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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.'"
It seems that promising too much in order to hook new users and then hitting the heaviest users (instead of fulfilling the promise)is a very valid business strategy lately.
So if I sign up with MLB to watch games which are not in my local television area, should I expect to get throttled by my local cable company because for 3hrs a week, I use a lot of bandwidth. The other hours of the week, I'm doing email and IM.
Isn't this taking away what people pay for? I know the main reason I got a faster internet connection was so I wouldn't have to wait for videos to buffer.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
... it's pro-retarded.
"You can use your car for anything you want... as long as you don't use it to go to work, or drive long distances. That's rough on the engine."
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Last I checked, Verizon wasn't doing this to their customers. Guess they're becoming the better communications company on multiple fronts now, huh?
I was just looking at the new Netflix Roku streaming service. To me this seems like a no brainer. $9/month for 1 DVD out at a time plus unlimited streaming movies and tv shows from there current selection. If Comcast was to start resetting connections while I was watching a movie that would really tick me off. Also don't providers realize that entertainment is moving more and more to the internet.
I watch most of my news stories on the internet, primarily CNN. I have noticed in the past week that the videos seem to be stopping midstream when it never did that before. I glance over at my gkrellm network monitor and see zero data coming to my box. Then it will pick up again after a short pause. Something has changed, not sure if it is Comcast or the video feed itself.
I'd be delighted to see streaming video killed.
We'd go back to "download the video to the client's hard drive, and play it back." Was that really such a bad thing?
Requiring a web-based client to stream content hosted on an external server, is, at the root of it, a form of DRM. When the server goes away (or deletes the link to it), the content becomes unplayable. This applies whether you're talking about YouTube's embedded flash player, or the hoops through which Windows users have to jump in order to save .wmv clips from TV news sites, etc.
And streaming is inefficient. You not only require a continuous throughput at a reasonably high bitrate, but after you've finished downloading your 20 megabytes of content for that 2-minute video clip, your client does you the favor of immediately deleting it. So the next time you want to watch the video, you get the joy of re-downloading it. WTF? In an age of $200 terabyte hard drives, that's ridiculous.
So bring on the death of streaming video, and let's get back to the good old days of File->SaveAs .mpg, .flv, .avi, .mp4, and a few minutes later, you can play the locally-stored content to your heart's content. Forever.
Like I said, cable companies... be careful what you ask for.
They want to control what we access, and when. The motive, of course, is money. But the collateral damage is our freedom.
Set the "baseline" price for video-on-demand = to your per-bit price for internet.
If the video is ad-supported, the price goes down.
If it's a blockbuster video, the price goes up.
Either way, the cable company gets the same $carraige_fee for every 1-hour video, whether it's from the end user or a sponsor. If the cable company has to pay a studio something, then that cost is passed on to end users.
So, instead of videos being "free" because the cable co. doesn't have to pay a vendor, they'll be $1 or something unless the vendor steps in and subsidizes them.
Normal-pay videos will go up in price by $1 or whatever per hour, unless the vendor is willing to lower his take.
Now, by "vendor" may mean the non-transport arm of the very company that owns the wires. You'll need some Chinese-walls between the two arms of the company to make this work effectively.
The bottom line is that within a given quality-of-service and time of day, a bit is a bit is a bit, and the "carraige fee" portion of the customer's bill should be the same whether it's from streaming video or video-on-demand.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If I had a choice in high speed internet companies, then they could throttle all they wanted. The problem is that I don't, Cox is the only game in town. They don't have any competition in the internet department, so by your reasoning they should be able to kill any service they don't like? That's murder, not competition, and it's not good for anyone involved except for a few executives who won't have to deal with the fallout of their monopoly being broken up by force.
To regurgitate, again: it's anticompetitive. because they use a monopoly in one market (internet access), which might be state-funded no less, to help their position in a different market, specifically streaming video.
This hampers competition in the streaming video market by making it impossible for online video sites to compete on equal footing.
People need to remember that the free market exists for a purpose - to allow the best product to win. These kinds of tactics completely destroy that mechanism.
Non-discrimanatory traffic throttling and bandwidth caps are in my eyes, the only workable solution for a balance between net neutrality and 'ISP over-saturation'.
If my telco/cable offers a rate based on raw bandwidth even if it is tiered more expensively during peak times, it still means they have more respect from me than specificly targetting any given application / company. At least then I pay for my access to a given service is directly relational to the amount I pay for their service, instead of having a divisor calculated based on how much Google payola's to my ISP.
If I download 120GB and my cap is 100, I should get throttled/warnings/charged/dropped based on my ISP's policies. If I want >200GB cap, I can pay more, or look for a carrier that is more bandwidth compatable.
The most important factor in this whole thing is transparency. If my ISP wants to meter me at a given policy, the policy should be laid out 100% in my terms of service. If 'changes' that affect my experience on their network occur, it should be reported -proactively-. It doesn't mean that I can change their mind, but it does allow me to decide if I want to change providers before they break my internet.
Bye!
most of the major ISPs either already provide video (cable) or are paying billions of dollars to offer video (verizon, att, etc).
the phone companies got hit by VOIP. and now the cablecos and the telcos are worried that some "video vonage" will come in and offer video at a lower rate over their own data lines.
this has been the game all along. come on in, take a seat.
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
You don't start a business to benefit the consumer, that's what a charity is for. You start a business to benefit you. And maybe kittens. But mostly you.
Took this comment seriously, did you?
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
MIT's Open Course-ware has videos (for some courses) of the entire semesters. I usually watch one or two per day, and they stream over an hour of .rm content each. So, I'm guessing that MIT is inherently evil for opening its fascinating courses for the public to view? Wait, MIT is trying to ruin the internet? OMG!!
Not to mention, I routinely download Linux images for Open Suse, Fedora, and Ubuntu for 3 different architechtures AND keep them up to date with patches. That's about 25+ GB (big B) of data/month in free software and video alone.
Damn, this free stuff is undermining the entire ISP's monopoly and forcing them to expand their networks... and charge me more money/month. Guess there really is no such think as a free lunch.
Can I get some sort of open source ISP please?
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
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
How does one abuse an "unlimited" internet plan?
"[..]the most abusive users [...]"
since when is USING a flat rate abuse? Goddammit, sell your bandwidth as "10GB per month" and shut up.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
This is problematic because the largest US ISPs are also big media companies.
Ideally, an ISP would be like a utility company. Pay a metered rate and the ISP moves data in the quickest and most efficient way possible. The ISP shouldn't care if broadband connections are used for streaming TV shows and movies. But many ISPs do care because they own TV networks and movie studios which are threatened by streaming media.
Look at Time Warner's plan to charge customers $1/GB if they exceed the monthly limit of 40 GB. Would you be surprised if Time Warner opens its own online store to sell movies and TV shows, one where downloads aren't counted against the monthly bandwidth limit? You think Apple or Netflix would appreciate that? And given the pitiful state of broadband competitiveness in the US, many consumers would be stuck with Time Warner...that or dial-up.
Just some of the many dangers of media consolidation.
It seems like YouTube is getting throttled a lot lately. To be fair though, I haven't checked for the deadly RST packet. Shouldn't be too hard. I just need to set Wireshark to filter everything but RST packets. Of course, that won't really let me know that it was Comcast that sent it. I'd say that a RST followed by the next packet in the expected sequence would be a giveaway, since the TCB at YouTube's server wouldn't send the next packet in sequence if it had sent the RST. Of course, if what Comcast is using to do this is stateful and smart, it'll block that next packet too. So. There is no way to tell, barring YouTube actually logging instances of having sent the RST itself, and letting us access that log. Feel free to point out any flaws in this analysis. I just typed it out in 5 minutes.
The bottom line though, is that YouTube is choppy lately.
It'd be nice if Adobe fixed flash so that it would double the buffering time whenever it got stuck. In other words, if it waits 5 seconds to buffer and then gets stuck again, it should wait 10 seconds the next time before trying to resume the stream. If it gets stuck again, it should wait 20 seconds. And so on, until, if necessary, it buffers the entire vid before playing.
Of course Adobe is not the underlying problem; but they could be more robust given the current environment.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Whatever happened to "build a better mousetrap"? It's thinking like yours that has ruined American business.
Caveat Utilitor
Well I guess I deserve that response for feeding a troll, but when you grow up maybe you'll see the real problem here : that the big telecoms are holding back our nation's technological progress just to satisfy the greed of thier shareholders.
Caveat Utilitor
You're not a broadband provider!
If you cant deliver the pipe... get out of the broadband industry because the demand for bandwidth is ONLY going to increase. It will NEVER decrease. We are a technological society, with more and more people using the internet everyday. The applications on the net are only going to increase the demand for bandwidth and speed.
Comcast, if you think you're having bandwith problems now... wait until 2011. Get off your ass and build for it, today. Stop punishing your customers, you have plenty of money as a business to provide the services that are demanded by your customers. AND YES... they are obviously demanded by your customers because the demand is too much for your network.
FIX IT.
How can a broadband provider see an increase in demand for bandwidth, and simply say... we're not going to increase our capacity? The demand is there because it is what is required by todays users.
You're not a broadband provider if you can not provide broadband. Comcast, you're a failure.
I am amazed on a regular basis by just how hostile Comcast is toward it's customers. Hopefully my cable provider doesn't start doing this crap too.
I do the same thing. I use an SSH tunnel through my server in Michigan (I live in Texas) and the streaming on youtube is fine. I had a sneaky suspicion they were throttling the videos. If I had a choice, I'd leave...but I don't. Since my server in Michigan has, essentially, unlimited bandwidth ( > 12 Gbit / month), I may as well do an SSH proxy all the time...
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.
I have (choke) Dial-up.
Alas I live in the deep woods, with a 35-year-old underground telecom wire. And can barely pull 35 Kbs if I'm lucky.
If I need an SPx upgrade or whatever, I go to a friend's in the town nearby and DL it onto my thumb-drive.
I do not understand these people who use THE INTERNET to download live action! It slows down even MY pathetic bandwidth!
Fer goodness sakes guys, get a satellite dish. And if it's some illegal movie? Hell- go rent the damn video at your local store! It's faster. And cheaper.
And - it's ILLEGAL? So go get an FTA sat receiver. They are easy enuf to find!
You idiots are destroying the internet! I use the internet for internet-specific tasks (wotever that means; I'm still in WEB-1)
A pox upon your movie torrents!
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- aqk
F U
Then that's some good decades-old wiring. 50k is the best you can really get on dialup even in perfect conditions with pristine wiring, 33.6 without downstream tricks.
You're obviously trolling here, but it provides a good jumping off point for what I want to say, so I'll bite. First off, other people watching live streaming video online aren't likely to impact your connection. Satellite TV, Cable and over-the-air antenna don't carry every live video feed of interest to everyone, so that may be someone's only option to see a particular event live. Also, there are lots of legal services to get movies off the Internet--some dinky 2 bit operations you may have heard of called iTunes and Amazon.com. I can download a 2 hour standard def movie in about 20 minutes on my connection, which is on par with how long it would take to go to the rental store, minus the hassles and gasoline. And it's certainly not cheaper to rent.
Nobody's destroying the Internet--well, maybe the cable companies. You see, what's going to happen is we consumers might actually get what we've been asking for these past few decades--ala carte channels. Paying only for the channels and shows you actually want, and the cable company becomes a mere bandwidth provider akin to a utility. No more content, premium channels, pay per view, or any of that crap. You pay for the pipe to your house, and what you want to watch. Cable companies want to retain control and maintain their monopolies, so they'll fight this every step of the way. That's what the net neutrality fight is really all about. The cable companies don't want to relinquish control.
Anwser just one question. Why don't we hear about this stuff from companies offering DSL? It seems its ONLY THE CABLE companies that see any need to limit or throttle traffic.