Slashdot Mirror
Sandvine CEO Says Internet Monitoring a Necessity
Khalid Baheyeldin writes in with a CBC interview with the CEO of Sandvine, Dave Caputo (bio here). Sandvine is the Waterloo, Ontario-based company that provides the technology that Comcast and other ISPs use to overrule Net neutrality by, for example, injecting RST packets to disrupt Bittorrent traffic. Caputo says, among other things, that Internet monitoring is a necessity. Some of the comments to the interview are more tech-savvy than the interviewee comes across.
And we can sell you just the product you need for that.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
http://redhatcat.blogspot.com/2007/09/beating-sandvine-with-linux-iptables.html [blogspot.com]
If you are running linux or a linux based router with iptables give this a try. My speeds returned to pre-sandvine levels.
"If you are using a Red Hat Linux derivative, such as Fedora Core or CentOS, then you will want to edit /etc/sysconfig/iptables. First, make a backup of this file. Next, open this file in your favorite text editor. Replace the current contents with this, substituting 6883 with your BitTorrent port number:
*filter :INPUT ACCEPT [0:0] :FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
-A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
#Comcast BitTorrent seeding block workaround
-A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6883 --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP
-A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
#BitTorrent
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 6883 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m udp -p udp --dport 6883 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
COMMIT
Reload your iptables firewall with service iptables restart. You should now see a great improvement in your seeding.
If you are using Ubuntu or another non-Red Hat Linux derivative, then place the following in a file and execute that file as root.
#!/bin/sh
#Replace 6883 with you BT port
BT_PORT=6883
#Flush the filters
iptables -F
#Apply new filters
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
#Comcast BitTorrent seeding block workaround
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport $BT_PORT --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
#BitTorrent
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport $BT_PORT -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m udp -p udp --dport $BT_PORT -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
Your firewall is now configured and you should have great upload speed now. You will have to run this script every boot, by the way. One easy way is to call the script at the end of /etc/rc.local."
From TFA:
For every five megabits they sell you for $40, they buy a quarter of a megabit because they're planning on you not using your computer 24/7. They count on you being away at work or being asleep. They simply cannot provision that five megabits because that costs way more than what they're selling it to you for. They need people not using the internet for it to work at $40 a month. (Emphasis added)So let me get this straight--poor planning on their part somehow does constitute some form of emergency on my part?
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
I'll admit I only skimmed the article so maybe it's explained earlier that he's had some kind of stroke that's messed with the speech centre of his brain resulting in this problem. Or maybe he's just an idiot.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
As stated in the article is that the ISP's are selling you 1 megabyte while really buying you 1/4th of a Megabyte... Network monitoring is in other words necessary to ensure you in other words only use 1/4th of a Megabyte for every Megabyte you buy. It's right there in his argument!
Yes, Internet monitoring is a necessity.[1] No, injecting anything into someone who doesn't wish to have his stuff interfered with is not only not a necessity but quite frankly an outrage. Remember people, just because one thing is a necessity doesn't mean that something more must also be necessary. This is a slippery slope. To be honest I was expecting more logical integrity from Dave Caputo whom I've always respected and liked personally but who has apparently started to be blinded by his corporate agenda. What a shame, Dave. What a shame.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
There used to be this honour system on the internet called "published ports."
It's an antiquated honour system now because there's plenty of application developers that have no honour.
Oh yeah? Well back in my day we had an honor system called "don't screw with my freaking packets while they travel over your routers that I'm paying you to use". If y
That sums it up. It's all of 'our' Internet, and its lucidness and capacity to re-adjust is part of its design. If you want a big-gulp download, you should get what you pay for-- subject to the randomness off aperiodic congestion, just like a freeway.
I'm guessing you weren't around or were kicking your siblings in the playpen when the Internet was designed. We believe in getting what we paid for, in a neutral, unbiased delivered fashion. All other attempts at control in our opinion, is not only illegal, but contradictory to the philosophy of egalitarian use, and in some corners, reason for revolting.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Honestly, I'm SHOCKED!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It's not going to speed up your internet connection.
At best, everything will remain the same as now.
More realisticly, your bill will increase and your service will become worse.
At worst, they'll disconnect you as they've kicked off so many of the "top 5%" of users that you're now part of the top 5%.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
So you can't provide those fantastillion megabits per sec for 40 bucks. Ok, I can see that. How about ... I dunno... selling what you can sell?
Trying to sell something and hope that the customer won't use it is at the very least false advertising. Personally, I'd call it fraud.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think that blocking bittorent is a horrible offense against net nuetrality and that Comcast really is just falsely advertising. They try to sell you a connection for a ton of money and than not let you use it....how is that fair.
Comcast is simply ripping people off and refusing to upgrade their network.
I blame comcast but I don't really blame sandvine. Someone is going to make the software whether its sandvine or "Network Management Unlimited" (wow not a bad idea for a new startup :P). He is just making software. He is just as much of an exploiting douchbag as the people who make the bandwidth hogging programs if you think about it.
Its comcast that are money hungry exploiting bastards who just want to exploit the fact that they are a monopoly.
After all,it isn't but a single step to go from "We are doing RSTs to save our network!" to "We can use this technology to "guide" our customers to our services and to our affiliates and to "discourage" them from using our competitors and make even greater profits!".
Mark my words,the Internet will end up a bunch of "walled gardens" like in the days of AOL and Compuserve. The amount of bandwidth they give you for "non-affiliated" services will be so pathetic as to not matter. They will offer the few big boys like Google a free pass to keep them from fighting it while the rest can just starve. The days of a wild and free Internet are coming to a close IMHO. And the world will be a much worse place for it. After all I'm sure that each "garden" will have their own "free" news feed where only approved views will be heard and the corporate spin will always be considered gospel. But that is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
destroying sandvine is a necessity.
ISPs should never muck with a TCP stream. They're entitled to send ICMP messages. ICMP Destination Unreachable has codes for things like "(13) Communications Administratively Prohibited" and "(10) Destination host administratively prohibited". Then at least the user knows 1) that somebody along the route didn't like the packet, and 2) who to blame. There's a right way to do this, and sending an RST isn't it.
Client software may not pass all the ICMP info up to the user, but that could be fixed easily enough.
How about just telling the customers EXACTLY what they're paying for?
For $40 you get a guaranteed MINIMUM bandwidth of X with a potential to burst to Y.
If you want more, you pay for more.
Fuckit, I'll bite...
"Want unlimited downloading? PAY FOR IT"
That's the problem, you payed for your (i would assume) non-unlimited internet account, which means no matter who else is downloading what, you should be able to get exactly what you payed for, limited, or not.
Besides, its the same network, so if someone Pays for an unlimited account (that's actually unlimited) whatever traffic they use has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere will be your account, to user your highway analogy...
If someone can afford to buy a car for ever member of their family, and they all live on the same block as you, then the odds are fairly high that when you go to leave your driveway, one of them might be passing by at that time, delaying your trip.
Its basically a democracy, the whole wolf and sheep deciding whats for dinner nonsense, the people who want to download 8 DVDs a day, will do so, and the people who just want to browse the internet, will do so, but one of them will be taking from the other, and its usually the biggest one who is doing the taking.
Its not possible (currently, or for the foreseeable future) to have unlimited accounts, but if they were all limited appropriately, you wouldn't feel any effect at all, you would get exactly what you payed for, even if it happens to be slower than you prefer, it would be a consistent 100kb/s or whatever...
But right now its working on like a tidal principle, whichever person has the most gravity, the water tends to conglomerate towards them.
I dunno, I'm kinda just rambling, so I'll shut up.
FTFA:
"Caputo: Here we are, a company founded on improving the quality of the experience of the internet and trying to make the world a better place."
Come on... The company is founded on maximizing revenue for ISPs. Who does he think his audience is? Oh, and I didn't realize bandwidth throttling was improving everyone's quality of life! And here I thought others were doing this. Congratulations on finding a way to make the world a better place and line your pockets at the same time!
Where is it written that it is all-you-can-eat?
All over ISPs' advertisements. Unless they've redefined the word "unlimited".
An Internet which is not neutral is less useful than an Internet that is. If web browsing is sped up at the expense of streaming video, that's going to hurt some people more than others. If streaming video is sped up at the expense of games, a whole other group is affected. Since people come up with new ways of using the Internet all the time, and we can't predict new uses, the best strategy is to give all packets equal measure.
Rather than throwing out Net Neutrality, it'd be more productive for ISPs to find business models that don't involve overcommitment, or at least make it less painful. Like some of the recent attempts to make P2P software favor nodes within the same ISP.
Not a typewriter
I suppose the argument the ISP's use is that their throttling service *is* unlimited, because they never cap how much you can download. They just change how fast you can download it at. You can never download an "unlimited" amount of data in a finite time, because you're always limited by your connection speed.
For example, on an 8Mbit connection, ignoring overheads, you can get 1MB per second. Or 2.592TB per month. All the ISP will claim they're doing is changing that figure, which is how fast you can pull data down. A "limited" connection would be one in which you're only allowed xGB per month (which is what I use in the UK - I pay Zen £35 per month for 50GB and get no throttling or anything crap like that - if I exceed 50GB, I pay per GB).
I'm not saying it's right, but it's how I've seen it argued.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
Churning means the loss of customers to other service providers. In other words, the opposite of customer retention.
Service providers can combat churn by having some sort of mechanism to make it hard to switch. For example, an email address tends to keep you using the provider of that email address because people don't want to go through the hassle of changing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Hartnell FTW! ;D
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Don't feed the troll. /thread.
This isn't about companies saving money on provisioning.
This is about a deep fear in some circles of people
getting together in egalitarian groups to do mysterious
and no doubt evil things.
This is about preventing people from having the power
of independent thought and action.
This is about spying to identify those who try to
move out of their assigned channel.
Clearly, a cold war is going to be needed here, and
the key weapon is going to be steganography.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
> If you look at that underlying transmission protocol[TCP], when you send a flow of packets â" if they're getting through â" they get bigger until you get congestion, then the packets get smaller. The idea of flow control in the internet has been a tenet of it since day one.
I find it funny he chose to reference TCP flow control as some sort of ancestor of deep packet inspection. Part of TCP control flow's purpose is to enforce fair usage, ie 'net neutrality'.
Read your contract - the ISP may say unlimited; but the DON'T guarantee a bandwidth. All unlimited means is that they don't cut you off or charge you more if you exceed a certain data volume.
Let's get real here. If an ISP was really selling you a guaranteed dedicated bandwidth you would be paying a much higher price than you do now. Why do you think T1 is hundreds of dollars per month at 1.5 Mb/s? Because of the service guarantee, that is why.
Packet switching works economically because it is shared bandwidth relying on a statistical distribution of traffic on the network. During peak loads traffic will be slower than at off peak times unless the network is extremely over-provisioned.
There is another technology out there that gives a guaranteed bandwidth for every customer - which is rapidly being displaced because of its inefficiency - it is called circuit switched, and it is what the phone companies use to carry analog voice. Every call gets it's own dedicated bandwidth. All I can say is that you would not want an internet based on this network model. It is slow, inefficient and inflexible.
Now ISPs have a problem with users that run applications that present a high constant load because they don't fit the statistical model. High volume P2P is the primary offender right now. If people are using these sorts of applications when the network is heavily loaded it seems to me quite reasonable that traffic based on interactive applications (VOIP, video, HTTP) should receive priority. ANY good computing system should favor interactive applications over non-interactive applications. It is a basic system design principle.
Sorry to inform you, but to do this you need to monitor.
A lot of people whine that this breaks the idea of network neutrality. I disagree; network neutrality must not allow one type of communications stream or application to seriously degrade the performance or usability of all of the other applications. If that occurs you do not have a neutral network. You have a network that is dedicated to that one application. That is NOT what I as an end user want.
Yea... this whole argument is nonsense. The 10-30+ mbps he is talking about isn't something you'll see all that often in the US, maybe with FiOs, and I dunno how good their service is.
But we pay for 7 mbps down from cox, and the only time I ever see anything near that number is in a speed test. Most normal web surfing, file downloads, etc, 1-2 mbps down is the highest we're gonna see.
So these RST packets, or anything else they do that keep us from consuming our full bandwidth potential... are just a kick in the nuts. We already don't get the service we pay for, not even close. We do sleep and go to work. Sometimes I think my old Speakeasy 768k sdsl was better than what COX sees fit to deliver, and I can't say that I know anyone in the US who doesn't have slow internet at times, internet dropping (far more often than would be acceptable for telephony dropping)... the notion of further interrupting this traffic flow that is clearly crap is silly.
The people who agree with traffic shaping don't have the solution, but the people who demand full speed all the way aren't right either. The internet is a "best effort" network. The only guarantee is that your local link performs as advertised. The network beyond that link is not guaranteed to transport your packets at the same rate.
It is technologically impossible to provide Mbps connections all across the globe to every subscriber at the same time. It is certainly a good ISP if you never feel that technical limitation, but they can't do magic. Every economically viable network configuration relies on "overselling", simply because the network would not see reasonable utilization percentages otherwise. You get more for your money if you can use a high bandwidth 90% of the time and the rest of the time you get the bandwidth that you would get without overselling.
The question is what should the ISP do in case of network overload. This is where network neutrality enters the scene. The operator can "punish" certain protocols in favor of protocols which the casual users need, or he can randomly throw away a percentage of all packages, or he can ask server operators for money and throttle the traffic to the servers whose owners didn't pay up. There are many traffic shaping schemes and many business models on top of them. This is the problem which needs to be solved: What to do when the network is overloaded? It is not as easy as it seems, because the bottleneck can be anywhere in the whole network. It does not have to be within the network of the last mile provider, where the bandwidth of all subscribers could simply be lowered by the same percentage until the total traffic is lower than the bottleneck's capacity. If the bottleneck is somewhere else, who does the throttling and what is fair?
You can all take your 100kbps connections if you want. I'll take a connection which is 100 times as fast most of the time and not slower than yours for a couple of hours a day, thank you very much.
Of course a netadmin has to monitor traffic. How else to assure good service? But what information is necessary and how it should be used ought to be carefully governed by ethics. Unfortunately, these ethics are not well known, and frequently violated by the concept of "owner privilige" (often might makes right). Essentially ignoring any notion of customer rights and treating employees as serfs. Both have been known to rebel for cause.
It is the deplorable state of IT ethics that is the root cause of many of these controversial actions.
Nobody on slashdot is stupid enough to believe that we shouldn't get what we pay for and that the alternative is to get even less of what we already pay for.
The fact that an ANON makes this post is very telling of itself.
Maybe with that philosophy we should all go back to dialup for 40$/month. yeah, that'll slide real smooth.
Meanwhile, how about undersell instead of oversell! WHAT AN IDEA! Maybe that might allow people to actually you know, expand like any smart business and not end up backtracking nonstop like comcast has been doing for the past few years of this crap?
nobody has a smaller dick than Dave Caputo.
His first sentence is that he thinks looking at everyones digital-internal communications is the most difficult, and therefore he wanted to do it because of it being the most difficult problem to solve.
From the article:"CBCNews.ca: During the panel discussion, you sounded more like a technologist than a business executive, where you're more in tune with what you're actually making as opposed to selling it. What do you consider yourself? Caputo: I'm very passionate about our technology and I'm pretty passionate about the concept with which Sandvine was founded on, and that was to improve the quality of the experience on the internet. When we first set down that path, the idea of looking at every packet⦠we said this is the most difficult problem that we could possibly imagine. The internet is so big, so vast, so continuous. And then we said that's "cool." We're going to attack a problem where we can't imagine there's a more difficult problem. I take nothing away from rocket scientists or biologists who are trying to cure cancer, but in our domain we really couldn't think of a more difficult problem, and that really excited us."
What the hell is that about? Did anyone jump when they read the first part of the article and saw that?
Stop with the damn caps and the unknown variables. I want to see an ISP with a basic monthly fee and pay-as-you-transfer rates.
Exemple: you pay 10$/month for your connection if you do less than 10 GiB of transfers, and you pay 1$ per additionnal 10 GiB.
You make less than 10 GiB download+upload during the month, you pay 10$. You upload+download for 100 GiB, you pay 19$. Not expensive enough? I have no idea. Change the price per GiB as needed, I have no idea how much ISPs are paying for their bandwidth.
"Read your contract - the ISP may say unlimited; but the DON'T guarantee a bandwidth."
Actually, most ISPs I've ever used, from Bellsouth to TW to Verizon to Comcast, guarantee you the bandwidth rate *TO THEIR SERVERS AND ROUTERS* and from there they can't guarantee jack shit. To their routers and servers and to other computers inside of their network, I've almost always obtained maximum data throughput. Get outside of that network and my average speed drops to about 3mbit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"As part of my job, I've seen the penises of a number of these men"
Hmmm, what job entails genital examination of your superiors?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Here's my whole wallet right now!!!!!!
You ask:
Hmmm, what job entails genital examination of your superiors? And the answer: I've been a professional executive secretary for 16 years now. *SLURP* Now, how bout that raise ?-Billco, Fnarg.com
I strongly suspect the CEO is hoping to do another PixStream... sell out to a big player and walk away with a small fortune as the former company gets ripped to shreds by the new owners. He cares not about the words coming out of his mouth, he's a sales guy. He sells businesses, takes his golden handshake and moves on to the next target.
The funny thing is a lot of Sandvine employees were former PixStream employees, so either the perks are fantastic, or these people are easily duped.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Anybody have this guys E-mail Address, home address, phone numbers? Just curious.... No reason.
All packets MUST be treated equally. That is the first mistake. When an ISP says that they will deliver "unlimited" Internet to you, they must actually do this. "Unlimited" is not vague or ambiguous in the context in which they have used it. They must give me unlimited service, or a service without limitations, boundaries, restrictions, or controls. I did not come up with the unlimited part, they did.
I was sold a 6 Mb/s connection from Embarq, which means that with unlimited service I should be able to transfer 6Mb/s * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 30 days, which is right around 2 TB of data transfer per month.
My neighbor was also sold this same package. We pay the same price. How can you determine which of our packets get priority? Can our packets be anything but equal?
This is why the "bandwidth hog" argument is so ludicrous. I cannot "hog" the bandwidth, nor can my neighbors. We all paid for a service, we all have equal rights to it.
This SHITHEAD just said it right here in plain English. Their business model is based on not actually delivering what they sold you. The "more" they don't deliver the more profitable they are. No wonder the ISP's have such an interest in figuring out the "problem". He is even more of an ass with his cavalier attitude about it. "Well that is just the way it has always been and it's okay". That attitude is why nobody trusts their ISP and these companies. It is so clearly greed that drives them.
What an ass. If you read between the lines here, he is basically saying that the fact ISP's are trying to figure out how to more effectively deny us the service we have been sold leads to greater business opportunities for his company. I'm shocked.
I hate to be somebody that just complains about a problem without offering solutions. Well the solution to this is very simple. Stop selling unlimited Internet. START being honest with your customers.
It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that 10 homes in a neighborhood each with a 10 Mb/s connection require a 100 Mb/s pipe connected to all of them to deliver the bandwidth. Telling each one of them that they have unlimited use of those 10 Mb/s connections is a flat out lie. There is no way that could work without raising the price by 10 times.
If the reality is that there is only 20 Mb/s coming into the neighborhood then they should sell it with a 2 Mb/s floor and a 10 Mb/s ceiling. They will guarantee that you can at least get 2 Mb/s dedicated just for you, but be able to burst up to 10 Mb/s "depending on conditions". That would be honest at least. You would know that if your neighbors are not using the connection, you might be able to get some pretty good porn 5 times faster than normal, but the worst
What monopoly? T1 service is available from many carriers in most locations.
If the CEO of a company tells you that the world needs things that serve the purpose that his companys products can provide and you don't find something wrong with that, then you get a big fat "FAIL" tattooed across your forehead.
The question is not so much about network neutrality or throttling as much as it is about modifying packets en-route--Comcast et al. now sens (falsified) RST packets, which is almost like a man-in-the-middle attack against peer-to-peer networking--if there's genuinely not enough bandwidth, why not just drop excess packets from P2P streams?
Let's get real here. If an ISP was really selling you a guaranteed dedicated bandwidth you would be paying a much higher price than you do now.
I do pay the higher price. I have a business-class cable modem exactly because I don't want to be subject to the malarkey that residential service has. And it's a lot cheaper than a T1 for the same downstream bandwidth (and acceptable upstream).
If people are using these sorts of applications when the network is heavily loaded it seems to me quite reasonable that traffic based on interactive applications (VOIP, video, HTTP) should receive priority. ANY good computing system should favor interactive applications over non-interactive applications. It is a basic system design principle.
The problem is that I don't trust my ISP to do that. I trust me to do that by setting up QoS on my own equipment, if I so choose.
The telecom industry should have had most of the urban US on 10Mb connections years ago. Instead, they've spent most of their efforts reconsolidating themselves back into MaBell. With the kind of infrastructure upgrades that taxpayers have already paid for, there'd be no need for the entire network neutrality debate.
Not a typewriter
Seriously... Sandvine, Phorm, NebuAd? We as the consumer have totally lost. In-network-spyware. Get the hell off my internets.
Kind of funny, reading the previous posts I'm reminded of a lot of the bad press that Fydor received when he created nmap. Sandvine simply created a tool. It's the ISP's that chooses to use it for good or abuse it.
Over subscription has been a standard ISP business model since we've had ISPs. In the old days we simply let the streams normalize themselves because data is data and TCP is extremely robust.
The problem you have today is ISP's selling VoIP. VoIP is far more suseptable to data latency than DNS, HTTP, etc. Rather than just "the Internet feeling slow" you experience dropped calls, echo, sounding like you are talking into a tin can, etc. For the typical end user they are far more likely to recognize this as abnormal than their browser taking 10 seconds to load a site. This means they are far more likely to call a support person to complain. More calls to support means you need more staff. More staff means less $$$ on the bottom line.
So the problem is not so much Sandvine as it is the ISP's themselves. They are trying to use the same resale models while failing to take into account that they are now offering services that will not function within those models.
Correction: TCP/IP packets do not get "bigger" as the quoted article states and Vint never would have made such a comment. If there is no congestion TCP/IP will permit more packet transmissions (of the same size) without requiring a pause in transmission (read up on TCP window size and scaling for more info). Don't know if Sandvine or the reporter borked this concept.
Just tell their ISP to censor their own Internet connections with the same software they develop. We'll see what they'll be saying after that.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
There - FTFY
Causation can cause correlation
Let's go over what you said:
Now ISPs have a problem with users that run applications that present a high constant load because they don't fit the statistical model. High volume P2P is the primary offender right now. Agreed, although I think the description of P2P with the term "offender" comes off as biased against yet another valid traffic patterns. If people are using these sorts of applications when the network is heavily loaded it seems to me quite reasonable that traffic based on interactive applications (VOIP, video, HTTP) should receive priority. I disagree. I think each user should be given an equal share of the bandwidth, and be able to decide on their own how best to distribute that share among their desired applications. ANY good computing system should favor interactive applications over non-interactive applications. It is a basic system design principle. This can be done by the user's system. There's no need for the ISP to second-guess the user.Since this is the case, I would say that it's more important that the user is in control, so he can choose the behavior that's right for him, than to have a default behavior that works for most people.
Consider this analogy: would you prefer a benevolent dictatorship to a democracy? Why not? Does it have to do with your influence on the governance?
You have a network that is dedicated to that one application. That is NOT what I as an end user want. Well, if you leave it to the ISPs to choose per-application network performance, you end up with an internet dedicated to the applications the ISP likes. Expect that to not include any services that competes with their offerings (say, cable tv).Would it be illegal to send by email a threat, or an extortion, or some other nasty content to oneself? Would it be a conspiracy if I planned out a crime via email with myself? Stupid, yes, especially if the Feds gets involved, but illegal?
A REAL T1 is expensive because the goverment requires certain service level requirements to be met related to reliablity, uptime and repair. All of this is related to the telephone infrastructure, not bandwidth. The bandwidth guarantee you refer is only from you to the central office, and has nothing to do with the internet. Again, this all was decided long before the Internet mattered and was for digital telephone services.
You refer to circuit switched like its somehow different and specific to 'analog phone calls' but this is simply misleading. There haven't been any analog phone calls made in years. As soon as it hits the CO its digitized. T1s are expensive because of this, because the goverment, by law, requires them to actually function the way the are supposed to.
Ironically you call it slow, inefficient, and inflexible. But, it works the exact same as the internet. I can take my number with me to my new physical address, my calls work unless the network is congested with too many calls, and I can hear a pin drop across the span of the US (assuming of course I'm not using some shitty VoIP system with a crappy codec (read as all of them)).
A T1 worth of bandwidth is cheap really, as long as you buy it as something other than a 'T1', even with guaranteed bandwidth the termination point. Guarantees for bandwidth are ALWAYS only to the termination point as they can't control the Internet.
You do not need to monitor, its worthless. Monitor and prioritize interactive sessions... except, as soon as this is common practice, every app will have a way to make it appear and flag itself as an interactive session to get priority. Trusting user controlled data to prioritize is retarded and shows you have no concept of network security. As an ISP you sell your customers a product you can produce for them.
My ISP can not sell me unlimited bandwidth at 7MB/s for $50/month. No one can. But thats not my problem, its theirs. They have plenty of money to pay for more bandwidth to fix the 'problem' of just not upgrading infrastructure when needed. Why do many of them have the same upstream bandwidth they had when they had half the customers? So now you're craming 1.5 million customers into the same bandwidth as when you had 750 thousand? Let me give you a hint as to why you're having bandwidth issues.
I love the fact that they are limiting people and 'managing' their network because they don't have the upstream to support it, while at the same time they are running commercials about the free bump from 5 to 7 megs for standard customers and 7 to 10 for 'turbo' customers.
Please don't come here and sing the hardship of managing a ISP sized network. Some of us have done it. We know the costs. We know the profit margins, they're public companies.
We call bullshit.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
There are a lot of people who have been buying up dark fibre and reselling it. And the cable TV guys also own physical plant.
http://www.4connections.net/?gclid=CKiguaWOiJQCFQoDGgodcXFCVg
http://www.fiberring.com/products/299/
http://www.optimumlightpath.com/ourNetwork.shtml
As the security folks have been telling us from the start: What's "necessary" is end-to-end encryption for all traffic.
Yes, this costs a bit of extra cpu time on both ends. But any other "solution" is bogus. Any unencrypted packet allows your ISP, and anyone else along the path between two sites, to examine your traffic and "manage" it.
To encourage this, we should be teaching everyone to always use https:// at the start of all URLs.
Maybe we could encourage the apache people to make port 443 the default, rather than 80. Or, as a stopgap, make it listen on both ports by default, with occasional helpful hints that port 80 will soon be deprecated.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
There is more to traffic shaping than bandwidth, for example latency. There are good, existing tools for prioritizing traffic and they work. Personally, while I see false advertising as an issue, I have no problem with network operators selling access to a service where bandwidth at a given point is not guaranteed, but traffic is well prioritized, especially since such a service can be a lot cheaper. As for network neutrality, that is a concept to prevent monopoly abuse and for that it needs to prevent traffic from being prioritized based upon sender and receiver. It does not need to guarantee prioritization based upon traffic type, just so long as everyone using a given protocol is given the same priority.
The Dark Fiber referred to is used for long haul connections. Not from an office to the POP, but from the POP onwards.
You also referenced people offering metro Ethernet and fiber to the premises, but no-one offers T1 over these -- only T1-like (and greater) speeds.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If there are competitive services that provide the same service levels any reasonable person would conclude that there is no monopoly regardless if they are T1 technology based or not.
Bandwidth is clearly a fungible commodity.
And, if you care to read all the parent posts, you will see that I commented already that there are many cheaper alternatives to a real T1 and the only reason that real T1 is more expensive is the cost of renting the wires from the incumbent monopoly telephone company.
I did not claim that there is a monopoly in bandwidth services.
The original claim that I was refuting was that bandwidth is expensive based on T1 charges. I was pointing out that T1 costs had little to do with bandwidth charges.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!