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.

Comments

Of course it's needed

[compro01]

And we can sell you just the product you need for that.

Re:Of course it's needed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure you get modded down for posting as 10 different people and having conversations only between yourself. That's how shilling works.

Beating Sandvine

[Misanthrope]

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."

Re:Beating Sandvine

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't work. Sandvine sends RST to both sides of the connection, so even if you drop the packet the other end most likely will see it and end the connection.

Re:Beating Sandvine

[ScrewMaster]

On the other hand, if a sufficiently large population of Torrent users made the change, that particular attack vector would pretty much go away.

How fscking stupid can a suit get?

[jeiler]

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?

Re:How fscking stupid can a suit get?

[cdrudge]

Poor planning on their part doesn't make it an emergency on your part. Poor planning on their part makes a problem that Sandvine's CEO wants to sell a "solution" to fix the problem.

What has overselling to do with monitoring?

[kandresen]

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 and no

[Mensa Babe]

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.

Re:What the fuck is 'churning'?

[Ethanol-fueled]

Let's hope that Caputo goes Kaput.

(sorry, someone had to say it!)

speeding up 'your' Internet

[postbigbang]

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.

Re:speeding up 'your' Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the downsides to living in a civilized society (as opposed to the anarchy you espouse) is that sometimes you have to curtail your activities for the benefit of the society as a whole. Just because you are legally entitled to rip off a loud fart, belch, and gab on your cellphone in the middle of an opera doesn't mean you should.

It's called being civilized, or, if you prefer, acting in a civilized manner.

Just because you can jam your neighborhood's pipe with your devil-may-care attitude of usage doesn't mean you should. Nor does it mean that society (us) should allow you to. This isn't the wild west. My apologies if this is a new concept for you; your parents should have taught you better.

Re:speeding up 'your' Internet

[postbigbang]

That's not what I'm advocating at all.

Civility means getting what you pay for. Civility means behaving when there's a traffic jam. Civility means not having what you bought and paid for surreptitiously examined, weighted, and thwarted.

I'm not interested in jamming my neighbor's pipe. I AM interested in not being lied to, and for getting what I paid for, and not having my information sniffed by a cockamamie CIVIL liberty-avoiding bone head that calls him/herself a service provider.

Where, praytell, is the civility in THAT?

Honestly, I'm SHOCKED!

[Frosty Piss]

NEWS FLASH! CEO of company that makes money helping ISPs throttle the Interweb says throttling the Interweb necessary!

Honestly, I'm SHOCKED!

Re:Honestly, I'm SHOCKED!

[DaMattster]

I am shocked because Sandvine is a frequent supporter of Open Source Operating Systems and has contributed to BSD Conferences. I would have thought that they would support the openness of the internet too. Apparently, their monetary sponsorship of open source conferences are just a PR Stunt.

Re:Honestly, I'm SHOCKED!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I am shocked because Sandvine is a frequent supporter of Open Source Operating Systems and has contributed to BSD Conferences. I would have thought that they would support the openness of the internet too. Apparently, their monetary sponsorship of open source conferences are just a PR Stunt.

Sandvine is one of many telecomm gear companies that strongly support OSS. I used to work at a similar company with at least one ex-Sandvine co-worker. Basically, they build "devices" which they sell to ISPs and other big network operators. They build those devices with custom or off the shelf hardware combined with on OSS operating system, toolchain, and applications, plus a few closed source applications that contain their core competency and money proposition. This is often referred to as the "secret sauce" code.

These companies do support OSS and build their entire business model around it (in combination with some closed source). They aren't OSS zealots, but most of the employees are strong supporters of OSS and the companies are very good about contributing code back. A lot of the code in Linux and the BSDs is contributed by these companies. They support OSS conferences and the like, because they want to promote OSS, because it is a good way to recruit new talent, and because the improvements that come out of those conferences are often beneficial to their bottom line. A lot of people think OSS is created by hobbyists, but really Sandvine is a good example of who really makes up the OSS community and contributes code. It is mostly businesses who use it to make money in conjunction with hardware, services, or additional closed source software.

This is the "perfect storm"

[hairyfeet]

That I have talked about several times in the past. When you combine corporate greed,the ease of buying off congress,and the desire by the telecos not to bother sinking any of their massive profits into infrastructure upgrades even though the taxpayers shelled out for them,you have the "perfect storm" that in the end will leave the Internet nothing but a crippled former shell of itself.

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

Re:This is the "perfect storm"

[Inquisitor911]

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. Unfortunately, what you said paints a frighteningly accurate picture of what the future may hold. I've taken a screencap of your comment so that someday we can tell everyone that we knew that this beast was coming before it reared it's ugly head.

Screenshot Link

Re:This is the "perfect storm"

[hairyfeet]

Thank you. Despite what Mr. Coward has so rudely said earlier,I am speaking from personal exp. In my area you have the choice of 20Gb for $35(WISP) or 36Gb for $33(cable). The DSL here is so damned slow you might as well be on dial up. I used to use a lot more FLOSS and try out newly released distros,but not anymore. I simply can't waste my bandwidth.

As to the earlier Mr. Coward...This is how the wall works.It isn't some giant "great firewall" that you bash against,they simply starve you out for bandwidth for anything that isn't "approved". And I have read several whitepapers and discussions by the telecos about how tiered pricing will work and they are all quick to point out that Microsoft updates will be given a free pass,either by a locally hosted WSUS server or having the Microsoft IP range not count towards your total. Which of course gives the public one more reason to use the "approved" OS,as it won't count against them when it updates. The telecos know pulling a "great firewall" will lead to bad press,so instead they will spin it about "local content" gets priority and the use of the "extremely limited" non locally hosted content will be punished.

And don't forget Mr. Coward,these "shills" have priority passes through the halls of congress and enough money to get their views heard. After all,it is their network,who better to "optimize" the traffic for the good of all? But that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:"Honour"

[Opportunist]

Back in my day we had a honor system that basically said "don't sell 100 gallons of milk when you only have 20".

ISPs should never send an RST

[Animats]

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.

Gotta love those statements.

[khasim]

CBCNews.ca: Has the internet always been managed, because this idea of network management almost seems recent?

Caputo: I had dinner with Vint Cerf [a U.S.-based computer scientist often called the father of the Internet] probably a year back and I think he'll be the first to admit that he's surprised and shocked at what his authoring of TCP/IP has meant. If you look at that underlying transmission protocol, when you send a flow of packets -- if they're getting through -- 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.

It really depends on where you draw the line on what management is. The service provider has to figure out the business model of how much service they're going to give a subscriber and how much bandwidth they're going to provide to the internet. That oversubscription ratio is their business model.

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. Now CBC may buy its one-megabit connection for $800 a month because it's a dedicated one-megabit connection.

...and...

CBCNews.ca: So theoretically an internet service provider could sell customers a dedicated peer-to-peer router?

Caputo: Conceivably. The beauty is to let the market figure it out, and it will.

So he wants to sell technology that allows the ISP's to OVERSELL their bandwidth while LYING to their customers and he refers to that as "the market".

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.

Re:Gotta love those statements.

[abigor]

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.

Re:Gotta love those statements.

[mrsteveman1]

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

Re:Gotta love those statements.

[Free the Cowards]

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.

Re:Gotta love those statements.

[Free the Cowards]

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.

Re:Gotta love those statements.

[call-me-kenneth]

How about just telling the customers EXACTLY what they're paying for?

Because most people want their router to be a little box the telco sends them that enables them to get to CNN, Yahoo mail, and donkeyporn.com . If you want to try explaining 95 percentile billing, BGP peering, settlement-free transit, backhaul, TE at the edge, Netfllow, CEF, OSPF, "tier [n]", eyeballs versus content networking, CDMA, MPLS, tag switching, jumbo frames, latency vs packet loss vs RTT, asymmetrical routing ILECs vs CLECs vs incumbents,... well, as someone once said, I encourage all my competitors to adopt ths approach :)

Re:Gotta love those statements.

[Dr. Donuts]

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.

Re:Gotta love those statements.

[Free the Cowards]

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.

Re:Gotta love those statements.

[jonaskoelker]

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?

Re:Gotta love those statements.

[Free the Cowards]

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?

Re:Gotta love those statements.

[Jerry]

For $40 you get a guaranteed MINIMUM bandwidth of X with a potential to burst to Y.

And "backward" countries like China (Hongkong) offer 100MB of bandwidth for $48. That's their "entry" offer.

Taxpayers funded the gov organization (DARPA) which created the Internet. How did it come to be "owned" by the corporations? The same way the White man stole the land from the Indians. When you own the law you make the rules.

Re:What the fuck is 'churning'?

[Zerth]

Churn is an industry term for the percentage of your users will leave for somebody else and the percentage of their users that leave for you. Frequently these users are the same damn people swapping back and forth.

So despite gaining and losing lots of users, everyone's base stays roughly the same, like a churning ocean, but each one of those churners costs you $X every time they switch sides(freebies, paperwork, number portability, etc).

Apparently this is now the superlative of "discontinuing service", i.e. "you guys suck, I'm leaving for your competitor."

Re:How about selling what you have?

[Zontar The Mindless]

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. Perhaps you would. Some people, however, find that it suits their purposes to refer to it as "marketing".

Re:Maybe I'm being selfish

[hardburn]

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.

Re:How about selling what you have?

[spottedkangaroo]

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).

... but one thing you couldn't do is sell unfiltered unconcentrated bandwidth to your neighbors for $40/mo.

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.

Re:"Honour"

[maxume]

Is it a let down knowing that your day has passed?

Re:"Honour"

[Opportunist]

I'm trying to get old in dignity, you insensitive clod!

Re:Maybe I'm being selfish

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Ethics more needed than monitoring

[redelm]

It rather bothers me when vendors and other strong advocates push their points (whatever those might be) without the slightest consideration of objections, as if there were none possible. The technique of the BigLie.

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.

Re:How about selling what you have?

[Wildclaw]

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Cogent-McBandwidth-Gets-Cheaper-95203/

$7/mbit (of course talking about decent volumes here with the cheapest provider and I guess with fiber already in the ground)

However that should give you a clue how much everyone is overcharging everywhere. The expensive part is the digging, but it is good (money earning) business to charge big money for small traffic volumes on lines that in reality could support far higher volumes. Not to mention how inefficent a big part of the industry is.

Atleast that is the only way I can explain how some countries are managing to supply such nice bandwidth to their citizens without getting economically ruined.

Full of $*&$%

[EdIII]

I think the beauty of it is the net neutrality debate is something that is going to be solved in our lifetime and, like I said before, I think it's going to be laughable in the next two or three years that people used to say all packets should be treated equally.

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.

Do you see dedicated connections ever becoming the norm for residential users?

Caputo: It's absolutely mainstream in the business environment. That's the way CBC or Sandvine buys its bandwidth. In residential, no, because what do people want? They want 10 megabits, 30 megabits, 100 megabits. Because that's going up, there's no way you can afford to ever provide that in the network. (emphasis mine)
.
.
They need people not using the internet for it to work at $40 a month. (emphasis mine)

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.

The subscribers that use large amounts of bandwidth are the leading adopters of what everyone is going to be doing on the internet. They're the first people on YouTube or Facebook. We can learn a lot [from them] and we certainly love consumption kings as they're very good for Sandvine's business.

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

Re:Full of $*&$%

[call-me-kenneth]

Look, it's really very simple. If you really want *unlimited* bandwidth, - well, you don't, you probably want to top out at 8Mbps or whatever the headline number is, and be able to run that flat out both ways 24/7. Here's a little exercise for you. (1) calculate your 95th percentile usage rate. (2) research the cost of transit or backhaul to a proper NSP (rather than a retail ISP). I think you might get a rather unpleasant surprise. THAT is the market rate for what you are demanding.

Now divide that number by whatever you're prepared to pay for it, say $360 pa. Divide your market rate transit bandwidth by the same figure. That's the amount of bandwidth you'd get if your $30/month was actually buying you the right to run your connection flat out 24/7. Oh look, it'd be a pretty poor speed for dial-up. Oh noes, the internet is exploding!!!! Gawrsh, if only there was some way to make use of the fact that most people don't actually want to run their connections flat out 24/7, and charge them a cheap rate for short bursts of high-speed data, multiplex thousands of similar users into one aggregated traffic flow... oh look, you've just re-invented the retail ISP market. Congratulations.

Re:Full of $*&$%

[EdIII]

Problem is, the ISPs do not believe they can sell the truth .

I really liked what you said, and I agree with your insight into the situation and especially why Japan has better Internet. I have always disagreed with the comparisons between Japan, South Korea, and the US.

That being said, your very first sentence explains the problem quite succinctly.

How the HELL did we get to the point in this country where you can sell anything but the truth?

I don't even think it is up for debate. You have to sell the truth. All the time. No exceptions. Serious consequences when you don't.

I have always been completely amazed that you can oversell something in this country and not tell the truth when marketing. It is pandemic in our corporate culture in my opinion and has caused me to be disillusioned and pessimistic about our society, culture, and potential to evolve into something better.

I know that may sound like hyperbole to some people, and I might be playing a drama queen, but seriously... how did it get this bad?

Why do we even have billboards for Cricket advertising "real" unlimited? Clearly we all have reached a point that we cannot believe anything coming out of the mouths of these corporations and a new skill set for survival in the future will be translating market-speak bullshit into plain English.

I don't care how hard it is to explain something to Ma and Pa, or "Joe Sixpack". I don't really agree that it is that hard in the first place. Since when is understanding your Internet contract a prerequisite to signing it and paying for it? I would bet that 5% or less actually read the whole contract or even have more then a basic understanding.

It should be a matter of law, and last time I checked it really is, that you have to market the truth. Now maybe there is some room to fudge it here a little for the ISP, but it is grounds for a class action lawsuit. Deliberately interfering with packets and injecting other packets designed to deny a customer their paid for service is criminal. I do mean criminal too. As in fraudulent to the point that a district attorney should be filing charges.

The way out is simple. Tell the truth. Will it be hard at first? Will there be a tumultuous transition? Most likely. What we will end up with will be worth it.

I suspect Verizon FIOS is similarly overcommitted. You can't wire a neighborhood for 20Mb traffic to every house without a node that can handle the 200 homes at 20Mb each. Such connections exist, but they aren't cheap. Certainly nobody is going to pay for it today.

Actually you can wire a neighborhood for 20 Mb/s traffic. Even more than that. You could wire them for 1 Gb/s traffic. How?

Real simple:

1) Give everybody a big fat pipe. The same size as the pipe coming into the whole neighborhood. I know, I know, let me further explain... :)

2) Set them up on a few bandwidth tiers. Obviously you cannot have the floors of all these connections be more than the whole pipe coming into the neighborhood. Stick to that rule, and you will have no problems at all.

3) Set them up on some transfer tiers. Let them know by telling them where they are during the month and give them options to self-throttle when they reach their set limit. This way nobody goes over $100,$200, or whatever their limit is.

If you did this, then people would get their floor guaranteed. There is the truth. They would get their super fast transfers whenever it was possible and during off-peak hours. There is the possibility they are paying for. The transfer limits would make them pay progressively higher costs the more data they end up transferring. There is the bandwidth hogs subsidizing the rest of the users.

I strongly believe that it is possible to do this. It is being done in major data centers. No reason why you cannot put in residential settings.

Re:Churn is nothing new

[IgnoramusMaximus]

That's the dumbest term I've heard since people calling single enemies "mobs" in online games

That's MOBs for you, not "mobs". It is an ancient MUD game engine acronym which stands for "Mobile OBject". One of those archaic game lingo terms which still survives but the origins of which most of the young whipper-snappers do not have clue about.

Now about that lawn of mine ...