Why does everyone assume verizon will use the spectrum for wireless when they have just as much need to deliver Video as they do wireless?
They could run a completely wireless 'cable' network over this spectrum and the only compatible device would be a set top box with a wireless interface that was compatible with their head end equipment. Was there something in the auction that requires the spectrum to be used for Cell phones or Internet access? I missed it if there was. Anyone know?
The whole point of the 'no servers' section of the ToS was because they are aware of the limitations of their HFC upstream network. Storing files on your system for others to download is clearly a server. It's exactly the same as running a ftp server.
Saying that running a web browser is the same as running a file server might be just a little far-fetched there.
Except for the fact that the customer knowingly and willingly ran the software on their computer that gives anyone in the world access to their machine. Comcast didn't install it and if Comcast had their druthers, I'm sure they would outright block it all together.
"Hey! I was engaged in illegal activity, but Comcast let me do it!" That will be the beginning of the end. The first lawsuit would result in Comcast just flat out blocking p2p.
If I were comcast, I would just completely block P2P uploading as it violates the TOS. Not a popular answer I know, but my terms do say that I cannot run a server on my residential connection. P2P seeding should qualify as a file server. Comcast made the mistake of letting customers do something that was against the TOS for far too long. Not that there is a time limit on enforcing TOS, but it is always harder to give someone something and then take it away than it is to not give them something to begin with.
Cable companies will make a lot more money just adding their 10% or whatever it is on a per channel basis in stead of the discounted bundled rate.
Your bundled rate might include 34 bucks right now for espn, but when you try to order it by itself, it will be closer to 7, and won't incluse the other ESPN packages. Comcast, and any other provider won;t hurt. They will still make their money.
Some stations will go out of business due to them being ethnic or niche programming, but that's really as it should be. The programmers will make less money overall, but more money per subscriber. The provider (comcast) will still make their margin on every feed they sell, even more so, because the base cost of the feed will go up. 10% of 2.00 is more than 10% of 35 cents. So instead of 150 channels, 125 which are junk, for the same price you will be able to pick your 20 channels you want. It will cost you more for less, but at least you get to choose. You just will have a lot less to choose from.
I work in the cable industry and I PRAY for ala carte.
BGP does not rely on the honor system. Every provider has the ability to lock down announcements to the finest of detail. They may choose not to, but that's just piss poor network management.
Every External BGP session (EBGP) SHOULD be configured with a very specific access list as to what that particular session will be allowed to announce to you.
Obviously, tracking 20K plus announcements from a provider and creating an access list for it, daily, is a bit tedious. This is why Route Registries were created and many tools that will look up an AS in a route registry and generate the appropriate ACL are already in existence and in use. The problem is a lot of networks do not keep their registries up to date unless forced to by a peer / transit provider.
A correctly configured session will allow only announcements of the specified address space at the specified length. Any major transit provider that allowed this should be looking at their advertisement policy and figuring out how to prevent it in the future. Solutions do exist and are used by the majority of large providers already.
How the hell did/25's get propagated anyway? There are still transit networks that allow prefixes that small to be accepted externally?
IP Transit is sold by the megabit. If you go to level3, Sprint, AT&T, etc, for IP transit, you will get a per meg price. Depending on the amount of megs you commit to, your rate will drop. If you approached level3 for 10 gigs of transit, they will tell you a price somewhere around 25 bucks a meg.
The confusion appears to be in how those megs are measured.
If I have a transit link and I pull 1 meg a sec every sec for a month, I'm billed for 1 meg. (usually its 95th percentile but thats not relevant to this conversation).
Your colo provider is probably giving you something like 2000 gig a month included with your server rental. That's not measured the same way. Your 2000 gig is measured by the bit. It is metered. IE, if you transfer 200 10 gig files, you hit your 2000 gig limit. If you were to take that 2000 gig and covert it to the way transit is calculated you would see that 2000 gig is really about 700k a second all month long and would cost less than 30 bucks a month (or whatever they pay per meg)
Did that clear it up any?
Out of curiosity, I'd love to know how much bandwidth you are given at what price. The 2000 gig number I used is from my colo provider.
If slashdot pushed all of their content to my pc and everyone anywhere in the world was downloading their content from me, I would fully expect to be cut off or at the very least, to be charged hosting rates.
If that isn't what you meant then I have no idea what your comment was supposed to refer to. Can you clarify?
Japan has fiber connections to the home, as you stated. Dedicated resource vs shared resource that cable companies have. As so many people have pointed out here, there is a major difference.
The cable company backbone (comcast in this case) has no congestion issues. Getting you to the backbone is where they have an issue. Their throttling is done, supposedly, only on the upstream.
just throwing more bandwidth at the local loop isn't a solution due to the way the p2p protocol was written. It uses all of the bandwidth available to it. Adding more doesn't give anyone else extra bandwidth. It just increases the percentage of overall bandwidth p2p is using.
So, if as a provider you are unable to throttle p2p yourself and adding bandwidth doesn;t resolve it, what option do they have besides charging people for what they use?
Take all you want, pay for what you take. Seems very fair to me. But I don't leave my pc up and running 24 hours a day 365 days a year seeding WoW patches and Linux Iso's so my bill would probably go down.
Call up level 3 or AT&T and ask them how much 1 meg of dedicated transit costs them. At a minimum commitment of 200 gigs you may be able to get it under 20 bucks a meg. If we want dedicated bandwidth, we need to pay dedicated bandwidth prices.
Order a T1 which is 1.5 megs dedicated (at least to the backbone of your provider) and youre looking at 500.00 a month.
I'm not making these numbers up. Please look it up yourself instead of calling bullshit.
If your business model requires you to use another companies LIMITED resources for free or you go out of business, your business model is busted.
From the testing I have done, I have only seen throttling applied to external networks trying to download from me. All comcast customers appear to be able to download from me with no issue. So if these companies are in fact being throttled it is because they are using Comcast's bandwidth and transit to serve video to non comcast customers.
Your mileage may vary as the sandvine policies implemented may vary from region to region or even sandvine box to sandvine box.
If the FCC says that Comcast cannot manage their network, expect internet access to switch to a per bit pricing model. Everyone using p2p to seed those ever popular linux iso's might have a change of heart when they end up paying what it costs comcast, which is close to 30 bucks a meg.
People expect an internet service that has a best effort price but dedicated bandwidth performance. You can't have both. You can order your t1 for 500.00 a month, or you can have your best effort cable modem service. the kicker is.. the p2p abusers will stop when they have to pay for it, but the rest of us will have to live with the new pricing structure they forced the ISP's to adopt.
While his statement was utterly stupid, yours was a bit off, too.
The last mile is where the problem is. There is competition galore for long haul fiber (ie, to build a backbone) and you can pick up a dark fiber us footprint for under 20 million. Optics to light the gear and all of your routers will cost more.
If it were easier to build the last mile, you'd have 20 people with a cable to your house fighting to connect you to the one or two backbones.
Shouldn't be looking in to the end of a fiber anyway. But if put it in a persons home, you have to make sure this can't happen. Someone will do it.
When you unplug the end of the cable you are going to look in to, the loss of light will put the transceiver in to pulse mode. It'll go in to a 'find' mode. The laser is probably a class 1 to begin with. (Ciscos' CWDM gbics are class 1)
Class 1 lasers are low-power lasers which do not normally pose a hazard. Class 2 lasers are low-power visible lasers or laser systems that cannot cause eye damage unless they are viewed directly for an extended period of time. Class 3 lasers are medium-power lasers and laser systems capable of causing eye damage with short duration exposures to the direct or specularly reflected beam. They are subdivided into two subclasses.
Class 3a lasers normally do not present a hazard if viewed momentarily with an unaided eye, but may present a hazard if viewed using collecting optics.
Class 3b lasers can present a hazard if viewed directly. This includes intrabeam viewing of specular reflections. Class 4 denotes high-power lasers and laser systems that may cause severe eye injury with short duration exposure to the direct or reflected beam. They may also cause severe skin damage and present a fire hazard. http://web.princeton.edu/sites/ehs/healthsafetyguide/E3.htm/
I went down to the Chelsea boxstore To get my wii that was on sale.. I was standing in line with a fake assistant, And man, he did the job pretty well.
We decided that we should have a party, My favorite pastime, mocking newbs. My storys been posted up on/. My servers dead, guess we filled the tubes.. .
You can't always wear what you want, You can't always wear what you want, You can't always wear what you want, But if you try sometimes you just might find A cease and desist,...oh yes
Current technology can tell whether or not it is P2P traffic, regardless of the port it uses. They can also tell if it is p2p regardless of whether it's encrypted. An encrypted p2p packet looks just like an encrypted p2p packet.
If the goal is to block p2p outright, then that is easily achievable.
If the goal is to just block copyrighted material that is illegal being transferred, it's not going to happen, today. They cannot break the encryption and run the fingerprint algorithm in real time. Not today, not publicly.
There is a way though. There is a company out there that makes a P2P cache, so to speak. It's a hardware device that sits on the network, as close as possible to the customer. All p2p traffic is directed to this device. When a new file is requested, it downloads it and maintains the copy there. The customers connections speed up and the ISP has a cleaner network.
The problem at the moment is, with the vast majority of the content available on P2P being illegal content, the ISP becomes a knowing party to the redistribution of copyrighted material. Of course, if there was a way to scan that content and remove all illegal content, then everyone wins, except the people wanting to download stuff they do not have the rights to.
I am sure there will be arguments about 'false positives' and 'copyrights shouldn't exist to begin with' and 'carrier class' and all of the usual things. But if this type of solution were to be implemented, would it be a bad thing? And why?
Yes, I have. In fact, I had to chase them down when they got out of their stolen car and started running after they turned the wrong way on to a one way street and hit me.
You are correct, this is a very very poor case to try to get a favorable ruling on.
For starters, the facts do not support a net neutrality argument. They aren't singling out Bit torrent and letting other p2p through unharmed. They are applying a protocol level solution.
Customers on the Comcast network are able to download their share of free linux distros and WoW patches to their hearts content. What they are not allowed to do is turn their home pc in to a server to allow non-comcast customers to download from them, at least not for 10 minutes anyway. So, if a Comcast customer is the only person seeding something and you are not a Comcast customer, you will be able to get it from them, eventually. A Comcast customer can still upload to another Comcast customer without an issue.
The whole RST issue really isn't an issue. The Sandvine could just as easily kill the connection request and not return anything at all. Sending the rst closes the connection on your side freeing up resources. This is standard network equipment behavior of firewall type equipment, is it not? Your connection is not getting through until it decides to allow it, whether it sends an rst or not.
I'm not saying there is nothing we can do, but any ruling based on this case will surely have very negative impacts.
A victory saying you can not prioritize traffic of any kind based on protocol, would be bad.
A victory saying network traffic cannot respond to packets that aren;t destined for itself would be beyond belief.
What is the ruling we are hoping for from this case?
Slashdot Mirror
Why does everyone assume verizon will use the spectrum for wireless when they have just as much need to deliver Video as they do wireless?
They could run a completely wireless 'cable' network over this spectrum and the only compatible device would be a set top box with a wireless interface that was compatible with their head end equipment. Was there something in the auction that requires the spectrum to be used for Cell phones or Internet access? I missed it if there was. Anyone know?
The whole point of the 'no servers' section of the ToS was because they are aware of the limitations of their HFC upstream network. Storing files on your system for others to download is clearly a server. It's exactly the same as running a ftp server.
Saying that running a web browser is the same as running a file server might be just a little far-fetched there.
Except for the fact that the customer knowingly and willingly ran the software on their computer that gives anyone in the world access to their machine. Comcast didn't install it and if Comcast had their druthers, I'm sure they would outright block it all together.
"Hey! I was engaged in illegal activity, but Comcast let me do it!" That will be the beginning of the end. The first lawsuit would result in Comcast just flat out blocking p2p.
If I were comcast, I would just completely block P2P uploading as it violates the TOS. Not a popular answer I know, but my terms do say that I cannot run a server on my residential connection. P2P seeding should qualify as a file server. Comcast made the mistake of letting customers do something that was against the TOS for far too long. Not that there is a time limit on enforcing TOS, but it is always harder to give someone something and then take it away than it is to not give them something to begin with.
I'm pretty sure it is trial gear, as in beta. One of the articles I read said the product wouldn't be commercially available until late this year.
You are incorrect.
Cable companies will make a lot more money just adding their 10% or whatever it is on a per channel basis in stead of the discounted bundled rate.
Your bundled rate might include 34 bucks right now for espn, but when you try to order it by itself, it will be closer to 7, and won't incluse the other ESPN packages. Comcast, and any other provider won;t hurt. They will still make their money.
Some stations will go out of business due to them being ethnic or niche programming, but that's really as it should be. The programmers will make less money overall, but more money per subscriber. The provider (comcast) will still make their margin on every feed they sell, even more so, because the base cost of the feed will go up. 10% of 2.00 is more than 10% of 35 cents. So instead of 150 channels, 125 which are junk, for the same price you will be able to pick your 20 channels you want. It will cost you more for less, but at least you get to choose. You just will have a lot less to choose from.
I work in the cable industry and I PRAY for ala carte.
Good luck getting an https connection to a blocked website.
BGP does not rely on the honor system. Every provider has the ability to lock down announcements to the finest of detail. They may choose not to, but that's just piss poor network management.
/25's get propagated anyway? There are still transit networks that allow prefixes that small to be accepted externally?
Every External BGP session (EBGP) SHOULD be configured with a very specific access list as to what that particular session will be allowed to announce to you.
Obviously, tracking 20K plus announcements from a provider and creating an access list for it, daily, is a bit tedious. This is why Route Registries were created and many tools that will look up an AS in a route registry and generate the appropriate ACL are already in existence and in use. The problem is a lot of networks do not keep their registries up to date unless forced to by a peer / transit provider.
A correctly configured session will allow only announcements of the specified address space at the specified length. Any major transit provider that allowed this should be looking at their advertisement policy and figuring out how to prevent it in the future. Solutions do exist and are used by the majority of large providers already.
How the hell did
Exactly!
they are paying about 20 bucks a meg I would guess. Those megs are calculated the same way you did the math in your post.
The t1 is at max 1.5 megs of transit. (30 bucks at 20 bucks a meg).
Sorry, let me see if I can clarify.
IP Transit is sold by the megabit. If you go to level3, Sprint, AT&T, etc, for IP transit, you will get a per meg price. Depending on the amount of megs you commit to, your rate will drop. If you approached level3 for 10 gigs of transit, they will tell you a price somewhere around 25 bucks a meg.
The confusion appears to be in how those megs are measured.
If I have a transit link and I pull 1 meg a sec every sec for a month, I'm billed for 1 meg. (usually its 95th percentile but thats not relevant to this conversation).
Your colo provider is probably giving you something like 2000 gig a month included with your server rental. That's not measured the same way. Your 2000 gig is measured by the bit. It is metered. IE, if you transfer 200 10 gig files, you hit your 2000 gig limit. If you were to take that 2000 gig and covert it to the way transit is calculated you would see that 2000 gig is really about 700k a second all month long and would cost less than 30 bucks a month (or whatever they pay per meg)
Did that clear it up any?
Out of curiosity, I'd love to know how much bandwidth you are given at what price. The 2000 gig number I used is from my colo provider.
If slashdot pushed all of their content to my pc and everyone anywhere in the world was downloading their content from me, I would fully expect to be cut off or at the very least, to be charged hosting rates.
If that isn't what you meant then I have no idea what your comment was supposed to refer to. Can you clarify?
Japan has fiber connections to the home, as you stated. Dedicated resource vs shared resource that cable companies have. As so many people have pointed out here, there is a major difference.
The cable company backbone (comcast in this case) has no congestion issues. Getting you to the backbone is where they have an issue. Their throttling is done, supposedly, only on the upstream.
just throwing more bandwidth at the local loop isn't a solution due to the way the p2p protocol was written. It uses all of the bandwidth available to it. Adding more doesn't give anyone else extra bandwidth. It just increases the percentage of overall bandwidth p2p is using.
So, if as a provider you are unable to throttle p2p yourself and adding bandwidth doesn;t resolve it, what option do they have besides charging people for what they use?
Take all you want, pay for what you take. Seems very fair to me. But I don't leave my pc up and running 24 hours a day 365 days a year seeding WoW patches and Linux Iso's so my bill would probably go down.
Sorry, not bullshit.
Call up level 3 or AT&T and ask them how much 1 meg of dedicated transit costs them. At a minimum commitment of 200 gigs you may be able to get it under 20 bucks a meg. If we want dedicated bandwidth, we need to pay dedicated bandwidth prices.
Order a T1 which is 1.5 megs dedicated (at least to the backbone of your provider) and youre looking at 500.00 a month.
I'm not making these numbers up. Please look it up yourself instead of calling bullshit.
If your business model requires you to use another companies LIMITED resources for free or you go out of business, your business model is busted.
From the testing I have done, I have only seen throttling applied to external networks trying to download from me. All comcast customers appear to be able to download from me with no issue. So if these companies are in fact being throttled it is because they are using Comcast's bandwidth and transit to serve video to non comcast customers.
Your mileage may vary as the sandvine policies implemented may vary from region to region or even sandvine box to sandvine box.
If the FCC says that Comcast cannot manage their network, expect internet access to switch to a per bit pricing model. Everyone using p2p to seed those ever popular linux iso's might have a change of heart when they end up paying what it costs comcast, which is close to 30 bucks a meg.
People expect an internet service that has a best effort price but dedicated bandwidth performance. You can't have both. You can order your t1 for 500.00 a month, or you can have your best effort cable modem service. the kicker is.. the p2p abusers will stop when they have to pay for it, but the rest of us will have to live with the new pricing structure they forced the ISP's to adopt.
They cover that in their TOS also where they say customers can not run servers.
Maybe because the article is well over a year old?
Pretty sure that was the main plot of one of Tom Clancy's book.
While his statement was utterly stupid, yours was a bit off, too.
The last mile is where the problem is. There is competition galore for long haul fiber (ie, to build a backbone) and you can pick up a dark fiber us footprint for under 20 million. Optics to light the gear and all of your routers will cost more.
If it were easier to build the last mile, you'd have 20 people with a cable to your house fighting to connect you to the one or two backbones.
When you unplug the end of the cable you are going to look in to, the loss of light will put the transceiver in to pulse mode. It'll go in to a 'find' mode.
The laser is probably a class 1 to begin with. (Ciscos' CWDM gbics are class 1) Class 1 lasers are low-power lasers which do not normally pose a hazard.
Class 2 lasers are low-power visible lasers or laser systems that cannot cause eye damage unless they are viewed directly for an extended period of time.
Class 3 lasers are medium-power lasers and laser systems capable of causing eye damage with short duration exposures to the direct or specularly reflected beam. They are subdivided into two subclasses.
Class 3a lasers normally do not present a hazard if viewed momentarily with an unaided eye, but may present a hazard if viewed using collecting optics.
Class 3b lasers can present a hazard if viewed directly. This includes intrabeam viewing of specular reflections.
Class 4 denotes high-power lasers and laser systems that may cause severe eye injury with short duration exposure to the direct or reflected beam. They may also cause severe skin damage and present a fire hazard. http://web.princeton.edu/sites/ehs/healthsafetyguide/E3.htm/
I went down to the Chelsea boxstore
/.
...oh yes
To get my wii that was on sale..
I was standing in line with a fake assistant,
And man, he did the job pretty well.
We decided that we should have a party,
My favorite pastime, mocking newbs.
My storys been posted up on
My servers dead, guess we filled the tubes.. .
You can't always wear what you want,
You can't always wear what you want,
You can't always wear what you want,
But if you try sometimes you just might find
A cease and desist,
Won't happen, at least, not in real time.
Current technology can tell whether or not it is P2P traffic, regardless of the port it uses. They can also tell if it is p2p regardless of whether it's encrypted. An encrypted p2p packet looks just like an encrypted p2p packet.
If the goal is to block p2p outright, then that is easily achievable.
If the goal is to just block copyrighted material that is illegal being transferred, it's not going to happen, today. They cannot break the encryption and run the fingerprint algorithm in real time. Not today, not publicly.
There is a way though. There is a company out there that makes a P2P cache, so to speak. It's a hardware device that sits on the network, as close as possible to the customer. All p2p traffic is directed to this device. When a new file is requested, it downloads it and maintains the copy there. The customers connections speed up and the ISP has a cleaner network.
The problem at the moment is, with the vast majority of the content available on P2P being illegal content, the ISP becomes a knowing party to the redistribution of copyrighted material. Of course, if there was a way to scan that content and remove all illegal content, then everyone wins, except the people wanting to download stuff they do not have the rights to.
I am sure there will be arguments about 'false positives' and 'copyrights shouldn't exist to begin with' and 'carrier class' and all of the usual things. But if this type of solution were to be implemented, would it be a bad thing? And why?
Yes, I have. In fact, I had to chase them down when they got out of their stolen car and started running after they turned the wrong way on to a one way street and hit me.
I am not defending it in any manner.
I am just questioning the logic behind this particular suit as there really isn't a 'satisfactory' ruling to be had.
You are correct, this is a very very poor case to try to get a favorable ruling on.
For starters, the facts do not support a net neutrality argument. They aren't singling out Bit torrent and letting other p2p through unharmed. They are applying a protocol level solution.
Customers on the Comcast network are able to download their share of free linux distros and WoW patches to their hearts content. What they are not allowed to do is turn their home pc in to a server to allow non-comcast customers to download from them, at least not for 10 minutes anyway. So, if a Comcast customer is the only person seeding something and you are not a Comcast customer, you will be able to get it from them, eventually. A Comcast customer can still upload to another Comcast customer without an issue.
The whole RST issue really isn't an issue. The Sandvine could just as easily kill the connection request and not return anything at all. Sending the rst closes the connection on your side freeing up resources. This is standard network equipment behavior of firewall type equipment, is it not? Your connection is not getting through until it decides to allow it, whether it sends an rst or not.
I'm not saying there is nothing we can do, but any ruling based on this case will surely have very negative impacts.
A victory saying you can not prioritize traffic of any kind based on protocol, would be bad.
A victory saying network traffic cannot respond to packets that aren;t destined for itself would be beyond belief.
What is the ruling we are hoping for from this case?
Thank you.