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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."
Oh sure, Google freeloads off all the ISPs and is now developing a tool to detect when ISPs fight back. ...what, you say, Google pays for its bandwidth already? They haven't just hacked their servers into the Internet? Hmmm, maybe the ISPs lied then...
FTA:
What:
Throttling detector
Where:
The interwho
Why:
Because ISPs like to throttle to give Papa Joe and his daughters a healthy feed of myspace and rain hellfire upon Torrenting Sam and his goon squad of seeders
How:
No details
When:
Who knows?
My UID is prime... is yours?
"We were pretty well known on the internet. We were pretty popular. We had some funds available."
Still, good on them for coming to a fork in the road - one to eviltown and the other to goodville - and choosing wisely.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Well if they do, then they can probably sign me up as a customer. If Google can act on the idea of a 100% neutral Internet and become an ISP, many people will head to them. But I don't think Google will expand into the physical world much just because of how everything they do has to deal with the Internet as more of an OS then it being a physical computer. But if Google becomes an ISP, I might just have to sign up after this.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
And watch the ISPs throttle this download to 1 byte/minute
It's not really that easy to make a tool that would determine 100% sure that the ISP is throttling your connection, many ISP's do limit the whole bandwidth, but this application would have to detect that only a certain type of trafic is limited.
I think Google is afraid it's youtube dreams are being squashed by evil ISP's. Google more than sure doesn't give a cent about P2P applications, so their app probably will only work for http throttling, namely flv streaming/youtube.
Sorry for the google bashing, but this doesn't seem like google is as much interested in defending the poor customers against the evil ISP's as it's trying to defend it's own commercial interests.
Something else, I don't think there will be a big success in bateling the big ISP's, as trafic rises, there is no way they can maintain the current bandwidth/price ratio, even with massive profit cuts and investments in infrastructure. ISP's are overselling at a massive scale, more than 100 times their banwidth capacity. (well, in the US it's possible to maintain current prices since it's one of the most overpriced countries in this domain).
You're behind the times. They already offer internet. I use it in my home; let's me browse /. while I'm on the toilet.
I'm sure there's stuff in the legalese of the contract you signed which says that that number's an upper limit and you should just be happy they give you any bandwidth at all, you filty customer.
I suspect the main aim here is to reduce ads injecting by ISP which would take away money from Google ads. Presenting it as throttling detection tool is just a way to make it more appealing.
How ironic that my feelings on the matter so closely match the quote "What we've got here is failure to communicate... Now I don't like this any more than you do."
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.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
...you filthy customer. The most concise phrase I have yet heard to describe how I feel dealing with Canadian Telcos and ISPs.
In B.C., our fascism is green.
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".
Wouldn't this be easy for ISPs to avoid? Just un-throttle any connections to Google's servers? Just figure out where the test is being done and don't throttle that site. Easy.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It's not really a bad thing, either.
I mean, they can't possibly guarantee you a certain speed. Try explaining to Joe Perv that even though he has the capability of 20 MbPS, the server that has his Chinese industrial accident porn can only deliver at 20 bPS.
There's enough reasons to sling vitriol at unethical ISPs, but advertising "up to [speed]" isn't one of them.
"...you filthy customer. The most concise phrase I have yet heard to describe how I feel dealing with Canadian Telcos and ISPs."
...you filthy customer. The most concise phrase I have yet heard to describe how I feel dealing with any big company.
More like:
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
I've found something quite fishy going on in the UK.
We currently have an 8Mb line, and I do mean 8, it gets to that speed quite often, especially in transfers from my university machines, other Janet sites, and other good download locations.
Otherwise we get around 4Mb.
Ok, all fine, but now UK ISP have started talking about max 2Mb lines in my area, and several have 'tested' my line and found it cannot go above 2mb, even when I clearly can get much greater speeds then this, and have before and after their 'test'.
Since this is usually accompanied by 'great deals' on 2mb packages, I smell several day old former fishies.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
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.
When it comes to bandwidth the total amount really doesn't matter (despite what the ISPs would have you believe). It's the amount per second, or, more reasonably, minute, that is the real determining factor. If I use 300 Gigs of bandwidth, but do so in 10 gigs a night, at the times when every normal person is asleep, over the course of the entire month that's going to have far less of an impact on my neighbors than if I used 30 Gigs on the first of the month during the waking hours.
Hmm...anyone else getting visions of power company like pricing? You pay per gig (or something) a reasonable fee (such that the average person pays the same then as now), but if you use it during off hours you pay less. It's probably been thought of before but it might help, those torrents would be a lot cheaper to run during off hours, making normal usage faster during on hours.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Sure it works, but the bandwidth is crap.
You have made this entire thread worthwhile.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
... use Google TiSP instead!
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
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.
Its not like the ISPs are denying it anymore.
Sure, you find out for sure, and and then what? In a lot of areas the 'hi-speed market' is a monopoly.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
They problem is that the ISPs over there are advertising it as unlimited interent.
You pay a flat fee and you can download as much as you want.
The catch is either in the fine print or its omitted completely.
Its illegal in Australia but legal in the US to do that.
Thats why nearly all our net plans have fixed quotas (sometimes with on and off peak) and your shaped after reaching the limit.
It is the next simplest solution and its extremely fair for consumers.
Maybe the somebody needs to clear the logs.
Or flush the streams...
eh... I'm tired of all these shitty jokes.
What I don't get is why an ISP would care if you encrypt things.
If you use encryption on your torrent connection you'd think that would be good for an ISP, if they're required by law to block people from downloading movies and songs but they can't see it since you're encrypting everything that should get them off the hook.
Bell Canada just seemed to just say screw this and started to throttle all encrypted traffic. Although they said it was because of bandwidth issues.
I say for an ISP ignorance is bliss!
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.
And Google Zeitgeist is going to be raising a few eyebrows next month...
[FUCK BETA]
I will happy pay for my bandwidth by the gigabyte if it is sold at market value. If they set up their pricing to reward lighter use or off-peak use, I will change my downloading habits to take advantage of it.
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.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Once the tool is ready how will Google get it to the masses? I'm talking about your average Joe Internet user. Let's face it, /. users will probably have this along with other nerd/geek/informed Internet surfers, but will that be enough noise to stop broadband corporations from throttling? Broadband companies will only care when average Joe starts complaining that he's paying for a service that isn't completely there.
Can I bum a sig?
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 see how this can be. when they're charging per gigabyte, then the more gigabytes they can deliver the more dollars they get!
If you're paying a flat rate for your connection, they've already got their money for the month, regardless of how much downloading you do. To maximize revenue, they have an incentive to discourage downloading, as this allows them to cram more flat-rate subscribers onto less infrastructure.
If instead they can levy a charge on every packet they deliver, then they'll want to facilitate your bandwidth consumption however they can.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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.
You have crappy humor.
The FCC really step in and say you guys need to come with a CIR in the context of best effort delivery and stick with it.
>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).
The crux of the problem is that US ISPs are advertising unlimited and don't want to deliver it. We in Australia went through that already, the ISPs got told to stop being jerks, and now they can't do that anymore.
The sooner the US ISPs start doing that the better - there's an adjustment period as people realise Internet connectivity needs to be treated like electricty - the more you use, the more it costs.
Yay, some quotes from some Google guy. Nothing technical.
First, you can bet your ass this is pretty damned hard not to get false positives, however I will admit before someone does it for me that the collective mind of Google is much smarter than I. I will not say it cannot be done. Its just unlikely ( still nothing technical ).
I work for a company that provides software ( and firmware ) for the largest ( physically, and capacity wise ) commercial satellite in the world. It only moves IP packets ( plus meta ). I am not a sales person, I design, prototype, sometimes build the software that controls the flows. I certainly maintain a heavy hand in in it all technically, I have nothing to do with service level policies, other than providing feasible solutions.I feel somewhat qualified to tell you strait up that this 'net neutrality' thing is both a bunch of bullshit and that its prompted by "Board Room" level jealousy of profits.
Before I get into the heavy of it I want to tell you that I feel that if you buy 1mbps you should get 1mbps. None of this "until you reach 15GB" crap... unless thats what you paid for.Unlimited should be without qualification unless they qualify it up front ( meaning its not "unlimited" ). Truth in advertising is the key here.
But on the other hand, you want your VOIP calls to be clear, you want your game session to be non-choppy. You want your web pages to take temporary priority over your FTP session, oh yes you do.
Likewise, you do not want the guy in the next cubicle to take up all of available bandwidth downloading [insert something big] over P2P or whatever you kids do these days to defeat fairness controls.Some of the legislation put forth in the name of neutrality would make it illegal for me to make it fair.
When I first got into this business it was common practice to oversell by five times, I recently have had documents cross my desk that suggest it is common practice to sell it 80 times over. Given that providers like TimeWarner want to jack the max speed to 15mb for an extra 5 bucks, its no wonder that they then want to put into place caps on usage ( they didn't mean you should use it ).
Oh wait, we were talking about neutrality. Right. So anyhow, you have groups trying to prioritize traffic, and then you have groups trying to tell the googles and the ebays in the world that they need to pony up some cash if they want fair access to the customers. This has nothing to do with QoS, this is extortion. We already have laws that cover this. Google is taking the wrong tact in the sense that they are trying to rally people behind them in demanding fair access, and I think they should be pressing criminal charges.
Do not get me wrong, my satellite covers a large portion of Asia, it has nothing to do with what is being proposed right here with Net Neutrality, other than the fact that my Internet is getting messed with by largish companies and politicians that do not know much about the problems.
Please... understand what you are proposing before you start pushing the badwagon.
I want to be clear, I feel that legislated "Net Neutrality" is bad, it will not work out well. I feel that there are plenty of laws in place that should incarcerate corporations ( if only we could ) for the obvious laws they are breaking by trying to force popular internet sites to pay them for access to customers that are already paying them. I would like to get into honesty in advertising, and why its really up to you guys to fix this, but it would rather go in a book for I am long winded.
Really guys and gals, we need some perspective on this, no one wants our internet messed with like this and if you leave it up to the corps and the elected, its going to get messed up. I am not sure what you expect to gain by this, but I am sure what you end up with is a pile of crap if it continues for too long. Please, we can apply laws that have been enforced for decades to cover this, its not mystery to us, its time we demystify it to everyone else.
P.S. Isnt the posting editing window really small now?
--dant
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
So a car dealer has two Ferrari's, but me sells 3 of them.
:)
The next day 3 customers show up to pick up their Ferraris, clearly the car dealer is outraged!
3 showing up when he only expected 2 even though he sold 3?! Unbelievable!
But the solution is simple, since the evil customers expected to get what they payed for, it's clearly all their fault,
and hence it is only fair to the car dealer that he be fully paid and the customers will have to timeshare.
Of course if the customers drive in California, the car dealer will have to be paid an additional $100/day since
driving in such a high traffic area it just completely unfair to the car dealer who only expected costumers to drive in rural, desolate areas of Idaho.
And in case some people don't know how to make the connection here, just replace "Ferrari" with "GB bandwidth" and "car dealer" with "ISP" (and what ever else needed to make perfect sense
If we let's ISP's get away with any of it, they won't just stop with throttling BitTorrent, they will oversell their bandwidth 1000-10,000x instead of just 10-30x and then throttle absolutely everything to make it all meet. Suddenly you downloading your 500kb Email attachment is an overuse of bandwidth and deserves to be cut down to 3kb/s. But don't worry, that annoying 1.2MB Flash commercial with be subsidized so it won't count and will stream with 10MB(yte)/s over your fiber connection to annoy you instantly. But you can't complain, after all you are getting your full bandwidth worth on SOME content.
In my overly optimistic way, i would hope that it doesn't really matter who releases such a tool and weather it works or not, just that the greedy ISP think there might be something to nail them down or at least make their unethical misdeeds visible might be enough for them to be not quite as bold, maybe even start campaigning with 'no throttling, test it yourself'. But i forgot that in the US there isn't really any ISP Broadband competition, i mean in the areas i lived in there was only once choice, first it was either Cable or nothing... then we moved, now we had the choice of At&t DSL or.... nothing.... yay. And even in those areas where people are lucky enough to have TWO offerings, chances are very good that both are evil bastards and already throttling
Now that i have been living in Germany for a while, i almost get weekly adds from some ISP i have never heard of supposedly being cheaper then my current isp. My 16MBit/s connection combined with some unlimited call package is cheap enough though (compared to the us) but it makes me feel good that if there is ever even the hint of throttling that i can simply switch one of the many other isp's.
Google should worry more about ISPs selling out to Phorm. Advert re-writing strikes closer to their revenue stream.