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."

Comments

The text in a readable format

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:The text in a readable format

[GooberToo]

Seems to me that if this is all true, there is certainly grounds for a class action suite here. After all, with them knowingly maxing their pipes, its impossible for them to ever argue good faith efforts of any kind. Its kind of like trying to deliver water past a sieve and arguing I'm working my best to deliver water. Its just not possible.

Re:The text in a readable format

[wings]

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.

I'm suprised the ratio is that good considering most broadband service providers force their customers into highly asymetric connections (8:1?, 10:1?, higher?) and not allow them to run servers. It's disingenious to expect the Level 3 to be a 'good network' and maintain a 1:1 ratio with them while they force their customers into a highly asymmetric traffic pattern. It appears to me that it's in the ISP's financial interest to force high assymetry.
If Comcast want's Level 3 to pay up for traffic ratios higher than 5:1, and Comcast forces their customers into still higher ratios, shouldn't Comcast be paying (refunding) their customers for the 'excess' traffic?

Re:The text in a readable format

[sirdude]

FYI, TATA is an Indian conglomerate which has fingers in many pies: ISP, Telecom, Software (TCS), Steel, Chemicals, Power, Motors (trucks & cars; also own Jaguar and Landrover; makers of the Nano), Tea, consumer electronics, pharmaceuticals, clothing, watches, salt, jewellery, DTH TV - I can just keep going on an on. It's ridiculous how much one single company can control :S Tata, the telecom carrier company, was previously named Teleglobe and was bought in 2005.

Re:The text in a readable format

[clone52431]

Alternate-alternate-site for people who can’t access either imageshack or glowfoto:
Image #1: http://ompldr.org/vNms2aQ/ntoday.gif
Image #2: http://ompldr.org/vNms2ag/sqnday.gif
Image #3: http://ompldr.org/vNms2aw/ntomonth.gif

Re:The text in a readable format

[Anonymous Coward]

The graphs explain utilization overtime....that's pretty much it. However, where does the picture say "Intentionally-run-their-IP-transit-links-so-full-that-Content-Providers-have-no-other-choice-but-to-pay-them"? I can spin another story behind these graphs.

I mean all this generates is the following questions rather then answers
"Why is Comcast taking so long to fix this?"
"Why is TATA taking so long to fix this?"

I think the poster needs to submit a little more then just graphs.

From,
Loius Syfer

Re:The text in a readable format

[Anonymous Coward]

Moar, moar, moar leaks like this. Seriously. the anti-trust folks should be peering up Comcast's ass with a penlight torch, it seems to be blatantly abusing it's monopoly powers to charge perhaps hundreds of thousands Americans 'no-choice', high prices.

It seems that leaking is becoming one of the only ways to force the government into (rearguard - assguard - action) to enforce its own laws. Too much bedsharing between politicos and corporate America.

Re:The text in a readable format

[Sepodati]

You got a peek at 3 interfaces on ONE router processing 30Gb of Comcast traffic (allegedly) and all of a sudden you know how the entire company is operating in enough detail to file a class action lawsuit? Ridiculous...

Re:The text in a readable format

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a one exceptionally interesting story The problem is the graphs really don't tell you Comcast's intentions no TATAs. It's simply a graph that states saturation to 100% most of the time on 3 different interfaces. Reminds me about a Fox News covering the Chilean Minors story and as they are about to be pull one of the miners out, the camera starts to focus on a boy - a son of one of the minors waiting to see his dad and has what looks like Minors Hat tucked under his arm. Mind you there is banner screen next to him blocking the rest of his body from the camera's perspective. So one of Fox news anchors...we shall call him the opportunist...decides to tell the audience that it's a hat signed by all the rescuers. He puts some emotion about how that hat will represent the heroes who helped his dad. Suddenly the helmet starts to float up - LIKE A BALLON. As someone had once said "A picture is worth a thousand interpretations"

Re:The text in a readable format

[Sepodati]

Comcast is paying TATA for the imbalance since TATA is a transit provider and Comcast is their customer.

The Level 3 issue is separate as Level 3 wants a FREE interconnection. If you want FREE then you should maintain a 1:1, or up to a 2:1 depending on the contract, traffic ratio.

Re:The text in a readable format

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should do this for every article, since most of us will never read the article but will comment here anyway. People like me, you know?

Re:The text in a readable format

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting ANON to avoid firing and lawsuits.

It is the Company policy to NOT upgrade anything until the number of customer complaints crosses a threshold. and we are talking real complaints threatening disconnection.

It has been this way for 10 years.

Re:The text in a readable format

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want FREE then you should maintain a 1:1, or up to a 2:1 depending on the contract, traffic ratio.

Why? Comcast's customers want the content, so Level 3 is providing a service by sending it to the Comcast network.

Re:The text in a readable format

[SuricouRaven]

Comcast doesn't have to force a ratio, though they do try. The majority of users actually *are* assymetric users. They watch lots of youtube, browse lots of websites. Occasionally they'll upload some family photos, but then many more users like them will download the same. Even those who actually create will consume a lot more, just because of the time ratio: It takes three minutes to listen to most pieces of music, but days to weeks to create them. The only home users who would not be heavily biased on the downstream are the p2p-pirates, for whome the total uploaded must equal the total downloaded for any isolated population, and the occasional heavy gamer.

Re:The text in a readable format

[GooberToo]

You got a peek at 3 interfaces on ONE router processing 30Gb of Comcast traffic (allegedly) and all of a sudden you know how the entire company is operating in enough detail to file a class action lawsuit? Ridiculous...

Where I said:

Seems to me that if this is all true...

. Which seems to clearly indicate you're not only an absolutely idiot, but an idiot troll. Learn to fucking read moron.

Re:The text in a readable format

[BitZtream]

which Comcast was complaining about with Level (3). The reality is that the ratio argument is bogus

The argument is bogus because Comcast is not a transit provider, they provide service to end users. 1:1 peering agreements are for when you transit between backbone providers. Without TATA and L3 Comcast has nothing to provide its customers.

Data from L3 does not pass through Comcast's network then head out to TATAs links for someone else, it goes to direct Comcast customers. When they transit traffic between TATA and L3, then they can try to charge for that traffic.

If anything, Comcast should be paying L3 a considerable sum.

Think of it like this:
L3 = Samsung
TATA = Apple
Comcast = Walmart
Customers = Customers

What Comcast is saying is that:
Not only should Customers pay for goods at Walmart, but also Samsung should pay for the privilege of selling those goods at Walmart.

Lets say it again, Comcast != Transit provider, Comcast == ISP. They just buy bandwidth from transit providers and sell it to end users. What they want to do is sell everyone the same 'bandwidth' multiple times.

Re:The text in a readable format

[anti-human 1]

At the very least, this proves the data is available and could be dug up in Discovery. I'll agree that it isn't enough info to base a lawsuit on, but it probably could open the door.

Re:The text in a readable format

[Sepodati]

If _what_ is true? That three links are saturated? That all links are saturated? That this is on purpose and anti-competitive? That these links actually belong to Comcast?

Your IF clause only makes sense if you're implying Comcast is being anti-competitive. There's no information provided in this article that would support that, however.

-John

Re:The text in a readable format

[mostlyDigital]

Too many secrets. Looks like we need (vetted) wikis to analyze and publish reports about the companies that are holding us hostage for monthly ransoms. One side-effect would be a total lack of credibility for government critiques of things like wikileaks. Keep the consumer in the dark and milk him/her as long as possible.

Re:The text in a readable format

[GooberToo]

Okay, so its agreed you're too stupid to read an article and follow a thread to maintain simple context.

Re:The text in a readable format

[Sepodati]

I read the entire thread, including the replies. The ONLY thing shown here is that three links are nearly 100% utilized during peak hours.

So yes, IF the baseless assumptions are true, there may be grounds for a lawsuit. What a useless statement and worthless contribution to the discussion.

Re:The text in a readable format

[GooberToo]

Read your contributions. Idiocy and uselessness is an understatement.

Re:The text in a readable format

[Anthony Mouse]

Comcast is paying TATA for the imbalance since TATA is a transit provider and Comcast is their customer.

The Level 3 issue is separate as Level 3 wants a FREE interconnection. If you want FREE then you should maintain a 1:1, or up to a 2:1 depending on the contract, traffic ratio.

So what you're saying is that Level 3 ought to put the Netflix data center in a separate business unit and then Level 3 should charge Comcast for transit between Comcast and the Netflix business unit.

This is clearly Comcast holding their customers hostage for money. I can see no principled distinction between Level 3 and TATA.

Re:The text in a readable format

[BuckaBooBob]

It depends on how you look at it and if Comcast has any desire to increase the level of Service its giving its Customers...

If your a Content Provider and your Pushing 5 Gig/s into Comcast it would be in their best interest to enter into a peering arrangement with that content provider so that 5 Gigs/s is offloaded from their main pipe.. But you would need to do some homework to find out whats being pushed into a network to see if there would be any benefit from a peering arrangement. But its Comcast.. What has Comcast done that didn't increase their revenue? It might make sense to enter into a peering arrangement with Level 3... But unless they pay for it why should they.(Thats whats going through their head)

And Honestly... That graph is for a Single Circuit.. If Comcast only has a Single 10gig connection for all of its customers...... Seriously.. 10gig/s isn't that much for How many Subscribers...

Re:The text in a readable format

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon does this as well.

Re:The text in a readable format

[hitmark]

Games are more latency sensitive then bandwidth sensitive, as usually the media data is locally stored and all that is required to send is various updates on location and actions.

Re:The text in a readable format

[SuricouRaven]

A congested link though is terrible for latency - even a tiny irregularity in flow leads to long queues of packets, and many packets are lost causing timeouts and retransmissions. You can demonstrate this by running a bittorrent client at full capacity and trying to play a game.

Re:The text in a readable format

[hitmark]

gah, true. I blame a caffeine shortage.

Re:The text in a readable format

[Khyber]

I guess you forgot where people signed up for having their connections monitored to ensure they were getting the service they paid for/were advertised.

Apparently you're too stoned to think about the past few months and remember we've been down this road, and that this is just ANOTHER PIECE OF EVIDENCE against Comcast.

Re:The text in a readable format

[sir99]

Pay for the privilege of selling goods?

Re:The text in a readable format

[euphemistic]

What I understand from your analogy is that Comcast is using the pimping/strip joint owner business model. At this point I don't even care if the analogy is flawed.

Re:The text in a readable format

[Anonymous Coward]

Senator Sanders has a form (direct link) collecting signatures telling the FCC to stop the Comcast / NBC merger. (If there were an alternative to Comcast up here in Vermont, I'd take it...) Feel free to let the FCC know how you really feel....

I, for one...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:I, for one...

[Mr. Freeman]

Look, comcast is a private company that exists to make money. Because they're a private company, the government doesn't regulate the quality of their product. This is because it's assumed that the free market will take over. The assumption is that people will switch to other providers and thus stop buying comcast service. In a market in which there's actually competition, this works quite well.

The problem is that comcast has a monopoly (or duopoly) with regard to internet service pretty much everywhere comcast offers service. Thus, there's no free market to drive prices down and quality up.

The only solution in these situations is government regulation. Either subsidize new providers, cap prices, mandate minimum quality of service, etc. Comcast argues that they don't need regulation because they're doing just fine and that they're serving the public good. These graphs show that this is clearly not the case.

Re:I, for one...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There is another potential solution that bears experimenting with, given the dangers of regulatory capture, which makes regulated monopolies a potentially unstable position over time:

Treat last-mile connectivity as a utility-style natural monopoly(which it essentially is, economically speaking). Have the municipality build out either fiber, or tubes for running fiber, to a peering point accessible under RAND conditions. Their responsibility would be to ensure that the pipe between you and the peering point is maintained(ie. this isn't a 'gummint internet'). At this point, anybody who wished to do so could set up shop at the peering point and offer services over the pipe, whether they be straight internet access, IP TV, VOIP, whatever.

Once you get beyond the last-mile, there is a much stronger case to be made that competition is both possible and actual; but the last mile is an oligopoly at best, monopoly at worst, and(like water, power, and roads) tends toward being a natural monopoly in the economic sense...

Re:I, for one...

[Opportunist]

Well our (read: my country's) solution was to force the companies owning the cables to split between ISP and "cable owner", and forcing the cable owner to rent out their cables and capacities to all ISPs for the same rate. Of course they tried to (and still try to) stall wherever they can, but we're getting somewhere.

Re:I, for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, that's just not true! I have a ton of choices for internet at my home. There's Comcast, there's Satellite, and 2 types of dial up! Who could ask for more! // Bitter because comcast just jacked up his rates.

Re:I, for one...

[blind_abraxas]

Look, comcast is a private company that exists to make money.

Stop right there. In the interest of honest logical discussion, Comcast is not a private company. They are publicly traded and all such corporations exist, in the words of some dude I once worked for, to make money for the shareholders.

Re:I, for one...

[operagost]

The problem is that comcast has a monopoly (or duopoly) with regard to internet service pretty much everywhere comcast offers service.

I live in a rural/suburban area 45 minutes from Philadelphia and have FiOS and CLEC DSL options. I previously lived in a suburban area and had the same options. I also used to live in a town on the Philly Main Line and had multiple options throughout the 2000s.

Re:I, for one...

[WindBourne]

Or, you can remove the legally granted monopoly that they pay gov. HANDSOMELY for. By changing their monopoly fee to a tax that drops based on how many providers services the area (2 providers and tax is 1/2 for both), and opening it to anyone to compete. Comcast DOES charge a lot of money and it will encourage other providers to come in. Oh, the smaller towns will not get it at first. Instead, it will the large ones that do. BUT, with time, it will improve all. In addition, removing those monopolies would encourage businesses to put money into their infrastructure. We call those jobs.

Re:I, for one...

[shentino]

I agree with you 100 percent.

And apparently, so did Monticello.

Unfortunately the incumbent provider TDS disagreed strongly enough to slug it out in court, and while the referee had the city in the corner, TDS sucker punched them during the bell by getting an injunction against the city and builing their own network while the city's hands were tied.

Re:I, for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still trying to wrap my head and purposeful over-saturation of ones network. You know, that thing they make money off of, right?

Has regulation, contract law, and business ethics come to the point that sabotaging ones name publicly in interest of a better deal, is standard practice at the level this provider is at?

If this is what the major leaders in telecomm. find acceptable, perhaps it is time we break the US grid and start over. Wide-scale fiber cuts would do the trick.... This whole thing is absurd on so many levels. And for some reason, new regulation just doesn't seem like it will do much.

Re:I, for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the solution is not more regulation, but rather, truth in advertising.

When comcast is forced to disclose (read as: NOT LIE) about what they're selling then the free market will be able to take over because they'll be forced to actually compete, rather than outadvertise everybody else.

Re:I, for one...

[TubeSteak]

Look, comcast is a private company that exists to make money. Because they're a private company, the government doesn't regulate the quality of their product.
...
The problem is that comcast has a monopoly (or duopoly) with regard to internet service pretty much everywhere comcast offers service. Thus, there's no free market to drive prices down and quality up.
The only solution in these situations is government regulation.

1. The government regularly regulates the quality of products put out by private companies.
There's the EPA, FDA, NTSB, FAA, NHTSA, and endless other federal/state regulatory bodies.

2. The problem is not that Comcast has a monopoly, it's that they are engaging in shitty business practices.
Enron managed to fsck the energy market in california and they did not have a monopoly.

(Federal) Government regulation can fix this, but it may not be the best or most elegant solution

Re:I, for one...

[morgauxo]

I think you are on to something here... The combination of TV and Internet services is not a positive one for the consumer. Maybe a better solution is to get rid of cable tv altogether? No, I'm not seriously proposing outlawing cable TV. I do believe however that broadcast/cable/satellite TV/Radio and Telephone as we know them do eventually need to go. I'm not saying we aren't going to watch shows anymore or that we aren't going to call people. I am saying that these services make more sense migrated over to the internet. Why do I need to pay someone to get a telephone number when I already have access to a giant network that is perfectly capable of carrying my voice and goes everywhere? Why shouldn't I be able to just log in from anywhere, on anything from my cellphone to a smarter version of a big screen tv and see all the content I have paid for. Why is a separate, location limited network necessary to distribute this to me? Why does a studio need networks, cable providers, satellite providers, etc... all acting as middlemen when they could pay one ISP bill and sell their product directly to EVERYBODY.

Ok, I realize that a lot of infrastructure needs to be upgraded before the internet could handle that kind of bandwidth. It's not just a matter of speed either, we need smarter routers that will handle many many destinations for the same packets. I don't really see this happening quickly but it is what IMHO we should be evolving towards. This is not in a cable companies interest. If they are split off then the cable companies will still be huge corporations with tons of lobbyists and money to slow or stop progress for decades. Perhaps if the cable companies saw things this way they would start a shift from being primarily TV providers to being primarily ISPs but they are not. I know from an inside perspective how Comcast sees it's focus. They still see cable TV as being #1. They see their biggest competitors as being phone companies trying to take the TV market from them. Their main strategy against the phone companies is to try to hit the phone companies main market by pushing their own phone service really hard. Internet is just a red headed step child they offer because they have to. A red headed step child with a 60-70% profit margin but still a red headed step child.

Re:I, for one...

[morgauxo]

Yes, you are only 45 minutes from a very very large city. What's your point?

Re:I, for one...

[overlordofmu]

Nice sarcasm. It works better if you know what you are talking about.

There are impressively high cost per sub per channel ('subs' is what subscribers are called in the cable industry). Also, a small number of companys (7) own 90% of cable TV channels. With that market power they can force the cable company to buy whole groups of channels with stipulations about placement (such as: no MTV or Nickelodeon if you don't put QVC on a single digit channel). As an aside, if we want a-la-cart channel selection with sat or cable (and we do), we must take it up with the FCC. Those seven big boys have both cable and sat by the balls on this issue. Only the we the people can make a-la-cart a reality, so write your Congressperson. Moving on.

Back to your ranting being all kinds of wrong: the ISP side of cable is the cash cow. The profit margins on family cable are orders of magnitude smaller than the profit margins on cable internet.

Video delivery is like the gas at the Circle-K (or 7-11). The store owner is making pennies per gallon.

You bought $50 in gas? Profit is $1.25 for the store (Exxon is getting rich though). A 3% profit. That is video.
You bought a 20 oz soda for $1.50? It was only $0.75 from the Pepsi distributor. That is 50% profit. That is the cable internet.

Adjust the costs to $55 at 3% and $45 at 50% and tell me again which service is the cash cow.

Again, nice rant, but you were wrong.

Re:I, for one...

[SuricouRaven]

We've ended up with something sort-of-like-that in the UK, as the result of privitisation gone horribly wrong. Our phone lines are all maintained by BT, a one-public-now-private company, which is obliged legally to provide equal access to all ADSL ISPs. In practice, they are also the countries largest ADSL ISP themselves, and several times have been given warnings and the occasional fine by the regulator OFCOM for taking a very, very long time to get competitor's equipment hooked up, or spending weeks processing ISP-change requests.

Re:I, for one...

[SuricouRaven]

That's what we did in the UK with telephone lines. The result was the same: It works, but it doesn't work that well, as BT is still known to use such dubious business practices at times.

Re:I, for one...

[SuricouRaven]

Not saying the accusation is true, but to explain what the accusation is...

Content providers have two ways to get content to Comcast customers: They can host outside on the wider internet, or put a CDN server in a Comcast rack. Comcast likes the latter, because they make money off those servers, and they reduce the need to maintain the more expensive transit agreements with other T1/2 ISPs. The accusation is that Comcast is deliberatly not upgrading at least one of their external links, allowing it to become heavily congested at times, in order to reduce the performance of video streaming and such services from non-Comcast-hosted servers... and by doing so, force all major providers (Netflix, youtube, hula, etc) to either pay Comcast for the privilidge of a CDN server, or lost the income from Comcast customers who are driven away by poor performance... which they will probably blame on the provider, rather than Comcast.

This being internet, a physical good analogy is manditory. So... imagine a shop that is obliged by some law to sell a sandwich affordable to all, for $0.59. This shop also sells luxury sandwiches for $1.59, which make a lot of money - but they arn't that much better than the cheap ones, so most people don't want to spend the extra. The shop can't stop selling the cheap brand legally, so instead they decide to do a horrible job of it. They neglect to order stock. When the fridge breaks down they put off getting it fixed for weeks, so the sandwiches are warm and soggy. They move the cheap sandwiches around the store, hideing them behind larger displays. Anything they can do make them less desireable, in order to encourage people to pay for their more expensive service.

Re:I, for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

We have government regulation in the form of local monopolies afforded to the cable companies already.

There is a reason that you only can get cable from either no one, or a single entity in whatever area you live in. Once they are opened up for competition, then the other cable companies will want to expand into new areas on their own, eventually. And if they don't, then stomp all over the newly formed (or newly uncovered) cartel that's stopping them.

Re:I, for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly what the US did with the telephone networks in the 1980's. Now, the telephone nets are again monopolized by three strong companies, and only underserved areas have independent companies available.

In fact, AT&T blocked me from reaching my preferred long distance provider, a clearly illegal act, for which I complained to the FCC. The FCC "investigated" and could find no proof (despite the letter AT&T sent me saying I could only access their long distance service).

In short, even regulatory bodies have been captured by the companies they regulate.

Re:I, for one...

[sjames]

We did that with phone lines for a while, but there wasn't a big enough wall between the two, so anyone but the old phone company went to the very bottom of the priority list, just below polishing the doorknobs.

Re:I, for one...

[Opportunist]

Oh, they tried that here.

Sadly (for them) our version of the FCC is packed with people who are ... let's say in favor of the competitors, i.e. the companies that are not the company that once owned the cables.

I'm fairly sure that in the long run this will end badly. But for now it sure is beneficial for our market. We just have to watch carefully that the underdogs aren't suddenly the top dogs.

Re:I, for one...

[thunderclap]

Actually the solution is for TATA and every other fat pipe supplier to cut them off unless they buy enough to decongest.

Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[plover]

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.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[epiphani]

This is _ONE_ ten gig link. Lets assume they have another 10 gig to level3.

His point is pretty clear: ten gig links are NOT THAT EXPENSIVE. We're not talking about a 100 million dollar expense here, we're talking probably an extra 200k per month per link.

They're intentionally bandwidth starving themselves. I can't see any other explanation, and Backdoor Santa is right.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[epiphani]

we're talking probably an extra 200k per month per link.

ps. I'm rounding _way_ up.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

While I am also (slightly) doubtful of the "drive service providers to comcast colo"(though Backdoor Santa probably knows more than I do, if he has access to these data, so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt) there is one major reason to suspect Comcast of perfidity rather than merely penny-pinching:

Comcast is a cable company. Their pre-internet business was realtime video delivery. This remains one of their more lucrative segments. As such, they have a built in conflict of interest when it comes to providing high quality internet service. They sure don't mind if you pay them to get your email really fast, or play video games with low ping, or download "linux ISOs"; but if youtube+netflix means that you cut the cord on your cable video, that is Bad News from their perspective. Thus, anything they do that would impact the reasonable performance of streaming video, online video downloads/rentals, etc. should be viewed as malice first and incompetence second.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[mysidia]

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.

That makes sense.

Their users don't necessarily have it that bad anyways. So Comcasts' links are just congested -- that means their users have some packet loss. Unfortunately, those graphs don't show discard rates, so it's not really known from those graphs just how badly things are congested.

It could be a lot of customer high-speed transfers bursting to use the full link. As the link becomes more congested, transfer conditions will become slightly less conducive, and those "high speed transfers" will back off in transfer rate, as more customers get fair treatment.

The TCP protocol is designed to deal with it by backing off trasmit speeds. So everyone's download/upload speed drops; your transfers still complete, unless drop rates get too high.

Most traditional applications deal with it just fine; VoIP and streaming video do not fare so well.

And protocols with very crappy congestion management, such as BitTorrent, are capable of causing some serious problems in such scenarios, without the ISP taking additional measures.

However, I don't see there being an issue with Comcast allowing 100% of their links to be utilized when there is demand for it. And there is no immediate requirement to upgrade if any applicable SLAs are being met, and congestion is within reasonable limits based on packet drop rates and latency.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[jeffmeden]

What if this is their lowest cost/most popular link? You know these newfangled routers these days can use more than 1 link at a time and unless they have identical start/end points they won't carry a synchronous amount of traffic. They may be falling back on another peer when this link hits 100%

Just playing devil's advocate. Anyone on comcast care to comment on if "netflix is unwatchable" from noon to midnight?

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[gsslay]

Because, Duh, conspiracy's are fun. People like hearing conspiracies. Conspiracies are news. Knowing it's all conspiracy makes you the smart one when all others are blind.

Conversely, boring old facts such as companies don't like spending money, if they can avoid it, are dull and nothing we didn't already know. News that some companies also are a bit rubbish is not news. No-one wants to read that.

Unless, of course, that's what they want you to think...

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[plover]

It's simple economics. If the cost of problems with annoyed customers remains below the cost of upgrading the system, then they won't upgrade.

Comcast makes no money on the traffic that traverses their network, and has nothing to gain by upgrading except their customers' good will. Since every third post here begins with "Comcrap" or ends with "sucks", I don't think they're too worried about their quality of service image.

Here's the deal breaker for Santa's conspiracy theory: what kind of idiot would locate their service inside this boundary, effectively guaranteeing crappy service to everyone who isn't a Comcast customer? There would have to be a compelling reason that this would improve Comcast's networking business for this theory to be true, and I see nothing compelling about this.

There's a perfectly simple explanation, backed by a mountain of evidence: Comcast is cheap.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Making up numbers is not rounding.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't comment about netflix since I don't use it (though that would not be on the tata link?). But, I do regularly experience massively sucky performance after 7PM; it correlates nicely with the link saturation shown on 1-day graph.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[epiphani]

They're certainly not made up numbers. That said, transit costs vary greatly by location and business negotiations. Getting a 10 gig link out of 60 Hudson when you have presence there is totally different than getting fiber run out to some middle-of-nowhere location.

I'm assuming we're talking about the opex cost of 10 gigs worth of transit from a fairly central hub. Capex to provide infrastructure to back that cost is not included. If we take the premise that Comcast's internal network isn't congested and only its transit links (which the graphs suggest is the major bottleneck), then there probably isn't significant capex cost in bringing online another link.

Of course I'm making huge assumptions. I'm on slashdot. Duh.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time something like this happened was with Enron, and their rolling blackouts. That didn't take long to repeat history.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[SuricouRaven]

"what kind of idiot would locate their service inside this boundary, effectively guaranteeing crappy service to everyone who isn't a Comcast customer?"

Both in and out. Large sites like netflix or youtube use a CDN - servers placed all over the world, because no one place could be optimal in providing service to all customers.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[EMN13]

AFAIK bittorrent has better-than-normal conjestion management, not "very crappy congestion management".

It uses either TCP (almost the definition of bog-standard) or uTP (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Transport_Protocol); designed for the express purpose to improve upon TCP traffic management.

Perhaps the uTP devs failed; but there's no evidence for that that I can see.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[groslyunderpaid]

Comcast doesn't give SLA's, even on business class. There SLA is "We're awesome, we'll keep everything running, trust us. And if it goes down, we'll get it back up soon. We promise"

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[shentino]

If you want to bring economics into the picture, you should also take into account the opportunity cost of forgoing a chance to squeeze content providers for access to its customers.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not personally on comcast, but my brother watches netflix all the time on his xbox in Maryland. I've never heard him complain about it, and if there were a problem I know he would have asked me about it.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, at 10g cogent will sell at $4/Mb/s
$40k/month

Other tier 1s are also well below $10/Mb/s when you're buying that much transit.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see that. I've already cut the cord on cable video and only pay for Comcast's internet service, which they overcharge because it's not "bundled" with cable. Total cost per month? Over $65 for the supposed 6 mbps service. I've tried AT&T DSL and it made for a good backup link at best. I guess I'm too far from the central office. If there was another provider that could supply decent bandwidth, you can bet your ass I'll switch to them.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[gorzek]

According to this article, Comcast's public image is about the same as Halliburton or ExxonMobil. They're one of the most despised companies in America and they really don't give a shit.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[DisKurzion]

Yes, as a Comcast customer, I can confirm this.

90% of the time we watch Netflix between 12 PM and 12 AM, we end up getting very low quality video (1 'bar'). I pay for the mid-tier service (not the "super-fast" gaming connection, but not basic either). Nothing else at the time is using the internet, other than maybe a bit of Stumbleupon on 1 PC.

Heck, even trying to stream Youtube at 720p requires a several minute wait as the video buffers.

It is unacceptable. If I actually thought it would accomplish something, I would complain. Sadly, Comcast is still the only reasonable option I have. DSL service equivalent to what I'm getting now would cost about $20 more a month than what I'm paying Comcast.

Just to test...I tried Netflix here at work...less than two blocks from where I live. They pay for an internet connection from Level 3. Full HD quality. HD Youtube streams instantly.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Occam's razor is simply not always right. Haven't you ever heard of politics? Or corporate deals that screw everyone in sight for profits? Oh right! these guys are really just *confused* or *misguided* but they really mean well! Here's another cup of cool aid little johnny....

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[jeffmeden]

I can't comment about netflix since I don't use it (though that would not be on the tata link?). But, I do regularly experience massively sucky performance after 7PM; it correlates nicely with the link saturation shown on 1-day graph.

That's not what the graph is telling you. The time printed there is no doubt GMT, since no way would the bottom of the usage valley show up at noon. It's likely a west coast router, noon GMT would put the valley at around 5am local time (where it should be) and the 100% plateau is really from about noon to midnight local time (again where it should be).

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[rakuen]

Here's an interesting idea though. What if they're not seeing the cost of annoyed customers as actually being above the cost of upgrading the system? In other words, a bleeding effect. It's not necessarily a big wound that kills you, but the little wound that just won't stop leaking.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Sepodati]

Actually, the three graphs each reference a separate 10Gb interface. So that's 30Gb total running through this ONE router in ONE location, allegedly between TATA and Comcast.

The cost to add another 10Gb link isn't the cost of a fiber patch cord and a monthly charge, either. Can TATA handle another 10Gb across their network to this location? Because you know once the link is added, it's going to be used up very quickly. Can Comcast handle another 10Gb across their network from this location? If this region has 30Gb interconnects within the Comcast core, then what good would it be adding another 10Gb at this one location? You just move the congestion from this link to the core. Is this link over-saturated or perfectly utilized? Without seeing the percentage of dropped packets on the TATA side, you have no idea.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you might have missed the point. It's not that they want services to live under Comcast and have Comcast dish out their service.

It's that Comcast is demanding that they house something under their umbrella of the clogged pipes

----------------\____/
INTERNET-|-link|- Concast, Netflix, your services
----------------/*****\

On the side of the internet is every service, including Netflix. However, on Comcast's side, they are demanding the services to host at least a subset of their service within it (in some cases, Netflix does host high-demand stuff within ISPs to save everyone bandwidth while increasing throughput at the same time), or pay extra for the joy of doing so.

They strong arm other companies by intentionally giving terrible quality of service until they pay up. I look forward to Comcast getting smashed to pieces, and hopefully dissolved as a company. They're simply scum of the Earth.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Bengie]

No way it's $200k/month for them. Level3 wanted Comcast to open up 27 10gb links. At those costs, it would be $5.4mil/month. This would also be a cost on L3s side. I doubt L3 would pay $5.4mil/month just to make Netflix happy.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Cytotoxic]

I'm with you. Comcast would be co-located with the peering networks at a network hosting facility such as Terra-Mark. They are amazing places with redundancy and security you can only dream of in your network closet. Bandwidth is super-cheap in these locations (comparatively speaking) because there is no last mile. Every carrier has a presence there, so interconnects between networks are done with a cat-6 patch cable or a fiber optic patch cable into a common router. Installation of an interconnect to the exchange costs on the order of $100. (of course you have to already have a presence in the co-lo to take advantage of that fact). If you don't like the price you are getting from one carrier, you can switch in minutes (at that point it is just a routing table update).

The co-lo hub marketplace is one of the great inventions of the internet age, and serves to significantly bring costs down. Unfortunately, the don't offer any solutions for those of us living at the end of some network's last mile. We still have little competition and little drive for innovation.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[StikyPad]

It will accomplish something -- it will drive up their Customer Service costs which, if everyone complained, would be far higher than the cost to add capacity.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is not about using a good congestion control mechanism. The issue is that bit torrent abuses TCP's congestion control mechanism. Which is originally intended to provide fairness among flows. A torrent creates tens or hundreds of flows, so another HTTP single flow will compete with another hundred flows. The fairness translates into N to 1 bandwidth share thus messing up the HTTP flow.

It's not the congestion control mechanism, it's the way it's abused.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that why comcast has such a good job rebranding itself as 'xfinity'? It is sad how well obvious marketing tricks work on the general public.

Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy?

[complete loony]

what I'm getting now would cost about $20 more a month

What you're getting now is crap. Adding $20 a month would, in this instance, get you something *better*.

Re:The text in a goatsable format

[Adolf Hitroll]

Great post, AC.
You however omitted the graph that most excellently summarizes this entry, here it is for your readers.

Oh Comcrap!

[digitaldc]

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.

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[Farmer Tim]

Is their company run by an evil troll who punishes all those who implement innovation and progress?

Yes, and MBA's don't appreciate being called names.

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[suso]

From what I've heard about their infrastructure staff at a few conferences, they seem somewhat competent as they've been into IPv6 and DNSSEC from an early stage (doesn't always mean anything though). It is 10Gbits which is impressive, but I can't believe thats their only link out. They have tens of millions using their internet service right? How can it only be 10Gbits?

For the record, I am a comcast customer now (for only 2 months now) and I do agree it sucks balls compared to the fiber to the house I had before. But I also deliberately chose to go with cable internet for the first time because I wanted my own real experience to back up my suspicions instead of just angry posts by random people on forums.

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[gstoddart]

But I also deliberately chose to go with cable internet for the first time because I wanted my own real experience to back up my suspicions instead of just angry posts by random people on forums.

Sounds kinda like smacking yourself in the face with a frying pan to confirm it hurts. :-P

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[EastCoastSurfer]

From my experience of living in 2 different areas of the country, Comcast is second only to fiber in speed. Now, of course my sample size is small, but when I read about the horrors of other cables cos or DSL I'm happy to have Comcast. I think it just shows how crappy the other broadband companies are.

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[suso]

Not really. I used to work for an ISP for 7 years that dealt in both DSL and Cable (don't ask how). I know the technologies behind DSL and Cable modems and know that the design of DSL usually wins out in situations where lots of people are online in the same area. Most people don't understand this and only pay attention to the marketing and data rates. For many years I had either direct ethernet, high speed wireless link,DSL and fiber to the home. So I wanted to try cable out to see how it was because all the marketing and clueless people making claims can really confuse the issue. I'm just familiarizing myself with my industry so that I have first hand experience when I give others advice. There is nothing wrong or sadomasochistic about that.

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[gstoddart]

There is nothing wrong or sadomasochistic about that.

Indeed, no, based on your supporting reasons I won't disagree with you.

I'm just not sure I'd subject myself to worse internet service than I already had to gain some better empirical knowledge.

I applaud you for doing it though.

Cheers

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[elrous0]

It's the company that destroyed TechTV. Nuff said.

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[Bucc5062]

Mom: Billy, don't touch the stove, it is very hot
Billy: Are you sure Mom, it looks pretty to me
Mom: Trust me Billy, I have experience, don't touch the burner
Billy: What does she know...
(billy puts his hand on the burner)
Billy: Ow Ow Ow...Mommy that hurts, why didn't you tell it would hurt so much
Mom: When one ignores wisdom for direct experience, what can be said to stop you.
Put some ice, wipe your tears and never touch a hot burner again.

Some people just have to try.

With that said, in my area I have one reasonable choice (dsl). I live less then 20 minutes from a pretty good urban area, but it is considered rural so cable wont deliver out to my neighborhood. Competition? Free Market? Bull crap.

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[Anonymous Coward]

MBA's don't appreciate being called names.

Shouldn't have become an MBA then.

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[robot256]

I would probably do the same if I were in your position, but I would make sure I could quit after six months without a huge penalty...

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[Sepodati]

You only hear bad because those are the people that complain. People that get good service from Comcast (like me) just use the service. Squeaky wheels, man... :)

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[wolrahnaes]

You are correct on paper. DSL's dedicated line per subscriber means that if the backbone from the DSLAM is sufficient bottlenecking can be completely avoided, where every user of a DOCSIS 2.0 system is sharing 42mbit/sec divided by the number of users of that node who ended up on the same channel, with total capacity limited by number of channels. DOCSIS 3.0 resolves the first bottleneck by allowing channel bonding, but the second can only be helped by splitting a node.

That said, in the real world my experience has been the exact opposite of what a purely theoretical look would tell you. First and foremost, DSL speeds are terrible. I do business VoIP and have customers all over the US. So far the fastest DSL connection I've seen was an AT&T U-Verse line specced at 18/1.5. In reality it ran closer to 14/1. Most are in the 3-6mbit/sec down range and have either 512k or 768k up, and this is often with the top package offered. Where there's a choice, in all but one case the local cable company offered a 10+mbit down, 1+mbit up package for less money, and it ran more reliably.

I suspect the discrepancies between theory and reality come mainly from the wiring. A typical phone wire is Category 3 at best, capable of handling 16MHz signal bandwidth by the spec, though the latest high-end short range DSL specs like VDSL2+ operate with a 30MHz signal. Range is obviously affected dramatically by exceeding the rated capacity. Now looking at cable, a TV channel is 6MHz wide. This means that five TV channels on any old cable system have the same signal bandwidth as the absolute latest "hope you're not more than 1km from the DSLAM" DSL technology. A typical cable system has capacity for between 80 and 160 channels. Obviously some are taken for analog TV (1:1 ratio of viewable channels to RF channels) and digital TV (between 4:1 and 10:1 I've heard depending on bandwidth allocated in the encoders), but what's left is often more than enough to support the bursty oversubscription-friendly uses of the average home or small business customer while at the same time being able to offer significantly higher burst speeds.

There's also the factor that a cable company's entire purpose in existence is to get a lot of those 6MHz channels to you and has been for the entire time the cable industry as we know it has been around. They're good at it and their infrastructure is built for it. On the other side, telcos have been moving 8kHz voice channels for decades and only in the past decade or so have they had to think about higher bandwidth for anything but their backbones and leased lines.

Another nice thing is the architecture means an outage usually involves more than just you. Unless it's specifically your lines or modem that have gone bad, the cable company probably has a few dozen customers at minimum yelling at them to fix their shit which tends to mean it gets done faster.

Lastly, and this is entirely the fault of the DSL providers rather than a problem with the technology itself, is PPPoE. Those who want or need to use their own router rather than the crap built in to the modem often have to jump through hoops to get the modem to just bridge, then they have to deal with a total lack of diagnostics when it goes wrong. On cable, I plug in my ethernet cord and either set an IP or use DHCP, end of story. There's no good technical reason to use that crap and I know some providers do just run a straight bridged DHCP setup, but for some reason the vast majority of the DSL connections in the US are stuck with it.

Again, on paper DSL is superior at least until you hit the bandwidth limits (24/3.5 for ADSL2+, 250/100 for VDSL2 at extremely short range), but those speeds fall off rapidly with distance and wiring that's anything but perfect, meaning that as long as the node isn't terribly overloaded or outdated I always expect cable to perform better.

Re:Oh Comcrap!

[StikyPad]

So... like smacking yourself in the face with a verbose treatise on the Art of Spoiling Jokes?

Comcast needs to be stoped befor NBC goes cable on

[Joe The Dragon]

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

Stop The Cap

[bengoerz]

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.

Re:Stop The Cap

[characterZer0]

If it is futile, how is it better than whining?

Re:Stop The Cap

[bengoerz]

StopTheCap.com MAY be futile. But it also may be productive.

Whining - absent all else - is always futile.

Re:Stop The Cap

[NevarMore]

Makes it quieter for the rest of us.

Current Comcast customer...

[gtvr]

Comcast is horrible, and this is just one more piece of the pie. For example, last time we had a service call, there were multiple automated calls, as well as the tech, calling to ask if we still had the problem & wanted a tech to come out. YES. Call center people that aren't empowered to make you satisfied - for example, for a service outage they can't give you a credit, just put in a request to another department. Poor escalation procedures. And so on.

Please someone tell me that Verizon is better, because I really want to switch to FIOS when it's available.

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[chemicaldave]

The speed and quality of my connection is excellent. Can't say much for the customer service though. Have fun waiting on hold for hours.

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[0111 1110]

Verizon is much better. I am very happy with my 35/35 mbit symmetric fiber connection. Almost no outages at all. Way less than comcrap which used to drop out on a weekly basis for me. If you don't live in a state/city with FIOS, move.

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[JackOfAllGeeks]

I've had very few problems with my Verizon access -- it's possible that their Customer Service is as bad or worse than Comcast, but I've never needed to use them.

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[varmittang]

I hate Comcast. When I was in NJ that I switched to DirecTV and added Verizon DSL (slower) to do a dual connection from my house in case Comcast went out (only $19, can't beat that for a second connection). When I moved to Maryland I had to go back to Comcast for everything until Verizon FiOS became available in October. So far no service calls have been needed for my FiOS compared to Comcast which had its issues down here too.

As for Verizon FiOS welcoming, it was a little over the top to the point of annoying. We got about 4 or 5 calls to confirm the installation and another bunch to confirm that it was installed and that we were happy. So many calls that during the first week I was guaranteed to have at least one message from Verizon thanking us for signing up and to call if there were any issues.

I'm much happier with Verizon FiOS than I was with Comcast.

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[operagost]

But Verizon blocks ports. I think it's safe to assume that's a relevant statement to make on Slashdot. That's why I still have a 1.5 Mbit connection via DSL. The 2000s were the golden age for geeks, when you could get a cutting-edge connection for a reasonable price and not worry about whether you could remotely access your home network.

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a delighted FIOS customer. Had it for two years now, my only complaint is that they constantly beg me to upgrade to their TV bundle (snail mail advertisements about once a week, phone calls about once a month). They don't seem to get that I really really don't care, and would say no to it even if it was free; I like not having the temptation to sit mindlessly in front of the TV...

In two years, I've only had to deal with customer-service once (they got confused when the people in the other half of my building moved out, and turned off the internet to the wrong side of the building). They weren't perfect; they wasted some time by sending out a person to our building for what was pretty clearly a central office problem (the tech arrived at our house, listened to our problem, and immediately just called the central office and told them what buttons to push to fix it).

So, if they ever do arrive in your area, ditch comcast and sign up for fios ASAP.

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[zero0ne]

Verizon blocks ZERO ports on FiOS.
(** THE FiOS router is what defaults to port 80, so if you want to host something @ port 80, you need to reconfigure it to use a different port, or just use a different router. Using a different router will kill video on demand and/or the interactive guide though, assuming you have their TV service as well - check out the discussions at dslreports)

They also don't complain when you saturate your connection 24/7 for weeks at a time.

You COULD set up a server on FiOS, but remember, you are still making multiple hops before you hit the backbone.

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[Sepodati]

I'm a satisfied Comcast customer. Cable works great. HD looks good. Internet and VoIP from Comcast have worked with no issues since we got here over a year ago. The kids and I watch Netflix videos through a Roku box almost daily. My little girl will stream SuperWhy for hours on end.

Now we have two data points. Yay!

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[gtvr]

Yeah, but my data point weighs more ;) I used to have a local cable company, then we switch to Starpower. Years later, Comcast bought out the local cable provider. Another year or 2 after that, they tried to bill me for the cable converter box they said I never returned. This is probably 4 years after I switched. They also did something similar to friends and family. When we moved into my current house, we got DirecTV. Comcast wanted to hook us up for service, we told them no. Right after we closed & moved in, a Comcast tech showed up to hook up our cable, regardless of the fact we had told them no. I could keep going.... Also fortunately I'm in an area where Verizon has a FIOS franchise. I'm hoping to have service within a year, but who knows.

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you dont already have FIOS available, then you wont, atleast not for quite some time. Verizon has stopped rolling it out nearly a year ago!

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[mrman18766]

Using a different router will kill video on demand and/or the interactive guide though, assuming you have their TV service as well - check out the discussions at dslreports

Actually as long as you configure the provided router behind your "different" router and make sure their subnets are different you can still use video on demand and the interactive guide. I had to specifically request Verizon provision the Ethernet on the ONT since they prefer/default to just using coax - at least in my area.

Re:Current Comcast customer...

[IsoRashi]

I had Verizon for about 1.5 years before I moved back to an area where Comcast is the only option. I had some initial hurdles getting my service up and running. Essentially I would call up support and get connected to some foreign-staffed call-center. They would give me some bs answer about stuff that needed to be done and I would call back a couple days later for a different answer. After two weeks of this I called up and got connected to their cancellation department. The lady asked if I would stay on if they offered me a free month and I told her that a free month was useless to me as my issue is that I had not received ANY service. She put me on hold, got her supervisor, and he came on the line and told me he would personally look in to the issue and credit me with a month. Next day -- next fucking day!! -- I had service.

The initial problems really had me questioning my choice to go with dsl, but once I talked to the right people stuff happened FAST.

Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[magsol]

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.

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[BrianRoach]

Arguably, no, they don't care.

Most monopolies don't. Even in areas where they have to compete against DSL, there's only a small segment of the population that can purchase service that rivals theirs in terms of advertised speed / service. And even then ... who are they competing against? Well ... the phone company, which has a stellar reputation when it comes to customer service ...

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[gstoddart]

Does Comcast simply not care about their customer satisfaction ratings, or are they on a quest to consciously plunge their ratings into the gutter?

Well, in the past, lots of people have pointed out that Comcast is essentially a monopoly in places, so, it's not like they're competing with anybody.

They simply have no incentive to spend money. They've got all of these customers now, and spending money on infrastructure isn't going to make them any more money, so why do it? Upgrading is just straight cost, and without a benefit to them, why do it?

The very cynical answer is that until they're more or less forced to upgrade, they have no incentive to. They make money by overselling a service -- the closer to maxed out the service is, the more money they make. They don't really care about you, they care about their profits -- they're not gonna spend profits just so some people have a faster connection.

And, they're not going to give up on the revenue of having people co-locate with them, so they're doubly uninterested in fixing their capacity issues.

Welcome to the "free" market, it isn't really about customer choice and value -- it's abut maximizing profits and giving you the least amount of service they can get away with. This is a perfectly logical situation when you look at it from their point of view.

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

We don't have to care. We're the phone company.

XOXOXO Ma Bell

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm quite satisfied with Comcast. My neighbor has it and leaves their wifi open. The price/performance ratio is infinite xD

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[Ornlu]

Yes, they simply don't care. In most of their markets, they are the only serious provider. For example, here in Houston, you can get DSL (from about 6 different companies) or you can get cable (only Comcast provides cable). Thats like 6 million people in this market alone!. What does customer satisfaction have to do with anything if the customers can't leave you (w/o going from 80mbit to 4mbit)?

Personally, I opted for the 4mbit DSL over having to put up with Comcast's shit. I was first getting my connection set up after moving to Houston, I wanted Comcast, so I called their customer service number. That was the day that the FCC censured Comcast for the whole throttling incident. The CS rep was like "We have never filtered anyone's traffic." I couldn't resist reading her some of the juicier bits of the FCC's statements. She was still like "We have never filtered anyone's traffic".

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[John_Sauter]

Arguably, no, they don't care.

Most monopolies don't. Even in areas where they have to compete against DSL, there's only a small segment of the population that can purchase service that rivals theirs in terms of advertised speed / service. And even then ... who are they competing against? Well ... the phone company, which has a stellar reputation when it comes to customer service ...

The phone company's 100-year reputation isn't always a reliable predictor: I recently had an excellent experience with the local phone company. My Comcast download speed, advertised as “up to” 12 million bits per second, was actually between 6 and 7. I had been waiting for DSL to be available for years, and when it finally was, I invited Fairpoint, the local telco, to install it on 30 days approval.

They sent me a DSL modem, which I hooked up, and then waited for the service to be switched on. To my surprise, they dispatched a technician. I walked him around the property, showing him where the wires were buried, and he then followed the pair of wires that connected me to the neighborhood fibre termination point, making sure I had a straight run. When he was done I had an excellent signal to noise ratio, and was able to actually get the advertised 15 million bits per second of download speed.

The technician told me that mine was the first 15 million bits per second installation he had done, so that might be why he went the extra mile (literally—the neighborhood fibre termination point is a mile away) to make sure I got good service. Nevertheless, it shows that when you get down to the level of individuals, the reputation of the organization doesn't tell you much.

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[putzin]

Well, in the past, lots of people have pointed out that Comcast is essentially a monopoly in places, so, it's not like they're competing with anybody.

They simply have no incentive to spend money. They've got all of these customers now, and spending money on infrastructure isn't going to make them any more money, so why do it? Upgrading is just straight cost, and without a benefit to them, why do it?

The very cynical answer is that until they're more or less forced to upgrade, they have no incentive to. They make money by overselling a service -- the closer to maxed out the service is, the more money they make. They don't really care about you, they care about their profits -- they're not gonna spend profits just so some people have a faster connection.

And, they're not going to give up on the revenue of having people co-locate with them, so they're doubly uninterested in fixing their capacity issues.

Welcome to the "free" market, it isn't really about customer choice and value -- it's abut maximizing profits and giving you the least amount of service they can get away with. This is a perfectly logical situation when you look at it from their point of view.

This is very true. It's effectively how Capitalism and the free market are supposed to work. Comcast isn't doing anything wrong from that standpoint. However, another poster noted that they have what is effectively a granted monopoly of duopoly, as there can usually be only a limited number of cable cos in one area. But, there are choices. In chicago, I can get ATT, RCN, Comcast, or DirecTV. RCN is my choice, but they certainly aren't perfect. And Comcast in my area isn't even locking you in with a contract, so after reading this, everyone in Chicago *could* just leave in droves. We're a lazy consumer population is what is the biggest problem.

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't contain that quote, but it is a little bit closer to home...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would they care? In most markets, they are a government guaranteed monopoly; no other company is _allowed_ to lay cable to bring you cable TV service or wired internet service...

Given that in those markets, the choice is comcast or nothing, they've got a guaranteed level of customers that will pay them and grumble, which is probably more profitable than making the service good (which gets more people, but costs a lot more).

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[Anonymous Coward]

It is warmer down in Florida, can that tech on my DSL line for me?

I am stuck with ATT or Comcast, so staying with ATT because they are cheaper right now. Their "gift" purchased with my grief. For years I had the 3Mb ADSL service with good results of between 2.8 and 3.2. Had to do a Homerun from the phone box to the modem (old house wiring issues), splitter went bad once and one toasted modem, all of which I found acceptable given how long they had been used. About 2 months ago the DSL signal went out. I called a customer support, I explained the problem of having no dsl signal even at the phone box (ended up as a conversation about modem light colors and how they did or did not blink >.>).

They overnighted a new DSL modem for free... Can't complain about that, but it came in and didn't solve the issue. I called once more with my new modem setup how they like them to help expedite the process, and more talking about blinking colors. They eventually sent out a "tech" (one of the home installers) and he told them I was getting no signal at the phone box.... He called out a real technician, and he did some work and got the signal back, at about 2.7 Mb tops, and mentioned that there was an issue with the line and another technician with a permit to dig would be called out to work on the line. All was going well, even a second technician of the same grade as the one whom got the signal back came later and checked the signal and quietly left.

The next day the Permitted technician came out and tinkered around, he even forgot to plug in the line in the phonebox after he was done for the day (pretty minor, but not something a customer should have to deal with) and he didn't fix the line, even though there was apparently something that was causing a loss in signal according to each tech. With the last tech, I decided to just shrug it off, because my signal kept getting worse and worse. I am not sure what happened, but the last tech said I should switch down to 1.5Mb because I couldn't get the 3.0Mb service I had for years before, and with the higher speed came a more unstable signal (during all this and even now my DSL signal drops for a couple of minutes every once in a while, was significantly worse before, now it is once or twice a day and doesn't last hours).

Now stuck with 1.7-2.5Mb service and after 6 weeks (was busy myself, so some time between calls if I had any usable service). To top it off, twice now I had Uverse representatives come out to the neighborhood saying that we could get it, but their system says otherwise, and from what the last tech said, the infrastructure isn't even installed for it considering I am only suppose to get up to 1.5Mb now. /sigh Got this unstable service for less than 1/2 the previous cost for a year at least, praying they install Uverse to my monthly internet deities.

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[Captain Spam]

Does Comcast simply not care about their customer satisfaction ratings, or are they on a quest to consciously plunge their ratings into the gutter?

They do not care. Period.

Back when they were the only game in town TV-wise where I grew up (that is, back when "satellite TV" meant "cumbersome gigantic dish that wouldn't fit very easily in a suburban backyard or rooftop and required some expertise to set up and maintain"), they would charge absurd amounts of money for less than 30 channels. Maybe around 20, come to think of it, most of the 30 were scrambled premium channels. Customer service stopped just short of "abusive", signals would be lost on a regular basis, and they liked pulling tricks like canceling your cable service without notice unless you coughed up extra fees for worse television. They just didn't care. What were you going to do, move? It's not like you had any other choice.

Then along came the choice of RCA's first DSS dishes (what we would now call "DirecTV"; back then, the dish had two separate services, DirecTV for the more-or-less basic channels and PPV, USSB for the premium stuff and a few owned-by-the-premium-guys basic channels). Poof! Comcast could suddenly pull 70 channels out of their ass! Wow! Where'd THOSE come from? They must've been just sitting under a couch somewhere, right? And shazam! Prices went down (not much, but slightly)! Incredible! I guess they made their riches and didn't need any more! Man! What a complete and utter coincidence that their service just improved so much at the exact same moment they had some manner of competition they couldn't legally regulate away!

Shame my parents had switched to DirecTV basically as soon as it came out. To this day, Comcast still sends out door-to-door salesdrones to try to con my dad into switching back. My dad has quite a bit of fun dealing with them verbally.

The point is, so long as they hold their monopoly, they seriously just don't care. They'll gleefully treat their customers like dirt, overcharge for their services, and treat said service like dirt, too. They know they'll keep raking in cash. And Comcast refuses to do business anywhere they CAN'T get a monopoly, so they don't even need to know HOW to deal with competition. But, put the threat of worthwhile competition in, and they'll change their tune quickly (and temporarily). Either they'll get on the local municipality's case to make the incoming competition illegal or, failing that, they'll pull concessions out of thin air and try to make you believe it was coincidence that they were treating you like shit all these years before.

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[matthewd]

In some places I'm sure it is true that Comcast is essentially a monopoly. Though I'd think that anywhere you can get cable, you can also set up a dish for DirectTV and Dish Network, so they do kind of compete against the satellite companies for TV service. Here locally, they do compete against AT&T's uVerse (or something like that) for TV/telephone/Internet service. And of course their Internet service competes against AT&T's DSL. And various local broadband wireless providers. And of course they have to compete against alternative options for getting TV programming (over the air and Internet download/streaming).

I'm not sure that you can definitively say they have no incentive to upgrade. They have just rolled fiber out to our neighborhood, and we did sign up for the xfinity triple play package. We are now getting phone/internet/cable for less than we were paying to Dish/DirectTV and AT&T combined. The speed (20Mb/s) is faster (verifiably and consistently) than anything else that's available. The equipment for xfinity is a step up in several respects from what we had with either Dish Network or DirectTV. There are a couple features we miss from Dish Network's equipment but they are more than made up for with the new features that were lacking in the satellite systems (for instance HD at every TV, DVR playback (in HD) at every TV). They are enhancing their OnDemand service which is a way of differentiating their service from satellite, so it appears that they are trying to compete against the satellite companies.

Knowing ComCast's reputation I am prepared to start hating them at any moment, but so far the xfinity package has been the best deal we have ever had.

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. My choice is currently Comcast or AT&T.

Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings

[BrianRoach]

And you can occasionally have a good individual experience with Comcast as well. Take for example my current Comcast connection (Denver, CO suburbs). It works. Exceptionally well; I actually get 15Mbit service and I'm only paying for what is advertised as 6Mbit (I suspect this is due to an inept service rep when I purchased service and my account is provisioned incorrectly, but we'll ignore that for the moment). I don't have packet loss, and in 4 years I can only remember one outage.

That fact doesn't outweigh the fact that overall, they suck. Prior to moving to CO 4 years ago I lived in the mid-atlantic (VA/DC/MD/DE) and had comcast in different locations over the years. It was horrible - packet loss, outages, slow speeds, etc. Every time, without exception. But I was never close enough to a CO to get DSL from Verizon except maybe one time at 768Kbps (and Verizon prior to FIOS was never interested in installing RT's in neighborhoods to extend their service area).

The point I was trying to make is that the phone companies are much like Comcast in that they operate as a local monopoly and arguably are ever only slightly better in regard to customer service. You won't ever find them at the top of the list. You're basically presented with a choice between the lesser of two evils, and 'lesser' in this case is often ambiguous.

Net neutrality

[airfoobar]

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.

Re:Net neutrality

[jeffmeden]

If you could prove somehow that they are causing the congestion and it's not the customers, THEN you are totally on to something. But look at the graph, it didn't spend much time at 100% before the Thanksgiving (US) holiday. At that point, a lot of people (mostly college students) just got a whole lot more bored with their lives and are no doubt watching youtube/netflix/hulu at a greatly increased rate.

Should Comcast be persecuted because there is a holiday rush on internet video? Probably not. Come on, there are better things to be stringing them up over. These graphs basically prove what everyone already knew, and what every other provider is probably going through at the moment.

Re:Net neutrality

[erroneus]

Be careful of the spin machine.

It might be argued that net neutrality principles should not and can not compel an ISP to buy bigger pipes. If their "limitation" is uniform and across the board, then they are being network neutral. So, if ALL incoming traffic is similarly impeded (which would seem to be the case) then there is no case to claim network neutrality being compromised here.

And this isn't about forcing content providers to pay for prioritization either. It is about Comcast offering to host the content providers within their network for a price.

From Comcast's point of view, they have a choice of (a) upgrade their pipe on their dollar or (b) get paid to host the content providers servers within their network. The choice is a no-brainer. Making money over spending money makes the choice obvious and clear.

Now, if it can be shown that Comcast downgraded their service through TATA, then the claim related to network neutrality begins to have a little more merit. But simply choosing not to spend more money is not enough grounds to make such a claim.

(On the other hand, if ISPs became a regulated utility, then we wouldn't have this problem at all.)

Re:Net neutrality

[TubeSteak]

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.

How will net neutrality force Comcast to buy more bandwidth and uncongest their links?

This strikes me as the type of problem meant for States' Attorney Generals and not Net Neutrality.

Re:Net neutrality

[gstoddart]

How will net neutrality force Comcast to buy more bandwidth and uncongest their links?

In theory, by disallowing them to charge content-providers extra to deliver the content in a timely manner, and forcing them to address the root problem of simply not having enough capacity compared to what they sell.

This strikes me as the type of problem meant for States' Attorney Generals and not Net Neutrality.

This will never happen in America ... once they make the argument that spending their profits to improve service without getting any more money is tantamount to communism, then they'll continue with the way things are now.

From their perspective, if they actually had to have the service they advertise, they'd be losing money. This is a shell game that relies on overselling what you have (by several times) in order to make as much money as possible. End-user satisfaction would just eat into profits -- never mind the fact that they basically have a monopoly paid for by the tax payers in terms of right of way and the ability to lay cables that only they can use.

Re:Net neutrality

[Hatta]

Should Comcast be persecuted because there is a holiday rush on internet video?

Yes. ISPs should be prepared for peak usage.

Re:Net neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it matter? They are failing to provide the service that their customers are paying for, since they don't have competition in most areas they should be prosecuted (really, any monopoly needs to be regulated, that means prosecuting them for failing to follow through with whatever they are selling). Is it a holiday rush? I don't think so, no, it is normal predictible traffic that is rising with time, they should be prepared for this.

Re:Net neutrality

[divisionbyzero]

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.

It's not that clear cut. Their behaviour affects all traffic. Net neutrality just stipulates that all traffic be treated equally. And in this case it is, abysmally. No wonder Comcast isn't that worried about net neutrality.

Re:Net neutrality

[jeffmeden]

They are prepared. At peak usage, everyone suffers equally. No way should they be required to maintain 1:1 subscription/bandwidth, the cost would be enormous. No ISP at the B2C level works that way, and that's why you can get a connection for $30 a month what would cost $300 if you wanted 1:1 bandwidth (aka, if you hauled an ATM line to a carrier and wanted a bandwidth SLA.)

I am not on Comcast's side here, I am just pushing back on all the monopoly/conspiracy/neutrality nutjobs and their ridiculous "theories". If you don't want their service, don't pay for it.

Re:Net neutrality

[scorp1us]

What TATA should do, is give Comcast a "free trial upgrade" for oh, say a week, maybe a month, then put the level back down. CC customers will get used to the network actually working, and call and complain when it gets back down to the actual level CC is paying for.

Re:Net neutrality

[Sepodati]

How do you get "intentional congestion" from looking at the graphs for 3 10Gb links? How many packets were dropped on TATA's side because of the "congestion"?

The ONLY thing that's proven looking at this is that 3 links average near 100% utilization during peak hours.

Re:Net neutrality

[skids]

While some level of regulation could help, the general tenets of the "net neutrality" movement lack a viable technical solution. They'll never happen. Now if you want to advocate for sensible regulations that will moderately improve things and call it "net neutrality" then that's fine by me, but "net neutrality" as the public understands it will never happen, or if it did happen the way some advocates define it, would have an overall negative impact on customers.

The only technical solution I could see that would allow a fully fair "neutral" network (and scale worldwide) would be an end-to-end ATM network. That would allow the customer's PC to treat each connection similar to a phone call and lock in QoS, with contention being resolved fairly by limiting the duration/number of these calls, and round-robin CAC with fallback to ABR on the client side. While this would be easier these days with most CPE/endstations well capable of being modified to support FATE/CIF it would be a project much bigger than IPv6, which we STILL haven't gotten very far on, plus it would require a complete retool of the entire network core, and eventual weening off of IP entirely to get rid of resource-hungry SAR problems. Never going to happen.

RSVP could be considered, but IP-level QoS mechanisms or even MPLS tag switching just don't have the oomph needed compared to finely honed/streamlined cell/circuit-based equipment. You'd have to totally rebuild the core for that, too.

As far as sensible regulation, really what needs to happen is oddly enough very similar to one of the health care reforms: require companies to spend a certain portion of their revenues from selling services on network improvements that improve the general state of the network. I'd add to that that any colo or special peering arrangements should be required to contribute to general expansion of the network in order to offset the hogging impact that latency inequality creates in the TCP stack.

Re:Net neutrality

[compro01]

Except they do an end run around that by offering server co-location inside their network for $$$ so they don't have to go through the clogged pipe to the rest of the world.

Different means, same effect.

Re:Net neutrality

[StikyPad]

I was one of the early adopters of 50Mbit service, which was actually just fine at the time. I could cap my upstream and downstream with absolutely no issues. Clearly, at the time, they *had* built-up capacity in advance of the new tier roll out.

Unfortunately, that's no longer true as of August, and I suspect it's because these higher tiers have reached a critical mass which has swamped the new capacity. As you say, their perspective is that providing the service they advertise would cut into profits. So I do my part to make sure that not providing that service costs them even more. Since August, I've called at least weekly to complain, had a service technician out to my house 3 times, and had my bill reduced by 30%. If more people demanded the service they pay for, it would be wildly unprofitable for Comcast to continue down this road.

Re:Net neutrality

[Alsee]

No way should they be required to maintain 1:1 subscription/bandwidth

Of course not. Most customers are offline most of the time. It is easy to use statistics and records of actual usage to determine what your actual subscription-to-bandwidth ratio is. It is perfectly legitimate to not-buy what you know that you won't need. It is reasonable not-to-buy what you know you won't need 99% of the time. We may even say that it's reasonable not-to-buy what you know you won't need 90% of the time. One may even argue it's reasonable to deliberately target a lower percentage of anticipated needs, if one makes the argument of deliberately under provisioning for anticipated needs for cost-benefit reasons.

They are prepared.

No they're not. They knew or should have known what their normal anticipated bandwidth needs would be. For twelve hours out of the day they were under provisioned, and for simplicity lets guess it as 50% of the anticipated usage. But note that from the viewpoint of customer-hours of usage, about 75% of all customer usage was during those under provisioned hours. About 75% of actual customer usage was subject to under provisioning.

It is difficult to credibly imagine that Comcast management could be so incompetent and ignorant of their own business to be unaware that they were grossly under provisioning their actual routine bandwith usage. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, but there does come a point where the ignorance/stupidity does become an unlikely or inadequate explanation.

I am just pushing back on all the monopoly/conspiracy/neutrality nutjobs and their ridiculous "theories". If you don't want their service, don't pay for it.

Greed is hardly ridiculous, nor does it require any sort of conspiracy.

For a significant percentage of the population, there is a de facto monopoly for broadband service. This is particularly true for Comcast customers. And where there isn't a de facto monopoly, millions more people face a duopoly.

And it's not like there is any market freedom here. In almost every instance broadband providers are in fact a government imposed monopoly/duopoly or a government supported monopoly/duopoly. Cable networks are almost entirely built using public land and public facilities, often with public subsidies and legislatively established monopolies on service areas and access rights.

I often agree with not wanting the government to get involved in things, but that ship left the building long ago. When it comes to something like Net Neutrality, the government has the right and obligation to place public interest conditions upon the usage of public land and resources. When the government legislates monopoly access rights then it is incumbent upon the government to regulate it's own establishment and grant of those monopoly rights in the public interest.

To turn around you "If you don't want their service, don't pay for it", if some company doesn't like Net Neutrality then don't build your networks based on privileged access to public property, don't build it using public funds, and don't engage in legislatively established regional monopolies.

But as far as the current issue of bandwidth provisioning, I see two issues. *If* the article is right about Comcast's purpose for under provisioning (which I admit I have insufficient information on), then that raises issues of monopoly law. Comcast has a de facto monopoly in many regions, and it is illegal to abuse a monopoly in certain ways. In my opinion the issue is vastly multiplied when the government is involved in establishing or enforcing that monopoly over regions. But even setting aside their uncertain intent, setting aside any monopoly issue, I see an FTC issue in their under provisioning. False or deceptive advertising is illegal. There is nothing new or unusual about that. The primary advertising characteristic of internet access is speed. When they advertise speed they should have to advertise the

Re:Net neutrality

[divisionbyzero]

Except they do an end run around that by offering server co-location inside their network for $$$ so they don't have to go through the clogged pipe to the rest of the world.

Different means, same effect.

Not really. Different means and different effect. It's a much more coarse means and is not as lucrative for Comcast. Imagine if Comcast could charge every single content provider and not just the networks/CDNs?

Re:Net neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

The first step, in my opinion should be to force all ISPs to post service quality bulletins. If any link of theirs is saturated (97%?) for some time (10 minutes?) they should have to announce this on a publicly visible website. Only then could customers make an informed decision which ISP to use (notwithstanding the fact that many can't choose or can choose between the plague and cholera).

Re:Net neutrality

[Crypto Gnome]

Now, if it can be shown that Comcast downgraded their service through TATA, then the claim related to network neutrality begins to have a little more merit. But simply choosing not to spend more money is not enough grounds to make such a claim.

Apparently the word on the street is that they have been actively downgrading their capacity with alternate upstream service providers. So no they have not downgraded their capacity with TATA, but they are now expecting their TATA link to carry more traffic. The end result is the same. They apparently are deliberately engineering a situation to force others to pay them to carry the bits into their network.

How is this not extortion?

1:x ratio because of plan design?

[Brit_in_the_USA]

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?

Re:1:x ratio because of plan design?

[RatherBeAnonymous]

I think the 1:5 ration is more because of their customer base. Cable Internet is mostly a technology for private homes. Some businesses use them for Internet access as well, but I doubt they deliver a lot of content to the public over Comcast's network. After having seen the Rube Goldbergian solution my local cable company calls a business class solution, I can't see how any business could deliver content to the public using it.

I'm not really well versed with the intricacies of DOCSIS, but when I asked my local cable Internet provider, they could not provide anything faster than 2.0 MB. They said it was due to limitations in DOCSIS. Any faster upload speed would require them to upgrade their cable network, or else I could have had them run fiber out to my location. That was absurdly expensive. They quoted me 17.5 k about 4 years ago, just to install the fiber. I should hope prices went down, but it's hard to say with these yahoos.

A provider that uses close to 100% of capacity!!!

[kenh]

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...

Comcast has been doing this for years

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Content providers must pay

[Demablogia]

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

Re:Content providers must pay

[JackOfAllGeeks]

There are two ways to get content to Comcast subscribers -- peer with them directly, or send your traffic through some other network that's connected to them. The graphs in the article show the "other network" links, and show that they're almost always running at capacity. if a link is running full, you can't get your bits through and that means packet loss. Peering directly to Comcast gets you uncongested links, which means you won't be dropping packets and your services will run as-intended, but it also means paying Comcast for the priviledge.

Re:Content providers must pay

[gstoddart]

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

They're double dipping -- they charge you to deliver the bandwidth to you, and they charge the content providers to co-lo with them so that their users have a faster service experience.

So, the gouge you for shoddy service, and they gouge the content providers extortion-style so their content arrives in a timely manner.

Re:Content providers must pay

[compro01]

They deliberately use inadequate links to the outside world so you (e.g. netflix or any other service that requires substantial sustained bandwidth) have to pay them to put your servers inside their network so your customers can get adequate service.

Or they can refuse to allow you to place your servers in their network and cut you out of the market in their areas, which in netflix's case, they also compete in with their own video-on-demand service.

Re:Content providers must pay

[KillaGouge]

I understand this to mean that if the content providers don't want to deal with the congestion coming into and going out of the Comcast network, they need to be inside the network.

Re:Content providers must pay

[Anonymous Coward]

and in a free market place, this would be fine. the crappy performance would result in people choosing other alternatives for internet service. BUT, in areas where comcast holds a monopoly position on high speed internet access, things get a bit squirly.

Re:Content providers must pay

[Rockoon]

I wouldn't classify TATA or L3 as "some other network that's connected to them." Both TATA and L3 are Comcasts INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS. They are Comcasts ISP's!

In the case of L3, they are more than willing to increase the link capacity between them and not charge Comcast any extra. Comcast response is "No sir! We will allow a little more, but if you want a lot more then you have to lower our bill!"

Imagine that Comcast wanted to give its customers twice the bandwidth for no extra charge, but the customers complained and said "no! we will not accept twice the bandwidth unless you lower our monthly bill!"

That is what comcast is doing, but they have sold it quite well as "a peering dispute"

Re:Content providers must pay

[StikyPad]

A priviledge? Is that anything like an outhouse cliff?

MRTG, seriously?

[bbasgen]

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. :)

Re:MRTG, seriously?

[rickb928]

MRTG is good enough for carrier-class deployment, and has been since 1993 or so. I relied on it to keep track of various metrics for our ISP business back then, everything from link utilization to Usenet volume to disk free space to modem utilization. (Side note, that #3 modem that had WAY more connection attempts than all the rest? That's a defective mode, boss, let's move the blade to the end of the pool until we get a replacement, ok? Just a thought...)

But damn, our first T-1 never looked like that. I would have been into the second T-1 in a day.

As a general note, if you're seeing 80% utilization on a regular basis for an Ethernet link, you're seeing true packet loss beyond what anyone should have to suffer. If comcast wants to argue this, show us your other links, and then call the gang at TATA and have them DO SOMETHING :) Riiiight.

Just a quick look at TATA, and they seem to be a services provider, not an in-the-business ISP or peering provider. Comcast chose them for cost. But I'm also thinking that TATA can't be Comcast's primary provider. We might be seeing some bad design here, and a change to some hop costs or metrics could improve this a lot. But I haven't seen their other charts, which would settle this.

Re:MRTG, seriously?

[Deadplant]

mrtg is commonly used by ISPs for this sort of thing.

100% utilization between mid-night and 7am?

[Brit_in_the_USA]

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.

Re:100% utilization between mid-night and 7am?

[LilBlackKittie]

Multi-national providers are likely to be running their graphs in UTC - reading the graph that way makes a lot more sense.

Re:100% utilization between mid-night and 7am?

[alen]

most traffic spikes after the workday is over. people come home from work, pick up kids, eat dinner and then stream netflix or youtube. and if you are a steam customer or downloading a new game purchase to your x-box or PS3 it will probably download during the night

Monthly graph

[POTSandPANS]

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.

Re:Monthly graph

[LilBlackKittie]

I'd be amazed if Comcast had only one 10Gbit/sec transit interface to one of their two upstreams: it's likely they take several at multiple different TATA POPs.

Re:Monthly graph

[JWSmythe]

    Yup, I noticed that too.

    Looking at the graphs, it shows failure to do good capacity planning. But, it's pretty clear that we aren't looking at the big picture. We're provided a few graphs, where there should be others to show the whole story. I seriously doubt that Comcast aggregates all of their connectivity out to one pipe, from all the cities that they service.

    We had a graph that looked very similar to that one once. I had GigE circuits in several cities with Level3. They simply ran out of capacity in one city, so we had to move our traffic over to other cities until they were able to upgrade for us. We always used the 80% rule for our bandwidth. Don't plan to exceed 80% on any circuit or even any server. When we had our problem, we were only at about 60% of that line, but since we had room in other cities, we were able to drop the effected city down to about 10% until the problem was resolved. I was shown Level3's graph of that cities circuits, and it looked just about the same as the Comcast graph. It took a few months for them to bring more capacity in, and then everyone was happy.

Re:Monthly graph

[alen]

do you know how long it takes to upgrade something like this? it costs tens of thousands of $$$ just to buy the hardware which must be approved by management only after evidence is collected that it's needed. then you have to add the new hardware to maintenance contracts. and provisioning new circuits takes months of waiting while it's installed and tested. and then you have to schedule maintenance to add it to your network, routing tables, etc. it's not like buying a new home wifi router or asking mommy to upgrade to the Turbo service

Re:Monthly graph

[POTSandPANS]

Exactly. we only have a month of data, but I would hope they already had a plan in place to get some more capacity since it was already a little close for comfort. From the way the traffic increased, its possible that another link is in a failed or unusable state and we're just seeing this one temporarily take the load.

Nobody has a peering agreement with Comcast

[Rockoon]

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.

Re:Nobody has a peering agreement with Comcast

[Richard_at_work]

I actually found Comcasts extensive Q&A's on this subject very informative - and its surprising how much you sound like a Level 3 shill...

http://blog.comcast.com/2010/12/20-qs---with-accurate-as---about-level-3s-peering-dispute.html

http://blog.comcast.com/2010/11/10-facts-about-peering-comcast-and-level-3.html

Re:Nobody has a peering agreement with Comcast

[Rockoon]

I actually found Comcasts extensive Q&A's on this subject very informative - and its surprising how much you sound like a Level 3 shill...

Translation: Comcast says that they are a saint and you believe them.

Re:Nobody has a peering agreement with Comcast

[Anonymous Coward]

or maybe the "at work" part is Comcast?

Either way I would never trust Comcast for providing a non biased opinion about Comcast. Neither would I expect a music industry exec about piracy, fox news about Obama and CNN about Republicans, etc.

I learned this stuff in Kindergarten...maaaybe 1st grade. Don't worry Rockoon most of us know Richard is trolling. :)

Re:A provider that uses close to 100% of capacity!

[Dunbal]

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.

Re:Comcast needs to be stoped befor NBC goes cable

[Anonymous Coward]

Two countries, separated by a common language...

Can't This Backfire?

[JackOfAllGeeks]

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).

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[DigiShaman]

I though Netflix buffered, metered the download rate, then determined when to start playback. Ok, so you're having to wait a few minutes to start the movie to ensure no interruption of playback. It's not a big deal unless you're watching real-time live streaming video (as events occur).

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[characterZer0]

You would think so, but the average user does not think that. The average user thinks "My YouTube videos of cats stream just fine, but Netflix does not. It must be Netflix's fault."

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[BradleyUffner]

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.

And the very next thing the customer thinks after that is "Hmm, I can't get DSL or fios out here, I guess I don't really have any choice but to live with it."

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[Amouth]

the user isn't going to think "Netflix is crappy"

care back that up?

I can understand if the User was using netflix and it was working fine then due to congestion it started to lag and skip they might blame Comcast..

but at the same time a user who has never seen it work correctly doesn't know who to blame for the problem and is more likely to just top using it.

but if they stop using it they will still want their content - the next best service that "doesn't lag out" is video on demand..

the average joe doesn't know anything about how an ISP works or over sells bandwidth.. but they can see very clearly that netfilx skips and lags and video on demand doesn't.. let me use the one that works.. and ignoring the fact that their service provider is intentional skewing things in their favor

as far as i'm concerned this is anti competitive and using their monopoly on the connection to sell other services and should be dragged into court under antitrust laws.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, It can't backfire on Comcast. What are your alternatives? I for one can ONLY get comcast to my apartment. But according to comcast, my apartment is illegal, so I actually can't get comcast services. They actually did me a favor and now I don't miss cable tv, and I'll never buy comcast again. Especially never again with all this BS they're spewing all over the place. I hope they burn in hell, and their merger doesn't get approved.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[alen]

ClearWire WiMax service is $50 a month for unlimited 4G internet. 3G is 5GB max per month. that's your competition

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[RatherBeAnonymous]

Maybe. It depends on if Hulu and ESPN and NBC, etc pay Comcast's entry fees. If other content providers pay for content mirrors for Comcast subscribers or just pay Comcast for better throughput, Netflix will look like the crappy one.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[magus_melchior]

If Comcast doesn't address this and tries to squeeze competing content providers seeking access to Comcast's customers, they could face anything from a stiff Sherman Act suit (barrier to entry) to RICO (extortion).

IANAL, of course. An actual legal professional can probably see the problems with my take on it.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, most Netflix users would blame Netflix in this scenario. As laymen, it's unlikely, they would be using their connection for anything else bandwidth heavy and be monitoring the bandwidth of those things actively. In short, email and the web works, but Netflix keeps cutting out. It must just be Netflix. Same with Youtube.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[JackOfAllGeeks]

Really just meant "Netflix" to be a place-holder for "any Internet content that is forced through congested links." I don't know details on how Netflix, specifically, delivers their content.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe. It depends on if Hulu and ESPN and NBC, etc pay Comcast's entry fees. If other content providers pay for content mirrors for Comcast subscribers or just pay Comcast for better throughput, Netflix will look like the crappy one.

Except that Comcast owns NBC, and doesn't NBC have a stake in Hulu?

Now you see how unlevel the playing field is.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and there's a problem: there is no competition. Jurisdiction over cable lines is granted by our friendly neighborhood government. Not everybody is lucky enough to have the option to flip over to DSL.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[matthewd]

We recently got xfinity with ComCast (20Mb/s) and NetFlix starts playback almost instantly, and we have never had playback stop to rebuffer. In comparison, we had problems with AT&T's DSL service all the time with NetFlix though. On DSL, playback would stop to buffer the video repeatedly and sometime would stop playback entirely.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[DigiShaman]

Yes, I have the same level of service here in Houston, TX. What have what they call "PowerBoost" Basically, the first 10MB of any new download starts a full throttle (Way beyond your 20Mb/s cap), then drops back down to your metered transfer rate (20Mb/s).

You may have noticed this visually when watching Youtube videos as they pre-buffer in the status bar.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

You would think so, but the average user does not think that. The average user thinks "My YouTube videos of cats stream just fine, but Netflix does not. It must be Netflix's fault."

After a decade in the support industry for cable and DSL companies, I can say that the first of these two posts was by far the more correct. Except that it doesn't matter whose fault it really is, it always gets blamed on the ISP eventually. You have no idea what kind of call volume those poor bastards in phoneland are getting since Cataclysm launched...

Sure, they'll bitch about Netflix too, but after they hear of a few people who find that Netflix streams nicely for them, they'll turn on the ISP instead. And nothing will convince them otherwise.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[characterZer0]

Working in the industry, you only heard from those who thought it was the ISP's fault. If you worked at Netflix, you would hear from all the people who think it is Netflix's fault.

And nothing will convince them otherwise.

That is the problem. Users have made up their minds, and evidence is meaningless to them. Thus, it is a PR battle, not a technical battle.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[AnnafromA2]

You would think so, but the average user does not think that. The average user thinks "My YouTube videos of cats stream just fine, but Netflix does not. It must be Netflix's fault."

Ahh, but as a long-suffering Comcast customer (there is NO alternative in my area) they do the same sort of thing with YouTube. No internet video over 35 seconds long is watchable over my connection. Except between 3-5 am. So I and my neighbors are all quite aware that it isn't Netflix. Or YouTube. It's Comcast.

Re:Can't This Backfire?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Interestingly, this hoses us Roku. It says, "oh, wow, you get 4 dots of bandwidth here, super... playing" and then "oh, noes, I have to buffer, wait," before just giving up and saying, "ok, 2 dots for you."

Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[bagboy]

So - Internet access is Universal Healthcare now? Comcast is a business designed to make profit yes? Best way to make profit in the internet business is to maximize your resources. A 100 percent full pipe is an efficient use of their resource. Geeze, slashdot is so full of whiners and babies it sickens me. Nothing prevents you from shelling out the dough to buy a dedicated 1:1 ratio pipe from a Tier 1 or 2 provider. Oh, wait, it costs to much? Then stop your bellyachin'

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[jhoegl]

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).

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[LordLimecat]

I would wonder however whether it is necessary for this to be a federal issue.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[bagboy]

I disagree. Everyone has a choice in the US. It is not Comcast's fault that your (an individual's) pockets are not deep enough to build your own infrastructure. Again, they are a business - internet access is not a right. 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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[SuricouRaven]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[bagboy]

As I engineer an ISP network, I'll tell you up front that there is no such thing as 95 percent. Users ALWAYS will consume what is available. Been there, done that.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except if you're paying for Service Y, Company X owes you Service Y. That you're incapable of seeing this is mind boggling.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[bagboy]

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.....

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[ironmaiden187]

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....

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[bagboy]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[compro01]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[HeckRuler]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Users ALWAYS will consume what is available

I guess that explains the low points in the graph....

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[bagboy]

Except users don't bitch about access during the low points... Right?

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[morgauxo]

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!

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[bagboy]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[kv9]

Holy fucking shit, thats a car analogy if I ever seen one.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[egamma]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[morgauxo]

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?

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[bagboy]

Amen to this!

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[morgauxo]

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!

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[bagboy]

No - you pay for high speed ACCESS to the internet. Not a high speed connection to the internet, that would be a tier 1 or 2 connection.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[clone52431]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[0111 1110]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Ichijo]

As I engineer an ISP network, I'll tell you up front that there is no such thing as 95 percent. Users ALWAYS will consume what is available.

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[brainboyz]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[clone52431]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Hijacked Public]

How do you describe the connections you sell for $80/month?

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[AdamWill]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Pharmboy]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[robot256]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Sepodati]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[jefe7777]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[AltairDusk]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[datapharmer]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[lymond01]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[robot256]

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!!!

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[DiademBedfordshire]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[0111 1110]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[datapharmer]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[mcgrew]

You don't think monopolies should be regulated? Are you stupid, or just trolling?

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[MiniMike]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[datapharmer]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[chemicaldave]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[chemicaldave]

The other solution they use is to build more routes.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[JustinOpinion]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a cyclical problem that has no solution.

Trains and buses, then?

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[citizenr]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[skids]

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.)

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Zero__Kelvin]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Nethemas the Great]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[mostlyDigital]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Nethemas the Great]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[jbr439]

A 100 percent full pipe is an efficient use of their resource.

Much like a 100% full highway.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Late Adopter]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[StikyPad]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[gtvr]

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).

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[HeckRuler]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[MickyTheIdiot]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Dr Herbert West]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anthony Mouse]

(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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[s73v3r]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[s73v3r]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ted Stevens, is that you?

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[s73v3r]

Extremely Shitty, but you can't do anything about it! Nyah Nyah Nyah

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[s73v3r]

If you advertise your connection as being unlimited, but you actually cap it, how is that not lying?

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[MickyTheIdiot]

They don't have to follow the rules.

They're an American corporation.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[robot256]

No can do, I have FIOS. So far they haven't given me a reason to dig into the contract since I signed up.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.....

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[paradxum]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[UnknownSoldier]

Mod parent up as funny, sad but true ...?

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[ep32g79]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[BLKMGK]

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....

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[BLKMGK]

Well for Comcast anyway, Verizon is doing fine for me with pretty high capacity...

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Konshu]

So about those flying cars....

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Coren22]

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.)

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[smitty97]

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!

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[egamma]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Ichijo]

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.

Is it really absurd to give people the freedom and ability to economize?

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[masterwit]

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

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[guruevi]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[robot256]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Crypto Gnome]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[BLKMGK]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[fredklein]

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!

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[egamma]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Mana Mana]

> 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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[ps2os2]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Belial6]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[BLKMGK]

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?

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Bengie]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[s73v3r]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[egamma]

Why should we treat the internet any differently than electricity and water utilities?

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Viperpete]

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.

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[fredklein]

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.)

Re:Universal Health, I mean, Internet Care?

[Belial6]

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.

Cuntcast is lying as usual.

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Why am I not surprised?

it won't be

[way2trivial]

fios is not expanding into any new areas for the forseeable future.

Re:it won't be

[wildstoo]

This is true, according to Wikipedia:

"Verizon announced in March 2010 that they were winding down their FiOS expansion, concentrating on completing their network in areas that already had FiOS franchises but were not deploying to any new areas, which included the cities of Baltimore and Boston, who had not yet secured municipal franchise agreements.[16]"

My brother, who lives in the DFW metroplex, has recently been getting flyers through his letterbox advertising that FiOS will soon be available in his area (although the Verizon website doesn't seem to agree yet). His in-laws, who live a few miles away from him, already have FiOS, and it's far faster than the Verizon DSL connection he has right now.

Re:A provider that uses close to 100% of capacity!

[KillaGouge]

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?

Re:A provider that uses close to 100% of capacity!

[Sponge Bath]

...this is like arguing that a road construction company doesn't have EXTRA/SPARE asphalt spreaders...

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.

Re:A provider that uses close to 100% of capacity!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:A provider that uses close to 100% of capacity!

[silas_moeckel]

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.

False advertising

[tepples]

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".

Re:False advertising

[breimann]

Do what most do, vote with your feet the day Verizon runs fiber down your block. Cable calls my house every. single. day. - begging me to switch back.

Re:False advertising

[morgauxo]

This is an option for what % of the population? And if everyone does it then what keeps Verizon in check?

Re:False advertising

[bigstrat2003]

Except Verizon, to the best of my knowledge, has stopped their FiOS rollout... and has sold their ISP operations in my area to Frontier in any case, so it looks like I'll never get FiOS unless I move.

Re:False advertising

[clone52431]

They can still give a user a 6 Mbps “PowerBoost” for a few seconds; they just have to prioritize those packets. It just means everyone else’s speed suffers as a result. Then when the “PowerBurst” is over (it doesn’t last long) they get the same slow-ass speed that everyone else is getting.

Re:False advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

6 Mbps burst now? 14 years ago they rolled it out as 10 Mbps continuous. This is broadband progress in the USA how?

Re:False advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

The really, really sad thing is, the price, QOS and sustained throughput of the municipal wireless in Minneapolis beats Comcast, hands down. You take a small hit in latency, but that's about it. I can't vouch for Qwest, but not having to deal with their customer "service" is bonus enough.

Re:False advertising

[twoallbeefpatties]

The really, really sad thing is, the price, QOS and sustained throughput of the municipal wireless in Minneapolis beats Comcast, hands down. You take a small hit in latency, but that's about it.

I hear people say the same thing about WiMax service in Houston.

Re:False advertising

[socrplayr813]

I don't know about Comcast, but with my Time Warner service, I get a solid 10 Mbps all the time (standard package; there is a turbo something-or-other, as well as a 'lite'), with a 15-20 Mbps burst. My only complaint is latency sucks for certain connections - if I want to connect to a west coast server (I'm in eastern-ish upstate NY - contrary to popular belief, that means roughly halfway up the state, not the northern part), my tracert goes through Rochester, Chicago, NYC, NJ somewhere, and Philly before it even THINKS about going west.

Anyway, my point is: while broadband in the US is not what I'd call good, it's not quite to the disaster level of Comcast's service.

Re:False advertising

[Bengie]

My ISP actually licenses powerboost from Comcast, but my ISP's powerboost only utilizes un-used network bandwidth. Not to say this couldn't be changed.

Re:False advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us notice that your post lacks a single user performance number, such as the speed of an FTP download from a Comcast customer to a nice server that is tata connected. Really simple to collect, and if it maxes out the line speed of the connection, could trivially prove you wrong. If you get 20KB/s, could help prove your point.

Re:False advertising

[s73v3r]

I believe they only sold the DSL operations.

Re:False advertising

[s73v3r]

How many competing ISPs are in your area?

Re:False advertising

[tepples]

Verizon sold FiOS to Frontier in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Re:False advertising

[MickyTheIdiot]

So they ran out of that silvery stuff they put on the baseball?

(sorry.. that's got to be the stupidest advertisement ever put on television...)

Re:False advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

You can tell them to stop calling.

Re:False advertising

[socrplayr813]

Time Warner and bad DSL from the phone company.

It's one of those or satellite/dialup. Same situation where I used to live, which is about an hour drive from here.

Re:False advertising

[rekoil]

Powerboost will only give you a burst if there's available headroom across the data path. If your traffic is going over the flat-topped Tata link, you'll be lucky to get even the 6Mbps you're paying for, much less the burst speed.

Re:False advertising

[Bengie]

I was responding to someone who mentioned that Comcast may have changed powerboost to be partially prioritized so quick loading data works fine, but any long transfers are abysmally slow. This would give the effect of web browsing being fine, but downloads and streaming will suck.

Glad I don't have Comcast

[Halifax Samuels]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How do they make money?

[shentino]

Basically, capitalism is emphatically about providing a service and good to those who want it most and are willing to pay the most for it, and using greed for money as an incentive grease to make the market.

What happens is that people are greedy enough that if they find a loophole that allows them to get the money and skip out on the services and goods, they'll do it.

Capitalism does well to exploit mankind's inherent greed. Thing is, greedy people like to cheat.

Re:A provider that uses close to 100% of capacity!

[kiwix]

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?

An article from Voxel on the probelm

[r4tf1nk]

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

It's simple

[u-235-sentinel]

Concast really doesn't care.

Comcast: The Enron of Data Delivery?

[tunapez]

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.

Enron Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:A provider that uses close to 100% of capacity!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

How is this surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

and what would be the point of class action?

[Lead Butthead]

Seems to me that if this is all true, there is certainly grounds for a class action suite here.

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.

Re:and what would be the point of class action?

[GooberToo]

News of providing a poor experience to many people which attempting to game the system is never good. Believe it or not, we're talking politics here. Politics is driven by or the lack thereof, knowledge. An informed public is not good for them.

Re:and what would be the point of class action?

[Khyber]

"And what would be the point of class action? Comcast will eventually settle for "undisclosed sum" with out "admitting wrong doing,"

That depends on if the class representatives want to settle.

They may very well demand a full jury trial and refuse to settle.

You haven't been involved in class-action suits, have you?

Re:and what would be the point of class action?

[ps2os2]

5 dollars off?? More like $25 added to pay for the lawyers.

Lyrics for a Tuesday

[GPLDAN]

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

Re:Comcast needs to be stoped befor NBC goes cable

[putzin]

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.

Re:A provider that uses close to 100% of capacity!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Excellent post

[jscotta44]

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.

Fraud?

[divisionbyzero]

Doesn't this effectively amount to fraud? Comcast knows there is no way it can deliver the bandwidth it's promised to its customers.

Re:Fraud?

[clone52431]

That’s why they advertise speeds up to “x” Gbps. They just don’t tell you that the only way you could reasonably expect to get “x” Gbps is if you were the only person in your entire neighbourhood using their service at that moment.

Re:Fraud?

[Sepodati]

How do three graphs show Comcast is not delivering the promised bandwidth and committing fraud? Two graphs are for a ONE day period for TWO separate interfaces and the third graph is ANOTHER interface over a 30 day period. 30Gb at this ONE location. The ONLY thing shown here is that the links were nearly 100% utilized for the time shown. That's it.

Re:Fraud?

[divisionbyzero]

How do three graphs show Comcast is not delivering the promised bandwidth and committing fraud? Two graphs are for a ONE day period for TWO separate interfaces and the third graph is ANOTHER interface over a 30 day period. 30Gb at this ONE location. The ONLY thing shown here is that the links were nearly 100% utilized for the time shown. That's it.

I didn't say that the graphs did. I'm assuming Comcast is doing what they have been accused of doing because it fits a previous pattern of behviour.

That's no moon^W("real") free market

[jonaskoelker]

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.

Re:That's no moon^W("real") free market

[gstoddart]

quite different from a (well-functioning) Free Market

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. Oh, it also has to solve the problems that everybody says it will eventually solve without being forced to.

This free market you talk of is a pink unicorn -- it's a hypothetical thing, but it has never existed. Oh, sure, people have painted ponies pink and stuck a fake horn on them; but it's still not what they claim it is.

I have yet to be convinced that what you describe ever has or even could exist. And, if it did, it would last about a week before the players decided to start taking shortcuts and gaming the system. At which point it would need to have checks and balances, and immediately cease to exist.

I'm afraid that in the 20 years I've been pondering such things, I have come to the conclusion that what you describe is myth.

Re:That's no moon^W("real") free market

[mdmkolbe]

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

Copper. Wood (modulo non-market related EPA regulation). Most industrial raw resources.

Re:That's no moon^W("real") free market

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhh, not so loud. You might scare the libertarians!

Re:That's no moon^W("real") free market

[vuke69]

Shut the fuck up, you wouldn't know a Libertarian if you had one cum in your face.

Re:That's no moon^W("real") free market

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up, you wouldn't know a Libertarian if you had one cum in your face.

But you would, right?

Let's be fair

[DrTime]

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.

Bad argument

[pavon]

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.

Re:Bad argument

[Anthony Mouse]

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.

I kind of doubt that's it. Having Level 3 pay for the links to near the endpoints saves Comcast money vs. having to maintain them itself, and nothing stops them from using all of the smaller points of contact to upload data to Level 3, assuming that's even what's going on. In fact, that is probably more efficient, because the sources of that upload data aren't all in the same place anyway.

Now, what it sounds like you're saying is that Comcast wants to a) be a Tier 1 provider and b) be their own, sole Tier 1 provider, and use that monopoly over Comcast ISP customers to extract money from everyone who needs to be able to reach Comcast ISP customers.

In the end, because there is a lot of competition between CDNs and not so much between ISPs, Comcast has the upper hand.

In other words, Comcast is holding its ISP customers hostages in order to collect a ransom.

Re:Bad argument

[DavidRawling]

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.

Wait a second ... So Comcast is pulling more traffic from Tata than they send, and paying Tata for that. Agreed?

In the L3 case, Comcast would be pulling more traffic from L3 than they send, and thus L3 should pay Comcast for that - and the reason is because it's a business in market X and not market Y!? Whatever you are smoking, I want some.

So how is it the same?! If Comcast is pulling more traffic from two vendors, why should one pay for it and one should be paid for it? In both cases, it's the Comcast subscriber requesting the data. Yet your argument is that L3 should pay for it and Tata can be paid for exactly the same scenario.

Maybe you should think about having a consistent opinion - change it by all means, or clarify it, but holding that two opposite viewpoints on the same issue are in fact equivalent makes you seem like a lunatic - and there's no full moon tonight.

Re:Bad argument

[pavon]

Doh, I was thinking backwards there for a bit :) Thanks for correcting me.

No

[pavon]

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.

Comcast Over-reaches: Ma Bell all over again.

[divisionbyzero]

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.

Build your own infrastructure?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Build your own infrastructure?

[Nadaka]

You could build your own infrastructure by using a collection of high power 802.11b/g modems to multiplex a small amount of bandwidth from every unsecured wireless connection in your neighborhood.

Re:Build your own infrastructure?

[Muad'Dave]

There is no question of the association allowing a satellite dish.

If you live in the US, you're covered by Federal Law. Now you just need to find an acceptable signal. I'm in Richmond, VA and have the 'east coast' Dish Network dish that works right in the middle of my tree-heavy property. It uses sats at 61.5, 72, and 77 degrees west.

Comcast routing

[straponego]

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.

Re:Comcast routing

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

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.

That's just wrong. I'm in Boulder and I have a virtual server in Denver which is connected to Level3. My traceroutes go directly on Comcast's network to Level3 in Denver. Typical RTTs are in the 15ms range.

Re:Comcast routing

[straponego]

Hmm, I guess it's different for you. I'm still getting the same traceroutes and ~72ms average to my colo that was <15ms before. So are a couple others around town.

Coming Soon to Comcast Metered internet usage!

[Tootech]

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!

Really!?!?

[wonkavader]

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.

So does Time Warner

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

lol

[Charliemopps]

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.

They are setting themselves up for a fall

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:They are setting themselves up for a fall

[gstoddart]

If this gets bad enough, competition shows up.

It's a nice theory.

But, the barrier to entry is massive. You'd need to lay new cable everywhere to run in parallel to them. That's a huge expense, and would basically need to dig up miles and miles of stuff to do.

Unfortunately, cable companies are essentially a monopoly since it would be almost impossible for a newcomer to build the infrastructure needed and hook it up to people's houses.

This is why they don't have competition in many places. It's also why they don't need to give a rat's ass about their customers.

Wow

[Arker]

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:

Welcome to the "free" market,

Your cognitive-dissonance circuits must be working lots of overtime.

Re:Wow

[gstoddart]

Welcome to the "free" market,

Your cognitive-dissonance circuits must be working lots of overtime.

*laugh* Not hardly. I don't believe that anybody has operated in a "free" market or that one can even exist. I don't believe that it would work like those who worship at its feet claim it would.

It's a skewed an imbalanced system from the get go -- I merely explained it using its own terms of reference. Here's the rest of the sentence you chose not to include ...

it isn't really about customer choice and value -- it's about maximizing profits and giving you the least amount of service they can get away with.

No cognitive dissonance needed. The "free" market is a myth (see them fancy quotes around "free", they imply sarcasm and using a word ironically).

Look more closely

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Bandwidth graph does not make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

 

Re:Bandwidth graph does not make sense

[compro01]

The graph looks perfectly sensible if you consider the times to be given in UTC.

You got what you paid for

[Danathar]

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.

Re:You got what you paid for

[HeckRuler]

Yup, read the fine print: "up to 8 Mbps"
Asked for metrics about what they actually delivered. Like what the average speed was for a request. What their uptime was. The mean-time to fix. Got transferred around a little bit until a tech started talking to me. His answer: "We don't keep track of that".
"So you'll deliver between zero and eight Mbps, and I just gotta hope that it's greater then zero"
"Well, we'll do our best to..." blah blah blah
"I guess we'll find out"

Turns out, that when I bought "up to 8", I really only ever got 3, and often got 0.
And so now I'm on DSL that gets me about 93% of what they sold me, and I'm ok with that. But I sure would like to pay a little more for a fatter pipe.

You can dance and prance around your legal fine print all you want, but I paid for 8, and got screwed. That's bad business. If you try to sell me that shit, you're a bad businessman.

And while I myself haven't fallen for what goes by the legal definition of false advertising in this particular market, they have, as you mentioned, pulled this crap before. That's also bad business. I'm not a fan.

Government regulation

[Danathar]

Whoah dude....how do you THINK they GOT their MONOPOLY.

Government Regulation

Why voting with feet is not more widespread

[tepples]

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.

Re:Why voting with feet is not more widespread

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Um, they have the 'disposable cash' to pay 15 years of monthly rental fees, but not to pay a one-time lost equipment fee??? (Which Comcast might very well waive if they ask politely as long-time customers.)

Re:Why voting with feet is not more widespread

[tepples]

Um, they have the 'disposable cash' to pay 15 years of monthly rental fees, but not to pay a one-time lost equipment fee???

Every time this is pointed out to them: "What's another month?" A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck, and they subconsciously apply time value of money. Having to pay $100 or so to report a cable box lost would mean they'd have to put $100 of groceries on a credit card. If the rental costs less than the interest on that, they pay the rental.

Look at the 30day graph

[vanyel]

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...

Please stop publicing NANOG

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Sign me up for that Class Action

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

I love Comcast!

[dstutz]

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.

This is normal...

[ryty]

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.

Freedom to constipate!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ba Dump!

Re:Comcast needs to be stoped befor NBC goes cable

[Sprouticus]

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)

mircteyiz.com

[mircteyiz.com]

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

"Don't oversell" is bullshit

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

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.

Re:"Don't oversell" is bullshit

[fredklein]

The total bandwidth demand by x users with connections of speed y is much lower than x*y.

Only if the users do not use all their bandwidth evenly.

Think of it in terms of water. You have a community with 100 houses. You figure that each house uses an average of 1 gallon per hour. So you set up a 100gal-per-hour pipe to that neighborhood. Is that adequate? No way. People don't use water while they are sleeping. People don't use water while they are at work. All those 24 gallons used per day are used in an hour or two in the morning and the evening hours- perhaps 1/4 of the day total. During those times, therefore, the use is more like 6 gal per hour. Therefore, to meet peak demand, you'll need a 600-gal-per-hour pipe to that neighborhood.

And that doesn't even take into consideration over-selling. With the increased usage caused by bittorrents, as well as streaming video (netflix, hulu, etc), you CANNOT assume that you can over sell connections by 10-1 or even 5-1. Anyone who does is living in the past. Wake up and smell the coffee, comcast.

A Government Monopoly means that...

[Lorien_the_first_one]

...Comcast, AT&T and others are really just common carriers. That's why I say that Net Neutrality is a ruse.

Bad Idea

[Belial6]

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.

A modest response

[jonaskoelker]

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?

Something 4U 2 read (some good "FYI")... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Something U ought 2 read (some "FYI")... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Something 4U 2 read (some 'FYI')... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Something 4U 2 read (some "FYI" on HOSTS)... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Something 4U 2 read, some "FYI" on HOSTS... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Something 4U2 read: HOSTS files & Windows Defe

[Anonymous Coward]

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

What are the graphs measures of?

[Radio_active_cgb]

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?).