Time Warner Filtering iTunes Traffic? 199
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."
ugh (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:For $1500/month (Score:4, Insightful)
BUYERS BEWARE
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: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.
Sure... (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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.
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.
Re:Perhaps (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:For $1500/month (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If this is true... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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%.
Net neutrality doesn't exist even now. (Score:2, Insightful)
Net neutrality is an illusion. If you want to use different services, you have to pay more RIGHT NOW regardless of who your ISP is. Let me explain. Net neutrality is a concept stating something similar to the following. Your ISP gets bought out by Microsoft. Suddenly, you as a consumer on the "Cheap" internet tier can no longer perform web searches on Google without experience long page loads. Your searches on Microsoft Live are fast as lightning, but you don't like the results. You call your ISP and tell them that you can't access Google properly, and they tell you there's no problem with their "Cheap" service, it's that the cheap service has a Microsoft "Preferred Portal." If you would like to use other "Internet Portals," you have to switch to their "Unlimited Tier," and pay $20 more per month for your "Unlimited" internet access.
If you're like most nerds, and have even a decent understanding of how the internet works, you know that this is a scam in the making. You, of course, are paying for bandwidth and IPv4 connectivity out to the rest of the internet, not "Microsoft Direct Connection Service plus Internet."
Some people don't realize that Net Neutrality doesn't even exist today. Try this: If you have email at, say, your office and you host it on your own domain, Telnet into port 25 on your email server. No response? That's because your ISP is filtering you RIGHT NOW. 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. So I called my ISP and asked them to remove the blocks so that I could test my email server at work, set up a personal FTP, and, god forbid, accept Email. I argued with them for two hours, during which they told me, several times, that I could get Business Class cable internet service (sound anything like the "Unlimited Tier" I mentioned above?) to alleviate my problem, and that the port filtering was in place to protect my ISP's subscribers from viruses and so on. I told them I didn't need that "protection" and would like it removed. They eventually forwarded me to a department that didn't give a shit.
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!
Time Warner thinks they can convince the American consumer that they should pay extra to access Google the same way they pay extra to watch HBO or Showtime... The same way we have to pay extra to send and receive SMTP traffic. This isn't the way it is now, and it's not the way it should be.
Re:For $1500/month (Score:3, Insightful)
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 dont intelligently so that the user can use what they pay for.
~Dan
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.
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For $1500/month (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 about what it will be next week, or, at most, by the end of the fiscal year. Something that gives short term benefits but hurts the business several years down the road is going to win their vote, every time.
The solution: Make dividends tax free, and have a substantial capital gains tax. That, of course, would never pass, but it would reduce short term "pump-and-dump" thinking, and increase long term investments.
Re:For $1500/month (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 basis. They pay for a pipe capable of sending X amount of data per second, and they're allowed to use up to that limit. So why should we be charged differently? If someone pays for a 7Mb down/1.5Mb up connection they should be able to use 7Mb/1.5Mb. If two people are neighbors and they bother pay for a 7Mb/1.5Mb connection, why should one of them have to pay more for using the connection more often? If I pay to have an analog phone line installed should I pay more if I make twice as many local calls as my neighbor? If my neighbor and I both have cable installed, should I have to pay more if I watch twice as much TV as my neighbor? If I pay for satellite radio, should I have to pay more if I listen to it twice as much as the next guy?
You have already bought into the greedy ISPs way of thinking, that somehow bandwidth is metered. It's not. We are paying for a data connection to be installed. We can pay more or less based on how much data that pipe can transfer in a second. We shouldn't have to pay extra on top of that for actually using the pipe too.
Unlimited ISP connections (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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!
Re:For $1500/month (Score:3, Insightful)
I have not checked to see if the policy is to cap the Internet bandwidth, but they are definitely not throttling the video streams. If every provider were to treat connections like the video streams I am getting, we would all be much better off.
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.
Re:For $1500/month (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:For $1500/month (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sure... (Score:3, Insightful)
The government has made sure that they don't have any.