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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

[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.

[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?

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.

 

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!

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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!

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...

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:What does this mean?

[ergean]

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

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".

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?

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.

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.

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.