Australian ISPs Claim Net Neutrality Is an 'American Problem' 363
RATLSNAKE writes "The heads of some of the most popular Australian ISPs were all interviewed over at ZDNet about Net Neutrality. For once, they all seem to agree, and they say it's a problem with the US business model, or the lack thereof. They discuss why they don't think it's an issue in Australia. Simon Hackett, the managing director of Adelaide-based ISP Internode, had this to say: 'The [Net neutrality] problem isn't about running out of capacity. It's a business model that's about to explode due to stress. ... The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity actually isn't necessarily the only way to live.' Of course, this also explains why we Australians do not have truly unlimited plans."
Not just a US problem. (Score:5, Informative)
Unlimited plans (Score:5, Informative)
> "Their problem is that unlike Australia, they [offer] truly unlimited plans."
Except that the following countries also provide unlimited plans: Canada, Japan, Korea, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore ...
Wait... if I am not mistaken, it is faster to list the (quasi-industrialised) countries, which don't provide unlimited plans: Australia, New Zealand.
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Unlimited plans (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:2, Informative)
I'm an Aussie and I love my ISP, iinet. (This is not a paid post, I'm simply giving credit where it's due).
They provide great customer service, their ADSL2 is always fast (unless I go over my monthly 45gb cap), they provide media services like I can watch EPL games streamed from their servers... ...and the best part is they tell companies like MediaSentry who demand personal information about users for alleged infringement to fuck off and get a warrant.
Some Aussie ISPs are still stupid, but there are a few very progressive ones who are well aware of issues like net neutrality, censorship, privacy, and who actively defend users rights.
Honestly I think the main complaint before was with "broadband" services that had 300mb (that's Mb) limits and then additional dollar charges for each mb (again, Mb) over that limit. Ridiculous. But now, it's much more sensible.
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, come on.
If you communicate within your ISP network, it would be the least cost, preferably 0 cost per packet.
If you communicate within the local network (peering ISP's, geographically local), it would be a low cost but non-zero.
If you communicate over large distances in which high utilization lines are used (undersea, satellite..) you have a high cost per packet.
One is only charged for sending, NOT receiving. This is usable using ONLY QoS already built in TCP/IP and could be set up per program or even per packet if the OS ever granted it.
Well, we see the bandwidth caps here in Oz, and the transatlantic cables are why there's caps and high costs. It costs a lot to communicate out of this island-continent.
The other thing is the local comm is free part: P2P sucks down every ounce of bandwidth. I'd rather have P2P coming from local than remote. It just makes sense.
Re:Unlimited plans (Score:3, Informative)
Canada is in the same situation as US, and there are often bandwidth caps too; Shaw for exampel have these plans:
High-speed internet Lite (256kbps with max 10GB/month) CAD $22/month (standalone $29.95)
High-speed (5mbps with max 60GB/month) CAD $32/month (standalone $40.95)
High-Speed Xtreme-I (10mbps with max 100GB/month) CAD $42/month (standalone $50.95)
High-Speed Nitro (25mbps with max 150GB/month) CAD $93/month (standalone 101.95)
Source http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/ [www.shaw.ca] (prices from each service sub-page)
Re:Unlimited plans (Score:1, Informative)
I live in the UK. I'm using an ISP with an unlimited plan [bethere.co.uk]. By unlimited, I mean COMPLETELY unlimited. I've regularly downloaded hundreds of GBs a month and never heard a word from them. And it's an ADSL2+ connection with no restrictions (i.e. if I live close enough to the exchange, I DO get 24Mbit down/1Mbit up - if I pay a little extra, I get 2Mbit up). And it's not overpriced, either. I currently pay £18 a month (A cheaper, ADSL1 plan that's still unlimited, is available) for this connection, albeit on top of line Rental because BT are a bunch of cunts.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm quite happy with my ISP.
I am with Optus, I get full ADSL2+ speeds and 20/40GB (20 peak, 40 off peak, and yes, peak is 12 noon to 12 midnight, off peak is the reverse).
I download enough to satisfy my needs, and the price is quite fair ($70 p/m).
I've only ever gone over my cap once, and that was to rebuild a Linux server for a mate.
I'd rather have a realistic cap than have some fucktard diddling with my packets.
As for "every Australian" you've ever talked to... what, is that a grand total of 5? I am a self confessed geek with lots of geek friends, we all love our ISPs because we're not idiots. We don't go for price, we go for quality and download capacity. I can only think of maybe 5 or 6 people I know that hate their ISP, and they aren't geeks - family members who didn't consult the family geek before getting their plan.
Net "neutrality" (I am still bewildered about how that term is valid) seems like a big excuse for ISPs in the US to punish their customers. I think the main downfall of the US is not having body like the TIO (http://www.tio.com.au/) to deal with ISPs fucking you over. I've had bad ISPs in the past that have tried to screw me, what do I do? Contact the TIO and have them fight my case for me. I don't go to court, I don't really need to do much other than contact them, give them details, and they do the investigations. They pull server logs, demand details of the case, and basically make the ISP think twice before dicking their customers. They don't enforce the laws, or even make them up, they are purely there to mediate cases. They have a "fee" structure that makes it hard for ISPs to see a net gain from screwing customers.
Case in point:
An ISP wasn't delivering advertised speeds for my connection, I said I wanted out due to false advertising. They returned saying I needed to pay AU$550 to release from the contract. Well, I wasn't going to take this laying down, so I went to the TIO. They investigated the case and ended up ruling in my favour. While they weren't fined (this is something for Fair Trading or Consumer Affairs, depending on the state), they were liable for AU$1500 in fees due to not responding at the first and second level of investigation. I ended up paying nothing, they ended up $2050 in the hole for being dickheads about it.
I digress, if you want to hear about people bitching about ISPs, talk to a Kiwi... or an American...
Re:Unlimited plans (Score:5, Informative)
Please. My quick search shows that the *vast* majority of Canadian ISPs have unlimited bandwidth. Most that do have bandwidth caps set it at a reasonably generous 200GB.
See: http://www.canadianisp.ca/cgi-bin/ispsearch.cgi [canadianisp.ca]
I have Teksavvy.com, which is $40/month (in Ontario, at least) for unlimited bandwidth.
It's only if you have the misfortune of subscribing to the services of a monopoly like Rogers or Bell that you'd be scraping the bottom of the ISP barrel. These companies profit by marketing to the ignorant masses, and peddling the lowest common denominator. The quality of their service is irrelevant, so long as it meets the basic expectations of a statistically significant segment of the masses.
Contrast this with the plethora of competitive ISPs in Canada who must compete on quality of service.
That's not to say that your area has much choice in ISP. However, if it's anywhere halfway urban, there ought to be at least one non-monopoly choice.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Net "neutrality" (I am still bewildered about how that term is valid) seems like a big excuse for ISPs in the US to punish their customers.
It's a big excuse for ISPs in the US who chose not to re-invest in their ifrastructure with the billions of tax break dollars they received in the past decade .
In particular, cable companies here have done nothing to improve their core. They kept ramping up the claimed speeds in the last mile, but never bothered to fix their core networking so it could handle all those leaf nodes at full speed. Pretty much every cable company in the US requires transit from some other ISP before they hit major backbones, and they pay dearly for that.
But, the ISPs that did any forward thinking and build out are not punishing their customers with total byte caps or speeds reduced from maximum.
The whole argument is a scam (Score:5, Informative)
I think the whole entire "Net Neutrality" argument is a scam. IMO it's about two things primarily:
First, I think it's about making a whole lot of money for, and giving corporate welfare/protectionism to large communications companies that have had plenty of the subsidies from the govt and taxpayers in the past - technology is making things they used to charge an arm and a leg for free, or practically free - look at VOIP for one - and every year the web and our networked society seems to progress more.
Second though, and more importantly, I think it is about control and censorship. The government and these large media conglomerates don't like that people can get any sort of unfiltered information they'd like from around the world in real time. They don't like the fact that people can get news up to the minute from anywhere on any subject that they are interested in that is likely less biased, more accurate, and less full of "agenda setting talking point spin" than they can from TV News* (which has really become absurd, it's Paris/Britney mixed with a health dose of paranoia-behavior-control). They don't like it that instead of having some fascist douche like Bill O'Reilly telling people "what the news means to them," people can either look it up on their own or find their own place full of smart people with diverse views to have conversations with (Slashdot being a perfect example).. They don't like how the net can be used as a tool for orgaqnization and mass communication by practically anybody.
When one of your main goals is control, and knowledge and information are pwoer - the internet is your enemy.
*Now everything I have stated as populist advantages to a free internet can also have their downsides, for example - not all news online is accurate, honest, agenda free - but compared to what you see on TV it is, especially if you are even halfway savvy consumer of media you can find it easily. Also, anything that can be used to spread information can also be used to disinform - but I don't think anything comes close to the amount of disinformation/one-sided information and societal control as network television does.
So these are the real drivers of anti-net neutrality: Money and control. All of this stuff about not having enough capacity, and how strained the internet is - those issues can be solved so many ways properly without creating a digital ghetto for non-corporate/big money websites.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Except that's not what net neutrality is. Net neutrality isn't about charging everyone the same price regardless of how much bandwidth they use, or requiring that everyone has unlimited network capacity. That's silly. It's not even about saying that certain types of traffic can't be prioritized over others -- net neutrality wouldn't prevent ISPs from throttling bit torrent, for example (though there is overlap in the people who support net neutrality and the people who oppose such throttling).
Net neutrality means that Microsoft can't pay your ISP to improve your bandwidth to MSN search while throttling the bandwidth to Google. Net neutrality means that your ISP is not allowed to charge you for bandwidth and then also charge websites to actually connect you to them. (Google is already being charged quite a lot for bandwidth.) Traffic of different types (web vs. bittorrent vs. whatever) can behave differently, but traffic from different sources should be treated the same, to avoid protection-racket style abuses (nice site you got there, it sure would be a shame if my 50 million subscribers were no longer able to reliably access it...)
So, no, net neutrality is not at all about all users paying the same amount regardless of their level of usage. But some of the ISP monopolies have managed to frame it that way by implying that the rules that would apply to destination sites (Yahoo vs. Google) are actually rules about individual subscribers (large versus small bandwidth demand from a single individual). The intent of net neutrality is that ISPs should only be charging for throughput at the network endpoints they control, not at both endpoints of all connections, so we don't end up quadruple-charging for every transmission (as opposed to the current double-charging, which is reasonable since it allows the two parties to the connection to share the cost of the bandwidth they both use).
Re:Unlimited plans (Score:2, Informative)
My Canadian ISP (MTS Allstream) gives unlimited plans. I download all kinds of stuff, and lots of it, and I've NEVER ONCE gotten an email or anything saying I've approached any kind of limit. I used to host my own website as well as FTP & SSH, no port blocking (other than 25), no complaints about that.
We used to have Shaw a number of years ago, and no issues with them either. I do, however, know some people who have received email saying "You've exceeded 100gb* transfer this month" (not sure on the exact number) but nothing comes of it unless you do it repeatedly, month after month after month... or at least that's what I've been told by a Shaw insider.
Either way, MTS seems pretty "unlimited" to me.
Re:What? (Score:2, Informative)
I pay a premium because I use the service more. It costs them to provide bandwidth, which I should be paying for if I am using it. Also the ISP I am with doesn't complain about P2P, they just explain that it is given lower priority than all other traffic and leave it at that. They also publish their total bandwidth utilisation so you can see when the shaping is occurring. Works well all up.
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No Shit (Score:4, Informative)
No, there is no cartel. What there is is one monopoly (Tel$tra) abusing its power and dictating to ISPs what those ISPs need to pay for access to the Tel$tra network.
To be considered a cartel, there would have to be some kind of deal done between the major players to deliberatly keep prices higher than they should be. The huge number of players in the DSL market means that that cant happen.
If there was a cartel and some kind of secret "lets keep the prices high" agreement, would we really see some of the deals coming from the likes of iiNet, Optus etc?
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
This already happens. I know of at least one colocation company that has different bandwidth caps for packets to the domestic exchange than packets that have to go abroad. Typically this is because their linkups are supplied by different companies, and the international link costs more.
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
>>>Come on. The United States is still the largest democracy.
I'm sure you posted this just to demonstrate how bad the Government Monopoly Schooling is in America. Right?
Or maybe you were demonstrating how Americans tend to think the whole world revolved around them. Right? Hello??? ;-) As already mentioned India is the largest, with the European Union being the second largest at 450 million citizens. I'm not sure who's third... is the Russian Federation more populous than the U.S.? I don't know without looking it up. In any case the U.S. is not the largest. (However if we annexed Canada we'd be number two again; maybe Obama will pursue that goal in 2010.)
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
>>>We have similar net connections in NZ and I don't see the problem. It is never a case of not being able to get what you want, it is a case of having to pay for it.
>>>
Precisely. I wouldn't mind paying $50 a month with a 100 gigabyte cap. I'd just download smaller files (70 megabyte tv shows) instead of the larger stuff. And if I hit my cap such that my access was cut-off for the rest of the month, I'd just use my backup 50k dialup account until October 1st came back around.
My fellow Americans do tend to make a big deal about small things, but I think that's a flaw with this entire "entitlement generation". I've heard a lot of university professors complain that young adults walk into a college classroom and expect to get an A just because they showed-up, and then they get yell at the prof, because he gave them a B. Likewise they expect to be able to download 1000 gigs while only paying $50 a month.
The world just doesn't work that way. You don't get something for nothing; you have to do the work and/or pay the cost.
Jeez.
I'm only 35 years old, and already I sound like my grandpa. ;-) Well at least I didn't have to walk to school in a snowstorm.
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:2, Informative)
Hardly. I know I don't. Sure, there's the elephant in the room that is the "deregulated" government monopoly called Telstra who maintain horrific price/quota ratios because they attract the people who don't know any better, and for whom the plans aren't that bad (relatively). Other ISPs like Internode and iiNet (the #2 and #3 suppliers, I think, although Optus might be in there somewhere) have reasonable plans as long as you know how much you're going to use. Go over the quota and you get your bandwidth reduced to a lower level.
The main problem that gets MMO-playing Aussies fired up is people complaining about latency, given our pings to the servers we have to play on that are almost invariably in the US.
Our government is also planning on an almost nation-wide FTTN network, something that should bump up the industry a bit as a lot of our infrastructure is still 100% copper wire-based. The net result of all this is not that we have the greatest plans (we definitely don't, and a lot of that is to do with the cost of laying the undersea cables to the US which gets passed right through to the consumers - unique to Aus and NZ), but the article is correct in that it means we don't have to worry about the Net neutrality issues directly.
Re:What? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
"The real problem is that ISPs don't encourage this, for example, by never throttling local connections and/or excluding that bandwidth from any caps."
Mr Nail, meet Mr Hammer
I am an unfortunate user of BigPond. While their service is generally reliable it is expensive, and capped.
What they do is arbitrarily provide some of their own sites that don't count towards your downloads which is great if you only want to visit their crappy sites but sucks for everything else.
They still count downloads to all other sites even those that are hosted within their own network
If for example I have a friend who is also a bigpond user and we decide to connect up for whatever reason, online gaming, voip, file transfers whatever, any bandwidth you use is still counted.
It also applies to other large commercial sites that are hosted on their servers. The site has to be "deemed" a free site by some bigpond marketing wonk or it counts as a download.
*If* they only charged you for downloads outside of their own network it would still suck, but at least it would be understandable.
*If* they made some peering agreements with large sites such as youtube et al which enabled them to host transparent mirrors of high bandwidth sites it would still suck, but suck less.
As things stand they are just ripping off their customers on the basis that they really have little alternative. Optus are totally fricking hopeless, the most incompetent bunch of retards ever to step into a data centre and everyone else pretty much just resells BigPonds bandwidth or operpriced frickin 3G crap with caps even lower than BP adsl
They all suck
Re:You are NOT paying enough to complain, STOP IT (Score:2, Informative)
This is a common misconception. Bandwidth is actually very, very cheap; if you use your full connection's worth of bandwidth, it costs only a tiny bit more than if you let it sit idle.
You're making some interesting assumptions there.
One of these is that the content you're downloading is close enough to you, that there's no significant cost incurred in getting it to your city.
When that's not the case (eg Australia, with $200 - $300 per Mbit costs on international links) there's one heck of a difference between the cost of an idle ADSL connection and one flatlined with International content.
Routers are cheap. In fact, thanks to Moore's Law, the price per unit bandwidth for a router falls exponentially over time.
However, as you need to handle more and more units of bandwidth, your overall cost keeps rising. Plus, the routers designed for backbone capacity links are specialised and expensive, you don't just buy them from your local Circuit City.
Fortunately, when you install fiber, you can install as much as you want for little extra cost.
once they've run the fibers, adding more bandwidth just means buying more cheap routers.
Aside from your (incorrect) assumption that routers are cheap, you're also assuming the fibre will run from router to router. Whilst this may be applicable on short distances, longer runs require repeaters every x miles. They're not that cheap either, and have to be added, upgraded or replaced to utilise additional fibre or newer technologies (eg higher DWDM rates).
In short, unless the content is in your city, there are significant costs in getting it to you, and generally the further away the content, the higher the cost.
Given the content trend outlined in the original article - that half the content is now coming into the US from offshore sources - the cost of getting that content to you is steadily increasing.
Even in the US, bandwidth is not as cheap as you seem to think it is. It's time the companies stopped trying to hide that, and started passing on some real costs to the end users, just like every other industry does.
prk
Re:You are NOT paying enough to complain, STOP IT (Score:1, Informative)
I buy bandwidth wholesale. The costs are definitely not "very, very cheap" (wholesale costs are often around $50-75/mb/month - not including connecting that bandwidth to your router). Even if you are a tier 1 provider, this is not cheap to do, even though you aren't buying anything wholesale from another provider - price what it costs to light a lambda on a fiber across the country sometime (excluding the cost of the fiber even). Make sure you include the staff to get to that hut 45 miles from anywhere you've heard of, so they can fix it when they break - oh, yes, also the equipment you need to locate and dig up your fiber to fix it when it gets damaged by an earthquake (note the ground has moved, so it's not where GPS says it should be anymore). Now price what that lambda to your neighborhood costs, so that you can get connected into this national network. And figure out how many people can fit on one lambda with no oversubscription. Now price the router that can router at wire speed for that lambda.
You might be surprised. There is a reason a business pays far more for a T1 line than a home user pays for 4 or 5 times the bandwidth - the home user isn't quite getting that bandwidth. Sure, ISPs should be up front about this, and that's the legitimate problem. The problem is not that ISPs are overcharing (the best run ISPs, from a business sense, make very little off of your DSL or cable modem connection, and actually can lose money if you use it as unlimited service).
I'd just assume go to an ISP that doesn't make me pay for users that use more bandwidth than me, and it makes sense for me to pay more than Grandma (who doesn't do anything but text email) uses.