Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's 6 of one, a half dozen of the other.
Why should they only prioritize known good traffic? Why not just throttle known bad traffic (when there's congestion)? At least then, unknown good traffic won't suffer.
Here's my anecdotal story.
Like a lot of people, I have a vanity domain. My desired domain was taken on all TLDs except for .mobi, so that's the one I chose. All was well until some people on Verizon complained to me that they couldn't send me mail--Verizon always came back with "invalid e-mail address." I thought that was kind of strange, so I started investigating. Went to a friend's house (he had Verizon) and tried to send mail--no dice. Sent raw SMTP commands to the server, and it turns out that Verizon just doesn't acknowledge that .mobi is a valid TLD.
Now that's just stupid. There's no need for Verizon to whitelist TLDs. None. DNS is here so that we don't have to micromanage things like that. The mail server should be looking up the domain name, getting the MX records, sending the message, and moving on. And Verizon is the only ISP I've been able to find doing anything like this. They probably made the whitelist before .mobi was created and just failed to keep up.
Just like an ISP might whitelist good protocols, but not keep up with the changing times, Verizon for some reason felt the need to enumerate TLDs and hasn't kept up. It's really quite irritating. Probably the most infuriating thing is trying to get in contact with someone who can actually /change/ it....