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Cisco talks up products to /slow access/
Marc Merlin writes "This excerpt from Yahoo News tells it all:
(...) But according to marketing materials from Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO - news), the No. 1 maker of computer networking equipment, cable companies will be able to work behind the scenes with sophisticated software included in Cisco products to slow down and limit access to selected Web sites. " As you would imagine, this has got the hackles of consumer groups up-Cisco brochures are saying that this stuff would allow cable companies to make competing sites appear more slowly then preferred ones. I'm speechless.
(...) But according to marketing materials from Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO - news), the No. 1 maker of computer networking equipment, cable companies will be able to work behind the scenes with sophisticated software included in Cisco products to slow down and limit access to selected Web sites. " As you would imagine, this has got the hackles of consumer groups up-Cisco brochures are saying that this stuff would allow cable companies to make competing sites appear more slowly then preferred ones. I'm speechless.
Cisco is a technology company driven by client demand. This is technology which some client wants. Sure it could be used in a bad way, but almost everything can. The people who use it in a bad way are the ones that should be blamed not the people who create the tools. You are not going to blame the Ford motor company if someone uses a Ford to run your friend over. You are going to blame the jerk who used the Ford to do it.
Remember that openness in standards and such is not just for a home user. The cable companies, ISP's etc all want to be able to have as many options as possible.
That's not the reason why unleaded gasoline cost more when it was first on the market. The unleaded fuel had to be processed more (to create more branched-chain aliphatics -- see any organic/petrochem textbook) to yield an adequate *motor* octane rating... that's the anti-knock property of gasoline. The leaded gas was simply any old crap distilled out of petroleum that would burn in a piston engine and have the right range of vapor/boiling temperature point. They just dumped a bunch of tetraethyl lead into it to raise its motor octane level up so your engine wouldn't compression-clatter from detonation. Adding lead was a lot cheaper than the extra cracking/reforming processes needed to create lots of branched-chain hydrocarbons out of straight-chains.
Isn't this really the same as your local Ford dealership saying that Chrysler is more apt to break down, not get as good mileage, steal your money, etc?
Isn't this the same as your neighbours all saying to get a PC since a Mac is slower and not as good at doing things?
I'm not saying it's right by any means, I mean there should *definately* be some kind of userbase intervention done here (I seriously doubt a boycott could come into play) to let Cisco know that this is NOT acceptable.
Okay, I'll bite.
What would you use?
I use Traceroute myself and certainly wouldn't mind hearing about better tools.
D
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Unfortunately, putting a contract out on 150 people would cost substantially more than a T1 connection. Worse, people would then buy the homes owned by the 150 expired folks, and then you'd have to start all over again. I recommend you just ring up your local bandwidth reseller and get your own T1 line; it's a lot cheaper and 100% foolproof to boot.
:-(.
Of course there are always a few other suggestions:
- Find 150 gorgeous blondes and have them seduce the householders when you want to surf the net.
- Convince all the householders that the net is a horrible, dangerous swamp filled with pornography and bomb-making information. Unfortunately, that would probably backfire in a big way, as your neighbors would promptly go on the net and look for that stuff.
- Convince the television networks to hold the Super Bowl 365 days a year.
On the whole, though, if you want $ 1,500 a month worth of access, the bottom line is you have to pay for it
D
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Using a tunnel like this will NOT, I repeat, will NOT tell you whether or not your ISP is throttling back your traffic. The route that traffic takes from point A to point B may have nothing in common with the route from point C to point B. In other words, you may have the following situation:
;-). Just for kicks, I connected to work, which is a nice clean route thru USWest, BBN, and C&W. At work, we have a QWest connection in addition to a C&W connection, so from work to any QWest host was a clean route. So, by "tunneling" thru my workplace, I was able to get much better connectivity than by going directly.
route from A -> B sucks
route from C -> B is good
route from A -> C is good.
This is probably more common than people think. There are a handful of places on the Internet backbone which tend to get really clogged up. If your traffic happens to be going thru one of those points, your connection will suck. By using a tunnel to somewhere else, you may be avoiding that bottleneck and your connection will improve.
I actually ran into exactly this scenario last night. I am a USWest.net customer, and was connecting to a host on QWest. The connection was horrible, and a traceroute showed a long tortuous path thru a half a dozen providers (Hopefully now that QWest owns USWest they will begin peering
If you actually wanted determine whether or not your ISP was throttling traffic, you would have to take direct measurements. I'm not sure what the best way to do this would be, as it would depend on exactly how the ISP implemented it. Some software along the lines of traceroute or mtr might be modified pretty easily to take some measurements. Another possible approach would be to use forged TCP packets. Say you have host A using the ISP you think is throttling. You have access to another host B at a different ISP. A program on host B sends forged TCP packets that appear to be from various web sites to host A. On host A, you have a program which tallies up the received forged packets. Since all the packets are taking the same route, the packet loss rate should be the same no matter what the source address is. If the ISP is throttling, it should be pretty obvious. The one problem with this approach is that the ISP host B is connected to should be dropping the forged packets. Not that it isn't easy to find an ignorant or irresponsible ISP that will let you source forged packets...
Yeah - but it is in poor taste to sell QoS by promoting this type of application. Very sleazy. Several companies make poisons, but most don't claim that they are handy to kill your spouse and collect the insurance...
As the original article states, this technology is not limited just to cable modem access. It can be used by any ISP using any access method (cable, DSL, dial-up, satellite).
Give this information to anyone and everyone that currently has or is thinking about getting internet access. Educate them about the alternatives. We need to make the providers understand that the public *will* switch to alternate access methods if this type of system gets implemented. Last, but not least, don't let this issue die without making sure that the ISPs understand that the public knows what they are up to.
Thanks,
UOZaphod
"The unicode stuff in the latest version is working fabulously well. My russian mafia friends are ecstatic."
Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death! - Patrick Henry (1736-1799) Speech in the Virginia Convention, March 1775
Now, there's the small problem that Patrick Henry was a monarchist...kinda odd when you think that the Yoo Ess of Ay coulda had a Prussian prince as King of America (he was invited but turned the offer down). And if Ben Franklin had had his way, we'd have had a turkey as our mascot instead of a bald eagle...and we came close to choosing German as our national language after the Revolution.
Just think. A German speaking, Prussian-monarch-ruled nation with a turkey for its emblem. Imagine your dollars (sorry, guess it woulda been "taler") with a big honkin' turkey on the back, with "EINS" in huge letters. And a picture of König Friedrich Wilhelm IX on the front. Odd...
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Quality of Service and Class of Service are designed to make the net a better place to be. They have been implemented by Cisco, Nortel, Microsoft, Linux, HP, Extreme, (insert nearly every network vendor/os on planet).
I want to be able prioritize my real time traffic over my non-interactive traffic. I want my internet game packets to have higher priority than my email.
ISPs are going to use this technology to better manage the traffic flowing across their networks. They'd be stupid to start blocking access to content from a legal and PR nightmare standpoint.
This stuff has been around since the start of IPv4 (ToS bits, now Diff-Serv) and is finally being implemented.
Check out http://www.qosforum.com if you want actual information about these technologies, not FUD.
Or check out the ietf DiffServ, MPLS, or IEEE 802.1p/q pages if you want to see why so much effort has been put into these technologies by the standards bodies and the commercial and non-commercial OS/network vendors.
Note: I work for a company who tries to educate and explain new internet technologies. The website above is one that I am the network admin for.
That's what I'd name the software! I can't believe I'm about to say this, but shouldn't PBS try to get into the ISP game for unbiased/unrestricted access...no, wait, then we'd never be able to visit Republican sites. Hmmmm, tough nut to crack.
Smacks of American Bar Association, they've got to be behind it. No wonder the Phillip Morris site is slow this morning.
...and stop calling me 'Shirley'.
Speaking as the owner of an ISP, restricting access doesn't work as either tactics OR strategy. What makes Internet access valuable is access to ALL sites on ALL networks. If you try to restrict access at your router (which has been suggested by some lawmakers in order to limit minors' access to pornography) you begin to lose customers.
Where the ability to throttle becomes useful, at least as far as the ISP is concerned, is where it gives you the ability to sell metered service to co-locations (and other downstreams.) If you don't throttle, you have to sell access to your LAN as if everyone was using all of your DS3. (Assuming you have a DS3.) Throttling allows you to sell cheaper access to lower-bandwidth sites. That lowers your up-front price and allows you to sell to a bigger market with less risk.
Oh, and don't hold your breath on that 100 Mb/s access. It remains to be seen how long it'll take the current backbone structures to adapt to the current crop of high-speed access schemes.
That's bull; access to the internet is access to the internet. You don't (and can't) sue when there's a network outage.
More to the point, there are a couple of valid uses for that kind of thing. First of all, ISPs in many areas of the world are forced to restrict access to sites to conform to local legislation. It's assinine but true. And it's easy to see that happening in America - the last decade of the Republican Party being a front for the Christian Coalition is more than illustrative enough.
Second, bandwidth limiting isn't exactly a new thing - it's used to determine quality of service. As a return for tv cable monopolies, cable co's have to devote a certain amount of broadcast to the public - public access television. It's not unreasonable to see that bandwidth might be treated in the same way - registered not-for-profit sites getting an allocated chunk. Or that pornographic sites be limited to a certain chunk (a weak second best to the point above, no doubt).
--
There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
If they claim to be an internet service provider and restrict access to any part of the internet then sue or bring charges of fraud. The internet is the whole thing. There is no right to rewrite reality.
IANAL
I agree
I first received my cable access, and I was restricted after the first month, they changed over their rules and all of us suffered. it was awful, and the worst part was that they had a monopoly in that area. I moved so I am fine now, but until someone can regulate the providers we can be screwed. The designers are not at fault, the providers are for sure...
First Post!
This feature is not new and it wasn't Cisco who started it. If companies wanted to do this then they would have done it with or without Cisco. Packeteer for example.
But all the same it is interesting that Cisco makes router configurations on higher level protocols. I thougth it's not their territory.
-Danny
Not to bring any unwanted sanity to all these wild posts, but I thing most of the people here are out of touch with reality. (More so than they should be anyway.) I work with IOS everyday, I've got stacks of routers sitting on my desk, those are my qualifications. For a good long time, IOS has had these little things called "Access Lists", you may or may not have heard of them. They "block packets" to a given "destination". /Every/ router manufacturer has this feature implemented in some form in one of there boxes.
On a side note, prioritization of packets is a "good thing", you want VoIP/VoFR/VoATM packets as well as Video over IP/FRM/ATM packets to get out of the box and down the line as quickly as possible. Getting lagged down in a buffer waiting for some idiot to get his porn, causes all sorts of havok in RT-streams. Don't forget that.
For a page whose audience is supposedly the Creme' de La Creme' of internet/computer savvy users, there sure are a lot of ignorant outbursts.
Oh, BTW Bowie, checked out Propaganda. Cool Sh!t.
There is a way to prove it. If you can get access to a linux box outside of the cable network, set up a tunnel to it, and make that tunnel your default route. Compare access times w/ and w/o the tunnel to a website you ssupect them to be throttling or blocking. If the tunnel is faster in spite of the extra hops, they are throttleing the connection.
In a related note, I discovered that Digex is silently proxying web access upstream from my provider using a prot redirector. Usually, it works OK, but some days it is overloaded and I can get faster web access thru the above mentioned tunnel.
Hasn't this feature (bandwidth throttling per IP) been in IOS for a long time now? Granted, almost every network tool has a potential for misuse, but panicking over a hyped-up Yahoo newsbit is silly. Besides, if the cable companies decided to do it, there's really no way to tell except to subpoena the router configs for every upstream node in the network. Not exactly a PHB-friendly tactic.
-- lk t lv ll th vwls t f wrds. T svs lts f tm t wrt bt ts pn n th ss t rd nd mks m lk lk cmplt dpsht.
Yes, it is very disconcerting that Cisco has found it serves their customers to provide such ethically questionable software. And of course it will be used for all the wrong reasons. But I think they (Cisco) have forgotten one of the fundamental rules of networks -- route around the glitches and find an optimal path through the maze. Unless the entire infrastructure is owned by a single controlling entity, no cable company, ISP, ASP or telcom can permanently limit bandwidth to/from any other entity.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Aurther C. Clarke
Frankly I think a little overreaction would be good for this issue. Most people don't seem to care that the same people who shovel crap over TV are going to try to lock us in to the same crap through the internet. At least this will get media attention.
I wasn't aware that ISP's are required to provide unrestricted access. Is this legally mandatted, or simply a policy of the backbone providers? Policies can change, especially when there is bigger money at stake.
The problem with assuming that the market will force providers to allow the freedom we expect is that it assumes that unrestricted net access is the most profitable.
That is not guaranteed! Big media is already paid billions by advertisers because they have a captive audience. What do you think is more profitable, selling real net access, or selling locked, proprietary content, loaded with ads, under the guise of net access? It is not in their interest to allow individuals the ability to publish on the net, because that is in competition with their own services.
And don't think competition from DSL and other technologies will change this. I'm speaking generically, because the telecomm and media industries are already intertwined in this realm. ATT owns cable companies, and MediaOne is providing phone services. They'll all follow each other's lead, doing whatever makes the most money.
I suspect the (US) courts would side with the offended party, as this surely meets most definitions of "anti-competitive".
Maybe such devices will end up being banned, but will be sold in a version where the feature is disabled, but easily restored, just like assault rifles...
And what do you consider Nortel/Bay and Lucent/Ascend? Seems like there's competition to me... And just because a company is large does not necessarily imply that they are a monopoly.
So why should Cisco should be broken up? Is it because of a feature (commonly known as traffic shaping, Quality of Service, etc) which has been a part of IOS for some time now? Maybe some people don't realize this, but QoS is not a feature specific to Cisco equipment... And as far as I am aware, traffic shaping is also a feature which is available under Linux. Yet there has been no controversy over that.
Besides, if some service provider wanted to use QoS in the way that everyone here is ranting about, you should be attacking the service provider, not Cisco...
I've known for a long time that the web sites mentioned on /. are orders of magnitude slower than the rest of the Internet. I always thought that this was to compensate for the audiences unusually long attention spans, and attention to detail. I saw this as a courtesy.
/. articles?
After all, good things are worth waiting for, so when I see that 'loading' bar zip back and forth across the bottom of my browser, I know I'm in for some good reading. And every time I get that little 'no response from server' pop-up, my anticipation just builds. The best sites, by far, are the ones that allow you ample time to get a coffee - and to indulge in the comforts of a physiological break. Sites like the 'world's smallest web server' are enough to make me pee my pants, and at work that would be embarassing. So I really do appreciate the significant delay these sites provide - as a courtesy.
So, you see, there's nothing to balk at in this new-fangled scheme. It's a value added for the customer. Sort of like PIII enabled sites.
But why invest in special hardware and software, when the CableCos could just submit the sites they want to slow down, as
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
OK, there is going to be a massive overreaction to this story. A few sanity checks.
... QOS metrics that prefer internal web sites to external (from the cable network) ones are already easily implementable, if not already implemented.
Cable Modem providers must provide unrestricted access if they are to recieve the pricing schemes that ISPs get for WAN circuits. As soon as they filter access, they aren't considered an ISP per se, and have to pay much higher prices for their circuits. This will self-regulate.
Cable modems are being treated by some providers as a LAN based technology, and the companies doing this (read Cox in Arizona) are filtering inbound access over certain ports, not allowing customers to run servers on the cable, etc. These inferior products will be edged out of the market by other technologies.
As soon as your ISP or cable provider decides that they can control your traffic, they can do a bunch of things that people wouldn't like
The moral of the story is that if you want leased-line style unrestricted access, you can dial up, buy DSL, or get a leased line. If cable providers don't want to play in the unrestricted access ISP field, then the free market will judge if it is a good idea. Don't blame the provider of the technology, blame the provider of the service that chooses to restrict your access.
When I left Cisco, I swore I would never attempt to teach IP routing to a clueless crowd ever again. Time to renege, I guess.
I have not seen the marketing materials Yahoo! is talking about. But I do know what a Cisco router (and a Nortel, Bay, etc) can do. One of the things it can do is prioritize or block traffic based on source/destination pairs, protocol numbers, whether or not its SYN bit is set, whatever. What I am seeing is that people somehow find fault in a router being able to do this. I'm speechless. Depending on the drugs you were smoking at the time, you COULD find fault with Cisco Marketing playing up this feature. This, combined with the fact that cable ISPs (let's not dance semantically here, shall we) are monopolistic entities by virtue of their infrastructure ownership, can be seen as quite nefarious. But can any of you goobers actually tell me that the fact that you can filter traffic on a Cisco router is, of itself, wrong? As an ex-member of Cisco Engineering (though not speaking for them) give me a goddamm break.
Your ISP can filter websites any time they want, by the way. The difference is that you have a choice in dial-up ISPs. You typically don't with a cable ISP, giving the latter much more leeway in the unethical things they can do.
The universe is bad enough without people poking it. -Mustrum Ridcully