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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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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%.
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?"
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
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...
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
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.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...