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@Home quietly initiates 128k upload cap
Ethan Butterfield writes
"Looks like the days of wine and roses are over for @Home subscribers.
A global 128k upload rate cap is @Home's solution to their chronic bandwidth problems.
Man, I'm glad I have DSL. " Even 128k seems fast to me,
but this article will definitely raise your eyebrows.
I, too, use Optimum Online... I've had outages since it was installed, but at least they don't have that evil firewall anymore. I certainly hope they don't impliment an upstream/downstream speed cap. Then again, I'd rather have a speed cap than an outright, and arbitrary, download limit. They should upgrade their connection to the backbone, not limit user's speed.
It's all a government conspiracy, I tell you. The NSA is probably involved in Echolon... thnk about the connection here! With high speeds, Echolon computers cannot scan and store inernet traffic fast enough... so they try to limit the speed of a download.
"When the government[or company, for that matter] no longer meets the needs of the people, the people have a right and a duty to rise up and replace it."
I guess you spend all your time on the @home home page, right? :-)
concentric runs a private DSL network; they make a ppoint of establishing service where the local telco doens't reach yet. so you pay more because there's less piggybacking off the existing infrastructure.
Actually, I would have to disagree with you. As suggested in previous comments, the type of data possibly played a large role in the abuse of @Home's services.
:)
"Warez/mp3/porn(Insert Illegal stuff here)" are inherently bandwidth intensive, and when placed on any public server, they become the target of tens of hundreds of hungry--so-called--leechers. Granted, "private" servers exist, with a supposedly limited audience; however, they still maintain the singular flaw of all servers, which, I think, @Home and most all broadband "bargain" consumer ISPs truly wish to avoid--redundancy.
It's one thing to have John Doe download a piece of data (regardless of its type or legality). However, it is an entirely different case when John Doe serves that same data to others. In the latter situation, that data may be served 10, 100, or 1000 times, ultimately leading to redundancy and inefficiency.
This is where Warez/Mp3/porn come in. Unlike the occasional hot development, like Linux, items of questionable legality (or decency, in the case of porn) seemingly effortlessly draw crowds on the internet--regardless of the quality or quantity of the data--as there is, unfortunately, a natural tendency for some people to experiment with the darker sides things. And quantity is the biggest issue of Warez/Mp3/porn. Like a pesky roach, much tends to gather around one--how many single disk (1.44MB) warez releases exist? How many Mp3 ftp servers have just one single? Or porn sites?
The mere popularity and size of Warez/Mp3/porn naturally brings about a huge amount of redundancy, and thus wasted/abused bandwidth, for any "home" oriented service. The sad fact is that few things surpass Warez/Mp3/porn in server usage and bandwidth consumption. (Exceptions do exist, of course... I know that for a fact, but for a general consumer service like @Home, I think this generalization is reasonable.)
Unfortunately for some, @Home may even have proof of questionable data being the cause of the majority of its abusers and could levy that to its advantage in any upcoming disputes...
This is, of course, my opinion based upon some personal observations, so.... don't take it too harshly--'kay? Thanks.
--Oh...as a passing note, I bet it has been a shocking experience for those warez/mp3 couriers/ops operating through @Home lately. Though, it's probably for the better...
I have MediaOne in Canton, MI (near Detroit) and I've had no bandwidth issues at all. The news server was having trouble a few months back but they seems to have resolved it. The mail server goes down periodically for a short time but it hasn't been much of a problem.
I love MediaOne and I never want to be w/out my cable modem again!
Nope, except for near-mythical multicast broadcasts, at least as much is read from a web or cache server onto the network as is sent to the user - usually more, due to dropped and resent packets - and the server receives at least as many bytes of acks as the client sends it. Perfectly symmetrical.
If, however, you are only concerned with the cable modem end rather than the Internet as a whole, then in the cases the article is concerned with you have it exactly backwards - the servers require as much or more bandwidth to the Internet as from.
Can't ipfwadmin (on linux) be used to set up rules to disallow connections from machine to specified ports? I've done it before with RCP wrappers but it always allows the initial connection and appears to be a live port. I had a friend set up his machine in this way with ipfwadm and it did what he expected, ignored the connection attempts.
-==-
Yes, I know, and this is part of the issue. The point I am trying to make is that the Broadband ISPs can't afford to supply unlimited bandwidth to people who are going to run servers on it. This is fact, it has nothing to do with what the stupid companies said or didn't say.
So as it is, you have a choice between a ratecap, a firewall, and generally bad service. That @HOME are a bunch of idiots who couldn't do the elementary math of guessing that their network would be overloaded when they launched it is really a moot point. You should have done that math...
Their is a certain group of people (who I seem to find are more predominant in America then here) who are always whining about whether things are right, fair, instead of just looking at the situation and trying to make the best out of it. This is the same philosophy that has turned the American legal system into the great cludge of stupidity it has become.
I doubt that it was sold as "unlimited" I had cox@home for a while (until I moved), and I knew from day 1 that you were not allowed to run a server. Just read the contract that you sign.
I thought this was a well known English proverb, but maybe I am mistaking (proverbs are a bitch to bilingualism, I can never remember which come from what language).
More clearly stated it would be - "You have to decide whether you want to eat your cake or have it later - you can't do both."
um dsl is only 256k total... so you'd be geting twice the upstream, for 1 18th of the downstream....
Um... look who's not paying attention. DSL and Cable u/dl is different depending on the provider. Around here, (if you can get dsl) you have options for 64u/256d, 384u/d, 768ku/d, 768u/1.5M d, and 1.5M u/d. All numbers are for kilobits unless otherwise specified.
However, in other places, just depending upon the provider, the speeds may be very different.
@home I feel is in violation of a couple of FTC laws regarding advertising. I know listening to the Dallas radio stations that @home advertises speeds of 50 times faster then a modem. The cap thing would be like the water company saying to you "Were sorry you can have all the water you can pump but as a feature to our customers you can only give x amount of gallons of water to clean per day." Pretty pathetic isnt it. I would go ahead and contact your public utilities commision about this also might be a good idea to write the FTC. I have no problem with @home needing to restrict pipeflow while they upgrade backbone but
1. Dont advertise what you cant deliever
2. Dont tell someone a restriction on your service is an added feature.
3. Dont do the above unless you plan on compensating subscribers with a rate reduction.
4. Dont be go sneaking around about it and not tell your
Any sort of move an RBOC, electric company, water company makes has to be approved by the state governing body and also clearly explained to new and exisiting subscribers in the form of correspondence. Bad @home, Bad. No cookie.
In the US something like 95% of people use dial up access. Where I live, there are no cable modems (nor are they likely to be anytime soon as this is not a high tech or affluent area) and ADSL is far too expensive for the average user.
Like you said, you get what you pay for and anyone who knows anything about shared bandwidth on cable modem systems should have seen this coming.
Is hard for all us 56k dial up users to get all teary-eyed just because your upload rate has been cut back to a mere 128k. Consider yourself very, very lucky to even have a cable modem.
Contrary to popular opinion, universal broadband internet access is a loooooong way off. . .
Paull Allen owns Trnsmeta, I belive
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
check it out. They've got a "low cost device" to open up the cable networks. And @home is pissed about it! So maybe sometime in the nearish future we could see some cable compitition... perhaps someone could interpret?
-- r . m o s q u i t o --
OK, for the purpose of discussion let's assume that all the @Home customers are wanting from their internet service is fast web browsing. Let's do some math. The internetnews.com article says that downstream speeds of up to 3 Mbit/s will remain unchanged. So let's divide 128K into 3M: the outgoing traffic associated with full use of the downstream connection would be some 23 times smaller.
Have you ever, while browsing the web, seen outgoing bytes less that one twentieth of incoming bytes? I never have. One to ten, maybe one to twelve is realistic. With modern browsers, more than just the URL is added the TCP header with each HTTP GET request. Yes, for the second and subsequent incoming packets of each connection, nothing much more than an ACK needs to be sent, but the average outgoing packet is still going to be closer to 100 than 50 bytes.
Let's do another calculation: let's divide that factor of 23 and a bit into a typical incoming packet of 1500 bytes. That comes to exactly 64 bytes. Considering that the IP header for each packet is normally 20 bytes, and the TCP header is another 20, that doesn't leave much room for HTTP payload before the 128K upstream cap would start to limit the rate at which downstream traffic can be requested and acknowledged.
About the only kind of web access that would be immune to slowdowns under a 20-to-one ratio policy would be large file downloads, but we were talking about web *browsing*, were't we?
The conclusion of this exercise? Let's look at it this way: Of course ftp servers etc. would slow things down - if outgoing bandwith is clogged, incoming traffic will need to wait for the acknowledgements of already-received packets to get out, and new requests to get out. That much is elementary. From an egalitarian perspective, capping everyone at a "reasonable" outgoing data rate will have the desired effect of allowing everyone to get their due share of the inbound data. But from a selfish perspective, a 128Kbit/s cap on outbound data will cut my incoming data rate from 3 Mbit/s to something more like half that. A cap of 256Kbit would be large enough to create almost no practical limitation on web browsing speed, and very little effect on the cost of providing service.
So why is the cap at 128, not 256? Here's my guess, and this is only a guess: 256Kbit/s would
still be enough to make it "worth the while" for those who want to flout the AUP and run a server from home.
Umm, don't see it. Because:
7 .html: "I'm 18 ... and no matter what advertising you run or how you promote to me, I will never buy a CD again." So much for keeping MP3 off the Internet.
In large, and despite fantasies of caching sheeplike subscribers into a desired few web pages, there is as much incoming John Doe as there is outgoing John Doe.
The packets don't just appear on the net magically - where are those 10, 100, etc John Does going to get their data, otherwise - while probably *not* themselves using much outgoing bandwidth, and thus freeing their own net's outgoing bandwidth up?
@Home has X amount of incoming network bandwidth. You can bet your bottom stack location @Home doesn't use ADSL to its peers - it has X outgoing bandwidth wired up too.
Caching servers don't deal well with dynamically built pages (like the one you're reading), responses to POSTed data for forms, or pages not in the ten percent of URLs requested ninety percent of the time (or whatever percent rule web cache servers depend on). These have to come off of the Internet. Unless, of course, the page requested is already *on* an @Home subscriber's server.. oops, that's out.
Okay. The data is coming from somewhere. and going to somewhere. "Flash Crowds" are likely to occur, tying up networking to the locations doing the serving, and network-adjacent sites. This means that - gosh - those people aren't tying up other sites!
I'm not saying someone should be allowed to operate a site that continuously serves at megabit data rates to a cable modem. But @Home is the one that is "leeching" if it feeds off the Internet's data without providing a channel to feed as much data to the net, and trying to cleave the internet into an unnatural division between "subscriber" and "content provider". To the extent that pages cannot be served at decent rates even to a few users, despite @home having *more* outgoing than incoming bandwidth free - the proportion of pages cached is not going to be anywhere *near* the ratio of outgoing to incoming packet bytes from apps like web browsers.
The solution to the problem: An ISP should not be so greedy as to *combine* caching and selling off even the limited outgoing bandwidth they have. Not, IMO, by forbidding the serving of the same data that *drives* the growth of the internet, and *sells* those cable modems for @Home - that popular data that you state should be restricted.
Are the majority of @home subscribers are mainly concerned with downloading linux quickly? D'oh! If it wasn't for such items as the porn and even such troublesome things as the Star Wars trailers, there wouldn't be an @Home to subscribe to, like it or not. There probably wouldn't be V.90 modems yet. I'm not sure what extent MP3 will drive technology. But, like it or not and the RIAA doesn't, MP3 is a legal, legitimate music format, and via it or another format, music *is going to be distributed on the Internet* for MP3 players. And to quote Angelo Sotira (who runs the Dimension Music site) from the Wired article at http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/2042
Personally, I'm glad that "adult entertainment" and other hedonistic services have helped provide incentive for fast connections and backbones to be developed and deployed. And will continue to do so. Yes, providing bandwidth-intensive services, and so on.
And I suspect that in the year 2005 at the latest, I'll hear people complaining about the bandwidth used by teledildonics slowing Linux downloads on T3+ connections probably developed for that very industry. Let's just think a little about whom is leeching off whom.
Well, the local cable modem provider :)
(videon) has a different solution. A fixed upload/download quota.
For a standard account you are limited to 10GB down and 1GB up of data. If you exceed these values you get charged $$$. (especially for the upload one, its like $10/100MB) It is very effective in deterring people from running bandwidth sucking servers. They have no problem with you running a server as long as it doesent exceed the quota. In case you think these numbers are small, only 1% of subscribers even do more then 5GB down/month. Im not sure about the upload
stats, probably a bit tighter since 1GB isnt a walloping amount, fine for online gaming and sending small stuff around but bad if you happen to be an iso warez courier. Its a shame that they will be merging with @home in sept. Oh well, time to get xDSL.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
That was close! TCI is upgrading the equipment in my area and I think @Home is soon to come. I just about signed up. Now I think I better look into DSL...
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
Once E-Trust is lost, your screwed. They had better remember that.
Malachi
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
My Dutch provider also has an upstream limit of 128 kbit, and they arbitrarily change it to 64 kbit whenever they feel like it..
You also risk having to pay extra money when you've reached a traffic limit they haven't specified, which leaves them enough room to get more money off anyone who's got a subscription..
no it wont. it may even make it worse. His problem is latency, not bandwidth. Compression adds a small amount of latency (compressing and decompressing takes time) in return for less bandwidth. I must say for all the crap the phone company puts me through, I'm still glad I went with ADSL. Latency is usually under 100ms to sites with decent connections.
This is interesting. ADSL and Cable have a lot in common, as they're both shared bandwidth, and ADSL is bottlenecked by design. And like cable, you can get get a fast download with the condition that you're overall monthly bandwidth doesn't exceed a certain amount (in this case, 1 gig).
Whats interesting is that my 64K isdn dedicated
connection will get me 16 gig per month in each direction of raw speed, and I can get 1:4 compression if the data is text (like webpages and such). Since my total monthly charge for isdn is about $160 when you consider the dedicated isdn rate from my isp plus the phone company charge.
Currently, I use about 95% of my bandwidth, and I'm permitted to use all of it, so I don't have to worry about them disconnecting me because of it.
But if I was only allowed to pull 1 gig per month, the service would only be worth $10 a month to me.
Now, with adsl you have an advantage of being able to get what you want RIGHT NOW, instead of having to wait for it.
The difference is, while adsl could handle a slashdot effect, I would probably choke on it. But in the long run, I can easily support a steady bandwidth stream, and I'm not held by any restrictions other than the technical ones.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I think Cablevision of CT *may* use them. My speeds were awesome until about MArch. Since then, service has sucked. Frequent outages (which usuall last a minute or two, but when you're playing Unreal online, it SUCKS!).
Also, newsgroup access speed has slowed tremendously. I finally wrote to them last week and they have been having a "hardware problem" in my area. Uh, yeah, right...
Anyway, Uploads "seem" to be OK from this end..... Wonder is DSL is available in my area... hmmmm......
It's not about the 128k cap, people.
I have cable service from Rogers@Home in Vancouver, BC. Like jamesm from Ottawa, I find the service to be horrible. And like him, I still use it, but for different reasons.
I don't know about all of you cable users who deal with other cable companies, but to me the issue isn't the 128k cap, it's the way they're implementing it.
These cable companies don't have a clue who their marketbase is. The majority of people paying twice as much as a casual analog service are going to be computer-savvy power users. The kind of user that reads "network upgrade" and "128k upload cap" in the same sentence and gets very angry.
This is just another example of the cable companies demonstrating a complete lack of comprehension about customer service. I would like to receive an email that says "Due to the abuse of outgoing bandwidth by some users, we have been forced to implement a 128kbps upload cap for all connections to improve the overall quality of service." There it is, plain to my face, what they've done and why they've done it. I can respect that, and understand it. If I don't like it, I can choose to leave, but I don't have a right to be angry.
But this "let's quietly lower the quality of their service, and if they notice, try to convince them it was actually an upgrade" is insulting. I'm not some schmuck who can't get the difference between left-click and right-click straight. And treating me like one really pisses me off.
Unfortunately this is not the first time, or the worst. When I signed up for cable service a year and a half ago, it was great. It was fast the service was almost 24/7.
Now, periods of no service lasting several hours are not uncommon and the service is always slow. I've had disconnections lasting longer than 24 hours. I've even had weeks go by where I've had no connection for more than half the time!
This too, I could deal with, if there was the slightest attempt at communication. A broadcast email apology for the lack of service and a promise that they are aware of it and working on it would be great. But instead there is nothing but silence, as if they expect that if they don't say anything, no one will notice, or the users will think it's something they're doing wrong. "Maybe I should double right-click on Netscape?"
Further, if you call the tech support line, you're greeted with a friendly message that tells you the average hold time is one hour. If you email their support department, you get a reply three weeks later that suggests you call their tech support line. If you call their automated report of service outages, your area is never listed. If you call their sales line, and ask to be transferred to someone who can take a complaint, the complaint line is always busy. Finally the poor salesperson tries to make you happy by taking down your complaint and filling out an escalation form. "A supervisor will call you back within two business days." That was two months ago, and I still haven't been called.
This is absolutely pathetic, and no company should be able to get away with it.
But unfortunately it comes down to having no choice, at least in my case. An analog connection is too slow, and for my usage needs would cost much more than a cable connection does. DSL service isn't available in my area yet. So I'm stuck. But there's no doubt that as soon as another ship comes along, I'm jumping off this one.
And all it would take to keep me content would be to talk to me, to listen to my problems, tell me what was going on, tell me when it was going to be fixed, apologize for the problems, and treat me like a valued, respected customer. If they just did that, I might be willing to put up with the frequent disconnections, the slow service, the oversubscription, and maybe even the ridiculous waits on the rare occassion I want to talk to someone from tech support that thinks my cable connection doesn't work because my hub has an IP address.
That's the point. It's the methodology, not the results. A 128kbps cap is a bandaid for the oversubscription and gross mismanagement of their network. But at least it's action, and it might make things a little better for a while.
But never, never, never will I accept a company trying to sneak something in behind my back, expecting me to be too ignorant to know the difference. This is just plain wrong.
-Cutt
My question is: Can anyone shed some light on why this might be?
I have four possible theories:
- Since my work computer is a Pentium III and my home computer is 486DX4-100, there is some sort of speed issue, like my 486 can receive data quickly, but hasn't got the horespower to send it out quickly. (This doesn't sound right, but its a possibility.)
- Cox@Home has already rolled out a bandwidth cap in my area. While this is possible, I don't think the cap would be this low. (We're talking 1/4 the cap described in the article.)
- My friend tells me that Cox regularly portscans computers on the network, and if they find FTP servers, they cap the bandwidth for that computer. I don't know if this is real, or if it is even possible. I do have an FTP server on my 486, but it is only for personal use.
- The availible bandwidth coming out of the Cox network was very low due to other people filling it up with their high-volume FTP servers.
I don't know which of these possibilities is more accurate, so I would be interested in hearing the experiences of other Cox@Home users.GOOD! This time I am glad the man busted you! I am home for the summer at my parents house in San Diego (Time Warner Road Runner, San Diego) and I can't get over the speed of RR. I just hope people like you, no offense, don't screw this service up. I don't know how many ISP's I have been on that came down on people for *ANY* big downloads or upload because some other fools abused it. Just use what you need and nothing else. No 31i+3 warez servers, web servers, or Icecaste servers. Your also kinda lucky I don't work in the Abuse Monitoring section of your cable provider. I would have kicked you off for about 3 months and then called you after your ban and asked you if you still want to run an Icecast server.
@Home is reacting in a bad way, but its the only way it can react to protect itself and legit users of it service.
Linux O Muerte!
...a bigger epub picked it up. All over the US, @Home has been doing this, and get indignant if you 'call them' on their ploy.
You see, along with lowering the xfer rates, making thinks like video out or audio out or game servers (which folks, are really what they are trying to kill. Every OS out their with any usage numbers runs a webserver when it boots up...) useless, they are slightly (and in some cases not so slihtly) raising the rates, or charginge extra for the cable'modem' when they previously were not.
The reason most folks around here that I know (power users and such) got cable modems was to avoid the limitations and cost of DirectPC, which @Home consantly compared itself to in its sales material.
Now they are really no better.
But, I'm a Sprint customer; they'll be taking care of me real soon...
-K
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
By definition anyone who is uploading huge
amounts of information is adding content to the
web. This is a _good_ thing. I find it annoying
that all the high-speed service providers want
all their subscribers to be Microsoft-sedated
surfers.
Very few (I'm sure) subscribers are running
high-bandwidth services so is it _really_ a
problem? I doubt it. It seems more likely
that they encountered a few problems, realized
they could convince most of their (non-technical) subscribers that this is the _only_ solution.
Now they have a way to charge more $$$ for offering hosting services.
I think @home subscribers should VOICE their
objections vehemently in the newsgroups and
demand a technical compromise that makes sense.
It worries me that the net is becoming more like
TV where you can't become a content provider unless you have the $$$.
The AOL analogy sounded like bogus logic. It doesn't fit this situation at all.
All you @home subscribers, let's get on the newsgroups and start hollering about this. To me, this cap is totally unacceptable, whether or not I use a web/ftp server. What happened to "100 times faster than a modem"?? Indeed, if @home sees this as an acceptable alternative to actually upgrading their network, I will certainly find another type of service.n eral
The newsgroups you can post to and get more information from are as follows:
athome.discussion-athomesvc
athome.discussion-ge
athome.users-general
I think that only @home subscribers have access to these groups.
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
I'm on with CGO@Home in Hamilton, ON and they have had a 128kbps upstream cap for a few months now. I just flat out sucks. It is impossible to upload and download at the same time. I tried to send a file to a friend over ICQ and browse the web, and no go. 128kbps outgoing just isn't enough to support a 2mbps down connection (not like we ever see that either).
I hate @Home. I wish daily that DSL was affordable and in my area.
From the help for the Linux Traffic Shaper option
("experimental"):
CONFIG_SHAPER: x
x x
x The traffic shaper is a virtual network device that allows you to x
x limit the rate of outgoing data flow over some other network x
x device. See Documentation/networking/shaper.txt for more x
x information. To set up and configure shaper devices, you need the x
x shapecfg program, available via FTP (user: anonymous) from x
x ftp://shadow.cabi.net/pub/Linux in the shaper package.
The shaper limits outgoing traffic. In the 2.2.xx documentation it lists the maximum as "about 256K, it will go above this but get a bit blocky."
If you try limiting to just under the 128K cap, then packets should not be dropped as readily. Assuming that the cap and not simply an overloaded network is responsible.
I am getting that this is all happening on an "as needed" basis.
What about TCI? I called them today, and they were unaware of the issue. I told them to check into it and call me back. They never did. Bastards.
EverCode
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ever use a University network? Ever connect to a machine in a university? Ever connect to a machine anywhere? Gosh, you could be vulnerable to packet sniffing. Better not use any machines. Ever. :)
Solution: SSL
There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
..that it came to this due to:
However I do not like the policy of deception. I'm fine with them imposing rate caps, but let's make it crystal clear and not advertise "unlimited service".
If you average it out, with the overhead of TCP/IP header info, you end up with about 10 bits of data transfer per actual bit sent.
So, saying 16 kbps of raw throughput is correct, but also, 12.8 kbps of true data throughput is also correct.
This is true, but he was talking about download speeds, not network speeds. Download speeds are most definately not rated in kilobits per second.
Roadrunner won't be able to use the excuse that @home uses if they try to do this due to the fact that they don't have static ips. If you're IP address is constantly changing, it makes it fairly difficult to keep any type of web server up and running.
Media One (now owned by ATT) is the cable providing Affiliate.. Road Runner is the company that owns and manages the cable routers, backbone networks and internet systems...
It's not a merger, it's a partnership of services that takes place to give you the service.
--------- The universe as we currently understand it: First there was nothing
Ack! That previous message should read "about 10 bits of data transferred per actual BYTE sent."
:)
Sorry about that!
I get 1.1mbps upstream with a static IP and non-proxied access for $65 - Canadian. It's not sold here anymore, now Bell uses Nortel's 1Meg modem.
--- Bigger bits, softer blocks, tighter ASCII.
It's owned by a partnership called ServiceCo, which is jointly owned by MediaOne, Time Warner (that's where the beeping bird comes from ^_^) and some other partners who I can't remember offhand. IIRC they are Advance/Newhouse and Microsoft, but I could be wrong...it's Sunday, and all my nifty business bookmarks are at work.
I'm still looking for more info, but at this time, I'm pretty much dead on info other than what I put above.
2400bps? I think your networking background could use some work. Back of the envelope calculations: Let's assume MTU=1500 bytes; no IP/TCP options; unlimited down, restricted up.
14k up means 1.2 full sized packets/s (14k/(8*(1500-40))); or 45 ack-sized packets up.
TCP steady state is 1 ack / 2 pkts, hence 90 pkts/s down (1 Mbps). I'm feeling sorry for you now.
In addition, this is assuming a zero-loss case. If you're transfering over anything lossy, your pkt losses will hurt you more on the data path than the reverse path (retransmits cost more, acks are redundant).
If you want to get really good measurements, see how much ping throughput you get to the border router with packet size of 40 (20 payload, 20 IP).
I'm on DSL, and accept the limited uplink (640k down, 90k up). Yeah it sucks for sending files on the reverse path, but I'd rather that than 365k symmetric.
Road Runner makes every customer SIGN and DATE a copy of the TOS at every install. They keep it on file. I have the service, I had to sign the TOS, and they change it every so often (see @Home's debacle w/TOS changes) so I read it every so often. It's best to be informed.
I'm sorry, you should have known. It's idjits like this that make ISPs create bandwidth caps...
If you're having problems with your cable service, check out www.cabletraffic.com .. they offer a proram that logs all cable traffic and tests speeds. This way you have to something to use when you need to complain to your isp about the service.
Oooooooooh, you're getting ripped off.
PacBell charges $50/mo. (Some of us even less) for guaranteed 384down and 128up. (On Sat morning, I usually get 1.84Mbps. No sh*t!)
The SDL is slightly more. However, it's not $200/mo.
They charge $140/mo for 1.54down/384 up guaranteed.
--Al
If they do do this, they will have to come up with a better reason than cox's reason, because they don't have static ip's. This means that people can't feasibly run servers, so they'll need some better idea.
Let's see...
128Kilobit streaming MP3 download 24/7
(this is normal for me)
128Kilobit / 8? = 16Kilobytes/sec
16K/sec * 60sec = 960K/min
960K/min * 60min= 57600K/hr = 56.25Megs per hour?
57600K/hr * 24 = 1382400KiloBYTES/day = 1.350 GIG's per day
1382400K/day * 31 = 42854400K/mo. = 40.86 Gig's
Per Month
That's not including ANY gaming/browsing/downloads/Mucking
Etc. etc. etc. etc.....
How much was that per extra 100M's?
Yeah.. I pay a bit for 768K DSL... but it's worth it not to have to bother with junk like this...
768K u/d Servers up to the individual.... No slow times of the day... *shrug* Who could ask for more?
If my numbers are off... I do apologize... (I'm just a wee bit tired this morning)
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
It's making me feel better about my 128K ISDN connection. If my dedicated connection is going to cost three times what a cable modem does, then I want it to work as well at least. :-)
Rogers @home in Ottawa has the no servers policy but has made it clear that as long as you aren't running mp3/warez/porn or other services that you've advertised or publicly made known, they don't care. They're not out to get people who set up an ftp server to share files with friends or leave telnet going to get in from work. They're leaving themselves a legal way to get rid of people who are a drain on the system for everyone.
Because you know what, the backup from this sewer system stinks like Hell and so does this deal from @home. We need to all broadcast alot of light on it.
What? do the math, buddy!
He has a T1. Max speed: 1544000 bits/s.
His audio channels use "128k". at least 128000bits/s. 12 of these could optimally fit in the T1.
He is serving the internet needs of up to 350 people. This is an amplification rate of 29 times the bandwidth from his net to the multicast servers!
And you think *that* 29:1 ratio is unacceptable?
I'm curious... I pay $75/mo for the DSL line from the local phone company and $50/mo for the ISP connection.
This is 768K up and down......
Do you pay extra for your digital subscriber line from the phone comapny.. or is that included?
I don't understand how that works....
Incedentally.... the dsl network is owned by the local phone
company around here. To increase my up and down
bandwidth.. I have to pay the phone company
more money per month... the isp rates stay the same. Weird, huh?
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
What?????
Dallas,TX is in SBC territory. SBC made PacBell lower their rates.
It's $39/mo for DSL where you are.
Check your facts.
--Al
The end of it all will be @Home making more money off a service that existed before they implemented the ONadvantage crap. They are going to offer a premium service of higher up-bandwidth for more money. They use 'user abuse' as the perfect taget for the SCAM.
Thank God @Home isn't down here in Jacksonville (although I do feel kinda dirty for using AT&T's mediaone.. yeah thats right.. AT&Ts.)
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It just occurred to me: @home is being awfully foolish to (apparently) implement this inside their network. If, as I gain the impression is the case, those packets are actually being sent over segments of their network before being dropped, then they aren't gaining much if any benefit for the other subscribers. Their client software in the subscriber's PC *should do traffic shaping itself*. If the problem only exists between the cable modem and the NIC (and the cable modem isn't just a modem+bridge), then the cable modem's own networking is flawed.
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/networking/shape.txt:
The only reason I can see for doing it further into @Home's network would be to *deliberately* screw up so-called "subscriber abuse" cases, who are actually trying to use their connections, and to condition those subscribers to use the internet in just those few ways desired, like reading the WWW and their @Home email box. Rather a rancid tactic, and the only reason they could have any objection to the Linux Traffic Shaper limiting to 127.9k or whatever.
If they should say otherwise, and that even less than 128K outgoing is "abuse", then the obvious question would be "Okay, so what bandwidth *am* I allowed?"
--
2nd quote from
"The shaper shapes transmitted traffic. It's rather impossible to shape received traffic except at the end (or a router) transmitting it."
Unless, you don't mind fscking up the person sending the traffic.
That's where PortSentry comes in handy. It watches traffic, and when it sees a pattern that looks like a port scan in progress, it uses ipfwadm, ipchains, or other methods to disable that route.
--
Fine, as long as they're willing to put the second part in writing. :-)
If it weren't for people whining and bitching about SOMETHING, nothing would get done. Why make the best out of a situation when the possibility is there to make it BETTER? Its called advancement. Its life. Don't avoid it and take whats given to you, make something of it. Although I do agree on the legal system having lots of fun problems (my dad's a lawyer even..ha)
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Well, he's right about that being "the type of user @Home is looking for". In fact, I gain the impression that they would prefer would:
Buy the cable modem subscription for status, or because they are told it is "good".
Be in the wide range between too computer-naive to effectively use a computer's capabilities on the internet and not so naive that they cannot run a Windows 98 box.
Not have had a previous decent internet connection to apply the advertised speed multipliers to.
Become quickly bored with the Internet as @Home Would Have It Be and thus condescends to present it to them, but keep the account to read email with once a month.
As for the credibility of his sociology, I simply suggest the AC author of the previous response look at the Magellan Search Voyeur at http://voyeur.mckinley.com/cgi-bin/voyeur.cgi - unless their personal ethics forbid reading other than easily cachable static pages.
Perhaps they did, but the AUP also states that its terms take precedence over any other agreements, particularly sales representations. We have a hard time understanding why a company would set things up so that the only people doing business with it were the ones willing to violate their contract from the git-go, but there you are. As for us, we *aren't* willing to operate on the "it's all right as long as you don't get caught" basis and aren't too thrilled about dumping our excellent ISP in favor of @home only to have our plug pulled and bye-bye to a sizable deposit.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
"Oooooooooh, you're getting ripped off."
Your making part of my point for me.
The PacBell DSL for $50 is 1 IP address; and they do not guarantee a fixed IP.
The Concentric DSL is 8 IP addresses, and they are fixed; and they provide reverse lookup.
Let's not even get started on the reliability vs pacbell, or how PacBell wasted 3 hours of my time trying to figure out if their service was available in my area (The final answer depending on who you asked was "yes", "no", and "we can't figure it out").
Try to figure out how much a PacBell DSL line with 16 fixed IP addresses including reverse lookup is a month. They couldn't answer that one either.
Your "ripped off" is my absolute delight. In addition to all of the above, the service has been near-perfect, which is much more than I can say for my associates with PacBell DSL.
The Point? As I said -- You Get What You Pay For.
Uh, network speeds are always measured in bps (bits per second).
/peter
In Holland, @Home measures it in webpages/minute in their ads...
Interesting point in marketing... [marketing hyperbole is quoted] If you are marketing something faster than average, find the slowest of the average and base your product on it. Thus, the "modem" in question could possibly be a 2400 modem...
.75" of nonusable area around), 1600x1200 resolution (interpolated), 1000 watts (peak). This goes for benchmarks, too. It's takes a lot of brains to cut through the (deviously true) marketing hype nowadays.
So, my 56K modem can be advertised as "up to" 24x as fast as "before". (Which is devious, yes, deceptive, probably not, since "up to" means "Yeah you *CAN* get it, but not damn likely")
Unfortunately, we're surrounded with this hyperbole, like 17.2 GB HD (GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, technically correct), 17" monitor (-
Oh, as if it matters, I'm using a 56K modem (high speed (cheap) pipes are either @home [yuk. Always been *SLOWER* than dialup during peak times, according to several users] or ADSL [something I cannot quite afford ATM]).
Yes, but kiddies, don't forget, SOMEBODY has to run those ftp servers (and iceCAST servers) for you damn leeches. You might not upload, but your sure as hell download. Don't get me wrong, I've been there (and don't let these others trick ya, they've all been there too..). Now I've moved on. I run Linux and everythings free. :) @home is really in a plot w/Microsoft to limit bandwidth of Open Source writers so they can't upload their new code. --[YALC]-- Yet Another Linux Convert
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
How easy for you to stand on your high horse and assinate the character of faceless people you don't know, by discriminating against them on the basis of nationality. As an Anonymous Coward to boot! For once, it's a well deserved name.
As an American, I think his point was lost due to do the fact that the proverb didn't really apply to the situation, and had nothing what so ever to do with the nationality of the majority of his audience.
When will we no longer suffer the slings and arrows of self-righteous eurotrash?
"I have no respect for a man who can only spell a word one way." - Mark Twain
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
So what, subscribers to this service want to have servers that use a huge (by todays standards, in 5 years we'll be laughing over this shit because we'll all have unlimited BW) amount of bandwidth. So, as a caring, concerned corporation (right?), @home should upgrade their networks to iso warez courior specs (funds-permitting, of course, although I dont think anyone here thinks @home is strapped for cash exactly). Nobody needs 800kbps transfer speeds for web browsing! Those kinds of speeds are for file-transfer, and if files tend to come in the form of warez/porn/mp3s/VCDs, so be it! Cable modem companies sell a relatively expensive product that could only be fully used for large file transfers, and bitch and whine when their paying customers fully use it!
That's just it, @Home isn't being an internet node, just a leech online service sucking off it.
"if you use @HOme like a modem"
Not all modem users are AOLusers in nature. This article makes me glad I am not an @Home customer.
Whatever. Jeeze - settle down!
The point of my post wasn't to defend myself. I took the bloody thing down - the last thing I want to do is degrade everyone else's service (and I fail to see how an Icecast server running mostly at night, serving maybe 3 clients at a time, at the most, could seriously impact things. Maybe I'm wrong.)
The point is they should have called before yanking my service. The "shoot first, ask questions later" policy is rubbish no matter which way you slice it. I see this (and other instances) as the action of a company unwilling to shell out to upgrade their network to fit their client base.
Enough. Peace.
"By definition anyone who is uploading huge amounts of information is adding content to the web."
While I agree that adding content is a positive, why do you make the assumption that the World Wide Web has anything to do with the subscribers' usage? There is much much more to the Internet than "the web."
Give us a break...
Ever thought of getting Satellite?
The point I believe the original poster was making was a feeling of resentment at being mislead. It's one thing to advertise a specific quality of service, but when that "QOS" gets to the point where it's perceived to be the same as what you have, it's natural to feel a little miffed.
So, I say again, Relax. Feel OUR pain. We were lead to believe one thing, and given another.
--
end
--
a better sig would normally be here. -blah-
I think we should just all start slinging fast ethernet out our windows and meet up in the middle somewhere. It'd probably get done before any of these businesses got in gear.
Hell, I'll do it. Let's see, I'm in Jacksonville Florida, and I've got about 300 feet of cat 5 cable.. and a 8 port linksys 10mbit hub.. I'll serve my neighborhood (full 10mbit shared up and down :)...woohoo). Who's next? HEHE. The new, Open Source model of internetworking. Screw the Cables and the Bells.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
So, Now we have a 128K Upload limit...
My reaction... I saw it coming.. you can't sell High-Speed internet service, without expecting to have some dumb-fucking kids with warez sites abuse it... So.. Thanks to a few really stupid in DUHviduals, everyone else has to suffer... Yeah, it really fucking sucks.. but Alot of the blame is placed on Johnny 14-yeard old running a WarFTP server off of his mommy's Compaq Deskpro.
What TCI should/could/needs to do is start tracking down the assholes who run Warez/mp3/porn(Insert Illegal stuff here) Servers, and prosecute the little fuckers.. or make the bastards pay some $$$ for the amount of bandwidth they abused.. Make the little bastards learn not to abuse a system, and ruin it for everyone else... Stupid Fucking Children, ruined it for everyone else.
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
No way. The 486 is easily fast enough. Even a 286 would be fast enough.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm sorry to take the side of the big bad corporation in this issue, but I definitely don't agree with all the whining.
You can't have your cake and eat it too people, if you super cheap flat rate broadband, you just can't expect that they will let you run a 100 channel shoutcast server off it as well.
Yeah, it has its disadvantages if you want to send large files around or remote heavy x applications, but for all other purposes this is enough for home usage, well enough in fact.
I know that several Cable Modem and ADSL services here in Sweden have taken it one step further in combating the server problem and put every user behind an ip masquerading firewall instead (goodbye ICQ, goodbye DCC, goodbye Telnetting/SSHing to the home machine, goodbye any kind of server what so ever). If that is the option, I know what I would choose (if I wasn't stuck on a stupid minute metered ISDN that is)...
Less is More, and 128kbps is "orders of magnitude" greater than 28.8kbps. since when is *4 an order of magnitude?
At 128kbps, the service certainly isn't what it could be (though it's better than what I've got). I fail to see how capping upstream rates constitutes scaling the network up to meet demands. If they lie like that to their own staff, what does that say about what they tell the customer?
I run servers on my DSL connection from SWBELL in Dallas, which is managed by the same people who manage PacBell. As long as it's not illegal, they don't care what you do. They do, however, limit my speed to 128kbps. This is acceptable though since they give me free reverse control of my IPs on my NS. These policies would differ from area to area.
Hehe. Not anymore. They never mentioned anything like that when I was talking to them.
This sig is false.
$70 a month telco charge for the 1.5-6mbps line.
:(
There's no need to have anyone surfing channels looking for abusers. You just meter the connection. Exceed X amount transferred in Y days and have your bandwidth throttled by a factor of Z. Totally automatic. Coldly fair.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Actually it was Fremont CA that was
the first city to have 128k upstream capping.
It seems to me that the problem here is that @home does not want to provide service to people running web sites (and other servers) from their home, and that people do it anyway because the cost is so low. The frustrating part I'm sure, is that there aren't any hospitable alternatives for a home user who wants to run a website from their house. It would sure be nice if some national company came out with something similiar to @home, but without the prohibitions against running a web server from your house. It would probably cost more though. I'd like to run a web server from my house, just to play around with, but so far I havn't found a cost-effective solution. I need something that costs less than $150/month. The local ISPS want $250+ a month for ISDN connections, and the costs go up from there.
Jonathan
graph available
I just have to tell you right now why the real reason for these caps are. It has nothing to do with "bandwidth" problems. They've oversubscribed their userbase. I have a graph up on my website detailing this. If you want the scripts to generate it yourself, contact me. What disgusts me the most is that I was paying $40 a month when the service was *good* during prime time. Now I'm still paying $40 a month, but the service is completely unusuable during prime-time. Please contact your PUC (Public Utilities Commissioner), as well as the technically-savvy press. This is an outrage - they're delivering less, but charging the same rate. In any other industry, this would be outright fraud.
--
What is the point of having cake.
If you can't eat it?
Just Wondering
w/k
-Jelly Musher, King of the Wompas
I love my Road Runner connection, I get the full 10mbs downstream, which is effectively about 6mbs from a REALLY fast site (like 500-600k/sec) that has a good connection to roadrunners network, and I can usually send at about 50k/sec, sometimes 60. I really fear such a great service being hurt by expansion like this, I am very impressed with the quality of service road runner has given, does anyone know if roadrunner has any plans like this for the future?
I subscribe to Cogeco @HOME and they have always (even before they were a part of @HOME) limited the bandwidth to 14Kbits/sec up. Not even enough to stream an MP3. I think I'm going to call my cable company and demand they implement this 128Kbit/sec limit :) :)
"...Is this world not a call I can screen out" --
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Same here, though I had to terminate my service when I moved a month ago.
Of course, with these big national cable ISPs, it really helps if you mention the town you're in, in case the quality isn't all that consistent.
On the other hand, I've generally heard better things about MediaOne than RoadRunner, and @Home seems to have the worst reputation. I'm hopeful that the merger of MediaOne and RoadRunner won't result in problems over the long haul.
From what I've read, they are going to be selling it. For just a few bucks more, you can upgrade your upstream bandwidth! How much is anybody's guess.
Unfortunately where I live, the stoopid cable company only offers download bandwidth over the cable. You still have to have a modem and telephone line as your upload pipe, which sucks royally.
I should move to another part of town (different cable system). Then I could get Road Runner. I still have reservations about that (what happens when everybody gets it, versus the extremely light subscriber coverage they have now)
I'd have to change ISPs, which I'm a bit loathe to do, but since my current ISP has been bought out by somebody else, it looks like that'll be changing by Feb. 2000, since that's the last date that they can guarantee that the domain name won't change.
Supposedly I'll have access to DSL by the 3rd quarter in my area. Won't have to move that way.
Bryan
It's one thing to decide that "oops, we goofed, we can't handle this much bandwidth." It's completely reasonable.
It's another thing entirely to say, "Oops, we goofed, we can't handle this much bandwidth, let's put in restrictions and not tell our users."
I never believed I'd be a cable-modem user. After all, letting my ISP be run by folks with a cable company's mentality just seemed like a really dumb idea.
Then ComCast@home showed up. And I still can't get ISDN, let alone *DSL.
Now I'm a cable-modem user. And I'm still wondering about the wisdom of letting my ISP be run by folks with the mentality of a cable company....
-F
This seems to be just my luck. I "was" waiting for @Home to drop into my area. For some reason TCI nor SWBell service the little area of North Dallas in which I reside but I do know that SWBell DSL has a limit of 128kUP unless you want to fork over extra $$ each month ($129 /me thinks)but now I must resign myself to the fact that no matter what I do I'm not going to be able to get more than 128kUP no matter which technology I go with since I'm not made of money. I'm beginning to REALLY MISS Memphis and the RoadRunner service. Consider this, a small (1/3 or less the size of Dallas) non-high tech city having better internet service/residential online technology than one of the biggest metroplex areas in the country. What's this world coming to!!??!!
I've known all along that cable modem companies would have to start capping rates. Just join any major IRC server (dalnet, efnet) and look at a few of the channel topics and you'll see why. Warez junkies are going to ruin it for everyone.
And don't forget, you're getting EXACTLY what you pay for. I can't tell you how many times people have bragged to me about the high speed of their internet connection because they have a cable modem, and my attempting to tell them that its a solution that will turn around and bite them in the ass, falls on deaf ears.
Cable modem statistics and prices are based on the assumption that the average user won't use any more bandwidth than a regular modem user will. The average person "surfing the net" won't read his webpages any faster, they'll just load faster. Email won't increase by much, and sure those downloads will be faster, but your average modem user doesn't download that much. $40 a month, or whatever cable modem prices are going for, is more than enough to cover a large number of users.
Ok, so there will be a few users who use more than their share, this also isn't a problem. Every isp has the occasional dialup user who never disconnects and is literally tying up the line 24/7. However, there aren't enough of them that they cause busy signals for others, so they can safely be ignored, or at least worked into the average appropriately.
The big problem with cable modems is that the average user, to whom a 28.8 modem is more than
adaquate, has no reason to switch to cable. Therefore, cable has a skewed user base. They have a lot more bandwidth hungry users who are exploiting high bandwidth at low cost, and fewer
low bandwidth users to balance the load out.
This means that cable modem providers are going to spend more money on bandwidth than they will recieve from their users. Also, cable networks are optimized for downstream. Certainly, they can handle the bandwidth in both directions, but since they expect clients to be primarily in the business of downloading, they therefore provide more bandwidth on the downstream side. This is why they don't want servers, as servers, especially when something in demand is offered for download, will chew up a LOT of bandwidth very quickly.
So they cap the uploads. Complain if you want, but 128K is still pretty damn good for only $40 a month. And while they may not have capped the downstream yet, I wouldn't blink for too long, because it will come there eventually too. GTE has done it already.
So, you want a large number of IP addresses, you'll have to pay for it. If you want dedicated high bandwidth rates, go get a T1. Yes, it will cost you a lot more money, but its all yours. 1.544 mbps and NOBODY will tell you how much of it you can use, as you can use all of it. But you're going to pay for it.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Technical issues aside, isnt' this limiting the size of ones' "soap box?" Part of the promise of the Internet is that now everyone owns the modern equivalent printing press, but what good does it do if no one can listen to what you say? It's fine if you want to download all the pablum that the major players have to say but they won't let us talk with "no server" policies.
On the technical side, (working for an ISP) we have tons up upstream bandwidth, it's the downloaders that cause us to buy additional T1's. Perhaps I don't understand their network (or don't understand why they would design it that way), but wouldn't every 100th user running a server just ballance the load? (I'm talking about their Internet gateway, not the shared media local loop)
Just because I like to deconstruct things doesn't make me a Deconstructionist.
I would dismiss most of the PR department if I ran @Home.
:).
:)
The decision to not encourage Web/FTP hosting from the subscriber link is smart. It should have been made when the service was initially created. Sure we would all Like to upload at a full Meg and this really sucks if you are building nightly RPMs/DEBs for an OSS project etc...
However the service is cheap because @home doesn't buy enough bandwidth to supply all users going full speed at the same time. All the people here who work at ISPs ( quite a few I would imagine ) know how that equation works. You goys don't even have as many phone lines as subscribers
Since it's @Home the assumption is you will be browsing and downloading most of the time and any web service will be for administering your home system from work or sending s few files to your box via FTP. If it was called @work then the revers would be true and serving would be more important than browsing.
The only problem is that the PR people went about announcing the thing in the wrong way. Show your clients sume respect. send out letters ( or Email ) to them and level with them that this is how it works and why you have to do this. point them to
a URL on your site where they can read the breakdown of how much bandwidth is availeble/used. Power users will use this info to reschedule the debian FTP install to whatever you say are the low periods
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
What really gets to me about this isn't just the deciet of it all, but that they are also offering a "professional" service which is uncrippled for more money. The 128k cap seems just low enough to make this service actually attractive and neccesary for anything like videoconferencing, which was one of my primary resons for getting the service. They call the upstream bandwidth we're getting now "free". so what am I paying $40 a month for? Let's hope that when the government forces cable isp's to open their networks, those new providers will actually provide some real service instead of this arbitrary abuse.
For one next-door neighbor and friend only.
With copper, was a nightmare due to ground loops. Ground one end, the other, both, neither, the current flow kept things from working.
I had to go to two AUI-to-fiber adapters I was lucky enough to find at a low but still painful price. With only optical fiber and no electrical connections things were fine, of course.
I was quite happily running a dub reggae Icecast server over RoadRunner, until this week that is. .
Came home and my cable modem was disconnected, with a voice mail from RoadRunner's "Abuse Management" department. I spoke to the guy, and he was cool enough - I told him I wouldn't do it again, etc., and he hooked me back up.
Problems I have with this?
1) At no point was I made aware that servers were a no-no. OK, call me naive and ignorant on that one. "But it's outlined in our terms of service." This document is posted on the web, and I'm supposed to check it every few weeks? Apparently so, as it's subject to change at any time AND
2) They pull the plug, no questions asked. That is, no phone call BEFORE killing your cable modem. From my logs I can see they yanked me at 10:00, with a phone call round about 15:00. This to me is not acceptable customer service. Again, call me naive.
3) The Abuse Management guy explained RR's official "policy" is to a) yank service, then b) call and c) send a Registered Letter explaining Terms of Service. And only upon my returning the letter, signed, would they reconnect me.
If they had followed this policy in my case, I would have hit the roof. It's not like I was running a kiddie porn site or something. My server had (at most) 5 connections at a time. But like I said, the guy was cool enough, and I was agreeable. .
Overall I'm fairly happy with RoadRunner. But I'll be happier when they open cable up and we have a choice of ISPs. I think RR needs to sort their customer service out.
Does DSL allow one to run servers?
As a @home suscriber, I haven't seen that speed that was advertised and now they are capping the upload speed. It's time for @home to stop blaming everybody for their eratic inconsistent service and fix the problems instead of cutting the service we pay for and never had. Last week I got a ticket for going too slow on the Super Highway by the Internet Police.
Just curious, what part of the Country is this?
I was one of the first to jump on Mediaone Express service when it rolled out here in the Chicago suburbs last fall. It was excellent - I loved it and I never even had to *think* bout how long something was going to take to upload/download, or did I have any trouble finding fast game servers.
Now, almost a year later, it is still a very good service, but I have seen some deterioration as more users are added. I see some slowdowns on Saturday nights, the e-mail and news servers are usually much slower than before, and we get short outages from time to time.
Overall, I agree that MediaOne has been a good ISP - I'm just wondering what happens when AT&T/TCI/@Home takes over here?
It looks to me like @home seriously oversubscribed, and now they have to put bandwidth limits in place to be able to service all of those customers. Can you say "class-action lawsuit"? AOL made the same mistake a while back and ended up shelling out million of dollars in refund money. Maybe @Home should upgrade their equipment for future customers, instead up "upgrading" their customer base first. If you are paying for 3Mbps down, and 1Mbps up, you should be able to use it for whatever you want. @Home needs to set up their network so you down/upload speeds are burstable to 3/1Mbps. That way, the average user will not notice a difference, but people running warez/mp3 servers will have their bandwidth limited after so many seconds of sustained transmission.
I got myself a DSL line from USWest, and I've gone through my share of hell with it, but from the sound of it, @Home should be paying its customers for the inconvenience. If customers are not getting the speeds that they are promised, they should be compensated for it. If "prime-time" last 3 hours each evening, and nothing is accessible, @Home should refund 3 hours*30 days worth of a customer's bill.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
It limits free speech immensely - that is part of @Home's business model. The point is, a subscriber just can't *go* anywhere on the Internet except in the "audience" direction, if they use a network provider that bluntly forbids or cripples servers. The difference in capability is like the difference between a cheap transistor radio and a cellular phone.
:)
:)
Think about it - if Microsoft would, for example, by default enable their Personal Web Server during Win9x/20xx's install/OEM customer setup; give them the option to walk through one of those pick-a-color-and-layout-fill-in-the-blanks whizzards; and give them a few examples of what they can do - then @home and other ISPs that overcensor servers would be totally screwed. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of angry customers, all demanding that this standard feature work, so at least a few people can see their vanity page; so their artistic little Jennifer's friends and the rest of the world can see the webcam on her special page - and the database of older images she's learned to build and web-enable - and later, so she can do that from the Linux server she's learned to run. That the WWW cache be turned on in both directions. And so on. Someone pointed out earlier that @Home's server prohibition does not extend to running NetMeeting. Can anyone or everyone guess why?
Unfortunately Microsoft probably won't do that, because 90 percent of the users would set their home page to their home page instead of MSN's "Start page" - they want to advertise as much as @Home does. Well, maybe not quite as much - from @Home's anti-open-access propaganda:
"If [...] cable companies were required to strip away the potential for generating advertising and commerce revenues by pursuing an access-only model, this would lead to an increase in the price of cable modem services. That isn't in the interest of the consumer."
Unless those consumers choose among the rest of the ISPs as well as @Home, and competition does its usual dance on prices.
So. Under @Home's short-sighted business model, everything that does not issue their advertising is abuse. Any of their own customers who issue their own data - yes, those paying for IP service - are treated as competitors! I suspect many ISPs who covet their customer's outbound bandwidth for the ISP's own WWW service do the same.
There aren't many businesses that could get away with that kind of crap treatment of their own clients, and there isn't any reason IP purchasers should have to put up with it.
I feel three-quarters ready to create a Slash engine site for small server questions, instructions, tips, announcements, and so on. Any comment on that idea?
alone. Yup, including
Am I the only one that is actually in favor of this, expect than that they did it quietly?
;)
I managed to get my hands on a cable modem from @Home in late '97, when they were first starting to roll out. The bandwidth was significantly faster at first(near-consistant 200KB/sec), but wound down over time. I did a little bit of poking around and managed to find more than a few ftp servers running on the same network as me; heck, I found other systems doing the same to me.
The bandwidth cap was inevitable, there was simply too much outbound usage from the various warez kiddies and mp3 hogs. I'd probably be doing the same thing in their shoes. How else would you get rid of this usage?
For those whining about not being able to run servers any more; It's not like you can't anymore, 16KB is ample for most things, you just can't go and run 16-player Quake servers anymore. Too bad.
Anyway... I do far more downloading than I do uploading, so this is really only an issue for me when the upload speed cap caps my download speed, and I seriously don't see that happening anytime soon, unless I somehow get another 600KB/sec kernel download.
Oh well.
I've been a subscriber of @Home in Ottawa (Ontario, Canada) for a year now. The service is TERRIBLE (hold time for customer support ranges from 40 minutes to nearly two hours in the evening), there are technical problems (the mail and news servers are down almost daily - mail is down as I type), and the speed is nowhere near what they advertise.
But I'm still with them, and here's why:
1. Although speed is not what they claim, it's much better than any dialup connection.
2. It's really not that expensive. $40CDN per month == about $27US.
3. Static IP. Yes, they use DHCP, but you always get the same IP. Just register a domain name so you don't resolve to cr836502-b.slnt1.on.wave.home.com (not my real name, btw), and you're cooking.
4. Although you technically aren't allowed to run any servers, they clearly spelled that out for us at a recent meeting: as long as you aren't advertising your site so as to invite high traffic, it's no problem. So run FTP and telnet for some friends, they don't care. It's just to stop the mp3/warez/porn sites that suck up so much bandwidth.
5. Persistence. It's so much more convenient to just sit down and use the net rather than dialing in and tying up the phone line.
(BTW, most of the above points, except for #3, could also be solved with DSL, which is slightly more expensive around here than cable modems).
For me, the bandwidth cap is not a big deal, since I don't run any servers and don't do a lot of uploading of large files.
I'm on Intermedia @HOME, and I did some testing today and couldn't get more than about 14Kbps on my uploads.
Even worse, when you are uploading at the max of 14Kbps, your downloads are basically KILLED. Its worse than a 2400 bps modem at that point. I've heard this explained as resulting from the ACK packets getting throttled, so since they can't get through, your downloads are basically killed as well.
Folks, this is simply unacceptable. When I signed up for @HOME over 6 months ago, the service tech told me that they had PLENTY of bandwidth, and wouldn't need to limit it. He said that if they ever did peak out their connections, they simply would add more bandwidth. As everyone knows, this hasn't been the case at all.
Let the Slashdot effect wreck its wrath on @home. I don't have a problem with @home making people running serious servers moving to a more expensive service, or stop serving. But if I just want to upload a few large files to my school webserver, I don't feel like they should be intentionally limiting my bandwidth. It would be simple to run statatics at the end of every month and identify the users and the abusers. Educate or disconnect the abusers and let the users enjoy the service that was advertised and that was paid for.
I'm also on CGO@Home in Flamborough.
Since they put the cap on, the 2meg modems are slower than the old Zenith 500kbit's which were amazing!
My connection dies twice a day for 5-10 minutes, and uploads are less than 100kbit.
Our retail store has had to deal with CGO a number of times when their service wasn't working, blaming it on the NIC (20 minutes after the customer had been on the net in the store with their computer).
On hold : 4 lines, 1.5 hours, still no answer.
The only way to get through : call the cable TV guys, and have them transfer you, or get the fax number of the @Home department.
I wish I had never traded in that beloved black Zenith.
damn! and for the majority of us who don't have alternatives like DSL yet that cap might just suck. I'm gonna have to go into leech mode only.
c'mon bell. c'mon bell.. gimme dsl!
It's just Crap.
Some people have touched on this before, but many have not. If no one has noticed, MediaOne has had a policy like this in effect for several years now in most areas. Initial beta deployments and some of the first 2-way services rolled out 2-4 years ago had no real cap on their upstream/downstream capabilities (aside from the technical limits of the cablesystem), however it quickly changed. Unfortunatley for the pile of /.'ers that run some type of server/firewall at home for *PERFECTLY* legitimate reasons (personal file transfers, personal eMails since we can only have one per acct on their servers, webcams, etc.) are penalized for the actions of a few.
In a way this is actually a good thing really, because everyone knows of at least one server you have run across somewhere that is on your local node running some type of illegal activity and is thus sucking down your good bandwidth. While the bandwidth cap Mediaone places is *VERY* reasonable (about 400kbit/s which is roughly 55kb/s), some disagree with the policy beacuse the links MediaOne use to connect our networks to the Internet work in both ways at the same speed, and we all know how blazing fast our downloads are, so there is no reason for us to not have blazing upload speeds, except for the fact you have to control your users or you end up with a nasty mess on your hands. This is precisly what the cable providers are doing, making sure that down the road we get the same high-level of service that we all expect (and have come to love).
Back to the topic of the @Home change, I do feel that limiting users to 128kbit/s (ISDN 2-B channel speeds, about 12kb/s) is too harsh, I feel that some sort of restraint needed to be placed on the users so the network is still usable by most of the general customer base.
In short, this sort of policy has to be placed in effect, otherwise we'd wakeup one morning and realize our service sucks and we can't really do anything to fix it (and remember, it beats the crap out of the 2-3kb/s upstream of a normal modem!).
-R
PS- In retrospect a better plan might be to hire a squad of a few people and give them the task of hunting down the *REAL* abusers of the network. I know paying someone to surf the IRC channels all day looking for subscribers abusing their privlidges might seem like a bad idea, it is probably worth the effort since you could catch a large number of the abusers who are running public-access services from their modems and simply limit them to slower speeds. But that is just a thought.
-R
Please remember that the bandwidth for a cable modem is shared among all of the users. Now when everyone on a block is using a shared resource, I'd like to think that we can all have a bit of respect for our fellow users. Let me put together a little analogy.
For example, lets say that you live out in the desert on a dirt road. There are about 50 or 60 other families who all live along the same road with you. This road is so bad that you have to leave an extra 20 minutes for your commute because of it. Fed up, you look into paving a section of the road, but it costs way too much for you to take on alone.
Now imagine that some big company comes to town and offers to pave the road for a small cost, split among all of the negihbors. Everyone chips in thier small monthly fee, and soon there is a pristine 2-lane strip of asphalt. You cut your commute in half and now you can get a boat and trailer for the weekends. Life is good.
Then your next door neighbor tears down his house, and tilts up a 500000sf Wal Mart national distribution center. Pretty soon trucks start clogging that little strip of road. Not to be outdone, the Flynts up the street build a mega-theme park. Cars line up for miles just to get in. The Waltons and the Flynts are still only chipping in a few bucks a month, but they are using most of the capacity of the road. Now your commute has expanded by 40 minutes each way, but your stuck.
OK, so how to fix the problem? Limit the number of axels on the residential road. Close the gates to the theme park. Then everyone can share the same strip of highway. It might be hard on their business to have these restrictions imposed. Yet, if they as a business customer want that much road, they should build their own. The same goes for the theme park. The same goes for the guy running Phil's Playhouse of Porn and Top 50 W4r3Z site next door off of his cable modem.
The cost of the bandwidth for cable is so low because it is shared among all of the users. If you want or need your own big pipe going out, you really should be paying for it rather than taking advantage of the guy next door. Just because you can sit in your living room with the blinds drawn and suckle on the teat of high bitrate bliss, does not mean that you should be the only one on your block with the privelage.
Its really easy to make the company the scapegoat in this situation. False advertising claims fly. Hey, its really not 50X faster than my old modem! No, that is a marketing come on phrased for a technically illiterate public. Sadly, people are starting to think that 56K is a brand of modem. Grandiose claims of peak speeds of 1.5megabits per second with a CIR of 10kbps does not make a catcy ad (but it does make a nice line in a service agreement.)
What it comes down to is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Yes, there are good non-business uses for upstream bandwidth. However I would rather have some sort of limit to curb abusers, than have an unusable connection because of my neighbors. Yes the company can take steps to increase bandwidth. However those steps are costly, and those costs are either reflected in higher bills, or lower returns for investors. A little respect for the guy next door would go a long way in this case.
> ...but for all other purposes this is enough
> for home usage, well enough in fact.
I seem to remember a Bill Gates prophecy stating
that 640K of RAM was more than anyone would EVER
need to use. In 3 or 4 years, you will look at
this statement and laugh, as most everyone (in
the US anyway) will be averaging T1 speeds or better...
Besides, @Home advertised speeds 100's of times
faster than regular modems. 128K is what, 4x faster than most modems?
I'm just glad I ordered DSL! It'll be installed
July 5th, woohoo!
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
I am very happy with the cap. Pre cap network status sucked... Download speeds had begun to crawl compared to what they were when I signed up with the service. I couldn't telnet to my box because of extreme lag. Now that they have enabled the cap, everything is fine. The service wasn't meant for upstream! There is no reason to run web, ftp, and other servers on this connection. If you want that try to find a provider that allows that in their acceptable use policy. 128k is plenty for what the service was designed for.
I'm not saying I like AOL [but compared to other models, they are NOT the evil incarnate], but it is ABSOLUTELY INEXCUSEABLE to use AOL as "the example that failed" as your excuse for ripping off your customers, by saying [sic] "we don't want to fall into the trap of what AOL did, and not provide enough bandwidth..." blah-blah-blah ....
Don't you get sick of how ISP's an get away with saying "we never promised you "X" peak speeds" ??
They've forgotten that we chose THEIR service over their competition because it's the speed that matters !! We're not interested in your fair business models ... we just want you speed, and by golly, that's what we agreed to -- why can't YOU agree to this, too ??
"He who questions training trains himself at asking questions." - The Sphinx, Mystery Men (1999)
In the paradise I live in, I pay about $125US per month and it takes me about 30-45 minutes to download 1Mb.
I have ADSL (yay!), and their terms of service[1] include a monthly limit of 1 gigabyte/month rather than any artificial rate caps[2] or restrictions on what services you can run. To me this is a much less invasive way of encouraging customers to share the bandwidth. The 1G limit is not yet enforced, but it's always been advertised very clearly on the FAQ pages, so nobody can be surprised if/when they switch it on.
p.s. I loved the title of the leaked @home document, "Upstream Enhancement". Sure makes me glad that the local cable company kept me on their "coming soon" list for so long that ADSL became available before they finally got around to wiring my neighborhood.
[1] BC Tel "Multimedia Gateway" in Vancouver, BC, Canada. CDN$65/month, 3 Mbits/s download speed, approximately 640 kbits/s upload speed.
[2] Apart from the natural asymmetry of ADSL rates.
Well I hate to go against the stream here. But I recently moved to a new state. My old state had some indepedent cable modem service that was more down than up. It sucked. The ping times were horrible. Insight Cable company here in Indiana is offering cable modem service through @HOME. I called and talked to them yesterday. The sales rep I talked to was very forthcoming. I said whats the up/down stream speeds. He said 128K up and up to 1 Meg down. He didnt try to make it sound better than it atually is. They need a tier system like ADSL does. The more up/down you want the more you pay. That is fair. I would get ADSL put the connect fee is $300 here and $60/month for 128k up and 384K down.
Remove the spam reference to email
Here's another @HOME subscriber who's generally in favor of the upload cap, although I would like to see it enforced only when necessary. Would that be hard to do? (serious question)
I never expected to get a T1 line for $40/month.
However, I would like to see @HOME take a more reasonable view toward low-bandwidth servers and other sort of upstream-dependent things. If they need to be throttled down, fine; but at least allow them to exist.
What I'd really like to do is map my domain name to a machine in my house. 128K upstream would be more than enough for personal servers like mine.
I've had a MediaOne cable modem for the past year and a half. Never in that time have I noticed a loss of bandwidth that appeared to be MediaOne's fault (I.E. other sites are often slow, but my connection to the net is always fast). There's always been a 300k upstream limit, but that's plenty for a low traffic website.
Last week I got a flyer in the mail from a company offering DSL, it was $150/mo for 256k both ways. I pay $40 for 1.5M down/300k up. Don't think I'll be switching any time soon.
If they're going to limit upstream, what reason do they have for continuing their no-server rule?
I'd rather run some basic servers on my box with an upstream limit than have no limit and no servers.
If anyone else was to provide internet service over cable, they would have to pay @Home for the bandwidth that their users use. Believe me, any ISP with half a brain would limit the speeds people can upload with, to stop servers, as they would end up paying @Home for what their users transfer. The only difference I would see if more people could provide access over cable is a possible additional pricing model, where you as the user pay for the data transferred, just like the ISP does. Small fry users would do this, since they use less, and "power users" would go for the flat rate but speed limited model, while warez puppies would have go for the @Work type service if they wanted to run their servers. Meaning more banner ads. Woop-de-f*cking-doo.
I could live with it if it was Kilobyte but, damn. They're really cramping my style now. At least it isn't in place in MY area yet. Hopefully I will move directly to a place with ADSL soon. It isn't available anywhere within 30 miles of here, though. I was lucky to get the cable...
I guess I should just be thankful not to be on my 56k (28.8 on a NEW phone line in the house, a**holes...) modem anymore. Unfortunately, since I do web design, I could use every bit of upload speed I can get. Waiting just over a minute at full steam for a 1 meg file to upload seems ridiculous when I can download it within 6-7 seconds from faster servers. BTW, I've capped my downloads before just over 600 Kilobyte/sec, just FYI.
8Complex
Last month we griped about how more and more ISP's were banning servers. Now there's not even uploading. Aren't these the same CEO's who said years ago the internet would never be more than a toy?
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
What you're saying is like telling someone who has been mugged that it's no so bad because they could have broken his arms too.
ISPs do this type of crap all of the time. The unilatterally change the conditions of service to their benefit without recourse on behalf of their customers. In many states people are hand-cuffed to one cable company. I can't choose Adelphia, TCI, Helicon, or Cablevision, if I want cable I HAVE to use Adelphia. They screw the customers over all of the time.
LK
I've been a subscriber for TCI@Home in Dallas since Early January, and by now I am getting disgusted with the thing. Let me explain.
TCI had a huge rollout party for cable modem trying to tell people why it is so much better. Of course, there were loads and loads of soccer moms there, wanting to free up the phone lines, but I went to ask what they planned to do about bandwidth problems. TCI claimed they had enginneers that watched the transfer rates, and if it got too low, they would split a node. Of course, this ignores the whole issue of @Home not having enough bandwidth. But I took their word for it. We got it installed, and I was very happy with the service for about a month. Then things changed.
All of a sudden, TCI couldn't keep up with the demand. The speeds in my apartment building started falling and falling (to the point where I couldn't use it during the day without getting really angry.) What used to be 40-60k/sec suddenly fell to 10-20k/sec. I felt cheated.
Furthermore, TCI's customer service was totally inept. Extremely Frequent emails about billing problems was the only way to solve an $100 overbilling, and even then it took 2 and a half months.
We've had the 128k cap installed in Dallas for most of the 1999, AFAIK, and it sucks. We have a small network setup here, and even registered for multiple IPs. If I try to FTP a file from wuarchive, while my roommate is playing Everquest or Quake or some other online game, the FTP really really lags. We didn't have that problem before the upstream cap.
It's just not fair how they have cheated existing customers and new ones as well. We continue to get promotional materials from TCI, with all the silly graphs displaying how Cable is 100x as fast as 28.8. I know from experience it just isn't true. They keep signing customers up without upgrading the network, and then turn a deaf ear on complaints. It's really too bad DSL is still so much here. It's really too bad poor college students don't have another choice.
Remember what your father told you, and I just recently realized he was right:
/. which claims "Now applications will know how to repair themselves." I think adage #3 certainly holds true here.....
1) You get what you pay for
2) There's no such thing as a free lunch.
3) If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
You're paying $40 a month for Internet service. How can a bandwidth provider give multi-megabit access to an entire city, peer on a backbone, and still be able to turn a profit? By oversubscribing and limiting bandwidth for everyone.
This is what I've realized when my own ISP, Charter Communications, pulled the rug out from under me. I rented their Windows-Only ISA-card cable modem last December since they promised 50 times faster speed than my 28.8 modem, for $34/month. And I had 200-300KB/sec downloads from it all the time.
Now they have a Linux-friendly external modem, but if I take the new modem, I have to go for their new pricing plan, which all new subscribers get thrown into: 256Kbps DOWN for $29/month, 512Kbps for $39/month, or 768Kbps for $79/month. And right now it's not even 2-way service. I can keep the Cable Winmodem and my better-than-T1 downloads until they go 2-way in my neighborhood, and then I'd have to fork over my old modem and take the new pricing. So it's a choice between "Use windows and get high speed" or "Use Linux and get ripped off." I should have expected this from a company owned by Paul Allen... protecting his Microsoft interests.
The gravy train's going to end soon, folks. Like someone else said, the cable modem is a system that's going to come back and haunt you. It did for me. If you want guranteed T1 speeds, you're just going to have to bite the bullet and get a T1. Otherwise you're going to pay $40/month for $40-quality Internet access.
On an unrelated note, I gotta love the Office 2000 ad on
I also have MediaOne service in Cambridge, MA that I've been quite happy with. They do have a 1.5Mbit limit downstream and a ~350kbit limit upstream, however. (The links are capable of sustaining about 10MBit/s). These limits give me performance that is almost always fast and reasonable with very low latencies. By putting these limits in place they make the cable modem performance highly consistent. Rather than performing like the shared bus that it is, it performs as a dedicated point-to-point link. The only time it gets frustrating is when I'm transferring images or files from my computer to machines at my office at school. It also keeps me from using AFS from home, just because the upstream bandwidth limit can get annoying then. (However, with round trip times of about 6 ms from home to my office, I'm not normally complaining... ;-)
I'm on ISDN now, so switching to @Home will do nothing for my speed uploading, although it will be faster downloading....or so in theory. I have a friend that has @Home and he says sometimes it gets so slow as to drop below 56K!!!
Also, @Home seems to change their rules as they go along. What may be here today may be changed with them tomorrow.
I'm sorry, but @Home can kiss my ass....I will NEVER join up with them now. Shoddy tech support, shoddy unpredictible bandwidth, shady rules.
My ISP...whom I've been with for 6 years now....is slowly bringing DSL online. I'll just wait for that.
--- "It's not enough that I succeed...everyone else must fail."
With this cap in place, shouldn't we be able to run low bandwidth web/mail servers? I do a lot of work from home, and its nice to be able to access my system from wherever. I don't see what it will hurt, now that we can't possibly use up much of their bandwidth.
Since whever you have a number greater then 2.5*10^x, such as 2.5, 25.250, etc
28.8*4 = 115.2, duh and with a 56k modem its only about 3.2 times as fast (33.6k upload)
and you call yourself a nerd....
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Did anybody read an old RFC which described exactly the same problem (bandwidth hogs) and the solution to it (fair queueing)? It basically says that the routers should act as if they had one incoming queue for each possible source IP (probably it is only one queue, but the router would act _as if_ it were many). Then it goes round-robin getting one packet from each IP and putting it on the output links. If some single source tries to send more packets than the link can handle, packets from _just this source_ will get dropped. This is a non-issue for OSs with congestion control (like Linux) since they can detect the drops and use them to adjust the outgoing speed.
This way, if a single node is sending too much data most of it will get dropped and (if it has a good stack) it will reduce its sending speed automatically. Other users and the download speed wouldn't be affected (assuming they use congestion control too).
What ISPs are doing when they regulate by content (ala httpd servers) or data direction is not supplying "a connection to the internet", an IP channel that might be considered a common carrier or even pseudo-common carrier service; but instead, well, an online service - one that will be, frankly, virtually useless for many new internet applications in a very short time. In no way does it deserve to be awarded the title of "broadband" - I don't think it deserves to be called an "internet" connection. I won't repeat the reports and examples in previous comments of how throttling outbound connections is already harming inbound connections and preventing normal use of existing programs.
Basically, what we are seeing here is greed - @Home wants to reserve all its outbound bandwidth for its own web servers, or resell same bandwidth to someone with a similar use. They don't see their customer as anything more than a passive observer of sites on the real internet, and are effectively destroying the ability of their customers to communicate their ideas and contributions to others on the internet. "You must listen, but cannot speak." In other words, it is exactly backwards of what the Internet was designed and built as - a *two* way service which gathers its data from the whole net, as well as sends - this is a concept known as "interconnectivity", or a "free Internet".
It is also a concept that is inimical to @HOME's preference for serving their customers data from cache servers rather than the actual Internet. This works a *lot* better when the majority of the requests are for a few "portal" pages and those within a few links of them. Diversity is *not* appreciated, please - serve our customers dull, static (literally) pages! Hardly a surprise that @HOME would discourage the idea as much as possible - Note the #1 listed goal in the leaked document, above the "upstream enhancement":
"1.ONadvantage Proxy Evangelization - Improve speed by storing data as close to the subscribers as possible by using proxy or caching servers."
I don't consider this dishonest, really. That's what @HOME sells, and that's what their customers are buying from them. Sure, they would have to charge a little more to let their customers talk as well as listen dumbly. What would be dishonest would be pretending that they are selling a real IP connection. The danger I see is that this and similar policies are becoming the rule, rather than the exception, and *real* broadband internet connections may become unavailable - strangling in the cradle new inventions and innovations that could otherwise have as much promise as email or the WWW.
I see only two outcomes: either this kind of thing will go on until companies are calling anything but reading static web pages "subscriber abuse" as Mr. Wolfram puts it - people will be afraid to call the ISP when their videoconferencing fails lest they be told they are stealing bandwidth (and have their link summarily *further* castrated) - or, and I hate to say it, there must be rapid and comprehensive FCC and other regulation.
Because it costs more to provide Internet connections than those services @Home sells, there should be incentives, in the spirit of the FCC deregulation's goal of enhancing new communications technology.
First and foremost, it is essential that any communities considering creating or renewing franchise agreements, must be certain that those agreements allow the citizens of those communities to have a voice so their opinions may be heard; by guaranteeing the ISP will not hog all the outgoing bandwidth, so that those in the franchise area may use their connections to run legtitimate servers, or to read/send whatever other data they may choose to communicate. For personal pleasure, internet business, or otherwise. There should be strong attention to the nature of the equipment to be installed as well, to provide decent rates in both directions - DSLite must be considered simply unacceptable except as a first step towards broadband IP, or unless other options like HDSL are also available, priced proportional to bandwidth or better.
On the Federal and State level, there is no reason that online services who take advantage of and muzzle their users' outgoing channels, should be treated the same for tax or regulatory purposes as actual ISPs who respect freedom of speech and the Internet. Existing and proposed taxes on services or the DSL connections for such should be moved to reserved for those who would otherwise profit by providing an inferior "fast" connection deliberately damaged in such manners, and true common carrier status could be granted to those, by contrast, who are acting as true common carriers.
tcp makes the bulk data packets much larger than the ack packets. Bandwidth use is nearly always very asymmetric -- most comes down.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
um dsl is only 256k total...
This is incorrect. PBI DSL has a downstream CIR of 384kbit, but it almost always hits the 1.5Mbit peak rate. The upstream is capped at the line level to 128k.
Neither of these are 256k, individually or total.
Maybe what you say is true out in Podunk, Nowhere but that's certainly not the case everywhere. xDSL technologies are quite capable of rates far higher than those I get, and certainly more than what you're saying.
Unfortunately this won't work. In my case, if the upstream bandwidth exceeds 128Kbps the cable modem just starts dropping packets. What the modem should do is only drop packets which contain data and not ACK packets.
Also, I have been on @Home for 2 1/2 years. In the last year the service has become terrible. When I first joined, I received email about billing, was notified ahead of time about downtime, and was treated with respect. Tech support was excellent and the hold times were low. Reliability was high. Also, the AUP I signed said absolutely nothing about running servers and they were accepted.
Now it's the opposite. Mail and news is frequently down. 20% packet loss when trying to leave the @Home network is a frequent problem. Performance sucks. I no longer receive any email about billing (only spam from @Home). Hold times for tech support are frequently around 2 hours. All this and my rates have gone up.
I would be willing to pay extra to be able to run a server again, but @Home will not support @Work in residential areas, and if they did it would cost around $400/month! My cable modem is capable of 10Mbps full duplex. @Home should offer tiered service where one can pay more for higher quality of service.
My employer also has @Work. The packet loss is also very high at peak times.
The packet loss is not over the local links, but as soon as packets leave the @Home network. @Home does not have adequate peering with the rest of the Internet.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.