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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."
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.
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.
"That's right...I said it."
"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.
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.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
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.
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.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
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.
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.
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...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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.
Avoid them like the plague.
Then the ISP should not sell it as if it does.
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.
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!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
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.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
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.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
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.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
tis' no man, 'tis a remorseless eating machine
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
They don't, they sell speeds "up to".
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
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Although not always the case, ssh is usually interactive. Lag in typing or editing across a slowed ssh connection is horrible.
>>>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.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
"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.
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.
>>>"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.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
"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.
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?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Wording they only recently changed.
Now they'll sell you "up to 20mb!" in an area fed by a single T1.
>>>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.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
QOS will do that as well if you do not have enough bandwidth to support all your users... Which was my point.
oh no that would mean they would have to invest in infrastructure
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Or some type of remote desktop app... Click... NO NOT THERE, NO!!!!! Crap.
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.
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
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
"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).
Who the hell put this to interesting? This is trolling and flamebait at best
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
>>> 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.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
"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.
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.
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.
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.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
"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.
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The linked table indicates that in the USA only Clearwire (a wireless provider) does any measurable throttling at all.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
P2P is dwarfed by Netflix alone
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.
I explicitly release the above into the public domain.
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.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
you just broke the first rule of it in saying so
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
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.
I'd like to torrent me some Chronic.
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.
co-lo prices and last-mile prices are vastly different.
$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.
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
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.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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.
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.
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.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
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
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.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
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.
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.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
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.
Next time my speed exceeds what I was promised, I'm suing.
I wouldn't mind this as long as they didn't charge the extra if you do your downloads during non-peak hours.
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.
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!
Why should my download of some Linux iso via bittorrent be slowed down while you hog all the bandwidth watching Nyancat on Youtube?
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.
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.
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.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Ratio, baby!!!!11
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.
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).
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.
Rethinking email
Maybe encrypting the protocol for torrent transfers will help. If you're using uTorrent, try this: Ctrl + P > Protocol Encryption; Forced
"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.
"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.
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 ?
Yup. And charge you more to recoup their greater investment.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
If you download.a movie or song that you didn't pay for, its called piracy! Look it up.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
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
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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".
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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!
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
You're paying for unlimited downloads, not unlimited bandwidth.
Goddamn it, the first rule of ###### is do not talk about ######.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
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.
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.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
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.
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.
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.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
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.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
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.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
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.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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).
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.