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

[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

[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.

[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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

[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

[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.
   

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!

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".

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

[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: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.