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What Will Come of the FCC Comcast Hearing
The FCC held its hearing on network neutrality and Comcast today at Harvard. One commentator not afraid to predict what will come of it is O'Reilly's Andy Orem, who writes: "The mere announcement of an FCC hearing on 'broadband network management practices' was a notch in the gun of network neutrality advocates. Yet to a large extent, the panelists and speakers were like petitioners who are denied access to the king and can only bring their complaints to the gardeners who decorate the paths outside his gate. What we'll end up getting is a formal endorsement of non-discrimination as a policy that Internet providers must follow, leading to continual FCC review of current practices by telecom and cable companies."
You're like all the developers I work with in cube land. Sometimes the truth we can implement in the real world is not the same truth that exists in your mind. This is *ok*. It doesn't mean we have failed. It just means we are making progress. And progress is good, no?
I need ammo!
What?
Looks like Comcast is pleading the Fizith
Ars Technica's article included MP3 Audio clippings of the hearing.
Demented But Determined.
1 ) Bell telephone companies.
2) Congress
3) dot-com commerce sites.
4) Internet2
5) "And finally, I'm mad at the public for taking the lazy route and accepting the cheapest form of half-crippled Internet access instead of a high-capacity bidirectional connection that could make us full Internet citizens. Let's not blame the telcos--or at least not stop with them. No one in a position to care has cared enough."
I don't know. I myself can see all those as part of the big problem, of course, but I'd rather just point my finger at guys like this:
Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen: "I don't think we're restraining the customers from using the service in accordance with the way we're selling [sticking] it to them."
Careful What You Wish For....
I'm actually for network neutrality: I think ISPs shouldn't try to manage traffic based on content or destination.
But if they can't cap BitTorrent, they have to cap volume, and I expect that's what's going to happen.
Network Neutrality refers to ISPs double dipping on charging/extorting fees for both users paying for their connections and web sites paying for prioritization of traffic according to origination and destination. It does not refer to protocol-based QoS. It does not mean a flat, unmanaged, unQoS-ed Internet. By repeatedly and deliberately misusing this phrase, its importance is being weakened.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I think Comcast will get a slap on the wrist, and throttling will resume. That's how the government has been operating for the past 7 years. Why should I expect them to change now?
Thats the FCC will do, Jack ... The majority of their hearings either come up unresolved or contrary to the public good. Business intrests win out more often then Joe citizen under the current administration... Though unlikely to change much even after administrations change... Once the damage is done it takes years, sometimes decades before things are set back right.
By slowing down music and movie sharing, they're slowing down terrorism. They're patriots!
"The whole debate an extension of the years-old tussle over whether Net neutrality regulations, which would prohibit network operators from prioritizing traffic as they wish, are necessary to safeguard the Internet's historically open architecture."
Not perfect, but at least the article gets the core idea mostly right. Usually, it gets totally butchered, you know?
How to Download YouTube Videos
1. FCC will formally issue a statement that comcast engages in traffic shaping.
2. Such traffic shaping and blocking of torrents have not financially harmed anyone so far. (this is why you geeks should file a complaint with FCC stating a specified amount of money. No need to prove it.).
3. Such behavior by comcast is not prohibited by law. (FCC forgets that there is no law that forces me to smile and call every cop an officer, although i have to do).
4. FCC declines to decide either way (much like the supreme court did for spying case).
5. Two weeks later one FCC commissioner resigns and joins comcast pressure group as VP.
6. Comcast, AT&T, verizon continue aggressive bittorrent blocking. Qwest refuses to do that and continues its old policy of allowing all.
6(a) All three announce unlimited plans with no blocking for @250 a month (capped at 10GB a month).
6(b) Qwest CEO is arrested and charged with monopoly behavior and sentenced to 20 years in prison plus a $25 million fine.
7. PROFIT!
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Much like the sprawl of many major metropolitan areas that weren't carefully thought and planned out decades in advance, I fear that the FCC's involvement in the greater issue of Net Neutrality, and in the more immediate issue of Comcast and it's ilk playing favorites when it comes to how it's customers choose to utilize their paid-in-advance bandwidth, is too little and too late. The big telecoms have had those decades to build up mass and velocity, and the FCC just doesn't have the delta-v to control their trajectory in truly meaningful ways. This is not to say (to continue the metaphor) that the FCC can't resort to weapons of mass destruction in a drastic and dramatic effort to force a change in course (or to fragment the target(s), if you take my meaning), but while that may prove both necessary and effective, it also runs the risk of turning into a negative-sum game for all in the end -- the consumer not being the least of the participants.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
If companies offered a choice would we still care?
Or are we worried that all providers will go the way of #2 and the price of #1 will inflate as supply dwindles?
-David
Nothing. Both money and time will be wasted on the hearings, but no changes will occur. Network shaping will persist, because the ISP's don't want to spend the money to upgrade their infrastructure.... unless they can get the government to pay for it, and then charge the end users more money for it.
Remember...the Internet interprets a restriction as an outage and routes around it.
Even if it is FTTC.
What Comcast truly thinks of its customers.
This is why I'm fighting for Network Neutrality. With it the company can't decide who get's to do what on the lines. We paid for them and it's legal content. So why can't we do what ever we want? It's our dollar
Rather than allow people like me to use the lines we paid for, they are also terminating people's accounts.
What a BS company
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
TorrentFreak had a nice blog post summarizing various expert opinions expressed in the hearings.
I had comcast for cable and they sucked. When it worked, the speed was great but I had to reboot the modem every day. Dealing with tech support, that had a standard response when I tell them that I run Linux, "We don't support Linux." So every time, I had to ask for a supervisor to have them explain, I was not asking them for Linux support, but support on their failed connectivity. I had technicians here 6 times before they realized they had a problem at their headend.
Then add in the issue of their false packet injection and other dirty tricks.
On the other side, they are fighting Linhardt (http://www.spamsuite.com/node/352 ), as I am (http://www.barbieslapp.com/spam/e360/e360insight.htm ).
Who do I root for?
Fight Spammers!
I'm a comcast customer. Maybe not for long though. I can't even load google today.
I literally can't load www.google.com in my browser. I also can't load a few other sites, tpb included.
I don't pay for comcast's shit services like their homepage, or their "chill" games useless turd. I certainly don't give a crap about their new mobile portal.
To those of us who want Internet access, we want Internet access.
We want fast, unfiltered, unfettered access to the Internet. That was what I thought I was getting. If comcast wasn't spending so much money on the shit and whistles, they could afford to allow us the bandwidth they promised. 20% of the customers use 90% of the bandwidth, big fucking surprise. That's the way it is. The other 80% just don't need 20Mbits for youtube and myspace. I happen to play a lot of games and download Linux distros and video and applications a plenty. I need the bandwidth. Comcast playing traffic cop is just fucking wrong. They're trying to ensure that everyone gets the same amount of bandwidth. That's not what you promised jack-asses.
They're using their grammar skills there.
WTF is a notch in a gun? Is that a good or a bad thing?
expandfairuse.org
my putty vpn is working again for the first time in months! I know it won't last...temporarily anyway, I can sign into my home computer from work with no worries about my unencrypted vnc session being monitored by the network security folks.
Not that I do anything questionable while I'm accessing my home system from work, but it's nice not to have to worry about any possible misunderstandings in regard to content being accessed.
>>> From the memorable rantings of...
Squatting_Dog
Prof. Timothy Wu, the man who DID first coin the term "Network Neutrality" testified at the hearing, and he seemed perfectly satisfied that discriminating against users' BitTorrent uploads is a fine example of a Network Neutrality violation.
... who already have defined ways for applications to identify time-critical, jitter-sensitive packets and have defined what carriers should do about them.
In your example, the incentive is MONEY gained by charging content providers extra fees for carriage and then giving their traffic preferential treatment.
However, in the Comcast example, the incentive is MONEY saved by eliminating BitTorrent traffic and then putting off the new plant installations installations and additional transit fees that would normally have been paid to handle user demand.
So what's the real difference?
And nobody wants an unmanaged un-Qos'ed internet. But most people think that how the Internet works is the job of the IETF and the Internet Standards
Otherwise, how do you write software for an world-wide internet when half-a-dozen ISPs and transit providers on any given path want to "tune" the higher-level protocols to their own secret views on how the Internet ought to be prioritized?
What if the electric companies managed your power usage? Imagine if they could determine that you ran the AC too much or ran the hot water heater too warm and could restrict the power those devices could use. Geez things would not work as expected and if you didn't know any better you would think something is wrong with the devices.
What if the power companies let customers opt in to a system that would turn off certain devices during peak usage? OMGWTFSANDWICH power companies already do this. In my area customers can get a small discount on their monthly bill if they let the power company hook up a small device that will cut off their hot water heater during peak usage.
To me it sounds like the Comcast network can't handle the customer load. They advertised how much faster they are than DSL and sold too much. Now they don't have the resources or the want to build the infrastructure they need to handle things. The cheap way out is to restrict usage and charge the same. -- Screwing the customer.
Comcast could run a program similar to the power companies. Let customers opt-in and offer them a small discount on their monthly bill. For that discounted rate the customer would allow to do some kind of throttling during peak usage.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
All it does is get the high-volume users to be more active at the beginning of their billing cycle, which will STILL impact 'the network'. It will just impact it for a shorter period of time. And if billing cycles are staggered, there will always be some BitTorrent users sucking up gobs of bandwidth, causing trouble, you know their drill.
Volume caps are a lie. The sad truth is that Comcast is acting as if they can't actually deliver what they say they can - all the Internet you can ask for. The truth is that no network has an infinite capacity, not even the South Korean and Japanese 'wonders'. It's just that Comcastand others have not kept up with demand.
Imagine if the cable companies had to carry full-bandwidth HDTVfor every channel, and I mean 1080p, not the MP4 dreck they foist on us now. This would cut their channel capacity by 50-75%. And no one would tolerate it. Same price for a quarter the content? And just because theh didn't have big enough pipes? We would correctly tell them to make the pipes, and then they can charge us.
As it is, throttling Internet bandwidth isn't even giving those who would the chance to pay even more.
Comcast is so out on a limb here.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The only thing that will come from this is a bribe! Duh!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
They're ripping out the copper (regulated) to put in (unregulated) fiber, so they can build a network like the cable company and do whatever the hell they feel like, not unlike Comcast.
If p2p traffic like bittorrent really is cloggin their pipes, why don't they just start charging for it?
Media, legal or not, is friggin HUGE. Even a second of video in ANY format is going to take up a good chunk of space. So charging to carry it would bring in a crapload of service charges.
So let Comcast switch to a per-megabyte policy, and then they can rake in some BIG DOUGH.
Why aren't they?
Comcast's meddling makes no sense from a profit making point of view...they're passing up a major source of revenue.
Hmm...is the RIAA pressuring them to meddle with BT? Are some powerful media interests jingling the changebox or playing hardball?
I thought Comcast had enough pipeline to serve their customers, at least that's what their commercials portray. After all, technologies show that shared cable is faster than (nearly) hardwired phone lines...
False advertising, I say!
I'm really sick of hearing about what Comcast doing as a violation of network neutrality. Network Neutrality means the provider is extorting money from the content providers for better service (ie pay us or we will randomly drop your packets). This is not what Comcast is doing. Comcast has a simple all you can eat internet service, which works fine for 90% of its users. The problem is that they have a very small portion of their users who use almost all their bandwidth. These are the people that leave their peer to peer software running uploading/downloading movies/etc 24x7x365. Comcast is actually only limiting peer to peer in the uplink direction, which means your home computer is serving content which is against Comcast's AUP btw.
The vast majority of Comcast customers should be applauding their actions. This would be like a pro football team showing up to an all you can eat restaurant and eating every single scrap of food the second it hits the buffet. Nobody else gets any because a couple folks are using all the resources. This is basically the restaurant owner asking the football team to sit down and let everybody else have a turn.
The solution has been QoS and it has been done for YEARS. Until peer to peer software, most applications involved a single TCP session. TCP has a built in flow control mechanism, if TCP detects lost packet, it slows down the rate at which it transmits because it assumes the network cannot handle it. If there is no loss, TCP sends more traffic. Networks deal with congested links by dropping a single packet once in a while from the larger TCP flows to get them to slow down. This has worked for 10-15 years and nobody really notices it. The problem with peer to peer is that it involves hundreds of smaller TCP flows. If you slow a single TCP session down, it will just establish more TCP sessions to go faster. The only way to get it to stop using up every single bit of bandwidth it can get its hands on is to start breaking some of the TCP sessions, which is what Comcast is doing.
There are only a couple solutions to this problem:
1. Comcast adds significantly more bandwidth. They are working on this, but expect this to cost you a LOT more money per month. Do you really want to pay more so Comcast can upgrade so 1 or 2 people in your neighborhood can continue to use all the resources?
2. Comcast switches to a usage based billing model. Wait to see some parents flip out because their kids downloaded 100 terabytes of illegal movies and music last month.
3. Comcast adds bandwidth to meet the average customer demand and they throttle certain high use customers and applications.
I vote for option 3, because I can get "unlimited" cheap internet. I know we all would like option 1, but are you willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for it?
Kevin Martin, the republican heading the FCC is quoted: But at the end of the event, which, all told, lasted nearly six hours, Martin told reporters he still hadn't made up his mind about whether Comcast had done anything more than "reasonable" network management http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9878330-7.html?tag=nefd.pulse/
Does it prove my earlier point?
Although the FCC declared in 2005 that customers have the right to use the content, lawful applications, and devices they wish on the networks they use, i don't think Martin would allow that.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
They can remove the copper lines from your home IF you're getting the "total package" and you sign off of the form giving them permission to do so. I'm not a fan of fine print, but I've seen the contract personally (at least the copy the service tech brought to my house) and it was pretty clear what they were going to do even before the tech brought it up. I opted out and still have my copper.