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Report on Web-Surfing Speeds Finds Pervasive Throttling
Stirling Newberry writes "New York Times has a report on web-surfing speed tests that their reporter ran using Glasnost, a tool that mimics the bittorrent protocol and measures the results. BT in the UK was among the worst. From the article: 'In the United States, throttling was detected in 23 percent of tests on telecom and cable-television broadband networks, less than the global average of 32 percent. The U.S. operators with higher levels of detected throttling included Insight Communications, a cable-television operator in New York, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, where throttling was detected in 38 percent of tests; and Clearwire Communications, where throttling was detected in 35 percent of the tests.'"
I think the OP is unlikely to be reporting on the web throttling capabilities of BP (British Petroleum as was) but more BT (British Telecom)?
My ISP clearly states that they throttle P2P and Torrent protocols if necessary. After midnight, there's less people using their connection, hence less throttling.
Any article that starts off with the problems of a web page not loading, then goes on to explain that it's because ISPs are throttling a different, completely unrelated protocol is either very confused or intentionally deceptive. It's the NYT, so "confused" is a fair bet.
Probably a defect in a Clacks tower along the Grand Trunk.
Damn you, Reacher Gilt!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
..bit torrents, me thinks you mean BT.
Give them time. David will likely see BP take over BT, because too big to fail is always a good thing.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ah, you forget not everyone wants payments, and because you use the same tool someone conducting a illegal act does, it should therefore be outlawed?
I torrent masses of linux isos. Much love.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Anyone using ComCast for their ISP, look for an alternative because it's guaranteed they throttle your bandwidth! Send them a message and maybe they will stop this Internet Control!
That depends on the contract one has signed.
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Probably a defect in a Clacks tower along the Grand Trunk.
Probably because it the nineties are over, and there is no more time for Clacks.
Um... how is mimicking the BitTorrent protocol taking money away from people? It's not. You, just like the people who pay you, are so scared of losing control you will go to any means to suppress a technology instead of innovating and coming up with new business models that make it easy for people to consume your product.
Of course, I'm sure it's just cheaper to buy politicians and people like you.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
If they throttle you so your bandwidth does not exceed the agreed upon bandwidth speeds then it should be no big deal. If they shape you below your agreed upon speeds because "it is busy time on their network" it is theft.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I've got no problem with them throttling, but throttling and then calling your plan unlimited is False advertising, and should be outlawed. Perhaps we need some new language to describe what they are actually doing, but Unlimited is not it.
I'm not surprised at all that ISPs are throttling internet speeds. If a cable company throttles netflix and youtube data then that increases the probability that people will get frustrated and just watch cable tv (especially the advertisements). If Verizon deprioritizes VOIP traffic to reduce call quality then that increases the probability people just go back to using P.O.T.S (which they conveniently sell). Maybe my tin foil hat is a little to tight today, but I think the only real way to prevent this kind of stuff form happening is a decentralized internet.
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
For people living in Comcast territory and outside the service area of FTTH, or for people living in Comcast territory who have give up a land line in favor of a cell phone with an unmetered voice plan, what's the alternative to Comcast other than dial-up?
Once these ISPs learn that we're entitled to everything we want, they'll finally have to stop throttling us.
7/10. Try "Once these ISPs learn that we're entitled to" the goddamned level of service we signed up and paid for.
Matters of legality belong in the courts, not the infrastructure.
And perhaps the content creators will realize that they are not special little snowflakes and not every idea that comes out of their heads is genius. Maybe if they start charging reasonable prices for their wares and if the governments of the world pare back copyright to a reasonable level, people will actually have respect for them again.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
I'm an Insight Communications subscriber in central Kentucky. I noticed a month or so ago that during a period of higher-than-average internet usage, my connection speed was being slowed. I pay for 20Mbits. At the worst, with a wired connection I was only getting around 1.5Mbits. This was after moving ~10GB in ten days or so. Hardly excessive usage by most standards.
Somehow I doubt that. The point is that people pay for that bandwidth. If your provider fails to provide what people pay for — then he is to blame. Not people using what they bought from him.
Imagine if phone companies handled calls the same way they handle data: first you would pay for "unlimited 24/7 connection" and then you would discover, that you as well as sever hundred clients are all connected to one line. Should you start complaining that your calls are more important then those, of all the others or just make the provider do his job and provide the advertised service?
What if electricity providers had to guarantee that every house in the country could consume the maximum current draw their connections are rated for at any given moment? I think the industry is young enough that everyone's still figuring out the right model under which to sell and provide service.
E pluribus unum
Telcos like to cry about heavy users, but at the same time they brag about the capabilities of their service. Just don't try to use the service as they've advertised it.
Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile all advertise that you can watch streaming video over their data networks, but then cap data and cry foul because people want to stream video. AT&T ran an ad campaign about the original iPad launch and how you could watch video over their network on the iPad, and then two weeks after the iPad launch they ended unlimited data because they didn't realize people would stream video over the network.
ISPs brag how fast their network is, and talk about downloading large files, streaming video and playing games. But God forbid you want to do any of those things with the service you're paying for.
These companies are subsidized by my tax dollars to build infrastructure. They charge more for less service than their counterparts around the globe. They advertise a service and then complain when people buy and want to use the service.
And while people would scream foul if Google got into the ISP business (despite allowing a Comcast/NBC/Universal merger) frankly I would welcome some competition.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This claim comes up a lot on Slashdot, but I disagree. The cat is out of the bag, young people are already used to getting films and music for free. The industry could lower prices, but actually completing a financial transaction for content is more work than just going to YouTube and typing in the name of the song you want to hear for free. The physical artifact (CD, DVD) is increasingly considered a luxury, which people will pay for if they wish but avoid otherwise, so lowering prices isn't going to solve anything.
If you want to talk about entitlement, you have to include the creator class. Nobody has a feeling of something for nothing more than they. Most see copyright as a lottery ticket, or as a reason to work hard for one album and live off of that for the rest of their unproductive lives. They steal from the public domain (Disney, etc.) and never give back. And people like you act surprised when the common person has zero respect for copyright anymore. I'm 30, my grandchildren will doubtfully see the Beatles in the public domain.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
If something is advertised as "Unlimited" and then a limit is applied, it is, arguably, false advertising. That opens the ISP to civil suits. Class action, anyone?
Comcast is a "common carrier"? Random XYZ ISP os a "common carrier"? Really?
Before you parrot something, get a clue about the subject.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Power companies charge by the amount of power used. If they could technically give you 100% of the power you demand they would. And then charge you for it.
ISPs could move to that model too. But they don't want to. They prefer to charge flat rates and then throttle people who use it more.
Sometimes, firing up a bittorrent client and downloading something will rapidly cause my internet to slow to a crawl... I'm talking pings of 2500+ to google.com.
However, capping the upload speed to something ridiculously low (10-30 k/sec) seems to fix the problem.
It makes me wonder if the upstream pipe is just saturated with all the connections made in the P2P network.
Furthermore, it doesn't always happen. Sometimes it does just fine with higher upload speeds, so it must have something to do with time of day and/or network conditions.
I have a web server hosted in location X. My ISP is company Y. I transport data to people hitting the site all using different ISPs. That data is carried by several different companies. They are very much covered under the definition of common carriers.
Telephone companies were considered common carriers. ISPs have fought back against being branded common carriers, but they aren't any different in principle to phone companies. The FCC hasn't gone out of their way to rule definitively on the matter, only vaguely determining that telecommunication companies can be considered common carriers.
The net neutrality debate could be made considerably simpler if the FCC would outright call all American ISPs common carriers.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
the phone company has never had the ability to service 100% of their customer base at the same time. it's been proven for decades every time something happens you get an all circuits are busy message if too many people try to call
the advertised bandwidth is not full internet bandwidth but up to your CO. BT you still have their internet gateway while netflix and other big companies use CDN's to stage their data inside the ISP's network so there will always be preference for some data
Once these ISPs learn that we're entitled to everything we want, they'll finally have to stop throttling us. Then we can continue to consume content without paying the people who spent their lives creating it.
I agree. The entitlement of the unwashed masses doesn't override my entitlement to send my grandchildren to college for a job I did once.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
The difference is that the electricity companies never CLAIMED to be able to give every household max current draw at any given moment (AFAIK). When I signed up for Comcast I was told "You can have 16 down, 6 up." Whenever I get close to the bandwidth that I was told I could have I get throttled down. Yes, there was the fine print in the contract saying "you can't actually have these speeds 'cause our network can't handle it", but doesn't that imply false advertising?
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
I pay to be connected to the ISP's on an unlimited supply, a claim they make on every fucking advert and website they have (as does every competitor) - yet they tell me that I have to share and it's only as 'unlimited' as they can manage....
Seriously?
Can you post one single advertisement where they claim you have unlimited data?
Please only post those where you have taken the time to read the fine print you overlooked the first time.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
They never said:
1. Unlimited speeds
2. Unlimited data
The term "unlimited" is from the AOL-centric dial-up days where you had a limited amount of connection hours.
Unlimited still means *unlimited connection time*.
It's been discussed before. Read your TOS and the fine print on advertising.
While I agree with your other post about people feeling entitled to content that they didn't pay for, I think you're going a little overboard here. To use a car analogy, it's like renting a car that is supposed to have a 150 hp engine (that's horsepower, not health/hit points) and then being told if you actually get up to 150 at any time your engine will automatically throttle back down to 50 hp. Yes, it's not your car, you're just paying for the privilege of using it, and the people who you got it from have every right to throttle it down, but in that case they shouldn't advertise a 150 hp engine when they know they'll never let you get that high. I feel entitled to my ISP telling me what speeds I can ACTUALLY get before being throttled down.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
I've always considered the last 80 years or so to be a bit of a golden age for the content creators. Technology has caught up to culture in that we can now share it effectively over any distance. It is possible to monetize is, perhaps not at the level that they're used to but still at a profit. Look at what iTunes and Netflix have done. Netflix put a pretty serious damper on casual piracy because it was easy and cheap. If the **AA want to continue hamstringing new innovators they will eventually see their distribution models go up in smoke as people start caring less and less about bought and paid for laws. Cooperate and/or innovate, don't treat your customers like criminals, and tighten your belts a little. Simple advice, I doubt anybody will pay it any heed.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Sure, and creators are entitled because teh pirates are bad. But hey, as long as they get what they're entitled to that's what matters.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
As has been pointed out here, none of the power companies, telcos, and ISPs could provide 100% of all customer's maximum usage at the same time. Throttling isn't in and of itself bad. The issue is if an ISP throttles, say, my Netflix download not because of congestion, but because Netflix competes with their services.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
Really? Perhaps you've never heard of the United States? We've had rolling blackouts over here several times. In fact, it looks like many places in the world have had rolling blackouts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout#Texas ...
Sucks to live in Texas, this we already know...
Be seeing you...
ISPs have fought back against being branded common carriers, but they aren't any different in principle to phone companies.
Maybe not "in principle", but in fact of law, yes, cable and ISP are not "common carriers". And that's what counts.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Oh, bullshit. Comcast never claimed to be able to give you anything either. Guaranteed they said 'UP TO 16 down, 6up', and not in fine print either. If you want a connection with guaranteed speeds, buy one. It will cost you probably 10x what you are paying now, but obviously your usage is important enough to warrant that.
If the broadband operators throttle during heavy traffic times to manage their network, that's one thing. But if they throttle BitTorrent while their 'partner' web sites or streaming video services are still running full speed, I'd be concerned. Very concerned. The former is just a means of keeping a rickety network from collapsing. Yeah, its false advertising if they promised you certain up/download speeds (but only at odd times when no one else is on line). But if its a means of driving business to their preferred services (or crippling all the others that won't kick back part of their revenue), its time for the antitrust people to step in.
Anyone know of a test suite that looks at simultaneous BitTorrent/commercial site download speeds?
Have gnu, will travel.
[...] Then we can continue to consume content without paying the people who [created it]
(emphasis mine) You seem to be arguing that BT or high transfer rates are used mainly for pirating, and throttling only affects self-righteous people who like to get stuff for free,,
No one said you weren't entitled to some perfect level of Internet performance on torrents, regardless of anything. Perish the thought!
Is this supposed to somehow be related to your initial argument? Otherwise, well done, sir, I wasted 5 min trying to parse that argument.
To use a car analogy, it's like renting a car that is supposed to have a 150 hp engine (that's horsepower, not health/hit points) and then being told if you actually get up to 150 at any time your engine will automatically throttle back down to 50 hp.
Your car's engine doesn't actually produce 150 hp most of the time. Not even near 50 hp most of the time. To drive at 70 mph constant speed on a straight road in a resonably efficient car only uses maybe 15 hp. Even when accellerating you don't get anywhere near the 150 hp until the rpm of the engine is excessively high.
ISPs consistently oversell their bandwidth. It's more profitable than actually upgrading their capacity.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
I don't believe any court has ruled on the matter. And as the law is written, they would be easily covered by the definition.
Please show me where the FCC or any major court has ruled definitively that they are not.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I'd like to offer my ISP 70% of their bill one month and then when they come after me, complain about how they're the "entitled" one like it's a bad thing.
I believe your line of thought requires some realignment. If I'm pay for a service, and I get a lesser service, then I am not getting that service. If I am paying for the lesser service, then fucking say so. Don't set my expectations and then fail to deliver.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
No, unlimited means "without limit"; the entitlement comes from the contract - a contract guaranteeing me X means I am *entitled* to X. Regardless of your particular world view, those words have meaning.
I'm 30, my grandchildren will doubtfully see the Beatles in the public domain.
No they won't. THEIR great-great grandkids MIGHT be able to sing 'Happy Birthday(C)' without paying royalties, but that's about it.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
If they advertised that, then they should absolutely be able to provide it.
I'm not wanting the max speed my equipment is capable of - hell everything in my home LAN past the cable modem is capable of Gigabit per second speeds. What I do want though, is that if the ISP offers me some advertised rate - say 6MBps, then they ought to be able to handle me using up to that amount of bandwidth at any given time.
And truthfully, I don't even think overselling their network would be such a problem if they were more reasonable about it. If providers were capable of delivering at network that could sustain people using more like 20-25% of their maximum capable bandwidth, then most people wouldn't be in as much of a bind. Instead, many are adding data caps that can be hit using 2 or 3% of your bandwidth.
Compare it to a buffet - not many people are going to care if you have some fine print that caps food consumption at 8 plates. If you advertise "All you can eat" and then have some fine print that cuts you off after 1 cup of soup, then people will rightfully complain.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Short answer:
Throttling is an outrage against the entitlement mentality of people interested in this news. Otherwise, why would anyone care much?
Big difference. Electricity is a metered service. "Unlimited" Internet is not, at least in theory.
Throttling bittorrent is an outrage against our entitlement.
You misspelled "what we paid for". I'm really not sure from where your misplaced holier-than-thou sense of injustice springs, but it seems the only person seeing what you consider obvious, is you.
if electricity providers sold me unlimited power draw. they are not. they are charging per usage. isps, are not doing that.
Read radical news here
What if electricity providers had to guarantee that every house in the country could consume the maximum current draw their connections are rated for at any given moment?
Then they had better lower the rated maximum current draw per house! The issue is that the ISP have a very good estimate of how much bandwidth is needed and what the usage bell curve looks like, and intentionally offer services they know they cannot provide.
The problem is the TelCo's advertise a speed and don't deliver. I would understand if the throttling if it were temporary, sure no problem. But if they have failed to solve the issue 5 years running, that is just nonsense. The issue of some users slowing down the system is not the consumers problem. I didn't buy a internet party line or time share, I bought a service from a company and I expect them to provide it.
The companies need to a) limit/segregate heavy users so they don't disrupt regular service, or b) stop signing people up for a service they are unable to provide. The ISP industry is the only system I can think of where companies get away with blaming poor service on their users. If only 8/10 phone calls made a connection, or you had blackouts 6 times a month, your credit card only worked 5 times a week, water 300 days a year, etc. people would pitch a fit.
OK fair enough, thanks for the explanation. I'd argue that it's correct to have a feeling of entitlement for a service that one is paying for, but you are right that one can't expect a perfect service 24/7 on a consumer plan.
You act like that is somehow wrong.
Yes, but there's a difference between emergency unexpected situations, and standard operating procedure.
The phone system might get overloaded in a disaster and everyone understands that, but I sure as hell would be pissed if, to make a phone call normally, I had to wait in queue for two minutes until a line opened up.
Phone companies: We can only serve 10% of the capacity we claim to provide at once, and about 2% is normally in use, so everything works except for emergencies.'
ISPs: 'We can only serve 10% of the capacity we claim to provide at once, and about 25% is in use normally, so we've decided to stop actually supplying the service we've sold to people we think are over-using it, and in fact we've built automated systems to do this.'
Everyone understands things fall apart in disasters, or even in expected fringe times. There's a reason, back when pizza places did '30 minutes or it's free' stuff, they always exempted holidays and sporting events. But we're not talking about any sort of unique event. ISPs are throttling all the time, they have are, quite simply, completely overselling their capacity. At all times.
Hell, no one would really care if throttling showed up at, oh, eight in the evening because everyone was on Hulu. Or the net connection was a little slow over Thanksgiving. People would bitch, but we'd understand.
But there's a difference between 'can be slow at peak times' and 'throttled all the time because we don't even have enough capability for normal usage'.
If ISPs don't want to buy more capacity, all they would have to do is stop claiming to provide stuff they don't. Which probably will require actual laws, because some ISPs being honest will result in the lying ISPs gettting the customers.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
So "if necessary" means "24x7x365.25 because we've been funneling the "infrastructure improvements" fund into our bonuses and stock dividends".
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
> And all laws preventing anybody from setting up an ISP of any kind.
And what laws might those be? If anything, we need federal laws to force municipalities and deed-restricted communities to allow competition, instead of allowing them to sign away the rights of their residents in near-perpetuity. The fact is, housing is about as non-elastic of a market as you can get, and it's hard to guarantee your own rights to competitive broadband in perpetuity EVEN IF you do your homework and make it a point to check out before buying a house somewhere.
Hell, before I bought my house, I actually (over the realtor's vehement objections) made the offer contingent upon DSL availability. I did my homework, verified that the neighbor had DSL, and signed off on the contingency. Two weeks before moving in, I called AT&T to order DSL, and was informed that the DSLAM was at capacity, and I couldn't get service until somebody moved, died, or disconnected. Fuck. Damn. Crap. And several other key expletives.
Living in a neighborhood with a HOA (and, in South Florida, and most parts of the country, it's damn near impossible to buy into a neighborhood less than 50 years old that DOESN'T have one), there's the ever-present risk that some future board might cut a deal with someone like Comcast to eliminate physical access to competition. If it ever happened, short of going postal and doing very, very illegal and immoral things in retribution to punish them for screwing up my broadband, there's not much I could do because the house is (slightly) underwater and unsellable. The idea that someone can casually sell his house and move to take advantage of preferable free-market broadband opportunities elsewhere is a sick joke that fails miserably in real life.
Here's some food for Libertarian thought: the FCC's supposedly oppressive yoke of burdensome regulation is PRECISELY the reason why you can tell your city and/or homeowners association to fuck off and go to hell if they try to prohibit you from pointing an 18" dish at the sky and doing an end run around their local mischief. When a higher level of government tells a lower level that it's not allowed to limit your freedom, that's a GOOD thing worthy of celebration, regardless of whether or not it passes an ideological purity test.
The main legal obstacle to setting up an ISP that actually reaches customers is property rights.
The Supreme Court in NCTA v. Brand X ruled that cable ISPs are "information services" rather than "telecommunications services", and thus are not subject to the taxes and regulations of the latter, which includes common carrier status. The next month, the FCC reclassified DSL ISPs as the same (link (PDF)), which also removed the requirement that incumbent carriers lease lines to independent ISPs, effectively obliterating competition.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I'd like to know if the bandwidth throttling happens to normal users, or people trying to download pirated videos and music. I could care less about the latter, but the former is quite troublesome.
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Do you have a service level agreement stating guaranteed speeds, latencies, etc? If not, it is highly unlikely that you paid for anywhere near what you think you did. A real T1 line (1.5Mb/s) from AT&T costs $430/month. A T3 line (47MB/s) can cost up to $13000/month. The only way most people can afford internet service at all is by sharing the cost with a whole bunch of other people. Sharing the cost also means you are sharing the resource with them. Sorry, but your $50/month does not entitle you to any specific performance.
And before you say 'they shouldn't advertise it then', note that they ALWAYS say 'up to' a certain speed, and they NEVER say 'at least' such a speed.
I'm pretty sure there has never in my life been a content creator who forced my to consume his wares and pay a fee. Pretty sure that at worst they're offering content for a fee, which I can take or leave if the price is right. I don't think I'm any the poorer if I ignore them.
Conent distributors, OTOH, do all that annoying MAFIAA shit, but they'll be dead in a generation.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Power companies charge by the amount of power used.
Not necessarily. Saner economies implement revenue decoupling to remove this perverse incentive from the marketplace.
Someone had to do it.
The only way most people can afford internet service at all is by sharing the cost with a whole bunch of other people. Sharing the cost also means you are sharing the resource with them. Sorry, but your $50/month does not entitle you to any specific performance.
I understand that, and don't expect to literally get the "up to" speed 24/7/365.24.
I do, however, expect to "fairly" compete with other users for the available bandwidth. That way, when everyone gets to enjoy sub-dialup speeds right after dinner, the ISPs might actually feel enough pressure to invest at least enough to bring us up to 2nd world broadband speeds.
Hell, South frickin' Korea has 100Mbps residential service, and I, living in the last remaining superpower (albeit in its twilight days), have to bounce signals off a goddamned satellite just to get 1.5Mbps with a half-second latency?
We don't need network neutrality (just) to avoid a "walled garden", we need it to force the ISPs to upgrade rather than throttle us.
You are an entitlement nag. You know the service you have. You might not have realized it when you got it, because you didn't PAY ATTENTION.
Oh, I know what I have. I am not happy about it, but I have no choice, because there IS no choice. That does not mean I, contrary to your apparent belief, need to be happy about it. In your mind, my options are apparently "shut up and be grateful like the good little pleb I am that I get service, period", and "live as an anachronism".
You want some government body to step in and make rules and laws so YOU don't have to READ stuff BEFORE YOU SIGN IT. You know very well now what your service is.
Yeah, laws and regulations that would force, well, companies to not lie in their advertising. I know, crazy, right?
I'll be honest, with the ISP I'm using right now, my roommate actually pays the bill. He's not in a contract. He 'purchased' service over the phone. I was standing right next to him while he did it. The only signature he provided was on a piece of paper that was from the tech that came out to check the wiring while we set up the router and confirmed the cable modem worked. This piece of paper signed was to acknowledge that the tech arrived on site and that services were rendered. No where that I am aware of did he actually agree to terms and conditions stating that his service would be throttled under X conditions, nor to what extent. Of course, I suppose it's possible that they slipped in some kind of "...and you also agree to the terms and conditions that are buried in our craphole of a website." Not that we actually see problems, though we are sure that they're throttling, it doesn't impact us much. It's the principle of the matter.
I should warn you that I'm also one of those _absolute_ sociopaths that finds the lack of truth in advertising seen to be appalling. For example I think that prescription drugs shouldn't be able to advertise.
If you don't like it, please switch to another provider, and stop whining that you didn't know/read what you were getting.
Again, I see that talking point parroted. I am not sure that works the way you think it works. Out of curiosity, which one of the ISPs was it that you worked for? You have kind of a shitty attitude, and I was thinking that I wanted to avoid subsidizing your paycheck. There's always internet at work after all.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
> If your provider fails to provide what people pay for — then he is to blame.
If your provider isn't providing what they are contracted to provide you do have a legitimate cause for complaint. But almost always in the cases where people complain they are in fact getting what they paid for - the ISP never promised you dedicated bandwidth and no traffic shaping on your residential connection and you haven't paid the going rate for that kind of connection.
If you shop around for dedicated bandwidth with an SLA and guarantees of zero traffic shaping and zero contention you can most certainly get it. Expect to pay at least an order of magnitude more than you pay for your basic residential connection.
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No it's only a contract if it's between large corporations. Anything paid for that benefits an individual (provided they make less than 7 figures - you know, the 'value producing' class) is an 'entitlement', and it's only right and legal that those so-called 'contracts' go unfulfilled. Only corporations and the upper class are worthy of 'entitlement'. And false advertisement? piffle. That's just the guaranteed right to free speech that the founders MEANT to grant to corporate entities.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
Perhaps we need some new language to describe what they are actually doing, but Unlimited is not it.
You could call it the Fricative model. Flow is restricted but never Stops. By the way, my experience here in Australia is that they say it's "capped, but we'll throttle if you go over" as opposed to the other, which is "capped, but we'll charge your for excess". I don't recall ever seeing an "unlimited" plan here.
Yes, but only if the company name is Comcast...or is it Xfinity?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Yes, but only if the company name is Comcast
or at&t or Verizon or Mediacom or Time Warner or Bell or Rogers or Telus.
Comcast is actually probably almost the least-worst in regards to infrastructure. They look to be the only ones getting their asses in gear with regards to IPv6, though it's fairly trivial for them as DOCSS 3.0 requires IPv6 support.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
For those in the UK who suffer from throttled connections, there are some alternatives. I am a very happy customer of Be (part of the Telefonica group) who provide an uncapped unthrottled service with a static IP for less than £20/month. I get 18Mb/s down. On the same line with BT I got 12Mb/s, capped and throttled for the same price.
This is a good resource if you've not found it already.
ISPs could move to that model too. But they don't want to. They prefer to charge flat rates and then throttle people who use it more.
They tried to do that in Canada and everybody went apeshit crazy. The federal government got involved and there were protests in the street (really) and ultimately the isps were ordered to abandon it. To be fair the the ISPs wanted to charge a monthly fee with a low cap plus something stupid like $2.50 /GB for overages.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=canada+usage+based+billing&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Once these ISPs learn that we're entitled to everything we want, they'll finally have to stop throttling us. Then we can continue to consume content without paying the people who spent their lives creating it.
You aren't entitled to everything you want, but you are entitled to everything you have already paid for. There is a big difference.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
And what principle would that be, exactly? By your own admission you don't even pay for the service, which gives you no say at all. In addition, your roommate apparently signed up without a contract establishing any terms of service at all - that makes him an idiot, and you even more so for thinking that you are entitled to complain.
Which would make sense, considering the fact that he didn't agree to any terms at all.
Did you even bother to read what you wrote before posting it? It proves the parent's point: You ARE an entitlement nag.
I'm not sure why you'd feel the need to warn us, it's not likely that anyone here really cares, not even if your sociopathic tendencies were to turn to violence. After all, what are you going to do, kill us over the Internet with the sheer force of your moral outrage? If you were to go postal in the real world, odds are the people that you killed wouldn't be any of us. I do, however, pity your roommate...
To quote the late Warren Oates in his role as Sergeant Hulka: "Lighten up, Francis".
Regards
dj
And what principle would that be, exactly? By your own admission you don't even pay for the service, which gives you no say at all. In addition, your roommate apparently signed up without a contract establishing any terms of service at all - that makes him an idiot, and you even more so for thinking that you are entitled to complain.
I pay him back for part of the service, though my name is not on the actual bill. Were my name to be on the bill, would it make my complaint any more legitimate? You sound like you would so eagerly white knight for ISPs that it wouldn't matter much if Charter sent jackbooted thugs to beat me in the street. Tell you what, instead of being insulting and snide, deriding me for having the sheer audacity to complain about a service so graciously provided to me, point me to an ISP in the St. Louis area who can provide me with a 20 mpbs, hell, even a 10 mpbs, connection with an SLA. Conditions are that they offer a contractual agreement not to throttle bandwitdh, or even if they are going to throttle, then a well thought out and concise list of circumstances and rates for which they will do so. That's all I'm asking here. I don't want the magic network fairy to hit me with her magic wand. I just want expectations set. If I'm an "entitlement nag" for wanting that, then I guess it's not as bad a thing as I initially felt it was meant to be.
Which would make sense, considering the fact that he didn't agree to any terms at all.
I know: You'd think legitimate business would be more inclined to draft contracts for services rendered, or something. I'm not a lawyer; I try not to worry about such things.
Did you even bother to read what you wrote before posting it? It proves the parent's point: You ARE an entitlement nag.
Yes... yes I did. Why? How does wanting expectations set make me an entitlement nag? Why are you so completely angry that I just want to understand the conditions in which that the QoS changes?
I'm not sure why you'd feel the need to warn us, it's not likely that anyone here really cares, not even if your sociopathic tendencies were to turn to violence. After all, what are you going to do, kill us over the Internet with the sheer force of your moral outrage? If you were to go postal in the real world, odds are the people that you killed wouldn't be any of us. I do, however, pity your roommate...
I warn you because I feel absolutely fucking insane when I see posts like yours, and I somewhat hope that you can ignore my posts, because I can't help but have that fear in the back of my head that I am in fact crazy, and somehow I will infect the rest of you. I warn you because something happened sometime recently causing people to stand up in the name of corporations. Why, I have no idea. It's off-topic, but the only arguments I've seen against the OWS crowd is that they're "entitled", or that they're "jobless hippies". I still have yet to see anything consisting of an actual argument not made from emotion with regard to them. This is the same situation. Why do you feel like they're justified in throttling? Why do you feel like they are in spite of the legal monopolies and subsidies?
Why do you feel sorry for my roommate? While I'm sure he appreciates your apparent concern and goodwill, when he heard of this story, he became concerned, as most of the cursory throughput tests he did during peakhours showed less than optimal results already and asked me if I thought we had a problem with getting throttled and needed to try to do something about it.
To quote the late Warren Oates in his role as Sergeant Hulka: "Lighten up, Francis".
Yea-fucking-verily.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
When you pay for a service that not only is advertised to be what it says, but also shows you on your monthly bill, the payment for that service, are you not obliged to fork up that service, and if you downgrade it, are you not subject to legal action, and being this is a nation wide problem, should the government not step in (as they do when they hear about price fixing) and set them straight with fines that are so massive, not only could the government get out of debt quicker, but once or twice would be enough for those big companies to not even attempt doing it again...
Verizon DSL/Cell maybe; FiOS is wonderful, and I have pushed it pretty hard at home without slowdowns are throttling.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
If you want an internet connection with a SLA, all you have to do is call AT&T and request a fractional DS3 line. I haven't checked in a while, but last time I did, it was approximately $12,000/month for a full DS3, and probably $6000 for a 1/4. There, your expectations are now set, enjoy. Oh, you wanted the SLA, the no throttling, but you didn't want to pay for it. I see.
well thought out and concise list of circumstances and rates for which they will do so. (throttling)
And again, I really don't get why people are still being snide. Why are you so angry at me for wanting this? Is it worth it? From a technical standpoint, it shouldn't be difficult to provide. I mean, they HAVE proceedure for this, right? It's not just some guy tossing commands at a packet shaper on a Saturday night, throttling because he's pissed his girlfriend dumped him and he got stuck working the late shift, right?
Just give me something telling me how much bandwidth I can use before I start to get throttled, or how much percentages of what type of traffic will cause throttling, and for either of those, at what rate the throttling commences. THOSE are the expectations I want fulfilled.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
The answer is simple, they already have a written policy, although you likely don't like the answer. It's they can throttle your connection whenever they want for whatever reason they want. Does that make you happier now that you have it written down (again)? Didn't think so.
Why do some of us get a little peeved when entitled fools like yourself start going off at the mouth? Because we actually know what the costs of an internet connection is, what the connect fees, wire fees, etc are because we've worked with them since the beginning of time. You demand business class connections.. That cost $6,000 a month with a full SLA, and bandwidth guarantees, then complain about your $50/month bill. You want to get the government involved to start mandating this or that because you don't like the service you are getting. Of course, they don't realize that won't make things just magically better. Your ISP will just have to raise everyone's monthly rate to cover the cost of implementing the new policies, or buying more upstream bandwidth etc. I don't want to pay more just because there are a few vocal minority that want to ruin a good thing for the rest of us.
You want a full SLA, no throttling, full bandwidth available at all times? Like I said, it's available in almost every city in the united states, however, you won't like the price (most likely). You DO have a choice, you've ALWAYS had a choice. People complain that there is no alternative, but there IS. What they always mean is that they can't get everything they want, and still pay sub $50 a month. There is a reason for it, and all the whining, name calling, and pointing figures at "the big bad companies" out to screw the little guy comes off as ignorance.
Personally, I'm tired of paying for a government agency to try and protect everyone from themselves. That isn't what this country was founded on and goes against everything in the constitution. People like you are ruining this country one stupid legal ruling at a time. Turning what was supposed to be the country of the free into the country of the nanny state that watches everything everyone does and takes all their money to pay for the privilege of it.
Maybe BP is buying BT to learn how to throttle pipes when they lose control of the flow rate.
The answer is simple, they already have a written policy, although you likely don't like the answer. It's they can throttle your connection whenever they want for whatever reason they want. Does that make you happier now that you have it written down (again)? Didn't think so.
Okay, so there's a few problems with that. How do I know Comcast isn't filtering Netflix/Hulu because it wants to force people back to cable? How do I know AT&T isn't filtering VOIP because it wants people to give up and go back to POTS? I suppose your reasonable answer is "You don't and you shouldn't. Consider yourself lucky that they're even willing to take your money."
Why do some of us get a little peeved when entitled fools like yourself start going off at the mouth? Because we actually know what the costs of an internet connection is, what the connect fees, wire fees, etc are because we've worked with them since the beginning of time. You demand business class connections.. That cost $6,000 a month with a full SLA, and bandwidth guarantees, then complain about your $50/month bill. You want to get the government involved to start mandating this or that because you don't like the service you are getting. Of course, they don't realize that won't make things just magically better. Your ISP will just have to raise everyone's monthly rate to cover the cost of implementing the new policies, or buying more upstream bandwidth etc. I don't want to pay more just because there are a few vocal minority that want to ruin a good thing for the rest of us.
Again, I'M OKAY WITH THROTTLING, if the network genuinely needs it to not go tits up. That's not unreasonable. Just give me a less bullshit set of circumstances it will happen beyond "Cause we feel like it." I never said I wanted the government to come rushing in and saving me. I just checked. Not said once.
You want a full SLA, no throttling, full bandwidth available at all times?
I feel like you're not listening. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough on the fact that I'd accept merely a list of circumstances and rates for which that throttling will occur. If that's the case, I apologize.
Like I said, it's available in almost every city in the united states, however, you won't like the price (most likely). You DO have a choice, you've ALWAYS had a choice. People complain that there is no alternative, but there IS.
If the 'choice' is outside of the budget of at least 90% of individuals in the country, then it's not really a choice and I would hope you realize that. Your 'helpful suggestion' is so far beyond the constraints of my requirements anyway, that I gotta imagine perhaps you're in sales.
What they always mean is that they can't get everything they want, and still pay sub $50 a month. There is a reason for it, and all the whining, name calling, and pointing figures at "the big bad companies" out to screw the little guy comes off as ignorance.
Actually, I can't in good conscience say that they are out to screw the little guy. Their system isn't open enough for me to be able to honestly say one way or another. Also, we pay about $70/month last time I checked for internet, because we bought the top tier package. We were actually at once point wanted to go to one of the small business packages, but the ISP balked at giving that to us because we were in a residential area. Still not sure what difference that would make, but perhaps if I had an EIN they'd let me do it. Something I suppose I will need to look into in the future.
Personally, I'm tired of paying for a government agency to try and protect everyone from themselves. That isn't what this country was founded on and goes against everything in the constitution. People like you are ruining this country one stupid legal ruling at a time. Turning what was supposed to be the country of the free in
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
But when was the last time any ISP or phone offered unlimited speed?
They offer Unlimited Data left and right, but they always state a speed limit, and never even claim that speed limit will be consistant, they always say "up to X MbPS".