Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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)
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.
Unless the fast speeds are coming from their peering partners while the true internet comes via a 56k modem. ;)
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!
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!
You have crappy humor.
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.