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RCN P2P Settlement Is Not Even a Slap On the Wrist
Ars covers the settlement of the RCN P2P throttling class-action lawsuit, which lets the company walk away without admitting guilt, without paying affected users, and without any meaningful restraint on their network management practices. "[The] settlement is due to be finalized on June 4. ... The case has largely flown under the radar. Yesterday, a notice ... was issued that alerted RCN customers to the settlement, and one Ars reader was aghast at the terms. Those terms provide nothing for users affected by RCN's practices. Instead, they require the cable company to change its network management practices. These changes are in two parts. ... These cessation periods would be retroactive. ... A moment's math will tell you that, when the settlement is finally approved, one cessation period will already have ended and the other will be ending soon. Once both cessation periods are over, RCN is allowed to implement whatever throttling regime it wants. Given that a federal court has just removed the FCC's authority to regulate network management, RCN appears to have carte blanche to single out BitTorrent and other P2P traffic for special throttling attention after November 1, 2010."
Let's see: I can switch to Comcast, or I can stay with RCN. Perhaps you're fortunate enough to have limitless options for broadband providers, but some of us would prefer the protection of government regulation when our choices (e.g., between one of two providers with a demonstrated tendency to screw with our service) are limited.
RCN users may not have another ship to jump to.
Unless regular citizens build their own wireless network for P2P or Google gets into the ISP business, they (and the rest of us later) are screwed.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
"if they can lay fiber to my house for internet and tv service"
sounds like FIOS.
Make sure your copper phones lines get to stay in case you want to leave from them later.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
RCN used QoS techniques on their network, which is expected. They weren't filtering BT or P2P per se. I'm not completely sure what this is in regards to, but I've never seen them as the big bad that Comcast was.
Please explain how "delaying or blocking P2P protocols." constitutes QoS? Delaying perhaps as that's what QoS does. It prioritizes those packets but blocking? QoS doesn't block AFAIK.
According to the judge's summary, RCN was charged with violating the Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act "by promising its customers 'fast and untapped' broadband Internet service, when in fact [it] was engaging in a network management practice called 'throttling,' which was designed to prevent or delay customers from using the Internet in certain ways, including for 'peer-to-peer' file sharing."
Sounds like bait and switch like what Concast has been doing. Don't promise if you can't deliver IMO.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Think about it. If everyone just flat out boycotted doing anything for even a week. If an entire nation stopped going to work, if they just ate whatever was in their fridge and spent time taking walks, talking with their friends, and just flat out relaxing, what the hell could corporations do besides finally realize they can't bend us over and rape us?
The mere notion of not checking the internet, not watching TV, and not buying corporate crap on a daily basis. That's what's keeping us from having any control. Maybe a small fraction of the country elects to avoid every corrupt corporation like the plague. Maybe. Maybe a large percent of the population would avoid these corrupt corporations if they had a choice. What remain is that enough people don't give a shit about anything except for living their consumerist lives. So long as that >50% of the population continues to let corporations do whatever they want out of sheer willful ignorance ("I'd do something if I could, but in truth I'd never dream of selling my ipod, let alone not buying a Big Mac every week!"), corporation will continue to do whatever they want. So long as it's profitable to the congress folk, those corporations will get away with bloody murder.
I just don't know how much more I can take before I lose it.
I am not familiar with the US market, but will tell you what it's like in the UK.
One of my previous ISPs decided to introduce throttling on different services using deep packet inspection to implement it. Their priority was for websites (port 80) and POP3 email. Everything else was throttled, in particular P2P services, and VoIP like Skype. However, by strange coincidence, the ISPs own VoIP service was NOT being throttled.
As the company had to issue new terms of service you had to agree to because of the throttling, I left without penalty, and actually told them they were a bunch of shysters who were more interested in saving money that commissioning more capacity (they actually oversold the network and could not keep up). If you can, the only way to teach these companies is to leave them.
Sure, the ISP has grown, but that's on the backs of new users who don't know any better, and would think that different internet services were just that slow all the time.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Indeed. Customers have plenty of alternatives. They could invest billions of dollars to setup their own infrastructure or switch to IP by carrier pigeon. If you can't succeed at it without help from the government you are clearly a spoiled little baby with no more right to communicate than a spineless worm.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
network management practice called 'throttling,'
Throttling is a QoS tecnique of slowing down transmission of lower-priority packets in favor of higher priority packets. To be quite frank, when you're on a cable line (RCN is ia cable provider, FYI), you know you're sharing it with your neighbors. Cable is not a dedicated line, and there's no reasonable expectation of such regardless of how marketing material puff it up. That's the nature of the technology in question. If a home user wanted a dedicated line, they'd have to pay for a dedicated line, not cable broadband.
It's completely reasonable to expect slowing down the transmission of packets that simply have a lower priority for the purpose of QoS using a connection shared between many clients. If a connection drops because of a timeout, then that's too bad. It's not a big deal, because that happens too in QoS (in fact, it'd happen without QoS, but for all of the users), and is more a symptom of the timeout of the client being set too low.
You can't comapre that to Comcast, which was forging packet contents to force P2P and high-bandwidth connections to outright drop.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
but I have faith a free market system will work it out.
Ha ha! Ha! That's funny.
The two parties are, more or less, "RCN" and "a bunch of class-action lawsuit lawyers". Compare the latter parties to the parties who could be construed as injured by this action, "the customers of RCN", whose recompense is nonexistent, and whose input seems to have been minimal.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
And how exactly are you planning on stopping corruption? Send in a good person who pretends to be corrupt and hope they don't get actually corrupted when offered millions to keep things the same?
but I have faith a free market system will work it out.
It might, if it were allowed to operate. That is not the case, however: in most jurisdictions internet is limited by law to certain companies. It is in no way a free market.
Qxe4
I don't even have 2 choices. It's comcast or dialup and there aren't even sub-40 year old telephone lines in this apartment complex.
This whole RCN thing is just Comcast deja vu. I wish Gates would set up billions in some non-profit for shit like this and not just malaria (yea, malaria is important, so is broadband and he's an American ffs; we already give out more foreign aid than anyone else without him).