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ISP Breaking Net Neutrality? The FCC's Got a Complaint Form For That

Posted by timothy on from the handy-dandy-forms dept.

Presto Vivace writes with news from The Consumerist that the FCC has updated its consumer help center with a revamped form for complaining about an unsatisfactory ISP. From the article: Among the issues concerned consumers can complain about, the form now contains "open internet/net neutrality," right there alphabetically between "interference" and "privacy." So what, specifically, qualifies as a net neutrality violation you can complain about? The FCC has guidance for that, too. In general, paraphrased, it's a problem if there's:

Blocking: ISPs may not block access to any lawful content, apps, services, or devices.
Throttling: ISPs may not slow down or degrade lawful internet traffic from any content, apps, sites, services, or devices.
Paid prioritization: ISPs may not enter into agreements to prioritize and benefit some lawful internet traffic over the rest of it on their networks.

99 comments

  1. Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? by sdw · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What is the best list of ISP monitoring software, services, or related techniques to detect, collect information on, and work around these kinds of problems?

    Has anyone created an automated test, detection, and complain system that uses minimal resources?

    --
    Stephen D. Williams
    1. Re:Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Specifically, does gaming speed tests count?

    2. Re: Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? by bemymonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The problem with having a single such tool is that the ISPs will prioritize traffic generated by it, just like they do with speedtest.net etc.

      How would you work around that without implementing measures that make the measurement of net neutrality related parameters impossible? VPN, for instance, would stop the ISP from prioritizing the measurement tool's data, but it would also prevent any of the potentially Net Neutrality threatening QoS/Blocking you're trying to measure in the first place. Any ideas?

    3. Re:Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      no need. here's what will happen. the major providers (comcast and the like), aka the greedy fucks, will just let their networks degrade naturally under ever-increasing demands.. then when EVERYTHING slows, they'll blame 'net neutrality' rules for the problems, while stuffing increasing profits from lack of investment into their corporate (and executive) pockets.

    4. Re:Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There isn't much money to be made in being an ISP. Verizon just sold off a lot of its fiber to the curb because they were making something like 4% on revenues and it wasn't worth their trouble.

      The real money is in making the next google or facebook and taking advantage of all that physical infrastructure OTHER companies paid for and using it for free.

    5. Re:Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

      I just wait for an ISP to spoof that form and make sure that any filed complaints "get lost".

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    6. Re:Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Infrastructure"

      LOL, good one.

    7. Re: Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? by Bengie · · Score: 3, Informative

      Almost no ISPs use any kind of AQMs. You could do a high sample trace route and watch for jitter and avg ping increases. In general, a health link's avg ping should not be more than 1-5ms over the minimum. If you do enough samples in a trace route, you should be able to see which hops are causing issues. If your ISP is doing high quality shaping along with an AQM, it would be much harder to watch for congestion because latency should be quite stable. Then you need to somehow measure a route's bandwidth.

      The good news is most decent traffic shaping algorithms are very CPU intensive relative to the amount of bandwidth an ISP's core network must handle and the algorithms do not scale well with the number isolated groups. In other words, you should be able to detect jitter and avg ping increases.

    8. Re:Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services? by Bengie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      4% on revenues included TV services, which make up a huge portion of the overall revenue and are incredibly small margins. ISPs make decent margins, TV providers do not. The only reason Verizon is selling off is because they want to liquidate a reliable 4% income so they can dump that money into wifi and make much higher revenues. Remember when text messaging costed more per byte than renting time from the Hubble Telescope? There is a lot of money to be made in price gouging mobile data.

  2. What does one complaint weigh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How may complaints will it take for the FCC to take any action?

    1. Re:What does one complaint weigh? by behrooz0az · · Score: 1

      42

      --
      Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
  3. So is there a form for the ISP by Revek · · Score: 4, Informative

    I really want to know so I can get people flagged for making false statements to that effect. We don't have a firewall at all on our internet customers. Its wide open and has been for years. We found throttling ports was self defeating in that the torrent hoarders used encryption and other means to hide their activity anyway. The filter we had was actually causing an additional 30ms of latency and I have missed it at all.

    1. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by SeaFox · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why would you be throttling ports? There's nothing illegal about using torrents.
      Sounds like these people are simply using the service they paid for.

    2. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Etherwalk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why would you be throttling ports? There's nothing illegal about using torrents.
      Sounds like these people are simply using the service they paid for.

      Assume you have more demand for bandwidth than you have bandwidth.

      Now assume person A is trying to look up the calendar at the local courthouse and person B is downloading an iso.

      Person A should be prioritized over person B both on a theoretical shortest-job-first basis and on a human court-is-more-important-than-porn level.

    3. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Revek · · Score: 1

      Just keep re reading what I posted until you understand what I said. Reading comprehension, how does it work?

    4. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by sumdumass · · Score: 2

      Because the ISP model (at least in the majority of the US) is to oversubscribe their bandwidth based on the assumption that not everyone will be using it at once. Throttling ports gets around the problem in this model where services run in the absence of users and use as much bandwidth as possible. It ensures a reasonable experience for users actually on line. It's mostly employed in saturated markets and does sometimes decrease speeds to below purchased rates.

      I have very limited experience on the ISP side of things (mostly hosting and a corp connection between 6 builings over 20 miles separation connected by T3) but that is my understanding.

    5. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Then Maybe you shouldn't have Oversold your Capacity?

    6. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by ArcadeMan · · Score: 2

      You said something about people getting flags for amusement parks with special effects, something about firing some of your customers but being open about it for years, something about defeating the hordes with the necronomicon and other hideous activities and that your coffee filter was removing 30mg of lipides but you're not missing it at all.

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    7. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Assume you have more demand for bandwidth than you have bandwidth."

      Translation; Company horribly oversold the bandwidth and is too cheap to buy a bigger pipe.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    8. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Um... no.

      If bandwidth is contended, then you should just use fair queuing. If you have N customers, everyone gets at least 1/N of the total, what's left over is shared equally, repeat until it's all used.

      You shouldn't get to decide that one customer's usage is more "important" than another's. If the customer thinks their usage is more important, they should upgrade their plan.

      Remember: the internet is based around IP, which doesn't have "ports". TCP and UDP only exist if you're an endpoint, otherwise everything past the IP header is just "payload".

    9. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Etherwalk · · Score: 3, Informative

      "Assume you have more demand for bandwidth than you have bandwidth."

      Translation; Company horribly oversold the bandwidth and is too cheap to buy a bigger pipe.

      Not necessarily. TCP/IP is designed to do congestion control and bandwidth between providers is expensive. You size your pipes to meet your need, but also so that you're not paying for unused bandwidth all the time. The result is that at peak usage your pipes are full, and how much of the time they're full off-peak depends on how you decided to allocate money. It doesn't necessarily make you cheap, but it does mean yeah, money matters to you.

    10. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Etherwalk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Um... no.

      If bandwidth is contended, then you should just use fair queuing. If you have N customers, everyone gets at least 1/N of the total, what's left over is shared equally, repeat until it's all used.

      You shouldn't get to decide that one customer's usage is more "important" than another's. If the customer thinks their usage is more important, they should upgrade their plan.

      Remember: the internet is based around IP, which doesn't have "ports". TCP and UDP only exist if you're an endpoint, otherwise everything past the IP header is just "payload".

      I disagree. I think a system like what you describe is mostly appropriate *after* you provide a certain base level of service to everyone. The person with very-low-bandwidth need should rarely if ever have to wait for the person with the very-high-bandwidth-need, because otherwise you have two people paying the same absolute amount for a service but the one who is using it more is being prioritized. If I pay $20 for as many bagels a week as I want and you pay $20 for as many bagels a week as you want, and I take one bagel a day and you take five hundred, the store should make sure I get my one before you get your five hundredth.

    11. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's not the customer's problem. That's a service provider problem. If everyone who signed up for X amount of bandwidth expects X bandwidth at the same time, the ISP better have a mechanism in place to provide what the customer is paying for.

    12. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by ooshna · · Score: 1

      No its more like you pay $20 a week to be able to get 5 bagels an hour and then someone else pays $20 for 5 an hour as well. That means at minimum the bagel shop should be making 10 bagels an hour to supply what they promised to both customers even if you usually only get 1/hr and only rarely 5 and the other guy uses his full 5/hr most of the time. ( we aren't taking into account the fact bagels go bad this is bandwidth nor food) If they can't make enough bagels they shouldn't promise that many.

    13. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by SeaFox · · Score: 1

      If people are claiming that you're throttling their torrents they may be having an issue with their service in general that is keeping them from utilizing the connection to the full potential. These issues may be with the customer's own equipment or networking, or indicative of an issue with the service itself.

      What is the result of your technical support department's investigations into these issues?

    14. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Bengie · · Score: 1

      TCP attempts to consume all available bandwidth. If you have a 1Gb connection, you can't consume more than 1Gb/s. The trunk should never be the bottleneck. If you're streaming Netflix, even if you transfer 1Gb/s, you're only averaging 3Mb/s. Very short lived bursts. The bigger offenders are bulk data transfers and not streaming. Even then, how much data can you download before you fill up your HD? For every customer using 1Gb/s, there's 1,000 others using 0.

      In this day and age, 100Gb trunks are becoming common. Of course links are always at 100% or 0%, there is no in between. The question is how long can they be at 100% before they're considered "congested". If your trunk is never at 100% for more than a few fractions of a milisecond, who cares.

    15. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

      > Translation; Company horribly oversold the bandwidth and is too cheap to buy a bigger pipe.

      Please try again. It's quite common for companies to make very reasonable assumptions that most of their customers will not be using their full bandwidth, unattended, 24x7. So they buy bandwdth from upstream and connecting to the core "tier 3" fiber optic backbones of our country. Then a modest number of Bittorrent users show up, each with 5 TB external drives, filling them 24x7 with thousands of hours of music and vides which they will never watch, simply to "complete their collecionts". Those relatively few users can take than the rest of the client base, combined. And they do not necessarily _want_ or require high bandwidth connections for this service.

      A natural and reasonably fair approach is to throttle the traffic. Bittorrent is not like video streaming, or gaming or VOIP. It deals well with throttling and short losses of connection. The difficulty is that the necessary proxies and throttles to do this degrade service, somewhat, for _everyone_.

    16. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Bengie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      First come first serve. If your ISP can't keep up, blame them, not other users for trying to make use of what they paid for. Bandwidth is the cheapest part of an ISP, cheaper than customer support even. If you want to blame people for consuming more than you, blame grandma for calling support and running up the ISP's cost of operations faster than the 24/7 torrent seeder.

    17. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Because the ISP model (at least in the majority of the US) is to oversubscribe their bandwidth based on the assumption that not everyone will be using it at once

      The entire internet is that way, even dedicated connections. The difference is the amount of oversubscription.

    18. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, people should get "prioritized" only based on what they pay for.

    19. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Bengie · · Score: 1

      You have it all wrong, Torrent only makes up 6% of peak bandwidth. It's all of those lousy customers paying for 100Mb connections and trying to stream 3Mb/s of Netflix. Those are the greedy bastards. They should pay for 100Mb and only use 0Mb/s. Even better, lets just get rid of ISPs and make a tax that gets funneled directly into the ex-ISP's pockets.

    20. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Your argument sounds like if you pay for X bandwidth, but less bandwidth than someone else, you should get priority over them. That makes no sense. I think what you want is a consumption based bill. Pay for what you use. But expect your bill to go up. The increased cost of managing everyone's bills will increase by more than the cost of just adding more bandwidth.

    21. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Links are not "always at 100% or 0%", because routers and switches have buffers, and the buffers can be part full. You are right in some completely asinine and idiotic sense, in that a synchronous interface is always either sending a user payload frame or a pad frame, but completely wrong because a segment with a 10ms RTT should have a 5ms buffer* on each end, and that buffer holds 33k full-length IP frames at 100Gbps. So the capacity of the link can be measured at different granularities by the average or instantaneous capacity of that buffer.

      TCP does not attempt to consume all available bandwidth. It is virtually guaranteed that TCP will not use more than 90% of a link capacity, and it's utilisation will fall drastically with increasing BDP and with increasing loss rate. Experiments I carried out last week show that with TCP Cubic (default on Linux) you will lose over 90% of capacity at 300ms RTT when you introduce merely 0.1% packet loss. There is a good reason ISPs don't use IP routing internally, and break traffic up inside their networks into different traffic classes (at my ISP we use GMPLS-TE over ethernet, other ISPs use GMPLS over SONET, ATMoE or ATM over SONET). If you were to put TCP through the same TE tunnels as UDP traffic, the UDP traffic would win and TCP would scale back to a crawl. TCP is a wuss, and losers out to just about every other protocol on the internet.

      *Combating bufferbloat, and effective traffic engineering suggests that buffers should be equal in size to the BDP of the link, which is 1/2 * RTT * bandwidth, so the delay of the buffer is equal to the delay of the link. Increasing the buffer beyond this limit decreases stability of flow control, and decreasing it harms capacity for no appreciable gain in average delay.

    22. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wrong.

      We have NetFlix OpenConnect boxes in a separate rack in our ISP. At the leaf, our edge routers take traffic destined for Netflix and drop it immediately into it's own TE class which is forwarded to the netflix switches. Since this makes up such a large portion of our traffic, we have dedicated switches for OpenConnect, and every edge router has dedicated ports attached to our Netflix forwarding domain. It doesn't even touch our "internet", which if you knew anything about ISPs, you would know isn't IP, but is MPLS on ethernet. The only IP on a "core" network is OSPF or ISIS traffic and MPLS label distribution, everything else is broken up into hundreds of TE classes and is label switched by the edge routers. The "core" routers are the dumbest pieces of equipment in the network, they just look at the label on each MPLS frame and stuff it down the right port; they are possibly even dumber than ethernet switches.

    23. Re: So is there a form for the ISP by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

      So, net netrality will result in price increases or degraded services across the board. And non-leachers will subsidise leachers.

      Doesn't sound very neutral to me, seems biased against non-leachers.

    24. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Remember: the internet is based around IP, which doesn't have "ports". TCP and UDP only exist if you're an endpoint, otherwise everything past the IP header is just "payload".

      No. because then TCP wouldn't work. TCP is a "losering" protocol, and if you mix it with a bunch of other protocols on a network, it intentionally throttles back "losers" to the other traffic on the network, until the congestion is resolved. To avoid excessive losering, ISPs break up traffic into TE classes (Traffic engineering classes), by port, src and dst ip and protocol. We then take each TE class and insert it into an LSP (label switched path), to it's intended exit from our network; from then until it leaves the network, the intermediate routers only look at the label to decide which interface to egress the frame from. So, on the internet, it is not IP, but MPLS doing the forwarding, with IP only making it's appearance at the edges of AS (autonomous systems, ISPs, Transit providers and the like).

      You can consider IP like the X.25 protocol in the thankfully dead OSI system. It's a contracted interface between the customer of the network and the network operator; inside the network the operators use all sorts of tricks to make it actually work, but we don't generally use IP routing, because it has very poor characteristics for TE and it is very expensive to route IP vs. label switched protocols like MPLS or ATM.

      Also your 1/N scheme is similar to what ISPs actually do, but would be impossible to achieve with IP. In IP routing, during congestion, the guy who sends 10x packets into the network gets roughly 10x successfully forwarded packets over the guy who sends 1x packets. By putting TE in front of IP, we can actually measure each users utilisation over various timeframes and allocate capacity fairly. The basic tenant of TE is that you don't stuff anything into the network that you aren't certain will come out the other side, otherwise known as "Admittance control". The alternative is to stuff the traffic in anyway, have it dropped after it's made a 90% transit, thereby consuming 90% of the resources it would have taken to completely forward it, while delivering nothing; and resulting in the situation whereby the users who stuff the most traffic in, get the most traffic out, at the cost to the users who send almost nothing.

      What you say you want is utterly impossible with IP routing, but is regularly implemented by ISPs with TE, and yet you are opposed to TE. It baffles me.

      You seem to have a wrong view of networking, like a road, where it can get jammed up but eventually you get to your destination. A packet network is like if you drive somewhere, and if you get stuck in a traffic jam, a bulldozer pushed you off the road and into a ravine, never to be seen again.

    25. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by mwvdlee · · Score: 1

      It's quite common for companies to make very reasonable assumptions that most of their customers will not be using their full bandwidth, unattended, 24x7.

      Those assumptions aren't reasonable if they then start complaining about that too many of their customers do exactly that.

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    26. Re: So is there a form for the ISP by Gavagai80 · · Score: 2

      Net neutrality doesn't mean ISPs have to sell "unlimited data" deals. Put a 30 GB monthly cap on the lower priced service plan and let the people just looking for court information use that while the guy downloading ISOs all the time pays for a premium plan.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
    27. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wouldn't it be cheaper just to prioritize video packets on a general IP based network (if it were legal) without having to build out a separate private network?

      I've thought for a long time that prioritization video traffic on virtual pipes over generic IP network would be ideal. Then anyone, anywhere could purchase reliable paths across the entire internet without having to go through all the trouble of building a separate, parallel, reliable, redundant, and therefore more expensive/wasteful network.

    28. Re: So is there a form for the ISP by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

      So now you are in the hands of all the Ad spammers instead and other malicious people spamming your IP with traffic. Of course - the ISP will not block that because it means that they can "upsell" their services.

      Paying for bandwidth is a different way of solving this. As long as it is equal regardless of accessed service it's not a problem with net neutrality. Then customers requesting high bandwidth can pay for it.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    29. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Translation; Company horribly oversold the bandwidth and is too cheap to buy a bigger pipe.

      air jordan 6

    30. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by grahamm · · Score: 2

      What customers are complaining about is not the inability to to use their full bandwidth 24x7, but the inability to use it for the (relatively short) periods when they want to. The problem is not people using the full bandwidth 24x7, but that there are times (peak period) when more people want to use it than the ISP has provisioned the bandwidth for.

    31. Re: So is there a form for the ISP by Type44Q · · Score: 1

      Mouth, foot, remove...

    32. Re: So is there a form for the ISP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So use more of what you're paying for then.

    33. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No,

      Persons A and B should each get their fair share or the bandwidth they can use at each constriction point.
      If they each are buying the same service and there is only one constriction, then they should each get the same b/w.

      There are problems with deciding some traffic is more 'important'.
      The first is that once B figures it out, he will just say his is important.
      Also a service provider who happens to also sell video, will want his video to work better than his over the top competitors.

      Hopefully, service contracts will get to where ISP's have to do this.

      btw, Is there something we should know about the courthouse example? ;-)

    34. Re: So is there a form for the ISP by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Cost wise, a customer consuming 1TB via torrent is about the same as one consuming 100Gb via Netflix. Most high speed dedicated links are billed based on 95th percentile, which means the peak 1.5hours.

    35. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by dywolf · · Score: 1

      sounds like the business should allocate more resources to support both customers equally for the services they paid for.

      --
      The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
    36. Re: So is there a form for the ISP by buchanmilne · · Score: 2

      Cost wise, a customer consuming 1TB via torrent is about the same as one consuming 100Gb via Netflix.

      This may have been the case before Net neutrality.

      Most high speed dedicated links are billed based on 95th percentile, which means the peak 1.5hours.

      Before net neutrality, it was feasible to limit the peak, and have torrents consume the unused capacity off-peak. With net neutrality, this isn't as practical.

      (I work for an ISP in a region that doesn't have 95th-percentile billing, we have to provision/pay capacity for peak demand, even if that is the 8 hours per quarter of iOS release day, or 2 hours per month of Patch Tuesday).

    37. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by silas_moeckel · · Score: 1

      If your 100% full you need more capacity, basic redundancy should allow one edge router to fail at any given time. This is part of the point of 95th percentile billing if you have say 2 providers with the same sized pipe your peak utilization should never exceed 100% of a link, money wise your paying the difference in the per mbs rate and the port cost.

      --
      No sir I dont like it.
    38. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by tomxor · · Score: 1

      If bandwidth is contended, then you should just use fair queuing. If you have N customers, everyone gets at least 1/N of the total, what's left over is shared equally, repeat until it's all used.

      I disagree. I think a system like what you describe is mostly appropriate *after* you provide a certain base level of service to everyone. The person with very-low-bandwidth need should rarely if ever have to wait for the person with the very-high-bandwidth-need, because otherwise you have two people paying the same absolute amount for a service but the one who is using it more is being prioritized. If I pay $20 for as many bagels a week as I want and you pay $20 for as many bagels a week as you want, and I take one bagel a day and you take five hundred, the store should make sure I get my one before you get your five hundredth.

      You are missing one major variable.

      You're bagel shop analogy has no rate, if instead each customer is only allowed to buy one bagel per minute and the bagel shop has sold the unlimited bagels package to 100 people... then they know that the maximum capacity they must be able to provide is 100 bagels per minute.

      Of course It's not reasonable to expect an ISP would ever buy their maximum possible required capacity because they would quickly be out-competed, but if their peak load requires more capacity then using sneaky tactics to limit heavy users rates is not an honest strategy, in which case they are overselling. Basing your capacity requirements on peak usage statistics, combined with 1/n allocation in the event of capacity exhaustion is fair.

      Big ISPs wouldn't do this because they'd rather sell an "unlimited package" that is only unlimited to people who never use more than 1 GiB per week. They will happily disappoint the 10% who try to use their service to the extent it was advertised to keep those 90% happy.

      I think a system like what you describe is mostly appropriate *after* you provide a certain base level of service to everyone

      I'd agree that it's important to provide a base level of service to everyone no matter what happens to the capacity... But does "eveyone" include the heavy users? i fail to see anything more fair than 1/n customers division, the heavy users gets as much bandwidth as the lightweight users in this scenario... how is that not fair.

    39. Re: So is there a form for the ISP by Bengie · · Score: 3, Informative

      95th-percentile billing, we have to provision/pay capacity for peak demand

      My ISP has roughly 6x peak bandwidth and all traffic is transit via Level 3, no CDNs or peering. 100/100 for $90. No caps, ISP claims you should get 100% of your bandwidth 100% of the time, which is why they have 6x peak. Technically 3x peak as live links and 6x because each of those links has a fail over that can be teamed to double bandwidth on request.

      A lot of small ISPs complain about similar things as you. Is it a scale thing or a lack of competition? Maybe my ISP is lucky and has access to several trunk options, even out here in the middle of farm land. our first hop is about 250 miles, but takes a 400 mile route. Do you not have access to a decent hub within 250 miles?

    40. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Lumpy · · Score: 1

      Reasonable.. you are hilarious.

      Overselling 1000 to 1 IS NOT REASONABLE to anyone but a Low IQ MBA.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    41. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Bengie · · Score: 1

      You are right in some completely asinine and idiotic sense, in that a synchronous interface is always either sending a user payload frame or a pad frame

      I was actually going for this, but I didn't get the reason why across very well, but I attempted to explain in the last paragraph. At some really small time frames the link is always at 100% or 0%. The reason I went to this extreme is to make a point that it's only once you start to get to macro level time scales, like milliseconds, that all you care about is averages. At some point you can say "I never have more than 1ms of buffer latency over this link", and that is what you're goal is. You want the latency to always be low, meaning the link is not congested.

    42. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Bengie · · Score: 1

      Edge routers, there's your problem? My residential connection plugs pseduo-directly into the core router. 0.14ms pings to the core router, yeah baby. CDNs? Blasphemy. I asked a manager when they were getting a Netflix CDN, their response, "We don't like to prefer one company over another and our trunk is just fine, we have no reasons to use CDNs".
      Topology: My Firewall - ONT - Aggregation switch with zero oversubscription - Core Router - 3 links to Level 3 each pair with a failover. My trace route looks like this: Hop 1 ISP Hop 2 Level 3, and like I said, that first hop is 0.14ms.

      The network topology is provisioned that 100% of all customers could use 100% of their connections at the same time, ignoring melting the trunk. But the trunk is sized 3x the 95th percentile with another 3x for fail over, so 6x 95th percentile in total. Because they have no CDNs or peers, they're very proactive about keeping their trunk sized with room to breath.

      If a small ISP in the sticks can do this, why can't you?

      I have a 6 hop, 110ms ping 1m jitter to AWS Frankfurth Germany from Midwest USA because Level 3 rocks, and I get 100% of my bandwidth. Using DSLReports jitter test, I get 1ms of jitter to all of their servers around the globe.

    43. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by lsatenstein · · Score: 1

      "Assume you have more demand for bandwidth than you have bandwidth."

      Translation; Company horribly oversold the bandwidth and is too cheap to buy a bigger pipe.

      Its not a question of cheapness, or under capacity. If the peak occurs for 5 minutes in the day, and then there is only 40% utilisation of the network, do you add 50% capacity for the 5 minutes per day. Consider the slowdown during the 5 minutes as being a factor of 5 or 10 versus normal non peak response times.

      I think that the dowloading of an iso file should be throttled. Perhaps in place of x bits per second download, it is x/2 per second. or perhaps the wget, curl, or other download fire transfer system should be self throttling. You are sharing a resource. An ISO download at supper time is an abuse.
       

      --
      Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
    44. Re:So is there a form for the ISP by Bengie · · Score: 1

      My ISP just promises that congestion will never happen on their network. Is that so much to ask for others to do the same? They explicitly told me congestion management is a hard moving target with too many problems. Much cheaper to just throw more bandwidth at the problem until the congestion is gone. They took the approach to the point of no over-provisioning. My personal sales person, who had been with the company for over 20 years, told me I can use my connection however I want, as long as it's not illegal. If I want to use it 100%, I am free to do so, they promise to never punish me in any way. They also promise I will never experience congestion on their network. If I do, to call them immediately and report the issue. Even their ToS says they will never QoS or traffic shape any traffic. All traffic will be treated exactly the same.

      I've load tested my connection during peak hours by downloading a bunch large files from many servers, enough to keep the link saturated for hours on end. On a 100Mb connection, one minute averages were 99.5Mb/s +- 0.25Mb/s, and my ping stayed below 0.2ms and 0 packets lost. All during peak hours. Oh yeah, zero buffer bloat.

      All of this tagging crap just to manage congestion sounds like a bunch of busy work. Not to say they aren't using TE's in other ways.

  4. Anyone know if this applies to free Wi-Fi? by TimSSG · · Score: 1

    Does anyone know if "net neutrality" applies to free Wi-Fi places? Like restaurants and public libraries type places. Tim S.

    1. Re:Anyone know if this applies to free Wi-Fi? by Revek · · Score: 2

      I'm pretty sure the end user can filter anything they want. We still maintain a filter on the public parks around here. After all you don't want little johnny to have to ask mommy what the strange man with doing with his thing out on a park bench.

    2. Re:Anyone know if this applies to free Wi-Fi? by bjwest · · Score: 2

      These places are not ISPs, and shouldn't be treated as such. They're businesses offering a service in addition to whatever it was you purchased, so don't be a leach. It costs them money, and if you're one to even think of reporting an establishment offering free WiFi for cutting you off from or throttling your torrent, then fuck you. Go pay for your own connection.

      Public libraries may be a different story, however, but I don't think they'd fall under ISP either. They are tax payer funded though, so leach away.

      --

      --- Keep the choice with the user..
    3. Re: Anyone know if this applies to free Wi-Fi? by Type44Q · · Score: 1

      We weren't going to ask but now that you mention it...

    4. Re:Anyone know if this applies to free Wi-Fi? by mattventura · · Score: 1

      My question is would it apply to those annoying infringement notice pages. Basically, if you get a DMCA notice on your IP, you'll be sent to a walled garden until you acknowledge the notice. It seems to fall under "blocking legitimate traffic", even if it's just a temporary block until someone clicks through a couple pages.

      Backstory: I'm currently in an apartment building that has one connection for all the residents. When one person gets caught pirating something, it cuts off the connection for everyone until someone acknowledges the notice. And of course, the chances are slim to none that the person doing the pirating is the person who will see and click through the notice, so it's pointless to begin with.

  5. Time to test Comcast by xeoron · · Score: 2

    Time to find out if they are still doing Man in the Middle Attacks against SSH and legal Bittorrent traffic.

  6. What about Netflix? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Does this mean they can stop paying Comcast and others, or demand refunds for the money they extorted from them ?

    1. Re:What about Netflix? by ArcadeMan · · Score: 1

      I was about to post something about Netflix too, I'm really wondering if Netflix can get back the extortion money they "had" to pay to some ISPs.

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    2. Re:What about Netflix? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There was an answer to this few months back (I'm sorry I don't have the link).

      Apparently it's a no because the contract was signed prior to the FCC changes.

  7. Most common response by SuperKendall · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The item you have filed a complaint for was in fact explicitly authorized by "Net Neutrality". Have a nice day.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  8. League of Legends by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    sounds like Riot Games violates this with their deals with ISP's to prioritize League of Legends traffic to reduce lag for players

    1. Re:League of Legends by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      Since when was Riot Games an ISP?

  9. Good Luck with That by turkeydance · · Score: 1

    we shall see you in court.

  10. report this by slashmydots · · Score: 1

    Time Warner really likes to block downloads of the Tor Client Bundle. Everyone go try and download it right now and if it doesn't work, report them. 1000 or so reports for the same thing should show up on their radar.

  11. The isps are violating by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    not riot, but we're splitting hairs at that point.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:The isps are violating by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i'm just saying Riot is culpable because they are initiating deals like this

    2. Re:The isps are violating by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      You mean they're culpable because they initiated a deal like this, before it was against FCC rules?

      Is Netflix a bad guy too, because ISP's extorted them into paying for bandwidth their customers are already paying for?

  12. Unlawful content? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's not very "neutral" if only the lawful content is protected.

  13. I wonder if this can force t-mobile to unfilter me by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 2

    I'm on t-mobile pay-as-you-go (prepaid, since I hate contracts). unless you 'prove to them you are not a child' (sigh) they treat you like a child and refuse to let you access any non-pg13 site (or whatever they call it). I don't want to have to 'identify' myself and I buy airtime for cash to keep what little is still left of my anon.

    to get full web access I'd have to give up my anon. this seems unfair. I'm a paying customer. what business is it of theirs who I am? the bill gets paid and no one complains, I don't see why they feel the need to be a nanny.

    so, can I report t-mobile for not allowing me full web access under such stupid 'prove it first!' conditions?

    its the only thing that annoys me about tmobile, really.

    --

    --
    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  14. What site? by jd2112 · · Score: 5, Funny

    My ISP appears to be blocking fcc.gov.

    --
    Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
    1. Re:What site? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Use TOR :)

    2. Re:What site? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Woosh :)

  15. Re:I wonder if this can force t-mobile to unfilter by sumdumass · · Score: 1

    I don't know about T-Mobile but I'm on the Boost mobile which is similar. I just installed a different browser and turned the safe search filters off on Google and do not have any restrictions. Dolphin and an add on can even act like a desktop browser and play flash videos. Might be worth a try.

  16. Re:I wonder if this can force t-mobile to unfilter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes, you can report them. Do so here

  17. Re:I wonder if this can force t-mobile to unfilter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    T-Mobile has terrible coverage: half that of Verizon or AT&T (about a third of the nation, while the others cover most of it). That's rather bothersome too.

  18. It's never been in the news, but by Cafe+Alpha · · Score: 2

    Comcast in the Bay Area disables routers when you torrent. You have to go unplug the router and plug it back in. It has nothing to do with legality, I've had it happen when torrenting Linux distributions.

    Since I shared a router and didn't have access to unplug it, I had to rent a vpn proxy so I could torrent without tripping this.

    1. Re: It's never been in the news, but by Dynedain · · Score: 2

      You sure you aren't just overloading the crappy router's buffer with too many open TCP connections? I've seen that problem with a lot of routers and lowering the limit solves the issue.

      --
      I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
    2. Re: It's never been in the news, but by Type44Q · · Score: 1

      Cross Communications (hick/inbred regional telco ~1hr southeast of Tulsa) used to pull this same shitty stunt on their incredibly-crappy "unlimited" 3G service.. .

    3. Re: It's never been in the news, but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Exactly, torrent involves a lot of connections to a lot of hosts. On a typical crappy, consumer device you typically end up consuming all of the device's memory with huge state and routing tables.

      Captcha: tampers

    4. Re: It's never been in the news, but by Bengie · · Score: 1

      I second this. I had a $200 router a few years back and it had issues with torrent. I never had these issues until I got my dedicated connection and could actually get decent speed from torrent, but there you go. And it showed up as packetloss, which is strange. I could get 100% of my connection speed with the router and torrent, but as long as I limited the connections. As the connection count got higher, packetloss and jitter started to increase, even with low bandwidth, like 1% of my connection.

      It was very binary. Once I reached a certain connection count in the thousands, all of a sudden packetloss and jitter kicked in, which is very unexpected since it didn't actually break existing connections or deny me from creating new ones. Strange way to degrade.

  19. Re:I wonder if this can force t-mobile to unfilter by Cafe+Alpha · · Score: 1

    Report them!

  20. Re:I wonder if this can force t-mobile to unfilter by wbr1 · · Score: 2

    No, mobile and landline are two different beasts. Current net neutrality rules only apply to land line based ISPs.

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
  21. Re:I wonder if this can force t-mobile to unfilter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    t-mobile uses a proxy. A diff browser will not help, in fact t-mobile does user agent sniffing, and will block your connection completely (redirect all http requests to an upsell page), if they think you are using a non-mobile browser (i.e., tethering).

    To get around both, I use a VPN.

    But, I hope the FCC will tell t-mobile they can't pull this crap.

    Same, here as GP about otherwise pretty happy with t-mobile. A much better company than most US carriers, and 10000000000000 times better than ATT with all ATT's shady billing practices, and ATT's FU attitude toward their customers.

  22. comcast / port 25 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So this means I can run my home mail server again? Comcast has been blocking DELIVERY of any and all packets on TCP port 25 for years now (I got no problem with forwarding all my outgoing mail thru comcast's mail server, but why in the heck won't comcast let me RECEIVE any mail?)...

    1. Re:comcast / port 25 by BVis · · Score: 1

      That isn't necessarily a net neutrality issue. ISPs block port 25 because idiots run open proxies (or get owned by the latest Bonzi Buddy clone) and spam flows like water over the falls. It's a QoS/abuse issue.

      I haven't looked at my ISP contract lately, but I would be surprised if there isn't a clause in there that says "no servers". They'd want you to upgrade to their "business class" service, which is basically the same shitty service with a slightly lower SLA at twice the price.

      --
      Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
  23. Re:I wonder if this can force t-mobile to unfilter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Which is silly.

    It's an admission that prioritization is useful over wireless which is an admission that it's also useful on low-bandwidth landline networks.

  24. FCC has no authority by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "Lawful" content. The arrogance of such a generic statement and the idea that the FCC can self appoint themselves the ones to decide such a thing makes my guts wrench in anger.

    The FCC has no authority whatsoever, and the ISP can't block anything, at least not in America. Censorship is contrary to freedom, and all the people I and others have talked to have indicated they support a military response against any entity that infringes on their freedoms.

    I hope they remain peaceful, but preliminary indications show it won't.

  25. We need more regulations like this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Paid prioritization: ISPs may not enter into agreements to prioritize and benefit some lawful internet traffic over the rest of it on their networks."

    More beets! We need more beets, comrade!

    If I can't pay more for better, why would want to pay in the first place? I want a Mercedes for the cost of a Kia, and I want it now.

    1. Re:We need more regulations like this? by Bengie · · Score: 1

      It wouldn't be so bad other than the extra money you pay just lines their pockets instead of increasing build out. Essentially people with less money get lower priority because they can't afford as much as those with more money. Just make everyone the same priority and stop with the artificial scarcity.

  26. So will this permit home servers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If I want to run a mailserver at home, I should have inbound port 25 access right?

  27. Come on People, Let's Get Port 25 Opened! by LinuxRegisteredUser_ · · Score: 1

    Blocking: ISPs may not block access to any lawful content, apps, services, or devices.

    I just used the form to complain about this. Join in!

    http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:k8CUNcUTddwJ:customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/list-of-blocked-ports+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

    --
    Life is Grand!