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Senators Ask Four Major Carriers About Video Slowdowns (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Three U.S. Senate Democrats today asked the four major wireless carriers about allegations they've been throttling video services and -- in the case of Sprint -- the senators asked about alleged throttling of Skype video calls. Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent the letters to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile, noting that recent research using the Wehe testing platform found indications of throttling by all four carriers.
"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise," the senators wrote. Specifically, the Wehe tests "indicated throttling on AT&T for YouTube, Netflix, and NBC Sports... throttling on Verizon for Amazon Prime, YouTube, and Netflix... throttling on Sprint for YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Skype Video calls... [and] delayed throttling, or boosting, on T-Mobile for Netflix, NBC Sports, and Amazon Prime by providing un-throttled streaming at the beginning of the connection, and then subsequently throttling the connection," the senators' letters said.
"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise," the senators wrote. Specifically, the Wehe tests "indicated throttling on AT&T for YouTube, Netflix, and NBC Sports... throttling on Verizon for Amazon Prime, YouTube, and Netflix... throttling on Sprint for YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Skype Video calls... [and] delayed throttling, or boosting, on T-Mobile for Netflix, NBC Sports, and Amazon Prime by providing un-throttled streaming at the beginning of the connection, and then subsequently throttling the connection," the senators' letters said.
First we hang em, den we kill em!
Democrats and Republicans waste time and money with stupid shit like this. This is a meaningless bunch of posturing. They should not be running the place. But you fucking retards keep voting for them.
"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise."
You can't just take something out of it's context and make a meaningful argument.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
All online traffic should be treated equally
Really? TCP video streams are the same as UDP text messages?
If you say yes, now you get to define "equally". Which means you want lawyers controlling the internet.
I'm confused. Isn't this simply non-net-neutrality?!
Yeah, but your QoS doesn't trump our QoS.
Why shouldn't it?
I'm paying the same amount for my connection, what the fuck do I care if your game is faster while my stuff is slower?
Net Neutrality doesn't mean all packets of the same type, you're just making up bullshit. Net Neutrality means it's agnostic to what kind of packet it is, and just handles them without trying to tune them to be faster.
Fuck your QoS you little snowflake, we don't give a fuck about you, and you clearly seem to think your stuff is more important than ours.
Sorry, but fuck you.
You said it ZIP: Where's your work everyone can see/use? It's not. It's HOTAIRWARE/NOTWARE (lol) "I'm a much better programmer than APK" - by Anonymous Coward ZIP on Monday October 08, 2018 @11:27PM (#57449082) FROM https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
The BETTER PROGRAMMER w/ no programs, lol - @ least you can say your "code" has NO BUGS - of course, it also does ZERO (like you) since it does nothing @ all, lol!
You hotair BLOWHARD talker, lol!
You f'd up ZIP https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
Yet 100,000++ users of my ware & dozens of even REGISTERED /.ers like/use/praise MY work https://news.slashdot.org/comm... vs. your HOTAIR talk punk!
* LMAO!
(Let's see how YOU take it when I publicly SHIT ALL OVER YOU by letting FACTS of YOUR FUCKUPS vs. ME https://science.slashdot.org/c... do the job for me)
APK
P.S.=> You STUPID & LAZY all talk chimpanzee - KEEP IMPERSONATING me https://science.slashdot.org/c... - I'll expose your BLOWHARD INCOMPETENCE publicly, lol... apk
Net neutrality FTW.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
...this sounds like the Senators expect the essence of Net Neutrality to be upheld, even though it is no longer a regulatory requirement.
The summary quotes the Senator as using the word "should." Is this "should" just, in that Senators opinion of what would be nice? Or is that "should" backed by some law we don't know about?
All Democrats. But let's continue to hate on Ajit (for doing the right thing).
>"All online traffic should be treated equally, and Internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise," the senators wrote.
Wrong. When there are cases of limited bandwidth, like there is on mobile networks, throttling of certain types or classes of network traffic makes perfect sense to prevent ALL customers' traffic from coming to a crawl or experiencing issues. Video is a perfect example of that, if it is done across-the-board or impartially. Video can consume a zillion times more bandwidth than anything else. And when we are talking about phones, it is unlikely that more than maybe and handful of users would even notice throttling that forces a 480P stream instead of 1080P on a 5" display held at a normal viewing distance. Another example would be once you go over your cap/plan data allowance- nobody will offer truly "unlimited" data with no throttling on mobile bandwidth, it would be a recipe for a disastrous user experience for most everyone.
What should be wrong is when the network operator does it to gain advantage over other companies, or to extort them or customers to pay something extra or force them to use certain alternative services owned by that company. But those magic words "or otherwise" in the quote, above, makes it sound like there could be no valid reason to throttle or apply quality of service, ever. There are services that also need to be real-time, like VOIP, compared to other traffic, like ftp, Email, or web downloads.
What exactly.
I have heard one, maybe two pieces of good news that have come from the FCC since he took over.
Most of the time it is him listening to the whispers of what the carriers want while getting fuck in the ass by the carrier without the reach around.
And enjoys every minute of it.
He is also cheap at $10 an hour.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
seems when I am just surfing the Internet all is fine.. but if I go to YouTube and watch a 14 minute soccer game clip -- quality degradation to the highest and I switch networks to my business network on Allstream | Integra and all is fine. ;-) switch back to Charter and all is bad.. seems funny huh?? oh well, at least I can make out the ball and the players, and the grass is green.. No 1080 or 4K but at least the audio is ok, and the video(s) are jerky... blurry.... just started about 30 days ago... I have noticed... we'll keep an eye on them...
they just don't want me to watch too much TV -- I get it...sounds like my parents.
See how STUPID "ZIP" (Zach Patterson) the CHIMP is (tried to take credit for what I solved before him) https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... (he needs to LEARN TO READ)!
I even SHOW ways to do it YOURSELF https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... (he couldn't).
Delphi/FreePascal/ObjectPascal HAS no issue w/ null-term'd string bufferoverflows - C does, C++ can UNLESS you do what I said 1st loser.
Tell us about CODE SIGNING (which has been STOLEN & ABUSED) https://www.helpnetsecurity.co... MY METHOD CAN'T BE (upmodded +2 INTERESTING in CODING FOR DEFCON no less) https://it.slashdot.org/commen...
"I'm a much better programmer than APK" - by Anonymous Coward ZIP on Monday October 08, 2018 @11:27PM (#57449082) FROM https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
BIG TALK - Yet ZIP has nothing to show in programs. I can https://news.slashdot.org/comm... from registered /.ers liking/using/praising my work (& 100k users worldwide too). He can't.
LIAR ZIP says he has no account "I don't have an account, so I don't have mod points" https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
Yet LIAR ZIP says he downmods my posts (IMPOSSIBLE MINUS AN ACCOUNT on /.): "I down-modded a few of your post on other threads" - by Anonymous Coward "ZIP" on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:31AM (#57461058) FROM https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
APK
P.S.=> KEEP IMPERSONATING ME CHIMP https://science.slashdot.org/c... - this comes out every time EXPOSING your BLOWHARD incompetence... apk
The Wehe web page is not clear on how significant the throttling is. For example, it seems the 22% of Sprint Skype calls are throttled at .5mbs, but it isn't clear that the unthrottled calls are much faster - they don't say anything about the unthrottled speed.
The response from the industry association is a little bit odd. They claim both that no throttling is going on, and that it is a good thing. I suppose it isn't supposed to be read carefully, so they provide all possible arguments, even at the risk of self-contradiction.
Also, I don't understand why only mobile is considered. We can no longer watch Netflix in the evening, because Comcast/Xfinity no longer provides enough bandwidth for Netflix to function. Why no test for wired connections?
When a requirement consists of two clauses joined together with an 'and', it's perfectly fine to argue against just of them.
You are like the politicians. Starting from a lack of understanding, you say stupid things, thinking they are smart.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I mean it's like anyone should still be surprised that PERPETUALLY DISHONEST NAZI FAGGOT HORNY WUMPWUSS CONTINUES TO LIE? I'm really shocked that anyone would be shocked by this. HE'S A KNOWN LIAR.
It's like his fucking JOB to lie on slashdot, the ridiculous nazi faggot doesn't have ANYTHING ELSE GOING ON.
Since posting the above, I've had a bit of a change of heart and thought about QoS a bit more.
Really, I just want the appropriate bandwidth for my data types, no more, no less.
And I'm sorry I said fuck you.
No, that is NOT what Net Neutrality advocates are asking for. Net Neutrality means that ISPs should be agnostic about the DESTINATION, i.e. that VoIP traffic to Skype should not be slower than VoIP traffic to Facebook Messenger or whatever.
No (sane) NN law should ever be written in a way that prevents differing prioritization of different classes of traffic, e.g. ensuring that latency-sensitive data, such as VoIP traffic gets sent without delay even if it means that non-latency-sensitive data, such as bulk downloads, are slower, even by a few seconds.
Because a five second difference in your download time could make the difference between somebody else's phone call being perfect and dropping out over and over. Services that require low latency should get priority, because if slowed down, they become unusable. Other services, if slowed down, do not become significantly less usable. The assumption is that every user will eventually do something for which latency matters, whether it is gaming, Skype, or even just video streaming, though the extent to which latency matters varies, obviously, depending on what you're doing.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Fuck the Republicans
Should anyone here still be surprised that PERPETUALLY DISHONEST NAZI FAGGOT HORNY WUMPWUSS CONTINUES TO LIE? I'm really shocked that anyone would be shocked by this. HE'S A KNOWN LIAR.
It's like his fucking JOB to lie on slashdot, the ridiculous nazi faggot doesn't have ANYTHING ELSE GOING ON.
No, he's right. You're just trol(l)ing* and making up bullshit. A neutral net is nothing more than a dumb pipe, and that is what we are supposed to demand from all service providers. But since we don't, we will end up with the internet just being another channel on the TV. We can let you trol(l)* all you want, but we should not let you vote. Your fascism is harmful to society.
*Stupid Slashdot censorship filters won't let me say a bad word.
Walmart greeters!
Warlmart greeters, they're the greetest! Why? Because I'm telling you why, I know walmart greeters and I'm telling you they're the greetest. Everyone says how greet they are when they greet you and I greet that with greet appreciation. The greetest. I know walmart greeters.
CAPTCHA: denying
Fix: Stop pretending infrastructure is, or can ever be, "free market". Stop allowing private wealth to extract rent from the privileged positions this misunderstanding creates. Utilities should not have any private stake in ownership.
Quality of service (QOS) prioritizes types of traffic. Time sensitive traffic such as VOIP gets priority over HTTP browsing.
ISPs that violate Net Neutrality prioritize traffic based on endpoint. Favoring one service, such as Xfinity over a competitor, like Netflix. When an ISP uses their position as intermediary to promote their own services or sponsored content over other services, they are abusing their abusing their position.
In many cases, as the lone landline provider, they are effectively using their monopoly power in one industry segment to affect another. In other cases, it appears that ISPs may be colluding to force companies to pay them to avoid throttling. Either way, these ISPs should lose their common carrier status and competitors should be allowed to enter these markets.
Conflating Net Neutrality with QOS is a deceptive practice of ISPs and their shills.
Encrypt your traffic, then complain about service issues for bill credits if you don't get bandwidth.
QoS only ever affects network traffic in any significant way when there is congestion. If there is congestion, the correct solution is to increase capacity, not to throttle some traffic. That traffic is paid for! You oversold your bandwidth too much and need to upgrade. QoS is fine on your own network with your own data. You can be as cheap as you want and use QoS to prioritize traffic that is important to you. An ISP however carries other people's paid for traffic and should absolutely treat it all equally. Yes, that means FTP gets the same priority as gaming packets. That is no problem at all unless you fail to upgrade the network to handle the traffic that your customers paid for. An ISP with regular bottlenecks on their network is doing it wrong.
They are throttling youtube, among others.
I use sprint, I haven't noticed a difference since the end of the 2015 NN rule, well the service has gotten better.. And they recently upped my throttle cap(only in congested areas) to 50GB, and "mobile hotspot" to 50GB from 25 and 10 respectively. And I have been using my phone as home internet for the last 3 months exclusively.. I can play games just fine, watch youtube just fine with the exception of sometimes it will drop to 480p for a few minutes or at normal peak times when all the kids around where I live are on their phones. I have more problems with youtube being a prick than anything else because I use safescript.
if I go to YouTube
Encrypt your traffic
YouTube has been HTTPS for years now. What sort of encryption did you have in mind beyond that?
Because a five second difference in your download time could make the difference between somebody else's phone call being perfect and dropping out over and over. Services that require low latency should get priority
No, they really shouldn't. If this kind of prioritization seems at all necessary, the traffic exceeds the capacity of the network. The only correct solutions are to increase the capacity or to reduce the traffic. Since an ISP can't really tell customers who paid for the bandwidth to not use it, the only real choice is to increase capacity.
Prioritization is also very subjective. What if you're mindlessly yapping about nothing on the phone, but if my download takes a minute more, I'll miss my flight? Is your phone call still more important? What if my important phone call is routed through a VPN and your game is not? NN is absolute. One user's priority is another user's throttling. You have no right to decide that my traffic is less important than someone else's.
No they shouldn't. If the carrier is offering a voice service, it is fine if they reserve bandwidth and make sure that voice server is low latency low jitter. If you are doing the VoIP yourself and are shoveling IP packets into the carrier network it is not the job of the carrier to do any QoS unless you or another 10T is maliciously overloading the network. You do your own QoS at the point of injection (your internet connection). The receiving party will do their own QoS at their point of connection. The carrier(s) in the middle have the job to transfer the packets you gave them to the other end, in the order you gave the packets, with consistent latency, jitter and packet loss, according to your contracted SLA. No more, no less.
And you are like a child, lacking the ability to add anything intelligent you lash out.
I bet you voted for Trump, didn't you puddin'?
Show us on the doll where the bad man touched you.
Idiot.
Simply remove the ability for any company to be both a carrier AND a content distributor.
You can either:
1) Be an ISP ( you sell bandwidth. It requires #2 for it to be useful. )
or
2) Be in the content creation / distribution business ( you sell end content people want that requires #1 to experience it )
but not both.
This would effectively remove any financial incentive for a carrier to throttle competing services in an effort to promote their own.
( Because, come on. This IS what they're doing regardless if they admit to it publicly or not. They will stone-cold LIE to your face to protect it. )
Hell, a Congress with a spine ( we can dream right ? ) needs only threaten these folks with such a possibility and this silly behavior will cease as of yesterday.
The parent's argument is 100% correct. Your comment has no point. The argument used by the Politicians reveals an utter lack of understanding. There are many different types of traffic and they're not supposed to all be treated the same.
Wrong. QoS is a used to control traffic within a network, it's not meant to be carried through or otherwise "honored" outside your network.
See subject: I'm so sick & tired of /. BULLIES. You shitweasels have nothing better to do than HARASS, STALK & IMPERSONATE little ol' me. I've done absolutely NOTHING wrong & just try to make everyone's lives better w/ my work that stops ads & malware.
* As soon as I post, I'm CENSORED to -1 w/ ABUSED downmodpoints by bullies like ZIP, who even admit to this. I caught c6gunner mocking then IMPERSONATING me when he forgot to log out. Zontar mailed me a postcard w/ THREATS on it, then LIES & STALKS me. All because you JEALOUS JOWIE "ne'er-do-wells" KNOW I'm World-Class & you're shit. It's why you hide behind FAKE names & UNIDENTIFIABLE ANONYMOUS.
I'm even improving my already GREAT PHYSIQUE by getting calf implants while you weezils sit around all day on /. STALKING & HARASSING your BETTERS. I repeatedly dust the no-mind bullshit blatherings you BULLIES post to attack me. Like always I WIN & YOU LOSE.
APK
P.S.=> This BULLYING of me is SO UNFAIR & is probably a HATE CRIME because I'm gay. GROW UP... apk
QoS only ever affects network traffic in any significant way when there is congestion. If there is congestion, the correct solution is to increase capacity, not to throttle some traffic
So you're arguing that QoS shouldn't exist because everyone can always just immediately increase capacity.
Good one.
You read his post and know that isn't what he is arguing for. Why are you trying to twist his argument and confuse the issue?
Because ftp is not as latency sensitive as gaming (well gaming is actually more jitter sensitive)
Should anyone here still be surprised that PERPETUALLY DISHONEST NAZI FAGGOT HORNY WUMPWUSS CONTINUES TO LIE? I'm really shocked that anyone would be shocked by this. HE'S A KNOWN LIAR.
It's like his fucking JOB to lie on slashdot, the ridiculous nazi faggot doesn't have ANYTHING ELSE GOING ON
The only correct solutions are to increase the capacity or to reduce the traffic.
Uhh, yeah, you're right. That's why they reduce the traffic by dropping packets, i.e. throttling...
Prioritization is also very subjective. What if you're mindlessly yapping about nothing on the phone, but if my download takes a minute more, I'll miss my flight?
If you miss a flight because a download took a minute longer, then you are to blame for incredibly poor planning. But aside from that, in order for this kind of QoS to impact a bulk download on the order of minutes requires it to be a download that is large enough to take many minutes. Over that kind of time, you would never be able to blame one particular person's usage on your delay. Now the question is no longer "my download vs. your phone call", but actually "my download vs. many other peoples' phone calls". Suddenly the prioritization isn't so subjective.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
they reduce the traffic by dropping packets, i.e. throttling...
But not indiscriminately. Anyway, you carefully overlooked the next sentence: The customers paid for the bandwidth and throttling denies them what they paid for.
then you are to blame for incredibly poor planning.
Your mindless yapping on the phone causes my traffic to be throttled and without knowing why my download is time critical, you decide that I'm the one to blame? And you don't care that my VPN-tunneled phone call gets throttled for the benefit of your unimportant gaming? Well, I'm on an unthrottled gigabit fiber connection, so none of this is a problem here, but you go ahead and allow ISPs to not deliver what you paid for and hide it with QoS. We'll see how that works out.
Use a vpn. (Preferably vpn over https, so they can't see that it is vpn traffic)
Youtube being on https won't help you. They can throttle because the endpoint is youtube - https doesn't hide that fact, but a vpn does.
But, but World of Warcraft is MUCH more important than those MRI images I'm sending!!! /sarcasm
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So they can throttle everything coming OUT of Netflix and Skype, so long as they don't throttle my occasional request to change channel...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
All bluster and no muster!
Consumer bandwidth does not come with a SLA (Service Level Agreement). If you want that, you can get it. It ain't cheap.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Vermin Supreme was the best candidate. Living in CA, my vote was wasted anyhow.
Moron.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Mine does. The ISP guarantees 100% of the advertised bandwidth. 80€/month, 500 Mbps up and down. You don't get it if you let ISPs get away with throttling.
Link to the ISP and it's SLA.
I doubt it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
ISPs in Germany are required by law to specify maximum, minimum and normal bandwidth so that customers can know in advance what kind of throughput to expect. Deutsche Glasfaser specifies the full bandwidth as max, min and norm for their fiber to the home products. Some people report having transferred several terabytes per month without experiencing any throttling.
Lol, let me tell you something. You cannot miss a flight by 1 minute. If you have flown significantly in your life, I'm sure you will remember waiting on the plane with everyone else until suddenly 2-3 people board and sit. And then the plane leaves. Of course you can miss a flight, but not by 1 minute.
That means that 1 minute was on top of the time they would have waited for you after everyone else boarded. If you said your download was delayed by 10 or 15 minutes, then maybe I would be more sympathetic. So yes, absolutely this is poor planning and nothing else.
And again, it isn't you vs. one person. This is not like when you had dial-up and your Mom was on the phone so you couldn't play Unreal Tournament. Network management doesn't work that way. For every one person "yapping" there could be another making a 911 call.
The customers paid for the bandwidth and throttling denies them what they paid for.
Yes, well this is an entirely different problem altogether. When ISPs give you a download/upload speed, that is your theoretical maximum. You will almost never get the speed you pay for. The problem is in the way ISPs sell and advertise their speeds, not in how QoS manages the network.
There is such a thing called the "over-subscription rate", which is how much the ISP oversells their bandwidth. I.e. let's say the ISP has a 1 TB pipe to a neighborhood to sell. What they actually do is sell 10 TB of bandwidth to customers in that area, i.e. an over-subscription rate of 10.
No system works the way you describe. If everyone tries to make a call, no one can make a call. If everyone tries to take their money out of the bank, there is not enough cash in existence to match actual wealth. If everyone was guaranteed their advertised speeds from their ISP, everyone would get shitty speeds. We design these systems with the amount of simultaneous usage in mind, and that way we can actually achieve higher performance.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
So what you're saying is that it is impossible to miss a flight. If you catch it now and one minute won't make you miss it, then you would catch it in a minute, but a delay of a minute would not make you miss the flight, so you would catch it in two minutes. By complete induction, it is impossible to miss a flight.
Can you not fathom that the time and necessity of a download is not under my control? It just has to be my fault, so you can have your pointless phone call prioritized. And you keep conveniently ignoring the other situation where selective throttling is not fair: A phone call which is routed through a VPN will be throttled, whereas some unimportant game won't be, because the former won't be recognized as real-time data, but the latter will be.
I am fully aware of contention ratios (which btw. is what that's called). A contention ratio above 1 does not mean that there will be congestion. Providers can and do take advantage of the fact that the total network utilization is much less than the average bandwidth sold multiplied by the number of users. Congestion is when a provider chooses too high a contention ratio by overselling the available bandwidth too much. That's neither necessary nor acceptable. I do get the bandwidth I pay for. If you don't, maybe you should stop shilling for cheapskate ISPs.
ISPs only control your speed to the peering point, they _can't_ make that promise in general. Most servers can't support that speed.
Even with a SLA you have to traceroute and show the slowdown is on the ISPs network.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's completely beside the point, isn't it. Obviously an ISP can't control what's happening on other networks, but they can't help there with QoS either.