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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."
Come to think of it btw. a while back my provider here in Germany tried to buy "power users" out of their contracts for a 100â bonus. I courteously but firmly declined the two letters and several phonecalls they gave me. During one of the telephone conversations though I was told that for my 6Mbit line the average calculated downstream "should not exceed 20GB/month" in their calculation. So they rent lines to people that are supposed to do a mere 1% (6Mbit 24/7 = ~1800GB a month / 20 = ~0.01) of their theoretical throughput. In my calculation that's about a fifth of what I actually use. And a lot of bullshit. It's not the customers, it's the bad price calculation on the ISP side.
I've also found DNS to be slow for some reason.
Try OpenDNS.
I used to have huge problems with http in the evenings, really long response times or timeouts. Some evenings we couldn't browse any websites for a couple of hours, even though ssh and games worked perfectly.
I changed to OpenDNS, and haven't had any problems since, not a single night of slow websites or timeouts. I think in my case, and perhaps in yours, the ISPs DNS servers are simply being swamped.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
The problem isn't just bandwidth, it's also latency. Which can be just as much a problem on DSL and 3G as it is on dialup.
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
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.
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...
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.
I seriously doubt that is the case because Verizon seems to have no issues with bandwidth hogs while Comcast seems to wail and moan about the issue. This could be because of the nature of cable vs DSL technology, but I suspect it has something to with the fact cable companies are more focused on content delivery and using their bandwidth for other things like "On Demand".
Personally, I have more problems with the cable just going out (no TV and no internet at the same time) than I do with slow service.
Now Verizon is focusing are rich suburban neighborhoods leaving both rural grannies and us urbanites out in the cold, but I suspect they'll roll out to us next before they will to the rural areas mostly because of the issue of more profitability versus population density and not because of network bandwidth hogging.
My argument is that it isn't the file sharers that are causing this problem but rather the unwillingness of certain companies to supply the rural areas with the last mile because in the end its not going to make them much money. The whole P2P argument seems like a straw man that points the blame on the wrong set of persons.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
What exaflood?
You can be pretty damn sure the contracts are so onesided the company isn't required to really do anything.
I had this problem with a cellphone company once. Nowhere in the contract does it say that they have to actually provide the service they are selling.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
It goes even faster if you use privoxy instead and let it filter out even more of the junk like cookies, trackers, javascript, etc...
I love it, the family loves it, and everyone at work loves it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is utterly useless. Any good ISP (eg almost any european ISP) will not ever need this, as they have _enough bandwidth to fullfill their contracts_ with their customers.
Your hardcore WoW addict would probably place very little strain on your network, seeing that he wants to have the lowest ping possible. Downloading a lot of stuff would just add latency to the game.
c++;
These ISPs are SERIOUSLY overselling their network capacity to create an artificial scarcity.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory, but the reality is different. The ISPs oversell their capacity to create artificially high profits, which they (partly) return to customers in lower prices. If you really wanted an equal share of bandwidth availability, and wanted to use all of it dedicated to yourself then you should expect to pay considerably more. I think there are ISPs who offer this - you'd have to look in their 'business' range, but you can get it along with multiple static IPs and SDSL connections.
The only greedy people here are those that want to consume all the resources and pay next to nothing for it.
PS. its not ambiguous how many gigabytes you're using - just look at the number of bits travelling down the wire to you. Its actually very un-ambiguous.
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.
One problem I've got with ISPs is that their bandwidth is asymmetrical. You get half (or even a quarter) to upload compared to what you can download. And if your download capacity is nearing its max, you can't upload at all. This gets even worse: You can't even browse webpages even if you're using your download capacity to half, because your uploads eat all the bandwidth you need to send a freaking HTTP GET request.
So as a result, I need to use only 10% of my upload capacity, hindering P2P transfer as a whole.
no script
This technology has existed in IP itself since 1981 as the TOS bits. Your "Interactive" is IPTOS_LOWDELAY. Your "Download" is IPTOS_THROUGHPUT. Your "Bulk Download" is IPTOS_LOWCOST. See RFC 791 from 1981 and RFC 1349 from 1992.
It's troubling how many people will blindly recommend OpenDNS without understanding the huge problems with that service.
What's even more troubling is people who don't understand something continually spout off about it. Case in point:
they redirect all your Google queries through their own servers
Umm, no, they don't:
they break with acceptable DNS behavior by sending you to their own advertising web server
Again, nope.
Now, if you *want* them to screw with your DNS (and there are people who do, for various reasons), they'll happily do that. Yes it's the default behaviour, but it can be changed very easily. But making claims that they do it all the time (and implying that there's no way to have them not do it) just makes you look like an AFDB-wearing fool.
If you are on Windows try using Treewalk and have it pointing to Open DNS. I have found this combination works VERY fast,at least for me. Treewalk will cache the DNS of the sites you use most often(so no look up at all for those) while Open DNS is usually faster than the ISPs DNS. I then have the ISP DNS set as a secondary in case Open DNS was to experience problems,and I have been using this setup for several years without a problem.
The Internet speed problem is simple: no competition. If we all have 5 or hell,even 3 competing broadband providers to choose from we could go with what served our needs best and the competition would drive them to lower prices and improve customer service. Instead we have a bunch of little monopoly fiefdoms where their only incentive is to spend as little money as absolutely necessary to maximize the quarterly profit reports. Which of course is why we are falling behind the rest of the world and will only get worse.
We need to IMHO separate the lines from the ISPs so that many companies can compete and to give a limited(LIMITED) monopoly for those that are willing to upgrade the infrastructure in the smaller markets to fiber. This way we all get better competition on the lines we have,while providing incentive to upgrade our national broadband infrastructure to fiber. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And not only that, but they fraudulently impersonated both their users and the entity the users were connecting to to do it!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Comcast used to be able to sell unlimited until p2p came along. Then they started using sandvine and other mitigating tactics to still make it 'unlimited' while continuing to make a profit. Since the FCC has now disapproved of this, Comcast has no choice but to start measuring and capping, since there's no other way to provide unlimited service.
Bullshit. TekSavvy, an ISP based out of Chatham, Ontario offers two 5Mbit DSL plans. One is on a slightly lower-latency network and is capped at 200GB/month for $30. The other is $40/month for unlimited. They have to pay about $20/month to Bell Canada per subscriber. This is supposed to be a wholesale rate set by the CRTC (like the FCC) to cover Bell's costs. So out of the $10 or $20/month TekSavvy gets, they have to pay for their bandwidth, their employees (who are in Chatham instead of India), their equipment, other expenses, and still make some profit. So either the CRTC set the wholesale rate too low (doubtful considering the number of former Bell people on the CRTC) or ISPs make a lot more profit than they'd like you to think.
The same ISP posted charts on dslreports.com breaking down bandwidth usage. UDP (presumably mostly streaming media) was the most used, Web was second, and p2p was a distant third. This is an ISP that is most likely to have bandwidth "hogs" on it.
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.
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.
Ayatollah Khomeini was a great admirer of Plato as well. (really!) Part of Plato's republic ended up in the Iranian constitution.
You want to see things change? Then US voters (as if they had any power to change anything) would demand that it be ILLEGAL to sell bandwidth that DOES NOT ACTUALLY EXIST. That would change things in a hurry.
You're right! It would erase America from the Internet in about a week. I worked for an ISP, and the reason we oversold (by about 10x) was that the typical peak load to our upstream was less than 10% of what it could have been if everyone started a big download simultaneously. After all, my connection is mostly idle as I sit here typing this, and unless you're actively download something in the background, yours is also idle as you read it.
For reasons you mentioned, bandwidth is expensive. It's the single biggest cost in providing Internet access. If you pass a law that effectively increases Internet access fees by 900%, then don't be surprised when you can no longer buy it from American companies at any price.
On the other hand, it'd be a great opportunity for a non-American entrepreneur to park a satellite on the equator south of America and provide then-reasonable prices for access to the rest of the world.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
If they delivered a fiber optic cable right into your telco box at the side of your house, gave you a fiber optic modem and could deliver VOIP, Internet, IPTV, etc., they would NOT have the capacity to service you all at the street anymore than they are now.
I work for an ISP. Our costs are getting data from our DSLAMs to the POPs. The price for Internet at a POP is essentially free. The incremental cost of getting 20 Mbps to a house is essentially free. If long core was a problem, the costs would be expensive. They aren't. So I have to presume that you are wrong. If you'd like to correct me, please tell me why it's so expensive to get data to big cities, but essentially free between LA and NY.
Learn to love Alaska