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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.
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.
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. . . .
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.