Slashdot Mirror
Comcast Accused of Congestion By Choice
An anonymous reader writes "A kind soul known as Backdoor Santa has posted graphs purportedly showing traffic through TATA, one of Comcast's transit providers. The graphs of throughput for a day and month, respectively, show that Comcast chooses to run congested links rather than buy more capacity. Keeping their links full may ensure that content providers must pay to colocate within Comcast's network. The graphs also show a traffic ratio far from 1:1, which has implications for the validity of its arguments with Level (3) last month."
Ever wonder what Comcast's connections to the Internet look like? In the tradition of WikiLeaks, someone stumbled upon these graphs of their TATA links. For reference, TATA is the only other IP transit provider to Comcast after Level (3). Comcast is a customer of TATA and pays them to provide them with access to the Internet.
1 day graphs:
Image #1: http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/78/ntoday.gif
Image #1 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/viewimage.php?img=13-224638L&rand=6673&t=gif&m=12&y=2010&srv=img4
Image #2: http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/749/sqnday.gif
Image #2 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/static_image/13-205526L/4331/gif/12/2010/img6/glowfoto
Notice how those graphs flat-line at the top? That's because they're completely full for most of the day. If you were a Comcast customer attempting to stream Netflix via this connection, the movie would be completely unwatchable. This is how Comcast operates: They intentionally run their IP transit links so full that Content Providers have no other choice but to pay them (Comcast) for access. If you don't pay Comcast, your bits wont make it to their destination. Though they wont openly say that to anyone, the content providers who attempt to push bits towards their customers know it. Comcast customers however have no idea that they're being held hostage in order to extort money from content.
Another thing to notice is the ratio of inbound versus outbound. Since Comcast is primarily a broadband access network provider, they're going to have millions of eyeballs (users) downloading content. Comcast claims that a good network maintains a 1:1 with them, but that's simply not possible unless you had Comcast and another broadband access network talking to each other. In the attached graphs you can see the ratio is more along the lines of 5:1, which Comcast was complaining about with Level (3). The reality is that the ratio argument is bogus. Broadband access networks are naturally pull-heavy and it's being used as an excuse to call foul of Level (3) and other content heavy networks. But this shoulnd't surprise anyone, the ratio argument has been used for over a decade by many of the large telephone companies as an excuse to deny peering requests. Guess where most of Comcasts senior network executive people came from? Sprint and AT&T. Welcome to the new monopoly of the 21st century.
If you think the above graph is just a bad day or maybe a one off? Let us look at a 30 day graph...
Image #3: http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/8917/ntomonth.gif
Image #3 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/static_image/13-205958L/4767/gif/12/2010/img6/glowfoto
Comcast needs to be truthful with its customers, regulators and the public in general. The Level (3) incident only highlights the fact that Comcast is pinching content and backbone providers to force them to pay for uncongested access to Comcast customers. Otherwise, there's no way to send traffic to Comcast customers via the other paths on the Internet without hitting congested links.
Remember that this is not TATA's fault, Comcast is a CUSTOMER of TATA. TATA cannot force Comcast to upgrade its links, Comcast elects to simply not purchase enough capacity and lets them run full. When Comcast demanded that Level (3) pay them, the only choice Level (3) had was to give in or have its traffic (such as Netflix) routed via the congested TATA links. If Level (3) didn't agree to pay, that means Netflix and large portions of the Internet
Am utterly shocked that anybody could be so cruel as to suspect a poor innocent cable company of trying to protect their cash-cow video delivery business by deliberately sucking at being an ISP(harder than they do simply by nature, that is) and using their oligopolistic incumbent position to shake down nimbler and more responsive competitors.
What makes Backdoor Santa think this is done to drive service providers to Comcast? Occam's razor has a much simpler explanation: Comcast doesn't want to spend more money upgrading their capacity.
Hell, if I was a service provider I wouldn't consider Comcast after seeing those charts, not with that bad service.
John
The more I know about Comcrap, the less I understand.
Is their company run by an evil troll who punishes all those who implement innovation and progress?
I have never, EVER heard anything good about Comcrap.
I would submit to a full-time McDonald's wifi connection before I would subscribe to Comcrap.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Comcast needs to be stopped before NBC goes cable only and maybe even comcast only in area with more then one cable system.
I don't want to lose CSN CHICAGO on Dish / Directv / WOW cable / RCN cable and ATT uverse
Anyone who is offended at the behavior of these ISPs could join http://www.stopthecap.com/ It may be futile, but at least it's better than whining.
Please someone tell me that Verizon is better, because I really want to switch to FIOS when it's available.
Does Comcast simply not care about their customer satisfaction ratings, or are they on a quest to consciously plunge their ratings into the gutter? I ask semi-seriously because the latter strategy has merit: they can effectively do whatever they want without fear of too much consequence. After all, if they still have customers after kicking them around like this with the crap they've been pulling, they can probably continue to treat their customers like dirt and get away with it.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
Seems like they are intentionally congesting their links to force content providers to pay them extra for prioritisation. Ground rules for net neutrality are needed.. badly.
The article indicates a 1:5 upload:download ratio. Would this be because most plans have e.g. 1mbit up : 10mbit down throttling (or similar) ?
I find it interesting that they could increase their upload speeds with minimal performance hit, or would that take away their argument against level 3?
Seriously, this is like arguing that a road construction company doesn't have EXTRA/SPARE asphalt spreaders...
If an ISP is expected to have, say, 20% extra capacity, that ISP is wasting money on unneeded capacity, impacting their bottom-line.
I suspect this leaked doCument came from someone in that wants to sell Comcast more capacity...
Ken
When I lived in the Washington DC metro area it was common to see 10% - 15% packet loss at the comcast border/peering routers during peak usage hours (7pm - 10pm). It was pretty much useless for gaming or anything else remotely interactive. Calling to complain was an exercise in futility as you couldn't actually talk to anyone who remotely understood what you were talking about (and power-cycling my cable modem really wasn't going to solve the problem).
I don't understand this sentence : "Keeping their links full may ensure that content providers must pay to colocate within Comcast's network" I don't know how Comcast's service works
Interesting data, but I almost find more interesting the use of MRTG to show it. :) Perhaps we can infer from this that whoever grabbed this traffic wasn't using Comcast network tools, and instead used their own tools for a simple and easy setup? Hmm. :)
Is this unattended (torrent) activity? I find it hard to believe that it is active web surfing / video streaming for the majority, unless daytime usage is extremely low and what we are seeing is that the network is completely overwhelmed with modest/typical use by 2nd/3rd shift shift workers.
Did anybody notice that the two graphs are taken from different interfaces? Also, it looks like the traffic only recently got that high. Either way, It seems irresponsible to let the traffic get that high without upgrading.
The Comcast argument is that they have a peering agreement with L3 (and TATA too) but that is simply not the case. Both L3 and TATA are providers for Comcast.
TFP (The Fucking Post) points out that Comcast runs its terminations with TATA at full capacity for most of the day and concludes that they do so on purpose to force services like Netflix to co-locate with them (= $$$ for Comcast.)
So L3 says to Netflix.. "Hey.. you dont need to be a slave to the Comcast overlord" and Comcasts reponse is to re-brand its business relationship with L3 as a "Peering Agreement."
Many slashdotters bought this bullshit hook, line, and sinker on the last Comcast vs L3 article. They did so because they learned about peering relationships at some point in other slashdot stories and took their 1:1 free peering knowledge and incorrectly applied it to the L3 and Comcast relationship.
L3 is Comcast's internet provider. Comcast's claim is like you claiming that you can charge your ISP because more stuff comes downstream to your LAN than goes upstream from it.
"His name was James Damore."
No, it's more like the construction company is taking forever to finish the road, and by happy chance they also operate the toll booth on the only alternate road.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Two countries, separated by a common language...
Can't this backfire on Comcast? I mean, if a Comcast customer tried watching Netflix and they can't get a good connection because of congested links, the user isn't going to think "Netflix is crappy" they're going to complain aboyt how they've got such a crap connection through Comcast.
That's only meaningful if there are alternatives/competition in the area, and there might be an argument that Comcast wants to push it's own video streaming service (which wouldn't crap out).
Why am I not surprised?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
fios is not expanding into any new areas for the forseeable future.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I agree. Monopolies have rights too...
Wait, what?
Some people have no choice but Comcast, however others have competition, allowing change to other providers.
Just because you live in the city, doesnt mean everyone does. (General statement, not directed soley at you. But it could be).
I would agree, but if adding another link only gives them 5% unused, and they can deliver the speeds they advertise, wouldn't the cost be worth it to stop all the outcry?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
The road construction employees are demanding bribes from motorists to allow them access to finished lanes which were already paid for by taxes on the motorists. Those unwilling to pay the bribe are routed to lanes still under construction that are populated by workers who do nothing but hold flags and scratch their butts. In other words, Comcast is full of useless butt scratchers who are trying to scam you.
Actually, if one factors in previous /. posts about Comcast, a more appropriate example is more like a private toll road company getting right of way for an eight lane expressway. Instead, they build a two lane, then whine to Congress that they are being abused since their road has cars on it 24/7, and instead of widening the road, they start charging people money per minute they are stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on the road, doubling tolls, and demanding that shops located off the highway pay money, or else the exit to those places would be closed.
Unlike a spare part you don't pay for extra capacity. Transit billing is generally 95th percentile you throw out the top 5% of samples and bill on the remaining peek. From a design standpoint if you had two links you would not want to see either running over 50% from a billing standpoint you pay about the same for two links 50% used as you do one link at 100% so there is little reason to max out links unless there is a failure and it's picking up the slack.
No sir I dont like it.
A 100 percent full pipe is an efficient use of their resource.
It also limits the ability of Comcast's customers to use the 6 Mbps downstream burst capacity that Comcast has advertised to them. When an oversold link flat-tops, it's been over-oversold. If Comcast is not capable of bursting at 6 Mbps for the majority of the day, it shouldn't even be advertising 6 Mbps, let alone "PowerBoost".
I would wonder however whether it is necessary for this to be a federal issue.
Actually a 100% full pipe is barely useable. You need a little slack even at the best of times - 95% full is much better, because when it goes any higher you start getting serious problems with retransmissions and burst latency from even the slightest irregularity in flow. According to these accusations, that's what Comcast wants.
One way to make profit in business is to maximise the use of your resources - but another is to deliberatly restrict supply of your product, in order to maintain a high price. You may shift less volume, but you make more per unit.
Now, I'm not exactly glad I have the ISP that I do, but anything seems better than Comcast after everything I've heard about and from them over the years.
I won't do business with Charter because I don't like how they've done business in the past. I can't get a wireless provider because I live in a small dead spot. I'm stuck with AT&T DSL and I get terrible speeds because of a similar dead spot.
I live, it seems, in the middle of a circle. This circle is made up entirely of residential homes and apparently companies either don't want to, or are being denied the opportunity to install a cell tower, phone switch, or anything of the sort closer to my home.
Basically, this all means that the only ISP that can possibly get me decent speeds is a company I won't do business with on principle. I'm sure if it came down to it and Comcast was the only provider I had available to me I'd seriously consider satellite.
How do they make money? What they do, as a private company is not exist to make money, but exist to provide something to customers who have money.
Without customers, Comcast doesn't exist.
Funny how all pro-capitalists forget that.
Most ISP sell you a broadband connection and punish you if you use it to the full capacity. But somehow they should be allowed to use the full capacity of their connection to the outside world, and therefore offer a crappy service?
They're a customer of Level 3 & this guy gives his analysis of the issue (found in followups to the NANOG posting)
http://www.voxel.net/blog/2010/12/peering-disputes-comcast-level-3-and-you
Except if you're paying for Service Y, Company X owes you Service Y. That you're incapable of seeing this is mind boggling.
Internet access from an ISP is not a 1:1 and never (I mean never - even days of dial-up) has been. If you can't see that, well then.....
But the way it looks is Comcast is possibly denying people access to content aka not providing the service as they have advertised unless the content provider pays them. Not sure how that amounts to universal health care or society owing me something. More of a this company does shady stuff to make even more money kinda situation....
Concast really doesn't care.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Is this the acme of US innovation... How to screw and lie for profit?
That's all I got, the abuses of corporate owned government are too pervasive to list again. Until YOU stop giving them your money, it will only get worse.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Comcast sold me an "unlimited" amount of bandwidth, then I find out they have "secret" caps on bandwidth. The problem isn't Comcast having a virtual monopoly, the problem is Comcast overselling "unlimited" bandwidth to far to many customers to promise any guarantee of throughput. See, the government gave all kinds of tax breaks to ISPs to make sure they kept up their infrastructure to support their customers. It isn't my fault that Comcast chose not to spend that money laying new infrastructure and they are now at capacity.
Let's put this to rest. You are a taxpayer in a state/city where there are 4 lanes of road going in and out of the heart of your city. During rush hour, congestion hits and it's go, stop, go stop. You and all the other citizens who pay taxes in the city/state complain that something must be done. 5 years later there are 6 lanes of traffic. Rush hour is still go, stop, go stop. See where I'm going here? This is a cyclical problem that has no solution.
In any competition environment marginal revenue = marginal cost is the 'sweet spot' in profit.
In a perfect competition market the marginal revenue line follows pretty closely to the demand line.
In a monopolistic/oligopolistic the marginal revenue line is usually well bellow the demand line. You can then price at a much higher rate (wherever in the demand curve you cross) and have very low costs. It also means you are producing less than the market really demands. However, it also means you have a weakness in your business and others can come in and 'take up the slack'. So you see monopoly type businesses doing whatever they can to shut out the competitors. They also restrict supply in order to maximize profit.
In effect this article is asking Comcast to sacrifice some of its profit to 'be a good guy'. That will not happen unless some external force makes them do it. Either thru competition (which is the better way), or thru gov regulation (which usually ends up wrong in the long term), or some sort of publicly embarrassing thing, or some combination of all three.
Being as state and municipal governments are the ones giving Comcast the franchise agreements (read: protected monopoly status) in exchange for various benefits, it is dramatically unlikely they would do anything with regard to opening competition or regulating their practices.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I don't understand why people are shocked at this. It's actually expected for a for-profit company to do shit like this. In capitalism, lower supply = higher prices = higher profit.
This is why Disney only releases their DVD's once every few years; they get to charge more because of it. This is why Enron shut down half of its power plants in the west; less power means there was a shortage and they could charge more for it.
And this is why Comcast artificially lowers the supply of bandwidth. They get to claim that people are using too much of it and therefore have to start charging more for it.
This is why a company should never be allowed to be in charge of an ISP. The profit motive is too large for them to not fuck with it to everyone's detriment.
Comcast is a business designed to make profit yes?
I see this argument way too much. It's very true, but it's entirely irrelevant. We don't CARE if they want to make profit. It's no excuse. It's like saying that it's run by a sociopath sadist that just wants to hurt you, so it's perfectly fine when he breaks your kneecaps. And that simile isn't that far off, "making profit" is at the expense of the customer.
What I care about is getting the damn thing I paid for.
And the false advertising, that bugs me too.
No, it's more like the construction company is taking forever to finish the road, and by happy chance they also operate the toll booth on the only alternate road.
Sounds like Texas.
Gas/oil companies do the same thing. It's cheaper to run at 99% capacity and manage demand than it is to limitlessly create extra capacity.
So what you are saying is, people need to work hard enough in life so they can have deep enough pockets to build their own broadband infrastructure?
No, you aren't saying that...you're saying, people aren't working hard enough to get the money to pay Comcasts rates? Whats to keep Comcast from jacking rates up, not in an unreasonable manner, but in an unfair one?
That's the problem with monopolies.
I think Comcast is operating too much as a money vampire, and doesn't give a fig about its customers, cause it knows it has us by the balls.
Users ALWAYS will consume what is available
I guess that explains the low points in the graph....
You must mean "users will consume what an ISP is willing to pay for". After all, add up all of the subscribers, multiply by the advertised connection speed of those subscribers and get that much interconnection with your Tier 1. It would never run at 100%, it would probably be about 10% max. But no ISP would ever pay for that much bandwidth because they would be bankrupt immediately. There is probably a middle ground though where the ISP can still make money, but deliver a service that works.
And what would be the point of class action? Comcast will eventually settle for "undisclosed sum" with out "admitting wrong doing," Lawyers walk away with millions while the rest of Comcast customers gets a 5 dollar coupon off the next month.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Except users don't bitch about access during the low points... Right?
Wha, yeah!
C'mon, yeah
Yeah, c'mon, yeah
Yeah, c'mon
Oh, yeah, ma
Yeah, I'm a back door Santa
I'm a back door Santa
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
Hey, all you people that tryin' to sleep
I'm out to make it with my midnight leak, yeah
'Cause I'm a back door Santa
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
All right, yeah
You routers eat your dinner
Eat your pork and beans
I eat more bandwidth
Than any man ever seen, yeah, yeah
I'm a back door Santa, wha
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
Well, I'm a back door Santa!
I'm a back door Santa
Whoa, baby, I'm a back door Santa
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
No, in most areas there are these things called Franchise Agreements. Telecommunications in the US is mostly a command economy.
Besides, since when was it a businesses right to advertise one thing, take money for it and not provide it? If a restaurant fails to provide what you order do you go start a new restaurant? What a bunch of NeoCon bs!
Yes... Someone who gets it! We provide internet to Rural communities via Sat transport. a 1:1 of 1mbps of transponder space is something more then 2K per month. To deliver that 1 mbps to one individual who pays $80/mnth would be insane. So, we oversubscribe, we use compression and acceleration and do the best we can.
Holy fucking shit, thats a car analogy if I ever seen one.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Let's put this to rest. You are a taxpayer in a state/city where there are 4 lanes of road going in and out of the heart of your city. During rush hour, congestion hits and it's go, stop, go stop. You and all the other citizens who pay taxes in the city/state complain that something must be done. 5 years later there are 6 lanes of traffic. Rush hour is still go, stop, go stop. See where I'm going here? This is a cyclical problem that has no solution.
The solution is to build toll roads, and possibly vary the tolls by hour of the day. That way, people who really need to use the road, will use it, and the road gets used more during off-peak hours.
On the ISP side, Comcast should charge customers by the gigabyte--these pipes are full of horse porn and dancing poodle videos. Or possibly, poodle porn and dancing horses. Either way, if customers actually had to pay per gigabyte, not only would they use their connections in a more responsible manner, Comcast would have an incentive to buy bigger pipes, since that would actually increase their profits, rather than cutting into their margins.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
No, you pay for a high speed connection to the INTERnet and they are providing a high speed connection to their own INTRAnet with a congested gateway to the internet. Then they make money on both ends by charging content providers to get onto the intranet providing their customers with the connection they already paid for in the first place. They get away with it because the consumers are ignorant, the politicians are crooked. The end result is the consumer will be charged more plus the carrier gets greater control of what is on their networks. This decreases competition further eroding what the consumer gets in the end. Eventually maybe it won't even be possible to discuss and make others aware of what is going on. How long until Slashdot for example is inaccessible through Comcast?
Amen to this!
I'm waiting for the day CSN is a web available service. That's the day I can finally cute the cord on my cable (which is not Comcast BTW). I don't actually mind paying Hulu $10 for their service, and then forking out another $10 to Comcast for CSN (if/when available) for internet delivery. My cable bill is almost $200 with internet service, so cutting that down to the $60 for internet plus some set of subscriptions (say another $50), and I'm still saving a ton of money. I think this is something that scares the bejeezus out of cable cos. The thought that they would be relegated to simply being an ISP probably makes them sleep less well every night.
Bah
A saturated link is not ideal. It is less efficient than a link without 100% utilization, because packets start dropping and getting re-sent, along with the associated ICMP traffic.
Competition would be awesome but while discussions of bandwidth and bottlenecks are too techical for the average citizen to be bothered with unsightly wires and people digging trenches through their front lawns are the end of the world. Wireless is nice but bandwidth is too limited for a significant percentage of the population to use it. Wireless is like everybody sharing one wire. One really really fast wire but still one wire and after it is split so many ways... Besides, this generation is offended by antennas. The site of them makes them cry.
Add to that a bit of money from the big few telecoms for our corrupt politicians... And you get about as much competition in the US as ice hockey in hell.
Support Net Neutrality!
I completely agree. In fact, for the Federal government, building out infrastructure (roads in the days of the writing of the Constitution) is a mandate. A smart government will let the free market work when and where it can, because a truely competitive market is virtually impossible to beat on a cost/performance level by any government.
I was just reading a story about how the state in last place for broadband access (surprise...Mississippi) has used Federal dollars to build out a web site how what vendors provide broadband access to places where you live. Talk about a waste of money when there are dozens of sites (some by vendors others by aggregaters) that do the same thing long before the Mississippi site was introduced. The state should have used that money to actually build out some sort of broadband access for the areas that don't have it. For example, they could have literally funded the electric co-operatives to build out the data over power line systems. This would have created more competition because the co-ops operate in many of the places where the phone and cable companies do - thus adding more competition, while providing broadband to the unserved areas of the state.
Doesn't this effectively amount to fraud? Comcast knows there is no way it can deliver the bandwidth it's promised to its customers.
Welcome to the "free" market
Welcome to a Natural Monopoly due to Network Effects and a lack of regulation---quite different from a (well-functioning) Free Market.
The free market retort doesn't work because cable companies have a government-granted monopoly on that technology. Even if someone wanted to, in most areas, they can't legally start a competing cable service, it has to use a different technology, so you're not going to have real like-for-like competition, you're not going to have DSL-for-DSL or cable vs. cable competition in the same area in most places. Fiber is faster, but you're also starting out the gate with a much more expensive system to lay.
First of all, the low points in the graph prove that users don’t “always” consume all of what is available. They only do when the demand is actually that high (wow, what a revelation).
Go look at that graph again (here it is) and instead of the flatline, imagine that curve extrapolated up to where it ought to be. Where does it peak, somewhere around 200%? So you could actually double that network’s capacity and still be thinking “oh my god they’re just using it all up!” No, that’s just the normal demand... triple the network’s capacity, and you’d likely find that you have excess capacity at all times.
So no, the users don’t just “ALWAYS consume what is available”. They consume all of what is available when what’s available is less than the normal demand ought to be.
You’re just stuck in the position of being so ridiculously over-sold that the demand is 2x what you can supply. And you really only have yourselves to blame for that.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
Internet access from an ISP is not a 1:1 and never (I mean never - even days of dial-up) has been. If you can't see that, well then.....
Apparently you don't live in a FIOS area. Sucks to be you.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Actually, you never want to run something like this at 100%. It leads to hardware failure, which also explains the frequent outages from providers like Comcast (and Cox, I assume is probably similar). Of course, running at 100% also means that paying customers are not getting what they are paying for because that means that at least some of their traffic is inevitably trapped until Comcast lets it through.
When I lived in an area that only had cable modems, or dial up, I had no other choice. I am all for businesses turning a profit--I generally side with companies--but the vast majority of cable companies abuse their local monopolies. Comcast speeds were initially awesome when it first became available, but after about a year the network became so saturated (everyone started jumping on board [clearly] without any network upgrades) that it was literally the speed of a 56k modem and complete failures were frequent. Literally the month that we decided to go back to dial up and after frequent complaints: speeds increased. Some of my family still lives in the area, and they still see wild fluctuations in speed, and regular failures. It's no surprise to me.
I think a lot of this would clear up if cable's local monopoly system was stomped out, but that won't happen until we stomp out most of the corruption in Congress, and hopefully add term limits.
Fortunately, I now live in an area where FiOS is an option. I will never go back to any cable company unless I have no other option. Both the speed, and quality of service is night and day; it's not even remotely close.
That only happens when peak hour pricing is below the market clearing rate. With congestion pricing, the pipe will always be 95% full. If it's more than 95% full, the price is too low. If it's less than 95% full, the price is too high, or there's more capacity available than is needed.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Problem is the road is bumper-to-bumper for 18+ hours a day. Congestion is expected at rush hour, but if the road can't handle normal loads it's not performing to need and needs upgrading.
5 years later there are 6 lanes of traffic. Rush hour is still go, stop, go stop. See where I'm going here? This is a cyclical problem that has no solution.
The infrastructure grew slower than the demands for that infrastructure’s usage did. Until it catches up, you’ll always be stuck behind the 8-ball.
And what’s more, the demands for the infrastructure grew unnaturally quickly because a price war drove down the cost without actually increasing the capacity of the infrastructure to meet the new demand.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
How do you describe the connections you sell for $80/month?
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
I use Netflix and Comcast. We use a lot of Netflix and I've never had a problem with viewing movies anytime I want. We have 2 iPhones, 1 Mac, a Wii, and 1 AppleTV all enabled for Netflix with 2 users and we both watch sometimes. I measure from 5 Mbs (worse case) to 18 Mbs on DSL Reports at various times. I also have the option of moving to FIOS and I have not because I never have trouble with Comcast. Whatever the graphs show for a single congested connection does seem to be causing this user trouble. These graphs do not measure my ability to download. Excuse me, my 3GB XCode update just finished, back to work.
no-one's expecting to be able to saturate their link all the time; no ISP offers this (though you have to look quite closely at the terms and conditions before you find the AUP that gets them out of it, usually). What's expected is to be able to achieve reasonable performance at a sensible level of usage, which Comcast clearly isn't offering. Don't do the ridiculous math based on everyone using 1Mb/s. Try instead a more realistic calculus where perhaps 10% of users use 50-200GB transfer per month, 70% use 10-50, 19% use 0-10 and 1% use over 200GB and will get kicked out just as soon as the AUP team gets to them. Then damn well pay for the backhaul necessary to provide that level of service. Most ISPs seem to manage it; as others have posted, Verizon don't seem to have any trouble.
Alternatively, be upfront and offer a tiered range of plans based on limited amounts of data transfer: $XX for XXGB. And actually provide what you advertise. Either way would be fine. But don't make your offer based on maximum speed capability and then provide an oversaturated backhaul link so no-one can achieve anything like a reasonable transfer rate at peak times.
Comcast claims that a good network maintains a 1:1 with them, but that's simply not possible unless you had Comcast and another broadband access network talking to each other. In the attached graphs you can see the ratio is more along the lines of 5:1, which Comcast was complaining about with Level (3). The reality is that the ratio argument is bogus.
Comcast claims that free peering arrangements should have close to 1:1 ratio. And if you don't maintain that ratio, then you should pay for transit, just like Comcast is doing with TATA. So this is entirely consistent with what Comcast is saying and if anything supports their argument, not undercut it like Backdoor Santa is claiming. His argument about saturating transit to force other to peer with Comcast is valid though.
I personally think it is garbage to apply Tier-1 peering standards to (what should be) a CDN-ISP peering arrangement as they are completely different situations with different economics. It would save Comcast money and improve their customer experience if they were to enter into a free peering relationship with L3-the-CDN, because without the peering agreement Comcast-the-ISP would have to pay someone transit to access this data.
But to play devils advocate, here is the issue from another perspective. Comcast actually has a it's own Tier 1 network now, in addition to the last-mile network that we normally associate them with. This includes many business customers who are content providers not consumers. Comcast is using this CDN issue to force L3-the-Tier 1 to start treating them like a Tier 1. L3 wants a traditional CDN-ISP peering agreement where they to route their CDN data over their backbone network and connect with Comcast at the closest possible location to the customer, with only data intended for those customers. Comcast wants a Tier 1 peering agreement where their networks connect at a smaller number of points, and more data would be routed over their Tier 1 network, and then they balance the ratio by sending more traffic L3's way for free. Think about it; if Comcast was paying any other Tier 1 for transit, then L3-the-Tier 1 would have no issue peering with them. So if Comcast builds out their own Tier 1, why shouldn't L3 treat them the same?
L3 is trying to use it's backbone capability as an advantage to support it's CDN, and Comcast is trying to leverage it's position as a huge ISP to push it's Tier 1 network. In the end, because there is a lot of competition between CDNs and not so much between ISPs, Comcast has the upper hand.
Unless the Interstate Commerce clause comes into play, and considering the nature of the internet and that Comcast's actions are crossing state lines, then yes, the Feds would have a cause to take action. Probably no inclination, but a cause.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
According to your pedantry, "access" implies burst rate, while "connection" implies continuous rate, but the result is the same. How can you possibly have high speed access with the gateway links this congested? You only get high speed access to their "preferred providers" (stealing a term from health insurance) and everything else is gonna be slow. Since the definition of the Internet is "everything", no exceptions, you clearly do not have high speed access to the Internet. Unless the service is advertised as a "limited package" when you buy it, they are clearly engaging in false marketing.
Which is scenarios is more likely: Customers
1) Recognize that this is a problem with Comcast not Netflix
2) Have another option for broadband connectivity
3) And choose to switch solely over this issue.
or
1) The customers blame Netflix for the problem
2) Netflix realizes that L3-the-CDN isn't providing the level of service they wanted.
3) Netflix switches to any number of high quality CDNs that do have peering agreements with Comcast.
Comcast has the stronger negotiating position here, which is why L3 gave in.
Without an accompanying graph showing % of dropped packets on each of the 3 10Gb links listed, everything said is just speculation. This is ONE router (in NY, apparently) with 30Gb of traffic going through it. I doubt this is the ONLY connection to TATA that Comcast has. For all we know, these links are perfectly optimized to be as close to 100% utilized at peak times and routes are managed in a way to move traffic around to other peer links.
no-one's expecting to be able to saturate their link all the time;
Tell that to the people who apparently live their life entirely based on their BitTorrent downloads.
One second later you'll get someone bitching that their connections are unfairly going slower. Five seconds later you'll get the same buzzword-filled screed he posts every time he gets kicked off his ISP for this sort of thing (buzzwords like "false advertising", "overselling connections", "my rights as an American", etc). Ten seconds later he'll be looking for a new ISP. One month later he'll cycle back to your ISP after all the others anger him in some way and he completely forgets what happened in the first place.
in a fair market where customers can see what's going on, they will spot the guy who is over promising and under delivering. then take their business elsewhere.
Comcast is a business taking advantage of a monopoly situation to gouge customers for larger profit. If you actually support our free market system you would recognize that the free market breaks in the case of a monopoly and requires outside interference (usually government) to restore competition to the market.
That isn't an issue if you don't oversell. If you sell x customers y available bandwidth you need to have x*y bandwidth available through peers. Comcast comes no where close to that or it would not need to offer "powerboost" to hide the bottleneck of being spiked at 100% for most of the day. There is a need for some overhead to run a network properly and if you are stuck at 100% then you are either selling speeds that are too high, selling to too many customers, or not buying enough bandwidth.
Get a web developer
I think it would be a delicious irony if as result of the scrutiny Comcast is receiving due to their proposed acquisition of NBC regulators not only to denied the acquisition but further split the company in half. One half would be Comcast cable and the other half would be Xfinity broadband. Comcast cable would be forced to lease the last mile lines to Xfinity as well as any other broadband provider that is interested. That would be justice and therefore it will never happen. We're just going to see a ban on charging for traffic that terminates in their network.
I believe it was established that the internet is not a series of tubes to be clogged by trucks. Increasing a road from 4 to 6 lanes of traffic can certainly ease congestion as long as you alter the off and on ramps and don't make the exits the choke point: having two lanes entering a 6 lane bridge that narrows back to 2 lanes doesn't help much. Happily, we have a lot of exit and entrance points so our problem isn't the same as a road. If Comcast buys more mainline to support its traffic, and they add more switches and routers in their own environment, the problem may eventually be solved.
Sure we have more video coming over the net and that means Comcast really needs to get moving if they want their users to not sue for not delivering the promised product. But the analogy isn't the same as a poorly designed road.
That only happens when peak hour pricing is below the market clearing rate.
Wait a second, "peak hour pricing"? This is America, we don't use rational market-based approaches to match unlimited demand to limited resources. That would be SOCIALISM!!!
Most problems are cyclical in nature and there is no ultimate end game solution. Take hunger for example. Every day no matter how much I ate yesterday I am still hungry. I can't solve my personal hunger problem forever. So I take incremental steps against it every few hours. Its not ideal, some days (most days) I eat more than I need but it works for now.
I disagree with your contention that you can build your own infrastructure. I live in a condo with some stringent rules about what can go outside. There is no question of the association allowing a satellite dish. Even if I could, the area I live in has a LOTS of trees, there is no way I could get a clean line of sight to a satellite.
Isn't it best to allow the citizens to pool their resources and built one. Oh yeah, we have something to allow citizens to pool their resources, it's called GOVERNMENT. If commercial interests won't expand their networks to allow for increased demand, maybe it's time for the government to offer some real competition to the Internet monopolies.
Not quite. Technology improves daily, old gear can be replaced as regular maintenance. You can't simply replace old roads like switches and routing circuits. You jump from 4 to 6 lanes, technology increases exponentially. Try going from 4 lanes to 18 in 5 years for comparisons, and then to 36 18 months later, 72 18 months after that.
When I used to have Comcap I would use up my 250 gig per month up+down bandwidth cap in 4-5 days with a 10 mbit connection. Nowadays that equals around 10 hidef movies, or 10 modern games assuming a 1:1 ratio. and very often 1:1 isn't even possible on p2p. So that would mean only 7-9 movies or games. Then the rest of the month I wouldn't be able to download anything and had to be careful browsing too many web sites. And obviously no netflix streaming. I now have 35/35 mbit Fios. I don't have to worry about caps. I can max out my connection 24/7 for as long as I want without worrying about getting booted from the ISP. I'm sure that there are months where I use 1 TB or more combined up+down bandwidth. And there are months where I have almost nothing to download and probably use up no more than 50 GB combined bandwidth. The idea that all ISPs have caps is a myth. One that Comcap would like very much to spread far and wide. Comcap is one of the few ISPs where a faster connection is actually a bad thing. A faster connection just means you can use up your monthly bandwidth in only 1-2 days instead of 4-5. I for one would not pay extra for that.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
That really isn't fair to your customers. Sure, you can't realistically sell them an unmetered 6Mbps connection for $80 per month, but you can do the following, and it would be fair:
1. Guarantee a minimum speed
2. Offer to accelerate some traffic via QoS policy (this is only fair if you are upfront with customers on what is prioritized)
3. Tell them what their maximum speed will be if there is no network congestion.
I would be much happier if my ISP told me I will get between 1Mb and 6Mb and streaming protocols of types a, b and c will be prioritized. Sure, I might not like what they prioritize, but at least I know what to expect.
As it stands currently I am told I get an "up to" 10Mb connection, meaning in real world tests my speed on Cox network has been as low as 2Kbps (yes slower than dialup). I call to complain and they send me to a site hosted on a college campus connected as part of their intranet infrastructure and say "see you get 26Mbps burst and 10Mb the rest of the time" and I say "yeah, what about the entire rest of the internet" and they say "not our problem we don't control the connection of other people's servers". Yet changing my MAC address and resetting the modem gives me a different IP and yields better speeds to the same servers - clearly there is some sort of artificial limit going on, but instead of telling me they throttle after a certain number of Gb a month they play stupid (or perhaps the call center people are actually stupid or poorly informed).
Don't be a PITA provider, be honest with your customers and they will be much happier.
PS - first alternative to Cox/AT&T to come through I'm jumping ship. Cox oversells this area so badly even on a good day I am lucky to get 2Mbps.
Get a web developer
I can guarantee you 1 thing.,
Comcasts lawyers wrote it to benefit them and screw you.
They dont give a rats ass how you define anything. read the contract you agreed to. what you think and believe has no bearing on anything.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You don't think monopolies should be regulated? Are you stupid, or just trolling?
Free Martian Whores!
Almost NOBODY lives in a Fios area.
I'd love fios... they have been promising it in my tiny town of 580,000 for 4 years now. and with the sale off to Frontier... I dont think it will ever happen.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, to make a proper car analogy (if possible) you should note the problem being not the width of the highway, but where it exits to another highway through a two lane rutted dirt road. Improving the bandwidth between their network and the outside network would solve the problem, not increasing bandwidth internally.
They sold you unlimited? got the contract in hand that says that explicitly? you can sue them for a lot of cash.
If it's not in the contract, they did not promise you anything.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Comcast is also doing stupid things with their Internet routing. For example, to get from Denver to anywhere else in Denver, you go through Dallas. This adds at least 30 ms to each ping. This is actually one of the more efficient routes they have now; google on CRAN and traceroute and you'll see.
Their rationale is that CRAN is all 10Ge, and therefore no matter how far it travels it will always be faster than any other connection via their peers (even if those are all 10Ge). Apparently Comcast has FTL links.
Oh, here's a hilarious quote from a FAQ on the matter:
"Such a network can provide network speeds far in excess of what Verizon's Fios offers with little upgrade by Comcast should they want to offer equivalent speeds.
All areas are being converted to the CRAN. The most apparent thing you will notice when you are switched, is the additional hops. These hops have little to no effect on speeds or latency. The good news is; by keeping the traffic more internal, it reduces cost to Comcast and allows the subscriber to put a less detrimental affect on the network."
I love the bit about how they could easily offer faster than Fios speeds if they ever felt the need to compete, which they don't.
Not really. If you don't allow your population (customers) to grow uncontrollably or if you make them carpool (multicast, internal p2p, popular content caching) or install mass transit (packet prioritization) then you can still control the roads without adding to congestion. The problem is that most cities with this problem also allow developers (sales and advertising departments) to "fill the void" - every time roads expand they build more housing to occupy the new lanes (get more customers to use all available bandwidth).
Proper infrastructure planning can work both in cities and in IT. Anyone that thinks otherwise is either weak and unwilling to stand behind proper engineering and planning or incompetent at engineering and planning in the first place. Sometimes it's both.
Get a web developer
But you don't market the freeway as if its a guaranteed 65 mph, sometimes up to 90...
Also, most major freeways were designed in an era when most households only had one car, and people didn't have 50 mile commutes.
Well this fits quite well with Comcasts complaints of people hogging bandwidth.... all part of their plan. Coming next will be there application to apply Bandwidth Metering. Everyone knows the Cable and Telcos would love to be able to bill their customers with Metered internet usage..Cha-Ching!
2X??
ISPs oversell by 5X-10X... I know I ran one as a Infrastructure director for 5 years. I had to get out because of how scumbaggy the whole business is.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Michigan solved that. Detroit traffic sucked... so they crashed the economy, over 50% of the people moved away and now Detroit highways are wonderful to drive on once again.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You get a 1:1 ratio with FIOS? Tell me how to set mine up like that. Last I checked it was more like 3:1 for me.
I have wanted that for years, but not a toll road but toll lanes. let me pay $8.00 to drive in the express lanes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No, my friend, most of them are not technical. After they decide the Internet is broken, they'll go to The Google and see that that page is OK, and decide Netflix sucks.
They know they have 6M per second and that that is a LOT -- way better than that DSL thing. They don't know about those places out there, and will blame them. One generally blames that about which one feels one knows less.
We know Comcast sucks because we're techies. They only know Comcast sucks because Comcast doesn't show up when they say they will for an install. Other than that, it's a black box for them.
The other solution they use is to build more routes.
The analogy has some flaws, though. Traffic is a problem, so you build more roads/lanes, so more people buy cars and commute (because there are more roads/lanes!) and so congestion remains a problem. However, there is a point at which you build enough roads/lanes/bridges that the traffic problem would actually be solved. The problem with roads is that they take up space, which is a very finite resource, so there are very hard limits on how much we can expand them. In practice the number of roads required for no one to ever hit traffic would be ridiculous.
Now think about network traffic. There is a similar problem: the network is congested, you add capacity, users realize this and consume more, and the new network is still congested. But notice two important things:
1. The network may still be "as" congested (100% usage), but each user is now getting a lot more data through. So it's not like the situation hasn't improved. It's still congested, but people are getting more data/utility out of the network. The added capacity wasn't wasted: people are using it. That's good.
2. Unlike for roads, we are nowhere near the practical physical limits of adding capacity. There are monetary challenges, of course, but we're not running out of places to put fiber-optic cables. Doubling the size of the current buried cables wouldn't bother anyone, and the costs are manageable. (Imagine if it were that painless to double the capacity of highways; we'd do it in a heartbeat.)
Network congestion is not an unsolvable problem. Just add capacity. The only limit right now is money. Companies have no incentive to put money into infrastructure, consumers don't have enough options to "vote with their wallet", and government dropped the ball with respect to oversight on the subsidies they've given out.
This is a cyclical problem that has no solution.
Trains and buses, then?
Let's put this to rest. You are a taxpayer in a state/city where there are 4 lanes of road going in and out of the heart of your city. During rush hour, congestion hits and it's go, stop, go stop. You and all the other citizens who pay taxes in the city/state complain that something must be done. 5 years later there are 6 lanes of traffic. Rush hour is still go, stop, go stop. See where I'm going here? This is a cyclical problem that has no solution.
yep, NO solution AT ALL http://www.blogcdn.com/green.autoblog.com/media/2008/02/05_gx_carpool_lane_500.jpg
I live in Poland (Europe) and I pay $20 for (10)5/1 Cable, Its 5Mbit during the day (peak hours), but goes up to 10Mbit between 24.00 and 12.00. I can saturate my upload and download 24/7. There wasnt a single situation where I couldnt saturate my connection to the internet.
Whats more my provider offers $50 (120)60/6 connection, and from what I saw at my friends house it also can be saturated with no problem if the server you are connecting to has the capacity.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
How long until Slashdot for example is inaccessible through Comcast?
I recently got a letter in the mail stating that Comcast was planning on upgrading my connection to the Internet to that of the WORLD WIDE WEB! That's right, I can access websites anywhere! I'm definitely paying the $5.99 for this upgrade, I mean, seriously, what a great deal!
Time Warner does the same thing - they advertise their speed and throughput, but when challenged with actual performance results (once you sign up and discover important things like latency and throughput are actually worse than some DSL providers like Cincinnati Bell), their sales engineers say their claims are for traffic within their own network only.
Since when does the Internet live solely within Time Warner or Comcast's own network? This is a completely misleading and unrealistic benchmark.
I called Time Warner out on this, said it was false advertising, and that their Business Class contract with me was not valid. They retrieved their equipment and complied with my rejection of the first month's use bill they sent me afterwards.
True, but those graphs show excessive congestion. Ratios that, if we had on our ISP link where I work, wouldn't be a matter of us pestering the CIO to buy more bandwidth, but a matter of the CIO asking US why we haven't asked for more bandwidth yet.
Normal uncongested traffic looks more or less like a sinusoid (just because we are diurnal creatures.) Mid-day on those charts it looks like that traffic would easily soak a link 6 to 8 times higher than the link capacity. That's flirting with congestive collapse even with modern countermeasures.
Note this has little to do with subscriber "ratios" and very much to do with the actual utilization. Barring a good deal from an equipment or service vendor, no responsible fiscal entity would buy 1:1 bandwidth because it would not be used. It would be pissing money up a rope. But this -- if the graph's for real, for shame.
You may ask then, why most of the places Comcast customers visit seem to load relatively fast. One word answer: akamai. Those using certain hosting services that don't ride over the congested links are able to present Comcast customers with a nice, smooth experience. Try to load someone unfortunate enough to be using a mom-and-pop ISP on the other side of that link, and it will be sluggish at best.
(And no, no "Net neutrality" legislation will fix that. To do so it would have to ban both server colocation and schemes like performance-reactive RRDNS, and that would be pretty much unenforceable.)
Someone had to do it.
The solution to this entire thing is simple. The FCC simply needs to create rules that classify speed packages and what those speed packages mean. ISPs can only sell using these FCC defined terms. 3MB services = 3MB of data per second can be transfered at any time of the day, from the cusomers end point to the exit point of the ISPs core backbone.
It would be fairly easy for the major carriers to setup tests sites just like DSL reports. Could test their connections and report trouble right from the site. The end result would be the majority of US customers would find out they are getting less than 10% of what they pay for.
If this gets bad enough, competition shows up. The informed people go for the better service, and others follow. Then, nobody bothers paying comcast for co-location anymore. Their remaining customers get packet drops...
Your analogy is phenomenally broken. Roads are not made of fiber, and cars are not bits. You cannot increase the speed of cars by orders of magnitude. It doesn't take years to upgrade the infrastructure, and they don't need to do a mere 50% increase when they do. Comcast sells a service, and they knew for years what the demand would be, so the added infrastructure is not reactionary. These are just the most glaring flaws in your ridiculous analogy.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Truly amazing. After having just pointed out that they dont operate in a free market and how that causes the problem, you then do a 180 in your concluding paragraph and say:
Your cognitive-dissonance circuits must be working lots of overtime.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Users will not always consume what is available. Users will consume what users would like to use. If you increase capacity and it gets used up then you didn't increase it enough. The developing world, not just the rest of the first world has passed the US by with cost and capacity by an order of magnitude or more. Everyone else get's substantially more, for substantially less per month. US customers are getting ripped off by all the communication markets. To make matters worse we're being forced to pay for a cable television market that's obsolete and could easily be replaced by Internet TV but for slimy pigs in Washington enjoying their hookers and blow supplied courtesy of businesses like Comcast.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Look at the bright side. At some point the traffic volume levels off when you can't increase the license plate size large enough to increase the number of characters shown and all combinations are in use. We're running out of TCP/IP V4 addresses. Just don't go to V6. That will give the networks time to grow.
Comcast did not have enough to build out the structure either. It was built out using right of way (took some of my land) and some tax payers dollars directly, and through collections and government fees for Comcast, the power company and the phone company. Sure, Comcast laid out the physical wires but that is a small part of the whole process. Now, they have a government controlled monopoly with no competition in an area.
What would have been better would be for local governments and people in the towns to build the last mile and providing companies competing for the exit connectivity. That did not happen and no the people are paying over and over again for the last mile and service. These should be two different things charged and maintained seperatly and until that happens in your area, you are stuck with it. In my area, a lot of housing developments are building out the last mile and the local HOA handles the contracts and the connectivity. Not perfect but at least if gives the HOA and its voting members some direct local control of their service provider choices.
To repeat something many people have been saying for years. Until you can break the cycle of the last mile being owned by a single company in your area, you are going to get fucked and have little to no competition. Some say wireless is the answer but there are only so many frequencies and a limited spectrum to use and they are controlled in the same manner. Yes wireless gives competition to wired but both are monopolies granted by the government and the people will be paying for it over and over again and still have little to know competition.
There's no reason one cannot provide for excessive users. However, it needs to be upfront and clearly seen what that means.
That said, bit torrent is not the bandwidth hog of today. It is everyday, common, and reasonable usage of services such as streaming video from the likes of Netflix, Hulu, etc.. If the network cannot support the everyday, common, and reasonable usage of the majority of its customers then they are not fulfilling their obligations.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Much like a 100% full highway.
Not defending comcast necessarily here, but I am a network engineer (not for comcast)
Look at the month-graph. The flat-top congestion has only just started in the last few WEEKS, and it appears traffic has picked up sharply starting around Nov 21.
There are many reasons why you could see an uptick in traffic. Some:
* December is just a high-traffic month.
* a link failed elsewhere in the network
* TATA inked a deal with some other company to start carrying their traffic (same as Level3's CDN deal) and now pushes more via this link
note the green line is about the same as it was when the link was not congested. Are people downloading more? Why did inbound increase while outbound decreased?
The internet is asynchronous. comcast may have a 1:4 traffic ratio with TATA, but they may have a 4:1 ratio somewhere else. That big of a disparity is not super likely, but it's very complex to control which links your inbound traffic comes in on, since that is determined by the routing policies of other ISPs and their customers. I see this sort of imbalance our own (many 10g internet) links frequently. They likely have several tens of 10g links for internet service, this is just one. Be careful extrapolating too far.
How long do you think it takes to add more links/capacity? Would you buy more for 1 month of relief?
Apples and Oranges. You oversell *individuals* 5-10x because the average, or even peak, aggregate use isn't the same as everybody maxing out their connections at once.
What Comcast is doing is overselling individuals at a rate so much higher that the *aggregate* use is oversold by a factor of 2x. That's an enormous problem.
Uh, yeah, except it's A LOT easier to add lanes to the information superhighway, and bandwidth grows exponentially. Unless content can somehow keep up with the exponential growth of bandwidth (and there's far less reason to believe this of content vs. bandwidth), then at some point capacity will exceed demand.
Right now, 90% of what consumers want *is* available online. Music, TV, movies, games, and correspondence. That's it, and most of it is available online. The only way to add demand now is to add customers, and at some point that too will plateau. In the very worst case, the number of customers has a physical limit equal to the population of the earth. Bandwidth shares no such physical limit; certainly not one that's worth concerning ourselves over. ISPs know this, and they're trying to milk this disparity while they can, and do everything they can to prolong it. Only a fool or a shill would equate the situation to actual traffic and say there's nothing to see here.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
And tell us, if you have a million people pulling 22mbps, with 22 mbps rate limitors, in a single stream across a router that is at 100% capacity, and just one more person starts a new stream, wanting to comsume all they can, what type of performance do they they get?
0 Mbps
22 Mbps?
Answer, 22mbps. And if the switch was at 1%, or 95%, they would still get just 22mbps.
You can order service with a symmetric upload/download. However, for most people usage patterns will still be highly tilted towards download (unless you are torrent seeding, hosting websites, or the like I assume). For instance this page http://www22.verizon.com/residential/fiosinternet/plans/plans.htm#plans shows download 25/upload 25 as 1 option (at least as I'm reading it).
The solution is trivial and well understood. It is called the free market. If a person owned the road, and everybody wanted the road to always be at most 50% full, trivially one could have usage charges that rose until the road was just 50% full. QED. As a society, we merely don't want the solution.
But they don't build an extra lane for that, they simply carve an express lane out of the plebeian lanes.
Instead of having an incentive to build more lanes, they just have to annoy the plebes enough so they cough up some more dough.
Actually it does have a solution, it is called planning ahead.
If you know that making it a 6 lane road will not be enough, than you don't make a 6 lane road, you make an 8 or 10 lane road instead.
And even then, this doesn't have any relevance to the topic as they are actually restricting the supply intentionally to extort more money from others seeking to get around it.
Kinda like if they had a 6 lane road where three of the lanes had toll boths so they blocked off the other three so everyone had no other option but to use the toll roads with no way to get around it. Now that is a more accurate analogy.
Market weenies should at least try not to flunk economics 101. If you as a consumer demand to pay for something that doesn't cost the ISP anything (data volume) instead of something that does cost money (data throughput at peak times), at least make sure that there is competition, so that there exists a market where this made-up product is traded. Otherwise you're just asking to be price-gouged.
As someone who also works for a cable company, no not comcast, that graph alone makes no sense. The peak times are all during off-peak hours, I would expect if this was really a graph of Comcasts pipe that, at the very least the bandwidth usage would be peaked at 7-9 pm.
Not defending Comcast, but basing your opinions of this badwidth usage graph seems iffy at best. Also, I sincerely doubt that Comcast has a single pipe to the internet, they likely have several all muxed together, using something like BGP.
Except that roads are already in nearly full capacity already. The proper analogy would be "imagine a 20-lane highway where your city only allows traffic on 4 of those lanes, now imagine that those 4 lanes have only single-lane off-ramps and you need to push your car across a gravel road on-ramp". There is a lot of dark fiber out there (much of it being bought up by Google). The backbone capacity is there. This is not a situation where major highway volumes are a proper analogy.
Unfortunately, my current congressman told me openly he thinks monopoly operators like Comcast shouldn't be regulated. Thank god he is on the way out, though I will be the guy on the way in thinks something similar.
Dumbass. You don't see how this is a fraudulent business practice? I pay (handsomely) for my internet service, advertised as "high speed unlimited broadband".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems as though Comcast is not providing the service they are a) advertising and b) selling.
Over the last decade I've watched as the tide has swung from the "Businesses provide a service that they get paid for" attitude to the "Steal whatever you can, whenever you can because that's 'free market' in action" attitude.
(And no, no "Net neutrality" legislation will fix that. To do so it would have to ban both server colocation and schemes like performance-reactive RRDNS, and that would be pretty much unenforceable.)
Well, you could just require them to expand capacity of the uplinks within a defined period of time if they've been at 100% utilization more than an average of e.g. 15% of the day over a period of 90 days.
Everyone has a choice in the US.
Only if you're going to include alternatives that actually aren't alternatives, or aren't even in the same class of product as broadband, like dialup and satellite.
Over the last decade I've watched as the tide has swung from the "I'll work hard to get what I want in life" attitude to the "Society owes me something" attitude.
Apart from being a very shitty strawman that equates to "Get off my lawn" or "Back in my day...", you forget to mention that business attitudes have also swung from the "Let's produce a good product and compete on the means of that product and our customer service" to "Fuck the customer, we need more money" attitude.
You got what you paid for. It's in the legaleeze of the fine print. Did you read the fine print?
Now I'm not supporting comcrap. I have them and have no choice but to cry that you had no idea what you paid for when it's all there for you to read is dumb.
If it were false advertising they would be sued...and have been. If you think you've been the object of a crime you should sign on to a class action lawsuit or sue them yourself.
Whoah dude....how do you THINK they GOT their MONOPOLY.
Government Regulation
Did they advertise it as unlimited? Then they offered it as unlimited. They don't want to provide actual unlimited? Then they should stop advertising it as unlimited.
Ted Stevens, is that you?
Extremely Shitty, but you can't do anything about it! Nyah Nyah Nyah
If you advertise your connection as being unlimited, but you actually cap it, how is that not lying?
But that doesn't help if the Internet user lives with relatives who 1. are happy with the Comcast TV service that they have had for over 30 years, 2. are still paying a monthly rental for a cable box that they no longer use and lost over 15 years ago and don't have the disposable cash to reimburse Comcast for lost equipment, 3. don't want to go into a 12- or 24-month commitment, 3. have heard unsubstantiated horror stories from friends and families about FiOS, and 4. don't want to have one company controlling TV, Internet, and home phone.
They don't have to follow the rules.
They're an American corporation.
If you look at the 30day graph, the situation loses a lot of the spin being placed on it: up until 2 weeks ago, they were doing fine, only peaking briefly at 10G with no upward trend. Then two weeks ago, a significant upsurge (online christmas shopping would be the obvious answer, but surprised it's costing *that* much bandwidth). You don't put in 10G lines overnight, and not if they're only going to be used for a few weeks... They clearly needed to be planning for it, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were in next year's plans...
No can do, I have FIOS. So far they haven't given me a reason to dig into the contract since I signed up.
It isn't now, but many nations believe it should or have already made it a human right... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_access#Internet_access_as_a_human_right
Yeah but rush hour never was a capacity problem, it's a yielding problem.
At that time enough really dumb slow people are on the road at once. Their downfall is not caring about speed. They are in rush hour, in the fast lane, NOT in a hurry.
They will only change lanes to fill newly opened spots, because they like the clear view and are going 0.0001mph faster than the guy in front of them. Ten seconds later their small brain forgot they were "fast" and they start coasting back down to the speed of traffic *beside* the guy they were passing 10 seconds ago. If you try to pass either people they will "remember" how fast they are and speed up to keep you from getting by because after all they are just as fast as you (until they forget again and line back up blocking the road).
Basically they don't get out of the way driving in the fast lanes, causing walls of slow people across all available lanes such that no faster traffic can get around. That causes all the normal fast lane people to shift into the other lanes in an attempt to get around. The fast people fail to pass and their failed attempt fills all remaining spots which ruins any chance of getting around the slow people.
If you manage to make it around, you'll have a clear road with very few sparsely positioned slow people who never kept up with the fast people in front of them, walled off from the world by the slow people behind them blocking everyone else from catching up. These are the void drivers. Too dumb to speed up, too dumb to move over, they just occupy the empty space and will cause further slow downs since they too are small brained slow people.
Also, I (seriously) always find that the slowest dumbest people on the road, drive Saturns. Start paying attention more and you might be surprised and agree with me. My friends and coworkers noticed too.....
Does this really need to appear on slashdot? As if the nanog mailing list hasn't been infested with opinion and nonsense enough already these stunts are only making it worse. Just stop it!
I live in one of those states!
but guess what.... Adding capacity actually HELPS!!! 5 years ago the freeway was 3 lanes each way, now it's 5 lanes each way. It used to take me 1.5 hours to get home. Now it's 45 minutes... during rush hour.
In another 10 years, maybe it'll be up to 1.5 hours again, then we'll expand again...
It is cylical, however your theory falls flat because when it is upgraded, it does fix the problem. AND if it were not upgraded, my travel time would go to 2, 3 hours.
Mod parent up as funny, sad but true ...?
Considering the nature of the Interstate Commerce clause and the feds taking action on everything through it, Yes regulation of Comcast could come into play. But probably not due to their significant campaign contributions.
I hope you don't mind but I fixed that for you.
The main problem with a minimum speed is the other end of the connection. If the place you are trying to download from only has a 4mbps connection, ideally if more than 4 people connect, you cannot get a minimum of 1mbps and people would scream about their guarantee not working.
Ok, sure. But you have to make sure that it's an acceptable level of congestion. You're still stopping and going, but more traffic is moving through now because there is more demand. And at first, you're likely stopping and going less. No one expects it to be perfect, but we do expect that the network grows as traffic increases.
A 100 percent full pipe is an efficient use of their resource.
You must not know much about business, process control, theory of constraints, operations management, or project management.
Googling Dr. Goldratt should be your first task after reading this comment.
I've been a Comcast Internet customer for many, many years and would LOVE to be a party to the coming Class Action. Sign me up!
There's nothing rational about time-of-day metering. Taken to the extreme, it can only lead to an absurd dystopia in which one third of your workforce operates during each of the three eight-hour shifts so that you keep your power and Internet bills down. That, of course, would be unhealthy for the workforce. There's a reason we have more demand during the day, and that's because people are and rightfully should be awake and doing their work during those hours. Any attempt to force usage to be more spread out through such ridiculous tactics is only going to cause economic, psychological, and physiological harm.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Seriously! I must be the luckiest guy on the internet because I don't have anything to complain about with Comcast. I've moved around a decent amount in the past few years in central NJ near the shore and have had the following experiences:
Comcast in Monmouth Beach and Long Branch:
I think this was back when the max was 6 or 8Mbps. Didn't block ports. Had a few issues with the lines running to my older apartment but once those were settled it was smooth sailing. Never really noticed "slowdowns" that the DSL people raised their noses about their non-shared connections.
Cablevision in Neptune and Asbury Park:
15/2 was the stock connection here I believe. Started using newsgoups and had no trouble maxing out the downstream at any time of the day.
Verizon FIOS in Asbury Park and Ocean, NJ:
Switched to FIOS solely for price reasons on a package deal. Base internet was supposed to be 15/5 but somehow I ended up getting a 25/25 connection. Not complaining. As with the previous Cablevision connection, had no problems saturating my downstream link downloading from the right servers.
Now I've moved to Aberdeen, MD and am back with Comcast due to the owners of my rental not wanting me to have FIOS installed. I ended up getting an internet-only package and now have a 50/10 connection for $50 a month. Yes...50Mbps. The kicker is, when I go to speedtest.net I get rated at 62/11.5. So now I'm downloading from newsgroups (using ssl at that) at just shy of 7MB/sec. I've never had issues with it going slower.
TL;DR:
I have a 50/10 Comcast connection that never slows down and speedtest.net says is actually 62/11 for $50 monthly, Netflix streams great.
Youtube, as usual sucks. If Comcast (and Verizon FIOS for that matter) are throttling anything, it's Youtube. That's the only thing I could even remotely say is slow.
Why exactly must the pipes only be used for those things that you or others deem "responsible"? Perhaps I want to read a tech blog or forum like Slashdot but someone else who deems that useless says it's not responsible - see where I'm going? I have a huge pipe at home, thank you Verizon, but I don't abuse it and only use full capacity in bursts, thank you Bitorrent. Why is this sort of thing a problem? I was offered and paid for a big pipe. If I were a Comcast customer and my big pipe was unable to perform despite their promises I'd have an issue with their infrastructure. I'm okay with not being allowed to use full capacity full time but from those graphs it's obvious that, if true, peak hours for them is pretty much most of the time normal people want to use the damned pipe. Paying by the gig will simply stunt the use of the resource, why would we want to encourage that? Wouldn't it be better to enhance the infrastructure instead? Lots of things to learn on the 'net so encourage it. Lots of stupid stuff too but that's interesting to others and who am I to say it's a waste? I'd only agree with a by the Gig plan if those gigs were awful cheap and then they'd be in the same place they are now. Oh and I would want them to provide me a tool to monitor my usage - that would be accurate and something I could trust. Yeah right....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Well for Comcast anyway, Verizon is doing fine for me with pretty high capacity...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
So about those flying cars....
Pay for the second tier.
Fios tier options (from their site)
15/5
25/25
50/20
I pay for it, so could you (if FiOS is in your area, if it isn't, I am truly sorry.)
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
For comparison, here is network usage for iweb.ca - a hosting and colo provider.
http://iweb.com/about-us/networks/usage-graphs/
You will notice 10Gbps links being 20% loaded, or less. And bandwidth costs are less than $0.1/GB..... So yes, comcast is ripping customers off if they run their links as they do. They should just charge $0.5/GB (400% profit over premium network access at a colo) and provide all the bandwidth that their customers need. Period.
Being an experienced network engineer, I can tell you that this graph is expected. TCP, by nature, uses all of the bandwidth it can due to its windowing mechanism. Since the FCC doesn't like carriers limiting people's use of applications like Bit Torrent, Youtube streaming, or the like, the pipe is naturally going to be full. There is nothing Comcast could do about it. Is it overloaded? Probably not. To show a "good" looking graph, you would have to have a pipe so large as to allow every communication to finish instantaneously, or very very quickly, thus not allowing TCP to expand to the full pipe in the time allotted. As you can see, the stream going out of Comcast is small-medium, because very few people probably host websites on the Comcast network. The transmissions are also reasonably small for requesting websites, and so, the transmissions complete quickly, thus allowing the graph to represent lower utilization. So, in the end, this is why Comcast is pro Internet prioritization, or QoS, really. To make something very clear, I am not affiliated with Comcast, so don't ask.
if you were me, you'd think the same way
I am a step ahead of you! I have access to HUNDREDS more web sites, with the email and internet gaming add-on package bundle for just $29.99 more!
mod me funny
Why exactly must the pipes only be used for those things that you or others deem "responsible"? Perhaps I want to read a tech blog or forum like Slashdot but someone else who deems that useless says it's not responsible - see where I'm going? I have a huge pipe at home, thank you Verizon, but I don't abuse it and only use full capacity in bursts, thank you Bitorrent. Why is this sort of thing a problem? I was offered and paid for a big pipe. If I were a Comcast customer and my big pipe was unable to perform despite their promises I'd have an issue with their infrastructure. I'm okay with not being allowed to use full capacity full time but from those graphs it's obvious that, if true, peak hours for them is pretty much most of the time normal people want to use the damned pipe. Paying by the gig will simply stunt the use of the resource, why would we want to encourage that? Wouldn't it be better to enhance the infrastructure instead? Lots of things to learn on the 'net so encourage it. Lots of stupid stuff too but that's interesting to others and who am I to say it's a waste? I'd only agree with a by the Gig plan if those gigs were awful cheap and then they'd be in the same place they are now. Oh and I would want them to provide me a tool to monitor my usage - that would be accurate and something I could trust. Yeah right....
I did not say anything about what I think is responsible. It is on you, as the one paying for the bandwidth, to determine what is worth paying for, and what is not.
Lets talk about the other pipes we have--water. Do you think that it would be a good idea to simply pay for 10psi, or 30psi, of unmetered water? I think that would cause plenty of problems with appliances, not to mention over-watering in drought-stricken areas. No, paying by the gallon ensures that people are affected by their own decisions. Consider it a form of empowerment--choose how much you pay!
A bit-meter would be a simple tool, similar to your wireless carrier's minute-meter. It should be available on your ISP's account page, and also on the web-interface of your cable modem. You, the user, can install your own choice of bit-meter on your computer, and compare the numbers.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
Ba Dump!
Is it really absurd to give people the freedom and ability to economize?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
For a lot of people the sporting events are the key. If I could stream sporting event (even if I paid for them individually in a pay per view model) for Blackhawks games and Bear games I would drop my sat provider in a Chicago minute (which is slightly less hectic and less rude than a New York minute)
think it would be a delicious irony if as result of the scrutiny Comcast is receiving due to their proposed acquisition of NBC regulators not only to denied the acquisition but further split the company in half. One half would be Comcast cable and the other half would be Xfinity broadband. Comcast cable would be forced to lease the last mile lines to Xfinity as well as any other broadband provider that is interested. That would be justice and therefore it will never happen. We're just going to see a ban on charging for traffic that terminates in their network. The rest of the car is left pretty much unchanged at first glance, but the beauty is in the details - slightly redesigned tail lamp cluster, body-coloured rubbing strips on the sides and an all new rear bumper with sharp reflectors on the far corners. The new i10 also gets turn indicators on the wing mirrors as standard fitment - a first in its class. mirc porno izle mirc yükle sikis izle turk porno
Contrary to what people may say in analogies for the past years,
the internet is not an information superhighway.
Analogies are good to help convey understanding, but should not be used as a basis for an argument.
I am not trying to be a total tool here bagboy, though, and to be honest I just refuse to see there is no solution. I would like to highlight an AC's comment I found insightful below me:
Not quite. Technology improves daily, old gear can be replaced as regular maintenance. You can't simply replace old roads like switches and routing circuits. You jump from 4 to 6 lanes, technology increases exponentially. Try going from 4 lanes to 18 in 5 years for comparisons, and then to 36 18 months later, 72 18 months after that.
Sure it isn't all that perfect on scaling, but his point is still valid.
Another AC comment worth pointing out:
But you don't market the freeway as if its a guaranteed 65 mph, sometimes up to 90...
Also, most major freeways were designed in an era when most households only had one car, and people didn't have 50 mile commutes.
Rush hour is one thing, normal commute another. Personally I just blame all the damn minivans blocking the left hand lane...
Bandwidth and content delivery is the future. Getting the world truly connected is the one of the next great technical goals of humankind.
And I for one welcome the challenge.
...
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Bandwidth.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?
-The Graduate
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
As I engineer an ISP network as well and you probably know as well, users will not ALWAYS consume what is available. Look at Universities, they have a small village (~50k people) to provide access for with individual lines between 100Mbps and 1Gbps and somehow manage to only peak up to 40-60% of their lines (2x 1Gbps).
What is really the problem here is that Comcast only has a couple of 10Gbps lines to their provider while those only cost $2500/month and maybe $25,000 installation costs. If Comcast doesn't have a spare $25,000/month, then the business is really bad off.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
There's nothing rational about time-of-day metering. Taken to the extreme, it can only lead to an absurd dystopia in which one third of your workforce operates during each of the three eight-hour shifts so that you keep your power and Internet bills down.
I have no argument that your doomsday scenario would be ridiculously harmful to society. But most things are harmful when taken to extremes--even sleeping, eating, and breathing. Therefore a more rational argument is in order.
I would like to point out that when not taken to such an extreme, demand-based pricing gives customers a reasonable incentive to avoid non-essential traffic during peak hours. Some services, such as offsite backups or bittorrent seeding, could obviously be done at off-peak times (but already are in most cases). This allows the provider to accurately gauge how much peak capacity is really needed and optimize network upgrades accordingly, keeping costs down for everyone.
In your dystopia, time-of-day pricing has altered user behavior to the point where network load is constant and the network operates at peak efficiency all the time. This assumes that, prior to the behavior change, the cost of putting all your usage during "peak" hours was more than the cost of operating on a shift-based schedule, which would be totally impossible for many businesses' actual operations, never mind basic health and welfare. I doubt peak rates could be raised that high without causing some kind of revolt among the populace.
The caveat, of course, is whether today's ISPs would actually use time-of-day pricing to benefit consumers, or simply use it as another price-gouging mechanism. I wouldn't put it past them to actually attempt to create just such a dystopia if given the chance.
As a footnote, many mass transit systems use peak-pricing on their fares to debatable effect: on the one hand, they raise more money from the essentially captive group of daily commuters with 9x5 jobs. On the other hand, they give what amounts to discounted fares to tourists and others who travel during the off-periods, making recreational use more affordable and keeping drivers unfamiliar with the city off the streets. However, this only works because the peak customers have no alternative comparable in convenience or cost, despite the fare hikes, and leaves them feeling exploited.
That isn't an issue if you don't oversell. If you sell x customers y available bandwidth you need to have x*y bandwidth available through peers.
A lot of people keep repeating this, but it's bullshit. No efficient network operates like that. The whole point of a network is to share the costs of a fast network, so that everybody can get a higher speed than the could otherwise. The only way to guarantee the performance you're demanding here is to use dedicated point-to-point links.
This comment by Late Adopter above lays it out fairly clearly. The total bandwidth demand by x users with connections of speed y is much lower than x*y. The shared network needs to provide that much upstream bandwidth. Comcast are in the wrong because they are evidently providing much less than the aggregate demand. Your "don't oversell" rule is wrong for the opposite reason, which is that it would provide way, way too much.
Are you adequate?
Your presumption that ALL consumers are ignorant is false. Otherwise we would never have this debate/discussion.
The problem is no one bothers to burn down the doors to their congressman (figuratively speaking of course). With that not happening you have as much chance pissing into the wind and making it into a beer bottle. You can complain or jump ship all you want but the provider could give two shits about what you really want otherwise they'd actually ask and grow their business based on that feedback. They listen to the shareholders who are looking at short term gains in their stock. Now, say 60% or more of their base customers leave. Then they may bat an eye and say 'holy shit we better do something' and they'll run around like mad men and finally give free stuff away until all the idiots that want free crap come out of the woodwork to fill those spots. Then they'll jack up rates.
Verizon is as evil as Comcast, they're just biding their time. You wait.
What really needs to happen is both Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon all need to be busted up again. In the cell world ATT probably needs a stab in the back from the FCC as well; or FTC. That will, for a time, provide some sort of competition until all the little siblings come back from hell to haunt us all. Unfortunately none of those conglomerates will ever fully disappear.
In a sufficiently competitive marketplace, businesses who charge too high a price for their services lose customers and eventually go bust.
The corollary is that if a business charges too high a price for their services but does not go bust due to losing customers, then the marketplace is insufficiently competitive.
Cable video+internet services is often a market with insufficient competition. Although usually that's because all too often there's ONE SINGLE PROVIDER for a given geographical area.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
What they advertise is not countable. you Agree to and SIGN a contract that states it exactly, Why did you do a dumb thing and not read it?
Welcome to how business works in the United states. It's a legal Bait-and-switch. and is gonna get worse because the baying sheep keep lapping it up.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...Comcast, AT&T and others are really just common carriers. That's why I say that Net Neutrality is a ruse.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Alternatively, be upfront and offer a tiered range of plans based on limited amounts of data transfer: $XX for XXGB.
The graph alone should show you why they can't be upfront about it without confusing the average internet user. The key is what you mentioned about Peak times.
As an illustrative example, who costs Comcast more, customer A who downloads 250GB per month during peak hours or customer B who downloads 500GB per month during off peak hours? The answer is that those off-peak GBs are basically free from Comcast's perspective whereas those peak GBs count towards the infrastructure that Comcast needs to pay for in order to keep their service at a certain quality level.
I'd be willing to bet that Comcast's caps are done in such a way that peak traffic counts far more towards your quota than off-peak. So if that's their strategy, how would you clearly lay out what the caps are in an upfront manner? It would read like an English version of an algorithm with asterisks explaining things that are not constant.
Would it be better if they said, "200GB per month of peak* traffic where off-peak traffic counts at 66% towards the quota. * peak defined as network utilization over 93% which is typically (but not always) between 6PM and 8AM." That's great for geeks who can decipher it, but your typical internet user will go cross-eyed and eventually find some plan that just offers unlimited at a certain speed.
Ah yes and only those with deep pockets should be able to afford to have it aplenty. This isn't water, it's information, it's knowledge, it's news, and yeah it's horse p0rn. These companies, in this country, are given monopolies in various areas. They take their profits and they fail to upgrade their networks - they have a captive audience. Worse they take money from the Govt. to build out their networks - and then DON'T. At this point I believe at least one "plan" has FAILED in each of the states in this country if not more. It's disgusting and to then limit bandwidth to assist the carriers that have failed to live up to promises they have made and money they have taken - I have no sympathy for them.
You know the best way to get broadband in many towns in the US? Get your local town council to start talking about doing it themselves. Suddenly out of the woodwork carriers that had heretofore snubbed your backwater will suddenly appear like a genie from a lamp ready to grant you broadband if you'll just give them a monopoly. Turn them down and watch them lobby State Govt to get your plan outlawed or even made illegal.
So no, I'm not real sympathetic. This isn't some huge mess caused by zillions of users wanting too much bandwidth it's too little bandwidth provided by a carrier who's trying to squeeze every last dime they can from every source. No sympathy from me. Paying by the gig will certainly slow things down, tell me again why we want to slow things down exactly? Meanwhile the likes of Google are working on devices that use the "cloud" for everything lol.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
If you had put in 4 lanes (total of 8), instead of 2 (total of 6), then you wouldn't be congested now.
See where I'm going here?
We're running out of TCP/IP V4 addresses.
I always wondered why they just didn't add an extra octet to the address. Instead of 11.22.33.44, you'd have 11.22.33.44.55, multiplying the available addresses by 256. (Currently existing addresses would start with an optional 0: 00.11.22.33.44). That'll be enough for a few decades. Then just add another octet: 11.22.33.44.55.66.
Instead, they jump to some ungodly hexadecimal crap that's like, 32 characters long: 105c:1b00:299b:f48c:7105:06de:3a0c:321b. Try to memorize that!
Ah yes and only those with deep pockets should be able to afford to have it aplenty. Paying by the gig will certainly slow things down, tell me again why we want to slow things down exactly? Meanwhile the likes of Google are working on devices that use the "cloud" for everything lol.
Slow things down HOW? If anything, the carriers would provide end users with FASTER connections, so that the end users rack up larger bills.
It would be like the cell phone network. The reason we have the coverage we do, is because the carriers don't make money if we can't get coverage. It's that simple.
All paying for the gigabyte does is align the desires of the capitalists with those of the consumers.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
> No, you pay for a high speed connection to the INTERnet and
> they are providing a high speed connection to their own
> INTRAnet with a congested gateway to the internet.
I just realized, seriously, exactly when did the fcc, guvment do away with `network providers cannot be content providers?'
This would fix the issue.
Under what administration? Was it the Clinton or the G. W. Bush deregulation, dumb-as-we-wanna-be White House was this done? The DMCA was done under Cinton's auspices. Now there was a Ball dancing, weekly book reading, Barbra Streisand ticket holding, friend of my aunt Dorothy.
Toll roads??!!! You have got to be kidding
Take the toll rode here in Illinois its run by relatives or appointees of corrupt politicians and talk abouty feather bedding I won't go there.
Or take for example the Ohio Turnpike (toll road) It was built in the 1950's and was to be turned over to the public once it had been paid for by tolls. Haha It still costs to take it and it seems that each year the turn over gets put back 20 years (or so).
On an ideal situation both of these would have been turned back to the state but the politicians find ways of making money over it and acrttually do not want this to happen as they will loose their gravy train.
IP4 is Hex as well. You are just used to seeing it translated to decimal. That is why they go from 0 to 255. That's FF. So, with your suggestion, we would rework the internet every few years instead of just making the number enough digits that it will last.
I wish people would stop suggesting this. It is a terrible idea. Last mile is NOT a natural monopoly. Cable is cheap. We do NOT want the government trying to run any part of the network. Governments do some things good. It is the things they are good at that you want them doing. Most governments are good at building networks of pipes through cities. I don't mean pipes euphemistically. I mean real concrete/steel/plastic/etc. pipes. Tubes. I have 3 sets of pipes running into my house now, and a 4th that reaches the street at the corner of my block. PG&E runs gas pipes into my house, and the city runs water and sewer lines to my house. The city also runs storm drains to the corner of my block. Physical pipes are a solved engeneering problem.
Lets get municipalities to start putting one more set of pipes into our homes. Make them the size of the sewer system. With actual pipes running to the homes, the municipalities can rent out space to run cabling to anyone that wants to pay the fee. This way the cities stay out of the ISP business, they collect money for pipe usage, citizens get competition, and upgrading the infrastructure becomes dramatically less expensive as new technology comes out.
A pipe system the size of our sewer lines would would easily handle Petabytes/sec of data. At that point, wire is not the bottleneck. Switches are.
Cite me one example of a "well functioning" free market that has existed without externalities, regulation, protectionism, network effects, AND which operates with consumers with perfect knowledge making rational choices.
I'll show you one when you can show me a spherical vacuum of uniform density ;-)
That's to say, Free Markets are a model of reality. Like any other model, one of my (Comp.Sci.) professors' quotes applies: "Of course it's wrong---it's a model".
Being wrong due to it being an oversimplification, I can't show you perfect information or perfect rationality or perfect deregulation or [...].
But I can point you to empirical evidence that economics has gotten a thing right or two; I'm not going to look it up now, but somewhere in the first nine chapters of Hal Varian's Intermediate Microeconomics, he references an observation study which suggests that 93% of consumer decisions with respect to transportation choices can be explained from an interpolated linear utility function, in accordance with fairly standard Consumer Theory.
For more: see maybe EconTalk's archives and EconLib; they have a strong austrian bent, at least Russ Roberts does, FWIW. Or the intertubes.
Based on my somewhat shallow understanding of the US ISP market, it seems that "Competitive Market" is a less accurate model than "Oligopoly" or "Cartel". The latter are still wrong because they're models, but they're less wrong because they're better models (again: in my head).
Further, we can explain why there's an Oligopoly by Network Effects (although I think Large Fixed Costs To Entry hold quite a bit of explanatory power too, to the extent they're different).
Also, if Free Markets are not the best models of the following sectors, please let me know what you think the most accurate model is and why:
Bicycles, bicycle repair services, food (e.g. at the grocer's), restaurant meals, gold/silver/(each other metal), wood, glasses and optician services, soda, glassware/ceramics and kitchen utensil, household machinery (washing machines, spin dryers, dishwasher, vacuum cleaners, ...), furniture, storage space.
A completely orthogonal question is this: "are de/unregulated markets the best way for society to run?" I think the answer varies depending on sector. Some sectors are natural monopolies, or have built-in externalities, or are non-rival/non-exclusive goods, or have other market failures. It makes sense to do something other than "Free Markets" in those situations. In other situations, letting free markets do their thing is best.
Finally, I'm surprised by your strong reaction. It looks (and I'm guilty of exaggerating here) to me like you think I just killed your puppy. I'm curious; Why is that?
Slow things down by folks being less willing to use their computers. The network would probably fly, usage however would likely shrink. Why would we want to discourage usage of a resource that promotes sharing, learning, and connectivity?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1903798&cid=34559886
APK
P.S.=> Just some "FYI" 4U on HOSTS files, & Windows Defender/Microsoft Security Essentials... apk
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1903798&cid=34559886
APK
P.S.=> Just some "FYI" 4U on HOSTS files & Windows Defender/Microsoft Security Essentials... apk
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1903798&cid=34559886
APK
P.S.=> Just some "FYI" 4U on HOSTS files, & Windows Defender/Microsoft Security Essentials... apk
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1903798&cid=34559886
APK
P.S.=> Some good "FYI" on HOSTS files, & Windows Defender/Microsoft Security Essentials... apk
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1903798&cid=34559886
APK
P.S.=> Some good "FYI" on HOSTS files, & Windows Defender/Microsoft Security Essentials... apk
back-bone infrastructure grows at ~40%-50% every year and back-bone bandwidth prices drop ~50% every year.
I can understand if the bottle-neck is in the last mile for 60mb connections since last-mile bandwidth is harder and more expensive, but we're talking about 8mb connections having bottlenecks at the ISP level, not last-mile.
This has to be done on purpose.
I say why allow them to get away with that shit? It is false advertising, plain and simple, and they should be spanked for it.
You seem to think that rates would go up. For many users, rates would go down, at least in theory--and not only that, but people who can't currently afford the price for "unlimited" internet would be able to get on the net, if only for a little bit each month. Rich people can afford to use more water and electricity in their homes--but the poor can still use water and electricity, if not as much.
If anything, we should make the internet more like an electrical utility, where the distribution network can be managed by one company, and ISP's take care of the user billing and purchase bandwidth from the ISP. That's the only way we're going to get competition for service on monopolistic areas.
All these arguments depend on the cost per gigabyte. If the cost is $10/gigabyte, or $0.10/gigabyte--the outcomes we are arguing about would vary widely. So the first step is ensuring competitive pricing, which means ensuring competition.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
It has a simple solution. Increase capacity to meet the current need and provide some room for growth. Analyze growth trends and proactively increase capacity as needed. Alternatively, you could sell connections to your consumers with a smaller cap per connection which will result in uplink bandwidth requirements you can supply.
I can't believe there's no class action suit over this (or maybe there is and I'm just unaware). Seems like it would be a slam dunk with the available documentation.
Exactly, they are an organization designed to make a profit and we are individuals intending to increase our quality of life. They do not give a damn about our quality of life and we (as least I) don't give a damn about their profit margin. So such arguments are moot.
I care about price fixing, corporate collusion and those not providing the service they sold as such things affect our quality of life.
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
So, with your suggestion, we would rework the internet every few years instead of just making the number enough digits that it will last.
Well, they've been crying about the 'end of ipv4' for, what, 10 years or more now. All the time saying 'the remaining addresses will only last a year!!!!!!11!!2!!' Yet it''s still going, 10 years later.
If the remaining dregs of the current system lasted for 10 years, increasing the total number of addresses by a factor of 256 should last us for, what, a century, easy? (Actually, to do the math- if, in the last 10 years, we used up the final 25% of ipv4, then 256 times as many addresses should last for 1024 years.)
No, it wouldn't. The address have been getting used up on right about the schedule that has been predicted for years. The only reason that we have not run out sooner is because of NAT, and other tricks that hold back development. With phones coming online in huge numbers, the usage is just going to continue to accelerate.
Realistically no one uses IP addresses directly anyway, so a long number doesn't affect the vast majority of people. Better to just fix the problem permanently.
I read the article and looked at the graphs. I understand what the text says, and it makes references to the graphs. The problem is, the graphs are meaningless to me and they aren't explained anywhere. What am I looking at?
I would be more inclined to accept the article if Backdoor Santa would care to explain the graphs. What axis (left or right) is used for what curve? What does each curve measure? Please be specific enough that I could (mostly) replicate the graphs if I took my own measurements (measuring what?).