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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.
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.
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.
Why the fuck can't slashdot fix the category/comments icons from covering the article title?
Assholes.
Incidentally, the ISP I worked for once specifically gamed the speed testing software with special rules in the network infrastructure for that type of traffic so it would always be prioritized.
Assholes.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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
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.
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.