Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Yea, from what I've seen, BP lacks the capability to successfully throttle down the flow of anything.
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.
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?
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.
You are the one who appears to be confused.
Nobody said anything about throttling bittorrent. The ISPs are detecting bittorrent activity and then throttling everything.
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
Lately, Comcast has been depositing nearly 100% of the checks that I have sent to them. If they continue to cash my checks at this rate, I will be force to throttle back the check writing to 50% of the invoice amount. During times of peak demand of my money, it is only fair to other utility providers who also require a portion of this limited resource. With throttling in place, which should only affect the top 1% of my creditors, everyone can continue to enjoy "unlimited" payments.
I am a former employee of Insight and here is their dirty little secret. When customers complained about speed issues for example they went to XYZ.com and their speed was slow, we directed them to the only "official speedtest site" which was on the Insight Broadband homepage. What customers didn't know was it never left the system they lived in. For example if you are a customer in Lexington the test went to the Lexington headend and back, so the speedtest levels were almost always at or above the "advertised" speed. So it never went out where the system might be congested or throttled by the company.
"If stupid things work...then they are not stupid."