First European Provider To Break Net Neutrality

Rik van der Kroon writes "Major Dutch cable provider UPC has introduced a new network management system which, from noon to midnight, for certain services and providers, caps users' bandwidth at 1/3rd of their nominal bandwidth (Google translation; Dutch original here). After the consumer front for cable providers in The Netherlands received many complaints about network problems and slow speeds, UPC decided to take this as an excuse to introduce their new 'network management' protocol which slows down a large amount of traffic. All protocols but HTTP are capped to 1/3 speed, and within the HTTP realm some Web sites and services that use lots of upstream bandwidth are capped as well. So far UPC is hiding behind the usual excuse: 'We are protecting all the users against the 1% of the user base who abuse our network.'"

Comments

What they mean:

[Anonymous Coward]

'We are protecting all the users against the 1% of the user base who use our network.'

Re:What they mean:

[Romancer]

Kinda like the old overbooking of flights.

I used to see the excuse:

We overbook our flights to save you money because some poeple don't show. So for that 1% that hurt our business we have to lie and sell you a service that we cannot possibly deliver on.

Just like the ISPs that overbook their network by selling a service that they could never deliver if all the poeple decided to show up at once and try and use their tier of 10/1.5 or whatever they pay for every month.

So the bet that not everybody will use the service doesn't pay off when some people regularly try and use what they have purchased. They get turned away at the gate or get 1/3rd of the service they paid for or even just get cut off. All for paying for a service and thinking that they have a right to use it.

Re:What they mean:

[Mashiki]

Funny that. Is the 1% P2P users, or is the the new breed of people watching video's online? If I remember the last graph that Teksavvy tossed out of their current breakdown of net traffic, people watching streaming media of all types accounted for around 50% of their net traffic.

Re:What they mean:

[Delwin]

That's why I'm glad that my cable company is quite upfront: They tell you not only what speed but how much bandwidth (in GB/Mo) you have. If you go over that they can and will lower your speed to something that allows only web browsing.

The fact that they told me that up front (and I chose my plan based on my own usage history) makes me quite content even with the caps.

Re:What they mean:

[Idiomatick]

If they overbook your flight they give your money back. If ISPs paid back w/e % you had taken away we'd see less complaints.

Re:What they mean:

[Mr Z]

Fun facts: If everyone in your neighborhood with a land line picked up the phone right now and tried to make a call, probably only 10% to 20% of them would succeed. If everyone in the average American suburb all hopped in their car and tried to get on the road to the nearest Interstate, it'd be gridlock. Traffic would move at speeds no where near the posted limits. We're surrounded by shared resources with capacity that reflects typical usage with a reasonable amount of head room for "normal" peaks, but is far from being able to support the maximum theoretical demand.

Airlines overbook because a certain %age of customers don't show up, and that %age is large enough and stable enough that it makes sense to do so. When too many people do show up for a flight, the airline pays penalties (in the form of travel vouchers and upgrades), so there's incentive to be conservative in the practice. Everyone benefits overall, though. More people get flown from point A to point B. If the airlines sell more seats on a given flight, then they can charge less per seat too.

ISPs are no different. They purchase bandwidth based on a model of "reasonable" network usage and how many subscribers they have. The major difference, though, is that it's very easy for someone to fall well outside the "reasonable" traffic usage. It's quite possible for 1% of the users to take up the majority of the network bandwidth. And I can see this being considered "unreasonable," and the ISP taking steps to make sure that the other 99% of users have a reasonable experience.

What I don't like is that ISPs can advertise something as "unlimited" or as running at a certain speed, when it clearly is limited, and the advertised speed is only a peak speed available in small doses. At least airlines are required to disclose their overbooking policy.

Re:What they mean:

[Jared555]

And of course, everyone in that 1% has to be someone abusing the network.... There is no such thing as a household with multiple people using different computers wanting to watch legal videos.

Something that always amazes me is that a university with 20,000 students on a 100mbit (or sometimes less) line can manage to do network shaping, etc. correctly but ISPs in even small towns cannot.

One major thing that the university I go to does: you have to OPT IN to file sharing access. No big deal, you just say I need it for whatever legal reason and they activate it.

This would also reduce the random kids connecting to file sharing networks (their parents, in theory, would have to activate it).

It would also reduce the number of people who break into some unsecured wifi network to download because there wouldn't be as many networks that had the ability to file share.

Re:What they mean:

[ZeroExistenZ]

We have that in Belgium too. Once you're over your bandwidth "allowance", you pay extra; or in parts of 5/5GB (which you need to readjust before the end of the month or you'll get rebilled as you're "altering your plan") or something as x /x KB.
Once users get through their monthly usage, they are presented to "continue surfing at broadband speed" (most expensive and per KB's), "expand monthly usage" or "continue at 56K".

People overpay alot for it with this system, some plans only have 20G which isn't too much for a month. If you take into account you pay 20 for "1 Mbps | 1GB" up to 60 for "25 Mbps | 60 GB" (current exchange rate between and $ is 1 to 1,4)

Re:What they mean:

[noidentity]

ISPs are no different. They purchase bandwidth based on a model of "reasonable" network usage and how many subscribers they have.

Read the summary again: they aren't throttling all traffic for a given protocol; they're throttling traffic based on what site it's to. This nicely sets the stage for the next phase: charge said sites to un-throttle traffic. Fortunately said sites can play the game too and put up a special page to users connecting from this ISP explaining that the site is slow because the ISP is making it so, and that they can get better service by switching ISPs.

Re:What they mean:

[johannesg]

There are some major differences between all those shared resources you list, and those of ISP's though:

1. With ISP's, you pay for different speeds. If you pay for (say) 1000kb/s but it is known in advance that you will only ever receive 333kb/s, that effectively means they have just raised their prices by a factor three.

2. Rather than giving everyone _at least_ one third of their paid-for speed, and then spreading the remainder evenly over the various customers, you are simply capped. In fact I suspect that even that promised one third of the paid-for speed is on an "if available" basis.

3. The phrase "abuse" is thrown around lightly, and there is a clear undertone of "illegal". These are probably the kind of people downloading illegal movies and childpr0n all day long! Cap them, before they do even more harm! Or... Maybe they have subscribed to a legal movie download service? One that competes with UPC's own TV offerings? (UPC is actually a cable TV provider, that also does internet on the side!)

Simple fact: UPC is advertising certain speeds, but not delivering them. And it's not even because of oversubscription (as in the examples you gave), but simply because they don't want to.

You use that word...

[jmknsd]

I thought Net Neutrality was to prevent ISPs from filtering and controlling content, not protocols and speeds?

Re:You use that word...

[avilliers]

Technically, "net neutrality" refers to the traffic being completely agnostic about what a packet is--phone, video, http, etc.

Most of the insidious scenarios painted by the loss of neutrality do relate to content filtering--ie, Comcast makes a deal with Amazon and gimps the connections to, say, Powell's dodgy enough customers just think Amazon is the place to shop.

If it's really as described in this case, for bandwidth management, I personally don't think it's all that scary. There are issues about transparency, and for some users this might mean their ISP isn't providing sufficient bandwidth anymore. But IMHO it's not automatically different than simple changing the maximum bandwidth available to a customer.

On the other hand, if a AT&T gimped VOIP to knock Skype out of business, or Comcast filtered video so you needed their cable services, you could get filtering-by-protocol that was just about as evil as the content filtering.

Re:You use that word...

[Quothz]

No, it absolutely does not. Net Neutrality only refers to filtering or throttling based on source or destination. Prioritizing VoIP traffic over BitTorrent traffic is not a Net Neutrality issue. Throttling Vonage's VoIP traffic to make your ISP's VoIP service more attractive is a Net Neutrality issue.

I agree. The redefinition of network neutrality to include traffic type is a marketing scheme, no more. It allows providers to say "Net neutrality is not bad. We use it to slow down abusive users." This makes the debate about a straw man - it's harder to object to this behavior than real neutrality violations. By making the debate about peer-to-peer and streaming traffic taking bandwidth away from other users, they sidestep the real issue of giving privilege to certain content providers over others.

Again: The people who want to define network neutrality to include this behavior are not on your side. They want you to use that definition so they can control the debate. If they win the debate, we the netizens lose, and we lose a lot.

This is an important issue that could well help direct the culture of the technologized* world for a long time - possibly centuries, but certainly decades. Do we want content approved and delivered mainly by large central providers, like with television, or the free-for-all we have today? I choose the latter.

* Don't you think it's time we stopped saying "industrialized"?

In unrelated news...

[lalena]

Torrents updated to now support P2P over HTTP.

Re:In unrelated news...

[Renraku]

It's really not a joke, I suspect something like this will happen.

The only way they'll be able to completely stop torrents and warez downloading would be to cut off internet access entirely.

Never underestimate nerds who want to fix something, even if they have to resort to TCP/IP over Carrier Pigeon.

A little cultural understanding here please?

[Vinegar Joe]

After all, where did the term "going Dutch" come from?

Re:Not capping, investing

[Anonymous Coward]

They actually have decent infrastructure.

The problem is that recently UPC started selling up to 120mbps (EUR 70,- per month) connections in a market were nobody can even come close to that. ADSL maxes out at 20mbps. In their advertisements they make that speed a issue.

In a market like this you can expect the kind of customers you draw in with an offer like this are the ones who actually want to use that speed. Knowing that, making such an offer anyway and then apply bandwidth throttling is nothing short of fraud.

Re:Not capping, investing

[ImYourVirus]

They want to cap me to 1/3, then I'm only going to pay 1/3 of my bill. Sure they want to blame (illegal) file sharing for the increase, but that's not the only thing that uses large amounts of bandwidth.

How about sharing homemade pictures, movies, music, free games, software, etc, not to mention playing games, uploading other types of files not via http, how about ftp, ssh, some other network, etc...

Some of the several games I play the maps can be 50 megs or bigger, the same goes with patches, hell I've seen some patches that are bigger than a couple hundred megs, oh and what about demo's and such, not to mention getting full games, like through say steam or some other provider, a demo I got was like 600 megs, and several full games are easily greater than 2 gigs, most being around 4 gigs or so, so gaming is easily an excuse (not that you should need one in the first place) for using high amounts of bandwidth and transfer.

At least they aren't complete idiots from what I read and don't throttle http, because then how am I supposed to watch my 10,000 youtube videos per day?

Oh and don't get me started on them investing in a better infrastructure, no no that'd cut into their precious bonus's to much, that's one reason right there that most if not all suits (read executives) will ever have any respect from me, because to them it's all about their bonus's and the grunts (read anyone below them) are only fodder for their meat grinders.

This is not Net Neutrality

[Tweenk]

Someone's missing the point of net neutrality.

Net neutrality means: if I have network access, and some guy has network access, we can connect; the ISP treats my connection the same regardless of WHO I'm connecting with. It doesn't mean the ISP cannot differentiate the quality of the connection based on HOW we connect.

This is something else: they are varying quality based on HOW they're connecting to others (what protocol). Note that it's not an outright ban, only a rate limit in order to prioritize of HTTP traffic. The only problematic part is the throttling of upload-intensive services. However, it is not a net neutrality issue as long as they are throttling solely on the amount of bandwidth consumed by a service, rather than who pays them most money to have his service unthrottled.

Remember: Net neutrality is not about unrestricted BitTorrent for everyone. It is about the Internet not turning into cable TV. It is about stopping ISPs colluding with content providers so that they can charge you or deny you access to your favorite websites, in order to ram their own inferior ad-infested versions down your throat. It is about being able to connect to everyone without seeking permission of your ISP or paying extra. It is about Internet access being a binary variable: either you can connect, or you can't. No limited service plans where you can connect only to the ISP's webmail and search engine, and all other webmails and search engines are blocked unless you 'upgrade'. No 'premium sites' you can only use if your ISP has a deal with the content provider that you cannot opt into or out of.

If you are dissatisfied by your ISP blocking or throttling your favorite website or service, by all means complain. But do not conflate traffic shaping with net neutrality. It muddles an already complex issue, and harms our chances to win this battle.

Re:Dutch ISP mini-review

[dotwaffle]

Errr, what? Seriously, I'd do some research first - unless you're using really small TCP packets, you should easily be able to manage 20:1 if not 50:1. With a non-acknowledged protocol such as UDP, you can increase that to over 100:1.

Just because you're using a vastly inefficient method to download your "must-have" illegal TV-rips, doesn't mean we get to blindly accept your facts.

Re:Sure

[laughingcoyote]

No, /. (and most net-savvy user websites) gets pissy when they go after the 1% because after all, they agreed to X Mbps, they should get to use that 100% of the time. Whether that argument is right or wrong, the two situations combined (the one in this article and the one I'm laying out in this post) equate to a catch 22 for the ISP. The ISP's only remaining choice is to drastically lower promised speeds, but that's a marketing disaster, and really a technical one as well, since most people do sometimes use the top speeds, but don't do so regularly - makes them happy to have it available when needed though.

Actually, I get pissy because I purchased a connection advertised as an "unlimited" connection at a certain speed. "Unlimited", as in, "without limit". When they then turn around and say "There's a limit", but still advertise the service as "unlimited", their advertising is not truthful.

If ISPs want to sell limited internet connections, they have every right to do that, but they should advertise them as such.

I also don't buy the "We build our infrastructure for anticipated usage..." bit. If this "1%" of users routinely exists, you factor them into your anticipated usage when deciding how much you need to build. Then, you build enough capacity for actual anticipated usage. You don't just ignore those users, hope they go away, and then be shocked and claim to need to throttle when your capacity doesn't meet your demand.