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Is Streaming Video the Real Throttling Target?
snydeq writes "Responding to legal pressure over its throttling of P2P traffic and other dubious practices, Comcast says it will now punish the most abusive users rather than particular applications. Yet its pilot tests in Pennsylvania and Virgina, which would 'delay traffic for the heaviest users of Internet data without targeting specific software applications,' raise greater concerns over net neutrality, ones that belie a potential preemptive strike against the cable company's chief future competition: streaming video. 'Despite the industry's constant invocation of the P2P bogeyman, at present, the largest bandwidth hog is actually streaming video,' writes Mehan Jayasuriya at Public Knowledge. 'Clearly, the emergence of online video is something that cable video providers find very threatening and by capping off bandwidth usage, they're effectively killing two birds with one stone; discouraging users from using their Internet connections for video while increasing the efficiency of the network. Is this anti-competitive? It sure seems like it.'"
I honestly couldn't believe it, but this past week Comcast has stopped throttling my torrent traffic completely and even increased the upload speed. Granted, they said they were increasing the speed a couple weeks ago (I suspect due Verizon recently entering the area and adding some competition). However, I figured it would be the usual initial burst of high speed followed by an immediate dive that never recovers, which is what has been happening as long as we've been hearing about it.
;)
No shit though, that stopped happening. It still isn't anywhere near advertised speeds, but it went from ~100KB/s up to more than 200 (and higher overnight) and there's none of that interfering bullshit anymore.
It's amazing what a little competition can do. They actually also added all of the premium movie channels for $5 less than we were paying (we'd only had HBO previously).
And no, I don't work for them, nor am I defending their questionable behavior (check past posts if you like). But it is nice to be surprised sometimes, even by nasty corporations
This is just the fundamental flaw with cable that has been waiting to expose itself since day 1:
Cable uses a shared local loop, and they advertise it as unlimited, and they advertise it as having 5 megabits. That math does not work. It is a lie. It is false advertising. They've only been getting away with it because most customers don't use what they've been sold.
Except that is changing. Video is exposing the lies of cable, and they're proposed solution is screwing the customer. Since they've been getting away with it for so long, they believe they are entitled to continue lying and to screw their customers to protect their lies. This is false advertising that has not been painful enough to result in a lawsuit. Now it is going to get there real fast unless they do something. So they are trying to convince the world that the customers are at fault. That is another lie. Don't buy it.
Stop lying about the product. False advertising is the problem here. People expect their cable to support 5 megabits unlimited because that's what they were sold. Degrading the service to those who consume what they were sold isn't just ethically reprehensible, it is (or at least should be) illegal.
There is no question of whether protocol throttling or customer throttling is the solution to the problem. There is no problem with the product. The problem is the false advertising.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The buffering of any flash movie is completely controlled by the dev, and the rules are implemented in ActionScript. Youtube movies preload the player, then wait for a % of total frames or something before starting. Your idea would involve just a little bit more complex ActionScript, but it would be doable!
My recent experience with Broadstripe(Cablespeed in disguise).
I try NBC.com video stutters and buffers every 3 seconds.
I try Hulu video stutters and buffers every 3 seconds.
I try Netflix and video stutters and gives me "3 hours" to ensure smooth playback.
I give up and bittorrent it.
2 days later "We've registered a copyright violation on your connection and will be disconnecting you. You get three free reconnects after which it'll cost $30."
My bandwidth is fine--over an average of 30 seconds. Within 10 seconds it'll fluxuate between dialup and real internet. For normal browsing that's unnoticeable for gaming and streaming... it's useless. So they can honestly claim I'm getting my bandwidth but it's in how you measure it.
They've successfully managed to 'sabotage' the legal not-cable options while leaving browsing intact. The part I find even more stupendous is that they disconnect you without consultation or verification and guess who gets the fee if you are a repeat offender? Them. So the cable company has begun enforcing copyright infringement and charging copyright violation charges! The cable company is profiteering from piracy!
The worse part is the multi-billion dollar corporations have been paid billions by the government to roll out universal broadband to everyone and have never delivered. That's worth whining about.
So the major telcos were given over 200 billion to give broadband to the nation and not delivering, in exchange for special FCC privileges to deny competition from really getting a foothold. There's been numerous articles about the money spent for services never delivered, that was just the first to show up in google.
The '96 telco act was passed to help get competition. CLECs were able to be formed, basically a second fiddle telco setup. Then Bush selected Powel's kid as chairman of the FCC and they went - not surprisingly - for big business monopolistic decisions. They dropped the telco act, they allowed companies to be pure monopolies once again. In fact Ameritech/SBC was petitioning that they wouldn't roll out any more broadband until the act was rolled back as they didn't want competition. They promised that if it was rolled back they'd get everyone on the latest broadband. And the suckers in Washington believed it!
If our telco companies existed in a free market, I'd be perfectly fine with having to move to get real service. Being in federally and state mandated monopolies is just a pain in the ass for innovation and should be complained about often.
But YouTube is only like 315 Kbps per Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube#Video_format. Are there any suggestions that bitrate is being throttled down THAT much? Also, it's progressive download via http, not any kind of streaming protocol.
:).
Ah, 300 Kbps H.263 + mono 22 KHz MP3. Just like web video I was making a decade ago
My video compression blog
FYI There's a Firefox extension called DownloadHelper which gives you a "Save As" for Youtube and other sites.