Hunting the Mythical "Bandwidth Hog"

eldavojohn writes "Benoit Felten, an analyst in Paris, has heard enough of the elusive creature known as the bandwidth hog. Like its cousin the Boogie Man, the 'bandwidth hog' is a tale that ISPs tell their frightened users to keep them in check or to cut off whoever they want to cut off from service. And Felten's calling them out because he's certain that bandwidth hogs don't exist. What's actually happening is the ISPs are selecting the top 5% of users, by volume of bits that move on their wire, and revoking their service, even if they aren't negatively impacting other users. Which means that they are targeting 'heavy users' simply for being 'heavy users.' Felten has thrown down the gauntlet asking for a standardized data set from any telco that he can do statistical analysis on that will allow him to find any evidence of a single outlier ruining the experience for everyone else. Unlikely any telco will take him up on that offer but his point still stands." Felten's challenge is paired with a more technical look at how networks operate, which claims that TCP/IP by its design eliminates the possibility of hogging bandwidth. But Wes Felter corrects that mis-impression in a post to a network neutrality mailing list.

Comments

The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[afidel]

They are generally using UDP so the original assertion that degrading the other users experience should be true as UDP should break down long before TCP does. Though I do agree that if Comcast's system works as described it's probably the best solution for a network that can't implement QoS.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Why do you think they are using UDP? Most of the bandwidth being used at this point, to my knowledge, is for streaming video (read: porn) and BitTorrent (read: porn). Both of them use TCP for the majority of their bandwidth usage (Some BitTorrent clients support UDP communication with the tracker, but the file is still transferred by TCP). Getting built-in error-checking, congestion control and streaming functionality in TCP makes much more sense than a UDP based protocol where you have to reimplement that yourself. I'm sure a few multiplayer games use UDP for latency reasons, but the data transferred for a multiplayer game is negligible and frequently loss-tolerant (if you missed where a player was one second ago, it doesn't matter once you get the new update).

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[FrankDerKte]

No, bandwidth hogs normally use file sharing which is implemented with tcp (i. e. bit torrent).

The problem is tcp distributes bandwidth per connection. Someone using more connection gets a bigger part of the available bandwidth.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Why do you think they are using UDP? Most of the bandwidth being used at this point, to my knowledge, is for streaming video (read: porn) and BitTorrent (read: porn). Both of them use TCP for the majority of their bandwidth usage (Some BitTorrent clients support UDP communication with the tracker, but the file is still transferred by TCP).

Most of the streaming protocols that I dealt with used UDP as their basis. The need to deliver the next frame or sound byte as soon as possible outweighs the need to guarantee that every single frame or byte arrives. We accept the occasional drop out in return for expedited delivery of data.

Unfortunately when trying to achieve the necessary data rate to satisfy the occasional drop outs, some protocols neglect being a good stewart of network bandwidth and have no throttle (ie congestion relief).

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[afidel]

Modern Torrent clients that support DHT (most of them) generally default to UDP. Since the Torrent protocol already includes block checksumming there's no reason to also use TCP for that, congestion control generally isn't an issue with Torrent traffic either, you just push the pipe till it's full. For video unless you have significant buffering there's little reason to have error checking or congestion control because if you can't get the bits in fast enough without retransmits then the video's not going to be watchable. I'm not sure how much video is done using UDP vs TCP, Flash is TCP and Netflix appears to use a design where they adaptively send different encoding levels of the same content across a HTTP 1.1 stream as they see bandwidth starvation.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Yeah, on looking around, it looks like the streaming protocols are UDP based. That still doesn't give it a flat majority of traffic; BitTorrent, along with the dedicated file sharing programs, are huge bandwidth consumers (the customers that are maxing out their connections aren't actively streaming video 24 hours a day), so if overusers of congestion unfriendly UDP are the problem, dropping the users of the highest bandwidth won't solve the problem (because they're using the relatively network friendly TCP most of the time).

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[ShadowRangerRIT]

I acknowledged my error on streaming video, but BitTorrent (and other file sharing programs) are still big TCP users.

While DHT is UDP based, the file transfer is still TCP based, and no client I know of allocates more than 10% of its bandwidth to DHT use (usually much less). Beyond the protocol compatibility issues, why waste a download of an up to 4 MB block when you could have TCP fix the error much earlier? TCP has a rough error interval of one bit in every trillion bits (that's from memory, but it's within an order of magnitude, might be every trillion bytes). UDP has whatever you code for it, and most of the time that means a hell of a lot less reliability (or more overhead than TCP requires; it was designed quite well for some things).

"Pushing the pipe until it's full" actually is a problem for UDP, when congestion gets out of hand performance degrades drastically as packets go missing more and more often. You need some level of congestion control or you will sabotage yourself.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[Anonymous Coward]

The need to deliver the next frame or sound byte as soon as possible

BZZZT. Wrong.

Streaming protocols need to deliver the next frame on time. So the ones that use UDP deliver at a fixed rate, which makes your assertion that UDP is the bandwidth hog *WRONG*.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[Bill_the_Engineer]

A technicality, and depends on someone else's definition of on time. My main assertion was streaming is UDP not TCP.

Besides, I didn't mean that UDP was necessarily an open spigot and thanks to the vagueness of english "as soon as possible" can equal "on time".

I meant the protocols don't take other traffic into consideration. Pacing out the UDP to satisfy some predetermined timing requirement still doesn't prevent congestion.

Also you assume that a single transmission would be a bandwidth hog, this is not the case. It's the multitude of transmissions using that protocol in the series of tubes that don't take congestion into consideration (pacing or not you are still slinging packets) that leads to problems.

Trying looking at the forest rather than the tree...

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[TeXMaster]

No, bandwidth hogs normally use file sharing which is implemented with tcp (i. e. bit torrent).

The problem is tcp distributes bandwidth per connection. Someone using more connection gets a bigger part of the available bandwidth.

Much of the load from P2P networks would be immensely reduced if providers started implementing XCAST. But of course that would mean actually expecting the ISPs investing into infrastructure, so I won't hold my breath.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[war4peace]

(disclaimer: I am living in Eastern Europe, so things may look very differently from US, but then again, maybe it's for the better for people to get a glimpse of how things are done somewhere else on the globe)

Well, as usually the truth is somewhere right down in the middle.
I have 2 ISPs (2 different providers). One is CAT5-based (plus optical fiber going out of the area) and the other uses CaTV (tohgther with those infamous CaTV modems I hate). To make things shorter, I'll name the CAT5-based one as ISP1 and the other as ISP2.
ISP1 offers max metropolitan bandwidth 24/7. My city has roughly 300K home Internet subscribers, not counting businesses. I can download from any of them at 100 mbps max theoretical transfer rate. When using Torrent-based downloads, every single one caps at 95-97% of the maximum theoretical amount, which is impressive to say the least. Furthermore, I can browse at the same time without interruptions or latency. I was playing games such as EVE Online and WoW while downloading literally tens of gigabytes of data at max speed and my latency as shown in WoW was about 150-250 ms, which is excellent according to my view.
I have never ever had any warnings from my ISP1 during last 3 years, mainly because they do not count metropolitan data transfers (I asked). They also told me why. All ISPs which offer metropolitan high speed access have an agreement to let those transfers flow freely (mutual advantage) and not count them against customers. It seems the logical thing to do. It's pretty much like throwing a cable between me and my neighbour and turning the pipe on. It's a self-managed thing, and if it works like shit, then it's our fault, not the ISP's.
ISP2 offers CaTV-based Internet Access. Now I have my reasons to loathe Cable Modems because they proved to be unreliable, slower than other types of Internet Access and prone to desync. I've had countless problems with this sort of implementation. Anyways, ISP2 downloads cap at 2 MB/s when downloading from either metropolitan or external sources. They brag about offering 50 mbps transfer rates from Metropolitan sources, but this doesn't seem to be true. I keep ISP2 for backup purposes, so it goes largely unused (i think I used their service for like 10 days during last year or so).
Maybe ISP1 or ISP2 do have a policy to cap heavy downloaders which access data from outside the metropolitan network area, but I've never heard of any case when they did. So either the policy exists but is not applied, or doesn't exist at all.Oh, I forgot to mention that ISP2 gas nation-wide coverage and ISP1 is just city-wide.
So I was wondering what makes US-based (and probably other) ISPs come to such a conclusion and apply such policies. I think it's because their network implementation plainly sucks. Maybe they rely on third party networks to get data across areas where they have no coverage and that costs them. makes sense for a company looking to maximize profits (I don't like this approach though). Don't they have a minimum guaranteed bandwidth? We do have it here, and if one starts complaining that he only can download at 2x of minimum guaranteed speed limit, the ISP just laughs in your face, because that's twice what they guarantee. And to that I agree :)
Let's assume I use videoconferencing from home. A lot. I know people who participate in high-bandwidth audio+video conferences all day, from home. So they eat up a lot of bandwidth for business purposes. They would be pissed to have a cap limit enforced on them :) So what's the ISP's take on such cases?
one more thing: if this policy is written in your contract with them, then you're legally screwed. If not, they're legally screwed. it all comes down to this in the end.
As a conclusion, I don't think "Bandwidth hogs" exist. They're mythical creatures indeed. But what is real is piss-poor network implementation, especially on WAN.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this internet is for porn thing is a myth.
None of the major torrent indexing sites got any real porn.
In 15 years i saw 2 only porn movies, and only one came from torrent after i really really actively looked for one.
If the internet is teeming with porn, i should have stumbled into it more readily.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Since the Torrent protocol already includes block checksumming there's no reason to also use TCP for that,

FYI - disabling the checksums in UDP packets fell out of favor 20 years ago when CPUs got fast enough to make the performance hit negligible. Nowadays, anyone running their UDP stack with checksums turned off is either completely clueless or has some ultra-specific application that nobody else cares about.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[Anonymous Coward]

That may be the case for christiantorrents.net but the rest of the internet is in fact porn.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[the_hellspawn]

Then you should try to plug in your CAT5 cable and actually connect to the Internet. Local HTML pages don't count as the 'Internet'. LOL, just playin'

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[citizenr]

I acknowledged my error on streaming video, but BitTorrent (and other file sharing programs) are still big TCP users.

uTorrent defaults to UDP when speaking to other uTorrents now

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[TheLink]

> Much of the load from P2P networks would be immensely reduced if providers started implementing XCAST

Actually much of the load from P2P networks would be immensely reduced if:
1) providers wouldn't get sued for running special P2P Auto caching seeders that detect P2P traffic from their customers and automatically start downloading and then seeding stuff on their networks.
2) The providers can then throttle any P2P traffic to/fro their network from/to the rest of the internet that's not to/from their caching seeders. Their customers wouldn't care because they still get fast connections from the caching seeders.

I think the technology is already there (some/all implemented already), the laws in most countries just don't make it viable ;).

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you're out of date. TCP is very far from perfect.

TCP has proved itself entirely unsuited to heavy P2P usage like torrent, and has repeatedly been demonstrating its utter inadequacy to deal with that kind of communication (not least because of terrible consumer routers, and issues with firewalls/NAT, which are not entirely TCP's fault, but which you cannot work around while still using TCP).

I can tell you as a P2P developer that TCP actually has an error interval of somewhere in the million bits, which is to say, not infrequent at all. (Why did you think we bothered with hash checking? Because it actually needs it. The packet checksum is only 2^16, remember!)

As for the download of a 4MB block, with current proposals you'll likely catch an error after 4KB in fact, because of hash trees. (Catching an error as late as you say makes a DoS/poisoning attack more feasible, and wastes bandwidth.) And you shouldn't be running blocks as big as 4MB anyway, it makes the first-block and last-block issues of torrent far more pronounced.

Torrent has a far more reliable and suitable transport protocol, which is indeed based on UDP instead of TCP, and you'll find that a lot of the clients in the wild already use it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Transport_Protocol

You'll find the congestion control in that far more advanced than anything TCP has, and indeed, far more gentle on the
other protocols on the wire. TCP relies on latency and dropped packets to detect where the limit should be, and floats around that limit in a steadily climbing sawtooth which drops precipitously on a single dropped packet. ACKs must be prioritised or saturated uploads have a terrible effect on download speeds. However, consumer connections almost always have easily-determinable asymmetric speed limits with much more download than upload, and much more defined behaviour approaching, near, at, and beyond those limits. TCP has no idea about this and saturates the connection much more easily than a UDP-based protocol!

But as a P2P developer you can do a lot better. uTP is surprisingly polite, but delivers very high performance. There are of course other protocols, such as SCTP, which also fix some of the shortcomings of TCP, although I understand that SCTP may not be available or usable on Windows, which of course presents a problem for anyone wanting to roll it out to a mass market.

I would concur that "bandwidth hogs" are perhaps not as big a problem as you might think, and that in reality what is happening is that the ISPs are simply unwilling to provision ahead for the natural expansion of bandwidth. Over time, users use more bandwidth, and more bandwidth has to be plumbed in to meet and exceed that demand, and provide enough headroom for packets not to be lost, and latency/jitter to remain small. An ISP that shirks that demand simply doesn't have enough bandwidth, although in many cases underprovisioning is rife to keep profit margins fat and to allow for the reduction of cost. Even though core datacentre bulk bandwidth rates have fallen tremendously, often wholesalers are massively overcharged for actually delivering that bandwidth to exchanges. Many ISPs have therefore been resorting to packet shaping, essentially to select the most active users, and throttle them down, in exactly the way this article describes.

A reasonable level of packet prioritisation is perfectly alright; for optimal performance, latency-sensitive protocols should have priority over web browsing, which should have priority over bulk protocols which aren't latency-sensitive; but because ISPs started using the same tools to throttle protocols down to unusability or block them, workarounds were implemented, and now the ISP itself is regarded by any sensible P2P developer as part of the threat model. Rampant abuse of deep-packet inspection by Sandvine resulted in protocol obfuscation and mass use of encryption. Further attacks on P2P

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[cheshiremoe]

You must be new here! On the internet I mean... In the past few years a lot of filtering has been added on all the major search engine's to hide the darker side. Ten years ago it was much more common to get porn mixed in with you search results even when you searched for benign things like puppies pictures (keyword pic). While porn and warez sites are still plentiful... much of it has been hidden with great effort. Much of the porn is behind paywall anyway.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[kimvette]

So I was wondering what makes US-based (and probably other) ISPs come to such a conclusion and apply such policies.

Modern American society has a sense of entitlement, and that applies even to the government-granted monopolies. ISPs were given hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars to push broadband out to every address in the US. They didn't do it, never got spanked for it, and abuse the customers and continually charge more using "service enhancements" and "upgrades" as their justification, when in actuality, the upgrades were paid for with our tax dollars, and they are REDUCING service by enforcing undisclosed caps.

Bandwidth hogs do not exist. Well, some do - ones who "uncap" their modems and get MORE bandwidth than they are paying for. Hacking a modem you rent, not own, is a problem and those users should be punted. However, simply using the bandwidth that was advertised and you purchased is NOT hogging bandwidth by ANY stretch of the imagination. Placing limits on users who simply use the product as advertised is unethical, immoral, and actually illegal because then those ISPs are engaging in a bait-and-switch - or more succinctly, FRAUD.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[hairyfeet]

Merry Xmas from your Uncle Bingo. Seriously the porn is so plentiful now that Ray Charles would have trouble not finding porn. I think we should give the Internet a motto - "The Internet....lots of porn..along with some other stuff you may or may not be interested in!"

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[budgenator]

Results 1 - 10 of about 26,100,000 for Free porn. (0.18 seconds), nuf said.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[Neil Hodges]

Why do you think they are using UDP?

It's called DNS, and it definitely uses UDP. Our connection is terrible because DNS times out most of the time unless it's tunneled to a machine somewhere outside of our home network. Thank goodness for public recursive DNS servers!

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[sjames]

That would be primarily audio/video conferencing, exactly the apps my ISP keeps pestering me to ADD to my broadband connection.

Torrents, video download, youtube/flash in general, shout/icecast, etc all use TCP.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[commodore64_love]

You stop too quickly. Look at these results

- 139,000,000 for free movies
- 208,000,000 for Free games.
- 614,000,000 for free songs

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[afidel]

It's not a matter of the stack, any app that does it's own checksumming is free to turn off UDP checksum generation.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no, they're not. The problem is that TCP is controllable (e.g., tcp reset, playing with windows) so ISPs started doing so because, surprise, surprise, all the filesharing was using all of the available bandwidth and choking out even simple web traffic. Bit torrent uses TCP for some control, but the data is transferred via UDP to avoid blocking or control. This is true of other P2P file sharing protocols as well.

So ISPs started fighting back against the UDP traffic. The problem is that online gaming and audio/video streaming rely on UDP -- if the packet doesn't get there in time, too bad, it would have been too late to matter anyway with real time play. Which means you have to identify the protocol before dropping the packet. Consequently, the movement in p2p file sharing is to use encryption as a means of avoiding protocol identification.

Notice that UDP is not really the best choice for file sharing. The data is not time sensitive and worthless after it has aged out. You always want to get every last bit of the data. So the P2P protocol has to compensate for this and provide mechanisms for dealing with data that was requested but didn't make it. TCP already does this for you, but the P2P protocols are reinventing the wheel.

Why? Because P2P isn't about reliable transfers, or low cost distribution of content (it isn't, the aggregate cost per byte of data is higher even though it may be lower for the originator). No, P2P file sharing is about getting something for nothing. People want their music, their movies and their software but they don't want to pay retail for it. So there is all this effort put into finding a way to circumvent the interests of the copyright holders. People also want to collect. They may have more music then they could listen to in a year if it played 24/7. They may have more movies than they could watch if they did so 24/7 as well. It is ridiculous, but they see and they want. They are marketed to all the time (you need this movie, you need this music, etc.). So there is a bottomless pit to feed. And this consumes resources, especially bandwidth, and a lot of it.

Maybe you can tell that I have to manage bandwidth for users. A few years ago five people -- representing 95% of the bandwidth. Actually, I think it was about 99%, but I forget the numbers. Bandwidth hogs are real. People who want to defend copyright infringement can claim otherwise, raise strawman arguments, whatever, but it doesn't change the reality that ISPs face: a few people *do* hog all the bandwidth.

Notice that I said it *used* to be five people. We now control the bandwidth via a device that understands protocols, including encrypted P2P such as ares or encrypted bit torrent. Bandwidth usage is much more fairly distributed now.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[kyliaar]

This analysis of TCP is extremely flawed.

TCP doesn't limit the amount of data sent if there is packet loss. This will only limit the amount of new data sent. TCP will continue resending data that hasn't been acknowledged as being received.

When there is network connection, the server doesn't send you less data, it only appears you are receiving less data per unit of time due to the packet loss.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[sjames]

I'm not sure if it's been tested or not, but in my area you bring your own cable modem. I'll bet they'll still get awefully upset if you hack it to ignore limits in the downloaded configuration.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

It's not a matter of the stack, any app that does it's own checksumming is free to turn off UDP checksum generation.

SO_NO_CHECK is a linux-specific non-standard socket option. No other major OS supports it, everybody else uses a kernel tunable for all or nothing.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[Anonymous Coward]

I only watch porn 8 times a day for 20 minutes each time. thats less than 3 hours of porn a day! Porn is not the bandwidth hog on my network.

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[dupeisdead]

Sadly the majority of the content on P2P networks are "not legal". Why would an ISP host content that is illegal? Look at the top files on your BT site. Now, tell me which percentage of those are "legal". Bad analogy time, that's like the cops handing out guns because the lineups at the arm dealers are too long. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/04/1518221/Hunting-the-Mythical-Bandwidth-Hog#

Re:The "bandwidth hogs" aren't using TCP

[TeXMaster]

> Much of the load from P2P networks would be immensely reduced if providers started implementing XCAST Actually much of the load from P2P networks would be immensely reduced if: 1) providers wouldn't get sued for running special P2P Auto caching seeders that detect P2P traffic from their customers and automatically start downloading and then seeding stuff on their networks. 2) The providers can then throttle any P2P traffic to/fro their network from/to the rest of the internet that's not to/from their caching seeders. Their customers wouldn't care because they still get fast connections from the caching seeders. I think the technology is already there (some/all implemented already), the laws in most countries just don't make it viable ;).

P2P software can already rely on the proxying capabilities of the providers (see eMuleXT webcache feature) in a content-agnostic, non-sueable way, but the benefits from this are rather limited in scope (ISP-local, sometimes even ISP+geolocation local). Proper XCAST support from the ISPs and from the clients would be most content could be distributed with an extremely small bandwidth usage, across the whole network.

Think about it: 100 clients request a chunk, you send it once, and it travels as a single chunk for much of its lifetime, getting duplicated in a rather small number of chunks only a specific, limited number of points.

The amount of bandwidth saved by the ISPs themselves would be HUGE.

Same tired argument

[BadAnalogyGuy]

We aren't getting the advertised bandwidth! Waaah!

Richard Bennett's response is worth the read, and it puts Benoit's theory of "fair bandwidth" in its place.

No one is going to take Benoit up on his offer because there is nothing to be gained either way for the telcos, and there is no point in giving this attention whore any credibility by responding to him.

Re:Same tired argument

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're really upset about is that there's always someone out there getting more for their money than you are. But envy is more pathetic than entitlement, isn't it?

Re:Same tired argument

[betterunixthanunix]

"We aren't getting the advertised bandwidth! Waaah!"

Yes, actually, false advertising is a problem. If an ISP tells me I can make unlimited use of my 10Mbps connection, I expect to be able to make unlimited use of it -- including sustaining 10Mbps or something reasonably close all day and all night. If such a level of service is impossible for an ISP to provide and remain profitable, why the hell are they advertising these plans?

If they are lying to consumers about the level of service they can provide, they should cover themselves by increasing the network capacity, or they should admit they lied, reduce the bandwidth they provide to users, and hope that nobody sues them over it. Kicking people off the network for trying to use what they paid for is not an appropriate response to overselling, and if the FCC had any spine they would kill the practice before it gets out of hand.

Re:Same tired argument

[popeye44]

Comcast isn't/wasn't lying by saying I have unlimited bandwith. It put a new rule in that stated 250g was my limit. Ok no problem I've not hit a 200g mark in quite a while so it's not usually an issue for me. NOW the fuckheads at Comcast also want to throttle me if I use 100% of my line speed for 15 minutes.

What the fuck? Can I actually download at full speed now? Well sure I can if it's under X amount. Anything over it and the brakes go on. I totally have no issue with a drop in line speed if my connection is hurting others, to drop my connection just because it's being used is beyond fucked up. And it's very apparent that I in no way am hurting them. "there are 15 houses on my street and 11 Att wireless routers. So how is my node going to go over capacity? Apparently everyone on my street is on AT&T. "I have fiber to my door and not a single provider will use it to provide me similar capacity as Cable." I really don't have any options that are comparable.

Re:Same tired argument

[gtall]

I don't know whether bandwidth hogging is a problem but it is possible that 1 heavy user isn't impacting everyone but the top 5% might be sucking up lots of bandwidth. So either Benoit is raising a red herring or the Slashdot precis' is defective.

I do think that if a teleco is going to advertise unlimited bandwidth, they are required to provide unlimited bandwidth. It's a stupid ad to make anyhow. They should say they will support up to x where x really is what they will support.

Re:Same tired argument

[Gerafix]

The FCC has a spine although it's been bought by corporations.

Re:Same tired argument

[jank1887]

"and if the FCC had any spine"

I believe we've identified the problem.

Re:Same tired argument

[hesiod]

They should say they will support up to x where x really is what they will support

The should, yeah... problem is, their competitors are advertising their inflated numbers, so if one company starts being honest, customers will purchase service from the liars because the numbers are so tempting.

Re:Same tired argument

[Anonymous Coward]

Kicking people off the network for trying to use what they paid for is not an appropriate response to overselling, and if the FCC had any spine they would kill the practice before it gets out of hand.

Before it gets out of hand? There is a problem with this.
K0 particles can be split in to 2 or 3 pions, however you can combine 2 and not 3 pions to make a K0 particle. Based on this I refuse to believe the FCC has a working time machine.

Re:Same tired argument

[Elshar]

You're misreading the contract between you and the ISP. It's unlimited in that it's not metered. They're not going to charge you any more for downloading 20GB as 100GB. But, it's not unlimited in the Download at max speed 24/7 unlimited.

What you want is what's called a CIR/MIR (Committed Information Rate, or Minimum Information Rate). Those are usually offered with commercial connectivity contracts after some form of negotiation. Residential connections DO NOT usually have a CIR. Thus, they are cheap.

Go read your agreement you signed with your ISP if you don't believe me.

Re:Same tired argument

[Mezoth]

Except they are not "throttling" you, they are just giving you lower priority IF you use over 80% of your bandwidth for 15 minutes AND the whole segment is over 70% utilization. This means that grandma can still get her mail when you are seeding the new release of Ubuntu, but you "lose" bandwidth if you actually hit 100% congestion.

Re:Same tired argument

[aicrules]

exactly...you know just buy offering "Unlimited" 10MBPS they're already limiting you to 260TB of transfer each month. Come on, if I have unlimited broadband, I want to download 300TB today! If this argument that the person you replied to still happens when everyone has an average of GB/s connection and it will go down to half if they meet the criteria for "hog" during a congestion time, then they will have completely lost me. I don't really like the 250GB limit idea, the 80%/70% thing seems much better. But either a total download limit OR a % throughput throttling are fine by me for the punks who think a residential service can be used to its technical full capacity without recourse. If I used my full sewer line capacity all day and night, at best I'd get a visit from the sewer company wondering wtf was going on...at worst every drain in my house would be reversed and my house would be full of everyone else's shit.

Re:Same tired argument

[CorporateSuit]

Perhaps this is a bit off-topic, but my telecom offers 4 tiers of service:

768Kb/s - $19.95/Mo
1.5 Mbs - $25.00/Mo
3 Mbs - $30.00/Mo
6 Mbs - $35.00/Mo

I have purchased the $35.00 a month plan (6 Mbs) yet in 6 months, I have never seen a single download exceed 400K/s -- should it be ok for them to charge me more than $19.95 for that month since I was only delivered their bottom tier?

It is a different branch from the same, corrupt tree. A very shady tree.

Re:Same tired argument

[Haidon]

You're suffering from the 'terminology trick.' your ISP offers 6 mbps for $35/month.... that's 6 megaBITS per second. Internet Explorer shows your download speeds in kilo- or megaBYTES per second. So, while you're not getting your full 6 mbps, you're definitely getting more than the 768kbps connection can offer. 6mpbs = roughly 750 KB/s, while the 768kbps = about 96 KB/s. Even as far back as dial-up, this has been a point of contention, as a 56k modem only offers a theoretical max of 7 KB/s, and you'd only realistically see 5 KB/s.

Re:Same tired argument

[jaraxle]

Oblig. Penny Arcade

~jaraxle

Re:Same tired argument

[Anonymous Coward]

A slashdotter doesn't know the difference between bits and bytes?

What the fuck has happened?

Re:Same tired argument

[Anonymous Coward]

Your ISP offers 6 mbps for $35/month.... that's 6 megaBITS per second.

No, it's not, you high-UID ignoramus. "Megabits per second" is abbreviated as "Mbps" - "mbps" isn't a measurement of throughput at all - "millibits per second"?

Cite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_rate_units

Slashdot has become a cesspool of the clueless arguing with the stupid.

No site has ever been slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

Because TCP doesn't allow it.

I hear all the websites are switching from token ring because of this.

Re:No site has ever been slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

During a Slashdotting, the problem is rarely network-related (aside from people who use a cheap host and have very low artificial bandwidth limitations, or are hosting their site on a low-end cable connection).

More often than not, the database goes down. MySQL is especially prone to just dying when put under any significant workload. That's why you'll often see error messages saying that the web front end can't connect to the database. You can still get to the site because the network can handle the volume of traffic just fine, and you can get the error message because the web server can also handle the volume of traffic just fine.

The next most common problem is the server-side web apps being unable to handle the load. I don't mean the web servers, as most of those can handle huge amounts of traffic, even on ancient hardware. I mean web apps implemented using PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, JSP and so on. Many sites don't use PHP bytecode caching, for instance, nor do they do much data caching. So it just ends up taking too long to generate pages, and your browser times out.

Re:No site has ever been slashdotted

[Qzukk]

You think you're being sarcastic, but has anyone ever seen a network go down in flames due to slashdotting, or has it always been the server?

Re:No site has ever been slashdotted

[ender-]

You think you're being sarcastic, but has anyone ever seen a network go down in flames due to slashdotting, or has it always been the server?

I'm inclined to think the network can certainly play a part. I had a K6-350Mhz/256MB server slashdotted on 9/11 with ftp/http links to pictures and video. The server ran with no issues, and was able to push out 100Mbit/s worth of data all day. I had a fairly weak server but an incredibly fast and robust network [100Mbit port to dual OC-12s with only a few customers on it].

A less robust network would have surely caused problems. Though also if I had configured the server poorly it would also have caused problems.

Anyway, my point is I have to think it's just as likely that a good number of sites that are not able to handle being slashdotted are due to the network getting saturated/failing long before the hardware is heavily taxed. At least with simple static sites. Obviously a highly dynamic site will put more load on the server.

Re:No site has ever been slashdotted

[clare-ents]

When the upside-down-ternet was slashdotted it originally had more images in the page, but the 100Mbit upstream on the server filled up, so I took some out.

Re:No site has ever been slashdotted

[rickb928]

Token-Ring is even more resiliant at layer 4 than Ethernet. You can approach 99% utilization on Token-Ring (I have on a production LAN for weeks on end) where Ethernet is pretty much congested arount 16%. Don't believe me, ask around.

And until we got 100Base-T, Token-Ring was just plain faster then 10Base-T. I had this fight with an applicaiton developer that claimed that our 16MB Token-Ring was hampering his app's performance. We went to 100Base-T at no small expense (5 blades 48 ports each in a Chipcom/IBM chassis). NO fix. Of course, it was the servers. Or the disk drives. Or the coffee. Whatever.

Alas, Token-Ring is no longer competitive, but no loss. IBM charged too much, and Olicom couldn't keep up. 100MB Token and switching could have worked, but Gigabit Ethernet is more than good enough. Not many LANS have any hardware available to fill that pipe.

Imagine a beacon event at 10GBs. You might see the wires glow...

Yes, I miss Token-Ring. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Re:No site has ever been slashdotted

[shentino]

Dammit you made me lose!

Re:No site has ever been slashdotted

[Rising Ape]

Ethernet. You can approach 99% utilization on Token-Ring (I have on a production LAN for weeks on end) where Ethernet is pretty much congested arount 16%. Don't believe me, ask around [com.com].

Hang on, that hasn't been true since switches replaced hubs, thus eliminating the collision problem.

Re:No site has ever been slashdotted

[Mezoth]

Except this is no longer true in a full-duplex world, you can approach 99% utilization on Ethernet at full-duplex. At the time token-ring was competitive, full-duplex Ethernet was just emerging. While IBM's marketing and some of the complexity of token-ring hurt it, what really killed it was the widespread emergence of full-duplex ethernet switches which basically eliminated the under-utilization problem while not having the complexity of dealing with a token-ring network.

Re:No site has ever been slashdotted

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Yes, I miss Token-Ring. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

I don't. plug a 4mb token ring card into a 16mb network and the token falls out, errm, the network falls over. The solution? unplug computers in turn until the network comes back. Contrast it with ethernet (and its $20 cards that don't stay warm when the computer's off), where your port just doesn't work. Also, you have to get over 70% on an unswitched ethernet net to see problems - with switches, it just doesn't matter.

Re:No site has ever been slashdotted

[rickb928]

Or you could run something to let you look at the ring (Lanalyzer was free, and worked, Ethereal wasn't made yet) and capture the beacon frame. This told you which station (MAC address) was beaconing, and the problem wes between them and the upstream.

Yes, you had to document your network. Some of us call that 'knowing what you are doing'. I called it 'getting past amateur status'.

Of course, I was using Token switches back then also, since CAUs and LAMs were already obsolete. But yes, full-duplex 100Base-T sure could work the wire, if your card was truly compatible. Many weren't...

Re:Interesting headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe it's even a variation of the article that HE FUCKING LINKED TO! ("Is the 'Bandwidth Hog' a Myth?") Some Slashdotters see a conspiracy everywhere they look......

Why?

[Maximum Prophet]

Why would any business cancel paying customers that don't negatively impact operations?

Re:Why?

[BESTouff]

Because they're probably heavy music/movies "illegal" downloaders, so they inconvenience their friends the media moguls ?

Re:Why?

[godrik]

Because the operators pay for the bandwidth. The high bandwidth users are less profitable than the other ones.

Re:Why?

[Trepidity]

They don't negatively impact operations in the sense of taking up a scarce resource that degrades other customers' performance. However, they do still use above-average amounts of bandwidth, which costs ISPs money. When offering a flat-rate, unlimited-use service, your economics come out ahead if you can find some way to skew your customers towards those who don't actually take advantage of your claimed "unlimited use".

Re:Why?

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Because they're worried that if they don't, they'll have to pay for equipment upgrades to handle the extra load, and I doubt they don't have the monitoring in place to figure out whether a "hog" is actually impairing the experience of other customers (after all, you'd need to analyze a whole lot of factors at each link in the chain where connections join, and that costs money too). Their paranoid belief is that half the customers will up and leave because there connection is one step shy of perfect, so they decide to sacrifice a few users to "save" the remaining base.

Re:Why?

[olsmeister]

I guess it's cheaper to sacrifice 5% of revenue than to have to undertake a network upgrade.

This mentality is part of why the U.S. lags so much in broadband.

Re:Why?

[Bob9113]

Because the operators pay for the bandwidth. The high bandwidth users are less profitable than the other ones.

That is why tiered services would solve the problem. High bandwidth users should be more profitable than other ones. Then the ISPs would be profit motivated to encourage heavy bandwidth usage, and the users would be cost motivated to be efficient with their usage.

No single thing is more at the root of this problem than the word "unlimited."

Re:Why?

[noname101]

Everybody already has Tiered services. What ISP are you on that only has one level of bandwidth?
I can get 762kb or 2MB or 5Mb or 10Mb or 15Mb
Again the telco said I get 5 Mb I should be able to do with it as I please.

Re:Why?

[morethanapapercert]

Because the ISP's discovered they could sell something they didn't actually have, this is called over-subscription. In theory, if you have a 100 Mbps backbone, you can grant a 10 Mbps connection to each of ten customers 24/7/365. The reality is that most customers don't use all the bandwidth they are allotted and some of the most bandwidth intensive things they *do* use are pretty tolerant of delays (AKA latency, if BitTorrent or a properly buffered video stream gets another 50 ms delay, nobody's really going to notice). This allows the ISP to grant access to that 100 Mbps connection to, just for the sake of argument, 15 customers allowing for higher profits or more competitive pricing, guess which option they chose? As long as those 15 users keep thier bandwidth usage within the predicted levels, nobody notices and the ISP coins money hand over fist. The problem comes when a small minority actually use all the bandwidth they have paid for. If one or two of those people use all the bandwidth they are allowed, now the connection will only support 11 or 12 total users without causing acceptable delays. But there is still 15 connected to it, so the ISP starts getting calls from the 5 or 6 people who are affected the worst, complaining about a slow connection. To complicate matters, ISP's will routinely sell you a 10 MB/s connection but actually allow your modem to get a bit more than that just to be on the safe side, so heavy users could actually be getting more than they have contracted for. Video streaming could max out even that extra allotment, but generally for short periods, say two hours max and only when the customer is at the computer. BitTorrent and other P2P apps though, are capable of maxing out the connection and doing so for hours or even days. Another factor to consider is that many ISP offering are not symmetrical, they allot far less upload bandwidth than download bandwidth. Email, web surfing and video streaming all use relatively little upload bandwidth, but P2P apps can and do use a lot more, making the effect on upload far more noticable on upload speeds. So, if you were an ISP and you had a very small minority whose usage patterns were slowing everybody elses connection down, what are you gonna do about it? You basically have 4 options:

1)buy more bandwidth from your backbone provider and invest in upgraded infrastructure = very expensive, cuts profits, unhappy shareholders
2)employ traffic shaping so that the applications you can identify get throttled back. = relatively minor infrastructure changes, slightly reduced profits until the new equipment is paid for.
3)change your terms of service and employ monitoring tools (you probably already have these) that can ID those heavy users so that you can drop customers who do this. = A minor amount of bad PR, some of which can easily be spun "In order to provide the best possible service to all of our subscribers..."
4) do nothing and wait until enough of the light users get fed up and cancel thier accounts, freeing up enough of the bandwidth that the remaining customers are no longer affected = losing your highest profit margin customers, developing a lot of bad reputation for being a slow provider

From what I've read, ISP's do a mix of all four, but focus mostly on 2) and 3)

Re:Why?

[Shakrai]

This mentality is part of why the U.S. lags so much in broadband.

No, that mentality has nothing to do with it. I know it's popular around here to point to countries like South Korea or Sweden with their 100 mbit connections and claim that the US is "lagging" behind, but I think that rather misses the point.

The major issue with US broadband isn't the actions of Comcast, shitty as though they are. The major issue with US broadband is a lack of availability once you leave the major urban areas. I can get 15mbits for the regular consumer price in my town, upwards of 30 if I'm willing to pay for it. If I drive 10 miles outside of town I'm limited to a 768k DSL (if I'm lucky) or dialup (more often than not).

Further, and I don't say this to troll, but WTF is the use of a 100mbit connection anyway? I "only" have 15mbits and I'm hard pressed to max it out. The only way I've ever been able to peg my connection is to start three or four Linux ISO downloads from different FTP sites. Just what are people doing with these connections that I'm unable to do with mine? I'm sure that as technology advances we'll use more and more bandwidth but it seems to me that at the present time once you exceed a certain amount it's all dick waving from that point going forward.

Does anybody here in the states with FiOS actually pay for the higher tiers? What do you use it for if you do?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

this is who you make me think of: http://720lignes.blog.lemonde.fr/files/2009/04/calimero.1239543982.gif

Seriously, telcos are just here to make money. If they see 5% of the customers eating 50% of the resources, they'll do all they can to stop them or slow them.

It's just like in a restaurant offering "all you can eat for 10$". The restaurant owners will try to tell them that they need to leave food some for the others.
Do you see the parallel?

I do, pure capitalism, and I'm fine with it. Although I still have the right to argue against it as a customer.

Re:Why?

[Bigjeff5]

That's not it at all.

The internet is not free, different large companies (like Verizon, Comcast, Sprint, and AT&T), and for example if Verizon wants to send data across Comcast's network, it has to pay a fraction of a cent for each and every byte.

Obviously, when what your customers use costs you money, the less your customers use the more money you make. It is very possible that their pricing model is such that if a customer uses their 10mbps line for 16-20 hours a day at full capacity that they will not make any money off that customer. In fact they could easily be losing money.

This has nothing to do with the technical limitations of high bandwidth - there really aren't any if the ISP isn't stupid. This is all about business contracts and a customer's internet usage habits causing higher expenses than the profit they bring in.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Revenue does not matter. Profits matter. The top 5% are much less than 5% of the profit.

If your profit margin on the top 5% is lower than your profit margin in other divisions of your corporation, you are better off ditching those customers and investing the money in your more profitable divisions.

Re:Why?

[Xtravar]

The only way I've ever been able to peg my connection is to start three or four Linux ISO downloads from different FTP sites. Just what are people doing with these connections that I'm unable to do with mine?

Porn. Lots and lots of porn torrents.

it's all dick waving from that point going forward.

Well, I guess you're correct in one respect.

Re:Why?

[AP31R0N]

i wonder if this is actually the case. Do people who drive more cause more traffic on their way to work? Seems that granny's Sunday drive causes just as much traffic as a cab driver... 1 car.

Does data cause some kind of wear and tear? Seems to me a packet is a packet. That more of them are going to .56 than to .27 shouldn't matter. Does the fiber going to my house get tired faster than the same cable going to granny's house? Do they need to hire more techie because i'm pulling down torrents? Seems more likely that the companies are just looking for an excuse to charge more.

Don't the operators pay for the bandwidth whether it's not used at all or if it's pegged?

Another question: Why is this vital service in the hands of companies trying to charge as much as they can for as little service as possible?

Re:Why?

[electricbern]

640k ought to be enough for everyone, huh?

Re:Why?

[mister_playboy]

Further, and I don't say this to troll, but WTF is the use of a 100mbit connection anyway? I "only" have 15mbits and I'm hard pressed to max it out. The only way I've ever been able to peg my connection is to start three or four Linux ISO downloads from different FTP sites. Just what are people doing with these connections that I'm unable to do with mine? I'm sure that as technology advances we'll use more and more bandwidth but it seems to me that at the present time once you exceed a certain amount it's all dick waving from that point going forward.

Does anybody here in the states with FiOS actually pay for the higher tiers? What do you use it for if you do?

Porn, bro. Porn, porn, and more porn.

Re:Why?

[misexistentialist]

At 100mbit it still takes at least an hour to download a bluray movie, 20 minutes if it's compressed. Really need gigabit to get instant gratification. I agree that 15mbit is decent, but ISPs act like they are doing you a favor, and are always scheming to limit your bandwidth. Upgrading to fiber would increase speeds, but would also increase availability, since DSL is limited by distance.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot, please don't post here anymore.

Re:Why?

[bconway]

Perhaps you've missed the weekly stories about ever-expanding FTTH or DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades around the country?

Re:Why?

[the_one(2)]

It's nice to download an episode in 720p with bittorrent and start watching it 2,5 min later

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the case of cable service, high users DO use up a scarce resource on the DOCSIS plant, and this CAN negatively impact other customer. The person claiming that someone cannot hog SHARED bandwidth is full of crap.

I work at an ISP, I have SEEN a single customer using up over 50% of the downstream bandwidth of a customer area (~100-400 people). It is the nature of DOCSIS cable plant, and it is entirely possible. If you look at Docsis 2.0 cable modem service, a single downstream port, which generally relates to at minimum one HFC node, and can be more than that, depending on usage. This one 256 QAM downstream port has a max realistic bandwidth of 38 mbps when you factor in overhead (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Speed_Tables). Even with only one node with say a small customer count, 100 customers... cable companies usually offer 10-20mbps of dowload speed on docsis 2.0 plant. Again, if we take the lowest end, it would just take 4 customers (or one customer with 4 modems, I have seen this before) to CAP the port, and prevent the 96 other people on the Node from getting their full speed. You can easily see in the case of a 20mbps customer on a downstream port with 4 nodes @ 400 customers apiece, when one person can use half the bandwidth alloted for 1600 people, it is ENTIRELY possible for someone to hog bandwidth, if they cap their connection 24x7.

Re:Why?

[Pollardito]

From their perspective any upgrade they build that is not accompanied by tiered pricing will just get used for free by the same people.

The US lags in broadband because the cable companies are so entrenched that they can see a market for 5% of users who use more bandwidth that could be filled by a higher bandwidth product, and it's just as easy for them to ignore those customers (because people have to take what they can get). It's a lot easier for them to overlook the 5% that get might be willing to pay more to not be stuck on their throttled plan, than it would be if those customers could actually leave altogether for another service. If they had true competition they'd offer more expensive tiers for people that needed more bandwidth, and they'd be forced by their competitors to offer cheaper tiers for people who don't use much at all. That's not necessarily a net gain for them.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many ISPs are now offering tiered service, locally both COX and Qwest offer multiple bandwidth tiers. Though that is a single area, and Comcast, AT&T and other operate a bit differently, usually without any competition in a given area. In the Prescott, AZ area, Cable One is generally far crappier than anything I can get in the city, they throttle you down more than even their TOS and help sites say. You can't watch hulu or netflix for more than a couple hours without you being throttled to below a 400kbps stream can run on.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just like in a restaurant offering "all you can eat for 10$". The restaurant owners will try to tell them that they need to leave food some for the others.
Do you see the parallel?

I do, pure capitalism, and I'm fine with it. Although I still have the right to argue against it as a customer.

This has little to do with capitalism. In fact, it has almost nothing to do with capitalism.

The restaurant offering "all you can eat for 10$" is not within its legal rights to ask you to stop eating. under the terms of the policy "all you can eat", under some benign constraints (for example, "during normal business hours", or "in an hour", "must clear plates" if clearly stated as policy, etc)

In particular, it is the restaurant's job to collect market statistics on how much its customers eat (quantifying assets and risks against their assets), and plan its inventories (i.e., how much it makes for the buffet every day) accordingly. If they don't want to do business with somebody outside the range of their profitable zone or production capacity, that's fine. This part of the situation is "capitalism".

But if they ask you to stop eating after you have begun a transaction, without having violated any of the "benign constraints" I mentioned, you are within your rights to get up and leave. The transaction is annulled, since they broke their promise. It is a classic bait and switch. This is fraud.

You can be sure that I would sue if somebody sold me "all I could eat" as a bona fide capital good and they didn't deliver. (Then again, I would be paying thousands a dollars for a claim as beneficiary in a trust, or something to that end)

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Further, and I don't say this to troll, but WTF is the use of a 100mbit connection anyway

When was the last time you were in an office building? Were they using 10mbit ethernet on their lan? What's the point? 100mbit barely costs any more and provides nearly 10 times the bandwidth. You will therefore have 10 times the capacity for a small additional cost.

Isn't that exactly what the ISPs are complaining about? Not having the capacity to meet their users' needs without culling? Would they have the capacity if they had just gone with 100mbit wires instead of the 5mbit connections they're using now? Yes. Absolutely yes.

Home based businesses running servers, video conferencing, VPN, teleconferencing, etc. Throw in some kids and a Hulu/Netflix video, and my 5MB/s is gone.

I don't have FiOS, but I wouldn't mind another 10 MB/s so that I can actually watch Hulu without buffering. It would be nice if I didn't have to quit my (legal) torrent upload to use Hulu, also.

Re:Why?

[Shakrai]

It would be nice if I didn't have to quit my (legal) torrent upload to use Hulu, also.

You shouldn't have to quit an upload to watch Hulu unless your bittorrent client and/or router are horribly configured.

Re:Why?

[poopdeville]

i wonder if this is actually the case. Do people who drive more cause more traffic on their way to work? Seems that granny's Sunday drive causes just as much traffic as a cab driver... 1 car.

Errr, and how long is granny on the road? How long is the cab driver on the road? How many cars are they each going to affect?

Don't the operators pay for the bandwidth whether it's not used at all or if it's pegged?

In short, no.

Re:Why?

[poopdeville]

I don't need you to correct my network configuration. As it happens, you are wrong. ACKs for 400KB/s kill my upstream bandwidth.

Re:Why?

[Shakrai]

So use QoS and prioritize the ACKs ahead of the bittorrent upload. Problem solved.

Re:Why?

[Seumas]

Their logic is always "the average user only checks their email and maybe the sports scores and a news website". If that's the case, then what harm to those users are the "heavy" users really doing? The nature of the argument undermines the argument to begin with.

What really frustrates me is that I use a lot of bandwidth and I would happily pay double what I pay now to have double the access (ie, pay for two accounts). Unfortunately, they won't let you do that. This "public utility" that always has a monopoly in each region as far as providing service offers one option and one option only. Period. That's pretty poor service.

I and others in my household enjoy watching a lot of HD content on netflix, downloading entire games on XBOX, streaming radio stations, VPN'ing into work, watching videos online, keeping vital backups remotely with backup services, downloading PLENTY of IPTV and podcasts in high quality, playing video games, etc. It definitely ads up to a LOT of bandwidth. And I'm willing to pay (not ridiculous jacked up prices, mind you - but I'll pay double to use double, certainly). Unfortunately, I can't get what I as a customer and citizen am willing to pay for, even though the company is granted special access by local government on behalf of me.

Instead, they consider people like me a pariah, because we don't have the same usage patterns as someone's elderly grandmother that just emails "the kids" once a month.

Re:Why?

[mea37]

"a max realistic bandwidth of 38 mbps ... a small customer count, 100 customers... cable companies usually offer 10-20mbps of dowload speed on docsis 2.0 plant"

In other words, you're selling something you don't have and then blaming the customers for wanting to use what they bought.

Re:Why?

[Bigjeff5]

Line saturation isn't the issue - if a telco offers 10mbit connections, they generally ensure that their infrastructure is capable of handling the peak usage, which is never going to be even close to 100% of their customers using the full 10mbit connection at the same time, peak would be somewhere around 10-15% of users doing that, depending on how much they sold their lines.

The issue is that for every byte that leaves Verizon's network, they have to pay one of the other large telco's to transmit through their network. If verizon sells you a 10mbit connection for $30 a month, and you saturate that 10mbit connection 10-15 hours a day, chances are it costs Verizon more than $20-30 a month to support your downloading habits. With overhead and maintenance, Verizon could be losing $5-10 a month to sell you internet.

In truth it probably isn't nearly so drastic, but if you destroy their profit margin they don't make money, and if they don't make money they aren't going to have a reason to sell you internet access. They should never have sold you "unlimited" internet if they could not make money off a customer who used it that way.

Re:Why?

[Bigjeff5]

You know just about all bittorrent clients allow throttling on both the upload and download within the client itself.

Since ACKS require very low bandwidth, you should be able to set your torrent uploads to slightly below your max upload speed and everthing will work fine.

If it doesn't work fine, then either hulu or your ISP are doing something funny, and a higher-bandwidth line won't do you much good anyway.

ACK packets are extremely small, 4 bytes actually, no matter how much you are downloading 5-10kb/s should be more than enough if ACKS are really your problem. Doing some very rough math, a 10kb/s upload can handle the ACKS for a 30mbps connection. There's more handshaking than that, though, so for reliabilities sake you'd want to cut that assumption down to about 5-10mbps. Since you have about a 3mbps upload (400kb/s times 8 to get mbps), you probably have a what, 10mbps download? So set aside 20kb/s in your torrent app and your Hulu and your torrent should both be fine.

If not, like I said, there is some funny business going on, and if Hulu is saturating your 400kb/s upload something is REALLY wrong, there is no reason on earth that it should be. More likely you are simply getting queuing delays, but it should not be drastic unless the torrent is very low priority - which it may be down the line from you, who knows.

Re:Why?

[Bigjeff5]

The US lags in broadband because there is simply a hell of a lot more ground to cover. Even our most urban cities are far less dense (and therefore more expensive to lay the infrastructure for) than the average European or Japanes or Korean urban center. Get outside the urban areas for these countries and the picture looks a lot closer to the US broadband situation. Suburban and remote areas get far poorer bandwidth options than the urban center, for precisely the same reason that the US in general has poorer bandwidth than Europe - it's far more expensive to do.

As soon as return on investment drops below a certain point, it isn't worth it for the company to make the upgrade. When the ROI is negative, there is no chance in hell that it will happen. It's a simple fact, and all your whining and conspiracy theories won't change anything.

That's why the only places in the US that are being upgraded are either the very rich communities who will pay the extra cost, or the very dense communities (that are well off enough to buy internet access, obviously).

Re:Why?

[Bigjeff5]

What he means by "Tiered Service" is adding another dimension to the tiers:

762kb at 5, 10, and 20gb per month instead of 5gb per month only
2mb at 10, 20, 50, and 100gb per month instead of 10gb per month or unlimited only
5mb at 20, 50, 100, and 150gb per month instead of 20gb per month or unlimited only

Et cetera, et cetera. The bandwidth determines how many people they can have downloading at the same time, and so they should divide it according to the size of the piece of the pipe they are willing to pay for. In my opinion, the throughput should be a reasonable markup from what it costs the ISP. If it costs Verizon $0.50 per gigabyte to access Comcast's network, they should charge $0.75-$1.00 per gigabyte to their customers.

The way I see it an average internet plan would look something like this:

$10 per month for a 10mbps connection
$1 per gigabyte of data consumed.

So, if you download 50 gigs a month, you'll pay $60 a month for your connection. If you download 100 gigs a month, you'll pay $110 a month. If you download 70 gigs one month but don't even access the net the next, you'll pay $80 for the first month and $10 for the second month.

It makes it very flexible, pretty simple, and the consumer has complete control over their broadband costs by simply consuming less or more. Also, heavy users become a non-issue - in fact, because you're marking up the throughput costs as well, your heavy users actually make you MORE money each month. It essentially neutralizes the ISP's complaints while giving the consumer just as much data as they are willing to pay for. You want unlimited? No problem, but it will vary depending on how much you actually use.

For the media company interests, it makes that blue-ray copy of whatever the latest movie is a lot less attractive, because it just cost you $30-50 to download it - though DVDs will only be $5 or so.

The price per gig probably wouldn't be that high if an ISP committed to something like this (as opposed to just "trying it out" at ridiculously high prices, dooming it to failure), it would probably be closer to $0.50 per gig, but I'm only speculating.

I'd buy it if my ISP offered it.

Re:Why?

[Bigjeff5]

Your analogy is flawed, a better analogy would be this:

Does traffic in Redmond increase when Microsoft employees get off work? Knowing someone who lived there, I can say yes, yes it does, and very, very badly. Well, your Modem is like Microsoft, and each packet you send is like an employee. When you unleash those packets at a rate of 1.25 million every second (around 10mbps), you can bet your ass it causes more traffic than someone who sends them out at less than 200 thousand every second (around 1.5mbps).

All of those packets must be forwarded by a switch to a router, which must process it and route it to it's next destination - probably another router, which must process it again, maybe this time sending it over a large network trunk, where it gets routed again, and routed again, then forwarded before landing at the destination modem.

100% of the latency you see is caused by the switches, routers, and modems on the net. These devices are extremely fast, but each and every packet must be at least partially read by each and every device between the sender and the reciever, and depending on the type of device it must use more or less processing power to determine the destination.

There is no limit to how much data can move across a wire, be it copper or fiber. There is also virtually no delay between when the data leaves the modem and when it reaches the first node in its journey - regardless of the technology (copper or fiber) the data moves across these wires at the speed of light. But there is definitely a limit to how many packets a router can process at a time (fiber tends to be faster because with optics they can use simpler modulation techniques than with copper), and if you are sending more packets per second than your neighbor is, you are definitely causing more traffic than they are.

Now, whether or not the highways are backed up depends on how well the ISPs have built their infrastructure relative to how many cars they said their highway could handle. They may have told you you'd be able to send out 1.25 million cars per second, but if they told the same thing to 1,000 other people, well at some point they started lying.

Re:Why?

[Bigjeff5]

Actually it's a bit of both - during peak times if an ISP has over-sold their lines, the "hogs" could be what pushes them past the limits of what their routers can handle. One person downloading a 10gb file is generating roughly 1 million packets per second of traffic per second for every router in the path between source and destination. The average web browser with 10mbps, however, will burst 1 million for a few seconds and then stop for 20-30 seconds, even several minutes, before bursting again at 1 million for a few seconds. In this case, a "hog" can generate the same traffic that 10-20 web browsing-only users will, or even more.

If the ISP can only actively handle 40mbps, then 20 people downloading large files at peak times can kill the speed for the other 100 people who are just browsing the web. At off-peak times, however, the bandwidth internal to the network is meaningless.

This has nothing to do with the technical limitations of high bandwidth - there really aren't any if the ISP isn't stupid.

Unfortunately, a lot of ISPs are stupid. But anyways, you are 100% correct for off-peak hours - it's the heavy users who are cutting into the ISP's profits by generating more cross-network costs than average for the ISP.

Re:Why?

[dupeisdead]

having worked for an ISP a few years ago, high bandwidth users do cost more than they bring in. Now, you may say that bandwidth is cheap, but the infrastructure sure isn't. Getting more bandwidth is fairly cheap. Getting core routers, deploying it to the curb via cable plants or dslam upgrades are were the majority of the cost go.

Re:Why?

[dupeisdead]

But, is that a legal use for your internet connection? If convenience is more important wouldnt it make more sense to get a PVR of some sort instead of downloading files from the internet?

Re:Why?

[dupeisdead]

Not directed at you, just generally.. But who would step up and pay for the higher tiered service unless they were told/force to by their ISP? If you want to download/upload hundreds of gigs a month, sure go for it, but be prepared to pay several hundred dollars for that. Nothing is unlimited, but when it comes to the internet people think that suddenly this is the exception to the case. Unlimited for $50/month? You believed that? I got a bridge to sell you then lets talk.

Re:Why?

[badkarmadayaccount]

I hope that RAID has enough spindles...

Interesting

[Drasham]

I'd love to see the result of such a data analysis.

Re:Interesting

[Drasham]

Just curious as to the reason why my previous comment "I'd love to see the result of such a data analysis." would get modded down.

I am truly interested in seeing the results of the proposed data analysis, if it were ever possible.

Not really sure how this would offend a modder or how it would seem inappropriate enough to rate losing karma over. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Who?

[thelonious]

So the telcos are like, "Felten who? Yeah, we'll get right on that"

East ireland

[jaggeh]

i was kicked off ESAT's 'no limits' service back in 2001 because i used it too much/was a heavy user. shortly after they instituted a time cap on the 'no limits' service.

in hindsight im sure i could have brought them to court over the trade discription.

Re:East ireland

[cupantae]

Marge: We drove around until three in the morning looking for another open all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant.
Lionel Hutz: And when you couldn't find one?
Marge: [crying] We... went... fishing.

Re:East ireland

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Ladies and Gentlemen, do these sound like the actions of a man who had "All he could download"?

Re:East ireland

[johno.ie]

Roy Keane, is that you? Stop living in the past man.

Re:Interesting headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

lol, you give us AC's a bad name.

Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

I have personally witnessed hogging of bandwidth and, I'd wager, so have you. This term describes when an individual user uses more bandwidth resources than they were assumed to need.

Example: My brother moves in with two of his friends. His latency is horrible. When his roommate is not home, the internet is fine. When he's away at work it becomes unusable. He calls me to look at the situation, and we determine that one of his roomies is a heavy torrent user. Turns out the roommate was ramping up torrents of anime shows he wanted to watch while he was gone. He was aware of the impact to his own internet experience, and so ramped it back down when he wanted to use it himself.

If that's not hogging bandwidth, I'm not too sure what is.

If this doesn't scale, logically, up to the network at a whole, I'm not sure why.

Now, to be completely clear - I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong. I feel the proper response to issues like this on the larger network is guaranteed access to the full amount of bandwidth sold at all times. On the local scale, these men should have brought in another source of internet. On the larger scale, the telco should do the same.

Denying that the issue can happen, however, is stupid to the point of sabotage.

An end-user can download all his access line will sustain when the network is comparatively empty, but as soon as it fills up from other users' traffic, his own download (or upload) rate will diminish until it's no bigger than what anyone else gets.

So, if I understand this statement, if a user is hogging all the bandwidth until no one gets any connectivity - since it is all the same it is totally fair. One user can bottleneck the pipes, but since their stuff isn't fast any more either, we're all good?

How does an argument of this kind help anyone but a bandwidth hog?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

I used QoS with iproute2 and iptables (see http://lartc.org/howto) when I faced that issue.
I do not mean to say I had room mates, but when I used bittorrent and noticed how it abused the network, I used that howto to limit it's bandwidth.

It worked very nice.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[randallman]

This could just be a problem with your router. Maybe it struggles to handle all of the torrent connections.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[enigmatiX]

Simple Fix: Limit his download (and more importantly *upload*) bandwidth--tell him to get a torrent client that allows it. Problem solved.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice anecdote.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Interoperable]

You pay for a 70Mbps connection. The ISP is saying that if you buy that service and then have the audacity to use the service you buy you're doing something wrong. Taking up 60Mbps and leaving 10Mbps for your roommate is one thing, but if the two of you are paying for 70Mbps you should get to use it.

The ISP should be required to provide the service paid for. If they throttle, they should be required to specify say 70Mbps instantaneous rate 10Mbps sustained, for example. That would provide a clear description of the product they offer. Anything less is false advertising.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[jeffmeden]

The basic counter argument is that TCP "fairness" assumes everyone wants the same experience. As you pointed out, a true bandwidth hog doesn't care about the latency during their hogging sessions since they plan around them, and therefore arguing that TCP is fair because it treats all packets the same is pure rubbish. If everyone (including the hog) is trying to make a VOIP call or play WOW then sure, the system is fair because the hog has degraded service just like everyone else. The enterprising hog simply waits for periods when they don't care about latency and cranks up the download speed, ruining the experience for everyone else.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[ShadowRangerRIT]

I should point out that this sort of thing, while true, is often overstated because of poor local network configuration. When I first set up my new Vista machine a couple years back, I noticed that torrents on it would frequently interfere with internet connectivity on other networked devices in the house. I hadn't had this problem before and was curious as to the cause. I initially tried setting the bandwidth priorities by machine IP and by port, setting the desktop and specifically uTorrent's port to the lowest priority for traffic (similar to what ISPs do when they try to limit by protocol, but more accurate and without an explicit cap), but that actually made the situation worse; the torrents ran slower, and the other machines behaved even worse.

Turned out the problem was caused by the OS. Vista's TCP settings had QoS disabled, so when the router sent messages saying to slow down on the traffic, or just dropped the packets, the machine just ignored it and resent immediately, swamping the router's CPU resources used to filter and prioritize packets. The moment I turned on QoS the problem disappeared. The only network using device in my house that still has a problem is the VOIP modem, largely because QoS doesn't work quickly enough for the latency requirements of the phone, but it's not dropping calls or dropping voice anymore, it's just laggy (and capping the upload on uTorrent fixes it completely; the download doesn't need capping).

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if I understand this statement, if a user is hogging all the bandwidth until no one gets any connectivity - since it is all the same it is totally fair. One user can bottleneck the pipes, but since their stuff isn't fast any more either, we're all good?

I agree totally. It sounds like some journalist found out how TCP/IP works _on paper_ and decided to write a story. Though I like his intentions, he misrepresents the way things actually work for users.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

I have personally witnessed hogging of bandwidth

You missed the point slightly.

If a roommate is hogging your apartment's bandwidth, you can't extend that to say that he must be hogging the entire network. He is just filling up the pipline to your single apartment.

The correct metaphor would be if each roommate paid for a separate internet connection, and when one roommate ramped up bittorrent, the other two's connections dropped. THAT would prove the existence of a "Bandwidth Hog"

But point of the article is that all apartments in your area (for example) get equal distribution of bandwidth.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[betterunixthanunix]

"If this doesn't scale, logically, up to the network at a whole, I'm not sure why."

Plenty of reasons why that won't scale up to the network as a whole. First and foremost, your ISP's network topology is a lot more effective for many users than the simple "star" topology most home router/switch combos give you. Beyond just the topology, the ISP uses better equipment that can cap bandwidth usage and dynamically shift priorities to maintain a minimum level of service for all users even in the presence of a very heavy user. The ISP also has much higher capacity links than what you have at home, and certainly more than the link they give you, and so even if there were a very poor topology and no switch level bandwidth management, it would be very difficult for a single user to severely diminish service for others.

I do not have any sympathy for ISPs when it comes to this issue. If they sell me broadband service and expect me to not use it, then they are supremely stupid, and retaliating against those users who actually make use of the bandwidth they are sold is just insulting. They oversold the bandwidth and they should suffer for it; blaming the users is just misguided.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

Turns out the roommate was ramping up torrents of anime shows he wanted to watch while he was gone. He was aware of the impact to his own internet experience, and so ramped it back down when he wanted to use it himself.

If that's not hogging bandwidth, I'm not too sure what is.

This is not the same thing - your brother's roommate is hogging the single bandwidth-limited connection from the residence to the net. It would matter if the roomie's torrent affected the folks in the next house over by clogging the connection from the curbside unit to the backbone.

This argument is not about the rate limit to your house.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

We agree on this. Do we also agree that denying that hogging bandwidth is possible is not helpful to the discussion?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Drethon]

I think the difference may be that a bandwidth hog of a single connection is a user that can use near 100% of the bandwidth. With ISPs on the other hand, the average use by a single user is probably only around 10-25% of daily bandwidth or less (uneducated guess). That means if 5% of the users are using 100% of the bandwidth continually, than everything is fine as long as the ISP can supply at least ~30% of the user bandwidth x the number of users. I could be completely off base however...

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

Are you advocating a system where the ISP has mandate power over the OS configuration?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

Which is dissimilar to what the ISP's are doing, how?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[tepples]

The correct metaphor would be if each roommate paid for a separate internet connection, and when one roommate ramped up bittorrent, the other two's connections dropped. THAT would prove the existence of a "Bandwidth Hog"

Which is close to what happens on cable Internet.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Drethon]

Ok how do I get new line characters into my post? I did a (very) brief search on this and don't see anything. Is it just because I'm using IE6?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

They oversold the bandwidth and they should suffer for it

I agree.

blaming the users is just misguided.

I disagree. The system wasn't designed, nor sold, with torrents in mind. End points are supposed to be content consumers, not content providers. It isn't exactly the ISP's fault that those end users want the system to function in a way against which it is designed.

The ISP should redesign the system. Absolutely, without a doubt. Meanwhile those users that aren't getting what they want shouldn't necessarily be ruining it for everyone else, should they?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Zen-Mind]

I think you pointed-out the real problem. The telcos want you to pay for the 70Mbps line, but don't want you to use it. If you cannot support a users doing 70Mbps, don't sell 70Mbps. I know that building an infrastructure based on the assumption that all users will use maximum bandwidth would be costly, but then adapt your marketting practices; sell lower sustained speed and put a "speed on demand" service that is easy to use so when you want/need to download the new 8GB PS3 game you can play before the next week. Otherwise you can always have a maximum sustained bandwidth based on high/low period of the day, but this needs to be clear.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[noname101]

You are comparing the results of a sub set of the network and not as a whole. Person B that was running the torrents was using all of the bandwidth of the given connection. So person A could not connect. That is fine that is what you have accepted as use with your telco, So much down and so much up. The issues that you missed is that it did not effect your neighbor next door or down the street or next town over because they have their own internet connection.

If the ISP sold me a 5 Mb line that it is mine to do with as a please. If they could not support it then they should not be advertising a 5 Mb line. Which on a side note I have a 5 Mb line and I have never seen over 3Mb even on their "optimized" internal network. So what the telco's are really afraid is going to happen is that people are going to find out that there is no way for them to support the line speed they are promising.

Can Ford tell me where I can drive my car? Does Dish tell me I have to watch a certain channel? Does Sony stop me from buying a Toshiba DVD player? Does the pone company tell me who I can and cannot call? So where are we allowed to be pushed around by the ISP?


---------------
Signature would go here if I was clever.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[bws111]

You pay for an 'up to' 70Mbps connection. 'Up to' means exactly what is sounds like - you are never going to go above that rate. It says absolutely nothing about the minimum or average rate. Since they make no claims at all about minimum or average rate, there is no false advertising. Every consumer is well familiar with what 'up to' means. How many times do you see an ad that says 'Sale! Save up to 50%'. Does that imply that you are in fact going to save 50% on everything you buy? No, it implies that somewhere in the store is at least one item that is 50% off - every other item may be full price, or more likely, discounted at a rate less than 50%.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience, the main problem with bittorrent on a shared connection is that it opens up many connections that the router is keeping track of and when you increase the number of connections that are allowed to be open or decrease the amount of time the connection is stored, the performance generally increases.

This isn't configurable in many routers' default firmware. I know it is an option in DD-WRT and Tomato firmwares for the Linksys WRT54G (which is a great router)

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[lastchance_000]

I've seen a similar thing with a neighbor of mine in our apartment building. We're on Comcast--and the congestion stopped when he switched to DSL (He had been sharing the connection of another neighbor, who moved out.)

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[beefnog]

I'm fairly certain that ShadowRangerRIT was talking about local networks only. He's referring to internal QoS, which will in no way affect the total bandwidth he's using relative to the ISP. The connection is saturated in both scenarios. Using QoS internally, he's just prioritizing his traffic.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[FictionPimp]

The ISP already limits my bandwidth. Say you purchase 'unlimited' 5mbps/768kbps service. You have a 5mbps download limit and a 768kbps upload limit. If they can't support you using that at full blast, then they should lower the limit. Instead they punish you for using the allocation they gave you. It would be like imposing a limit on your roommate, then kicking him out for using the limit every day.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[noname101]

Well first stop advertsing you are using IE6 it does not help any.

For a new line you need to put in <br>

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[betterunixthanunix]

"It isn't exactly the ISP's fault that those end users want the system to function in a way against which it is designed."

I would agree if the ISPs were honest about what how they built their network, but they continue to lie and then complain about people believing their lies. If an ISP designed its network with downloading in mind, and provides only the minimum upload capacity needed to facilitate such service, they should be very clear about that. It is not "unlimited Internet access," it is "Internet download service."

If they cannot market what they designed without lying to people, it is their fault, and as you said, they should redesign their product and sell what people actually want. The ISP lied, and that is where the blame stops. Nobody should be blamed for believing that their ISP is selling them the service that was advertised.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Hatta]

That's just bad configuration, not bandwidth hogging. Prioritize ACK packets and you can run torrents all day without affecting other uses of the network.

One user can bottleneck the pipes, but since their stuff isn't fast any more either, we're all good?

If the "bandwidth hog" isn't fast anymore, he's no longer a hog.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

Look how dumb you are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_Congestion_Notification

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

Can Ford tell me where I can drive my car?

Yes.

Does Dish tell me I have to watch a certain channel?

Yes.

Does Sony stop me from buying a Toshiba DVD player?

Yes.

Does the pone company tell me who I can and cannot call?

Yes.

So where are we allowed to be pushed around by the ISP?

Because business relationships are regulated by both laws and contracts, and it is more complicated than it would seem.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Ephemeriis]

If that's not hogging bandwidth, I'm not too sure what is.

Yes. Your brother's room-mate was hogging the available bandwidth in their apartment.

If this doesn't scale, logically, up to the network at a whole, I'm not sure why.

It will only scale up to the network as a whole if you're overselling your bandwidth.

Now, to be completely clear - I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong.

Err... Well, if it's wrong to oversell bandwidth... Then it is wrong to create a situation where it is possible to hog bandwidth...

If I buy a 5 Mbps connection from a small ISP here in town, I expect to be able to get roughly 5 Mbps. And unless they make it very clear to me ahead of time, I'm going to expect that "unlimited" really means unlimited.

Say they've got another 9 users out there who bought the 5 Mbps connection as well. So that's 10 of us. The network hardware should cap each of us individually at 5 Mbps because that's all we're paying for. So the most the 10 of us could pull down is roughly 50 Mbps.

If the ISP actually provisions enough equipment and buys enough bandwidth to handle 50 Mbps, then it is impossible for any user to "hog" the bandwidth. There is enough for each individual user to get their full 5 Mbps connection. Even if I completely saturate my connection, there's still enough hardware and bandwidth out there to handle another 45 Mbps.

The problem is that ISPs don't do this. They assume that a given user will only use a very tiny portion of their bandwidth at any point in time. They assume you might download some email, watch a YouTube video, or something like that... Maybe have some bursts of traffic that hit that 5 Mbps mark... But, in general, you'll barely be touching it.

So the ISP only provisions enough hardware and buys enough bandwidth for 25 Mbps... Or maybe even less.

So if I'm using my full 5 Mbps, there's only enough left over for another 20 Mbps - that's only 4 users worth, and there's actually 9 users out there.

Where it gets really bad is at the neighborhood level... Everyone in the neighborhood shares a trunk line of some sort back to the ISP. And that trunk line is going to be oversold just like everything else. Maybe that trunk line can only handle 5 Mbps total. Even though two of my neighbors bought the 5 Mbps package, the trunk line just can't handle more than 5 Mbps at a time. So if all three of us are trying to make full use of our connection we're going to be saturating that trunk line. We'll each see about 1.5 Mbps - nothing more. Even though we're paying for 5 Mbps.

So... Yes, it is possible to hog the bandwidth. But only if the ISP oversells their bandwidth. Which means that if the ISP is being honest in its marketing and sales material, it should be impossible to hog the bandwidth.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

Yes, but the example should extrapolate up to the larger network, or else we're straying off topic.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Archangel Michael]

Now, to be completely clear - I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong.

Over selling isn't wrong, it is necessary for services like this. The fact is, all service providers oversell their capacity. The trick is to manage the overselling to a ratio that on average, within a specific scope, doesn't cause bandwidth jams for a prescribed statistical level.

Having run an ISP, the oversell ratio is about 10:1 - 15:1 depending on who your subscribers are, and their usage patterns. This means you can get 10-12 people on a data circuit that is really designed to handle 1 fully loaded client. This statistical usage only works at large scales, and actually as the scale increases, may raise the over subscription to 20 or 25 to one.

I guarantee you that if everyone wanted to Torrent all the time, at full speed, the internet could not handle the traffic. It wasn't designed to. It has been over sold.

Bittorrent is not normal traffic pattern. A Torrent is a congestion point on the internet, at a place where one is not expected. Most people don't need 80 gigabytes of streaming data, day in and day out. If this were DVD movies, you'd be downloading more movies than you could watch.

I don't have any complaints for ISPs that throttle Torrents and take other measures against "high usage" users, who are file sharing. I'm not against filesharing, I'm against idiots who cause congestion because they don't know how to configure Bittorrent client to be "reasonable".

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[DrOct]

It's not the customers fault that the ISP didn't design their network in such a way that someone using all the bandwidth that the ISP provides them causes problems. If people uploading too much is a problem, then cut down their upload bandwidth, but don't just ban them.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

It would be like imposing a limit on your roommate, then kicking him out for using the limit every day.

Which would make sense when the limit-imposing solution was still not getting the desired result.

Again, the network needs re-engineered. Meanwhile, the rest of us should probably be able to use what's presently here while the 'hogs' get to wait for the product they need.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Bourdain]

The router could be part of it -- I have a decent router and monitor the CPU utilization under a variety of situations and found in my case, it's rarely the cause of latency...

I've found that when I saturate only the upsteam, my latency substantially increases (despite setting QoS to lowest with that).

Saturating the downstream does not significant affect latency.

i.e. I have an older cable internet connection in NYC (only thing available in this grand / advanced city...) and I download up to about 1000Kb and upload at about 40KB

if i set upload to only 10-15KB, it doesn't affect latency whereas I could be downloading at full capacity with minimal impact

fyi -- I'm using a buffalo router with tomato

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

The ISP lied, and that is where the blame stops. Nobody should be blamed for believing that their ISP is selling them the service that was advertised.

Except you're comparing the advertising tagline with the execution of the actual contract.

One is very short, the other is not.

It is not "unlimited Internet access," it is "Internet download service."

I'd agree to an extent that this should be rephrased to "unlimited Internet access for most users, your experience may vary".

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BoppreH]

The article talks about ISP problems, not domestic ones. I think everyone here knows that torrent can destroy your connection, but it won't affect anyone else in the area with the same ISP.

Ask your neighbors if their connection slows down when you open your torrent client. They will answer No, but the ISP says YES.

And THAT is the point of the article: wether using your connection fully hogs everyone's bandwith in the area or not.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

Of course he is. A saturated network is as hogged as any, even when no one gets what they want.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

So... Yes, it is possible to hog the bandwidth. But only if the ISP oversells their bandwidth. Which means that if the ISP is being honest in its marketing and sales material, it should be impossible to hog the bandwidth.

And it has been generally accepted that the network is oversold by design and that using it in a manner that pretends that it was not oversold is hogging it.

Yes, overselling wrong.

Pretending that it was not oversold is also wrong.

And to go one further, pretending that your price for a non-oversold network would be the same is also wrong.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

But you'd run into that situation no matter how the network is engineered. What needs to start happening is that the ISPs need to stop overselling the capacity they have.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

It's not the customers fault that the ISP didn't design their network in such a way that someone using all the bandwidth that the ISP provides them causes problems.

Sure it is. It means they didn't select the service that meets their needs.

If people uploading too much is a problem, then cut down their upload bandwidth, but don't just ban them.

I actually agree that bans aren't warranted. Action of some kind is, but bans are overpowered. Some kind of accommodation should be made to get these people what they need.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[ShadowRangerRIT]

The thing is, a larger network has already set a cap for you, the speed you are paying for. Your modem supports it, it doesn't matter how your computer is configured. Your connection and their hardware could support a much higher speed most of the time, but they limit it to what they are capable of providing reliably and inexpensively.

With your roommate, you could simulate a similar scenario by configuring your router to limit the bandwidth of each machine to, say, (connection speed / # of machine) * 1.2. Note that each user is capable of using a little more than his fair share, but he can't completely dominate the network. Some capacity is wasted most of the time (since most people won't use their share), and the users who really want bandwidth get a little extra. If everyone tries to max it out at once, then the top download speed drops by a bit (that final 0.2), but everyone gets a decent experience because the router was enforcing the policy.

Basically what I'm saying is that your situation was caused by poor local network management. The ISPs are perfectly capable of enforcing good global network management on their users (local management doesn't matter, attempts to hog bandwidth by local sources are filtered by your modem, which they do control), so your problem is inapplicable.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

Ask your neighbors if their connection slows down when you open your torrent client. They will answer No, but the ISP says YES.

And THAT is the point of the article: wether using your connection fully hogs everyone's bandwith in the area or not.

So we're comparing a single torrent user to an entire neighborhood's worth of bandwidth as a reasonable test of impact?

What if all but one neighbor were also torrenting? Any impact then?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Are you advocating a system where the ISP has mandate power over the OS configuration?

A short version of my longer answer below: They already have this power. They don't need to control your OS, because they control your modem, and your modem will obey QoS from their network, even if your OS won't obey it locally. All you'll do is overload the CPU on both OS and modem dropping and resending packets.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Correction, make that *above*.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Ephemeriis]

So... Yes, it is possible to hog the bandwidth. But only if the ISP oversells their bandwidth. Which means that if the ISP is being honest in its marketing and sales material, it should be impossible to hog the bandwidth.

And it has been generally accepted that the network is oversold by design and that using it in a manner that pretends that it was not oversold is hogging it.

Yes, overselling wrong.

Pretending that it was not oversold is also wrong.

And to go one further, pretending that your price for a non-oversold network would be the same is also wrong.

It is also not only wrong, but straight-up illegal here in the US to advertise a product deceptively.

It may be a safe assumption that my ISP is overselling things, but that isn't really my problem. It may seem that $20/month is awfully cheap for "unlimited" bandwidth, but that isn't my problem.

If my ISP sells me "unlimited" bandwidth, I should be able to assume that I'm going to have unlimited bandwidth. If there is, in fact, a limit on my bandwidth - then it isn't unlimited. They are being deceitful in their advertising.

If that is allowed, why bother stopping there? They can sell me 5 Mbps with a 10 GB/month cap... And then only deliver 2 Mbps with a 1 GB/month cap. Or maybe they'll bill me every month and just not provide any bandwidth at all.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Hatta]

If everyone's traffic is going slow, who is the bandwith hog?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

If this doesn't scale, logically, up to the network at a whole, I'm not sure why.

The above example has the problem that each user in the local network doesn't have a cap. Each user on the network will have more local bandwidth than they will have on the internet connection, so any single user can saturate the network, therefore hogging it.

However, your dsl/cable does have a cap. You are sold 10,20,30 Mbit and if you cannot use it that is the ISPs problem of over subscription. No single user should be able to saturate the connection, contention should be highly regulated and bandwidth increased if subscribers increase.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

The simplest test would be - which user, once removed, makes things no longer slow?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[hitmark]

comcast = cable = coax style networking in modern form, no?

that is, its like going back to pre-hub style ethernet, where every computer is listening for the next millisecond of no signal on the coax so that it can hopefully push its next packet on there. There is a reason why this was quickly replaced with switches when said tech became available at acceptable prices...

mostly to me it seems that the ISPs that cries highest are the ones that geared up when the net was mostly static webpages and ftp file transfers, able to handle the odd spike of traffic when someone clicked a link. But now the gear they have sitting around, and that they where banking on where not to be replaced for the next decade or so, baring hardware failure, is being swamped by continual "spikes". And the only way they can fix that at their end is by replacing the gear ahead of schedule, playing havoc with their earnings estimates. And rather then doing that, they break out the whip, trying to force the "cattle" back into the "pen".

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[mikael_j]

"Up to" is only fair advertising if the "up to" is a CYA for issues with your ISP's peering or if your connection to the ISP can't handle the bandwidth. At least that's how it seems to be treated here in .se where nothing but wireless connections has caps, I suspect US ISPs have another definition...

/Mikael

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[jank1887]

well, when you get DSL or cable or FIOS or whatever, they always come out to install your service, which basically means putting that setup cd in your primary computer. This CD is modifying your computer settings to configure access to the modem and their network. Why wouldn't 'enable QoS' be a viable default option in this configuration change?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[DrOct]

It's not the customers fault that the ISP didn't design their network in such a way that someone using all the bandwidth that the ISP provides them causes problems.

Sure it is. It means they didn't select the service that meets their needs.

I think you misunderstand what I meant, I mean it's not the customers fualt that using all the bandwidth the ISP provides them causes problems for the ISP.

Sure if the customer has problems with their own connection when they fully saturate it that's their problem not the ISP's.

But it's certainly not the fault of the user that the ISP is giving them more bandwidth than the ISP can handle them using.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BoppreH]

As far as I understand the ISP are dealing with single users, not entire neighborhoods.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[noname101]

Wow... I do not think you could have missed the mark on those any more if you had tried (which I am not sure you were not trying)

Anyway about the Car? The answer is No I could drive it anywhere I wanted to. I had to get it in certain places but I could drive it any where I wanted to. It was a lease I could do as a please and then return it and pay the extra penalty.

Dish: The answer is no. Again I can watch any channel on cable once it is decrypted but I do not have to watch 2 hours of CBS before I watch something else. It does not matter how much or how little I watch I paid for the channels I get to watch them when I like.

DVD Player: Wow really Blu-ray? What does that have to do with connecting a DVD player to a Sony TV. I think you just wanted to contradict me and would have put down a flying squirrel if you could make it fit.

Telephone: Really you are going to go so far as to compare my leased line with a service level agreement to a free service. Come on you are not even trying.

No it is not more complicated that it would seem. I was sold 5 Mb line I should get to use 5Mb it was the telco's idea to sell it I did not make a special deal with them. They offered it and sold it to me they should be able to support it and EXPECT me to you it.

----- So what ISP do you work for?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

It may be a safe assumption that my ISP is overselling things, but that isn't really my problem. It may seem that $20/month is awfully cheap for "unlimited" bandwidth, but that isn't my problem.

It isn't your problem, that's true. You're pushing the gap off onto the other users of the network, making it their problem. You feel justified in this because it isn't your fault - you didn't create the situation - and you may be correct. You're still in the wrong, however, by intentionally causing harm to others who didn't really do anything to deserve it.

If my ISP sells me "unlimited" bandwidth, I should be able to assume that I'm going to have unlimited bandwidth. If there is, in fact, a limit on my bandwidth - then it isn't unlimited. They are being deceitful in their advertising.

If that is allowed, why bother stopping there? They can sell me 5 Mbps with a 10 GB/month cap... And then only deliver 2 Mbps with a 1 GB/month cap. Or maybe they'll bill me every month and just not provide any bandwidth at all.

Advertising cannot, and should not ever contain the entire detail of the entire contract. To presume that this is necessary means the death of meaningful advertising. There would be more asterisks than ordinary characters.

By the way, this is NOT the fault of ISP's. This is the fault of the entire legal system.

Burger King's burger sold me is nothing like the one on the TV screen. At all. Yet I don't feel justified in collecting the meager burgers served to the other customers and piling them up until it makes me happy. Mostly because I knew damn good and well that there would be a gap, and I was never at any point deceived.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[gbjbaanb]

They oversold the bandwidth and they should suffer for it

I agree.

I disagree. overselling is fine, the problem comes when they squeeze too much overselling out of what they've got.

For example, ISP A had 100gb of bandwidth and 1000 customers. They sell each customer 0.1gb, everyone's fine but no customer will use that much bandwidth so most of the network cap is wasted, and when the upstream ISP sells it to you a quite a large sum, you'll find you have no customers as the price you have to charge them is prohibitive.

So, you oversell a bit, and you have 2000 customers, each one getting 0.05gb of bandwidth, most of the time no-one will ever use more that, but occasionally 1 will, when they do a big download. Still, you've made the network more price-competitive but its still probably more than most people will pay for.

So, you go further, and you have 10,000 customers so each could use 0.01gb, which is fine if all they do is surfing and email with the odd bit of streaming and downloading, and the price per customer is great. But then someone decides to up/download 365/24/7... and the model of shared usage falls apart.

The trouble is that most ISPs can look at how much bandwidth they have per customer, and how much actually gets used and make appropriate allowances for that, but most customers will use a lot of bandwidth during 4pm to midnight, and practically none the rest of the day. The better ISPs will tell you this, and will cap you only during that peak time, but the 24/7 downloaders don't care about the other users, so the ISP gets a bit stroppy with them and kicks them off the network, or caps their speeds to persuade them to go or to minimise their impact of the network.

OK, some ISPs oversell to the point where a minimal number of users downloading make an impact, but generally downloads aren't an issue during off-peak times.

The answer is nearly always simple - go with a provider that allows unlimited transfer during off-peak and don't be selfish during the peak times. Its like (car analogy time!) rush hour, drive as fast as you like at 10am, but don't expect to go faster than 5mph at 8am.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Hatta]

The system wasn't designed, nor sold, with torrents in mind. End points are supposed to be content consumers, not content providers.

This is incorrect. TCP is designed so that every computer on the network is a peer. There is no fundamental difference between my computer at home and slashdot.org. The great promise of the internet is that everyone can be a content provider. The ISPs seek to destroy this notion in favor of simply creating a content distribution mechanism that they control. That is far, far worse than any "bandwidth hog" could ever be.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[ShadowRangerRIT]

That CD isn't actually necessary for most systems (my machine at home is on Verizon DSL, but I've got no Verizon software installed by choice, same went for the Comcast service I used to have, I just configured it on a throwaway OS so the software wouldn't clutter my machine). And like I mentioned, isn't required for global network QoS anyway. Yes, having the CD enable local QoS is a good thing in any event, but that's for the benefit of that user, it doesn't affect the ISP or its other customers in any way.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

No, I get you. And I'm saying that by barring certain users the ISP is attempting the same kind of management. The technique is heavy handed and wrong, but the intent is not.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[hitmark]

problem is that if one go with the on bill speeds one is paying for, and tweak the torrent client based on that, one will still saturate the connection, thanks to the isp oversell.

hell, going by your 10-15:1, that means i could be paying for 10mbit/s, tune torrent to use maybe 9 (to leave a opening for other traffic) and still be saturating the connection as the isp only have a 1mbit/s calculated, not the 10 i am paying for.

if the isps wants the customers to be responsible, they first need to be honest with the customer and tell them "sorry, but our upstream is such that we cant sell you more then x pr second right now". But instead they are happy to nod and sell whatever speed is asked for, and then turn around and bank most of the money, and hook the customer up with a much smaller product.

if one was to do this with a physical product, it would be fraud, plain and simple, as one is claiming to sell one product but delivering another.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Yvanhoe]

"If this doesn't scale, logically, up to the network at a whole, I'm not sure why." You and your roommate are using a link between your computer and the internet link that is faster than the internet link. Try saturating a DSL internet connection while sharing it through 9600 bauds links and you get a fair comparison to what is happening. Sure, hundreds of users in these conditions can choke it, but it is unlikely for a single user to be responsible for the whole situation. The fairer way would be to lower the speed cap of everyone, while the easiest way is to disconnect those that use the connection at the maximum : this minimizes the angry-users/performance-gains ratio.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

And why do you assume they are doing that?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BoppreH]

From the summary:
"What's actually happening is the ISPs are selecting the top 5% of users"

I bet that all those users don't live in the same neighborhood.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Bakkster]

This is correct. There's no reasonable way for them to 'guarantee' a minimum speed, since an outage (either theirs or the backbone) or other interruption is a huge issue.

There are really two problems:
1) The networks aren't always transparent about their management practices. If you throtle a user for using >50% of their max for more than 15 minutes, tell me that. At least I know up front.
2) The inability to change providers. If I don't like Comcast's management policies, I can't get another cable internet service. I'm stuck with DSL or fiber (if I'm lucky). Europe has significantly more choice of available ISPs in any given area. This allows competition where a customer can actually decide to use a different company based on network management.

This is the reason why we're stuck, we have little choice to avoid network management policies, aside from forgoing internet or possibly reducing your max speed (both options worse than sticking it out). Until we can effectively 'vote with our dollar', we have little recourse.

Look at how well (comparatively) this has worked for the cell phone industry. It's a race to provide free perks, and if you don't like your carrier you have the ability to switch to at least 2 other, roughly equivalent, carriers. There's no enforced monopoly for them to hide behind, they have to compete or they lose money.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Hatta]

If I'm using 90% of the bandwidth and you're using 20%, removing either of us from the network would put the network below saturation and back to full speed. So this test fails.

It's also worth pointing out that I can never use 90% of the ISPs bandwidth because I'm capped.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Cwix]

If I purchase a 10mb connection, and my using 5 of it harms my neighbors connections, its most certainly not my fault, I bought what i needed, the company shouldn't have sold what it couldn't support. Blaming customers is a way for the providers to increase profit margins, and to make customers look bad in the net neutrality debate.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

GM took back the EV1's. You cannot drive one at all. Dish won't let you put the CableCard in any machines that don't honor DRM. Sony will prevent you from buying a DVD player at all, once Bluray kills the format entirely. Google Voice selects where it provides service based on its physical presence and its cost, and would do so despite the free service factor.

If you were sold a 5 Mb line, and have a contract that details that this is not limited in any way, and this was not provided, you should sue. You'll probably be able to get your subscription fees back. Unfortunately, that's all you're entitled to.

I don't work for an ISP. I just don't want to live in a world where people consume things without looking at the consequences. "Not my problem" is immoral. I believe in market forces resolving this particular issue, whereas others feel they are immune from the harm they cause by willfully abusing the design of the modern ISP. Those individuals are wrong, and it will result in higher costs for my household and business. I'm getting what I pay for and would not mind if it remained the same, or got cheaper. People changing the rules of the game by consuming more than they were designed to receive will drive up my costs.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Shakrai]

If they could not support it then they should not be advertising a 5 Mb line.

So you think that an ISP should have to have a 1:1 contention ratio for residential users? How can you make such a blanket statement anyway? Even if your ISP has a 1:1 contention ratio they still aren't going to be able to promise you 5mbit/s at all times. Events beyond their control (anybody remember how useless the internet was on 9/11?) will crop up from time to time and prevent you from achieving the promised speed.

So where are we allowed to be pushed around by the ISP?

Because you signed the contract and agreed to be bound by it's terms in exchange for receiving their services? If you don't like the terms then start your own ISP. It's not the easiest thing to do in the world but you'll find it easier than starting your own car company or satellite TV provider.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Ephemeriis]

Burger King's burger sold me is nothing like the one on the TV screen. At all. Yet I don't feel justified in collecting the meager burgers served to the other customers and piling them up until it makes me happy. Mostly because I knew damn good and well that there would be a gap, and I was never at any point deceived.

This is a bad analogy, to say the very least.

You and another guy show up at Burger King at the same time. You both order two burgers.

Burger King only actually has the fixings for two burgers, but they still sell you both two burgers.

The order comes up, they hand you your bag, you open it - just one burger.

You complain and they indicate that the other burger is going to the other customer. You demand your two burgers. The guy behind the counter calls you a "burger hog" because you want to deprive their other paying customers of the burgers they ordered. He takes away your burger and kicks you out of the store. Then he gives your burger to the other customer - so that he actually gets the two burgers he ordered and doesn't cause another scene.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

You and your roommate are using a link between your computer and the internet link that is faster than the internet link. Try saturating a DSL internet connection while sharing it through 9600 bauds links and you get a fair comparison to what is happening.

The saturation isn't happening because the of the content exchange on the fast part of the network. It is the remote users that are saturating it.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

But they live in some neighborhood at all, do they not? So there is an assumption that those resources will now be less taxed.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

What about four 20% users and one 90%? Same conclusion?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[noname101]

Sure it is. It means they didn't select the service that meets their needs.

Sure I did I selected the one that let me have 5 Mb of bandwidth. That is what I wanted, that is what I pay for, that is what I *try* to get. If the telco cannot support what they are selling then the telco needs to change not the user.

I actually agree that bans aren't warranted. Action of some kind is, but bans are overpowered. Some kind of accommodation should be made to get these people what they need.

Some kind of accommodation like the telco upgrading to meet the promises they made? Ohhh maybe that telco should limit my bandwidth, waaiiittt they already do that. I guess it is back to the telco to deliver what they sold.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BobMcD]

The system wasn't designed, nor sold, with torrents in mind. End points are supposed to be content consumers, not content providers.

This is incorrect. TCP is designed so that every computer on the network is a peer. There is no fundamental difference between my computer at home and slashdot.org. The great promise of the internet is that everyone can be a content provider. The ISPs seek to destroy this notion in favor of simply creating a content distribution mechanism that they control. That is far, far worse than any "bandwidth hog" could ever be.

I'm not referring to the design of TCP/IP. I'm referring to the Bell's implementation of it.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[IpSo_]

Now, to be completely clear - I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong. I feel the proper response to issues like this on the larger network is guaranteed access to the full amount of bandwidth sold at all times. On the local scale, these men should have brought in another source of internet. On the larger scale, the telco should do the same.

You're completely delusional if you actually believe this.

Lets take a tiny data center with 1000 servers for example, each server gets a 100mbit ethernet connection, if the hosting provider wasn't overselling their bandwidth they would need 100GBit of upstream bandwidth. Sorry but that just isn't going to EVER happen.

If Google has over 500,000 servers, each with 100mbit ethernet connection, do you think they have a nice fancy 50terrabit connection to the internet?

Overselling bandwidth is business as usual, and always will be. The internet by design is just one big bottle neck at some point or another, you may as well just get used to it now.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[frog_strat]

Over selling isn't wrong,

Huh ? It is a lie, it is wrong, and should be illegal. I welcome you to show me otherwise.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[tibman]

Companies overselling is a very popular and acceptable thing too (for them). Airlines, hotels, and movie theaters often do this expecting no-shows and cancels. But i expect the percentage oversold is based on historical facts for that particular day the previous year. ISPs might have been able to oversell so much in the past but as more content moves from tv/phone/radio to the internet, the typical usage might be outstripping the previous years usage numbers. Just my thoughts..

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[noname101]

So you think that an ISP should have to have a 1:1 contention ratio for residential users? How can you make such a blanket statement anyway? Even if your ISP has a 1:1 contention ratio they still aren't going to be able to promise you 5mbit/s at all times. Events beyond their control (anybody remember how useless the internet was on 9/11?) will crop up from time to time and prevent you from achieving the promised speed.

No of course I am not saying they have to guarantee the speed. You are right all bandwidth is shared on the entire internet. What I am saying is if I use 5 Mb according to my contract how can they cancel my service. They are only canceling it because I am using it.

Because you signed the contract and agreed to be bound by it's terms in exchange for receiving their services? If you don't like the terms then start your own ISP. It's not the easiest thing to do in the world but you'll find it easier than starting your own car company or satellite TV provider.

Well if would be lot easier to just go to a competitor but, since the government is letting this go on for all ISP that does not really work does it.
Of course I am not going to start my own ISP, why should I have to when I am following my agreed contract.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[BoppreH]

This "assumption" is what the ISPs are trying to sell: "The Mythical 'Bandwidth Hog'".

So, by the power of the Summary, I state that no, those resources won't be less taxed because the difference a single user makes, using *his* connection fully, is not enough to interfere with the neighborhood's.
And, if it IS enough, it's because the ISPs are doing it wrong.


And BAM, we are back to the beginning.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Shakrai]

I don't have any complaints for ISPs that throttle Torrents and take other measures against "high usage" users, who are file sharing.

My only issue with throttling is that there are better ways to manage your network than arbitrarily lowering someones bandwidth. My office is located out in the sticks and we can only get a T-1. I have to share 1.5mbits with 60 employees, including time critical services such as VOIP and VPNs. I set up a priority list that looks like this:

1. VOIP
2. Priority packets (small SSH packets, NTP, DNS, pings)
3. TCP ACKs
4. VPN Packets
5. Core network services (e-mail mostly)
6. Unclassified packets from administrative workstations
7. Unclassified packets from other workstations
8. Idle Tier for large downloads that aren't time critical (I use this myself when I need to download large patches, Linux ISOs, etc.)

Each tier gets a promised amount of bandwidth. When they need more they borrow unused bandwidth from the other tiers in order of priority, VOIP gets first dibs, then the priority tier, then TCP acks, etc. etc. I don't arbitrarily limit the bandwidth available to a certain protocol or end user. If the line is free then even bittorrent is allowed to use 100%. If the line is pegged then traffic is allowed through according to the above priority list. Bittorrent doesn't care if it winds up in the queue -- VOIP does.

I did this with an old Linux box and the HTB packet scheduler. It cost nothing but time to setup. If I can manage to do this then doesn't it stand to reason that a company with the resources of Comcast could pull it off? Why do they need to impose bandwidth limits and the like when they could simply prioritize interactive traffic ahead of the torrent kiddies?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

If the limit isn't getting the desired result then you fucked up and it's solely your problem.

If my ISP were to ever reduce my bandwidth because I was using it full speed 24/7, I would sue them and win. If you were to limit my bandwidth in a roommate scenario then get angry with me for using that limit, I'd beat the shit out of you.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[kalirion]

And if everyone wanted to withdraw their money from the bank, the bank would not have the funds. That's why banks limit clients to withdrawing no more than 10% of their accounts balance per month. Oh wait, NO THEY DO NOT.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it is local to their apartment?

did you even understand the grand parent post's history's point?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

The high bandwidth of torrents causes lag on half duplex systems like cable modems. Full duplex systems like DSL are not impacted.

If you keep the torrent rate limited, or switch to full duplex, this problem goes away.

If you have a 6 Mbps download and 600 Kbps upload, your ping times will get 10x longer as it has to spend 1/11 time uploading and 10/11 time downloading over the half duplex.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Archangel Michael]

It isn't a lie, it is accepted business practices. You don't want what you're really asking for. You want 10mb for $24.95, not the dedicated 10mb for $1500.

If you REALLY wanted dedicated 10mb connection, you'd ask for it, with QoS and SLA agreements, in short, you're asking for BUSINESS CLASS SERVICE not the Consumer Class versions.

Yes, most service providers offer this service, it is just that most people really wants to pay for it.

Warning, Car Analogy Ahead:

You're like the guy who buys a F150 truck with the smallest engine, and then complains that they can't tow their big-ass boat up the hill very well, even though the "Tow Rating" says it should.

And you burn up your engine / transmission early because you do it every weekend. Should FORD be sued because they advertised it wrong? Or are you an just an idiot using consumer toys for commercial duty?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[noname101]

I am going to ignore your comments about Google cars, Google voice, and the others because the do not make sense and are not worth it.
I never said I was gurneteed a 5 Mb line. I have accepted that it will be less than 5 Mb 99.9% of the time. My point, which you cannot seem to grasp, is that how is it right for the ISP to disconnect me for using the service that they sold me. If I am having an impact on other people the the telco is at fault not me. I is not a "not my problem" sort of thing it is a "they are selling this promise to all these people and cannot possibly support all of them" thing.

How am I willfully abusing the design of the ISP if I am using TCP/IP, the problem again, is that they over sold the bandwidth.

the forces of the market economy will not fix this. Those forces are driven by greed and nothing else. All of the problems that we have had come back to one thing, lack of ethics, from selling loans to people that could not pay, to selling derivatives that nobody know the value, it was all about money.

A free market economy will always end the same way. I have yet to find anybody that can admit that Standard Oil and System Bell were good things and that is what happens in an unregulated market.

You really should read the article from yesterday: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/how-the-robber-barons-hijacked-the-victorian-internet.ars/2

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Coren22]

The article even quotes numbers on this. In your example it works out to the ISP having one 5 Mbps connection for 40-100 users, this is where the whole claim of unlimited totally falls apart.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Coren22]

I assume you weren't working for a BIG ISP, the ratios quoted in the article relating to the big guys is 40:1 - 100:1. I think it is absolutely absurd to oversell to this point, but that is what many of the big guys do. I will make an exception for Verizon FiOS however, as from personal experience, I have never seen less then my advertised 25 Mbps, so they must not be overselling to this level.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Archangel Michael]

I did this with an old Linux box and the HTB packet scheduler [luxik.cdi.cz]. It cost nothing but time to setup. If I can manage to do this then doesn't it stand to reason that a company with the resources of Comcast could pull it off?

Yeah, because a 1.5 mb T1 is just like multiple routed GB (or 10GB) connections.

What you fail to not realize is that your setup doesn't "scale" to ISP backbone levels. Yeah, I agree that it probably works for your office setup, but it doesn't work at ISP levels.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[GuidoW]

Now, to be completely clear - I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong. I feel the proper response to issues like this on the larger network is guaranteed access to the full amount of bandwidth sold at all times.

I disagree completely. Overselling is a very sensible tactic, and in fact about the only thing that allows you to get flatrate lines as cheap as they are are. Of course, it's a matter of degree, and many telcos are overdoing it, but on the other hand, a strict no-overselling policy would, in practice, lead to upstream capacities on part of the ISP that are used at maybe 20 percent at best - at peak times.

Besides, an ISP doesn't have just one big fat line to "The Internet"; they are part of the internet, and they have a number of connections to a number of other networks, with vastly different capacities. (And usually at least on Tier-1 or Tier-2 upstream provider that connects them to all those networks they cannot or don't want to connect to directly.) If you wanted to take this no-overselling rule literally, you'd have to prepare for some extremely unlikely scenarios, like for example, every single one of your 20 million customers wanting to download something from some obscure location in Madagascar at full speed, at the same time.

They are not prepared for this sort of thing for the same reason that traditional telcos aren't prepared for something like every single person in Chicago calling someone in NYC at the same time: That sort of thing doesn't happen.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is hogging? It is just an idiot who forgot to limit his upload speed on the torrents!
Its really really easy:
1. Locate much upload speed, and download
2. Ask the your roomy for "reasonable" up and down speeds, so he can NOT choke the network
3. If he refuses, set the reasonable limits on to the ruter(1 user max 60-80% upload and max 70-80% download), which would make it impossible to block the bandwith.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Archangel Michael]

Over subscriptions are based on average loads and peak loads, and statistical analysis. BitTorrent Clients skew the stats. And mostly people are complaining about bittorrent or other "file sharing" applications. They are using bandwith that they themselves are not actually "using" (hence the "sharing" part.

Look, I'm not complaining about filesharing per se, just those who want to seed and saturate their connection for whatever ego boosting they think they deserve for doing it.

If they throttled the torrent to a "reasonable" level, they could benefit the torrent community, while not being a asshat to everyone else who has to share the same resources.

Yeah, you can be an asshat, but just realize asshats screw it up for everyone else. If that is your goal, then by all means, go ahead and be an asshat.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[noidentity]

Now, to be completely clear - I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong. I feel the proper response to issues like this on the larger network is guaranteed access to the full amount of bandwidth sold at all times.

You can get this today, but it'll cost you a lot.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Shakrai]

What you fail to not realize is that your setup doesn't "scale" to ISP backbone levels.

Where the fuck did I say that they needed to use "my setup"? I said that it stands to reason that a company with the resources of Comcast could manage to do something similar.

Thanks for completely ignoring my fucking point though.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Shakrai]

You mean the contract that says you can't run servers or engage in any activity that degrades the performance of the network for other customers?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[TheThiefMaster]

Most ADSL connections are effectively sold as 256 kbps guaranteed / 8 Mbps burst on download, 256 kbps upload. They just simplify the whole thing to "8Mb" in their adverts. The guaranteed number comes from the speed they cap you at when you exceed your bandwidth allowance, which is of course hidden in the fair use policy document. It's also not really guaranteed, it's just the lowest they will cap you at, other issues could still cause you to get less.

Higher speed "home" connections are the same. If you want real numbers, you need to speak to the business sales guys. For some reason, the people selling internet lines to businesses' IT depts tend to treat their customers as if they are technically competent and actually know what it is that they want more exactly than just "the internet".

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

We had this problem in our house, and it did come down to the router. Commodity routers have only a limited amount of memory for the NAT tables, and when you have more connections than the router can handle, it starts dropping entries, and thus connections, from the table. The only solution is to configure your P2P programs to lower the maximum number of connections and half-open connections, since you won't be able to find a cheap router without this limitation.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Archangel Michael]

I didn't ignore your point. Your point misses the point.

They (Comcast et al) are using the resources they have, and people are f'in whining about it.

They want their full 25MB connection without any QoS applied. Or are you just not reading the threads.

They want their BitTorrents running at 25MB (or whatever) without any throttling.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[MoralHazard]

comcast = cable = coax style networking in modern form, no?

that is, its like going back to pre-hub style ethernet, where every computer is listening for the next millisecond of no signal on the coax so that it can hopefully push its next packet on there. There is a reason why this was quickly replaced with switches when said tech became available at acceptable prices...

No, No NO! For the love of God, NO! You're completely wrong, and you have no idea what you're talking about. There is no such thing as "coax style networking", and there never has been. And the network behavior of cable broadband connectivity has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that some cable connections use coaxial wiring.

You are probably thinking of the old 10BASE2 Ethernet standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2), which used coaxial cable with BNC connections and T-connectors to a shared cable bus medium. Cable broadband uses the DOCSIS protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS) over coaxial cable with F connectors. The cable is the only really similar thing between the two technologies, everything else is pretty different.

10BASE2, like all Ethernet technologies, is a shared-medium, PURE collision-detection protocol. The hosts share the cable segment as a broadcast medium, so that a transmission by one host will be "heard" by all the rest. Each host makes its own decisions about when it wants to transmit, independent of the rest, and then transmits when it senses that the cable is "silent". If multiple hosts start transmitting at almost exactly the same time, they will all shortly detect the "collision". They all cease transmitting, and each picks a short random-length interval to wait before trying to transmit again, unless another host that picked a shorter timeout window starts transmitting, first. Statistically, it's unlikely that two hosts will pick the same random wait timeout, so most collisions resolve quickly unless the network is particularly congested.

DOCSIS uses a mixture of time-division, code-division, and collision-based contention behaviors (depending on the exact revision, too), but the impact of contention is really limited. From a bandwidth scheduling and congestion standpoint, it's nothing like 10BASE2, because the TDMA and CDMA elements of the protocol help each node sees a "fair share" of throughput. Plus, modern DOCSIS supports quality-of-service tags, which (if properly implemented) are pretty much a brick wall against congestion issues.

mostly to me it seems that the ISPs that cries highest are the ones that geared up when the net was mostly static webpages and ftp file transfers, able to handle the odd spike of traffic when someone clicked a link. But now the gear they have sitting around, and that they where banking on where not to be replaced for the next decade or so, baring hardware failure, is being swamped by continual "spikes". And the only way they can fix that at their end is by replacing the gear ahead of schedule, playing havoc with their earnings estimates. And rather then doing that, they break out the whip, trying to force the "cattle" back into the "pen".

I don't think you have any kind of real grasp on the technical implications of terms like "swamped" or "spike" in this context. You certainly understand the metaphor, and I bet you could analogize extensively comparing electrical, water, or highway systems to the Internet, but you don't seem to know too much about actual networking beyond setting up your home LAN.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[EricWright]

Congratulations, bad analogy man! The prime difference is that I can't go to the bank and withdraw as much money as I want. I can only withdraw as much as I have in my account. ISPs selling 'unlimited' service would be analogous to banks who let you take out as much money as you wanted, as long as your withdrawl rate doesn't exceed the rate for which you are paying.

The internet is basically a large shared pool of bandwidth where nobody really has a pre-defined stake. You pay for the ability to download bits at a certain rate, possibly capped at an upper threshold. The bank is a large shared pool of money where everyone is entitled to a specific amount, their account balance. In other words, there is a hard-cap upper limit.

The ISPs want to throttle how fast you withdraw your possibly unlimited, possibly limited but renewable portion of the shared pool. The bank doesn't care how fast you withdraw from the shared pool, but you aren't going over your limit until you replenish it.

See the fundamental difference now?

Rant aside, if I'm paying for a service advertised as unlimited, I damn well want no limits on using the service!

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Wiechman]

This is a horrible comparison for many reasons. However, running with your analogy, if you go to a sale that says up to 50% off. You see a sweater you want marked as "50% off" and pay for it before going to grab it. Then as you go to grab it, you are told that you can not have the entire sweater because too many people have bought it. Now I guess a fairer comparison would be a sale sign saying, up to an entire sweater for full price, and they hand you part of a sleeve. I think the article is talking about something even worse. It is saying that you go to grab your paid-for sweater from a warehouse full of sweaters, and no other buyers in sight, and you are told are told that you can no longer buy from them because you are purchasing and expecting to use too much of that sweater at the detriment of other sweater purchasers in a time of a sweater scarcity. It is disingenuous and possibly deceptive business practices.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[zmollusc]

Yup. Those 'income hogs' at the ISP are taking the full amount you agreed to pay every month, you should be able to take the full 5Mb you were sold.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[bws111]

A more accurate way to put it is this: the telcos want you to pay for a 1Mbps line, but let you run it at 70Mbps if resources are available.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Wiechman]

Where in the world did you get the concept of what was in mind when these systems were designed. Torrents, web browsers, ftp... they all just transfer data, and the application manipulates the data. For the sake of networking level transmissions, the only thing remotely different with torrents then a standard ftp transfer is using multiple sources, like say.... a web browsers does with linked images & misc. The data, uploading or downloading is not a novel concept with networking. Not are you given a max download cap, usually it is accompanied by a max up load speed cap. This argument goes beyond torrents. What about ISO downloading (like Linux). Content providing to other locations, VPN connections, streaming Video (Hulu/YouTube), etc.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[bennomatic]

I totally agree. In fact, I think that there should be either tiered or per-usage pricing. Flat-rate is what makes this so difficult. The tiered or metered usage charges shouldn't be ridiculous, but enough so that heavy users pay a little more of their share than the light users. Here's what I think would resolve the whole problem:

• Everyone pays a base-rate for the connection, say $10/mo for the physical line, i.e. cable or DSL.
• Offer tiered rates for a few different levels of sustained/burst rate combinations, as well as some premium packages, including different options for up/down-stream feed speeds.
• Offer a base amount of data transfer with each package, with reasonable, fully detailed overage charges, say $0.50/GB, rounded up to the next GB for any given month's overages.
• Offer tools to monitor usage so nobody gets surprised at the end of the month.
• Offer tools to shape your own connection to avoid overages while still getting the service you need.

I work out of my home office and I'm on the system all day, pushing gobs of data. My wife is at home, taking care of our kid while I work, and when he's napping, she'll often watch a show over streaming video. The service is good and fast, and I am fine paying $50 a month for it like I do. But someone who does email and facebook updates for an hour a day should be able to do so for $15/mo, and someone who is pushing 500GB of torrents back and forth each month should be paying more.

Argue the legality, morality and other merits and liabilities of file sharing--which is part of what this is all about--part of the reason people do it is that it's effectively free. If downloading a 5 GB HD movie cost them an extra $2.00, then they may be more likely to go down to the local BlockBuster and just rent the darn thing.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[temojen]

Shaw cable, in BC, Canada now sells "High speed" with"Powerboost" which means your connections are throttled after the first few seconds of connecting. It seems a good way to do it; people just surfing have a good experience, but torrenters still have fairly high (but not as high) speed access. Sadly, they market it as medium speed with boosting, not throttled high speed which it is.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

reasonable... bs.

You sell me something you can in NO WAY actually deliver... yeah. fuck you buddy.

If you can't tell your customers up front all these little bits of your business practices because they WONT do business with you if they know about it...

It's a scam.. You're a crook. We should toss your ass in jail.

Just because you've been getting away with it. Doesn't make you any less of a scumbag.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Wiechman]

Whats is interesting is this article is saying... show me the statistical proof that it actually is affecting the performance of the network for other customers (not a scenario of my buddy and I share a router in our apartment & he slows my connection). Additionally, if you are sold a service at up to 5 mbps, you shouldn't be able to affect the performance of the network for other customers.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see how taking advantage of the service to which you subscribed is "unreasonable."

Don't offer all you can eat and then complain about people eating too much. It's not their fault you were too shortsighted to stock enough food.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Zen-Mind]

I like the idea of allowing people to customize their package to their needs and I think it might be the key to this whole telecom mess. One one side telcos might perceive some people as abusing their system and on the other side customers feel telcos are punishing or at least threatening them without reason...

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Zen-Mind]

Not a bad solution. I'm sure if telcos were to put a bit more effort together instead of just competing, they could probably achieve much better overall customer satisfaction by sharing this kind of idea.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a crap fix. The correct fix is to prioritise traffic so that BT traffic is left until last. That way he'll still get maximum speed downloads when nobody is using the internet, when they are, they won't notice the torrents. This has been possible with consumer level hardware for at least 10 years so I don't know why the ISPs can't manage to do it without limiting certain user's bandwidth regardless of the current network utilization or even disconnecting people entirely. Wait, I do know - it's because they're rip-off artists.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Coren22]

Maybe I'm not an asshat to your definition then. You don't need to upload anything to use Bittorrent and Netflix, and game, and all the other stuff we all do. I just happen to expect to be able to use my connection. The only upload I do is when I connect to my home server from other locations, but that is not even statistically significant.

I do however saturate my download link at times, and I expect to be able to do that as I have paid for a connection that was advertised as unlimited at a specific rate.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[ShakaUVM]

>>I have personally witnessed hogging of bandwidth and, I'd wager, so have you

Right. A neighbor torrenting 24/7 will impact your cable modem performance. And if not one, two.

A simple test is to measure the speed of your local connection (roadrunner used to have an FTP site to test in-network cable modem speed) and watch as it fluctuates dramatically during the day.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm advocating a system where everyone is a ground hog, for a day.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[bws111]

No, you are wrong. In both the case of the ISP and the example I gave, you knew ahead of time that the phrase 'up to' was used. If you are unclear what that means, ask the ISP before you sign up for service. In the twisted example you gave, you had every reason to believe it was a whole sweater, and were not informed otherwise until AFTER you made your purchase. Huge difference.

As far as capping goes: you probably either have a pay-as-you-go plan, or a contract. If you have a pay-as-you-go plan, you are both free to walk away from the deal at any time, and the terms of the deal can change at any time. The most they have to do is notify you before your next bill of any changes. Nothing deceptive there. If you have a contract, it should state in there what service you get. If there is no specific mention of data volume, you are out of luck - you should have had it put into the contract (if it was important to you). Again nothing deceptive. If it does say you get unlimited data volume, and they are now capping you, sue them for breach of contract. I doubt there are many cases of the latter.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[noname101]

It also says that you cannot use it to support an enterprise system, have you ever worked from home?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[eth1]

How is "if you want to use our network, your network client must be up to X standard" (QoS, or whatever) any different from "if you want to drive on the public roadway, your car must be up to X standard" (working brake lights, etc.)?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[noname101]

Hmmm.. Not sure if that is sarcasm or not but I have to say it made me laugh.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Zantetsuken]

even though the "Tow Rating" says it should... Should FORD be sued because they advertised it wrong?

I think you just answered your own question. Ford put that "Tow Rating" sticker declaring tow capacity, his boat falls in the advertised capable capacity whether it's a generic sticker they put on for the large and small engines for the F150, or if the sticker is specific to that engine class. So at that point, either way the truck should be good for it, meaning that yes, Ford did falsely advertise to him, and therefor yes, they should get sued.

Somebody gave an example of an ISP having a maximum of 100Gbps on their end, and selling it to customers by evenly dividing it up. Now if what they allocate per customer is 10Mbps, that's what is advertised and the line is capped at that speed, and even if it has like a 100GiB per month total limit - ok enough. Depending on pricing that may or may not be a crappy deal for you, but at that point, that's your decision as a customer.

The problem is though, is they aren't doing things that way. What happens is the ISP advertises 20 to 30Mbps, they give you that speed alright, but because they oversold, they cap you at 50GiB per month, meaning either you have to throttle yourself to 10Mbps or only download for the first week - AND they still charge you at that $100 USD a month for a 30Mbps connection, even though as I said, you are forced to throttle yourself. THAT is where this entire problem comes from.

It's fine enough if they lower the speed, but it better be what's advertised and priced accordingly. Right now I pay $50USD a month for a 6Mbps cable line (you bastards are lucky if you're getting 20 or 30Mbps for the same price). If they lowered it to 2Mbps, ok that would really suck, but if it's priced accordingly at like $15 a month or so, that wouldn't be too bad. It's just that most of the ISP's seem to be wanting to force you to use that lower speed (whatever it is) while still charging you $50 a month...

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

Have to repeat this, I tend to only use routers I can load the tomato firmware on, simply because I really like how simple the interface is for QOS setup... to me email, newsgroups, irc and chat in general come first, then web stuff, then streaming video sites, then far below this, anything else (including torrents), with my QoS policies defined, I find torrents scale out well in lower use, and my general usage ins't interrupted. most mail, chat and even web usage is in short bursts, which really doesn't bring anything else down, but without the QoS, a few hundred torrent connections really slow down a few web/email connections (given that connections tend to be treated equal by default.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't a lie, it is accepted business practices. You don't want what you're really asking for. You want 10mb for $24.95, not the dedicated 10mb for $1500.

We are "asking for" what is being advertised. Check that, we are being prompted to ask for the advertised product because that's what advertising is. Now, what is being advertised does not match up to what is being sold or even offered. It seems to me that over-selling is advertising a dedicated 10mb line ($1500 by your price schedule) for only $24.95. That is a lie.

If you REALLY wanted dedicated 10mb connection, you'd ask for it, with QoS and SLA agreements, in short, you're asking for BUSINESS CLASS SERVICE not the Consumer Class versions.

Yes, most service providers offer this service, it is just that most people really wants to pay for it.

The truth is, we DON'T want or need a dedicated line. The problem is that bandwidth is not the only advertised spec. We're also being sold unlimited data transfer, and although most of us are smart enough to see that the product being offered is NOT the same as the advertised product, it really only shows up on the transfer speed or bandwidth. Now, there is obviously a functional limit of how much data you can pull down given a certain transfer speed, but well before we hit that point we're being told that we're hogging bandwidth. We were offered the functional limit with respect to bandwidth (which is below that which was initially advertised) and we're being busted for using even that? If that's not fraud, I don't know what is.

Warning, Car Analogy Ahead:

You're like the guy who buys a F150 truck with the smallest engine, and then complains that they can't tow their big-ass boat up the hill very well, even though the "Tow Rating" says it should.

"Tow Rating" is a function of the truck hitch's tensile strength and the engine's horsepower, among other factors. The rating in the owner's manual factors the engine into it. Now, hitches that fit many makes of cars can have a maximum rating, but even that is contingent on the car.

And you burn up your engine / transmission early because you do it every weekend. Should FORD be sued because they advertised it wrong? Or are you an just an idiot using consumer toys for commercial duty?

Nevermind that your vehicle's tow rating wouldn't put you in that situation and the confusion is in a third-party hitch's individual rating, the Internet does not work that way. Your network connection will happily whiz along as quickly as your bandwidth and network congestion will allow, and you as the user will never see any permanent ill effect, unlike the car analogy. The only indication that something is wrong is that the ISP starts complaining that we're hogging bandwidth and threatens to boot us. We're just using it the way you told us we could use it. If you really can't handle every user doing that, then don't tell us we can do that and even let us do it until you change your mind and ban us. If you were upfront about the limits and how you intend to enforce them then these problems wouldn't crop up.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe he's explaining the difference between a bandwidth hog and an "improper network configuration". It's a kind of a catch-all phrase that causes your internet to suck. In this case, it's specifically cause Vista sucks. But it is not because someone was hogging the bandwidth, indeed there was plenty of bandwidth. The internet is not really a nebulous cloud. It is not a truck. It's actually more like a chain (or a web of chains), and the weakest link will "make it slow".

So no, ISPs should not mandate your OS config, you should get a router that can handle 3 people using torrents.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

Bittorrent doesn't care if it winds up in the queue -- VOIP does

What will you do when they tunnel Bittorrent through VOIP. I mean we've already witnessed DNS tunneling. This is the wrong approach.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right, if we manage the amount of risk that these dastardly hogs pose by bundling them with the masses of Real Americans we can advertise our network as having a AAA rating!

And we can have "down-time service swaps" (tm) with all the other ISP to manage our accounts in case things go south, just in case. That way we'll all be so inter-dependent that no one will ever have to worry about going out of business due to a lack of bandwidth.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

That comparison is not relevant. When I go into the store, individual items will be marked with the sales percent, but the ISP does not specify when or on what "download items" my connection is going to be throttled. The "50% Off" sale store certainly wouldn't toss me out on my ear for attempting to only buy 50% off items and then keep my money on top of that.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Anonymous Coward]

> Are you advocating a system where the ISP has mandate power over the OS configuration?

Of course he's not! He's telling users to fix their own damned configurations instead of complaining.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Surt]

Do the math. If Comcast has 5, 40 Gigabit fibers to your node, and 50K subscribers on that node, what's the maximum bandwidth they can advertise in your formulation? What's the realistic amount a user will get?

Now maybe you could make the argument that they should be forced to advertise both the minimum and the maximum speed, but in terms of real usage, it really is the maximum that matters to the customer.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[sjames]

That wasn't hogging the network's bandwidth, that was hogging your brother's LAN and the uplink capacity. That is, the offense was against your brother and the other roommate, not against the ISP.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[shaitand]

With the possible exception of a superior network tech working on a cable network I'd venture that most professional network techs lack intimate knowledge of DOCSIS.

Even having a rudimentary understanding of collisions puts him ahead of many low end network integrators.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Chirs]

"I have paid for a connection that was advertised as unlimited at a specific rate."

Are you sure? Mine was advertised as unlimited usage (ie, not metered) at speeds _up to_ a specific rate. There is no guarantee that the specified rate would ever necessarily be reached, much less be sustained for any significant amount of time.

Thus, they would be quite within their rights to give me burst speeds at the specified rate, but limit my long-term average to some reasonable level.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[sjames]

The Internet is and was always intended to be peer to peer from day one. That's not exactly a secret. They offered the Internet. Big surprise people expect to have peer to peer capability.

Torrents are just one application that fits within the meaning of peer to peer. It isn't the users fault the ISP failed to design their network to handle the service that they sell.

If the ISPs cared and/or weren't packed with bumbling incompetents, they would have implemented fair queueing years ago and it would be impossible for any user or group of users to degrade network performance short of climbing the pole and modifying the cable hardware.

Calling cutomers bandwidth hogs is nothing short of the ISPs exclaiming "WOAH!! You didn't think we were actually going to let you do the things we said you could in the commercials did you?".

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[sjames]

It's OK to oversell within reason, but it's not OK to complain when you can't oversell as much as you want to or even as much as you used to be able to.

If you do oversell though, accepting that sometimes the gamble (and it is a gamble) doesn't pay off and appropriately compensating those you fail to serve fully as a result is all on you.

Airlines commonly oversell and count on a few no-shows. When an airline oversells a flight and everyone shows up, they have to bump a few. Do they call those few "seat hogs" and claim that they're somehow trying to cheat the airlines or do they start offering deals to people who will volunteer to take a another flight?

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[sjames]

The analogy sorta fails, but so does the argument behind it. Weekend boating isn't commercial service. Towing the load every single day for 8 or more hours a day is commercial load. In your analogy, if the engine couldn't handle it they should have published a lower tow rating or indicated a duty percentage.

The accurate analogy is that Ford advertises a given hauling capacity and tow rating, then installs an engine that is way too small for that (gambling that most users will never notice). They give you no way of knowing that or how close to the REAL rating you are. To make the analogy complete, they'd have to soundproof the cab so you can't even tell if you're straining the engine. They don't install any sort of governor because then you'd notice that the "big powerful truck" they sold you is actually a wimpy sedan in truck's clothing. Your first indication of trouble is when they say "no truck for you!" and suggest you buy a bicycle.

Supposedly the difference between a business and a residential account is the SLA and committed rate. Business outages are supposed to get an immediate response and network performance below the committed rate is fixed, residential may have to wait a day or two and don't get a committed rate.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[shaitand]

"You don't want what you're really asking for. You want 10mb for $24.95, not the dedicated 10mb for $1500."

No I want dedicated 10mb for $24.95. If bandwidth were not oversold 10mb might not be $24.95 but it sure as hell wouldn't be $1500.

It's supply and demand, because consumers are being lied to and bandwidth is being oversold it creates an artificial reduction in the demand for real pipes. This means that anyone who wants a real pipe is going to pay dramatically more for it. I promise you, if there were 100,000,000 consumers demanding dedicated 10mb service the price for 10mb service would drop pretty damn fast.

For god sake, T1 is outdated, expensive, and slow but the Telco's are still selling them for $700+. There is no technical explanation for this at all, the telcos charge these ridiculous prices to deliver obsolete technology to their business users simply because they can get away with it.

There is no technical reason whatsoever in a world of synchronous pipes for consumers to lack synchronous full duplex pipes, self hosting, and full utilization of the bandwidth they are buying. Consumers won't see a chance in price, but they might see a short term reduction in speed.

It's like buying the world's production of diamonds and storing them in a warehouse and releasing them slowly to artificially drive up prices.

Internet has become an essential public communication medium. We can't afford to let large telco's restrict and constrain high speed links and infrastructure.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[shaitand]

"They want their full 25MB connection without any QoS applied. Or are you just not reading the threads.

They want their BitTorrents running at 25MB (or whatever) without any throttling."

No they want a high speed link without any QoS or throttling. They want to do away with the outdated model of selling them slow uplinks and fast downlinks. They know this only results in vastly overinflated prices for those have no choice but to purchase links like this.

They want the ISP's to be forced to take the billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars they pocketed and invest that money into enhanced infrastructure that can provide a reasonable level of bandwidth to consumers to be used however the consumer damn well pleases.

If 25mb can't be done (our European brothers would beg to differ) then 6mb, 3mb, and I can certainly guarantee you neither the cabilities of the ISP's nor the market demand will result in the $700+/month T1 speed links we have now (t1 itself is more or less obsolete for internet links and will go the way of the dinosaur pretty much instantly if that happens).

The people who want to use peer to peer, servers, and steam videos aren't the problem. The problem is that ISP's have been artificially restricting the ability to serve content to those with financial incentives and then gauging them.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[shaitand]

"Look, I'm not complaining about filesharing per se, just those who want to seed and saturate their connection for whatever ego boosting they think they deserve for doing it."

If the ISP's stopped artificially restricting upstream bandwidth reserving it for those trying to make money and gauging them for it then this wouldn't be a problem in the first place. The big pipes are synchronous, there is just as much upstream as downstream to go around. The ISP's create artificial scarcity.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[shaitand]

"You don't need to upload anything to use Bittorrent"

If you don't upload anything when you use bittorrent then you are certainly an asshat by my definition.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[masmullin]

blockbuster costs like $6 a pop... and you have to return it too! plus you have to actually walk to the fucking place and talk to some pierced weirdo!

fuck that!

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[dupeisdead]

100% completely wrong. Please dont spread mistruth like this on slashdot, how did you get modded up?! That disturbs me.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[FictionPimp]

Or instead of kicking him out, you could...well... change the limit to a reasonable value so you did get the desired results. I'd rather have a 10mbps connection I can use all day long then a 20 meg connection I get banned for using for more than an hour.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Narcogen]

Now, to be completely clear - I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong. I feel the proper response to issues like this on the larger network is guaranteed access to the full amount of bandwidth sold at all times. On the local scale, these men should have brought in another source of internet. On the larger scale, the telco should do the same.

Denying that the issue can happen, however, is stupid to the point of sabotage.

The entire existence of the ISP sector is enabled by overselling. A typical oversold ratio is 10:1. Disallow providers from overselling and you'd be paying quite a bit more, even if you were to drive down margins, either with regulated pricing or by encouraging more competition.

You can verify this yourself by comparing the commercial rates for connectivity you get that come with an SLA that guarantees a certain data rate, compared to the rates for consumer Internet connectivity, which are nearly always nothing higher than "best effort" for everything.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Eil]

Over selling isn't wrong, it is necessary for services like this.

You and the other poster have different definitions of "overselling." Everybody knows full well that an ISPs upstream bandwidth is much smaller than their aggregate downstream bandwidth. That's not what broadband consumers complain about. What they complain about is the oversell ratio being too small. Once the threshold is crossed and a pipe connecting a neighborhood to the datacenter gets saturated, latency skyrockets and customers connections perform worse than dialup. That's what oversold means. It's a condition to be remedied by investing in infrastructure, not by wagging your finger at your customers for being naughty bittorrent users.

Bittorrent is not normal traffic pattern.

Too many broadband companies (mostly cable and telcos) fail to realize that Internet usage never going to plateau or decrease. I'm sorry, but the days of 95% of your customers using their $60/month high-speed broadband for email, IM, and the occasional trip to cnn.com are over. There are plenty of ways to abuse a network connection, but utilizing it at it's stated capacity isn't one of them. If an ISP can't provide the service, then they shouldn't. Or they should at least be up-front and honest about how poorly their network was designed.

I'm not against filesharing, I'm against idiots who cause congestion because they don't know how to configure Bittorrent client to be "reasonable".

I currently work at a web hosting company and have worked at ISPs before and I still don't understand this mentality. The ISP business is the only one that I know of where companies threaten their customers for demanding more product than the company can currently deliver. Every other business in the world sees such a situation as an opportunity to sell more product and out-perform their competitors. Oh, right, most ISPs don't have competitors.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Archangel Michael]

They want the ISP's to be forced to take the billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars they pocketed and invest that money into enhanced infrastructure that can provide a reasonable level of bandwidth to consumers to be used however the consumer damn well pleases.

The Telco's are doing what the government has been doing, namely taking billions(Trillions) of dollars and not actually doing anything useful with it.

You want to complain, complain to the Politicians who dreamed this shit up. Cash for clunkers is a good example was a joke, costing $24,000 per clunker, one could buy a nice new car for that.

And now, they are trying to be just as efficient with "healthcare". Good luck with that.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[MoralHazard]

No, it doesn't. He had no idea what the term "DOCSIS" meant. He believed that cable modems and 10BASE2 Ethernet operated on the same principles because they both used coax cable.

The cable type is 100% irrelevent to the networking protocol. Hell, you can operate a collision-based protocol that's basically identical to 10BASE2 via radio broadcasts, it's just less energy efficient.

He wasn't just wrong--he blew right past "wrong" and left it in the dust, behind him. As for him talking about collisions, well... Even a stopped clock is right, twice a day.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[hitmark]

heh, i was wrong on the protocol level, but the physical layer is still shared between all users on the same cable.

ok, so i didnt bother to look up the details on docsis, and i see now that they share quite a bit of higher levels with mobile phone networks, and probably other wireless connectivity.

thing is that dsl, fiber and similar behaves, for the customer at least, as a scaled up star network, as the connection between customer and first hop of the isp network is dedicated to the individual customer (i am probably generalizing heavily here, but hang with me).

cable and wireless on the other hand, shares the transmission medium (or whatever its called) between multiple users, and such is much more sensitive to one user pushing the limits of the bandwidth.

while the protocols have become much better since the days of coax ethernet, this basic behavior have not changed, and probably never will, unless some new physics comes along...

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[Coren22]

I do upload when I bittorrent, but that is a very rare thing. I also have a pretty good upspeed at 5 Mbit, so I can do that, but not everyone can.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[shaitand]

"I also have a pretty good upspeed at 5 Mbit, so I can do that, but not everyone can."

Then they have no business using bittorrent.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - I've seen it

[MoralHazard]

heh, i was wrong on the protocol level, but the physical layer is still shared between all users on the same cable.

First, your statement is a tautology: Every Layer2 networking protocol that supports IP provides a "shared medium", by definition.

That's like patting yourself on the back for recognizing that water is wet. Good job, there, kid.

Second, you are misconstruing the significance of the word "SHARED", which does not mean the same thing as "BROADCAST". A pure time-domain multiple-access (TDMA) protocol provides a shared medium by giving each transmitter a fixed time window. There can be no contention, and my usage will never negatively impact your performance. Contrast that with a pure collision-sensing (CSMA) protocol, where there is a lot of contention, and your performance gets worse I increase my usage.

All unswitched Ethernet variants, including 10BASE2, are pure CSMA protocols. DOCSIS is a mixture of mostly TDMA and code-division (CDMA), with a *slight* amount of CSMA behavior.

In other words: CABLE IS NOT A BROADCAST MEDIUM. If you and I are both CATV customers in the same neighborhood, sharing a DOCSIS medium, MY USAGE DOES NOT DEGRADE YOUR PERFORMANCE on the medium.

thing is that dsl, fiber and similar behaves, for the customer at least, as a scaled up star network, as the connection between customer and first hop of the isp network is dedicated to the individual customer (i am probably generalizing heavily here, but hang with me).

cable and wireless on the other hand, shares the transmission medium (or whatever its called) between multiple users, and such is much more sensitive to one user pushing the limits of the bandwidth.

Utter nonsense.

It's possible that I could hog the upload bandwidth, on the link from our neighborhood to the Internet, *if* that uplink capacity is smaller than my DOCSIS channel capacity. In that scenario, your performance would suffer if I maxed out my download rate. But this is totally unrelated to Layer2 contention, be it Ethernet or DOCSIS. I could hog the uplink and slow you down even if our local medium was a contention-less protocol (say, pure TDMA, or frequency-division).

In other words, the problem would be that your Cable provider cheaped out or oversold your neighborhood (depending on your point of view), and they provisioned an uplink that is too small.

But, (AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART), the same kind of congestion can (and does) happen regardless of what kind of Internet connection you have, if your ISP fails to provision enough uplink capacity. So using a Cable modem versus using DSL is irrelevant. Your local medium could be DSL, T-1, FiOS, Metro Ethernet, WiMax, WiFi, EVDO, HAM radio, or frigging carrier pigeons: If your ISP oversold the shared uplink, there's going to be congestion.

while the protocols have become much better since the days of coax ethernet, this basic behavior have not changed, and probably never will, unless some new physics comes along...

That's... I don't even know what to say to that.

Anyway, you've dug yourself into quite the hole, here. Maybe you should think about stopping with the digging?

Bandwidth != Volume

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the argument that the ISPs use is that they always talk about volume, but they call it bandwidth. Network capacity isn't cumulative. Bandwidth that you don't use now isn't saved and therefore cannot be used later. An important consequence of that observation is that total amount of bits transfered is not a useful metric for the impact that a particular user has on the network, but somehow all residential ISPs have chosen precisely that misleading metric to determine who is a "bandwidth hog" and who isn't.

You can't eliminate heavy users.

[cupantae]

The thing is, because of the distribution of people using broadband (bandwidth usage plotted as an ogive comes out as a sharp exponential), there will always be a situation of 5% of the population downloading 95% of the material, no matter who you disconnect.

Re:You can't eliminate heavy users.

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, because of the distribution of people using broadband (bandwidth usage plotted as an ogive comes out as a sharp exponential), there will always be a situation of 5% of the population downloading 95% of the material, no matter who you disconnect.

Ummm, no.

There will ALWAYS be a top 5% of users (and a bottom 5%), no matter what you do.

But to state that the top 5% are always downloading 95% of the material is flat-out ridiculous.

Re:You can't eliminate heavy users.

[jschen]

If those numbers are correct (5% taking up 95% of bandwidth), then kicking out the top few percent of users (of the entire population, not necessarily of the current customer base) seems exceptionally good for one's bottom line. After that, there's no point removing the new "heavy users" since you've already removed most of your traffic, and your existing infrastructure can more than handle the remaining traffic, so you're better off getting the revenue.

If there's no such thing as a bandwidth hog...

[teneighty]

If there's no such thing as a bandwidth hog, then why are is anyone worried about "hunting" them?

Something tells me PETA is behind this...

PS: Yes we'd all like to be able to download 20 TB of movies a month for free. We'd all also like free gasoline so we can drive Humveees with 30 inch chrome wheels.

Re:If there's no such thing as a bandwidth hog...

[betterunixthanunix]

"We'd all also like free gasoline so we can drive Humveees with 30 inch chrome wheels."

Speak for yourself.

Re:If there's no such thing as a bandwidth hog...

[Byzantine]

Amen. *I* want 32" platinum wheels.

Re:If there's no such thing as a bandwidth hog...

[Anonymous Coward]

All this talk about hunting the mythical bandwidth hog...I was under the impression that everyone knew that it was Chip from Sales that was the bandwidth hog. Are you telling me that he isn't? Who is, then? I am so lost...

Re:If there's no such thing as a bandwidth hog...

[Anonymous Coward]

If anyone wanted to buy humvees, there'd be one on the market. All I can see are a few toys made in china on a light truck chassis that sort-of resemble HMMWVs in a cheap chinese knock-off kind of way. They don't even run on the same fuel!

Re:If there's no such thing as a bandwidth hog...

[HTH NE1]

If there's no such thing as a bandwidth hog, then why are is anyone worried about "hunting" them?

A bandwidth hog is simply someone who is an outlying statistical anomaly in bandwidth usage, regardless of whether the system handled that anomaly without incident. And they seek these anomalies out by whatever means they can think of, just so that they can ID an e-witch so they can burn her Internet access.

The last site that cut me off was for consuming bandwidth at a rate of 25% of a DVD for a week. And it was a taxpayer-funded city government services website, without notice or justification other than being a bandwidth consumption statistical outlier. And they cut off not just me but everyone at my place of employment!

Re:Interesting headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe it's even a variation of the article that HE FUCKING LINKED TO! ("Is the 'Bandwidth Hog' a Myth?")

Huh? Who clicks on the links in the summary?

Nice theory...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Where are the facts again? Oh, right, he tells us!

The fact is that what most telcos call hogs are simply people who overall and on average download more than others. Blaming them for network congestion is actually an admission that telcos are uncomfortable with the 'all you can eat' broadband schemes that they themselves introduced on the market to get people to subscribe. In other words, the marketing push to get people to subscribe to broadband worked, but now the telcos see a missed opportunity at price discrimination...

It's nice of him to declare that without evidence. Now I know it to be true.

I'm not saying he's wrong... quite possibly he's right, but seriously - how does someone's blog entry that doesn't provide one single data point to back up the claim make it to the front page?

Re:Nice theory...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no evidence that santa clause do not exist either. Everyone grown-up person will agree it a myth tho.

Re:Nice theory...

[eldavojohn]

I'm not saying he's wrong... quite possibly he's right, but seriously - how does someone's blog entry that doesn't provide one single data point to back up the claim make it to the front page?

The important thing that he's doing is trying to shift the burden of proof back onto the ISPs and telcos. They just declared that some people are bandwidth hogs and terminated their connection. They didn't give the public any proof that they were ruining the internet experience for anyone else ... nor did anyone come forward after the purge and say, "Gee, my internet sure is fast now that the bandwidth hogs are disconnected!"

So he calls for proof since he hasn't seen any. He has to say that there are no bandwidth hogs in order to get a response from the telcos. Saying someone might be wrong is not the same impact as calling someone a liar. Yes, he's basing this on an assumption but it's just the same that everyone assumed there were individuals out there ruining the experience. All of us just let the telcos terminate the service of whoever they wanted to and then we moved on with our lives.

I welcome his opposing viewpoint and challenge to "because we said so." They can release anonymous usage data without harming anyone so why not open it up to a request?

Re:Nice theory...

[Anonymous Coward]

how does someone's blog entry that doesn't provide one single data point to back up the claim make it to the front page?

See this story from earlier today

Re:Nice theory...

[LoneWlf]

Wizards first Rule?

Re:Nice theory...

[ClosedSource]

If you don't consider the laws of physics evidence.

Re:Nice theory...

[Bat Country]

Actually, that's logic. You don't need evidence for simple symbol manipulation.

What he states in that quote there is telcos call people hogs when they maximize their utilization of the connection they were sold. The telcos blame them for causing network congestion, ergo they believe that they cannot provide what they sold to their customers.

The telco T claims they can provide bandwidth B to the customer C. The average customer Q never uses what they've been sold, while the alleged hog H does, all the time at full capacity. However, H and Q are both subsets of C, the people guaranteed the bandwidth B. If T claims they cannot provide B to H because it affects Q's performance, this admits that T cannot provide B to all of C.

There's no part of that which requires sourcing, except perhaps the implicit understanding that it's not possible for a DSL customer to use more than the bandwidth that they were sold.

Re:Nice theory...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not saying he's wrong... quite possibly he's right, but seriously - how does someone's blog entry that doesn't provide one single data point to back up the claim make it to the front page?

Have you been gone a while? How would it *not* make the front page? Sadly Slashdot has jumped the shark and put page views above all else.

Re:Nice theory...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Valid point - if the data points don't exist, he can't very well reference them. I think what bugged me was more the tone of "I present this as fact though it is speculation" that led up to his request.

There's also the inevitable conclusion that will be drawn when no company provides the information. Rightly or wrongly, the lack of information will be used as "proof" that there's something to hide.

Re:Nice theory...

[Changa_MC]

Valid point - if the data points don't exist, he can't very well reference them.

I prefer to say that since there are no data points to be referenced we have no reason to assume they exist.

ISPs may complain about hogs all they want but until they release some data, we should assume such hogs were within their contracted rights.

I can't get out of my AT&T contract by saying they failed to meet our contracted terms, I have to offer proof. All I ask is that they be held to the same standard.

Sessions

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, TCP will do this. But that's per stream. What if I have 100 streams open? Then I get 100x the bandwidth of someone with one stream.

Small ISP

[Bios_Hakr]

Lately I've had to deal with this problem. Our solution was rather simple. We use NTOP on an Ubuntu box at the internal switch. We replicate all the traffic coming into that switch to a port that the NTOP box listens on.

It may not be a perfect solution, but it can easily let us know who the top talkers are and give us a historical look at what they are doing.

From that report, we look for anyone uploading more than they download. We also look for people who upload/download a consistent amount every hour. If you see someone doing 80gb in traffic each day with 60gb uploaded, you probably have a file sharer. When you see the 24-hour reports for the user and see 2~3gb every hour on upload, you *know* you have a file sharer.

After that, it's as simple as going to the DNS server and locking their MAC address to an IP. Then, we drop all that traffic (access list extended is wonderful) to another Ubuntu box. That box has a web page explaining what we saw, why the user is banned, and the steps they need to take to get back online.

Most users are very apologetic. We help them to set up upload/download limits on their bittorrent client and then we put them back online.

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Or stop overselling your bandwidth and then you wouldn't have to worry about how much bandwidth your users use.

Re:Small ISP

[betterunixthanunix]

Why not just throttle them? Or limit the maximum bandwidth provided to a level that is less likely to allow one user to disrupt service for everyone else?

Re:Small ISP

[imunfair]

Is there really a problem with allowing your users to actually use their connection? By my rough calculations 2-3gb/hr is only 60-90kb/s upload. I really don't understand why you can't handle that unless you're massively overselling. I would be a lot more sympathetic if we were talking about users maxing out fiber connections or something higher speed.

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

If you advertise your service as "unlimited", then doing this means you need to be cockslapped to death. Not only are you treating your users like shit, but you're encouraging them to be leecher scum.

Re:Small ISP

[lobosrul]

How does your TOS read I wonder. Until recently I shared a 12mb/768kb DSL line with 3 room-mates from QWEST. I'm sure we nearly maxed the thing out most days during peak hours. *Most* of that traffic was actually legit. I pay thru the nose for it (~$70/month), but *gasp* somehow QWEST can afford to have a few customers actually use all of the service they pay for. I never received any sort of warning in over a year. How about ISP's actually giving their customers what they advertise. If you want to limit your customers, offer a plan for limited monthly bandwidth.

Re:Small ISP

[betterunixthanunix]

"unless you're massively overselling."

Hammer, meet the head of the nail.

Re:Small ISP

[Monkeedude1212]

This upsets the customer. I know it sounds completely back-asswards, but most people would rather be blocked for an hour, told why they are blocked, and told to change, and then resume their normal speeds, as opposed to NOT getting a warning, having speeds decrease what they are paying for, and are left alone and angry to the point where they will go somewhere else.

Re:Small ISP

[D Ninja]

Maybe they aren't overselling their bandwidth. Maybe they are selling their bandwidth fine and someone is going past what the ISP said they would offer to them and, as such, they limit the user.

Re:Small ISP

[DrOct]

My thoughts exactly.

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just throttle them? Or limit the maximum bandwidth provided to a level that is less likely to allow one user to disrupt service for everyone else?

By doing that, they are being passive and are affecting the customer without direct communication with them about what is going on.

I like the fact that they make the customer aware of the issue and needs and help them to adjust their activities so everyone can be happy with the situation.

I feel it is important to be in contact with the customer and relay the information instead of simply throttling.

Re:Small ISP

[mikael_j]

So, you treat the internet like cable TV? Anyone who uses their service for anything other than mindlessly receiving stuff is evil? How about you just stop overselling?

As stated in another post, I'm in Sweden and I don't know of any ISPs around here who do throttling of caps on wired connections (although a few did back in the late 90s and early 00s) so my POV is a bit different from the US "caps are necessary because all the (US) ISPs say so".

/Mikael

Re:Small ISP

[mikael_j]

"...or caps on wired...", should've checked the preview a bit more closely.

Re:Small ISP

[broken_chaos]

It's more like 600-800 KiB/s (assuming the grandparent was just lazy in not capitalising any part of the 'gb's they used). 2-3 GiB per hour is about 700 KiB/s. 2-3 Gib is only about 80-100 KiB/s.

Handy listing of prefixes (si followed by binary for each):
k: 1000 (yes, the 'k' prefix is supposed to be lowercase)
Ki: 1024 (yes, they decided to capitalise this 'K')
M: 1000000
Mi: 1048576 (1024 * 1024; 2^20)
G: 1000000000
Gi: 1073741824 (1024 * 1024 * 1024; 2^30)

Handy listing of units:
b: bit (a single zero or one)
B: byte (an octet of bits; eight bits)

Combination examples:
gb: meaningless (g is not a prefix)
Gb: gigabit (1000000000 bits)
Gib: gibibit (1073741824 bits)
kb: kilobit (1000 bits)
kB: kilobyte (1000 bytes; 8000 bits)
KiB: kibibyte (1024 bytes; 8192 bits)

Re:Small ISP

[ZaphDingbat]

Then wouldn't it be handy for the ISP to state the normal bandwidth vs. the burst rate? If they told me that up front, rather than just the full bandwidth of the pipe, I wouldn't have a problem.

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody seriously uses power-of-2 units for bandwidth measurements.

Re:Small ISP

[funkboy]

How much does your bandwidth cost for it to be worth your time to do all this?

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

You're off by a factor of 10... 2-3gbph is around 600-900kbps.

Re:Small ISP

[Monkeedude1212]

If they tell you the real rates, the other lying companies would look alot better than, wouldn't they.

Since everyone is lying, no one is going to stop lying.

Re:Small ISP

[imunfair]

That may be the proper usage, but in 'common' usage it's usually GB = gigabytes, gb = gigabits If we are actually talking about gigabytes then I retract my previous statement, but since I've seen a lot of residential cable and DSL with 100KB/s or less upload speed I wouldn't be surprised if he meant gigabits.

Re:Small ISP

[Elshar]

Well, another small ISP here. Couple of things. First off, customers are NOT paying for what's called a CIR. So, of course the service is "oversold". Every service provider industry is "oversold". Landlines, Cell Phones, Car Mechanics, TV Repairmen, Satellite TV, even Tech Support. You think there's one guy in India sitting there waiting for you to call about your Dell? No, of course not. By definition, service providers HAVE to oversell to survive.

Secondly, it's really not about just one person doing something like this as a small ISP. Yes, one person doing such can have a seriously negative impact on the rest of the users, but it's when you get multiple people doing it that really compounds the problem. One torrent user generally isn't too much of a problem. Get two or three with high connection limits, and up/down set to unlimited, and you have a serious problem on your hands.

Finally, equipment is expensive, commercial connections are expensive. If you don't believe me, go price out some comparable commercial internet connections from Cogent, Level3, any of the baby bells (Verizon, Qwest, AT&T/Cingular, etc), and you'll see that you'll easily be paying 10x more than what a cable/FiOS user is going to pay for a residential connection. There's a reason, and it's up in the first point.

Re:Small ISP

[nawitus]

Why would anyone do business with you? I would change my ISP in a second if they tried to throttle my bandwidth, or "ban" me. I pay for my 10Mbps connection and I will sure as hell use every bit of that if I so choose.

Re:Small ISP

[Coren22]

Same experience here from FiOS, but I pay the same for 24 Mbps.

Re:Small ISP

[TheThiefMaster]

They do for bytes/second, but not for bits/second.

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're banning people because they're uploading a lot of files I hope you get sued. Besides file sharing they could be running VNC or moving backups or photo archives around. And you say "file sharer" like it is a bad thing - what if the files being shared are not infringing someones copyright? If you sell me X amount of up/down bandwidth and I want to max it out to run a torrent of a linux distro that was just released, that is my perogative. Bottom line, if you don't want people using the bandwidth they purchased from you fair and square, DO NOT MARKET IT AS UNLIMITED!

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Who do you work for again?

3 gig an hour is just 300kbit/sec. 40KB/sec upstream constant. That's frankly fuck all for constant usage. Seriously, can't you handle that?

If that's more than you can handle, you're a terrible value ISP no matter what size you are. You need way more capacity to meet the needs of your users - who are already being nice to you by limiting down that low. If you can't get that bandwidth, you can't afford to keep providing internet service. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.

They're using your DNS. They're not VPNing, they're not changing their MAC. They're being nice to you. And you're banning them. Don't push your luck.

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Math helps:
If he means 2 gigabits, then that's still 555 kbits/sec
2 gb/hr -> 2e6 kb/hr -> 555 kb/sec
If he means 2 gigabytes, that's a hell of a lot more, and yes, that's a lot of traffic.
Not to rain on your parade, but clarify your numbers.

Re:Small ISP

[broken_chaos]

Ah, I didn't realise 'gb' was in common usage for gigabits. I've more commonly seen it referred to by Gbit/gbit or Gbps/gbps (when someone isn't using 'Gb'). I'm a bit of a stickler for proper units and prefixes for some reason -- maybe I'm just anal about clarity or something. Someone drag Bios_Hakr back here to clarify all this! :-)

Though I don't think I've ever actually seen someone measure upload amounts in gigabits. Well, until (possibly) the OP, I suppose. ;-)

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Since everyone is lying, no one is going to stop lying.

Until the FCC busts out real ISP regulations that keep them honest.

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, 3GB/hour is 874KB/second! 60KB/s is only 0.2MB/hour

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Unlimited refers to the amount of data transferred per month. Most things are advertised with regards to typical average use.

Your argument is kind of like saying "Why can't I run a catering service off the buffet I just paid $15 to get into? Unlimited food for me means I can take all the food I want once I've paid, right? Because it's unlimited!"

Go back to your mom's basement, thanks.

Re:Small ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you do if people were using tons of bandwidth to view streaming media? You talk about file sharing, but streaming media is starting to take over as the highest user of bandwidth. Everyone is watching something online. Even my elderly mother watches her soap online! As for myself, I'm a heavy Netflix streaming user.

So what will you do when in a few years everyone is going to have a set-top box for streaming video?

Re:Small ISP

[sjames]

Overselling is a necessary practice but a correctly designed network will deal with congestion by fair queueing rather than by calling users "hogs" and dumping them.

Re:Small ISP

[sjames]

That is a real problem. If truth in advertising laws actually existed as opposed to being on the books, it would be possible for honest players to enter the market.

Re:Small ISP

[shaitand]

he didn't say GB or KB, he said gb and kb. Bandwidth is measured in bits and does not use powers of 2. In bandwidth land 1kb is 1000bits, 1mb is 1000 kbits, 1gb is 1000 mbits, etc Its a marketing thing to make our slow arse network links sound bigger.

3000mbit (3gb) /60 = 50mbit per minute / 60 = 0.83 mb/s or 833 kb/s

memory uses 8bits to byte, 1024 bytes to kilobyte, 1024 KB to 1 MB, etc

Hard drives shack things up a bit, they use bytes but call 1KB 1000bytes instead of 1024. This inflates the size of the drive some.

And of course operating systems generally report the size of the files on the drives in the units memory does since all software actually handles data this way.

It could be argued that since the data on your hard drive, or going in or out of your network link is going to be utilized in manipulated in powers of 2 all of the above should just use that system. But alas, to these people (including me) or the annoying SI obsessed, its unlikely the above ambiguity is going away any time soon.

Re:Small ISP

[Spykk]

Overselling is fine so long as you do it responsibly. When your peak bandwidth use gets close to capacity then it is either time to upgrade your infrastructure or to stop taking on new customers. It is not ethical to start canceling the accounts of people who are not breaking your terms of use.

Re:Small ISP

[masmullin]

Your serious? people like being treated like adults. No fucking way!

Bandwidth hogging is relatively easy to solve

[drinkypoo]

You need a TCP/IP stack with queueing. You give each IP address a fair chance to transfer and/or receive some data, and as always you drop any traffic for which you have no time.... but you drop them from the bottoms of queues first, and the queues are per-IP (or per-subscriber, which is harder to manage unless you are properly subnetted... in which case, they can be per-network, for which computation is cheap.) This should be the only kind of QoS necessary to preserve network capacity for all users and prevent "bandwidth hogging". Let the users implement their own QoS for VoIP traffic within their available bandwidth.

Re:Bandwidth hogging is relatively easy to solve

[godrik]

Ensuring fairness at one point of the network won't ensure fairness over the whole network which is what you really want.

Re:Bandwidth hogging is relatively easy to solve

[drinkypoo]

Ensuring fairness at one point of the network won't ensure fairness over the whole network which is what you really want.

If enough people do this then it works. If not enough people don't do it, it doesn't. Doing this at your node won't stop someone upstream from sending you a lot of crap; they have to do it too. Everyone should be doing it, because there are no drawbacks outside of some memory consumption; it's not a complete solution but it is a massive win.

TCP is only fair if no one cheats.

[Anonymous Coward]

TCP enforces fairness for well behaved apps. If each app only opens one stream to do its job, the streams will adjust their windows to give each stream an even share of the bandwidth.

But then a download accelerator simply has to open n streams for one job, grabbing n times its fair share. TCP is a perfectly reasonable system in that it works as long as you don't deliberately break it.

The best way to ensure fairness is by pricing for heavy usage (> 250GB seems reasonable nowadays), along with adequate information. People know how many minutes they use because they get a report each month. ISPs need to give out similar reports, probably broken down by protocol or top sites like youtube, so users have some clue how much bandwidth they're actually using.

I don't know.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bandwidth is a finite resource; it stands to reason that if User A uses more than his fair share it would negatively impact User B. I think everybody would agree on that. So the only question left is how much does it take to start affecting other users? Unfortunately, this is probably a question that only the providers can answer.

Re:I don't know.

[Hatta]

Bandwidth is a finite resource; it stands to reason that if User A uses more than his fair share it would negatively impact User B. I think everybody would agree on that.

Not true at all. If I use 90% of the available bandwidth, and you only need 5%, it does not affect you at all. If I use 90% of the available bandwidth and you use 20%, we both get throttled.

What about spammers?

[LuxMaker]

I can hear them now saying "I'm in your networkz hogging your bandwidth."

Re:What about spammers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can hear them now saying "I'm in your networkz hogging your bandwidth."

That just begs for a lolcat!

ISP says:

[L3370]

"... I'll advertise that you'll have up to 10mbps connection speed and unlimited bandwidth, and you'll get it. But if you ever come close to using the maximum potential of the service you actually paid for I'm gonna cripple or stop you completely."

If these companies are going to be doing this they just need to stop calling their service packages "unlimited."

Too bad there isn't any real competition in this sector. We all just eat it.

YES!

[GNUPublicLicense]

Finally, it's coming through! In the context of replacing totally the services provided by classic telephony, we must set up neutral IP traffic classes (VoIP over mobile radio link do *NOT* work reliably, and won't be after broad adoption of the FTTH). Indeed, the idea is to give priority to voice traffic on client initiative. The *only* allowed exception to this rule would be emergency calls, because that has to be done at the ISP initiative. We can even think of a video stream for emergency calls! With enough good video quality... imagine the amount of people we could additionnally save thanks to the video!!! We already have the terminals able to do so! We need to set up that next gen Internet ASAP!

Friends and family coming soon to your ISP!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

These ISPs sold what they ain't got. Sold more bandwidth than they can sustain, and when someone actually takes delivery of what was promised, these telcos bellyache, "we never thought you will ask for all we sold you! whachamagontodoo?". Eventually they will introduce billing by the Gigabytes, and pipesize. Like the electric utilities charge you by the kWh and limit the ampearage of your connection.

Then they will introduce the "friends and family" of ISP, some downloads and some sites will be "unmetered", and the sources will be the friends and family of the ISP. You know? the "partners" who provide "new and exciting" products and content to their "valued customers". Net neutrality will go down the tubes. ha ha.

Google needs the net to be open and neutral for it to freely access and index content. When the dot com bubble burst Google bought tons and tons of bandwidth, the dark fibers, the unlit strands of fiber optic lines. If the net fragments, I expect Google to step in, light up these strands and go head to head with the ISPs providing metro level WiFi. Since it is not a government project, it could not be sabotaged like Verizon and AT&T torpedoed municipal high peed networks.

Re:Friends and family coming soon to your ISP!

[teg]

These ISPs sold what they ain't got. Sold more bandwidth than they can sustain, and when someone actually takes delivery of what was promised, these telcos bellyache, "we never thought you will ask for all we sold you! whachamagontodoo?

Basically, they want to sell a product with high speed - but not continual use. A product where more of the bandwidth is used - or dedicated, not oversubscribed - is vastly more expensive, and is what they sell to businesses. To fix this problem, they should start with metered costs per gigabyte, or specify the products better so that normal users get their current experience at their current price, and those who really want a different product at the current price, are shifted to that product.

Re:Friends and family coming soon to your ISP!

[King_TJ]

Yep! This is really, and has always been, the bottom line. They found that throwing words around like "unlimited!" nets them a lot of subscribers. And as long as they keep signing up people who don't use their Internet connections too often, it works out well for them.

The problem is, the "average user" is starting to discover more bandwidth-intensive things he/she wants to do with a given Internet connection. A few years ago, only a few "hard core" enthusiasts would have really considered trying to download all their TV shows to watch offline, vs. obtaining them some other way. Now? It's becoming "expected" to be able to catch your favorite shows as live streams via Hulu or other such services, and MANY people are well aware of how to torrent for shows.

The "law of averages" that used to dictate that "for every REAL user of our broadband connection, we've got at least 5 who only use it to check email and view a few web pages" is changing. Their "average user" is using up a lot more bandwidth, and their "big users" are reaching the point of having their connections saturated 24 hours/7 days as they leave servers up all the time to share files.

Even people who are only occasional users of their PC on the net are buying devices like iPhones, that also use their wi-fi connection at home ... so it gives them more opportunities to use that same connection.

And yeah, I think they're going to try to start selling connections with monthly gigabyte xfer limits attached to them ... but the public won't accept that without a fight. Like you say, Google might see a chance to step in at that point and shake things up ... or users might even start using wireless repeaters to bypass the ISP completely and build their own ad-hoc networks. I could see it working sort of like the old BBS days, where people had networks like Fidonet and WWIVnet set up to get messages delivered all over the world by hopping them from point to point, until they reached their destination ... except this would happen at 802.11g or n speeds and involve peer to peer file sharing among all the participants, in a private network.....

Re:Friends and family coming soon to your ISP!

[A Friendly Troll]

Eventually they will introduce billing by the Gigabytes, and pipesize.

I'm on a connection with a monthly cap of 10 GB, both upload and download. It's a soft cap; you go over, you pay extra.

I have personally been using 3-4 GB per month. Once I let other family members online from their computer, the bandwidth usage less than doubled. We have never crossed the monthly bandwidth cap, not once. Unlimited traffic is... let me check... about $10 extra per month, and we don't consider it worthwhile. Sure, I could download some torrents and they could watch YouTube all day, but neither of us needs to do those things.

What I'm trying to say that metered connections and billing by the gigabyte isn't necessarily such an evil thing. There's a lot of people out there who don't need "unlimited" traffic and would be perfectly content with a lower monthly fee that would still cover their bandwidth usage (and then some).

Re:Friends and family coming soon to your ISP!

[Elshar]

Residential connections usually have either NO CIR or a very very low CIR.

What people who are trying to download 10 DVD's a day are doing is NOT typical use, and it does impact not just their local ISP, but the remote end as well as the whole internet, really.

As a small ISP myself, I don't care if my commercial customer who has the foresight to know they want to use more bandwidth, and buy a higher CIR from me use what they paid for. I have a problem with people paying $30 a month for a residential connection with no/low CIR and expecting me to give them the equivilant of a 100% CIR on the advertised speed.

It just doesn't work that way. If that's what you want, go buy your own 10MB line from Level3, Qwest, etc. I'm sure the $300+ you're going to be paying will give you an even greater feeling of entitlement. And, hey. People will still care that you're doing illegal things with your connection, by the way. I get letters all the time (And the occasional Subpeona from some law enforcement of another) about p2p users. Unless, of course, you're trying to say you like saturating consumer-level circuits by hosting massive amounts of F/OSS torrents?

Re:Friends and family coming soon to your ISP!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

As a small ISP myself, I don't care if my commercial customer who has the foresight to know they want to use more bandwidth, and buy a higher CIR from me use what they paid for. I have a problem with people paying $30 a month for a residential connection with no/low CIR and expecting me to give them the equivilant of a 100% CIR on the advertised speed.

As a small consumer, I don't care if you have the foresight to put a limit on how many gigs of data could be downloaded in your contact up front and charge more for letting people download/upload more data.

But I do have a problem if you sell me a "unlimited bandwidth" or "all-you-can eat" connection and then come bellyaching saying your connection is up 24/7/365 at full load. Just dont sell what you dont have. Just dont mislead customers. It does not work that way. There are still people who believe in truth-in-advertisement laws and full disclosure laws and consumer protection laws. If you called a connection "unlimited", make sure there are no limits on it. Fair is fair.

BTW, don't get steamed up on illegal activity and piracy and all sorts of things. You get legal liability protection as a common carrier. Essentially you are claiming, "I dont know what my users are downloading and uploading. If it is child port catch them, lock 'em up and throw away the key. Hey FBI take this, my IP allocation timestamp data". The moment you start discussing whether or not what your users are downloading is legal/illegal, you open yourself up to liability. If your users download child porn, you will be charged as an accessory, aider and abettor. Suddenly you can't switch to common carrier defense. Get that straight pal.

Re:Friends and family coming soon to your ISP!

[shaitand]

"A product where more of the bandwidth is used - or dedicated, not oversubscribed - is vastly more expensive, and is what they sell to businesses."

Yes, but if this is what was sold to everyone the problem disappears (there isn't really less upstream than downstream) and the cost for this type of connection would drop dramatically.

Imagine a crazy sort of world where I publish webpages and picture galleries from my own pc and don't have to rely on hosting services. A world where I can deliver content by purchasing low cost hardware and start a business. A world where I would only need to pay proportionately more for increased bandwidth when my need exceeded what was available. A world where the benefits of my untilized bandwidth are mine to captilize on and not my ISPs.

They shouldn't start with metered costs per gigabyte because it doesn't cost them per gigabyte. It costs the ISP x amount to have y bandwidth available. The bandwidth is all there, 100% of the time. It basically costs the ISP the same if that link is 0% utilized or 100% utilized.

The reality is that is that if no bandwidth is shared before the end user and content hosting isn't centralized like they do now the demand becomes more distributed, instead of a few heavily overloaded links and routers the traffic gets spread around more and the load better distributed. More at&t users are accessing content hosted by other at&t users. A greater portion of traffic becomes more localized traveling through fewer and more distributed hops.

In the end everyone wins. Except maybe the telcos.

Freedom of information act

[TimeElf1]

Felton has thrown down the gauntlet asking for a standardized data set from any telco that he can do statistical analysis on that will allow him to find any evidence of a single outlier ruining the experience for everyone else. Unlikely any telco will take him up on that offer but his point still stands."

It's too bad there isn't a freedom of information act for business, that could come in handy for this sort of thing. Although if there was I suppose that would make industrial espionage really easy.

An Impasse?

[lymond01]

Felten's challenge is paired with a more technical look at how networks operate, which claims that TCP/IP by its design eliminates the possibliity of hogging bandwidth. But Wes Felter corrects that misimpression in a post to a network neutrality mailing list.

Wait till I get going! The blogosphere, initially made famous by one Cory Doctorow, has impressed upon us for years that the internet highway is headed for a 100 car pileup. The Distinguished and Honored Senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, tells us that the tubes are filling up every day. But only a fool would liken the internet to a series of tubes when clearly the highway analogy is what's best! And clearly you can't think that any single user confined to the HOV lane is going to encroach upon the bandwidth of the other 10 lanes of traffic! It's obvious that I know where the problem with the Internet is. I've known from the beginning! Wait! What in the world could THAT be! Oh. Never mind. It was nothing. Now. I'll drink from FiOS in front of me and you drink from your DSL in front of you. Hah! You fell victim to one of the greatest internet blunders of all time! The first being that you never believe what you read on the Internet followed closely by the fact that you never take Slashdot seriously when money is on the line! Ha ha ha! Ha ha....

My point being: if they're going to cut you off for maxing out your line regardless of how it affects other people, THAT'S the real problem. Imaginary or not, you can still die from fright over the boogeyman in the closet.

I do it too

[holophrastic]

I also go through my client list and drop those that consume more of my time and resources in favour of the easier clients who ultimately improve my business at a lesser cost. What's wrong with that? My company, my rules. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" -- it's in every restaurant. Why would you expect a business to serve you? Why would you consider it a right?

Re:I do it too

[Anonymous Coward]

a minimal level of internet access should be a right though. It's fairer to just throttle the hogs rather than cut them off from possibly crucial services like email.

Re:I do it too

[Colonel Korn]

I also go through my client list and drop those that consume more of my time and resources in favour of the easier clients who ultimately improve my business at a lesser cost. What's wrong with that? My company, my rules. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" -- it's in every restaurant. Why would you expect a business to serve you? Why would you consider it a right?

Your company's service isn't based on federal subsidies meant to provide internet access to all citizens.

Re:I do it too

[Anonymous Coward]

I run an all-you-can-eat buffet. If you eat more than the other patrons, I handcuff you to your chair! It's my business, after all.

Re:I do it too

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I do consider it a right when in my country we have publicly subsidized large portion of their network...

Re:I do it too

[Byzantine]

While your point is well taken—and, for that matter, correct—a restaurant who kicks out an obnoxious customer would still allow them to take their food with them: i.e., to have what they paid for. An ISP is well within its right to cut off service at the end of whatever period x a customer has paid for; just not at x-1.

Re:I do it too

[hitmark]

because the net have become as integral to modern life as water and electricity?

with a restaurant, one can go somewhere else to get a ready meal, or one can make ones of by parts sold almost anywhere. The net however is not something one can make at home if needed, and rarely one find more then 2 suppliers (or even that many) in a area...

Re:I do it too

[Ephemeriis]

I also go through my client list and drop those that consume more of my time and resources in favour of the easier clients who ultimately improve my business at a lesser cost. What's wrong with that? My company, my rules. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" -- it's in every restaurant. Why would you expect a business to serve you? Why would you consider it a right?

Let's say you sell widgets.

You have 5 people come to you, each one wants to buy 1 widget. And another guy shows up and wants to buy 5 widgets.

You only have 5 widgets in stock, you need 10, but you really want their money. So you sell each of those people a coupon for their widgets, and tell them to pick it up at your warehouse. You figure they won't all run over there right now, and you'll probably have time to get a couple more widgets in stock before anybody notices.

Of course you don't tell your customers this. You don't tell them "I only have 5 right now, you'll have to wait 'til the next shipment" You just take their money and leave them with the impression that the widget is there, waiting for them, available for pickup whenever they want.

So all of them show up at the warehouse about 5 minutes later. All of them want their widgets now. But you don't have enough widgets to go around. So you call the guy who bought 5 widgets a "widget hog", cancel his order, and throw up a hastily-made sign that says "limit 1 per customer."

Legal? Yeah, I guess... Assuming you refund his money.

Right? Not so much. You should have clearly explained that you only have 5 widgets in stock, or that the coupon couldn't be redeemed for a week, or that there was a limit of 1 per customer, or something. You mis-represented what you were selling to your customers.

Likely to leave a good impression on your customers? Nope.

Re:I do it too

[Hatta]

You might have a point if there were actual competition in the bandwidth market.

Re:I do it too

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that ISPs are really more like utilities. The gas company - even if privately owned - can't simply "reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." In fact, depending on your local laws, there may be quite a few restrictions on the gas company, such as not allowing them to cut people off during the winter.

I don't believe that _legally_ ISPs are considered utilities, but socially and functionally they certainly are, since it's a more-or-less essential service, that you can only buy from one or a few local providers. (It's certainly as important as phone service, for an example - which is definitely considered a utility)

Re:I do it too

[hitmark]

did you just describe how the futures stock market works?!

Re:I do it too

[dkleinsc]

"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" -- it's in every restaurant.

Actually, only sort of. If there's a pattern to who you refuse service to, it can get you into big trouble. For instance, if you consistently refuse service to black people, you are in violation of a number of civil rights laws.

Re:I do it too

[Anonymous Coward]

I also go through my client list and drop those that consume more of my time and resources in favour of the easier clients who ultimately improve my business at a lesser cost. What's wrong with that? My company, my rules. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" -- it's in every restaurant. Why would you expect a business to serve you? Why would you consider it a right?

Because they are granted local monopoly protection, as well as benefits that they don't pay for (right of way) by government.

If they want to act like a regular business, then they should be treated like a regular business. I would love to negotiate a fee for their cables running under my front lawn.

Re:I do it too

[Anonymous Coward]

And I think also such behaviour is called fraud.

Re:I do it too

[Zekolas]

I think the issue is they market unlimited access. For example if a restaurant advertise a meal as "All you can eat" but then they cut customers off after their 3rd plate I assume most would think this is bad business or false advertising. I really think the issue is they are being sold "Unlimited Access" but really they do not get it unlimited access. I guess the difference is when you walk into a restaurant you do not sign a contract with fine print before you eat your all you can eat meal. Either way its deceptive.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

I have yet to see any all-you-can-eat restaurant forget to put the sign that limits eating to 2 hours.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

I don't think the publicly subsidized is for 100MB/S.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

...and refund you for the outstanding time. you are correct.

we should run governments together.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

you're doing it again. I won't let you cross the line between convenience and safety.

Water and electricity are entegral not because they are expected but because real safety is dependent on them. They are a part of building codes for that very reason too.

Internet is a luxury -- like air conditioning in most climates. Yeah, you'll wantto have it. Yeah, you're way better off with in. But no, it's not a necessity. You have no right to it.

Telephone, however, is considered an essential service is my country -- because it's a life-line. Television is not because it isn't.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

Just because one company offers much better service than another, doesn't mean you don't consider them outside of their class.

You can get 56K dial-up from anywhere. If your cable company decides to hate you, yo uget to go back to dial-up. So either play nice, or find an alternative.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

I won't let you do that. I'll never let you cross the line between convenience and safety.

Around here, heating and telephone and gas and electricity are "essential services" because tehy relate to real safety. Telephone is considered a life-line aronud here. Television is not.

Internet doesn't keep you safe in an emergency. You can't call your local police or fire station.

There is basically zero way for you to die as a result of lack of internet. Yo ucan't starve to death, freeze to death, burn to death, or bleed to death.

"Socially" and "functionally" are crap. Treat your ISP well, and they'll treat you well. That's yoru "socially". You can't force them to be social to you.

Re:I do it too

[Byzantine]

I, for one, welcome our new correct-thinking overlords.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

They are called "Erline" tables. You buy telephone service. You pick up your land-line telephone, or any other telephone, and you get a dial-tone as your handset grabs a real physical line/channel for itself.

The problem is, there aren't enough channels for everyone to be on the phone at the same time. It would be a huge waste of resources to have such capacity because it would generally go unused. So the Erline tables ultimately tell telecom companies that if they have 3'000 customers, they need 450 physical lines.

This is like "slippery when wet". It's an obvious notion that allows you to support a company that purchases 450 lines because you could never afford a company that pays for 3'000 lines. The military chooses the latter. Business-grade chooses something in between. Consumer-grade gets the bottom. That's the definition of consumer-grade.

In my business, I'd actually screw the 5 customers to keep the one big one because my business is served better by fewer larger clients, not additional smaller clients. But you'd better believe that's exactly what I'd have done.

And it's certainly legal. And it's certainly "right" -- whatever you want that to mean.

It's "right" because that's the only logical way that a world of business can work. And you as a consumer don't get to dictate what structures will work outside of paying or not paying or not paying again.

And you do it personally. Pose the very same situation, but switch business to friend, purchase to favour, and screwing with cancelling. How many times have you cancelled on one friend for another? Or said "I can't help you move anymore, my girlfriend wants me to go to her friend's wedding".

It's expected, it's understood. Not everyone is of equal priority all the time. Your girlfriend gets priority over your friend's move. Better clients get priority over lesser clients.

I get to make reservations at The Keg. They don't take reservations. So I show up, there's a huge line, and I get to walk right by it. Those in line can be upset if they want to be. Or they can understand that in some places, they aren't as important. I pay a lot more than they do.

Most consumers don't realize that you get to pay for priority, or get a discount for being last on the list. You don't get to pay the low amount and also get certainty. You pay for certainty -- that's why businesses pay more.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

...to be used responsibly. If there's a good business reason to refuse service to black people, then it isn't illegal.

Off the top of my head, a "good reason" would be that some "association of only black people of niagra" (I'm making this up, I hope.) has been campaigning to force you out of the neighbourhood in order to have only black owners on the street.

Re:I do it too

[mcgrew]

Bad analogy. If your restaraunt advertises "all you can eat" they'd damned well better not stop me after the fourth plate. Your company, your rules, but once you write those rules you'd better follow them yourself, or you're going to be getting correspondance from lawyers.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

sign on every buffet wall -- 2 hour limit. And "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone", and the ISP contract that you did -- essentially -- sign, says they can cancel your service at any time.

So be nice to your suppliers.

Or, you can purchase the business-class service, and pay for certainty.

"Unlimited access" is unlimited in terms of what you'll be charged. Not unlimited in terms of how much you can take.

It's obviously limited in terms of speed -- to the size of the wire.

Re:I do it too

[KraftDinner]

Whats your company's name so I can never buy your service.

Re:I do it too

[Ephemeriis]

I understand all that. And I don't have a problem with that.

The problem I have is with an ISP selling something called "unlimited" when they know perfectly well that they have neither the ability nor the intention of delivering anything vaguely resembling unlimited service.

And while I can assume that they don't actually mean unlimited literally, I don't generally have any way to know what they do mean by unlimited. Most of the times the limits or caps are not documented or are not predictably enforced or are not made available to customers.

I have absolutely no problem paying for the level of quality that I want.

I do have a problem paying for the level of quality that I want, and then finding out that the ISP has a different definition of "quality."

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

Every restaurant: "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone". and any all-you-can-eat restaurant limits eating to 2 hours -- or less.

And the ISP contract which you -- essentially -- signed says all of the same.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

You're supposed to see it from the other side. You don't want to buy my service as a random purchase. But when your business needs to depend on its suppliers, you want my business to be your supplier.

It's simple, you know that if you treat me well, I'll treat you well. And you know that when you really need something done, you can pay to have anything rushed.

Your alternative are those suppliers where you get to wait for their schedule. That doesn't fit your schedule 10% of the time -- and that's a huge problem.

I can delay or cancel my other clients for you when it's urgent for you and not for them. Every one of by clients loves that. It means that they can talk to their boss/employee/staff/clients and promiss that something will get done, and know that I'll be able to do it for them if tehy really need it done. They don't have to wonder if maybe I have time for them.

And yes, it keeps me very very busy -- and that's a great thing.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

You've mis-read "unlimited". It couldn't ever have meant "unlimited" and you never thought that it did.

The wire running to your door is a limit -- it limits the bandwidth. You knew that.

You are limited by distance -- you can't use it from the sahara desert, nor from the moon. You knew that too.

They aren't changing you more as you use more. Your usage is unlimited by your payments. You knew that. That's what you were actually purchasing. And that's why you didn't choose a service that changes by the hour -- like old dial-up.

You aren't limited by the time of day, day or week, nor by what you are downloading.

You aren't being limited, you're being discarded. You can use as much as you'd like within the other limits. And they'll never drop you for using too much. They will, apparently, drop you for using more than others.

So if you'd get everyone else to use more, you wouldn't be dropped as the out-lier.

Re:I do it too

[Ephemeriis]

You've mis-read "unlimited". It couldn't ever have meant "unlimited" and you never thought that it did.

The wire running to your door is a limit -- it limits the bandwidth. You knew that.

You are limited by distance -- you can't use it from the sahara desert, nor from the moon. You knew that too.

They aren't changing you more as you use more. Your usage is unlimited by your payments. You knew that. That's what you were actually purchasing. And that's why you didn't choose a service that changes by the hour -- like old dial-up.

You aren't limited by the time of day, day or week, nor by what you are downloading.

You aren't being limited, you're being discarded. You can use as much as you'd like within the other limits. And they'll never drop you for using too much. They will, apparently, drop you for using more than others.

So if you'd get everyone else to use more, you wouldn't be dropped as the out-lier.

Incorrect.

I have personally purchased a 10 Mbps connection. I understand that there is network overhead, line noise, packet loss, whatever... But I have never, ever seen any more than 3 Mbps.

I am being limited by their oversold equipment. I am not being discarded. I am not an outlier. Their equipment simply is not able to deliver the level of service they sold me.

Re:I do it too

[KraftDinner]

When I purchase something that is advertised at certain speeds, I use those speeds. If I'm throttled or cut off, you're going to lose my business. I don't know what you're talking about with waiting for suppliers, I've never had a problem with my ISP taking long to fix anything.

Re:I do it too

[KraftDinner]

Exactly, but do your advertisements say "Unlimited bandwidth, for 2 hours per day"?

Re:I do it too

[KraftDinner]

I'll just go to a supplier where they offer true unlimited. I don't know where you live, maybe the US, but in Canada we have lots of legitimate suppliers that offer 'true' unlimited internet at the advertised speeds. Such as my current, unlimited or capped at 200GB/month.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

That 10 Mbps is undoubtedly the best the equipment can be, not the worst. Perhaps that's what it is at source, and you're far from source. Perhaps that's your neighbourhood's maximum, and there are six houses in that neighbourhood hub.

But either way, you're certainly welcome to complain. You're certainly welcome to refuse to pay. And you can ask for a discount. And just the same, they can drop you for being annoying.

You can also request their business-grade service, 60 Mbps, and get the business-to-business guarantee.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

Different kind of supplier. I'm not an ISP.

But hey, maybe not. If you paid for 10, but this weekend you need a quick boost to 100, just for the weekend, can you get it? If I were your ISP, I'd have a facility for that.

In fact, my business ISP does have that. I can call, 24/7/52, and get a boost in anything. It may or may not cost me to do so, but it's always possible.

What you purchased is capable of those speeds. This is a technical product. The speed at source is very different than the speed at your end. Your own router may be throttling it. Do you have a business-grade cisco router? I have two routers on my desk. One dlink one linksys, bothconsumer-grade. One throttles my speed by half.

Re:I do it too

[Anonymous Coward]

Your company doesn't have a defacto-government granted monopoly. Your company isn't providing a critical infrastructure service. Your company doesn't sue competitors (muni's) who try to simply compete on a level playing field.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

Not limited by time of day. not limited by how much you'll be charged. not limited by what you can download. not limited by where you use it nor by what you do with it.

that's all "unlimited". you're looking for a different "unlimited"? You'll need to use more words.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

I'm in Canada. I have no problems. Mine's capped at 60/GB/month. And by "capped" I mean I get to pay a little more for usage beyond that. Where little is both reasonable and to a maximum of $25 for no max download.

But that doesn't change anything. I'd have no qualms if I got dropped for using 200GB/month over my 60GB planned. And I certainly wouldn't want my supplier to be forced to like me.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

Everyone has access to dial-up, and there is plenty of competition.

The government-granted monopolies for ISPs are rarely for business purposes. They tend to be for infrastructure purposes. As in yoru ISP needs to dig up the ground, and it'll take years to see profit from that expense, and your government wants it done because otherwise no one will do it and your government's citizens will be living with low-speeds forever because it won't be profitable for anyone to provide higher speeds.

See, that's the thing. ISPs that are already profitable don't have any need to upgrade. And ISPs that aren't yet profitable can't afford to build the infrastructure.

So if you want it to be done, you need to encourage someone to do it. That's the price -- the defacto monopoly. You don't get to penalize the ISP for it -- that's their encouragement for helping you out in the first place.

And you can't force private companies to build infrastructure in your conutry. You can't force them to grow and to expand and to take risks.

Re:I do it too

[devman]

Probably the most insightful comment made on this topic and completely passed over by moderators. People who complain about this are victims of there own wishful thinking and lack of understand how the world works. The meaning of "up to" is pretty clear, if you want a guaranteed connection with and SLA be prepared to pay a business class price for it.

Re:I do it too

[dkf]

I have personally purchased a 10 Mbps connection. I understand that there is network overhead, line noise, packet loss, whatever... But I have never, ever seen any more than 3 Mbps.

That's because you're on ADSL and it's a crappy technology unless you're sitting on a short high-quality line. And there's nothing the ISP can do about it short of putting in a new line; it's a physical restriction. Would you want to pay for that yourself? If not, why should other people buy it as a gift for you?

If you go read the ISP's ads carefully, I bet you'll see the weasel words "up to" before that bandwidth measure. Your best move is to consider trading down to a cheaper and slower connection; the loss of bandwidth you never had shouldn't be too much of a concern, and then you'll at least have more money in your pocket. (OK, imperfect but beats arguing with physics.)

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

Thank you. It still stuns me that business-class anything is al but gone in most industries. The whole CFO theary of "we can get away with paying less" and going with consumer class is fine, outside of mission-critical areas. But it's a world of difference in terms of reliability. That's all fine, but then you can't complain when the $10 part doesn't hold up to par with the $100 part. Order-of-magnitude exists in reliability as well.

Anyway. I appreciate your appreciation.

Re:I do it too

[shaitand]

Are you a monopoly duopoly? Are you federally subsidized? The answers to those questions make a great deal of difference in what level of service I expect and demand from you. Do you enjoy government granted perks as a common carrier?

If taco bell were the only restaurant and federally subsidized then refusing to serve me amounts to making me pay you to provide me the option to eat out and then refusing to allow me to eat out.

When there are a dozen carriers in every town and they all over varying terms instead of engaging in collusion, then we can talk about a carriers right to refuse service.

Re:I do it too

[hitmark]

and whats stopping the net connection from taking over the tasks one today assosiate with the phone?

more and more services prefer that you use their website for any dealings with them, as then rhey can make you do many of the tasks they may have hired a person for before...

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

First, yes, I do receive government funding. Most successful businesses do -- there are dozens if not hundreds of ways in which your tax dollars reward businesses, including mine.

Second, the fact that consumer-grade service is not reliable has nothing to do with the provider, and has everything to do with reality. If you want dedicated reliable service, you get to pay for that. And you can, it's called business-class service. If you read the agreements that you've effectively signed with your ISP, you'll see that the discussion of reliability is covered quite well in their favour.

But that's what consumer-grade service is all about.

Finally, the real funding that these ISPs get from the governments, and the exclusivity that they are granted when it comes to competitors, has nothing to do with their customers.

The fact is that most ISPs are successful without upgrading their services year over year. If you left it up to them, they'd offer the same speed and bandwidth and such forever -- because they are already profitable, nad have little interest in taking huge risks to maybe become more successful.

The huge risk is in building your country's infrastructure. They have to dig up the street and burry wires and all sorts of things. It's just not worth the risk, so they don't want to do it.

Your government, on your behalf, wants your service to get better and better with each passing year. Of course, no one can force the private company to take that risk, or to change their offerings at all. So the next step is encouragement.

Those ISPs are "encouraged" to spend big money and take big risk in order to develop your country's infrastructure. That encouragement is in the form of exclusivity. You can't then fault those companies for having it. They depend on it in order to hopefully make back that investment before they're asked to do it again.

And if you think regular competition can make it happen, because the stagnant successful ISPs will be beaten by the new guy who wants to get customers by offering something better, then you forget the infrastructure part.

The new guy can't afford to dig up every street in a 20 mile radius. The new guy can't afford to interface with the huge companies across the planet to make that go smoothly. And the new guy isn't trusted by your government to be permitted the resources and the risk of digging up the street -- your government simply doesn't believe he has the experience to see it through.

So you're left with great competition for last place, or little to no competition for first place. Those are your options.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

Then everything changes. Dang I hope that happens, my business would sky-rocket if it did. And certainly it's starting to. My country has been "encouraging" hospitals and other health-care industry companies to file their claims electronically.

But until I, joe shmoe, from my bedroom, while in bed, can click the FIRE button, not on my video game but at my local fire station that's never more than 7 minutes away, from telephone ring to door-bell ring (or axe as the case may be), and I can click the "I've fallen and I can't get up" button, then it doesn't become an emergency service. It becomes an optional luxury service.

We're getting there. And in a few years, probably eight years, you'll see me here arguing with someone who thinks that it shouldn't be an emergency service because it wasn't necessary before.

But for now, it's not an emergency service simply because it isn't treated as one.

The thing I'm most proud of, and one of the few reasons that I accept being called human, is our emergency service co-ordination.

Right now, on a whim, as a prank, I can push three buttons, say zero words, and you know what happens?
    1. someone figures out that there's a possibility I might need help
    2. that someone doesn't know what help I need, and so calls everybody -- fire, police, ambulance
    3. sirens blare, traffic lights change, traffic stops, and everyone in the city pulls over because my emergency -- even if it's fake -- is understood to be more important than whatever the hell they have to do.
    4. a dozen people arrive at my location, magically knowing where I am, with enough equipment to tear down my home, keep my home from being torn down, kill human or animals who may be threatening me, save me from illness, stupidity, or any time of bleeding, respiratory issue, or head trauma -- on the spot and before any most permanent damages (that's the 7 minutes) -- and to do all of this legally.

The whole city stops for me. And assuming I wasn't faking, I may be asked to pay $70 if I can afford it -- or nothing at all.

When all of that is possible with an Internet connection, then hell-yeah Internet access is an emergency service.

We're getting there, but we ain't anywhere near there yet.

Re:I do it too

[KraftDinner]

The speed at source is very different than the speed at your end. Your own router may be throttling it. Do you have a business-grade cisco router? I have two routers on my desk. One dlink one linksys, bothconsumer-grade. One throttles my speed by half.

*sigh* ok. My router is not throttling anything. We're talking about a hypothetical situation here. Obviously I'm not a customer of yours, nor am I a customer of any ISP that throttles. So I don't know why you're discussing hardware with me.

Re:I do it too

[KraftDinner]

"If there's a good business reason to refuse service to black people, then it isn't illegal." You have no idea what you're talking about. If you're just refusing black people in a restaurant because they're black, you're violating civil rights laws. No matter how good of a business reason it is. I don't know how you figure "good business reason" means legal.

Re:I do it too

[cerberusss]

If there's a pattern to who you refuse service to, it can get you into big trouble. For instance, if you consistently refuse service to black people, you are in violation of a number of civil rights laws.

I is tellin' ya, they all are a goddam' bunch-'a file-sharin' carrrriminals!

Re:I do it too

[sydneyfong]

Unless your coupon has a bunch of legalese covering your ass (and the buyer knows about it when he paid the price of the widget), it's probably not "legal".

In most cases it doesn't matter much and it wouldn't be worth it to fuss over waiting a bit for you to restock or finding another supplier for widgets, but if the widgets are expensive and prices fluctuate, then getting the widgets now and getting them later could be of great difference.

You will be liable for any loss that the buyer incurs due to this.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

Because we're discussing the concept of complaining about speeds, the way that you did.

You said that you expect to use the advertised speeds. The problem is that the advertized speeds were never the advertized end-result speeds b-- for a whole host of reasons.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

I provided an example.

Re:I do it too

[Anonymous Coward]

My company, my rules. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone"

I bet you say that to all the blacks that want to do business with your company, dont you?

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

I say that to everyone -- lacks included. What's with you and blacks. You couldn't pick any other colours?

What's more, the better clients -- those that are successful on their own -- appreciate it. To them it means that I have control over my own business, and over my own supply chain. It proves to them that I can get things done, and that they needn't baby-sit me throughout their project.

It brings trust to already good relationships.

Contrast that with a company so desperate for business that they'll do whatever the client says. Such companies don't bring anything to the table in terms of consultation or experience -- because they simply do what tehy're told. hat style of contractor is how most companies start -- it's how I started when I was 14 years old. I took any business I could get, and I had little or no experience, and the only way I could get clients to trust me was to do what I was told.

Things are much better now.

Incidentally, in my 15 years of experience, I've never had any problems with clients based on their race. It would seem that black clients are no more or less likely to be troublesome in terms of client relationship than white or yellow or brown clients.

On the other hand, gender has a lot to do with things. I've found that the majority of my female clients over the years have been troublesome. It's quite likely that I simply have trouble working with them. It would seem to be that my style of communication -- especially via e-mail -- comes across as unprofessional to these women. It's possible that I'll simply stop working for female clients. I can do that. And it's a good thing too.

I used to have difficulty working for clients in the legal industry. That seems to be a wash now. But the fitness industry seems to pose a consistently troublesome relationship. So I consider no longer working for the fitness industry. Again, a good thing.

So yeah, my company, my rules, and my preferences. I'm here to have fun. I get to select the work I want to do, and the clients I want to have. I love every bit of the work that I do, and I deserve to enjoy every client relationship just as much.

Would you prefer that I be forced to work for clients with whom I simply do not get along?

Re:I do it too

[KraftDinner]

You're clearly limiting by how much bandwidth they can use, that's what your original post says at least.

Re:I do it too

[KraftDinner]

So that sounds exactly like Rogers. That's fine if you want to settle for that. There are many of us who want to have true unlimited service and not pay through the nose for it. I still don't see how using the line as advertised is "not being nice to your supplier". If they leave no cap and you pay your bill every month, I see no violation of terms there.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

Yeah, but "width" means the speed of the pipe. You knew you couldn't get 99999999MB/s.

You refer to "length" in how much you can download over time, not instantaneous or momentary speed.

My point is simply that you knew it was limited on many dimensions, and you knew it was unlimited on many other dimensions. So most of these people are complaining about a single dimension among many where they feel the grey is more black and less white. Had they read the contract/agreement, they'd see the more white and less black.

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

Oh, no violation, certainly not. And yes, it is Rogers, I've been quite happy with them.

But just because you're not violating terms, doesn't mean you're being nice. I do favours for my friends. I like doing them. But a friend that asks me for a favour every day isn't being nice.

I'm a supplier to my clients. I offer excellent service. I have clients who call five times in a single hour twice per week, and I have clients who call me twice per week. I certainly don't mind the former, but the latter consume less of my time.

So given a client that needs more of my complimentary services, and one that needs fewer of them, the fewer is being nice.

One of the reasons that I'm happy with Rogers is that they've come to trust me whenI report an outage. They no longer put me through the debug process to ensure that it isn't on my end. So it's a quick phone call to tell them that it's down, they believe me in ten seconds, and send out a truck to repair the cable that was cut by the electrical company. It's all done in an hour, and I use my dial-up backup to finish any mid-way work.

I'm nice to them, they're nice to me, and everything works out quite smoothly -- in that nothing negative affects my work. That's all any business wants from any supplier.

Re:I do it too

[KraftDinner]

I still don't see how using the line as advertised is being rude or not nice. If I'm not supposed to use the line to it's full potential, why advertise as such? I'm not saying you advertise this way, I have no idea what your business is named so I couldn't know, but this discussion is about businesses that do advertise like that and then throttle the people that actually do. It's false advertising plain and simple. I'm glad you're happy with Rogers, on the other side, I've had nothing but bad experiences with them. Not the cable internet side, but cable TV. Nothing but billing errors and transferring me 5 times(Not exaggerating) to get to the right department. What could I have possibly done to them? Pay my bill every month?

Re:I do it too

[holophrastic]

Not speaking about Rogers specifically, but in general...

It's not being rude, but it isn't being "actively" nice. Paying full price adn using less would be nice -- unnecessarily, but nice.

There are many reasons to purchase a 10 when you only need a 7, and those are all of the reasons why a company would advertise a 10 and prefer that you only use a 7.

In my case, for example, I upload text files for a living. There's no way for me to consume any real amount of upload total when I deal with 13KB and 50KB text files. That said, once a day I upload a 3MB file. And once a week I upload a 50MB file. I still couldn't possibly consume any real amount of total upload. But there's a big diference between fast uploading 50MB and slow uploading 50MB.

So I pay for the band "width" of being able to quickly upload 50MB, but I don't need the band "length" to be able to do it constantly.

In my case, I want a fast car to get to my destination very quickly, but my destination just ain't far away so I don't need a big gas tank, and I don't do the drive often so I don't need to be permitted to use the road often (unlike a commercial trucker for example, who needs a heavy-vehicle licence).

I'm a light vehicle, that moves fast, infrequently. So I get to use the left lane -- the passing lane. Whereas the truckers, operating heavy vehicles, have never been able to use the passing lane at all -- so as not to slow down ordinary light vehicles.

So when it comes to suppliers in general, there are services that are charged for, and there are services that are not chagred for -- that are complementary or even complimentary. Those complimentary services are a part of the package, certainly, and you're expected to use them appropriately. But if you start to use only the free services and not the charged ones, then the supplier has no revenue from you and you're taking advantage of their free services.

The same spectrum has a node along the way whereby you're using more of the free services than the charged services. And there are threshholds of profitability along the way.

That's the being nice. Most of those complimentary services are there to ease or appease clients who lack confidence in something - often in their own usage patterns. It's the "don't worry, we'll help you through this if you have trouble". But that's not supposed to mean that every client has trouble every day.

And that's where business-class comes in. When businesses purchase services, it's often to resell them, or effectively based their own services on them. As such, the purhased service becomes not only mission-critical, but it becomes a liability to the supplier because the client can have anything go wrong at all ever without it being a real negative -- money lost. As a business, every supplier is a risk. As a consumer, every supplier is a convenience.

So business-to-business sales often follow business-class service arrangements which differ in only two ways -- binning for the better quality product/service, and more available hand-holding.

My bank, for example, has a separate telephone line for business accounts. That line is covered by people speaking with local accents only. It's open earlier and later. Because problems with business accounts can't be fixed later.

Regular consumer accounts, if money is lost, it can be found later, and your bank can pay for any interest lost or reverse charges or write a letter to the government or your behalf explaining their error. With a business account, missing money means broken accounts with suppliers and clients, lost employee wages and missing products. hat can't be fixed later.

It's not false advertising to say that you can drive 120km/h on my highway -- even if it's only in the left lane and only if you're not a truck. And it's not improper for me to look the other way when you are a truck and when you do occasionally use the passing lane. But at some point, even within the limits, it becomes reckless as you start to i

Charge us per GB

[T Murphy]

Charge for internet like electricity. You get charged for the power used, not the power available, and you get charged less during off-peak hours. If bandwidth hogs insist on running torrents during peak hours, they are just helping to pay for system upgrades. I don't trust the ISPs, so the government would have to enforce the rate of a basic connection (such as 256k with 20GB/month), and the government would have to enforce some amount of expenditure on system upgrades. In theory, the upgrades would allow the basic package to improve without much change in price.

The other option is to be annexed by Finland.

Re:Charge us per GB

[jank1887]

I get charged for energy used, not power. where do you live? facilities will get a charge for peak power draw (to encourage load leveling and reduce the overcapacity requirement), but that's for BIG users. of course, this still does support the analogy.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

He's obviously never met any of my previous roommates. The bandwidth hog(s) is/are alive and well.

-Dras

bandwidth limiting per process

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps slightly off-topic, but does anybody here know about a way to limit bandwidth consumption on a per-process basis under linux?
for example, if i wish to limit bandwidth usage of my torrent client, how do i do that?

i've seen some horribly complicated methods using iptables, so i was wondering, is there anything simpler?

Re:bandwidth limiting per process

[Neil Hodges]

Most Bittorrent clients support throttling without any external means. rtorrent, for example, has a maximum bandwidth use setting that is by default disabled, but can be set fairly low.

Ut Oh

[bittles]

Shit! they're on to me! 200+ torrents in transmission, nooooo I'm not a bandwidth hog.

Re:Ut Oh

[schizix]

the movie industry made me do it, if they'd come out with a DVDRIP instantly, I wouldn't have had to leech 15 diff copies of 2012 and use all that bandwidth...

Elusive?

[2names]

Ted Nugent has 10 of these hanging on his walls.

Using what you bought

[gmuslera]

If you bought a month of internet use at up certain speed, you can't be blamed if you use it, even if you use all of it. If doing that causes problems to other customers or the ISP, is isp fault for selling more than what they have, not yours.

newlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Try posting in plane old text.
if you want to use HTML, use
.

Bandwidth Hog

[Aladrin]

First of all, I am, and always will be, a bandwidth hog. Why? Because I'm better at using the internet than everyone around me. That means I find more things, and bigger things, to download. If they someone banned P2P, I'd still have more streamed video than anyone I know. If they banned that, too, I'd still download more images. If they banned that, i'd still have more web traffic, email, IM, etc etc etc. I will always be a 'hog' in any environment. I was even told that I was "#1 abuser" of the "Unlimited" service when I was on dial-up in a small town and they tried to charge me an extra $300 that month. As someone else had just come into town, I switched, obviously.

I don't pay for the top tier of residential service to just let it sit idle. I'm going to -use- it.

I have absolutely no sympathy for people that sell me something and then get upset when I actually use it within the original limitations. I have only a small amount of sympathy for people that sell me something and I use it beyond their arbitrary limitations, even if I agreed to them.

Why?

America has -crap- for internet compared to other developed countries. We are quickly falling behind the rest of the world in terms of internet bandwidth. This is purely from greed and laziness on the part of the ISP. They refuse to upgrade and try to prevent competition at the same time. Sprint even has the nerve to advertise Pure and claim that it's faster than Cable internet, despite being 1/10th of the speed.

Re:Bandwidth Hog

[not_anne]

I work for a large ISP, and for residential accounts, we don't particularly care if you're a "bandwidth hog," as long as you're not affecting other customers around you. If we see that one person is causing significant congestion, then that's a problem that we'll address (but only when it happens repeatedly and consistently). Most of the time the customer is either unaware, has an open router, or has a virus/worm/trojan.

Re:Bandwidth Hog

[Anonymous Coward]

So the ISPs are greedy and you're not...lol.

I'll bet that you are one of those 500 pound porkers that I see at the all-you-can-buffets.

Re:Bandwidth Hog

[Amitz Sekali]

So, how to not cause congestion but still able to hog bandwidth?

"a more complex implementation of TCP"?

[Anonymous Coward]

That having said, a more complex implementation of TCP might do it differently and reduce the bitrate for all session coming from one IP-adress.

It is all a design choice.

No. There is no way to change TCP to do this. Congestion control is handled at the end hosts. Intermediate switches and routers just fling the packets. You can't solve a layer 2 problem at layer 3.

I work at an ISP for corporate clients and I can tell you we have customers that are "bandwidth hogs". For instance, we have one well-known customer that uses something like 60% of our capacity in one of our locations, a site which has hundreds of customers. The thing is, we charge by 95p bandwidth. This means they pay us much more than the other customers, which allows us to invest in the hardware and other infrastructure needed to handle their traffic.

Bandwidth Pig

[Anonymous Coward]

a.k.a ManBearPig!!!!!!!!

hold them accountable

[Anonymous Coward]

If you pay for up to 10MB per second bandwidth service then the ISP is selling you a Maximum 10MB/s x 31536000 seconds in an average year. I believe this is a maximun of 315.4TB a year they are being paid money to provide.
The "average" person will never use that much but this is what is advertised, paid for, and agreed upon. The ISP should be held responsible to provide the agreed upon and paid for service. If they cannot provide then they shouldn't be selling the service, not punishing the people that are paying for the agreed upon service. IANAL, just my opinion.

Bandwidth hogs already had a name

[dhall]

I thought bandwidth hogs had a name already. They were called spammers.

Unlike streaming technology that is consistent and less likely to impact other users on the same network (unless they're attempting to stream the same thing from the same sites), spam tends to be bursty and disruptive for other network users.

Re:Bandwidth hogs already had a name

[gujo-odori]

Well, yes, but spammers are not hogging bandwidth on your ISP's last-mile or middle-mile links. The places spammers use bandwidth are:

-On the ISP's own incoming links, and the the links from there to its MXes. This is why blocklists and graylisting are so popular: the MX can look at the connecting IP and tell it to go away and come back later, or to just go away, without ever seeing the mail. This saves not only a lot of bandwidth, but a lot of CPU time that would otherwise be used by content filters after acceptance of the message. Even here, however, link congestion is unlikely to come from spam; web traffic (especially streaming media) and p2p traffic account for far more bandwidth than spam does. Spam volume can bring an unprotected MX to its knees and it requires ISPs to operate much larger email infrastructures than they would otherwise need (at the ISP where I used to work, we could have thrown away 75% of our email infrastructure if we hadn't needed it to filter spam), but it's not the major consumer of inbound bandwidth. It just consumers more bandwidth than legit email does.

-In the outbound direction in cases where customer PCs become infected and are participating in botnets. However, this does not usually present a congestion problem. When was the last time you heard about an outbound congestion issue, and if you've ever heard of one, when was the last time you heard of one caused by bots sending spam?

In your own experience, have you ever received so much spam that it caused link congestion on a broadband connection?

Why hunt something you are sure is mythical?

[John Hasler]

Just asking.

Network saturation

[davidwr]

There have been times when telephone networks, wireless networks, and utilities have been knocked offline due to too much demand. Most utilities have "turn off" agreements with heavy industrial users who can tolerate a shutdown in exchange for a concession, such as a lower rate, to ensure consumers still have service.

Even that doesn't work. Witness the jammed cell-phone lines after a major event or in days of yore jammed long-distance phone lines on holidays.

Cutting off or throttling heavy users during times when the network is saturated is sensible. A more sensible route is to charge by the GB or TB, as long as the charge is fair and reasonable.

A fair and reasonable charge would be "X" for your initial allowance plus Y for every block of bytes after that point. X would cover fixed costs such as the cost of billing. On a per-byte basis, X would be higher than Y. A fair and reasonable charge could include time-of-week-sensitive, bitrate-sensitive, and quality-of-service-sensitive billing. For example, there could be a 20% surcharge during afternoon and evening hours, a discount when you voluntarily throttle to a very low bitrate, or a discount when you accept a lower quality of service, such as for bulk file transfers.

Involuntary speed reductions or QOS reductions could be imposed on either heavy users or those users who volunteered for them in exchange for a discount when the network is saturated. These should not last more than the duration of the saturation, and the effect should be spread around in a fair way. Of course, since customers are paying by the bit and paying higher for higher-rate/higher-quality transmission, every time a service provider did this they would be hurting their revenue stream, at least a little.

I'm a fraid to be the Bandwidth Hog

[u64]

That's why i choose the cheapest internet money can buy 250kbps/128kbps ~9€/month :D
I keep DC++ up around the clock on a silent 256 RAM 350MHz. I get on average
a movie per day, that's more then plenty for me.
Even Youtube often works _while_ p2p does two full uploads!

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\parameters]
"Tcp1323Opts"=dword:1 ;unlock larger TcpWindowSize And no Timestamp save 12 Byte every packet
"TcpAckFrequency"=dword:9 ;smoother traffic. 'd' also works, but perhaps high latency ;connections suffer if there's too long wait between ACKs...
"TcpDelAckTicks"=dword:6 ;1-6 = 100-600ms Def=200
"SackOpts"=dword:0 ;no extra packet overhead
"KeepAliveInterval"=dword:fff ;=4095 Def=1000(ms) between keepalives when no response is received ;Linux def=75000 (may have changed nowadays?)
"TcpMaxDataRetransmissions"=dword:4 ;XPDef=5 requests for data. LinuxDef=9

Carefully add one at a time and measure overall performance over time. Check if it
makes things better or worse or has no effect. I've been using these with no noticable
problems over several years.

Oh, and the 350MHz PC is also a DNS server, helps cut more traffic.
(i tweaked W2003 until it ran fine on 256 RAM)

This should be obvious

[damn_registrars]

Why would any business cancel paying customers that don't negatively impact operations?

They do it so they can tell the paying customers that they have to purchase "premium" access to maintain their use level. They know that there are plenty of people out there who are willing to do so.

Now that Comcast owns control in NBC

[keytohwy]

I wonder if this just gets worse. Or traffic shaping to legit sites like Hulu, but degraded if I want the same content from iTunes or Amazon.

If I'm paying for a 15 mb connection

[TranscendentalAnarch]

If I'm paying for a 15 mb connection, I should be able to use 15 mb of bandwidth 24/7 if I want to. If the ISP is going to limit bandwidth usage to a certain amount or throttle the connection during peak hours, the customer should be made aware of this before the purchase.

Re:If I'm paying for a 15 mb connection

[Chirs]

Typically you're paying for a connection rated for _up to_ 15Mb.

A true 15Mb symmetric connection is a third of a T3 line, costing in the vicinity of $500/month.

Pareto principle

[jd2112]

The Pareto Principle is well known in both IT and Businesss circles. It states that for many events roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. (This is sometimes called the 80/20 rule) So it should not have suprised anyone that a fairly small group of so-called "bandwidth hogs" use most of the bandwidth. Since this is well known (Even MBA-holding PHBs should have heard of it) I have always called BS when ISPs bring up the bandwidth hog boogeyman.

They sell TV service over the same wire anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Qwest wanted me to pay extra for their broken (won't work with my PVR) TV service. I declined. But their hand is tipped: they're happy with the idea of people using the wire for high-bandwidth multimedia. So yeah, by the ISPs' own standards, there is no such thing as a bandwidth "hog." You can stream all day at full blast, and as long as you pay extra to get it from their own (subcontracted) server, it's business as usual.

The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[TheLink]

One problem is by default many network devices/OSes do bandwidth distribution on a per _connection_ basis not on a per IP basis. So if there are only two users and one user has 1000 active connections and the other has just one active connection the first user will get about 1000 times more bandwidth than the second user.

P2P clients typically have very very many connections open. Wheres other clients might not.

A much fairer way would be to share bandwidth amongst users on a per IP basis. That means if two users are active they get about 50% each, even if one user has 100 P2P connections and the other user has only one measly http connection.

Then within each customer's "per IP" queue, to improve the customer's experience you could prioritize latency or loss sensitive stuff like like dns, tcp acks, typical game connections, ssh, telnet and so on, over all the other less sensitive/important stuff.

Of course if you have oversubscribed too much, you will have way too many active users for your available bandwidth. A fair distribution of "not enough" will still be not enough.

If you have two people and you give each a fair slice of one banana, they each get half a banana. Maybe both are satisfied.
If you have 1000 people and you give each a fair slice of one banana, they each get 1/1000th of a banana. Not many are going to be satisfied ;).

And that's where we come to the other problem.

The problem with P2P is many customers will often leave their P2P clients on 24/7, EVEN when some of them don't really care very much about how fast it goes (some do, but some don't). To revisit the banana analogy, what you have here is 1000 people, and 1000 of them ask for a slice of the banana, EVEN though some of them don't really care - they'll only really feel like having a slice next week, when they're back from their holiday!

So how do you figure out who cares and who doesn't care?

Right now what many ISPs do is have quota limits - they limit how much data can be transferred in total. When the quota runs out "stuff happens" (connections go slow, users get charged more etc). So the users have to manage it.

BUT this is PRIMITIVE, because if you can figure out when a user doesn't care about the speed etc, technology allows you to easily prioritize other traffic over that user's "who cares" traffic.

So what's a better way of figuring it out?

My proposal is to give the customers a "dialer" which allows users to "log on" to "priority Internet" (and then only something starts counting the bytes ;) ), BUT even when they "log out" they _still_ get always-on internet access except it's just on a lower priority (but NO byte quota!). A customer might be restricted to say 10GBs at "priority" a month.

The advantage of this method is:
1) There is no WASTED capacity - almost all the available bandwidth can be used all the time, without affecting the people who NEED "priority" internet access (and still have unused quota).
2) It allows a ISP to better figure out how much capacity to actually buy.
3) If there is insufficient capacity for "priority Internet" the ISP can actually inform the user and not put the user on "priority" (where the quota is counted). While the user might not be that happy, this is much fairer, than getting crappy access while having your quota still being deducted.

Perhaps this system is not needed and will never be needed in countries that don't seem to have big problems offering 100Mbps internet access to lots of people.

But it might still be useful in countries where the internet access and telcos are poorly regulated/managed. For example - you run a small ISP in one of those crappy countries and so you pay more for bandwidth from your providers- this system could allow you to make better use of your bandwidth and to be a more efficient competitor. And maybe even give your customers better internet service at the same time.

Yes the ISP could always buy enough bandwidth so that _everyone_ can get the offered amount even though not everyone really cares all the time (believe me this is true). But that could mean the ISP's internet access packages being much more expensive than they could be.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[TheCarp]

> A much fairer way would be to share bandwidth amongst users on a per IP basis.
> That means if two users are active they get about 50% each, even if one user has 100 P2P
> connections and the other user has only one measly http connection.

Although, it really doesn't matter if Alice gets 99% of the bandwidth if Bob is only trying to use .1 % of the bandwith. As long as he gets that .1% that he wants, it is all fair as far as he is concerned. That is to say, someone with "only one measly http connection" is clearly unlikely to be using near the bandwidth he is subscribed to.

> Of course if you have oversubscribed too much, you will have way too many active users for your available
> bandwidth. A fair distribution of "not enough" will still be not enough.

This, I think, is more the reality. ISPs have been pulling this game for a long time. I left one of my first ISPs because of this in the mid 90s. I was on my 14.4 kbps modem, with my Unlimited service. They had the nerve to call me
up and tell me that I was on the "offenders list" because I was one of the top users of time on the system. I told them that I had an unlimited account. They said "Your usage amount is business level, you either need to cut back or
get a business line".

I quickly found a new ISP and they lost my business. Its too bad how hard the broadband companies have made that with locked in contracts and well... they even own the lines now!

Voting with my dollars worked for me back in the 90s, but now, there are just less viable players in the field, and none of them seem much better than the others.

The problem really is ignorance. Too many people just don't understand the service that they are buying well enough to know when they are being offered less for their money than advertised, and a full comparison of the value of services is complicated and not easily available or easily made relevant to an individual (a comparison of services not offered in my area doesn't help me). As such all competition is based on geography, speed, and price.

Blaming your customers for your poor capacity planning is kind of bad form, if you ask me. If you can't compete fairly (that is offering the unlimited service, at the speeds that you know your customers are expecting when they buy it), then perhaps you overplayed your hand, and need look no further for places to land the buck.

-Steve

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[petermgreen]

One problem is by default many network devices/OSes do bandwidth distribution on a per _connection_ basis not on a per IP basis.
Standard IP networks do bandwith distribution on the basis of the clients backing down (or if nobody backs down on the basis of who can get packets in when the queue isn't full). If the systems all use equally agressive implementations of TCP then each TCP connection will get a roughly equal bandwidth. OTOH a custom UDP based protocol can easilly take far more or far less than it's fair share depending on how agressive it is.

A much fairer way would be to share bandwidth amongst users on a per IP basis. That means if two users are active they get about 50% each, even if one user has 100 P2P connections and the other user has only one measly http connection.

It's a nice idea but there are a couple of issues
1: it takes more computing resources to implement a source based priority queue than to implement a simple fifo queue.
2: to be of any use such prioritisation needs to happen at the pinch point (that is at the place there is actually a queue built up), unless you deliberately pinch off bandwidth or you overbuild large parts of your network predicting the pinch point location may not be easy.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[kimvette]

Even fairer would be for the ISPs to actually deliver what they advertised to their customers, and not impose limits on "unlimited" internet use after having accepted payment for the service they sold.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[kimvette]

Although, it really doesn't matter if Alice gets 99% of the bandwidth if Bob is only trying to use .1 % of the bandwith.

Honestly, that's not the customer's problem. The ISP offered a service for money, the customer accepted and paid that money, now the ISP should be forced to deliver - and if that means they have to fix their network design flaws, then they should fix those problems. They shouldn't be allowed to punt a customer who decided to simply use the product/service the ISP offered and they accepted as evidenced by their payments for product/service.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[TheLink]

> it takes more computing resources to implement a source based priority queue than to implement a simple fifo queue.

Similarly it takes more computing resources to do what ISPs are already doing (throttling, disconnects based on XYZ) than to implement a simple fifo queue.

> to be of any use such prioritisation needs to happen at the pinch point (that is at the place there is actually a queue built up), unless you deliberately pinch off bandwidth

I'm sure they can find the pinch points - they're the spots where they keep having congestion (which should show up on one of their monitoring screens).

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[TheLink]

> Although, it really doesn't matter if Alice gets 99% of the bandwidth if Bob is only trying to use .1 % of the bandwith. As long as he gets that .1% that he wants.

It depends, if you allow "bursting" it matters.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, that's not the customer's problem.

How naive. It's almost cute.

In ANY business transaction, every problem is both counter-parties problem. The share of how that problem is solved depends on the price elasticity of demand.

They shouldn't be allowed to punt a customer who decided to simply use the product/service the ISP offered and they accepted as evidenced by their payments for product/service.

Oh, "there ought to be a law!" No, there shouldn't. If the telco's don't want to do business with somebody, it is BOTH their problems. It doesn't matter that the parties have done business before. I don't want to be stuck in perpetual contracts just because I once did business with somebody.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[hrimhari]

I think you're concentrating too much on bandwidth usage and neglecting user experience.

That one lousy http connection is likely to take 1 minute to download a content that should take 5 seconds in a non overloaded network.

It has little importance that the 0.1% user is only going for 0.1% if it takes forever for him to get the content he wants. And that's typically what happens when you have such a user next to a heavy P2P user clogging the uplink with thousands of TCP/UDP packets.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[kimvette]

They SHOULD be forced to deliver what they sold because at least here they are government-granted monopolies (or at best duopolies). There really isn't anyone else to turn to for the service.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[gnu-user]

I remember hunting for an ISP back in the mid 90's. All ISPs priced there service as if bandwidth was going to be 100% utilized. A cheap rate was roughly $200/month...

Overselling bandwidth is a good deal for both the provider and the consumer. Without it the net as we know it would have been stillborn. Yes there are abuses, but the alternative is far worse.

In some more perfect world, an ISP could be counted on to clearly explain all the tradeoffs, but in the world I live in, marketeers speak to rubes, and ISPs differentiate themselves via specious and irrelevant shiny talk of "7MBS bandwidth"

The "harm" you experience when the ISP can not fully deliver in return for the artificially low amount you are spending doesn't really hold much weight. If you need the bandwidth, there are many who will honestly sell it to you. It's just that the real premium for that is 2X to 10X the shared rate.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[fast turtle]

If You've sold me a good/service based upon claims that

1. it's always on 24/7
2. I have this much bandwidth available to use
3. I have this many mailboxes available

then I fully expect to be able to use said good/service to it's limit when/how ever I want. I do not expect you to interfere with said good/service after I have purchased the right to use it as I want, otherwise I can/will nail you to the wall for false advertising and contract violation.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[TheCarp]

That depends on how you man bandwidth. I would say that, in the case you describe, he is NOT getting the bandwidth promised. It is the responsibility of the ISP to A) enforce their caps fairly (and as advertised) and B) make sure they have enough "pipe" to handle ALL of the demands that are made within the allowed amounts.

So if I subscribed for 100 units of bandwith (it doesn't matter what the units are), I should have that available to me, regardless of what any other network user is taking up. If they can provide that while oversubscribing (because most people seldom use even a fraction of their allotment), then more power to them.

If that means they need a LOT more pipe, to deliever what they sold, then maybe they shouldn't have oversold so much pipe. Oversubscription is always a bit of a gamble.

Sometimes you gamble and lose, sometimes you can't prevent your commitments to one customer from causing issues with the commitments to another. When that happens to a company, they need to find a way to deal and to adjust either their capabilities or their offerings.

It is regrettable to offer a service, have genuine problems, and have to modify agreements or spend more on expansion. It is downright dishonest to continue to advertise a service that you already know that you can't provide as advertised, and continue to take your customers money while blaming them for being why you can't provide the service that they are paying you for.

-Steve

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[jmorris42]

> I quickly found a new ISP and they lost my business.

You say that like you think you were really 'showing them' by taking your business elsewhere. They were trying to get rid of you and when you left their attitude was more of "I pity the fool that signs that a**hole!"

> Voting with my dollars worked for me back in the 90s, but now, there are just less viable players
> in the field, and none of them seem much better than the others.

Yes, there used to be a few 'hacker friendly' ISPs who were usually run by people like thee and me and utterly clueless about ISP economics. They went out of business. It isn't quite as bad in the broadband world but back in the dialup era it was just insane to keep a nethog once we got past the period when those heavy users were also helping bring in new customers. Do the math.

Customer 1 is a nethog. They nail up a connection pretty much 24/7/365 and push as many bits through it as they can. They pay regular price. In the dialup days that was typically $19.95/mo and you pretty much had to dedicate a modem and terminal server port to the idiot. ISP's cost one modem, port telco charge for one business line plus about 4% of a T1 for upstream. Hint, the ISP is paying more than $20/mo for the inbound phone line unless the ISP is AT&T.

Customer 2 is a normal. They connect for four or five hours per day, perhaps six or seven the first six months. You can sign up four to six of these per port. And since most of their activity is bursty the impact on your upstream is minimal.

Customer 3 is a light user. After the shiny wore off the Internet they typically do email and hit a few websites. One port will support ten or more of these people.

It should be obvious that you should want to lose Customer 1 ASAP since they cost you more money than they pay in. If you have a good mix of the second and third type you can get six to eight customers per line and not have too much fussing. AOL used to run ten to twenty customers per dialup port.

In the broadbad era the upstream is the biggest contended resource and depending on the market can be very expensive. Again, the P2P user is the one you want to gift to your competition if you can do it in a way that won't lose his friends/family or generate undue media attention.

> The problem really is ignorance. Too many people just don't understand the service that they are
> buying well enough to know when they are being offered less for their money than advertised...

Agreed, but it is you who are ignorant. I admin at a public library. We have a 6MBps link delivered as four T1 circuits and we also have a 6Mbps business grade DSL that I use to push most of the http traffic through to help the load on the main link. The DSL link is pretty much what us normal people buy and is just a little over $100/mo. It is good but doesn't always deliver full capacity. If it goes out we just fail over to driving everything out the T1s. The T1 circuits cost a hell of a lot more but always deliver the goods and have a great SLA.

Question, in your world why would we pay for the T1 lines? Why would anyone? Really, if we could lawyer up and force AT&T to give us the 6Mbps we 'paid for' 24/7 why are we paying for the dedicated service? Because we understand the real world. And the C block we get as part of the statewide WAN is a big plus. :)

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[TheCarp]

These issues were going on back when there was real competition. However, I think my own point illustrates this... in the 90s I left an ISP over this. Right now I am with Verizon FIOS. If they pulled this sort of tactic with me, who would I turn to?

The only real rival in town is comcast. Thats it. Two big players hardly make a free market.

-Steve

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[shaitand]

"These issues were going on back when there was real competition."

What real competition? I must have missed that part of history. Before High speed you had dialup and all the independents had to buy lines from the phone company, the result is that no independent could could offer better terms than the phone company and stay in business.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[shaitand]

"All ISPs priced there service as if bandwidth was going to be 100% utilized. A cheap rate was roughly $200/month..."

Not sure what you are referring to, in the 90's there was dialup and the average price was more like $15/month.

"Overselling bandwidth is a good deal for both the provider and the consumer."

No its not. Sure it artificially lowers rates (or rather artificially increases the speed for those rates, the actual rates only go up).

But it also artificially lowers the speed and increases the rates for anyone who absolutely has to have guaranteed bandwidth for financially justifiable reason and has the means to get it.

If ISP's sold real bandwidth the prices would be the same, the speeds may or may not be lower (all real investigations have failed to produce any evidence of congested pipes, just ISP's reluctant to update infrastructure) and the price of guaranteed bandwidth would be much much lower than it is today.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[AmiMoJo]

The problem is that ordinary users are now becoming bandwidth hogs.

Downloading large amounts of video used to be the preserve of those with the technical know how to use P2P, IRC or Usenet. Now everyone is doing it via YouTube, iPlayer, Hulu and all the rest. Now everyone is demanding continuous bandwidth at peek times.

The old trick of "get rid of the 5% of most unprofitable users" with the old bandwidth hogs excuse doesn't work any more. ISPs have only two options: add more capacity or tell users they can't watch video. Incredibly BT seem to be doing the latter, preventing users from accessing high quality streams on iPlayer and YouTube at peek times.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[gnu-user]

I forget how long I've been in this game...

Not sure what you are referring to, in the 90's there was dialup
and the average price was more like $15/month.

My time frame from memory is about 1994. I came to Minneapolis in 93, and spent roughly a year looking for an ISP. MRNet was the only real
provider, and as a consortium, they priced service assuming you were a
reseller. A friend of mine at 3M actually did use them, and he was
paying $185/mo for dialup, well beyond what I could afford.

Not to surprisingly, this was a reasonable rate from a reseller
perspective. The going rate for a T1 of internet was in the $5K range.

Roughly a year later, some internet enthusiasts put together the
wonderfully named "winternet" and offered access for $25/mo. I was
absolutely thrilled!

They were, of course, selling at a rate that reflected the natural
over subscription of casual internet use, not the potential cost of full
usage. They saw what ISPs were to be before others did.

But it also artificially lowers the speed and increases the rates for anyone who absolutely has to have guaranteed bandwidth for financially justifiable reason and has the means to get it.

Last I checked, wholesale reseller bandwidth was around $100/Mb. That's the rate they charge each other. Here in Minneapolis, the ILEC will sell you a T1 of internet for around $300-$500. If you need guaranteed bandwidth, that's a pretty reasonable markup considering it includes transport cost in addition to internet.

If you are paying $30/mo for "7Mb" (the most aggressive current local consumer pricing) you are pretty much in the position of buying dollar
bills for nickels, nice if you can get it, but clearly there's a "catch".

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[shaitand]

You are going further back than me on the internet issue. The first connections I remember ran about $30/month for dial-up and I was still in high school at that point.

You are a bit off on the bandwidth prices though:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2008/10/7/1223396848839/ipt_price_drop.jpg

In Q2 2008 the average price per mb on a gigE port in the US and Europe was between $10-14.

That would make a 7mb home connection $70 - $98 for dedicated bandwidth wholesale. There are other costs at play and that home connection for $30 SHOULD probably end up being around 2mb/s if all the bandwidth games were stopped. But that 2mb would be 2mb/2mb not 2mb/256k or some other such nonsense, in fact it would be 2mb full-duplex so in practice that would give a potential 4mb/s if using maxing out your up/down connection. That is 10368gb/month of potential transfer EACH WAY.

Of course that means more infrastructure to support those connections and buying more connections. That in turn means higher volume of those large infrastructure components which would lower their cost per unit and drop that cost per mb further.

This starts a cycle that would eventually get us back up to the advertised speeds of today, but they would be real speeds without bandwidth games and consumers could host their own content, voice servers for games, game servers, etc, etc.

And that, would drive a concern for IPv6 to the end user but that's a discussion for another day. ;)

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[BikeHelmet]

Yes, there used to be a few 'hacker friendly' ISPs who were usually run by people like thee and me and utterly clueless about ISP economics. They went out of business. It isn't quite as bad in the broadband world but back in the dialup era it was just insane to keep a nethog once we got past the period when those heavy users were also helping bring in new customers. Do the math.

Teksavvy? (Canada) No ports blocked unless you want them blocked. 200GB/mo for $30, plus $10 per 100GB extra.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[wvmarle]

Question, in your world why would we pay for the T1 lines? Why would anyone?

I think the real answer here is, or should be: "we need the reliability". Now I have no idea how reliable that 6 Mbps DSL is (at USD 100 per month it should be pretty good), and how much downtime costs you.

And you get a C-block of IP space just for a library? You really have that many servers that you want to connect to a direct IP address? I'd expect that you want to connect most if not everything through a single firewall, blocking all direct incoming connections. Unless you specifically allow those.

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[Pr0Hak]

What real competition? I must have missed that part of history. Before High speed you had dialup and all the independents had to buy lines from the phone company, the result is that no independent could could offer better terms than the phone company and stay in business.

That really isn't the way it turned out. Before DSL and cable gobbled up most of the dialup market, the vast majority of Internet users were customers of ISPs that did *not* own the lines connecting them to their users. The telcos generally weren't successful ISPs at the consumer level until after dialup began to fade (although many were successful in selling upstream transit to ISPs in addition to phone lines).

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[kimvette]

. . . which is direct response to the unlimited internet advertised for downloading and listening to music, watching movies, videos, videoconferencing, and so forth. How exactly is the consumer in the wrong again?

Re:The thing about P2P and bandwidth distribution

[AmiMoJo]

I'm not saying that the consumer is wrong, I'm saying that the ISPs didn't expect video to take off like it has which IMHO was extremely short sighted.

Hunting the mythical bandwidth hog?

[Anonymous Coward]

SELECT user_id FROM usage ORDER BY bytes_out DESC

or is that assuming too much?

Why charge per GB xferred won't work

[GuyFawkes]

It won't work because for 90% of internet users their monthly bill will go DOWN, a LOT.

I use an old Samsung pre-pay mobile, my average monthly cost is less than 2 dollars.

Which is why telco's LOVE stuff like line rental, monthly plans, etc etc etc.

The whole cost of bandwidth thing is just arbitrary bullshit, the actual physical cost of running a given pipe at 0% capacity, and the same pipe at 100% capacity, is measured in cents worth of electricity per hour.

It is artificial scarcity, no more.

Re:Why charge per GB xferred won't work

[mypalmike]

The whole cost of bandwidth thing is just arbitrary bullshit, the actual physical cost of running a given pipe at 0% capacity, and the same pipe at 100% capacity, is measured in cents worth of electricity per hour.

It's not actually pipes or tubes.

Aggregate bandwidth exceeding router or upstream and peering bandwidth capacity impose real costs for ISPs. It's not BS.

Too cheap to meter

[Animats]

X would cover fixed costs such as the cost of billing.

Billing is a very large cost. In the telco world, the cost of billing passed the cost of transmission about two decades ago. That's even more true for Internet transmission at the retail level. With proposed "economic" solutions, you have to factor in the costs of billing. Those costs apply both to the provider and the customer. If customers have to meter to control their expenses, that's a cost to the customer in attention, and drives business to competitors that require less attention.

Handling one phone call about a billing complaint eats up months of profits from selling the service. Complex billing means big call centers.

Overselling is the *whole point* of an utility.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Over selling isn't wrong,

Huh ? It is a lie, it is wrong, and should be illegal. I welcome you to show me otherwise.

It's actually much less than wrong; overselling is precisely what a communications network like the Internet was designed to achieve. Bandwidth on long-haul communications cables is a limited resource. The Internet is a scheme to share that bandwidth efficiently by overselling it.

Do you think that the existing transatlantic cables, taken together, have enough bandwidth to allow everybody in the USA with an Internet connection to simultaneously get their local maximum bandwidth to Europe? The whole point of the way the network is designed is that since the majority of the users aren't sending packets to Europe at any given time, they get a better deal (bandwidth/price) on connectivity by sharing a transoceanic cable that might not be able to accommodate them all at once, instead of each of them setting up their own dedicated transatlantic cable or channel.

This isn't the case only for Internet, but also for the old phone network ("all circuits are currently busy"), the power grid (blackouts during times of heavy use), or pretty much any public utility.

Re:Overselling is the *whole point* of an utility.

[Maximum Prophet]

In the old days, the farther you called, the more you were charged. These days with Akamai and other proxy companies, many of the bytes you receive are generated on the major ISP you connect to, so the bandwidth to them is already paid for. ("Free")

It would be a lot harder to bill for, but charging for packets off network, vs. packets on network would make sense. What people are complaining about is and advertised rate of n Mb/s in large print, and hidden rules that say if you use more than m Mb/s in x minutes, they'll cancel your service. That wouldn't really be so bad if there were many ISPs to choose from, but for most people there is one phone and/or one cable provider.

Christmas with the Marx Bros.

[BancBoy]

There is no evidence that santa clause do not exist either. Everyone grown-up person will agree it a myth tho.

I believe you meant Sanity Claus. ;)

Re:Interesting headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, do not feed the trolls ;)

I'll bite: I FULLY AGREE WITH YOU!!!

Bandwidth hog

[Anonymous Coward]

The only bandwidth hogs I know of are the ad servers.

MOD PARENT UP

[petermgreen]

Except this is no longer true in a full-duplex world, you can approach 99% utilization on Ethernet at full-duplex. At the time token-ring was competitive, full-duplex Ethernet was just emerging. While IBM's marketing and some of the complexity of token-ring hurt it, what really killed it was the widespread emergence of full-duplex ethernet switches which basically eliminated the under-utilization problem while not having the complexity of dealing with a token-ring network.
Agreed, lots of people seem to think that ethernet implies CSMA/CD and make claims about modern ethernet networks based on CSMA/CD ethernet networks.

Re:Why not?

[nobodylocalhost]

Some of us have plenty use for 100mbit connections. 720p video streaming, voip telephony, video or audio conference, remote desktop, desktop view sharing all require higher through put. Most of them as well as gaming also require lower ping time. You also have multi processing network such as distributed network video encoding and application over terracotta cluster that you can actually set up at home over the net with your friends. Some people lack both experience and imagination in using the bandwidth given, that does not mean those of us who can dream and produce should be held back by lower standards.

Re:Bandwidth can be hogged - or oversold?

[formfeed]

If your brother had the same taste in torrents as his roomie, and they had a caching server, there wouldn't be a bandwith problem. If 100 people download the latest CD, or watch the new youtube fab, the local ISP has to get the content only once upstream.

Problem is, they oversold bandwith to the point, where upstream is saturated. So, you cancel heavy user, or preferably heavy users with a high percentage of unique traffic. Because that's all you can do as an ISP once your backbone is gone.

I say screw em

[ILuvRamen]

What are the options here? Upgrade their network to pretend like everyone will use the max speed like 75% of the time and charge me $300/month for internet to make up the expense OR disconnect someone that's taking up the same amount of bandwidth as 100 other average users. That's 100 customers worth and they're paying 1/100th as much for what that service would cost. I say kick em out. I'm a web designer and a very busy geek in general who uses youtube and Hulu and online games and I still don't even come close to the assholes that run downloads basically 24/7 just because they can and they're greedy.

Not True

[Fnord666]

But Wes Felter corrects that mis-impression in a post to a network neutrality mailing list.

"This is definitely not true; TCP implements a pretty weak form of "fairness" that is different (and worse) than the common sense definition of the term. George Ou and Lawrence Roberts have explained this several times."

This must be some new definition of the word "corrects" that I am not familiar with.

Bad old days of Frame Relay

[Tisha_AH]

In most cases, this is the fault of the companies who advertise "high speed" and leave open the implication that you can do anything you want with it. Put that in front of a geek and we will push those limits and come up with a dozen new ways to use that bandwidth up.

In a past incarnation I worked for a CLEC who had a large number of bank customers who used 64 Kbps DDS circuits for each automated teller machine. Everything went through a frame relay connection and those customers would constantly tinker with their Bc Be and CIR values for each frame circuit. We spent an inordinate amount of time each month tweaking each circuit to the new values that the customer wanted.

The big secret was that we did not penalize them for sustained bursts of traffic. Of course we told them that we would and that we would drop packets if they went beyond the duration of a burst. As long as the connections did not overwhelm our backhaul off of the data switches we never really cared too much. A few customers figured that out and if I had a moment of morbid curiosity I would peek in at their usage and see a high sustained data rate (usually a branch office and not an ATM and their IT folks would try to do backups across the frame relay network at night).

+1 we can only hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

Though I honestly think that mesh networks can work, I am kind of against broad use of municipal wifi because it really doesn't scale well as it is now. Better, broader, lower frequency signal ranges are needed for even mesh networks to scale well in congested areas, and as it stands it's the cellular/wireless carriers that are snagging most of the bandwidth that gets opened up.

Re:Interesting headline.

[KrimZon]

THEY do! They're everywhere, clicking the links in the summaries on tech sites.

Cogeco

[DarthVain]

I just got my bill from Cogeco Cable the other day up here in Ontario, Canada.

I has rather pissed to see that I got charged an additional 30$ on top of the 70$ I already pay monthly for my CableTV/Internets. My cap is 60GB and I exceeded that. I don't contest that. I also concede that Cogeco has a right to charge for extra bandwidth over cap.

What does piss me off, is that they charge 1.50$ a GB, where it should be more inline with 0.25$ a GB. They and Bell are using their duopoly to artificially inflate their numbers as usual.

However even that I could maybe live with, what really pisses me off is that we are more less blind. You see, as part of your online account services you can monitor your "Internet Usage" which I did use to make sure I didn't exceed my cap. In most cases I can schedule my downloading appropriately to my cap, and if I REALLY want to download, then I have full disclosure and know how much it will cost me if I so choose. However, what they DON'T tell you (if you search around it is in small print someplace) is that the stupid POS "Internet Usage" tool, only updates every day or two. So what happened to me is I starting downloading, hit some great speeds, and basically killed my cap and exceeded it in TWO days without notice. Then on the third day I see I am at 150% of my cap, up from 0%. That sure is a useful tool!

Sure one could argue, that its your responsibility to keep track of this sort of thing, however I would argue they your wrong. For one you are paying for this service they should be required to provide this better, and secondly they are the ones stipulating a limit on you, they should be responsible for monitoring not me. At any time (and I never have) I could march outside and look at my electric meter, and see exactly how much I have used and are currently using.

God I hate them so much.

Re:Cogeco

[Shrike82]

So what happened to me is I starting downloading, hit some great speeds, and basically killed my cap and exceeded it in TWO days without notice. Then on the third day I see I am at 150% of my cap, up from 0%.

Started downloading what? Did it never occur to you at any point during those two days to look at whatever you were downloading and check the file sizes? To check how much of your bandwidth you had used? You obviously queued up a large amount of files to download and yet you never thought about possibly going over your bandwidth allowance? You say they charged you $30 at $1.50 per GB over your allowance (20 GB right?). So in the two days during which you went from 0% to 150% of your cap you managed to download your 60 GB allowance and an extra 20 GB. Did you never think to yourself "Hmm maybe I shouldn't download these 80 GB worth of files all at once". Did you never think to install a bandwidth monitor on your PC instead of relying on one from your ISP? For God's sake man, take some responsibility for your connection, your PC and your actions.

they are the ones stipulating a limit on you, they should be responsible for monitoring not me.

They do monitor you, but they don't need to do it in real time. If you want that you can very, very easily do it yourself.

At any time (and I never have) I could march outside and look at my electric meter, and see exactly how much I have used and are currently using.

Install and bandwidth monitor and you can do that. Then you'll have no reason for ever going over your allowance again.

Re:Cogeco

[DarthVain]

Not sure how much you have downloaded before, but it is very hard to tell sometimes.

Yes I did queue up a LOT. As it was day 1 of the month, and I had 60GB to play with. Many times things start out very low and give a long time to download (sometime 1 week+ depending on how obscure), which is why you run a lot at the same time... It just happened that I lucked into some crazy speed and finished a bunch of stuff. That said if I had a way to see my bandwidth in real time I could have killed some processes and saved myself some coin.

I would argue by checking the tool provided to monitor my "Internet Usage" I am doing my due diliganece and taking responsibility for my my actions. I am just saying that they should provide me a tool that does this in real time if they propose to limit me by cap or charge me extra for going over, I don't think that is an reasonable expectation.

Seeing as I have no choice in options, and little recource I guess I will have to look at 3rd party solutions so that this doesn't happen again. As I said I am trying my best to say within the limits they make me adhere to but they certainly are not making it easy.

I can google some bandwidth monitors, but if you have any suggestions I am all ears...

that's easy

[buddyglass]

Top 5% of users probably consume around 30% of the total bandwidth. That means they need to pay for 30% more out-of-network core bandwidth. Is that cost footed by the heavy users? No. It's distributed across every paying customer.

Re:that's easy

[Shrike82]

It's distributed across every paying customer.

Yes, very much the same way that you're paying less for your connection thanks to that nice old lady down the street who's grandson had Broadband installed in her house so she could order her shopping online once a week, and doesn't do anything else on the Internet at all. If she (and everyone like her) paid only for what she used you'd suddenly find yourself paying more for your connection.

Re:that's easy

[shaitand]

"Top 5% of users probably consume around 30% of the total bandwidth. That means they need to pay for 30% more out-of-network core bandwidth."

Why? The bandwidth would still need to be there and paid for by the ISP if it weren't utilized.

Re:that's easy

[buddyglass]

Uh, how do you figure?

Re:that's easy

[buddyglass]

Obviously there are fixed costs and there are costs related to bandwidth usage. Core capacity isn't the only one tied to bandwidth. My usage is approximately 3GB downstream per month, so I'll take my chances on pay-per-byte.

Re:that's easy

[shaitand]

Even with the top 5% of users in place no major ISP is ever at over 50% utilization at peak. These ISP's are whining about projected usage in a number of years requiring them to upgrade their infrastructure before they'd like to. An upgrade taxpayers already paid for I might add.

But even if they were utilized, they have to buy a big enough pipe to handle the biggest peaks in traffic. They have to pay the same price for that pipe whether it sits idle or its maxed to capacity. Bandwidth that isn't being used is just wasted.

Re:that's easy

[buddyglass]

So they buy a pipe fat enough to ensure peak utilization consumes 50% of capacity. Now cut peak utilization by 30%. Would that not allow them to buy a "thinner" pipe, since peak capacity is decreased, and still afford the same guarantee (i.e. peak utilization = 50% of capacity)? Or if the current "pipe" is already in place, save money by postponing upgrades (as you mentioned)?

New infrastructure costs money. I'm either going to pay an unfair share of that cost by virtue of the fact that my ISP charges a bandwidth-agnostic flat rate and I'm a low-consumption customer, or I'm going to pay an unfair share by virtue of the fact that I'm a taxpayer whose tax dollars subsidize the cost of that new infrastructure.

Re:that's easy

[shaitand]

"I'm either going to pay an unfair share of that cost by virtue of the fact that my ISP charges a bandwidth-agnostic flat rate and I'm a low-consumption customer"

Yes that's how things work. When you sign up for a blockbuster unlimited 3 at a time rental plan you the typical consumer who doesn't take advantage of it subsidizes the guy who changes his movies out every night. That doesn't make the guy using his plan 'an abuser'.

You the guy who buys high markup drinks, fries, or shakes pays the subsidy for the savvy consumer who buys dollar double cheeseburgers only and drinks at home.

Re:that's easy

[buddyglass]

While I agree with you that the high-consumption customer is not an "abuser" so long as he stays within the terms of his service contract, the ISP is also not being "abusive" if it decides to terminate his contract, so long as it also acts within the agreed upon terms. Its also not being particularly evil if it decides to codify usage caps in future service contracts, or decides to go with a per-bandwidth pricing scheme.

TCP isn't really self-limiting as described

[kyliaar]

The technical analysis of how TCP works is a bit flawed. Dropped packets from the server to the client show up as unacked bits in the stream being sent. The server will have a limit of how many bits it will send from the previous acked bit. Thus, if it stops receiving acks, it will continue to resend data that was sent previously but un-acked. Thus, the server does not reduce the number of packets it is sending, it just keeps re-sending data that has not been acked. The only rate limiting in TCP is the rate of 'new' data sent.

There are also other conditions that occur that break this assumption that TCP will slow everyone down equally. Any effects of TCP self-limiting its rate of transfer will only impact long connections, not connections that are established for a short period... such as an http get/response on a small file, DNS requests, etc.

Re:TCP isn't really self-limiting as described

[shaitand]

"Thus, the server does not reduce the number of packets it is sending, it just keeps re-sending data that has not been acked."

Actually when packets are dropped, the tcp window size is reduced. This mean fewer packets sent without waiting for an ack and an overall reduction in transfer speed. This happens on a very low level and there are never a huge number of backed up packets waiting to be resent that would congest the pipe as you suggest. The slower connection relieves the congestion in the pipe, the server catches up, and the new tcp window becomes smaller and smaller until there aren't any unack'd packets to resend.

The best thing is that tcp reevaluates the window from time to time, so if the congestion is no longer present it will speed back up.

"Any effects of TCP self-limiting its rate of transfer will only impact long connections, not connections that are established for a short period... such as an http get/response on a small file, DNS requests, etc."

Which is a good thing. Outside of viruses there aren't many things that require enough tiny requests to congest a pipe. Big transfers require big requests to complete in order to be efficient, they are less time sensitive and they are what are most affected by long transfers.

Bandwidth hogging

[russotto]

ISPs disconnecting "bandwidth hogs" is about as proper as The Phone Company disconnecting customers with teenaged daughters (for those of you who remember the days before ubiquitous cell phones, anyway)

Re:Bandwidth hogging

[hitmark]

difference is that the telco would just bill the household for x hours use, and leave the disconnecting to the parents.

thing is tho that i suspect more people would be happy with slower connecions, as long as it was flat/fixed rate.

"We've found a witch! Can we burn 'er?"

[HTH NE1]

Some sites sort statistics by who used the most and, if that amount is much more than anyone else, they cut off that user, even if there was no problem with that amount of usage. Find the outliers for a month, penalize or cut them up, repeat until your user base is sufficiently cowed.

My city's government website silently cut off my employer's access by IP range because I was accessing too many traffic cameras at once for too long of a period of time (building a time-lapse video of snowfall and melt across the city, from at most 3 IP addresses not simultaneously). The government website simply pretended to be off-line to our subnet (stopped at their router). Human Resources was unable to do criminal background checks on potential employees (head of HR is retired law enforcement). They expected anyone they cut off to contact them to regain access.

Thing is, if I had used a service like TOR to anonymize my IP address for this, they wouldn't have been able to identify any particular IP user or IP range as an outlying bandwidth user and they probably wouldn't have noticed it at all, though it would frustrate the timing for the timelapse video.

It's like they're trying to organize the data in ways that let them find witches to burn.

Re:Why not?

[Bigjeff5]

I can't tell the difference between the Netflix HD movies and my DVDs (i.e. they come in at DVD quality), and I get that at 3mbit, and voip, RDP, and desktop sharing don't require all that much bandwidth for what they do - the big issue with all of those is latency, not bandwidth (after a certain point, very low bandwidth would be an issue). Video conferencing will use a bit more than those, especially if you have a very high quality video conferencing setup, but I would be extremely surprised if you saturated a 10mbit line with that, and certainly you aren't using more than 20mbit.

Also note that a 100mbit connection can have a latency of 4,000ms just as easily as a 56k line. Latency has absolutely nothing to do with bandwidth, and those applications you mention all require very low latency to achieve high quality results, but except for video they don't require much bandwidth at all. And the video requires a lot less than you think it does. Hell, if your latency is really bad even web pages will load slowly. It would look kind of odd, you'd click a link and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and all of a sudden the page would be there, regardless of what it was. You wouldn't get slow page loads, you'd get delayed page loads, which can be even more annoying. You'd be able to send 12 megs per batch of packets, but if it takes 5 seconds to get to the destination it's still going to take 10 seconds to load (5 there 5 back).

You're not dreaming and producing as much as you think you are if you think all of that stuff is saturating your 100mbit connection, either that your you aren't paying attention to what your true throughput is and you're only really getting less than an average 5mbit connection would.

Where a 100mbit connection would be useful is in massive downloads. If you download 30-40 gigs a day, you might find a 100mbit line usefull, as downloads don't care about latency (it just queues up the next packet, any latency just means it starts a few seconds later) and your downloads would be extremely fast. Any packets that drop are simply re-sent later.

seeing more

[WeeBit]

I saw first hand a print out done by a ISP. Has customer ID, bandwidth, bytes transferred, log on time, and time in session. In a neat roll it showed several customers. They can have more information I suppose if they wanted. I do realize that the ISPs think they are in a pickle about whom is hogging what. But I do also hope they keep in mind many more people are logging on to do more than download from a file sharer website. Many more work at home just to be able to keep their jobs. If you start limiting bandwidth per month eventually it will harm those that need it most. I have never seen a controlled limit not get out of hand. I also never seen such a limit put on customers that did not hurt a few regardless of the size of the limit. Those that will hurt the most are those that do work at home two or three days per week, or work full time at home.

Respectfully I don't want to see any type of Limits period done by any ISP. You are just opening Pandora's box. Everything a ISP does from that day forward will have a excuse as to why it's needed. Give them a inch, and they will take a mile.