost me a few bucks to download, I might go to Cheap Bytes or somewhere instead for a CD. And that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. The internet is a disruptive technology alright, but it may be being made artificially so due to stuff like moratoriums on sales tax, loss-leader free shipping, etc. I'm not (entirely) sure that I don't want there to still be a neighborhood bookstore, and if it's killed because it can't compete with, say, Amazon - and that's because Amazon customers can afford the convenience because the government said there should be no sales tax (for now), that's not as great a deal as it may sound.
I pay for broadband mainly so that day to day web browsing (well within the suggested 20GB limit) is fast. Not so I can download music and movies, etc. It's nice that I can, but given the choice I might prefer to forgo that for the option of cutting my broadband bill. Of course, nobody's offering to cut my broadband bill, so the whole exercise is probably moot. Still, the point is that broadband costs something, and the pricing structure needs to reflect that. Unlimited downloads at a low, low price is not likely to fit into a reasonable pricing structure if you expect capacity to keep up with demand.
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Overselling is not without risk there is an outside chance that overselling will backfire and the isp may/should have compensation plans in place for IF that happens.
We do have compensation plans in place. They are called SLAs and they come with the above mentioned $1500/month contract.
I don't see why this is a surprise to people. The internal business decisions outweigh whatever grumbling people may make. At least, that's what the mindset was at Road Runner when I was there. They wanted to pimp internally developed content to the point of using the term "walled garden" to describe their efforts to try and get customers to stay away from the Internet as a whole. That filtered down to the affiliate level: We (the affiliates) didn't give a rat's poop about that content; we wanted to develop our own and have full control of it. Why should they be able to offer their own stuff but we, as the "local experts" couldn't have complete control over our customer's screen real estate? (We were given 20% of the homepage to put up content that was locally grown. The rest was set aside for the corporation to use.) We complained and complained, but it fell on deaf ears. It was headquarters' decision, not the affiliates, who were the direct point of revenue generation.... It wasn't about logic or customer service. It was about bad decisions made by corporate. My point is, they (TW headquarters) have always wanted to offer their own stuff rather than what customers necessarily want. It makes sense: They have their own content, why wouldn't they push back against making it easy for other content owners to move in? Is it logical? Sure. Is it a ridiculous, losing battle that ultimately make them look stupid? Same answer.
Bark less. Wag more.
I get that maybe 2 or 3 times a year tops. Retrying works. But I don't consider it fraud - just too many people on at once. Only one newyears when I was on a real lousy provider (who alot of people seem to complain about) but never on anyother network.
Our standards here in Austalia seem to be alot better than in the US I assume this is to do with US providers having monopoly over certain areas because over here you have at least the 3 biggest networks covering most of the population.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
If everyone made a phone call at the sametime the phone network couldent handle it because they oversell the service to produce cheaper rates but I have NEVER had a problem making a phonecall because my service provider has carefully planned things out to make sure this dosent happen.
I work for a phone company. Last year there was a huge snow storm, and when work got out, at about 2 in the afternoon (Everyone was let out early to "beat traffic") the trunk groups between the land line switches and the cellular switch plugged up. I couldn't get a hold of my wife on a landline when she was going home so I went and grabbed a cell phone to call her. There's only one cell switch so there were no capacity issues there.
Needless to say, after that the trunk groups are a lot bigger now then they were then.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
This is a statutory monopoly. Some people may argue it's a statutory monopoly only because it would be a natural monopoly anyway, so the distinction doesn't matter. I disagree. But we couldn't really know whether or not internet connectivity is a natural monopoly or not unless we were to try repealing the laws making these utilities statutory monopolies.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I respectfully disagree (mostly), you have your nerd glasses on. There is another, more compelling reason to have 'broadband.' Since I'm in a market that is rapidly converting from 56K, and I support clients in their transition to the 21st C, I get to see the process first hand.
For the average busy or middle-aged user, large files are an added bonus. The main goal is 'always on' and quick web browsing. Period. Young people, technophiles, nerds, sure, they download large files. Older folks don't know how, mostly. But they want email, they want it now. They want weather reports, google, wikipedia, stocks, and inspirational or funny streaming video (not really qualifying as large files, I think) sent to them by relatives and friends. For many of them, especially telecommuters, the other big thing is being online for hours at a time with no grief.
My clients are wonderfully relieved to have their phone lines back, to not have their connection drop out, to get those medium sized photos via email without interminable crossed fingers. They love sitting down and getting the answer to an obscure question in 20 seconds instead of 20 minutes, and reading webmail without suffering. It's speed/latency, not capacity, that comes first.
Damn those pesky terrorists
10 years ago only few people really thought about getting online. Now everyone wants to go there and do the things that others do. Use messenger, IRC or . Right now we are used to non-56k modems and to the fact that internet is paid monthly with steady old same price which does not change no matter what you do online - and especially does not have pay-by-usage as 56k did, just not in bandwidth terms, but money. If you are telling me to go back for usage limits for my internet, i feel like we are going backwards in time. For example, i have now about 440 times faster internet than 10 years ago. What it costs me in money, is actually _less_ than 10 years ago so you got a point there but i use it only something about 7-10 times more bandwidth wise than before, by average. It's good if you need to pick up a file somewhere, like 100MB photo.zip from a friend. It's down to your pc with no time. If i would use a good video rental service through internet (if only one shoud exist), i woulds get a movie, lets say 1 GB too pretty fast but there goes 1/20th of the bandwidth limit. I might think if i would get something more usefull or use bandwidth to something instead of that. I really had to get Linux iso recently for my home server. That would have cost me 0,7 Gigs which was already almost 2/20th of the cap. Thinking like this makes me feel old, stupid and fat. This is what Linus would say. I shouldn't need to think this at all. This leads me to the point where i wanted to go since starting to type this comment. Services. Everyone wants their piece of the internet and it's users. ISP of course is your first link online. When they start throttling connections and setting limits, this affects everyone who offers services online, which may hog some bandwidth. Solution according to you is to put some more price for the internet. Pay for play as they say. Am i in stone age? You get a pretty much free internet already here with 20 euros a month, no limits of usage, nothing except speed is like 256Kbit/s (soon to be 512Kbit/s). Perhaps few ports blocked like 25 incoming but hey, almost every ISP blocks that. You can download 77 Gigs with this 'slow' speed if used 24/7. This goes beyond the Time warner caps already for the faster connections. For higher speeds, the cap should be something like 200 gigs minimum, just to make sure everyone is happy, except those pirater. ARRRR.
Now you're talking like a no-good Communist! "Develop infrastructure"? What kind of business model is that? I'll tell you what kind it is! It is the kind of business model that wastes good cash that could otherwise go into the pockets of top corporate officials and shareholders, that's what it is! Down that path lies socialism and corporate ruination! There is NOTHING more important than profits. . .not your porn nor your Linux ISOs nor your legally paid for iTunes media! If your getting 1bit/day throughput is what is necessary to guarantee the profits of your ISP, then suck it up. The 'free market', with all five of its players, will get around to fixing things sometime in the next millennium.
Your video streams aren't going over the Internet; they're coming from some SaskTel server. To them it's all internal (i.e. free) bandwidth -- the streams' bandwidth does not affect SaskTel's upstream requirements, and costs them nothing.
Then that ISP shouldn't be selling 1 Mbps 'unlimited' connections to 1000+ customers and then complain when people actually *use* the bandwith *they are paying for*. That's false advertising.
ISPs sell still broadband with unlimited *access* diffentiating it from dialup. Remember dialup? When you got 4 hours, 20 hours, 100 hours, or *unlimited*? Well with broadband its always unlimited. Nothing obviously deceptive there. Dialup customers have no conception of bandwidth limitations; but they are very familiar with time limitations and having the phone tied up for hours on end. ISPs are still advertising primarily to *THEM*.
And while the max speed of that ADSL is 1 Mbps, or 15x faster than dialup!! (in advertising parlance)
they don't ever promise that there is no limit to the amount of data you can push through.
And just because YOU can multiply 1Mbps * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 31 days = 2678400 Megabits/mo ( ~335 GB/mo ) doesn't mean they've promised you that much data transfer per month.
ISPs don't like to talk about bandwidth caps because:
a) Most customers don't understand bandwidth
b) Most customers aren't anywhere near hitting the caps
c) Prominently advertising limits that aren't relevant or understood by most people is a poor advertising strategy
d) Other ISPs aren't doing it. Making it an even worse advertising strategy
So they're in the fine print. And they're often vaguely worded.
Why are they often vague? Because a lot of ISPs don't have a hard cap. They don't really care how much YOU use, as long as the network isn't being strained. So rather than set a cap at the lowest common denominator that they can really gaurantee everyone can have if they ever get called on it. They leave it vague and the end result are soft caps which are annoying due to their not being well specified... but are really not that bad a thing because the soft caps are much much higher than they'd be if they were hard caps.
I still disagree. If they cannot provide the service then they shouldn't be selling it. If they buy an OC-12 from an upstream provider then they have every right to expect the full use of that OC-12 24/7. If they sell a 7Mb/1.5Mb cable connection to consumers, then why shouldn't the consumers have every right to expect full use of that connection too?
Cable companies are trying to pull a fast one on us. They started offerring an ISP service, and in order to compete with other ISPs they kept ratcheting up the speed without building out capacity. Now they're allegedly oversubscribed and need to build out upstream capacity to handle the increased traffic, but that would actually require investment. So instead they want to put caps on/disconnect people who actually use the service that they're paying for and keep only the people who underutilize the service. They're perfectly happy to take our money for their service as long as we're not going to use everything that they're selling. But when people actually do start using their entire bandwidth allotment they cry foul.
Here's an idea...if you can only accommodate users with 1.5Mb/512Kb connections, don't sell services rated at 7.5Mb/1.5Mb. Don't promise what you can't deliver and you won't have problems. Oh, wait. I forgot. Cable companies are big businesses, so they're allowed to screw you coming and going. If they had to advertise service levels that they could actually meet 100% of the time then nobody would buy their services. Sounds like the problem is their business model, not their user base. And playing these games with their user base is only going to temporarily forestall the inevitable...more users will use more bandwidth and the companies will have to either a) cut off most of their customers or b) invest in more bandwidth.
But to play devil's advocate -- would you want to be the one who has to develop the explanation to the average home user of exactly what he is buying? In the end, I think we'll end up with something like cell phone plans, where very few people are sure they've got the economically optimal plan, but you have at least one measure thats' reasonably understandable: minutes.
I think tiered bandwidth is a good idea. Every subscriber should be guaranteed a certain minimum bandwidth at any time, so he can get his email and VoIP. On top of that he can buy either a higher guaranteed bandwidth, or perhaps if the routers could be interfaced with the billing information, he'd be able to budget the number of peak minutes he wants per month. If he wants to watch one streamed HD movie a week, he could buy a 500 peak minute plan.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If my home ISP were to start setting bandwidth limits, how would I go about logging my usage so I could audit the charges?
Why wasn't it argued that since they didn't specify which in their advertisements it actually meant both?
...what on earth is possessing these cable companies? FiOS Internet is being installed in more and more communities across the country. Their TV service is being installed more and more as well. And all the while these cable companies are not keeping up on HD capacity. They're introducing foolish tiered service plans that are designed to screw over any who does anything with their cable modem beyond checking their email once a day...all the while they advertise fast download speeds and how much bandwidth you'll get from their service.
Any sensible company would be doing the opposite. The cable companies are under the biggest threat they've ever seen from Verizon, and they apparently have yet to realize it.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
There has to be a paradox in there somewhere. It just doesn't feel right.
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You really think 20-30G is going to be enough? Belgium has bandwidth caps, (10G-30G depending on what you pay) and look at them complaining. They have nice bandwidth (5 Mbps) but can't use it to the full because before 2/3 of the month is over, everybody is surfing at 56k (restrictions if you exceed your limit) again.
We have it good here in the US as is. We have somewhat decent bandwidth for somewhat decent price without any caps. Let's keep it that way. The price sure isn't going down, so the more you give up, the more expensive it gets. Sure, the ISP's funneled $200 billion dollars of our taxes into their pockets, let's ask them first where that is before they can cap our bandwidths because they "don't make enough money".
I DO NOT want 20G bandwidth limits, I DO NOT want tiered bandwidth, I DO want cheap, affordable internet service where I can stream radio, surf, check e-mail and download stuff. My bandwidth usage is about 50G/month. Just so you know, if you have an XBox 360 (and probably a PS3 too), they suck up lots of bandwidth constantly. Yesterday I was at somebody's house trying to use their measly 1MBit line and had to unplug the XBox (and they weren't even playing on XBox Live) before I got a decent internet connection.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I've got TWC through Earthlink in Austin and it's been teh suck. First, they gave me the wrong AC adapter, which prevented DHCP from working properly. Basically only Windows machines could get IPs, and not, say, my router or iPhone or room mate's Mac. Sometimes my Linux box got lucky. Eventually, the adapter fried the cable modem, at which point they replaced it and it started working.
Speed was much better until last week. I had thought it was due to the rerouting of traffic due to the cables being cut in Eurasia, though that theory felt a bit strange; but lately, the ping to places other than Google has been just awful. iTunes was the least of my worries.
Time Warner Austin? NO DON'T WANT.
I had ISDN for a few years. Verizon *did* charge by the minute for data calls, but you could do something called "data over voice" or something like that where the calls to the ISP went through as voice calls (which was included as part of the unmetered monthly voice charge). But since it was all digital anyway, you got the ISP service. It was kinda stupid to have to do it that way, and I was glad when DSL came available so you didn't have to deal with such rigamarole.
And which is exactly why net neutrality is so vitally important.
You mean besides the prospect of a fraud trial that would have been open and shut on the merits (and implicated their fundamental business model)?
(IANAL)
Yeah, exactly. Itunes already pays for it's bandwidth. So does google, youtube, etc. They are paying by the gig, or paying for X gpbs connections. It is absolutely wrong for the ISP *at the other end* to decide they can charge a second time for this, because they don't want to build out enough to handle the customers they have paying them.
>if you can only accommodate users with 1.5Mb/512Kb connections, don't sell services rated at 7.5Mb/1.5Mb. Don't promise what you can't deliver and you won't have problems.
But then you have lots of wasted cost, which is passed down to me, that I don't want.
It's not like it's a mechanism unique to the cable companies.
If 10% of land line phones are offline at the same time, the whole phone system in that area crumbles, they systems just can't handle it.
What happens if everyone turns their water on full at once?
Can all 300M folks in America hop on the interstates at once?
So what if they run into problems... they either upgrade, try to finagle things, and do what they can to keep customers from defecting to competing systems. (I just wish we had a competing system in my area that wasn't satellite)
> they cry foul
Get the customers to call foul, and see how things go.
If it stays as only the few customers that are crying foul, you just don't matter. You fit in the margins and are easily written off, get some support or start your own ISP.
So your argument is that the semantics of the word "unlimited" have changed, and that it's still OK to use the word "unlimited" in a sense that has long taken the road of the dinosaurs to falsely advertise something you are not willing to deliver?
Excuse me, I have had "unlimited" DSL service for years now, sometimes going beyond 350GB/month. My ISP has *never* complained - but then again, in my market (Germany, German language), the semantics have not changed, because they always advertised "Flat fee DSL", and that still means "all you can eat".
A good point, but this leads to the kind of TV advertising I'm used to see from Vodafone and O2: "Buy our unlimited phone and data plan!" - footnotes 1-34 following, you'd need a 40" screen and a still picture to be able to read the footnotes.
It makes an informed decision impossible, by exponentially increasing the cost of processing the information you need to make an informed decision.
Sometimes, standardization is a good thing.
That's funny - I just came into this article to comment on the Belgian system. I have my ADSL via Belgacom, and with my "Belgacom ADSL Go" package, I have 12Gb/month included. Sure, when I exceed this I have my line throttled to 64kbps or something, but I also have the option of buying an additional 5Gb pack for 5 Euros, which seems fair enough to me - and as far as I know there is no limit to the number of packs I can buy.
It's a great situation, they don't lie to customers by selling an "unlimited" package, they make the limits clear, and if you exceed them then you have the choice of having your bandwidth severely throttled for the rest of the month, or paying a little extra for an additional allowance. Heavy users pay more in proportion to the amount they use - you can't say fairer than that!
Even better, the volume packs carry over, so if you only use 1Gb of a volume pack, then you still have 4Gb left to use for the next time you go over your limit.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
That's completely wrong. That's what we should already have. There's no reason to compromise with them like that. It's I'm Time Warner, I'm selling a car, and I want $5000 for it. I price it at $7000, you "negotiate" me down to $6000, and I still make $1000 more than I want to. We shouldn't have to negotiate or compromise what we should already be getting. If I'm paying for my internet service, you have no right to filter it. If I want to make full use of my internet connection, that's my business. I get advertised 15mbps, I get actual 6-8mbps (which is on a good day), and I'm not even complaining about that. But to tell me that not only do I not get the advertised speed (Read: ever), but now I can only use it so much? Fuck you Time Warner, I'll go back to using the library for my internet access before I put up with that bullshit.
a government controlled national broadband infrastructure. Looks like Time Warner just added another "tax" and all the users in return Texas got was the same 3Mb/s. That is much better than paying taxes to the federal government and getting 100 Mb/s. When greed (oh, wait I mean bottom-line) becomes dominant, business are the most unethical entities in the country. I have no idea why anyone put their trust in them or market forces to provide the best outcome. All I can say is I am lucky Verizon isn't involved in Hollywood yet.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
....Young people, technophiles, nerds, sure, they download large files.....
Assuming that it costs a certain sum total to provide Internet service, the whole or most cost should be borne by the providers of the information, just like it is in the broadcast industry. Instead of charging at all for DOWNloads, charge CONSUMERS only for uploads, beyond a set limit. On the telephone, the charge is for the calls made, not for the ones received. Anyone who wants to SEND information should pay whatever the ISPs can get away with. Really big "broadcasters" such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and others could still shop around for their best providers. Consumers generally don't generate, ie. broadcast much information and should pay little or nothing to receive the information from those who do profit by generating this data. This would also reduce spam greatly, since the senders of information would pay. Any ordinary consumer with a compromised bot computer would get a fat bill for excess uploads. They would thereby have a compelling reason to clean the vermin out of their computers that caused them to get a large bill.
All theory is gray
....service provider has carefully planned things out......
That's patently false. It's just that for ordinary phone service, no new kind of content has come along that has significantly increased number of phone customers wanting to use the phone at once. If somebody invented a "magic modem" that would allow 100Mb/s dial up, they would suddenly have the same sort of problem -- namely not enough phone lines.
Most ISP's capacity was set up in the beginning for email and simple web surfing. Computer performance and cheap storage has made video possible, but the old ISP capacity has not adapted to the new applications.
To pay for this added capacity, charge the UPloaders of all this content whatever it costs. Consumers should not pay, neither should the carriers. The PROVIDERS of all this added high bandwidth content should pay for the added costs. Charge for data transmitted out onto the Internet, not data received. That's how it has always been with ordinary phones and still is.
All theory is gray
.....you have everybody downloading.......
Why not charge for the bits at the SENDING end and have the receiving of the bits free or very low cost? Receiving a normal phone call or broadcast doesn't cost anything extra. If I subscribe to Cable or Satellite TV, do they charge according to how many hours the TV set is turned on and receiving bits of data? No? Why then should it cost extra to receive bits of data over the Internet?
All theory is gray
......and they pay a great deal more than you would pay for the same bandwidth.........
I don't believe that even for a nanosecond. I bet that bit for bit, these big broadcasters of data pay only an infinitesimal fraction for each bit they shovel out onto the Internet, compared to what each consumer pays for each of the bits that come down their ISP connection.
The Internet inherently is NOT a broadcast medium, but a point to point communications network. It is being misused by a relatively few large broadcasters sending their signals to millions of receivers. In broadcasting, the number of receivers listening to the signal does NOT affect the cost of getting that signal to each receiver. Whatever the cost of getting the signal out to the receiver(s), it is all borne by the sender.
For the Internet, there is a cost associated with reaching each receiver. Right now, the receivers are paying the lions share of getting the data from the sending station to the receiver. It seems that the senders who wish to reach the receivers on the Internet should pay whatever the costs are, not the receivers. If the receiving of data were free or low cost, how much would the Apples and Googles of this world have to pay for shoveling their terabytes per day data onto the Internet?
All theory is gray
LOL! True:) But I think it was a refund for my last months internet service or something. Was only for $40 or whatever. Nothing special.
Still have the letter somewhere in case they ever changed their mind and decided to pursue it again.
Insightful,
You have a good point in the 90's most of us never predicted services such as youtube.
Service providers need to increase the gap between supply and demand.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
And you pay what for phone/tv/internet? Time-Warner Cable charges $150-$200 per month for 1 phone line, no options, 50-channel cable, no dvr riddled with ads and pay-per-view and 3 Mbps internet. As far as I can remember, I payed not even $70 in Belgium for a 5 MBps package (with caps) and tv/phone.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Well I personally don't do TV, but if I check the Belgacom website, then I see I can get decent (capped) ADSL, a TV subscription and a mobile phone subscription for 58.50 Euros/month.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS