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Cox Communications and "Congestion Management"
imamac writes "It appears Cox Communications is the next in line for throttling internet traffic. But it's not throttling of course; Cox's euphemism is 'congestion management.' From Cox's explanation: 'In February, Cox will begin testing a new method of managing traffic on our high-speed Internet network in our Kansas and Arkansas markets. During the occasional times the network is congested, this new technology automatically ensures that all time-sensitive Internet traffic — such as web pages, voice calls, streaming videos and gaming — moves without delay. Less time-sensitive traffic, such as file uploads, peer-to-peer and Usenet newsgroups, may be delayed momentarily...' Sounds like throttling to me."
...sucks Cox!
...describes the executives at the company.
Explain to me why my gaming or surfing should suffer because you want to download/upload XXX_Donkey_Love.WMV from thepiratebay, again?
Sounds like QOS to me.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Are they purposely referring to priority traffic as "time sensitive" as opposed to "delay sensitive" just to make the average joe think this is better? Don't get me wrong - as a network design engineer I'm all for prioritizing latency sensitive traffic like VoIP or streaming video. Just don't treat Cox's VoIP any better than Skype's or Vonages... This whole Net Neutrality thing is a bummer. I like the idea of democratizing traffic - but only of the same type. No way in hell should FTP or BitTorrent have the same priority as VoIP.
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
Unless they've decide to throttle /. traffic too
The same technology may give them the capability to do all sorts of mischief, but I don't see a problem with prioritization based on application. If they prioritize their own VoIP but somehow keep dropping or delaying Vonage packets, that's a problem. That's just an example, of course.
Wouldn't it be much simpler and cheaper to implement an Akamai-style solution and install local servers for popular content? With quality animal-based porn available for free download the yokels' demand for peer-to-peer would soon dry up.
Umm.. thats not throttling, it applying QOS (Quality of service) Throttling would slow your traffic all the time, where as this applies prioritization to data that needs it. Packets have a qos field that says the priority they should be given..
Im glad there is a telco that will respect QOS - I've wasted a week with a voip problem, only to learn that the telco was shaping traffic and discarding everything above 3mb without paying attention to QOS Flags.. Allstream charges more for this!
they have the internet in Kansas & Arkansas?
Does this mean when I call these bumbledweebs when my connection crashes or they suddenly decide to send my packets halfway to Zimbabwe and back to get to a server in the next state over that they can no longer deny that they support VOIP or gaming?
Damned A--hats.....
...Web Servers around the world are now listening on port 5060.
If they don't want egg on their faces, they better do this right.
They better be completely transparent about what does and does not get priority.
They better be completely transparent about any "special rules" like "no more than 128kb/sec will get preferential treatment" - that's more than enough for 2 simultaneous 2-way audio channels.
They better be completely transparent if they make "additional priority traffic" a premium-charge option.
They better use common sense when determining what is and is not "priority." "If it looks like real-time, treat it like real-time unless the customer is above his real-time quota, then use more discerning measures" is a good rule of thumb. Another good rule of thumb is "only throttle as much as necessary, no more" so that bits fly without delay during times of no congestion.
They better listen to their customers and be willing to admit if they make a mistake.
If they fail do do all of these, they will get some major backlash.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I've read about 5 different articles on this and none of them make the clear distinction as to whether or not Cox plans to use QoS for traffic classification on their transit network or if they're going to be doing actual all-out throttling. I don't want to defend them doing either but the implications are different between the two implementations.
Articles also seem to be fond of mentioning and comparing it to Comcast's p2p blocking where they actively reset TCP streams inline -- which in my opinion is ethically dubious (just like NetSol's hijacking of all unregistered .com space a few years ago so their could set up that Sitefinder crap). If all they are doing is effectively implementing QoS, I don't really see a problem with it as long as it is source/destination agnostic and is only classifying by protocols.
Honestly it sounds to me, from all I've read, is that they're just planning to classify some protocols as high priority and some as normal priority, ala QoS. Naturally if there is congestion at some router in their network, the high priority traffic will be forwarded before the lower priority. IMO that's more ethically tolerable than Comcast's current "if you're using what we deem is too much of the bandwidth you paid for, we're going to QoS your ass to the lowest priority queue we can invent"....
It sounds like they are throttling but have simply change the term for it and the stated reason for doing it. Kind of like when you invade a country to protect your own from weapons of mass destruction that you "know"" exist, and none are found so you say you went in to liberate the country's people from an evil dictator. I know that is not a fair comparison, but that's where they learned it from: if someone objects to what you are doing or why, change your reasoning or supposed goals until they shut up.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Cox suckers!
As long as the P2P apps and file transfers can run at full speed when nothing time sensitive is using the network, this is the RIGHT way to do things.
They use a European implementation of an American technology.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How are file uploads and P2P traffic intrinsically less time sensitive than other types of traffic?
As long as they're using QOS techniques instead of throttling parts of the network that are not under duress, it's fine with me. As long as they're not prioritizing one party's packets over another's of the same protocol (Vonage vs Cox's self-branded VOIP) it's fine with me.
It seems foolish to expect a consumer ISP to provide 100% of the advertised bandwidth 100% of the time. If you need it, there's a certain expectation that you can get a professional line with some established guarantees there. It's widely known that the bandwidth is oversold, and while it's their responsibility to work out some of the congestion, it's not their responsibility to provide bandwidth for 100% of their customers to be uploading at 100% of their available bandwidth.
Both IPv4 and IPv6 headers have fields for the priority of the associated data...
NOT ALL TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT IS BAD YOU FUCKTARDS!
Why is it that every form of bandwidth throttling is seen as evil? There are some good, legitimate, reasons for managing traffic flow across a network. While most of the pukes on Slashdot may be hugely inconvenienced by having their latest pirated copy of software X, or DVD rip of 'I love it in the ass' over BitTorrent slowed down, there are people who are trying to use the same pipes for more normal activity. Who cares if it takes an extra five or ten minutes to download that file. I'm much more annoyed when a VoIP call, or streaming video gets choppy.
Whether you mod me -1 Troll or -1 Flamebait or not, you know you agree with me, at least in part.
There needs to be a distinction made between people whining that their service provider won't give them unlimited bandwidth at blazing speeds for a low monthly fee, and those who aren't getting the full connection that they're paying for.
I personally find most people that complain about 'throttling' are in the former category. The internet is not a landline phone, period. The linked article does not provide the information to assess which boat Cox's customers are in.
I can agree with the way the way they state they're going to do this...
but...
Does this mean that 5 hour download to upgrade stuff on my Linux box because I didn't upgrade for like 2 weeks and some bigger stuff came out (openoffice upgrade, kde 4.2, etc.), is going to take even longer? That, I hate. I already didn't have enough time to sit here and wait for the damn 5 hour downloading.
Oh wait, I don't have Cox any more... ok... dammit, I have AT&T... *kills himself*
My ultimate preference would be to see all of the ISPs upgrade how much bandwidth they can actually handle, instead of getting more and more customers, and then bitching when they don't have enough bandwidth to handle all of the customers they got, while they still go out to get more customers. Would any of this really be a problem, then? I suppose that costs money, but we're all giving them money every month; and many of us got their service expecting no such problems as this. I guess I, like a lot of people I know, just expected too much...
For that imminent future of everybody doing hi-def downloads...
Your market has choice? Because my market has just Cox and AT&T/BellSouth. BellSouth offers underpowered, overpriced DSL service if you sign up for a one-year contract for an overpriced local phone line. As for Cox, this is a conversation I had with their salesperson:
Personally I wouldn't mind them giving real-time traffic like VoIP priority (SIP, Skype, etc). I don't think anything else deserves that treatment though. ...and WTF are they talking about, limiting newgroup traffic... They already have a bandwidth cap on it that is like 10 times slower than your connection when using the COX (highwinds) servers. How much more do they want to limit it?!
The most annoying thing to me is COX's monthly bandwidth limits. They give you a 10 Mbps connection with a 40 GB allowance. You can blow that out in just a couple hours and it's suppose to be for the whole month!
Please Verizon, hurry up with the FiOS already! My choices right now are either COX with extreme restrictions or expensive and slow DSL.
As a cox customer in Kansas I will be keeping a definite eye on this, but I don't feel too concerned. I know that I use up more than the average user in bandwidth, but I set up my large bandwidth uses to operate overnight when congestion is not an issue. Cox has always been pretty open about being able to talk to a real person who actually knows what they are talking about whenever I have a problem, so I am far more inclined than the regular /.er to trust them. Provided they are only traffic-shaping people who are using more than their fair share of bandwidth during times of congestion I not only am OK with it, but expect it. I will allow their previous good PR with me to give this a rose tint, but you can be sure that if it does become an issue they will both lose me and any client/personnel recommendations they are getting right now. Fortunately, Kansas has surprisingly diverse internet options in its bigger cities.
As several people have responded to you, we are all paying the same price, we should get the same performance.
But there's a difference: downloading isn't as sensitive to slight irregularities in delay as gaming or VoIP. If the service you want requires more stringent standards, it would be fair that you should pay more to get the same level of service. Or get a lesser quality for the same price.
In a fair system, a price of $X should give you Y bytes/second within a Z latency range, no matter what kind of service you use. I don't want my dollars to pay for an infrastructure investment that you alone need.
Yes, the technology could be the same, but let's keep the issues separate. After reading about this stuff for a while now it hit me that there is confusion. I am starting to wonder if the confusion is on purpose.
One issue is over subscription. Unless a company is large enough to have lots and lots of peer connections, your ISP is probably over subscribes their upstream connections. This is fine, because on average traffic goes in bursts. The problem is that everything starts to break down once you have a small pool of people running P2P 24/7. These people are just as greedy as the ISP's they complain about. They want a huge "dedicated" pipe, but have others subsidize it. I have no issue with someone like Cox de-prioritizing their traffic so that the people that just want their Vonage to work don't get squashed out. This is a temporary solution because the ISP will eventually have to up their pipe speed.
The other issue is granting certain companies privileges on a network and penalizing other companies they don't like (e.g. penalize Vonage and prioritize a VoIP partner). This should be illegal. This is a clear case of violation of neutrality. At the same time, the company should be able to directly peer with a company (say a VoIP provider) without violating the law. This may seem unfair, but peering has been a perfectly valid way of reducing traffic on a transit connection.
The last issue is traffic caps. I don't think there should be a law against it as long as the company is upfront about it. Putting caps on traffic allows ISP's to maximize their over subscription and cater to people that want low cost Internet service. We *want* people to afford Internet services. The market chooses. If you are a big user of P2P, then you will have to go with another ISP that does not have caps. You may have to pay more for this privilege... sorry, but that is how things go. The market must have a way to manage scarcity of resources. If you want more of a resource, you will have to pay for it even it if looks the same (e.g. 5mbit from Cox versus 5mbit from FiOS).
Don't confuse QoS with net neutrality. As long as the QoS is applied equally, then it should be perfectly fine.
Why is Email "time sensitive"? I think I can wait 5 more minutes for the next Viagra add to show up. Even if it's important email, who cares if it gets delivered now or 5 minutes from now? In fact, the protocol itself expects to be prioritized low, thus the retries.
Is this truly a global problem that I just don't hear about because of my own media filter?
I tried to submit this here, but it's still pending after a week.
Cox has an auto blocking mechanism for P2P.
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2009/01/cox-blocked.html
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
I know it is not popular to post positives about an ISP, but...
As far as ISP's go, I must say that Cox is generally very "good". They don't use PPPOE, they don't redirect DNS, they don't lock the MAC address of your equipment to their modem, they don't require MS-Windows "stuff" to set up your account, they have not dropped/outsourced services like Email, they don't block "non-server" ports, they have not dropped USENET, they don't penalize non-Cox VOIP and such, and they have a very fast and robust setup. I must say, I have been quite pleased over many years; especially hearing the horror stories about other ISP's, both local and afar.
Note- this is the Hampton Roads market, not their other ones; so I can't attest to any other locations.
Anyway, I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they will do the "right thing" and just prioritize traffic, only when necessary, not just to screw people. No matter how much bandwidth an ISP has, the customers are going to suck it all up, so *some* amount of traffic management really is necessary to prevent mass discontent from the customers. Let's hope Cox has watched and learned from the mistakes of other ISP's.
Linux kernel accused of throttling background processes.
to usenet :p
You can't take the sky from me.
look like how it should be done. sorry the 24/7 bt user should get moved down the list of speed on heavy network use times. at night when few are using the network let them hog all the bandwidth they like. sound like a win win. so why are people complaining. there not doing a comcast and just blocking it.
If they throttle in my state, I am going to write a letter to the headquarters to tell them to stop this shit or I will leave the company and I will let my friends know about this shit. Plus, cox is a crap isp. I occasionally get slow speeds. I might migrate to Verizon for those Fiber optics, and get better speed and service.
I have Cox in Nebraska, and I have noticed P2P speeds steadily dropping the past few months. Cox does offer and promote their SpeedBoost service, which I have noticed when using direct downloads they give you a priority boost in bandwidth if it is available. I've noticed myself pulling speeds that are actually higher than my limit.
So they may not be throttling everything, merely what they perceive as illegal downloading via P2P traffic. Unfortunately for me, I often download Linux DVDs via P2P.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
you teleco shill
"Sounds like throttling to me."
Not to me. What are the options for when a network is full? Randomly drop traffic to get it to fit? That will make anyone with sensitive material grumpy. The other option is to select something to drop based on intelligent factors. Now, if you knew that 10% of your packets had to be dropped, would you prefer that your FTP gets dropped, gets retransmitted, and you get the whole thing, but with a little delay, or would you like your voice call to be uninteliigible? I'd rather my time sensitive traffic get through and the download take the hit. So would nearly everyone else out there. And as such, this is a good thing, not a bad thing. The only people that call this a bad thing aren't calling the actual result a bad thing, but whining about oversubscription and such.
It's more like setting DE (drop elligible) for non-sensitive traffic and letting the network sort it out. Throttling is when something is slowed down even when the network is not taxed. And this is not that.
Learn to love Alaska
Granted I did not read the article but from the blurb it sounds more like QoS than true throttling.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Its not necessarily throttling but prioritizing data. Some of it is simply time sensitive, I work on SATCOM and a 2-3 second delay can really put a hamper on the ability to communicate. VOIP traffic is relatively small bandwidth, in reality so is web browsing. On top of that web browsing is (theoretically) click, read, click read so there's going to be even less of a demand from such users. Done correctly they could keep P2P traffic and large FTP transfers at nearly the same rate. Ping times don't completely dictate your bandwidth.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
...web pages, voice calls, streaming videos and gaming â" moves without delay. Less time-sensitive traffic, such as file uploads, peer-to-peer and Usenet newsgroups, may be delayed momentarily...' Sounds like throttling to me."
Sounds more like prioritization to me. This can effect latency and jitter more than effective bandwidth. Of course latency can effect practical bandwidth of shorter TCP segments, and of course in the end, they will drop traffic. But thats not what they are talking about in the description.
I know most of you guys who comment on this hate the idea of playing favorites with traffic, but I would suggest that you actually want this. It does in fact, make for a "smoother" network.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Less time-sensitive traffic, such as file uploads
Ummm, when I'm pushing a properties file to production because part of the system is misbehaving, it's a helluva lot more important than stalling the video of Ninja Cat. OK - admittedly - even when I work from home I'm remoted in and pushing that file from the secure network over a leased line - but you get the idea, right?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Nikki Cox that is.
Actually, I'm not scared about this at all. Cox currently provides my local phone service via VoIP (although they won't actually admit that's what it is), and the call quality is absolute crap. One would think they'd have functioning "prioritization" on their own VoIP packets if anything, and they can't seem to get that right - I'm sure my torrents will survive just fine.
As in youtube streaming? Because youtube videos, compared to live TV, are not TRUE streaming. They're downloading + playing.
So this opens the question: What streaming applications are actually downloading (buffering...), and which ones are really time-sensitive streaming?
And doesn't the discrimination algorithm prevent P2P video streaming (not that there's a working algorithm right now, but there COULD be)?
Wow and on top of this they raise their rates by ~$2 every 6 months or so. At least in the Arizona market they have been. I'm guessting we're funding this new hinder to our service :(.
I'm surprised no provider has yet tumbled to this oh so natural euphemism for throttling. There would be warnings, of course.
"May cause nervousness, high blood pressure, loss of appetite, urinary problems, increased heart rate, and irritation of the lining of the wallet."
-mel
How long until people are able to figure out how to mask their undesirable data to make it look like mission critical data.
When friends and I ran a private FTP server from my high school (higher bandwidth back then)I thought I was clever and assigned it to a port that was used by the game Team Fortress Classic. Eventually we got a call from the bandwidth nazis saying we were running a possible game server on our network; find it and get rid of it. Many laughs were had.
Also my downloads from usenet today were crippled until I told my news reader to use port 80; all of a sudden my download speeds tripled.
How long can companies play this song and dance?
And the way to do it right is pretty simple. FFS, just clearly say what it is to expect in the package, even if it has to sound:
"1 Mbit/s guaranteed rate, up to 20 Mbit/s may be achieved, but the upper 19 are subject to QoS."
Can't be that hard, can it?
Although if this were a comcast post, I would be really annoyed, or maybe just amused by how often it occurs.
But as a Cox customer, I find this to be possibly realistic. Maybe this is a legit thing??
I still think it's the wrong idea.
If Jack and I pay $45 a month to download porn,
I should get it as the same speed as little Jack who wants to talk to grandma on the IP.
If Jack pays more than me,
Then, shit. He should get more bandwidth.
However, I should be guaranteed a certain amount of bandwidth and just get lucky 95% of the time.
Anyway, I still have strong feelings for Cox.
MPAA caught me downloading videos.
C0x didn't give them my name.
They sent my main email account a message saying basically "Send us a message saying it was an accident and I will delete it, or we will cancel your account"
Rather than just slamming their Cox into me and handing out my information to the MPAA.
I guess it took Cox some time to come up with an almost friendly, harmless-sounding name for throttling, considering that they've been throttling users in all of their markets for better than a year now. Day or night P2P and other users can expect to see a lot of jiggering of throughput.
Sounds like throttling to me.
Well it sounds like QoS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service) to me. Not that I RTFA or anything, but just based on your own summary (where you conclude throttling) their plan sounds perfectly reasonable. Of course VOIP, Gaming, Streamed Video, etc are very time-sensitive. If your VOIP call gets held up for just a second or two it'll be a big pain. If your P2P download of the latest Linux distro (I'm assuming you were using that P2P for something legal) take 15.5 minutes instead of 15 minutes, its a lot less noticeable.
I think we're missing the big picture here.
In the USA where COX is an ISP, we have horrible bandwidth compared to Europe, Japan, just about everybody (except Australia). If its because our infrastructure is crap we need to improve it. If its because ISPs are greedy asshats only looking out for there investors, then we need to fix that.
Poor infrastructure:
Get loans (ie more investors) who think more bandwidth = more customers = more $.
Greedy asshats:
If my broadband provider pisses me off I'm going to another one. I'll go all the way down to dial-up internet if I have too and go to public services if I need large files.
When did people forget they were the reason businesses made money and the people that needed to be pleased, not the damn investors.
100% True. Cox and SBC is the only "choices" we have here and both are terrible in Kansas.
Here's the contradiction. Cox seems to be favoring traffic based on the time needs of the application. This means phone calls go ahead while file transfers lag... but wait, isn't favoring somebody else's phone VoIP using their network actually bad for Cox's own phone service?
The Net Neutrality side favors a prohibition on priority that gives right of way to content-owner or network-owner friendly services. But what if Cox just does what we'd do on our own network if we had the equipment, time, and need to set up? That's QoS, and if done right makes everybody happy except those who misapply the idea.
You have things that need low latency. VoIP, online gaming, and http (especially for audio/video), maybe ssh traffic, etc., and then you have things where it's okay to lag a bit, especially things like email, usenet, etc.
I can go a few seconds or even minutes longer between reloading the newsgroups I'm reading (I forget what the protocol word is, XLIST?) if it means I'm not going to catch a sticky grenade to the face in Call of Duty: World at War. I don't mind if my email shows up a couple minutes late if it means my VoIP calls are intelligible -- and I've been on my cell to a VoIP user where I got maybe 2/3rds of every sentence because they were downloading something.
Honestly, this doesn't bother me. I'd be happier if it were me doing the shaping, but I get where they're coming from.
(Yes, I have a cable ISP, for some reason.)
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
There's a fine line between throttling certain types of traffic by default and giving preference.
Smart algorithms can make limited bandwidth work better for everyone. Most of us do something like this ourselves. We'll limit upload speed on a torrent so we can keep surfing. We'll set a a lower priority on a download to get something else done quicker.
An intelligent algorithm that says "Hey, everyone's eating some shit here, non-realtime applications have to eat shit first..." is actually a reasonably fair way of dealing with this. If it takes you 30 seconds longer to download a song from itunes your frustration is going to be far smaller than the frustration of someone watching a youtube video that stutters 15 times for 2 seconds each.
I'm a Cox customer, and I'm fine with it. You can get your pandora stream now, and I'll be patient on the new Chiodos album. I'll get my Lost streamed first, and that funny video your lesbian aunt sent of her 10 cats can wait a little longer.
COX lacks investing in its INFRASTRUCTURE and is a bunch a cheap bastards being too greedy
OR
COX IS GREEDY...
Did anyone design a P2P protocol that looks like VoIP or Video streaming yet?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Why not limit over all bandwidth only of those customers who go over their quota, instead of throttling certain protocols for everyone including those who stay within their quota?
None of this would be an issue is we'd been forward-thinking enough to have chosen ATM to the House instead of TCP/IP. It supports Traffic Engineering out of the box.
I had some exposure to ATM 'back when', and I must say it was the cat's meow for combining all of the different types of traffic and their widely varying delay, jitter, and throughput constraints.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
All the cheap Cox suckers using VOIP need to get a cell phone like everyone else...
Something is bugging me here... mostly about the comments I've read, but also about the summary
summary: Sounds like QOS to me, not throttling
Comments: at 250+ comments, I've seen roughly half saying "OMG, this is bad, how can they do this, etc. etc." but I seem to remember [citation needed] when we were discussing comcast throttling, that almost 99% of us were saying don't throttle, use QOS instead. People, make up your minds already, either QOS is good, or it isn't, you can't have it both ways.
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.