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."

Comments

not necessary...

[SuperBanana]

Comcast recently announced they bumped upstream bandwidth from 384kbit to 1mbit (FiOS pressure, anyone?) and they've also said they won't monkey about with p2p, right?

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.

Re:Why not caps?

[Kenz0r]

Here in Belgium and other European countries, bandwidth is not throttled but capped. I can Bittorrent as much as I want, but I fall back to 1-3 kB/s as soon as I hit the 100 gigabyte barrier. This system is waaaay less underhand or hypocrite. FYI, I'm at 30.7 GB this month. It resets the day after tomorrow.

Free market capitalism, eh? It's just crazy enough to work. We should try that here. :) I live in Belgium too, and I strongly disagree with parent. Our internet access may be neutral, but they're slower (4Mbits down / 400Kbits upload is the common standard for our adsl), and we're mocked by almost every other Western-European country for our traffic capped.
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.