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:

[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.

You use that word...

[jmknsd]

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

In unrelated news...

[lalena]

Torrents updated to now support P2P over HTTP.

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.