Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
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'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...
Of course, you are correct. But we're going to hear a lot more about how "the few are making it slow for the many" because the telecoms and ISPs are looking for a big price increase.
They're jealous of the oil industry, who was able to raise prices by 300 percent in a few years.
Believe me, now that the oil industry has raised the bar for profit, the other monopolistic industries are going to go whole hog, especially if their favorite Party gets another four years in office.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Indeed.
I worked for a couple of years as administrator for a couple of large websites. We had our own ad system. I kept it running fast on some RH servers, making sure that it served everything quickly.
Then one day some in da management wanted to outsource our ads to one of the big known companies.
And I promptly asked if they had made sure that the contract specified something about perfomance. Of course I had seen what you described about other sites being slow when using these banner companies.
So one day they changed the templates of all the sites to the external ad company and the load times for a page went from 4-8 seconds to 18-30 seconds before the browser were done. I always checked the sites in a browser even though we had some external companies monitoring the response times.
And then I sat waiting for the call that I knew would sound something like this "the sites are slow, do something".
So I got my ammo ready and made some speed tests in firefox with Adblock+ and Tamper Data, which clearly showed that all the load time was the external ads.
Of course I had to be a BOFH about it for a couple of minutes when they called and said stuff like "there is no problem" and "I get fast load times here". :D I mean I did tell them that it would happen
Then of course I asked politely again if they had some sort of performance / response time written into the deal they signed and then mailed them the results of my speed tests which clearly showed the problem. I also sent at mail to the web developers that gave instructions on how they could make the tests themself.
I then continued running adblock+ because it was hard to maintain the sites and find problems when there were elements on the sites that could not do anything about.
The sites were quite slow for many months ahead but it went from all the times to peak hours. it annoyed me because the system I had built could handle the large load, even 9/11 like events. (though everyday traffic now was larger than that day and big news didn't make the same type of spikes perhaps just 4x normal.)
I know that today it is not just geeks like me that notice that "the internet" has been slower. Friends and family sometimes comment on that it seems that browsing is slower.
Most people are not sitting on dial-up or ISDN anymore(I pity the ones that does) and the designers make pages that have way more data on them than before. I tried a ISDN backup line I have, about a year ago when my ADSL2 went down. I powered on the router and thought, "hey this was not all bad if I run 2 lines the speed will be acceptable". Wrong. even with adblock+ on it still took 60-120 seconds to load some pages, with all the images, and 1000 objects.
The ironic thing about net neutrality is that in order for any package-based traffic management scheme to work, you would have to slow down the packets for big video and audio file. These are the same files that big media hopes will bring in the profit. Throttling /. posts or granny's ancestry.com searches will do nothing to improve overall traffic speed.
Bottom line is you would have to make people pay MORE in order to waste bandwidth downloading the content big media has to sell. This would make downloading legal content less attractive, forcing people to download illegal encrypted content that wouldn't get picked up by the filters - and I'm positive someone will come up with a way to fool the filters.
Problem not solved!
Even more ironically, Comcast's decision to throttle bittorrent traffic actually sounds logical in this context.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
In case you didn't know, all your other utilities are contended too
Yeah, but the utilities didn't seem to mind updating the contention ratios as time passed. I'm guessing that the contention ratio on today's power distribution network is not the same as it was back in the 50s when the biggest electrical appliance was the icebox, air conditioning was a luxury and nobody had PCs and a TV in every room.
The ISPs don't seem to want to update for the times. Look at Roadrunners purposed 40GB cap. Do you really think 40GB is fair in this day and age of streaming on-demand video? Did you watch any of the streaming video during the Olympics or Political Conventions? It would have been pretty easy to blow past this 40GB limit if you did so -- and that doesn't even count other services like Amazon's Unbox or Netflix instant view.
They can blame bittorrent all they want but at the end of the day if they can't handle 5% of the customers running p2p how are they going to handle 50% of them using streaming video?
I do find it amusing that it's generally the cableco's trying to impose these limits. Verizon doesn't seem to have any problem offering unlimited services to their customers -- and several of their executives have even made a point of mentioning this. I guess it's easier when your bread and butter isn't video (like the cable company) and you don't have a revenue stream to protect......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
My ISP here in Ireland has reliable QoS and bandwidth, thanks to the fact that they strictly enforce a rolling 30 day cap (so you don't have network degradation at the start of each calendar month as heavy users use up their cap).
They do in fact have a meter webpage you can visit when on their network, that not only tells you how much you've used, but provides graphs of inbound and outbound traffic in the last 30 days (P2P activity is very obvious by the heavy outbound traffic).
Sure real serious P2P users won't consider the network at all, but it is more honest and up front than other ISPs who pretend you can have your cake and eat it. The worst service is from the ones who have no usage restrictions (service levels jumped on one network recently that went from unrestricted to strict cap).
Net neutrality, pro or anti, is a piece of nonsense. The simple and fair answer to it all is to bill for usage. Heavy users may wail about this, but why should everyone else subsidise them? (It's not just the companies taking the hit, but other consumers).
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
It shouldn't be happening, but it is. Why?
My personal opinion is that capitalism in the U.S. mutated some time during the 1980s from "spend more to provide a better product, get more customers, make more money" (classic capitalism) to "spend less to provide a cheaper product, get more customers, make more money" (the race to the bottom). U.S. consumers have followed suit: spending less is worth more than higher quality. I've heard some blame Harvard's MBA program for the whole mess.
Europe appears to be following the U.S.'s lead. As Gordon Ramsey would say, "What a shame!"
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Most people would have their bills lowered, and us-in-the-know would mercilessly jump towards the cheapest gigabyte.
The fatcats in the broadband business would go from relatively high-margin to cutthroat business.
Stop the brainwash
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?
Your missing part of the big picture here actually. Focusing on something that is not even part of the problem at all.
All the copper wire has been converted to fiber optics with the exception of the "last mile". That last little bit of copper is not what is slowing us down at all. The bandwidth that can be achieved on copper is actually quite high and is perfectly capable of delivering 20-50 MegaBYTES per second. How many power users do you know that have all fiber optic networks in their house? Yeah, I don't know any yet either. %99 of us exist on copper networks in our houses, yet we can easily reach sustained Gigabit speeds. Changing the last mile over to fiber is quite difficult considering just how much has to change. The average home builder employs guys that have intelligence barely above that of an average chimp. Maybe that is overly harsh, but changing the communication infrastructure of an average residential house to fiber optics and deploying the devices to use it is not as easy a task as one might think. It is understandable why residential houses are still relying on copper as it really is easier to use.
The fiber that was purchased all those years ago is NOT the same fiber that can be purchased today. A mile of 1995 fiber pushes less data than a mile of 2009 fiber. Technology is getting better all the time. Capacity is the problem that exists today, and the inevitable comparisons between South Korea, Japan, etc. are fallacious. The distance between fiber endpoints in the US is dramatically longer than in smaller countries. That results in much higher costs to deliver the bandwidth. A packet has to travel over VASTLY LARGER DISTANCES to get from Los Angeles to New York. Plain and Simple. The US could be the leader in the world as far as Mb/s per citizen, but it would cost at least 10x the money than any other country. Every mile of fiber adds up. The US just requires so much more of it. With that logic, people might as well complain that it costs less to deliver packages from one end of Japan to the other, than it does from coast to coast in the US. You can't compare the two when the scale of the problem is dramatically different.
The GREATEST problem facing the US is that a large investment needs to be made in the fiber optic infrastructure yet again to increase the capacity to deliver bandwidth on par with smaller countries. That "5% of users taking %50 of bandwidth" argument is getting old. That is NOT THEIR FAULT. If you were to listen to the marketing-bullshit speak coming out of ISPS one might think that the capacity was endless. Far from it, as any reasonably intelligent person already knows. "Unlimited" was the greatest curse to befall Internet users in the US. It came into existence by a corrupt desire to make huge amounts of profit while never intending to contractually deliver on obligations to provide anything close to unlimited bandwidth.
The GREATEST reason why we are still at a perceived standstill today is the Over Sell that exists. Estimates vary between 10x and 150x the bandwidth being sold than the capacity that actually exists. 100 Mb/s per user is a pipe dream (no pun intended), and even with a fiber optic last mile, it could never be delivered.
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. Not only would people finally get a clear picture of just what bandwidth is really available in the pipes but it would eliminate the catalyst for truly frightening totalitarian fascist developments in efforts to control the net.
I don't consider the submitters homepage to be part of the submission.
You don't seem to understand how Slashdot submissions work. Take a look at the form, you enter a homepage for each submission.
Your post made it seem as if the fine editors here at slashdot were routinely posting stories linked to articles on corrupt.org.
Not the articles themselves, but the submitter link is part of the summary and is posted on the front page. Their little site is getting quite a bit of free publicity from Slashdot.
So what you're actually advocating is blanket censorship of an individual because they belong to a group that you don't approve of?
That's a giant leap. Not once did I say that the editors should ban their accounts or stop accepting their submissions. I only suggested that they should think twice before posting links to Corrupt's neo-fascist site on the front page.
no two groups can exist in the same place. For this reason, local cultures can decide who or who not to accept on any basis they desire, including heritage and culture. We believe this will prevent the crass and destructive racism that is a consequence of two or more populations competing for cultural and economic dominance in the same area.
Translation - 'the solution to racism is to separate the races'. This crap is nothing more than stock White Nationalist rhetoric dressed up in more politically correct language.
so which ISP's paid you?
comcast?
the bells?
all of them?
this is a blatant lie.
It doesn't cost substantially more to push data across longer distances beyond the initial investment which you claim has already been expended properly.
wooo the HORROR.. a few more boosting stations in the US than japan.
The bandwidth doesn't cost anything more than the cost of upkeep on the network because of peering agreements.
finally, a fiber cable is a fiber cable is a fiber cable.. the "advancements" in capacity have been in the control units, not the cable itself.
once again.. a minimal outlay to increase capacity exponentially which your cash grabbing overlords don't want to put into place.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!