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Time Warner Filtering iTunes Traffic?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Feb 03, 2008 02:24 AM
from the trial-has-begun-maybe dept.
from the trial-has-begun-maybe dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Starting on Thursday, January 31st, Time Warner subscribers in Texas starting experiencing connectivity issues to the iTunes store to the point where the service wasn't usable. General internet traffic issues haven't coincided with these problems, and many folks have reported that the store works as normal when they head to the nearest mega-bookstore and use their ISP instead. Time Warner has announced that they're going to begin trials of tiered pricing in one local Texas market, but I'll be darn sure to switch my provider if I hear the slightest hint of destination/content based tiers instead of bandwidth tiers."
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Technology: Time Warner Cable to Test Tiered Bandwidth Caps 591 comments
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a leaked internal memo, Time Warner Cable is testing out tiered bandwidth caps in their Beaumont, TX division as a way to fairly balance the needs of heavy users against the limited amount of shared bandwidth cable can provide. The plan is to offer various service tiers with bandwidth fees for overuse, as well as a bandwidth meter customers can use to help them stay within their allotment. If it works out, they will consider a nation-wide rollout. Interestingly, the memo also claims that 5% of subscribers use over 50% of the total network bandwidth."
Submission: Time Warner filtering iTunes traffic? by Anonymous Coward
[+]
Technology: Time-Warner Considers Per-Gigabyte Service Fee, After iTunes 557 comments
destinyland writes "Time-Warner is now mulling a plan to charge a per-gigabyte fee for internet service. A leaked memo reveals they're now watching how many gigabytes customers use in a 'consumption-based' pricing experiment in Texas, which we discussed early last month. The announced plan was that they were considering a tier-based approach, as opposed to per-gigabyte fees. 'As few as 5 percent of our customers use 50 percent of the network,' Time-Warner complains, with plans to cap usage at 5-gigabytes, and more expensive pricing plans granting 10-, 20-, and 40-gigabyte quotas. Steven Levy at the Washington post suggests Time-Warner's real aim is to
hobble iTunes, raising the cost of a movie download by $10 (or $30 for a high-definition movie). Eyeing Time-Warner's experiment, Comcast cable also says they're evaluating a pay-per-gigabyte model."
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For $1500/month (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you,
Your ISP
Re:For $1500/month (Score:4, Insightful)
BUYERS BEWARE
Parent
a cap is better than selective throttling content (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is to let the customer decide what they want to access. If it costs a dollar or two to download the equivalent of a CD, maybe you should buy the CD and use your bandwidth for something else (or just save the money and pay less for Internet access). Maybe that'd get the RIAA off our backs. In any case, don't tell me what I can access.
I guess there's a flip side to that. If the content's something like on-demand video rental, why shouldn't your ISP be able to provide a cheaper service based on having direct connectivity to you? Or, put another way, if it costs them less to deliver the service to you, why shouldn't you reap some of the savings? There are different aspects to the net neutrality issue. A Netflix isn't providing original content. We may gain in terms of competition based on their having, essentially, a free delivery mechanism though. I guess that's good for us and good for Netflix, but it's obviously not good for our ISP's. Do we care about that? I'm not sure, but there are two sides to the issue.
Parent
Re:a cap is better than selective throttling conte (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that 20GB per month worth of downloading big files fast ought to be plenty for most of us. About a Linux ISO per day, I'd think. And that's my point. We download this stuff because it costs us exactly nothing. If it cost me a few bucks to download, I might go to Cheap Bytes or somewhere instead for a CD. And that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. The internet is a disruptive technology alright, but it may be being made artificially so due to stuff like moratoriums on sales tax, loss-leader free shipping, etc. I'm not (entirely) sure that I don't want there to still be a neighborhood bookstore, and if it's killed because it can't compete with, say, Amazon - and that's because Amazon customers can afford the convenience because the government said there should be no sales tax (for now), that's not as great a deal as it may sound.
I pay for broadband mainly so that day to day web browsing (well within the suggested 20GB limit) is fast. Not so I can download music and movies, etc. It's nice that I can, but given the choice I might prefer to forgo that for the option of cutting my broadband bill. Of course, nobody's offering to cut my broadband bill, so the whole exercise is probably moot. Still, the point is that broadband costs something, and the pricing structure needs to reflect that. Unlimited downloads at a low, low price is not likely to fit into a reasonable pricing structure if you expect capacity to keep up with demand.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"destination/content based tiers instead of bandwidth tiers"
bandwith throttling we understand, its the content/destination filtering that is bs. They now are deciding what biz survive and which do not.
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
So ask yourself. What ISP would limit a popular service to such a degree that it becomes 100% unusable for their entire user base? That doesn't sound like successful traffic shaping to me. That sounds like a misconfiguration somewhere. If it was traffic shaping, I would expect that the speeds would drop to levels to where it would be impossible to watch a movie real-time (for example), yet possible to download it within the time-frame of a few hours. (Say, 4-8 hours as a reasonable range.)
Outright blocking a popular service like iTunes only invites unhappy customers and bad press.
Parent
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
It's so utterly ridiculous that ISP's can get away with this shit. I am fairly certain if iTunes started getting nerfed on a wide scale, they would incur the Wrath of the Jobs.
My ISP throttles Bit Torrent. Confirmed this myself the other day when I wound up back using the default port. Down and up sucked. Changed the port, reloaded, speeds increased 4000%.
Parent
Re:For $1500/month (Score:4, Interesting)
And what happened?
Parent
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps the solution is that iTunes should bear some of the additional cost of the high amount of traffic their service creates.
They already do that, because they already pay for their bandwidth, and they pay a great deal more than you would pay for the same bandwidth.
Seriously. The only people who should be paying more here are the ISPs and ultimately us, the customers. The ISPs have been overselling bandwidth for years and years, and now that we are starting to use what they claim they have sold us, they can't all of a sudden tell us not to, without either increasing the price a lot, lowering the max speed, or admit to the gene
Re:For $1500/month (Score:4, Insightful)
Fourth option - accept that they'll make less than ten-bajillion dollars this fiscal year and plough some of their profits into developing their infrastructure. I like option four!
Parent
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh please, no! The last thing we need is the precedent of ISPs charging both ends of a connection or choosing how much to charge a company based on the perceived profit they make (i.e. "how much can we get out of them?"). At best, it would just be another way big companies to produce a barrier to entry for smaller companies.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Why should Apple pay MORE for using bandwidth? I already paid for the bandwidth my connection uses (for iTunes or anything else) on my end and Apple paid for on their end. Why in the world would you suggest there be another fee when we both already paid for what we are using?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Then that ISP shouldn't be selling 1 Mbps 'unlimited' connections to 1000+ customers and then complain when people actually *use* the bandwith *they are paying for*. That's false advertising.
Thats actually fraud.
A customer pays for a service and the ISP takes payment but dosent deliver.
There is nothing wrong with overselling provided your customer can use what you sell them!
If everyone made a phone call at the sametime the phone network couldent handle it because they oversell the service to produce cheaper rates but I have NEVER had a problem making a phonecall because my service provider has carefully planned things out to make sure this dosent happen.
Overselling makes sense provided its don
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The ISPs successfully argued 'unlimited' means unlimited *access* not unlimited service. As long as they're not saying you can long use the internet at certain times they're safe.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Judge : "Indeed, that user is clearly wasting the time of the court. 10 lashes ! Now tell me about how those tubes work again."
Re:For $1500/month (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps the ISPs could not make record profits and send CEOs to resorts with multimillion dollar bonuses and instead spend some money on the infrastructure that supports their business model. You know, to be in business tomorrow.
Just a thought.
Parent
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're jesting. This is the US of A, where company bosses get paid with stock, and their main concern is thus the stock price. And investors (including the companies own CEOs and CFOs) don't care about what the stock price will be five or fifty years down the road -- they care
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
Its their ISP and if they feel the need to cap bandwidth to certain sites, block sites/ports etc - thats fine - just put it in writing.
Parent
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get the paranoia people have with regards to bandwidth caps, the truth is it costs ISPs a certain amount per gigabyte. A heavy user should be paying more, this isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is when ISPs advertise unlimited and then put a cap in the fine print.
I will however disagree the idea that is okay for ISPs to throttle traffic just because they're upfront about it. Network neutrality is what made the internet the force it is today, without it the internet cannot thrive.
(and if anyone's wondering, my ISP is TekSavvy. No this is not a advertisement, if it was I'd ask you to mention me so I get referral credit)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. Putting in the data pipes costs ISPs a certain amount of money. Putting in bigger pipes costs ISPs more money than putting in smaller pipes. But ISPs do not pay for their connections to the Internet on a per gigabyte
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I have
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you get a T1 or other dedicated circuit, you certainly aren't metered. Why would an ISP be treated any differently?
Never attribute to malice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on all the comments, I have a sneaky suspicion that it's not an attempt at active filtering, but rather a network screwup somewhere in the Texas routers. I imagine that the Apple guys will be talking to every network admin up the line until they find the one who is responsible for maintaining the malfunctioning routers. Should be back up in a few days, unless I miss my guess.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
-- Ecks
Re:Never attribute to malice... (Score:5, Informative)
Sarcasm aside, it doesn't detract from my point. There was a misconfiguration somewhere in the chain of routers between TWC and Apple's nearest server. Maybe a bad routing table, an incorrect configuration of traffic shaping, or a router on the fritz. Either way, I seriously doubt this outage was intentional. Because if it was, it was possibly the most incompetent attempt at traffic shaping in the history of the Internet.
Parent
Re:Never attribute to malice... (Score:5, Funny)
No, that coveted spot is already reserved people who truly do reshape traffic: backhoe operators and anchor-dragging boat captains.
Parent
Sure... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
This can be translated as "Can't somebody else do it?"
Giving a government run by politicians who are in the back pockets of these same corporations the power to regulate is not going to achieve what those who want regulation want to achieve.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The government has made sure that they don't have any.
Bad Summary (Score:5, Informative)
There are also a lot of comments about how it all happened when they upgraded to iTunes 7.6, including this gem (which includes a work-around:
Of the few that claim that they were not using 7.6, a couple of them later came back and said "[oops, I did have 7.6]"
But of course, Apple is the perfect and the evil cable monopoly must be violating net neutrality.
Re:Bad Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
I can back these claims (Score:3, Interesting)
Will people understand monopoly issues? (Score:5, Informative)
In the end, I think we are back to the times when it makes sense for everybody to start building their own internet connections again and buying a single corporate connection per group. Look up community network [google.com] on google and start building. You know best how do do it.
How about what I pay for? (Score:3, Informative)
As a Comcast customer, I have tended to get about 1/10th of their advertised "you will get up to..." bandwidth, and sometimes not even that.
And yes, they are STILL throttling BitTorrent traffic, illegally. I have been trying to download perfectly legal but large files, with plenty of peers and seeders, yet my download speed has been between 1k and 30k! This on a multi-megabyte-download-speed cable service. Just about everything else downloads very quickly... but of course would download even more quickly if I got anywhere near the throughput they advertise.
You know it is getting bad when certain traffic (BitTorrent, for example) downloads faster on dialup than it does on cable.
Great maker, what has slashdot become? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe a router was down? Maybe BGP was flapping a bit? Maybe there is just a couple of peering partners between apple's provider and this provider ? And a backhoe took the cable?
Maybe powerloss in a Single Point of Failure?
That conspiracy theories should reach slashdot due to a couple of hours of outage is just insane. I expect more of slashdot. And also I expect more of the slashcrowd.
Tiscali do this in the UK (Score:5, Informative)
Despite having acknowledged the problem recently (they said they're working on it - try turning off your traffic shaping???) they initially ignored it, deleting support forum posts wholesale.
I've walked away.
On Road Runner Business in Greensboro, NC (Score:4, Informative)
FWIW, Before 8pm, I've seen no other speed impacts, and have been able to download ISOs at a normal speed. I've only seen it with iTunes.
Re:Totally against tiered internet, but (Score:5, Informative)
"Bandwidth" (data transmission) is paid for by both the sender and the receiver of data. Apple has an ISP at the data center where they are housing the iTunes servers, they pay for the level of service they recieve. You and I also pay our ISPs for the level of service we receive.
Everyone is already paying. Tiered internet is just about making some people pay more for the same level of service then other people do.
Discrimination is bad mmmmmkay ?
Parent
Ironically... (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine a world where "the studios" had to pay for all bandwidth usage twice, or suffer degraded performance. What happens to independent [youtube.com] projects [sanctuaryforall.com], then?
Did someone actually try to argue that raising the barrier of entry can do anything at all other than support the existing, entrenched power structures?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My point is, we all get the idea, but how far fetched is the difference from paying extra for the ability to send and receive SMTP traffic, paying extra to send/receive HTTPS traffic, and, of course, the coup de gras, paying extra to access Google or Yahoo!
It is coup de grace, but otherwise, spot on. Someone mod this guy. This is the wet dream of all ISPs: to charge you by connection type, by port, by protocol and finally, by content and end-point access. They want to charge you the same way they charge your cell phone usage: lots of completely made up charges that are only differentiated because their tracking software can.
I predict in the fairly near future (5 years or so) that there'll be a lot of these tests going on, and a lot of cut-rate Internet offer
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You can't send packets out on or receive them in on a variety of ports, notably 21, 25, and 80. I figured that there must be filters up on my connection because most consumers don't require service on them, and on Joe Sixpack's connection, it's more secure that way.
May I suggest you go visit an abuse's desk of an ISP not filtering port 25 outbound before stating that it's blocked for the unique reason that they don't require it? Viruses on customers' computers don't need port 25, period. It's allowed for businesses because they usually have some kind of IT dealing with viruses, but at the ISP I worked for we could block these as well if abuse was reported, no matter the price of the connection.
My point is that ISP's unrelentingly filter port 25 traffic. Abuse or not. And in the case of my ISP, they claim it's for security.