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Study: Major ISPs Slowing Traffic Across the US
An anonymous reader writes: A study based on test results from 300,000 internet users "found significant degradations on the networks of the five largest internet service providers" in the United States. This group includes Time Warner Cable, Verizon, and AT&T. "The study, supported by the technologists at Open Technology Institute's M-Lab, examines the comparative speeds of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), which shoulder some of the data load for popular websites. ... In Atlanta, for example, Comcast provided hourly median download speeds over a CDN called GTT of 21.4 megabits per second at 7pm throughout the month of May. AT&T provided speeds over the same network of of a megabit per second." These findings arrive shortly after the FCC's new net neutrality rules took effect across the U.S.
When you strongly regulate something the effects are negative for the consumer!
You must be living in some kind of bizarro reality. Internet connections are NOT regulated at all, right now. Things will improve when Internet connections fall under the auspices of the FCC.
I don't respond to AC's.
The FCC has removed incentives for monopolistic ISPs to increase backbone network capacity since they are not allowed to derive any additional revenue to offset the cost of those investments...
They were NEVER going to do that, ever, until it became absolutely necessary and/or someone else paid for it.
For starters, ISPs do not have anything to do with the backbones - those are owned and operated by other companies that do not sell connections to the end user. The backbone is not the problem - the ISPs which control the "last mile" are.
And there's plenty of bandwidth for the most part. All evidence suggests that the plan was never to increase bandwidth and charge extra for better service - the plan was to throttle and charge extra for normal service.
This is self evident in the fact that the backbone is fine, but traffic is what's being artificially throttled. It's exactly what they were doing and the FCC regulations were put in place to stop it and preserve the internet how it was, not change it.
There's no such thing as a free market when there is a monopoly. Network Neutrality prevents monopolies from harming competition and actually *preserves* what little free market exists on the internet.
=Smidge=
You do realize FCC has no hand in market prices, correct?
Yes, the article referenced doesn't point to the actual study directly, a but with a bit of goggling I found:
The battleground — where this degradation takes place — is at ISP interconnection points. These are the places where traffic requested by ISP customers crosses between the ISP’s network and another network on which content and application providers host their services.
This test measures whether interconnection points are experiencing problems. It runs speed measurements from your (the test user’s) ISP, across multiple interconnection points, thus detecting degraded performance.
What I don't understand is why people assume congestion is intentional throttling by ISPs for them to profit later with imagined fast lanes. Isn't the simpler assumption that it costs ISPs money to add interconnection capacity. And since their customers don't/can't choose ISPs based on the quality of their connection all the way to the popular content providers, the ISPs don't spend money on those upgrades? Usually the only thing customers have to go on and promised is the maximum download/upload speeds quoted by the ISP for the last mile.
So you made your bit torrent client look like a speed test?
No, they identified the ports the popular free speed check software used and then wrote special rules to handle that traffic with priority so the user thought the connections were faster than they were.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Soy sauce made from human hair.
Poisonous alcohol made from industrial alcohol.
Counterfeit drugs, including antibiotics with a disinfectant as an ingredient.
Tainted meat from all kinds of animals: pork, beef, lamb and chicken, but also cat meat sold as rabbit, poisoned snails, and goat urine treated duck.
And always a big favorite: cooking oil filtered from sewage.
When you strongly regulate something the effects are negative for the consumer!
Why is Snark Required?