Sandvine CEO Says Internet Monitoring a Necessity 171
Khalid Baheyeldin writes in with a CBC interview with the CEO of Sandvine, Dave Caputo (bio here). Sandvine is the Waterloo, Ontario-based company that provides the technology that Comcast and other ISPs use to overrule Net neutrality by, for example, injecting RST packets to disrupt Bittorrent traffic. Caputo says, among other things, that Internet monitoring is a necessity. Some of the comments to the interview are more tech-savvy than the interviewee comes across.
Of course it's needed (Score:5, Insightful)
And we can sell you just the product you need for that.
Re:Of course it's needed (Score:1, Insightful)
How fscking stupid can a suit get? (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
So let me get this straight--poor planning on their part somehow does constitute some form of emergency on my part?
What has overselling to do with monitoring? (Score:5, Insightful)
As stated in the article is that the ISP's are selling you 1 megabyte while really buying you 1/4th of a Megabyte... Network monitoring is in other words necessary to ensure you in other words only use 1/4th of a Megabyte for every Megabyte you buy. It's right there in his argument!
Re:How fscking stupid can a suit get? (Score:4, Insightful)
Poor planning on their part doesn't make it an emergency on your part. Poor planning on their part makes a problem that Sandvine's CEO wants to sell a "solution" to fix the problem.
speeding up 'your' Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
That sums it up. It's all of 'our' Internet, and its lucidness and capacity to re-adjust is part of its design. If you want a big-gulp download, you should get what you pay for-- subject to the randomness off aperiodic congestion, just like a freeway.
I'm guessing you weren't around or were kicking your siblings in the playpen when the Internet was designed. We believe in getting what we paid for, in a neutral, unbiased delivered fashion. All other attempts at control in our opinion, is not only illegal, but contradictory to the philosophy of egalitarian use, and in some corners, reason for revolting.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Honour" (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in my day we had a honor system that basically said "don't sell 100 gallons of milk when you only have 20".
ISPs should never send an RST (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs should never muck with a TCP stream. They're entitled to send ICMP messages. ICMP Destination Unreachable has codes for things like "(13) Communications Administratively Prohibited" and "(10) Destination host administratively prohibited". Then at least the user knows 1) that somebody along the route didn't like the packet, and 2) who to blame. There's a right way to do this, and sending an RST isn't it.
Client software may not pass all the ICMP info up to the user, but that could be fixed easily enough.
Re:speeding up 'your' Internet (Score:2, Insightful)
One of the downsides to living in a civilized society (as opposed to the anarchy you espouse) is that sometimes you have to curtail your activities for the benefit of the society as a whole. Just because you are legally entitled to rip off a loud fart, belch, and gab on your cellphone in the middle of an opera doesn't mean you should.
It's called being civilized, or, if you prefer, acting in a civilized manner.
Just because you can jam your neighborhood's pipe with your devil-may-care attitude of usage doesn't mean you should. Nor does it mean that society (us) should allow you to. This isn't the wild west. My apologies if this is a new concept for you; your parents should have taught you better.
Re:How about selling what you have? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe I'm being selfish (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is it written that it is all-you-can-eat?
All over ISPs' advertisements. Unless they've redefined the word "unlimited".
An Internet which is not neutral is less useful than an Internet that is. If web browsing is sped up at the expense of streaming video, that's going to hurt some people more than others. If streaming video is sped up at the expense of games, a whole other group is affected. Since people come up with new ways of using the Internet all the time, and we can't predict new uses, the best strategy is to give all packets equal measure.
Rather than throwing out Net Neutrality, it'd be more productive for ISPs to find business models that don't involve overcommitment, or at least make it less painful. Like some of the recent attempts to make P2P software favor nodes within the same ISP.
Re:How about selling what you have? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you can't provide those fantastillion megabits per sec for 40 bucks. Ok, I can see that. How about ... I dunno... selling what you can sell?
You can get un-fucked-with bandwidth for that price, or you can live with the fact that your concentrated. You can't have it both ways.
The more you buy, the cheaper it gets, so you could order a T3 or something for like $5000/mo and then sell it to your neighbors for like $200/mo... (not including the cost of the routers).
I don't know about you, but I'm happy to have 3megs part of the day for $30/mo instead of my old ISDN line for $145/mo. Or maybe dialup? No thanks. I'll take the concentrated 3megs for $40.
It's just not realistic to expect to get more for your $40 than they get for their $300.
Re:Of course it's needed (Score:1, Insightful)
You dummy, no PR firm has set their sights on you. You get modded down by all and sundry because you offend everyone, even other free software advocates, with your sheer idiocy.
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:4, Insightful)
All ISPs oversell, with our without Sandvine's products. Your ISP tells you you're getting a certain amount of bandwidth, but you aren't, at least not 24/7. This has always been the case from day one.
This company isn't doing anything particularly brilliant. ISPs have been doing ad hoc versions of it for years and years.
FFS (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Maybe I'm being selfish (Score:5, Insightful)
Read your contract - the ISP may say unlimited; but the DON'T guarantee a bandwidth. All unlimited means is that they don't cut you off or charge you more if you exceed a certain data volume.
Let's get real here. If an ISP was really selling you a guaranteed dedicated bandwidth you would be paying a much higher price than you do now. Why do you think T1 is hundreds of dollars per month at 1.5 Mb/s? Because of the service guarantee, that is why.
Packet switching works economically because it is shared bandwidth relying on a statistical distribution of traffic on the network. During peak loads traffic will be slower than at off peak times unless the network is extremely over-provisioned.
There is another technology out there that gives a guaranteed bandwidth for every customer - which is rapidly being displaced because of its inefficiency - it is called circuit switched, and it is what the phone companies use to carry analog voice. Every call gets it's own dedicated bandwidth. All I can say is that you would not want an internet based on this network model. It is slow, inefficient and inflexible.
Now ISPs have a problem with users that run applications that present a high constant load because they don't fit the statistical model. High volume P2P is the primary offender right now. If people are using these sorts of applications when the network is heavily loaded it seems to me quite reasonable that traffic based on interactive applications (VOIP, video, HTTP) should receive priority. ANY good computing system should favor interactive applications over non-interactive applications. It is a basic system design principle.
Sorry to inform you, but to do this you need to monitor.
A lot of people whine that this breaks the idea of network neutrality. I disagree; network neutrality must not allow one type of communications stream or application to seriously degrade the performance or usability of all of the other applications. If that occurs you do not have a neutral network. You have a network that is dedicated to that one application. That is NOT what I as an end user want.
Re:Beating Sandvine (Score:4, Insightful)
Ethics more needed than monitoring (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course a netadmin has to monitor traffic. How else to assure good service? But what information is necessary and how it should be used ought to be carefully governed by ethics. Unfortunately, these ethics [lopsa.org] are not well known, and frequently violated by the concept of "owner privilige" (often might makes right). Essentially ignoring any notion of customer rights and treating employees as serfs. Both have been known to rebel for cause.
It is the deplorable state of IT ethics that is the root cause of many of these controversial actions.
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:4, Insightful)
Its more like selling access to the keg, telling everyone they can drink the whole thing, and expecting everyone to blackout before they notice its gone
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody in my neighborhood picked up the phone at the same time and half of them couldn't get through!
Overselling is not a bad thing. It can just mean that you sell based on statistical maximums rather than theoretical maximums which never happen. When done this way, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
When 90% of your customers are offline at any given time, there's no point in provisioning more than one tenth of the bandwidth you would need to support all of them downloading at the maximum rate simultaneously.
The problem is not overselling. The problem is that some ISPs oversell too much. They aren't willing increase capacity to match actual use, but instead try to reduce usage to match actual capacity. This is wrong. But the simple fact of overselling is the only sane way to do business.
Full of $*&$% (Score:3, Insightful)
All packets MUST be treated equally. That is the first mistake. When an ISP says that they will deliver "unlimited" Internet to you, they must actually do this. "Unlimited" is not vague or ambiguous in the context in which they have used it. They must give me unlimited service, or a service without limitations, boundaries, restrictions, or controls. I did not come up with the unlimited part, they did.
I was sold a 6 Mb/s connection from Embarq, which means that with unlimited service I should be able to transfer 6Mb/s * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 30 days, which is right around 2 TB of data transfer per month.
My neighbor was also sold this same package. We pay the same price. How can you determine which of our packets get priority? Can our packets be anything but equal?
This is why the "bandwidth hog" argument is so ludicrous. I cannot "hog" the bandwidth, nor can my neighbors. We all paid for a service, we all have equal rights to it.
This SHITHEAD just said it right here in plain English. Their business model is based on not actually delivering what they sold you. The "more" they don't deliver the more profitable they are. No wonder the ISP's have such an interest in figuring out the "problem". He is even more of an ass with his cavalier attitude about it. "Well that is just the way it has always been and it's okay". That attitude is why nobody trusts their ISP and these companies. It is so clearly greed that drives them.
What an ass. If you read between the lines here, he is basically saying that the fact ISP's are trying to figure out how to more effectively deny us the service we have been sold leads to greater business opportunities for his company. I'm shocked.
I hate to be somebody that just complains about a problem without offering solutions. Well the solution to this is very simple. Stop selling unlimited Internet. START being honest with your customers.
It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that 10 homes in a neighborhood each with a 10 Mb/s connection require a 100 Mb/s pipe connected to all of them to deliver the bandwidth. Telling each one of them that they have unlimited use of those 10 Mb/s connections is a flat out lie. There is no way that could work without raising the price by 10 times.
If the reality is that there is only 20 Mb/s coming into the neighborhood then they should sell it with a 2 Mb/s floor and a 10 Mb/s ceiling. They will guarantee that you can at least get 2 Mb/s dedicated just for you, but be able to burst up to 10 Mb/s "depending on conditions". That would be honest at least. You would know that if your neighbors are not using the connection, you might be able to get some pretty good porn 5 times faster than normal, but the worst
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly right. So complain about insufficient capacity, and not about overselling which is necessary, common, and entirely reasonable.
It just gets me how it seems like everybody in these discussions does not actually understand reality. "Ooh, the evil cable company promised 100 people in my neighborhood 5MBit connections but they don't actually have 500Mbit of bandwidth serving us! What a bunch of liars!" Sorry guys, but that's not actually how it works!
Now if people will complain about a lack of capacity then I'll be right there with them. But everybody just jumps straight to complaining about "overselling" and it makes them look like a bunch of fools.
To take your analogy, if you know from past behavior that you can sell beer "subscriptions" and only purchase half the beer that your subscriptions would require because most of your customers won't drink their full subscription, this is just good business practice and it's a good thing to do.
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all true, however, the point being made is that companies are not selling/telling their customers this. They are advertising it as unlimited.
To build on the analogy, you can have unlimited beer but if we see you drinking more than a six beers a day we'll cap how much beer you can have. See how ridiculous that is?
Overselling is not unreasonable. Advertising as unlimited is.
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. Advertising as unlimited is perfectly reasonable, if you can provide it. There's nothing that says you can't. This should be obvious simply by observing that a huge number of ISPs over a very long period of time have advertised and provided unlimited access with no problems.
The problem comes when you no longer want to provide it but still want to advertise it, which is what these large US ISPs are beginning to do, and this is indeed unreasonable.
Back to the beer analogy, let's say you sell a beer subscription that's limited to 1 beer an hour but is otherwise unlimited. However you only provision your restaurant for 10 beers an hour despite the fact that you've sold 100 subscriptions. Nothing wrong with this so far. If you worked out your numbers to see what your peak demand is and that peak demand is 10, then you're in good shape!
The problem comes when people start drinking more, and so your peak demand increases past 10 beers per hour. At this point you have two honorable choices. One is to say, sorry, we can no longer offer the unlimited subscription, would you like a subscription which comes with 30 beers per month, and a charge per each beer after that? Another is to increase your supply of beer. If your subscribers are now peaking at 15 beers per hour then arrange for that amount to be delivered. Unfortunately these US ISPs are taking a cowardly way out. They are, essentially, continuing to offer the unlimited beers but are finding all the guys who constantly come in for one beer every hour nonstop, intercepting them on the way out the restaurant, dragging them into the alley, and beating them up.
But if you just increase your supply to match the actual demand, there's nothing wrong with overselling while advertising unlimited service, since that is in fact exactly what you are providing.
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:4, Insightful)
Could you explain what would be lost if such as page was clearly marked as highly technical, and was optional to read?
I'm thinking something along the lines of the link text being "high technical information" and the page having a header that goes "The information on this page is meant for people who want to know the technical details of how internet service is provided by $ISP. It's written with the assumption that the reader knows what TCP window sizes, anycast routing and best-efforts networks are and which practical implications they have. If these terms are new to you, you probably want $USER_FRIENDLY_DOC."
I'm with you on the point that you shouldn't try to force your users to understand the technology (just as the car stereo salesman doesn't wax on/wax off about how frequency modulation works and the benefits of optical versus magnetic storage). But not having to explain something is different from having to not explain it. Why not make both groups of users happy?
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:4, Insightful)
So obvious that everybody knows about it and solves it.
It's not a problem. You size your infrastructure for peak demand. Yes, that peak demand tends to happen between 6PM and 11PM. Yes, a lot more people use their connection a lot more than they do at other times of the day. But no, that peak demand is still well below the theoretical maximum. If you oversell by sizing your network to average demand then, yes, you will fail hard. But if you oversell by sizing your network to actual peak demand then you will succeed in providing what you promise while still provisioning only a small fraction of the theoretical maximum usage.
The concept of overselling isn't very hard to grasp. I don't know why so many people here just don't get it. Aren't you people supposed to be smart?