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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."
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.
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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
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
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.
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...
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.
...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.
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.
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.
or do what smart businesses have done all throughout history: increase supply to satisfy demand. we have some of the slowest and simultaneously most expensive internet service in the world. as the richest nation in the world, and the global leader in science and technology, this should not be occurring.
check out this chart of broadband prices around the world. then take a look at this map of broadband speeds around the globe.
i refuse to believe that South-Korea, Sweden, and Japan have fewer "power users" per capita than the U.S. or that they don't have file sharing in those countries. blaming the problem on consumers to try and divert blame ignores the most obvious and logical solution.
perhaps ISPs should spend less money and energy on packet shaping technology and trying to curb p2p file sharing, and spend more resources on what we're actually paying them for: internet access. i'm not paying $50/month for them to tell me what i can or can't use my bandwidth for, or how i should be using my bandwidth. if they want customers to only use their connection for web access, then they should just call themselves "Web Access Providers."
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.
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!
It's practically straight out of Plato. Now isn't that scary in itself?
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.
So ... it makes sense to you to specifically purchase crap with your rapidly devaluing currency? Because that makes no sense to me, and even from a business point of view, if currency is devaluing, then it makes more sense to me to invest in infrastructure now, before it devalues any further.
I agree.
Corporate greed, along with job outsourcing, HB1 importing and illegal immigration is rapidly turning the USA into a 2nd world nation.
I pay $72/mo for a "10Mb/s" bandwidth that clocks out at 8.5Mb/s. No cable TV.
Almost fifteen years ago my city fathers decided that the Ingernet was too important a national resource to be monopolized by the cable and telcoms for profit. They decided to install a city owned fiber optic cable. Why not? We have a city owned police force, fire department and school system. A city owned local, state, national and international communication system affordable and accessible by the poorest of us was, and still is, and excellent idea.
The cable and telcos went crying to Congress about "unfair" competition and their lobbyists paid enough Congressmen of so that Congress passed a law making it illegal for cities to "compete" with cable and telcoms in furnishing the Internet. To "help" the telcoms finish the job the villages, towns and cities started Congress GAVE the cable and telcoms $200B to "finish" laying the fiber optic cables in this country. The greedy cable and telcoms immediately POCKETED the money and promptly forgot about their obligation to finish laying the cable. Classic corporate greed, approved by congress because congress included no provisions to FORCE the cable and telcoms to finish the job. That's right - there were no punishments for non-performance in that 200B Congressional giveaway.
IF the US voters had any brains, and their politicians had any ethics, they'd DEMAND the cable and telcoms FINISH the job of laying the optical cable and converting from Copper wire to fiber optics, AT NO COST TO THE CONSUMERS. Then we'd have 100Mb bandwidth and the ISPs wouldn't be able to play the "pipe" game and extort more money from consumers for "better" service. As it is, they are playing word games with Net Neutrality, and using it as justification for their extortions.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
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.
...I worked for an ISP, and the reason we oversold...
Are not many, if not all utility services oversold? If everybody flushes their toilet at once, does the water pressure in the mains not drop? If everybody picks up their telephone at once, do many users NOT get a dial tone? The electrical service of the average home is 200 amps. If every home started using that full capacity, will the electrical grid not collapse? Just last week, when about 2 million people suddenly had to get out of New Orleans. Were there are not many miles long traffic jams on at other times perfectly serviceable roads? In LA, and other large cities, are the freeways not often long parking lots during rush hour? Why should the Internet be any different? After all, it has been called the information HIGHWAY.
Is there a power company or water service that offers unlimited service for a fixed price? Is there not a water meter or electric meter on every house? Does the service company not come out periodically and read such a meter? Do the customers not get charged according to how much they use? Why then, should the Internet be any different? Every utility has only limited resources which they sell for prices the users are willing or able to pay. If your electric bill is too high, you find ways to save power.
All utilities and many other business services are scaled to average projected use. When you want to make a phone call, most of the time you to get a dial tone and there is no problem. The same is true of your other utility services. ISPs only need to and do scale the networks for average service, not the peak. They should be easily able to determine how much use there is by the average subscriber as well as the highest and lowest users. Then they can structure their prices according to use, just as any other utility does. I don't think that Internet service providers are any greedier than the average utility company.
All theory is gray