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App To Keep ISPs Honest About Bandwidth Caps
alphadogg writes "A browser-based app developed by Georgia Tech researchers is designed to help Internet users make better use of their bandwidth – and to make sure ISPs are holding up their end of the bandwidth bargain. The Kermit app, which is being shown off Wednesday (PDF) at the CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing in Vancouver, emerges at a time when service providers are starting to place bandwidth caps not just on wireless services, but on wireline services, too. AT&T, for example, is putting such caps in place this month for its DSL and U-verse customers. At least initially, such caps aren't expected to affect all but the very heaviest bandwidth users."
How is a browser based app going to keep track of all TCP/IP traffic?
Also, Kermit is a terminal emulator. Pick a different name.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Instead of using such app, just choose a provider that doesn't cap you.
Or al least just slows down the connection speed if you are over the cap, but doesn't charge you extra.
I can't forget the times my internet access was metered, back in dial-up days. Don't want that nightmare again for any price and any cap.
Heathens!
Waaay back, the Kermit protocol was the shit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol)
Now get off my lawn!
Sounds like a less useful version of the SamKnows white box already out.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Also the steam users, netflix users and itunes users? The pirates arn't the only ones that have an insatiable demand for bandwidth.
"Stealing" bandwidth, funny. Also funny that it's "Pirates" doing it, not just consumers using what they paid for. QQ
Yeah! Outlaw the bittorrent protocol, that'll make everything on the net go smoother!
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
sarcasm, right?
"...such caps aren't expected to affect all but the very heaviest bandwidth users."
Last month, I used 350gb of traffic; all of which was legitimate, split between services like NetFlix for television and movies, Steam for gaming, iTunes for music and podcasts, and the rest of normal day-to-day traffic. I may be on the extreme end for most people at this point in time, but the point is that technology keeps moving, and eventually usage like mine will be the norm, not the exception.
What the bandwidth caps will do is stifle technological progress. To use the required car analogy, they are like putting a 40mph cap on the newly-invented automobile, simply because few, if any, people need to go that fast. At some point, people did need to drive 40mph, then 50mph, then 60mph, and so on and so forth. It will work the same way with internet usage, and that is why bandwidth caps are such a serious problem. A decade ago, most of the country was still on dial-up, and the ideas of streaming video, social media, and the proliferation of modern media over the internet were still in their infancy. 150gb then would have been, literally, an unreachable amount of data to consume in a month. However, times change, and today 150gb is next to nothing for someone who uses the internet to its current full potential.
So many people may look at these, if they notice them at all, and say, "Who cares? I don't use that much data." But the point is that they don't use that much data now, and this is an attempt to keep them from using that much data ever.
Because let's not mince words about this. Infrastructure is fairly expensive, but once it is in place bandwidth across it is extremely cheap (often approaching as low as 3 cents per gigabyte, according to several studies). Corporations like AT&T and Comcast aren't doing this because the bandwidth usage is expensive. They are doing it because they are terrified of a future where consumers don't need their multiple services anymore. If you can get your television, movies, music, games, e-mail, social contacts, phone service, etc. all through your internet connection, there will be zero incentive to pay for locked-down cable television and movie rentals, and highly priced telephone service. They are not about to let that happen, and this is a major salvo in their war on that.
That's what people need to be aware of with this. It's not about the cost, it's about controlling the flow of information and stifling technological progress to secure corporate profits. And nobody should stand for it.
Who came up with that boneheaded term, "wireline"?
Stick with "wired" or "cable" or "landline," please. They're well-established and not redundant.
Not to mention the MMO's and other applications now sending around their updates via Torrent protocols.
And the people who telecommute.
Or use Skype.
Or use a lot of Hulu Plus.
I don't torrent, and yet my "usage" always seems to be about 2/3 of my ISP's cap. Just wait till apps get even hungrier, in 2 years time everyone will be hitting cap and either getting PO'ed or start dropping those services... which is what the ISP monopolies want so they can force people back into cable TV, pay-channels, etc.
Or get something faster then 28.8k
Satellite and 3G ISPs still limit customers to about 5 GB per month. Anyone approaching the cap gets throttled down to dial-up speed.
Did you check for virii
No, but I did check for viruses.
Stick with "wired" or "cable" or "landline," please.
Wired is a magazine. "Cable" commonly means DOCSIS, as opposed to DSL or fiber to the curb. "Land line" commonly means POTS, as opposed to VoIP or cellular.
I'm an AT&T customer. So far I haven't been given any notification (outside of Slashdot) that my DSL account is about to receive a bandwidth cap. Moreover, I really have no idea how much bandwidth I use. I've read recent stories about methods to track my own use, but honestly, why should I? If they are going to charge me or punish me for exceeding an arbitrary limit, won't they be required to tell me how close I am to that limit?
I have no love for AT&T. I refuse to use their cellular service because I don't want to give AT&T any more of my money after their wiretap debacle. But my only other high speed internet service options are Clearwire (horror stories of low function) or Suddenlink (personal experience with 40% upstream packet loss), so I'm pretty much stuck with AT&T.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I can see the email now.
Is it just me that thinks that if Netflix, or ESPN, or whoever sells streaming subscriptions gets a few thousand emails like this that they wouldn't start putting pressure on the ISP's?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
What Netflix is doing is lowering the quality of the video they stream so people don't use as much data. They do this now for Canadians who face far stricter caps right now. Secondly, how exactly is Netflix going to put pressure on the ISPs? They are extremely tiny compared to the ISPs especially when it comes to political clout. Why exactly do you think AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast or Verizon are going to care that Netflix might lose customers to caps?
Most protocols are dedicated to a specific function. It used to be that you wouldn't run a network application unless it was doing something that you specifically wanted it to do.
That expectation has changed significantly over the past decade, and not for the better. Now your choice of operating system or application is taken as an implicit invitation for it to use your network connection in ways that are not necessarily intended for your benefit at all. That's why it sometimes makes sense to configure a separate firewall device even for personal use. You can't, theoretically, prevent a proprietary protocol from tunnelling whatever data it likes, but you can at least perform a practical kind of triage over the traffic passing across your network.
As the Web becomes an increasingly general transport for applications, it becomes a network management exercise in its own right. And the concepts are similar to firewall management. Given that I'm paying for my system resources and my network bandwidth, I certainly don't want to waste them transporting and processing content that isn't valuable to me. Advertizing is not valuable to me. Therefore, I block it, just as I block any protocol that isn't valuable to me. As a consequence, I get very high signal-to-noise in my use of the network.
My ISP should be grateful.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
ISPs will simply put in their ToS that caps are based on the ISP's sole measurement of your bandwidth.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
and then a different protocol will be used, just like they were before bittorrent, so what do you outlaw next, ftp, html, what?
From the summary:
>and to make sure ISPs are holding up their end of the bandwidth bargain.
It's hardly a bargain if it's a term forced on you from lack of ability to take your business elsewhere.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
All this is, is rflow for dummies... dummies who are smart enough to get a DD-WRT compatible router and flash it. That said, I just picked up a cheap Buffalo 802.11N router, and it came with DD-WRT preinstalled, so this may be more accessible than it once was.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Of course they care, but they're powerless to do anything about it and ISPs (particularly cable providers, though any triple-play provider) would love nothing more than to see Netflix fail. So you're thinking completely in reverse: what you really need is half of Netflix customers threatening to cancel their ISP contracts.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
in canada use velcom or teksavy
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Good point, and I only glanced at the pdf, but hopefully it'll do both.
I have a rather good friend that runs a ISP. He has a rather simple solution to bandwidth hogs, he disconnects them. If they paid for the month he refunds them and sends them on their way. It just is not worth it to keep those problem customers.
Got Code?
Then theres the inverse of that. AT&T are the damn phone company. Why so stingy with the bandwidth, girls? How 'bout getting them legendary labs to work on compression or at least a good sense approach to routing and shaping that the old Road Runner service had? You know, a f*&king cable company. But, you own the lines, the phone company. No wonder you limp along like 50's pr0n star with no Viagra. Lamers!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Bandwidth caps are just one more reason to secure your WiFi so that you don't end up paying for your neighbors torrents on top of having to deal with copyright trolls.
Bow before me, for I am root.
It is probably the bot running on your xp box that is using all the bandwidth.
Got Code?
Does anybody know any good FREE programs to keep track of bandwidth usage? Something like NerWorx by SoftPerfect. I tried it and I liked it but for some reason it is tracking my usage incorrectly, I think by like a factor of 8 or 10. I couldn't figure out what the problem was.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
There are two different units of measure at play here. Network bandwidth is measured in bits, or bits/second. PC storage is measured in bytes, where each byte is made up of 8 bits.
When your provider sells you a connection of, say, 1.544mb/sec - thats megaBITS not megabytes. You need to divide by 8 to come up with your connection speed in bytes.
Storage on a PC is based around a byte, which is 8 bits. The network usage captured is correct - it was simply displaying it in bits, not bytes.
--
True, streaming netflix is an extremely small market for a tiny number of bleeding edge customers who think they are average.
Even as bandwidth prices at wholesale come down, there's still a cost to obtain it, connect, route, and especially there's a cost to deliver it the last mile. I know, I've worked with some smaller ISPs and I know that they require caps because without them, bandwidth hogs would essentially be costing the ISP thousands of dollars more, they would become unprofitable, and go out of business.
It's nice to assume that the big guys could afford to offer uncapped services at current now-capped prices, but it's just the gigantic profit greed keeping that from happening. I doubt that's true even for them.
I bet some of my retirement mutual funds own stock in the big players. So for my own self interest I hope those companies are profitable.
If you seriously think that one could be profitable with uncapped service at very fast speeds, go convince some venture capitalists and build just such a network. Put YOUR money and/or effort where your mouth is. And if you are right, you'll win, raking in the cash and customers. You'll change the whole game. I think that would be cool.
Until that happens, having seen how ISPs work (at least the small guys), I generally just sigh a big sigh every time this topic comes up and shrug off all the complainers whining about their ISP capping or limiting total usage on their inexpensive accounts.
(Where I live, if I wanted a gigabit pipe to the 'net, the best deal I could fined, wholesale, at the local data center where multiple carriers are present, ignoring how I get that bandwidth to my house, I'd have to fork over thousands of dollars per month. So a 100 meg. connection would still be several hundred per month. But I'll need a router--I'll go Linux running zebra for BGP, an AS number and IP allocation from ARIN (add $$$ per year to ARIN), colocation space for the router, then a link to my house... I'll lease space on a tower at the data center and buy a $5k one-time up-front 100mbit licensed link, pay $$ to the FCC annually for the license..There..--Crap, that's a lot more than my local ISP charges, but hey, it's uncapped.)
What's the difference? 250GB in 31 days is 783kbps. Sure, you might get higher burst speeds, but if you can't supply 6.4 terabytes of data every month, you shouldn't be allowed to advertise 20Mbps speeds.
LOL! Right, because your local ISP could give a fuck about Netflix's profits. They WANT you to cancel your Netflix subscription. Don't you get it? They hate Netflix. Cable companies want you to pay for cable TV. That's what the whole Net Neutrality is all about. If it were up to the cable companies, your access to Netflix would be completely blocked..You'd be playing right into their hands by cancelling Netflix.
Netflix Canada solves the problem by not having any content worth streaming. No Star Trek. No Lost. Almost no Battlestar Galactica. No Star Wars, no Gilligan's Island, no Hogan's Heroes, no V, no Breaking Bad, no Corner Gas, no Survivorman, no Babylon 5, no Jurassic Park, no Rambo, no James Bond, no Columbo, no Simpsons, no Futurama, no Pirates of the Caribbean, no Get Smart.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Track your usage (DDWRT has a nice bandwidth tracking feature built in), and at end of the month run a BitTorrent client and help FOSS by sharing the lastest distros, while at the same time forcing ISPs to upgrade their bandwidth. If everyone used every last bit of their cap down to the last hunderd MB or so, we'd see some traction.
They'll do it by sending lobbyist to counteract the ISP lobbyist.
When your provider sells you a connection of, say, 1.544mb/sec - thats megaBITS not megabytes. You need to divide by 8 to come up with your connection speed in bytes.
Dividing by 10 to calculate bytes is generally more accurate for net throughput numbers due to transport overhead (checksums, parity bits, packet headers, etc.).
It has gotten better over the years, overhead has gone down. The "divide by 10" was mostly during the dial-up age. Now it's probably only a 5-10% overhead.
But it's easier to just drop a digit when dividing by 10.
(And nobody complains much when a transfer finishes sooner then the hand calculation indicated.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Here in Australia, where we have had caps for as long as I can recall, we have streaming services that are integrated with the ISPs who quota, so the streamed movies are not metered against your quota (they are in the "free zone", etc). The major movie streaming players have deals with the major ISPs so this is a non issue.
You can use Steam in the same way (non-metered). Also, they host repos for Linux distros, etc, so yum or whatever don't count against your quota, either and some of the nice ones even let Windows updates through for free.
Pretty much the only high bandwidth thing that is not free is, unsurprisingly, bittorrent.
I have a 1TB a month quota. If I could even download 1TB of torrents a month, on my crappy DSL connection (I am a long way from a phone exchange), I'd be laughing. However even if I could, there's no way I could find 1TB a month of legit torrents.
Huh? Most newer TVs have netflix streaming built in. Sony and Samsung aren't "bleeding edge," they're mainstream.
I find that the divide by 10 thing is still pretty accurate, although YMMV of course. My sync speed according to my DSL modem is 7200 kbps and the max download speed I can achieve is around 730 - 740 kB/s. So pretty close! Depends on a bunch of stuff though like your MTU, how clean your line is (i.e. bit error rate), whether you're using PPPoE or PPPoA to connect blah blah blah.
ifconfig works great for me
Like a tax, once an ISP has implemented a cap, it will only get worse not better. Unless government rips the privilege from their cold dead hands, which will not happen as much like in the USA, the regulators are in bed with industry.
So it went from no caps, like 3 years ago, to caps, to tiered caps... So it used to be that everyone got the same cap. Then they figured we can make even more money of this and separated it into usually 3 tiers, light, regular, and Pro... Basically most Canadians can go with the Cable company (Rogers) or Phone/DSL company (Bell).
For a regular DSL account with BELL in Ontario, Canada (I know because I was looking to switch recently from Cable as the caps suck), the Uupload/Download Cap is 2GB. Yes that's right, that is not a typo, not 150GB but 2!. Their "Performance has 25GB.... I am not kidding here is the link:
http://www.bell.ca/shopping/PrsShpGnl_PrdCompare.page?oct_browse_page_url=PrsShpInt_Access&oct_catalog_category_id=SympaticoOffers&skuListComp=DSLTIEPlusNCOONNewMass;DSLTIPONNewMassNCOPF10;
It is absolutely ridiculous. Pathetic. We live in the dark ages. Now there are new "Fiber" accounts you can get which are much better, however you have to live within certain "Areas". I live in a medium sized city in the most populous area of Canada and I can't get it. I suspect you have to actually live within Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal to get it so not available to most Canadians.
I am with cable and my current Cap is 60GB so it isn't nearly as bad, but it is still stupid compared to just about anywhere else. We just had an election and the Internet and price gouging actually became a pretty big topic during the election, we shall see if the elected Conservative government actually does anything about it... I'm not going to hold my breath.
That's an interesting argument but I think it's deeper than that. Since I got high speed internet through my cable provider 7 years ago, I have not have cable tv service. There was no need. It think alot of people are in this same situation. It just seems funny that the more people wish to stream the more ISP's want to throttle what used to be wide open. Think more money more bandwidth, or more money due to exceeding a gb limit or god forbid a mb limit per month. Not only that but what of ISP's that aren't also cable tv providers? Do they also wish you not to stream?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Yeah, Netflix is really going to take on Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon who are some of the largest companies in the US. That's a good joke.
Of course Netflix should care. The point is that the ISPs aren't going to care because every single one of them either offers cable services themselves or bundle TV services with their Internet and phone services. Netflix losing customers is going to mean all of jack and shit to them.
The whooshing...
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
Their solution isn't that great. Streaming video is hardly an attractive alternative to renting a physical disc if the quality falls below a certain point. I don't want to watch dancing blocks making trails across my screen to telephone-quality audio. I want high quality A/V.
You're right, though, that Netflix doesn't have the necessary pull to force the hand of an ISP. ISPs might care if the only reason anyone was subscribing was to use Netflix, but that just isn't the case. ISPs are trying really hard to find a bulletproof way to edge competing services like Netflix out of the way of their own on-demand premium services while maintaining an innocent "Who, ME?" face. Think of how much data they send across the line to send you your on-demand movie... It isn't magically less than Netflix.
Netflix will be joined by practically any company that delivers content mainly over the internet. That would include such nobodies as Google. Meanwhile, Netflix and co will be able to show actual anti-competitive effects at that point. Actually having a point with evidence isn't necessary to lobbying, but it is still helpful.
They would rather you didn't do anything that would push them to spend more money on infrastructure. A DSL provider may have less incentive to throttle your access to Netflix, but the incentive is still there. I think we're getting to the point where you pay for bytes like we pay for electricity. No cap, but you pay for what you use during peak times. At least I hope peak/off-peak times will be considered. I'd hate to have to pay per torrent during off-peak times when it doesn't cause any congestion.