British ISPs Could 'Charge Per Device'

Barence writes "British ISPs could start charging customers depending on which device or which type of data they're using, according to a networks expert. 'The iPad created a very interesting situation for the operators, where the devices themselves generated additional loads for the networks,' said Owen Cole, technical director at F5 Networks. 'The operators said "If we have devices that are generating work for us, this gives us the ability to introduce a different billing model."' 'The operators launched special billing packages for it, which is in direct contravention to net neutrality,' said Owen. 'If things are left to just be driven by market economics, we could end up with people paying for the amount of data that they consume to every device and that would not be a fair way to approach the market.' Owen also foresees a billing system that charges less for non-urgent data, with an email costing less per bit than either Skype or video packets that need immediate delivery."

Comments

Re:First poster

[zill]

Congrads, you got first post. But was the Urgent Packet Delivery Fee worth it?

Wow, that's worse than the Canadian UBB thing!

[drunkennewfiemidget]

OK, not really, but it is really fucking stupid.

Re:Wow, that's worse than the Canadian UBB thing!

[CastrTroy]

To be fair, I don't really opposed UBB completely. I think if they would have brought the base rate down to $15, and then $5 increments for each additional 40 GB, with a maximum charge of $50 or something like that it would work out quite well. Also you shouldn't have to pay for the extra 40 GB up front, You should only pay the extra $5 increments when you actually do go over. UBB isn't a terrible idea, but the way it was proposed was extremely bad.

Re:Wow, that's worse than the Canadian UBB thing!

[greed]

If it was truly usage-based, there'd be no cap. You'd start with a basic "0 byte" connection for whatever it costs to operate the line, then pay per GB. (Why 40 GB increments? Why not 128MB or something reasonable? I don't buy electricity in 100 kWh blocks; my meter runs to the 1/10th of a kWh. Sure, advertise the rate as $X per 40 GB if you like, but bill fractionally.)

Thing is, the dominant cost of the network is the static, "0 byte" service. The incremental cost of transfer is very small compared to the cost of bandwidth provisioning in the first place. The billing system alone could cost more than the transfer costs.

And the real problem was, of course, forcing a usage-based billing model "because we can't compete with them." 3rd party ISPs already pay for bandwidth; they have to lease aggregation lines back to (say) 151 Front Street, they have to pay for peering to get on the Real Internet, their customers pay for the line capacity from the DSLAM to their house... all of that is already being paid for on a capacity basis. (More customers for ISP X? ISP X has to buy more aggregation and have a larger peering agreement.)

So it wasn't just the price, which was insanely out of whack with real costs. It was the double-dip. It's one of the best examples of "Regulatory Capture enabling Rent Seeking".

Re:Wow, that's worse than the Canadian UBB thing!

[travisco_nabisco]

Where are my mod points when I need them!!

This is my view as well. UBB is a great option as long as the rates are reasonable and the datat caps revisited on a yearly basis.

Re:Wow, that's worse than the Canadian UBB thing!

[Anthony Mouse]

Thing is, the dominant cost of the network is the static, "0 byte" service. The incremental cost of transfer is very small compared to the cost of bandwidth provisioning in the first place. The billing system alone could cost more than the transfer costs.

Exactly. This is why I can't understand the people who promote usage based billing. It seems like they think what would happen is that the 90% of light users would get to pay $5/month instead of $40 and the 10% of heavy users would make up the cost to the ISPs by paying $400/month. In reality, if they set up the billing that way, the heavy users would all cut their usage back until they were paying something closer to the original $40/month that they have a budget for (say, $60/month), which only offsets the payments of the 90% of light users by something like $2/month.

But the side effect is to totally screw over any and all high bandwidth services that might try to enter the market -- it might cost the ISP an extra dollar or two a month for you to be streaming Netflix all day and all night, but if they charge you a quarter for every hour you spend watching, you're going to cancel your Netflix subscription because you can't actually use it without paying through the nose. And realistically this is what they're after -- they want you to watch Cable TV instead of switching to Netflix.

Conversely, if they did what you're suggesting and charged somewhere near actual cost for increased usage (i.e. did something reasonable), it wouldn't actually do anything. The light user would pay $39.95/month and the heavy user would pay $42/month. There's little point in even doing the accounting.

So, to recap: Usage based billing. It's a scam.

Re:Wow, that's worse than the Canadian UBB thing!

[CastrTroy]

To add to this, on the episode of "The Agenda (TVO)" where they had Bell and others on for a discussion on UBB, the guy from bell specifically said that "50% of the customers who are on the 25 GB plan only use 20% of their allotted amount", which means that there's a whole lot of users out there using less than 5GB a month. So that's a lot of of people who on a pure UBB system would be paying almost nothing. But Bell doesn't want to charge those people less. What a scam.

Re:Wow, that's worse than the Canadian UBB thing!

[ormondotvos]

How about an honest cost-based model?

Industry fearmongers.

[jhoegl]

I would advise against this type of "hypothetical model" unless you want to slow innovation and business growth.
I would also advise against it because the industry is leading consumers into an "online world", where all data will exist.
If infrastructure can not handle the load (how much dark fiber do we have in the world?), then it needs to catch up. Living off the 90s infrastructure boon is just not going to cut it.

Re:Industry fearmongers.

[gl4ss]

the new billing model would need a revamp of the internet protocols. or they could charge per IP, which wouldn't be that strange, but would actually need them to give ip's to people.

but it's ridiculous that they say that new devices like ipad are generating traffic. well doh. but it's not the device, it's the person they sold the service to that's generating the traffic. but it's amazing how you can actually get people to pay more for an internet connection to an ipad than to a netbook, even though the ipad will generate less traffic as it's much less likely to be used for running a torrent client etc

anyways, the caravan goes as usual and they can whinebitch all they want but if they still at the same time want to sell secure, usable connections there's not much they can do about it.

Re:Industry fearmongers.

[sousoux]

or they could charge per IP

That isn't practical with IPV4 but with IPV6 it seems to me that it may become possible. A negative effect of IPV6 that I had not thought of before.

Re:Industry fearmongers.

[mirix]

If it came to that, you could still NAT IPV6. It's just that other than for bullshit like this, there isn't really a need to, ja?

Re:Industry fearmongers.

[sousoux]

Actually I did a little research on this and it has been anticipated and fixed as an issue (see http://playground.sun.com/ipv6/specs/ipv6-address-privacy.html) ... perhaps ... there is some randomization and temporal cycling of auto assigned IPv6 addresses although not everything seems to implement this at present. The worry for me is that it is possible and it is very difficult for the average consumer to detect (and understand) so it is likely to be used. NATing and more importantly the generally dynamic nature of IPV4 addresses as you roam around between home, work and mobile helps to enforce (although does not ensure) privacy.

Re:Industry fearmongers.

[pla]

I would advise against this type of "hypothetical model" unless you want to slow innovation and business growth.

Slow innovation? My very first thought on reading this amounted to "Cool, time to write a tethering app for the cheapest device they allow on their network".

When you price based on something over which your customers have direct control, expect your consumers to exploit that to minimize their costs.

Re:Industry fearmongers.

[Anthony Mouse]

Innovation directed toward working around stupidity is inferior to the absence of stupidity.

Re:Industry fearmongers.

[jhoegl]

Actually, I was thinking more of small business and their lack of control on their users.
Because, lets face it, limiting users on a small 20 person network isn't cost affective.
but forcing a small business to invest in that technology and the configuration of it to prevent users from spending all the corporate money is a cost that small businesses usually cannot afford.

First they wanted us to buy our music repeatedly..

[calmofthestorm]

...and now our bandwidth too? When will this madness end?

Scaremongering?

[Fusen]

"could" "might" "maybe", what a complete non story.
broadband ISPs COULD charge you per character typed but they don't and probably wont.

Re:Scaremongering?

[cheekyjohnson]

But they're completely possible and it's not unreasonable (in my opinion) to expect it to happen. We've already seen an instance where Comcast blocked/throttled bittorrent in the US.

Re:Scaremongering?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the simplest mechanic of leverage. Shift general *perception* by suuggesting something insane, then 'settle' with a half measure.

It's all about making net neutrality seem like an extreme Communist Terrorist conspiracy instead of reasonable practice. Eventually, you just know they'd charge per device though.

Re:Scaremongering?

[mr_lizard13]

My brdbnd ISP DS chg me pr crtcr typd, u insnstv cld.

Re:Scaremongering?

[mirix]

Would you like to buy a vowel?

Re:Scaremongering?

[rtb61]

The catch right there is that most P2P and bittorrent traffic is not time sensitive and could occur in off peak times.

As for shifting traffic from peak to off peak as they are fantasising, firstly it requires incredibly invasive data monitoring and secondly it forces the users devices to either continually cycle over for hours on end trying to send traffic or the ISP must build in enormous data storage capacity to hold data for hours on end.

Incumbent telecoms want to keep making huge profits from local and long distance calls and despise VOIP and secondly want to establish content distribution monopolies on their networks. The reality at one stage, when we made a call we had our very own copper line and could send and receive as much data as possible down it. With fibre optic multiple communications share the same line and they want to make that line as profitable as possible and they simply do that via gross and extreme overselling, selling far more bandwidth than they have access to. They want to legally sell a lie, they want to sell you bandwidth and by the delusion of modern legal shenanigans and government corruption deny you the use of what they have sold you because they never had it to sell. By law they should be forced to detail what bandwidth they actually have available with simultaneous transmission to all their customers, as part of the advertised bandwidth.

Re:Scaremongering?

[Goffee71]

That could revive Carol Vorderman's career

Re:Scaremongering?

[N1AK]

When companies are adding caps etc it is because they believe it will decrease costs. If there is competition in the market then that saving will, reasonably, quickly make its way through to lower costs to consumers. If there isn't competition, that saving will be kept as pure profit indefinitely. Charging for use isn't inherently evil, even though internet use has a very low variable cost, sharing the fixed costs of infrastructure etc based on level of use is acceptable.

The thing that I have a massive issue with is when companies start to differentiate based on content provider. I'd like to believe that this could work fine in a free market, sadly I don't think it will. Small businesses have boomed on the internet, and I doubt the likes of Skype, Youtube etc would have come about if the only way to get 'priority' on each ISPs network was to pay up.

Re:Scaremongering?

[cheekyjohnson]

When companies are adding caps etc it is because they believe it will decrease costs.

They didn't add a cap. They completely throttled the bittorrent protocol.

Re:Scaremongering?

[SimonTheSoundMan]

broadband ISPs COULD charge you per character typed but they don't and probably wont.

You mean, like SMS?

A charge per 140 characters.

Re:Scaremongering?

[TheLink]

In theory ISPs could implement something like back in the "dial-up" era.

Basically, you still have always-on internet, but your traffic is on low priority.

When you want to do stuff with high priority, you "dial in" or "login", then your packets get "normal priority". Then you can play your FPS or MMORPG.

Once you're done you log-off and go back to "low priority", you can actually still surf the web, send email etc, but it could be a lot slower depending on how oversubscribed the ISP is.

But it all depends on the package - you could get X number of hours per month or get charged $ per priority hour. Problem of course if you forget to "logoff".

Re:Scaremongering?

[grahamm]

Even the PSTN is contended. While each subscriber has their own copper line to the exchange (the same as each DSL subscriber has a dedicated connection to the DSLAM), neither the switching facilities in the exchange (certainly with electromechanical exchanges) nor the number of 'trunk' lines from the exchange could support every subscriber being on a call at the same time. However the PSTN is well enough provisioned such that it is very rare for a call to fail because there are insufficient resources to handle it.

Re:Scaremongering?

[tixxit]

Back in the day when cable internet first came out, they tried to get people to pay per computer attached (at least in Canada). They used to specifically try to foil routers by checking their MAC addresses to see if the traffic was coming from a PC NIC or a router; if it was a router, it wouldn't work. Their "solution" was to pay for service for each computer! Needless to say, router's started coming with the ability to clone your PC's MAC address and within a few years the cable company was SELLING the routers to customers. If this didn't work a decade ago, I have no idea why they think it'd work now.

Re:Scaremongering?

[drb226]

My brdbnd ISP DS chg me pr crtcr typd, u insnstv cld.

At $1; per vowel, that would already be $6.

Re:Scaremongering?

[raju1kabir]

I'm not up on all the developments, but I was in the US last month (Feb 2011), staying at a place with Comcast, and I was able to saturate the 12mbps downlink with BitTorrent any time of day or night.

Re:Scaremongering?

[cheekyjohnson]

They have since stopped throttling bittorrent (I believe that it was the FCC that made them stop).

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's very expensive maintaining and upgrading network equipment. We're due for another upgrade soon. Wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to upgrade, but could still put our prices up? Can anyone invent a reason for this?"

And others could not

[dmomo]

Who will get the business?

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

None of this drivel seems to be coming from ISPs - just a technical director at F5 Networks.

Since so much stuff seems to come in over tcp/80 nowadays I'd like to see how they propose to reliably differentiate between HTML pages and images, *Tube videos and downloads of device firmware updates, Linux .isos, etc. - or are they just going to charge based on the size of each request? <1MB at 1c/MB, <10MB at 2c/MB, <100MB at 3c/MB, >=100MB @ 10c/MB? Why have monthly caps at all then?

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why have monthly caps at all then?"

They'll eventually reach a point where there aren't that many new people buying their service since everyone already has it, they need to continue to grow, so they come up with these bs models of how to extort us more effectively.

Re:Really?

[sgbett]

'If things are left to just be driven by market economics, we could end up with people paying for the amount of data that they consume to every device and that would not be a fair way to approach the market.'

I've never heard so much guff.

Charging for bandwidth is exactly how it should work. That's how it works in business, and its just dandy.

The problem will be that the telcos will pick a stupid price per GB

Re:Really?

[SuricouRaven]

It is an unfortunate consequence of economic theory that companies are expected to endlessly grow.

Who do you have to bribe to make that legal?

[bit trollent]

These people seem like simple leeches to me. You just want an internet connection. Your probably connecting to your own router doing your own networking.

That's one connection

So you give me the internet and I'll give you the cash. Nobody needs to get screwed.

Wait... Your company bribed a politician, didn't it.

Re:Who do you have to bribe to make that legal?

[fredjh]

Yeah... billing by device sounds terrible, but then we have this: 'If things are left to just be driven by market economics, we could end up with people paying for the amount of data that they consume to every device and that would not be a fair way to approach the market.'

This is not net neutrality, in which ISPs charge third parties for data requested by their own customers, who are already paying.

But if I'm the customer of an ISP, how is paying for the amount of data I transfer over the network not a fair way to approach the market?

It's possible I misunderstood - like if he's insinuating that if you transfer 1GB and have five devices, you'd be charged for 5GB, but that'd just be stupid. I don't see any ISPs suggesting any such thing.

Sounds like a challange

[fragMasterFlash]

How long will it take before someone mods DD-WRT to obfuscate Internet traffic to make device identification by ISPs difficult?

Re:Sounds like a challange

[herojig]

Seems like this should already be so! Is this to say that an ISP can tell what devices are hooked to a home router today? That just seems plain wrong.

Re:Sounds like a challange

[scdeimos]

Technology to fingerprint an internet node has existed for a very long time - you can tell what OS is running by seeing how it responds to certain requests and "tells" in the format of its icmp/tcp responses in TTL fields, how it adjusts packet windows, etc.. Even if it is behind a firewall/router, a lot of these tells are passed up the link. Theoretically, if an ISP was interested they could keep a record of unique fingerprints they've detected on your connection and bill you for the number of devices they think you have.

Even simpler, if your ISP is running a proxy/transproxy, you could count unique User-Agent request headers to get a fair idea of the number of devices involved. Even ignoring User-Agent headers you can easily distinguish iDevices from just about any other HTTP consumer because of their screwed-up HTTP/1.1 Host headers - when connecting to a proxy the host in their get|head|post request line is often different to the one specified in the Host header, especially when consuming Apple's own services.

Re:Sounds like a challange

[jrumney]

Sounds like an opportunity for modding the TCP stack to present random characteristics when analysed in this way. When the complaints flood in from some percentage of their users about being billed for having a million devices behind their router, the ISP might think twice about such a scheme.

Re:Sounds like a challange

[jimicus]

Sounds like an opportunity for modding the TCP stack to present random characteristics when analysed in this way. When the complaints flood in from some percentage of their users about being billed for having a million devices behind their router, the ISP might think twice about such a scheme.

Unless you're going to get Apple and Microsoft to update their TCP stacks to do this, that "some percentage" is going to be so small as to be quite practical to ignore.

Re:Sounds like a challange

[scdeimos]

Ah, so now you're effectively paying two ISPs: one sitting at the other end of your cable/DSL modem and the second sitting at the other end of your VPN.

Re:Sounds like a challange

[herojig]

I won't pretend to understand what u wrote, but thx. I had no idea an ISP could see anything other then the router itself. I'm sure glad I live in a country where the ISPs don't give a crap what you do, as long as you pay the bill on time, which is pretty steep: about $40 USD per month for 512 broadband.

Already the case

[dargaud]

2 years ago I got an Android phone on my own (not through my Operator). I called them to add 'data' to my plan and they wanted to know if it was an iPhone or an Android as they had 2 different plans. They were the same price so I investigated a bit. It turns out that they block http requests if the referrer field doesn't contain 'Android'. Like that's gonna stop me from using the phone as a 3G hotspot for the rest of the bus, right.

Re:Already the case

[dargaud]

SFR (in France). 1GB cap, but degrades to lower speed above that. Changing the referrer field in Firefox when using the phone as a modem is real hackdom, yessir.

Re:Already the case

[scdeimos]

It turns out that they block http requests if the referrer field doesn't contain 'Android'

The Referer header (sic) or the User-Agent header?

Re:Already the case

[dargaud]

Sorry, that's what I get for writing comments before breakfast...

Re:Already the case

[tlhIngan]

2 years ago I got an Android phone on my own (not through my Operator). I called them to add 'data' to my plan and they wanted to know if it was an iPhone or an Android as they had 2 different plans. They were the same price so I investigated a bit. It turns out that they block http requests if the referrer field doesn't contain 'Android'. Like that's gonna stop me from using the phone as a 3G hotspot for the rest of the bus, right.

Not unusual. In North America, providers often provide data plans that vary by device. Here you can have Blackberry plans, "dumbphone" data plans, smartphone data plans, and hotspot dataplans (and those can come in regular and "vpn" variants).

Basically the gateway differs and they offer differeing levels of access. Blackberry obviously offers access to various Blackberry services and gateway access for apps. Dumbphone plans offer WAP access that's usually proxied and cached locally.

Smartphone plans normally offer HTTP(S) access, firewalled, NAT'ed, transparent proxies with recompression, etc. Laptop data plans typically are just NAT'ed out, with the VPN service offering a real live IP address without firewalling.

As an adjunct, the "tethering" modes of operation typically involve the modem telling the carrier that it's gone into modem operation - CDMA carriers like Sprint and Verizon know when you do this, and maybe some GSM ones. (The claimed reason is to offer you a real "pipe" but it's really for billing you extra even though they sometimes do take down some of the intervention)

The "fake proxy" utilities are invisible though as they rely on the phone itself to establish the connection as a proxy server. Hotspot utliities vary - the userlevel ones tend to use the existing data facilities, while the others use a real tethering solution that gets rid of the restrictions.

It's one reason why carriers charge extra fees for "tethering" and "hotspot" functionality. And they can tell. If you use your phone's data connection (which for most purposes of web surfing you don't care about downscaled images and the like) they can't tell the difference without traffic analysis, but enable real tethering they can (as it often uses a different gateway).

It's a nasty system and leaves many people wondering what they are paying for...

Re:First they wanted us to buy our music repeatedl

[zill]

First they wanted us to buy our music repeatedly

I'm pretty sure "per second playback billing" is next on RIAA's list.

9 ways to Sunday

[lawnboy5-O]

I means these blokes are in boardrooms licking their proverbial chops, and we are on the pick wheel.

Its look like the rapacious beginnings of the cable industry all over again, but this time you count amongst you shaledowns fees for your refrigerator's call to the repairman. 'wonder if there will be an opt out for that?

its looking spooky, people.

Re:9 ways to Sunday

[RightSaidFred99]

What's spooky? It's nonsense, if they want more money out of you they'll just increase their existing rates.

Re:9 ways to Sunday

[cheekyjohnson]

This could be a way for them to acquire more money and appear to be reasonable (by pretending that certain types of data are interfering with their network).

Re:9 ways to Sunday

[scdeimos]

Yeah, like how P2P "screws" networks because broadband providers provision their DSLAMs and connecting bandwidth on the assumption that only 1 in 100 customers actually use their internet plan for anything other than e-mail?

Re:First they wanted us to buy our music repeatedl

[JimboG]

Additional speaker charges are after that. Whoa you want stereo? That'll cost you twice as much.

Re:First they wanted us to buy our music repeatedl

[scdeimos]

lol. How you do pay 5.1 x 99c?

Re:First they wanted us to buy our music repeatedl

[JimboG]

$5.05 (rounded up of course) + a low frequency surcharge of $0.50

Re:First they wanted us to buy our music repeatedl

[gweilo8888]

If it's a stereo to 5.1 upmix, you don't. You pay 16x.
Unfair, I hear you say? But no! You've got your left channel, your right channel, your center (using data from left and right channels), your left surround (using data from left and right channels), and your right surround (using data from left and right channels).
Clearly that's eight separate audio channels in simultaneous use, requiring eight times the licensing fees. And you do have two ears, right? So you're listening to each of those eight channels twice over...
Now, pay up, serf!

Tranlsation

[Hognoxious]

'The operators said "If we have devices that are generating work for us, this gives us the ability to introduce a different billing model."'

Translation:

Some of our customers appear to have more money than sense. We aim to restore the balance.

Re:Tranlsation

[TapeApe]

'The operators said "If we have devices that are generating work for us, this gives us the ability to introduce a different billing model."'

Translation:

Some of our customers appear to keep their money in their own pockets rather than in ours. We aim to restore the balance.

Fixed that for you.

Fair? Hardly

[jandersen]

I can see where they are coming from, in a sense: you should pay for how much you use, which is hard to argue against. After all, that's how we pay for other resources we use - I don't use the internet for watching movies or other high-bandwith things, so why should I pay more to support those that do?

However, what they propose is almost exactly the opposite of paying for what you use; it's like being billed for water by measuring the size of your garden or the number of taps in the home. And just as for water, it is perfectly easy to measure the actual consumption; if they don't know how, I am sure there is a large proportion of /. readers who can help them figure it out.

Re:Fair? Hardly

[Jon Stone]

Water bills in the UK were governed by the "rateable value" of the house. Water meters were introduced about 15-20 years ago and are required for new houses. Older properties can choose to have a meter installed or to remain on the rateable value billing.

Re:Fair? Hardly

[Bert64]

What are the consequences for not paying the water bills? Won't they eventually take you to court for not paying the bills, even tho they have to keep providing you service?

I do agree with your comment about denial of service attacks, being attacked can become extremely expensive and its not uncommon for moderate strength attacks to be launched, eg enough to push up your costs but not enough to take you offline. It should not be possible for a third party criminal to directly cause you costs in this way.

Re:Fair? Hardly

[rrossman2]

Do you pay for how much TV you watch? I'm not talking about channels, but how much time you spend watching it, and on how many TV's you watch it on within your house? (again, I'm not talking about since the switch to digital or the equipment for Satellite, as the comparison there would be if you couldn't use a router on a cable or dsl modem due to the physical nature of how it works.. it would be like needing a cable modem for each computer connected, in wish case you either rent the equipment or buy you own, but you're still only charged for the package you receive).

I remember stories of back in the day with cable TV and how they wanted to do this or did this this, but it was regulated that once the cable hits your house what you do with it inside is all up to you. Same with the telephone.. that'd be like them charging you different rates if you had a cordless phone vs a corded phone, or per the number of phones and/or wall jacks within your house. It's utter crap. If you're paying a set rate for unlimited internet, or internet with a cap, how you use the data up to the cap (or unlimited) on which device(s) shouldn't matter in the least.

Re:Fair? Hardly

[stabiesoft]

There is no "load" put on the system by watching tv though. There is a "cost" to transmitting your bits. Maybe its not the water model. Maybe its the airplane model. Once the plane takes off empty seats are wasted. BUT around christmas & other high load holidays, fares do go up because more people want to fly and they could sell every seat and more at the lower rate. Well, now with all the high usage home applications (TV over IP I suspect is the real cause) every day is like christmas for the ISP and they want to raise the fare. Why anyone wants the low rez TV over IP netflix crap is a mystery to me on their hi rez HDTV. Get a DVR, record the the cable/OTA show and play it back in real HD. Just lazy I guess.

ridiculous

[samantha]

iPads don't use anymore bandwidth than any other device will that you can watch over the air video on. iPads cannot in principle do anything at all any other computer cannot do. This is pure gouging. Note that it is the cellular carriers themselves that have pushed video on command. The goal is good enough broadband that these and many many other applications can run for everyone everywhere. This is not achieved by nickel and dime-ing us.

SHH!!!

[Dangerous_Minds]

Keep it down, will ya? AT&T might hear this!

Re:Fair? Harder than you think!

[DamonJW]

There is a big difference between water consumption and Internet consumption. With water you're depleting a resource, and whenever you use it or however you use it, the amount you consume is the amount it's depleted by, so that's how much you pay for. With Internet you're not depleting anything -- the links are still there with the same capacity, after you've gone.

Instead, on the Internet, what you need to be charged for is the "hurt" you cause others by your usage. If you use 4Mb/s at peak hours you're causing lots of hurt, if you use 4Mb/s in the middle of the night you're not causing much hurt. Or if you download 100MB at 1kB/s you're not causing much hurt but it's for a long time, whereas if you download it at 10Mb/s you're causing a lot of hurt for a short time. How it all balances out is rather tricky to understand. Arguably, time-of-day throttling as a crude attempt to approximate this idea of "hurt".

Thats fine

[mistralol]

Thats perfectly fine. I will use a proxy and then I will only be technically using a single device from your point of view! But hey since you cannot actually tell what devices I have in my house that use the internet without digging into my data they I will be using ipsec to somewhere else. Of course though you have to get all isp's in the UK to change to this billing model together otherwise all your customers are going to leave and join the other isp. This is also fine because the crap isp's that are coming up with this stuff don't work anyway.

Re:*could* charge ..

[Rob Kaper]

How exactly does paying for infrastructure you use have anything to do with free speech and limitations thereof?

Traffic hungry iPad?

[Eraesr]

Why is the iPad costing them more work? The article refers to it as the "traffic hungry iPad". Traffic hungry? A PC downloading Torrents every day is not traffic hungry?

Re:Traffic hungry iPad?

[cardpuncher]

Because xPads are being sold primarily as media-consumption devices - handy personal TVs you can pick up when you feel like a quick burst of Hollywood. They make it easier to consume streaming video on impulse and so people who wouldn't sit in front of a PC to watch a movie will sit in bed watching their mobile device - more convenience = more use.

Real-time streaming also has requirements on network performance (in particular latency) that exceed torrent download. It's not just about the bitcount.

And, just to be cynical for a moment, you have to do something to justify to yourself the cost of your xPad, and what else are you going to do with it?

Re:Traffic hungry iPad?

[bsDaemon]

Because people with iPads are obviously willing to pay way more than they need to to get what they want, and the ISPs want a slice of the pie like the cell carriers do. Its like the perfect storm of economics and psychology.

Wow, that is garbled.

[serviscope_minor]

There's some really garbled understanding of what is going on there.

What I think is fair is something along the lines of the following:

1. Pay some fixed cost per unit time in order to have a connection.

2. Pay per bit sent and received based on QoS.

It seems like the most fair thing to me. Uncapped is just rediculous and a complete lie. The companies shouldn't even be allowed to claim it since it is blatantly false advertising.

Part 2 is the most sensible option. People pay a reasonable price for what they use. Of course it only works if they charge a non punative price per bit. If ISPs want to offer some automatic capping to prevent enexpected bills too, then that's fine too.

It also avoids any network neutrailty problems. If you want low-latency, you must pay since it costs more to implement. If you want to run your bittorrent client with VOIP QoS, then fine. Knock yourself out.

Remember, QoS is not in violation of network neutrailty if it is selected by the user. If the ISP offers only uniform QoS to the user, but then nobbles companies that don't pay the protection racket, then that is very much in violation of network neutrality.

And this is news, how?

[Decker-Mage]

Any reputable engineer who isn't owned by one side or the other in this 'debate' will look at the network infrastructure, then the size of the anticipated customer base (hell, just for Apple's projected sales alone), and the anticipated customer usage patterns. Result is a train-wreck. No other result. It won't work.

Now I'm an unusual customer with normally unusual demand and, fortunately, all my wireless service provider does after a I blow through twice the max capacity for the month in just a couple of days and just slows my connection. The rest of the industry either cuts you off or charges you exorbitant overage fees. If everyone wants video wherever, whenever (or downloads a lot of alpha and beta software to test), it just won't work.

Engineers and economists (usually) deal with the real world, the world with (rational?) constraints. I am, and have been, both to my misfortune. Why misfortune? Because I've been watching this build for a very long time. No one listened. Enjoy.

F5 is not a provider, they make high-end routers

[TBBle]

So, the technical director of a large carrier-grade router and packet classification equipment manufacturer is suggesting that British ISPs adopt a billing model which requires carrier-grade router and packet classification equipment to operate?

I'm not sure that an article should really be allowed to claim that something is an opinion of "experts" but quote only one (admittedly expert) person whose business would directly benefit from his prediction being accurate. I'd rather they actually asked an academic or someone else without direct economic interest (as well, not instead).

I think this article was more aimed at the ISPs going to the meeting than the rest of us: "Hey British ISPs, if you want to be able to charge more than just £x/megabyte, how about this model? We also happen to be able to sell you the equipment to implement it. You probably should get the government to agree first, if you happen to be meeting with them any time today."

Not always

[Anonymous Coward]

"Uncapped is just rediculous and a complete lie. The companies shouldn't even be allowed to claim it since it is blatantly false advertising."

Well, I on FIOS I have a 50Mb/s connection, and I probably download 500GB per month, and have done so for about 5 years.

If I put my mind to it, I'm sure I could download more, and I don't think Verizon cares.

Tabloiddot

[benbean]

Is it rampant speculation week on Slashdot? First the ridiculous "Apple's handcuffing web apps!" nonsense from the Reg, and now this completely speculative nonsense? /. standards are really slipping. Can we link to some proper journalism please?

Yes, I must be new here.

Re:The argument against per-byte billing

[Shimbo]

What's the resources usage when transmitting a packet one hop? The electricity to run the router and the space occupied by the router.

Plus the transit fee charged by the upstream provider, which is probably the largest single expense. If I ignore the charges my service provider makes, my internet service costs me almost nothing too.

Re:*could* charge ..

[ledow]

1) British law has no interpretation of "free speech". None. It's an assumed "right", not an actual one. Funnily, we seem to do a better job than those countries *WITH* such laws.

2) Even in countries that proclaim "free speech", nobody is ever obliged to provide you with a platform. They can't *stop* you from saying what you want, but they aren't obliged to publish your every word online, or in the papers, or the 10 o'clock news.

You can say what you like (under certain limitations, in ANY country that has "free speech") but nobody is obliged to give you a soapbox. Certainly not your ISP, who can cut you off if their T&C's say you shouldn't swear on their forums, in theory.

3) The ISP's are putting out a code to discuss traffic management, which most of the big ISP's are signed up to. Nowhere does it mention an inherent restriction on free speech. You might have to pay for to push your speech over bittorrent than over email, but see #2.

4) The UK is actually pretty aware of what's happening. ID cards were scrapped last year, by public demand, before they were ever used. It's actually the second time we've scrapped them because they were made compulsory during the War for security reasons and then we got rid of them when they were no longer required. It's MUCH harder to get rid of something you've spent government money on to establish and which would be cheaper to keep running, but we've done it twice.

We are one of the few countries in the world that *doesn't* have an ID system - I do *not* have to own any ID whatsoever, I certainly don't have to carry it on me at any time, and if I don't drive/fly then I probably don't have a passport or driver's license and thus no formal ID whatsoever, and yet I still could live quite happily in the country. You can open a bank account with a birth certificate and an electricity bill, if you want (i.e. something that says X was born on day Y with no way to prove you're X).

I *do* now drive and fly so I have license and passport but I've only *ever* been asked for them when driving (to ensure I had a valid licence, and it was only by luck I was carrying it because I'm not required to, and could instead present it within 14 days at the police station of my choice at a police officer's insistence AT BEST) and for crossing international borders - at the insistence of a foreign entity (the British passport has a kind of mystique about it outside the UK - nobody bothers to check them, or see the "UK" part and then wave you through).

My ID spends more of its life gathering dust than anything else. Sure sign of 1984, that is. Or I could mention that our privacy and data protection laws are some of the best in the world. Or I could mention that we have things like Hyde Park Corner. Or I could mention that, actually, for a country with NO formal rights to free speech, etc. that we're actually pretty damn high up on the list of freedoms we *do* enjoy.

Stop reading the tabloids, and instead look at what a UK person does during their lives compared to any other country (including the US!). Driving laws (ever roll through a stop sign in the US? I once saw a guy who "failed to come to a complete stop" at the line and he was taken out of the car at gunpoint. Do it in the UK and nobody would even notice. Which one is more reminiscent of 1984?). Privacy laws. Data laws. Telecoms laws (we made BT scrap Phorm, and initiated a legal case). Equality laws. And they *work*, for the most part. Sure, Phorm should have never got off the ground, or the ID card scheme, but when they do and come to the public knowledge, they end up dying a death.

Come live in the UK, and see what a real country is like. You can cross the road where you like, and everything.

Re:*could* charge ..

[Anonymous Coward]

1) British law has no interpretation of "free speech". None. It's an assumed "right", not an actual one. Funnily, we seem to do a better job than those countries *WITH* such laws.

I too am a fan of our uncodified constitution but you went a bit too far here. The European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is a signatory, has been in force since 3rd September 1953 and became directly enforceable in UK courts when the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force. Article 10, taken from Schedule 1 to the 1998 Act:

Article 10
Freedom of expression

1 Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2 The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

DPI Vendor Pimping DPI: Shock

[igb]

The story is complete tosh.

Firstly, the extra volume created for ISPs by iPads is close to zero: they're being used as extra devices in houses, and aren't capable of running any of the bandwidth-intensive P2P applications that (when they're pimping different things) ISPs and vendors are keen to tell us represent 90% of their volume.

Secondly, this is a vendor of DPI kit pushing applications for DPI. But it's a doomed endeavour. It would be impossible to split tariffing based on numbers of devices as the market would react with domestic proxies if NAT didn't provide enough aggregation. So the only way it could conceivably be done would be by inspecting packets at close quarters to see which application is being run. At which point the market would respond with encryption.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[somersault]

It does apply if they try to charge you per IP. I'd sure as hell NAT my devices then. Try reading the context to his post. I'd think it would also be useful if you have any still useful IPv4-only devices at home, an IPv6 NAT could enable that device to interface with the outside world by doing IPv6 DNS resolution, etc for it.

Re:First they wanted us to buy our music repeatedl

[somersault]

Now you want to turn the volume up? There's some more potential for other people to hear it! That'll be ( $100 ^ increase in decibels) thanks.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[hab136]

You just demonstrated the Anon's point perfectly. mirix gave a reason for users to want to NAT IPv6 - to avoid per-IP billing. You then say a lot of hoopla without addressing the point that IPv6 NAT would be useful in a per-IP billing situation.

Is per-IP billing stupid and unwarranted with IPv6? Yep. Will it exist? Almost certainly.

Re:First they wanted us to buy our music repeatedl

[metalmaster]

imagine per cost billing for ringers...

Re:Fair? Harder than you think!

[Bert64]

Also, bandwidth that is not used is wasted...
Water that is not used can be stored and used later.

What happened to the recent

[mario_grgic]

UK ISP's announcement about voluntary commitment to net neutrality?

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Hazel Bergeron]

Anon is trying to use an extreme exception to prove a rule. IPv6 NAT would also be "useful" in the case where a government implemented a law requiring everyone to deploy IPv6 NAT just because, or in the case where a weekly lottery was held only for those people deploying IPv6 NAT. But it is intellectually dishonest to justify a rant that IPv6 NAT is therefore sometimes useful.

IPv6 involves giving each network a /64 and there are enough of those for everyone. Conscious effort is required to do otherwise. If some ISP makes the effort to create an artificial scarcity by limiting routing of IPv6 IP addresses then it might as well just stick with IPv4 and IPv4 NAT. The main advantage of IPv6 is the opportunity for end-to-end connectivity.

Anything can be argued useful if given the right context. So you have to limit the definition of "useful" to reasonable (technically, socially) scenarios. Finally, if you're not the type to bend over and take anything coming, encountering an absurd re-definition of "useful" should be taken as an opportunity to voice a loud objection and refuse to participate in the nonsense. Consider: Airport body scanners are useful. Random stop-and-search laws are useful. Censorship is useful.

Jukebox

[tepples]

I'm pretty sure "per second playback billing" is next on RIAA's list.

Pay-per-play for musical recordings has been around since the 1890s. See "Jukebox" on Wikipedia.

Re:Jukebox

[Golddess]

Yeah, but jukebox owners didn't then pay a portion of the income generated by the jukebox back to the RIAA/artists/whoever, did they? I didn't read the entire entry, but a keyword search didn't seem to indicate it.

Re:Jukebox

[tepples]

but jukebox owners didn't then pay a portion of the income generated by the jukebox back to the RIAA/artists/whoever, did they?

Performance rights for the underlying musical work have been around effectively forever and are currently licensed through JLO. And yes, the major music publishers tend to be co-owned with major record labels. But you are correct that there is a separate right for performing sound recordings through a digital transmission payable to the record label in addition to the long-standing one for performing musical works.

Re:*could* charge ..

[macs4all]

1) British law has no interpretation of "free speech". None. It's an assumed "right", not an actual one. Funnily, we seem to do a better job than those countries *WITH* such laws.

I too am a fan of our uncodified constitution but you went a bit too far here. The European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is a signatory, has been in force since 3rd September 1953 and became directly enforceable in UK courts when the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force. Article 10, taken from Schedule 1 to the 1998 Act:

Article 10 Freedom of expression

1 Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. 2 The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

Yeah, that's the problem with the UN "Bill of Rights" as compared with the U.S. Constitution.

In the U.N. Bill of Rights, it is the GOVERNMENT that grants the "right".

In the U.S. Constitution, it is GOD who grants those rights. That is why they are referred to as "Inailenable".

The difference is, what Government "grants", Government can "revoke".

Yes, the U.S. Constitution CAN be modified; but the bar is set so high that it is nearly impossible to accomplish. And even the average, non-politically-savvy citizen in Amurika understands the value of the First Amendment. So, it is highly unlikely that particular "Amendment" will be up for review anytime soon.

U.N. "Human Rights"? Better than nothing, I suppose; but not nearly as strong as the First Amendment. I cannot speak to other countries' "Free Speech" provisions, however; there are probably some that are even more "bulletproof" than the U.S.' First Amendment.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Compaqt]

Somebody mod the parent up, he posted as Anonymous.

Amazing how the NATsi's modded him to -1 for bringing up the idea. Just goes to prove his point.

Buy an ARM seedbox

[tepples]

it forces the users devices to either continually cycle over for hours on end trying to send traffic

Is that such a bad thing? If a home user wants to torrent while sleeping, he could buy a cheap little low-power ARM NAS and use it as a home seedbox.

Re:Buy an ARM seedbox

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

So would the ISP get a kickback from the NAS makers since people have to buy them due to the ISP's change to get closer to what service they had previously? LOL. Home user already has a computer, network device, etc., why would they want to buy something else?

Re:Buy an ARM seedbox

[tepples]

Home user already has a computer

If the home user is willing to leave the computer on overnight to take advantage of "Free Wee Hours", that's fine too. The NAS would for people who routinely hibernate or shut down their computers at night, such as people whose primary workstation is built for performance, not power consumption.

Re:Buy an ARM seedbox

[rtb61]

So basically you are saying it is a ok for the corporation to inflate it's profits by double screwing the customer, once for selling them something the corporation never had to sell and secondly by wasting the customers electricity and using up the life of their computer equipment. How come consumers never get to screw over corporations in the same manner.

Re:Buy an ARM seedbox

[tepples]

<devils-advocacy>

So basically you are saying it is a ok for the corporation to inflate it's profits

High-speed Internet access is a privilege, not a right.

by double screwing the customer

Any customer can buy a share in the profits of a publicly traded corporation.

How come consumers never get to screw over corporations in the same manner.

Of course they do. They just have to start a company and think up a disruptive business model. I will admit that that's more difficult with the state-sponsored control of the last mile that incumbent ISPs have.

</devils-advocacy>

ISPs...

[JustAnotherIdiot]

...finding more ways to charge you more for the same service you've had for years.
Hey ISPs? I've got a mind blowing idea, how about you ACTUALLY IMPROVE YOUR SERVICE to keep up with today's standards, instead of trying to live by the standards of the 90s.

but HOW?

[EricX2]

Between phones and different computers I currently have 10 different items off my internet connection, how would the ISP know that? Are they running IPv6 with each device using their own public IP? Are they going to be using their own routers locked to specific mac address and preventing you from buying your own?

Does my ISP know when I watch a youtube video that it is going to a desktop or a laptop or an iPad? It doesn't seem like they should be able to tell that.

just wait for comcast to do this with ipv6 $5+ per

[Joe The Dragon]

just wait for comcast to do this with ipv6 $5+ per system just like how in some areas they want $8.95 per cable box and $16+ per HD DRV.

Re:*could* charge ..

[bsDaemon]

Yeah, but the other problem is that the government is real and god isn't, and certainly isn't about to come down smiting people for alienating the inalienables. Frankly, I think I have more to fear from religious folks than from government types, especially where the two over-lap, which seems only to happen in statistically siginificant numbers in the US and the Middle East. Funny why the two don't get along so very well, isn't it?

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[CastrTroy]

I would NAT regardless, just to guard against any incoming ports that might have been enabled by default.

you are right & wrong

[way2trivial]

as i understand it, at the very highest levels, the debits & credits for a connection is based on how many more bits one backbone generates vs. another backbone over each others networks during a billing cycle.

Further consideration, at the consumer level, this is why home users ABOVE the 99th percentile are the ones targeted for either cessation of service or increased charge.

Mind Reading? Cool!

[Bob9113]

> Owen also foresees a billing system that charges less for non-urgent data

That is frigging AWESOME! I can't wait to wire into the mind-reading system that will tell the ISP which data is urgent. Particularly when I'm running data through an encrypted tunnel.

It's also going to have to make a very good estimate of the difference between my concept of urgent and that of every other user on the same shared channel. That will be an extraordinary advance in real-time psycho-analytics.

Unless they are talking about letting me choose when to run my line at low-latency -- which would actually be pretty cool.

Re:Mind Reading? Cool!

[Skapare]

Urgency will be ranked based on which web sites will pay them more for preferential routing and bandwidth. Your cheap non-urgent data will be as slow as a dialup modem.

Re:*could* charge ..

[jmpeax]

Where did you get "UN Human Rights" from?

The GP is talking about The European Convention on Human Rights. It has nothing to do with the UN. It is a treaty for the protection of fundamental rights within Europe. The UK is a signatory to the treaty.

Also, do you really think that codifying a law as coming from "God" makes it harder to change? I'd never thought about it before - it's an interesting concept, although I think a modern version would have to be secular. Perhaps a law of the universe? I think that one of the the main reasons the constitution is so hard to change is because the idea of its supremacy is socially entrenched in the US. We don't have a specific set of codified, core values with which the whole country can identify like that here in the UK, but I really like the idea. I would be very much in favour of drawing up a constitution of universal rights and freedoms that is strongly protected from change.

Re:*could* charge ..

[jmpeax]

I should also mention that as well as being a signatory to the treaty, it is actually implemented in domestic law, allowing the breach of these rights to be dealt with by UK courts instead of just the European Court of Human Rights.

How would they know?

[dasheiff]

I mean if everything is run behind a router (though I guess you might need to add your own) how would they know how many devices are being used?

Re:Fair? Harder than you think!

[jandersen]

Look, this is not about whether we have an exact analogy between water use and internet use; otherwise we would be back in the "tubes" scenario, right? I'm just saying, it is hard to argue against paying in proportion to how you use, be it bandwidth or not.

It isn't all that difficult to find a reasonable model - here, meaning one that most people would find agreable, rather than "the most objectively fair" (whatever that means). Assume there is something like a price per minute on the total bandwidth on the internet, leaving out local variations etc since this is only a sketch anyway. So, you pay for the percentage of the bandwidth you use per minute, measured by counting the number of packets with your name on per minute as a percentage of the total capacity. This is not even mildly difficult; it is trivial.

Next question, them counting devices or me.

[AbrasiveCat]

It will be like what I have today, one device connected to their network a router.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Buelldozer]

Why would you have to NAT in order to accomplish that? Any port based firewall can do this without the overhead, and busted ass stupidness, of NAT.

Already happening

[xbmodder]

I live in Scotland, and I recently signed up with an ISP that did this. They have block control over my building, so there wasn't any other solution. They have a device (I'm pretty sure it's just a linux box based on my nmapping) that looks at each packet's TTL. If the TTL is odd and the port is NOT 80 or 443, it drops the packet. If the TTL if odd and the port is 80 or 443, then it redirects you to a billing page. I bypassed it by incrementing TTL at my gateway. I imagine people will modify openwrt/dd-wrt to do this as well. Additionally, I have a solution which tunnels my connection over a VPN to an Amazon EC2 instance and does some magic to beat QoS. It seems like oversubscribing at at least 2000% seems typical. I'm paying for a 50 mbit/sec connection. I see closer to ~6-8 mbit/sec (no, I'm not getting my megabytes and bits confused). Additionally, since I know a little about my ISP internally, they run all these blocks to their HQ over MetroE-like products, and then concentrate it into their core. Their transit is 10GigE (based on traffic numbers pulled from various private sources). I know that they sell far more than 10GigE of bandwidth to customers. There is far more wrong with the ISP environment here than you'd know. My girlfriend's ISP is even worse. They do a significant amount of throttling on specific ports (1935, 80, so on..) and basically any kind of download during the day slows down to a halt. They have about 6000 people + several offices on a 10 GigE connection. I don't know if this will even be seen, but I thought it was worth throwing out there.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[h4rr4r]

You should use a firewall as a firewall not NAT. You are woefully uneducated.

Only one device hooked up to the internet...

[superdave80]

...my wireless router, so bill me for one device.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[CastrTroy]

No, I'm actually just thrifty. A hardware firewall costs much more than a simple NAT router.

if thats the case

[ideaz]

expect more jailbreaks in the future...

Re:*could* charge ..

[macs4all]

Yeah, but the other problem is that the government is real and god isn't, and certainly isn't about to come down smiting people for alienating the inalienables. Frankly, I think I have more to fear from religious folks than from government types, especially where the two over-lap, which seems only to happen in statistically siginificant numbers in the US and the Middle East. Funny why the two don't get along so very well, isn't it?

Hey, I'm not much of a believer in the FSM, either. BUT, everyone in this country (USA) seems to treat those words as meaning "These rights are yours, and no government can take them away." And THAT is what is important.

I'm with you on the "fearing religious folks", though.

Re:*could* charge ..

[macs4all]

Where did you get "UN Human Rights" from?

Um, because that's where this concept of "Government is the grantor of rights" originally came from, way back in 1948, long before the EU formed. The EU more or less just copied some of the original UN language. But, now that I look at it, the UN's version is much better than the EU's. FAR less "asterisks". I do note that in 2008, the UN Council on Human Rights formed. I have no idea what shenanigans they may be up to, though.

The GP is talking about The European Convention on Human Rights. It has nothing to do with the UN. It is a treaty for the protection of fundamental rights within Europe. The UK is a signatory to the treaty. Also, do you really think that codifying a law as coming from "God" makes it harder to change? I'd never thought about it before - it's an interesting concept, although I think a modern version would have to be secular. Perhaps a law of the universe? I think that one of the the main reasons the constitution is so hard to change is because the idea of its supremacy is socially entrenched in the US. We don't have a specific set of codified, core values with which the whole country can identify like that here in the UK, but I really like the idea. I would be very much in favour of drawing up a constitution of universal rights and freedoms that is strongly protected from change.

I'm not an FSM believer, either. I was just saying that people in the USA more or less universally recognize those words as meaning "You are born with these rights, and no law can be created, and no action of government can be allowed that materially restricts them."

Now, having said that, of course there are minor restrictions on those freedoms everywhere: Can't walk outside without pants on (and women without just a shirt), FCC restricts certain images and language from broadcast, can't yell "fire" in a crowded theatre, etc. But those restrictions are, by and large, at least, somewhat understandable (although the censorship has always been over-the-top prudish, IMHO). When it gets dangerous is when the gummint says you can't say stuff about the gummint itself. Until then, you essentially have what most people would agree is free speech.

Contrast this with the countries that imprison/execute those who disparage, or satire, political or religious figures.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[h4rr4r]

No it does not. In fact many of NAT routers can and will act as a hardware firewall when you disable the NAT.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[raju1kabir]

You can make a fine hardware firewall out of an Asus RT-N10 which costs about $25 at the store. How much cheaper do you want?

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[raju1kabir]

This rant might make sense if you completely ignore the context of the discussion, which is about how IPv6 would make it easy for ISPs to see how many different devices people were using and charge accordingly.

Nobody is trying to take things outside of that context except for you, and you are seemingly only doing it for the purpose of justifying a rant.

Re:Fair? Harder than you think!

[DamonJW]

Internet pricing is a bit like computer security: if you ask most people (or even most Slashdot readers) to design a secure system, chances are it will be hacked; and if you ask them to design a pricing scheme, chances are it will be gamed.

• * For example, if you charge by the bit, then I have no incentive to shift my big downloads to off-peak hours, even if it makes no difference to me when I download.
• * Another example: network operators often charge smaller network operators according to 95-percentile billing. This means they measure the traffic in 5-minute bins, over a month, and find the 95th percentile, and charge in proportion. This way you don't penalize too much for sudden spikes. An enterprising company can set up agreements with 20 network operators, and round-robin between them, so that their 95th percentile is 0 for each operator.

Gaming the system will lead to retaliation by ISPs in the form of DPI, throttling, and other nasty tricks. My point is that it's worth thinking hard about how pricing should be designed, not simply going with a version that "most people would find agreable" and that will end up surrounded by kludges. There is in fact an IETF working group called conex, working on how to measure "how you use it" in an un-gameable way. This should be a sound basis for un-gameable pricing. More reading here.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Anthony Mouse]

It was my understanding that the zealots prevailed, and IPv6 NAT was declared a "nonfeature".

As if nobody is going to make software that does it anyway.

What is a business supposed to do when their ISP gives them IPv6 pubic addresses but they still have thousands of IPv4 computers with private IPv4 addresses and site local software that doesn't support IPv6?

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Anthony Mouse]

So you have to limit the definition of "useful" to reasonable (technically, socially) scenarios.

So you want a real use for IPv6 NAT? Information security. If I have several devices and I don't want the outside world to know how many devices I have, or be able to tell which is which, I can use NAT to make them all appear as one public IP.

Yes, most of the reason for having NAT is not present with IPv6. No, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be possible. It just means you probably don't need it most of the time.

TVs vs toasters, space heater vs several ipods...

[neurocutie]

If I understand the idea correctly...

it would be like the power company charging you separately for EACH device you've plugged into the wall. Moreover, rates would be dependent on WHAT the device was, not how many WATTs it uses. You enjoy your TV more than your 500watt toaster? the TV costs more. 3 ipods drawing 5 watts each will cost more than that 1500watt spaceheater...

Been done before

[EkriirkE]

Cable providers here in the bay area, ca, usa used to charge more if they detected more than one MAC on your cable modem (hub). They also prevented known router mfgr MACs from obtaining IP addresses - luckily this was avoided by configuring your router's MAC to spoof the MAC of your original machine 's NIC (back then it was called "@home" for me)

Sure!

[Ancantus]

Give me a non NAT static IP for every device, and I will pay for each device.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Hazel Bergeron]

You're the third person not to know about IPv6 Privacy Extensions.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Anthony Mouse]

IPv6 Privacy Extensions are a lame attempt to do what NAT does without NAT. And it doesn't even work -- if you have five PCs each with one IPv6 addresses all connected to the same host at the same time, it's obvious that you have at least five PCs. Moreover, if different machines have different usage profiles then you can track them individually as they change their addresses based on their usage profiles, instead of having all usage aggregated behind one IP address. And making machines change their addresses with a higher frequency can actually make it worse because it makes it more likely that a machine will change its address in the middle of a TCP connection, which will have to be reopened using the new address, making it pretty obvious what happened.

To make it work fully you would have to assign multiple IP addresses to each machine simultaneously, one for each connection it has open -- but that's just NAT by another name, using part of the IP address in place of the port number.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Hazel Bergeron]

Fortunately, there are no ways to detect whether a NAT router is being used.

Wait, no, that's trivial.

And there's no active research going as far as trying to count the number of devices behind a consumer NAT router for the specific purpose of stopping people from exceeding the AUP on connected devices.

Oh, never mind.

Like I said, IPv6 NAT has no uses.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Anthony Mouse]

That doesn't negate the benefit of NAT in general, it just means the existing implementation is flawed. So we want to have the IPv6 NAT router rewrite the packets' IP ID and TTL to avoid identification, etc.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Hazel Bergeron]

It's not "flawed" for this reason. NAT's purpose is not to hide the count of hosts behind the NAT gateway and it's never done this effectively. But it does seem fairly typical of NAT proponents to have a gravely unfounded sense of security when using it.

If you want to engage in an arms race with your ISP to hide the count of hosts behind your network, you're welcome to do so. There's enough DPI already going on at ISPs that you're wasting your time to think you can win the race with nothing but a consumer gateway. IOW it would not even be sufficient to create a hypothetical perfect NAT implementation (heh) which avoided the "etc." that no-one's exhaustively enumerated.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Hazel Bergeron]

The discussion started off concerning a flawed method of breaking the ISP AUP, but Anthony Mouse suggested the benefit of a false sense of security. NAT solves neither problem (see my other posts in this thread).

Confusion

[fuliginous]

What will inevitably be the case is confusion. Like now with phones and mobile phones people barely know what their bills mean or if the option they have is the cheapest for them according to all the bit of this and that deals available. Thus will be the case with provision of the internet until some genius comes up with a simplified service where you charge one fee and just use it, how radical would that be (in 3 or 4 years time I mean:-).

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Anthony Mouse]

You're still arguing against the implementation rather than the concept. Security is always an arms race -- if someone finds a vulnerability then you have to plug it. The fact remains that if you want to hide the number of hosts behind a firewall, step one toward achieving that is to make them all appear to have the same IP address.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Hazel Bergeron]

Dude, vigorous handwaving is no substitute for actually confronting the facts. I'll try it one more time because you may just have a genuine misconception, but I'm AFK after this...

There is no such concept as "1 IP address one machine" (as NAT itself demonstrates!) so you are making a conceptual error if you think that one of NAT's purposes is to hide the count of machines on your network from your ISP. Your ISP has every packet you send and receive available for a decent analysis if it really wanted a machine count. It could at the very least trivially confirm that your network configuration is designed to give the wrong impression of how many machines you're using.

To reiterate, the flaw is not in the implementation; it's in your conception of what NAT is.

Now, NAT may help obscure the particular machine used on a network from a remote host, but IPv6 privacy extensions do a better job of this (I can choose where and when they're applied). An application level proxy may be an even better solution in some cases, as it does not simply pass on a subset of identifying qualities of the original machine. In every case you're hoping that the remote host makes a sufficiently crude analysis of behaviour or other fingerprint.

Re:"Freedom is Slavery!", "NAT is Evil!"

[Anthony Mouse]

There is no such concept as "1 IP address one machine" (as NAT itself demonstrates!) so you are making a conceptual error if you think that one of NAT's purposes is to hide the count of machines on your network from your ISP.

I'm not sure what you mean by "purposes" -- things can be used, or modified to be used, for purposes other than those they were originally designed. And some things are effective for purposes they were never designed for -- NAT was effective in the 1990s at preventing ISPs from knowing how many devices were behind a dial up modem, because the methods for detecting were either not known or not feasible then. If you want to continue using it for obscuring the number of machines going forward, it has to be changed to defeat the vulnerabilities we now know exist in using it for that purpose.

You seem to be taking the position that those vulnerabilities cannot be removed. For example:

Your ISP has every packet you send and receive available for a decent analysis if it really wanted a machine count. It could at the very least trivially confirm that your network configuration is designed to give the wrong impression of how many machines you're using.

How can they do this, in a way that is impossible or even impractical to work around? It should be possible for a NAT router to emit packets from two machines that are byte-for-byte identical to the packets that would be emitted if you ran exactly the same programs at the same time on a single machine. Current NAT implementations are not designed for this obviously, but you seem to be arguing that it is impossible to achieve.

I understand that it may be impossible under specific circumstances. For example, if you have 5000 machines, it may be impossible to make them appear to be one machine, if only because of the traffic level. But I have confidence that you can make e.g. two machines, one running a web browser and the other a BT client, appear to be a single machine running both.

Re:Fair? Harder than you think!

[DutchUncle]

When you buy a beer at a bar, they charge you the same price whether it's the top of the barrel or the bottom, the first bottle in the case or the last. There's no sacred reason that internet usage should be "all you can eat", since ISPs are in business to make money. I agree with you that "congestion pricing" would be better to balance out usage; and then they offer "quality of service" choices, and suddenly we wind up with a tiered service level controlled by those who can pay, just like space on supermarket shelves where small or new players can't even get a spot. What I'd like to see, ever since grade school: Punish the troublemakers. Don't punish everyone, don't raise everyone's rates, just find the IP address that's maxing out its bandwidth all day and deal with its user. Heck, maybe he'll be happy to find out that his system is pwned.