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Time Warner Filtering iTunes Traffic?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sunday February 03, @02:24AM
from the trial-has-begun-maybe dept.
from the trial-has-begun-maybe dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Starting on Thursday, January 31st, Time Warner subscribers in Texas starting experiencing connectivity issues to the iTunes store to the point where the service wasn't usable. General internet traffic issues haven't coincided with these problems, and many folks have reported that the store works as normal when they head to the nearest mega-bookstore and use their ISP instead. Time Warner has announced that they're going to begin trials of tiered pricing in one local Texas market, but I'll be darn sure to switch my provider if I hear the slightest hint of destination/content based tiers instead of bandwidth tiers."
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Firehose:Time Warner filtering iTunes traffic? by Anonymous Coward
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
For $1500/month (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you,
Your ISP
Re:For $1500/month (Score:4, Insightful)
BUYERS BEWARE
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
Its their ISP and if they feel the need to cap bandwidth to certain sites, block sites/ports etc - thats fine - just put it in writing.
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get the paranoia people have with regards to bandwidth caps, the truth is it costs ISPs a certain amount per gigabyte. A heavy user should be paying more, this isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is when ISPs advertise unlimited and then put a cap in the fine print.
I will however disagree the idea that is okay for ISPs to throttle traffic just because they're upfront about it. Network neutrality is what made the internet the force it is today, without it the internet cannot thrive.
(and if anyone's wondering, my ISP is TekSavvy. No this is not a advertisement, if it was I'd ask you to mention me so I get referral credit)
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
So ask yourself. What ISP would limit a popular service to such a degree that it becomes 100% unusable for their entire user base? That doesn't sound like successful traffic shaping to me. That sounds like a misconfiguration somewhere. If it was traffic shaping, I would expect that the speeds would drop to levels to where it would be impossible to watch a movie real-time (for example), yet possible to download it within the time-frame of a few hours. (Say, 4-8 hours as a reasonable range.)
Outright blocking a popular service like iTunes only invites unhappy customers and bad press.
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
It's so utterly ridiculous that ISP's can get away with this shit. I am fairly certain if iTunes started getting nerfed on a wide scale, they would incur the Wrath of the Jobs.
My ISP throttles Bit Torrent. Confirmed this myself the other day when I wound up back using the default port. Down and up sucked. Changed the port, reloaded, speeds increased 4000%.
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh please, no! The last thing we need is the precedent of ISPs charging both ends of a connection or choosing how much to charge a company based on the perceived profit they make (i.e. "how much can we get out of them?"). At best, it would just be another way big companies to produce a barrier to entry for smaller companies.
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps the ISPs could not make record profits and send CEOs to resorts with multimillion dollar bonuses and instead spend some money on the infrastructure that supports their business model. You know, to be in business tomorrow.
Just a thought.
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Insightful)
Never attribute to malice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on all the comments, I have a sneaky suspicion that it's not an attempt at active filtering, but rather a network screwup somewhere in the Texas routers. I imagine that the Apple guys will be talking to every network admin up the line until they find the one who is responsible for maintaining the malfunctioning routers. Should be back up in a few days, unless I miss my guess.
Re:Never attribute to malice... (Score:5, Informative)
Sarcasm aside, it doesn't detract from my point. There was a misconfiguration somewhere in the chain of routers between TWC and Apple's nearest server. Maybe a bad routing table, an incorrect configuration of traffic shaping, or a router on the fritz. Either way, I seriously doubt this outage was intentional. Because if it was, it was possibly the most incompetent attempt at traffic shaping in the history of the Internet.
Re:Never attribute to malice... (Score:5, Funny)
No, that coveted spot is already reserved people who truly do reshape traffic: backhoe operators and anchor-dragging boat captains.
Sure... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
This can be translated as "Can't somebody else do it?"
Giving a government run by politicians who are in the back pockets of these same corporations the power to regulate is not going to achieve what those who want regulation want to achieve.
Bad Summary (Score:5, Informative)
There are also a lot of comments about how it all happened when they upgraded to iTunes 7.6, including this gem (which includes a work-around:
Of the few that claim that they were not using 7.6, a couple of them later came back and said "[oops, I did have 7.6]"
But of course, Apple is the perfect and the evil cable monopoly must be violating net neutrality.
Re:Bad Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
Will people understand monopoly issues? (Score:5, Informative)
In the end, I think we are back to the times when it makes sense for everybody to start building their own internet connections again and buying a single corporate connection per group. Look up community network [google.com] on google and start building. You know best how do do it.
Great maker, what has slashdot become? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe a router was down? Maybe BGP was flapping a bit? Maybe there is just a couple of peering partners between apple's provider and this provider ? And a backhoe took the cable?
Maybe powerloss in a Single Point of Failure?
That conspiracy theories should reach slashdot due to a couple of hours of outage is just insane. I expect more of slashdot. And also I expect more of the slashcrowd.
Tiscali do this in the UK (Score:5, Informative)
Despite having acknowledged the problem recently (they said they're working on it - try turning off your traffic shaping???) they initially ignored it, deleting support forum posts wholesale.
I've walked away.
Re:Totally against tiered internet, but (Score:5, Informative)
"Bandwidth" (data transmission) is paid for by both the sender and the receiver of data. Apple has an ISP at the data center where they are housing the iTunes servers, they pay for the level of service they recieve. You and I also pay our ISPs for the level of service we receive.
Everyone is already paying. Tiered internet is just about making some people pay more for the same level of service then other people do.
Discrimination is bad mmmmmkay ?
Ironically... (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine a world where "the studios" had to pay for all bandwidth usage twice, or suffer degraded performance. What happens to independent [youtube.com] projects [sanctuaryforall.com], then?
Did someone actually try to argue that raising the barrier of entry can do anything at all other than support the existing, entrenched power structures?