Time Warner Filtering iTunes Traffic?

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."

Re:For $1500/month

[fitsnips]

can you read?

"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.

I can back these claims

[yamamushi]

I'm in San Antonio TX right now, and Itunes has been so slow since thursday, to the point of being completely unusable. Whereas downloading albums or tv shows would take a few minutes, I'm now looking at an expected wait of 4 hours for a 3mb download. I thought it might have been issues with the itunes servers, but kudos to the article for shedding some light on the issue.

Re:Bad Summary

[solar_blitz]

At the beginning it seemed as that iTunes 7.6 is just as likely to be the culprit as the ISPs, but given that the peoples' speeds returned to normal (I, too, rtfa'd) - without an update patch for iTunes - it would seem like it was an issue on the server side of Apple or Time Warner. Since nobody from other areas in the United States complained about the issue as frequently as those from the Austin, Texas region this is not likely caused by Apple. Odds are it is a Time Warner issue. I never studied servers or networking, so all I can go by is my own experience.

Ironically...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Tiered internet would support oligarchies and monopolies more.

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?

Re:Net neutrality doesn't exist even now.

[NeutronCowboy]

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 offerings that have these sort of restrictions. If even 20% of all customers sign on, I expect that all future offerings will be of that nature.

Shudder. It will be the end of the Internet as a medium of innovation, communication and productivity enhancements... it'll become like TV and radio.

Re:For $1500/month

[pipatron]

I went so far as to file fraud charges against them.

And what happened?

Re:For $1500/month

[sumdumass]

Not to mention that Time Warner either owns or has partnered with Rapsody, an Itunes competitor.

Re:For $1500/month

[Tony Hoyle]

This has already been through the courts. Someone tried exactly your argument and failed.

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:For $1500/month

[Anonymous Coward]

>I don't get the paranoia people have with regards to bandwidth caps, the truth is it costs ISPs a certain amount per gigabyte

Depending on what top tier provider they use, they pay a flat rate. Cogent does this, for example. Other providers use a percentile system. So no, in fact, very few top tier providers just simply charge by the gigabyte. You'd probably have to search for one that does nowadays. It isn't 1998 anymore.

I wish the myth of providers being billed by the byte would finally vanish, it's about time. They're either billed by average usage (averaged out to about the 95th percentile in m/g/tbits) or they're billed flat-rate for the entire pipe. So, a user that downloads 1 TB per month, but only at night, costs the ISP less than a user that downloads 20 GB a month, but only at 4:00 - 5:00 pm. If your ISP is stuck on the old system, tell them to join the new millennium like all the other ISPs have. Some smarter ISPs do not count transfer outside top percentile hours (whatever they may be, the ISP will usually advertise them as "at night" hours) against any caps they might have. ISPs that do this know their business. ISPs that just have flat caps end up with all their users beating the hell out of the internet during peak hours, because users figure (rightly so) why be arsed to download anything at night when there's no benefit?

Interestingly enough, my ISP is Teksavvy also. Teksavvy offers unlimited usage accounts (what I use, although I rarely use more than 100 GB a month, I like never having to worry about paying more), and those all go through... guess who... COGENT! Why? Because Cogent bills them flat rates. Their other peers work on the percentile system. If you don't believe me, call Teksavvy. It is unfortunate that Teksavvy, while a good ISP, doesn't offer a benefit to users "abusing" the internet during off-peak hours. If they did, they'd probably find they could have stuck with the 100 GB cap rather than the 200 GB cap that they just implemented this month.

$0.25/GB isn't bad, I suppose, but the reason it's so high (be assured, they do make a profit on that) is because Teksavvy doesn't pay for their internet this way. So they have to charge _at least_ the equivalent percentile charge at peak times converted to raw GBytes (would be in GBits/s for them, really) plus admin fees. Of course, this means that if you went "over" at 3:00 am, they are making money hand over fist, since they paid $0.00 for that extra data. If you go over at 4:00 pm, they probably break even, plus a penny or two. Oh well, if anyone in Ontario converts to a reasonable billing system, Teksavvy will probably be the first. :-)

[ Why did I choose 4:00 pm? I work tech support, guess when the queue is 10x heavier than any other time of the day... ]