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Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow?
Anti-Globalism writes "The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth, sometimes more, during peak hours. While these 'power users' are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."
See? First post
just the journalists who try to write about it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I have on occasion used Firefox plugins that filter out most banner ads. I've found my pages load about 70% faster. I watch the little status line at the bottom of Firefox and I've found that most of my "waiting" time is for advertisements.
I've also found DNS to be slow for some reason. Things that aren't cached on the local machine slow browsing down significantly (something else adverts contribute to).
Of course the people who just leave P2P applications running non-stop are a bit of a pain.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Is this a US phenomenon? My Internet seems to be pretty much as fast as always and I don't do filesharing. The reason Granny waits for her webpages is because she still uses dial-up and webpages have become increasingly dial-up unfriendly.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
A contract cuts both ways. People were ranting about personal responsibility when that family got hit by $18k roaming charges a few stories ago by AT&T. Companies need to hold themselves to the contract too, they signed the contract saying they'll provide a service under the given terms, so when a user takes advantage of it they have nothing to complain about. If they have oversold their capacity that is solely the ISPs problem.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Yeah! Damn all those people slowing down *my* internet by using the bandwidth that they paid for! Damn them for cutting into ISPs profit margins. People who expect to get what was advertised to them and what they paid for are nothing but dirty rotten thieves, stealing from the pockets of poor, disadvantaged company directors the world over!
Gadgetoid.com - Gadgets & Games Journalism
Yes? Is this astounding, breathtaking news?
I would have guessed the ratio closer to 20-80, but still?
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Because of me!
Does it irk anyone else that the teaser blurb that appears on Slashdot for articles gets tagged with something like "Anti-Globalism writes" when it was a sentence taken from the first paragraph of the article? It makes it seem like Anti-Globalism wrote that sentence himself, when he obviously didn't unless he's Chris Wilson, the author of TFA.
I don't have any grannies of my own left, but I have no reason to believe that every otherwise canny granny has a slower connection than you or that she hasn't discovered the delights of FasterFox or premium service or whatever! Try to give up the annoying and patronising stereotypes...
Back to the point: it's called the tragedy of the commons. Shared and limited resources are misused by the greedy or impatient or desperate.
Perhaps we'll need peak-hour kWh and MB charges to help persuade people to use those resources sensibly and fairly, and not be too anti-social.
I just paid 3x more than baseline up front, negotiated with my ISP, volunteered an AUP for my own usage, and I down-regulate my traffic when there is Net congestion, and hey-ho! I'm not disappointed with my service.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
It's ok to blame the users for clogging up your pipes if the pipes you have a already the best in the world.
But it's not ok to do so when there're plenty of people in the likes of France, South Korea, Japan and Hogn Kong who're already having 100Mbps+ at home, at a much cheaper price, and not-so-clogged up.
This report is perhaps based on a false premise. While it may be true that 5% of all the users are using 50% of the bandwidth, that's only because the rest of us aren't as demanding. Were we so demanding, TCP, which is what most of the world runs on, would provide more of a fair share. It wouldn't be perfect, mind you, but particularly with WFQ, if you're using more there is a larger chance that your traffic will drop. This doesn't hold true with UDP-based applications that are less friendly to the network.
Also, where is that 50% measured? Is it on peering points or is it at the access point? If it's at the access point then (A) it could be p2p traffic that never transits a backbone and (B) some of that traffic could be dealt with by making arrangements with content providers like Akamai to bring the content closer.
it's most of us who are not gamers and online video file sharers. I just don't have the time to do those things. I find a lot of other things (including my research) exciting enough. And I find my internet access annoyingly slow (particularly the latency), during weekends and other times when I expect it to be normal or good.
If the story that it is due to 5% of the users is true, I feel it should be set right.
Nah, it's more because website designers still haven't figured out how to make compact, fast-loading websites. They swear by flash, while we swear at it. They forget to set content expiry properly so your browser reloads all their little images every time you revisit their site (yes Greg Dean of Real Life Comics, I'm looking at you). They consider their site to be "unfinished" if its frontpage is below 500 kbyte.
That site mentioned in the article, ancestry.com, has 59,6 kbyte of HTML, 56,99 kbyte of CSS, 64,88 kbyte of images and a whopping 314,39 kbyte of scripts, totalling 495,91 kbyte. And most of the non-image content isn't even compressed! No wonder it's slow.
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
How incredibly obvious and transparent is this ad? This is not a problem for DSL providers because they have bandwidth limiting built in to their service. Only cable has the problem described where there is bandwidth sharing going on.
Comcast is appealing the FCC ruling with the courts. I hope they lose, but it is pretty easy to imagine that they will win by arguing something stupid like "we provide the internet and we need to control it."
In my general travels through news sites and places like Slashdot, a good portion of waiting comes from the third-party embedded ads. When I hit some Slashdot pages, it can literally take 5-8 or so seconds (count it out - that's slow for a page that's largely text) to show the content. For most of that time, the status bar is flickering with action from one of Doubleclick or Mediaplex's (I think) ad servers.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Flat Rate...
Deleted
My three gig movies and online games work just fine ...
In other words: Build better infrastructure, all the providers try to sell broadband HD content and Triple-Pay. How can they complain about 5% using what they are trying to market to everybody? Hypocrites.
If the premise of the article is right let's cut the Internet connections of that 5% of power users. We end up using only 50% of the available bandwidth and ISP paying more than they should. I bet that they'll quickly sell the unused bandwidth (it's called cost reduction and profit maximization) and poor granny will start waiting for Ancestry.com again.
The Internet will never be fast because ISPs will give us no more than what we need to use it in a more or less acceptable way.
By the way, how it comes that poor granny's connection is slow while power users play WoW without problems?
... but I can still get all my porn just fine! Oh Yeah!!! :)
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Have online games started using large amounts of bandwidth (instead of trying to minimise traffic in the interests of latency) since I last played a new game?
Or are they just something that the aforementioned Granny doesn't do, and therefore probably antisocial?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
It means the ISPs haven't been bothered to fix the pipes. The ISPs should be able to provide for both users seeding their BT files, and Granny with her Windows 98 machine trying to find out what great-great-grandma did for a living. I can understand, perhaps, if users were downloading the Wikipedia database dump every hour (and then mirroring it) but we're not in 1997 any more.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Because of improperly implemented ad or site statistics scripts. I cannot even begin to count how many times I have thought a site was being served up slow due to network congestion only to see "waiting for doubleclick/google/etc" in the status bar...
Monopolies and their typical game of artificial scarcity. It seems that most countries each have their own token monopoly telecom giant who is holding everyone back so they can make an extra few million $ while selling back something that is relatively cheap for them to produce at a much higher cost.
so granny and ancestry needs to upgrade their connection to the great big cloud
This is all bullshit.
The technological ability to push data through every larger curve is on a logarithmic curve just like everything else in science.
The one problem is cost of roll out and really is pretty damn cheap in large population centers. The problem is the urban areas which happen to be a lot of places in large countries like the US.
If the government subsidized the cost of running line far out into rural areas with the Internet, as it does with TV and Phone service, we'd be seeing the social benefit immediately.
There is absolutely no reason why we shouldn't wire up every home with 100Mbit up and down and have the backbone that can support all that speed at full duplex within 10 years. The technology is there and the one time cost is little more then wiring and routing equipment.
It's called "The Tragedy of the Commons" Allow everyone unlimited use of a shared resource, and some people will abuse it, reducing the utility of the resource to every else. The only solution is to charge those who use more bandwidth proportionately more. This is Economics 101 stuff, and I've been saying this for years now.
The reason Granny waits for her webpages is because she still uses dial-up
The reason Granny still uses dial-up is because the broadband providers haven't reached her house yet. Instead of spending money on rolling copper or fiber into less-urban areas, the providers are spending all their spare money on backbone transit for bandwidth-hogging customers' packets.
If we let ISP's vilify a minority as an excuse for their aging copper-wire infrastructure, instead of forcing them to upgrade it to European/Asian standards, then their greed with stifle and choke the last growth market the USA has: intellectual property. Good luck selling your movies and music online if downloading is strictly rationed.
I think poor granny needs her computer and/or internet service checked or upgraded.
I'm one of those 'power user' and even when I'm maxing out my pipe with non-interactive* stuff I still get good browsing speeds. I don't see how my downloading habits can affect granny but not me.
*interaction starts once the download has completed, so it's irrelevant here.
If 5% are consuming 95% of the bandwidth, then clearly the best option is to run a bittorent tracker, edonkey, gnutella nodes and an ftp mirror all the time. Might as well get my money's worth while I'm paying for something they are using.
The sooner the bandwidth is used up, the sooner a sane pricing model will appear. So, fuck you all, I'm off to mirror ibiblio and anything else I can think of.
Deleted
Anti-Globalism writes "The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth, sometimes more, during peak hours. While these 'power users' are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."
Wow. Awesome. About two lines of text but they pack two dimensions of bias. While I"m sure most here will descent into the discussion with the 5% vs. 50% angle
Anti-Globalist(?) also attempts to convey the idea that somehow text traffic is obsolete / desired to a lesser degree - i.e. "granny" in a pursuit of a topic most find extremely boring.
...and it couldn't be any other way. Even if they built 100 times the bandwidth we have now, it would still be slow. Like George Carlin's routine about people buying stuff that fills up their home, and when it's full they move all their stuff to a bigger house, so they can buy.. more.. stuff.
With no new source of packets the era of cheap internet communications is coming to an end.
"We need to build a new Internet based on sustainable technology. We can no longer depend on an unending stream of cheap, easily-obtain packets to fuel the Internet. Plant-based packets, while still expensive and difficult to obtain are the only way to go if we are to move confidently into the twenty-first century", said movie star and technology guru Sean Penn.
Some critics maintain that recently-discussed slowing of the Internet is due to the escalating cost of packets but others maintain that the slowing is due to artificial constraints engineered by OPEC - the Organization of Packet Exporting Countries - in a bid to seize control of the Internet.
"For too long the wealthy nations of the west have treated the Internet as if it belonged to them when in fact, without a steady supply of cheap packets the Internet would not exist." said H.E. Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawian minister of Trade and Private Sector Development. "Malawian packet mines are too valuable a national resource to allow them to be exploited by wealthy, western nations where they are used to download pornography and pirate music."
Dr. Mutharika went on to outline a proposal to trademark high quality, natural, Malawian packets to differentiate them from the cheaply-made and inferior Chinese packets that are flooding the market.
"Consumers should be aware that cheap, artificial packets can clog the Internet's pipes and can easily cause modems to explode violently", Dr. Mutharika warned. "Natural packets are safe to use and protect the pristine beauty of the natural Internet."
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Big ISP don't pay for backbone transit, they have peering agreements. And content providers pay for the transit, in cash and service, it's spelled A.K.A.M.A.I.
You've fallen prey to the corporate american bullshitocracy. They are trying to lobby and lawyer their way out of a technical problem instead of investing in network and equipment.
My ISP did that, they have zero caps whatsoever, they make shitloads of money. It's not in the US, obviously.
I have no reason to believe that every otherwise canny granny has a slower connection than you or that she hasn't discovered the delights of FasterFox or premium service or whatever!
Some grannies live in parts of the United States where "premium service" is ISDN.
Have the australians moved to america....
She's being victimized by the file traders! And we, the ISPs, are powerless to help! If only there were some way to make Granny's internet connection higher priority. Some kind of . . . service quality protocol. Quality of Service, perhaps. We could call it that. But no such thing exists, of course, because if it did, we'd be using it by now. And we aren't. So.
But even if it did, it would rely on web traffic being easily recognizable. And it isn't! It's not like virtually all web traffic goes through a specific "port" or anything. And it's not like HTTP connections are easy to check for and flag as "higher priority". The technology *just doesn't exist*, and can never be developed. Ever.
And even if that all existed, well, of course it would be impossible to implement it! For reasons I don't feel like explaining right now. Just trust me. And I suppose we *could* just buy more bandwidth but, whoops, that takes too much money! Money which we've spent on . . . uh, we just don't have it. That's right. We don't have it. It's . . . I think someone else has it. Ask them. I guess, instead of solving the problem, we'll just have to whine at the lawmakers until they prop up our badly-designed business. Wait that's not right. Let me try that again. We'll have to complain in news articles and attempt to villainize our customers who foolishly took our contracts as contracts. No, no, no, that's not right at all. Man I just can't think of the proper solution right now.
Well, to make a long story short, we're too cheap to solve the problem QUICK LOOK OVER THERE it's an elderly person who's being inconvenienced by those damn hoodlums again! Think of your grandmother!
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
seems to be. Ten years ago i look enviously at the US because of the connectivity they had. Today i have a 18/1 mbit dsl connection without caps for 30 Euros/month and just have to wonder what happened over there (probably nothing)
Realize, though, the population densities are much, much higher in the Asian countries you mentioned (>300 people/km^2) as compared to the US (31 people/km^2), which likely makes it much, much more cost effective to connect all of those people together at high rates. I, for one, would rather have slow internet than 10 more people per every one person who already lives in the square km around me (I live in a suburban area).
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
...had used those billions the government gave them to beef up their networks like they were supposed to, instead of just pocketing it, they wouldn't be in this mess now.
Akamai and friends. Costly service, but delivers (or is at least supposed to deliver) that much.
Google has its own infrastructure to achieve the same kind of thing.
I have a 30/10 mbit fiber connection for 55 USD a month. Bit more than you pay, even after taking into account that American money is almost worthless, but it's also faster. My last connection was 15/1.5 for 45 USD a month. These are home based connections, nothing out of the ordinary. 30/10 was provided by Verizon and 15/1.5 was Time Warner.
It would be instructive to see distribution data for monthly bandwidth use. Tentatively, I have no problems with ISPs reallocating bandwidth above some threshold as a toll road.
Some kind of . . . service quality protocol. Quality of Service, perhaps. We could call it that. But no such thing exists, of course, because if it did, we'd be using it by now.
What's to stop every file sharer from turning up the QoS for all packets?
It's not like virtually all web traffic goes through a specific "port" or anything.
Especially now that so many applications are tunneled over HTTP or HTTPS in order to coast through corporate firewalls.
The real news, not much discussed, is the way that "Major ISPs" are being absorbed into the old telecoms cartels. This news is not about bandwidth at all. It's about turning the heat up on the pirates by blaming them for bad service (which as many posters have explained, is a bogus argument). The attacks on "bad users" of the Internet is part of a campaign to filter, lock down, and shackle the Internet so that it stops being a threat to the telcos and the music / movie / TV industries.
Once the telco/ISPs have isolated the "pirates" as the bad guys, it's simple to keep stretching the border between "good" and "bad" use of the Internet until we're back in 1980 where every thing one did with a telco line had to be sanctioned and paid for, or one was disconnected.
It's about banning VoIP, banning streaming, banning anything that is not part of the profitable communications and media cartel system.
Anyone in doubt at the reality of ISPs + old media vs. the Internet should be aware of the Telecoms Package (4 directives) going through the European Parliament this month. Not nice stuff.
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I'd love to have an ISP that could do something like the following:
1. My hardware identifies traffic streams as 'Interactive', 'Download', and 'Bulk Download'. 'Interactive' is the obvious ssh, rdp, etc traffic. 'Download' is for stuff I want sooner rather than later, 'Bulk Download' is for stuff that I don't necessarily want so fast (eg torrents).
2. I get 'Interactive' traffic at full speed for the first 10MBytes and then at a much lower speed after that, eg a Token Bucket Filter. The 'much lower speed' is to stop customers just classifying their p2p data as 'Interactive', but the initial 10Mbyte bucket ensures that you'll never hit it otherwise.
3. I get 'Download' traffic at full speed (lower than interactive though) for the first (say) 200MBytes and then at a lower speed after that. I'm not sure how well TBF's scale up to the bucket being 1GByte though...
4. I get 'Bulk Download' traffic at whatever is left over after other customers 'Interactive' and 'Download' traffic is taken into account, up to my monthly download limit (eg 20G or whatever)
This only happens on the customer end of the ISP's business, and because it is done in agreement with the customer (eg the customer nominates the tier of their traffic) I don't think it breaks net neutrality in any way. If an ISP did this sort of thing without customer agreement then the deal is off...
I've done this sort of TBF shaping (eg with a big bucket) on a smaller scale at the local library and it works really really well. They offer free 802.11abg wireless that works at the full 20mbits/second off of the DSL for the first 10MBytes, and then shapes back to 200kbits/second after that. People coming in to surf, chat, or update facebook etc never notice the limit, but anyone using p2p gets shaped down almost immediately. No deep packet inspection or anything required at all. Having the tiers though would mean that your interactive traffic doesn't suffer just because you hit your download limit...
STOP FILTERING MY TUBES
Not only are those ads a major slowdown, but the absurd amounts of Javascript used these days for various, often unused or even useless "features", are also slowing down websites. And that's *not* because Javascript executes slowly, but simply because all those scripts have to be downloaded as well. Often they are placed inside the body, so they have to be downloaded before the browser can render the site! So speedier Javascript engines are *not* goint to fix it.
Try for yourself: disable Javascript in your browser and surf the web. The effect of this on my Symbian mobile is even more dramatic. And well-built websites do not depend on Javascript to function properly, so disabling Javascript by default is a good option.
I'm in Germany and yes, parts of the internet are slow. DNS can take ages (upwards of fifteen seconds aren't unusual on a slow day) and on slow days I seem to spend most of my waiting time between the DNS lookup and "Waiting for XYZ...". It fluctuates heavily and doesn't seem to correlate with heavy usage periods - for example, right now everything's fine even though it's sunday afternoon.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
This must be an ISP issue, not the infrastructure as a whole. Heck, I'm fetching most of my packets across an ocean, and most pages still load virtually instantly.
> Is this a US phenomenon?
It's a personal problem.
> My Internet seems to be pretty much as fast as always and I don't do filesharing.
Same here (in the rural US. Of course, I also don't download any ads.
> The reason Granny waits for her webpages is because she still uses dial-up and webpages
> have become increasingly dial-up unfriendly.
You're right, but granny still doesn't think broadband is worth the extra cost. She's willing to wait a few minutes to see the pictures of the grandkids.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Reality check: I'm running P2P, a news crawling application, and half watching a video on hulu while I browse. My pages are loading just fine. Am I supposed to believe that other folks on my provider's pipe are having slowness while I myself am not? Yeah right. If your internet is slow it is because your provider sucks, plain and simple.
Ah, I guess I'd have to switch to my ISPs DNS server in order to find out if it makes a difference. I run my own DNS server since ages and never saw a need to switch back. (Yeah, a full power one, not merely a forward cache DNS)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Bandwidth hogs are sucking all this bandwidth playing online games? I have never seen *any* game use more than a small percentage of even the crappiest dsl or cable connection. 5kb/sec would be about average.
The internet is slow because tards like the poster (Anti-Globalism) don't believe in free markets, or anarcho-capitalism. So they regulate markets, which reduces competition, financial incentives and innovation.
The same people complain about ISP's starting to limit their customers to 250gb per month, or complain about business doing things to stay competitive, such as shaping (Net Neutrality?) and similar.
There are a whole host of problems which lead to shortages in markets (or more accurately where total surplus (excluding government surplus) is not maximized) when you regulate markets.
I just find it funny that the same people who complain about the problems, are the ones causing them with their control (through government) of the system.
Want to know why?
It's because of you!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
"When I hit some Slashdot pages, it can literally take 5-8 or so seconds (count it out - that's slow for a page that's largely text) to show the content"
.. cause it's waiting .. waiting .. waiting for doubleclick.net and the script to do stuff in the background. By which time I've lost interest and moved on. I recall someone invented a method of producing static html pages from dynamic content, why are more people not using it?
Slashdot, isn't the only culprit. As someone else here said, it's down to very badly designed sites. For instance why does the whole page need to reload just to view a 4x3 rectangular text box
http://img357.imageshack.us/img357/3364/unresponsivescriptky2.png
davecb5620@gmail.com
I hope she has tech-savvy kids, because I've seen people send 5-Meg photos directly copied from their camera. That's gotta hurt, if it doesn't bounce on the recipients inbox. For grannies here, DSL is still an advantage, simply because they'd pay per minute for dial-up. Downloading those pictures then comes down expensive too...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Bacause the ISPs choke back bandwith to the domestic consumers during business hours and inject fake reset packets to disrupt peer-to-peer systems.
davecb5620@gmail.com
is the potential to lower revenue for the ISP - most people, as the article pointed out, don't use anywhere near the cap and so would benefit from cheaper prices. If enough went to a lower tiered price, ISP's would reduce revenue and have little incentive to upgrade the infrastructure because:
a) they aren't getting as much money which reduces the return on a large capital investment; and
b) the heavy users are paying more which means the either slow down their use or pay a lot each month.
At some point the economics of file sharing becomes bad - it's cheaper to buy the stuff on a tangible medium than get it via file sharing - whether it's a rented or purchased movie/song/file or a pirated one.
Will that stifle commerce - to some extent but most people don't d/l that heavily so there is a lot of room for growth with the 95% that are way below the caps, and there are delivery mechanisms for high bandwidth things such as movies already in place (Video on Demand via cable for example) that can deliver the in a way that the product pays for bandwidth separate from internet access.
Finally, caps aren't a new idea - in the day of dial up they came via hourly costs or limits rather than bits n bytes but still metered usage.
I think that we need to go to more fiber, the question is how to pay for it. As for comparisons to Asia / Europe - one challenge in the US is the population density is a lot less, so each mile of fiber has less potential revenue associated with it.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I wasn't aware a few megabytes/hour constituted being a 'power user'. Why do online games always get mentioned in the same sentence as people who download 4 gigabyte movies every day?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Granny is retired ... she has all the time in the world ... I don't use P2P personally, but I don't particularly care if Granny has to wait a few extra seconds for ancestry.com to load (or any other site, for that matter).
can still result in perceivable slowdowns.
Seriously, why do we need a bloated, plodding DHTML frontend on a glorified forum? Between that and the ever-increasing ads, the user experience is really starting to suck lately. Please stop.
And 9/10 those 5 meg pictures were taken on digital cameras with shit optics and look like utter crap, but the camera manufacturer added a whole bunch of interpolation to boost the resolution in order to make it sound like it was so awesome, "OMG, 5 megapixels for less than $100! I rule the school!"
Monstar L
Who is this Timothy guy who's been posting really bad news lately? Most of the news from this guy is redundant and meaningless. Why has the mods allowed this to happen?
"Big ISP don't pay for backbone transit, they have peering agreements. "
And obviously the upstream bandwidth is free. Remember someone is always paying even if it isn't you directly.
"And content providers pay for the transit, in cash and service, it's spelled A.K.A.M.A.I"
Not everyone uses akamai. And like I said someone pays the bills one way or another even if you directly don't pay. Why's that a hard concept for this forum to grasp?
If you filter out all those adverts then you'll do a lot fewer DNS lookups every time you view a page.
It's adverts and multimedia which make the internet feel slow because they create many extra connections, DNS lookups, etc.
Javascript too, sometimes I go to apage with a video on it which is blocked by noscript and I give up clicking "temporarily allow XXX" before I get to the video. It's just not worth it.
Scripts from a dozen sites, adverts from a dozen others, three or four flash animations....
"There's your problem", as Mythbusters would say.
And the solution is a thing called "noscript".
No sig today...
I have Time Warner, and when we moved into our house I was disgusted by how slow websites were. Then I discovered that TW's DNS server blow, so I stopped using them. Instant speedup.
Fast-forward about 2 years, and TW is pushing the fact that they're up to 10Mbit, and 15bit if you want to pay for the "turbo" service. Yet I'm not getting much more than 1Mbps from them. The solution: my cablemodem was too old to handle the firmware updates they were pushing to upgrade everyone to 10Mbps.
If you're a cable customer and not happy with your performance, check speedtest.net and make sure you're not getting what you're paying for. Then get the modem replaced.
You know the funny thing about your argument is I've found most people don't actually read their contracts. They just go on and on about "I thought it said...".
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I know... tried to explain that to someone yesterday. Wouldn't listen. *deep sigh*
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
What exaflood?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only thing slow around here is my upload speed. And thats only slow for the evil p2p.
Maybe your isp is crap. Maybe you don't know what the hell you are doing. Maybe your pc is so loaded with spyware its eating all your bandwidth.
Maybe the pages you are trying to view are huge craptastic flash ad filled garbage.
But the most likely explanation is you're an idiot. Sorry. Can't fix stupid.
If i am sucking up all your bandwidth with my use, well then you shouldn't have oversold.
Pretty soon most everyone will be sucking more and more bandwidth due to on demand movies, music, VoIP, etc. Better get the infrastructure fixed and stop bitching. The ISPs make plenty of money to do it.
If the gas company tried this garbage they would be shut down in a heartbeat.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It should be no surprise that a version of the Pareto principle applies to Internet usage. It isn't allocation of "wealth", per se, but bandwidth is still a (more or less) finite resource.
Now, it COULDN'T be the incessant advertising - pop-ups, SPAM and banners - that clog the 'netwaves, could it???
Ancestry.com is probably slow because its gotten more popular and doesn't have the server capacity to meet demand.
Or maybe the server-side code is ineffecient.
Or maybe they skimped on their bandwidth costs.
Or maybe they're using an ad network that is slow (this one happens ALL THE TIME), and its just causing Ancestry.com to have the perception of being slow when its really not.
With all the likely reasons for any given website to be slow, the likelihood of it being because I'm downloading a World of Warcraft patch are pretty remote. The reality is that just like "stuff" in a house, bandwidth usage will expand to fill all available space.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I dont know about you guys, but i remember dl'ing stuff on bbs's at 14.4, 9600, 1200, etc.
That was many years ago.
Why is it so fucking hard for an ISP to get the concept of computers? SPEED MATTERS. Every fucking day... SPEED matters. This is a speed race.
ISP's are complaining and whining about high bandwidth use, like i was whining about my 286 not being fast enough. Well.. maybe the ISP's should do what i did then... UPGRADE.
Technology doesnt get slower... it gets faster. Thats the nature. ISP seem to think this doesnt apply to them. If they cant keep up, then just say it. That way your stock holders can invest in REAL service providers, instead of greedy, milk the old network to death, fuddy duddies that just dont get this whole "computer thing"
They never did anyways.
Your connection will be as fast as the slowest link.
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
oh my GOD this took for EVER to load! I can't believe anyone puts up with how slow this god damned internet thing is!
.25sec?
End sarcasm
Seriously, who out there is infuriated with slow internet speeds? I have the ability to stream realtime movies (via netflix) without hassle. The last time I recall my internet connection was 'frustratingly' slow was back when I paid $20 a month for dialup and it took 10 minutes each day to download my email. Needless to say, things are a bit better today. So, by a show of hands, who here is outraged that slashdot.org took 1.5sec to load instead of the optimal
What is granny doing online, anyway?
I watch the little status line at the bottom of Firefox and I've found that most of my "waiting" time is for advertisements.
The personal experience of myself and countless other users concurs : Most of the waiting is due to downloading flash monstrosities used by ads. Complete with annoying blinking title, stupid music and sometimes even embed video.
I think the web would be a much more supportable place if flash could just manage to die. ISP are always pointing to the "Torrent" scapegoat.
But probably if "Adblock plus"-like plug-ins were more popular on browsers (or even better, if content provider started to use much lighter textual ads like googe - but whom am I fooling ? this is never going to happen) the bandwidth usage would probably drop significaly.
Well, all that. And virus.
I'm ready to bet that at least 75% of times when Joe 6-pack bring his computer to technical service "because it is really slow and un responsive these days", or even more accurately (and worse) each time Joe decides to buy a new computer because the last one is starting to be a bit slow and crash-prone, the unstabilities and slowdowns are due to the computer being member of at least 3 bot nets, with a dozen of rogue process running in the background and spitting "p3n!s enl@rgmentz" mails, recording every keystroke, injecting pop-ups for "online casino and m0rtgage and hammering every IP within range trying to propagate.
That's also why multi-core CPU are going to be big hit in the near future on the desktop. Not that reading web pages and writing "lol" in MSN requires tremendous processing power. But the average users will finally be able to use their machine even with all the crap running on them.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Um... Do you really think the 5% statistic would change? If so, you clearly don't understand people...
Humans use a resource until it is depleted. Doesn't matter what it is.
Here's a video you should watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM1x4RljmnE
The answer is a resounding "no" BTW.
Deleted
5% of users using 50% of bandwidth? Isn't that like 10% of the population controlling 90% of the wealth? I figured the Suits would probably laud the "industriousness" of the filesharing users for being the pioneers in this Tragedy of the Commons. How about this: I'll use less bandwidth when the millionaire C-levels re-distribute a reasonable portion of their salaries to the mail-room clerks and entry-level positions.
First post !
The internet isn't slow. At least it isn't in Europe or Asia. It's cheap, unlimited, and fast.
It may be slow, expensive and limited in the US, but last I checked the US weren't the Internet.
In an ideal world I would therefore be in favour of traffic metering. One in which ISPs offer cheap subscriptions with a low bandwidth and a low traffic cap (as long as you don't want to download videos or music you'll do fine with 1-2Gb per month). Another one with, say, a higher-speed connection 5 Gb. a month plus a small fee per Mb.
Only ... there is one fly in the ointment. We don't live in an ideal world, and ISPs are profit maximizers that often don't face any real competition in any given area. In addition the information we have about "excessive" traffic comes from ISPs, and they are notoriously less-than-candid about the precise performance of their network (for obvious reasons). If given the opportunity to meter traffic without anyone checking up on how they do that, ISPs will happily gauge the consumer and give nothing back. Now lay off the righteous indignation. They wouldn't *be* profit maximizers if they didn't have that tendency, Ok?
I would be willing to pay per Mb. if I somehow had a guarantee that I wasn't being fleeced. Now information from ISPs about what's causing the problem just isn't satisfactory because it may well be counter to their commercial interests to be truthful. Again ... spare me the righteous indignation. Commercial entities aren't about being truthful, they're about making a profit. They can be kept honest through enough competition or through oversight, but through little else.
So if we could get an independent assessment of network capacity, network load, and how the infrastructure is being paid for, we could see what the real bottleneck is and decide how to pay for that (instead of trusting ISPs to handle the problem). Because we're not the only ones who'll have to pay. If consumers are the car-drivers of the internet, companies that do internet adverts and providers of (non-free) content are its fleet operators.
I think that approximately the same holds for traffic shaping, but with vastly greater possibilities for abuse by ISPs and content providers. Again, it's possible to implement it in ways that benefit the consumer, and it's possible to implement this in ways that fleece them and sell out to vendors of proprietary sites and / or protocols. And who can we trust to give us a reasonable deal? When we're not even allowed to see what they're doing?
To give a small example: I understand that streaming video material puts a heavy burden on a connection, but I don't understand why P2P connections do the same. I have a broadband connection which I used e.g. to downloaded 2 Gb Linux distros in an hour and a half directly from the server (using HTTP) and in 10 hours during the night using P2P. Guess which option causes the greatest band-width hit.
So I'm not quite ready to believe the contention that it's P2P traffic that's causing the problem, despite what ISPs say. What I do know is that my ISP throttles HTTP downloads after a few MBs. The download speed starts high and then falls off after a few seconds, and even more after a few minutes. I don't believe that they throttle P2P traffic since each stream is limited by the upload speed of the peers, which is a lot lower than my download speed. ISPs may at this point stand up and shout "See that's why you're hogging bandwidth!", but I don't believe it. Not when it takes 10 hours to download 2Gb. using P2P and 90 minutes using HTTP.
In short, I believe that this is one of those instances where a little government regulation would be helpful. E.g. by mandating all ISPs and Telcos to give full and truthful disclosure of their traffic volume and download rate by hour of day in total and by protocol, say at ward level. That should guarantee transparency. And its effects on competition should be bearable if every company has to do that. How about that?
Dialup here, and likely to be dialup for a long time. And I have timed it before, hard surface road, 15 minutes to an office depot one way, around 20 minutes in another direction, so can you really say that is "way out in the sticks"? I picked office depot because that is an indication of modern tech reality, a common enough store that reflects that. So think about it, that close, both directions, yet nothing but dialup offered. I certainly don't consider this to be way out in the boondocks, it is suburbia, some subdivisions, some farms, a lot of stand alone homes on big lots. No other practical options, neither the phone company nor cable will upgrade their infrastructure here, just milk out what they have. I don't know what cable criteria is, but for DSL you have to be two miles or less to their nearest box, beyond that, nothing but dialup. Across the US, that means a zillion square miles won't get broadband at all unless they get it wirelessly, and there are no cheap or even good options with wireless. There aren't even any medium priced options, just expensive and limited and if there are any hills around you are SOL unless you happen to live at the tippy top of the local highest hill. I've heard of this fabled and mythical "wimax" thing, but seeing as how I started hearing about it many years ago and it is still in the "mythical" stage I can't comment on it. I guess a few places have it...someplace..over the rainbow.
Webpages in general terms have become hideously bloated over the past few years, and if you turn javascript and images off to try and speed things up, some huge percentage of them are unusable, you don't see anything but blobs. Leave them on and it can take *minutes* for a single page to load. By far and away the worst though is flash, egads what a freaking disaster if you are on dialup. Now I don't care if web masters and sites want to use flash, just if they could provide an easy way to go to a non flash variant, that would be acceptable. But they don't for the most part. It used to be you might see a little link "skip intro" but now that is going away, they don't even bother, because they have nothing but flash on every page.
Here's a good trucks and tubes analogy though, FedEx and UPS have zero problems running an actual truck here to deliver packages, they seem to still make money overall.
They should place the javascipts at the end of the body-tag. For example I see a lot of sites have a google-analytics script at the top. That's just stupid.
New things are always on the horizon
no script
Well thankfully he's considerate enough to touch himself at night and not during peak hours. As long as he touches himself while most casual users are offline, then both him and the casual users get the most out of their connection.
> For grannies here, DSL is still an advantage, simply because they'd pay per minute for
> dial-up.
No per-minute charges here. Granny can go bake a cherry pie while the pictures download.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Most of internet slowdowns are due to viruses AND antiviruses. I disabled the McAffee antivirus the other day at work, and EVERYTHING i was doing got a huge speed up.
As for viruses slowing down both the machine and the internet, you're absolutely right.
I don't know what you mean by by "end users". ISPs can traffic shape for their own customers to their hearts content, so long as they don't downgrade it unevenly based on kind or source of traffic. So no choking youTube to make their own (or their partner's) video service more attractive, and no choking Asterix to make Skype look better.
What they can't do, and this is the point of net neutrality, is to choke packets from users who are not their customers. So if YouTube get their connectivity from ISP A and you get yours from ISP B, then ISP C who just happen to link the two together should not be allowed to throttle youtube packets heading for your computer until either you or Google pay them a lot of money. There are two reasons for that.
Firstly, they already get paid to shift those packets through peering agreements and if they want more money, they can re-negotiate with the others. There's no need to hold third parties to ransom just to get a ROI. Secondly, once ISP gets away with such tactics, they'll all want to join in. Everyone will block everyone else's packets until new recripiocal arrangements are drawn up, and when the dust settles, the only Internet you'll get will be that which is sanctioned by a cartel of ISPs, at which point you might as well go back to watching TV.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
I mean, if people weren't trying to use the Internet, ISPs and telecoms would have such an easier job! Come on people, stop being so mean to the corporations, pay your bill but don't ask for any goods or services or anything silly like that...
I work for a major European ISP. Video on demand and more than a hundred channels, some of them HD (all of them being pushed to the DSLAM as multicast traffic) are making Internet usage look not so impressive anymore. With the increasing use of HD and multistream to the home as soon as we can deploy enough fiber, that difference is going to remain in the visible future. And since any significant ISP has peerings all over the place and therefore does not care that much about transit costs, I think that the scarcity argument about Internet capacity is grossly overdone - save for particular cases such as insular locales that actually suffer high transit costs.
Is that ISPs still have the same mindset they had during peak dial-up days...
Everyone only went on for short amounts of time, etc, so when broadband came along they still think that everyone is only going to stay at dial-up usage levels when the exact opposite is true.
I have no pity for 'professionals' who should have known better.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seriously, what is this, part of the paid-for grassroots campaign Comcast is running to get people to turn in their neighbors?
Where is this astroturf bullshit coming from?
I'm not afraid to say that I support net neutrality regulation. Why are opponents afraid to state their position in such clear terms?
If you're against net neutrality regulation, just say so. This manipulative bullshit has to stop.
Which part of Germany are you living in where *DNS-lookups* are slow? And what ISP do you use? I am living in NRW and Bavaria, been using Arcor, Alice and T-COM as ISP and I don't have such problems. Are you sure you haven't misconfigured something?
95% of customers are overpaying for their connections by 50%, due to their ISP selling them a service far beyond what they actually need.
I prefer that one, personally.
Comcast and the rest have no reason to deliver what they advertise, because there is no penalty if they don't. Bloody head on a post out side their HQ might get us some of that speed that overseas users enjoy every day. Apparently one of the America freedoms is to abuse your customers, and not give them another choice.
This may be a bit off topic, but I can not help but think of Robert Moses solving all of our transportation in the 1950's and 60's in NY, by building more highways. The more that were built, the worse the traffic got. Yet, for decades people have been putting up with it. He also solved the transportation issue by only spending money on transportation by automobile. This has come to haunt us now as the automobile is too expensive, and the other alternatives don't exist in enough capacity. We need to be more careful about developing a single internet and coming to rely on it now because of it's *inexpensive* nature. Dare I say, leave the Internet be and come up with another solution to this data exchange issue, in the end redundancy is not in two internet connections, but two modes of connecting. I would prefer grandma have a faster connection, she has less time to spare. Let all the power users jump on the new technology as they are willing to adapt more easily.
It's Sunday morning and my coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but what would a curve look like with 50% of it's area from [0, .95] and 50% from (.95, 1]? I mean, the long tail of people who only come in to check their email once a day or so must be enormously long, so I imagine it'd be pretty easy to land in that top 5% just by watching a few YouTube videos.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Your internets are slow? Maybe it's not the users' fault.
My ISP provides me with internet access at advertised speeds, and they don't charge me an arm and a leg. I think it has something to do with there being a working market with ISPs that actually compete with quality.
Of course, I live in Europe.
OOOOOOooooooh yeah! Hot grits!
Whooaaa!
We can now send a message around the world and back in milliseconds. Am I the only one who sees this as quite a great feat on it's own? A hundred years ago, you would have had to carry a letter physically around the world (and how long would that take?) to accomplish the same task that we can do now in under a second.
And now we're complaining that it's too slow?
A lot of the ad servers are very slow, or overloaded.
I finally started blocking some of the more obnoxious adds, and pages started appearing much faster.
I am probably going to start blocking flash soon. It doesn't play nice with Konqueror on x86_64.
DNS resolution also seems to have slowed dramatically. I should probably put a caching name server on my network finally.
Lower Saxony, using T-Com. It's not like DNS is always slow. The speed fluctuates heavily; usually lookups return nearly instantaneous, but sometimes it takes fifteen seconds before the server graces me with a response. The slow periods don't usually last long, but they are noticable. This also happens when I'm using the ORSN name servers, although ORSN has a much higher tendency to be slow.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I don't know if it could be faster or not but who cares! FIRST POST!!! Woo.
I also know it's not completely "free"; my point is that ISP traffic doesn't work as assumed by the OP, ie ISP don't get charged for every bit their subscribers use. It's the same difference between, say, having your own car and taking a cab. Both cost money to operate, but you're going to go bankrupt if you commute daily by cab, and conversely you're wasting a lot of money if you buy a car to use just once a month.
In any case, as far as P2P bandwidth hogs are concerned, and that is the point of this article, every ISP is holding the same kind of bottle. Every ISP will have roughly the same amount of P2P traffic inbound and outbound.
wasn't it a USA case that recently ruled that because the certain contract was so ambiguous and one sided that the other party was not obliged to abide by it.
Comes to this we aren't lawyers and if they give us the letters in huge print.
UNLIMITED INTERNET ,.';,.';.;,'',;',.; .KEY WORD UNDERSTAND, making contracts so complex and hard to understand and one sided is grounds to have them tossed.
and below that small print is.
only for 5 seconds of the day that we choose.
It would be a misrepresentation of the contracts spirit and a direct attempt to mislead a consumer who may or may not understand
What is needed is for more of these contracts to be taken into court and smashed to bits.
In Firefox, the DNS look-up status notice is called "Looking up...". The thing immediately preceding "Waiting for" is not that, but it is "Connecting to ..." which is an attempt to establish a TCP connection. Thus your problem may lie there moreso than in DNS. At any rate, DNS is a fundamentally slow protocol, but it should not be that slow. The fact that you are in Germany may mean that you are likely to load a wide array of sites under different ccTLDs. There have been study to show that some ccTLDs are really bad offenders at DNS organization; that is: some ccTLD authorities may refer you back and forth to various other nameservers. In one case, if I recall correctly, there was some Japanese domain name for which it took some four hundred queries to resolve. That may or may not be the case with you. Most likely it is not. What is probably happening here is that your local DNS settings, and any forwarders for which the nameservers you're using refer to, may be experiencing a permanent of temporary downtime. It isn't uncommon in the DNS for one server to go down and for people to scarcely notice since the back-ups kick in and things start working immediately, albeit slowly (might it be nice if there were some sort of metric system for DNS? though I would prefer for the security issues to be "resolved" [ahahah] first).
The other more likely thing is that you're experiencing just a general connectivity problem. If you are connected through some sort of wireless service, this is quite common. But you may be experiencing packet loss for a multitude of reasons; it is hard to say. The fact that you seem to have trouble merely connecting to hosts once they're resolved (as much as I can deduce from your post, at least) would indicate this, and it is quite common for such things to happen. DNS becomes monstrously slow in such instances, because it largely relies upon the connection-less UDP. Perhaps you should look into that side of things more closely.
Why blame our USP,s all the time? I'm on the east coast and just about all the websites here are fast, but anything across the Mississippi and the west coast is slow most of the time. Ive downloaded products from Corel with speeds mostly 300KBps and under, i have a 8Mbps or 16+ boost "Comcast" How can i blame my ISP for the speeds outside there networks or web sites that wont allow anything over 300Kbps and there are allot of them.
Jack of all trades,master of none
If too many people are sharing music and movies I say make them even worse than they are now. That will severely limit the sharing. Barry Manilow isn't dead yet, try to get him to belt out a few hundred albums a year of standards and get rid of all bandwidth clogging popular groups. Also make WoW even more boring than it is now. Spending several days trying to work through one spot isn't enough. Make people kill and skin rabid wolves for a month before they can move on. All but the hardest gamers will cry uncle and go back to their lonely PC and Xbox based games. If too much bandwidth is being eaten up by traded content the content is obviously too good. If you want some one to diet you put them on prison food not take them to Wolfgang Pucks for dinner. To save the internet we need to start a program to clone Ed Wood and put clones in charge of all the major studios. Once enough clones are ready they can take over all the writing and directing jobs and eventually all the acting jobs. Ed liked dressing in drag so his clones could even play the female parts. With enough hard work we can drive people back to books and reading. Why will this save the internet? Text files take up far less bandwidth.
It's not a US phenomenon - its a US Cable Company phenomenon. I had comcast for years and it was miserable - went to a college with a decent internet connection and it made all the difference. I moved off campus - and back on comcast - and my page loading times skyrocketed.
I move into a decent building with its own T3 and the internet is back to how you expect it.
It's got everything to do with Comcast overselling, and undersupporting their bandwidth.
I have a problem with charging per gigabyte. The thing is its very ambiguous how much gigabytes you're using. Theres nothing like an odometer to measure you're overall useage of bandwidth.
It's not ambiguous at all, it simply takes a lot of hardware to measure.
These ISPs are SERIOUSLY overselling their network capacity to create an artificial scarcity.
Bullshit. ISPs are selling you a volume limited, high bandwidth account. They simply haven't been imposing the volume caps because it's hard and costly to measure.
In other words they're being greedy and their own actions (overselling)
No, *you* are being greedy. They could simply bandwidth limit everybody to 1Mbit/sec, charge you the same amount, and be done with it. Everybody can max out their lines.
But it's preferable to give people high burst bandwidth because it's nice when pages load fast. And it's nice not to have to spend billions on bandwidth metering when statistics say that there are only a few bad apples that try to get a maxed out line on a consumer priced subscription.
So, take your pick: for your $30/month, you can get 16Mbps burst bandwidth with an (implicit) volume cap, or 1Mbps sustained. You can pick either one. You can't get 16Mbps sustained for $30/month, it's just not economically feasible yet.
and when the oil reserves run out then what , what excuse will we have , the fact is that we wont be able to afford to have a computer ON due to the electricity costs , with thrttling it means more electricity use not less.
THIS WILL BE AN ISSUE IN 5 years guaranteed as the current supply of oil versus what is needed is dwindling now as peak oil has been realized.
By time we get at the northern oil and get all the agreements down pat, it will be too late ONLY those with forward vision of renewables and solar and other tech will move on.
As gore said it may be that those of us the most advanced will have the hardest to fall and if we do nothing about it it may lead to a NON democratic society.
CAN YOU IMAGINE USA NOT BEING DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC?
Spying and gitmo aside its beginning, the migration to chinese style and facist style of govt's
What will you do when your energy cost goes up 3000% will you turn off the computer for good?
The oil industry is gouuging now cause later it wont have the political power to do it, as more governments nationalize oil and take control.
Watch that inside a ten years that same control comes back to canada.
I am inontario we invested taxpayers cash into htis country for years.
Why did albertans get a 400$ oil check and what do i get ? 2% off GST?
let me see , that measn i save a total of 10$ a year.
we should vote out the neo cons and save the world, outlaw lobbying and arrest media defender types as terrorists they are.
proof bandwidth isnt the issue
bell canada throttles the net
4PM to 2AM ( varies slightly )
30 kbytes a sec
on 5 megabit i pay for to get 200GB yes capped the unlimited would be10$ more but with teh throttle i can't get that for one.
Two , on weekdays this works the way they wish, but weekends , everyone gets up and guess what the thrttle isn't on, ( 4PM to 2AM ) i do not nor have i heard of anyone getting real slow speeds so why all a sudden is everyone on a weekend getting max speeds?
CAUSE HOLLYWOOD THREATENED TO SUE BELL CANADA
ODDLY, the 275 million from the cdr levy isnt enough they want ALL MY MONEY , and NO INTERNET USAGE.
Canada is the worst country for this greed, text messaging is SICK AS SHIT
page a text = Kbyte
each page a text they want 6 cents
1000 pages of text =160$ or about a mega byte
1000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte = 160,000$ per GB
NOW YOU FRAKING TELL ME THIS SHOULD NOT GET SOMEONE LANDED INTO A JAIL WITH HIS ARMS LEGS AND TOUNGUE CUT OUT WITH THE PHRASE
I AM TOO FRAKING GREEDY
If it weren't for the file sharers or other heavy users, ISP's would only build out enough to handle 1/10 of the bandwidth they handle now.
We should thank the file sharers for forcing ISP's to keep pushing up the total available bandwidth.
When your money devalues exponentially, it makes absolutely no sense to spend it on "quality", it makes far more sense to simply get rid of it as fast as you can on any old crap.
Deleted
The Internet appears to be slowing down because of issues at the endpoints, not the network. Many web sites are pulling in a huge number of files just to display a simple page. Javascript libraries and CSS files require extra network transactions to load, and if there's any delay at the servers for any of the components, page display stalls.
Then there are ads. It's not uncommon for a page to be hitting ten different servers related to advertising content and other dreck. Often, the page won't load until some ad comes in, and some of the ad-serving services aren't that quick.
These effects can cause browser stalls when the browser hits its connection limit or some operation with a lock set stalls halfway through waiting for a server. Then you get a brief browser freeze. Firefox seems to have this problem.
When you see delays of seconds to load a web page, that's usually the reason.
So you are trying to watching streaming video, and are calling other people bandwidth hogs???
As for my online games: while they tax the heck out of my CPU & GPU, the last time I checked the bandwidth requirements were a mere trickle ... in the kbps range (though they do seem to demand low ping times).
I think I take exception at saying it is ISP greed; I'm more inclined to say it is a small handful of P2P users that can rationalize their theft of copyrighted material as (astonishingly) helping the people they are stealing from.
Although I agree with most of what you say about bandwidth, as an ISP, you have no business judging what I send across the line. Whether it is "theft of copyrighted material" or fair use is up to me and the copyright holder.
P2P and home servers are enormously important for private and personal use, as well as for not-for-profit redistribution of CC material (e.g., Miro).
As an ISP, your best bet is to shut up and completely forget about what people transmit over your lines or you open a Pandora's box.
Slashdot readers may have noticed a large volume of submissions coming from Anti Globalism and burnitdown, many of which are being accepted onto the front page. Taken on their own, many of the articles are indeed interesting.
However, these accounts always link to corrupt.org in their submissions, a site that advertises the goal of "remaking modern society". The content is mostly boilerplate 'society is failing' rhetoric, with an emphasis on how we are out of touch with reality and hung up on "emotional abstractions" that are holding us back.
So what is this reality our society has denied? Corrupt.org is somewhat evasive on the specifics. Talking points include the impending danger of overpopulation, derision and scapegoating of people seen as inferior (who are called "parasites", "schemers" and "leeches", among other things), and why democracy doesn't work and needs to be replaced with "strong leaders".
As for the "emotional abstractions" they would like for us to dispense with, those seem pesky things like valuing human life. Corrupt betrays their intentions in their mission statement:
And no, they're not referring to prisoners guilty of capital offenses there - they're talking about dealing with the 'undesirables'. This kind of rhetoric is intended to prepare their audience to accept the idea of killing on a large scale as a solution to society's problems. They also preach thinly veiled racial separatism on the same page:
corrupt.org is registered to Throne Networks, which is run by a neo-Nazi. Throne has been behind several other fringe sites, including anarchy.net, nazi.org, pan-nationalism.org, antihumanism.com, and amerika.org. Each of these sites targets a different demographic, but the modus operandi has been the same - appeal to intellectual and philosophical outcasts who are inclined to distrust 'the system', and then reel them in with an empowering philosophy that paves the way for fascist indoctrination.
Their fake anarchist website managed to piss off some real anarchists earlier this year, who proceeded to do an excellent job of exposing them in that thread. It's long and heavily peppered with debates/flamewars about anarchism (if you find yourself tuning out after a couple pages, skip to page 10), but it documents who is behind corrupt.org along with their goals and strategy. It's really quite damning.
Of coarse, even manipulative crypto-Nazis have the right to free speech - but that doesn't mean Slashdot should be providing them with free advertising. Unlike dumb aggregaters like Digg, Slashdot is supposed to have editors. Is it really too much to ask that they remove links to neo-Nazi fronts from front page articles?
Stop hogging all the internet, you're clogging my intertubes!
Why can't they make all the power users download faster? I always think that if I drive faster I'll be using the interstate highway for a shorter duration of time, for most of my usage.
Comcast gives you "power boost" and claims you can download up to 12mbps... I'm hardly a power user, listening to internet radio and reading email and news... I'm sure somewhere in my bill I'm paying for that, but why not give it to someone that can use it instead of charging me for something I would rarely use?
*rant*Anyway, I still think with the 250gb/mo hard cap, Comcast is using shady business tactics to hurt Netflix and Xbox Live. I can stream how many 1080p movies now before my ISP shuts me off or makes me watch their terribly compressed content?*/rant*
High bandwidth lines are expensive, very expensive. Almost no one could afford one for web browsing and email. So an ISP pays for that expensive line and then shares it among hundreds or thousands of people, each paying very much less than the cost what the high bandwidth line actually costs. For this to work, people must be willing to share nicely. Too many are not sharing nicely having some rediculous notion that they are actually paying for the bandwidth available to them rather than a share of the bandwidth.
What you're describing has been the electric utility model for the last 125 or so years. If the electric utitilities provisioned their generation, transmission and distribution capacity to support simultaneous peak capacity of all their customers, electric rates would be several times higher than they are now.
Damn I wish I had some mod points, this definitely should have a +5 Interesting on it.
I'm going to throw this out there, eventhough it might be stupid. Would it be possible for someone or a group of people to become their own ISP? I know it sounds stupid but it's something I have been wondering
In other words... Because they failed to plan for the 80/20 rule, it's the customer's fault the services aren't living up to the promises. Simple fact: whether you're a restaurant, electric company, attorney etc - in most cases 20% of customers account for 80% of your business. Been that way for a long time past and likely will continue for the foreseeable future. -Frank
Yikes! I decided to look at corrupt.org... Their posision on leadership is quite frightening:
Democratic leaders do not lead. They listen to polls and propose nice-sounding but impractical plans. We need strong leaders who are willing to do what is unpopular if it is the right thing to do. Banning SUVs or destructive plastic products will generate cries of "oppression," but if all of humanity benefits, it is a freedom from oppression. No one can make a decision for a society at large without stepping on some toes, but as most individuals are inclined to see detail and not the whole, their desires are often inappropriate. Among our people there are those who lead intelligently, nobly and compassionately. Rigorous education in history and philosophy can round these people out, and we can start them out as local leaders and promote those that do the best job. Further, we should breed them in a special category of people, or "caste," so that we pass on the genes that produce great leaders.
To hell with that!
poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com
As a service provider with a major web service, I'll tell you why the internet is "slow":
1. Servers, like my company's, that are near capacity.
2. Slow browsers, that need to wait for JS to fully load before rendering anything.
3. Virus scanners, that post-process JavaScript before it an execute.
4. FireFox plug-ins.
5. Slow computers
6. Low bandwidth for dialup users
7. Web pages with a zillion resources on a page, loading from a multitude of web servers.
8. Bogged down ad servers, that serve up a shitload of ads.
9. Poor DNS servers
Enough for you? Bandwidth is just a tiny part of performance. If fact, I contend that most "abusive bandwidth" is from virus and spyware laden machines, not "power users".
Now that the ISPs have built their customer bases, the cost of hogs becomes irksome. Before I could really decide whether the ISPs are making reasonable claims, I would want to see some measure of bandwidth per customer at various levels and over time.
I strongly suspect the ISPs have been adding customers without commensurant build-out. They're milking their networks and hog slaughtering is yet one more technique.
Of course, nothing requires an ISP to be reasonable. But nor am I totally without recourse. If they cannot provide me with the service I pay for, they I can downgrade from the premium package they cannot deliver. This is much easier than switching ISPs, and probably more costly to their profitability.
Seriously, I have about 300 KB/s up and down, not the fastest connection out there, I know, but everything I click is there for me within a reasonable amount of time. This is no exceptional service I'm getting, so if you're getting worked up about waiting a bit here and there, put some experience points in your meditation skill.
Running an (nowadays mostly) business ISP since 1996, I agree with some of your conclusions, but would like to add something to it ...
Having started out with a 128k ISDN line in 1996 which served a total of three POPs, bandwidth usage was much more of a thing to watch out for back then than now ... we even had our dialins limited to business users during the daytime to keep the bandwidth free for the better-paying customers ...
Anyway, I blame the outrageous price dumping caused by most of the larger ISPs for the trouble of bandwidth shaping ... seeing that one of those "bandwidth hogs" could cause something like 6-16 MBit of bandwidth use, for very low monthly fees (German Telekom charges around 35 for the basic aDSL 16mbit hookup - plus as low as 9-20 for flat Internet access), there is no way they will cover for the cost they cause ... now, add to that that an ISP using Telekom as their DSL uplink (via L2TP or ATM) to a customer, they are charged for the bandwidth use on top of the actual internet they have to provide ... this can quickly add up to something like 50-100 of cost that _ONE_ user can cause ...
Sure, the percentage of high bandwidth users is usually relatively low, but it can quickly eat up the profits ... in turn, making Hardware investment and line expansion impossible ...
So, what to do? Easy - either prices need to rise again, or the pricing model needs to change - from flat rates to some kind of volume-based pricing (which can still include a reasonable amount of traffic). But many users seem very unreasonable nowadays - take for example a new offer a German low-cost mobile provider/reseller has just announced - a per-day mobile flat rate at 2,50, using UMTS/3G ... they already openly said that the bandwidth for the transfer will be shaped to GPRS rates once you use 1Gig of traffic.
Guess what - in forums, people started complaining right away that "that's not a flat rate"! Heck, people, get real! You're talking about more traffic than can fit on a CD. For 2,50. Mobile. How awful is it to be throttled after a gig (per day!) ...
Users are spoiled today. I guess prices will have to go up, or performance will go down. And if it's just the multi-hundred-GB bandwidth hog's bandwidth - that's fine with me. At least that way, all "normal" users won't be suffering. But at least providers should be fair enough to openly admit to what they're doing. By maybe offering a "flat time, XX gig" rate that will cover ANY normal user, even when doing some occasional P2P stuff ...
Comcast complains about congestion, which occurs at the street corner where all the connections on the block coming in over copper are aggregated onto the fiber network, but that problem would be largely mitigated by giving every house its own fiber connection directly to the head-end. Comcast (and the other cable TV companies) had no incentive to do that because they faced zero competition when they were upgrading their networks thanks to local monopolistic franchising policies. If Verizon and AT&T (and 4 or 5 others) had been breathing down their necks 5-10 years ago, they might have spent the extra money to put fiber all the way to the living room. Now, of course, they would have to basically start their upgrade over again, which they can't afford to do.
If you want to make a difference (and yes, people can still make a difference in politics, particularly if they stop focusing on the national scale and look locally), call your local government and demand that they open up the PROW to others, and that they stop granting monopolistic cable TV franchises.
I'm a lawyer with excellent karma. Something's gotta be wrong.
http://adblockplus.org/en/
Power users no doubt use the internet the most during off-peak hours cause they know you can't do anything worthwhile while Joe Dirt checks his 5 shares of Intel to see if he is rich yet every 5 minutes. Given your crappy experience with internet, why would you think someone can magically use more of it than you at the same time? It's not possible really.
What I don't get is why does someone who barely uses the internet have to pay $50 a month?
It's practically straight out of Plato. Now isn't that scary in itself?
iirc, USA have a high percentage of cable tv based ISP's.
and doing data over cable tv is kinda like going back to coax for ethernet.
the big thing about p2p under such a setup is not so much the amount of bandwith eaten up, as the number of network packages that need to be sent.
under more normal file transfers like http, the client can just tell the server to start sending, and then send a bulk message about the packages received at regular intervals.
with p2p there is a whole lot of setting up a connection, grabbing some packages, disconnecting and then connecting to someone else.
one p2p transfer can have the amount of connection overhead of 10-100 web browser connections.
and lets not forget that when the web page is down and being read, the connection idles. not so with a p2p transfer.
its as if one had set up 10 browser windows accessing stumbleupon suggestions continually...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Given that granny's computer is probably a lot faster than computers used to be, is it worth sending the text/markup data to her compressed?
The browser can transparently uncompress and display a compressed html stream.
Is anyone compressing in-line these days? Or is most of the bandwidth for casual browsing being taken up by images and flash?
Well, you can still buy a t-shirt for a reasonable price. Good to see even neo-nazis are willing to whore themselves for money.
Does Godwin's Law apply when you're pointing out real neo-Nazis?
Just askin... :)
p.s. Great response, but creating a new account just to tell us this suggests you might be in collusion with the site in question.
"So what is this reality our society has denied?"
Read the philosophers and you will understand.
It doesn't matter how fast it is, we'll figure out ways to bring it to its knees.
HD Teleconference between multi-points 24/7 ... hell yeah! Oh wait, I can't get my mail.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
This gave me pause for a while, because on the SURFACE, it sounds like, yes, it'd be a problem. You add more infrastructure to your system (lay cables, etc...) and then what happens? P2P just gobbles up that resource and you're back to square one...
Except that its not true at all. Its a complete fabrication. Here's why.
P2P expands to fill allotted bandwidth, not available bandwidth.
If you have 100mbit total, and say 100 users, and you give each user a hard cap at 1mbit, then there's absolutely no way, even if all your users ran maximum p2p, 24/7, that they'd step on each others toes.
Unfortunately, the real scenario here is that ISPs have, for example, 100mbit total, and they accept EVERY USER THEY CAN (obviously), and then allot them far more bandwidth than they have. So they'd have 100mbit total (for example) and they'd allot each user 10mbit... and have 10,000 users.
The only reason they say 'p2p expands to fill all available bandwidth' is because they've so vastly oversold the available bandwidth, and allotted it so deeply overlapped, that a couple users fully utilizing the bandwidth they have been allotted can hit the limit.
This is not a case of P2P expanding, this is a case of deep overlap and overselling of resources, instead of infrastructure upgrading and proper resource management.
And in a couple years its just going to get worse. We're seeing the start of a trend that shows that ordinary users, the ones that you could count on to never use their bandwidth, are starting to go download HD movies, be it from netflix, itunes, pirated copies, Miro, a plethora of other services. The content is getting bigger and this time "ordinary" users are consuming it.
This means that 'headroom' that ISPs have for the number of people they can pack onto the same segment of bandwidth, the number of times they can sell the same thing to different people, is shrinking rapidly.
P2P might be the scapegoat now, but in a year or so its going to be 'online video', something which many of the cable providers have direct competitors for.
Background: Granny's usage patterns are spurious. She loads a page and waits for it to complete. The page may include some script and a few dozen images, but the expected load time is in the under 30 second range. Then she reads the page for a few minutes and loads a new page. Meanwhile, the bandwidth hogs have 24/7 connections.
Simple solution that's already in use by some providers: give a 30 second "Speed boost" to a connection if the line has been idle for a few minutes.
I agree. I'm in Canada. I've lived in multiple provinces and used multiple ISPs (using different technology to provide bandwidth), and I haven't seen these kinds of issues in 5+ years.
Hell, around here Granny doesn't even use dialup because most areas no longer offer it. It's far more common to see less knowledgeable users on some sort of "DSL-lite" offering (128kbps) for around $16 / month.
I always hear about how bad the availability and options for high speed service are in the US, perhaps these complaints are more a symptom of that than anything else?
-- sudo.ca
I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after living in France and I noticed that internet service was more expensive in America. I always thought that it was simply because population is sparser in America than in France.
The denser the population is, the easier it is to provide internet service. That's why you get cheaper or better service in France, Hong-Kong, or Korea than you get in America.
I do not believe that French, Hong-Kong, or Korean Internet Service Providers are neither nicer nor more competent than their American counterpart.
There might be sparsely populated areas whose internet service is as good as densely populated areas but those would be exceptions, not the rule. The denser the population is, the easier it is to provide internet service.
Whatever the cause, I found that I could actually drive to a library and look up the information in books ( sacrilege! ) quicker than I could get it online from these folks.
In this case the submission links to slate.com. I think you should check your facts before posting boilerplate personal attacks.
I don't know about the ISPs in the US, I live in Romania. I pay ~$10/month for my internet service. In this subscription I get 10Mbit/s download and 1Mbit/s upload bandwidth if I browse the public internet, and I get 50Mbit/s up and down for my metropolitan network (the ISP's network in my town), and this metropolitan network is now extending to the whole country (major cities are already interconnected). The network infrastructure is Fiber To The Building from where is distributed by a local router to my apartment. I am very satisfied with my ISP, and my internet never seems to be slow. Maybe the US is lagging behind - as far as internet connection is considered - other countries.
The Internet is so infuriatingly slow because 90% of the traffic out there is shaped, throttled, or monitored in some way.
My ISP still blocks my http access when I download new mmorpg clients over torrent.
Their thinking is, if it's legitimate, it's going to be over http. That thinking is counter-intuitive and just plain dangerous.
They're using their grammar skills there.
It isn't the internet that is slow, not really. Three things have a disproportionate effect on users perception of the internet: (1) Web site load times and (2) Horrible packet management by your DSL/Cable modem for outgoing and (3) Massive packet backlogs on the ISP side of the router in the download direction, mainly due to YOUR devices advertising ridiculously huge TCP windows or otherwise not doing any management of the incoming bandwidth at all. Those three issues cover 90% of the problem space and none of them are really the ISP's fault.
* Web sites access all sorts of crap these days, mostly related to ad content. Many also run horrible javascript all over the page which slows the site way down even once the page has been loaded. Ad content sources often present a larger responsiveness issue then the site itself. Using ad site blockers will improve site responsiveness.
* Many home systems these days have more then a few devices accessing the internet. Very few of these devices do any sort of packet management or bandwidth control. The result is that your interactive traffic is not prioritized over all your other traffic.
* Most consumer (read: windows) boxes, and most cable and dsl modems either have no bandwidth management or have only very primitive bandwidth management for uplink data. They might be capable of separating out various types of traffic, such as VOIP, but they usually can't handle more then a few simultaneous connections and then only under very strict conditions. They simply do not have enough memory to buffer more then two or three packet streams.
* Programs like bittorrent will easily blow-out the downlink direction of an ISPs DSLAM or cable provider side router. It is virtually impossible to manage the downlink packet rate with a cable modem, even with the configuration options available. In fact, the many ways people use to mask bittorent traffic ends up making things worse by defeating attempts by ISPs to simply manage the packet stream (verses cutting it off).
None of these issues are really the ISP's fault. People who know what they are doing throw a unix-based (aka linux, bsd) router inbetween their home network and their cable/dsl modem. Simple QOS filtering doesn't do the job, you really need to run a full-blown fair-share sub-scheduler on top of your basic QOS separation and pre-restrict the bandwidth to move all the packet queues onto your router, for both directions. That will take care of the uplink direction at the very least.
Incoming bandwidth is harder to deal with because you often do not have direct control over the devices trying to downlink the data. The best you can do there is create an artificial bandwidth constriction between your unix-based router and the target devices in the incoming direction. This will shift the bulk of the packet backlog away from the ISP's DSLAM/router and onto your router. Your router has enough memory to deal with megabytes of stream backlog if necessary so you can control all incoming bulk data streams while letting all the interactive traffic bypass the queues.
Here's an example: Take a single TCP stream downloading a movie. If the TCP connection is advertising a very large data window, such as a megabyte, then what winds up happening is that a megabyte of data winds up getting backlogged on the ISP-side of your connection as the bandwidth is constricted down to your cable/dsl modem's capabilities. The ISP cannot handle that large a backlog, particularly if you are downlinking several things simultaneously (each with a megabyte of backlog). Traditionally ISPs have used RED or other congestion control algorithms but the plain truth of the matter is that THEY DO NOT WORK VERY WELL FROM THE POINT OF VIEW AND PERCEPTIONS OF THE END USER. It is far better to not have the backlog to deal with in the first place, at least not on the ISP side of the connection.
In anycase, the issue is more due to the many applications trying to use your pipe as if they owned the whole thing then it
Who is your ISP? I don't get so many problems on freenet but I block most ads.
See my journal, I write things there
someone please explain to me the difference in bandwidth usage between downloading an mp3 from a p2p network and downloading an mp3 from iTunes. It seems to me either one would use less bandwidth than streaming the same song many times from an internet radio station.
Evidently.... The fact that we pay per minute in Europe pushed the broadband acceptance. In the early DSL days, we had over 100€/month ISDN connection fees for Internet alone (evidently we weren't a bunch of Grannies). That was enough reason to switch to ADSL, which was 75€/month for 256kbps/128kbps flatrate, but that was a very very long time ago.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Question is... If they do goto metered access or per gigabyte stuff... Where will be the 'pay as you go' for the person who might check his Email once or twice a day and generally not use the internet? Everyone keeps talking about how Bittorrent users and what not are chewing up so much of the bandwidth what about the guy who uses maybe 1 GB a month? Doesnt he deserve to pay $1 a month for his internet? Yet he's stuck paying $20/mo just because theres no cheaper alternative because the phone companies like to have customers that generate like 20x the normal profit and will never offer such a pricing scheme.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
"Often they are placed inside the body, so they have to be downloaded before the browser can render the site! So speedier Javascript engines are *not* goint to fix it."
That's also true if they're linked with script src. All of the "modern" browsers freeze rendering until the script is loaded and executes. This is, generally, meant to avoid a race condition.
Here in Chile the problem is awful. We've got 2Mbps/512Kbps plans for over $24.000 ($50 US). Local internet is ok, but it is common knowledge that the international pipes are heavily clogged.
To make things worse, all our internet access is routed through the US, so the RTT to any country that is not Chile or the US is a joke.
The problem is charging >> MARGINAL_COST per marginal byte.
A realistic way to price:
1) If traffic remained unchanged, what flat-rate price would we have to charge our customers to make a fair profit. Call that $X.
2) If every customer's monthly traffic were to increased double over the next year and a half, what investment would we have to make to keep customer perception the same, and what flat-rate would we have to charge over the next 18 months to afford those investments and still make a fair profit? Call this $Y.
The difference in the prices is a good starting point for per-megabyte pricing. If the average user uses 0.5GB/month and pays $29.99 today, but would have to pay $34.99 in 18 months to keep profit margins and customer satisfaction where they are today, then a fair price might be $6/0.5GB. On the other hand, if we would only have to raise rates by $0.25/user, then the price/0.5GB should be $0.25. I have no clue what the correct values for X and Y are.
Once you set a per-byte price, even if it is seemingly low, like $0.10/GB, it still adds up. A fiber user with 20Gb/sec can suck down well over 6TB/month. At a dime a GB, that's still $648, which is more than enough to encourage middle-class home users to scale back a bit. Every bit scaled back gives the ISP more time to improve the neighborhood infrastructure. Every extra dollar paid gives the ISP more cash to improve it today rather than tomorrow.
ISPs that want to charge a buck a GB are deliberately pricing their product to discourage use rather than encourage revenue. It's the difference between a punitive tariff and a revenue tariff on imports and exports.
The maths: 20GB/sec: 2592000 sec/30 days * 0.0025GB/sec = 6480 GB/month
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm trying to download 1080p version of Casino Royal and I'm getting less than 500kB/s. Damn those grandmas hogging the bandwidth with their ancestry.com.
i have twc in tx, and i've never had issues with connection speed or throughput. i have 10mbit. as far as i know, there's plent of people around here that have cable internet as well.
when i had slower service, it was still speedy and responsive. so, i don't know what the poster is talking about. can some pages take a while longer to load than others? yes, of course. but don't necessarily assume it's because of my connection. it could just as easily be the company's connection to blame. and don't forget about the large flash ads, etc, that take up much of the bandwidth anyway....
not only is time travel possible, it's irrelevant.
Real-time files, like video-on-demand, need an initial burst big enough for a buffer followed by transmission at about the speed of the human reader. For live events, they just need enough speed to provide the data the human reader and his equipment needs. They also have the advantage that they can tolerate dropped packets.
Less-than-real-time files, like any sort of download to be used later, can go at whatever speed the network will allow and the human user's patience will tolerate. If the human user has gone to bed for the night, as long as it's done by the time he wakes up nobody cares. On the other hand, if the file is urgent, like the spreadsheet you are downloading from the company's file server, you want access at least as fast as it would be if it were local.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In many countries, high-speed internet providers enjoy a monopoly or duopoly, with a high barrier to entry for new competitors.
This may be a government-controlled monopoly, or it may just be a monopoly of high entry barriers such as the high costs of laying cable or buying spectrum licenses.
In much of the United States, residential high-speed internet is limited to 1 cable provider and 1 telephone company. Medium-speed internet service, from >50Kbps to about 3-4Mbps, has a few more options, including satellite, cell phone, fixed wireless, and other options, most of which are more expensive than DSL or cable. In rural areas of America, satellite may be the only practical option.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"There is no end to the demand of the 5%."
True. ISPs should simply charge them more. If a customer is routinely over the 95th percentile, then charge them more, much like Sprint or Verizon charges significantly higher fees on "overage" minutes on a cell phone plan.
Want more "minutes"? Pay for them.
If nothing else it would stop most of the idiots who trade huge torrent libraries of music and videos... that they never even watch.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I named the lookup and "Waiting for..." separately. DNS lookups occaionally do lag, whether it's from Firefox or from shell programs like dig. Among the worst sites is eBay, but that might just be because you have to resolve at least half a dozen (sub-)domains for each site displayed.
I'll look into packet loss next time I get those slowdowns; my computer uses WLAN. However, they also occur on a different computer which uses Ethernet and they occurred across three different routers. Maybe it's the connection to the ISP itself.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Well done, thank you sir. Perhaps the solution is to do away with Slashdot's user link and only provide links relevant to the story. There seems to be nothing but corruption from these, and it leads to the likes of Roland and other terrible bloggers as well as these jerks who are trying to fish people in and raise their website hits (be it for advertising dollars or for their stupid agenda). I'm not sure that linking to a user's chosen website brings any value to Slashdot articles.
If you have 10,000 customers with an average usage of 20,000 bytes, restructure your fees so that some large percentage of your users pay a flat rate and get "up to X" GB/month, and everyone else pays the flat fee plus Y/GB for everything over X GB/month. Just make sure Y is fair and affordable, and make darn sure there is real-time disclosure and customer-initiated throttling available so the teenagers don't drive the bill into the stratosphere.
You are happy - customers who need the bandwidth pay for next month's infrastructure upgrades and those that don't cut back and no longer disrupt your other customers.
Your average customers are happy - most will save a buck or two every month
Your high-usage customers may or may not be happy - if they are "gravy trainers" with no sense of fairness they'll be unhappy, but the rest will understand.
Your stockholders will be happy - you'll probably net more revenue.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If your ISP promised to ignore the content, would you be willing to pay a fair price/GB in exchange for a correspondingly lower base rate for the first GB?
In other words, if your ISP lowered its flat-rate for average users and imposed per-GB prices that were in line with or cheaper than the first-GB price, would that be okay with you?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Imagine a house full of kids whose parents let them watch TV 16 hours a day each on their own high-def TV. Assume those same kids are watching movies downloaded from a legal source like NetFlix or iTunes. Assume their parents can afford it.
Should Comcast cut them off?
No, Comcast should charge them for their actual usage. Comcast's stockholders should demand they do so.
By the way, I strongly recommend against using TV as a babysitter. However, there are some parents who do just that.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Oh but you won't as it would be suicide as all your customers would flock to someone else who was lying about their package...
Oh but not if you made a deal with your government to stop lying in exchange for making sure every other ISP didn't lie either.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Anti-Globalism and Anti-Fascism face off! This Sunday at 8!
Fnord.
I ... actually see no connection between who posted the original story (Anti Globalism) and any of the sites the above poster mentioned. The linked story in the OP goes to Slate.com (a microsoft-owned publication, IIRC), which itself points to various respected URLs (chicagotribune.com, msnbc.com, washingtonpost.com, fcc.gov, techcrunch.com, infoworld.com....)
While "Anti-Fascism"'s post is very interesting, in this particular case, I don't see a reason to discredit this story simply based on who posted it to /.
It's one thing for someone who has a $30/month phone bill to see it jump to $60 for 5 1-minute international calls.
It's another to see it jump to $600 without being notified well ahead of the $100 mark. It's called taking advantage of a customer's understandable ignorance. In the financial sector, your average person is prohibited from engaging in certain investments precisely because they can put him at risk for losing more than he can afford.
When it jumps to $6000 without the customer being notified, well, that's just evil.
The solution to $60,000 phone bills is to notify customers ASAP when their phone usage reaches 2x their last year's peak usage, or better yet, when it reaches a level preset by the customer. For customers over their warning levels, tell the customer "If you make this data connection it will cost you $10/MB" and show a meter in real time, or "if you make this voice call, it will cost you $5 + $1.25/minute."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow?
It's because of lack of regular maintenance. You need to unplug your network cable, spray a bit of WD-40 on the connectors and then plug it back in. Repeat this every two weeks. Also, do it whenever you replace a network interface card.
What counts is the density of potential paying customers in a neighborhood.
If you've got high-rise buildings or even a large low-rise apartment complex with lots of middle-class-or-better customers and the complex is wired for networking, there's no reason not to string a bunch of fiber to the building and turn on the taps full blast.
If you've got a greenfield area that's going to have to be wired anyways, no reason not to lay down fiber to the curb.
In existing suburban or urban neighborhoods, fiber-to-the-neighborhood or -streetcorner and coax-to-the-home may be the best you are going to get for now. Coax can carry dozens of analog TV channels. By reassigning some of those channels to other uses including internet, and by providing faster neighborhood-level connections, you can increase the home user's peak internet speeds without laying new cable. In a few years, we may have everything-over-IP, where the entire cable is one big pipe to be divided up on demand for video, audio, phone, and other data.
In rural areas, it's simply too expensive to lay new cable. Fixed wireless may or may not be feasible either. Satellite or maybe cell phones for customers near highways may be the only viable answers for the next few years.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Be careful asking for government mandates. You may get what you wish for.
I'm in favor of some kind of taxpayer- or consumer-funded program to bring a "minimal" level of communications to those areas that are 1) not economical to serve but at the same time 2) not ridiculously cost-prohibitive to serve. However, that's a far cry from making telcos replace copper with fiber when it just isn't necessary for a reasonable level of service. You can do 384Kbps DSL over several thousand wire-feet of copper on the "last mile." Ok, maybe it's the "last half-mile" or "last quarter-mile" but there's no need to replace it now in most places.
Maybe in 5 years, the only copper in cities will be in the "last 1/8th mile" and on the customer premises, but that will be okay, because most of us will be able to get 25Mbps Internet, and all of us will be able to get 3Mbps. Sure, the Koreans will be doing 8Gbps but so what?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Wankers will divide their bulk downloads into 9.9MB chunks.
You either have to throttle the "interactive" to something like "60 Mbit/minute." A typical web user that loads a page wants to to load fast, then he reads it, then he loads another page, then he reads it, etc., with a relatively low overall usage but high peak usages.
You could also charge higher rates for interactive traffic:
For example, if you have a metered plan that gives you $30 for the first 30GB and 0.25/GB after that, you could charge 25% off for "downloads" and 50% off for "bulk downloads."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
1) And what about all that dark fiber?
2) Turn on the bandwidth people pay for.
3) File class action lawsuits against the cable utilities for marketing bandwidth that they are unable to deliver.
4) Engage in competition, providing the bandwidth advertised for real, and see them lose customers.
Comcast especially should have known better, given that they bought out @Home, and the 5% user/50% bandwidth problem was KNOWN THEN, back in the late 1990s, early 2000s. @Home at least tried to do things the Right Way by redirecting port 80 requests through their own caching web proxy to help lighten the load (since internally, they had more bandwidth than externally). Comcast bought out @Home, and apparently fired everyone there with a clue after I left @Home...
Help us build a better map!
So lemme get this straight, I didn't just buy a 1Mbps connection, what I actually bought was a SHARE of my ISP's connection? What kind of share? 1/100th? 1/1000th? That was nowhere in the contract. I bought and paid for a 1Mbps connection and to hell with you if you think I've no right to actually use it.
So people are using more bandwidth? That means you need to provide more bandwidth OR SELL less.
ISPs are greedy. It's not the network admins who are the greedy ones though. No. It's their marketing. They want to advertise WAY past their capabilities. They got away with it due to statistics and averages. THAT IS CHANGING. To hell with your business model. Change with the times or GTFO.
yea no kidding. Someone really likes his ideas in the republic. You'de think after a couple thousand years of no one wanting to do this, it would end but I guess not.
All other criticisms of this article aside, is anybody surprised that most internet users aren't interested in downloading DVDs and seeding Linux distros? If this headline was rewritten to say "Most people surf web while on internet" would anybody be alarmed?
When every republican administration eviscerates the labor and consumer rights laws, and at the same time eviscerates the regulations which promoted actual competition, you get this kind of thing.
People work more, make less, and get fewer choices in an increasingly consolidated market.
Do you think people like to buy particle board furniture?
Of course they don't!, but they make less, and the fact that smaller suppliers are squeezed out by global particle-board furniture holdings limited means there is less choice/competition among people providing real wood.
The same can be said of pretty much every sector, and is exemplified by the broadband and media markets.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Divx may be 0.5GB/hour but HD video is more like 10GB/hour (less for 720p, more for 1080p).
That means that someone who watches 1 hour of HD video every day (way less than a typical TV viewer) consumes 300GB a month or more if he uploads as well and would immediately run afoul the comcast cap.
What now, eh? I thought so...
Sure, it is so incredibly easy to write a toy "digg" button -- the poseurs at Make: even sell a kit. Now try doing that hundreds of millions of times per second in a multiprocessing system, using a different counter for each of hundreds or thousands of netmasks. This is why cisco and the other big boys get paid the big bucks.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
you're not getting it either.
We have made progress from the early 90's "by the piece at 4k" to now "unlimited at 6 meg".
I wouldn't call a shift in local calling plans from unlimited local for 24 bucks a month to a byzantine cellular-esque plan "progress".
they need to upgrade their infrastructure to meet the times, not start regressing us back to the stone age!
The other side of net neutrality is the spirit behind it: promoting innovation by assuring open access. Billing by the byte is not open access, it's a big sign to anyone offering media to "stay the effin hell out"
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The article itself is fine. Hover your mouse over "Anti-Globalism writes".
The goal was not to discredit the article, but to make the editors and readers aware that a neo-fascist website is being linked to on the front page on a daily basis.
An entirely sensible business model is to give X bandwidth for $Y dollars up to Z bytes per month, and then charge overage fees when the user goes beyond Z bytes per month.
what obvious astroturfing by an ISP rep out to turn ISP's into cellphone carriers.
The real sensible model would be to offer services at X speed for Y dollars a month, and when they hit a predetermined cap, they move to half of X speed.
This would enforce "polite sharing" without gouging customers or destroying the "high speed" of high speed internet.
going from 6 megabits to 3 megabits won't impact normal web browsing, gaming, or IM, only heavy-bandwidth transfers.
If calculated properly, people would be mathematically unable to exceed a hard data cap.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I'm more infuriated by how slow slashdot has become.
Slashdot now uses 80% of my CPU with a single page open and 400MB of ram.
For being a site which often idolizes small and efficient the new slashdot is the slowest most resource intensive webpage I've ever visited in my life. It's out resourcing Hulu! And it's just a forum!
I receive instant messages in the blink of an eye; today I downloaded a movie in less time than it would have taken me to drive ONE WAY to the store to buy it; I created a VPN tunnel in to work and completed my tasks in less time than it would have taken me to drive there.
Finally, I sent a bunch of email, and it was delivered WAY faster than any postal employee could have delivered those messages.
Judging by the amount of stuff I got done today - I'd say the internet is plenty fast.
-ted
Block all that nonsense and watch your web browsing experience speed up greatly.
You can be damn sure that if ISPs start rationing bandwidth, EVERYONE will be blocking ads.
-ted
When I was a power user, and a responsible net citizen, I called my provider, and asked them: "When during the day are your top usage moments, so that I can reduce my usage during those moments?" They refused to answer.
But they should. If you ask the power-users to reduce file-sharing bandwidth during the top hours, I bet you can cause a significant improvement in throughput. And for the power users, a script to e.g. throttle the file-sharing program at 8 PM, and set it going again at 10PM is easy to install. And it makes a minor impact on their file sharing habbits. But for the bandwidth of the provider this will make a big difference.... The provider however needs to "grow up" and politely ask their power-users to move their usage away from the top hours-of-the-day.
Ayatollah Khomeini was a great admirer of Plato as well. (really!) Part of Plato's republic ended up in the Iranian constitution.
We have the technology but we don't have enough desire for speed that we are willing to pay the incredible price that will be levied. When we feel the pain enough we will be informed that we can get on a fast link for about $200 a month and everyone will jump at it. I have a friend from Korea who laughed out loud at what I was paying and the 2.56MB speed I receive on my DSL. He said "At home that's called BROKE!"
Am I the only one that thinks that the people that use the service more should pay more for it? If somebody is moving gigs of data a day and consuming more network resources it seems to me that they should expect to pay more, end of story. If I have to mail 100 boxes I expect them to get there as fast as somebody that mails a single box, but I also expect to pay more.
Hes got his right to free speech, even if you (or I) happen to think its really fucking stupid speech, and using the submitters political leanings as a reason for why we shouldn't have his article here is I think I very bad path to go down.
Guess what, nobody is forcing you to read his website, if it offends you, do what i did.
Don't click the link.
For FireFox 3.01, I gain speed AND security, via AdBlock Plus, + NoScript, & Perspectives .xpi addons...
However, I go that EXTRA '1 step further', using a custom HOSTS file!
Plus, "not just any HOSTS file", but one built from reputable sources over a decade now!
I used valid/reputable sources for my custom HOSTS file, such as:
----
A.) The wikipedia page for HOSTS files (which showcases ones like mvps.org's model & 4-5 others)
B.) My own HOSTS file that had 28,000 blocked adbanner servers, bad sites, &/or bad adbanner serving servers etc. blocked\
C.) SpyBot "Search & Destroy" immunize functions' lists
D.) Gaining "the most current intel on this subject" (known malicious websites), via Dancho Danchev's blogspot for this, & stopbadware.org (google)
----
It's very comprehensive, & uses literally the MOST efficient format there is for blocking alone, by using 0 as the blocking IP address-to-URL equation addy used. Very small this way, took my file down from 20mb to 12mb in size, yet it allows the SAME blocking function - thus, a more efficient structure, that lends/yields the SAME benefits for both speed & security.
Thus, this HOSTS file universally extends to ALL of my web-bound programs, such as other webbrowser programs (IE8 & Opera 9.6x) & email programs, you-name-it (as long as it "hits the internet")
Guess what...? Yes, it works, & for FAR better speed and security online. How do I accomplish this? Via a program I created.
----
E.G.-> A friend of mine is using the 12mb sized custom HOSTS file I use & the file is additionally "normalized" (all repeat duplicate entries removed & all entries FULLY alphabetized for easy search also via notepad.exe) monthly, via a program I have written for this:
APK Hosts File Grinder 4.0++:
http://www.tcmagazine.com/forums/index.php?s=30295b6f438594c7be59eb6bec884eb0&showtopic=2662&st=25&start=25#
(Pictured on that page in post #36)
This program also speeds up access to my fav. websites, via hardcoding their IP address (true one, not blocking 0, 0.0.0.0, or 127.0.0.1) equation into the HOSTS file & the program has a pinger built into it to make those be @ their current IP address from OpenDNS servers as my DNS servers & the program is written in Borland Delphi - Thus, it is easily portable to Linux as well!
----
I am considering "open sourcing it" (once I add in the FTP code which I have working in another of my apps, just a matter of "transplanting it" to this one, for downloads of new updated HOSTS files), via Kylix, & quickly, via my use of the literally proven fastest language for both MATH & STRINGS there is short of pure assembler!
(Yes, even faster than say, MSVC++ & was proven thus in Visual Basic Programmer's Journal Sept./Oct. 1997 issue "INSIDE THE VB5 COMPILER", of all places (competing language mag no less, where Delphi absolutely TRASHED both MSVB5 &/or MSVC++ 6 in speed on 7/10 tests, & DOUBLED them in math & strings, which every program does, but especially strings on this one, so... it made sense to build it in this because of that))
Anyhow, my main tester (He is 1 of 2 testers I have so far), states he literally feels he surfs 3x as fast using this file (vs. when he has javascript on (recommend this, & all other browser plugins stay off for both security & speed's sake + iframes too = off) + adbanners shown).
Yea, it works, & for both security AND SPEED, online today (especially nowadays, & the past 2-4 yrs. now, in this "era of the poisoned webpage &/or adbanner").
APK
P.S.=> There are 2 "catch-22's" here, however, when using a HOSTS file size of that order (12mb example I note), but they're actually GOOD on
about:config
search:http
change anything pipe-lining related to true.
you had me up till "crypto nazi"
moox. for a new generation.
"The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth, sometimes more, during peak hours. While these 'power users' are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."
Granny needs to get a life.
Of course in NZ etc we go to the ISP's page and it says how much is left. But dont let this happen to you! Tell them to screw their 250GB! God help you if you wake up with a 3GB a month plan, I mean you cant download movies! its hell!
---
That sounds better than the economic situation in the US... where 2% of the population control over 80% of the wealth. ISPs should venerate these bandusers for attempting to reach their own version of the American Dream.
"(Seriously: We have the porn companies to thank for pioneering all sorts of technologies, from VHS to secure credit-card transactions online.)"
I didn't know porn companies invented VHS. From this fact, I will treat the article suspect, esp. after seriously part.
P.
Only 3 gig movies, huh? Someone needs to get Usenet.
1080p forever!
It's nominally 4Mbps (but I get something around 1.5Mbps in speed tests).
This allows me to watch two (nah, make that three) simultaneous low-resolution flash movies.
(Low-resolution here means images like VHS or even NTSC).
Yet, I'm unable to watch a single flash movie continuously. At times, it just won't play and show a message like "buffering" or similar.
Since movies are not interactive, this is easy to solve: I just let the flash player buffer enough so that -- even with network problems -- the movie won't stop.
IT'S THE LATENCY STUPID!
But, yes, there may be reasons for this, ranging from lack of net neutrality to router problems in the middle of the way...
The head of the web user's lobby for that remark. I have never seen it put so succinctly and clearly how this business model should function. Thank you.
Doesn't this simply seem like an application of the Pareto Principle (e.g. 20% of your customers make up 80% of your sales).
I don't claim to be an expert but I have read that in business, it can make sense to ditch the 80% of your customers who take up all of your time and generally only cause you ass pain (whining, complaining, demanding) in favor of catering to the minority who actually make up all your business.
Likewise, if the statistics presented are true, then ISPs could simply make high-bandwidth users pay a premium for use--while simultaneously making internet cheap/free for everyone else. That is, they would cater to gamers, bittorent users, and youtube junkies who would essentially subsidize educational and business users.
I don't share files with bit torrent or any other such bandwidth eating activities. It's was a huge inconvenience for me when a flatmate's BF started doing so. He did it at our place, because the internet was so infuriatingly slow for him. Why? Not because of the usage stats you listed, but because he was on a cheap DSL connection, and I was on a slightly more expensive cable connection (maybe $15/mo more, at most), that got at least 5 times the download speed (very conservative).
Now I've moved, and I'm on such a DSL connection. I use LESS bandwidth, because the connection is so poor. I don't get 25% of the advertised "speeds up to" number.
Ancestry.com is a great example. On cable it loaded in a few seconds, on DSL I gave up after minutes of a loading screen. Consistently, I've found "high speed" DSL to be in the ballpark cost of actual high speed connections, and in the case of my transition, the actual maximum transfer speed I can get was decimated (in the literal sense).
I mean to pose a good point: that the same usage under one service had the Internet blazingly fast, and under another service infuriatingly slow.
There's also an obligatory rant in here, which you can ignore. WHAT SORT OF HIGH SPEED CONNECTION IS TOO SLOW TO EVEN STREAM FROM HULU?
For download speeds, the service is for 1 mbps, and in speed tests I get 200-300 kbps. The cable service was only estimated to be around 8-10 mbps (for about $10-12/mo more), and speed tests always were in the 12-16 mbps range.
Why is the internet so infuriatingly slow? Because you have a poor service provider!
Well if we didn't have a culture of obesity, laziness, and porn maybe people would get a life and not be on the line so much. (this is coming from a computer engineer)
50% of all alcoholic beverages produced are consumed by 5% of the population. If alcoholism were made curable, breweries would be whining for government subsidies to stay afloat. If "power users" all disappeared ISPs would go back to whining about all the dark fiber (as they did not that long ago) and beg for government subsidies to pay for their oh so valuable investment in modern day infrastructure. Or some such crap.
Don't think for a second that breweries and ISPs aren't already aware of the facts.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Adopt the Australian system of purchasing a pre-made package that contains "x" Gig's @ "x" speed. Once you go over you get capped to 56k.
So for instance my package is 40 gig usage to servers within my state, 20 gig international usage at 20mb/s for AUD$59.95.
I use libswfdec in Firefox and it doesn't download or start the flash-movie by default that saves quiet a bit of loading.
I personally use GNASH, but has the same feature too.
Also, Gnash runs in a separate process (the plugin is actually only a thin layer that launches the standalone player) which is a nice feature too in case of crashes.
The only problem is that these still leave a big black square where the flash animation should be (which still breaks appart the text you're trying to read, etc...) whereas Adblock+ is a little bit more efficient at cleaning the page and making more pleasing to the eyes and more readable (it removes the holding iframe too, for example).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And they have 50% less bandwidth used.
So the ISP's should halve the prices, yes?
Oooh, no, there's another reason for that. Just give them a minute or two to work it out...
The way I see it, the internet functions just fine at fast speeds (through personal experience). If the ISPs need to rate limit its customers then they haven't done their job to build their networks to meet demand.
Here is Tokyo, Japan, I have great internet usage speeds. I have 100 Mbps fiber to my home. It should be 100 up/down, but up is always slower. I am able to easily cap out my bandwidth esp if things are downloaded from inside of Tokyo (crossing an ocean tends to slow things down a bit). The ISPs in Japan have chosen to invest in their infrastructure so that they can truthfully advertise 100 Mbps speeds.
Check out my speedtest.net results:
Tokyo-Tokyo: http://www.speedtest.net/result/320103019.png
Tokyo-Yokohama, Japan: http://www.speedtest.net/result/320111142.png
Tokyo-Chatan, Okinawa: http://www.speedtest.net/result/320109814.png
Tokyo-New York: http://www.speedtest.net/result/320105818.png
Tokyo-Chicago: http://www.speedtest.net/result/320105532.png
Tokyo-Los Angeles: http://www.speedtest.net/result/320106192.png
Tokyo-London: http://www.speedtest.net/result/320106863.png
Tokyo-Stockholm, Sweden: http://www.speedtest.net/result/320107174.png
Tokyo-Frankfort, Germany: http://www.speedtest.net/result/320107789.png
Tokyo-Hong-Kong, China: http://www.speedtest.net/result/320108421.png
Tokyo-Taipei, Taiwan: http://www.speedtest.net/result/320108846.png
Over $200 billion has been given in taxes to the telcos to build out our 45 meg up / down fiber to the home network and now they want more?
This article gives some good info on what happened. Where's the accountability? NII was Bill Clinton and Al Gores deal for America.
Epic Fail if we don't demand they build the damn thing now.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Congratulations for the most creative invocation of Godwin's Law to date.
-- Mojo Tooth : exploring our world as only an idiot can.
That's already what's happening: ISPs have always had monthly volume caps, they simply weren't spelled out and only enforced when bandwidth hogs were actually a noticeable problem.
Comcast has now been forced to spell it out (250G); I'm fine with that. I'm fine with a 250G monthly volume cap at current prices, and so are probably 99.99% of all users.
In return, I expect my ISP to leave my traffic alone. And, you know what? Despite all the bad press, Comcast actually has been leaving my traffic alone, both outgoing and incoming.
ISPs might offer lower volume caps (10G, 50G, whatever) at lower monthly prices, although I don't see either an obligation or a big need for that.
Hes got his right to free speech, even if you (or I) happen to think its really fucking stupid speech
Which has absolutely nothing to do with posting on Slashdot, a privately owned and edited forum. The Corrupt people have the right to say whatever they want on their own site, but there's nothing in the First Amendment that requires Taco to use his resources to expand the reach of their message.
Don't get me wrong, part of what makes Slashdot worthwhile is that they don't delete posts or ban the crazies and trolls, but when was the last time you saw a goatse link on the front page? The editors have discretion over what goes on the front page of their site.
using the submitters political leanings as a reason for why we shouldn't have his article here is I think I very bad path to go down.
I agree. I would however suggest that the editors edit the submissions to remove links to corrupt.org.
"The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth, sometimes more, during peak hours. While these 'power users' are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."
It's all well and good to argue with the ISPs about net neutrality, but let's not forget to dispute the implied causation.
Granny's delay (if she has one) will be a combination of (i) latency, (ii) ancestry.com's speed at serving up the page, (iii) available bandwidth, (iv) her contracted bandwidth, and (v) her machine's speed at rendering the page. Really, now, let's have a show of hands. How many people here are experiencing speed problems loading mere web pages that are caused by congestion?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)