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Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector
bigwophh writes "Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt — Senior Policy Director for Google — announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs."
That's why consumer Internet connections are so much cheaper than business-grade internet connections riding on T1's and the like -- cable modems, DSL, EVDO connections, etc are almost always sold as "up to xxxbits/second". On the other hand, true T1's, T3's, etc, are sold as a guaranteed speed and very often with an SLA and penalties for non-performance of the speed. Of course, even T1's with guaranteed speed only guarantee the speed for the ISP's portion of the journey into the Internet "cloud".
Well, funny thing then that when my bittorrent client inched above 45-50kB/sec (less than half of the new limit, which is 125kB/sec), shortly thereafter ping times exploded from 20-25ms to 300-500ms. On a second occasion, it went up to 1000ms to 3000ms. Even if you throttle back to, say, 20kB/sec, ping times stay the same. They don't drop until you stop the client completely. Seems to take about 10 minutes for the throttling to kick in. It's so bad that ssh latency goes up to 5-10 seconds, and the web interface to my p2p client completely stopped working.
The same thing happened with eDonkey, so either they're going off traffic volume, or they're detecting any p2p traffic.
Please help metamoderate.
The Swedish Post and Telecom Agency has had a tool for testing your connection available to the public at http://www.bredbandskollen.se/ for a few years. It's open source and you do the test in your browser.
You don't pay for 5Mb download speeds, you pay for UP TO 5Mb speeds. There is the difference - speed is not promised.
However before we call all ISPs evil for throttling bandwidth, lets look at the facts. 5% of the userbase on average for an ISP provides for (usually) over 80% of the usage. Now, cables have a maximum capacity of bandwidth (that copper going out your wall? Yeah, theres a limit). If your ISP did not perform any form of traffic shaping you wouldn't ever reach your 5Mb speed, not even in bursts. Throttling has been going on since the beginning, have you ever bought a real router? Not the walmart linksys ones, but something on the level of a cisco 2800 or higher, they all boast a large list of features - traffic shaping is one of them for a very very good reason and has been since the beginning.
Oh, and I get my info from being the devil - aka, I manage the throttling for an ISP.
This pricing model would make sense; bandwidth is priced according to the actual laws of supply and demand, rather than whatever the ISP feels like charging.
That's why ISPs won't do it.
Because most customers are doing just fine the way it is. The customers getting 'screwed' are the ones that want to transfer 1000s of GB per month for 35$ flat rate.
If the ISPs ever actually switched to a supply/demand pricing model, with tiered bandwidth, guess what, the same customers that are moaning about getting 'screwed' now by throttling, are going to be moaning that their internet costs $1500/mo when they they run torrents at 25down:2up Mbps 24x7.
Meanwhile 'regular' people will be complaining because they don't understand their up/down ratios, why bandwidth costs more going in one direction than the other, why they had to pay $5 extra one month when they didn't do anything out of the ordinary.... except update windows to sp3... and according to the MS page, thats only a 97kb download.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=68C48DAD-BC34-40BE-8D85-6BB4F56F5110&displaylang=en#filelist
In effect: everybody loses.
Actually a lot of ISPs in India offer this. Its more like the US cell phone model .. 1 GB per month .. 6 am -9pm and unlimited bandwidth at night. Great for torrents. (Costs around the equivalent of 15-20$ a month).
Unless the fast speeds are coming from their peering partners while the true internet comes via a 56k modem. ;)
Free market capitalism, eh? It's just crazy enough to work. We should try that here.
Seriously, the biggest provider (a partially state-owned company, which has the entire nation's telephone net infastructure) charges 41 euros (61 usd) for 12 Gigabytes of traffic per month. Twelve, that's nothing! If you want to buy an extra pack of 5 Gb, it costs another 5 euros. Our internet providers would make a terrible model to follow, capped internet is almost just as terrible as a non-neutral net.
+1 Funny Signature
It is if they're the ones stopping you reaching the speed they advertised.
How would you feel if hard drive manufacturers didn't give you all the drive space they advertised or if your new sports car couldn't really run at the advertised max speed all the time? oh, wait...
Seriously though, living in the UK where we have ADSL max and I get advertised as being allowed up to 8mbps broadband but living in an area I can only get 2mbps is one thing. When the ISP then only lets me have 512kbps if I'm lucky half the time despite me getting shafted harder than most people the rest of the time it's a whole different matter, it's a kick in the nads. They really need to rethink their business plan if not only can they not supply what they're selling, but if they then can't even supply 1/4th and can in fact only supply 1/16th of what they're selling and even less than that with some ISPs.
The current pricing regime exists because there was no (affordable) way to measure traffic to the individual customer when the Internet first 'rolled out', although routing technology at the time did support capped speeds to customers.
Not any more. That is why countries late to the Internet were able to put a structure in place that allowed measurement of traffic (monthly GB) and charge you accordingly. This happens to be normal in many countries, though the US customer base has had a hard time stomaching anything beyond the 'all you can eat buffet' that is their speed limited connection. (and rightly so!)
I pay NZ$50 / month (about $40USD) for a 2MBps connection, with a monthly cap of 6GB of traffic. (after that it then throttles to dial-up speeds). Gives me about 200MB a day, FTP and Torrent traffic is 'throttled to about 60kBps - the network is 'managed' to the extreme. But here is my issue:
If I buy a CD from iTunes, it costs me for music BUT ALSO a portion of my monthly bandwidth. If I was to purchase a streaming movie or TV show, that would chew through my monthly allowance in no time. A 1GB movie download is worth about 5 days of my monthly limit. If I change to the next plan so I pay for the GB I actually use, then there is a 'real' cost associated to any internet purchase that requires download.
The 'pay for GByte' plan is really the ISP taxing purchases and transactions on their current infrastructure. It allows the ISP to oversell their infrastructure EVEN MORE than they do already and provides them with little incentive to improve their network capacity.
The cost to the ISP is the infrastructure capacity in X-Bps, not X-B/Month. They'll try to 'manage' traffic as profitably as they can, and this means getting the most from customers for the existing infrastructure.
Having had BOTH the USA system $/MBps and now $GB/Month, I much prefer the former. And just like the GP, I'd rather use my 2MBps 100% of the time, prioritizing what I want when without affecting cost.
I don't expect some sort of bot to go off on one when this sort of nonsense is posted (because I doubt that it is yet possible to construct one that wont missfire on /.) but I would hope that a supa dupa meta whatever from /. would have picked up on it and binned it by now.
What a wanker - whoever AC is.
And no, I was not being sarcastic. I genuinely think that the the poster to whom I replied does not understand the networking concepts.
>The ones really being "screwed" under the current model are the light users, who push a good 2 or 3 megabytes a day to check their email and the weather report, don't call tech support very often, and are paying $60 a month to subsidize us compulsive downloaders.
You've never actually worked in ISP tech support (or any in general), have you?
The worst, most annoying customers are the ones that barely use the service. The ones that use it a lot (and therefore KNOW how to use it PROPERLY) are the ones that never call unless it's broken on your side.
The only times I talked to "heavy users" was when they were transferred to tech support because sales didn't know the answer to "How unlimited is unlimited?" Well, that and when their line turned out to be shite. But that's not the customer's fault (and not ours, actually, but that's a state-of-Canadian-DSL story).
If you are using p2p, half that to account for upload (1:1 ratio as a good netizen) and you are down to 4 hours. God forbid if you watch HD at double the size. That leaves you with 2 hours of tv per day.
And that is just TV for one single week for one person in the household (although the grandparent did say university so it is likely a one person household).