"It's good that they're doing good and paying down their negative karma, but sometimes I wonder if people are deliberately infecting their sources with GPL'ed code just to make them cough it up once it gets published."
Yeah because that keeps happening agai.... wait this is the first and only time its ever happened? Shit, so much for that theory.
MS has only GPL'd code twice and the last time was because they wanted some stuff in the kernel so their virtualization would work better.
"The news here is that Microsoft kept the open source tool instead of replacing it with one of their own."
I think you are jumping the gun on that conclusion. Of course they are keeping the tool for the moment. But no doubt they are moving at corporate speed to develop a replacement immediately! They should begin hiring people to do it sometime in the middle of next year.
"And this post is PROOF that you're a MORON. Microsoft hires the most expensive people."
Going around calling people morons says about as much for your own level of wit as thinking there is a relation between the most expensive people and the best.
As for your overall point. Having bright people doesn't help much if they don't have the freedom they need.
"Microsoft's problem with code quality isn't the engineers - they're the same as everywhere else. In Windows 2000, they set out to eliminate BSOD, and they mostly did. In XP SP2, they set out to make it secure, and it's better."
So in 1999 they set out to eliminate the BSOD but they failed. Then they blamed the failing on third parties... when the reality is that Microsoft is responsible for the fact that hardware drivers are maintained by thousands of third parties in the first place. In XP SP2 they set out to make windows secure and again they failed, miserably.
"Anyway, trust me - it's very professional, clean code, nice design, and not filled with hacks like the Big Global Lock that used to be in the Linux kernel."
I'm sure its very pretty. But at the end of the day, it doesn't work as well as the Linux kernel.
It doesn't matter if they continue to infringe. They have already committed copyright infringement at this point. They didn't distribute with accompanying license terms or with a notice that those they distributed to were entitled to the source upon request or distribute the source itself.
Distributing the source for the binary as distributed would bring them closer to the spirit of the license but there is nothing they can now to change the copyright infringement. It's like a murderer regretting the killing after the fact, oops too late now.
Fortunately for Microsoft this is something they did to the open source community and not to a company like Microsoft. Most companies would only be interested in the fact that they were entitled to damages whether MS willingly came into compliance or not.
But the community has different views of copyright and will be pleased that MS is complying now.
"A company is not a conscious entity and acts of capitalism are not "evil" on their own."
Actually it is an emergence consciousness like an ant colony or... a human brain. As for acts of capitalism being "evil" on their own, you need to back that up.
"You have witnessed Microsoft make money in a society based around the freedom to make and lose money."
I'm not sure which society that is. This society is based on freedom from government oppression. Capitalism is a tangent and this society won't lose what it is based on if those ideals are expanded to include freedom from oppression in the name of profit.
"Microsoft furthering it's company's agenda in the global marketplace is capitalism."
Microsoft has been intentionally stifling the advancement of technology from the very start when it intentionally sold an inferior system to run on IBM.
What could man have accomplished without the interference from Microsoft in this time? Where would we be? Would we have stabalized the global market? Enhanced communication to the point of eliminating corruption? World peace? Colonized alien worlds? Developed penthouse clone sex slave bots who can cook and sell 2 for the price of one at walmart?
Some of those are difficult to believe or impossible to imagine but all are theoretical improvements with advanced technology or facilitated by advanced technology.
Why is this modded troll? It isn't just a random flame. Microsoft has long and well established history in this department and it is perfectly valid to doubt anything that appears to be a deviation from it.
Last I checked Microsoft is run by the same anti-competitive CEO who refers to the GPL as cancer.
any ISP peak bandwidth caps should be required by the fcc to use this as a baseline. Caps below the consumption of the average american are obviously anti-consumer.
"For instance, I spent more than $350 on an iPhone."
An iphone is a very real, very tangible and very limited resource. So are many of the raw materials it is made from and the materials required to make it. The manufacture of chips in particular involves many finite and expensive chemicals. Not to mention power. The same applies to pretty much any technology product.
The only thing that I know of which more or less qualifies as not being finite and limited is copyrighted material or IP.
The people of the world are exclaiming en mass that they will not tolerate artificial restraints on what amounts to infinite free supply. Don't believe me? Check the latest stats on bittorrent traffic. The IP cartels are fighting the good fight, and they can fight it well since they control government (in the US they own both major parties) but at some point peasants with pitchforks will ultimately win. History has shown that peasants with pitchforks always win in the end though it may take years, decades, centuries, or even millenniums to get there.
Even IP requires labor to produce. There is a lot of labor to be exploited yet, but your limit on population also means there is a limit on labor to be realized.
Everything requires resources to produce physics demands it and in the beginning there might be a disparity between the resources invested and the economic value but in the end the market will correct this.
There are always limits and there is no potential for unlimited growth.
"I'm either going to pay an unfair share of that cost by virtue of the fact that my ISP charges a bandwidth-agnostic flat rate and I'm a low-consumption customer"
Yes that's how things work. When you sign up for a blockbuster unlimited 3 at a time rental plan you the typical consumer who doesn't take advantage of it subsidizes the guy who changes his movies out every night. That doesn't make the guy using his plan 'an abuser'.
You the guy who buys high markup drinks, fries, or shakes pays the subsidy for the savvy consumer who buys dollar double cheeseburgers only and drinks at home.
Even with the top 5% of users in place no major ISP is ever at over 50% utilization at peak. These ISP's are whining about projected usage in a number of years requiring them to upgrade their infrastructure before they'd like to. An upgrade taxpayers already paid for I might add.
But even if they were utilized, they have to buy a big enough pipe to handle the biggest peaks in traffic. They have to pay the same price for that pipe whether it sits idle or its maxed to capacity. Bandwidth that isn't being used is just wasted.
You are going further back than me on the internet issue. The first connections I remember ran about $30/month for dial-up and I was still in high school at that point.
In Q2 2008 the average price per mb on a gigE port in the US and Europe was between $10-14.
That would make a 7mb home connection $70 - $98 for dedicated bandwidth wholesale. There are other costs at play and that home connection for $30 SHOULD probably end up being around 2mb/s if all the bandwidth games were stopped. But that 2mb would be 2mb/2mb not 2mb/256k or some other such nonsense, in fact it would be 2mb full-duplex so in practice that would give a potential 4mb/s if using maxing out your up/down connection. That is 10368gb/month of potential transfer EACH WAY.
Of course that means more infrastructure to support those connections and buying more connections. That in turn means higher volume of those large infrastructure components which would lower their cost per unit and drop that cost per mb further.
This starts a cycle that would eventually get us back up to the advertised speeds of today, but they would be real speeds without bandwidth games and consumers could host their own content, voice servers for games, game servers, etc, etc.
And that, would drive a concern for IPv6 to the end user but that's a discussion for another day.;)
"Thus, the server does not reduce the number of packets it is sending, it just keeps re-sending data that has not been acked."
Actually when packets are dropped, the tcp window size is reduced. This mean fewer packets sent without waiting for an ack and an overall reduction in transfer speed. This happens on a very low level and there are never a huge number of backed up packets waiting to be resent that would congest the pipe as you suggest. The slower connection relieves the congestion in the pipe, the server catches up, and the new tcp window becomes smaller and smaller until there aren't any unack'd packets to resend.
The best thing is that tcp reevaluates the window from time to time, so if the congestion is no longer present it will speed back up.
"Any effects of TCP self-limiting its rate of transfer will only impact long connections, not connections that are established for a short period... such as an http get/response on a small file, DNS requests, etc."
Which is a good thing. Outside of viruses there aren't many things that require enough tiny requests to congest a pipe. Big transfers require big requests to complete in order to be efficient, they are less time sensitive and they are what are most affected by long transfers.
Are you a monopoly duopoly? Are you federally subsidized? The answers to those questions make a great deal of difference in what level of service I expect and demand from you. Do you enjoy government granted perks as a common carrier?
If taco bell were the only restaurant and federally subsidized then refusing to serve me amounts to making me pay you to provide me the option to eat out and then refusing to allow me to eat out.
When there are a dozen carriers in every town and they all over varying terms instead of engaging in collusion, then we can talk about a carriers right to refuse service.
"A product where more of the bandwidth is used - or dedicated, not oversubscribed - is vastly more expensive, and is what they sell to businesses."
Yes, but if this is what was sold to everyone the problem disappears (there isn't really less upstream than downstream) and the cost for this type of connection would drop dramatically.
Imagine a crazy sort of world where I publish webpages and picture galleries from my own pc and don't have to rely on hosting services. A world where I can deliver content by purchasing low cost hardware and start a business. A world where I would only need to pay proportionately more for increased bandwidth when my need exceeded what was available. A world where the benefits of my untilized bandwidth are mine to captilize on and not my ISPs.
They shouldn't start with metered costs per gigabyte because it doesn't cost them per gigabyte. It costs the ISP x amount to have y bandwidth available. The bandwidth is all there, 100% of the time. It basically costs the ISP the same if that link is 0% utilized or 100% utilized.
The reality is that is that if no bandwidth is shared before the end user and content hosting isn't centralized like they do now the demand becomes more distributed, instead of a few heavily overloaded links and routers the traffic gets spread around more and the load better distributed. More at&t users are accessing content hosted by other at&t users. A greater portion of traffic becomes more localized traveling through fewer and more distributed hops.
In the end everyone wins. Except maybe the telcos.
he didn't say GB or KB, he said gb and kb. Bandwidth is measured in bits and does not use powers of 2. In bandwidth land 1kb is 1000bits, 1mb is 1000 kbits, 1gb is 1000 mbits, etc Its a marketing thing to make our slow arse network links sound bigger.
3000mbit (3gb)/60 = 50mbit per minute / 60 = 0.83 mb/s or 833 kb/s
memory uses 8bits to byte, 1024 bytes to kilobyte, 1024 KB to 1 MB, etc
Hard drives shack things up a bit, they use bytes but call 1KB 1000bytes instead of 1024. This inflates the size of the drive some.
And of course operating systems generally report the size of the files on the drives in the units memory does since all software actually handles data this way.
It could be argued that since the data on your hard drive, or going in or out of your network link is going to be utilized in manipulated in powers of 2 all of the above should just use that system. But alas, to these people (including me) or the annoying SI obsessed, its unlikely the above ambiguity is going away any time soon.
"Look, I'm not complaining about filesharing per se, just those who want to seed and saturate their connection for whatever ego boosting they think they deserve for doing it."
If the ISP's stopped artificially restricting upstream bandwidth reserving it for those trying to make money and gauging them for it then this wouldn't be a problem in the first place. The big pipes are synchronous, there is just as much upstream as downstream to go around. The ISP's create artificial scarcity.
"They want their full 25MB connection without any QoS applied. Or are you just not reading the threads.
They want their BitTorrents running at 25MB (or whatever) without any throttling."
No they want a high speed link without any QoS or throttling. They want to do away with the outdated model of selling them slow uplinks and fast downlinks. They know this only results in vastly overinflated prices for those have no choice but to purchase links like this.
They want the ISP's to be forced to take the billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars they pocketed and invest that money into enhanced infrastructure that can provide a reasonable level of bandwidth to consumers to be used however the consumer damn well pleases.
If 25mb can't be done (our European brothers would beg to differ) then 6mb, 3mb, and I can certainly guarantee you neither the cabilities of the ISP's nor the market demand will result in the $700+/month T1 speed links we have now (t1 itself is more or less obsolete for internet links and will go the way of the dinosaur pretty much instantly if that happens).
The people who want to use peer to peer, servers, and steam videos aren't the problem. The problem is that ISP's have been artificially restricting the ability to serve content to those with financial incentives and then gauging them.
"You don't want what you're really asking for. You want 10mb for $24.95, not the dedicated 10mb for $1500."
No I want dedicated 10mb for $24.95. If bandwidth were not oversold 10mb might not be $24.95 but it sure as hell wouldn't be $1500.
It's supply and demand, because consumers are being lied to and bandwidth is being oversold it creates an artificial reduction in the demand for real pipes. This means that anyone who wants a real pipe is going to pay dramatically more for it. I promise you, if there were 100,000,000 consumers demanding dedicated 10mb service the price for 10mb service would drop pretty damn fast.
For god sake, T1 is outdated, expensive, and slow but the Telco's are still selling them for $700+. There is no technical explanation for this at all, the telcos charge these ridiculous prices to deliver obsolete technology to their business users simply because they can get away with it.
There is no technical reason whatsoever in a world of synchronous pipes for consumers to lack synchronous full duplex pipes, self hosting, and full utilization of the bandwidth they are buying. Consumers won't see a chance in price, but they might see a short term reduction in speed.
It's like buying the world's production of diamonds and storing them in a warehouse and releasing them slowly to artificially drive up prices.
Internet has become an essential public communication medium. We can't afford to let large telco's restrict and constrain high speed links and infrastructure.
With the possible exception of a superior network tech working on a cable network I'd venture that most professional network techs lack intimate knowledge of DOCSIS.
Even having a rudimentary understanding of collisions puts him ahead of many low end network integrators.
"All ISPs priced there service as if bandwidth was going to be 100% utilized. A cheap rate was roughly $200/month..."
Not sure what you are referring to, in the 90's there was dialup and the average price was more like $15/month.
"Overselling bandwidth is a good deal for both the provider and the consumer."
No its not. Sure it artificially lowers rates (or rather artificially increases the speed for those rates, the actual rates only go up).
But it also artificially lowers the speed and increases the rates for anyone who absolutely has to have guaranteed bandwidth for financially justifiable reason and has the means to get it.
If ISP's sold real bandwidth the prices would be the same, the speeds may or may not be lower (all real investigations have failed to produce any evidence of congested pipes, just ISP's reluctant to update infrastructure) and the price of guaranteed bandwidth would be much much lower than it is today.
"These issues were going on back when there was real competition."
What real competition? I must have missed that part of history. Before High speed you had dialup and all the independents had to buy lines from the phone company, the result is that no independent could could offer better terms than the phone company and stay in business.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's good that they're doing good and paying down their negative karma, but sometimes I wonder if people are deliberately infecting their sources with GPL'ed code just to make them cough it up once it gets published."
Yeah because that keeps happening agai.... wait this is the first and only time its ever happened? Shit, so much for that theory.
MS has only GPL'd code twice and the last time was because they wanted some stuff in the kernel so their virtualization would work better.
"The news here is that Microsoft kept the open source tool instead of replacing it with one of their own."
I think you are jumping the gun on that conclusion. Of course they are keeping the tool for the moment. But no doubt they are moving at corporate speed to develop a replacement immediately! They should begin hiring people to do it sometime in the middle of next year.
"And this post is PROOF that you're a MORON. Microsoft hires the most expensive people."
Going around calling people morons says about as much for your own level of wit as thinking there is a relation between the most expensive people and the best.
As for your overall point. Having bright people doesn't help much if they don't have the freedom they need.
"Microsoft's problem with code quality isn't the engineers - they're the same as everywhere else. In Windows 2000, they set out to eliminate BSOD, and they mostly did. In XP SP2, they set out to make it secure, and it's better."
So in 1999 they set out to eliminate the BSOD but they failed. Then they blamed the failing on third parties... when the reality is that Microsoft is responsible for the fact that hardware drivers are maintained by thousands of third parties in the first place. In XP SP2 they set out to make windows secure and again they failed, miserably.
"Anyway, trust me - it's very professional, clean code, nice design, and not filled with hacks like the Big Global Lock that used to be in the Linux kernel."
I'm sure its very pretty. But at the end of the day, it doesn't work as well as the Linux kernel.
It doesn't matter if they continue to infringe. They have already committed copyright infringement at this point. They didn't distribute with accompanying license terms or with a notice that those they distributed to were entitled to the source upon request or distribute the source itself.
Distributing the source for the binary as distributed would bring them closer to the spirit of the license but there is nothing they can now to change the copyright infringement. It's like a murderer regretting the killing after the fact, oops too late now.
Fortunately for Microsoft this is something they did to the open source community and not to a company like Microsoft. Most companies would only be interested in the fact that they were entitled to damages whether MS willingly came into compliance or not.
But the community has different views of copyright and will be pleased that MS is complying now.
"A company is not a conscious entity and acts of capitalism are not "evil" on their own."
Actually it is an emergence consciousness like an ant colony or... a human brain. As for acts of capitalism being "evil" on their own, you need to back that up.
"You have witnessed Microsoft make money in a society based around the freedom to make and lose money."
I'm not sure which society that is. This society is based on freedom from government oppression. Capitalism is a tangent and this society won't lose what it is based on if those ideals are expanded to include freedom from oppression in the name of profit.
"Microsoft furthering it's company's agenda in the global marketplace is capitalism."
Microsoft has been intentionally stifling the advancement of technology from the very start when it intentionally sold an inferior system to run on IBM.
What could man have accomplished without the interference from Microsoft in this time? Where would we be? Would we have stabalized the global market? Enhanced communication to the point of eliminating corruption? World peace? Colonized alien worlds? Developed penthouse clone sex slave bots who can cook and sell 2 for the price of one at walmart?
Some of those are difficult to believe or impossible to imagine but all are theoretical improvements with advanced technology or facilitated by advanced technology.
Why is this modded troll? It isn't just a random flame. Microsoft has long and well established history in this department and it is perfectly valid to doubt anything that appears to be a deviation from it.
Last I checked Microsoft is run by the same anti-competitive CEO who refers to the GPL as cancer.
"I also have a pretty good upspeed at 5 Mbit, so I can do that, but not everyone can."
Then they have no business using bittorrent.
any ISP peak bandwidth caps should be required by the fcc to use this as a baseline. Caps below the consumption of the average american are obviously anti-consumer.
This includes cell phone data plans of course.
"For instance, I spent more than $350 on an iPhone."
An iphone is a very real, very tangible and very limited resource. So are many of the raw materials it is made from and the materials required to make it. The manufacture of chips in particular involves many finite and expensive chemicals. Not to mention power. The same applies to pretty much any technology product.
The only thing that I know of which more or less qualifies as not being finite and limited is copyrighted material or IP.
The people of the world are exclaiming en mass that they will not tolerate artificial restraints on what amounts to infinite free supply. Don't believe me? Check the latest stats on bittorrent traffic. The IP cartels are fighting the good fight, and they can fight it well since they control government (in the US they own both major parties) but at some point peasants with pitchforks will ultimately win. History has shown that peasants with pitchforks always win in the end though it may take years, decades, centuries, or even millenniums to get there.
Even IP requires labor to produce. There is a lot of labor to be exploited yet, but your limit on population also means there is a limit on labor to be realized.
Everything requires resources to produce physics demands it and in the beginning there might be a disparity between the resources invested and the economic value but in the end the market will correct this.
There are always limits and there is no potential for unlimited growth.
"I'm either going to pay an unfair share of that cost by virtue of the fact that my ISP charges a bandwidth-agnostic flat rate and I'm a low-consumption customer"
Yes that's how things work. When you sign up for a blockbuster unlimited 3 at a time rental plan you the typical consumer who doesn't take advantage of it subsidizes the guy who changes his movies out every night. That doesn't make the guy using his plan 'an abuser'.
You the guy who buys high markup drinks, fries, or shakes pays the subsidy for the savvy consumer who buys dollar double cheeseburgers only and drinks at home.
Even with the top 5% of users in place no major ISP is ever at over 50% utilization at peak. These ISP's are whining about projected usage in a number of years requiring them to upgrade their infrastructure before they'd like to. An upgrade taxpayers already paid for I might add.
But even if they were utilized, they have to buy a big enough pipe to handle the biggest peaks in traffic. They have to pay the same price for that pipe whether it sits idle or its maxed to capacity. Bandwidth that isn't being used is just wasted.
You are going further back than me on the internet issue. The first connections I remember ran about $30/month for dial-up and I was still in high school at that point.
You are a bit off on the bandwidth prices though:
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2008/10/7/1223396848839/ipt_price_drop.jpg
In Q2 2008 the average price per mb on a gigE port in the US and Europe was between $10-14.
That would make a 7mb home connection $70 - $98 for dedicated bandwidth wholesale. There are other costs at play and that home connection for $30 SHOULD probably end up being around 2mb/s if all the bandwidth games were stopped. But that 2mb would be 2mb/2mb not 2mb/256k or some other such nonsense, in fact it would be 2mb full-duplex so in practice that would give a potential 4mb/s if using maxing out your up/down connection. That is 10368gb/month of potential transfer EACH WAY.
Of course that means more infrastructure to support those connections and buying more connections. That in turn means higher volume of those large infrastructure components which would lower their cost per unit and drop that cost per mb further.
This starts a cycle that would eventually get us back up to the advertised speeds of today, but they would be real speeds without bandwidth games and consumers could host their own content, voice servers for games, game servers, etc, etc.
And that, would drive a concern for IPv6 to the end user but that's a discussion for another day. ;)
"Thus, the server does not reduce the number of packets it is sending, it just keeps re-sending data that has not been acked."
Actually when packets are dropped, the tcp window size is reduced. This mean fewer packets sent without waiting for an ack and an overall reduction in transfer speed. This happens on a very low level and there are never a huge number of backed up packets waiting to be resent that would congest the pipe as you suggest. The slower connection relieves the congestion in the pipe, the server catches up, and the new tcp window becomes smaller and smaller until there aren't any unack'd packets to resend.
The best thing is that tcp reevaluates the window from time to time, so if the congestion is no longer present it will speed back up.
"Any effects of TCP self-limiting its rate of transfer will only impact long connections, not connections that are established for a short period... such as an http get/response on a small file, DNS requests, etc."
Which is a good thing. Outside of viruses there aren't many things that require enough tiny requests to congest a pipe. Big transfers require big requests to complete in order to be efficient, they are less time sensitive and they are what are most affected by long transfers.
"Top 5% of users probably consume around 30% of the total bandwidth. That means they need to pay for 30% more out-of-network core bandwidth."
Why? The bandwidth would still need to be there and paid for by the ISP if it weren't utilized.
Are you a monopoly duopoly? Are you federally subsidized? The answers to those questions make a great deal of difference in what level of service I expect and demand from you. Do you enjoy government granted perks as a common carrier?
If taco bell were the only restaurant and federally subsidized then refusing to serve me amounts to making me pay you to provide me the option to eat out and then refusing to allow me to eat out.
When there are a dozen carriers in every town and they all over varying terms instead of engaging in collusion, then we can talk about a carriers right to refuse service.
"A product where more of the bandwidth is used - or dedicated, not oversubscribed - is vastly more expensive, and is what they sell to businesses."
Yes, but if this is what was sold to everyone the problem disappears (there isn't really less upstream than downstream) and the cost for this type of connection would drop dramatically.
Imagine a crazy sort of world where I publish webpages and picture galleries from my own pc and don't have to rely on hosting services. A world where I can deliver content by purchasing low cost hardware and start a business. A world where I would only need to pay proportionately more for increased bandwidth when my need exceeded what was available. A world where the benefits of my untilized bandwidth are mine to captilize on and not my ISPs.
They shouldn't start with metered costs per gigabyte because it doesn't cost them per gigabyte. It costs the ISP x amount to have y bandwidth available. The bandwidth is all there, 100% of the time. It basically costs the ISP the same if that link is 0% utilized or 100% utilized.
The reality is that is that if no bandwidth is shared before the end user and content hosting isn't centralized like they do now the demand becomes more distributed, instead of a few heavily overloaded links and routers the traffic gets spread around more and the load better distributed. More at&t users are accessing content hosted by other at&t users. A greater portion of traffic becomes more localized traveling through fewer and more distributed hops.
In the end everyone wins. Except maybe the telcos.
he didn't say GB or KB, he said gb and kb. Bandwidth is measured in bits and does not use powers of 2. In bandwidth land 1kb is 1000bits, 1mb is 1000 kbits, 1gb is 1000 mbits, etc Its a marketing thing to make our slow arse network links sound bigger.
3000mbit (3gb) /60 = 50mbit per minute / 60 = 0.83 mb/s or 833 kb/s
memory uses 8bits to byte, 1024 bytes to kilobyte, 1024 KB to 1 MB, etc
Hard drives shack things up a bit, they use bytes but call 1KB 1000bytes instead of 1024. This inflates the size of the drive some.
And of course operating systems generally report the size of the files on the drives in the units memory does since all software actually handles data this way.
It could be argued that since the data on your hard drive, or going in or out of your network link is going to be utilized in manipulated in powers of 2 all of the above should just use that system. But alas, to these people (including me) or the annoying SI obsessed, its unlikely the above ambiguity is going away any time soon.
"You don't need to upload anything to use Bittorrent"
If you don't upload anything when you use bittorrent then you are certainly an asshat by my definition.
"Look, I'm not complaining about filesharing per se, just those who want to seed and saturate their connection for whatever ego boosting they think they deserve for doing it."
If the ISP's stopped artificially restricting upstream bandwidth reserving it for those trying to make money and gauging them for it then this wouldn't be a problem in the first place. The big pipes are synchronous, there is just as much upstream as downstream to go around. The ISP's create artificial scarcity.
"They want their full 25MB connection without any QoS applied. Or are you just not reading the threads.
They want their BitTorrents running at 25MB (or whatever) without any throttling."
No they want a high speed link without any QoS or throttling. They want to do away with the outdated model of selling them slow uplinks and fast downlinks. They know this only results in vastly overinflated prices for those have no choice but to purchase links like this.
They want the ISP's to be forced to take the billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars they pocketed and invest that money into enhanced infrastructure that can provide a reasonable level of bandwidth to consumers to be used however the consumer damn well pleases.
If 25mb can't be done (our European brothers would beg to differ) then 6mb, 3mb, and I can certainly guarantee you neither the cabilities of the ISP's nor the market demand will result in the $700+/month T1 speed links we have now (t1 itself is more or less obsolete for internet links and will go the way of the dinosaur pretty much instantly if that happens).
The people who want to use peer to peer, servers, and steam videos aren't the problem. The problem is that ISP's have been artificially restricting the ability to serve content to those with financial incentives and then gauging them.
"You don't want what you're really asking for. You want 10mb for $24.95, not the dedicated 10mb for $1500."
No I want dedicated 10mb for $24.95. If bandwidth were not oversold 10mb might not be $24.95 but it sure as hell wouldn't be $1500.
It's supply and demand, because consumers are being lied to and bandwidth is being oversold it creates an artificial reduction in the demand for real pipes. This means that anyone who wants a real pipe is going to pay dramatically more for it. I promise you, if there were 100,000,000 consumers demanding dedicated 10mb service the price for 10mb service would drop pretty damn fast.
For god sake, T1 is outdated, expensive, and slow but the Telco's are still selling them for $700+. There is no technical explanation for this at all, the telcos charge these ridiculous prices to deliver obsolete technology to their business users simply because they can get away with it.
There is no technical reason whatsoever in a world of synchronous pipes for consumers to lack synchronous full duplex pipes, self hosting, and full utilization of the bandwidth they are buying. Consumers won't see a chance in price, but they might see a short term reduction in speed.
It's like buying the world's production of diamonds and storing them in a warehouse and releasing them slowly to artificially drive up prices.
Internet has become an essential public communication medium. We can't afford to let large telco's restrict and constrain high speed links and infrastructure.
With the possible exception of a superior network tech working on a cable network I'd venture that most professional network techs lack intimate knowledge of DOCSIS.
Even having a rudimentary understanding of collisions puts him ahead of many low end network integrators.
"All ISPs priced there service as if bandwidth was going to be 100% utilized. A cheap rate was roughly $200/month..."
Not sure what you are referring to, in the 90's there was dialup and the average price was more like $15/month.
"Overselling bandwidth is a good deal for both the provider and the consumer."
No its not. Sure it artificially lowers rates (or rather artificially increases the speed for those rates, the actual rates only go up).
But it also artificially lowers the speed and increases the rates for anyone who absolutely has to have guaranteed bandwidth for financially justifiable reason and has the means to get it.
If ISP's sold real bandwidth the prices would be the same, the speeds may or may not be lower (all real investigations have failed to produce any evidence of congested pipes, just ISP's reluctant to update infrastructure) and the price of guaranteed bandwidth would be much much lower than it is today.
"These issues were going on back when there was real competition."
What real competition? I must have missed that part of history. Before High speed you had dialup and all the independents had to buy lines from the phone company, the result is that no independent could could offer better terms than the phone company and stay in business.