Bell's Own Data Exposes P2P As a Red Herring

dougplanet writes with news from the Canadian-throttling front: "As ordered by the CRTC, Bell has released (some) of its data on how torrents and P2P in general are affecting its network. Even though there's not much data to go on, it's pretty clear that P2P isn't the crushing concern. Over the two-month period prior to their throttling, they had congestion on a whopping 2.6 and 5.2 per cent of their network links. They don't even explain whether this is a range of sustained congestion, or peaks amongst valleys."

Comments

How funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else find it funny that the article links to a video in it's "rgbFilter podcast"? Could it be that the explosion of streaming video is one of the real causes of network congestion, not a few "copyright infringes"? Never!

Re:How funny

[dafrazzman]

The statistics say nothing about P2P's role in congestion. All it says is that the networks aren't that congested (or is 5 percent a lot?).

Exactly what role P2P plays in the five percent is an entirely different matter.

Re:How funny

[SpaceLifeForm]

Queueing Theory says that around 70% utilization is when delays occur.

They are not close, they are blowing smoke.

Re:How funny

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

(or is 5 percent a lot?)

I would say that depends on if it's the five percent I am in.

Re:How funny

[rcw-home]

Queueing Theory says that around 70% utilization is when delays occur.

Delays occur whenever anything is waiting in an output queue instead of being immediately transmitted. This could happen at very low average utilization levels if multiple sources all try to send data across a link simultaneously. The delay time is a function of the number of bytes waiting to be transmitted and the transmit speed.

Retransmission delays occur when the output queue gets full, the router drops additional packets as they come in, and the TCP connection hangs until the retried packets come through (700ms for the first one, much more for subsequent dropped packets). To avoid compounding the problem, output queues on routers are typically sized to something a fair bit less than 700ms.

Re:How funny

[Casandro]

Actually 5 percent is already a _lot_. The network should never be utiliced to more than 50%, even at peak times.

But it's not the fault of the customers, it's the fault of the company. It's their duty to constantly upgrade their network connections. Why else should they charge money.

If it really was about network congestion, they wouldn't block P2P-trafic, but they would give those packets lower priority. That way those packets only get dropped whenever there is an actual congestion.

Re:How funny

[dotwaffle]

I was always taught that rate-limiting *causes* congestion on networks. A properly configured network uses QoS to determine priorities, and with the modern equivalents of FECN/BECN, you can end up with a fast, useful, uncongested network with the same traffic flows.

Re:How funny

[GigaplexNZ]

Actually 5 percent is already a _lot_. The network should never be utiliced to more than 50%, even at peak times.

Care to explain where you get that info from? Using at most 50% of a resource at any given time is a waste of the other 50%.

Re:How funny

[NovaHorizon]

how about the source of my local cable company? Which re-allocates sources to local lines if they touch 50% capacity to ensure that the network never exceeds 50%

Re:How funny

[Casandro]

Kristof Obermann, he used to work at Arcor one of the bigger ISPs and phone companies in germany. He now works as a professor.

Besides, it's not like twice as much bandwidth costs twice as much money. Besides there's always redundancy. So in case one line breaks, you'll be at 100% peak utilisation. And then you will have problems as you will loose packets.

If those situations would exist, ISPs would use the TOS fields. Packets belonging would just be dropped more likely in case of a network overload. Nobody notices a missing packet at a download as the server will continue sending packets and the missing one eventually gets retransmitted a few seconds later. Missing packets are a _lot_ more noticable at web-browsing or interactive sessions.

Re:How funny

[Guspaz]

The relevant networks here are all ATM (the ones being throttled, the ones P2P is being used over).

My understanding is that ATM doesn't handle retransmissions. Furthermore, Bell's data shows that network wide, with millions of customers and trillions of ATM cells flying about per month, they only suffer from about 3500-4500 cell loss events per month.

You'd think that if they had even a single congested line, they'd be dropping millions (or even billions) of ATM cells per month.

Re:How funny

[thegameiam]

The queueing theory I've studied shows that the congestive threshold varies with queue length and interface speed. Low-speed ( 2Mbps) links are very vulnerable to serialization effects, and begin to exhibit congestive behaviors at around 50% usage (depending on the accuracy of measurement). As the interface gets larger, serialization delay becomes less relevant, and the congestive effects start to change.

Certain techniques are better than others at dealing with specific types of traffic flows - for instance, WRED is worthless for UDP, but invaluable for TCP. The Bell CA engineers might be faced with a user population which is changing their patterns faster than they can deal with it.

Re:How funny

[Red Flayer]

But it's not the fault of the customers, it's the fault of the company. It's their duty to constantly upgrade their network connections. Why else should they charge money.

Oh, I don't know why else they should charge money. Maybe so they csan pay their staff? Maybe so threy can pay overhead? Maybe so they can make a profit? They are a business, after all.

Now, if you want to discuss why they should charge so much money, you may have a point. If you want to discuss tax incentives they've received to build out infrastructure, you may have a point.

But asking why a business would charge money for providing a service is like asking why a raccoon wants to get into your garbage... and I'll give you a hint, it's not to help sort your recycling.

Re:How funny

[Casandro]

Well OK, of course. On the other side, if they wouldn't need up upgrade their equipment they wouldn't need as much people, etc.

But I see your point. The "so much"-part really is important.

Re:How funny

[spyrochaete]

50% is the maximum acceptable load for many network architecture devices according to the Cisco CCNA courseware I studied in college. It has more to do with the CPU utilization than the theoretical throughput of the networking spec.

Here's a Microsoft-published paper on the topic entitled Impact of BGP Dynamics on Router CPU Utilization.

Re:How funny

[Tack]

Care to explain where you get that info from? Using at most 50% of a resource at any given time is a waste of the other 50%.

I don't know if this is related to the GP's post, but a common reason to cap utilization at 50% (or upgrade the link when you approach 50%) is because of redundancy: given two separate links each carrying half the load and where the links are not used beyond 50%, if one link fails, the other can pick up the remaining load without significant (perhaps slight) service degradation.

Re:How funny

[smallfries]

Not really. It's been a long time since I worked in telecoms so if my explanation is really far off I'm sure someone will jump in and call me a tool before correcting me :)

You have two types of resources where you will measure capacity. One type of resource is a simple point-to-point link. You want to run this resource as close to 100% as you can*. Your intuition is correct that not using the link is wasted capacity. * = modulo what I'm about to say.

But you can't make a very effective network out of point-to-point links, they need some form of routing between them. Where ever these traffic flows merge you need to arbitrate for access on the outgoing link. This may be some kind of ring network using ATM link like Sonnet (as I said it's been a long time) or a router.

In either case when you get a collision you have to make a decision what to do. Lets say my router has three links A, B and C. If 100% of links A and B is saturated with incoming traffic bound for link C then what can I do? Assuming the links have the same capacity then some of the traffic needs to be dropped. This is why delivery is not guaranteed at the low-levels.

I can use memory on the router to buffer some of the traffic so that if usage drops I can squeeze onto the outgoing link. But once that fixed amount of memory is used I have to drop packets. If I hold it in memory for two long then I may as well drop it anyway because it will be stale.

So when the transmitting end realizes that packets went missing it retransmits - which increases the usage on the link. To get the optimal amount of traffic through the network you need to leave enough slack to reduce the probability of collisions, and thus the amount of retransmission needed. Somebody who has more knowledge of queuing theory could probably explain why that leads to using 50%, but this is the basic handwaving behind why there is a tradeoff that needs to be optimised.

In order to reach the desired capacity at the routing points you need to reduce the capacity at the links which contradicts the intuition that they should run at 100%. If you could model the collision rate at the routers accurately enough then the whole thing would reduce to a flow equation and you could probably solve it using something like Kirchoff's law. Qos isn't my field but from what I've read the situation is far too complex to model like that, so you end up with engineering rules of thumb about how much capacity to use.

Re:How funny

[Cliffy03]

How do we know that those traffic boxes aren't the ones causing the dropped cells?

Re:How funny

[rcw-home]

My understanding is that ATM doesn't handle retransmissions.

Correct. About the only physical network that does is Token Ring. Most let TCP handle it, and the TCP retransmission delay is what I was talking about.

Furthermore, Bell's data shows that network wide, with millions of customers and trillions of ATM cells flying about per month, they only suffer from about 3500-4500 cell loss events per month.

I suspect those numbers (without their context) may be misleading. I can leave mtr running for a month across any backbone's network and get a hell of a lot more than 5000 dropped packets in a month (assuming isolated cell loss events cause an entire IP packet to be dropped), even if everything's operating normally. Most SLAs I've seen only promise < 0.5% packet loss.

Re:How funny

[rcw-home]

I was always taught that rate-limiting *causes* congestion on networks.

It certainly can. A naive QoS setup can easily hurt more than it helps. However, rate-limiting is an essential part of a QoS toolkit.

A properly configured network uses QoS to determine priorities

While some of the medicine in the cabinet isn't so bitter, it's also of limited effect. A router or bridge may use QoS to reorder packets in its output queue, choosing to send this packet out before that one. It can only do so if those packets are actually waiting in that router or bridge's output queue. It may also choose to rate-limit certain packets even if there is nothing waiting in the output queue (this can force a queue to be maintained on your own router instead of one downstream). It can ECN-mark packets (not widely supported), drop them altogether, or it can forge packets in ways that may reduce further incoming traffic.

and with the modern equivalents of FECN/BECN, you can end up with a fast, useful, uncongested network with the same traffic flows.

Only if you have the bandwidth needed in the first place. For example, Wikipedia's ECN article says: Use of ECN has been found to be detrimental to performance on highly congested networks when using AQM (Active Queue Management) algorithms that never drop packets. Modern AQM implementations avoid this pitfall by dropping rather than marking packets at very high load.

QoS is not magical. Just as renicing a process to -20 won't make it run any faster, QoS does not squeeze more packets down a line. It's for saying "foo is junk and it can wait, let bar and baz skip to the front of the line."

Re:How funny

[Guspaz]

You raise a good point; people have pointed out that Bell's graphs of the ATM cell loss events started going up pretty much in tune with the installation of the DPI boxes.

Re:How funny

[dotwaffle]

The way I understood it, and I'm probably very wrong in this, was that with Rate Limiting:

Several packets arrive.
Some make it through to the physical line, up to the agreed limit.
The rest are dropped - and as so many packets are lost, many RSTs occur, meaning you get about 10-25% less throughput.

With QoS, I thought:

Several packets arrive.
The router determines which to send first.
The router drops some and sends back ICMP congestion messages so that the sending speed is reduced.
Over a number of packets, the flow rate maxes out the connection.

Is that wrong?

Re:How funny

[rcw-home]

Several packets arrive. Some make it through to the physical line, up to the agreed limit. The rest are dropped - and as so many packets are lost, many RSTs occur, meaning you get about 10-25% less throughput.

A RST means the end of the TCP connection. That won't happen unless multiple packets in a row go unanswered. TCP will adapt to sending at the allowed rate, just like it adapts to the size of any network link.

Several packets arrive. The router determines which to send first. The router drops some and sends back ICMP congestion messages so that the sending speed is reduced. Over a number of packets, the flow rate maxes out the connection.

Sending ICMP Source Quench messages is typical behavior (routers can send one any time they drop a packet) and are certainly preferable (esp. regarding latency) to the sender just blindly waiting to retransmit, although they don't return any information about what speed is acceptable. TCP works without them, and a lot of misguided firewall admins block ICMP entirely. Either way, packets for a TCP stream will, in the long run, make it through up to the agreed limit.

Re:How funny

[NovaHorizon]

I can't post a link. It was a verbal conversation while they were installing the cable into my friend's house..(We were joking about sucking all the bandwidth out of their lines) I can cite it as being from a CableOne installer in American Falls, Idaho though if that makes you feel better. :)

Glad to hear this.

[suck_burners_rice]

It was quite clear to me all along that this whole throttling issue revolved around the agenda of some nasty people who want to lock the world in to their way of doing things, and had nothing to do with use of bandwidth or any other legitimate issue. I'm glad this is coming out.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[blahplusplus]

It was so obvious, we know ISP's are the worst kinds of businesses, they oversell the bandwidth massively on the customer end and yet their backbones are pretty hardly ever used so they just end up cheating the consumer. It's basically extortion.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mrsteveman1]

Overselling bandwidth is necessary, its called statistical multiplexing.

Capping transfer per month at ridiculously low levels is not necessary though, they get plenty of money to pay for what people use, and lets face it, this is a quasi-socialist ISP environment, people who barely use their connections are paying for those who use the connection all the time.

Might not be fair, but the ISPs have nothing to complain about, they have been taking peoples money without having to provide much in return to most of them for a long, long time.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[debrain]

Overselling bandwidth is necessary, its called statistical multiplexing.

Capping transfer per month at ridiculously low levels is not necessary though, they get plenty of money to pay for what people use, and lets face it, this is a quasi-socialist ISP environment, people who barely use their connections are paying for those who use the connection all the time.

Might not be fair, but the ISPs have nothing to complain about, they have been taking peoples money without having to provide much in return to most of them for a long, long time.

FYI, the bandwidth Bell is traffic shaping, which this case arises out of, is (1) not Bell customers (Bell simply provides the last-leg of the DSL connection - the DSLAM, I believe) and (2) not using Bell's backbone internet connection.

The traffic is from, for example, Teksavvy (ISP) customers to the Teksavvy backbone. Bell is just an intermediary.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[suck_burners_rice]

This is true; in addition, if there actually were a reason that the ISPs were losing money, then they would raise the monthly rate by a few dollars. Most people won't switch ISPs over a few dollars a month since it's such a hassle to do so anyway. However, note that I said *IF* there were such a reason, which there isn't, at least until we start doing everything, including all voice and video communication (think all your cable TV and phones), over the Internet.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[theshowmecanuck]

It doesn't matter, the CRTC (some say it means the 'Canadian Radio and Television Commission, but it is really the Canadian Roadblock To Communication) will side with Bell anyway. They bend over, and force all Canadians to bend over for Bell, Telus, and Rogers.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[g0at]

some say it means the 'Canadian Radio and Television Commission Actually, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mi]

Most people won't switch ISPs over a few dollars a month

Most people would not switch over "traffic shaping" either — not even most slashdotters.

Ultimately this comes down to whether ISPs are free to control their network, if it annoys customers...

Re:Glad to hear this.

[sedmonds]

Teksavvy gets last mile copper, and DSLAM to peering location at 151 Front St, in Toronto from Bell. If they had peering at each CO and remote, then Bell really would have no justification to impose throttling. Bell is claiming that some network links between the DSLAM and edges of their network are inadequate. What's particularly greasy is that Bell negotiated transit bandwidth agreements with third party ISPs, and then pulled this throttling crap on them. So Teksavvy negotiates a multi-year agreement with Bell for X Gbps transit, so that they can serve their clients during peak hours and be prepared for anticipated growth of their subscriber base. After being locked into transit contracts, Bell starts throttling during peak hours, thus changing the bandwidth that Teksavvy would need during these hours. Further, they don't provide third party providers information about WHICH clients are throttled, putting third parties at a further disadvantage for planning bandwidth needs. The Supreme Court of Canada just cleared the way for the sale of Bell to interests which are financing the sale to the toon of 34 billion dollars of new debt for a company with annual profits of about 4 billion dollars. I'm not at all surprised that Bell is electing to spend a relatively small amount of money on throttling boxes, rather than making any real investment in infrastructure.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Ethanol-fueled]

They're like OPEC. They don't even try to hide behind phoney legitimacy anymore, They're basically saying, "We don't have to rape you, but we will, and you're going to bend over and LIKE IT!".

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're like OPEC. They don't even try to hide behind phoney legitimacy anymore, They're basically saying, "We don't have to rape you, but we will, and you're going to bend over and LIKE IT!".

False.

Since when has "and LIKE IT!", in relation to the customer, ever entered into any telco (or OPEC) executive's mind?

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Opportunist]

Switch? WHERE TO, for crying out loud.

It's not like you have any real choice in the cartel they formed. It's a bit like crime syndicates splitting up the areas, you get the west coast, I take the south...

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Gerzel]

The world is already locked. The nasty people want to turn the screws to get more money.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mi]

It's not like you have any real choice in the cartel they formed.

Don't know about your neck of the woods, but here in NYC I can switch between two different DSL-providers and a cable-company. Plus the T-Mobile's recent announcement of offering wireless static Internet service.

But I did not start talking about (not) switching — the gp did...

Re:Glad to hear this.

[billcopc]

I know everyone's debated this topic before, but why wouldn't we (as a nation) buy out Bell and convert it into a federally-mandated non-profit ? It's precisely the kind of long-term asset that benefits society as a whole - a perfect candidate for socialization.

34 billion dollars, in the grand scheme of things, ain't all that much when 34 million citizens stand to benefit. That's $1000 per Canadian, but that 4 billion in annual profit would come back to us, which means the purchase pays for itself in 8-9 years. There's no finance minister that can squeeze that much money that quickly; certainly not the inbred albino monkeys we've had lately.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Ethanol-fueled]

Uh, when they need it for work or school perhaps?

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Ethanol-fueled]

Clarification: if you work full-time and go to school(on-campus and online classes) not wanting to exhaust yourself spending an extra 3 hours of the day taking mass-transit(though I am very much in favor of augmenting mass-transit).

Yeah, I do believe that some of us LIKE being connected to the internet and putting petroleum-based fuels in our vehicles, much like Winston Smith loves big brother.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[jlarocco]

In most areas the local government grants a single telco and/or single cable company sole access to the city. Your best bet is to complain to your city council and tell them to open your market to competition.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Ethanol-fueled]

Whoooooosh. Sorry AC.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Up here, all DSL flows through Bell's copper.
Until recently, this was (fairly) fine and dandy, as the regulating body (the CRTC) forced Bell to lease time on their lines to third party wholesalers at reasonable rates. Some of these wholesalers have been offering much better AND cheaper service than Bell.

In April, Bell extended its network throttling practices to include customers of these third-party wholesalers (note, they did this with absolutely no notice) -- that's what brought about the complaint to the CRTC from the CAIP (Canadian Association of Internet Providers).

The only alternative is $cableCompany, which is another monopoly with either throttling or lower bandwidth caps, and at a higher price (the specific cable company varies from province to province).

Yes, most people admit that ideally the CAIP would band together and lay down some copper (or better yet fibre) of their own...but the barriers to entry are huge, so it will probably never happen.

Considering how many times Bell has screwed with me (literally cheated me), I would gladly pay an extra 30% for DSL service just to know that Bell won't ever get another penny of my money and won't be able to touch my service again.

Also, it's worth bearing in mind the decades of support (subsidies, tax breaks, right-of-way) that Bell received during the time when they were an official government monopoly. I wouldn't go so far as to say that we as taxpayers paid for the whole network, but we've certainly earned our share.

Incidentally, there are plenty of us who have found our way around the throttling. I won't detail it here (no, not protocol encryption), but the information isn't hard to find.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[The Grim Reefer2]

It's not like you have any real choice in the cartel they formed.

Don't know about your neck of the woods, but here in NYC I can switch between two different DSL-providers and a cable-company. Plus the T-Mobile's recent announcement of offering wireless static Internet service.

But I did not start talking about (not) switching — the gp did...

If you actually only have four choices in NYC then I'd take it almost as validation to that statement. Most of the rest of the US is slightly less urban than where you live. My family and friends that live there consider anything that takes more than 20 minutes via highway outside of the city to be the "Boonies".

Re:Glad to hear this.

[bryce1012]

So, in New York City -- the supposed center of the world -- "competition" is 3 carriers? In backwoods America, there's generally one cable and one DSL provider... if you're lucky. That is NOT competiion.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Korin43]

Because government owned monopolies don't tend to work very well.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[TihSon]

Welcome to Canada folks, where any chance to create yet another government funded monopoly is always embraced ... then extended.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than buying out Bell, why not light a fire under their collective ass with a heavily-subsidized, government-regulated ISP (that's not Bell)? Then they might actually have to compete.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Walkingshark]

Wow, so I guess if I want to switch ISP then all I have to do is move to NYC? Brilliant!

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

HELLO, ME! :o

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mrsteveman1]

Yes, this private one is working perfectly fine isn't it.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[hairyfeet]

As I have been saying for awhile now,we are at the beginning of a "perfect storm" which will ultimately cause us here in the US to end up in walled gardens like the old days of Compuserve and AOL. You have ISPs that don't want to spend any of their massive profits on infrastructure,even though the taxpayers paid for the upgrade,you have congress critters that will be happy to take the money, and you have big media who wants everyone to end up on a PPV system that will turn everything into a giant jukebox that will nickel and dime us to death. Then just add in the fact that many ISPs have a reason to want to stick you on their own media services,and you have your perfect storm.

Mark my words,they'll be slick about it. No great firewall to slam against to piss everybody off. No,they'll put out massive spin how those evil piggies using that P2P junk is slowing everybody else down while funding the terrorists and how businesses that use P2P are just dirty freeloaders who don't want to pay their share. Then they will go to a nationwide tiered system,where you get something like I do which is 36Gb for $33,with a max of 75Gb for $110. Anything over will cost you $1 per Gb,and of course their OWN offerings,since they are being hosted on "non strained" local resources won't count toward your cap. Oh,and every discussion I've read with ISPs about P2P they are quick to point out that Windows Updates won't count,as they can host them on a local WSUS server. Which will be one more reason to only use the "approved" OS,as your multi Gb of updates won't count toward your cap.

While I truly hope that it doesn't come to pass,it looks like too profitable a deal for the major players to pass up. They will be making money hand over fist,and can make even more by giving those who "pay their fair share of the costs" priority on their network. Which means the big boys like Google,Amazon,Ebay,etc. And of course you'll have even more incentive to go with bundled services as I did,because the cableco's VoIP doesn't count against my cap like Vonage would. But I think this shows how much smoke they have been blowing up the public's collective butt trying to push for tiered networks and dirty tricks like RST packets. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Hal_Porter]

If you give the Americans a buy option on Canadian oil shales, they'll probably come and liberate you.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh the power of have a 2 party system... What is sad is they are abusing the only reasonable 3rd party which is teksavy

Re:Glad to hear this.

[ProfessionalCookie]

Nice. My Choices are Dialup, Satellite or T1. If only I had some line-of-sight neighbors to split the cost of a T1 with.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[ProfessionalCookie]

...and you can mod that +1 Pity. Thanks

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd switch in a fucking instant, right now, give me an alternative, I'm in.

Whats that? Oh thats right, there isn't one. Theres no competitor I can run to because everyone who supposedly 'competes' with bell is actually renting their lines anyway, and bell has demonstrated their willingness to fuck with third parties leasing their shit.

I could go for cable, you say? Nope same deal, the cable companies set up little pocket monopolies, if your in this city is rogers, one city over somebody else, never a choice. And all their packages are surprisingly shitty anyway.

Telcos long ago figured out they stood to make way more money for providing shittier service if they all provided the same shitty service.

And until somebody decides to spend a few trillion dollars to lay their own wires we'll never see competition. As long as the actual medium is controlled by one corporation (or a group working together) the status quo will never change, because a change would mean less money to The Suits.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[gmack]

Wow if that's true then Teksavvy got a better deal than the isp I worked for did. Bell hooked everything up then came back and told us they couldn't provide high speed links anymore and we would have to go to someone else for the access. On the upside the company we ended up going to sold us bare fiber so they couldn't throttle that even if they wanted to.

The problem with that plan is that Bell has no regulatory requirement to provide access to the "remote co" so they refuse access. That means that anyone too far from the CO will still need to be resold access to bell's DSLAM.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Antique Geekmeister]

Would you rather have a centralized, Soviet Union style setup? It's already bad enough when the NSA can and does instlal taps on AT&T's central backbone without notice or warrant: centralizing companies like Bell into a monopoly is begging to have bad policies and bad decisions cast in bureaucratic stone and resistant to evolutionary forcs.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Because government owned monopolies don't tend to work very well.

Neither do government-granted monopolies.
Due to the nature of the beast, both 'monopoly' and 'government' are going to be factors. So they might as well accept that fact, drop the ideology and work towards the least sucky implementation.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Markspark]

in socialist Sweden, we have shitloads of examples of government owned monopolies doing very well, and when they got sold out to the private sector, all of a sudden they start effing people over for profit. The electricity market is a very good example of this.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[NickFortune]

Most people would not switch over "traffic shaping" either -- not even most slashdotters.

The trouble is this is not Bell penalizing Bell's customers. This is Bell penalizing Teksavvy's customers. Switching ISP hurts Teksavvy for no reason, and rewards Bell by helping eliminate a competitor. That hardly seems like a rational response.

This is the central issue to the whole net neutrality argument. It's not about your ISP throttling you for doing things they don't like. It's about someone else's ISP throttling you for their market advantage. It's difficult to address that by voting with your feet.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[NovaHorizon]

Because a non-profit simply requires that the company has a net gain of $0 at the end of the fiscal year... meaning they can just give out all of their net income to salary bonuses and be considered non-profit.

Also

That's $1000 per Canadian, but that 4 billion in annual profit would come back to us, which means the purchase pays for itself in 8-9 years.

and

why wouldn't we (as a nation) buy out Bell and convert it into a federally-mandated non-profit ?

bit of a contradiction there..

Re:Glad to hear this.

[NeilTheStupidHead]

I've noticed the same thing in parts of Canada, where former crown corporations (ex. electric and water) were shut down and for-profit companies took over on government contract. QoS took a very noticable nosedive very quickly. (greater grid instability and less 'safe' drinking water).

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Schadrach]

^^This.

Where I live, we have two broadband options, Verizon DSL or Suddenlink Cable. I also live about 20 minutes via highway from the capital city of my state, who has the same two options as everyone else in the valley.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[p0tat03]

It's all about your approach and attitude. We've socialized much of our water and electric utilities, and that's worked out well so far. Electricity and water are sold at reasonable prices, availability is damn near universal, and few people have to call and bitch about billing errors, sneaky back-door hidden costs, etc etc. If we treat the internet as an utility as important as water and power and roads, it's perfectly socializable.

As for your wiretapping comment... AT&T is not government owned, but seems to have done the warrantless, secret wiretapping ANYWAY. So, given that warrantless wiretapping is going to happen regardless, I'd rather have my utilities run by a company that isn't out to turn billions in profit without offering anything in return.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes,
You offer the traditional government solution. If something isn't working perfect, lets attempt untested or poorly tested ideas and see if we can make it better. Who cares that most of the time things work out worse (which can be very hard to prove). The truth of the matter is that not every problem has a solution. People need to understand that some things are not going to be "fixed".

Re:Glad to hear this.

[kocsonya]

But how about a government owned *non* monopoly? Just an other player? Without the need of making a profit (but making enough to sustain itself)?

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mi]

Your best bet is to complain to your city council and tell them to open your market to competition.

Your best bet is to "vote the bums out". To continue buying into "natural monopoly" and other arguments against competition is an outrage...

Re:Glad to hear this.

[TerribleNews]

The trick is that you really do have a choice. You choose to pay $4 a gallon for gas and to pay $50 a month for a violated service agreement and next to no bandwidth, whether you like to admit it or not.

Nobody is holding a gun to anybody's head and saying "burn oil and use DSL and cable."

At least not anyone I know. Which, I will admit, is a reasonably small sample size, given the population of the Earth. It just seems a little far-fetched when it's obvious that people will pay it without the gun.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Throttling is a great red herring considering most folks here should be aware that DPI is basically Wireshark on steroids... Distract them with one things while you quietly WATCH them with another.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Ecuador]

Hmm, let's see.
In upper west side (Zip 10023) I have the choice of:
1. Verizon ADSL 3mb/764 for $40/month
2. Speakeasy ADSL2 up to 12mb/1mb for $180/month (brand new choice, not available last year, but it might not go anywhere near 12mb if you are not close to the DSLAM - at least comes with static IP).
3. Time Warner Cable 5mb/512 for $60/month

I went with Verizon + static IP for around $80/month. All my friends in Europe mock me when I tell them.

In Brooklyn (ZIP 11209) I have the exact same "choices".

In our Chelsea/Manhattan location (ZIP 10010) we have the exact same "choices".

FiOS is nowhere to be found of course.
May I repeat that my friends in Europe can switch between over 10 providers with up to 24Mbit for less than 30-40 euro (price depends on the country)?

So, no, in NYC we don't have a choice. We are stuck with slow & expensive connections.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[William Baric]

For infrastructures, monopolies are the way to go, and government owned monopolies works a lot better than private monopolies.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mpe]

I've noticed the same thing in parts of Canada, where former crown corporations (ex. electric and water) were shut down and for-profit companies took over on government contract. QoS took a very noticable nosedive very quickly. (greater grid instability and less 'safe' drinking water).

What happened to the prices?

Re:Glad to hear this.

[wye43]

It was so obvious, we know ISP's are the worst kinds of businesses, they oversell the bandwidth massively on the customer end and yet their backbones are pretty hardly ever used so they just end up cheating the consumer. It's basically extortion.

Sorry I have to say this: I feel like puking at the thought that /.ers actually find the above troll statement as informative. This is where public moderation fails in a horrible way: this is a popularity content, not moderation

Regarding the original issue, I worked for a few years as an admin on an ISP and I can tell you torrents have some nasty impact on the routers. Bell just really sucks on presenting the issue. Torrents are basically DOS, and deep down you know it. All ISPs are hating it, and not because of the copyright issue (they don't care about WTF you steal), its because of technical reasons(they care about you smashing their routers/lines).

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mpe]

Neither do government-granted monopolies.
Due to the nature of the beast, both 'monopoly' and 'government' are going to be factors. So they might as well accept that fact, drop the ideology and work towards the least sucky implementation.

In the absence of strong regulation a private monopoly is probably amongst the worst of situations.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[theshowmecanuck]

I still say Canadian Roadblock to Communication. :-p

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Chatterton]

Actually no. There is no contradiction. The company will not make any profit, but the bill of the consumer will see the profit in a way of it's reduction.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[I Want to be Anonymo]

For many, many years, utilities were generally run by municipalities (some very well, others, not so much), or were very heavily regulated private monopolies.

I suppose my opinion isn't very popular anymore, but I always thought that regulated monopolies normally worked pretty well.

Competition in utilities is generally a farce anyway. It almost always means competition among a bunch of resellers and middle-men who don't really add much value, and boils down to passing money along to the people who actually own the pipes and wires, who are generally still regulated monopolies, but without enough protection to reasonably finance proper maintenance and growth capacity. Everybody lines up with their checkbooks to get in on "The Next Big Thing", but once it's more or less matured, the focus switches to this quarter.

We see how well power deregulation worked in California, and the news has been talking about how much electric rates have gone up in Virginia since deregulation took effect. Have you tried to get a problem fixed on a T1 circuit lately? The smartjack loops, it's your wiring. No, then maybe the local carrier's loop is having a problem. Uhh, maybe it's an issue with our upstream provider...

People like to talk about all the innovation since the Bell System break up. What did we get? Cell phones? Bell invented them. Cheap long distance? Long distance is now technically trivial, but I'm still paying for it. It is technically trivial because of all the hard work Bell Labs put into cutting its cost. The Internet? Data circuits were out there for a long time, and the ARPA net was going along pretty well for its intended purpose until the www "Killer App" came along, at which point, ISDN would have been great - except it died because of interoperability problems and clueless pricing. (See Scott Adams for commentary on ISDN.) A regulated monopoly may still have had clueless pricing, but at least the interop problems would be non-existent.

Enough ranting. Who's with me?

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Abcd1234]

Would you rather have a centralized, Soviet Union style setup

Just FYI, it's not the 50s anymore. People aren't buying into the red scare bullshit anymore.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Kattspya]

Name them.

Post Office - Privatized
Train/tracks - Privatized
Phone/ISP - Privatized

What we have left are alcohol and pharmacy monopolies the latter will be dismantled soon though. And calling the alcohol monopoly successful depends on if you're a teetotaler or not.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because federally regulated businesses end up getting bloated and inefficient. They may START with good intentions and good ideas, but end up kow-towing to political agendas due to patronage, mismanagement, and blackmail.

To see proof of regulatory inefficiency, check out gasbuddy and have a look at the gas prices in the regulated provinces of NS and NB. The prices are regularly 2-4 cents per litre higher than the non-regulated provinces. That extra overhead goes to fund the regulatory body.

The business model of private enterprise and free market SHOULD mitigate this. A bloated, inefficient company should lose market share to one that offers the same product (or a better one) for the same price or slightly cheaper. That's the idea at any rate.

I'm actually in favor of the buyout. I suspect that it will be the first step off a very very large cliff, to the benefit of all. What do teachers know about running a telecom? When Bell-Aliant goes bust, it will leave a gaping hole in the telecommunication industry which can be filled by a nimble, new player. RIM perhaps?

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding right? Another government run monopoly? What makes you think anything run by the government is going to be efficient and not another huge waste of money? Hello unions!

Look at the LCBO, Toronto Hydro, even the damn Catholic School board. (okay cheap shot, that was not run by the government but gets government funding.)

Really the problem is we don't have enough competition. If you live in TO, you have 2 basic alternatives, Bell or Rogers. Both have been raising their prices steadily while lowering their service (hello throttling)!

The problem here is Bell found a way to stifle what measly little competition they had. Those aren't even real alternatives any more.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[KillerBob]

The only alternative is $cableCompany, which is another monopoly with either throttling or lower bandwidth caps, and at a higher price (the specific cable company varies from province to province)

I still ended up switching to Rogers, in Ontario. I'm paying less than I was for my DSL through Magma (now Primus), and getting faster service. Admittedly, throughput sucks royally when I download a bittorrent, but one of the advantages of having a server in colocation is that I can use some of its spare bandwidth to download torrents (capping it at 1mbit, still faster than I get on Rogers despite being on a 10mbit cable connection)...

But what I really wanted to point out was that not all of the cable monopolies suck worse than Bell. If I lived in Quebec, I'd be on Videotron without a 2nd thought... you can get a 30mbit cable connection from them for what I was paying for my 3mbit/800kbit DSL through Primus. And they offer connections up to 50mbit.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[KillerBob]

Your friends in Canada will mock you too... I'm on 10/1 cable, for $60/month. It doesn't officially have a static IP, but their DHCP lease is 1 month and automatically extends every time you renew it.. and it's tied to your MAC address, so it is, for all intents and purposes, static as long as you reboot the router once every 3 weeks.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[RedK]

You must not know of Hydro-Quebec. It's the reason Quebec pays half of what the rest of Canada pay for electricity and it is a profitable source of income for the provincial government. Before you go generalizing, make sure there aren't any examples of why you're completely wrong.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[RedK]

Went up, what did you expect ? Shareholders don't have social consciences.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[SleptThroughClass]

Youngsters also don't remember Ma Bell.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[digitrev]

Fine. No gun to your head. You're right. You're not required to burn oil and use DSL or cable. Oh, but you live in the boonies and need to heat your place in the winter, plus you need to drive to work (no public transport out in the boonies or even the suburbs in some places). Move to the city, you say? Fine (if that's where your job is), but you still have to heat your home some way, and you can bet that the energy is coming from hydrocarbons. As for DSL and cable, you don't really need it. I mean, who really needs to stay in contact with people? I mean, if you ignore the benefits of e-mail, quick research, entertainment, access to work, and the necessity of an internet connection if you're a student, the internet is completely useless.

Sarcasm aside, we've reached the point where the internet is as necessary as phones, roads, and electricity is. This means we need either regulation, or a complete cut of corporate welfare for the incumbent ISPs, and start helping the new guys. The fact is, the $50 crippled connection is still the better option than none at all. We just want better choices.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[greed]

How do the two different DSL providers get signal to your house? Here, the only company that can provide last-mile copper phone lines is Bell. Just like the only company that can provide last-mile copper cable lines is Roger's. So, no matter what, you're on one or the other company's wiring plants.

And the Ts&Cs at Roger's mean you can't operate any server. So that means just DSL providers.

So you can't escape Ma Bell. Unless you go Microwave or Satellite.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mi]

So, no, in NYC we don't have a choice.

The beginning of your post, where you listed three choices, contradicts the above-quoted ending...

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Ecuador]

Well, I guess if telco customers are like you, we will never have real, competitive choices.

I am sorry but having the following options:

1. Rather slow, not really cheap.
2. Decent speed, exorbitantly expensive.
3. Pathetically low upstream, high cost.

when most of the world has dozens of faster & lower cost providers to choose from, really falls under my definition of "having no choice".

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mi]

falls under my definition of "having no choice"

Well, if you redefine "zero" as "three", it all falls into place. Thank you.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[TihSon]

Don't

even

joke.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Ecuador]

Hmm, in case you are not just trying to be a smart-ass but you actually do have a deficiency when dealing with natural languages, I will try to explain.

Let's try examples:

-Why did you give that guy your money?
-He had a gun and he said it was either that, or he would kill me. So, I had no choice!

-Why did you get me a red lipstick.
-Well, they only had three colors: "red rose" "passion red" or "cherry". So, I had no choice!

Now, notice that you can say that in both these examples there was a "choice", if we take the world literally, in it's dictionary definition. However, languages usually allow us to convey subtler meanings than those listed in a dictionary, which are context related. So, in both the examples the protagonists considered the available "choices" as not "real" or "worth mentioning" or not what they would expect "choices" to be.
If you only speak math, it is a bit hard to understand at first, but reading some literature (no, I don't mean white papers etc) should help. I suggest you start with something by Terry Pratchett or Douglass Adams that will have interesting language constructs for you to study, and great entertainment value to science people. Be careful there are even more complex devices like a "metaphor" or a "hypocatastasis" etc. so be prepared.

Anyway, I gave my best, perhaps a native English speaker might explain it even better. I will now go back to surfing with my "super-fast" Verizon DSL that I "chose" among so many others...

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Machtyn]

We've socialized much of our water and electric utilities, and that's worked out well so far.

Californians (electricity) would like to object.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Abcd1234]

You *do* realize that private monopolies and government-operated monopolies are not the same thing, right? And that the latter behaves very differently as compared to the former?

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Stewie241]

Also, it's worth bearing in mind the decades of support (subsidies, tax breaks, right-of-way) that Bell received during the time when they were an official government monopoly. I wouldn't go so far as to say that we as taxpayers paid for the whole network, but we've certainly earned our share.
Well... I don't know how valid an argument that is, since I'm not sure Bell was just given away to the private enterprise that now owns it. Presumably that has been paid for. Whether the government negotiated a good deal for it or not is a question that I don't know the answer to.

You would assume that the value of everything sold was worked into the sale price (and yes, I know what happens when you assume).

Re:Glad to hear this.

[shaze]

It's because of friggin Nafta! We couldn't do it to Shaw or Telus either, because they're both American owned companies...

Re:Glad to hear this.

[NeilTheStupidHead]

They went up. I'm afraid I can't give you a comparison of the rate of increase before vs. after the change, but really, when was the last time a utility (public OR private) lowered its rates?

Re:Glad to hear this.

[msromike]

Then after you get that working you could take away peoples choice about healthcare. Oh yeah that's right...

Re:Glad to hear this.

[NotmyNick]

So, in New York City -- the supposed center of the world -- "competition" is 3 carriers? In backwoods America, there's generally one cable and one DSL provider... if you're lucky. That is NOT competiion.

It's worse than that. If you live in an apartment building, coop, or condo, you generally have a choice of one.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[billcopc]

Canada is not the U.S.

Up here, we still like to hang (some of) our corrupt leaders out to dry. I think it comes from the Canadian demographic being more diverse, thus any one leader's hushing influence having a much smaller reach. Lower violent crime also leads to people being more confident to go against the grain. We don't kill our dissidents. Michael Geist does not need personal bodyguards and a motorcade.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[billcopc]

In most of Canada we have semi-monopolies on alcohol. By that I mean we have government-run liquor stores, but in Quebec you can buy beer, coolers and many liqueurs and spirits below a certain alcohol content (not that I would ever want to drink 18% ABV Vodka).

It works out pretty well, except for the Ontario Beer Stores whose pricing is completely out of tune with reality, thanks to the right-wing taxes on beer and a few other items (notably some wines).

Example: a regular case of beer costs $37 in Ontario, when the same beer costs $23 across the bridge. That's for Canadian beer. It gets worse with imports, for example Heineken, at $45 a case in Ontario, $28 in Quebec. Thankfully, there's Lakeport, a local brand, that's only $26 and is unremarkable but still pretty decent (better than "economy" beer, for sure). Oh, I forgot to mention, those Quebec prices are what you'll get at every convenience store in the province. I think they have the model down pretty tight, everyone there benefits from the two-tiered alcohol monopoly.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[billcopc]

They couldn't compete. The fiber's already buried, and Bell owns it. There's no way I'd tolerate a federal ISP being little more than a Bell reseller. Besides, Bell would trigger lawsuits as usual.

Better to buy out the existing setup, than spend gazillions of dollars and years duplicating what's already there.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[billcopc]

We don't need choice, we just need to take what we have and make it WORK.

Americans suffer from "the grass is greener" syndrome. The difference with socialized enterprises is they're in your hands. If the healthcare system sucks, it's because we need more/better doctors, better managers, smarter politicians to fund the war on illness, instead of the war on drugs.

Or maybe we, as a society, need to evolve philosophically and learn to sacrifice the terminally ill at the benefit of everyone else. On the web we often speak of the long tail, terminally-ill children and super-elderly are that long tail, the 0.1% that eat up 5-10% of our resources.

Competing health-care services do nothing to help society at large. Their responsibility begins and ends in their pockets.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[msromike]

Believe it or not I agree with almost everything you say.

I think resource management is best left to private enterprise based on capitalist fundamentals. I will also say that a hybrid socialist and capitalist structure can not efficiently function. That is the real problem in the delivery of many social services in the US.

As far as I am concerned health care is a service to be purchased like any other. In a capitalist construct that delivery method works perfectly and no other method is as fair. If one cannot afford health care than one does without. Healthier is not a constitutionally protected right. The only thing our founding fathers guarenteed us is freedom and the right of a chance for success.

I am resigned to the fact that someone will always have a better car than me, a better house than me, and better health care than me. I will strive to work and provide for myself within the limits of my abilities, and desires.

I will play the cards I've been dealt and not expect someone else to pick up the slack. I don't want a handout from anyone.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[billcopc]

Okay but the thing is, your health depends on the health of those around you. If they're ill, you might catch it. If they're suffering, they might take out their aggression on you. If they're dying, well they just might take out the whole city block as a final "fuck you" to the world. It's hard to be happy, but it's even harder to be a useful, functional member of society when you're sick.

I would much rather pay a bit more to live in a clean, healthy environment, than some of the places I've seen where people are literally dying in the street because they can't afford expensive treatment for their disease.

I'm obviously biased and I won't try to hide it, but I think it's fundamentally wrong to profit from providing health care. It creates jobs, and that's great, but when a pharmaceutical sales rep makes more money than the people actually working in hospitals, that sets off alarms in my head. First of all, there shouldn't be "sales" of medicine, there should only be "supply". "Hi, my patient needs X. Here's a fair amount for payment, kthxbye" not "Hi, I'm pushing this new drug and we'll give you a 25% kickback"

But hey, I'm weird in my ideological ways.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[naasking]

Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see how some TCP/IP traffic is any worse than any other. It's all just packets on the wire.

If the directions of the packets are somewhat abnormal of traditional traffic, it's because the ISPs have structured their networks to optimize local client to backbone server traffic patterns. So that assumption no longer holds. Who's fault is that?

I knew it!!

[Cathoderoytube]

I knew it! I knew it! You sons of whores Bell! $70 fucking dollars a month!! I'm coming down to your HQ and throwing a cinderblock through your front window!

Re:I knew it!!

[aikodude]

get 'cher fresh hot torches here! can't go to an angry mobbing without fresh hot torches!!!

Re:I knew it!!

[grim4593]

From www.bash.org:

DmncAtrny: I will write on a huge cement block "By accepting this brick through your window, you accept it as is and agree to my disclaimer of all warranties, express or implied, as well as disclaimers of all liability, direct, indirect, consequential or incidental, that may arise from the installation of this brick into your building."
DmncAtrny: And then hurl it through the window of a Sony officer
DmncAtrny: and run like hell

Re:I knew it!!

[Sponge Bath]

There's no justice like angry mob justice.

Re:I knew it!!

[LoganDzwon]

Silly person, everyone knows Bell building don't have windows.

Re:I knew it!!

[Slacksoft]

If you're going to Canada you'll need to get abreast of the proper Canadian dialect so you're able to voice your frustrations properly. So instead of saying "I'm coming down to your HQ and throwing a cinderblock through your front window!" it would be "I'm going to come down to your HQ eh, and I am going to throw a brick eh, through your window, eh!"

In all seriousness though. I hope this ruling will help in the fight against the plans to start charging for a monthly bandwidth allocation that Time Warner is setting up in response to 'congestion'. If you go over Time Warner's allocation they will begin charging you X dollars per MB over your allotment. I swear I went to high-speed internet (DSL) to get away from pay-as-you-go service. It's like when AOL 2.5 was around where you had to pay per minute, and finally they realized they'd get more business with 20$ a month unlimited minutes. That was the happiest day of my life, or at least it was until we got RoadRunner from Time Warner.

Re:I knew it!!

[kiehlster]

Or how about take the software licensing approach and say something like, "By touching, or directing employees or other persons to touch this brick (the Brick) you release all liability for damages caused by the thrower of the Brick (the angry mob) and will adhere to all demands by the angry mob which include but are not limited to: reducing service expenses by half or the square root of current contract offers -- whichever is greater; hiring qualified support engineers according to the type of support call; removing all network throttling hardware not already destroyed by the angry mob that threw the Brick."
Then affix the disclaimer with text facing in toward the brick and hurdle it through ISP of your choice.
Stand there and laugh at said ISP's lawyers who cannot do anything because the evidence they need to convict you is now wrapped within a release of liability notice.

Re:I knew it!!

[deepgrey]

Fresh hot Cher torches!! That oughta scare them into submission! :)

Re:I knew it!!

[blankoboy]

Pitchforks half price! Get 'em while we have 'em.

Re:I knew it!!

[mini me]

it would be "I'm going to come down to your HQ eh, and I am going to throw a brick eh, through your window, eh!"

I believe what you meant to say was: I will ride my sled down to your main igloo, eh? And throw snowballs at you hosers.

Re:I knew it!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Will you be my lawyer?

Seriously, I need you in arguments with my wife!

Re:I knew it!!

[MadnessASAP]

I'm more partial to the technique where you go to a bar, get roaring drunk and then loudly exclaim "Fuck You!" While throwing a cinder block through any window. I figure if enough Canadians do this at least a few will hit Bell.

Re:I knew it!!

[NickFortune]

Don't forget the pitchforks

Re:I knew it!!

[Slacksoft]

Have to be very careful throwing bricks through windows in Canada. I figure you'll eventually hit a maple syrup shop and there is nothing worse than a drunk sticky belligerent brick throwing miscreant... it'd probably just make you easier to catch in the end.

Re:I knew it!!

[digitrev]

Actually, for the legal wrapper to be legal, you'd need it in both English and French. ;)

Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

1) ISP's oversell network
2) network gets congested
3) P2P is a lot (politically) easier to target than streaming video, because they have support from the media industry, so abuse P2P as needed to solve congestion problem
4) PROFIT !!!

Re:Nothing new

[Hijacked Public]

1) RTFS
2) RTFA
3) Discover that existence of anything more than tiny pockets of congestion is just a bunch of bullshit, and that not only have you been lied to about P2P being a problem, you've been lied to about the whole goddamned problem
4) PRICELESS

Re:Nothing new

[Hungus]

Huh?
1) Romanian Translators for Free Software
2) Ready-Team-Fire-Assist
3) ???
4)Pinpoint, Record, Involve, Coach, Evaluate, Law Enforcement Satellite System

So you have something against European FOSS? (Field Operations Support System)

Re:Nothing new

[Jesus_666]

Southern Tenant Farmers' Union

Let's see...

[Monkey_Genius]

1. Advertise unlimited Internet.
2. Throttle customer bandwidth.
3. ?
4. Profit!
Business for the 21st Century 101.

Re:Let's see...

[Serenissima]

Unfortunately, there's no "???" in this equation.

1. Advertise unlimited Internet (ie: get lots of paying customers)
2. Throttle customer bandwidth (ie: don't use all that money to upgrade systems and screw customers)
3. Profit! (ie: Actual Profit)

Re:Let's see...

[NovaHorizon]

(can't help it)

Step 1: Steal underpants

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit!

So then.. what is this about?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this isn't a "You bittorrenters are maxing out our bandwidth"... what is the real reason they're expending the time and effort to do this?

Re:So then.. what is this about?

[Dystopian Rebel]

Research TVants and Sopcast.

Re:So then.. what is this about?

[Opportunist]

The fact that more and more (top level) ISPs are also in some way concerned with TV, broadcasting or content. The last thing you want is to faciliate a competing (internet) TV network.

And the easiest way to do that is to control what your users can do with their bandwidth and what they can't. If you can simply keep them from watching TV online (and I'm not even talking about doing something "illegal" like watching a syndicated show abroad, just something that's more interesting than the reality soaps we get shoveled down our throats on ordinary TV these days), you retain customers for your TV services.

Re:So then.. what is this about?

[Serenissima]

To justify a move to a tiered system to charge more for the same service.

Re:So then.. what is this about?

[BPPG]

Demand for technology will always exceed it's availability. The Internet will always be under heavy stress (without drastic changes), so the ISPs are trying to put a band-aid on the situation by trying to remove a chunk of traffic. But once they do, there'll be all of this bandwidth that people will start trying to use for something else.

Telus in particular, (I'm not sure about Bell or Rogers)has actually contracted out more bandwidth than they can afford to spare now, and smaller companies that it has 10 year contracts with are becoming bandwidth-starved.

Article is pure shit

[RockMFR]

The blog linked to is pure shit. Here's a link to the actual article:

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/06/25/tech-caip.html

Re:Article is pure shit

[TubeSteak]

The blog linked to is pure shit. Here's a link to the actual article:

A while back, I thought /. instituted (or started enforcing) a 'policy' that linking directly to the news article in the summary was highly preferable over linking to a blog that links to the article.

Am I just imagining that?

Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[zappepcs]

I've said it before, saying it now. There is NO reason to believe anyone in business who cannot show WHY they need legal help, or rights to invade your privacy to protect their business. There has never been proof by the **AA that file sharing is harming their businesses. There has never been proof by any ISP that P2P is harming their businesses. Without proof, what they wish to do is nothing less than criminal.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=592247&cid=23904147
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=588163&cid=23844923

Sure, they can say, oh it's our network and that's what we are going to do with it, however, in the interests of the national GDP/economy we have to consider ISP infrastructure as vital to the economy now, both of the US and the world. Any shenanigans on how it is run are of vital business interest to business concerns other than the ISPs themselves.

P2P is simply being used as the pike that gets network monitoring in the door. No, I have no actual proof of that, but if it were the danger that it is said to be, there would be plenty of evidence. Some of that evidence would be people complaining on the Internet about how slow their ISP is.

Now, add to that the fact that these same ISPs have a vested financial interest in using more of your bandwidth than you want them to in order to provide the triple-play and quadruple-play service packages that stock holders are counting on for revenue.

There are the two reasons for finding something to blame/fear in order to ease the pain of making the changes to the network at consumer's costs. Sure, some think that right, but they squandered the money/tax incentives etc. they have already been given and still do not provide anything much better than they used to.

They have a technological problem and need someone/something to blame. For better or worse, they chose P2P because it's already scapegoated by the **AA. I don't think this plan is going to work out so well.

Just my opinion

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[figgypower]

It's not a good idea to nationalize our network infrastructure. Not now. Not ever. Let me explain: first, it is their network and therefore their property... that is unless the government is giving them our tax money. What needs to stop is the government needs to stop handing out tax revenues to massive corporations.

Second, P2P is the pike which private companies will try to bring in network monitoring; you don't think the government will do the exact same thing? They just passed a broad wiretapping law in Sweden; they promise not to monitor domestic activity, but in fact they don't have to. Gee, I wonder if the Swedes are going to get spied on? And America? I dream for the land of the free and home of the brave, but a lot of times I get land of the monitored and home of the arrested. England? I'm sure all those cameras are to respect the privacy of citizens and only catch criminals.

Third, you don't think the government has its own agenda? You don't think they'll develop their own vested interests, in the name of national security or whatever the latest nonsense happens to be? Why did we go into Iraq...? Or you know... maybe they'd just throttle bandwidth with whoever decides not to shake hands behind the door. I know politicians commit crimes that are never brought to light now, so do I really want those people to have control over the Internet?!

The solution is to have a balance between the two, increase private competition, and push for enforcement of laws that come companies are violating nowadays. Nationalization/socialization will just perpetuate the problems. And that's my 2c.

Sure, they can say, oh it's our network and that's what we are going to do with it, however, in the interests of the national GDP/economy we have to consider ISP infrastructure as vital to the economy now, both of the US and the world. Any shenanigans on how it is run are of vital business interest to business concerns other than the ISPs themselves. P2P is simply being used as the pike that gets network monitoring in the door. No, I have no actual proof of that, but if it were the danger that it is said to be, there would be plenty of evidence. Some of that evidence would be people complaining on the Internet about how slow their ISP is. Now, add to that the fact that these same ISPs have a vested financial interest in using more of your bandwidth than you want them to in order to provide the triple-play and quadruple-play service packages that stock holders are counting on for revenue.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[jlindy]

Nothing malicious - just greed.

I always thought greed was malicious. Just my 2 cents :)

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[zappepcs]

Can you explain how decreased usage decreases costs?

I pay for 10Mbit/s. The equipment needed to provide that service does not turn off when I'm not using it. The infrastructure required to support that service has to still be there, in service, awaiting my desires to use it. How does that reduce costs?

You seem to want to justify the practice of overselling your capacity - a business practice that needs to stop. ISPs have been getting away with it for a long time because of the shared nature of Internet resources and networks in general. The recent story where too many people watching sports videos caused some ISPs to think they were being attacked with DDoS is exactly what happens when you oversell your infrastructure. IMO most ISPs have built their networks poorly and cheaply and have to catch up with requirements when they get caught out. When I say poorly and cheaply, read that as centralized and without scaling in mind at the planning stage. Admittedly, virtualization and other new technologies can help improve this, but that is the nature of technology based businesses: you have to upgrade often to stay relevant. It is clear that there is not enough infrastructure to support triple-play and quadruple-play services. An argument that touches on the problems not readily apparent to the North American consumer is here http://innerdaemon.wordpress.com/2007/05/12/while-verizon-fiddles-with-fios-strategy-apple-has-triple-play/

Here is a note about one of the major problems for large ISPs http://gigaom.com/2007/05/07/comcast-smartzone/

Back to the point. The above links and my comments are clearly indicating that ISP do not want you to use LESS bandwidth, they want you to use more but only when connecting to their content services. Blocking and limiting P2P means you will be more likely to use their content services. Triple and quadruple play is a way for them to help ensure that. Read up on net neutrality issues a bit. That little problem is all about ISPs trying to milk their infrastructure for double the money they should get. It will also allow them to make their content cheaper to consume as well as give them a mechanism to sell you special content packages so they get MORE money for what you now enjoy freely for the cost of your connection.

Now, your comment indicates a belief that ISPs are trying to make money by me not using the bandwidth while everything else on the Internet says their stock holders are being told how much content they are going to sell their users. There is a bit of a difference of opinion between you and what seems to be happening in the real world.

Yes, trying to write quickly enough to be useful here means editing and rewrites are often not pragmatic. I'm not sure it was a nonsensical rant, but you are welcome to that opinion.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[Opportunist]

Nah, it's just a mortal sin. Along with 6 other vices that are today pretty much a "required skills" list for any upper management position.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[trawg]

There has never been proof by any ISP that P2P is harming their businesses. Without proof, what they wish to do is nothing less than criminal.

I'm curious as to what proof you would find acceptable.

Question: who do you think foots the bill when a content creator decides to use BitTorrent to distribute their bytes?

Answer: it's not the content creator. It's the ISPs (.. it should be the "peer", but broken ISP pricing models make it the ISPs).

BitTorrent (the entity) has always billed its software as a way to reduce your content distribution overheads.

These overheads don't magically disappear - the cost of moving those bytes around hasn't gone anywhere. It's just been shifted from you to the "p" in p2p - the peers.

Now, this is "harming" (open to interpetation) the ISPs in the sense that in the US (and sounds like Canada), ISPs have gone the "unlimited downloads" route and are now paying for that stupidity when people actually try to use their pipe in an unlimited capacity (the audacity!).

While I have zero sympathy for the ISPs - in fact it's pretty clear most of them are being complete and utter dicks about the whole thing - I have started to sympathise somewhat, because they're absorbing the costs of content distribution from people who have seen that BitTorrent removes the burden of cost from them and puts its "over there" (ie, anywhere that it doesn't appear on their bill.

This is true even of legitimate content (World of Warcraft patches, Age of Conan Early Access client, Linux ISOs, etc) in addition to the illicit stuff that people use torrents for.

ISPs need to fix it, fast. Blocking BitTorrent is such a stupid option all round that it actually hurts my brain.

Sane monthly download quotes followed by traffic shaping OR EXTRA COSTS for those that exceed those quotas just makes so much more sense for any business.

I guess it's just going to come down to what is going to cost them less - restructuring their plans like that, or getting sued for continuing to advertise "unlimited" plans whilst taking every opportunity to limit them.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[iCEBaLM]

Question: who do you think foots the bill when a content creator decides to use BitTorrent to distribute their bytes?

Answer: it's not the content creator. It's the ISPs (.. it should be the "peer", but broken ISP pricing models make it the ISPs).

It's the users who paid the ISP for the bandwidth they use.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[Brain Damaged Bogan]

"There has never been proof by any ISP that P2P is harming their businesses. Without proof, what they wish to do is nothing less than criminal."

even WITH proof... it just means they need to reevaluate their business strategy or become a thing of the past... it's called capitalism, some trades survive for generations, others don't.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[trawg]

It's the users who paid the ISP for the bandwidth they use.

That's who it SHOULD be - but because the ISPs have fucked up, they're footing the bill. They didn't cater for the fact that their users might suddenly band together and form a content distribution network.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[H0D_G]

Of course, decreased usage means less photons moving down the fibre optic line. which means less wear on the fibre, cause of all the wear that photons cause on the line.

totally.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[TubeSteak]

Can you explain how decreased usage decreases costs?

I pay for 10Mbit/s. The equipment needed to provide that service does not turn off when I'm not using it. The infrastructure required to support that service has to still be there, in service, awaiting my desires to use it. How does that reduce costs?

Decreased usage decreases costs because the ISPs don't have to pay for more bandwidth.
The hardware is a sunk cost, bandwidth is a variable one.

Back to the point. The above links and my comments are clearly indicating that ISP do not want you to use LESS bandwidth, they want you to use more but only when connecting to their content services.

Right, because bandwidth from their content services is "local".
It does not need to transit [someone else's] pipes, which costs the ISP money.

You seem to want to justify the practice of overselling your capacity - a business practice that needs to stop.

LOL. Overselling is never going to stop. As an example:
A DSL company with 100 1.5Mb customers is not going to purchase 150Mb of upstream bandwidth (an OC3) on the off chance that all 100 of their customers decide to max out their connection at the same time.

What else do you propose besides overselling bandwidth?
Are you seriously going to propose dedicated bandwidth per user?

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[rrohbeck]

I always thought greed was malicious.

Yes it *was*. Get with the times. Greed is good. At least since the 80s.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[TheRaven64]

Overselling, to me, means selling more bandwidth than you are capable of offering. It's a form of fraud. If you can't offer a 10Mbit connection 100% of the time, don't advertise it. Instead, advertise the guaranteed minimum (e.g. 1Mb/s), the theoretical maximum (e.g. 100Mb/s) and the maximum you have more than a 75% probability of being able to sustain over any given period (e.g. 10Mb/s for one hour, 1.5Mb/s for 8 hours).

Existing truth in advertising (or fraud) laws really need to stop these companies from advertising capabilities that they can't provide.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't offer a 10Mbit connection 100% of the time, don't advertise it.

They DON'T. Ever see the "subject to availability; actual speed may vary" disclaimers? Tada!

It's never been guaranteed bandwidth, ever, for residential customers. If you need it, you pay for it. T1, T3, and OC-x connections are available for that.

Not overselling means a good tripling of the monthly service cost. If they didn't oversell, they wouldn't have enough customers to offer the service at that price. Look at their earnings statements on broadband. Profit's a lot less than you'd think.

Don't get me wrong, it's still millions and millions of dollars, but any number of other businesses turn the same kind of profit without complaint.

They're not advertising capabilities they can't provide. "Unlimited" is still bound by capacity and subject to non-abuse.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[Thundersnatch]

Dude, you do not "pay for 10 Mbps". You pay for ZERO Mbps Committed Information Rate, with best best-effort service up to 10 Mbps. Read your contract.

Committed, uncapped, non-oversold internet transit bandwith is US$50-200 per Mbps in most US markets. Businesses buy these connections for guaranteed throughput. $300 for 1.5 Mbps of guaranteed bandwidth on a T1, or 45 Mbps for a couple of grand.

Consumer Internet service has always been best-effort to make it affordable, even in places like Japan and Sweden with government-subsidized fiber. There are typically no throughput guarantees at all, or very low guarantees. The backbone connectivity is massively oversubscribed at 20:1 or higher ratios.

If you want 10 Mbps guaranteed, pony up the $500+ per month that most corporate customers do.

Unsustainable congestion...

[AllIGotWasThisNick]

Over the two-month period prior to their throttling, they had congestion on a whopping 2.6 and 5.2 per cent of their network links. They don't even explain whether this is a range of sustained congestion, or peaks amongst valleys. I believe somewhere in their filings they identify their process, which simply involves sampling the "congestion" at a fixed frequency (1/d?), and if any 4 samples during a 2-week period identified "congestion", the entire 2-week period is marked as congested for (eg) the entire DSLAM. I leave the interpretation of this data to the network engineers.

Re:Unsustainable congestion...

[bluefoxlucid]

so it's a low-resolution digital peak measurement, like charging 1024K+1 bytes as 2MB for cell phone data usage. Period is 1MB, and 1-1024K bytes counts as 1MB. Do you see a problem here?

From a scientific and statistical viewpoint this data is of limited use; it show that they experience 4 instantaneous states of congestion in any 1 given 2-week period, but not that that period experienced congestion. It's an easy Simpson's Paradox candidate, with the fine grained analog being a tally of those periods which experienced congestion more than X% of the time, or with smaller periods (which would be better, because we do mind if you have 10% congestion being 5 solid days vs 10% congestion being a random distribution of 1-second periods with any congestion states within them).

IOW the data is a crock of shit.

Re:Unsustainable congestion...

[SpaceLifeForm]

Just like the 6 to 11 second phone call.
They don't exist. Minimum call is 12 seconds.

Re:Unsustainable congestion...

[bryxal]

After a close examination it does say percent of congested links (out of several thousand) but the critical threshold would probably be around 10%. Taking the highest percent before DPI which is 6.6%, that's still not high and if it's that bad it would not have been that expensive to upgrade those links. not to mention the CRITERIA for getting ito that count of "congested links". here are the utilization limits for congested as per Bell Canada: DS-3 61%, OC-3 84%, OC-12 and OC-48 90%. so, for one of those links to be considered "congested" and added to that low % graph the following has to occur (using DS-3 links as an example). Over a 14 day period, utilization measurements are taken every 15 minutes. (snap shot of usage at that time). the limit of 61% must be exceeded atleast ONCE on 5 seperate days over that 14 day period. what that means is that for the total UP TIME of a link over that 14 days (in minutes) is 20,160 minutes (24hrs x 60min x 14 days). The link must only be above 61% for a TOTAL 75 of those minutes to be considered "congested", or 0.37% of it's available time. Lets also not forget that there could be a sudden spike of usage right at that 15 minute mark and then die down, but i'll assume the entire 15 minute interval is at that level for simplicity, lol.

- http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20690166-The-Bell-Disclosure

I guess the CSE doesn't have the fast computers

[johninsf]

like the NSA does. Maybe they just need some time to upgrade and then everything will be fine, it's just a temporary measure.

Harm done.

[twitter]

Bell's data shows that unrestricted P2P creates no congestion in better than 95% of their networks. Schemes to "filter" P2P will slow down 100% of their networks. It is obvious that either:

1. They are incompetent. They are going to create a problem to solve one that does not exist. Or
2. They are liars. Their goals and reasons are different from those stated.

My bet is on #2.

Re:Harm done.

[Smidge204]

While I would also tend to vote #2 here, those two options are not mutually exclusive.

=Smidge=

Re:Harm done.

[Anonymous Coward]

3 ???

4 profit

Re:Harm done.

[hostyle]

s/???/Start a new meme/

Re:Harm done.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

What obviously no-one can ask is "just how bad is 2.6% congestion", never mind 5%

Well, as a network engineer, I can tell you this : it's VERY bad. This number means that some of their core lines were inoperable 1/20th of the time due to p2p.

The target number in any network, in case anyone doesn't know, is 0%. Congestion == line down. It creates unacceptable and unworkeable slowdowns.

And let's not forget that this congestion was created while they were upgrading their lines as fast as they could.

Re:Harm done.

[Guspaz]

You're completely incorrect because you're completely ignoring Bell's criteria for a line being considered congested.

First, their thresholds: They consider anything over the following utilization thresholds to be congested:

DS-3 61%, OC-3 84%, OC-12 and OC-48 90%.

Second, they determine usage and congestion by taking samples every 15 minutes. If five samples return percentages over those limits in a 14 day period, the line is considered to be congested for the entire 14 day period.

Their percentages are actually not all that bad; they're a useful guideline for when it's time to turn on another link. Their methodology for MEASURING the usage, on the other hand, is completely flawed. A two-hour long DDoS attack one afternoon might mark a slew of lines as congested for two entire weeks.

Further bolstering the fact that they've chosen their measurements to make the issue seem worse than it appears is that despite the supposed congestion on a given percentage of their lines, they only have about 4000 ATM cell loss events network-wide each month. This is out of the trillions of ATM cells flying around their network every month, they only drop a percentage so small that my calculator resorts to scientific notation trying to calculate it.

In short, they've pretty much made up the issue. Their figures when taken at face value don't indicate significant congestion (5% of lines congested? Why not just purchased a handful more lines?), when examined based on their methodology appear to be garbage data, and when compared against actual packetloss caused by congestion, is proven to be completely non-existent. Bell has zero actual network congestion, their own ATM loss data backs that up.

Disclaimer: I'm not a network engineer, and so I might be talking out of my ass. But I think that common sense can play a role here; their methodology makes it trivial to declare a line as congested, and having 4000 instances of ATM cell loss on a network in a month with millions of customers (and trillions of ATM cells sent per month) doesn't seem particularly bad.

Re:Harm done.

[Z00L00K]

Their ultimate goal is to probe the possibility of various means to inflict harm on streamed video from services outside their network.

By destroying P2P traffic they are doing it to some traffic that has a large part of the traffic volume in their networks and see what happens. P2P has probably been chosen as a legitimate target since it has a considerable amount of "illegal" or "gray" data which in turn means that the number of companies that are affected and buying services from the ISP is lower. Which in turn means that the risk of costly legal suits are held at bay.

So the P2P corruption is mostly a test, not the real deal.

The true reason is that they want to keep the customers to themselves and just tell their customers that they will only get good video if they buy it from them and not any independent vendor.

And this means that everybody has to sit and watch the movies and TV channels that the ISP provides and nothing else - with injected commercials and other crap.

Re:Harm done.

[thegameiam]

I am a network engineer. 90% is a really high threshold for calling something congested. Also, 15 minute averages are better than a lot of measurements I've seen, but are far from perfect - lots of "microburst" type activity can cause a noticeable loss in performance over a much shorter period than that.

Bittorrent-type flow patterns do tend to cause microburst issues - it might be that Bell CA needs to implement some more fine-grained measurements to see whether the thresholds are still the right ones for them.

Re:Harm done.

[Anonymous Coward]

You really have no idea what you are talking about, do you?
I would like to see your amazing calculation of a 1 minute dns response time from the sole input of "90% usage".

Re:Harm done.

[rgviza]

/QFT. I was thinking the same thing when I read the op.

Congestion on only a few end links can cause a whole interlink to get saturated. I.E. if you have 128 customers on a DSLAM box with 10Mbps to the backbone, and 8 of them saturate their 1.5Mbps link, that's all 128 dealing with shitty network throughput since they connect up to a core link through the same wire. If you multiply that out, the whole backbone gets saturated and everyone gets horrible service.

That's *less* than 5% of people saturating their connections. If they are doing it 24x7 they become a nuisance and the other 123 people can't even look at cnn without experiencing stalled page loads.

P2P _must_ be throttled or no one's QoS can be guaranteed and they'll lose customers. What they should really do, is scale p2p based on demand... IE if someone is saturating their connection as others start sending packets, back off their connection speed as necessary. They shouldn't target p2p traffic specifically, they should apply it to _all_ traffic. Otherwise p2p clients will just start operating on random ports and their rulesets will get out of hand, slowing things down even more.

Trust me, I hate comcast and verizon as much as the next guy, but they gotta do what they gotta do. You can't bend the laws of physics. People that whine about it have sharing issues and are selfish.

They should simply meter it and charge people for what they use beyond 50GB a month or something. "You want to p2p constantly? Fine, we need to upgrade our network to accommodate you, so it's going to cost you."

This would serve fine for people that occasionally need to download a 8GB game they just bought from direct2drive or something, but p2p would get real expensive, real fast, for people that simply log into whatever p2p system and download everything they see.

-Viz

Re:Harm done.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a pretty good bet considering DPI is like Wireshark on steroids: distract with throttling without mentioning the platforms are capable of watching and reporting what unencrypted traffic is on the network. Next step? Intercept encrypted traffic using man-in-the-middle techniques, possibly compromising a connection's security.

Re:Harm done.

[nabsltd]

Their "90% utilization is congested" figure is for an OC-48, so that would still leave 240Mbps free on that line. I don't know if this is enough to cause "congestion", but I can't see how it would make a 50-byte DNS request/reponse take a minute to get through.

Re:Harm done.

[yabos]

Maybe it's bad for those links but why is the solution to throttle EVERY SINGLE LINK ON THEIR NETWORK including 3rd party links. That makes absolutely no sense. 2-5% is something that they can upgrade to higher capacity fairly quickly. Bell is absolutely not upgrading as fast as they can BTW. They're years behind on their FTTC and ADSL2 deployment. They were supposed to be significantly further along by now according to their plans. They're pretty well holding off on their ADSL2 deployments on most of their network.

Re:Harm done.

[somersault]

if you have 128 customers on a DSLAM box with 10Mbps to the backbone, and 8 of them saturate their 1.5Mbps link, that's all 128 dealing with shitty network throughput since they connect up to a core link through the same wire. If you multiply that out, the whole backbone gets saturated and everyone gets horrible service.

That sounds more like the ISP's fault for false advertising and poor network infrastructure if 5% of people can't constantly use their full bandwidth.. I understand that traditionally people used to use very little of their bandwidth unless they were downloading a file, but these days with streaming radio, video, massive legitimate file downloads.

For example I downloaded a couple of game demos on my PS3 recently and they were both 1.5GB. I remember downloading a 100MB demo on 56k dialup before, it took all night. But 3GB probably takes less than 2 hours on an average 'broadband' connection these days. Am I selfish for downloading 3GB demos when a few years ago I would have been maxing out my connection for days on end? Not really. These days, 3GB is nothing. In another few years, 300GB downloads will be nothing.. and people will probably have found ways of needing even more bandwidth. Personally I don't see how even super-hi-def audio and sound could require so much data for a movie or whatever but ways will be found to wastse/use the bandwidth.. probably via on-demand movie and music services.

As an aside, I wonder what percentage of their traffic each day is just spam?

I have no problem with Comcast or whoever charging more or having caps for what you call 'selfish' usage as long as they make usage limits and bandwidth caps obvious up-front. Saying that people shouldn't be maxing out their bandwidth all the time and calling it 'selfish' isn't the right attitude to me though, that's trying to displace the blame from the poor infrastructure. It's like getting annoyed at people for causing traffic jams when it's really just the infrastructure that is the problem, not any one driver (even if the driver is driving a truck full of backup tapes :P ).

Re:Harm done.

[Stewie241]

The article relates to Bell Canada... this is the company that used to advertise 'always fast, never shared'. Charging for bandwidth over a certain cap isn't a bad idea. My ISP (in Canada) caps at 100GB for premium service.

It seems misleading to always advertise that your product is better than the competition and then limit or shape traffic to accomplish that.

Re:Harm done.

[orielbean]

They are incompetent at managing their infrastructure to handle total demand, and are lying so they don't have to increase capacity or otherwise enhance the user experience... You got it.

Re:Harm done.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

okay, it's simple : a datapipe is not a water pipe. It's serial, not parallel.

In a water main every droplet of water has it's own space available, in an OC-48 every bit must be nicely lined up and 1 bit at a time gets sent down the line. (yes I know about the modulation, so it's 64 bits or so, but the principle is the same)

That means that a line that is 90% utilized in a space of 15 minutes is 13.80 minutes utilized and 1.20 minutes not utilized at all : there could be a single 13.80 minute burst and then nothing and the line would be 90% utilized. Generally you're going to see a limited number of bursts per minute.

The bursts are unpredictable, but they get exponentially longer the higher the utilization gets. A 1% used line will in practice only have bursts of milliseconds. In a 90% used line the bursts will (sometimes, obviously) last minutes.

During a burst, basically the pipe is utterly full. Nothing can get in until enough stuff gets out first.

Therefore a 90% utilized line is totally unuseable for anyone. It leads to massive slowdowns.

I know this is not what you want to hear, but it's the way it is, simple as that.

Re:Harm done.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

It's like your adsl modem. Everybody knows that if you fill up the line to an adsl modem traffic slows down like hell.

Well at that point you're going to see you're using about 80% (90% if you've got a really good modem with big buffers) of the line. Using many downloads you may bet this slightly above 90% but only a wizard gets it above 95% (I hear there's a zmodem-over-udp tool that can do it, but tcp will not do it).

You'll also notice the line is, despite "not completely filled up" and "still more than 2 isdn lines available capacity" dog slow. Utterly unuseable.

It gets worse since tcp generates extra traffic, even more than normal, on a congested line, which can really exacerbate the problem further at times.

Re:Harm done.

[Guspaz]

That assumes that Bell is recording usage as the difference between the last measurement was taken 15 minutes ago, and not as a snapshot of the current usage.

Presuming that it is an average of the previous 15 minutes, your logic is still flawed; yes, the latency will be increased on a line with 90% utilization, but not by minutes.

First of all, you have to understand that the larger the pipe (the greater the aggregation), the less impact bursts have on the line. An OC-48 is about 2.5 gigabits per second. Furthermore, the end-user connection on this network are primarily 5mbit DSL users, and we're talking about an ATM network right up until they hit the wholesaler's own network (where congestion isn't an issue).

ATM cells are 53 bytes. You can send about 6 million per second on an OC-48. And the buffers on routers don't have room for minutes of data; if the buffer is full, it drops packets. Bell isn't dropping packets (beyond ~3000 times per month network-wide), so they're obviously not filling those buffers.

Re:Harm done.

[rocca]

My head hurts from reading that. I'm not sure where you are pulling numbers from but they don't smell very good. The reason adsl "gets slow" when busy is the asymetrical part, specifically when you saturate the slower outbound direction with general traffic the ack's to tcp packets can't be sent fast enough to also saturate the faster inbound direction which leads to the download effectively slowing to the same speed as the upload.

Re:Harm done.

[rocca]

> a datapipe is not a water pipe. It's serial, not parallel.
> During a burst, basically the pipe is utterly full.
> Nothing can get in until enough stuff gets out first.

You make it sound like once someone initiates a large transfer their entire session is 'put in line ahead of anything else'. That is not the way it works however as packets are interleaved as they arrive at the router. Excluding any QoS tagging, generally speaking every packet has the exact same chance of making it through.

Re:Harm done.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're learning. Now enable comments on your journal so your detractors have a harmless way to lose Karma.

Oh, yeah, and read up about public information infrastructure. It turns out that the evil telecoms are not the only option. Try WA SB 6102 2007 (pdf) for an example.

IANC...

[Taibhsear]

but I would LOVE to see the similar data from Comcast and the other monopolies here in the US. Preferably in pike form lodged firmly up their asses.

If Bell actually cared.

[Anonymous Coward]

If Bell actually was trying to "Support all their customers" and there really is a problem with bandwidth, the best way for them to do that is to actually open up their network with no limits of any kind and push the network to it's limit. If there truly was a bandwidth problem, we would start to notice it and get used to slower speeds in the evening. Then Bell could come out and announce throttling of those "evil downloaders" which is actually their customers and then people would see things improve and say yes, this throttling is a good thing.

The problem is that there isn't actually any problem other then the fact that a red light turned on on someones overview screen so Bell decided it needed to save the internet and they might as well make some more money while doing so.

Re:If Bell actually cared.

[Nikker]

Common you really think setting them up like that will make a difference? If you are going to sit there waiting for a slow night they can definitely give it to you. Only those who set up the hardware and laid the cable know how much there really is over there . Who cares they are going to lie no matter what the numbers are.

We should buy fiber and lay it across Canada and let anyone who wants to be an ISP set up shop and serve via their own servers. If bell is really that good then they will have no problem making ends meet other wise oh well ...

Re:If Bell actually cared.

[Dunbal]

Only those who set up the hardware and laid the cable know how much there really is over there .

      Yes, and those who laid the cable and "set up the hardware" are laughing when the telco's claim that they're running out of bandwidth on their networks. There is no shortage of cable. There is only greed on the part of telcos who want to bleed the public dry. Especially AT&T, who have ALWAYS favored a metered approach to "internet" since before the internet was even around, as I remember reading in Forbes articles in the early 90's.

Re:If Bell actually cared.

[Anonymous Coward]

Canada already has oodles of dark fiber running across it. My employer leases several runs between cities for our own private network. Claims that the capacity is not there is just bullshit.

Re:If Bell actually cared.

[neuromancer23]

>> If bell is really that good then they will have no problem making ends meet other wise oh well

And they wouldn't need a government enforced monopoly.

To add to the corus

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggested in the last slashdot report that isp's like Bell should be forced to disclose, using standard measurement methods, the specs on their system so I will know what I am buying. There is no magical mysterious tech here on this thing called the internet. Bell and others should be forced to disclose and not be allowed to fleece their customers with smoke and mirrors. Just like when buying stereo equipment, the law does not allow those companies to misrepresent peak and continuous power etc., There is absolutely no difference. I want what I pay for and I should have ways to see if I'm getting it.

Seeing as it appears Bell was giving us a song and dance and I'm sure others have done similar. I will now take this a step further. This would ensure they are giving us what they claim to be selling. I suggest their networks be monitored by a regulatory body directly. I would even suggest a public channel be open so customers may check for themselves. As a start, why not something similar to the Internet Health Report website for example http://www.internethealthreport.com/ but of course tailored to the individual ISP' internal networks. How else are consumers to know if they are being lied to or cheated regarding this product they are being sold. The public are discovering albeit slowly that internet is just another product and service. Plugging the holes stops misrepresentation just like the power available from my stereo amplifier.

Mmmm Herring.

[fahrbot-bot]

Over the two-month period prior to their throttling, they had congestion on a whopping 2.6 and 5.2 per cent of their network links.

Geesh. A few well-timed /. articles could beat that. I wonder if we could organize the /. effect to battle Evil? Like a virtual flash mob - dibbs on "/ mob" - and I don't mean Slash Mob though I can see some similarites:

The Slash Mob Project is an interesting phenomenon where people gather at a determined point, kill all surrounding onlookers, and then disperse as fast as arriving, thus leaving the onlookers dazed, bewildered, and hopefully dead by what they just experienced...

The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[some damn guy]

It's easy to see why Comcast wants to limit customers. Peer-to-peer sharing is the scapegoat. If people think they can download as much as they want all the time, they might start thinking of their computers like the TV. Oh wait, they're already starting to.

Seriously, the day when you can ditch cable altogether is very very near (okay already here for me). Even without pirating anything. Seriously, the networks know the way the wind is blowing. Everything will start going online- it already is. Sure, the cable companies want to bring you the "on-demand" world, but they want to own it. But they're losing control and they're scared and they are starting to do stupid stuff... "WHAT? you watched Netflix ALL NIGHT?? ARRGGHHhh..."

They are realizing they have two businesses- content delivery and connectivity. Now they have to compete with the likes of Apple, Google, and Netflix for the former (among others). Recording industry 2.0. Their business model is a genereation away from being obsolete (well half is). The other half is just fine, and they really should have split the company along those lines, but probably can't for regulatory reasons, at least without further damaging the TV business.

The best course of action is clearly to blame the pirates and bury their heads in the sand.

hmm.. bad smell here

[QuantumG]

Say a particular 4 letter lobbying organization was offering these ISPs money to curb P2P usage.. would that be legal?

Kinda sounds like tortuous interference to me.

Re:hmm.. bad smell here

[Opportunist]

Since when does "legal" apply to or at the very least concern one of the mentioned four letter organizations?

What matters is "getting caught". And so far, I don't see much danger here.

Re:hmm.. bad smell here

[Guspaz]

That particular 4-letter lobbying organization being, of course, the CRIA?

load of BS

[roman_mir]

In revealing the details, Bell explained in an accompanying letter that "while these numbers may seem low to the average lay person, they are significant to network traffic engineers such that it is important to consider the number of congested links in the proper context." - of-course, the context being that Bell would like to make more money from various throttling schemes as well as from their new IPTV stores.

If only a single link in the network is congested, end users may still experience slowdowns or dropped connections, the company said, - of-course, especially if you throttle these connections.

because the situation is similar to the road system -- where if one major artery is backed up, all connected roads will also have problems. - of-course they conveniently omit the fact that the Internet is designed to route around damaged/congested areas.

Re:load of BS

[Opportunist]

Hold it! The internet was designed to route around congested and/or damaged/interrupted areas. It's anything but that anymore.

The internet is no longer the redundant, resilent network it was. It turned from something with the notion of "working, no matter what it costs" to "cheap, no matter if it's working". In other words, from something the DARPA made to something that has to make profit.

That's why you have "backbones", which by their very definition are an anathema to the idea of a redundant, resilent network (single point of failure). And that's why whole areas go black when one of those precious things breaks down.

Sure, the internet itself and the protocols used do support such a thing. All it takes to route around congested and problematic areas is to add links, "edges" if you want. That would be a solution that allows the internet to exist the way it is, because any kind of congestation can be solved that way. Almost trivially so. But that costs money, so this solution doesn't even get any consideration.

Re:load of BS

[TeacherOfHeroes]

because the situation is similar to the road system -- where if one major artery is backed up, all connected roads will also have problems. - of-course they conveniently omit the fact that the Internet is designed to route around damaged/congested areas.

They also leave out another obvious notion. When a road is backed up, the solution is not to limit the number of cars that are allowed on the road, or to impose rules limiting each family to one car. When a road is backed up, you widen the road.

Re:load of BS

[Anonymous Coward]

the Internet is designed to route around damaged/congested areas.
Wrong. The internet does not route around congestion (without using something like a RouteScience box which monitors "quality"). A fully-down link is routed around. A link where one end thinks its down and the other thinks is up ends up being a one-way black hole.

Re:load of BS

[Alomex]

The internet is no longer the redundant, resilent network it was.

It was redundant and resilient in theory, meaning that it was designed so that it could be made resilient if enough alternate traffic links were deployed, and that it doesn't need to be 100% functional to keep working (say as opposed to token ring like topologies). In practice many places have always hung precariously from a single trunk to the backbone, and we have seen regional blackouts through the years. They never make the big news, as they are rarely national events, again by design the Internet can tolerate partial failure.

And in other news...

[Moekandu]

An ISP in Japan will also soon be throttling their user's bandwidth.

Yes, they are creating an upload cap of 30GB per day. Not per month, per day .

I for one, welcome our Japanese ISP bandwidth capping overlords! Please?

Re:And in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

-2, Jealous

Re:And in other news...

[Fred_A]

Yes, they are creating an upload cap of 30GB per day. Not per month, per day .

That's still an awful lot of tentacles...

Re:And in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not really throttling, is it?

I *wish* Bell would just have bw caps -- most of the DSL ISPs on their network had set up way more attractive packages (including some "unlimited") but with throttling it doesn't really matter anymore...

Re:And in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

here in NL i got a letter about 18 months ago saying there was no cap official or otherwise (xs4all). I have a 20mbit line i can flatline at any time !

Re:And in other news...

[k-macjapan]

While the cap may be 30GB, quite a large % of ISP's still shape P2P traffic. You will find that the majority of the large providers do. That being said I generally get fantastic speeds using ftp. 20$ a month for fiber is a great deal here... To bad about the N.A market.

Re:And in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

30 GB per day? That works out to about 340 KiB/s (kibibytes), or 2.8 Mb/s (megabits).

Re:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[drinkypoo]

I guess the question is, what does it actually cost to get cable internet into your house? Can they actually provide it profitably? The telcos couldn't put copper into your house profitably without help originally, and they don't seem to be doing amazingly well now either (although AT&T has been ratcheting prices up.)

I'm eating a sandwich

[Aphoxema]

I was actually in the belief that torrents were really gobbling up the internet, or at least taking up a gigantic portion of it. It was kind of a blind assumption because of how many simultaneous connections it has and it seems like just all the TCP switching would be hard on the routers.

I suppose if they're coming out with hardware that can sniff EVERY SINGLE PACKET that goes through them now then anything else ought to be able to handle the less intrusive stuff. If it can't, then ISP's seriously need to get their priorities in order.

Re:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already well on it's way, I haven't bothered having cable for almost 3 years now. The only time I miss it is for sports, and I know there's plenty of streams online for that anyway. Over the next few years I expect a lot more people to follow suit.

To Editors

[Anonymous Coward]

Editors, can we please include Canada in the headline for these articles? There are several Bells in existence besides Canada Bell.

Re:To Editors

[Anonymous Coward]

Really?

Name one?

ok I'll give you Cincinnati Bell

But name another, you can't because there isn't any.

Re:To Editors

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah dude fuck off, everybody knows that it is Bell Canada.....

Re:To Editors

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_Bell
http://www.bellsouth.com/

Re:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[Opportunist]

And they got mighty supporters. Imagine someone being able to create a network without having to shell out millions if not billions just for the infrastructure. In fact, a halfway well off person can start an internet TV network.

A worldwide TV network, just to make matters worse (for those that oppose it, that is).

Can you see how not only established TV networks but also governments don't really like that idea? It's already bad enough that Al Jazeera spills counterpropaganda against Fox, now imagine anyone being able to do that. Worldwide.

I could well see that some governments don't really like that idea one bit.

They rob bodies, too

[hyades1]

Having been paid in full to have an ailing father's Bell service switched over, a friend of mine is now having to fight Bell to get some money back. They cashed the cheque immediately, then, after his death used their direct deposit privilege on the old boy's bank account to pay themselves twice.

And they're making the family deal with the problem through the bank rather than refunding or crediting the phone bill of the survivor.

If Bell Canada had a totem, it would be a rabid, starving rat.

Interested Party Responses.

[ChanxOT5]

More interesting than the bell data are the responses from the other concerned parties.

Specifically, the response from Skype is a good read. The response from Cisco is pure crap and doesn't directly address the issue at hand.

Anyways, if you want to see the data yourself, look at the links here.

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/PartVII/eng/2008/8622/c51_200805153.htm

Bell zip file with data:
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/public/partvii/2008/8622/c51_200805153_1/920764.zip
Note that all the Bell responses are in .doc. Go figure.

Skype response:
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/public/partvii/2008/8622/c51_200805153/920240.PDF

Cisco BS:
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/public/partvii/2008/8622/c51_200805153/920258.PDF

Which links?

[Dave114]

From the CBC article on this:

between 2.6 and 5.2 per cent of the links that make up Bell's network in Ontario and Quebec experienced congestion between March 2007 and April 2008.

The question that comes to mind would be: what type of links are congested?

If it's a relatively minor link - just a few megabits - then the congestion wouldn't affect many people. If it's one of the primary links on Bell's backbone and it's pretty much continually congested then that might be a problem.

Of course, they could just invest in upgraded infrastructure...

Re:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[some damn guy]

That's an excellent question. If the TV business isn't profitable, maybe they could try asking for big fees from large, media-heavy sites, and then, if they didn't pay up, they could limit their customers' bandwidth to them.

Of course, I'm probably just talking crazy here...

All I know is, I'm trying municipal wifi. It's way cheaper and very comparable if you buy a year or two at a time, though obviously it might go up later. Still I can lock in now and always go crawling back to cable.

Congested links are ATM, not IP!

[Anonymous Coward]

When an ATM link is congested, it is dropping 53-byte cells, not 1500-byte IP packets. Lose one cell, you've just dusted 30-odd other cells, even if they do arrive.

Any (ANY!) ATM congestion is very bad, when your payload consists of a train of cells that makes up a 1500-byte packet. It is doubly disliked because ATM links carry many kinds of traffic (voice and QoS private data), and the Internet junk is typically the lowest QoS. So when the overall link gets congestion, the Internet part of it gets the brunt of the cell loss.

Re:Congested links are ATM, not IP!

[Anonymous Coward]

So instead of 4000 cells worth of information, they've lost 30 times that much (assuming the loss was not bursty, otherwise multiple losses might affect a single packet).

12000 cells ruined in a month is still pretty gegligible.

Re:Congested links are ATM, not IP!

[dahitokiri]

4,000*30 = 120,000

Re:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[mrchaotica]

They are realizing they have two businesses- content delivery and connectivity.

Exactly, and that's what's wrong! If we simply forced content delivery and connectivity to always be performed by entirely separate, independent companies then we wouldn't have this problem.

Got your economic systems mixed up?

[PontifexPrimus]

[...]this is a quasi-socialist ISP environment, people who barely use their connections are paying for those who use the connection all the time.

I'm sorry, but I'd say asking for as much money from your customers while delivering as little of your resource as possible is capitalism, not socialism.

Re:widen the road

[zmollusc]

Nope, the solution is to narrow the road and block off side streets so that you can't route around the tailback. Also stick speed bumps everywhere.
Well, that is what happens here (UK).

Re:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[some damn guy]

That's why YouTube was so highly valued. Anyone can/will be able to have their content distributed anywhere in the world. It's a simple business model, you give us the content but don't necessarily give away ownership, we distribute it for you free, we keep all the ad revenue.

It's brilliant, because your revenue is proportional to how much you distribute the content. Low interest content generates little money, but little cost, and vice versa for the popular stuff.

It still seems like a novelty because the video quality is absolutely hideous, but a few generations from now it will be very good, and decades from now, our eyes will be the limiting factor and quality won't even need to improve further. We're basically there with audio already (too bad so many people still think 128k mp3s sound good).

This is 1.0. In the future, everyone gets their own TV show. If you get really popular (for free), you better believe you'll be able to get a cut of that ad revenue too. Why? Because You Tube is going to have a lot of competition....

Bank needs to repay you.

[freedom_india]

The bank needs to repay you the money they let Bell steal.
If a bank allows money to be withdrawn from an account of a deceased person, then the bank is liable to put the money back WITH interest and penal charges.
Once a person dies, the bank needs to legally freeze the account to prevent any deposits or withdrawals (esp. withdrawals).
Only the estate or the nominee can withdraw (not deposit) ALL the money from the account in one single operation.
Nope, the bank cannot unilaterally close and send you a check for the same. If you are the legal heir, you need to either prove by way of nomination OR successor OR court orders asking the bank to pay you the money.
The check that the bank cashed and the Direct Debit, if both happened AFTER your dad died, are not valid. In a court you WILL prevail, plus the bank has to pay a nasty fine.
But BEll cannot be held liable. You were not in a contractual relationship with Bell.
Order the bank in writing stating facts and giving them 7 days to repay you with interest.
If the bank fails to respond, file a criminal case stating fraud, and simulatenously ask the court to rule in your favor citing your dad's death certificate and date of debit.
The court usually will not want to hear from the bank because if the debit happened AFTER death then any legal arguments are moot.
Get a court order making the bank pay you.
If you want to play real nasty, send the order by ordinary post undistinguishable from other letters (after all banks hide their rate increases in same way) to the bank's registered office (NOT the branch). Those morons at the registered office will have no clue and throw away the letter. (Assuming you have given a deadline to pay you from date of letter do next steps).
Approach the court again whining pitifuly (yes it pays) that the Holy Judge's order was disobeyed (get the same judge) by an unruly bank.

The judge will ask what you want to do next.

This is most important: Now the culpability of the bank is established as defying court orders (your money now plays a second role. Judges don't like to see anyone defying their orders). Request the court grants you permission to seize and auction the bank's nearest branch's assets to get your money back. The judge will accept this.

Go with a sheriff and his posse to the branch, and now you are legally authorised to rob the bank. You can shut down the doors, throw out customers, restrain staff, seize cash from tills, auction PCs on the spot (better yet, arrange a few friends to be there for the auction to get bank's PCs at HUGE discounts). Sell ALL their stuff to get your money back: Remember, your goal is to first bankrupt the branch. Don't seize cash. Seize the hardware, valuable furniture anything that the bank needs to run its branch. Sell it on doorfront with sheriff standing by for a dollar or whatever you like.

The bank will try to move mountains to get the order overturned. So do it quickly, very fast. Get some 100 friends to suddenly appear, bid for the assets, and block the traffic to prevent their lawyers from reaching you to serve you a STOP SALE order they can get from a sympathetic judge.
Good luck

Re:Bank needs to repay you.

[debest]

I have mod points right now. Where is the "+1 Deliciously Evil" mod option?

Re:Bank needs to repay you.

[freedom_india]

I actually did this with my ex-banker. You would have seen a news item about 5 years ago saying someone auctioned assets of a bank because of a court order and how it was stopped by a personal guarantee by the bank president.
Yup. I did manage to sell off about 5 PCs before the bank served me with a court's injunction.
I got my order signed by a Justice of Peace -:)
And eventually i got my money back (the PCs of course were valued at $1.10 each-:))

Irrelevant

[truesaer]

The assumption seems to be that if only a small amount of the network is congested then P2P traffic is not a problem. That does not really follow. Regardless of congestion, bandwidth costs money. If they have to build out extra capacity then it might be an issue regardless of actual congestion.

I don't have much sympathy for the whining of most slashdotters on this topic. They tried traffic shaping and people had a fit. So then they started trials for metering the small percentage of bandwith hogs, and people had a fit.

If you are a heavy user of a service with limited resources, you should expect to be charged more. Deal with it.

Re:Irrelevant

[Mr EdgEy]

It's not advertised as a service with limited resources. Your costs aren't my problem. If you promise me unlimited access, that's what I get.

Re:Irrelevant

[freedom_india]

If you are a heavy user of a service with limited resources, you should expect to be charged more. Deal with it.

Limited my as$!
Bell advertises "Unlimited Internet Plans".
So can you explain, corporate shill, what "unlimited plan" is? Care to venture a guess? Probably it means unlimited plan to milk customers unlimited amount of money?
2.6% was the "whooping" traffic increase they had. And 2.6% is still less than the CEO/CFO uses to browser the "intarnet" from their Free-home-PCs.
Probably if the CEO's and CFO of Bell start paying from their pay packets for all the use they do accessing their blackberries etc., then you will see some good done.
I say, sue Bell for false advertising, perjury and convict their CEO.
 

Re:Irrelevant

[Thundersnatch]

But here's the thing: IT WAS NEVER AN UNLIMITED SERVICE, nor was it probably ever advertised as "unlimted" (at least not in the last 5 years). Your Committed Information Rate is either zero kbps or very close to it. ZERO. Read your contract, and read the updated terms and conditions they publish every so often. You can actually reject many of the changes.

For consumer internet contracts, all service is best-effort, and you pay for unlimited best-effort servcice. That means traffic shaping and capping are fair practices, as is just about anything else the ISP wants to do to make best-effort on behalf of the mass of their customers. You do not have a contract for guaranteed transit of your traffic (which costs a whole lot more).

This isn't statistical multiplexing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's overselling.

Statistical multiplexing would be "90% of the time I can satisfy the requirements of 30 people per installed line, so I'll use 30 people per line".

But with broadband now bringing people into applications that use much more bandwidth each, they haven't upgraded the size of the pipe. So it's now

"90% of the time I cannot satisfy the requirements of 30 people per line, so I'll blame P2P and throttle everyone".

Which isn't statistical multiplexing: they KNOW they don't have enough bandwidth, but supplying more would cut into profits.

In comparison...

[SpzToid]

In comparison, the tiny Netherlands with all that cheese and those cows seems to have a lot of consumer ISPs to choose from. Here's a partial list:

Alice Comfort
Argeweb
12move
Abel Telecom
CompuServe
Concepts
DDS
Domestix
EDPnet
Fiberworld
Filternet
GreenOnline
HCC Net
Het Net
InterNLnet
KPN ADSL
Orange
Planet ADSL
Primus
Qfast ICT
Quicknet
Scarlet
Solcon
Speedlinq
SpeedXS
Studenten.net
Supersnel ADSL
Tele2 ADSL
The One Hosting
Tiscali ADSL
TweakDSL
Unet
Vastelastenbond Internet+bellen
xsDSL
XS4ALL tip
ZIEZO.biz

Even bloody Compuserve (yes that one!) will sell you 20down / 1up ADSL for 19.95 euros a month. For another 5 euros a month they'll add PSTN phone termination and a DID. 30 euros monthly for 20 mb down is most typical now. And little traffic shaping if any, to my knowledge.

In fact providers such as XS4all make a political statement against such practices, when they can under legal and contractual agreements, as they do with their statement of privacy too.

For more complete info: http://adsl.startpagina.nl/

Re:In comparison...

[Anpheus]

You live in Europe, going by the names of those ISPs and the address you used. There's more competition there. The netherlands perhaps? I forget what .nl is.

You clearly have no experience with Canadian or US ISPs. We have no choice.

My choices, in my area, are:

Qwest DSL.
Mediacom Cable.

There is no DSL competition, there is no cable competition.

They both suck.

Re:In comparison...

[smallfries]

The GP said:

In comparison, the tiny Netherlands with all that cheese and those cows seems to have a lot of consumer ISPs to choose from.

You replied:

You live in Europe, going by the names of those ISPs and the address you used. There's more competition there. The netherlands perhaps?

Seriously, is the education system where you live really that bad? Going by the names of those ISPs and the address you used. Canada perhaps?

Re:In comparison...

[Anpheus]

Wow, total failure to read the first line of text on my part.

Not a failure of education, I assure you. I just didn't see the first line when I clicked on the post. It scrolled down partway into the list (the AJAX discussion system can scroll down too far) and I just read down from there.

Though I appreciate your hostile, troll-like response.

Re:In comparison...

[dwye]

Do you mean that all those companies run their own networks, in parallel? Wow!

Isn't that a tad wasteful, though? I mean, think of all the telephone poles it takes to carry all those wires to every neighborhood.

Re:In comparison...

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is understandable, with Holland being a tiny miniscule country as it is. Except for the things it is super-power-like. Internet penetration and infrastructure, for example. When will the USA catch up?

BTW, Canada stats much better than the USA in internet penetration as well. When will the US catch up? Good luck with that.

Re:In comparison...

[smallfries]

It caught me as amusing enough that I had to point it out. No offense intended. I thought you'd get that from the canada comment (it's in your reply) :)

Re:In comparison...

[LunarCrisis]

You live in Europe, going by the names of those ISPs and the address you used.

Really? I couldn't tell until he said that he was talking about the Netherlands, in the first sentence.

Re:In comparison...

[bryce1012]

I would guess it's probably more likely that they just don't have one government-sponsored monopoly corporation that's able to charge their competitors up the ass for access to the physical network. What a novel idea!

B.S. the initials say it all...

[Anonymous Coward]

lie number 1.
Always a fast connection...
I've never even got 50% of the speed advertised...
lie number 2
The commercials said that i would not share a Bell connection. Throttling says I do...!
lie number 3
Bell sold me UNLIMITED... ummm... Caps and Throttling makes that a lie...

The bosses at Bell Sympatico should keep their BS to themselves... The shit does hit the fan and their lips are brown...!!!

Re:B.S. the initials say it all...

[digitrev]

Well, apparently they've managed to work the language so that unlimited really means unlimited connectivity, not unlimited download/upload. It's a filthy lie that they get away with because of ambiguity of language and those 10 pt white font legal disclaimers on the bottom of their commercials. Even though they know damn well that Joe Sixpack is going to think unlimited means how much he can do with his connection. I hate their bullshit, and I'm going to sign on with Teksavvy when I finally move out.

Peering is the issue

[Daver297]

While its been a few years since I have been with a ISP.. I would 100% say its not a issue of their core bandwidth, its a issue of their peering Ratios

Really?

[BlackCobra43]

Hydro-Quebec seems to be working out just fine here in Quebec. We wouldn't mind yet another Quebec crown company owning a monopoly :)

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously didn't hear about the last deal they made, which consists of Hydro Quebec selling an oil field for VERY little money to a private company, who in turn sold it for massive profits to foreign interests.
Check the article (French only)

Ars Technia users fail math

[bconway]

These caps are equal to 3% of a user's upload 24/7. In Comcast's area, that would be 324 MB a day for 6/1 service, or 9.7 GB a month.

These caps are much, much worse for the service offered than Comcast's rumored 250 GB cap or the actual 400+ GB cap they currently use to remove excessive users from their network today.

Re:Ars Technia users fail math

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, in the real world, higher speed and higher caps are still a better deal.

Re:Ars Technia users fail math

[smallfries]

But the Japanese don't live in a world where the files they are sharing scale up with the bandwidth. Just because Comcast bandwidth is 100x lower, doesn't mean that the Japanese are using some sort of super internet where every file has been bulked up by a factor of a 100. It's not teh beefcake-interweb.

These caps are equal to 30Gb a day. Yes, it's a small percentage of their burst speed, but that is because they have huge bandwidth on the edge of the network, and a much smaller ratio between the capacity of the backbone and the capacity of the leaf nodes.

As a comparison, if I lived close enough to my exchange to get perfect ADSL2 I could have a 2.6Mb uplink. If I saturated that link 24 hours a day then I could still only upload 28GB a day. Are you trying to tell me that the deal in Japan is worse because it's a smaller percentage of the peak rate?

Re:Ars Technia users fail math

[Free the Cowards]

How to argue on slashdot:

1. Use your gut to decide what position to take.
   
2. Rationalize until you have some vaguely convincing math-like argument that justifies that position.
   
3. Profit!
   

Grandparent has this down cold, but you clearly need some more work.

Re:Ars Technia users fail math

[smallfries]

Thankyou. It's nice to know that I'm still too rational for slashdot. I'll work on it some...

Re:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[mpe]

If we simply forced content delivery and connectivity to always be performed by entirely separate, independent companies then we wouldn't have this problem.

Instead there would probably be different problems :)

WTF???

[Zero__Kelvin]

" ... prove its claim that P2P throttling was having a negative impact on its network." [emphasis added]

I think they mean P2P is having a negative impact, and throttling is their solution, no? It is hard for me to take seriously a writer who gets the fundamental facts wrong in the first paragraph.

ying3

[ying3]

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One more thing...

[symbolset]

The real problem with bandwidth in the US today is astonishingly margins. Comcast et. al. make billions a month serving their high margin dense customers and neglect the less dense rural customers. They do this because the corporate margin number is of extreme importance to the CEO and the stockholders as it inflates the value of the stock. That means they companies are leaving money on the table with the lower margin (but quite profitable) rural customers because serving them would give them more profits net but lower margins as a percentage of investment. Likewise with technology improvements -- if they can't get more money for more bandwidth, they won't build it even if the only change is a $10,000 switch that replaces a $100,000 switch and works 10 times as fast. They've already paid for the $100,000 switch and made millions on it. They could replace it with the newer cheaper, just as reliable tech but they won't because people won't pay extra for the extra bandwidth. They can afford to do this because their monopolies are enforced by law and new competitors that could build out a more modern infrastructure would have to drag new fiber at horrendous cost.

This is classic monopoly economics. To defeat it we need to defeat the monopoly by having public agencies tell them "if you won't serve these customers, we will."