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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.
Would'a been, damn network...
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
I live in LA and subscribe to Time Warner. We pay for up to 40 Mbps in our apartment yet rarely see anything beyond... 21 (with only one device using the connection). Now that seems to make a little per sense...
You are an idiot. This demonstrates that they were fucking with people's speeds all along.
If the last mile ISPs are going to only allow balanced traffic for free (and last mile traffic is clearly not balanced by its nature) then we should fix the problem for them and generate enough upstream traffic to balance the equation. This is simple - answer one idiotic position with another idiotic position. Have Netflix go peer to peer and then manage traffic flow to create balanced traffic at all of the last mile ISPs. It's what they want ---- we should give it to them.
Since they can't get their way to squeeze more profit from their customers, they'll punish them instead.
Assholes.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Perhaps the FCC will fine them 0.3% of their annual profit for lying to customer about unlimited plans for several years!
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.
Is it:
A. Actively punishing users?
B. The natural side-effect of the legal inability to shut out extreme bandwidth usages?
C. A coincidence?
D. A failure in the process of making changes required by the FCC?
E. Something else?
I think people also tend to forget that the providers can cancel the contract if they don't like it and offer you a new one.
If they are regulated in a way in which they don't see any profit in it anymore, they just stop servicing an area altogether.
These studies were done before the FCC's Net Neutrality regulations went into effect.
Actually, I'm lying. I don't know when they were done. The article links to... get this... no study. I can't find a single link on the Internet to the study that this article suggests happened.
So how can we draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of the new policies from this article?
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
This is the single most stupid thing said on the internet today.
Congrats, you even make Kardashians look like rocket scientists.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
- reminds me of something a previous President said - he had to violate free market principles to save the free market... And oh how you all laughed when he said it, now you borrowed his logic.
Utopia is always sold that way... And always with the same results.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Why the fuck can't slashdot fix the category/comments icons from covering the article title?
When you strongly regulate something the effects are negative for the consumer!
Ya! Like all that clean air and water the government is regulating. And don't get me started on safe food and drugs. /sarcasm
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yea, but what do I care? They won't send a dime of the fine to me....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
What a load of crap. The Major ISPs want to become content publishers, nothing more and nothing less. They want a 30% hit from all the content sold on their networks.
The internet, the digital highway, needs to be as regulated as every other road for smooth traffic flow. Imagine a sick corporate world, where you are forced to pull over to allow a corporate executive through and if you do not move over fast enough, forced straight off the road. Imagine roads run as revenue operations, fines for everything, penalties for excess use, penalties for not using it enough, all you movements subject to review. Imagine wanting to drive to one place only to be forced to drive somewhere else instead. Imagine tolls on every road and footpath. Imagine someone else owning your driveway, front path and garage. Imagine being charge for having more stuff in you car when you use roads, four people four tolls, full boot, extra fees. That is corporate freedom in roads just as they would implement it on the digital highway.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
There used to be alternatives to the big ISPs, but they've all been anti-competed out of business. And the US doesn't break up monopolies anymore, so not much chance of the situation improving.
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're right. I followed the relevant links in that article (and several were pointless primers) and none of them including mlab pointed to the study claimed, not even indirectly. I can't find it either. I have no love whatsoever for Verizon or Comcast, but it makes you wonder.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
How can you tell? Internet speed tests only check the speed from that server to you, not network to network speeds.
This is why you want internet to be a government owned and operated service, like the highways. That way if you don't like your service you can at least vote for change, unlike now where your only option more money.
Net neutrality stops your ISP from throttling your netflix to force you to pay for their streaming service instead.
Looks like they are artifically throttling back traffic a) to charge the end users more later on to turn it back up again and b) to bypass net neutrality rules and divert the extra bandwidth to the media corporations.
So they need to get slapped down for false advertising for any link that is hitting 100% on a 95th.
No sir I dont like it.
Our internet speeds are hopelessly degraded until the government data collection has been halted. The ISPs are unable to provide appropriate quality of service while they are expected to mirror all data that travels through their pipes. This has been a problem for over a decade now, I doubt it'll come to an end any time soon.
I'm sure AT&T care, or who ever it was that got fined.
To put it in a car analogy, a 0.3% fine is like driving down the road and hitting a bump 0.3% of the radius of your tire. A bump around 1mm high. That's got to be noticeable...
You do realize, that in the example provided, Comcast to Nlayer was a steady 21Mbs, while AT&T was the sub Mbs carrier, right? The problem wasn't Comcast to Nlayer.
The funny thing is, if you read the article, that is the only time in the entire thing Comcast's name is mentioned, and it's not in a negative way.
But I guarantee you that everyone is going to assume Comcast is one of the five mentioned in the summary just because of the general bias.
I think the study is the last paper published in 2014 at this site.
http://www.measurementlab.net/publications
Looks like they did a good job of isolating the cause to the Interconnection point.
They admit that they have no clue as to why there was a problem at the point.
That seems more a private business consideration instead of a technical issue.
They also found some interesting latency increases with Comcast which appeared to be there even during non-busy times.
Over time, they appeared and disappeared nationwide.
Again, seems more like a business choice that a technical problem.
Untill we have a clear definition as to what service a comsumer ISP is required to provide, or we get competition, this is not likely to get better.
I still want the destination ISP to accept any traffic to it's customers gratis provided it is delivered near those customers.
That, coupled with fair sharing of the access network should clean up most of this nonsense.
Or at least expose a need for a minimun average access speed floor.
Most of us don't even have that option. There isn't a "don't suck, if I give you more money" plan. Money ain't what they're into: they're only into suckin', and nothin' else.
You do realize FCC has no hand in market prices, correct?
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Love_Canal
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.
The study, conducted by internet activists BattlefortheNet, looked at the results from 300,000 internet users and found significant degradations on the networks of the five largest internet service providers (ISPs), representing 75% of all wireline households across the US.
When 5 companies have 75% market share, it's a highly monopolistic market, which will result in very high prices because of lack of competition.
You need to figure out how (politically and technically) only five companies are allowed to profit from a commodity service. Imagine if only 5 vendors made and sold all t-shirts. How high would the price of t-shirts be then?
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?
They dug themselves that hole over a course of decades, so they have the reputation that they deserve. The fact that they became one of the remaining five ISPs shows that when the business environment is monopolistic, the worst will be the survivors
If someone could wave a magic wand and have immediate competition in the ISP market (with lots of new players) Comcast wouldn't last six months because of their bad reputation. That is the way the system is supposed to work.
Remember ISP stands for Internet Service Provider. Comcast forget that.
Why is Snark Required?
In Cupertino, near Apple - suddenly AT&T is rolling GigaPower fiber to home with up to 1 Gbps speeds.
So have had 12 Mbps Uverse, until recently was not uncommon to see download speeds 12 Mbps. Curious if the GigaPower rollout was sandbagged until FCC regulation that now forces ISP to actually complete on service.
Hopefully by end of the week we'll have upgraded to GigaPower, will be curious to see if the actual higher down/up rates stay true.
at least where I live. I'm paying for up to 60 Mbps and when I test it the speed always falls between 50 and 65 (variations seem due to peak hours). Though I still wish I could pay less for 15 Mbps since I really don't need 60.
Ya!
Just like food safety...
car safety...
workplace safety...
hazardous waste...
You know what, the list is too big.
It's easier to just call you an idiot.
Idiot.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It's just lawmakers judging what is right for people.
Let me see here. Stores are deciding they don't want to associate their name with a flag that many people see as a racist and divisive symbol. What exactly do lawmakers have to do with this?
You must be a young kid. Im guessing you dont remember when Ma-Bell ran all the phones in the US and you paid $0.25 a min to call someone that was less than 30 miles away.
Tell me, how much does it cost to call someone 30, 50, or 100 miles away now? Oh wait, it is $0 a min. All from regulating Ma-Bell and having the markets opened.
Kind of killed Phreaking with $0 a min long distance. lol
When you tax something it's negative. It's stupid easy to find examples of regulations increasing consumption. Why, food is a great example. The government says you can't sell poisoned food, so people are more willing to eat anything from anywhere.
At one point in time, there were no regulations about clean air, clean water, safe food, etc. Nobody figured they were needed.
Then some people figured out that they could make more money by not giving a shit about what they dumped into the rivers, spewed into the sky, or whether the meat/produce/etc they were selling was safe to eat, etc. After a while, there was enough of a public outcry about stuff like rivers literally catching on fire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River#Environmental_concerns), smog so thick you can't go outside some days (go visit Beijing if you want to see what that's like today), tainted food, and so forth, that laws were passed making it illegal to do sociopathic crap like that.
It'd be great if we lived in a world where we didn't need laws like that, because everyone would do the right thing to begin with. We don't. Corporations are entirely sociopathic constructs, and have proven time and again that they cannot be left unsupervised. And who does the supervising? It takes someone with the power to enforce stuff on them, and that's the Government. Consumers and market forces are simply not strong enough to account for all the negative externalities. This isn't to say that corporations aren't useful, just that they need a check on them. Government needs a check on it, too, for that matter, but that's what democracy and elections is supposed to be about.
China is also a wonderful example of how important Clean Air (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-30826128) and Clean Water (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/23/china-half-groundwater-polluted) regulations can be, and what happens when you don't have them.
The ideal solution would be to have the backbone infrastructure be owned and maintained either by the government, or by a heavily regulated corporate entity kept entirely separate from the companies that provide service over it. Then you let companies compete to provide service over that infrastructure, on a level playing field, instead of letting some of them try to leverage local monopolies in infrastructure into the service field.
After all, it works pretty well when it comes to roads and highways.
This is why you want internet to be a government owned and operated service, like the highways. That way if you don't like your service you can at least vote for change, unlike now where your only option more money.
Seriously now... That's NOT a viable answer to this problem.. Roads are a unique solution, and in some places the level of service they provide is horrible. (Like LA during "rush hour"). No, I don't want THAT kind of service from my ISP.
If you want to start talking about doing stuff like we did to get electricity and phones into rural America using private investment though favorable regulations, say give out tax abatements for "last mile" infrastructure owners who allow third party use of their networks at competitive rates, or forbid the owner of the "last mile" infrastructure from actually selling to retail customers, you'd be on to something...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
However, it will not matter. Google has invested into SpaceX internet sats, so, Google is likely going to drive these companies into the ground within 4 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Seriously, what really needs to happen is that we need to let the monopolies go. Once it looks like Google can come in at will, all of them will change their tune and improve the situation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Smart is spending more than a Mac so you can build it yourself.
Smart is not paying the Apple tax. Smart is buying a PC for half the price, or building one for a third the price. Smart isn't buying Apple crap which doesn't work with 90% of the software on the market.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
If you're fed up (pun intended) with safe food and other consumables I suggest that you order the cheapest possible products directly from China. Unlike the commies here in the US, manufacturers there are mostly unencumbered by effective regulation, so anything goes.
You're not kidding. Just today there's this article on the BBC (and elsewhere) titled China 'seizes 40-year-old meat in crackdown on smugglers'
According to state newspaper the China Daily, officials from Guangxi, a southern region bordering Vietnam, found meat dating back to the 1970s.
Yang Bo, an anti-smuggling official in Hunan province, was quoted as saying food was often transported in ordinary rather than refrigerated vehicles to save money. "So the meat has often thawed out [and re-frozen] several times before reaching customers," he said.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So, because the local government forced them to sell the land, and the dept of education didn't actually bother to read the deed to the land, then built on the land causing the breach of the containment structure, it is all the chemical companies fault? That is absurd.
From that Wikipedia entry:
The Niagara Falls City School District needed land to build new schools, and attempted to purchase the property from Hooker Chemical that had been used to bury toxic waste. The corporation initially refused to sell citing safety concerns; however, the school district refused to relent.[1] Eventually, faced with parts of the property being condemned and/or expropriated, Hooker Chemical agreed to sell on the condition that the School Board buy the entire property for one dollar.
To be certain that the School Board knew what it was getting by taking the Canal, Hooker escorted School Board members to the Canal site and made test borings in front of them. On its own initiative and at its own expense Hooker Chemical thus ensured that the School Board had directly witnessed the danger which would later be proclaimed in the deed which the School Board would sign. Hooker Chemical thus also ensured that the School Board understood the singular unsuitability of the land for the uses the School Board planned to make of it. However the School Board already had a plan, and would not change it.
So this was a failure in the school board. They were warned that this spot was an awful spot to build a school. Now, I don't know much about how dumps work, but it sounds like they were doing the proper preventative stuff of the time, it was the school board that refused to listen here.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I would not call SuperKendall a Libertarian. He is a corporate stooge, libertarians would expect to be able to sue the ISPs for this behavior.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The backbone is less of a problem than the last mile.
The backbone situation is reasonably healthy and competitive in the US (although, at some point they might have to step in and stop Zayo from buying everybody else out).
The last mile... well, that dictates who you can get based on where you live. So I'd say: open and regulated last mile, any retail ISP can offer their service to any subscriber on any last mile infrastructure they like. I may be biased but I like how New Zealand's model has become over the last few years.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
It will be rather hard for them to do that when many of us have contracts.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
When you strongly regulate something the effects are negative for the consumer! What an astounding shock that must be to everyone except the people who tried to warn you!
I know! Consumers were so much better off before regulation. Why does the stupid government prevent me from buying the patent medicines I want? The free market was working perfectly until whiners like Upton Sinclair came along. Rivers were intended (by God) to be the sewers of industry! Then the cry-baby unions, "waaah, eighteen hours a day is too much, waaah!"
Please, can we go back to the way it was before stupid regulations? Everything sucks now.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
You can cancel those contracts whenever you like, right?
So can they.
In fact, they already frequently do, and you don't even notice it because they just give you a new contract with new terms, and you keep paying.
Tell me, how much does it cost to call someone 30, 50, or 100 miles away now? Oh wait, it is $0 a min. All from regulating Ma-Bell and having the markets opened.
No, I think that's a result of competition from the internet/data networks. When Ma Bell was broken up into regional Bells, there were still high long distance fees. And yes I do remember that.
Cell phones with extremely high monthly costs, so high that providing long distance was an "eh why not" for the companies involved, sealed the deal. And they drove down costs by using data networks to carry voice. Packet switching vs dedicated lines made a big difference.
Why is that the ideal solution? It seems like we're starting to get some traction with plain old competition from Google Fiber, AT&T Gigapower, Time Warner MAXX, Comcast's 2Gbps thing (don't recall the name), etc. We didn't need government owned infrastructure to do that...
And frankly, if the government owned it I'm not sure these types of upgrades would have been any faster. If the reason it's faster is something like "they can do it via eminent domain and bypassing their own rules and regulations" then that's pretty much bullshit.
Wow I'm surprised we're ranked that highly. I didn't expect that we'd be above France and Germany.
But anyway, with all the gigabit projects going on now it seems like the "more competitive option" has come. Basically it took one company to not play along (Google), then another company to get scared and react (AT&T), and now everybody's jumping in.
This is why, as President of my condo-complex HOA Board (c.a. 100 units), I made sure that Verizon fiber was wired to every unit, just like Time Warner Cable had been years prior.
The result was real market competition. I switched. My bandwidth increased by about 15x (symmetric), with a reduction in price over the service TWC had formerly been (intermittently) providing.
.
There is only one person to pay for everything. The end user customer.
All other 'customers' must pass through the costs as a cost of doing business, or go out of business eventually..
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
what universe do you live in where apple products cost more than PCs for comparable speed and power?
where do you buy these flags and flag symbols now?
You say that, but just look at the state of internet in countries which do have government-mandated access to the last mile infrastructure. They generally have far more competition, lower prices, and better speeds. You already have the LA rush-hour internet, and are arguing against fixing it.
Those are Akamai's findings - they might not be too representative.
We wouldn't need the FCC to make any sort of regulation changes if we could just get lemon laws for ISPs. Instead of fines, make it stupid easy to sue your ISP to get your bills refunded.
I think you need to re-read what I posted. I'm just opposed to government owning and operating infrastructure. It bloats the size of government unnecessarily and opens up avenues for graft and corruption. I am in favor of rules that forbid the owners of the "last mile" infrastructure which government has allowed (like the cable franchise in your local town) from not allowing competitive use. Perhaps going so far as to forbid them from dealing directly with retail customers. So competition yes, government owing and operating infrastructure, no.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101