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Australian ISPs Claim Net Neutrality Is an 'American Problem'
RATLSNAKE writes "The heads of some of the most popular Australian ISPs were all interviewed over at ZDNet about Net Neutrality. For once, they all seem to agree, and they say it's a problem with the US business model, or the lack thereof. They discuss why they don't think it's an issue in Australia. Simon Hackett, the managing director of Adelaide-based ISP Internode, had this to say: 'The [Net neutrality] problem isn't about running out of capacity. It's a business model that's about to explode due to stress. ... The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity actually isn't necessarily the only way to live.' Of course, this also explains why we Australians do not have truly unlimited plans."
Every Australian I've ever talked to seemed to completely hate their ISP.
From what I remember, isn't the Internet in Australia totally socialized?
Of course the government ISP wouldn't have a problem, they get to define "problem."
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The Australians claim it's only a US problem? The CRTC here in Canada would disagree.
> "Their problem is that unlike Australia, they [offer] truly unlimited plans."
Except that the following countries also provide unlimited plans: Canada, Japan, Korea, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore ...
Wait... if I am not mistaken, it is faster to list the (quasi-industrialised) countries, which don't provide unlimited plans: Australia, New Zealand.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Unless the definition of unlimited changed neither does anyone else. At best, places get unmetered, and call it unlimited...
How can it be unlimited if you can want some and not have it?
Are you saying that if someone builds a maintenance-heavy canal from a perpetually filling freshwater lake, and charge people a fixed fee to draw "unlimited" water from it, then there would be a problem if a few select individuals decided to build fifteen bakeries and twenty-seven car washes next to it?
I'd even go as far as saying that downloading continuously at max capacity is somewhat immoral in itself, so long as you know that you are using far more than everyone else _and_ that it causes congestion problems. You are like the person founding a car wash next to the canal and saying that the contract stated unlimited access.
I think the ISPs have indeed gotten things wrong, with falling into the "unlimited" trap (inspired by the 'unlimited e-mail' concept?) that is impossible to follow up on, and so only a number of half-arsed and unclear stopgaps are implemented to avoid the inevitable. People should not really have a problem with a monthly download limit of even 100gb, with more expensive tiers above, so long as there isn't a "cash trap" on the other side (i.e. you get a fair warning when approaching). Unlimited download for private individuals is like a product looking for a customer.
At least partly, they don't get it. They are right that it's a business model that we use. It's called "You get what you pay for." As long as that is the case, AND you realize what it is you are actually paying for, then how exactly is this business model about to 'explode'? In a free market competition defines the minimum quality of the products. The broadband companies need to be more clear I guess. When I sign the contract for broadband I am not getting 100% of my theoretical maximum bandwidth or minimum latency 100% of the time. That's just part of the clause. I understand that. I expect that. If you go into it expecting to get those things then you had better damn well be paying a hell of a lot more than I am, because that kind of level of service is just not part of the agreement in a day-to-day contract.
You know what, fuck all of what I just said. It overcomplicates the issue. It's simple: You pay for 'unlimited' usage, and that means you get usage that is as unlimited as the resource permits. It's the only way this sort of resource distribution should ever work. It's fair: if you want to take your share, then go out and take it. But don't sit there and cry that other people are doing what they are paying for. Don't try to get the government involved in something that they should stay the hell out of.
These Australians are wrong.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
australia is a huge country with less people per mile than most other nations, so the enconomies of scale don't apply.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Australian ISPs Claim Net Neutrality Is an 'American Problem'
What a bunch of self-serving assholes. They're no better than Comcastoff.
This is a problem for any nation that wants its citizens to have more than basic email and Web browsing, and doesn't want said citizens to have their services curtailed at the whim of anticompetitive monsters. Apparently, the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on those, either.
At some point, more and more nations are going to have to put connectivity in the same class of service as electricity and fresh water, and start applying some meaningful quality-of-service standards to these bastards.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It would make sense to me that costs on the network would be regulated to cost-distance acquired for said packet.
That's exactly what we need, having to watch all the time if we're not accidentally browsing transatlantic after we click a link, or chat with someone.
Other smart ideas :P?
and not live under an oppressive government ( or government blessed monopolies )
You got to be kidding! If a business is failing and a government gives it $700bn cash to stay afloat, how is that not a monopoly? I would rather have a government-run ISP than government-run banking and airlines.
Of course telus and the government cronies propping them up would say that.
They have worse business practices than the monopolies which spawned the sherman act!
They have a 100% monopoly on australian pipes, and they don't allow peering agreements like every sane nation has.
This means they charge by the bit for every australian ISP.
This results in internet service which is an utter joke. The statues on easter island get better access, and they are stones!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
However, they seem perfectly okay using that economic model for their medical care, retirement, welfare, etc.
Oh, come on.
If you communicate within your ISP network, it would be the least cost, preferably 0 cost per packet.
If you communicate within the local network (peering ISP's, geographically local), it would be a low cost but non-zero.
If you communicate over large distances in which high utilization lines are used (undersea, satellite..) you have a high cost per packet.
One is only charged for sending, NOT receiving. This is usable using ONLY QoS already built in TCP/IP and could be set up per program or even per packet if the OS ever granted it.
Well, we see the bandwidth caps here in Oz, and the transatlantic cables are why there's caps and high costs. It costs a lot to communicate out of this island-continent.
The other thing is the local comm is free part: P2P sucks down every ounce of bandwidth. I'd rather have P2P coming from local than remote. It just makes sense.
I'm getting seriously fed up of this. You are not paying even in the same ballpark of the actual cost of supplying your full connection's worth of bandwidth for an entire month. If you want to use that much bandwidth, buy a leased line. If you don't like that you get more kb/s than you can use all the time, move back to a 56kb/s modem.
Why on earth the US ISPs have tried telling you that you can just use as much bandwidth as you want, for so long, I'll never understand. Comcast's model of "this much, then we write to you, then we cut you off if you do it again" is absurd, doubly so given they don't provide any easy metering, but that doesn't change the reality of what you're paying for vs what you wish your money covered.
Why are we relating Net Neutrality to the current condition in the states (corporate greed) then saying it's not about capacity?
While the sluggish inefficiency of bureaucracy is a problem in terms of quality of service, it's even more of a problem in terms of cost.
Unless you tax the citizenry to heinous proportions, there is only a limited government budget to deal with. That budget should be allocated effectively into programs that, for whatever reason, cannot be provided effectively as anything but a government service. For the most part, this means programs that inherently must run net operating losses in order for the service to be at a price point where the public can take advantage of it (and services that are of great importance to the public). I would call these "minor" market failure points.
If the service is one capable of being profitable at a reasonable price point, then there is no reason to take money out of the pockets of taxpayers to run that system -- they will be able to pay someone else instead of the government, and thereby keep money in the economy rather than in the government coffers. And remember, so long as there is competition without antitrust violations, you DO have a say -- it's called voting with your pocketbook, I believe.
I don't see any reason an ISP would fall in the former rather than the latter category. Then again, I don't see any reason a lot of popular government programs do, either.
NOTE: There are of course other motivating factors (such as keeping dangerous powers out of the hands of the politically unaccountable) that tilt in favor of some services being provided by the government (e.g., military/police), but I just think people often forget the most important reason is that you are having to pay for these services either way. Perhaps you'd pay less per capita if you were just paying directly for the service rather than paying the government to employ bureaucrats to pay some independent contractors to provide the service.
The problem is that this idea undermines one of the main points of net neutrality, to make as many parts of the Internet as free and easily accessible as others.
I agree that P2P is holding us back, and unfortunatley current P2P systems aren't "smart" enough to prefer local connections over long distance ones (which might actually be a trivial fix, but I don't know enough about the inner workings of Bittorrent and others.
Plus, it kind of fits with one of the main truths of the Internet's capacity; demand will always meet or exceed availablity.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
You may want to look up "monopoly" in the dictionary.
A dictionary is a book that has sentences which describe what an individual word is. You can go to a library or bookstore (they have pages of paper with words written on them, which is the form a dictionary tends to come in). Or search the web for information (probably using Google, which is a good example of an actual monopoly).
When the government loans money to a business to keep it afloat, its usually called a "bail out." It has nothing to do with monopolies. There is an entirely different term for this type of situation.
Do the research, you'll find your answers.
Remember, I believe in you! :)
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Two reason for this one being their cheap bastard or their choice of internet wasn't their decision
It was forced on them cause their parents/room-mate. whom makes the decision choose an ISP because the ad was on TV alot or Telephone provider with a monpoly that offers bundled Voice/Data + Mobile on a single bill.
Most likely these people are on a lower income to afford good ISP plan or under-contract, out of contract and CBF churning to another ISP.
I pay $150 for 8mbit service. This pays for 80Gb Download Cap and unmetered/free content offered by my ISP. Unmetered content includes File mirror, Shoutcast local relays, Large Gaming Network, Mirroring large media content (Revision3 and other online media)
US ISP don't do currently is investing in their network. Building array of unmetered content/services or build dedicated gaming networks/communites for customers.
As if Americans these days know anything about freedom. While those of us who give a shit about freedom are getting buried under the masses of those who would happily sell their soul for a government that would micromanage their lives cradle to grave.
At any rate, I could see tiered usage, so long as it's neutral (no "long distance charge" if my packets happen to be routed off to East Jamunga, no special charge to carry access to certain domains, etc.), and as long as a high usage option is available. I would certainly prefer unlimited; I am a relatively heavy user, and I run a server. (Business class connection)
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Looking at the actual European model, I'd say that the federal model looks better. Besides the EU is gradually becoming a government. I doubt it'll stay where it is.
I think the whole entire "Net Neutrality" argument is a scam. IMO it's about two things primarily:
First, I think it's about making a whole lot of money for, and giving corporate welfare/protectionism to large communications companies that have had plenty of the subsidies from the govt and taxpayers in the past - technology is making things they used to charge an arm and a leg for free, or practically free - look at VOIP for one - and every year the web and our networked society seems to progress more.
Second though, and more importantly, I think it is about control and censorship. The government and these large media conglomerates don't like that people can get any sort of unfiltered information they'd like from around the world in real time. They don't like the fact that people can get news up to the minute from anywhere on any subject that they are interested in that is likely less biased, more accurate, and less full of "agenda setting talking point spin" than they can from TV News* (which has really become absurd, it's Paris/Britney mixed with a health dose of paranoia-behavior-control). They don't like it that instead of having some fascist douche like Bill O'Reilly telling people "what the news means to them," people can either look it up on their own or find their own place full of smart people with diverse views to have conversations with (Slashdot being a perfect example).. They don't like how the net can be used as a tool for orgaqnization and mass communication by practically anybody.
When one of your main goals is control, and knowledge and information are pwoer - the internet is your enemy.
*Now everything I have stated as populist advantages to a free internet can also have their downsides, for example - not all news online is accurate, honest, agenda free - but compared to what you see on TV it is, especially if you are even halfway savvy consumer of media you can find it easily. Also, anything that can be used to spread information can also be used to disinform - but I don't think anything comes close to the amount of disinformation/one-sided information and societal control as network television does.
So these are the real drivers of anti-net neutrality: Money and control. All of this stuff about not having enough capacity, and how strained the internet is - those issues can be solved so many ways properly without creating a digital ghetto for non-corporate/big money websites.
Recent events indicate that net neutrality isn't the only "problem with the US business model, or the lack thereof". It seems that big business wants the profits privatized (as they should be) but any losses should be socialized.
There is plenty of blame to go around but the majority of the blame rests on the shoulders of big business. By the way, for the companies not incorporated in the US, there are some of the same problems. They are not quite as extreme as in the US but people not living in the US shouldn't feel smug, it could happen to you if you are not vigilant.
Except that's not what net neutrality is. Net neutrality isn't about charging everyone the same price regardless of how much bandwidth they use, or requiring that everyone has unlimited network capacity. That's silly. It's not even about saying that certain types of traffic can't be prioritized over others -- net neutrality wouldn't prevent ISPs from throttling bit torrent, for example (though there is overlap in the people who support net neutrality and the people who oppose such throttling).
Net neutrality means that Microsoft can't pay your ISP to improve your bandwidth to MSN search while throttling the bandwidth to Google. Net neutrality means that your ISP is not allowed to charge you for bandwidth and then also charge websites to actually connect you to them. (Google is already being charged quite a lot for bandwidth.) Traffic of different types (web vs. bittorrent vs. whatever) can behave differently, but traffic from different sources should be treated the same, to avoid protection-racket style abuses (nice site you got there, it sure would be a shame if my 50 million subscribers were no longer able to reliably access it...)
So, no, net neutrality is not at all about all users paying the same amount regardless of their level of usage. But some of the ISP monopolies have managed to frame it that way by implying that the rules that would apply to destination sites (Yahoo vs. Google) are actually rules about individual subscribers (large versus small bandwidth demand from a single individual). The intent of net neutrality is that ISPs should only be charging for throughput at the network endpoints they control, not at both endpoints of all connections, so we don't end up quadruple-charging for every transmission (as opposed to the current double-charging, which is reasonable since it allows the two parties to the connection to share the cost of the bandwidth they both use).
I am the man with no sig!
Unless you tax the citizenry to heinous proportions, there is only a limited government budget to deal with.
I live in Sweden - we pay an exorbitant amount of tax - something like a 56% income tax, with a nice 25% sales tax and then a 400% tax on alcohol - and believe me when I say that the Swedish government still have a quite limited budget to deal with. We can't even afford to buy a single Stealth Bomber.
I agree that P2P is holding us back, and unfortunately current P2P systems aren't "smart" enough to prefer local connections over long distance ones (which might actually be a trivial fix, but I don't know enough about the inner workings of Bittorrent and others
Ah, but they already are, to a large extent, based on three principals:
1. (Almost) All P2P systems will prefer high bandwidth and/or low-latency peers. These tend to be the ones that are local.
2. I've seen plugins/mods to several popular clients including eMule and Vuze that do a version of this by IP address look up.
The real problem is that ISPs don't encourage this, for example, by never throttling local connections and/or excluding that bandwidth from any caps.
I don't want to start getting charged different rates per country, but might not be so offended by a bandwidth cap if it excluded local peers; particularly if the ISP actively facilitated taking advantage of this feature.
whenever conservatives talk about socialized services they seem to conflate problems of government corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and unpopular government with the socialized institution. but you're forgetting that public schools, law enforcement, fire departments, public libraries, roads, post offices, etc. are all socialized public infrastructure.
Good grief, you are using those as examples of socialism working? Lots of people have problems with police departments all over the place, and listing schools there is just short of insanity.
Roads are almost never in good repair, and when is the last you you saw a road crew where you thought "hey, that's just about the right number of people and they are all working diligently".
Public libraries and fire departments are probably at the top of that list as to things that generally work OK - but that's mostly because so few people pay attention to what they spend, you can't say for sure how truly inefficient they may be (especially libraries).
You do realize that in a lot of smaller communities the fire department is local volunteers right? That's not socialism.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because their ISPs are a cabal of exploitative assholes.
They COULD easily have unlimited plans. They don't because people are willing to pay large sums of money for non-unlimited plans because it's the only thing available to them.
I raged when I read this article and couldn't finish it.
+++ATH0
They are demanding to pay the same $19.95 as their grandma who only checks her email once a day.
Riiiiiight. That's why I pay $60 for a faster network connection, and why just about every ISP that isn't dialup offers "fast" "faster" and "fastest" packages. Smell that? I think your strawman seems to have caught fire.
The fact is, the ISPs have been using this tired "tiered" argument to sideline the real neutrality debate (note how "speed" and "neutrality" aren't synonyms?), as opposed to facing up to having threatened to block competitors' Voice (or TV) over IP offerings rather than competing, or threatened to hold Amazon, Google and iTunes hostage unless Amazon, Google, and iTunes paid up big bucks.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
ISP: What a wonderful idea! Let's get our Cisco rep on the line and see if we can get our gear reconfigured to ship every packet to Europe and back!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I'd even go as far as saying that downloading continuously at max capacity is somewhat immoral in itself, so long as you know that you are using far more than everyone else _and_ that it causes congestion problems.
Imagine if you could only reach websites hosted by your ISP. THAT is what the supporters of Net Neutrality are fighting to prevent. NN is not about what the ISP charges it's users. NN is about preventing ISPs from charging websites a fee to receive traffic. It would be a death of 1000 cuts for any website when every major ISP on the planet comes looking for a handout.
It's really disappointing that /. editors are posting misleading stories like this. They're making net neutrality supporters look like morons who don't understand simple supply and demand. I'm beginning to wonder which side /. is really on here.
I love Australia and New Zealand, but a consequence of pervasively metered internet service means that you must check what an AU/NZ hotel means by "internet access". As one of the bandwidth hogs who (for example) downloads podcasts and uploads pictures, I found that it was startlingly easy to hit some limits. Further, the limits can bite you.
When checking a hotel in a country like AU or NZ, be sure and ask:
For markets to work, both sellers and buyers must be sharp dealers when it comes to pricing. At least once I changed hotels when "unlimited internet" turned out to be "unlimited in the sense that there's no upper limit on how much we'll charge you." After that, I made sure to have a tediously detailed conversation about internet pricing when choosing hotels.
I think hotels *should* charge by the bit if they want to -- I just think that they'll have to get by without my patronage -- just like a hotel that wanted to charge extra for towels, by the liter for hot water and toilet flushing, and by the joule for electricity (including elevator rides!) would find me checking out quickly, or more likely, never staying there.
If you don't want this sort of regime, use your wallet to try to stop it -- hunt around, find hotels and service providers who say things like "No, we used to charge by the bit, but it turned out to be a source of bad feeling, and not worth the money".
It's not inevitable that we'll wind up with by-the-bit pricing -- but it's inevitable that bean-counters will try it. And, who knows? Maybe that is the way things should work. But right now, you have a choice.
... is all about how the various bits of the Internet are privately owned and unregulated. Today, we can use our broadband connections to access any sites we want. But this is based completely on the charity of the owners of those pieces. At any time, they reserve the right to knock any and all traffic off 'their' networks to accomodate their own product.
Meanwhile, in most of the rest of the world, the network operators contract with their customers to provide bandwidth as a service separate from any content that the ISP's might want to deliver. As a result, their networks must be run as businesses that are viable on their own. This leads to a system where usage must be charged for. There is nothing wrong with this system, so long as the charges are assessed uniformly, with no prejudice against one content provider over another.
I'd much rather have to pay for my bandwith in a network neutral world than be given it with the risk of having that 'gift' be taken back for the convenience of the network operators. If we can't get to that kind of system through open competition, perhaps we need the FCC to step in and split up the network operators from the content providers.
Have gnu, will travel.
And what about when web sites start restricting content to oversea users because it costs them more?
If you communicate within your ISP network, it would be the least cost, preferably 0 cost per packet.
That might be true on a telco network using DSL for the last mile but I don't think it holds true on a cable network using DOCSIS. If I'm sucking down 5Mbits that's still 13.1% of the available downstream (5/38) on a DOSCIS 2.0 network regardless of where it's coming from.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The interesting thing with web traffic in Australia is that there are elements that come close to truly violating net neutrality (and not in the facile "I paid for 100 TB, why can't I get it?" way), but in a way that mostly works better for us.
The thing is that bandwidth is so expensive here, that downloading service packs for windows on, maybe, two or three computers would put an enormous dent in your traffic for the month. Same with patches for games/etc... so what most of the ISPs end up doing is mirroring a lot of this content themselves on their own servers, and not charging customers to access it.
Most of this content is free, but where it gets questionable is when the ISPs charge for content -- such as our largest ISP, which lets you download music/movies/tv/etc... for a fee per download, but without metering the content. I don't know if said ISP still charges $150/Gb for excess usage, but they did until recently, and if they still do, it doesn't take a genius to see the potential for anti-competitive conduct here. If anyone wants to start up an alternative content provider, this ISP will charge its customers through the nose to access it, while providing their own content much more cheaply.
Like so many others, this article starts from the false premise that Network Neutrality implies unlimited or unmetered access, and then goes on to point out that such a model wouldn't work.
Network neutrality doesn't mandate unlimited access. It doesn't even mandate high volume access. What it does require is that any limits be expressed in terms of unbiased metrics such as the instantaneous bandwidth provided, the packet rate allowed, the guaranteed latency, etc. Network neutrality does imply that my ISP must not discriminate based on other factors, such as that they've got a financial kickback arrangement with Movies R US.
From a network neutrality point of view, there's nothing wrong with my ISP offering a cheap plan with very strict limits, even as low as 100 MBytes per month or 1 MBit/second, as long as those limits are applied independent of which Web resources I'm connecting to, or which protocols I'm using to do it.
Now, if the protocol I choose, say Bittorrent, takes a higher speed connection to perform well, I'll probably want to pay for a faster connection, but then I should have a choice of using any of the protocols that leverage the better connection, and I should be able to connect at the higher rate to my choice of Internet sites. I've yet to hear why this sort of Network Neutrality is impractical, or why it isn't essential to supporting continued widespread innovation on the Internet.
RTFA = what simon says is that because Australia has download caps it's not an issue.
Which is bullshit because net neutrality isn't really about bandwidth congestion; it's about money and control. The big telecoms want the internet to be more like cable television, and a "tiered" internet is their way of implementing it.
The Australian system is NOT a cartel system, there are at least 15 different major DSL ISPs and a whole pile of minor ones. Plus you can get various kinds of wireless from the mobile phone companies.
And you say i have problems. You need professional help. Seriously.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Please explain to me , using simple words, how google is a monopoly and in what sector of business.
Good-bye
This reminds me of something:
docsigma2000: jesus christ man ...!!!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK
docsigma2000: my son is sooooooo dead
c8info: Why?
docsigma2000: hes been looking at internet web sites in fucking EUROPE
docsigma2000: HE IS SURFING LONG DISTANCE
docsigma2000: our fucking phone bill is gonna be nuts
c8info: Ooh, this is bad. Surfing long distance adds an extra $69.99 to your bill per hour.
docsigma2000:
docsigma2000: is there some plan we can sign up for???
docsigma2000: cuz theres some cool stuff in europe, but i dun wanna pauy that much
c8info: Sorry, no. There is no plan. you'll have to live with it.
docsigma2000: o well, i ccan live without europe intenet sites.
docsigma2000: but till i figure out how to block it hes sooooo dead
c8info: By the way, I'm from Europe, your chatting long distance.
** docsigma2000 has quit (Connection reset by peer)
It's sad, that bash.org is gone. :(
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I rather like the current model, but for another reason: Americans are already so isolated, so unconscious of the existence of other countries or other parts of the world, that the current model in a sense subsidises not just browsing, but education. Getting more people on the 'net is important, but a tiered structure opens the door to things like "US-only" plans, which is exactly what the head-up-their-ass America-is-the-world Republican redneck hicks would buy. That makes the Internet far less valuable to us as a society.
Think global.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
No, there is no cartel. What there is is one monopoly (Tel$tra) abusing its power and dictating to ISPs what those ISPs need to pay for access to the Tel$tra network.
To be considered a cartel, there would have to be some kind of deal done between the major players to deliberatly keep prices higher than they should be. The huge number of players in the DSL market means that that cant happen.
If there was a cartel and some kind of secret "lets keep the prices high" agreement, would we really see some of the deals coming from the likes of iiNet, Optus etc?
This already happens. I know of at least one colocation company that has different bandwidth caps for packets to the domestic exchange than packets that have to go abroad. Typically this is because their linkups are supplied by different companies, and the international link costs more.
Thank you. I'd been searching for the words all morning.
Come on. The United States is still the largest democracy.
But the point is that net neutrality is indeed an American issue. It was not the first time that an issue was raised and turned down by the lobby but net neutrality is very proactive. It is like an open source preference and Microsoft starts to lobby against it and then you complain that you don't get it. It gets stronger as the lobby fights against it.
Net neutrality is the dominant pratice worldwide. Do we need to codify it? ...no But could be fun to keep the Telco lobby busy.
The Europeans explicitly endorsed the net neutrality this month in the forward looking Toia report.
Europeans don't have a real net neutrality debate but it sounds good, so politicians adopt it.
India is the largest democracy as they have 1billion people and the US has around 300million.
The problem is that we, as Americans, would not like the consequences of having those particular businesses fail. (Or so we're being told.) That raises the questions of how much freedom those business should have in their actions, or whether or not they should be private at all.
>> The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity
Its very dissapointing how even key decision-makers are at the top of big ISPs don't really understand (or are choosing to misinterpret) the whole notion of net neurtrality.
Its way more than just about punishing a few (p2p implied) high bandwidth users. Its about the whole ntion that ISPs even thinking they have a right to limit bandwidth to certain services.
Anyway even if the guy neext door is a major bandwidth user, why should it be acceptable that the ISP's push their incapability to handle it onto everyone else's plate? I know in practice thats cable works, but as a consumer who paid for cable on the basis of the high bandwidth advertised, the weakness of their architecture to deliver because of its shared-bandwidth design shouldn't be made to be my or any other consumers problem.
>>>The problem is that this idea undermines one of the main points of net neutrality, to make as many parts of the Internet as free and easily accessible as others
I disagree. My understanding of "net neutrality" is that all packets will be treated identically, regardless of where they came from, or where they are going. It has nothing to do with providing cheap service. It's about not censoring access (such as Comcast giving nbc.com packets low priority).
>>> "The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity isn't the only way to live."
I agree. IMHO internet should be just like phone calls or electricity usage or gasoline purchases. The more you use, the more you pay. If grandma downloads 1 gigabyte of emails, charge her $7 a month (current rate on Netscape dialup). If a younger person watches 100 gigabytes of Internet TV, charge them $50 a month (Comcast's lowest rate). And if someone like me goes nuts & downloads 500 gigabytes a month, then charge me $150 a month.
There's no need to prioritize or deprioritize packets based-upon application (example: comcast.com gets highest priority, while nbc.com gets lowest priority). Just vary the prices according to each user's demand, and then use the excess funds to purchase extra T1 lines as needed to avoid congestion.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
It's not called a monopoly, but a backup of the American financial system.
When the biggest banks of this country fail and you look in your wallet those plastic cards that you so loving hold will be useless. The mortage on your new house won't go through because hey where is the capital to do it? There isn't. We need these big financial giants to stay afloat.
I am all in support of bailouts with regulations. The deregulation of the financial industry caused this mess. It's time to put them back in their place. It appears most politicians agree with me.
>>>Come on. The United States is still the largest democracy.
I'm sure you posted this just to demonstrate how bad the Government Monopoly Schooling is in America. Right?
Or maybe you were demonstrating how Americans tend to think the whole world revolved around them. Right? Hello??? ;-) As already mentioned India is the largest, with the European Union being the second largest at 450 million citizens. I'm not sure who's third... is the Russian Federation more populous than the U.S.? I don't know without looking it up. In any case the U.S. is not the largest. (However if we annexed Canada we'd be number two again; maybe Obama will pursue that goal in 2010.)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Back in the 1980s some of my friends paid for calls to European BBSes with stolen calling cards or credit cards. (One of them almost got arrested by the FBI.)
Let's please not go back to those bad old days. I prefer the flat rate fee regardless of how far the packet traveled.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
My main complaint about "public schools, law enforcement, fire departments, public libraries, roads, post offices, etc. are all socialized public infrastructure....." is that they are not pro-choice. They are anti-choice. They are a monopoly. While some of those activities like police can't be converted to a "multiple choice" plan, a lot of those things can be:
- Just as colleges compete with one another for students, so too can K-12 schools. If University of Phoenix is lousy (it is), go to Penn State instead. If Baltimore High is lousy, take your money and send your kids to Johns Hopkins High instead. Vote with your dollar.
- Libraries, like video rental stores, should operate as private business. Charge $1 per book rental and eliminate the need for taxes to prop them up. (In recent years, a lot of U.S. libraries have started doing exactly that; charging for new releases.)
- Post offices can be competitive. The U.S. Post Office should (and does) compete against other businesses like UPS and Federal Express so that citizens have CHOICE in where they spend their money.
- Likewise internet service providers should be competitive in nature. I don't have an Uncle Sam ISP Monopoly; I have multiple choices - Netscape, Verizon, Comcast, Dish, Directv, FiOS.
- I even have choice in my electrical providers. I choose GreenEnergy which is solar and wind power.
Government socialism is just another form of monopoly that takes-away people's freedom to choose for themselves where they will spend (or not spend) their dollars. It's no more desirable than the monopoly that Microsoft holds over Wintel PCs.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
And here's Australia's problem. So I guess the land down under isn't exactly paradise after all
So thought the entrenched telcos back in the day, and created a bunch of protocols like X.400 which added costs on every step. That effectively died because the "shared cost" internet protocols came out the winners.
It would make sense that the major ISPs, who also happen to be owned by the entrenched telcos, now start pusing for a differentiated payment scheme - the opposite of net neutrality - and your suggestion would just be the last stage in their apparent quest to warp the internet into what they originally wanted.
Here in South-Africa, you have the option of buying local only ADSL accounts that range between R130 for 30GB (+-USD0.50/GB) to R19 / GB ($2.50) for a prepaid account.
International ADSL accounts are from R350 for 10GB (USD4.35/GB) to R70 / GB (USD8.70)...
Using some interesting routing tricks it is possible to do a form of least cost routing...
I disagree. My understanding of "net neutrality" is that all packets will be treated identically, regardless of where they came from, or where they are going. It has nothing to do with providing cheap service. It's about not censoring access (such as Comcast giving nbc.com packets low priority).
I know what you mean, there's many different definitions of NN. Yours is essentially the same as mine, if a bit more specific (which is good). When I say free, I meant more free as in speech; it'd be kind of silly to make ISPs non-profit organizations.
It's just the gatekeepers. The ISPs become gatekeepers to the Internet. If you don't deal with the ISPs directly, then it's your local Internet Cafe or Library etc; that become gatekeepers. My point is, NN should be about limiting the number of gatekeepers to deal with, giving everybody one Internet, not just several different versions of the Internet depending on who you're paying or not paying. The Internet Cafe in one city should give you the same Internet as you would get from a home connection in a different city, and so on.
I like your definition of NN, but not all packets are treated equally. Depending on their size and nature, they will be treated different, and not because of third party interference. Whether this actually implies anything about the feasability of NN remains to be seen.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Well I disagree about limiting the gatekeepers. Imagine if every home had 10 different ISPs he could choose from. It would mean "buying" an ISP is like buying a TV - it's just a commodity, and the only real difference is price. You'd have true competition.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I think it goes further then that. It isn't specifically giving NBC.com a low priority but slowing their speed down to below that the customer already paid for. A low priority on QOS won't actually achieve that 100% of the time, they are actually planning on rate caps below the connection speeds they sell the service to the customer at unless they "profitably" websites don't pay the ISP money on top of what their customer already pays.
Let me ISP's go loose, Bruce
Let me ISP's go loose
They're of no further use, Bruce
So let me ISP's go loose.
What the Australian ISP's are saying is that ISP's are looking into charging content providers *because* their "one price for all customers" business model is flawed.
In Australia, you pay for your 40GB/month at 8Mbit/s. If you want more downloads, you pay more. If you want faster speeds, you pay more. It's simple.
ISP's here aren't complaining about users who have bit torrent downloading all day over their 24Mbit/s connection, because that user is paying them enough money to cover the cost. And as a result, ISP customers in australia know that they will get the full speed they're paying for, and they can self monitor how much usage they're going through by logging into the ISP's website, and even buy more if they need it this month "shit! I downloaded 25GB of movies on iTunes yesterday and there's still 3 weeks left in this month! I can either be shaped to 64Kbit or pay a once off fee of $10 for a few extra GB for this month"
Finite resource, infinite demand, something's gotta give.
Until someone finds a technical solution that truly allows everyone to have 'unlimited' internet, you have to find some way to ration it.
I'd rather be charged for what I use and not have to worry about ISPs sticking their noses into my data stream and killing traffic they don't like.
Here in oz, I'm on a $A60 plan that gets me 40G/month @ 20 megabits/sec. I don't find that restrictive, I'm not constantly worrying about how much bandwidth I use (as some of the hysterical postings above imply) and I'm not paying for the wankers who download 400G/month of movies they never find time to watch.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Disclaimer: I'm on what is considered a very good plan for Australia. Optus Cable, 20GB peak/40GB off-peak (off-peak is 12 midnight to 12 noon), 10Mbps down/256kbps up (though in practice it's really about 7Mbps down). After all my peak usage is used I get shaped to 64kbps down/up (and my extra off-peak becomes unavailable). If I use up all my off-peak it starts taking from my peak usage. No free sites - all traffic counts towards my usage no matter the source. I pay about AU$70/month for this service (which BTW is very reliable - my only real issue with it is the pitiful upload speed). It's a grandfathered plan - you can't get it anymore but I'm allowed to stay on it - the new plans are much less friendly (value for money for net access has been trending downwards in Australia over the last few years).
I find your definition of "application" strange - I would have thought "application" would refer to type of traffic, rather than source.
I want ISPs to prioritise traffic based on type, just I do at my end. I use cFosSpeed to prioritise real-time applications (VOIP) highest, things requiring low latency (e.g. web browsing) next, and things which aren't particularly time-dependent lowest (e.g. downloads, P2P).
Most of the time, P2P runs at full speed, because there's nothing else going on. But as soon as something else starts using the net, P2P slows down - and then quickly speeds up again as soon as the higher-priority activity stops.
I'd love ISPs to do the same thing, so my VOIP calls were at the highest priority end-to-end. ISPs should never prevent any type of traffic, but I'm very happy for them to reduce the performance of applications that are not significantly time-dependent so that significantly time-dependent traffic is preferred. I'll still get my downloads - it'll just take a little longer.
I'd also be in favour of per-megabyte charging, so long as it's at a reasonable rate (not $150/GB as Telstra charges for excess usage!), and that you can set a cap after which you get shaped to low speeds, at which point you have to go to a secure web site and set a new cap for that month only (or something along those lines).
(Almost) All P2P systems will prefer high bandwidth and/or low-latency peers. These tend to be the ones that are local.
I am a heavy Bittorrent user in Seattle, USA, and I think you're wrong. I have noticed that the fastest and most reliable peers/seeds tend to be European or Asian, even when I'm downloading American TV shows or the Presidential debates.
Possibly because their residential connections aren't limited to 128kbps upload.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
I'd like to know more about this.
Aren't backbone-speed routers still big-bucks items?
How much of the money for renting a pipe and for filling it up goes to
o making payments on the routers
o making payments on the DSLAMS/(whatever the cable acronym is)/edge routers
o paying off the fiber
o making a reasonable profit on the fiber
o making an excess profit on the fiber
?
To put it another way, what would have to be bought and installed in order for US ISPs to be able to support the backhaul for a zillion residential subscribers at Japan-level connection speeds?
try qdb.us
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
1. (Almost) All P2P systems will prefer high bandwidth and/or low-latency peers. These tend to be the ones that are local.
I disagree, I get allot of good seeds from America, when I have a limited amount of bandwidth and need to get a torrent down as efficiently as possible I sometimes wait until the Americans have finished work for the day. That seems to be when they do the most torrenting from their home connections.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Well, we see the bandwidth caps here in Oz, and the transatlantic cables are why there's caps and high costs.
No, the reason that we have high costs is because of the Telstra/ Southern Cross duopoly. Telstra are well known for their high costs (for example the NT pays two to three times as much as the rest of the country only because there is one link. Tasmania has even worse problems). Southern Cross provided much needed capacity when it went in but (AFAICS) doesn't compete on price.
Consider this: When Pipe International announced it was building a new cable (PPC-1) and were selling it at a much lower cost to their customers, Southern Cross massively increased it's capacity and Telstra announced they intend to build new fibre. Pipe have stated that they intend to market their cable at approx 30% less for those who sign up now (IIRC). I can only conclude that we are currently paying far to much to the incumbents. Considering that Telstra and Southern Cross have probably paid for the cost of the infrastructure a high percentage of the money they get now is pure profit. Given the impact that Pipe Networks has had in the peering arrangement between ISP's in Australia I have high hopes that they will have just as much of an impact in international transit.
My websites are all in the USA, Australia is too expensive for web hosting, increasing the cost won't make me bring my sites home any time soon.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I think hotels *should* charge by the bit if they want to -- I just think that they'll have to get by without my patronage -- just like a hotel that wanted to charge extra for towels, by the liter for hot water and toilet flushing, and by the joule for
electricity (including elevator rides!) would find me checking out quickly, or more likely, never staying there.
It would attract environmentalists.
If you don't want this sort of regime, use your wallet to try to stop it -- hunt around, find hotels and service providers who say things like "No, we used to charge by the bit, but it turned out to be a source of bad feeling, and not worth the money".
It is useless when a large enough portion does it. Then you have no choice at all save for regulation against it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
>>>I want ISPs to prioritise traffic based on type
That seems logical, but given how companies like Comcast act, they'd decide that the NBC.com "type" or the CWTV.com "type" should be given low-priority simply because it competes with Comcast's own television sales. It is better, I think, to simply tell ISP's to ignore the content. Be neutral.
Rather than have the ISP control traffic, let the sender adjust dynamically to congestion. For example CWTV.com's video player is constantly fluctuating from 128k to 500kbit/s based upon changing conditions. (BTW Voice-over-Internet is hardly a demanding application. I don't about your country, but in the U.S. telephones are only 56k wide. That's all you really need for voice-quality connections over VoIP.)
And finally, ISPs need to stop being lazy. They should be constantly upgrading the network & adding more bandwidth. I get the impression ISPs want to just sit on their butts & "freeze" capacities at current levels rather than add more. So they are trying to limit usage, rather than expand.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Care to show us your license to practice psychiatry &/or psychology, or your PhD in those fields, since you see fit to psychoanalyze others?
Oh, you don't have one??
Quick to judge, and make assumptions with no facts at all. I hope you don't live that way in real life. It would be a setup for a miserable one if you do..
And this is /. i really don't need to prove anything here.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
>>>I want ISPs to prioritise traffic based on type.....I use cFosSpeed to prioritise real-time applications (VOIP) highest...
P.S.
Just because YOU prioritize VoIP highest does not mean your ISP will do the same. For example my ISP is Verizon Phone Company. They might decide (reasonably) that VoIP interferes with their primary business & give it LOW priority to discourage its use.
Obviously that would be bad. Net neutrality, where my phone company does not slow-down my VoIP or any other application, is better.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
We are talking about Telstra and co here. Just their reputation outside their own market makes them look like they eat babies. Of course they defend the way they do things. They make quite a bit of money raping their customers.
You have somehow managed to read this entire article, and argue four paragraphs against its thesis -- BACKWARDS. Because the premise the article starts from is exactly the opposite of what you just spent four paragraphs rebutting.
LOL all this coming from someone who lives in a country that's just nationalised half of it's finance industry. People from the USA calling out other people for being socialists are displaying the worst case of cognitive dissonance possible, actually delusional, is probably the more correct term..
Even at the hight of our "socialist experiment" in the '70s we didn't dare touch the banks.
Oh delusional yanks, it wouldn't be so bad if so many of you weren't so blindingly hypocritical.
Well, the post I was responding to was explicitly implying that net neutrality was just a bunch of greedy computer geeks wanting to download a bunch of torrents without paying for the bandwidth. TFA itself is another matter.
I still disagree, though: ISPs are looking into charging content providers because they are greedy and see a way to exploit their monopoly on users. If it was really a matter of covering costs, then they would just do the sensible thing and charge the current price for "as much bandwidth as any normal human would need" and then a second tier higher price for "truly unlimited" bandwidth (add additional tiers as necessary). If they want to avoid customer complaints, (1) they can offer a slight price decrease to users who don't use tons of bandwidth, (2) the people who will be bothered most are the same people they're claiming are running them out of business with their crazy downloading, so losing them should improve profits anyway.
They don't do this, though, because they are covering costs quite comfortably, and in many places they have effective monopolies anyway and only the fear of litigation keeps them from pushing the price up even further. Charging content providers is thus a back door to exploit their monopoly that, depending on how legislation favors them, would be less vulnerable to lawsuits or monopoly-related charges than simple price-gouging would be.
I am the man with no sig!
"The real problem is that ISPs don't encourage this, for example, by never throttling local connections and/or excluding that bandwidth from any caps."
Mr Nail, meet Mr Hammer
I am an unfortunate user of BigPond. While their service is generally reliable it is expensive, and capped.
What they do is arbitrarily provide some of their own sites that don't count towards your downloads which is great if you only want to visit their crappy sites but sucks for everything else.
They still count downloads to all other sites even those that are hosted within their own network
If for example I have a friend who is also a bigpond user and we decide to connect up for whatever reason, online gaming, voip, file transfers whatever, any bandwidth you use is still counted.
It also applies to other large commercial sites that are hosted on their servers. The site has to be "deemed" a free site by some bigpond marketing wonk or it counts as a download.
*If* they only charged you for downloads outside of their own network it would still suck, but at least it would be understandable.
*If* they made some peering agreements with large sites such as youtube et al which enabled them to host transparent mirrors of high bandwidth sites it would still suck, but suck less.
As things stand they are just ripping off their customers on the basis that they really have little alternative. Optus are totally fricking hopeless, the most incompetent bunch of retards ever to step into a data centre and everyone else pretty much just resells BigPonds bandwidth or operpriced frickin 3G crap with caps even lower than BP adsl
They all suck
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Yep. ISPs should use Nationwide peering to start of with. For a lot of data, there are localized copies anyway.
P2P, although high bandwidth, isn't as high priority as streaming and voip. P2P packets can be identified easily enough. The same can be said for direct downloads, updates etc. They are needed but not as high priority as real time internet.
With a well developed peering structure, a lot of the bandwidth issues can be ameliorated.
There is also a neat commercial model, where a few percentage cents of user purchased data would go to the isp from the provider. This can easily be built into the cost and is easy to set up.
For ISPs that sell their own data like Bigpond or Apple Australia, local downloads would become cheaper and they'll be more competitive. Users would go local because it's cheaper and faster than an off shore source.
Looking into the future, I would rather see P2P developed so that all off shore requests could be cached locally before download. Currently that's illegal if the content is copyrighted and the last thing an ISP needs is to be sued. But there is a lot of public domain that could be cached.
And while we're at it, we need more ISPs willing to provide higher upload speeds. It works both ways you know!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
... The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity actually isn't necessarily the only way to live.' Of course, this also explains why we Australians do not have truly unlimited plans."
It is quite a popular one if you describe the US model as such.
Enough distaste with that model is what got rid of it, and what drives many to keep it that way.
It offers too much ability to abuse, with a long record of it in the US - Comcast being the prominent example.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Don't laugh, it is trivially easy for an ISP to fubar their system accidentally to do this.
I remember when the company I worked for was on the optus network. If we traced a site in Melbourne from Sydney packets would go via Los Angeles.
Optus really are a bunch of clowns.
Their GSM network has had broken SMS for ten years now and they still haven't fixed it.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Australia has very little cable internet (compared to the US).
We didn't even have cable TV until about 10 years ago and even now it reaches a pitiful percent of homes. I will pull a figure out of my arse and say "less than ten percent" but don't quote me. It might be more than that but I do know it sure ain't much. Cable roll outs stopped years ago, most pay tv is done via satellite here.
This is why Telstra (BigPond) is so dominant, there are no cable networks to compete with their adsl so we poor users have to play by their rules.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
(despite there being signs of a crafted complaint, posting anyway)
Why on earth the US ISPs have tried telling you that you can just use as much bandwidth as you want, for so long, I'll never understand.
Because the demand is for a bulk pipe, not Compuserve, nor an overpriced Leased Line. They get away with it by being the only choice in many regions.
56k lines require the same limitations. That blows away your argument in that area completely.
Having it at 19.95 is one thing. Having the only choices be metered at $20-$70+ versus upwards of hundreds for a leased line is not a real choice at all. It is a sign of abuse of government by business.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
go with soul/tpg. they will rip you a new asshole. TPG was ontop here is aus, but got into bed with SOUL. reliability factor -1 bdsl with soul/tpg is a f**king joke. unlimited plan bs. 5/6 hours on the phone to a bunch of dud offshore techies... f**k that.
Stop helping Comcast become what you are now.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Net Neutrality already doesn't exist in Australia. You have a monthly cap, say $100 for a 25GB cap if you're on Bigpond Cable. Now, now apple has an agreement with Bigpond where itunes doesn't count against the cap (I'm guessing by paying Telstra). Bigpond movies, no cap. There is a list of affiliate sites, without the cap. Presumably these sites are paying telstra for the that right.
Bandwidth caps are the beginning of the tiered, non-neutrality internet. Here in Australia, its already a reality.
Most of the ISPs joined onto PIPE Networks in Australia have free traffic between them. It comes up in your traffic usage but under a different heading that doesn't contribute to the monthly limit.
This makes all traffic within the ISP and most of Australia free, but everything else outside that network counts.
( or government blessed monopolies )
Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, and AT&T aren't? They're not bad as Telstra right now, but Comcast is heading dangerously close(with enough ability to get the others in line).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
JAPAN 1GPBS synchronous 56/month USD
that says it all about australia
and the stupid USA
and the even more stupid canada
THIS IS ENTIRELY GREED
the furthar you get from greed
the better the service and the more speed
and technology you get.
PERIOD
I agree that P2P is holding us back, and unfortunatley current P2P systems aren't "smart" enough to prefer local connections over long distance ones
In Australia, privately hosted trackers have sprung up around various peering points, which only allows registration and use by people with IPs 'local' to that peering point.
These creates small islands of community hosted content, available at a high speed, without the associated latency and costs of international links.
If the business model used by ISPs makes local traffic 'cheaper' to the end customer, then the high volume customers (those most affected) work out ways of using it.
prk.
I think the point the poster was making is that if the government is bailing them out then there can be no competition. How can an upstart, with better ideas, compete in a market where billions in cash is thrown at failed business models. It's happened, but it's happened rarely. Google and Firefox are examples.
So if there is no competition due to government intervention then I'd agree that the government has created a monopoly of sorts.
Exactly!
Especially, since we all want the same, we can equalize the distance-related price-difference over all packets, and be good with it.
You just have to accept, that you pay for long-distance packets of others. But for the right to get financed by others in expensive times.
Oh boy, this sounds a bit like communism. But as I say: Nothing in bad (or good) in all aspects everywhere. And in this aspect it seems to have the good without the bad. As long as there is nobody who is more equal than the others. We'll see... :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
They still count downloads to all other sites even those that are hosted within their own network
They still have to get that data from person A to person B. That involves back haul costs, particularly if you aren't localised on the same networking gear (ADSL concentrator, etc). Telstra run a lot of their own back haul so the costs would likely be less, but a lot of other ISPs don't.
If you're on fibre you're usually sharing the bandwidth with everyone in your neighbourhood so free data to people in your street might seem good to you, but it is actually detrimental because there is only a finite amount of bandwidth to play with.
Adam Internet provide a cool service to users on the same ADSL gear. They call it 'Community Net' and basically if you're on the same ADSL concentrator then you can set up a second virtual connection on a network that is private to that gear. It means you get free data (doesn't leave the concentrator so they don't have to provide back haul for it) to some people in your neighbourhood. It's also not supported so if it breaks you're S.O.L.
Internode provide a neat file mirror with a bunch of useful things. The common Linux distros are on there, as are a bunch of useful Windows tools. It's too bad they can't provide Windows updates as well because that would be cool. Internode also have a bunch of 'radio' reflectors for some streaming stations that don't count toward your usage cap. That's a neat feature because there's something in there to cater for almost everyone.
I drink to make other people interesting!
I'm not going to debate the details of the particular plan (personally, I'd stay right the hell away from Optus). But you do bring up interesting points about traffic prioritisation. I would also like ISPs to start doing (or at least offer) this kind of QoS with all traffic. It's not an incredibly hard thing to do and it allows me to just set my torrents in the background and never have to worry about shaping their speeds to accommodate what else I'm doing at the time (browsing, gaming, whatever). On the other hand, there are various programs that will allow you to do this client-side without interaction by the ISP. Why should the ISPs be responsible for this extra cost when you can do it cheaper at home with your own CPU cycles. The ISP is simply providing you with a pipe and that's the way it should be.
I do disagree that ISPs should never ever shape traffic to the end-user without express consent. That's part of the premise of Net Neutrality. What the ISPs want to do is be able to shape traffic to certain sites/services based on a subscription model with the content provider. If a site doesn't pay fees to have priority then the speed to that site is shaped. No. Just no, guys. Bad ISP!
There is no knowledge that is not power.
Actually Canada is trying to get closer to Europe, at least economically to the 27 nations that officially use the Euro: :-D
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=1247770e-d31e-4452-9713-364320dfd049
It would certainly be interesting if some day Canada starts using Euros
To add to OP, with Bigpond's "download limits", if you exceed your cap, you get charged 0.15c per extra megabyte downloaded, which works out to be $150 per a gigabyte see here, in comparison to Westnet for example, another Australian ISP which charges $6/GB (see: here.
I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but for most ISP's other than Bigpond, a scheme called "shaping" is in place for nearly all plans, so that when you exceed your download limit, your internet speed gets slowed to 64kbps for the remainder of the month (as opposed to paying for any excess you use). Bigpond have slowly been introducing their plans that "feature" unlimited downloads (shaping) - which have been a defacto standard for most other ISP's for long before. Bigpond sales have also been known to flat out refer to these "Liberty" plans as "unlimited downloads", without explaining the concept of shaping (believe me - I have had to explain this to several people).
As a subsidiary of the previously state-owned monopoly, Bigpond is a joke. I went from 256kbps @ 12GB for $60AU per month (believe me - not my choice) with Bigpond, to ADSL2+ speeds (realistically for me: 1MB/s~) @ 21GB (now 30GB) for $60AU a month with my current ISP (iiNet). On top of that, Bigpond tends to be rated far lower in customer service (see: here) than most other ISPs.
Sorry, but that is NOT on "what's considered a very good plan for Australia". You have a "very good plan for people who don't bother trying".
You get 10Mbps down.....I get 22Mbps.
You get 256kbps up......I get 1Mbps.
You get 20GB peak.......I get 40GB peak.
You get 40GB off-peak...I get 110GB off-peak.
So, you have half the downstream, a quarter of the upstream, half of the peak downloads, a quarter of the off-peak downloads...oh, and it's the SAME PRICE and I have had no downtime in over a year. Your grandfather deal that you're so lucky to be allowed to stay on is being undercut massively by deals on billboards and in whole page newspaper ads. You need to get out more.
If only everyone could agree on your definition of Net Neutrality....
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
And to go alll the way up there, we'd still be screwed if we were charged for distance as most (all?) of our links out of Aus are undersea cables anyway. Someone pasted me this a few days ago, it's an old article but it helps explain why we're all fucked either way.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Yep very interesting article.
But if Canada's provinces seceded and joined the E.U. as member states (I can easily imagine separatist-Quebec doing that), I don't think the U.S. would allow it to happen. The U.S. doesn't want a superpower like the E.U. parked on its northern border. There would always be the fear that Europe might invade.
The U.S. would likely take-over the seceding provinces by force (same way we took the Southeast from Mexico). Or possibly lend military aid to the Canadian government to hold the pieces together & maintain the status quo.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Most long-distance calls are not much more expensive than local calls (in the U.S. anyway). 10 cents for local versus 25 cents to call Europe or Japan. I don't have any problem with just lumping it all together & paying a flat rate.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
The real problem to this is who cares? If I pay for the bandwidth I should be able to do whatever the damn I want with "my bandwidth" I mean hell, I pay for it. I had 3mbs of bandwidth (2 bonded t1's) in 1996... noone tried to tell me what I could do with it then, they sure as hell shouldn't be able to decide what I can do with it (50mbs) now..
You pay some amount for it, yes. Do you pay enough to recover the costs of you downloading 540GB/day, every day? Not likely.
Just because someone gave you an (I assume) a 50mbit/sec fibre connection, do you think they provisioned N * 50mbit/sec backhaul for the N subscribers in your neighbourhood? You can assert your right to do WTFYL with your network connection, but if all your neighbours decide to do likewise, there'll be a big sucking sound as you all open your throttles and the backhaul becomes the bottleneck.
Here's a clue: all you can eat restaurants do not actually have an infinite quantity of food out the back. Their business model assumes that most people don't bring a trowel to empty out the shrimp tray at the buffet. Your ISP's business model is similar. Sure, your ISP could lay in scads of capacity all through its network to accommodate every subscriber using every connection to capacity - but then they'd have to charge a whole lot more for the service... just like when you buy a dedicated server colocation plan with an unmetered network connection. Server providers assume that you WILL be trying to get the most out of your network connection, and they charge accordingly.
-Snorbert, somewhere in the antipodes
"There would always be the fear that Europe might invade."
Are you serious or is it just that you've seen too many Hollywood movies? Why would Europe want to even try? For what gain? What's with the constant fear of countries attacking the US about? That's a pretty f*cked up comment if you really think that (or maybe you're just a very sophisticated troll, I hope that you were just joking).
The only reason the US wouldn't be happy about it would be because of economical reasons. It's highly improbable that Canada adopts the Euro, it was an exaggeration from my part. Anyway, Canada is already in the Mexico-US-Canada economic group, joining the EU would have the side effect of making Mexico and the US in the same group, so a big percentage of government tax income would disappear, etc, etc. It's clear that Canada wants to relate with Europe because of its better founded economy, it's not as prone to grow spectacularly like for example the internet related sector, but it's not as prone to have huge exploding bubbles that leave its citizens economically vulnerable. I'm not saying that European economy is as solid as a rock, a good example is Spain's real estate problem similar to the US's, but its not as exaggerated.
Well, anyway, this summit will limit itself to make Canadian and European economical agreements that will have little or no impact on actual economical bonds. Things that wont happen: no taxes between countries, implementing the Euro, etc. Things that could happen: competing European companies for building government infrastructures and vice verse, better trading bonds between Europe and Canada, etc.
Or the overseas connections aren't being throttled as much as the domestic ones...
Probably more of a combination though, as I've noticed that at least in Asian countries (Japan, S Korea, and many parts of China) the internet infrastructure seems to be more pervasive and better developed than much of the N. American offerings.
Hehehehe... You're funny.
With what money would the US do that exactly? Damn, you can't even get a tank of gas in large parts of the States right now.
- Most of your banks are hemorrhaging cash like there's no tomorrow.
- Therefore the survival rate for said banks might suffer.
- Your biggest pension fund insurance company has been bought up internally so you can have an orderly bankruptcy.
- Two other financial institutes already nigh toppled completely.
- Your remaining financial institutes need a 700 billion dollar rescue venture which none of the European banks endorse.
- You are currently involved in two costly wars overseas.
So starting a war in your back yard because of the risk that the Evil European Union poses is a brilliant plan, Maestro!
Besides, why the hell would the US have something against an EU member state next door? What bloody incentive do we have to invade the United States? Although at the rate Induhviduals like yourself are going, you might indeed soon end up with no cash, no power and more enemies than you can shake a bloody stick at.
Tasmania has even worse problems
Tasmania always has worse problems. Nothing to do with duopolies. Move along.
Or call it a utility, and require the utility to provide, at their cost, a physical bandwidth meter on the wall of your house. Then you can be charged per MB, and you can see exactly what your usage is.
What is right is that European Parliament members are making fuzz that an anti Lisbon treaty campaign was financed by the US...
But the Lisbon treaty is just horrible...
I'm Australian and I have a 40 gig on peak and 60 gig off peak cap. I don't even have a proper phone line because I have "naked broadband" and just use a voip system that our ISP set up. We get free phone calls to land lines and (my favorite part) they don't have a call center in India. I wouldn't go near Telstra or Optus with a ten foot pole. All of our little ISPs seem to be the better ones.
here in Perth we have WAIX (Western Australian Internet Exchange) and any traffic on that network is free because it's basically one big LAN throughout our city. Very useful when grabbing linux distros or updating them as you'll never have a slowed connection. there used to be huge file sharing networks that were WAIX specific (eMule and DC++) but the ISPs frowned on that and put a stop to it... if this statement is wrong, please, somebody send me the details of the new WAIX P2P :)
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
Australians do have truly unlimited plans, you just have to pay business rates. A$1500 for a 10 megabit fibre connection, plus installation of the fibre.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Reasons to use one of the 'pretty much everyone else'
1. Customer service: They have it, BigPond doesn't.
2. Price: They might not so generous as to have 'free sites', but the plans are more than generous on a download to dollar ratio to make up for it. And most of them don't charge for uploads like BigPond.
3. Resale: There is no resale of ADSL2 that I know of. Most of the 'pretty much everyone else' got tired of Telstra's excuses and setup their own. If you have access to that, what's your problem?
Oh, and what the hell is wrong with Optus?
Bigpond doesn't rip people off on the basis that they 'really have little alternative'. They rip people off on the basis that people have a perception that this is the case, or by sucking people into the whole 'Wow! I can save $2 by bundling my internet with my phone line!' thing.
Two men claimed to have walked into a bar. Only one had the bruises to prove it.
"BTW Voice-over-Internet is hardly a demanding application. I don't about your country, but in the U.S. telephones are only 56k wide."
When I talk on the land-line phone, isn't that all analog data? I don't think 56k applies here.
They also agreed that electronic voting, televangelism, Enron, the housing crisis, the collapsing dollar, telemarketing, marketing the US republic as a democracy, military invasions of other countries, government bailouts, ongoing government handouts to billion-dollar industries, and the current US administration were also problems with the US business model...