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Comcast Accused of Congestion By Choice
An anonymous reader writes "A kind soul known as Backdoor Santa has posted graphs purportedly showing traffic through TATA, one of Comcast's transit providers. The graphs of throughput for a day and month, respectively, show that Comcast chooses to run congested links rather than buy more capacity. Keeping their links full may ensure that content providers must pay to colocate within Comcast's network. The graphs also show a traffic ratio far from 1:1, which has implications for the validity of its arguments with Level (3) last month."
Ever wonder what Comcast's connections to the Internet look like? In the tradition of WikiLeaks, someone stumbled upon these graphs of their TATA links. For reference, TATA is the only other IP transit provider to Comcast after Level (3). Comcast is a customer of TATA and pays them to provide them with access to the Internet.
1 day graphs:
Image #1: http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/78/ntoday.gif
Image #1 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/viewimage.php?img=13-224638L&rand=6673&t=gif&m=12&y=2010&srv=img4
Image #2: http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/749/sqnday.gif
Image #2 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/static_image/13-205526L/4331/gif/12/2010/img6/glowfoto
Notice how those graphs flat-line at the top? That's because they're completely full for most of the day. If you were a Comcast customer attempting to stream Netflix via this connection, the movie would be completely unwatchable. This is how Comcast operates: They intentionally run their IP transit links so full that Content Providers have no other choice but to pay them (Comcast) for access. If you don't pay Comcast, your bits wont make it to their destination. Though they wont openly say that to anyone, the content providers who attempt to push bits towards their customers know it. Comcast customers however have no idea that they're being held hostage in order to extort money from content.
Another thing to notice is the ratio of inbound versus outbound. Since Comcast is primarily a broadband access network provider, they're going to have millions of eyeballs (users) downloading content. Comcast claims that a good network maintains a 1:1 with them, but that's simply not possible unless you had Comcast and another broadband access network talking to each other. In the attached graphs you can see the ratio is more along the lines of 5:1, which Comcast was complaining about with Level (3). The reality is that the ratio argument is bogus. Broadband access networks are naturally pull-heavy and it's being used as an excuse to call foul of Level (3) and other content heavy networks. But this shoulnd't surprise anyone, the ratio argument has been used for over a decade by many of the large telephone companies as an excuse to deny peering requests. Guess where most of Comcasts senior network executive people came from? Sprint and AT&T. Welcome to the new monopoly of the 21st century.
If you think the above graph is just a bad day or maybe a one off? Let us look at a 30 day graph...
Image #3: http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/8917/ntomonth.gif
Image #3 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/static_image/13-205958L/4767/gif/12/2010/img6/glowfoto
Comcast needs to be truthful with its customers, regulators and the public in general. The Level (3) incident only highlights the fact that Comcast is pinching content and backbone providers to force them to pay for uncongested access to Comcast customers. Otherwise, there's no way to send traffic to Comcast customers via the other paths on the Internet without hitting congested links.
Remember that this is not TATA's fault, Comcast is a CUSTOMER of TATA. TATA cannot force Comcast to upgrade its links, Comcast elects to simply not purchase enough capacity and lets them run full. When Comcast demanded that Level (3) pay them, the only choice Level (3) had was to give in or have its traffic (such as Netflix) routed via the congested TATA links. If Level (3) didn't agree to pay, that means Netflix and large portions of the Internet
Am utterly shocked that anybody could be so cruel as to suspect a poor innocent cable company of trying to protect their cash-cow video delivery business by deliberately sucking at being an ISP(harder than they do simply by nature, that is) and using their oligopolistic incumbent position to shake down nimbler and more responsive competitors.
The more I know about Comcrap, the less I understand.
Is their company run by an evil troll who punishes all those who implement innovation and progress?
I have never, EVER heard anything good about Comcrap.
I would submit to a full-time McDonald's wifi connection before I would subscribe to Comcrap.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Comcast needs to be stopped before NBC goes cable only and maybe even comcast only in area with more then one cable system.
I don't want to lose CSN CHICAGO on Dish / Directv / WOW cable / RCN cable and ATT uverse
Anyone who is offended at the behavior of these ISPs could join http://www.stopthecap.com/ It may be futile, but at least it's better than whining.
Please someone tell me that Verizon is better, because I really want to switch to FIOS when it's available.
Does Comcast simply not care about their customer satisfaction ratings, or are they on a quest to consciously plunge their ratings into the gutter? I ask semi-seriously because the latter strategy has merit: they can effectively do whatever they want without fear of too much consequence. After all, if they still have customers after kicking them around like this with the crap they've been pulling, they can probably continue to treat their customers like dirt and get away with it.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
Seems like they are intentionally congesting their links to force content providers to pay them extra for prioritisation. Ground rules for net neutrality are needed.. badly.
The article indicates a 1:5 upload:download ratio. Would this be because most plans have e.g. 1mbit up : 10mbit down throttling (or similar) ?
I find it interesting that they could increase their upload speeds with minimal performance hit, or would that take away their argument against level 3?
I don't understand this sentence : "Keeping their links full may ensure that content providers must pay to colocate within Comcast's network" I don't know how Comcast's service works
Interesting data, but I almost find more interesting the use of MRTG to show it. :) Perhaps we can infer from this that whoever grabbed this traffic wasn't using Comcast network tools, and instead used their own tools for a simple and easy setup? Hmm. :)
Is this unattended (torrent) activity? I find it hard to believe that it is active web surfing / video streaming for the majority, unless daytime usage is extremely low and what we are seeing is that the network is completely overwhelmed with modest/typical use by 2nd/3rd shift shift workers.
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.
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Did anybody notice that the two graphs are taken from different interfaces? Also, it looks like the traffic only recently got that high. Either way, It seems irresponsible to let the traffic get that high without upgrading.
The Comcast argument is that they have a peering agreement with L3 (and TATA too) but that is simply not the case. Both L3 and TATA are providers for Comcast.
TFP (The Fucking Post) points out that Comcast runs its terminations with TATA at full capacity for most of the day and concludes that they do so on purpose to force services like Netflix to co-locate with them (= $$$ for Comcast.)
So L3 says to Netflix.. "Hey.. you dont need to be a slave to the Comcast overlord" and Comcasts reponse is to re-brand its business relationship with L3 as a "Peering Agreement."
Many slashdotters bought this bullshit hook, line, and sinker on the last Comcast vs L3 article. They did so because they learned about peering relationships at some point in other slashdot stories and took their 1:1 free peering knowledge and incorrectly applied it to the L3 and Comcast relationship.
L3 is Comcast's internet provider. Comcast's claim is like you claiming that you can charge your ISP because more stuff comes downstream to your LAN than goes upstream from it.
"His name was James Damore."
we're talking probably an extra 200k per month per link.
ps. I'm rounding _way_ up.
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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.
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.
No, it's more like the construction company is taking forever to finish the road, and by happy chance they also operate the toll booth on the only alternate road.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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?
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).
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...
fios is not expanding into any new areas for the forseeable future.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I agree. Monopolies have rights too...
Wait, what?
Some people have no choice but Comcast, however others have competition, allowing change to other providers.
Just because you live in the city, doesnt mean everyone does. (General statement, not directed soley at you. But it could be).
I would agree, but if adding another link only gives them 5% unused, and they can deliver the speeds they advertise, wouldn't the cost be worth it to stop all the outcry?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
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.
John
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.
Unlike a spare part you don't pay for extra capacity. Transit billing is generally 95th percentile you throw out the top 5% of samples and bill on the remaining peek. From a design standpoint if you had two links you would not want to see either running over 50% from a billing standpoint you pay about the same for two links 50% used as you do one link at 100% so there is little reason to max out links unless there is a failure and it's picking up the slack.
No sir I dont like it.
A 100 percent full pipe is an efficient use of their resource.
It also limits the ability of Comcast's customers to use the 6 Mbps downstream burst capacity that Comcast has advertised to them. When an oversold link flat-tops, it's been over-oversold. If Comcast is not capable of bursting at 6 Mbps for the majority of the day, it shouldn't even be advertising 6 Mbps, let alone "PowerBoost".
I would wonder however whether it is necessary for this to be a federal issue.
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.
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Last time something like this happened was with Enron, and their rolling blackouts. That didn't take long to repeat history.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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"
Most ISP sell you a broadband connection and punish you if you use it to the full capacity. But somehow they should be allowed to use the full capacity of their connection to the outside world, and therefore offer a crappy service?
They're a customer of Level 3 & this guy gives his analysis of the issue (found in followups to the NANOG posting)
http://www.voxel.net/blog/2010/12/peering-disputes-comcast-level-3-and-you
Except if you're paying for Service Y, Company X owes you Service Y. That you're incapable of seeing this is mind boggling.
But the way it looks is Comcast is possibly denying people access to content aka not providing the service as they have advertised unless the content provider pays them. Not sure how that amounts to universal health care or society owing me something. More of a this company does shady stuff to make even more money kinda situation....
Concast really doesn't care.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Is this the acme of US innovation... How to screw and lie for profit?
That's all I got, the abuses of corporate owned government are too pervasive to list again. Until YOU stop giving them your money, it will only get worse.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Comcast sold me an "unlimited" amount of bandwidth, then I find out they have "secret" caps on bandwidth. The problem isn't Comcast having a virtual monopoly, the problem is Comcast overselling "unlimited" bandwidth to far to many customers to promise any guarantee of throughput. See, the government gave all kinds of tax breaks to ISPs to make sure they kept up their infrastructure to support their customers. It isn't my fault that Comcast chose not to spend that money laying new infrastructure and they are now at capacity.
Let's put this to rest. You are a taxpayer in a state/city where there are 4 lanes of road going in and out of the heart of your city. During rush hour, congestion hits and it's go, stop, go stop. You and all the other citizens who pay taxes in the city/state complain that something must be done. 5 years later there are 6 lanes of traffic. Rush hour is still go, stop, go stop. See where I'm going here? This is a cyclical problem that has no solution.
Being as state and municipal governments are the ones giving Comcast the franchise agreements (read: protected monopoly status) in exchange for various benefits, it is dramatically unlikely they would do anything with regard to opening competition or regulating their practices.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
Users ALWAYS will consume what is available
I guess that explains the low points in the graph....
And what would be the point of class action? Comcast will eventually settle for "undisclosed sum" with out "admitting wrong doing," Lawyers walk away with millions while the rest of Comcast customers gets a 5 dollar coupon off the next month.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Wha, yeah!
C'mon, yeah
Yeah, c'mon, yeah
Yeah, c'mon
Oh, yeah, ma
Yeah, I'm a back door Santa
I'm a back door Santa
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
Hey, all you people that tryin' to sleep
I'm out to make it with my midnight leak, yeah
'Cause I'm a back door Santa
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
All right, yeah
You routers eat your dinner
Eat your pork and beans
I eat more bandwidth
Than any man ever seen, yeah, yeah
I'm a back door Santa, wha
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
Well, I'm a back door Santa!
I'm a back door Santa
Whoa, baby, I'm a back door Santa
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
No, in most areas there are these things called Franchise Agreements. Telecommunications in the US is mostly a command economy.
Besides, since when was it a businesses right to advertise one thing, take money for it and not provide it? If a restaurant fails to provide what you order do you go start a new restaurant? What a bunch of NeoCon bs!
Yes... Someone who gets it! We provide internet to Rural communities via Sat transport. a 1:1 of 1mbps of transponder space is something more then 2K per month. To deliver that 1 mbps to one individual who pays $80/mnth would be insane. So, we oversubscribe, we use compression and acceleration and do the best we can.
Holy fucking shit, thats a car analogy if I ever seen one.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Let's put this to rest. You are a taxpayer in a state/city where there are 4 lanes of road going in and out of the heart of your city. During rush hour, congestion hits and it's go, stop, go stop. You and all the other citizens who pay taxes in the city/state complain that something must be done. 5 years later there are 6 lanes of traffic. Rush hour is still go, stop, go stop. See where I'm going here? This is a cyclical problem that has no solution.
The solution is to build toll roads, and possibly vary the tolls by hour of the day. That way, people who really need to use the road, will use it, and the road gets used more during off-peak hours.
On the ISP side, Comcast should charge customers by the gigabyte--these pipes are full of horse porn and dancing poodle videos. Or possibly, poodle porn and dancing horses. Either way, if customers actually had to pay per gigabyte, not only would they use their connections in a more responsible manner, Comcast would have an incentive to buy bigger pipes, since that would actually increase their profits, rather than cutting into their margins.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
No, you pay for a high speed connection to the INTERnet and they are providing a high speed connection to their own INTRAnet with a congested gateway to the internet. Then they make money on both ends by charging content providers to get onto the intranet providing their customers with the connection they already paid for in the first place. They get away with it because the consumers are ignorant, the politicians are crooked. The end result is the consumer will be charged more plus the carrier gets greater control of what is on their networks. This decreases competition further eroding what the consumer gets in the end. Eventually maybe it won't even be possible to discuss and make others aware of what is going on. How long until Slashdot for example is inaccessible through Comcast?
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.
Amen to this!
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.
I'm waiting for the day CSN is a web available service. That's the day I can finally cute the cord on my cable (which is not Comcast BTW). I don't actually mind paying Hulu $10 for their service, and then forking out another $10 to Comcast for CSN (if/when available) for internet delivery. My cable bill is almost $200 with internet service, so cutting that down to the $60 for internet plus some set of subscriptions (say another $50), and I'm still saving a ton of money. I think this is something that scares the bejeezus out of cable cos. The thought that they would be relegated to simply being an ISP probably makes them sleep less well every night.
Bah
Competition would be awesome but while discussions of bandwidth and bottlenecks are too techical for the average citizen to be bothered with unsightly wires and people digging trenches through their front lawns are the end of the world. Wireless is nice but bandwidth is too limited for a significant percentage of the population to use it. Wireless is like everybody sharing one wire. One really really fast wire but still one wire and after it is split so many ways... Besides, this generation is offended by antennas. The site of them makes them cry.
Add to that a bit of money from the big few telecoms for our corrupt politicians... And you get about as much competition in the US as ice hockey in hell.
Support Net Neutrality!
I completely agree. In fact, for the Federal government, building out infrastructure (roads in the days of the writing of the Constitution) is a mandate. A smart government will let the free market work when and where it can, because a truely competitive market is virtually impossible to beat on a cost/performance level by any government.
I was just reading a story about how the state in last place for broadband access (surprise...Mississippi) has used Federal dollars to build out a web site how what vendors provide broadband access to places where you live. Talk about a waste of money when there are dozens of sites (some by vendors others by aggregaters) that do the same thing long before the Mississippi site was introduced. The state should have used that money to actually build out some sort of broadband access for the areas that don't have it. For example, they could have literally funded the electric co-operatives to build out the data over power line systems. This would have created more competition because the co-ops operate in many of the places where the phone and cable companies do - thus adding more competition, while providing broadband to the unserved areas of the state.
Doesn't this effectively amount to fraud? Comcast knows there is no way it can deliver the bandwidth it's promised to its customers.
Welcome to the "free" market
Welcome to a Natural Monopoly due to Network Effects and a lack of regulation---quite different from a (well-functioning) Free Market.
The free market retort doesn't work because cable companies have a government-granted monopoly on that technology. Even if someone wanted to, in most areas, they can't legally start a competing cable service, it has to use a different technology, so you're not going to have real like-for-like competition, you're not going to have DSL-for-DSL or cable vs. cable competition in the same area in most places. Fiber is faster, but you're also starting out the gate with a much more expensive system to lay.
First of all, the low points in the graph prove that users don’t “always” consume all of what is available. They only do when the demand is actually that high (wow, what a revelation).
Go look at that graph again (here it is) and instead of the flatline, imagine that curve extrapolated up to where it ought to be. Where does it peak, somewhere around 200%? So you could actually double that network’s capacity and still be thinking “oh my god they’re just using it all up!” No, that’s just the normal demand... triple the network’s capacity, and you’d likely find that you have excess capacity at all times.
So no, the users don’t just “ALWAYS consume what is available”. They consume all of what is available when what’s available is less than the normal demand ought to be.
You’re just stuck in the position of being so ridiculously over-sold that the demand is 2x what you can supply. And you really only have yourselves to blame for that.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
That only happens when peak hour pricing is below the market clearing rate. With congestion pricing, the pipe will always be 95% full. If it's more than 95% full, the price is too low. If it's less than 95% full, the price is too high, or there's more capacity available than is needed.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Problem is the road is bumper-to-bumper for 18+ hours a day. Congestion is expected at rush hour, but if the road can't handle normal loads it's not performing to need and needs upgrading.
5 years later there are 6 lanes of traffic. Rush hour is still go, stop, go stop. See where I'm going here? This is a cyclical problem that has no solution.
The infrastructure grew slower than the demands for that infrastructure’s usage did. Until it catches up, you’ll always be stuck behind the 8-ball.
And what’s more, the demands for the infrastructure grew unnaturally quickly because a price war drove down the cost without actually increasing the capacity of the infrastructure to meet the new demand.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
How do you describe the connections you sell for $80/month?
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
I use Netflix and Comcast. We use a lot of Netflix and I've never had a problem with viewing movies anytime I want. We have 2 iPhones, 1 Mac, a Wii, and 1 AppleTV all enabled for Netflix with 2 users and we both watch sometimes. I measure from 5 Mbs (worse case) to 18 Mbs on DSL Reports at various times. I also have the option of moving to FIOS and I have not because I never have trouble with Comcast. Whatever the graphs show for a single congested connection does seem to be causing this user trouble. These graphs do not measure my ability to download. Excuse me, my 3GB XCode update just finished, back to work.
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.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
no-one's expecting to be able to saturate their link all the time; no ISP offers this (though you have to look quite closely at the terms and conditions before you find the AUP that gets them out of it, usually). What's expected is to be able to achieve reasonable performance at a sensible level of usage, which Comcast clearly isn't offering. Don't do the ridiculous math based on everyone using 1Mb/s. Try instead a more realistic calculus where perhaps 10% of users use 50-200GB transfer per month, 70% use 10-50, 19% use 0-10 and 1% use over 200GB and will get kicked out just as soon as the AUP team gets to them. Then damn well pay for the backhaul necessary to provide that level of service. Most ISPs seem to manage it; as others have posted, Verizon don't seem to have any trouble.
Alternatively, be upfront and offer a tiered range of plans based on limited amounts of data transfer: $XX for XXGB. And actually provide what you advertise. Either way would be fine. But don't make your offer based on maximum speed capability and then provide an oversaturated backhaul link so no-one can achieve anything like a reasonable transfer rate at peak times.
Comcast claims that a good network maintains a 1:1 with them, but that's simply not possible unless you had Comcast and another broadband access network talking to each other. In the attached graphs you can see the ratio is more along the lines of 5:1, which Comcast was complaining about with Level (3). The reality is that the ratio argument is bogus.
Comcast claims that free peering arrangements should have close to 1:1 ratio. And if you don't maintain that ratio, then you should pay for transit, just like Comcast is doing with TATA. So this is entirely consistent with what Comcast is saying and if anything supports their argument, not undercut it like Backdoor Santa is claiming. His argument about saturating transit to force other to peer with Comcast is valid though.
I personally think it is garbage to apply Tier-1 peering standards to (what should be) a CDN-ISP peering arrangement as they are completely different situations with different economics. It would save Comcast money and improve their customer experience if they were to enter into a free peering relationship with L3-the-CDN, because without the peering agreement Comcast-the-ISP would have to pay someone transit to access this data.
But to play devils advocate, here is the issue from another perspective. Comcast actually has a it's own Tier 1 network now, in addition to the last-mile network that we normally associate them with. This includes many business customers who are content providers not consumers. Comcast is using this CDN issue to force L3-the-Tier 1 to start treating them like a Tier 1. L3 wants a traditional CDN-ISP peering agreement where they to route their CDN data over their backbone network and connect with Comcast at the closest possible location to the customer, with only data intended for those customers. Comcast wants a Tier 1 peering agreement where their networks connect at a smaller number of points, and more data would be routed over their Tier 1 network, and then they balance the ratio by sending more traffic L3's way for free. Think about it; if Comcast was paying any other Tier 1 for transit, then L3-the-Tier 1 would have no issue peering with them. So if Comcast builds out their own Tier 1, why shouldn't L3 treat them the same?
L3 is trying to use it's backbone capability as an advantage to support it's CDN, and Comcast is trying to leverage it's position as a huge ISP to push it's Tier 1 network. In the end, because there is a lot of competition between CDNs and not so much between ISPs, Comcast has the upper hand.
Unless the Interstate Commerce clause comes into play, and considering the nature of the internet and that Comcast's actions are crossing state lines, then yes, the Feds would have a cause to take action. Probably no inclination, but a cause.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
According to your pedantry, "access" implies burst rate, while "connection" implies continuous rate, but the result is the same. How can you possibly have high speed access with the gateway links this congested? You only get high speed access to their "preferred providers" (stealing a term from health insurance) and everything else is gonna be slow. Since the definition of the Internet is "everything", no exceptions, you clearly do not have high speed access to the Internet. Unless the service is advertised as a "limited package" when you buy it, they are clearly engaging in false marketing.
Which is scenarios is more likely: Customers
1) Recognize that this is a problem with Comcast not Netflix
2) Have another option for broadband connectivity
3) And choose to switch solely over this issue.
or
1) The customers blame Netflix for the problem
2) Netflix realizes that L3-the-CDN isn't providing the level of service they wanted.
3) Netflix switches to any number of high quality CDNs that do have peering agreements with Comcast.
Comcast has the stronger negotiating position here, which is why L3 gave in.
Without an accompanying graph showing % of dropped packets on each of the 3 10Gb links listed, everything said is just speculation. This is ONE router (in NY, apparently) with 30Gb of traffic going through it. I doubt this is the ONLY connection to TATA that Comcast has. For all we know, these links are perfectly optimized to be as close to 100% utilized at peak times and routes are managed in a way to move traffic around to other peer links.
in a fair market where customers can see what's going on, they will spot the guy who is over promising and under delivering. then take their business elsewhere.
Comcast is a business taking advantage of a monopoly situation to gouge customers for larger profit. If you actually support our free market system you would recognize that the free market breaks in the case of a monopoly and requires outside interference (usually government) to restore competition to the market.
That isn't an issue if you don't oversell. If you sell x customers y available bandwidth you need to have x*y bandwidth available through peers. Comcast comes no where close to that or it would not need to offer "powerboost" to hide the bottleneck of being spiked at 100% for most of the day. There is a need for some overhead to run a network properly and if you are stuck at 100% then you are either selling speeds that are too high, selling to too many customers, or not buying enough bandwidth.
Get a web developer
I 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I used to have Comcap I would use up my 250 gig per month up+down bandwidth cap in 4-5 days with a 10 mbit connection. Nowadays that equals around 10 hidef movies, or 10 modern games assuming a 1:1 ratio. and very often 1:1 isn't even possible on p2p. So that would mean only 7-9 movies or games. Then the rest of the month I wouldn't be able to download anything and had to be careful browsing too many web sites. And obviously no netflix streaming. I now have 35/35 mbit Fios. I don't have to worry about caps. I can max out my connection 24/7 for as long as I want without worrying about getting booted from the ISP. I'm sure that there are months where I use 1 TB or more combined up+down bandwidth. And there are months where I have almost nothing to download and probably use up no more than 50 GB combined bandwidth. The idea that all ISPs have caps is a myth. One that Comcap would like very much to spread far and wide. Comcap is one of the few ISPs where a faster connection is actually a bad thing. A faster connection just means you can use up your monthly bandwidth in only 1-2 days instead of 4-5. I for one would not pay extra for that.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
That really isn't fair to your customers. Sure, you can't realistically sell them an unmetered 6Mbps connection for $80 per month, but you can do the following, and it would be fair:
1. Guarantee a minimum speed
2. Offer to accelerate some traffic via QoS policy (this is only fair if you are upfront with customers on what is prioritized)
3. Tell them what their maximum speed will be if there is no network congestion.
I would be much happier if my ISP told me I will get between 1Mb and 6Mb and streaming protocols of types a, b and c will be prioritized. Sure, I might not like what they prioritize, but at least I know what to expect.
As it stands currently I am told I get an "up to" 10Mb connection, meaning in real world tests my speed on Cox network has been as low as 2Kbps (yes slower than dialup). I call to complain and they send me to a site hosted on a college campus connected as part of their intranet infrastructure and say "see you get 26Mbps burst and 10Mb the rest of the time" and I say "yeah, what about the entire rest of the internet" and they say "not our problem we don't control the connection of other people's servers". Yet changing my MAC address and resetting the modem gives me a different IP and yields better speeds to the same servers - clearly there is some sort of artificial limit going on, but instead of telling me they throttle after a certain number of Gb a month they play stupid (or perhaps the call center people are actually stupid or poorly informed).
Don't be a PITA provider, be honest with your customers and they will be much happier.
PS - first alternative to Cox/AT&T to come through I'm jumping ship. Cox oversells this area so badly even on a good day I am lucky to get 2Mbps.
Get a web developer
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.
I can guarantee you 1 thing.,
Comcasts lawyers wrote it to benefit them and screw you.
They dont give a rats ass how you define anything. read the contract you agreed to. what you think and believe has no bearing on anything.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You don't think monopolies should be regulated? Are you stupid, or just trolling?
Free Martian Whores!
Almost NOBODY lives in a Fios area.
I'd love fios... they have been promising it in my tiny town of 580,000 for 4 years now. and with the sale off to Frontier... I dont think it will ever happen.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, to make a proper car analogy (if possible) you should note the problem being not the width of the highway, but where it exits to another highway through a two lane rutted dirt road. Improving the bandwidth between their network and the outside network would solve the problem, not increasing bandwidth internally.
They sold you unlimited? got the contract in hand that says that explicitly? you can sue them for a lot of cash.
If it's not in the contract, they did not promise you anything.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Comcast is also doing stupid things with their Internet routing. For example, to get from Denver to anywhere else in Denver, you go through Dallas. This adds at least 30 ms to each ping. This is actually one of the more efficient routes they have now; google on CRAN and traceroute and you'll see.
Their rationale is that CRAN is all 10Ge, and therefore no matter how far it travels it will always be faster than any other connection via their peers (even if those are all 10Ge). Apparently Comcast has FTL links.
Oh, here's a hilarious quote from a FAQ on the matter:
"Such a network can provide network speeds far in excess of what Verizon's Fios offers with little upgrade by Comcast should they want to offer equivalent speeds.
All areas are being converted to the CRAN. The most apparent thing you will notice when you are switched, is the additional hops. These hops have little to no effect on speeds or latency. The good news is; by keeping the traffic more internal, it reduces cost to Comcast and allows the subscriber to put a less detrimental affect on the network."
I love the bit about how they could easily offer faster than Fios speeds if they ever felt the need to compete, which they don't.
Not really. If you don't allow your population (customers) to grow uncontrollably or if you make them carpool (multicast, internal p2p, popular content caching) or install mass transit (packet prioritization) then you can still control the roads without adding to congestion. The problem is that most cities with this problem also allow developers (sales and advertising departments) to "fill the void" - every time roads expand they build more housing to occupy the new lanes (get more customers to use all available bandwidth).
Proper infrastructure planning can work both in cities and in IT. Anyone that thinks otherwise is either weak and unwilling to stand behind proper engineering and planning or incompetent at engineering and planning in the first place. Sometimes it's both.
Get a web developer
Well this fits quite well with Comcasts complaints of people hogging bandwidth.... all part of their plan. Coming next will be there application to apply Bandwidth Metering. Everyone knows the Cable and Telcos would love to be able to bill their customers with Metered internet usage..Cha-Ching!
2X??
ISPs oversell by 5X-10X... I know I ran one as a Infrastructure director for 5 years. I had to get out because of how scumbaggy the whole business is.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Michigan solved that. Detroit traffic sucked... so they crashed the economy, over 50% of the people moved away and now Detroit highways are wonderful to drive on once again.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You get a 1:1 ratio with FIOS? Tell me how to set mine up like that. Last I checked it was more like 3:1 for me.
I have wanted that for years, but not a toll road but toll lanes. let me pay $8.00 to drive in the express lanes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No, my friend, most of them are not technical. After they decide the Internet is broken, they'll go to The Google and see that that page is OK, and decide Netflix sucks.
They know they have 6M per second and that that is a LOT -- way better than that DSL thing. They don't know about those places out there, and will blame them. One generally blames that about which one feels one knows less.
We know Comcast sucks because we're techies. They only know Comcast sucks because Comcast doesn't show up when they say they will for an install. Other than that, it's a black box for them.
The other solution they use is to build more routes.
The analogy has some flaws, though. Traffic is a problem, so you build more roads/lanes, so more people buy cars and commute (because there are more roads/lanes!) and so congestion remains a problem. However, there is a point at which you build enough roads/lanes/bridges that the traffic problem would actually be solved. The problem with roads is that they take up space, which is a very finite resource, so there are very hard limits on how much we can expand them. In practice the number of roads required for no one to ever hit traffic would be ridiculous.
Now think about network traffic. There is a similar problem: the network is congested, you add capacity, users realize this and consume more, and the new network is still congested. But notice two important things:
1. The network may still be "as" congested (100% usage), but each user is now getting a lot more data through. So it's not like the situation hasn't improved. It's still congested, but people are getting more data/utility out of the network. The added capacity wasn't wasted: people are using it. That's good.
2. Unlike for roads, we are nowhere near the practical physical limits of adding capacity. There are monetary challenges, of course, but we're not running out of places to put fiber-optic cables. Doubling the size of the current buried cables wouldn't bother anyone, and the costs are manageable. (Imagine if it were that painless to double the capacity of highways; we'd do it in a heartbeat.)
Network congestion is not an unsolvable problem. Just add capacity. The only limit right now is money. Companies have no incentive to put money into infrastructure, consumers don't have enough options to "vote with their wallet", and government dropped the ball with respect to oversight on the subsidies they've given out.
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.
Let's put this to rest. You are a taxpayer in a state/city where there are 4 lanes of road going in and out of the heart of your city. During rush hour, congestion hits and it's go, stop, go stop. You and all the other citizens who pay taxes in the city/state complain that something must be done. 5 years later there are 6 lanes of traffic. Rush hour is still go, stop, go stop. See where I'm going here? This is a cyclical problem that has no solution.
yep, NO solution AT ALL http://www.blogcdn.com/green.autoblog.com/media/2008/02/05_gx_carpool_lane_500.jpg
I live in Poland (Europe) and I pay $20 for (10)5/1 Cable, Its 5Mbit during the day (peak hours), but goes up to 10Mbit between 24.00 and 12.00. I can saturate my upload and download 24/7. There wasnt a single situation where I couldnt saturate my connection to the internet.
Whats more my provider offers $50 (120)60/6 connection, and from what I saw at my friends house it also can be saturated with no problem if the server you are connecting to has the capacity.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
True, but those graphs show excessive congestion. Ratios that, if we had on our ISP link where I work, wouldn't be a matter of us pestering the CIO to buy more bandwidth, but a matter of the CIO asking US why we haven't asked for more bandwidth yet.
Normal uncongested traffic looks more or less like a sinusoid (just because we are diurnal creatures.) Mid-day on those charts it looks like that traffic would easily soak a link 6 to 8 times higher than the link capacity. That's flirting with congestive collapse even with modern countermeasures.
Note this has little to do with subscriber "ratios" and very much to do with the actual utilization. Barring a good deal from an equipment or service vendor, no responsible fiscal entity would buy 1:1 bandwidth because it would not be used. It would be pissing money up a rope. But this -- if the graph's for real, for shame.
You may ask then, why most of the places Comcast customers visit seem to load relatively fast. One word answer: akamai. Those using certain hosting services that don't ride over the congested links are able to present Comcast customers with a nice, smooth experience. Try to load someone unfortunate enough to be using a mom-and-pop ISP on the other side of that link, and it will be sluggish at best.
(And no, no "Net neutrality" legislation will fix that. To do so it would have to ban both server colocation and schemes like performance-reactive RRDNS, and that would be pretty much unenforceable.)
Someone had to do it.
The solution to this entire thing is simple. The FCC simply needs to create rules that classify speed packages and what those speed packages mean. ISPs can only sell using these FCC defined terms. 3MB services = 3MB of data per second can be transfered at any time of the day, from the cusomers end point to the exit point of the ISPs core backbone.
It would be fairly easy for the major carriers to setup tests sites just like DSL reports. Could test their connections and report trouble right from the site. The end result would be the majority of US customers would find out they are getting less than 10% of what they pay for.
Your analogy is phenomenally broken. Roads are not made of fiber, and cars are not bits. You cannot increase the speed of cars by orders of magnitude. It doesn't take years to upgrade the infrastructure, and they don't need to do a mere 50% increase when they do. Comcast sells a service, and they knew for years what the demand would be, so the added infrastructure is not reactionary. These are just the most glaring flaws in your ridiculous analogy.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Truly amazing. After having just pointed out that they dont operate in a free market and how that causes the problem, you then do a 180 in your concluding paragraph and say:
Your cognitive-dissonance circuits must be working lots of overtime.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Users will not always consume what is available. Users will consume what users would like to use. If you increase capacity and it gets used up then you didn't increase it enough. The developing world, not just the rest of the first world has passed the US by with cost and capacity by an order of magnitude or more. Everyone else get's substantially more, for substantially less per month. US customers are getting ripped off by all the communication markets. To make matters worse we're being forced to pay for a cable television market that's obsolete and could easily be replaced by Internet TV but for slimy pigs in Washington enjoying their hookers and blow supplied courtesy of businesses like Comcast.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Look at the bright side. At some point the traffic volume levels off when you can't increase the license plate size large enough to increase the number of characters shown and all combinations are in use. We're running out of TCP/IP V4 addresses. Just don't go to V6. That will give the networks time to grow.
There's no reason one cannot provide for excessive users. However, it needs to be upfront and clearly seen what that means.
That said, bit torrent is not the bandwidth hog of today. It is everyday, common, and reasonable usage of services such as streaming video from the likes of Netflix, Hulu, etc.. If the network cannot support the everyday, common, and reasonable usage of the majority of its customers then they are not fulfilling their obligations.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Much like a 100% full highway.
Apples and Oranges. You oversell *individuals* 5-10x because the average, or even peak, aggregate use isn't the same as everybody maxing out their connections at once.
What Comcast is doing is overselling individuals at a rate so much higher that the *aggregate* use is oversold by a factor of 2x. That's an enormous problem.
Uh, yeah, except it's A LOT easier to add lanes to the information superhighway, and bandwidth grows exponentially. Unless content can somehow keep up with the exponential growth of bandwidth (and there's far less reason to believe this of content vs. bandwidth), then at some point capacity will exceed demand.
Right now, 90% of what consumers want *is* available online. Music, TV, movies, games, and correspondence. That's it, and most of it is available online. The only way to add demand now is to add customers, and at some point that too will plateau. In the very worst case, the number of customers has a physical limit equal to the population of the earth. Bandwidth shares no such physical limit; certainly not one that's worth concerning ourselves over. ISPs know this, and they're trying to milk this disparity while they can, and do everything they can to prolong it. Only a fool or a shill would equate the situation to actual traffic and say there's nothing to see here.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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).
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.
Unfortunately, my current congressman told me openly he thinks monopoly operators like Comcast shouldn't be regulated. Thank god he is on the way out, though I will be the guy on the way in thinks something similar.
Dumbass. You don't see how this is a fraudulent business practice? I pay (handsomely) for my internet service, advertised as "high speed unlimited broadband".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems as though Comcast is not providing the service they are a) advertising and b) selling.
Over the last decade I've watched as the tide has swung from the "Businesses provide a service that they get paid for" attitude to the "Steal whatever you can, whenever you can because that's 'free market' in action" attitude.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
(And no, no "Net neutrality" legislation will fix that. To do so it would have to ban both server colocation and schemes like performance-reactive RRDNS, and that would be pretty much unenforceable.)
Well, you could just require them to expand capacity of the uplinks within a defined period of time if they've been at 100% utilization more than an average of e.g. 15% of the day over a period of 90 days.
Everyone has a choice in the US.
Only if you're going to include alternatives that actually aren't alternatives, or aren't even in the same class of product as broadband, like dialup and satellite.
Over the last decade I've watched as the tide has swung from the "I'll work hard to get what I want in life" attitude to the "Society owes me something" attitude.
Apart from being a very shitty strawman that equates to "Get off my lawn" or "Back in my day...", you forget to mention that business attitudes have also swung from the "Let's produce a good product and compete on the means of that product and our customer service" to "Fuck the customer, we need more money" attitude.
You got what you paid for. It's in the legaleeze of the fine print. Did you read the fine print?
Now I'm not supporting comcrap. I have them and have no choice but to cry that you had no idea what you paid for when it's all there for you to read is dumb.
If it were false advertising they would be sued...and have been. If you think you've been the object of a crime you should sign on to a class action lawsuit or sue them yourself.
Whoah dude....how do you THINK they GOT their MONOPOLY.
Government Regulation
Did they advertise it as unlimited? Then they offered it as unlimited. They don't want to provide actual unlimited? Then they should stop advertising it as unlimited.
Extremely Shitty, but you can't do anything about it! Nyah Nyah Nyah
If you advertise your connection as being unlimited, but you actually cap it, how is that not lying?
But that doesn't help if the Internet user lives with relatives who 1. are happy with the Comcast TV service that they have had for over 30 years, 2. are still paying a monthly rental for a cable box that they no longer use and lost over 15 years ago and don't have the disposable cash to reimburse Comcast for lost equipment, 3. don't want to go into a 12- or 24-month commitment, 3. have heard unsubstantiated horror stories from friends and families about FiOS, and 4. don't want to have one company controlling TV, Internet, and home phone.
They don't have to follow the rules.
They're an American corporation.
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.
If you look at the 30day graph, the situation loses a lot of the spin being placed on it: up until 2 weeks ago, they were doing fine, only peaking briefly at 10G with no upward trend. Then two weeks ago, a significant upsurge (online christmas shopping would be the obvious answer, but surprised it's costing *that* much bandwidth). You don't put in 10G lines overnight, and not if they're only going to be used for a few weeks... They clearly needed to be planning for it, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were in next year's plans...
No can do, I have FIOS. So far they haven't given me a reason to dig into the contract since I signed up.
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.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I live in one of those states!
but guess what.... Adding capacity actually HELPS!!! 5 years ago the freeway was 3 lanes each way, now it's 5 lanes each way. It used to take me 1.5 hours to get home. Now it's 45 minutes... during rush hour.
In another 10 years, maybe it'll be up to 1.5 hours again, then we'll expand again...
It is cylical, however your theory falls flat because when it is upgraded, it does fix the problem. AND if it were not upgraded, my travel time would go to 2, 3 hours.
Mod parent up as funny, sad but true ...?
Considering the nature of the Interstate Commerce clause and the feds taking action on everything through it, Yes regulation of Comcast could come into play. But probably not due to their significant campaign contributions.
I hope you don't mind but I fixed that for you.
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.
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.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
There's nothing rational about time-of-day metering. Taken to the extreme, it can only lead to an absurd dystopia in which one third of your workforce operates during each of the three eight-hour shifts so that you keep your power and Internet bills down. That, of course, would be unhealthy for the workforce. There's a reason we have more demand during the day, and that's because people are and rightfully should be awake and doing their work during those hours. Any attempt to force usage to be more spread out through such ridiculous tactics is only going to cause economic, psychological, and physiological harm.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Seriously! I must be the luckiest guy on the internet because I don't have anything to complain about with Comcast. I've moved around a decent amount in the past few years in central NJ near the shore and have had the following experiences:
Comcast in Monmouth Beach and Long Branch:
I think this was back when the max was 6 or 8Mbps. Didn't block ports. Had a few issues with the lines running to my older apartment but once those were settled it was smooth sailing. Never really noticed "slowdowns" that the DSL people raised their noses about their non-shared connections.
Cablevision in Neptune and Asbury Park:
15/2 was the stock connection here I believe. Started using newsgoups and had no trouble maxing out the downstream at any time of the day.
Verizon FIOS in Asbury Park and Ocean, NJ:
Switched to FIOS solely for price reasons on a package deal. Base internet was supposed to be 15/5 but somehow I ended up getting a 25/25 connection. Not complaining. As with the previous Cablevision connection, had no problems saturating my downstream link downloading from the right servers.
Now I've moved to Aberdeen, MD and am back with Comcast due to the owners of my rental not wanting me to have FIOS installed. I ended up getting an internet-only package and now have a 50/10 connection for $50 a month. Yes...50Mbps. The kicker is, when I go to speedtest.net I get rated at 62/11.5. So now I'm downloading from newsgroups (using ssl at that) at just shy of 7MB/sec. I've never had issues with it going slower.
TL;DR:
I have a 50/10 Comcast connection that never slows down and speedtest.net says is actually 62/11 for $50 monthly, Netflix streams great.
Youtube, as usual sucks. If Comcast (and Verizon FIOS for that matter) are throttling anything, it's Youtube. That's the only thing I could even remotely say is slow.
Why exactly must the pipes only be used for those things that you or others deem "responsible"? Perhaps I want to read a tech blog or forum like Slashdot but someone else who deems that useless says it's not responsible - see where I'm going? I have a huge pipe at home, thank you Verizon, but I don't abuse it and only use full capacity in bursts, thank you Bitorrent. Why is this sort of thing a problem? I was offered and paid for a big pipe. If I were a Comcast customer and my big pipe was unable to perform despite their promises I'd have an issue with their infrastructure. I'm okay with not being allowed to use full capacity full time but from those graphs it's obvious that, if true, peak hours for them is pretty much most of the time normal people want to use the damned pipe. Paying by the gig will simply stunt the use of the resource, why would we want to encourage that? Wouldn't it be better to enhance the infrastructure instead? Lots of things to learn on the 'net so encourage it. Lots of stupid stuff too but that's interesting to others and who am I to say it's a waste? I'd only agree with a by the Gig plan if those gigs were awful cheap and then they'd be in the same place they are now. Oh and I would want them to provide me a tool to monitor my usage - that would be accurate and something I could trust. Yeah right....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Well for Comcast anyway, Verizon is doing fine for me with pretty high capacity...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
The graph looks perfectly sensible if you consider the times to be given in UTC.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
So about those flying cars....
Pay for the second tier.
Fios tier options (from their site)
15/5
25/25
50/20
I pay for it, so could you (if FiOS is in your area, if it isn't, I am truly sorry.)
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Being an experienced network engineer, I can tell you that this graph is expected. TCP, by nature, uses all of the bandwidth it can due to its windowing mechanism. Since the FCC doesn't like carriers limiting people's use of applications like Bit Torrent, Youtube streaming, or the like, the pipe is naturally going to be full. There is nothing Comcast could do about it. Is it overloaded? Probably not. To show a "good" looking graph, you would have to have a pipe so large as to allow every communication to finish instantaneously, or very very quickly, thus not allowing TCP to expand to the full pipe in the time allotted. As you can see, the stream going out of Comcast is small-medium, because very few people probably host websites on the Comcast network. The transmissions are also reasonably small for requesting websites, and so, the transmissions complete quickly, thus allowing the graph to represent lower utilization. So, in the end, this is why Comcast is pro Internet prioritization, or QoS, really. To make something very clear, I am not affiliated with Comcast, so don't ask.
if you were me, you'd think the same way
I am a step ahead of you! I have access to HUNDREDS more web sites, with the email and internet gaming add-on package bundle for just $29.99 more!
mod me funny
Why exactly must the pipes only be used for those things that you or others deem "responsible"? Perhaps I want to read a tech blog or forum like Slashdot but someone else who deems that useless says it's not responsible - see where I'm going? I have a huge pipe at home, thank you Verizon, but I don't abuse it and only use full capacity in bursts, thank you Bitorrent. Why is this sort of thing a problem? I was offered and paid for a big pipe. If I were a Comcast customer and my big pipe was unable to perform despite their promises I'd have an issue with their infrastructure. I'm okay with not being allowed to use full capacity full time but from those graphs it's obvious that, if true, peak hours for them is pretty much most of the time normal people want to use the damned pipe. Paying by the gig will simply stunt the use of the resource, why would we want to encourage that? Wouldn't it be better to enhance the infrastructure instead? Lots of things to learn on the 'net so encourage it. Lots of stupid stuff too but that's interesting to others and who am I to say it's a waste? I'd only agree with a by the Gig plan if those gigs were awful cheap and then they'd be in the same place they are now. Oh and I would want them to provide me a tool to monitor my usage - that would be accurate and something I could trust. Yeah right....
I did not say anything about what I think is responsible. It is on you, as the one paying for the bandwidth, to determine what is worth paying for, and what is not.
Lets talk about the other pipes we have--water. Do you think that it would be a good idea to simply pay for 10psi, or 30psi, of unmetered water? I think that would cause plenty of problems with appliances, not to mention over-watering in drought-stricken areas. No, paying by the gallon ensures that people are affected by their own decisions. Consider it a form of empowerment--choose how much you pay!
A bit-meter would be a simple tool, similar to your wireless carrier's minute-meter. It should be available on your ISP's account page, and also on the web-interface of your cable modem. You, the user, can install your own choice of bit-meter on your computer, and compare the numbers.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
Is it really absurd to give people the freedom and ability to economize?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
For a lot of people the sporting events are the key. If I could stream sporting event (even if I paid for them individually in a pay per view model) for Blackhawks games and Bear games I would drop my sat provider in a Chicago minute (which is slightly less hectic and less rude than a New York minute)
think it would be a delicious irony if as result of the scrutiny Comcast is receiving due to their proposed acquisition of NBC regulators not only to denied the acquisition but further split the company in half. One half would be Comcast cable and the other half would be Xfinity broadband. Comcast cable would be forced to lease the last mile lines to Xfinity as well as any other broadband provider that is interested. That would be justice and therefore it will never happen. We're just going to see a ban on charging for traffic that terminates in their network. The rest of the car is left pretty much unchanged at first glance, but the beauty is in the details - slightly redesigned tail lamp cluster, body-coloured rubbing strips on the sides and an all new rear bumper with sharp reflectors on the far corners. The new i10 also gets turn indicators on the wing mirrors as standard fitment - a first in its class. mirc porno izle mirc yükle sikis izle turk porno
Contrary to what people may say in analogies for the past years,
the internet is not an information superhighway.
Analogies are good to help convey understanding, but should not be used as a basis for an argument.
I am not trying to be a total tool here bagboy, though, and to be honest I just refuse to see there is no solution. I would like to highlight an AC's comment I found insightful below me:
Not quite. Technology improves daily, old gear can be replaced as regular maintenance. You can't simply replace old roads like switches and routing circuits. You jump from 4 to 6 lanes, technology increases exponentially. Try going from 4 lanes to 18 in 5 years for comparisons, and then to 36 18 months later, 72 18 months after that.
Sure it isn't all that perfect on scaling, but his point is still valid.
Another AC comment worth pointing out:
But you don't market the freeway as if its a guaranteed 65 mph, sometimes up to 90...
Also, most major freeways were designed in an era when most households only had one car, and people didn't have 50 mile commutes.
Rush hour is one thing, normal commute another. Personally I just blame all the damn minivans blocking the left hand lane...
Bandwidth and content delivery is the future. Getting the world truly connected is the one of the next great technical goals of humankind.
And I for one welcome the challenge.
...
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Bandwidth.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?
-The Graduate
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
As I engineer an ISP network as well and you probably know as well, users will not ALWAYS consume what is available. Look at Universities, they have a small village (~50k people) to provide access for with individual lines between 100Mbps and 1Gbps and somehow manage to only peak up to 40-60% of their lines (2x 1Gbps).
What is really the problem here is that Comcast only has a couple of 10Gbps lines to their provider while those only cost $2500/month and maybe $25,000 installation costs. If Comcast doesn't have a spare $25,000/month, then the business is really bad off.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
There's nothing rational about time-of-day metering. Taken to the extreme, it can only lead to an absurd dystopia in which one third of your workforce operates during each of the three eight-hour shifts so that you keep your power and Internet bills down.
I have no argument that your doomsday scenario would be ridiculously harmful to society. But most things are harmful when taken to extremes--even sleeping, eating, and breathing. Therefore a more rational argument is in order.
I would like to point out that when not taken to such an extreme, demand-based pricing gives customers a reasonable incentive to avoid non-essential traffic during peak hours. Some services, such as offsite backups or bittorrent seeding, could obviously be done at off-peak times (but already are in most cases). This allows the provider to accurately gauge how much peak capacity is really needed and optimize network upgrades accordingly, keeping costs down for everyone.
In your dystopia, time-of-day pricing has altered user behavior to the point where network load is constant and the network operates at peak efficiency all the time. This assumes that, prior to the behavior change, the cost of putting all your usage during "peak" hours was more than the cost of operating on a shift-based schedule, which would be totally impossible for many businesses' actual operations, never mind basic health and welfare. I doubt peak rates could be raised that high without causing some kind of revolt among the populace.
The caveat, of course, is whether today's ISPs would actually use time-of-day pricing to benefit consumers, or simply use it as another price-gouging mechanism. I wouldn't put it past them to actually attempt to create just such a dystopia if given the chance.
As a footnote, many mass transit systems use peak-pricing on their fares to debatable effect: on the one hand, they raise more money from the essentially captive group of daily commuters with 9x5 jobs. On the other hand, they give what amounts to discounted fares to tourists and others who travel during the off-periods, making recreational use more affordable and keeping drivers unfamiliar with the city off the streets. However, this only works because the peak customers have no alternative comparable in convenience or cost, despite the fare hikes, and leaves them feeling exploited.
That isn't an issue if you don't oversell. If you sell x customers y available bandwidth you need to have x*y bandwidth available through peers.
A lot of people keep repeating this, but it's bullshit. No efficient network operates like that. The whole point of a network is to share the costs of a fast network, so that everybody can get a higher speed than the could otherwise. The only way to guarantee the performance you're demanding here is to use dedicated point-to-point links.
This comment by Late Adopter above lays it out fairly clearly. The total bandwidth demand by x users with connections of speed y is much lower than x*y. The shared network needs to provide that much upstream bandwidth. Comcast are in the wrong because they are evidently providing much less than the aggregate demand. Your "don't oversell" rule is wrong for the opposite reason, which is that it would provide way, way too much.
Are you adequate?
In a sufficiently competitive marketplace, businesses who charge too high a price for their services lose customers and eventually go bust.
The corollary is that if a business charges too high a price for their services but does not go bust due to losing customers, then the marketplace is insufficiently competitive.
Cable video+internet services is often a market with insufficient competition. Although usually that's because all too often there's ONE SINGLE PROVIDER for a given geographical area.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
What they advertise is not countable. you Agree to and SIGN a contract that states it exactly, Why did you do a dumb thing and not read it?
Welcome to how business works in the United states. It's a legal Bait-and-switch. and is gonna get worse because the baying sheep keep lapping it up.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...Comcast, AT&T and others are really just common carriers. That's why I say that Net Neutrality is a ruse.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Ah yes and only those with deep pockets should be able to afford to have it aplenty. This isn't water, it's information, it's knowledge, it's news, and yeah it's horse p0rn. These companies, in this country, are given monopolies in various areas. They take their profits and they fail to upgrade their networks - they have a captive audience. Worse they take money from the Govt. to build out their networks - and then DON'T. At this point I believe at least one "plan" has FAILED in each of the states in this country if not more. It's disgusting and to then limit bandwidth to assist the carriers that have failed to live up to promises they have made and money they have taken - I have no sympathy for them.
You know the best way to get broadband in many towns in the US? Get your local town council to start talking about doing it themselves. Suddenly out of the woodwork carriers that had heretofore snubbed your backwater will suddenly appear like a genie from a lamp ready to grant you broadband if you'll just give them a monopoly. Turn them down and watch them lobby State Govt to get your plan outlawed or even made illegal.
So no, I'm not real sympathetic. This isn't some huge mess caused by zillions of users wanting too much bandwidth it's too little bandwidth provided by a carrier who's trying to squeeze every last dime they can from every source. No sympathy from me. Paying by the gig will certainly slow things down, tell me again why we want to slow things down exactly? Meanwhile the likes of Google are working on devices that use the "cloud" for everything lol.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
We're running out of TCP/IP V4 addresses.
I always wondered why they just didn't add an extra octet to the address. Instead of 11.22.33.44, you'd have 11.22.33.44.55, multiplying the available addresses by 256. (Currently existing addresses would start with an optional 0: 00.11.22.33.44). That'll be enough for a few decades. Then just add another octet: 11.22.33.44.55.66.
Instead, they jump to some ungodly hexadecimal crap that's like, 32 characters long: 105c:1b00:299b:f48c:7105:06de:3a0c:321b. Try to memorize that!
Ah yes and only those with deep pockets should be able to afford to have it aplenty. Paying by the gig will certainly slow things down, tell me again why we want to slow things down exactly? Meanwhile the likes of Google are working on devices that use the "cloud" for everything lol.
Slow things down HOW? If anything, the carriers would provide end users with FASTER connections, so that the end users rack up larger bills.
It would be like the cell phone network. The reason we have the coverage we do, is because the carriers don't make money if we can't get coverage. It's that simple.
All paying for the gigabyte does is align the desires of the capitalists with those of the consumers.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
> No, you pay for a high speed connection to the INTERnet and
> they are providing a high speed connection to their own
> INTRAnet with a congested gateway to the internet.
I just realized, seriously, exactly when did the fcc, guvment do away with `network providers cannot be content providers?'
This would fix the issue.
Under what administration? Was it the Clinton or the G. W. Bush deregulation, dumb-as-we-wanna-be White House was this done? The DMCA was done under Cinton's auspices. Now there was a Ball dancing, weekly book reading, Barbra Streisand ticket holding, friend of my aunt Dorothy.
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*.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
IP4 is Hex as well. You are just used to seeing it translated to decimal. That is why they go from 0 to 255. That's FF. So, with your suggestion, we would rework the internet every few years instead of just making the number enough digits that it will last.
I wish people would stop suggesting this. It is a terrible idea. Last mile is NOT a natural monopoly. Cable is cheap. We do NOT want the government trying to run any part of the network. Governments do some things good. It is the things they are good at that you want them doing. Most governments are good at building networks of pipes through cities. I don't mean pipes euphemistically. I mean real concrete/steel/plastic/etc. pipes. Tubes. I have 3 sets of pipes running into my house now, and a 4th that reaches the street at the corner of my block. PG&E runs gas pipes into my house, and the city runs water and sewer lines to my house. The city also runs storm drains to the corner of my block. Physical pipes are a solved engeneering problem.
Lets get municipalities to start putting one more set of pipes into our homes. Make them the size of the sewer system. With actual pipes running to the homes, the municipalities can rent out space to run cabling to anyone that wants to pay the fee. This way the cities stay out of the ISP business, they collect money for pipe usage, citizens get competition, and upgrading the infrastructure becomes dramatically less expensive as new technology comes out.
A pipe system the size of our sewer lines would would easily handle Petabytes/sec of data. At that point, wire is not the bottleneck. Switches are.
Cite me one example of a "well functioning" free market that has existed without externalities, regulation, protectionism, network effects, AND which operates with consumers with perfect knowledge making rational choices.
I'll show you one when you can show me a spherical vacuum of uniform density ;-)
That's to say, Free Markets are a model of reality. Like any other model, one of my (Comp.Sci.) professors' quotes applies: "Of course it's wrong---it's a model".
Being wrong due to it being an oversimplification, I can't show you perfect information or perfect rationality or perfect deregulation or [...].
But I can point you to empirical evidence that economics has gotten a thing right or two; I'm not going to look it up now, but somewhere in the first nine chapters of Hal Varian's Intermediate Microeconomics, he references an observation study which suggests that 93% of consumer decisions with respect to transportation choices can be explained from an interpolated linear utility function, in accordance with fairly standard Consumer Theory.
For more: see maybe EconTalk's archives and EconLib; they have a strong austrian bent, at least Russ Roberts does, FWIW. Or the intertubes.
Based on my somewhat shallow understanding of the US ISP market, it seems that "Competitive Market" is a less accurate model than "Oligopoly" or "Cartel". The latter are still wrong because they're models, but they're less wrong because they're better models (again: in my head).
Further, we can explain why there's an Oligopoly by Network Effects (although I think Large Fixed Costs To Entry hold quite a bit of explanatory power too, to the extent they're different).
Also, if Free Markets are not the best models of the following sectors, please let me know what you think the most accurate model is and why:
Bicycles, bicycle repair services, food (e.g. at the grocer's), restaurant meals, gold/silver/(each other metal), wood, glasses and optician services, soda, glassware/ceramics and kitchen utensil, household machinery (washing machines, spin dryers, dishwasher, vacuum cleaners, ...), furniture, storage space.
A completely orthogonal question is this: "are de/unregulated markets the best way for society to run?" I think the answer varies depending on sector. Some sectors are natural monopolies, or have built-in externalities, or are non-rival/non-exclusive goods, or have other market failures. It makes sense to do something other than "Free Markets" in those situations. In other situations, letting free markets do their thing is best.
Finally, I'm surprised by your strong reaction. It looks (and I'm guilty of exaggerating here) to me like you think I just killed your puppy. I'm curious; Why is that?
Slow things down by folks being less willing to use their computers. The network would probably fly, usage however would likely shrink. Why would we want to discourage usage of a resource that promotes sharing, learning, and connectivity?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
back-bone infrastructure grows at ~40%-50% every year and back-bone bandwidth prices drop ~50% every year.
I can understand if the bottle-neck is in the last mile for 60mb connections since last-mile bandwidth is harder and more expensive, but we're talking about 8mb connections having bottlenecks at the ISP level, not last-mile.
This has to be done on purpose.
I say why allow them to get away with that shit? It is false advertising, plain and simple, and they should be spanked for it.
You seem to think that rates would go up. For many users, rates would go down, at least in theory--and not only that, but people who can't currently afford the price for "unlimited" internet would be able to get on the net, if only for a little bit each month. Rich people can afford to use more water and electricity in their homes--but the poor can still use water and electricity, if not as much.
If anything, we should make the internet more like an electrical utility, where the distribution network can be managed by one company, and ISP's take care of the user billing and purchase bandwidth from the ISP. That's the only way we're going to get competition for service on monopolistic areas.
All these arguments depend on the cost per gigabyte. If the cost is $10/gigabyte, or $0.10/gigabyte--the outcomes we are arguing about would vary widely. So the first step is ensuring competitive pricing, which means ensuring competition.
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
Exactly, they are an organization designed to make a profit and we are individuals intending to increase our quality of life. They do not give a damn about our quality of life and we (as least I) don't give a damn about their profit margin. So such arguments are moot.
I care about price fixing, corporate collusion and those not providing the service they sold as such things affect our quality of life.
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
So, with your suggestion, we would rework the internet every few years instead of just making the number enough digits that it will last.
Well, they've been crying about the 'end of ipv4' for, what, 10 years or more now. All the time saying 'the remaining addresses will only last a year!!!!!!11!!2!!' Yet it''s still going, 10 years later.
If the remaining dregs of the current system lasted for 10 years, increasing the total number of addresses by a factor of 256 should last us for, what, a century, easy? (Actually, to do the math- if, in the last 10 years, we used up the final 25% of ipv4, then 256 times as many addresses should last for 1024 years.)
No, it wouldn't. The address have been getting used up on right about the schedule that has been predicted for years. The only reason that we have not run out sooner is because of NAT, and other tricks that hold back development. With phones coming online in huge numbers, the usage is just going to continue to accelerate.
Realistically no one uses IP addresses directly anyway, so a long number doesn't affect the vast majority of people. Better to just fix the problem permanently.
I read the article and looked at the graphs. I understand what the text says, and it makes references to the graphs. The problem is, the graphs are meaningless to me and they aren't explained anywhere. What am I looking at?
I would be more inclined to accept the article if Backdoor Santa would care to explain the graphs. What axis (left or right) is used for what curve? What does each curve measure? Please be specific enough that I could (mostly) replicate the graphs if I took my own measurements (measuring what?).