Wholesalers like TekSavvy don't have an SLA with Bell. They merely have an SLO that states the levels of service that Bell will probably provide, but makes no guarantees about it one way or the other. It's unlikely that any sort of agreement between Bell and the wholesalers prevent this. It's more likely that CRTC regulations prevent this.
The core problem here is that there are no more "bandwidth hoggers". Bell's own service has a 30 GB per month cap, with $1.50 per gig over that cap. They're also removing the limit on the maximum overage charges (currently $30) on new customers June 30th.
In short, users are already paying per-gig for what they use. Calling them a "bandwidth hog" despite the fact that they're paying Bell 50x cost for that bandwidth is incorrect.
The same is true when it comes to wholesalers; they pay Bell per-megabit for backhaul services (currently $1.30/mbit based on the fee of $1300/mth per GigE). The more bandwidth the wholesaler customers use, the more the wholesaler must pay to Bell.
Some wholesalers are actually suggesting they band together and colocate their own DSLAMs in Bell's COs (as some already do, but this would be a shared initiative). This has the downside of limiting coverage to certain areas where the wholesalers have DSLAMs, and the inability to use Bell's remote DSLAMs. It has the upside of removing the possibility of throttling, since the only thing between the wholesaler and the customer is dumb copper wire (wholesaler would provide their own backhaul link from the CO).
Almost all internet service in Canada is already tiered and metered; Bell Canada provides (in Quebec) 30GB/mth with the connection, charges $1.50 per GB over that, and STILL throttles.
TekSavvy charges $30/mth for 5mbit down 800kbit up DSL, with 200GB cap, $0.25 per GB over (averaged over two months), or $10 for 100GB. There is also an unmetered cogent-only service for $40/mth.
Pretty much everybody has caps/overage charges these days. Clearly the fact that ISPs are still throttling despite the incredibly low caps indicates that the throttling is about profit, not congestion.
No. It's not load balancing. It's fixed-speed throttling.
All blacklisted (or non-whitelisted, we're not sure yet) traffic is throttled to 60KB/s from 4PM to 5PM, and from 30KB per second from 5PM until 2AM.
There are two problems with your load-balancing allegation:
1) Load balancing would imply that provisioning of available bandwidth would be balanced, rather than limited to very specific thresholds 2) Users reported that speeds were perfectly fine before throttling; the network was able to handle all load without throttling or balancing. In order for load balancing to make sense as an explanation, there would have to have been congestion.
Further problems are that when blacklisted traffic is detected (P2P, for example), the users' entire connection is throttled (killing off VoIP service even with QoS). If the user is using a whitelisted service (HTTP), no throttling is performed. This IS protocol-specific.
There was a five year gap between XP and Vista. That's 60 months, or about 3 Moore's Law doublings.
Vista should therefore reasonably expect to be able to use up to 4x more resources to perform OS duties. It would be nice if the OS were to become relatively more efficient, and I'd argue that it has. Vista does not use four times more resources than XP did. Heck, does anybody else remember the days when we'd have to reboot a Win95 box in DOS mode to play certain games because there just wasn't enough memory to run both Windows and a single demanding application?
4096^18 is 1.0531229166855718669791802768367e+65 bits.
which is:
1.3164036458569648337239753460459e+64 bytes
So much for mores Law..or rather your poor/lack of understanding of it.
Yeah, see, my "poor/lack of understanding of it" is that it DOUBLES 18 times, it doesn't get squared. Your first "doubling" is 4K * 4K (16MB), when in fact twice 4K is... 8K.
Nice try. Come back after completing the fifth grade, at which point you'll also presumably be able to spell "Moore"
And there's one company providing 504GB external memory enclosures that behave like local memory via PCI-Express interconnects; that's going beyond high-end server and into the HPC arena...
I'll give you the 64 slot Opteron board, though. Knock 18 months off the 6 years. Still doesn't change the consumer figures, in any event:P
Current high-end server boards support up to 64GB of RAM (16 slots, 4GB DIMMs).
By Moore's Law, we should hit 1TB in a high-end server 6 years, high-end desktops (assume 8GB of RAM, currently selling for $180 CAD) in 10.5 years, and the average midrange desktop (assume 2GB of RAM, currently selling for $45 CAD) in 13.5 years.
We might be a while off in consumer applications, but for high-end servers, 6 years doesn't seem very far away.
Good essay? Maybe if you know nothing about Canada. I randomly skipped to the "The Two Economies" and couldn't help but breaking out laughing due to the hilarious amounts of bullshit and ignorance.
Random gem: "For example, if you own a store in Montreal, the French language signs inside the store are required by law to be at least twice the size of the English signs."
Nice exaggeration. The law requires French to be "more prominent", which may be as simple as italicizing the French text. Making up crap like "at least twice the size" doesn't help the author's shattered credibility.
This is obviously a pro-American opinion piece with no actual research. He rants about how doomed Canada's economy is while the US economy is busy going into a recession. Ours is doing quite well despite the negative impact the crappy US economy has on Canada due to the heavy reliance on exports.
MTS is obligated, like every other telco, to offer wholesale access to their lines. There are many other DSL wholesalers who will sell you service in MTS territory, just like there are in Bell or Telus territory. A quick google turned up dozens.
As for TekSavvy, they're expanding to Bell Aliant territory soon (the maritime provinces), and I'd expect that MTS and SaskTel can't be far behind. They're already well on their way to becoming a national ISP.
If by "locked", you mean you need to pay an ETF to get out, you're not really stuck. They're required by law to offer wholesale service, assuming you're hooked up to an ADSL or ADSL2+ DSLAM.
You might still want to consider a $10/mth secondary login with TekSavvy (not advertised, but still available). 100GB of bandwidth per month. Not a huge amount, but it's still a lot better than what you're getting with Bell (and you can add another 100GB for another $10 per month).
Of course, you'd still have to pay your full Sympatico bill, as the TekSavvy login is just a PPPoE account. If your Sympatico subscription is PPPoE-based, you can get a secondary login and avoid the throttling and ultra-low caps.
I suggest you call in (1-877-779-1575) between 8AM and 2AM EST and discuss your options with TekSavvy. I'm sure they can work something out with you.
If you'd be so kind, because your situation is quite interesting, it'd be appreciated if you could post about your story in the official TekSavvy forums (http://www.dslreports.com/forum/teksavvy), as I'm sure many of us would be very interested in hearing the details of your issues with Bell.
So, what you really want to do is ban Shoutcast/Icecast/etc, not anything actually related to the listening of music. iTunes itself doesn't even have anything to do with it.
I'll admit, at one previous employer (being a student doing internships, I tend to change jobs every 4 months), I spent my work day listening to an icecast stream. Luckily, the owners of the company were too busy listening to icecast streams to complain about the bandwidth being used by iceast streams.
That, and, streaming radio barely uses any bandwidth. Typical aacPlus v2 streams are something like 96kbit. At wholesale prices, that's 96 cents per month in bandwidth. If the company can't afford to spend 96 cents per month in bandwidth to keep me productive, they've got management issues. You know what? Knock fifty cents off each of my paycheques and we'll call it even. Adding a few extra megabits per second to the fibre link isn't going to break the budget.
That's what iPods and other MP3 players are for. Some people keep their music on their workstation, although they're not supposed to. Regardless, it still keeps the music off the fileserver.
I'm more productive when listening to music (blocks out outside noise). I've worked at places where my bosses have SUGGESTED that I get a pair of headphones and listen to music at work. If anything, iTunes should make an employee MORE productive by helping them get into the zone, and less prone to distractions.
The same thing applies to media players, assuming they're used for audio and not video. Anyone suggesting that such things makes employees less productive has obviously never worked for a software development company/department.
You realize that most houses have basements, despite the fact that most parts of North America don't get tornadoes?
In fact, tornadoes often have nothing to do with why a house has a basement or not. It's usually because it adds an extra floor to your home without increasing the height.
Previous gen onboard graphics (this new stuff is DX10) was capable of running Aero. The requirements for Aero aren't terribly demanding, far less than an actual game.
What's wrong with a race to the bottom? Like any other competitive market, it will force companies to innovate to try to provide faster performance at lower prices, driving innovation in the lower end of the market. I, for one, am quite excited.
"international contempt"? They're strong allies of Canada. The primary source of international contempt towards Cuba comes from the US. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the world looks more favourably on Cuba than the US due to foreign policy. Gitmo doesn't help.
Haven't you been listening to Apple Legal? It's obvious why that one didn't show up on the front page. Macs don't have any bugs, so any user experiencing that problem obviously did something wrong. Their lawyers said so.
Actually, being essential and going on strike means they fine you AND throw you in jail for a year for contempt. Generally, the violations of the Essential Services Council's orders have been rare, and they're obviously not going to throw everybody in jail if enough people are illegally striking. I believe it happened when all teachers in Quebec went on strike in the 90s, and the council ruled that they couldn't (the council doesn't usually stop teachers from going on strike). They went on strike anyhow, but when every teacher in the province is on strike, they can't do terribly much.
No, because it wasn't an actual paint job. They just slathered a whole lot of green paint over most of the fire engine. They used paint that supposedly washed off, although I understand that it really does a number on the underlying paint job. Once the pressure tactics ended, they were required to clean off the fire engines.
Also, we're talking dull puke green, not bright green.
I'm not sure about garbage workers, but teachers in Quebec are not considered essential services, and as such are allowed to go on strike. The cities don't grind to a halt during a strike.
Transit employees are considered essential services, but are still allowed to go on partial strikes. During these frequent strikes, they eliminate all service except for rush hour and night time. It sucks, but again, life goes on.
Firefighters, however, are considered an essential service. Last time they had a contract dispute, being unable to strike, they settled for painting all their fire trucks puke-green.
It doesn't help that, the moment they start to get traction towards resolving their anti-trust concerns, their products take a nosedive in quality.
In the CPU front, the Core 2 is spanking the Phenom in all market segments, although the Athlon series is still holding on to the very low-end on low cost alone.
On the GPU front, they just gave up on the high end entirely for a while. The only way they can even compete with nVidia's 8800 series (which is about to be replaced with new cards) is to stick two of their best GPUs on one card. Yes, it's a neat technical solution, but it'd be a heck of a lot more impressive if each of those two GPUs was the equal of an 8800. nVidia's soon-to-be-released 9000 series is going to hurt AMD a lot. What're they going to do, put four GPUs on a card to compete with nVidia's one? What happens when nVidia starts putting multiple GPUs on a card, offering double the performance of AMD's solution?
It's only a matter of time before the Core 2 products start breaking into the very low-end market, and AMD gets supplanted there too. Unless their next generation of CPU and GPU products can actually compete on merit, it may not matter if Intel's semi-monopoly is broken.
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Wholesalers like TekSavvy don't have an SLA with Bell. They merely have an SLO that states the levels of service that Bell will probably provide, but makes no guarantees about it one way or the other. It's unlikely that any sort of agreement between Bell and the wholesalers prevent this. It's more likely that CRTC regulations prevent this.
The core problem here is that there are no more "bandwidth hoggers". Bell's own service has a 30 GB per month cap, with $1.50 per gig over that cap. They're also removing the limit on the maximum overage charges (currently $30) on new customers June 30th.
In short, users are already paying per-gig for what they use. Calling them a "bandwidth hog" despite the fact that they're paying Bell 50x cost for that bandwidth is incorrect.
The same is true when it comes to wholesalers; they pay Bell per-megabit for backhaul services (currently $1.30/mbit based on the fee of $1300/mth per GigE). The more bandwidth the wholesaler customers use, the more the wholesaler must pay to Bell.
Some wholesalers are actually suggesting they band together and colocate their own DSLAMs in Bell's COs (as some already do, but this would be a shared initiative). This has the downside of limiting coverage to certain areas where the wholesalers have DSLAMs, and the inability to use Bell's remote DSLAMs. It has the upside of removing the possibility of throttling, since the only thing between the wholesaler and the customer is dumb copper wire (wholesaler would provide their own backhaul link from the CO).
Almost all internet service in Canada is already tiered and metered; Bell Canada provides (in Quebec) 30GB/mth with the connection, charges $1.50 per GB over that, and STILL throttles.
TekSavvy charges $30/mth for 5mbit down 800kbit up DSL, with 200GB cap, $0.25 per GB over (averaged over two months), or $10 for 100GB. There is also an unmetered cogent-only service for $40/mth.
Pretty much everybody has caps/overage charges these days. Clearly the fact that ISPs are still throttling despite the incredibly low caps indicates that the throttling is about profit, not congestion.
No. It's not load balancing. It's fixed-speed throttling.
All blacklisted (or non-whitelisted, we're not sure yet) traffic is throttled to 60KB/s from 4PM to 5PM, and from 30KB per second from 5PM until 2AM.
There are two problems with your load-balancing allegation:
1) Load balancing would imply that provisioning of available bandwidth would be balanced, rather than limited to very specific thresholds
2) Users reported that speeds were perfectly fine before throttling; the network was able to handle all load without throttling or balancing. In order for load balancing to make sense as an explanation, there would have to have been congestion.
Further problems are that when blacklisted traffic is detected (P2P, for example), the users' entire connection is throttled (killing off VoIP service even with QoS). If the user is using a whitelisted service (HTTP), no throttling is performed. This IS protocol-specific.
There was a five year gap between XP and Vista. That's 60 months, or about 3 Moore's Law doublings.
Vista should therefore reasonably expect to be able to use up to 4x more resources to perform OS duties. It would be nice if the OS were to become relatively more efficient, and I'd argue that it has. Vista does not use four times more resources than XP did. Heck, does anybody else remember the days when we'd have to reboot a Win95 box in DOS mode to play certain games because there just wasn't enough memory to run both Windows and a single demanding application?
4096^18 is 1.0531229166855718669791802768367e+65 bits.
which is:
1.3164036458569648337239753460459e+64 bytes
So much for mores Law..or rather your poor/lack of understanding of it.
Yeah, see, my "poor/lack of understanding of it" is that it DOUBLES 18 times, it doesn't get squared. Your first "doubling" is 4K * 4K (16MB), when in fact twice 4K is... 8K.
Nice try. Come back after completing the fifth grade, at which point you'll also presumably be able to spell "Moore"
And there's one company providing 504GB external memory enclosures that behave like local memory via PCI-Express interconnects; that's going beyond high-end server and into the HPC arena...
:P
I'll give you the 64 slot Opteron board, though. Knock 18 months off the 6 years. Still doesn't change the consumer figures, in any event
Current high-end server boards support up to 64GB of RAM (16 slots, 4GB DIMMs).
By Moore's Law, we should hit 1TB in a high-end server 6 years, high-end desktops (assume 8GB of RAM, currently selling for $180 CAD) in 10.5 years, and the average midrange desktop (assume 2GB of RAM, currently selling for $45 CAD) in 13.5 years.
We might be a while off in consumer applications, but for high-end servers, 6 years doesn't seem very far away.
Well, my $30/mth DSL account comes with 200GB, and it can be such a chore keeping under that limit ;)
Good essay? Maybe if you know nothing about Canada. I randomly skipped to the "The Two Economies" and couldn't help but breaking out laughing due to the hilarious amounts of bullshit and ignorance.
Random gem: "For example, if you own a store in Montreal, the French language signs inside the store are required by law to be at least twice the size of the English signs."
Nice exaggeration. The law requires French to be "more prominent", which may be as simple as italicizing the French text. Making up crap like "at least twice the size" doesn't help the author's shattered credibility.
This is obviously a pro-American opinion piece with no actual research. He rants about how doomed Canada's economy is while the US economy is busy going into a recession. Ours is doing quite well despite the negative impact the crappy US economy has on Canada due to the heavy reliance on exports.
MTS is obligated, like every other telco, to offer wholesale access to their lines. There are many other DSL wholesalers who will sell you service in MTS territory, just like there are in Bell or Telus territory. A quick google turned up dozens.
As for TekSavvy, they're expanding to Bell Aliant territory soon (the maritime provinces), and I'd expect that MTS and SaskTel can't be far behind. They're already well on their way to becoming a national ISP.
If by "locked", you mean you need to pay an ETF to get out, you're not really stuck. They're required by law to offer wholesale service, assuming you're hooked up to an ADSL or ADSL2+ DSLAM.
You might still want to consider a $10/mth secondary login with TekSavvy (not advertised, but still available). 100GB of bandwidth per month. Not a huge amount, but it's still a lot better than what you're getting with Bell (and you can add another 100GB for another $10 per month).
Of course, you'd still have to pay your full Sympatico bill, as the TekSavvy login is just a PPPoE account. If your Sympatico subscription is PPPoE-based, you can get a secondary login and avoid the throttling and ultra-low caps.
I suggest you call in (1-877-779-1575) between 8AM and 2AM EST and discuss your options with TekSavvy. I'm sure they can work something out with you.
If you'd be so kind, because your situation is quite interesting, it'd be appreciated if you could post about your story in the official TekSavvy forums (http://www.dslreports.com/forum/teksavvy), as I'm sure many of us would be very interested in hearing the details of your issues with Bell.
So, what you really want to do is ban Shoutcast/Icecast/etc, not anything actually related to the listening of music. iTunes itself doesn't even have anything to do with it.
I'll admit, at one previous employer (being a student doing internships, I tend to change jobs every 4 months), I spent my work day listening to an icecast stream. Luckily, the owners of the company were too busy listening to icecast streams to complain about the bandwidth being used by iceast streams.
That, and, streaming radio barely uses any bandwidth. Typical aacPlus v2 streams are something like 96kbit. At wholesale prices, that's 96 cents per month in bandwidth. If the company can't afford to spend 96 cents per month in bandwidth to keep me productive, they've got management issues. You know what? Knock fifty cents off each of my paycheques and we'll call it even. Adding a few extra megabits per second to the fibre link isn't going to break the budget.
That's what iPods and other MP3 players are for. Some people keep their music on their workstation, although they're not supposed to. Regardless, it still keeps the music off the fileserver.
and software for personal devices (iTunes etc).
I'm more productive when listening to music (blocks out outside noise). I've worked at places where my bosses have SUGGESTED that I get a pair of headphones and listen to music at work. If anything, iTunes should make an employee MORE productive by helping them get into the zone, and less prone to distractions.
The same thing applies to media players, assuming they're used for audio and not video. Anyone suggesting that such things makes employees less productive has obviously never worked for a software development company/department.
...
You realize that most houses have basements, despite the fact that most parts of North America don't get tornadoes?
In fact, tornadoes often have nothing to do with why a house has a basement or not. It's usually because it adds an extra floor to your home without increasing the height.
Previous gen onboard graphics (this new stuff is DX10) was capable of running Aero. The requirements for Aero aren't terribly demanding, far less than an actual game.
What's wrong with a race to the bottom? Like any other competitive market, it will force companies to innovate to try to provide faster performance at lower prices, driving innovation in the lower end of the market. I, for one, am quite excited.
"international contempt"? They're strong allies of Canada. The primary source of international contempt towards Cuba comes from the US. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the world looks more favourably on Cuba than the US due to foreign policy. Gitmo doesn't help.
Haven't you been listening to Apple Legal? It's obvious why that one didn't show up on the front page. Macs don't have any bugs, so any user experiencing that problem obviously did something wrong. Their lawyers said so.
Actually, being essential and going on strike means they fine you AND throw you in jail for a year for contempt. Generally, the violations of the Essential Services Council's orders have been rare, and they're obviously not going to throw everybody in jail if enough people are illegally striking. I believe it happened when all teachers in Quebec went on strike in the 90s, and the council ruled that they couldn't (the council doesn't usually stop teachers from going on strike). They went on strike anyhow, but when every teacher in the province is on strike, they can't do terribly much.
No, because it wasn't an actual paint job. They just slathered a whole lot of green paint over most of the fire engine. They used paint that supposedly washed off, although I understand that it really does a number on the underlying paint job. Once the pressure tactics ended, they were required to clean off the fire engines.
Also, we're talking dull puke green, not bright green.
Perhaps in New York... Not elsewhere.
I'm not sure about garbage workers, but teachers in Quebec are not considered essential services, and as such are allowed to go on strike. The cities don't grind to a halt during a strike.
Transit employees are considered essential services, but are still allowed to go on partial strikes. During these frequent strikes, they eliminate all service except for rush hour and night time. It sucks, but again, life goes on.
Firefighters, however, are considered an essential service. Last time they had a contract dispute, being unable to strike, they settled for painting all their fire trucks puke-green.
It doesn't help that, the moment they start to get traction towards resolving their anti-trust concerns, their products take a nosedive in quality.
In the CPU front, the Core 2 is spanking the Phenom in all market segments, although the Athlon series is still holding on to the very low-end on low cost alone.
On the GPU front, they just gave up on the high end entirely for a while. The only way they can even compete with nVidia's 8800 series (which is about to be replaced with new cards) is to stick two of their best GPUs on one card. Yes, it's a neat technical solution, but it'd be a heck of a lot more impressive if each of those two GPUs was the equal of an 8800. nVidia's soon-to-be-released 9000 series is going to hurt AMD a lot. What're they going to do, put four GPUs on a card to compete with nVidia's one? What happens when nVidia starts putting multiple GPUs on a card, offering double the performance of AMD's solution?
It's only a matter of time before the Core 2 products start breaking into the very low-end market, and AMD gets supplanted there too. Unless their next generation of CPU and GPU products can actually compete on merit, it may not matter if Intel's semi-monopoly is broken.
Sadly, a very often overlooked and undervalued movie. It was a true classic.