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."

Comments

Not so slow

[Anonymous Coward]

See? First post

Re:Not so slow

[Anonymous Coward]

the internet is so slow cause timmy touches himself at night

Re:Not so slow

[electrictroy]

I'd be more concerned if Timmy wasn't doing that.

>>>"poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."

SOLUTION: People who use less than, say, 10 gigabytes per month, should get a $10 rebate for that month. Make granny happy & encourage others to save resources too. (Save energy; save the planet; et cetera.) Of course, that idea will never fly past the greedy corporations who enjoy pocketing $50 a month from granny even though she only costs them $10 in actual usage.

Re:Not so slow

[lysergic.acid]

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."

Re:Not so slow

[bbagnall]

I don't like that solution at all. You shouldn't encourage people to use less bandwidth because that will just kill the potential new products that use bandwidth. I'd like to see even more things using internet bandwidth, like my mailbox, my car, television, etc... Just let the free markets continue to evolve and come up with faster hardware as they always have in the past. I can't believe how fast it is compared to five years ago. Remember modems? Usually slowness has to do with the server, not the infrastructure. The article is a little misleading.

Re:Not so slow

[autophile]

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.

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

Re:Not so slow

[lysergic.acid]

but if you look at current trends, it seems like Americans are spending more to get less. if our rates were as low as South Korea, Amsterdam, Japan, France, Finland, etc. then i could understand the slow internet speeds. but we have some of the highest broadband prices for non-rural populations.

Re:Not so slow

[amilo100]

"we have some of the slowest and simultaneously most expensive internet service in the world."

Bullshit. Compare your internet prices to South Africa. You are comparatively extremely fortunate with your internet services.

Re:Not so slow

[lysergic.acid]

well, that certainly explains our lower broadband penetration. and i agree that we should take geography and population density into account. but why should moderately-populated suburbs, or densely populated urban areas still have relatively poor/expensive broadband service compared to similar areas in other developed nations?

since all IT infrastructure is currently run by the private sector, shouldn't rural areas like Alaska, Wisconsin, etc. be part of a different market from states with similar population densities to Japan/South Korea/France/etc. such as California and New York?

i mean, if we had a nationalized ISP and networking infrastructure or municipal wi-fi, then i could accept the higher cost and lower average value of broadband access in the United States. we would be paying for a cohesive national IT infrastructure, whereby those of us living in more network-accessible states help to subsidize the cost of spreading broadband access out to rural areas like Alaska. i would be all for this kind of public internet access.

but that isn't the reason why i'm currently paying 10-15 times the average monthly rate for internet access as someone in France or Finland. and the majority of the U.S. population is still composed of urban communities and their surrounding suburbs. it's not like we're Canada or Australia.

Re:Not so slow

[Jerry]

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.

Re:Not so slow

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the blame is the slowness of ISPs to understand and invest in improved technology. For example, the Anagran TCP/IP flow manager easily restores 30% of the unused bandwidth along any network connection by eliminating traffic bursts and preventing huge packet losses. But network mangers in the big ISP and Tel Co engineers can't even begin to suggest to upper management spending money for new flow-management technology (actually invented by the project manager of the ARPANET!). ISP execs like the simplistic idea that they need to be punitive. It is a fear of limits rather than a desire to maximize usability. On the other hand, how many web pages use HTML 1.1? We are shooting ourselves in the foot all the time.

Re:Not so slow

[EdIII]

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.

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.

Re:Not so slow

[plasmacutter]

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.

Re:Not so slow

[ShakaUVM]

The problem with metered accounts is that it breaks the internet. Suddenly users are paying for things like spam and all those unnecessary flash animations. While it probably wouldn't amount to much, it would be like getting spam phone calls on your cell phone all the time that you have to pay for.

I think that instead of metered, your bandwidth should dynamically scale based on the amount of bandwidth consumed over the last 24 hours. Bandwidth and latency. Then, a person who fires up Quake to play a game for an hour or so would have a blazingly fast connection, but the person who is downloading torrents 24/7 get QOSed down to a bulk-transfer rate that gets less precedence than other people on the network, but with some guaranteed minimum. I know several people that run 10 or 20 torrent downloads all the time, 24/7. The won't care if their download takes 5 days instead of 3, but lots of people would care (and in a good way) if their ping time or web page access speed suddenly doubled. Best of all, such a plan is protocol-neutral, meaning ISPs don't need to know if their clients are running torrents, or FTPing ISOs, or just consuming terabytes of porn.

Just scale em down, and everyone wins. After a day of no bandwidth, they get fast service again.

Re:Not so slow

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Re:Not so slow

[shaitand]

'The won't care if their download takes 5 days instead of 3'

I would certainly care. Using QoS to lower the priority of downloads is one thing, doing so to the extent that it actually has a visible effect on my download speeds instead of just impacting my latency is not appropriate.

That is what makes this ridiculous. I use simple QoS on my home network. I am able to run 20 torrents wide open, browse the web/play streaming video, and my wife is able to enjoy a low latency world of warcraft experience on two computers.

Is the bandwidth maxed out at all times? Pretty much. That doesn't prevent all the services on my network from performing well.

Re:Not so slow

[EdIII]

so which ISP's paid you?

comcast?

the bells?

all of them?

Ahhhh yes. Anytime someone tries to inject some common sense into the argument, the conspiracy theories come out and allegations that someone is being bought by the "enemy". Grow up. Try to talk about the arguments instead of just attacking someone. Besides, if you could read, you would see that I was not supporting the side of the ISPS. In fact, if you weren't so busy being part of the moron brigade blindly labeling anyone that is not yelling as loudly as you are that the enemy must die, the enemy himself... you would see that what I said was a scathing indictment of their behaviors. You could only possibly misconstrue what I said, if you were in fact not trying to comprehend it all.

this is a blatant lie.

Far from it.

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..

Ummmm, are you sure about that? Don't want to think about that again? How about the "initial investment" part? There have been advancements in fiber optic cable and not just the control units. To say otherwise is misinformed and naive. Of course it costs more overall to transmit data over fiber when the distances are greater. The fiber run does not stretch. Be realistic. The total runs of fiber from Los Angeles to New York COST more than a run of fiber from the north tip of Japan to the southern tip. Same for South Korea. That investment needs to be paid off, which means that they need to recoup more money, hence the cost of bandwidth must rise. It's not all that hard to comprehend. Capacity is finite, and cannot currently support 10 Mb/s for every residential user. You have to lie to them.

The capacity you seem to think exists, or should exist, cannot be realized by just a "minimal outlay" of cash. If they could increase the bandwidth that easily, they would. Those telcoms are not just selling to residential customers. They could make more money with more capacity. Now even with retrofitting the existing fiber runs, you cannot increase the capacity "exponentially". Exponentially? Are you serious? You sound like you are going to start talking about an Oscillation Overthruster any minute.

There is a capacity problem, unlimited bandwidth contracts are damaging to all concerned and the biggest source of our problem, and the last mile of copper is the least of our problems.

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.

If they were forced to be honest about how they can sell you the bandwidth, and you only paid for what you used and what you were guaranteed to receive, they would be forced to increase the capacity at the street. It's not as easy as you make it out to be, but it would be done. It would have to be, since over selling would be illegal and they could only add users by adding capacity.

Why are they going to increase capacity any faster than they are now, even if it just as easy as you say, when they can keep dicking with the residential users? The first step is to make unlimited contracts illegal, or at least mandatory performance requirements. None of that exists now for the consumer.

Now try saying again that I some paid stooge for the ISPS. It makes you sound stupid.

Re:Not so slow

[EdIII]

Selling bandwidth that does not exist is lying . There is no excuse for selling services that you cannot render. This activity does not exist in many products in the US, and it is corruption that allows it to continue past the point it starts to fail. It is failing now, and instead of changing the business model, they are destroying the TCP/IP protocol with their "bandwidth management" devices to get users to stop using their connection. The way to get them to stop is to bill them correctly.

Your FUD about 900% increases in Internet Access Fees is also incorrect.

We can't go on selling people on the idea that you can have X Mb/s of bandwidth with an unlimited transfer cap per month. Especially, since now people are STARTING TO FUCKING USE IT. The Golden Days of the Over Sell are coming to a close one way or the other.

Over Selling only works as a business model when the average consumer only uses 1-10% of their paid-for slice of the pie. When everyone shows up for their slice, and some have to go without, than things get ugly. It's unethical.

With my proposal, people would be forced to use less bandwidth. This is true, unless you believe that the telcoms can waive their magic +10 wand of Infinite Capacity. The main point of my argument here, is that the ISPS have to come clean and just tell people they can only deliver less, but it will be it will be more transparent and easier to understand.

The ISP gets paid the same for their bandwidth overall with no over selling.

The average residential user would have access to burstable bandwidth at higher than 5 Mb/s, but would be guaranteed a much smaller floor. Even if the floor was only 256 Kb/s, that is guaranteed and more than capable of regular use. For those that are determined to download large files, which would be at the highest sustainable speed with the neighborhood traffic, they would pay for it at the end of the month.

So Internet Access fees would not increase for the average user. After all, it's the infamous 5% of the users that use 50% of the bandwidth anyways. Those would be the people that see their access fees increase by 900%, which is the correct thing to do. If you are going to transfer Terabytes of data around each month you are going to have to pay.

It's funny, the moment you mention to people that they have to pay 10x what they are paying to max 20 Torrent files 24/7 they go nuclear and start to claim you are in league with the "enemy". They are the victims of the Over Sell and magically-technically-impossible unlimited plans. They don't want to understand the the simpleness of the truth. The free ride is over.

You either move to transparent and easy to understand bandwidth contracts, or things will only get worse. Unlimited Internet is about as real as Unicorns. Both words of course, being in the Marketers Dictionary of Bullshit Terms.

If you worked for an ISP then you probably have an idea about how bandwidth is sold commercially, and it is nothing like how it sold residentially. I am only proposing that residential users be sold bandwidth the same way. I certainly don't think absolute destruction of the Internet in the US will be a result of doing that.

Re:Not so slow

[arminw]

...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.

Re:Not so slow

[AK Marc]

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.

Re:Not so slow

[EdIII]

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say in that sentence. The poster I was replying to was trying to say the reason we don't have higher speeds comparable to other countries was that the "last mile" was copper and not fiber optic.

I was only pointing out that amount of bandwidth at the street is insufficient to deliver 100 Mb/s to each house regardless of whether each house is connected by copper, or fiber optic. If you are not going to lie to the customer, and actually deliver the bandwidth to them with no "funny business" then you obviously need to have 10 Gb/s at the street to service 100 homes with a 100 Mb/s connection each. If that were true, then you would also have to 1000 Gb/s of capacity to service 100 neighborhoods. So and so forth.

I don't think the capacity actually exists at the street to deliver the bandwidth they are claiming now, much less the 100 Mb/s number the poster came up with. Pretty sure it does not. ISPS have been over selling the bandwidth capacity at the street by 10-150x depending on who you ask.

That is the crux of my argument by the way, the over selling of bandwidth. If you take that out of the picture, than you can understand why there is a sudden capacity problem everywhere as unlimited usage of 10 Mb/s accounts adds up rather quickly if all that capacity has to exist at the street.

If you can't over sell the bandwidth anymore, and really have to deliver 100 Mb/s to each customer (the main reason for that is that unlimited requires it), than you have to increase the ISPS capacity at the street.

As for the expense of getting the data from LA to NY and to bigger cities, that is related to the increased capacity required to deliver 100 Mb/s to each home WITHOUT the over sell in place. I doubt all of your customers are going to share data just between themselves. They need to send and receive data from other networks. That is where peering and transit agreements come into place. Caching websites, and smarter Torrent networks could reduce that, but still you are going to require greater capacity connecting your network to your peers.

Re:Not so slow

[GauteL]

"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"

Bullshit. American has 80 people per square mile. Norway has 32 people per square mile. I'm originally from Finnmark, Norways northernmost, harshest and sparsest county with 5.2 people per square mile (even Montana and Wyoming are more densily populated).

My home town has less than 3000 inhabitants and it is at least 2.5 hours drive away from any other settlements larger than 1000 inhabitants.

Yet, if I decided to move back I could order 12Megabit ADSL tomorrow.

The Internet isn't slow..

[QuantumG]

just the journalists who try to write about it.

Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[pecosdave]

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.

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[petes_PoV]

Apols, for just posting a "me too", but that's close to my experience, as well. Frequently when I actually have to wait for a website to load, FF has the link for an ad-farm or 'plex as the site being waited for.

The other thing that does delay websites is when their front page is a multi-megabyte FLASH. What's wrong with good ole plain text, guys?

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[thermian]

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.

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[Niten]

It's troubling how many people will blindly recommend OpenDNS without understanding the huge problems with that service. Stay far, far away from OpenDNS - that is, unless you just don't care that they redirect all your Google queries through their own servers:

[noatun:~]$ host www.google.com. 208.67.222.222
Using domain server:
Name: 208.67.222.222
Address: 208.67.222.222#53
Aliases:

www.google.com is an alias for google.navigation.opendns.com.
google.navigation.opendns.com has address 208.69.32.231
google.navigation.opendns.com has address 208.69.32.230

Or that they break with acceptable DNS behavior by sending you to their own advertising web server, rather than return a NXDOMAIN response, when a name cannot be resolved. (Good luck filtering spam with a DNSRBL if you're using OpenDNS.)

[noatun:~]$ host www.ajvelkajslkjalkvjeasl.com. 208.67.222.222
Using domain server:
Name: 208.67.222.222
Address: 208.67.222.222#53
Aliases:

www.ajvelkajslkjalkvjeasl.com has address 208.69.32.132

Use Level3's anycast DNS servers instead: 4.2.2.1, 4.2.2.2, ..., 4.2.2.6. They're faster than OpenDNS and they don't pull any of that nonsense on their users.

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[Bender Unit 22]

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.

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[Spy der Mann]

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.

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[hairyfeet]

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

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[Anonymous Coward]

State your affiliation and don't try to discredit criticism that you full well know is true.

if you *want* them to screw with your DNS [...], they'll happily do that. Yes it's the default behaviour,

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I find your attitude offensive. I have just spent five minutes scouring the OpenDNS knowledge base looking for some hint as to how to use OpenDNS without having them screw with my DNS and I cannot find so much as a single mention of the possibility. Perhaps someone of your inherent superiority finds this kind of thing "very easy", but maybe you can bring yourself to accept that for the majority of people, there is no way to avoid OpenDNS screwing with our DNS?

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[Niten]

Don't be a fool. The fact that it is the default behavior is problematic enough, especially when people carelessly suggesting "Just use OpenDNS!" on Slashdot and elsewhere never seem to finish that breath with "...but be sure to sign up for an account with them, and log in to disable these features, and then install a dynamic DNS client on your computer and configure it to send updates to OpenDNS whenever your public IP address changes, otherwise they'll start hijacking your traffic again whenever you get a new IP address from your ISP."

So you tell me, why does it make any sense to recommend OpenDNS to anyone, when Level 3 and others have publicly-accessible servers that are faster and that respect users' privacy without gratuitous configuration and software installation?

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[burnin1965]

Of course the people who just leave P2P applications running non-stop are a bit of a pain.

Perhaps the problem is that there are to few internet users who leave their P2P applications running non-stop.

Seriously, the problem telecoms and ISPs are complaining about is users using the bandwidth they purchased and has nothing to do with P2P.

In fact, if a greater number of people were leaving P2P applications running there would be a higher probability that the packet you need is available from a peer that is fewer hops away. The result would be less traffic leaving the ISP network and impacting the Internet as a whole.

Of course this assumes the P2P application is coded in a way that it can prioritize peers on the same network or geographically closer to one another. I don't know if this is currently implemented in any P2P applications but if not it could be.

And if telecoms and ISPs have so much issue with P2P then perhaps they should invest in setting up automated P2P clients of their own that watch Internet P2P traffic and dynamically join in so they can eventually seed on their network and reduce traffic leaving their network.

Whether we keep using P2P or not the bandwidth usage is going to keep increasing, be it peer to peer sharing of media files or the telecoms getting what they really want which is control of the file sharing and content so they can add one more charge to your bill.

burnin

Re:Banner ad's, dynamic content.

[hitmark]

thats why i use firefox with the noscript extension...

the web have become one big mashup, with videos from youtube, images from flikr and all kinds of third party data hosts are being comboed with ready to use blog templates to create the next narrow focus news page.

I have no idea what they're talking about

[jawtheshark]

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.

What's the problem?

[A beautiful mind]

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.

Re:What's the problem?

[KDR_11k]

You can be pretty damn sure the contracts are so onesided the company isn't required to really do anything.

Re:What's the problem?

[PopeRatzo]

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.

 

Re:What's the problem?

[Kjella]

What's the problem?

The real one? That in the US it's far too easy to terminate customers that you don't want. If they tried anything like the blameshifting in the US our consumer protection agency would tell them to put a sock in it and fix their terms. I do remember them trying here in Norway with X Mbit/s for Y GB, then ISDN-speed = 64 kbps for the rest of the month or pay an extra boost. It was pretty much a flop so now the commonly understood definiton is that "X Mbit" means that speed 24/7. Also they've been pretty strict on the "up to" under normal circumstance, on the highest tier it's "as much as possible" but on lower tiers it's fairly strict. So if they're offering up to 2, 5 and 20Mbit but only able to deliver 12 (dsl line speed) then that's fair for the 20Mbit, but if you're not normally delivering 5Mbit on the 5Mbit service you'll be in trouble.

In the US, particularly in the monopoly areas (which we don't have much of because the telco giant must lease the lines to others btw) it seems people are afraid to complain because what'll happen is that there'll be a stink, they might get some petty cash and the company will terminate their broadband access and say they don't want them as customer anymore, which means they're back to dialup. Seriously, if any company here tried to terminate or deny customers service on such vague grounds they'd be slapped so hard they just don't do it. If all it costs you is some petty cash to get rid of a "problem" customer who's using a lot of bandwidth and isn't profitable anyway forever, they'll do it. And if you think PR - a heavy user telling other users, which often are also heavy users, to stay the hell away from them is not bad PR - it's good PR to lose customers you don't want in the first place.

Re:What's the problem?

[dotancohen]

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.

Yeah!

[wodeh]

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!

Re:Yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, ISPs sell more bandwidth than they can cover because they assume you will only use 5% of what you pay for.

I know why they do that, but hey, a little more headroom wouldn't hurt. If a few saturated consumer connections can make your entire net sluggish, you are cutting it too close.

Re:Yeah!

[NickFortune]

Interesting that you use the phrase "what they paid for" in defending people who are illegally downloading large volumes of copyrighted material.

Yep. Because they paid for the bandwidth. And that remains true regardless of whether they're downloading pr0n, sharing movies, running a 24/7 multi-webcam stream or just streaming white noise between locations.

You can't have it both ways. If the law is the law, then it protects the subscribers right to fully use the service they paid for, just as it does much as rights of copyright holders. You can't justify throttling everyone just because some of those people using the full amount they contracted to have available may be engaging activities that arguably impact the profitability of the big studios and software houses.

Re:Yeah!

[Smidge204]

...or telecommuting (which I do a lot of)

...or videoconferencing

...or video/media streaming (YouTube et al)

...or using a third party VoIP application (Lots of this too)

...or doing any of a thousand other perfectly legal and legitimate reasons for a private individual to be sending or receiving lots of data. (Collaborative video projects as a personal anecdote)

That said, I've been quite happy with FiOS in that I've never seen slowdown that I could attribute to the network itself. Part of the problem with cable is everyone on the block shares the same coax, and therefore the same bandwidth. FiOS has dedicated fiber runs from each house on the block to a head-end with very high bandwidth so there's no congestion there.
=Smidge=

Why is poor granny picked on as an example?

[DamonHD]

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

Re:Why is poor granny picked on as an example?

[xaxa]

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.

In some countries we already have higher charges during the day for electricity, and lower charges at night (here in the UK you have a choice between that, or a flat-rate). Some appliances (e.g. washing machines, dryers, dishwasher) have an in-built timer so you can set them to start at night, or you can use a normal timer switch that you connect between the appliance and the socket. Some buildings have "storage heaters", where cheap night-time electricity is used to heat up a block of concrete, which radiates its heat to the room during the day.
Some large users of electricity (factories etc) are even charged a different rate every half-hour or so.

Last time I was on a pay-per-GB ISP it was free between midnight and 6am, but I've since switched to an unlimited connection.

Incompetence from ISPs

[francium de neobie]

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.

I don't buy the premise, just yet

[iritant]

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.

Not just the poor granny..

[heteromonomer]

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.

Slow websites

[SigILL]

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.

Re:Slow websites

[SigILL]

We're not on dialup anymore

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.

"WHO" (Comcast) might have paid for that "ad"?

[erroneus]

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."

It's the market

[pmontra]

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?

I don't know what you're doing...

[bhunachchicken]

... but I can still get all my porn just fine! Oh Yeah!!! :)

Games?

[bcmm]

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?

What does this mean?

[jrothwell97]

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.

Re:What does this mean?

[ergean]

Do you mean that spam-bot that granny has on her desk is slow accessing internet pages?

Besides size, many sites are "Slow" today...

[onlysolution]

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...

Re:Can't say it's slow

[meist3r]

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.

Scapegoat

[WoollyMittens]

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.

Re:Two words

[badpazzword]

The point is not about the cost, the point is about this mythical 5% group of cancer/hackers/sharers/etc. who are at fault of everything that's wrong with internet. They are killing the music industry, They are killing the films industry, They are killing the videogame industry, They shamelessly copy copyrighted content to their computers, They disrupting the ad industry with filthy plugins, They do not contribute to the OOS movements, and they are the cancer who is killing random boards on weird websites.

It's always Them.

bias

[gd23ka]

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.

Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[Nymz]

...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.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[Ed Avis]

Well, duh. If they built 100 times the bandwidth and it was still flat-fee, use-as-much-as-you-like then... guess what... people will use as much as they like. If bandwidth is a scarce resource then just charge people per gigabit of data sent and received. Or arrange that the first N gigabits of data you transfer each day are high-priority, with priority dropping off (relative to other users of the same ISP) as you use more and more.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[the_womble]

I think you do not understand net neutrality.

Net neutrality would mean that there should be no prioritising of traffic by content provider: i.e. you should not slow down some websites, to speed others up.

The idea is to prevent anti-competitive, anti-consumer choice agreements between telcos and other big companies that squeeze everyone else out.

I see no problem with providing different service levels to different end users. It already happens, and I have never heard of anyone finding it objectionable.

I doubt many people have a problem with charging per gigabyte either.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[Tuoqui]

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.

These ISPs are SERIOUSLY overselling their network capacity to create an artificial scarcity. I would not be surprised if the number was upwards of 100 (or even 1000) (Customers):1 Unit of Bandwidth. I suspect as much as 10 years ago that the number might have been something more sane like 10 (Customer):1 Unit of Bandwidth. Since no customers (except Bittorrent users) are going to be using their full allotment 24/7. Even at 10:1 you're gonna have many more 'mom and pop' types who just browse email and the web a few times a day for every hardcore 23 hours a day WoW addict that downloads videos of their favorite TV show off bittorrent.

In other words they're being greedy and their own actions (overselling) are creating the artificial scarcity which they are benefiting from by being able to go from 'buffet style billing' to 'individual item billing'.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[pipatron]

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.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[aurispector]

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.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[E IS mC(Square)]

Mod parent up!

For any other utility (water, gas, electricity), we pay by the usage. Why not this? Everybody should be accountable for whatever they are using and pay as much. At the moment, low bandwidth users are paying for higher users.

And once pay-as-you-use is in place, it may also force a lot of websites to revert to basic, nice and simple html pages without the bloat (Flash and such) we see today.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[hador_nyc]

I think you're missing the general point. ISPs have thus far gotten us used to unlimited bandwidth. This allows them to oversell it since I am probably not going to use all "my" bits when my neighbor is; thus making that work.

Now they are talking about charging me by my usage. This is inherently fair, as you say, but since they are changing a model that they created, you should expect some resistance. Beyond that, while for most readers of this site, it is possible to see how much bandwidth you are using, it's still a pain to keep track of it over the course of a month. If they want to put bandwidth limits, and charge us by bit or byte, then they should make it very easy for us to check our usage. They could even offer some kind of incentive, akin to what a few power companies are doing, to use bandwidth at off peak times.

Ultimately, my point is, and I think the one of the person who started this chain, is that charging by bit or byte is fine, but then the onus is on the ISP to make it very clear both what my costs and usage are. If they did that, then it would be easier for us to adjust to that new model.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[fimbulvetr]

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. Now they've started putting 250GB monthly caps in place, which is exactly what you want. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that soon we will see more tiers available.

Other ISPs will probably soon follow suite - especially mom and pops since it's extraordinarily expensive to do anything remotely close to traffic shaping without ungodly amounts of money for hardware. A lot of these mom and pops are going in the red in bandwidth because of p2p. Since comcast has set a precedent, they will either adapt so they can control costs, or go away.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[thanatos_x]

Honestly, there's a reason I don't generally go to buffets. I don't get my money's worth out of the trip, and I could go to another restaurant and get a better meal.

It actually makes sense to bill by a few definable metrics for internet usage.
1) Speed (Down or up)
2) Reliability (guarantee of speed and/or uptime)
3) Transfer

Yes, transfer makes sense. If it took you 3 hours to go 60 miles on the highway because of the bumper to bumper trucks on the highway, you'd demand something to get them off it. You'd demand more trains, or more expensive tolls for trucks, because they're using more.

The one reason I'd be hesitant about this is the lack of competition in the US internet market (which is one of the reasons for the problem in the first place). However nowhere else would you have someone who uses 100 times more of something pay the same price as someone else.

As a final thought, if everyone only paid per GB, it would be interesting. Mom and pop wouldn't mind 3-5$/gb, since their total bill would be maybe 20$, but other people would - and so most of their bandwidth would remain unused. They'd almost have to lower prices to increase demand. (or they'd strangle the internet and kill it in large sections of the US)

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[electrictroy]

>>>The thing is its very ambiguous how much gigabytes you're using.

Not really. A modem can certainly count how many bytes you sent or received. "Theres nothing like an odometer to measure..." Yes there is. Right there on my screen there's a little icon of two computers talking. It tells me that in the last 30 days I've sent 45 gigabytes and received 89 gigabytes.

Simple.

A fair and reasonable company would charge me by the gigabyte. Say 10 cents per gigabyte == $13.40 a month. My electric company operates on that same principle (9 cents per kilowatthour), so why can't my internet company work the same way? No reason I can think of.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[sammyF70]

Somehow I think some people are mistaking "checking" and "controlling".

Yes, you can check how much bandwidth you used so far.
No, you can't really control it, at least if you use your connection regularly for more than "checking you bank account and then logging off".
As soon as you start using bittorrent or another P2P network (and there are actual legal reasons to do that), your computer is going to receive and send tons of packets. The funny part comes when you closed your client and you keep on receiving requests from other people who have your IP Address as a potential seeder. Even more funny when you have a dynamic IP and get seeding requests because the guy who had the IP address before you was sharing the latest American Idol album.
Similarly, if you're using an IM, chances are your client is continuously sending and receiving packets, even if you're not actively talking to someone.

Another nice case? You have a FTP or SSH server, and some idiot runs a bot to brute-force your root password.
If you're unlucky, he'll be doing this for a few hours, resulting in a lot of unwanted traffic.

There is no way to control the amount of data coming and going from your router. You can check, yes .. but apart from avoiding being connected as much as possible, there's nothing you can do to actively CONTROL it.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[mollymoo]

Ultimately, my point is, and I think the one of the person who started this chain, is that charging by bit or byte is fine, but then the onus is on the ISP to make it very clear both what my costs and usage are. If they did that, then it would be easier for us to adjust to that new model.

Most UK ISPs are limited now and they do provide web pages to check your usage and emails giving you warning as you approach your limit (mine trigger at 50% 75% and 90% IIRC). Better ones also allow unlimited off-peak and allow you to carry over or borrow against the previous/next months allowance.

I use 10-20 GB a month (2 desktops, 2 laptops, one server, one PS3). My dad never uses more than 1 GB a month. He pays less than the old unlimited packages and I pay about the same. People who use hundreds of GB per month pay more.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[Shakrai]

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......

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[sammyF70]

Your point being?

Another nice analogy : want to pay for the spam that ends up in your mailbox (either real or electronic)? Beause that's what you are asking for.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[zoney_ie]

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).

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[tonyray]

I'm an ISP of 14 years and it really troubles me that so many people don't understand what the ISP model is.

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.

We term people who can't share nicely bandwidth hogs. No ISP, no matter what they say publicly, wants bandwidth hogs on their network under the current ISP model. Why? Because they want their customers to have a good experience using their service, keep it forever, recommend it to friends and so on. Bandwidth hogs degrade that experience and cost ISP's not only money, but reputation and customers.

14 years ago the average per user usage over all customers was 50 bits per second. Now the average per user usage averaged over all customers is 20,000 bits per second. A typical bandwidth hog averages over 900,000 bits per second (on a typical DSL line) 24 hours per day.

We know to the byte exactly how much bandwidth each customer is using; there is indeed an odometer to measure the overall bandwidth usage of each and every customer. We use a Redback SMS 1800 subscriber management/router and it gives us exact figures. Cisco makes a similar unit also used by many ISP's.

There are no allotments; things don't work that way. But 10 years ago and ISP could correctly figure a user was actively downloading something 1/30 of the time, but only because they were on a dialup modem. Broadband users were downloading more like 1/1000 of the time when broadband first became available because files downloaded faster. P2P destroyed that model and raised costs hugely.

Now the problem with P2P is that it expands to fill all available bandwidth. At one time, after Kazaa first appeared we saw our lines starting to become congested, so we doubled our bandwidth. That relieved the problem for almost 10 days. Other ISP's I've talked to agree, increasing bandwidth doesn't solve the P2P/bandwidth hog problem.

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.
   

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[Jeppe Salvesen]

A fair and reasonable company would charge me by the gigabyte. Say 10 cents per gigabyte == $13.40 a month. My electric company operates on that same principle (9 cents per kilowatthour), so why can't my internet company work the same way? No reason I can think of.

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.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

Interesting post.

Have you thought of having a subscription model that degrades service, say per 3 day, based on the average bandwidth usage for the last 2 days and the current day? This way old granny can have a fast internet connection (assuming she is not into P2P all day long).

For a faster connection and slower degrading transfer rates you could charge more to cover more bandwidth on your side. You could allow the customer to choose both the best connection rate and how fast the service degrades.

Also, not all P2P traffic is copyrighted material flowing along the tubes of the internets.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[markov_chain]

The garbage example is good. Yes the city will pick up a couch or two. But just try and dump all the furniture from a small office building on trash day and see how that works out for you. That is the kind of usage difference between casual and p2p users.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[CyberBill]

Even more ironically, Comcast's decision to throttle bittorrent traffic actually sounds logical in this context.

Yes, in this 'context' it does. If by 'context', you mean the utter bullshit that was in TFA. Comcast wasn't 'throttling' bittorrent. It ENTIRELY DISABLED IT! They didn't make it a lower priority so Ancestry.com would load, they just completely turned all bittorrent traffic off!

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[Vellmont]

For any other utility (water, gas, electricity), we pay by the usage. Why not this?

Maybe because the major cost isn't bandwidth, but maintaining the lines, paying salaries, etc? Also, bandwidth is increasing at an exponential rate.

I also dispute that all other utilities we pay by usage. We don't pay by usage for cable/satellite TV. We don't pay by usage for local phone service. What do all these have in common? They're all information services.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[Bat Country]

I'd like to also point out that the reason they oversell their capacity is the same reason that parking at your local university oversells parking permits... Because they can

It doesn't have an effect on overall availability assuming people are using the service in the way that they're expected to - the way normal users do - and it keeps the services utilized during hours where they would normally see far less usage.

If you get on most ISPs in the US in the late morning on a weekday, you'll find everything to be very snappy and responsive. Same with after 3am. That's because hardly anybody is using it at that time - just the "bandwidth hogs" and stay-at-home parents, kids home "sick" from school and aforementioned granny looking up her genealogy.

Not everybody uses the internet during prime-time either, so it tends to balance out... Assuming that people use the internet the way that they are expected to - not full bore all day long.

<caranalogy>Your automobile manufacturer gives you the same warranty as anyone else on the assumption that you're not driving it at 120mph in a loop nonstop on a raceway for the first 3 years of your warranty, necessitating more repairs than should be reasonably expected.</caranalogy>

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[timholman]

Now the problem with P2P is that it expands to fill all available bandwidth. At one time, after Kazaa first appeared we saw our lines starting to become congested, so we doubled our bandwidth. That relieved the problem for almost 10 days. Other ISP's I've talked to agree, increasing bandwidth doesn't solve the P2P/bandwidth hog problem.

Of course not. It's a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario. You'll always have someone who wants to utilize a shared resource to the maximum limit, regardless of how it hurts the community as a whole. What makes it worse (in my opinion) is that most P2P traffic is driven by compulsion rather than any reasonable personal need for the content. Consider that DiVX video requires about 0.5 GB per hour. If you downloaded and watched 12 hours of video per day, every day, you'd need about 270 GB of bandwidth a month (assuming you uploaded half of what you downloaded). Note that Comcast intends to cap users at 250 GB a month.

Now ask yourself what reasonable person watches that much TV, movies, etc., every day. It makes no sense until you realize that a small minority of P2P users are compulsive data collectors. They want to have a copy of every song, every movie, every TV show, every game. They have thousands of GB of content they've never even bothered to open. We all know someone like that, and it doesn't take very many people who behave that way to utilize every bit of available bandwidth.

It's been obvious for some time that ISPs will eventually be forced to go to something like the cell phone business model. You pay a flat rate for a certain number of GB per month, then a per-GB surcharge over the cap. This will force the obsessive P2P users to throttle back and make P2P more useful to everyone, without letting it become a compulsion that brings the net to its knees.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[advocate_one]

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.

hey, you sell me a package as having 1meg/second download rate and I expect to have it... whenever I want, 24/7 if needs be... anything less is false advertising. If you want to be upfront about it, then sell it properly as a maximum burst speed and have a total capacity per day where I get billed per 100 megabytes over that. 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...

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[Dirtside]

Wow, that's the neatest deflection of responsibility I've ever seen in this debate. It's horse puckey, of course. :)

The problem with your whole argument is that you're acting as if the end-users have some unwritten responsibility to share nicely, rather than simply being responsible for adhering to the terms of their contract with the ISP. Bandwidth hogs certianly do use up way more bandwidth than the average (and whether or not they're using that bandwidth to commit copyright infringement is utterly irrelevant).

But the problem is that ISPs tell their users "We'll give you 24/7 access to X bandwidth, for $Y a month." Then some users use up X bandwidth 24/7 (dutifully paying their $Y a month) and the ISPs (like you) start whining "HOW DARE THEY USE THE BANDWIDTH WE PROMISED THEM!"

You do not get to say "These hogs are supposed to be sharing nicely, not using up all the bandwidth we're providing them with!" This is a business transaction, your rosy moral view of the world has nothing to do with it. It'd be nice if everyone behaved politely all the time, but they don't, which is why we have laws and contracts. That way, there's force behind agreements, so when you whine "They're using too much bandwidth" they can point at the contract and say "You said we could, right here in writing."

But you sold them X bandwidth for $Y a month. That's in the contract. If it's not a viable business model for you to sell people this (because too many of them actually use that bandwidth) then you need to change the contracts so that people are paying for the bandwidth they use.

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. That's what ISPs are starting to switch to. But whining that some users use up too much bandwidth -- when YOU CONTROL how much bandwidth they have, and YOU DECIDED how much to give them -- is idiotic.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[mrchaotica]

And not only that, but they fraudulently impersonated both their users and the entity the users were connecting to to do it!

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[Jardine]

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.

Re:Internet Axiom: The internet is slow

[Znork]

Random script kiddies on the power grid have a hard time pushing electricity into your sockets and costing you a fortune tho.

But there's nothing preventing them from sending you a flood of packets. What was your IP address again...?

Re:Why Granny still uses dial-up

[EdZ]

I wish! Most fibre is still dark. Granny is using dial-up because a nice man over the telephone gave her a 'good deal' on it after a long chat.

Re:Why Granny still uses dial-up

[Antique Geekmeister]

Of course. That 'granny' is often in a less dense, or poorer, neighborhood. Why spend money there when spending the same investment in a customer dense, higher income neighborhood gets a lot more services purchased with a lot more margin for profit? Even for DSL, which requires only network setup at the Telco offices, if the homes are further away from the switching office the customers will get much less bandwidth.

That backbone transit is not only for the home customers, it's for the serious business customers. Take a good look at the bandwidth costs for your workplace: it's not cheap.

Backbone transit, lol

[Nicolas MONNET]

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.

Oh man, poor Granny

[ZorbaTHut]

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!

Population densities...

[WallaceAndGromit]

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).

Re:Population densities...

[maxume]

What is the population density of your neighborhood? I ask because Alaska doesn't really make it harder to service you (nor do Texas, Arizona, Nevada, ...).

Re:Population densities...

[witherstaff]

Why should the monopolies in the US plop down more lines when they can keep getting subsidies and billions given to them to 'roll out broadband'.

The realization of ubiquitous broadband is right up there with Duke Nuke'm Forever, except the telcos have actually figured out how to keep getting paid for a mythical product. The phone companies collected over $200 billion in higher phone rates and tax perks, about $2000 per household and the FCC and legislature keep letting them get away with empty promises. What a great Lobbying effort!

Re:Why Granny still uses dial-up

[Anonymous Coward]

bullshit.

they don't roll it out to less-densely-populated areas because it takes much longer to recoup the money they put out. it's not cost-effective, so it doesn't happen.

what isp do you work for?

Traffic shaping is the answer

[jamesh]

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...

Re:Traffic shaping is the answer

[kidde_valind]

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.

Re:Traffic shaping is the answer

[James Youngman]

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).

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.

Re:Traffic shaping is the answer

[mollymoo]

I have to read the entire sentences before replying now? Holy crap, I though reading TFA was bad enough.

Uh, OK, guilty as charged.

Games?!

[Xelios]

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?

Why is Slashdot so slow?

[PeeAitchPee]

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.

Re:I have no idea what they're talking about

[antifoidulus]

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!"

Like the man said...

[Joce640k]

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".

Re:Like the man said...

[Xelios]

I use a modified HOSTS file. Before I'd frequently get websites that would refuse to load for 10 seconds or more, because some ad server was taking its sweet time. Now any calls to ad servers are blocked and pages generally load up in less than a second. 90% of the time ads are blocked by the HOSTS file, the other 10% of the time I use the content blocker in Opera.

Re:Why Granny still uses dial-up

[vertinox]

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.

Ars Technica doesn't think so

[Andreaskem]

What exaflood?

Re:Why Granny still uses dial-up

[tepples]

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.

Exactly. Verizon quietly spends more on keeping bandwidth hogs happy than on installing DSLAMs or whatever the FiOS equivalent is called.

The whole P2P argument seems like a straw man that points the blame on the wrong set of persons.

But it's convenient for the ISPs, and apparently the burden is on the public to get straw men like this out of the way before the ISPs can consider serving less-dense, higher-cost areas.

Your connection

[Xanlexian]

Your connection will be as fast as the slowest link.

Exactly. That and virus.

[DrYak]

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.

Re:Duh!

[Tuoqui]

Unfortunately 'The Tragedy of the Commons' does not apply in this case.

1) The resource is not technically 'shared'.

The ISP gives you a set amount of bandwidth but expect you to use only a minuscule fraction of what they give you. Typically they'll expect you to use maybe 5% of the speed of your connection for about 5% of the time in any given day. The problem with that is that it might have been representative of the connected populace during the Dial-Up Era and maybe early into the Broadband Era... However, as leisure time tends to be spent more on the internet the speed of your connection tends to get used more with things like Youtube (NOTE: A single video on Youtube can potentially use as much as 100mb or more, watch 10 videos in a day and you've eaten up 1 GB) and web browsing as someone said with flash and lots of video content now the average webpages are typically hitting about 1MB. People also spend more time in front of the monitor now and may be there as much as 10% of the day. Bittorrent users typically use 90%+ of the bandwidth 100% of the time. However, the way to deal with bittorrent is not by criminalizing it (although it may be used for copyright infringement), the idea would be to rework the protocol so it prefers to use seeds with shorter number of hops over ones with longer number of hops so as to keep bandwidth within the network which presumably keeps the ISP's own costs down. The reason the 'resource' is 'shared' is because of overselling and more overselling when users even the average user are demanding more and more bandwidth.

2) The providers somewhat brought this on themselves by advertising in such a way that people equate SPEED with BANDWIDTH.

This is 100% the ISPs own fault. They've spent so much money advertising their speeds that Joe Sixpack thinks speed is the only thing and that things are generally unlimited.

Wait - who's fault?

[AJNeufeld]

He's called the "bandwidth hog," and it's his fault that streaming video on your computer looks more like a slide show than a movie. The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidthâ"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.

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).

that's bullshit, too

[speedtux]

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.

OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric.

[Anti-Fascism]

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:

"Where in the past we spent huge amounts of money to try to "rehabilitate" many, with a high rate of failure, in the future we should not shy away from removing them."

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:

"Ethnic self-determination
Each local culture is tied to a group by heritage, and 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."

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?

Re:OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric

[AxemRed]

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!

Re:OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric

[TwistedSymmetry]

It's practically straight out of Plato. Now isn't that scary in itself?

The myth of P2P expansion

[Vektuz]

One thing I keep hearing from ISPs is that "P2P expands to fill all available bandwidth."

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.

Not the 5% causing granny to wait on Ancestry.com

[idommp]

I have a reasonably fast DSL connection and use (but don't abuse) what I'm paying for. I used to be an Ancestry.com subscriber (for one year). They are, without exception, the most overpriced, under-powered subscription service I have ever used. My actual, tested bandwidth this morning is 6287 kbps which is a little below my average speed. My typical connection and download speed from ancestry.com never exceeded 256 kbps and was more often in the range of 90-150. This could be due to any number of causes:

• All of their outgoing connections to the net are still 56K modems. I was actually lucky and snagged several of them in parallel.
• Someone at my ISP doesn't like Ancestry.com and intentionally throttles their connections.
• I'm on a branch of the net with ten million little old ladies who were trying to use ancestry.com at the same time and we bogged down the router.
• Ancestry.com is simply incapable of pushing data fast enough to keep up with their marketing department.

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.

Re:August 15th 1971

[TechnicolourSquirrel]

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.

The internet isn't really slow

[m.dillon]

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

Re:OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric

[pchan-]

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.

Are you willing to pay per GB?

[davidwr]

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?

Re:OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric

[gabec]

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 /.

WD-40

[ciaran.mchale]

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.

Re:Off-Topic

[Anti-Fascism]

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.

It's called Reaganomics.

[plasmacutter]

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.

Re:OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:OT: Article submitter links to fascist rhetoric

[Incadenza]

Ayatollah Khomeini was a great admirer of Plato as well. (really!) Part of Plato's republic ended up in the Iranian constitution.