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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
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.
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
Problem is that locally at least they have horribly inconsistent download speeds and that some throttling is probably necessary. I don't know what their user agreements are like. I don't have a problem with throttling in principle as long as the provider is very clear about the circumstances that will trigger it. There needs to be truth in labeling.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.