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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.
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...
QOS and bandwidth throttles ARE integral to business LAN/WAN routing as you say.
However, the article said that the sales brouchure SPECIFICALLY mentioned restricting customer bandwidth to a competitors service to improve business for your own.
It's the difference between lawfully selling a gun (observing all manditory waiting and background checks) which may be used for good or evil, and putting a sign up that says: Messy divorce?, Passed over for that promotion? Buy a gun and blow your problems away!"
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