ISPs Throttling BitTorrent Traffic, Study Finds

hypnosec writes "A new report by an open source internet measurement platform, Measurement Lab, sheds light onto throttling of and restriction on BitTorrent traffic by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) across the globe. The report by Measurement Lab reveals that hundreds of ISPs across the globe are involved in the throttling of peer-to-peer traffic, and specifically BitTorrent traffic. The Glasnost application run by the platform helps in detecting whether ISPs shape traffic. Tests can be carried out to check whether the throttling or blocking is carried out 'on email, HTTP or SSH transfer, Flash video, and P2P apps including BitTorrent, eMule and Gnutella.' Going by country, United States has actually seen a drop in throttling compared to what it was back in 2010. Throttling in the U.S. is worst for Cox at 6 per cent and best for Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and others at around 3 per cent. The United Kingdom is seeing a rise in traffic shaping and BT is the worst at 65 per cent. Virgin Media throttles around 22 per cent of the traffic while the least is O2 at 2 per cent. More figures can be found here."

Comments

Or have a crap ISP like Eastlink

[EmperorOfCanada]

Or have a crap ISP like Eastlink that has always throttled uploading of any kind. When I upload using ftp or ssh I am lucky to get 60kbs sustained. 1.6mbs down. The CRTC needs to gets its ass in gear and get some real competition. Toronto isn't all of Canada.

Good

[not already in use]

No seriously, good. Chronic torrenters use a disproportionately high amount of bandwidth compared to other people. Your desire to attain every single movie released in the past 30 years in high def shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Have to agree with this, despite being a torrenter.

Re:Good

[Ultra64]

"Chronic torrenters use the bandwidth they purchased. The ISPs greedy oversubscribing of their bandwidth shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for."

Fixed that for you.

Re:Good

[bigredradio]

You are probably going to get modded down for this, but I agree with you. I rarely have downloaded torrents, but when I do, I enjoy the speed I get. However, if I did that all day long (as I know some who do), I am sure it would effect my neighbors. Until fibre becomes the standard, there needs to be something in place so that average users are not effected by the bandwidth usage of others.

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[houstonbofh]

Mixed on this... On the one had it makes sense to delay a non-interactive protocol and favour an interactive one, like VoIP or web browsing. That way, you have people away (torrenters, ftp, e-mail) waiting a bit longer, while people in front of the keyboard "right now" are prioritized. On the other hand, consistently delivering far less that the speeds sold is a problem. If down reasonably, it would not be a problem. But no ISP so far has been able to resist the temptation to be unreasonable.

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[Krneki]

I pay 33E for my optical 20/20MB (5ms to my ISP, 24ms to google, 0 jitter or packet loss, static IP free of charge) line and I exchange 800Gb data per month.

In my country (Slovenia) not a single person has ever received a letter of complaint from the ISP (ISPs got several from US, but they trash it instead to harass their users), no one was ever throttled and the line always, without a single exception, delivers the promised speed.

Only people living in rural areas experience internet problems due to old infrastructure, in towns the downtime are limited to a couple of hours a year and it happens only during the night.

P.S: I live in a town of 10.000 people, so size doesn't matter when it come to Internet prices. So if you pay more and get less you only have to blame the greed of your ISP provider.

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[Anonymous Coward]

If you would like to pay for dedicated bandwidth, you can definitely do so, however you are taking advantage of the cost of the pipe being spread among many people with the expectation they won't all max it out at once. Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe.

Just keep sticking it to the man though.

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[Dunbal]

Nah he's the guy that takes the $300 when the airline tells him they overbooked and would he mind going on standby on another flight over the next couple days. He thinks he's getting a sweet deal, too. That airline is being so nice to him, giving him free stuff and everything...

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Chronic torrenters use a disproportionately high amount of bandwidth compared to other people.

Do you think so? How about those bastards who are running youtube in order to listen to music? Or where the Spotifier is always on? I download the movie once, and I upload it for a while. Downloading stuff in general makes a better use of the bandwidth than any streaming service, where if you would like to show a clip to your friends, you have to download it again because your flash/browser/drm-service dumps the downloaded files.

ISP's can start selling a different infrastructures for VoiP and Web browsing, and a different one for heavy data-exchange where the delay is not critical. But otherwise, this is not what I bought for my money, so ISPs should be honest and state this shit straight in their contract. Saying things like: "The bandwidth can be different" is too general: State your fucking intentions!

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[Anonymous Coward]

Then the ISP should not sell it as if it does.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they don't, its the streamers that use most of the bandwidth. Torrents are a very small fraction in comparison.

Just because you like to buy something and not utilize it to its full capability doesn't mean the rest of the world should. Tell your ISP to upgrade their network instead of punishing their paying customers.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt peer-to-peer traffic is a problem on a symmetric connection.

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[kyrio]

Dear God, the above comment needs to get modded up to the max. It's no different from the morons who go on about population density in Canada being the reason for ancient speeds and horrible prices.

No, you dipshits, if that was the case, some of the provinces east of Ontario wouldn't have 100/100 connections in cities of 1000 people for less than $100/m. If "horrible" population density was really the case, Toronto, which contains 1/6th of the population of Canada in a tiny* city, would have unlimited, unfiltered transfer on gigabit connections to the home for less than $50/m. Yes, I know you can get 100Mbit connections in some parts of the west, and it costs a fortune too.

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[na1led]

Maybe they should limit how much TV you watch too! If I pay for a 10MB connection, I expect to get those speeds, unless they disclaim to me that they will throttle traffic on my connection. Problem I have with these ISPs, is when you call them, and ask them if they throttle BT, they say no. A blatant LIE!

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[na1led]

Most of that can be handled by QoS, and usually the customer can decide how they want their traffic prioritized. Plus, if the ISP was prioritizing traffic, it wouldn't cause bit-torrents to come to a crawl. They deliberately throttle down traffic they feel is associated to pirating.

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[Hatta]

High bandwidth users encourage infrastructure investment which gets you the speeds you have today. You could have made the same argument about MP3s back in the 56K days, and if it prevailed then we'd all still be on dialup speeds.

We should all pay the same for the same access to the network, and we should all use as much of it as we need. If the network isn't sufficient for that, we should all invest in a faster network.

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[gl4ss]

why would fibre becoming standard change the thing at all? you see the same argument applies when you're on 64kbit connection and so is everyone else. it does so on 1mbit, it does so on 10mbit and will apply on 100mbit too.

"something in place" could only be not overselling your bandwidth. if they don't want to do that they could start advertising and contracting it as being base speed of say 0.5mbit/s and a burst speed of 10mbit/s for max of one hour.

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[Anonymous Coward]

You're the one who whines at the football team at a buffet for eating all "your" food rather than at the manager, aren't you?

Hint: you will be forever sad because you are tageting the wrong people.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying that torrenters aren't entitled to the bandwidth they've paid for? The ISP sold them the plan, they have every right to use every bit they were sold. If it is affecting you it is the ISP that has failed to provide you with the service you paid for.

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[Anonymous Coward]

They don't, they sell speeds "up to".

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[ganjadude]

If they cant handle it, they should stop selling it. As far as I am concerned, I pay for unlimited bandwidth at 50 down 25 up. If I want to upload all 25 and download all 50 24/7/365, that is what I payed for.

You dont go to an all you can eat buffet and have 1 burger and fries right?? unlimited should be unlimited

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[Anonymous Coward]

He was obviously talking about people who download more than they can possibly watch, which is something some people do.

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[joelsherrill]

Although not always the case, ssh is usually interactive. Lag in typing or editing across a slowed ssh connection is horrible.

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[Anonymous Coward]

$100/mo does buy the equivalent of 7Mbit dedicated at a colo (100Mbit burstable connection). $60/month should be enough to buy 4.2Mbit (1.36 terabytes/mo). If you're paying more for a wired connection, you're being ripped off.

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[cpu6502]

>>>Your desire to attain every single movie released in the past 30 years in high def shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for.

Well this was why I support usage-based billing. Say $30 for the first 200GB and then $10 for each additional 200GB bracket. Make them pay for their high use of the lines. (Just as people who use more water or electricity or natural gas pay more.)

BTW verizon has never throttled my torrent download. Of course I'm only using 700kbit/s so maybe that's why.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't they throttle based on usage instead? Not all torrenters are the top offenders. Also, doesn't this go against net neutrality laws?

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[HermMunster]

Come on. These ISP are throttling (buying technologies to limit bandwidth in both directions) rather than spending to increase their bandwidth (building out their infrastructure). If the did that they'd be satisfying customers and not restricting everyone. People that torrent and use a lot of bandwidth are doing so because that's what they bought, and they deserve to be able to use it. Because these ISPs sold you a bill of goods that stated your bandwidth is X amount and then set it up to share in your neighborhood, then turned around and started throttling you, doesn't make the torrenter the bad guy.

What does it take to get you guys to understand: They sold you bandwidth, then limited you by sharing that same connection with those in your neighborhood, when you started using it by downloading via torrents they began throttling you because others in your neighborhood couldn't use the bandwidth they sold them, then they capped your usage. Seriously, that's a massive bait and switch. These guys should be held legally liable.

Comcast should not be throttling anything. That was part of their agreement to buy NBC Universal.

It is not the torrenters, it is the ISPs not advancing their technologies and building it out, rather they want to soak up the big bucks by ever increasing the cost of the services that they hobbled (as per above). Look at what Google did: $70.00 (+ $300 connection fee) and you get a gigabit upload and download without caps. Given time we should see more of Google's offerings in other cities. Comcast, et al, you are on notice. And let's not forget what almost every other country in the world has done by offering massive increases in bandwidth and no caps.

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[Jane Q. Public]

"Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe."

Nonsense, at least here in the U.S. While it might be catching up (hard to say for sure), compared to most "first tier" countries the U.S. has averaged significantly lower bandwidth at much higher cost. Mainly due to insufficient competition.

Bandwidth for ISPs gets cheaper by they year, as they have continued to steadily raise their monthly rates.

They can afford it.

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[cpu6502]

>>>"Chronic torrenters use the bandwidth they purchased. The ISPs greedy oversubscribing of their bandwidth shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for."

And yet if they installed a 200GB cap (with an option to buy another 200GB chunk when the first runs-out), then you would bitch about it. Why? Because you want expensive service AND a cheap bill, at the same time. You don't want to actually pay to cover the expense you are incurring. (Like those who complain a 99 cent ebook is too much money so they go swipe the book for free.) (Or demand the power company give-away unlimited electric for $100/month.)

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[Anonymous Coward]

But isnt it a waste to allocate everyone those speeds when most people only use it for casual internet browsing? or for streaming videos?
Thats like giving everyone their own lane on a freeway, it means you will never get stuck in traffic, but it will cost a lot more and most of the time it will be mostly empty

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[Jane Q. Public]

"you see the same argument applies when you're on 64kbit connection and so is everyone else."

But that's not so much the case anymore. Larger ISPs, and many of the smaller ones, have moved to tiered pricing plans, depending on the bandwidth they dole out to you.

If they're going to charge for the extra speed, they had better deliver that extra speed, or else it's fraud.

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[BronsCon]

Then as long as my torrenting doesn't increase your speeds above the "up to" number you're buying from your ISP, you can STFU, you're getting what you're paying for. If my torrenting ever causes your speeds to exceed your purchased "up to" rate, then you can complain about it.

Wait, what? Why are you defending that practice?

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[Charliemopps]

Wording they only recently changed.
Now they'll sell you "up to 20mb!" in an area fed by a single T1.

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[cpu6502]

>>>why would fibre becoming standard change the thing at all?

Because when you have a 1 Gbit/s line you can torrent a movie in just a few seconds. That means the line will be open most of the time & there will be no contention between neighbors. Contrast that with a line that is only 1 Mbit/s and is busy downloading a single movie for hours, and thus not open for other neighbors to surf the web.

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[houstonbofh]

QOS will do that as well if you do not have enough bandwidth to support all your users... Which was my point.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... Why was this modded insightful?

http://gizmodo.com/5929295/googles-crazy-1000mbps-fiber-internet-connection-is-out-today

I guess 60 bucks doesn't come close to 70..

Face it, you overpay for underrated service but have been conned into thinking it's as good as it gets (or even close) because you live in a 'first world country'

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[lister king of smeg]

oh no that would mean they would have to invest in infrastructure

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[houstonbofh]

Or some type of remote desktop app... Click... NO NOT THERE, NO!!!!! Crap.

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[alen]

ok fine

let the ISP's charge a few hundred a month for people who torrent and p2p all the time. the same people will scream how its unfair, the end of the world and how we need a system where the cost is spread out among all the customers

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[Bengie]

Hurricane Electric - $1/Mb advertised rate

GPON(2.5Gb) - Assuming all users on a 32 person node max the connection, about 70Mb/s

At this point the end user has an effective dedicated 70Mb/s(78Mb/s but rounded down for safety margin) to the ISP, the ISP can then purchase 1Mb/s of dedicated bandwidth for $1/month and even cheaper if peering.

For $70/month, the ISP can purchase 70Mb/s. Add the cost of infrastructure(connection fee), $15/month. For $100/month, one could expect 70Mb/s of dedicated bandwidth and a small margin of profit for the ISP. I'm sure there are other costs and the ISP needs enough margin to cover future expansion/etc, but it's not far-fetched to get decent amounts of dedicated bandwidth.

This is not a dedicated connection, but that doesn't remove the fact that there is a 1:1 ratio of max consumption to available bandwidth. I'm sure other bottlenecks will occur.
State non-profit co-op sells 1Gb dedicated fiber connections to Hospitals/Schools/Libraries for $300/month. And yes, they do get 1Gb effective. This is because the state University buys bandwidth in bulk, has massive peering agreements, and re-sells at non-profit rates; and these are the real-world prices to break even on a 1Gb dedicated line.

Before you break into the "laying fiber is expensive", real world recent studies have shown running fiber from the ISP to the house plus datacenter equipment is actually LESS expensive than the fiber receiver installed. Installing the fiber to Gb Ethernet converter at each customer's house makes up 60%-70% of the total costs.

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[ganjadude]

that Is my point, if they dont want me using the service they sold me, they should not sell me that package and do something that does work

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[Jane Q. Public]

"They deliberately throttle down traffic they feel is associated to pirating."

I think you mean filesharing, not pirating. They are not the same things. Pirating is a crime, filesharing is not. Look it up. Copyright "pirating" has been a specific legal term for close to 100 years. It's amazing how many people have come to misuse it in just the last few. Of course, we have the "content industry" to thank for that propaganda.

In any case, here's the problem: first off, throttling filesharing requires deep packet inspection, which is very undesirable and may be illegal in some circumstances. Second, throttling regardless of what is being sent or received is illegal in the United States. Comcast has already been chastised by the FCC for that. I don't recall exactly, but I think they made a settlement and agreed not to throttle, in order to stay out of litigation (which Comcast would almost certainly have lost).

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[dywolf]

Who the hell put this to interesting? This is trolling and flamebait at best

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[cpu6502]

>>> It's no different from the morons who go on about population density in Canada being the reason for ancient speeds and horrible prices.

It makes no sense to compare apples to oranges (a northern continent-spanning country versus a little teeny-tiny Slovenia in the heart of civilization). When you compare the WHOLE of the European Union versus the whole of the Canadian Confederation, you will see that Canada is only 2 Mbit/s slower (average speed). You will also find Canada is faster than Mexico, Brazil, China, India, and the Russian Federation.

You will also discover that Canada's eastern provinces like Ontario are faster (on average) than many European states. For example: Faster than Spain. And France.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Look at what Google did: $70.00 (+ $300 connection fee) and you get a gigabit upload and download without caps

At what contention ratio? Are those speeds guaranteed?

Also, all types of "server" are banned from their network as it may impinge on the "experience" of other users. Doesn't sound like they have built adequate capacity, does it?

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[Jane Q. Public]

"It's no different from the morons who go on about population density in Canada being the reason for ancient speeds and horrible prices."

They're not morons. They are at least partly correct.

The majority of the cost of the infrastructure isn't the backbone (which runs from city to city), but the hubs and the infamous "last mile". And your bandwidth depends on the quality of the infrastructure.

That last mile is far more expensive in sparsely populated, rural areas. THAT is why population density matters. It doesn't matter so much anymore how remote the city is, as long as it's a city.

Throughout the U.S., there are strong correlations between bandwidth, price, and population density. That correlation would be even stronger if the ISPs' pricing structure did not tend to spread the cost between regions.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Why should "unlimited be unlimited" and does any ISP ever explicitly state it's "unlimited?" Most major carrier and cableco ISPs have bandwidth caps so by definition there's no such thing as unlimited.

What you're paying for is a very cheap, shared, commodity pipe to your ISP. Beyond that it's a crap shoot. Hopefully they have multiple 10-40gig uplinks to the major carriers, private peering with the largest video web sites (Netflix, Youtube, etc.), and possibly caching to make the "average user" happy that they're "getting what they paid for." Most of the major cable/telco ISPs have this kind of infrastructure to support their broadband users so if you "only" get 5-10 meg downloads sometime instead of 50, that's not a bad deal, really.

If you understood anything at all about the costs and economics associated with bringing 50/25 to your door step for how little you pay for it you'd never again feel the indignant and petulant sense of entitlement you feel now about what you think you "should" be getting from the ISP. As someone who worked for several years in the dialup ISP business I got a major whiff of that entitlement and it's quite unappealing.

Re:Good

[Jane Q. Public]

Mod up.

"That was part of their agreement to buy NBC Universal."

That's right. I knew it was an agreement with the FCC, but my memory was not complete. I was thinking that the FCC was threatening litigation. Instead, they wanted to prevent Comcast from discriminating based on where the content was coming from... as they are now doing with their game content.

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[Anonymous Coward]

and so to satisfy this, they would need to invest in much more infastructure.

so assuming they currently have about 20 users sharing a line, that means to give everyone dedicated lines costs to the user would increase by about 20 times.
I think i would much rather leave it how it is than have my internet cost 20x as much

so that leaves throttling. internet usage isnt even, its mainly huge spikes. so to ensure your speeds arent compromised at all, they would have to completely block torrenting, which would piss off a lot of customers who would then leave. It makes more financial sense to have everyone a little bit unhappy so that they stay, than to push a large number of customers away

Re:Good

[HermMunster]

Of course, they are guaranteed. Google has been able to accomplish this because they have used new technologies that have brought down the cost of implementation significantly. The US's established ISPs have not even begun to re-invest. They want to suck the bucks out of everyone for as long as they can.

The rest of the world offers significantly higher speeds than the US and you don't hear their customer base complaining that their services are being hobbled. And stop muddying the waters with superfluous word use. The only thing limiting their offering is everyone else. And when Google expands that'll become less and less an issue.

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[Bengie]

P2P is dwarfed by Netflix alone

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[Nugoo]

Um, didn't US ISP's get billions of dollars in tax breaks to lay down fibre across the country a decade ago? You're getting ripped off with prices, compared to most other first-world countries; you're getting ripped off with service, with unadvertised bandwidth caps and throttled protocols; and you got ripped off by paying taxpayer money for something that was never done. If I lived there, I'd use every bit (pun not intended) of bandwidth I was paying for, all the time, just out of spite. Not that using a service you pay for should be considered a spiteful act.

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[ganjadude]

you are only thinking in one term. why does there have to be a one size fits all scheme? time warner already sells 3 or 4 tiers at different speed rates from 5-1 to 75-30. If those people who only want to use email and news readers, they can gladly save money by using a lower tier. if they need to chage people like me a few bucks more to cover them paying less, also a fair trade.

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[Anonymous Coward]

sigh.. it's funny how many people don't understand congestion (probably from a not so subtle effort from ISPs to claim they don't have it whenever they roll out a new technology).. it's all about how oversubscribed the ISPs overall pipe is.. It doesn't matter whether you are on FIOS or on DSL or on Cable.. the bottleneck is just in different points along the ISP's chain depending on the technology.

People need to stop defending the crap we are offered for the price we pay. They need to start upgrading their networks, something they should have been doing all along regardless of whether FIOS was in place or not. If they want to sell "unlimited" (which many do in the US) then they should have kept upgrading their infrastructure appropriately.

Instead, most raised their rates and let their infrastructure stagnate (even while the cost to improve said infrastructure has steadily dropped over time), then cried when normal growth and (both in population, and in usage) has gone up.

It doesn't take a genius to just look the growth of simple desktop applications over time (in terms of size) and the content richness of the web to realize that this was going to be necessary.

But like with many things, greed speaks louder than wisdom.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say half of those $60 are internal cost and profit, leaving $30 for the internet connection and cost of leasing copper to the customer. Let's further assume that half of those $30 lease the copper and the remaining $15 pay for the uplink, all transit. I'll refer you to this for an idea what you get for $15. (I calculate about 6Mbps dedicated, and that is with rather generous assumptions about the other costs of an ISP. 6Mbps nonstop amounts to roughly 2TB/month.)

You're not going to get more if you don't demand more. People who are advocating volume limits and/or throttling are either ISP shills or stupid like a brick. Americans in particular are getting fleeced by the ISPs.

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[Anonymous Coward]

But what if you cant afford that and still want to torrent? Those people will cause the same issues as they do now.

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[geoffball]

I'd like to torrent me some Chronic.

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[Anonymous Coward]

this is ridiculous.
I hear what you are saying. But I am a network designer and to design networks the way you say is absolutely prohibitive.

Nothing gets designed like this; and none of us could afford anything if it did.
it is a statistical game of use prediction.

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[misexistentialist]

There is no ISP or book publisher that bills based on cost. This requires auditing by a 3rd party, like the government's regulation of the power company.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Wording they only recently changed. Now they'll sell you "up to 20mb!" in an area fed by a single T1.

Oh please, people like you have been making that argument around here for YEARS. So it's not that recently changed.

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[Stalks]

co-lo prices and last-mile prices are vastly different.

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[sglewis100]

$100/mo does buy the equivalent of 7Mbit dedicated at a colo (100Mbit burstable connection). $60/month should be enough to buy 4.2Mbit (1.36 terabytes/mo). If you're paying more for a wired connection, you're being ripped off.

So a colo, where hundreds or thousands of customers convene in one centralized location, with massive amounts of infrastructure coming in at huge scales maps exactly pricewise to getting that same bandwidth and pricing to every single house in america.

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[misexistentialist]

Even if you use your connection for 1 hour per day, you could be degrading your neighbors' service while they are trying to stream a movie. Either the capacity is there or it isn't. The availability of fiber is the time when caps become a reasonable idea, because the cost to the ISP of each household downloading a petabyte could possibility be unsustainable with a rate increase

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[Anonymous Coward]

If you would like to pay for dedicated bandwidth, you can definitely do so, however you are taking advantage of the cost of the pipe being spread among many people with the expectation they won't all max it out at once. Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe.

Just keep sticking it to the man though.

Oh really, it doesn't? How about the $70 for Google's 1Gb line both ways with no bandwidth limitations? Pretty sure Google losing money on that, but go ahead and keep thinking that the Telecos aren't ripping everyone off

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[AliasMarlowe]

If you would like to pay for dedicated bandwidth, you can definitely do so, however you are taking advantage of the cost of the pipe being spread among many people with the expectation they won't all max it out at once. Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe.

Just keep sticking it to the man though.

So I guess my euro45/month does not cover the 100/100Mbps fiber link we have at our house? It's a standard domestic service: uncapped, unthrottled, with no blocked ports or other limits. I don't think we've gone past 1TB in a month, but we've certainly exceeded 500GB a few times. Two adults and two teenagers and our own web server add up to a fair amount of traffic. We're not egregious users either, and some others in the area do exceed our throughput. Some ISPs are not as miserly as others, but still manage to make a profit.

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[number11]

Chronic torrenters use a disproportionately high amount of bandwidth compared to other people. Your desire to attain every single movie released in the past 30 years in high def shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for.

How about your desire to watch movies via Netflix? My typical internet usage doesn't involve watching videos/movies.

Netflix accounts for 24.71 percent of Internet traffic, Add another 9.85% for Youtube. So shouldn't we be throttling all you people who consume obscene amounts of bandwidth watching video on demand? BitTorrent only 17.23 percent.

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[Andtalath]

So, you say you are using between 1.5 and 3 Mb/s for a whole family.

Barring peak speeds, this would mean, if you where a typical customer, about 2000 euros a month for 100 Mb/s.

Not unreasonable, just stating what it actually costs.

So to state that you should have a right to 100 Mb/s for 45 euros seems kinda silly.

Of course, I myself pay approximately 7 euros for my 100/100 with static IP and only port 25 blocked.

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[aardvarkjoe]

If they cant handle it, they should stop selling it. As far as I am concerned, I pay for unlimited bandwidth at 50 down 25 up. If I want to upload all 25 and download all 50 24/7/365, that is what I payed for.

Every ISP I've dealt with in the last ten years has included terms that they can throttle or cap your service at some point, and also do not guarantee a particular rate. As far as I'm concerned, you're getting what you paid for -- unless your ISP's terms say differently.

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[Pf0tzenpfritz]

Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe.

Why would anyone pay that much for something as a simple uplink? We pay about $30/month for unlimited and unthrottled traffic. Our ISP has been in business for 15 years and they don't seem to make a bad cut.

Re:Good

[hawkinspeter]

I agree with you (chronic torrenter here), but it does make sense to mark torrent traffic as less important than other traffic. It makes little difference if a torrent is slowed down due to peak network demands, but you don't want a Skype call to fail.

I'm with Virgin Media and they will throttle you if you use too much bandwidth during the day, so I set up transmission to run full speed overnight and throttle down during the day.

I'd like to see some kind of QOS that lets torrents be marked as less imortant than http/https, but I don't want ISPs to enforce really slow torrent speeds all the time - just at peak times.

Re:Good

[ZiggieTheGreat]

And if everyone else's TW experience is like mine (warning: anecdotal) - it doesn't matter what speed you pay for, you will have crappy service.

Re:Good

[na1led]

No I think your wrong. I haven't seen any evidence that my ISP throttles File Sharing. I can download legit Torrent files very quickly, but try downloading a movie and it's almost impossible unless you encrypt the connection, and even then it's still very slow. There is clear evidence that many ISP's have ways to stop torrents from seeding and limiting their bandwidth, and it all depends on what you are downloading.

Re:Good

[wierd_w]

Yes they were, in the 90s.

However, they just pocketed the money and ran.
"We cant possibly keep track of every dollar that enters our enterprise!" they proclaim.

So, basically Unckey Sam just gave them a several billion dollar windfall to feed to boardmembers and investors.

But the ISPs are "clearly" victims here. Clearly.

Re:Good

[Imrik]

I wouldn't mind this as long as they didn't charge the extra if you do your downloads during non-peak hours.

Re:Good

[morgauxo]

That's stupid!

The routers should be configured such that when 100 users are moving data at a given moment then each user's data moves through the link at the lesser of 1/100th of total speed of the link or the greatest speed at which the link feeding the user's data into this one is sending it. (Actually, when you consider the links that some of the other 99 users's data is coming in at are probably not coming in at 1/100th the speed of this link the others can be sped up to greater than 1/100th to take advantage of this) Anyway, the point is why aren't these routers smart enough to route fairly yet? Why is it even possible for one user to "hog" the pipe? This seems like yet another case of attempting to solve a technological problem with policy.

There is no reason why a specific protocol should be targeted for throttling. That just makes an incentive for somebody to come up with a new protocol whose only advantage is that it doesn't look like the old one to the traffic shaping software. Then that one can get throttled too. So the cycle repeats. The likely result is that the ISPs throttle any data that is between two residential connections as opposed to a residential connection downloading a page from some commercial site (if they aren't doing this already). Then the only way you can get a decent presence on the internet is to buy into some corporate host. Thus the internet becomes less an open network and more just a media tool like AOL was.

Re:Good

[morgauxo]

The bandwidth you get then should be proportional to the size of the pipe vs how many other people are trying to use it at this moment though.. not based on what protocol you are using!

Re:Good

[morgauxo]

Why should my download of some Linux iso via bittorrent be slowed down while you hog all the bandwidth watching Nyancat on Youtube?

Re:Good

[ThatsMyNick]

Actually I would be fine with a 200 GB cap. Provided they would increase it every year, to what is appropriate at the point of time. I dont want to be struck with a 200 GB cap, when the average bandwidth usage increases, and streaming becomes the most common way to get content.

Re:Good

[Imrik]

That was kind of his point, if population density was the reason for the poor speeds then large cities would have good connections while sparsely populated areas would not. This is not the case.

Re:Good

[Imrik]

And more importantly, streamers tend to use bandwidth during peak hours while torrenters will often leave it running when they aren't using the computer for something else. Although, to be fair, some people are both.

Re:Good

[Imrik]

I support usage-based billing as long as it takes the time of usage into account as that is far more important than the amount of usage.

Re:Good

[nabsltd]

Because you want expensive service AND a cheap bill, at the same time.

This fallacy is exactly the thinking that ISPs in the US encourage. Actual costs for bandwidth are dropping, but prices are no longer dropping. Instead, we are seeing price jumps and ads for faster and faster "up to" rates that seldom (with the exception of Verizon FiOS) are truly available 24/7. Even Verizon is now raising FiOS prices because they can. When other ISPs charge $60/month for "not-really 20Mbps", it's pretty much a no-brainer for Verizon to sell "really 50Mbps" for $80.

ISPs do their best to contribute to the feeling by people that they need more (both by the "up to" issue and their pricing structures). Verizon advertises their $80 50/25 as "Recommended Internet for 3-4 devices", which is a lot less than it can really handle. Right next to that, they have 150/65 service for just $20 more, and I'm sure a lot of people will go ahead and pay for that even though there is no way they can actually use it (not because the speed isn't there, but simply because the uses aren't there). Yet, a typical home can't use more than about 50Mbps. You could max that out for a while with torrents, but unless you're a leech and don't share back, after a month or so you probably have a full hard drive and can't download any more.

If there were actual competition in the US instead of government-sanctioned monopolies, pretty much every private home could get far more than they need for about $50/month, and the ISPs would still be making 30-40% profit.

Re:Good

[nabsltd]

It doesn't matter whether you are on FIOS or on DSL or on Cable.. the bottleneck is just in different points along the ISP's chain depending on the technology.

Actually, it does matter. FiOS isn't oversubscribed. Every user could use 100% of their bandwidth at the same time and it would work to the edge of the Verizon network. The tricky issue would be finding sources that could provide that much data into the Verizon network.

Yes, I know that there is still a "bottleneck" in my example, but you can't blame your ISP for things out of their control. Within their own network, Verizon gives FiOS users 100% of bandwidth, and it's not their fault if other ISPs can't feed the Verizon network fast enough to keep up.

Re:Good

[Larryish]

Ratio, baby!!!!11

Re:Good

[nabsltd]

I can download legit Torrent files very quickly, but try downloading a movie and it's almost impossible unless you encrypt the connection, and even then it's still very slow.

It's possible that your "legit" torrents never leave your ISPs network. It's usually only at boundaries that they throttle. So, check the location of the peers on the torrents and see which ones are fast and which are slow.

Re:Good

[nabsltd]

BTW verizon has never throttled my torrent download. Of course I'm only using 700kbit/s so maybe that's why.

My average speed over the last year was 1.1/6.8 Mbps (down/up with Verizon FiOS). Verizon doesn't need to throttle, because they don't oversubscribe FiOS, and DSL is self-limiting (because of the distance from the DSLAM).

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we stop it with caps? Caps are useless. The ISP doesn't buy their bandwidth with caps, they shouldn't sell it. Caps aren't good for the ISPs and they're definitely not good for their customers.

200 people each downloading 1MB of data in 1 minute costs the ISP more than 200 people each downloading 20G over a month.

It's all about peak utilization. Smart ISPs set up reasonable expectations with their customers and upgrade their infrastructure to support those expectations. Greedy ISPs cap and complain about usage. The former are perfectly capable of making a profit; the latter make a profit and behave like spoiled children at the same time.

Re:Good

[Jane Q. Public]

"I haven't seen any evidence that my ISP throttles File Sharing. I can download legit Torrent files very quickly, but try downloading a movie and it's almost impossible..."

Downloading a movie is filesharing. It is NOT "piracy"!!!

"Piracy" is a legal term, and it means copying and distributing copyrighted works for profit.

Close to zero percent of the people uploading and downloading files via P2P are "pirates"... that would defeat their whole purpose.

I'm not picking, this is an important point!!! Filesharing (uploading/downloading via P2P) is a civil infraction. Piracy is a crime. In some cases, a very serious crime.

Re:Good

[Jane Q. Public]

"That was kind of his point"

No, it wasn't.

"... if population density was the reason for the poor speeds then large cities would have good connections while sparsely populated areas would not."

Yes. But CITIES are not "sparsely populate areas". RURAL areas are. That was MY point.

The so-called "last mile" difference between one city and the next is relatively miniscule compared to the difference between, say, a downtown and a farm 10 miles outside of town.

And that last mile is not necessarily cheaper in "densely populated" cities as opposed to those that are less dense. Sure, people are closer together but a lot of the costs, including property and access (which you need to run your cables, for example) is a lot more expensive per foot.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the simple fact that the internet is fundamentally designed to be oversubscribed ? I'm not just talking about the consumer to lex level. But lexes to central sites. Central sites between one another. Central sites to other isps (especially once one moves long distance) ?

Think about it. What is the mathematical implication of a non-oversubscribed internet ? Ah simple, that every host can satisfy the maximum possible request that can come in. What is that maximum possible request ? Well, what comes in if every other host on the internet fills it's bandwith sending to your station, and receiving the same amount of data (symmetric) or 10x more (assymetric).

Obviously that means that an internet that actually delivers "what is advertised" can only have 2 computers on it in the symmetric case, and is not possible at all for any number of computers in the assymetric case.

And if the isp does not get to treat packets special, then you're mandating by law that one customer can destroy the experience of all other customers (well, ont one, but the smallest number of customers that can fill any backbone connection, usually 100 or at most 1000 customers). Given bittorrent's popularity, it's very simple : if you have low latency on your internet connections, if skype is actually usable on your connection, your isp is not running a neutral network. If they weren't, bittorrent would fill the pipes and the buffers of all devices in the chain, creating huge delays and packet loss, and because the vast majority of tcp connections would be bittorrent connections, it would receive 99%+ of the available bandwidth.

Would you really want to be on such an isp ?

Re:Good

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Yup. And charge you more to recoup their greater investment.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Question : is it even possible to build a network that can handle all edge stations transmitting at maximum speeds ?

Mathematical answer : if using symmetric speeds, there is ONE network that can do it : 2 computers connected back to back. EVERY other configuration cannot do it. If using asymmetric speeds, it is not possible at all.

Given that isps have profit margins of ~30% at best, the backbone increases that profit would pay for are minimal.

Re:Good

[rtfa-troll]

Nah he's the guy that takes the $300 when the airline tells him they overbooked and would he mind going on standby on another flight over the next couple days. He thinks he's getting a sweet deal, too. That airline is being so nice to him, giving him free stuff and everything...

There are lots of people that would be right that's the airline offer is a great deal. Maybe you took the cheapest ticket and $300 is actually a pretty good return. More likely, you get told an actual flight; you get given a hotel and you get to spend another day or two in your holiday destination that you couldn't afford otherwise. You may be a student travelling around the world not caring where or when you get to a place and $300 is an entire weeks budget. If people are happy what's the problem? If they aren't then they should just learn to say "no thanks".

What's key here is that, every time I see it, the airline is completely up front about what they offer. Everyone gets to make their own adult choice. In the case of ISPs, it's impossible for an ISP to offer a real "unlimited" subscription. They will always find that the price they can charge is below the cost because the other companies pretend to sell "unlimited" but in fact don't deliver. This undermines the customers percieved value for the real unlimited offers.

Re:Good

[na1led]

If you download.a movie or song that you didn't pay for, its called piracy! Look it up.

Re:Good

[ganjadude]

if that is the case, stop labeling it "unlimited" and be honest, if not, leave me the hell alone for for using what I payed for

Re:Good

[AmberBlackCat]

They also say "up to" with the knowledge that nobody will understands it means "hardly ever reaching". I wish we had laws against misleading advertising in the United States. Instead, they allow "puffery", which seems to me like the opposite of a law against misleading advertising. As a side note, Google Fiber also says "up to".

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Create artificial scarcity - The ENRON incentive

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell are you talking about? The internet doesn't have filling stations. Please stick to talking about things you understand. You obviously know nothing about the internet.

Re:Good

[MatthiasF]

"why would fibre becoming standard change the thing at all?"

Because if files remain about the same size and the bandwidth increases, the file download takes less time and thus less a disruption on everyone else.

That assumption is out the window though if in this fibre utopia everyone discovers they need 60 megapixel videos of their favorite pornos.

Re:Good

[Jane Q. Public]

"If you download.a movie or song that you didn't pay for, its called piracy! Look it up."

YOU look it up, in a LEGAL book, dimwit. It has had the SAME legal meaning for around 100 years, maybe more.

It's also DEFINED that way by Federal copyright law. I repeat: copyright infringement (which is what uploading or downloading is), is a CIVIL INFRACTION, not a crime.

PIRACY is the distribution of illegal copyrighted works FOR A PROFIT. Which is a VERY different thing and is a CRIME. It can even be a felony, depending on the severity of the case.

Since most people uploading and downloading have no profit motive, they are NOT "pirates", and they are not criminals. By the 100-year-old DEFINITION of the word in the legal books. That is, at least if you live in the U.S. Repeat, just in case it didn't sink in: In the United States, copyright piracy is a crime. Uploading and downloading for personal use are NOT.

I'm am done with this. If you aren't going to bother to find an authoritative reference and look it up yourself, I have nothing further to say.

Re:Good

[KingMotley]

That's a pretty good example. Of course, almost all "all you can eat buffets" have either a maximum plate limit, or a time limit, and none of them will let you come back tomorrow since you can eat more then. It's people like you that make companies have to put stupid things on the label for asprin bottles, like... Not a suppository. Not for use in the eyes. Don't eat the whole bottle at once.

Sometimes, a little common sense is implied. Wish more people had it.

Re:Good

[KingMotley]

Or they could just do what they are now... Use QoS and throttle down traffic that isn't time sensitive and consumes a lot of bandwidth (bittorrent, mainly).

Did your service contract say they would deliver your top speed all the time across all types of traffic? No? Oh, if you wanted that, you should have gotten the service that guarantees it. Or gotten the service that guarantees they will handle all traffic the same. Didn't get that one either? Don't like it when it works both ways do ya?

Cry me a river.

Re:Good

[thegarbz]

Actually, it does matter. FiOS isn't oversubscribed.

Yet. The fallacy in your argument is that you assume a system capable of providing 1Gbps to each user at the same time all the time. Hardware doesn't work like that. The fibre may depending on how users are allocated and how it's setup, but the routing system certainly can't.

Then there's the fallacy of assuming free time on the fibre due to peak usage being spread over time. It's not, as any mobile data subscriber can tell you the system typically slows to a crawl at 6pm when people come home from work. So now we got you and all your neighbours using the 1Gbps at roughly the same time.

The division of bandwidth must come in at some point. Unfortunately there's nothing that is going to stop ISPs over subscribing FiOS. Also with the rapid growth in the size of data there's nothing slowing down the growing complexity of our day to day web use. With greater speed comes the ability to assume larger amounts of data. 3DHD Youtube!

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

common sense says that you should explain exactly what you *actually* mean when advertising products and services. Rather than presenting half truths and bollocks, then getting annoyed when others call you out

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

And discounts/refunds for any data corruption in transit, surely? Otherwise that's just ASKING for ISPs leave faults unsolved

Re:Good

[drsmithy]

unlimited should be unlimited

You're paying for unlimited downloads, not unlimited bandwidth.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should my download of some Linux iso via bittorrent be slowed down while you hog all the bandwidth watching Nyancat on Youtube?

because watching Nyancat on Youtube does not consume a full 25mbps.

Re:Good

[nabsltd]

Yet.

Or ever, based on the hardware they are throwing at it. Verizon has been pretty clear that they won't ever oversubscribe FiOS, at least not on the neighborhood level.

They could have rolled out the "Quantum" much earlier with no actual issues, but in each neighborhood they waited until every piece of hardware could handle 100% bandwidth at 100% uptake. What this means is that right now, in my neighborhood, every home could get 300/65 Mbps FiOS with no contention, ever. In some parts of the country, the hardware is better or worse, so those places have different max speed plans available.

So, if only 50% of my neighborhood purchases FiOS, and the average speed they buy is 50Mbps, then only 8% of the bandwidth for the neighborhood is actually being used. This allows another neighborhood to use more than average and still keep the overall Verizon network at less than 100% capacity. By the time there is enough uptake, Verizon will be able to upgrade their backbones to handle the aggregate.

The only thing that bothers me is that instead of doing this with the funds they got in the 90s, Verizon is building the network with money they get now from subscribers. Since FiOS is far faster than any other ISP where it is available, there is enough uptake to allow buildout of the next area. Also, their prices are not going down as they expected they would (and did for a while), because other ISPs are raising theirs, and FiOS still wins the price/performance battle.

The other thing to remember is that FiOS has symmetric speed available, and the only reason Verizon doesn't sell it that way at very high speeds is because of peering agreement costs. So, it's possible to saturate your personal upstream FiOS without ever even coming close to bothering anybody else's performance, even if FiOS ever becomes oversubscribed.

So now we got you and all your neighbours using the 1Gbps at roughly the same time.

That's where you miss the reality of FiOS...there is something like 50Gbps available per neighborhood. Even before "Quantum", each neighborhood had more than 3Gbps available.

Re:Good

[na1led]

OMG, hey Bone Head, where do you think the word Piracy came from? Pirates steal! Get it! It doesn't matter if I keep it for myself or sell it.

Re:Good

[thegarbz]

The reality you miss is the timesharing of the backbone. Even if I believed the claimed figure of 50Gbps (when currently many providers can't even bother to upgrade their aging ADSL equipment I highly doubt we'll see state of the art switching in every suburban exchange), ultimately ISPs love to maintain central control over things. Verizon is a proponent of deep packet inspection and has put in a request for proposal as well. So assuming various neighbourhoods can handle the 50Gbps bandwidth, just how much gear and bandwidth will go into watching what customers do?

I frankly take it with a whole kg of salt when someone says FiOS will fix any problem that is inherent to the way the telecom industry is setup, and isn't just a technical issue. I'm keen to see what happens in 5 years, but I'm not hopeful.

Re:Good

[mgcarley]

Using your logic of the buffet, one could also say that the restaurant would throw you out if you tried to take the entire buffet. What is served there is for everyone in the restaurant, not just your table, and the all-you-can-eat idea is based on the premise that you can only realistically consume so much as a human being. You can not literally sit there 24x7x365 consuming every piece of food the restaurant puts out, so why do you think you should be allowed to do the same with your Internet? Just because your computer can sit there doing something 24x7x365, you as a human being cannot. This is part of the problem, actually.

The kind of usage you're describing (being allowed to saturate your 50mbit/s pipe 24x7) simply would not be considered reasonable - that equates to about... 15TB a month of transfer, which is surprisingly difficult to maintain (tried it) but also is well beyond the realms (at this time) of the average user who probably has 1 or 2TB if they're lucky... it's only us geeks (and businesses and people who *need* large storage arrays) who actually have 4, 8, 16 or more TB at our disposal at the moment. This will change, of course, but as will the ISP offerings.

Anyway, with regards to the use of the word "unlimited", deep down in the recesses of the agreement you'd have signed when you subscribed, the ISP will have a clause somewhere outlining that your usage should be "reasonable" or "fair" (if it's not got a limit that is explicitly defined) and that excessive usage will lead to "traffic management" and so on.

As such, I think that while in some respects you are right in that ISPs should put up or shut up on the promise of "unlimited bandwidth", the simple fact is that truly unlimited bandwidth likely is *not* possible, and it's really the advertising that needs to change, that is to say that basically, no ISP can realistically offer "unlimited bandwidth" these days, period, and the terminology should be replaced.

I personally like "flat-rate" as it refers to pricing, not usage - and with that, we can define the usage as simply being "reasonable" - some ISPs I've seen define this as "up to 5x the average user" (which comes out at anywhere from 100 to 400GB per month depending on the ISP/country/etc) and at the end of the day, if some traffic is zero-rated thanks to peering with [insert streaming service of choice, be it Netflix, Hulu, iSky (NZ), Bigflix (India), Quikflix (Aussie), Youtube etc etc etc] then the worries about crossing some arbitrary bandwidth cap can disappear and become almost irrelevant.

Re:Good

[mgcarley]

I think what people (including myself) are trying to point out is that you are *not* paying for a dedicated 50mbit/s pipe. You are paying to share that bandwidth with your neighbours/street/neighbourhood/town.

End of discussion.

Re:Good

[mgcarley]

Clearly you've never tried laying infrastructure. You're forgetting all of the costs associated with civil works and so forth, and these make up a pretty significant portion of the overall costs of laying infrastructure, whereas, contrary to what you claim, the cost of the ONT is actually a fairly small part of the total (by most accounts 15% at most), so, I'd like to know what studies you've been reading, because the ones I've got in my hands indicate that you're looking at the better part of US$2,000 per household if we assume suburban conditions in a first-world country (detached housing, 30m road frontage, 5-15m from the footpath to the door).

Where I'm laying fibre it costs me about US$1,000 for a 48-apartment building BUT this is NOT including the customer equipment (between $50 and $150 depending on the unit) or the civil works (varies by neighbourhood, city & method) or labour... which is only about $50 per apartment but by the time they get service I've still spent over $300 which I then have to recoup - in a third-world country - and so my baseline price for infrastructure is $20 or so per month before I've even delivered any bandwidth, irrespective of speed or usage or equipment in my DC.

And you're also forgetting about OPEX, which, while quite low with fibre, still do exist and have to be accounted for.

Anyway, after all of that, I have to think about bandwidth & distribution. If I contend bandwidth at 50:1 at my network border I'm probably looking at around $40/subscriber (if I offer say 50mbit/s to the end users) but due to the aforementioned contention ratio I can actually only "afford" about 1mbit/s worth of usage (or somewhere around 300GB/month), hence I am forced to implement a fair-usage policy if I'm to keep my prices palatable, and even at these speeds, I'm not going to saturate my PON tree, but frankly, that's the least of my worries.

Now, I will grant you that my bandwidth prices are significantly higher than what I would find in the USA, but, even at $1/mbit for peering bandwidth there are still costs which you're not taking in to account, and I should also like to point out that you're also assuming that every ISP is using FTTH or ready to start building FTTH at an outright cost of $X per subscriber (depending on your location etc) - instead we need to look at what the costs are now given the majority of the world is unfortunately still on DSL or Cable which have a completely different set of overheads.

Re:Good

[BronsCon]

Have you ever set up a LAN? No? I'm guessing you've never done anything more complext than that, either. You seem to have a vague understanding of the principles, so I won't say you have no idea what you're talking about, but I will say you don't know enough to berate me, or anyone else, speaking factually about this topic.

The internet is not designed to be oversubscribed, WTF-ever that means. If I buy a 1gbit commit from a backbone provider, I can saturate that line 24x7 without affecting service for any of that provider's other customers. This is because backbone providers don't oversubscribe; you buy based on commit/burst, commit is guaranteed and burst is what you can do when it's available. Let me rephrase, in light of that last bit: backbone providers don't overcommit; burst is, by definition, oversubscription, but you're not paying for burts, you're paying for commit, and that's not oversubscribed.

All I'm asking is that my ISP not sell me something they can't provide. If they want to sell me a 768k commit, burstable to 20mbit, fine, be up front about what you're selling and I'll accept it and not call it oversubscription, provided the network can actually provide the commit speed at all times.

Re:Good

[BronsCon]

I almost feel like I should complain to Comcast every time I get a 24mbit speed test on my "up to" 12mbit connection. But, then, of course, they advertise "power-boost", which provides additional bandwidth for the first [insert unknown length of time here] of a connection, so, in reality, they've put themselves in a position where whatever they provide is what they said they'd provide; "up to 12mbps, or more". Fuck the laws that let that slide. Seriously.

And yes, I'm complaining that I get 2x the speed I pay for. Consistently. All day. Every day. On sustained connections (HTTP, not torrents).

Verizon FiOS

[CheshireDragon]

Verizon FiOS isn't doing it...yet. I don't D/L all that often, but I did a few days ago and was not throttled. I can get up to 5.1MB down, but I usually get only 2-3MB on torrents anyway. I have not noticed a change.

Re:Verizon FiOS

[houstonbofh]

Ideally, they only shape when congested... Really... I am serious... Stop laughing!

Re:Verizon FiOS

[CheshireDragon]

You are thinking of Verizon Wireless and their Unlimited data subscribers.

Re:Verizon FiOS

[kelemvor4]

Verizon FiOS isn't doing it...yet. I don't D/L all that often, but I did a few days ago and was not throttled. I can get up to 5.1MB down, but I usually get only 2-3MB on torrents anyway. I have not noticed a change.

I pulled down nearly 2TB last month to test my new upgrade to "quantum" 150/75. I didn't see any performance less than 160/78 during any of that testing. I sure feel bad for those Brits stuck with BT or Virgin. I'd be furious if I was not getting the service I was paying for.

Re:Verizon FiOS

[CheshireDragon]

I should be going to that speed soon. I am currently on 35/35 and even with that speed a DVD quality movie only takes about 10min. They are making us Texas customers wait for the good stuff. They have been out in this area for 4yrs now and are building out like crazy all over the place. I hope that speed comes soon. :D

Re:Verizon FiOS

[CheshireDragon]

Just to add...
I do have to agree with getting what you pay for OR at least getting advertised speeds. I test the speed about once, maybe twice a week and I usually get over the 35/35 at 42/38.

When I was at Suddenlink(CABLE) in Tyler or Time Warner(CABLE) here in Dallas, they were slower and even less reliable. time Warner went out about every night for 3 hrs and the 15/2 was more like 12/768k off peak. Suddenlink never went down, but the 10/1 they had was 9/512k off peak

Re:Verizon FiOS

[hawkinspeter]

I'm currently a Brit Virgin user. AFAIK the throttling mainly happens after you use too much daytime (peak time) data. I got a letter from them once asking me to reduce my data usage during the day, so I just adjusted Transmission to switch to full speed overnight.

I quite often see torrents downloading at 2-3MB/s when going full speed which is plenty fast enough. Ultimately, the ISPs know that torrenters are good customers who are willing to pay for greater speeds, so they shoot themselves in their feet if they start screwing with the service too much.

on my cheap (19€/mo) German 16/1 no throttlin

[acidfast7]

Alice/O2 ... I pay for the cheap 16Mb/1Mb package (19€/mo with telephone) and I routinely average 1.5-1.8MB/s with uTottent, which seems quite good to me.

I will use what I buy

[Anonymous Coward]

If I buy a hamburger and fries with a coke at BK, the chuckle-heads behind the counter don't come out and take back ten fries and half the burger.
If I buy a tank of gas the pump guy doesn't follow me around with a hose and siphon back a couple gallons
When I use water the city doesn't ask me to pay for 5 hundred gallons and then say I can only use 4 hundred gallons because 5 hundred would just be too much
When I buy cable TV no one stops me from watching TV 24/7 because I might use too much.
On my land-line I can make non-stop phone calls to Guam and ask the operator there to connect me to Paris and from there to my next-door neighbor and no one complains that I am tying up a line.
If I buy anything else in the entire world no one says boo if I use it all up or even how I use it as long as I don't ACTIVELY stop other people from using it.

God damn it, if you sell me something and I use it, don't come back and say i can't use it because you didn't plan ahead. Get some more bandwidth or cut my rates.

This is BS! These idiots are just shills for the RIAA and co. No other business in the world works like this.

Re:I will use what I buy

[CheshireDragon]

Insurance companies?
I pay outrageous premiums then someone backs into my bumper and causes a small dent. I want this dent fixed so I call my insurance to file a claim and they pull a bitch fit because they have to pay 300$(US) for the dent. Then they demand I pay the 500$ deductible and my rates go up. SO, instead I say 'fuck off' to the insurance company and then pay the 300$ myself to get the dent fixed.




Shall I start in on the medical insurance?




How about the pharmaceutical companies?




How about the food industry?




Are you sure ISP are the only ones like this?

Re:I will use what I buy

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually electricity works like this and, to an extent, so does water. Although to be fair neither is sold as "unlimited" like bandwidth apparently is. With electricity, you have a certain rating that your "service entrance" says you can draw. If everyone draws that at once you get a brownout or blackout. Hmm, they over sold their capacity - just like the ISPs did. It just turns out that they typically don't oversell it by quite as much. Now, I live in California and today at work I got a note from my employer (major company, 100,000 people) that we need to do our best to avoid rolling blackouts today an we should turn off half of our lights, unused equipment, etc. Not to save money - but to prevent the power company from having to have blackouts. So I think we can say for sure that they did oversell their capacity there. Water is really the same way. Have everyone in the neighborhood open their faucet and hoses at the same time. See what happens to water pressure and see if you can take a shower upstairs. The odds are good that you can't. Again - you have a certain capacity (pressure range and flow rate) that you were sold and it can't be achieved if everyone tries at once. ISPs are just more obvious because they oversell by one or two orders of magnitude more than these other services do.

Re:I will use what I buy

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument is flawed.
You pay for X gallons of gas.
You pay for X gallons of water used monthly.
You purchased 1 burger, 1 container of fries, and 1 coke.
Your operator assisted phone call is charged by the minute.

To make your comparison parallel, you would have to buy XXX GB of data, and be denied access to some portion of it. Otherwise you would have to compare speed:
1. How long did it take to fill your gas tank?
2. How long did it take to run the X gallons of water through your tap?
3. How long did it take the chuckle-head behind the counter to fill your order?

There is a difference between paying for a service, and buying a good. You can download as much content as you want over your broadband connection. There are no guarantees on speed unless you have a business-class account.

Re:I will use what I buy

[girlintraining]

How about the food industry?

The average profit margin for most businesses in the US is around 5.5%. The average profit margin for a grocery store is about 0.8%. They also don't charge you taxes, and due to the small margins, most of the people who pick the food and package it are illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage. It's back breaking work, you're in the sun all day, and your skin is regularly cut up from constantly reaching into bushes, etc., to rip the food from the plant, who has had thousands of years to develop defense strategies to keep animals from doing just that.

As to medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies, you can thank your government for that -- they handed them a monopoly on a silver platter and give them large private police forces to travel worldwide attacking and imprisoning whomever threatens the profit margin. ISPs also have a government-mandated monopoly, thanks to exclusive contracts negotiated with municipalities that guarantee they're the only provider in an area. In other parts of the world, pills you pay hundreds of dollars for cost pennies, and internet flows freely from giant pipes, fed to you all day long by beautiful women.

Your government is the sole party to blame for this state of affairs.

Re:I will use what I buy

[cpu6502]

>>>When I buy cable TV no one stops me from watching TV 24/7 because I might use too much.

There is a limit to how many channels the cable company can squeeze through the line, so it is self-limiting. How many times have you turned-on the TV and discovered nothing to watch? That's because there's no more room to add an exra channel that you might enjoy (like Space or Horror Channel). It's congestion.

As for phone calls, they only use 4 kbit/s when digitized so that's why there's no restriction. There's plenty of bandwidth to carry them. Heck you could carry 13 cellphone calls over an old dialup modem!

Re:I will use what I buy

[arth1]

If I buy a hamburger and fries with a coke at BK, the chuckle-heads behind the counter don't come out and take back ten fries and half the burger.

No, but in the US and some other countries, McDonalds does sell you a "quarter-pounder" where the small print says that this is uncooked weight, and the local food regulations allow them to add as much water as they like to their ground meat before cooking it.

What is needed is similar regulation as for the car industry. Where they earlier could say "up to 30 mpg" they now have to be at least slightly more honest, and tell you the typical rate. It should be similar for internet.
Or, even better, not allow "up to" speeds unless they're preceded by a just as prominently displayed "from" speed. FROM 0 bps UP TO 15 Mbps doesn't sound as attractive, now does it?

As for internet access, it shouldn't be called that unless you actually get unfettered internet access. Port blocking, throttling, enforced NAT -- none of this is what we think of as internet. If they sold "Columbia LocalNet including limited access to a remote internet gateway", at least they wouldn't be deliberately deceptive.

Re:I will use what I buy

[HermMunster]

His arguments are fine. He's spot on. Throttling and capping is bait and switch, almost fraudulent. Hell, they even lie to the consumer when they buy the service indicating a bandwidth without telling the customer to divide by 8 (as in megabits vs megabytes).

Re:I will use what I buy

[Jane Q. Public]

"The average profit margin for most businesses in the US is around 5.5%. The average profit margin for a grocery store is about 0.8%."

Yes, but percent margin is an inappropriate measure to use in this situation.

One of the reasons for the small grocery margin (and how they can get away with it and stay in business), is that they do vastly higher volume than most other kinds of stores. So while their margin might be 0.8%, give or take (I have seen it reported as high as 2%), what really matters is that a store can still make $30,000 profit per day.

Re:I will use what I buy

[CheshireDragon]

indicating a bandwidth without telling the customer to divide by 8 (as in megabits vs megabytes).
While we are at it, let's jump the storage manufacturers for doing the same.

Re:I will use what I buy

[HermMunster]

Storage manufacturers aren't doing the same things as ISPs. Most manufacturers do label on their retail boxes indicating the true size of 1 megabyte. The ISP are actually fraudulently selling their offerings. A 12 mb connection is not 12 megabytes, it is 12 megabits, which is a sizable difference in bandwidth. I've had this discussion in my store with many a customer believing they purchased massive bandwidth.

Re:I will use what I buy

[girlintraining]

Yes, but percent margin is an inappropriate measure to use in this situation.

I can only assume you point this out to distract readers from the point; Namely, that the government has created a monopoly which results in massive profits for those companies at the expense of the people consuming those services.

Anyway, not that your point has any merit... if it did, grocery companies would be the darlings of Wall Street, protesters would be outside their headquarters protesting their profiteering ways, and the cover of People magazine would regularly feature The Most Eligible Grocer with a 5 page writeup. None of those things are happening because groceries are one of the few things you can buy and most of the money goes into the production and labor costs of what you're buying.

Re:I will use what I buy

[Jane Q. Public]

"I can only assume you point this out to distract readers from the point;"

Why would you assume that? I'm not trolling, I'm simply saying that you are using inappropriate statistics to try to make YOUR point. (Which, by the way, I have pointed out to you before.)

If you don't think large grocery franchises make good money, you are dreaming. Wal-mart (though admittedly they aren't mainly grocery), Fred Meyer, Safeway, Costco, Sam's, etc., etc., there's a large list.

They aren't "the darlings of Wall Street" in part because their business is relatively steady; there's not much to speculate on.

But in any case, I did use the word "large". I certainly did not try to claim that a mom-and-pop corner grocery is going to make thousands in profit in a day.

Re:I will use what I buy

[Anonymous Coward]

They charge taxes depending on the local state tax laws. Some states have a sales tax on groceries, some don't.

Re:I will use what I buy

[girlintraining]

I suppose now would be a bad time to point out that my step-dad works as a general manager for a grocery store. When I say there's no profit in grocery stores, that's based on direct knowledge. In either event, most people will tell you that, in mature markets, the profit margin is the only thing investors consider, which is best represented as a percentage, not an aggregate. Aggregates only matter for investments in private companies, and of the examples provided... none of them are private.

Re:I will use what I buy

[Jane Q. Public]

"works as a general manager for a grocery store"

That's nice. A nice cozy corner store, does maybe $2000 volume per day? I'm not being sarcastic, but since you gave no other information, how would I know?

"In either event, most people will tell you that, in mature markets, the profit margin is the only thing investors consider, which is best represented as a percentage, not an aggregate. Aggregates only matter for investments in private companies, and of the examples provided... none of them are private."

So, you basically re-worded what I already wrote. The profit margin for commodity retailers like groceries does not change much, so they AREN'T going to be "the darlings" of Wall Street, even if their aggregate is high. That's more-or-less what I stated.

The point is still that you tried to compare a low-margin commodity market to "most" companies, and "most" companies operate on a completely different basis. It's still apples and oranges.

Re:I will use what I buy

[mgcarley]

The above analogies are complete bullshit.

>>>If I buy a hamburger and fries with a coke at BK, the chuckle-heads behind the counter don't come out and take back ten fries and half the burger.
>>>If I buy a tank of gas the pump guy doesn't follow me around with a hose and siphon back a couple gallons
>>>When I use water the city doesn't ask me to pay for 5 hundred gallons and then say I can only use 4 hundred gallons because 5 hundred would just be too much

In these examples you are buying a finite amount of product.

>>>When I buy cable TV no one stops me from watching TV 24/7 because I might use too much.

This is the only one where you are using a resource in an unlimited fashion - although one could argue that the metrics are entirely different because the channel is not dedicated to you - the cost of the channel/programming is shared between yourself and the million other customers of your cable TV provider. If you got a dedicated channel with dedicated content (and you had to pay the salaries and production costs of the same quality of programming), it'd cost you quite a bit more.

>>>On my land-line I can make non-stop phone calls to Guam and ask the operator there to connect me to Paris and from there to my next-door neighbor and no one complains that I am tying up a line.

Are you on the phone 24x7x365? I didn't think so. And chances are that this is a VOIP call - there are no "lines" to tie up. The rates they charge vs the costs they incur are sufficiently different that making large volumes of calls to countries with low termination rates (like France) doesn't matter, but even then, I'm fairly sure there would be a fair-usage policy attached to your landline.

Re:I will use what I buy

[mgcarley]

Stop right there: Electricity, while "unlimited" (like bandwidth apparently is) is still subject to usage-based billing.

An ISP offering you "unlimited bandwidth" is charging you a flat-rate.

Big. Difference.

Countermeasures

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always wondered what it would be like to fight back against some of these throttling mechanisms. Since they rely on breaking tcp/ip (Actually forging packets between you and a third party) I think it would be fair game to poke back at some of these systems.

Since these are "carrier grade" monitoring and throttling solutions sold by "enterprise" software developers, we can safely assume that they're crap. I'm sure the developers think they're secure, since they're "invisible" passive monitoring/insertion systems. Why is this important? I bet you could crash any and all of pretty easily. I bet it will be as easy as generating some "interesting" traffic, then inserting lots of invalid/random garbage in fields/payloads that the throttling system might inspect.

This simple "technique" has been known to crash IDS/passive monitoring systems pretty much since they've been around. For whatever reason, nobody thinks that passive monitoring systems can be the targets of attack simply because they're "invisible" and don't respond to direct requests on the network being monitored.

If not outright crashing, you could attempt to bog down said throttling systems. It might not be hard to create a torrent client that generates a lot of noisy garbage that would cause an asymmetric load on said throttling system.

Re:Countermeasures

[kyrio]

Why are you wondering about it; why not do it? If you don't have the skill to do it, find someone who does. Stop wondering and start doing.

Re:Countermeasures

[zlives]

yes and when the isp drops you (especially in small us cities where there might be just the one) you can route all your internets through the post system.

Re:Countermeasures

[zlives]

and that is if you have post privileges after dhs gets done with you regarding the "hacking/causing damge"

Re:Countermeasures

[lister king of smeg]

What would be there reason for dropping you? They were the ones who's software was snooping, and there software had bugs in it. Your packets are not meant for them anyway. And why are they inspection you packets anyway.

Re:Countermeasures

[HermMunster]

They are forging packets back to a service independent of those that buy. That itself has to be highly illegal.

Re:Countermeasures

[darkfeline]

Ah, good ol' USPS tunneling. Someone needs to port that to Linux.

Re:Countermeasures

[zlives]

they can drop you for no reason at all, but certainly if you give them one... :)

BT is crap

[CadentOrange]

When I was with them 2+ years ago, not only did they shape BitTorrent downloads they also shaped HTTP and streaming video downloads. I require bit torrent when downloading WoW client updates (don't use it for anything else as I don't have the time. See WoW ...). I noticed things speeded up when I disabled the Blizzard Downloader's P2P functionality. I've also noticed them throttling Steam downloads from about 5 - 9 pm, and they throttle video services that compete with their BT Vision package.

Avoid them like the plague.

Re:BT is crap

[Jamu]

I'm with BT. AFAIK they only throttle BitTorrent. I've not noticed Steam being throttled. It's impossible to avoid using BT where I am. Even if I pick a different ISP, I'd still be using their infrastructure.

Re:BT is crap

[asquithea]

BT Infinity (FTTC, uncapped) doesn't seem to suffer from throttling at any time - I get the full 40 Mbps.

However, I often need to switch ports after a download has started to realize full speed. I don't know if this is a quirk of my BitTorrent client, or whether there is actually throttling that's broken by the port switch. Worth trying if you're having trouble, though.

Re:BT is crap

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

It's impossible to avoid using BT where I am. Even if I pick a different ISP, I'd still be using their infrastructure.

Protocol throttling such as you mention is imposed by BT Retail, not Wholesale. So if you moved to another ISP you would be subject to that ISP's policy, not BT Retail's.

Wholesale just provide connectivity; they do nothing but deliver the stream to the ISP through L2TP.

I suggest you try ID Net; they provide BT Wholesale-based ADSL with no throttling or blocking. I used them a few years ago on a BT-only exchange and they were fine.

Usenet is so much better anyways.

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Some of you may have used usenet back in the day when there was a lot of work involving downloading a ton of RARs, PARs, and then going through the process of PARing, and unRARing. However newer software greatly simplifies this process. It even goes so far as to calculate how many PARs you actually need before even downloading them.

Look up the following apps (they run on all three major OSes):

Sickbeard, Couchpotato, Headphones, and SABNZBd.

Beats cable, beats netflix, and beats hulu. Not by a little, but by a LOT. I only pay $11 a month for access to astraweb. If you want to get NZB's for free, use nzb.su or binsearch.info. Those will work fine for the vast majority of your needs. Later on though got a 8 week subscription to newzbin2.es because it has a more comprehensive library. After that ran out, I just paid a one time $10 fee to nzbmatrix.com and haven't looked back.

Forget giganews btw. Not only are they ridiculously expensive, but they are missing a bunch of stuff due to DMCA takedowns. If astraweb ever got hit (doubtful,) here are plenty of other services to subscribe to.

Most services, including astraweb, support SSL connections and will provide you so much bandwidth that you'll fill up your pipe. I always fill up my 30mbit pipe right out the gate, unlike torrents where I rarely do, because I have to wait for seeders and meanwhile I have to also have to use heavy upstream traffic.

And no I do not work for astraweb. They are popular though because their service is fast, cheap, and unlimited.

Re:Usenet is so much better anyways.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you just broke the first rule of USENET.

Re:Usenet is so much better anyways.

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

Some of you may have used usenet back in the day when there was a lot of work involving downloading a ton of RARs, PARs, and then going through the process of PARing, and unRARing.

Excuse me: some of us actually used USENET back in the day before binary groups were invented!

Actually I still follow a handful of text-only groups and the quarily of discussion is improving again as web fora draw-away the trolls and twits.

Re:Usenet is so much better anyways.

[AlphaWolf_HK]

So did I actually. It was kind of ruined by the spammers though. I still remember all of the chain mails "send these people on the list 1 dollar each, and then post again with your name at the top." And then it became just plain stupid to include any form of your email address anywhere, no matter how obfuscated, so nobody could ever contact you outside of usenet without you getting spammed hard in the process.

Trolls don't bother me though.

Re:Usenet is so much better anyways.

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Well what about the third rule of usenet:

If this is your first time at usenet, you have to fight.

Re:Usenet is so much better anyways.

[Hatta]

I haven't used newsgroups in a long while. How does USENET compare with niche private trackers? Are there newsgroups with cult films, and how does the selection and quality compare with Cinemageddon? Similarly, are there newsgroups that focus on retro games, and how do they compare with UG?

Basically, if I'm not interested in the popular stuff, will I be able to find my niche on USENET?

Re:Usenet is so much better anyways.

[Anonymous Coward]

oh man... again, what is the FIRST RULE of binary news groups? you seem to forget :(

Re:Usenet is so much better anyways.

[antdude]

Try searching on https://www.binsearch.info/ and see what you find. ;)

Post your results in EU

[Anonymous Coward]

And let's collectively punish the fraudulent ISPs who lie and abuse us.

http://respectmynet.eu/

I throttle my own uploads anyhow

[Megane]

I limit my total upstream because performance really sucks if you use up more than about 85% or so of your upload speed. The reason is that ACKs will start to get dropped (unless you have a router with a good QoS algorithm). I set my limit to 20KB/sec (I have 6Mb down/~600Kb up, so that's about 33%), and just let it sit longer until I hit my ratio.

I wonder how many people think they're being throttled when actually they don't limit their upload speed and are completely fucking up their connection with lost ACKs and retransmits.

Re:I throttle my own uploads anyhow

[jones_supa]

Can the QoS feature actually be useful in basic DSL routers? I have sometimes played with it, but didn't get any perceivable results. I have typically used the bandwidth-limiting trick mentioned.

Re:I throttle my own uploads anyhow

[Bengie]

You need to make sure that the upload rate is throttled on your router. QoS is almost useless if you don't throttle as most DSL/cable modems have HUGE buffers and you get nasty bufferbloat.

I don't use the word 'hero' lightly,

[Thud457]

tis' no man, 'tis a remorseless eating machine

yeah i dont get as many uploads as i used to

[Anonymous Coward]

my ratio has been dropping on a lot of private trackers because even though my total speed is fast as hell i dont seem to be getting as many incoming connections (and yes my firewall/port-forwarding is configured correctly) so i do think there is some kind of blocking.

Car analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Traffic shaping is a good thing, everyone wants the fastest connection while not wanting to share said connection with anyone else. It's simply not feasible. Pulling a car analogy would be that there were no speed limits, everyone driving as fast as they desired, not caring about the roads or the traffic.

Those arguing against traffic shaping usually pull the same line: -We must get what we pay for.

Learning from the car analogy we see that the way ISPs market their product is wrong. Instead of Mbps we need another rating which can more easily be interpreted. Why not Mbph.. h as in hour, we don't see road speed limits measured in seconds either.
Downloading a movie, takes for the average internet connection about an hour. Loading an html page takes mere seconds. Persistent connections should simply not get the same speed limit as non-persistent ones. Car analogy: trucks and cars.

Re:Car analogy

[HermMunster]

Traffic shaping in all regards is a bad thing. A car analogy would be where the manufacturer says that the cars will drive on average 400,000 miles when in reality they hobbled the car so as to only get an average of 100,000 miles, doing so because the roads are too crowded.

Traffic shaping in all regards is a bad thing. These ISPs should be increasing their services and reducing prices. The onus has been passed from the ISP to the consumer. Instead of capping and throttling the ISPs should be building out. Rather, they just keep increasing the prices and reducing the service by throttling and capping. The money they make should be invested in significant increases in equipment to speed up and increase the pipes. It is not the consumer's responsibility to NOT use what they paid for -- even by force.

It's not necessarily bad - but it probably is

[Anonymous Coward]

There are bottlenecks, and P2P is a rather new traffic pattern that internet infrastrucure isn't engineered to handle.

It's perfectly reasonable that they'd add a "cost" factor to P2P traffic leaving their network, thus favouring P2P exchange within their own, supposedly fast, routing network. Since P2P protocols like BitTorrent don't really care or optimize for different topologies, they can force such optimization by properly throttling.

I doubt, however, they "throttle the right way".

Some comments

[Anonymous Coward]

The study seems very well done. In the paper linked from the site, they say that they try the exact same traffic volume in upload and download, but with and without BitTorrent protocol headers.

I suspect that a lot of the symptoms of too small capacity could be alleviated by reducing buffer bloat instead of installing expensive deep packet inspection devices. The problem is that if a connection/router gets to the point where it starts randomly dropping packets, then you lose (...and the torrenters win, because they have many TCP connections and get an "unfair" advantage, because the OS just backs off on one connection, not all of them). It's really better to put some intelligence *before* the congestion, installing devices that do some buffering and gives each *customer* equal priority, not just dropping packets randomly. Doing this after the point of congestion is more difficult, because you have to anticipate the behaviour of your customer's OS, and make sure that the link in question never saturates. Even then, it shouldn't be necessary to discriminate based on content, though, that seems like a massive cop-out to me.

File under "No shit Sherlock"

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Name another industry in which you pay for an advertised service and then get far far less.

Would you buy a computer that claims 8GB of ram but you could only utilize 3?
Would you buy a camera that claimed it could take 1000 pictures but only could store 100 maximum?
Would you buy a car that advertised 200 HP but could only output 50 HP?
Would you buy a 3 bedroom house that only has 1.5 bedrooms?
Would you buy a food product with printed 350g on the container but the contents only weigh 180g?
Would you pay for a meal if it claimed it would come with sides that you never received?
Would you buy a gallon of gas if you only got a pint?
Would you buy a 24 pack of beer if you only got 16?

So in what FREAKIN reality is it acceptable for ISP's to charge you for an advertised speed and then offer you something far less then that on average.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[garyoa1]

Well, none of them advertise their speeds. They all say "up to". Now if we could get them to advertise "at least" instead that would be a whole different ball park.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[Anonymous Coward]

You must never shop at Best Buy, because some people will certainly by a 32-bit Windows system with 8GB ram.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. This happens all the time.

Would you buy a computer that claims 8GB of ram but you could only utilize 3? Yes, you only get 7.whatever GB of "usable RAM"
Would you buy a camera that claimed it could take 1000 pictures but only could store 100 maximum? Yup, when you have pictures of any decent resolution you get far less than advertised.
Would you buy a car that advertised 200 HP but could only output 50 HP? Close: How often do you get the mileage listed on the sticker.
Would you buy a 3 bedroom house that only has 1.5 bedrooms? Who advertises a house based on bedrooms... a house has "rooms" (including the kitchen? wtf?)
Would you pay for a meal if it claimed it would come with sides that you never received? Have you seen food advertising lately? You never get what it looks like.

You have three specific examples that I can't invalidate immediately... Im sure someone else can.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[Anonymous Coward]

When I buy a 400gb hd, it only has 372gb space. (Yes, I know that it is due to reporting, not actual change in availability, but as far as most consumers are concerned, they are getting less than they paid for).

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you buy a car that advertised 200 HP but could only output 50 HP? Close: How often do you get the mileage listed on the sticker.

It's more like if you were trying to run it at max. power output for many hours, there's a good chance that the engine would break down.

Would you buy a food product with printed 350g on the container but the contents only weigh 180g?

There's a trend of stuffing meat with water, so you'd get 180 g of chicken and 180 g of good old H2O and NaCl. I don't think it's that extreme, though.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[ClosedEyesSeeing]

Would you buy a car that advertised 200 HP but could only output 50 HP?

This kind of exists with rev limiters on cars. Your engine is capable of speeds in excess of 100 mph but you actually hit a limit at 80mph with the governor.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[Anonymous Coward]

> Would you buy a computer that claims 8GB of ram but you could only utilize 3?

I did this with L3 cache the last time I bought from Tiger-Direct. The motherboard they sent me didn't boot; when I sent it back they sent me one with lower spec.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience, ISPs do not limit my download speed. I'm sure some do but not the ones that I have used. They do this my only allowing limited upload bandwidth which effectively limits your download speed. So when they say they offer 20mbit download they are telling you the truth - and you get very high speeds when downloading from a cached server (like the one Apple and Microsoft uses) that offers high speed and low latency. But as soon as you packets have to travel a reasonable distance then latency and a limited upload pipe effectively limit your download speed.

I can get 2MB/s download via newsgroups while saturating my upload bandwidth at 50kb/s. This is available all the time as there are no apparent limits except for that 50kb/s upload pipe (and a 400Gig/month limit). Downloading a software update is even faster thanks to the local caching servers.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[JesseMcDonald]

They all say "up to".

Technically, 0 bps is "up to" any speed. That doesn't mean they can get away with a connection that never works. To be meaningful, that "up to" number has to represent their best reasonable effort—in other words, you can actually get the advertised "up to" speed in the absence of factors outside the ISPs control, like upstream network issues or server-side congestion. Active throttling is something the ISP controls, and about as far from "best effort" as it's possible to get.

If you advertise a service "up to" a given amount, you may not be able to guarantee the customer will actually be able to use that amount, but you certainly shouldn't get in the way until they reach the advertised limit.

While we're on the subject, if an ISP restricts incoming connections or servers, or blocks certain services, protocols, or ports, then they aren't selling Internet service and shouldn't advertise as such. Similarly, co-located servers and caches within the ISP's network, and other services granted priority access based on a specific arrangement with the ISP, should not be counted toward the advertised Internet speed. I'm not a fan of so-called "net neutrality", but if you advertise a 10 Mbps Internet connection, customers should be able to get that speed from any Internet site (network conditions permitting), not just sites which have payed the ISP for priority access.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[syncrotic]

Actually, the car analogy isn't far off the mark.

Your car's engine can deliver a certain amount of power, but if you tried using it at 100% load continuously, it'd probably last a few hours before it tore itself apart. Ever wonder why a soccer-mom SUV can have a 500hp engine, while an 18-wheeler makes do with about the same amount of power? The truck engine is rated for continuous load: it's five times as heavy and costs five times as much.

So it is with bandwidth: if you want a product that can deliver 50mbit in bursts, you'll get it for $40/month.

If you want something that will deliver 50mbit, guaranteed, continuously, you'll have to pay what that service actually costs.

That said, we know from Korea, Japan, Germany, etc that consumer-level connections can be far better than they are in the US, and for far less money.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[Solandri]

None of your examples are shared resources. A better analogy would be a toll road which advertises a 100 mph speed limit. If so many people flock to it that it creates a traffic jam moving at 25 mph, that's just the way it is.

If you want a guaranteed 100 mph or 10 Mbps (or whatever your ISP advertises as max speeds) at any time you want, then pay for a dedicated line. They typically cost about 10-20x more than a shared connection specifically for the bandwidth guarantee. But if you're paying the much lower shared bandwidth rate, then it's completely ridiculous for you to expect max bandwidth any time, all the time.

Now, if the ISP has plenty of excess bandwidth (i.e. instantaneous use has not reached their bandwidth capacity) but is throttling anyway, then yes you have a legitimate complaint. That'd be like a toll road advertising a 100 mph speed limit, there's no traffic jam, but they decide to pull you over for going over 65 mph just because your car is red.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[RLaager]

I work for a small, rural ISP. When we advertise X Mbps, a properly working (i.e. not virus laden or too old to get X Mbps on its own) computer will actually get X Mbps to our speed test. In other words, we overprovision the customer's service to account for not just access technology overhead (e.g. ATM for ADSL), but TCP/IP (+HTTP) overhead as well. Our speed test is from Ookla (a popular speed test vendor) and is not doctored in any way; we just can't guarantee speeds to random speed test servers on the Internet. Congestion within our network or on our upstream links would be considered a serious outage. However, if, for example in the case of DSL, your line is simply too long to get X Mbps, you won't; most customers in that position are grateful for whatever they can get. But if you felt we cheated you, canceled your service, and demanded a refund for that first month, you'd get it. (We only require contracts on one type of Internet service--terrestial, fixed location wireless--because of the cost of the equipment and the install, but we'd waive the contract term in such a case.)

Aside from enforcing the speed purchased, we don't shape, throttle, or do evil things to traffic on customer Internet connections, except by customer request. (We offer an *optional*, opt-in service that blocks porn sites using an HTTP proxy.) We don't prioritize or de-prioritize particular packets on customer Internet connections by source, destination, or anything else.

However, for security reasons, we block the Microsoft file and print sharing ports (which nobody should use directly over the Internet anyway) and outgoing port 25 (SMTP) traffic. The latter makes a huge difference in blocking spam from infected customer computers. If you ask for port 25 to be unblocked on your connection, we will unblock it.

Personally, I think this is exactly how ISPs should behave. Anything I should do differently? Is this an "Internet connection", or does the port blocking disqualify it?

Other random details: Our DNS servers verify DNSSEC, but accept expired signatures to avoid customer complaints every time an otherwise working domain forgets to rollover their keys. We unfortunately do not yet sign our own domains and don't yet support IPv6 everywhere, but are working on both. (We only finally got redundant IPv6 upstreams earlier this year after making significant changes to which networks we buy from because one upstream has ignored literally years of IPv6 requests from us.)

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[JesseMcDonald]

However, for security reasons, we block the Microsoft file and print sharing ports (which nobody should use directly over the Internet anyway) and outgoing port 25 (SMTP) traffic. The latter makes a huge difference in blocking spam from infected customer computers. If you ask for port 25 to be unblocked on your connection, we will unblock it.

Personally, I think this is exactly how ISPs should behave. Anything I should do differently? Is this an "Internet connection", or does the port blocking disqualify it?

Would you also unblock the file and print sharing ports on request? I don't have a problem with ports being blocked by default for security reasons, so long as they can be unblocked at no additional charge. Some ISPs block incoming HTTP/HTTPS, IRC, (non-ISP) DNS, and other traditional "server" ports, or use DPI to detect and filter specific protocols, unless you pay extra for a "business class" connection—assuming they even offer that at your address. What I really object to is essentially being sold a fancy cable TV package as if it were Internet access. The Internet is a network of peers, not just a way to consume content or upload it to someone else's servers. Far too much effort has been expended on workarounds for "peers" which can only initiate connections, not accept them.

It sounds to me like you're doing everything right, and I wish you the best of luck. I wish more ISPs were so enlightened. My own isn't so bad either (CenturyLink DSL, formerly Qwest, though it can vary by location). It's depressing how many manage to get this wrong, though—even Google's new 1Gbps broadband project has a "no servers" policy.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[RLaager]

Would you also unblock the file and print sharing ports on request?

It's never come up and we don't expect it to, so we don't have a formal policy on those ports. At our size, we can deal case-by-case. If someone had a legal use case, we'd make sure their needs were met; this may or may not involve unblocking the port(s). Using the port 25 blocking as an example... if someone says, "I can't send email from my Gmail address using Outlook.", we say, "Use port 587. Here's how...". This limits the number of exceptions and maintains as much of the security as is possible. However, if they say, "I use Linux and want a proper MTA setup.", we say "We'll unblock port 25. Please make sure to secure your mail server so it can't be use to send spam."

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[bingoUV]

I'm not a fan of so-called "net neutrality",

Why?

customers should be able to get that speed from any Internet site (network conditions permitting), not just sites which have payed the ISP for priority access.

Then you ARE a fan of so-called "net neutrality". Do you hate the terminology "net neutrality" ? You sure are for the concept behind it.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[JesseMcDonald]

customers should be able to get that [advertised Internet] speed from any Internet site (network conditions permitting), not just sites which have payed the ISP for priority access.

Then you ARE a fan of so-called "net neutrality". Do you hate the terminology "net neutrality" ? You sure are for the concept behind it.

"Net neutrality" is too blunt; it would prohibit ISP from charging sites for priority access entirely. I'm fine with ISPs doing that; I just feel they shouldn't count that as Internet access for the purposes of advertising.

If an ISP wants to offer 10 Mbps access to normal sites, but charge Netflix extra for 20 Mbps, that's fine; it just can't throttle Netflix down to 5 Mbps for not paying (since that would mean the ISP was only providing 5 Mbps Internet rather than 10 Mbps), or advertise 20 Mbps Internet access if they agree. Advertising 10 Mbps from the Internet and 20 Mbps from Netflix would be fine. I'm only interested in truth in advertising, not complete ISP neutrality.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[sjames]

Would you buy a bag of coffee that contained 'up to' 12 oz of coffee and an unspecified weight in rocks?

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[mgcarley]

>>>Would you buy a computer that claims 8GB of ram but you could only utilize 3?

That's a software problem - and a stupid manufacturer for including a 32-bit OS on a machine clearly meant for a 64-bit one.

>>>Would you buy a camera that claimed it could take 1000 pictures but only could store 100 maximum?

In this case this would be an "ideal" number used for advertising, but how many cameras are advertised this way?

>>>Would you buy a car that advertised 200 HP but could only output 50 HP?
>>>Would you buy a 3 bedroom house that only has 1.5 bedrooms?
>>>Would you buy a food product with printed 350g on the container but the contents only weigh 180g?
>>>Would you pay for a meal if it claimed it would come with sides that you never received?
>>>Would you buy a gallon of gas if you only got a pint?
>>>Would you buy a 24 pack of beer if you only got 16?

All of these would be examples of fraud.

The lines provided by your ISP are probably capable of the speeds they're advertising, however, this can only remain true when you have under a certain percentage of the users saturating the lines at any given time.

To put it another way, your 200HP car will only use 50HP if there's a lot of congestion on the road, and the ISP is selling their product in a similar fashion: your connection can technically do 20 or 50 or 100mbit/s without any issues BUT if there's a lot of congestion it's going to be slower than that.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[mgcarley]

The very nature of the Internet makes this impossible. You couldn't get 10mbit/s to a website in Casablanca, Morocco from Los Angeles, USA because of distances and congestion between the two points on this earth UNLESS you literally go out and buy some kind of IPLC between the two places.

Re:File under "No shit Sherlock"

[JesseMcDonald]

I never said it was reasonable to expect the "up to" speed on every connection. What I said was that the speed should only be less than advertised due to factors outside the ISP's reasonable control. Distance and upstream congestion are obviously outside of their control; throttling and underprovisioning are not.

Holy hell..

[Anonymous Coward]

The US actually comes out near the top in this one...

Conflict of interest

[cockpitcomp]

If you want to watch movies, you buy the cable companies movies, because they will use their monopoly on broadband to quash other services. Have issues with the cable company? The only option is to out-bribe them.

Re:Good, exactly

[scharkalvin]

That's where dowload caps come in. Maybe the ISP's should respeak and say you get x amount of upload and download up to some g amount of gb per some unit of time and after that your bw is reduced for some period of time to give everyone else some of the bw THEY purchased. Which, "hey hey" is what they are actually doing, but don't tell you.

Interesting: Teksavvy Bad Throttler in Canada

[theshowmecanuck]

It looks like highly geek touted Teksavvy is one of the worst for throttling in Canada. (disclosure: I use Teksavvy but I don't use bit torrent much if at all, so cannot provide my own observations).

What is VERY interesting is late last year Bell Canada told the CRTC regulator that they would stop throttling. And here they are, the worst offender according to the data provided on this new list. I'm not surprised that they seem to be a bunch of lying scumbags. In discussions with the federal regulator and in the publicity wars, they pretty much lead the charge over the years for throttling and bandwidth caps. I wonder if this can be used to file a complaint against them.

In Canada, Ontario at least, most geeks having been trumpeting how good Teksavvy is because they have higher or no bandwidth caps. They are no cheaper and can be more expensive if on a dry loop. And according to these numbers, they look to be as bad or worse on throttling than the often maligned (in my opinion with merit) Telus, and Rogers. The only one that is worse is Bell who, and I'll make no bones about it, is in my opinion a pretty disreputable company and one of the worst abusers of their position in the marketplace..

It is amazing that Telus and Rogers are among the least offenders here. But I wonder how much a ruling earlier this year telling Rogers to stop throttling has to do with it. I may be mistaken but I don't believe Bell received the same warning. Probably because they had already at this point, lied to the regulators saying they would stop voluntarily (which apparently they haven't).

I have been considering going back to Rogers but past experience makes me gun shy. Present experience with cost/benefit with Teksavvy is making me think hard about it though.

Re:Interesting: Teksavvy Bad Throttler in Canada

[Yvan256]

I can't seem to find it, but I've read a letter from Teksavvy's CEO about needing to throttle some users in some over-subscribed areas, to the point that they couldn't accept new subscribers anymore and adding people to a waiting list. They had problems leasing more lines to increase capacity or something.

Re:Interesting: Teksavvy Bad Throttler in Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

I was also surprised with the Teksavvy findings. I'm with Teksavvy right now, do a decent amount of torrenting, and I haven't had any problems. I get about the same speeds on a well-seeded torrent as I do when downloading directly from a dedicated server. Compared to Rogers (who I used to be with), I'm getting faster torrent speeds, a much higher cap, and I'm paying about half the price. That's my experience anyway

Re:Interesting: Teksavvy Bad Throttler in Canada

[theshowmecanuck]

I am less than enthralled by them, and getting less so as time goes by. The moan and complain about not being able to make easy money renting lines from the big companies. And they make no effort to reinvest so that they can start offering their own infrastructure and increase stability and add competition. They seem more and more to me like some easy money guys who will dump this business when things like this (running out of bandwidth) stop them from making enough money. i.e. they're here for a good time, not a long time. The sad truth is that the big guys got a lock on things and no-one wants to be the little start up any more.

Re:Interesting: Teksavvy Bad Throttler in Canada

[cbeaudry]

You cant make sweeping statements about Teksavvy, the data in the study is meaningless because Teksavvy uses the big ISPs last mile and have no control if those big ISPs decide to throttle.

Was it CABLE or DSL?
In which province? (this determines which ISP they are using as the last mile, rogers, bell, videotron, cogeco, etc...)

If all tests where done on DSL, then they would get the same throttling results as they would with Bell.

In my case, in Quebec on Cable with a 70$/month unlimited packet at 30mbps. No throttling, no limits (I use almost 1 TB per month easily), no problems.

Re:Interesting: Teksavvy Bad Throttler in Canada

[jonwil]

Its all well and good to say "they should invest in their own infrastructure" but what about if they cant because the various entities that own the land and/or grant the needed permits have refused to allow them to build said infrastructure (possibly after being given a suitcase full of money from the local incumbent)

Re:Interesting: Teksavvy Bad Throttler in Canada

[theshowmecanuck]

Novus in downtown Vancouver has connected all the condos and highrises with their own fibre optic network and it kicks ass. Even 6 or 7 years ago you could get 10 meg down AND up. For the same or cheaper than Shaw or Telus. Now they have even faster. Now it is only in the downtown condos and highrises. But it is their own infrastructure. I wish Teksavvy would at least do that in Toronto. But they are contect to coast. I don't believe for a minute that anyone would block Teksavvy if they wanted to do do this. Their is no conspiracy, there is only inertia.

Re:Interesting: Teksavvy Bad Throttler in Canada

[theshowmecanuck]

And if they would reinvest in their own bloody business they would have their own backbone and last mile. Statement still stands because it is their decision on what their business model will be. So none of your post is meaningful.

Re:Interesting: Teksavvy Bad Throttler in Canada

[cbeaudry]

Are you serious?

Your asking for a small indy ISP to just lay down another last mile?
Even the big ISP didint have the money to do so. They got heavy subsidies from the government.

I think your being disengenous to an extreme.

Re:Interesting: Teksavvy Bad Throttler in Canada

[theshowmecanuck]

Everyone is ready with an excuse why something can't be done.

Where do the numbers in the summary come from?

[John Hasler]

The linked table indicates that in the USA only Clearwire (a wireless provider) does any measurable throttling at all.

Re:###### is so much better anyways.

[lister king of smeg]

you just broke the first rule of it in saying so

ISP profit margins are not that high.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the money made on the internet is from big data providers, like Google, Netflix, etc. I am not sure how fair it is to blame the ISPs for not super-provisioning their links. They make so much less money compared to these data giants. As everything else in this life, rate-limiting can be used for good or evil. If the ISPs use it to control the BW for BitTorrent clients during, say, peak hours, so that the rest of the people enjoy a faster Farmvile, I think is fair. However, the fact that ISPs have such technology at hand, raises concerns about privacy and network neutrality in general. I say let the market decides. If your ISP is behaving bad, you can always switch to another one.

People will find another way

[overmoderated]

An encrypted way so that ISPs can no longer sniff. Since when are ISPs cops?

A buffet *would* cut you off

[popo]

Actually the buffet is a perfect example.

Buffets charge a fixed price because (and only because) they assume you will eat a certain amount within and up to a certain limit.

But let's say a bulimic person goes into a buffet and eats / pukes / eats / pukes ad infinitum until he or she has clearly eaten 20x their expected capacity.

The buffet would absolutely ask you to leave. You could complain and make the claim that it's "your right", but it's also their right to protect their business.

 

Re:A buffet *would* cut you off

[Anonymous Coward]

You should read the fine print at a buffet then. All the ones I have seen around here all have signs that limit their otherwise unlimited offer. Otherwise, and my state has had a court case on it, short of closing time, they don't have a right to kick you out for "eating too much," even if that amount seems abhorrently unreasonable.

also, YMMV and IANAL

Re:A buffet *would* cut you off

[Anonymous Coward]

popo, you seem to be in favour of lying as a general practice, is this correct? If you advertise as "all you can eat", and then throw people out before they've eaten all they can, you'd have lied in your advert, and defrauded people of the money they paid in the expectation of eating all they can. As well as the travel costs, artificially inflating the costs of fuel and use of roads, rails and public transport vehicles. Sounds like a total mess. Also: how do you work out an "expected capacity" of someone, when you don't have access to full medical records?

See, what all you can eat places do is have loads of stuff that makes you feel full very quickly. That way you eat til you feel you can't, you don't eat a lot, and they get to sell various quantities of food for a single fixed price.

Re:A buffet *would* cut you off

[sjames]

First, they generally don't charge the customer who is asked to leave and second, they certainly are not a monopoly or even part of a duopoly on food in the area.

Link aggregation to get around caps

[agizis]

Alex Gizis of Connectify here. Sorry to pitch you here, but this is one of the reasons that we created Connectify Dispatch. By using link aggregation to divide your traffic across a couple different links you can assemble a fast download speed even in the presence of throttling. We use real-time throughput stats to decide how to divvy up the traffic. Plus the pretty graphs give you a sense of what we're doing and why (bandwidth, latency and reliability of each link, mostly). On Kickstarter now: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/523076551/dispatch-the-internet-faster

Converse Petard

[ThatsNotPudding]

They don't, they sell speeds "up to".

Next time my speed exceeds what I was promised, I'm suing.

Re:Converse Petard

[KingMotley]

Mine do, just an FYI. Comcast regularly delivers 8-10% over what you pay for,

My girl seeded me last night!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Although I don't like throttling, I have fewer issues with this than general throttling.

Bittorrent, despite its name, is really a background distributor, fire-and-forget. Pick your stuff and come back tomorrow.

It can be fast, but is designed to work when you're not watching it and doing something else.

Not really having trouble here...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in the US, and in my particular area, you learn quickly to stay the hell away from the cable company. They're way oversubscribed, and they shape more than they'll admit. They sell (nominal) 50/20 cable, and advertise that they're so much better than [DSL provider X], but in reality, you'll get 35/15 at 3 am if you're lucky, and 10/5 with a minimum 500 ping at peak times. Meanwhile, my 24/10 DSL with the DSL endpoint boxes about 100m from my house is always up and always gives me as much or more bandwidth than I'm paying for.

However, my same ISP in another city is complete crap compared to the cable co there. So, you can never really tell w/o trying it.

Re:Good, exactly

[marcosdumay]

Exact. And if they put that in the contract, and tell you before you buy, they'll do The Right Thing. Bonus if they have a more expensive plan, with highter limits.

But they don't. They lie to their clients, and don't provide the service they anounced and agreed on a contract. That's fraud.

Hide and seek

[hybr1d]

Maybe encrypting the protocol for torrent transfers will help. If you're using uTorrent, try this: Ctrl + P > Protocol Encryption; Forced

Re:Hide and seek

[hybr1d]

Sorry, I've missed a step ... It's Ctrl + P > BitTorrent > Protocol Encryption; Forced

Re:Hide and seek

[cffrost]

Maybe encrypting the protocol for torrent transfers will help.
If you're using uTorrent, try this: Ctrl + P > Protocol Encryption; Forced

Also, disable incoming legacy connections (same dialog), and disable bep22 in Advanced.

Be a good librarian and seed 2+:1.

Yes-yes, we do.

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact we're worse than that. We throttle down the connection entirely.

Could be false results

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran tests tonight and Glasnost was reporting noise and blocking. I then when through my network settings, checked the MTU, etc. Once I corrected this, the reports of blocking and throttling disappeared.

SHHHHHHHHHH!

[LanMan04]

Goddamn it, the first rule of ###### is do not talk about ######.

Not here

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay for 60 Mbs and often see it go as high as 80 Mbs whether a direct download or via Bittorrent as I can watch the speed. Even if you are under the limit the bottleneck may be throttling or just a busy router. To e-mail my neighbor it goes from Michigan to Atlanta and back to Michigan. Is this efficient, or just another way to monitor traffic? Do a tracert some time to see where you mail/traffic is going.