Cable Industry Taking Control of the Net 686
Tompaine.com has a piece warning of measures that cable internet providers are taking to control their users' experiences online. We've touched on this before, but this issue needs a lot of attention and it has gotten very little from the mainstream press.
Re:Tired of getting screwed by the cable industry? (Score:5, Informative)
bits and bytes (Score:5, Informative)
20 Kbps * 60 s * 1 B/8b = 150 kB/min
that means 568 hours worth..
I assume he was talking about kilobits, because the next paragraph talks about most good net stations being 56k...either that or the people writing the article messed it up.
Re:If they (the cable companies) keep this up... (Score:2, Informative)
The Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative Association [rric.net] got fed up with the poor quality of service (coming from Quest, I believe) and decided to make their own ISP.
Your post is way off, dude (Score:5, Informative)
If you'd (wait for it!...) read the article you would have seen the example given in Canada; Sympatico, run by Bell, has recently done this very thing. 5 GB cap. Go over the limit.. and they dock ya.
I personally know a few people who were incensed enough about this to flee to the only other broadband provider in Canada, Rogers... which also has a tiered plan in effect. The difference is that Rogers will pinch the connection after a certain data-rate has been sustained for an unspecified period of time (basically warez kiddies snarking something off LimeWire). But it's not capped. Thus, the lesser of two evils.
But yeah, it's real today.
Re:Bandwidth caps.. (Score:2, Informative)
53/8*3600*24*30/1048576 ~ 16GB.
However the point is well put. My terms of service state that I cannot use the link primarily for business but I am allowed to have servers, p2p, and pretty much anythings else that is not illegal. I use a lot of bandwidth and get no down time. And that makes me a satisfied customer. DirectTV DSL (aka Telocity) is the best.
Re:in a capitalist system... (Score:2, Informative)
Capitalism is the equal exchange of goods and services. Many people think it's greed and power, but that's actually a form of socialism.
In a capitalist system, corporations cannot exploit the clients. In a capitalist system, the compay and the customer must both agree 100% on a deal, otherwise it's not capitalism...
Re:This is nothing new. (Score:5, Informative)
I know this because I recently had to pry some straight answers out of Time-Warner/Roadrunner on behalf of my boss's boss's boss (He and I are both RR customers). It seems the Dean (yes, I work at an edu) wanted to work from home, including mounting the Windows shares on our NT domain. Time-Warner swore up and down that they did not have the netbios ports blocked until I identified myself as a customer and demanded to speak to security because I could prove that the Level I tech was lying to me. I had port-scanned my box at home and it showed 137, 138 and 139 in state 'filtered' (this is a Linux box without Samba installed, so blocking by RR is the ONLY way I could have gotten that result).
They finally told me that, yes, the netbios ports are blocked (which I consider to be a Good Thing (TM)) and will STAY that way, and that the only way the Dean could get them unblocked is to buy a commercial account and a static IP (for which RR charges $130.00/month) (which the Dean considers a Really Bad Thing(TM)).
I told them I would keep that in mind the next time a faculty member asked for my recommendation of an ISP and whether they should get cable internet or DSL.
SPEED tiered pricing instead (Score:2, Informative)
256Kb/s down -- approx. $20/month
768Kb/s down -- approx. $30/month
1.5Mb/s down -- approx. $40/month
the upload is capped at 128Kb/s for all tiers I believe.
This strategy allows the heavy bandwidth users to choose the fast connection (and pay for it) while the "check your email and look at tomorrows weather on the 'net" person can choose the cheaper options. It's a good comprimise, IMHO -- and you aren't penalized if a new version of redhat comes out
Re:Evidence? (Score:5, Informative)
Have you been living in a cave?
[from http://www.fcc.gov/mb/ [fcc.gov]]
"The Media Bureau develops, recommends and administers the policy and licensing programs relating to electronic media, including cable television, broadcast television, and radio in the United States and its territories. The Media Bureau also handles post-licensing matters regarding Direct Broadcast Satellite service."
Re:in a capitalist system... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If they (the cable companies) keep this up... (Score:4, Informative)
What's happened where I live... (Score:1, Informative)
Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.
All bandwidth limits are artificial (Score:1, Informative)
Here is an idea, if you have a monthly cap of 5GB, then rate limit your connection.
5GB/month = 170.67MB/day = 7.12MB/hour = 121.37KB/min = 16Kbps
There you go. Just rate limit to 15Kbps and you will never go above your limit, even if used 24 x 7 x 365. Makes that 56k modem look even better.
Re:improve service for mainstream users (Score:2, Informative)
If your service is affected by others in the neighbourhood, then they need to upgrade the routers in the neighbourhood, split it into two subnets, get another DS3 pipe in, or give everyone a partial refund for the service they weren't delivered.
It's more like kicking a frequent flyer off a airplane because they oversold the flight.
"Sorry bub, you fly around too much. This other guy deserves a chance to sit in seat 15A. No refund."
Same thing.
A net connection isn't communal property. It's a service contracted to individuals.
And the "Gee Whiz! We didn't know anyone would actually use it!" crap from the cable co's frankly isnt my problem. So they label their high end users 'thieves' and 'bandwidth hogs'. Pure FUD and utter bullshit.
If their business model sucks that badly, let em go bankrupt. I payed for unlimited, I'm using unlimited.
I Install Cable Systems And Here Is What I See (Score:3, Informative)
Now, the cable modem system can handle around 27-38Mbps on the downstream channel and around 2.5Mbps on the upstream channel (yes, there are systems with multiple upstreams, but they are less common). And upstream overloads will strangle your downstream.
One of my latest installs in the midwest had a single T1 and 42 users. Within a week, customers were calling the operator to complain about download speeds. When we checked the logs, we found that 2 (two) users had UPLOADED > 40 GIGABYTES in less than a week. Can anyone say Kazaa!
Obviously we had to limit their upstream capability to make the system work for everyone else.
Now, where I live, I also have a cable modem. I consistently get 2-3Mbps download speeds (and I limit my P2P use to less than 5 hrs/week) and yet, my provider chose to eliminate newsgroups (and not just alt.binaries, but also all computer/linux etc related - none!!!). I have not noticed anything else being blocked, so I can't really complain.
The point here is, that it all depends. If you have the bandwidth, let em rip. But if you don't, you have to impose some rules to make it a good experience for everybody. An don't nickel and dime them to death. Put that energy into getting lower prices from telco's for T1's.
Re:Whoa (Score:1, Informative)
Yeah, but SBC-Yahoo! DSL (which SBC is inflicting on all their DSL customers) is restricted too.
(See the TOS [yahoo.com])
Maybe that was just a network outage? (Score:3, Informative)
And yet I know a dozen attbi.com users in the SF Bay Area who listen to Live365 up to 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week (myself included), and none of them have ever had their service shut off.
Are you sure that your friend isn't just getting poor service from ATT ? They are known for their outages, and their supplied cable modems have trouble dealing with network hiccups. Did the support folks actuall say the problem was with the AUP?
During the rainy season earlier this year, I had a period where my ATT connection died every several days. When it happened, I called tech support, they asked me to do the 'unplug the cable modem. Wait 5 minutes, plug it back in' trick. It worked, but my connection would die just a few days later. After a few rounds of this, and alot of complaining on my part, ATT finally sent a technician to check on the problem.
Lo-and-behold, the problem was actually a corroded connector on one of the telephone poles. Apparently my connection would die, and the cable modem couldn't cope with the degraded network connection. It's been 8 months and several hundred hours of streaming audio later, and I've only had 2-3 more outages, and of which were all resolved within 10 minutes.
Re:The reason is obvious (Score:3, Informative)
This will slow down your surfing to a crawl as your browser will sometimes try to connect to adserver repeatedly first before loading the actual page. A better solution is just to drop all outgoing packets to adserver, works really well for me.
This is exactly backwards. Setting an adserver name to localhost causes connection refused or a 404 (quick). Dropping all packets is more complicated and will either require a timeout (slow) or a no-route error (quick).
Re:The reason is obvious (Score:3, Informative)
Cable companies shouldn't be regulated (Score:3, Informative)
The DirectPC way makes a lot of sense (Score:3, Informative)
Their approach achieves appropriate allocation of bandwidth, at least on downlink, with a mechanism that seems to be very fair. They do so without regulating any particular application.
The approach is to have a bit bucket. Not the traditional trash can bit bucket... but a bucket used as a capacity measurement. They continuously fill your bandwidth bucket at a specific rate (I think it was 46 kbps for a home user). When you use bandwidth, it depletes the bucket at the rate you use it. The bucket, of course, has a maximum capacity... it never can be filled over a certain size (a few hundred megabytes).
Thus you get good peak bandwidth. You get decent average bandwidth. And you can't hog the system at the expense of other users.
Sure, this would be a pain for downloading a CD, and it breaks big P-P sites if a similar approach is used for uplink.
But I have no sympathy for those wanting to serve up a lot of P-P stuff, consuming vast amounts of upstream bandwidth compare to normal users. Hey, if you want to P-P serve up movies, *pay* for the bandwidth.
As a number of other posters have pointed out, correctly, why bandwidth indeed must be limited, and the average bandwidth to a home broadband user needs to be a lot less than the peak bandwidth. You may have a peak bandwidth of 5Mbps, but you sure aren't paying for it as an average bandwidth - see the other posts - and you haven't been guaranteed that bandwidth in any way unless you bought DSL or a dedicated line (which would cost thousands per month for 5Mbps).
Time to pay for what you use. (Score:3, Informative)
With regard to the latter, please realize that ISP's usually pay for their bandwidth. To make a profit, they must charge (bandwidth cost) + (distribution cost) + (overhead) + (profit). The marginal cost of 1 gigabyte of transfer is very roughly $5.00. I base this on rates charged by colocation providers, so realize that it doesn't include distribution (last mile) costs. Therefore a typical consumer bandwidth allocation of 5 Gigabytes per month costs the provider roughly $25. If the provider charges $40/month, he has $15 to cover (distribution cost) + (overhead) + (profit). That's slim. If the consumer manages to double his transfer, and consume $50 worth of upstream transfer, he is now costing the provider money.
I think that under the current system many customers are costing their providers money. We've gotten so used to subsidized bandwidth (subsidized by the foolishness of telecom marketers) that we've lost sight of the underlying economic reality, which is dictated by the backbone carriers.
Look at it another way. If you want a full 1.5 Mbps internet conection, you must pay from $700 to $1500 for a T1, depending on location. How do you expect to buy the equivalent for $40-$60 a month, even if the last mile capacity is that high (which it sometimes is)? Just to break even, the provider would have to dilute that bandwidth by a factor of 20 (fit 20 consumer circuits on one T1) - and that's without considering distribution and overhead costs. Therefore, you can use an average 70 Kbps - little faster than a modem.
For better or for worse, the providers estimated very low usage when they planned their offerings. They now want to ditch the high-usage users who are like Homer Simpson at an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can call the providers foolish, dishonest, etc. and probably be right. But you cannot expect them to subsidize you indefinitely.
Eventually users must start paying for their own bandwidth or reduce their consumption to meet their budget.
Sympatico DSL in Canada (Score:1, Informative)
Re:How to ISP's carry newsgroups? (Score:5, Informative)
As is the case in these sorts of situations, ISPs are in the difficult position of either leaving it largely alone and arguing that content on USENET is decentralized and nearly impossible to monitor and censor; or attempting to do so and thus implicitly concede their own liability for that content and their responsibility for failing to censor it when it's illegal.
Most ISPs do one of three things with USENET: they either carry all groups and don't censor (although I believe--but could be wrong--that most everyone uses filters to fight spam); or they don't carry the binary groups (which they are probably doing mostly to radically reduce bandwidth and disk usage, but it also gets rid of the illegal porn, too); or they carry the binary groups but monitor group names for egregiously illegal content. For example, they don't carry "alt.binaries.pictures.erotics.pre-teen" or "alt.binaries.warez".
One reason that you may still see these sorts of groups even if your ISP is attempting to block illegal content is because people are creating new groups to get around the block.
And while it may sound simple to monitor for the child porn that you are objecting to, in reality it's nearly impossible. They can block groups that are named obviously enough. But that doesn't stop anyone from posting child porn on other groups. An ISP that's taken responsibility for censoring child porn is arguably just as responsible for it when it appears in "alt.binaries.erotica" as when it appears in an obvious child porn group. And there's no way that anyone could actually monitor the content directly, since in the erotica groups alone there are probably more than 100,000 individual images posted every day.
Putting aside the issue of dedicating resources to all the binary traffic, were the decision ever to be mine, I'd chose to leave it alone and argue that I'm no more responsible for the content on my news server than I am the content on my http caching server. (That's a precarious argument, but only because technologically ignorant courts have made unreasonable rulings involving this sort of thing. These issues are still being fought over, obviously in the case of P2P.)
Finally, I previously used Time Warner's Road Runner cable ISP, and they seemed to be pretty "hands-off", although (since I do look at the a.b.p.e.* groups every now and then) I think I noticed that flagrantly child-porn groups would eventually disappear. The teen groups they seemed to keep. Now I use SBC DSL, since I got annoyed with TW, and they block quite a few groups. I'm actually more weirded out by the child molestation and adult-child incest stories in the alt.sex.stories groups than I am upset by the photo groups. I guess because I think that there's not really that much real child-porn out there (children and pre-teens), but there sure are a lot of people posting and reading stories about daddy having sex with his daughter. Or nice Mr. Smith seducing the neighborhood children. Maybe it's an outlet. But I've scanned over some of these stories (out of the same sort of curiosity one looks at a traffic accident or murder scene) and I've thought "this guy has actually done this. I'm sure of it by how he is describing his 'strategies'". It really, really disturbed me. But then, my ex-wife is an incest survivor, and my ex-father-in-law (the abuser) was the creepiest most evil person I've ever met. I don't like these people. Many or most are not just turned on by children the way the rest of us are turned on by adults--no, a lot of them are honest-to-God predators who primarily enjoy "catching" their pitifully weak "prey". It is absolutely horrifying. But sorry about that rant.
(The coolest thing about news via cable modem was since their news server was local, and in those days there wasn't as much neighorhood traffic, and there weren't caps, the DL speeds from the server to my computer were enormous.)
DISCLAIMER: I am not, nor have I ever been, a news admin. I may be mistaken about a few things in this post. This being Slashdot, I don't have to request that more knowledgable people correct my errors. They will. But please do.
Missing the point (Score:2, Informative)
What IS scary about this trend is that, with this kind of fine-grained control over network traffic, it would be a breeze to cut off access to a particular web site, or exclude certain protocols. When service providers start differentiating based on the TYPE of data you're downloading, not the QUANTITY, it's time to worry.
Re:Whoa (Score:2, Informative)
What dream land do you live in? In PA, ONE good winter will destroy even newly repaved roads. In other places, it seems to about ~5 years.