Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
"...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.
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.
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?
I received an email, however they told me to check my usage on their site.
I went to their site and was told they didn't know my usage, so I didn't need to worry about it (it actually said that). I found that a bit disquieting.
I'm not heavy user. The most I do is go on occasional Netflix binges watching a bunch of TV episodes in a row. It's very unlikely I'd actually hit the cap. But if it's going to be enforced against me, I want to be able to see what I've used.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
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.
--
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!
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.