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."
Re:Unlimited plans (Score:5, Interesting)
I had the same thoughts.
I would be much more interested in hearing what the top ten Japanese or Korean ISPs have to say about U.S. broadband.
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
fuck you have no clue. there is an existing previous monopoly that's fighting competition tooth and nail.
Re:The Australians miss the point. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's simple: You pay for 'unlimited' usage, and that means you get usage that is as unlimited as the resource permits.
And since that isn't really unlimited, there's a bit of a problem. You're paying for one thing, and they're providing something else. That's usually called "fraud" or "false advertising", and it tends to annoy people who want to actually know (and get) what they're paying for. That they probably put something like "unlimited doesn't mean what you think it does" in the fine print only matters from a legal "see, you can't sue us, nyah nyah" perspective, not a "this isn't what I paid for, you bastards" perspective.
Re:Shock and awe (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd even go as far as saying that downloading continuously at max capacity is somewhat immoral in itself, so long as you know that you are using far more than everyone else _and_ that it causes congestion problems. You are like the person founding a car wash next to the canal and saying that the contract stated unlimited access.
Some of us are paying for 3Mbps down/ 384kbps up, I see nothing immoral about actually using it. If the business did not anticipate that people would use what they pay a a premium on, then the business needs to change. We're not here to second guess them, if they offer a service, expect us to use it. They absolutely have, and always have had, the ability to regulate our bandwidth to the contracted rate. You won't get a penny more than you pay for.
It's very easy to caclulate the total "bytes" needed to accomodate this, although it's misleading to do so. Unlike your reservoir model, the actual limitation is the flow rate through the pipe, not the "available bytes". At certain times of the day the flow rate might be maxed out and they start dropping packets. More importantly they already have the models to know what they need to do to meet their capacity demands. No one can drain the reservoir, unless someone is selling a product he can't deliver on. Who wants to start that class action suit? Count me in.
The real issue is the networks are horribly out of date, since there has never really been a push to give customers better service, only service to more customers. The question they want to get answered is "who is going to fund upgrades?" because in a monopoly, you don't take the cost of upgrades out of your net profits, you make customers pay. On this I can't blame them, why should they suffer just to deliver a product that won't deliver a single extra dollar?
No, karma doesn't count, that they've been robbing us for half a century has been long forgotten, at least by them.
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not really a "conservative" but its nice of you to immediately try polarizing the conversation.
Are you serious about using public schools, law enforcement, public libraries, roads and post offices as examples of socialism "done right"?
For real? Maybe this is an American problem, but all of those groups have pretty poor records as far as efficiency goes.
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not against government, I'm against federal government. Most of these should be controlled at the local and state levels, not by the feds.
Let's see. The local library, the police, the fire department (we have a volunteer fire department) are all controlled locally. Those work. Federal programs rarely do.
Re:You are NOT paying enough to complain, STOP IT (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure the telcos prefer to give 'all you can eat' to everyone, and live with the fact that there is a percentage of people that will actually use their bandwidth 24x7, than charge a proportional amount.
At least in Spain, they charge a minimum (I think it's around 20 euros per month now) just for access, even if you don't use the service at all. And when you have 10 million lines, that's a lot of money. If they decide to switch to a pay per use model it's possible that the regulator makes the telcos reduce that outrageous 'just for having a line' fee.
They make good money, they have more or less 'social peace' with the customers (a few years ago a telco was by definition the enemy), and some of those bandwidth hungry users provide technical support to families which prefer to call them than the telco when things don't work.
Why change a successful model?
Whats the US isn't doing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Two reason for this one being their cheap bastard or their choice of internet wasn't their decision
It was forced on them cause their parents/room-mate. whom makes the decision choose an ISP because the ad was on TV alot or Telephone provider with a monpoly that offers bundled Voice/Data + Mobile on a single bill.
Most likely these people are on a lower income to afford good ISP plan or under-contract, out of contract and CBF churning to another ISP.
I pay $150 for 8mbit service. This pays for 80Gb Download Cap and unmetered/free content offered by my ISP. Unmetered content includes File mirror, Shoutcast local relays, Large Gaming Network, Mirroring large media content (Revision3 and other online media)
US ISP don't do currently is investing in their network. Building array of unmetered content/services or build dedicated gaming networks/communites for customers.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
i completely agree with you. the way i see it, the larger a government gets (in terms of the size of the population it governs) the less democratic it becomes, not only due to bureaucratic inefficiencies which are incurred as an organization increases in size, but also because of the logistical problems presented by trying to satisfy such a large population.
there's a huge political spectrum covering the vast American cultural landscape. that diversity is one of our strengths. however, being part of one large nation creates a single political hegemon which rules over this diverse cultural landscape. it's impossible to homogenize such a vast population spread over such a large geographical area, and even if it were possible, it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.
i think it would be preferable to adopt the European model, whereby "states" are actually states, but their political autonomy and cultural diversity do not prevent them from working together to achieve common interests through the European Union. you could still have federal-level initiatives, for things like FEMA, but they would be run as international agencies similar to UNICEF or the IPCC.
Re:Only addresing half the problem with socializat (Score:1, Interesting)
Unless you tax the citizenry to heinous proportions, there is only a limited government budget to deal with.
I live in Sweden - we pay an exorbitant amount of tax - something like a 56% income tax, with a nice 25% sales tax and then a 400% tax on alcohol - and believe me when I say that the Swedish government still have a quite limited budget to deal with. We can't even afford to buy a single Stealth Bomber.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that P2P is holding us back, and unfortunately current P2P systems aren't "smart" enough to prefer local connections over long distance ones (which might actually be a trivial fix, but I don't know enough about the inner workings of Bittorrent and others
Ah, but they already are, to a large extent, based on three principals:
1. (Almost) All P2P systems will prefer high bandwidth and/or low-latency peers. These tend to be the ones that are local.
2. I've seen plugins/mods to several popular clients including eMule and Vuze that do a version of this by IP address look up.
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.
I don't want to start getting charged different rates per country, but might not be so offended by a bandwidth cap if it excluded local peers; particularly if the ISP actively facilitated taking advantage of this feature.
Net Neutrality Not An Issue, Perhaps, But.... (Score:2, Interesting)
I love Australia and New Zealand, but a consequence of pervasively metered internet service means that you must check what an AU/NZ hotel means by "internet access". As one of the bandwidth hogs who (for example) downloads podcasts and uploads pictures, I found that it was startlingly easy to hit some limits. Further, the limits can bite you.
When checking a hotel in a country like AU or NZ, be sure and ask:
For markets to work, both sellers and buyers must be sharp dealers when it comes to pricing. At least once I changed hotels when "unlimited internet" turned out to be "unlimited in the sense that there's no upper limit on how much we'll charge you." After that, I made sure to have a tediously detailed conversation about internet pricing when choosing hotels.
I think hotels *should* charge by the bit if they want to -- I just think that they'll have to get by without my patronage -- just like a hotel that wanted to charge extra for towels, by the liter for hot water and toilet flushing, and by the joule for electricity (including elevator rides!) would find me checking out quickly, or more likely, never staying there.
If you don't want this sort of regime, use your wallet to try to stop it -- hunt around, find hotels and service providers who say things like "No, we used to charge by the bit, but it turned out to be a source of bad feeling, and not worth the money".
It's not inevitable that we'll wind up with by-the-bit pricing -- but it's inevitable that bean-counters will try it. And, who knows? Maybe that is the way things should work. But right now, you have a choice.
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe basing a whole country's state of development on two people you know in an online game isn't a great idea? Why do you think it would be so different over here anyway?
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Come on. The United States is still the largest democracy.
But the point is that net neutrality is indeed an American issue. It was not the first time that an issue was raised and turned down by the lobby but net neutrality is very proactive. It is like an open source preference and Microsoft starts to lobby against it and then you complain that you don't get it. It gets stronger as the lobby fights against it.
Net neutrality is the dominant pratice worldwide. Do we need to codify it? ...no But could be fun to keep the Telco lobby busy.
The Europeans explicitly endorsed the net neutrality this month in the forward looking Toia report [europa.eu].
Europeans don't have a real net neutrality debate but it sounds good, so politicians adopt it.
Re:Those are counterexamples? (Score:2, Interesting)
"hey, that's just about the right number of people and they are all working diligently"
I used to work in construction, including heavy & highway. It's kind of a unique industry in that absolutely every member of the general public thinks they know exactly what we're doing and how to do it faster. I mean, what's to know about repairing a suspension bridge? Throw down some concrete, slap on some asphalt, and you're done, right?
Imagine trying to work while a long conveyor belt of PHB's coast by in cars, every 20th one or so shouting "advice".
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>The problem is that this idea undermines one of the main points of net neutrality, to make as many parts of the Internet as free and easily accessible as others
I disagree. My understanding of "net neutrality" is that all packets will be treated identically, regardless of where they came from, or where they are going. It has nothing to do with providing cheap service. It's about not censoring access (such as Comcast giving nbc.com packets low priority).
>>> "The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity isn't the only way to live."
I agree. IMHO internet should be just like phone calls or electricity usage or gasoline purchases. The more you use, the more you pay. If grandma downloads 1 gigabyte of emails, charge her $7 a month (current rate on Netscape dialup). If a younger person watches 100 gigabytes of Internet TV, charge them $50 a month (Comcast's lowest rate). And if someone like me goes nuts & downloads 500 gigabytes a month, then charge me $150 a month.
There's no need to prioritize or deprioritize packets based-upon application (example: comcast.com gets highest priority, while nbc.com gets lowest priority). Just vary the prices according to each user's demand, and then use the excess funds to purchase extra T1 lines as needed to avoid congestion.
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well I disagree about limiting the gatekeepers. Imagine if every home had 10 different ISPs he could choose from. It would mean "buying" an ISP is like buying a TV - it's just a commodity, and the only real difference is price. You'd have true competition.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I'm on what is considered a very good plan for Australia. Optus Cable, 20GB peak/40GB off-peak (off-peak is 12 midnight to 12 noon), 10Mbps down/256kbps up (though in practice it's really about 7Mbps down). After all my peak usage is used I get shaped to 64kbps down/up (and my extra off-peak becomes unavailable). If I use up all my off-peak it starts taking from my peak usage. No free sites - all traffic counts towards my usage no matter the source. I pay about AU$70/month for this service (which BTW is very reliable - my only real issue with it is the pitiful upload speed). It's a grandfathered plan - you can't get it anymore but I'm allowed to stay on it - the new plans are much less friendly (value for money for net access has been trending downwards in Australia over the last few years).
I find your definition of "application" strange - I would have thought "application" would refer to type of traffic, rather than source.
I want ISPs to prioritise traffic based on type, just I do at my end. I use cFosSpeed [www.cfos.de] to prioritise real-time applications (VOIP) highest, things requiring low latency (e.g. web browsing) next, and things which aren't particularly time-dependent lowest (e.g. downloads, P2P).
Most of the time, P2P runs at full speed, because there's nothing else going on. But as soon as something else starts using the net, P2P slows down - and then quickly speeds up again as soon as the higher-priority activity stops.
I'd love ISPs to do the same thing, so my VOIP calls were at the highest priority end-to-end. ISPs should never prevent any type of traffic, but I'm very happy for them to reduce the performance of applications that are not significantly time-dependent so that significantly time-dependent traffic is preferred. I'll still get my downloads - it'll just take a little longer.
I'd also be in favour of per-megabyte charging, so long as it's at a reasonable rate (not $150/GB as Telstra charges for excess usage!), and that you can set a cap after which you get shaped to low speeds, at which point you have to go to a secure web site and set a new cap for that month only (or something along those lines).
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
(Almost) All P2P systems will prefer high bandwidth and/or low-latency peers. These tend to be the ones that are local.
I am a heavy Bittorrent user in Seattle, USA, and I think you're wrong. I have noticed that the fastest and most reliable peers/seeds tend to be European or Asian, even when I'm downloading American TV shows or the Presidential debates.
Possibly because their residential connections aren't limited to 128kbps upload.
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>I want ISPs to prioritise traffic based on type
That seems logical, but given how companies like Comcast act, they'd decide that the NBC.com "type" or the CWTV.com "type" should be given low-priority simply because it competes with Comcast's own television sales. It is better, I think, to simply tell ISP's to ignore the content. Be neutral.
Rather than have the ISP control traffic, let the sender adjust dynamically to congestion. For example CWTV.com's video player is constantly fluctuating from 128k to 500kbit/s based upon changing conditions. (BTW Voice-over-Internet is hardly a demanding application. I don't about your country, but in the U.S. telephones are only 56k wide. That's all you really need for voice-quality connections over VoIP.)
And finally, ISPs need to stop being lazy. They should be constantly upgrading the network & adding more bandwidth. I get the impression ISPs want to just sit on their butts & "freeze" capacities at current levels rather than add more. So they are trying to limit usage, rather than expand.
Re:Well.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of the ISPs joined onto PIPE Networks in Australia have free traffic between them. It comes up in your traffic usage but under a different heading that doesn't contribute to the monthly limit.
This makes all traffic within the ISP and most of Australia free, but everything else outside that network counts.
Re:Well.. (Score:2, Interesting)
They still count downloads to all other sites even those that are hosted within their own network
They still have to get that data from person A to person B. That involves back haul costs, particularly if you aren't localised on the same networking gear (ADSL concentrator, etc). Telstra run a lot of their own back haul so the costs would likely be less, but a lot of other ISPs don't.
If you're on fibre you're usually sharing the bandwidth with everyone in your neighbourhood so free data to people in your street might seem good to you, but it is actually detrimental because there is only a finite amount of bandwidth to play with.
Adam Internet provide a cool service to users on the same ADSL gear. They call it 'Community Net' and basically if you're on the same ADSL concentrator then you can set up a second virtual connection on a network that is private to that gear. It means you get free data (doesn't leave the concentrator so they don't have to provide back haul for it) to some people in your neighbourhood. It's also not supported so if it breaks you're S.O.L.
Internode provide a neat file mirror with a bunch of useful things. The common Linux distros are on there, as are a bunch of useful Windows tools. It's too bad they can't provide Windows updates as well because that would be cool. Internode also have a bunch of 'radio' reflectors for some streaming stations that don't count toward your usage cap. That's a neat feature because there's something in there to cater for almost everyone.
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but for most ISP's other than Bigpond, a scheme called "shaping" is in place for nearly all plans, so that when you exceed your download limit, your internet speed gets slowed to 64kbps for the remainder of the month (as opposed to paying for any excess you use). Bigpond have slowly been introducing their plans that "feature" unlimited downloads (shaping) - which have been a defacto standard for most other ISP's for long before. Bigpond sales have also been known to flat out refer to these "Liberty" plans as "unlimited downloads", without explaining the concept of shaping (believe me - I have had to explain this to several people).
As a subsidiary of the previously state-owned monopoly, Bigpond is a joke. I went from 256kbps @ 12GB for $60AU per month (believe me - not my choice) with Bigpond, to ADSL2+ speeds (realistically for me: 1MB/s~) @ 21GB (now 30GB) for $60AU a month with my current ISP (iiNet [iinet.net.au]). On top of that, Bigpond tends to be rated far lower in customer service (see: here [whirlpool.net.au]) than most other ISPs.