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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."
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"
I play WoW with a couple of Aussies, and the easiest way to get them fired up is to complain about your internet. You'll start hearing about their month 10gb caps for 50 bucks. The reason it's an American problem and not an Australian problem is simply because the internet is almost as limited in Australia as it used to be here when everyone had 56k and was on AOL.
It's not actually like that - the simplest description is that it's a government mandated monopoly run by Mexican bandits. Nobody else can compete without the permission of the bandits.
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.
fuck you have no clue. there is an existing previous monopoly that's fighting competition tooth and nail.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'm an Aussie and I love my ISP, iinet. (This is not a paid post, I'm simply giving credit where it's due).
They provide great customer service, their ADSL2 is always fast (unless I go over my monthly 45gb cap), they provide media services like I can watch EPL games streamed from their servers... ...and the best part is they tell companies like MediaSentry who demand personal information about users for alleged infringement to fuck off and get a warrant.
Some Aussie ISPs are still stupid, but there are a few very progressive ones who are well aware of issues like net neutrality, censorship, privacy, and who actively defend users rights.
Honestly I think the main complaint before was with "broadband" services that had 300mb (that's Mb) limits and then additional dollar charges for each mb (again, Mb) over that limit. Ridiculous. But now, it's much more sensible.
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. if you really think that having government run infrastructure (in other words, having a government) is a bad idea, then wouldn't it be worse having them run the military, police, and writing laws?
if a country is a true democracy, then its government is merely a mechanism for carrying out the will of the people. i mean, most people like the idea of having free schools, but a single person cannot establish a free education system, so you do it through the government. likewise with roads, libraries, the legal system, etc.
if the government isn't acting in public interest, then that's a whole other fundamental problem that needs to be addressed regardless of whether ISPs should be socialized. i mean, why would a government ISP ignore problems any more than a commercial ISP would? would the gestapo come out and silence anyone who complains? or would they just ignore customer complaints like commercial ISPs do? at least the public has a voice in government, whereas they don't have a voice in private corporations.
all the people i've spoken to who've used public wi-fi access have commented on how great it is and seem quite satisfied with the way it works. there's no reason to think that just because a service isn't run based on corporate profits that it would be inherently inferior.
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?
It's simple: You pay for 'unlimited' usage, and that means you get usage that is as unlimited as the resource permits.
And since that isn't really unlimited, there's a bit of a problem. You're paying for one thing, and they're providing something else. That's usually called "fraud" or "false advertising", and it tends to annoy people who want to actually know (and get) what they're paying for. That they probably put something like "unlimited doesn't mean what you think it does" in the fine print only matters from a legal "see, you can't sue us, nyah nyah" perspective, not a "this isn't what I paid for, you bastards" perspective.
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 not really a "conservative" but its nice of you to immediately try polarizing the conversation.
Are you serious about using public schools, law enforcement, public libraries, roads and post offices as examples of socialism "done right"?
For real? Maybe this is an American problem, but all of those groups have pretty poor records as far as efficiency goes.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
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?
Have we not learned our lesson from communism? The more power and control of people's lives Government has, the more widespread and pervasive society's problems are. Most problems we encounter are CAUSED by government. The sad thing is that we need government to a certain extent. So, we tolerate some of the problems it causes, but we must keep a watchful eye on government to make sure it doesn't overstep its bounds and we must keep a watchful eye on ourselves and our neighbor, lest they ask government to overstep its bounds.
The Internet is one area that government does not need to interfere with. I pay $50 a month to get unlimited high speed Internet access. If my neighbor wants to save a few bucks, let him get a limited plan for $40. What do I care? What should my neighbor care? There is no need for the government to step in. Ever.
I'm not against government, I'm against federal government. Most of these should be controlled at the local and state levels, not by the feds.
Let's see. The local library, the police, the fire department (we have a volunteer fire department) are all controlled locally. Those work. Federal programs rarely do.
Gone!
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!
I'm quite happy with my ISP.
I am with Optus, I get full ADSL2+ speeds and 20/40GB (20 peak, 40 off peak, and yes, peak is 12 noon to 12 midnight, off peak is the reverse).
I download enough to satisfy my needs, and the price is quite fair ($70 p/m).
I've only ever gone over my cap once, and that was to rebuild a Linux server for a mate.
I'd rather have a realistic cap than have some fucktard diddling with my packets.
As for "every Australian" you've ever talked to... what, is that a grand total of 5? I am a self confessed geek with lots of geek friends, we all love our ISPs because we're not idiots. We don't go for price, we go for quality and download capacity. I can only think of maybe 5 or 6 people I know that hate their ISP, and they aren't geeks - family members who didn't consult the family geek before getting their plan.
Net "neutrality" (I am still bewildered about how that term is valid) seems like a big excuse for ISPs in the US to punish their customers. I think the main downfall of the US is not having body like the TIO (http://www.tio.com.au/) to deal with ISPs fucking you over. I've had bad ISPs in the past that have tried to screw me, what do I do? Contact the TIO and have them fight my case for me. I don't go to court, I don't really need to do much other than contact them, give them details, and they do the investigations. They pull server logs, demand details of the case, and basically make the ISP think twice before dicking their customers. They don't enforce the laws, or even make them up, they are purely there to mediate cases. They have a "fee" structure that makes it hard for ISPs to see a net gain from screwing customers.
Case in point:
An ISP wasn't delivering advertised speeds for my connection, I said I wanted out due to false advertising. They returned saying I needed to pay AU$550 to release from the contract. Well, I wasn't going to take this laying down, so I went to the TIO. They investigated the case and ended up ruling in my favour. While they weren't fined (this is something for Fair Trading or Consumer Affairs, depending on the state), they were liable for AU$1500 in fees due to not responding at the first and second level of investigation. I ended up paying nothing, they ended up $2050 in the hole for being dickheads about it.
I digress, if you want to hear about people bitching about ISPs, talk to a Kiwi... or an American...
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.
i completely agree with you. the way i see it, the larger a government gets (in terms of the size of the population it governs) the less democratic it becomes, not only due to bureaucratic inefficiencies which are incurred as an organization increases in size, but also because of the logistical problems presented by trying to satisfy such a large population.
there's a huge political spectrum covering the vast American cultural landscape. that diversity is one of our strengths. however, being part of one large nation creates a single political hegemon which rules over this diverse cultural landscape. it's impossible to homogenize such a vast population spread over such a large geographical area, and even if it were possible, it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.
i think it would be preferable to adopt the European model, whereby "states" are actually states, but their political autonomy and cultural diversity do not prevent them from working together to achieve common interests through the European Union. you could still have federal-level initiatives, for things like FEMA, but they would be run as international agencies similar to UNICEF or the IPCC.
Net "neutrality" (I am still bewildered about how that term is valid) seems like a big excuse for ISPs in the US to punish their customers.
It's a big excuse for ISPs in the US who chose not to re-invest in their ifrastructure with the billions of tax break dollars they received in the past decade .
In particular, cable companies here have done nothing to improve their core. They kept ramping up the claimed speeds in the last mile, but never bothered to fix their core networking so it could handle all those leaf nodes at full speed. Pretty much every cable company in the US requires transit from some other ISP before they hit major backbones, and they pay dearly for that.
But, the ISPs that did any forward thinking and build out are not punishing their customers with total byte caps or speeds reduced from maximum.
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!
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
take a look at the US public education system and tell me there isn't a problem...
judging by the last seven years including the war on terror, patriot act, telecom immunity act, torture and numerous other unconstitutional doings, I'd say that we have a very serious problem with how the US federal gov. handles the responsibilities that we have given it and to me the idea that we should limit the amount of power/control it has over pretty much everything is a very good one. socialized services are basically natural monopolies that the costs are hidden in taxation. to be frank, the belief that restricting competition to a single very large entity that has no limitation on funding [if it spends money badly it can always raise taxes] can remain efficient is absurd.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
We have similar net connections in NZ and I don't see the problem. It is never a case of not being able to get what you want, it is a case of having to pay for it. Sure if you want to pay $30 a month you will get 10GB a month, but for myself I get 100GB a month at ADSL2+ unthrottled speeds (although only this speed within the country reliably) for around $80 a month.
I pay a premium because I use the service more. It costs them to provide bandwidth, which I should be paying for if I am using it. Also the ISP I am with doesn't complain about P2P, they just explain that it is given lower priority than all other traffic and leave it at that. They also publish their total bandwidth utilisation so you can see when the shaping is occurring. Works well all up.
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.
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.
Having attended both private and public schools, and driven on private roads, and also in areas with privately-run fire departments and security, as a user of FedEx, and video rental stores, project Gutenberg, university libraries (and having read books which were researched with LexisNexis)..
Yeah, I can honestly say that the government-run versions of these have all been inferior.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The United States is NOT a true democracy, we are a republic. The will of the people is not always the correct action, no matter how many scream for it. It may seem a bit pedantic, but it is a very important distinction.
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 $69.99 to your bill per hour.
docsigma2000:
docsigma2000: is there some plan we can sign up for???
docsigma2000: cuz theres some cool stuff in europe, but i dun wanna pauy that much
c8info: Sorry, no. There is no plan. you'll have to live with it.
docsigma2000: o well, i ccan live without europe intenet sites.
docsigma2000: but till i figure out how to block it hes sooooo dead
c8info: By the way, I'm from Europe, your chatting long distance.
** docsigma2000 has quit (Connection reset by peer)
It's sad, that bash.org is gone. :(
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
People should not confuse 'unlimited' with 'infinite'. Everything humans do is finite.
According to the context you agree with when you get the broadband account your account really is 'unlimited'. In the context of broadband it only means that the company is not going to single you out and limit what you can do. That's all it means. There is legal precedence to use this word in this context. It's not fraud of false advertising.
The problem I think is one of defining the value of information. How does one measure the value of streaming video from YouTube against the value of someone researching their family history? Or the value of someone doing a video conference with their son in Iraq against the value of a teenager watching porn?
Clearly this is a much more complex issue than just giving people 'unlimited' transfer.
I'm not really aware of a good solution, but I'll be thinking about it now -- maybe you or someone else can offer an idea?
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
No, there is no cartel. What there is is one monopoly (Tel$tra) abusing its power and dictating to ISPs what those ISPs need to pay for access to the Tel$tra network.
To be considered a cartel, there would have to be some kind of deal done between the major players to deliberatly keep prices higher than they should be. The huge number of players in the DSL market means that that cant happen.
If there was a cartel and some kind of secret "lets keep the prices high" agreement, would we really see some of the deals coming from the likes of iiNet, Optus etc?
This already happens. I know of at least one colocation company that has different bandwidth caps for packets to the domestic exchange than packets that have to go abroad. Typically this is because their linkups are supplied by different companies, and the international link costs more.
I'm in Australia and get a 3 times higher GB:$ ratio (assuming you were using AU$, it's higher than 3 if those were US$).
Maybe basing a whole country's state of development on two people you know in an online game isn't a great idea? Why do you think it would be so different over here anyway?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
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 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.
>>>We have similar net connections in NZ and I don't see the problem. It is never a case of not being able to get what you want, it is a case of having to pay for it.
>>>
Precisely. I wouldn't mind paying $50 a month with a 100 gigabyte cap. I'd just download smaller files (70 megabyte tv shows) instead of the larger stuff. And if I hit my cap such that my access was cut-off for the rest of the month, I'd just use my backup 50k dialup account until October 1st came back around.
My fellow Americans do tend to make a big deal about small things, but I think that's a flaw with this entire "entitlement generation". I've heard a lot of university professors complain that young adults walk into a college classroom and expect to get an A just because they showed-up, and then they get yell at the prof, because he gave them a B. Likewise they expect to be able to download 1000 gigs while only paying $50 a month.
The world just doesn't work that way. You don't get something for nothing; you have to do the work and/or pay the cost.
Jeez.
I'm only 35 years old, and already I sound like my grandpa. ;-) Well at least I didn't have to walk to school in a snowstorm.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
No, he didn't sue anyone, he complained to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. Under the Telecommunications Act providers have an obligation to provide set levels of service, with potentially huge fines if they are in breach of the Act. In some cases the ISP has to pay the fines (thousands of $ / day) to the customer. If you let your ISP know you will contact the TIO if they don't fix something it's usually fixed within 3 days.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hardly. I know I don't. Sure, there's the elephant in the room that is the "deregulated" government monopoly called Telstra who maintain horrific price/quota ratios because they attract the people who don't know any better, and for whom the plans aren't that bad (relatively). Other ISPs like Internode and iiNet (the #2 and #3 suppliers, I think, although Optus might be in there somewhere) have reasonable plans as long as you know how much you're going to use. Go over the quota and you get your bandwidth reduced to a lower level.
The main problem that gets MMO-playing Aussies fired up is people complaining about latency, given our pings to the servers we have to play on that are almost invariably in the US.
Our government is also planning on an almost nation-wide FTTN network, something that should bump up the industry a bit as a lot of our infrastructure is still 100% copper wire-based. The net result of all this is not that we have the greatest plans (we definitely don't, and a lot of that is to do with the cost of laying the undersea cables to the US which gets passed right through to the consumers - unique to Aus and NZ), but the article is correct in that it means we don't have to worry about the Net neutrality issues directly.
>>>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.
Australian ISPs aren't too bad if you look around. The big name ISPs like Telstra Bigpond offer shitty deals like 20gig caps, but you can find places like TPG that offer 150 gig caps, for around the same price. The problem is most people just use the broadband service offered by their landline phone service, instead of researching the best deals.
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.
"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!"
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.
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.