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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.
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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?
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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!
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.
Back in my day we had a honor system that basically said "don't sell 100 gallons of milk when you only have 20".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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
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?
The problem is, that a megabit still costs $300/mo or $700/mo. There's no way around that.You can get un-fucked-with bandwidth for that price, or you can live with the fact that your concentrated. You can't have it both ways.
The more you buy, the cheaper it gets, so you could order a T3 or something for like $5000/mo and then sell it to your neighbors for like $200/mo... (not including the cost of the routers).
I don't know about you, but I'm happy to have 3megs part of the day for $30/mo instead of my old ISDN line for $145/mo. Or maybe dialup? No thanks. I'll take the concentrated 3megs for $40.
It's just not realistic to expect to get more for your $40 than they get for their $300.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
All ISPs oversell, with our without Sandvine's products. Your ISP tells you you're getting a certain amount of bandwidth, but you aren't, at least not 24/7. This has always been the case from day one.
This company isn't doing anything particularly brilliant. ISPs have been doing ad hoc versions of it for years and years.
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.
On the other hand, if a sufficiently large population of Torrent users made the change, that particular attack vector would pretty much go away.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Its more like selling access to the keg, telling everyone they can drink the whole thing, and expecting everyone to blackout before they notice its gone
Everybody in my neighborhood picked up the phone at the same time and half of them couldn't get through!
Overselling is not a bad thing. It can just mean that you sell based on statistical maximums rather than theoretical maximums which never happen. When done this way, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
When 90% of your customers are offline at any given time, there's no point in provisioning more than one tenth of the bandwidth you would need to support all of them downloading at the maximum rate simultaneously.
The problem is not overselling. The problem is that some ISPs oversell too much. They aren't willing increase capacity to match actual use, but instead try to reduce usage to match actual capacity. This is wrong. But the simple fact of overselling is the only sane way to do business.
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Exactly right. So complain about insufficient capacity, and not about overselling which is necessary, common, and entirely reasonable.
It just gets me how it seems like everybody in these discussions does not actually understand reality. "Ooh, the evil cable company promised 100 people in my neighborhood 5MBit connections but they don't actually have 500Mbit of bandwidth serving us! What a bunch of liars!" Sorry guys, but that's not actually how it works!
Now if people will complain about a lack of capacity then I'll be right there with them. But everybody just jumps straight to complaining about "overselling" and it makes them look like a bunch of fools.
To take your analogy, if you know from past behavior that you can sell beer "subscriptions" and only purchase half the beer that your subscriptions would require because most of your customers won't drink their full subscription, this is just good business practice and it's a good thing to do.
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That's all true, however, the point being made is that companies are not selling/telling their customers this. They are advertising it as unlimited.
To build on the analogy, you can have unlimited beer but if we see you drinking more than a six beers a day we'll cap how much beer you can have. See how ridiculous that is?
Overselling is not unreasonable. Advertising as unlimited is.
I disagree. Advertising as unlimited is perfectly reasonable, if you can provide it. There's nothing that says you can't. This should be obvious simply by observing that a huge number of ISPs over a very long period of time have advertised and provided unlimited access with no problems.
The problem comes when you no longer want to provide it but still want to advertise it, which is what these large US ISPs are beginning to do, and this is indeed unreasonable.
Back to the beer analogy, let's say you sell a beer subscription that's limited to 1 beer an hour but is otherwise unlimited. However you only provision your restaurant for 10 beers an hour despite the fact that you've sold 100 subscriptions. Nothing wrong with this so far. If you worked out your numbers to see what your peak demand is and that peak demand is 10, then you're in good shape!
The problem comes when people start drinking more, and so your peak demand increases past 10 beers per hour. At this point you have two honorable choices. One is to say, sorry, we can no longer offer the unlimited subscription, would you like a subscription which comes with 30 beers per month, and a charge per each beer after that? Another is to increase your supply of beer. If your subscribers are now peaking at 15 beers per hour then arrange for that amount to be delivered. Unfortunately these US ISPs are taking a cowardly way out. They are, essentially, continuing to offer the unlimited beers but are finding all the guys who constantly come in for one beer every hour nonstop, intercepting them on the way out the restaurant, dragging them into the alley, and beating them up.
But if you just increase your supply to match the actual demand, there's nothing wrong with overselling while advertising unlimited service, since that is in fact exactly what you are providing.
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Could you explain what would be lost if such as page was clearly marked as highly technical, and was optional to read?
I'm thinking something along the lines of the link text being "high technical information" and the page having a header that goes "The information on this page is meant for people who want to know the technical details of how internet service is provided by $ISP. It's written with the assumption that the reader knows what TCP window sizes, anycast routing and best-efforts networks are and which practical implications they have. If these terms are new to you, you probably want $USER_FRIENDLY_DOC."
I'm with you on the point that you shouldn't try to force your users to understand the technology (just as the car stereo salesman doesn't wax on/wax off about how frequency modulation works and the benefits of optical versus magnetic storage). But not having to explain something is different from having to not explain it. Why not make both groups of users happy?
So obvious that everybody knows about it and solves it.
It's not a problem. You size your infrastructure for peak demand. Yes, that peak demand tends to happen between 6PM and 11PM. Yes, a lot more people use their connection a lot more than they do at other times of the day. But no, that peak demand is still well below the theoretical maximum. If you oversell by sizing your network to average demand then, yes, you will fail hard. But if you oversell by sizing your network to actual peak demand then you will succeed in providing what you promise while still provisioning only a small fraction of the theoretical maximum usage.
The concept of overselling isn't very hard to grasp. I don't know why so many people here just don't get it. Aren't you people supposed to be smart?
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