First European Provider To Break Net Neutrality 343
Rik van der Kroon writes "Major Dutch cable provider UPC has introduced a new network management system which, from noon to midnight, for certain services and providers, caps users' bandwidth at 1/3rd of their nominal bandwidth (Google translation; Dutch original here). After the consumer front for cable providers in The Netherlands received many complaints about network problems and slow speeds, UPC decided to take this as an excuse to introduce their new 'network management' protocol which slows down a large amount of traffic. All protocols but HTTP are capped to 1/3 speed, and within the HTTP realm some Web sites and services that use lots of upstream bandwidth are capped as well. So far UPC is hiding behind the usual excuse: 'We are protecting all the users against the 1% of the user base who abuse our network.'"
What they mean: (Score:5, Insightful)
'We are protecting all the users against the 1% of the user base who use our network.'
Re:What they mean: (Score:5, Interesting)
Kinda like the old overbooking of flights.
I used to see the excuse:
We overbook our flights to save you money because some poeple don't show. So for that 1% that hurt our business we have to lie and sell you a service that we cannot possibly deliver on.
Just like the ISPs that overbook their network by selling a service that they could never deliver if all the poeple decided to show up at once and try and use their tier of 10/1.5 or whatever they pay for every month.
So the bet that not everybody will use the service doesn't pay off when some people regularly try and use what they have purchased. They get turned away at the gate or get 1/3rd of the service they paid for or even just get cut off. All for paying for a service and thinking that they have a right to use it.
Re:What they mean: (Score:5, Insightful)
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If they overbook your flight they give your money back. If ISPs paid back w/e % you had taken away we'd see less complaints.
or they book you first class on the next flight.
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What happens if the next flight is overbooked? Eventually you would have to have a plane dedicated to the people who have been waiting.
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No what would happen is that they'd just keep pushing everyone backwards, until towards the end of the day some guy who was supposed to leave at 11 p.m. gets to ride on the near-empty midnight plane instead.
It's kinda similar to how the doctor's office works, shoving everyone backward in time but still managing to see all his patients' that same day, even if the last patient doesn't leave until 2 hours past the official 5 p.m. closing time.
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No what would happen is that they'd just keep pushing everyone backwards,
What they actually do is ask for volunteers at each flight that are OK with being bumped. If you are bumped one flight someone else at the second flight may accept being bumped so you can fly, or you can accept being bumped again for additional compensation. Of course if they think that chain might occur they start out asking for people willing to be bumped a whole day or so to avoid the extra cost of multiple compensations.
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Sounds like somebody's been flying business or full-flex economy. The regular tickets definately either don't let you do that at all or against a high fee.
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They sold the tickets to those 1% and get the money whether they show up or not. A more accurate statement would be "we overbook our flights to (save you money and/or make more profit) because we can - 1% of people don't show up, an
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When I said "they sold 3X as much bandwidth as they should have", I'm not talking about a wost-case scenario. I didn't mean "they oversold their bandwidth by 3X when they should not have oversold at all." That's not realistic. I meant they oversold to the extent that users are regularly unable to use more than 1/3rd of their nominal bandwidth. They are not meeting their commitments during condit
Re:What they mean: (Score:5, Insightful)
Fun facts: If everyone in your neighborhood with a land line picked up the phone right now and tried to make a call, probably only 10% to 20% of them would succeed. If everyone in the average American suburb all hopped in their car and tried to get on the road to the nearest Interstate, it'd be gridlock. Traffic would move at speeds no where near the posted limits. We're surrounded by shared resources with capacity that reflects typical usage with a reasonable amount of head room for "normal" peaks, but is far from being able to support the maximum theoretical demand.
Airlines overbook because a certain %age of customers don't show up, and that %age is large enough and stable enough that it makes sense to do so. When too many people do show up for a flight, the airline pays penalties (in the form of travel vouchers and upgrades), so there's incentive to be conservative in the practice. Everyone benefits overall, though. More people get flown from point A to point B. If the airlines sell more seats on a given flight, then they can charge less per seat too.
ISPs are no different. They purchase bandwidth based on a model of "reasonable" network usage and how many subscribers they have. The major difference, though, is that it's very easy for someone to fall well outside the "reasonable" traffic usage. It's quite possible for 1% of the users to take up the majority of the network bandwidth. And I can see this being considered "unreasonable," and the ISP taking steps to make sure that the other 99% of users have a reasonable experience.
What I don't like is that ISPs can advertise something as "unlimited" or as running at a certain speed, when it clearly is limited, and the advertised speed is only a peak speed available in small doses. At least airlines are required to disclose their overbooking policy.
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Re:What they mean: (Score:4, Interesting)
And of course, everyone in that 1% has to be someone abusing the network.... There is no such thing as a household with multiple people using different computers wanting to watch legal videos.
Something that always amazes me is that a university with 20,000 students on a 100mbit (or sometimes less) line can manage to do network shaping, etc. correctly but ISPs in even small towns cannot.
One major thing that the university I go to does: you have to OPT IN to file sharing access. No big deal, you just say I need it for whatever legal reason and they activate it.
This would also reduce the random kids connecting to file sharing networks (their parents, in theory, would have to activate it).
It would also reduce the number of people who break into some unsecured wifi network to download because there wouldn't be as many networks that had the ability to file share.
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For a subscriber to use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, such a bandwidth peak would have to be a sustained bandwidth peak.
There really should be different plans to cater to the hard-core users vs. the typical users. You have your average web surfer browsing You-Tube occasionally, or downloading the latest stuff off of iTunes or what have you, and then you have the hardcore folks that are streaming HD non-stop. Makes sense to me that you'd want to move the latter guys onto a different plan wit
Re:What they mean: (Score:4, Interesting)
Read the summary again: they aren't throttling all traffic for a given protocol; they're throttling traffic based on what site it's to. This nicely sets the stage for the next phase: charge said sites to un-throttle traffic. Fortunately said sites can play the game too and put up a special page to users connecting from this ISP explaining that the site is slow because the ISP is making it so, and that they can get better service by switching ISPs.
Re:What they mean: (Score:4, Insightful)
There are some major differences between all those shared resources you list, and those of ISP's though:
1. With ISP's, you pay for different speeds. If you pay for (say) 1000kb/s but it is known in advance that you will only ever receive 333kb/s, that effectively means they have just raised their prices by a factor three.
2. Rather than giving everyone _at least_ one third of their paid-for speed, and then spreading the remainder evenly over the various customers, you are simply capped. In fact I suspect that even that promised one third of the paid-for speed is on an "if available" basis.
3. The phrase "abuse" is thrown around lightly, and there is a clear undertone of "illegal". These are probably the kind of people downloading illegal movies and childpr0n all day long! Cap them, before they do even more harm! Or... Maybe they have subscribed to a legal movie download service? One that competes with UPC's own TV offerings? (UPC is actually a cable TV provider, that also does internet on the side!)
Simple fact: UPC is advertising certain speeds [www.upc.nl], but not delivering them. And it's not even because of oversubscription (as in the examples you gave), but simply because they don't want to.
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Could you provide a reference? I tried digging through The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (available here [fcc.gov]). Looking through the combined 335 page behemoth (Communications Act of 1934 as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996), I couldn't find the needle in that haystack.
I've heard different numbers over the years for different parameters. For example, that some phone companies strive for "five 9s" service. That is, 99.999% of the time, when you pick up the phone, you'll get a dialtone. That servi
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What I find funny is if my ISP did that, capped stuff to 1/3rd the speed... It'd still be twice as fast as the DSL service I paid the same price for a little while ago.
Re:What they mean: (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that they told me that up front (and I chose my plan based on my own usage history) makes me quite content even with the caps.
Re:What they mean: (Score:4, Interesting)
We have that in Belgium too. Once you're over your bandwidth "allowance", you pay extra; or in parts of 5/5GB (which you need to readjust before the end of the month or you'll get rebilled as you're "altering your plan") or something as x /x KB.
Once users get through their monthly usage, they are presented to "continue surfing at broadband speed" (most expensive and per KB's), "expand monthly usage" or "continue at 56K".
People overpay alot for it with this system, some plans only have 20G which isn't too much for a month. If you take into account you pay 20 for "1 Mbps | 1GB" up to 60 for "25 Mbps | 60 GB" (current exchange rate between and $ is 1 to 1,4)
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Which company is this and where?
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Well technically "bandwidth" is the width of your line in terms of frequency. I don't know what it is for cable, but for my DSL it's somewhere around 500 megahertz with the bottom 8 kilohertz set-side for the voicecalls and the rest used for data.
50 kbit/s is the *bitrate* that's available over an 8 kilohertz-wide phoneline. Higher bitrates for DSL or cable.
And the GB/month would be the maximum data allowance, aka data cap.
Re:What they mean: (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny that. Is the 1% P2P users, or is the the new breed of people watching video's online? If I remember the last graph that Teksavvy tossed out of their current breakdown of net traffic, people watching streaming media of all types accounted for around 50% of their net traffic.
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its kind've irrelivant too this discusion, dont' you think.
You dam grammer/spelling/e.t.c. nazzies.
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They're aiming for douchebag of the week award. To think, it's only Sunday. Amazing how time flies when you're having fun, smiling, singing, and imaging what the world would be like without idiots.
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According to the grammar rules of your "dialect", wouldn't it be "bleed's", not "bleeds"?
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>>> /grammar nazi
In my dialect we just abbreviate this as "ass"
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I'd like to be able to go to a local park and hike the nature trail. If the trail is cordoned off for a race every once in a while, I'll skip it then. If it's cordoned off for a race every weekend, that's a problem. I'll expect the park rangers to reject requests which too frequently occupy the park's resources to the exclusion of people like me.
1% of the network's users take action with protocols like bittorrent which fully occupy the network to the exclusion of folks who just want to check their webmail a
More intelligent ways (Score:2, Insightful)
There must be more intelligent ways of handling this. For instance, someone who downloads more than so many GB a day can be throttled or capped individually. That shouldn't be too hard, I think.
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I download a TON of stuff. I would happily accept a speed throttle.
Of course if they charge you by gigabyte over the cap they make more money than just throttling you.
Sure (Score:2)
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Whether that argument is right or wrong, the two situations combined (the one in this article and the one I'm laying out in this post) equate to a catch 22 for the ISP. The ISP's only remaining choice is to drastically lower promised speeds, but that's a marketing disaster, and really a technical one as well, since most people do sometimes us
Re:Sure (Score:5, Interesting)
No, /. (and most net-savvy user websites) gets pissy when they go after the 1% because after all, they agreed to X Mbps, they should get to use that 100% of the time.
Whether that argument is right or wrong, the two situations combined (the one in this article and the one I'm laying out in this post) equate to a catch 22 for the ISP. The ISP's only remaining choice is to drastically lower promised speeds, but that's a marketing disaster, and really a technical one as well, since most people do sometimes use the top speeds, but don't do so regularly - makes them happy to have it available when needed though.
Actually, I get pissy because I purchased a connection advertised as an "unlimited" connection at a certain speed. "Unlimited", as in, "without limit". When they then turn around and say "There's a limit", but still advertise the service as "unlimited", their advertising is not truthful.
If ISPs want to sell limited internet connections, they have every right to do that, but they should advertise them as such.
I also don't buy the "We build our infrastructure for anticipated usage..." bit. If this "1%" of users routinely exists, you factor them into your anticipated usage when deciding how much you need to build. Then, you build enough capacity for actual anticipated usage. You don't just ignore those users, hope they go away, and then be shocked and claim to need to throttle when your capacity doesn't meet your demand.
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"Now if it really is one percent of the users who abuse it, go after them, not everyone else."
They point being that since it's the ISP the one that configures speed limits and router negotiation I can't see a way to abuse it but sort of cracking their routers and I don't think that's what the "1 per cent" they are talking about are in fact doing.
If they promise 24x7 X upload/Y download bandwith, they well damn provide that and there's no abuse when I in fact use what they promised me. If they can't stand b
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"For instance, someone who downloads more than so many GB a day can be throttled or capped individually. That shouldn't be too hard, I think."
For instance, they could be compliant with the fucking contract we both agreed on that says 24x7 X bandwith upload Y bandwith download. If they can't stand by those terms (that, contrary to me, they were absolutly free to choose), then they can change for their next contract agreement or upon renoval at termination of mine. Then they could be not blatant liers and s
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What's to stop me from using port 80 for things other than http?
Not a god damn thing that's what.
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Packet inspection. Unless of course you encrypt the data 100% both ways but then they just block port 80 because you aren't allowed to run a web server.
People talk about using TOR, etc. for P2P but at least last I checked they specifically request that you NOT use TOR for those purposes as it puts too much strain on the network.
Re:Not capping, investing (Score:5, Insightful)
They actually have decent infrastructure.
The problem is that recently UPC started selling up to 120mbps (EUR 70,- per month) connections in a market were nobody can even come close to that. ADSL maxes out at 20mbps. In their advertisements they make that speed a issue.
In a market like this you can expect the kind of customers you draw in with an offer like this are the ones who actually want to use that speed. Knowing that, making such an offer anyway and then apply bandwidth throttling is nothing short of fraud.
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Right now I'm with AAISP, who offer ADSL2 in my area. I have 100GB evening, 2GB daytime useage per month at whatever speed I can get on my connection, frequently over 8Mb. I work during the day, so this works out very well for me.
Re:Not capping, investing (Score:5, Insightful)
How about sharing homemade pictures, movies, music, free games, software, etc, not to mention playing games, uploading other types of files not via http, how about ftp, ssh, some other network, etc...
Some of the several games I play the maps can be 50 megs or bigger, the same goes with patches, hell I've seen some patches that are bigger than a couple hundred megs, oh and what about demo's and such, not to mention getting full games, like through say steam or some other provider, a demo I got was like 600 megs, and several full games are easily greater than 2 gigs, most being around 4 gigs or so, so gaming is easily an excuse (not that you should need one in the first place) for using high amounts of bandwidth and transfer.
At least they aren't complete idiots from what I read and don't throttle http, because then how am I supposed to watch my 10,000 youtube videos per day?
Oh and don't get me started on them investing in a better infrastructure, no no that'd cut into their precious bonus's to much, that's one reason right there that most if not all suits (read executives) will ever have any respect from me, because to them it's all about their bonus's and the grunts (read anyone below them) are only fodder for their meat grinders.
I use UPC (Score:3, Interesting)
I use UPC in Austria. I don't think this is anything new. They been fucking with my bandwidth for ages.
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You use that word... (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought Net Neutrality was to prevent ISPs from filtering and controlling content, not protocols and speeds?
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Technically, "net neutrality" refers to the traffic being completely agnostic about what a packet is--phone, video, http, etc.
Most of the insidious scenarios painted by the loss of neutrality do relate to content filtering--ie, Comcast makes a deal with Amazon and gimps the connections to, say, Powell's dodgy enough customers just think Amazon is the place to shop.
If it's really as described in this case, for bandwidth management, I personally don't think it's all that scary. There are issues about transpa
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Technically, "net neutrality" refers to the traffic being completely agnostic about what a packet is--phone, video, http, etc.
No, it absolutely does not. Net Neutrality only refers to filtering or throttling based on source or destination. Prioritizing VoIP traffic over BitTorrent traffic is not a Net Neutrality issue. Throttling Vonage's VoIP traffic to make your ISP's VoIP service more attractive is a Net Neutrality issue.
Re:You use that word... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it absolutely does not. Net Neutrality only refers to filtering or throttling based on source or destination. Prioritizing VoIP traffic over BitTorrent traffic is not a Net Neutrality issue. Throttling Vonage's VoIP traffic to make your ISP's VoIP service more attractive is a Net Neutrality issue.
I agree. The redefinition of network neutrality to include traffic type is a marketing scheme, no more. It allows providers to say "Net neutrality is not bad. We use it to slow down abusive users." This makes the debate about a straw man - it's harder to object to this behavior than real neutrality violations. By making the debate about peer-to-peer and streaming traffic taking bandwidth away from other users, they sidestep the real issue of giving privilege to certain content providers over others.
Again: The people who want to define network neutrality to include this behavior are not on your side. They want you to use that definition so they can control the debate. If they win the debate, we the netizens lose, and we lose a lot.
This is an important issue that could well help direct the culture of the technologized* world for a long time - possibly centuries, but certainly decades. Do we want content approved and delivered mainly by large central providers, like with television, or the free-for-all we have today? I choose the latter.
* Don't you think it's time we stopped saying "industrialized"?
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You mean, like this type of behavior described in TFS?
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I thought Net Neutrality was to prevent ISPs from filtering and controlling content, not protocols and speeds?
That's true, but if the summary is accurate (I know, I know), they appear to be throttling certain HTTP traffic because the site supposedly uses too much bandwidth.
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"within the HTTP realm some Web sites and services that use lots of upstream bandwidth are capped as well."
Sounds like it fits the bill perfectly....
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If your ISP throttles YouTube down to a speed where you can no longer watch a video without waiting half an hour for it to buffer (hi Virgin Media), then that pretty effectively blocks their content.
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Definition of: Net neutrality (NETwork neutrality) A level playing field for Internet transport. It refers to the absence of restrictions or priorities placed on the type of content carried over the Internet by the carriers and ISPs that run the major backbones. It states that all traffic be treated equally; that packets are delivered on a first-come, first-served basis regardless from where they originated or to where they are destined.
From http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=Net+neutrality&i=55962,00.asp [pcmag.com] (yes, I know I probably could have found a better site, but didn't feel like Wikipedia would have enough credibility for this AC). This violates net neutrality because HTTP is being favored over FTP, P2P, and a whole host of other protocols.
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But that definition talks about major backbones, about enforcing such rules on wider scale; it doesn't fit this scenario, sorta fits to what jmknsd says.
Yeah, I think he's right - while not a correct behavior, let us not put this into "net neutrality" bag. If only because it trivialises the issue of net neutrality to "those damn leechers soaking everybody's bandwidth" (if you think about it, those pushing for "real" net neutrality breaches would very much like that...)
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Without net neutrality, your ISP can then charge the other ISP or it's customers to send and receive the traffic you've already payed for (this is the massive fucking flaw in the claim that these companies are "stealing all the ISP's bandwidth": it's already been payed for).
Imagine that, in an attempt to "come up with new and innovate ways of providing network s
In unrelated news... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really not a joke, I suspect something like this will happen.
The only way they'll be able to completely stop torrents and warez downloading would be to cut off internet access entirely.
Never underestimate nerds who want to fix something, even if they have to resort to TCP/IP over Carrier Pigeon.
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Might as well. It seems to me, their real problem is they oversold their bandwidth, and the proper thing to do is to reprice bandwidth usage. Stop bullshitting the customers with promise of bandwidth they can't deliver.
Yeah, that would suck in marketing aspect. Again might as well. If a company actually uttered a truth, it just might shock some of us into death by heart attack.
There's got to be a better way (Score:3, Insightful)
Couldn't they instead perform a kind of load-balancing based on the actual bandwidth being consumed by each customer, regardless of protocol or destination? As far as I'm concerned, that's the only way to do QOS without violating the principle of network neutrality.
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Or, they could just charge by the bit, like every other utility (water, gas, electricity).
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I think you mistook my comment to suggest a high per-bit price. There are lots of ways to charge for bandwidth utilization, the 95%ile method being one of them.
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Enron's marketplace concerned long-haul pipes. The market for last-mile connections is quite different, and is where most of the congestion is, because telcos are cheap and laying new fiber to leaf nodes (i.e., homes and small businesses) is expensive.
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And I already wanted to go to another ISP (Score:2, Insightful)
Move along now, nothing to see here!
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Are you sure contract can hold you, considering that it probably mentions also speed, which has now changed?
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You need a contract for internet access? Jesus. I can just call my ISP and say "Shove it. Cheers!"
A little cultural understanding here please? (Score:4, Funny)
After all, where did the term "going Dutch" come from?
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trying to bring fun into this talk (Score:2, Funny)
Huh ?
A Dutch provider messes with the network ?
What are they smoking ?
Not filtering by destination (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't like filtering by protocol: I would get pissed off if my ssh sessions were slowed down.
I *used* to be UPC customer (Score:2, Insightful)
In the short time that I've been UPC customer, I have been thoroughly dissatisfied with their service. Too many outages, and a paid helpdesk who weren't competent enough to do anything but reading from scripts. Quite the difference from when I was with XS4all- slightly more expensive, but what a difference. Competent people there (met them at HIP back in '97). Never needed the helpdesk as the connection *just worked*. Always. Now that I live abroad, I've got similar experiences. Goodbye BT- I hope you've le
Soo they oversell their network (Score:2)
So Just tunnel over HTTP (Score:2, Insightful)
Dutch ISP mini-review (Score:2)
Compared to the US, I guess we're doing better, but these are my options as I currently see them in Amsterdam.
Everytime I change ISPs, it is to get more bandwidth for less cost. I'm just finishing a ADSL 2 year contract with Tele2 and was seriously considering UPC. Still am, but this news sucks. UPC also has extraordinarily bad customer service. Bad in a legendary way.
There are loads of ADSL ISPs offering 20mb down/ 1up, with phone & TV for 30 euros a month. UPC uses the city coax network and DOCSIS 3.0
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Forgot to mention, real-life speeds:
While I pay for 20 mps down, I'm lucky to get 10 mbs down. Usually around 7.5 mps download is average, and about .6 mps up. This is with Tele2 ADSL, but I think all Dutch ADSL is the same now.
Any other consumers out there willing to compare? At least ADSL can be bought cheap here.
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Sounds like your ISP is overselling its bandwidth.
In the UK it's the same sort of situation.. you can get up to 24Mbps* (theoretically.. most people get around 16 due to distance from the exchange) but not all ISPs are equal. There are some *really* cheap deals out there eg. £9.99 'unlimited' (subject to limits**), but if you go with such an ISP be prepared to deal with nonexistant customer support, huge latency and massive slowdowns especially in the evenings. Alternatively you can go with a more p
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60 down and 1 up is a joke. There is no way that you are going to be able to effective use much more than 10 mbps down with only 1 mbps up.
And since when did net neutrality have anything to do with traffic shaping? Net neutrality is when all destinations are treated equally, not all protocols.
If you are on a net that has both tcp and udp traffic (the entire internet) you are already making protocol choices.
Re:Dutch ISP mini-review (Score:5, Interesting)
Errr, what? Seriously, I'd do some research first - unless you're using really small TCP packets, you should easily be able to manage 20:1 if not 50:1. With a non-acknowledged protocol such as UDP, you can increase that to over 100:1.
Just because you're using a vastly inefficient method to download your "must-have" illegal TV-rips, doesn't mean we get to blindly accept your facts.
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There's a misunderstanding. One of UPC's package is 60mps down which I am considering is, 6 up. Just to be clear.
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"Everytime I change ISPs, it is to get more bandwidth for less cost."
Everytime I chanhge ISPs, it is to get more *claimed* bandwidth *that it could be called "abuse" if I dare to in fact use it* for less cost.
There, corrected for you.
Re:Dutch ISP mini-review (mod up please) (Score:2)
Thanks for the clear explanation! (I hope this gets modded up)
It's not strictly the first one. (Score:3, Informative)
I know from internal sources*, that at the beginning to middle of the decade, Jubii was so successful in Denmark, that they were able to put the following rule on the providers:
Either you give us money, or your users won't be able to access our site.
Of course this was not strictly caused by the providers, but it was certainly not neutral.
___
* I don't think that it was ever a secret. (For obvious reasons.)
1. Illegal, 2. Breach of contract (Score:2)
If I buy a DSL 6000 line with a flat-rate, I expect to get it. Period. No, I don't care for any "up to" clauses or "extreme traffic capping". People are expecting to get those 6000 kb/s and no limitations, they know it, and they specifically use that expectation to get you as a client. It's a scam, and they know it. Period.
The nice thing is, that now, you can end the contract, because they changed the terms. They can't simply change things afterwards, without you accepting them.
So goodbye UPC. See you in ba
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If you bought a DSL 6000 line that actually guaranteed that service level it would cost you several times more than what you are paying now. The fact is that the internet gets much of economic power because of statistical use of the bandwidth. If everyone actually insisted on guaranteed service levels we would be back in the era of the switched circuit networks of the 1950's.
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If I buy a DSL 6000 line with a flat-rate, I expect to get it. Period.
Sure you can get that, but expect to pay anywhere from 3 to 10 times the price of a regular consumer connection.
No, I don't care for any "up to" clauses
You should, it's in the contract you signed.
That does not make sense (Score:2)
Well IMAP, SMTP and POP3 are not HTTP protocols, nor is IRC, or IM programs, or video game clients like Wow etc. I also assume Google Earth will be slower as well as Antivirus programs doing updates will be slower and O
This is not Net Neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone's missing the point of net neutrality.
Net neutrality means: if I have network access, and some guy has network access, we can connect; the ISP treats my connection the same regardless of WHO I'm connecting with. It doesn't mean the ISP cannot differentiate the quality of the connection based on HOW we connect.
This is something else: they are varying quality based on HOW they're connecting to others (what protocol). Note that it's not an outright ban, only a rate limit in order to prioritize of HTTP traffic. The only problematic part is the throttling of upload-intensive services. However, it is not a net neutrality issue as long as they are throttling solely on the amount of bandwidth consumed by a service, rather than who pays them most money to have his service unthrottled.
Remember: Net neutrality is not about unrestricted BitTorrent for everyone. It is about the Internet not turning into cable TV. It is about stopping ISPs colluding with content providers so that they can charge you or deny you access to your favorite websites, in order to ram their own inferior ad-infested versions down your throat. It is about being able to connect to everyone without seeking permission of your ISP or paying extra. It is about Internet access being a binary variable: either you can connect, or you can't. No limited service plans where you can connect only to the ISP's webmail and search engine, and all other webmails and search engines are blocked unless you 'upgrade'. No 'premium sites' you can only use if your ISP has a deal with the content provider that you cannot opt into or out of.
If you are dissatisfied by your ISP blocking or throttling your favorite website or service, by all means complain. But do not conflate traffic shaping with net neutrality. It muddles an already complex issue, and harms our chances to win this battle.
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Protocol discrimination is an equally important issue for network neutrality, as it has the same result. While prioritizing traffic by protocol in the name of QOS may appear to be fair on the surface, it is anything but, and will stunt the growth of innovative and competing services on the Internet.
Think about it; how will a competing protocol, or any other innovative new protocol emerge when it is so disadvantaged? The most popular existing protocols end up with a natural monopolies on the Internet.
No on
That always annoyed me... (Score:2, Interesting)
But the strange thing is, the "abusers" are still using their internet at less-then or equal to their cap.
They pay for X Mbs/sec and when they actually use somewhat close to that amount suddenly they are abusing it?
So exactly how can you abuse a network while following the ruled laid out when you purchased the use of it?
The internet is not just the web... (Score:2)
So, they are slowing down all but one port out of 65535 by 1/3rd... are they also going to reduce the price by 2/3 * 65534/65535? Didn't think so.
Solving the rwong problem (Score:2)
We are protecting all the users against the 1% of the user base who abuse our network.
Hang on a minute. That 1% are abusing the network, which presumably is against the terms of service or some such. A logical person would suggest that they could protect the 99% of their users who are not abusive by kicking off the 1% that are? Like kicking the loud drunk of the train for the good of the other passengers (and the train).
Instead this ISP is punishing all the users on your network that use youtube or what-ever other popular site (which chances are is a fair majority of their users) while leavi
First? (Score:2)
My ISP's been playing games with throttling my (overpriced, shitty upstream speed) connection for at least 2 years. They have a virtual monopoly because I live in the middle of nowhere, and I know some poor guy who lives near one of the worse exchanges whose connection goes to hell at the same minute each day.
Just curious (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it really 1% of the user base consuming a huge portion of the bandwidth? That figure gets tossed around a lot, and I wonder if it's true.
We decry 1% of world citizens controlling 90% of the world's assets (substitute your favorite estimate for the 90%), and 4% of the world's people (USA) consuming a vast amount of the energy of the world.
Do we not care about the disproportionate internet usage because the /. community are the ones doing the consuming? Theoretically, without P2P, would the "experience" for Joe six-pack be better? Or not?
First European provider to break net neutrality? (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess they've never heard of a little country in Europe called Great Britain.
Yes, a country where net neutrality has been broken for nearly 3 - 5 years now. Not only that, but in the UK the government has declared no interest in net neutrality and has given ISPs the green light to do what they want.
Originally OFCOM, the telecommunications watchdog in the UK stated that it would be unacceptable if ISPs took it to the level of slowing down certain companies sites over others, but even that stance seems to have changed now as they appear to be considering allowing ISPs to hold the BBC to ransom forcing them to pay for the bandwidth they already pay their ISP for and their users already pay the threatening ISP for.
Britain is not unique in this respect in Europe either, it happens in many other countries here, I can only guess the submitter lives under a rock in his home country and now this has happened has woken up and started to take notice crying blue murder to the world. Unfortunately, the rest of us have been trying to fight the destruction of even the slightest hope for net neutrality in Europe for a few years now.
Isn't it great when people only cry out when something suddenly effects them? This is why things like this happen in the first place, because no one gives a shit about potential issues. If people across Europe had made a loud point about breaking of net neutrality earlier on it could've been stopped and wouldn't be creeping from country to country as it is now.
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Was that really necessary? Yes, the story is about Europe, but has clearly been going on elsewhere for some time, but nobody cared, but now it's Europe everyones panties are in a bunch.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd say the primary reason to get things like that up in the media is the war over the "public meaning" of things. For example, I think in my country the consumer protection agency would be all over them and say "Well, if you're delivering Internet subscription at 1/3rd the speed, you have to advertise it as such. You can't say 'up to' but only on specific protocols, sites and on friday the 13th under a full moon". If they have to instead say "2Mbit Internet, up to 6Mbit on selected websites" it'll pretty m
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Re: (Score:2)
"Well I mean, come on, if ten people leech all day and you and 989 others can't read slashdot anymore because of that. Obviously, it costs way too much money to upgrade the network for those 10 people. Then 990 people pay extra for those 10 people. That's not fair, is it?"
Of course not! They advertise that the 1000 of them could use the full advertised bandwith but then, when only 10% of its users is effectively using it, they call it "abuse" and break their contract terms. Yes: I do call that abuse.