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

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.

Comments

Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services?

[sdw]

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?

Re: Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services?

[bemymonkey]

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?

Re: Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services?

[Bengie]

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.

Re:Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services?

[Bengie]

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.

So is there a form for the ISP

[Revek]

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.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[SeaFox]

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.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[Etherwalk]

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.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[sumdumass]

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.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Then Maybe you shouldn't have Oversold your Capacity?

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[ArcadeMan]

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.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[Lumpy]

"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.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[Etherwalk]

"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.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[Etherwalk]

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.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[Bengie]

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.

Re: So is there a form for the ISP

[Gavagai80]

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.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[grahamm]

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.

Re: So is there a form for the ISP

[buchanmilne]

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).

Re: So is there a form for the ISP

[Bengie]

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?

Time to test Comcast

[xeoron]

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

Re:Anyone know if this applies to free Wi-Fi?

[Revek]

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.

Re:Anyone know if this applies to free Wi-Fi?

[bjwest]

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.

Unlawful content?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I wonder if this can force t-mobile to unfilter me

[TheGratefulNet]

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.

What site?

[jd2112]

My ISP appears to be blocking fcc.gov.

It's never been in the news, but

[Cafe Alpha]

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.

Re: It's never been in the news, but

[Dynedain]

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.

Re:I wonder if this can force t-mobile to unfilter

[wbr1]

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