Time Warner Filtering iTunes Traffic? 199
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."
For $1500/month (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you,
Your ISP
Re:For $1500/month (Score:4, Insightful)
BUYERS BEWARE
a cap is better than selective throttling content (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is to let the customer decide what they want to access. If it costs a dollar or two to download the equivalent of a CD, maybe you should buy the CD and use your bandwidth for something else (or just save the money and pay less for Internet access). Maybe that'd get the RIAA off our backs. In any case, don't tell me what I can access.
I guess there's a flip side to that. If the content's something like on-demand video rental, why shouldn't your ISP be able to provide a cheaper service based on having direct connectivity to you? Or, put another way, if it costs them less to deliver the service to you, why shouldn't you reap some of the savings? There are different aspects to the net neutrality issue. A Netflix isn't providing original content. We may gain in terms of competition based on their having, essentially, a free delivery mechanism though. I guess that's good for us and good for Netflix, but it's obviously not good for our ISP's. Do we care about that? I'm not sure, but there are two sides to the issue.
Re:a cap is better than selective throttling conte (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that 20GB per month worth of downloading big files fast ought to be plenty for most of us. About a Linux ISO per day, I'd think. And that's my point. We download this stuff because it costs us exactly nothing. If it cost me a few bucks to download, I might go to Cheap Bytes or somewhere instead for a CD. And that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. The internet is a disruptive technology alright, but it may be being made artificially so due to stuff like moratoriums on sales tax, loss-leader free shipping, etc. I'm not (entirely) sure that I don't want there to still be a neighborhood bookstore, and if it's killed because it can't compete with, say, Amazon - and that's because Amazon customers can afford the convenience because the government said there should be no sales tax (for now), that's not as great a deal as it may sound.
I pay for broadband mainly so that day to day web browsing (well within the suggested 20GB limit) is fast. Not so I can download music and movies, etc. It's nice that I can, but given the choice I might prefer to forgo that for the option of cutting my broadband bill. Of course, nobody's offering to cut my broadband bill, so the whole exercise is probably moot. Still, the point is that broadband costs something, and the pricing structure needs to reflect that. Unlimited downloads at a low, low price is not likely to fit into a reasonable pricing structure if you expect capacity to keep up with demand.
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the reason we have broadband is to allow us to download large files quickly.
I respectfully disagree (mostly), you have your nerd glasses on. There is another, more compelling reason to have 'broadband.' Since I'm in a market that is rapidly converting from 56K, and I support clients in their transition to the 21st C, I get to see the process first hand.
For the average busy or middle-aged user, large files are an added bonus. The main goal is 'always on' and quick web browsing. Period. Young people, technophiles, nerds, sure, they download large files. Older folks don't know how,
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"destination/content based tiers instead of bandwidth tiers"
bandwith throttling we understand, its the content/destination filtering that is bs. They now are deciding what biz survive and which do not.
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.
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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:4, Interesting)
And what happened?
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Informative)
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Interested. How did it go and how successful were you?
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Before there was widespread DSL there was ISDN, but 144K ISDN was *always* measured by the telcos. NOBODY wanted it, and nobody (well, essentially nobody) deployed it in a home environment.
ADSL and cable modem service have been unmeasured, "unlimited", which is all people will pay for regardless of the reality that at some level *ALL* bandwidth is measured.
The ADSL and Cable modem providers have had high success in obtaining cus
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Perhaps the solution is that iTunes should bear some of the additional cost of the high amount of traffic their service creates.
They already do that, because they already pay for their bandwidth, and they pay a great deal more than you would pay for the same bandwidth.
Seriously. The only people who should be paying more here are the ISPs and ultimately us, the customers. The ISPs have been overselling bandwidth for years and years, and now that we are starting to use what they claim they have sold us, they can't all of a sudden tell us not to, without either increasing the price a lot, lowering the max speed, or admit to the gene
Re:For $1500/month (Score:4, Insightful)
Fourth option - accept that they'll make less than ten-bajillion dollars this fiscal year and plough some of their profits into developing their infrastructure. I like option four!
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.
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Why should Apple pay MORE for using bandwidth? I already paid for the bandwidth my connection uses (for iTunes or anything else) on my end and Apple paid for on their end. Why in the world would you suggest there be another fee when we both already paid for what we are using?
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Then that ISP shouldn't be selling 1 Mbps 'unlimited' connections to 1000+ customers and then complain when people actually *use* the bandwith *they are paying for*. That's false advertising.
Thats actually fraud.
A customer pays for a service and the ISP takes payment but dosent deliver.
There is nothing wrong with overselling provided your customer can use what you sell them!
If everyone made a phone call at the sametime the phone network couldent handle it because they oversell the service to produce cheaper rates but I have NEVER had a problem making a phonecall because my service provider has carefully planned things out to make sure this dosent happen.
Overselling makes sense provided its don
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The ISPs successfully argued 'unlimited' means unlimited *access* not unlimited service. As long as they're not saying you can long use the internet at certain times they're safe.
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Judge : "Indeed, that user is clearly wasting the time of the court. 10 lashes ! Now tell me about how those tubes work again."
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We do have compensation plans in place. They are called SLAs and they come with the above mentioned $1500/month contract.
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I get that maybe 2 or 3 times a year tops. Retrying works. But I don't consider it fraud - just too many people on at once.
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Half a dozen times in my life.
And once when I was calling 911. It was on their end, not the phone company.
Everything is oversubscribed (Score:2)
Then that ISP shouldn't be selling 1 Mbps 'unlimited' connections to 1000+ customers and then complain when people actually *use* the bandwith *they are paying for*. That's false advertising.
Virtually ALL telecom infrastructure is oversubscribed. If everyone on a particular central office picked up their phone at the same time, probably only about 50% (made up statistic) would get a dial tone. If enough people were camped on a cell tower and hit 'send' at the same time, some of them would not have their call go through. Do any of these services mention this in their ads?
I'm not saying that this is OK, but it's not just the cable companies that do this. To do otherwise would incur a hugh cos
Re:For $1500/month (Score:4, Insightful)
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Then iTunes users would see 1/2 the speed they were seeing previously. Unless the routers are extremely poor at traffic management, in which case half of the users would be zipping along while the other half would be dying. Of course, traffic is not constant. So if it was the latter, the speeds would pick up during off peak hours. Thus suddenly "solving" the problem temp
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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)
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You're jesting. This is the US of A, where company bosses get paid with stock, and their main concern is thus the stock price. And investors (including the companies own CEOs and CFOs) don't care about what the stock price will be five or fifty years down the road -- they care
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Additionally, I think that traffic shaping is a big deal and if there is traffic shaping then tra
Re:For $1500/month (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'd guess that they start by dropping everyone into the lowest tier, then if you wanted your faster service back you would pay more...
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)
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I disagree. Putting in the data pipes costs ISPs a certain amount of money. Putting in bigger pipes costs ISPs more money than putting in smaller pipes. But ISPs do not pay for their connections to the Internet on a per gigabyte
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I have
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I don't know what sort of bandwidth a cable carrier actually has, but lets assume for easy numbers it's an OC-12 (~622Mbps, ~77.75MBps)
In 30 days, there are 2,592,000 seconds.
In that 30 days, they can transmit about 200 TB. (77,750,000MBps * 2,592,000s)
I don't know how many customers they might have, so lets assume 20,000.
If everyone was on using it evenly, they could each consume 10GB/mo.
If everyone was
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If you get a T1 or other dedicated circuit, you certainly aren't metered. Why would an ISP be treated any differently?
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I'll see you in court for misleading advertising
Telco:
Good luck with that !
Why do you think we paid off enough senators for not passing a net-neutrality law?
Seriously i think this would expand to many other telcos like comcast, verizon, etc.
This enables them to double-dip both the consumer and the company (google).
Screw the tax-payer funded expansions they got, that money long went to buy yachts, etc.
So, as a home user am screwed. As a business user, i can get some tax deductions.
As a corporate, i don't care.
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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.
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-- Ecks
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But sometimes its pretty malicious to be that willfully stupid.
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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.
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It's very easy for idealists to phrase arguments in ways that sound reasonable, but reality speaks for itself. You want to believe that regulation would ONLY entail penalizing a certain business b
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Don't be naive. These ISPs are already regulated, and the politicians are already operating in their best interests. Many are state- and municipal-backed regulated monopolies--- in other words, they're already being guaranteed preferred access to their customer base and high barriers of entry to competitors.
What the p
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I proposed no such thing, that you would twist my words like this speaks volumes about you.
Now, I didn't say they weren't regulated, nor did I pretend they weren't. nor did I advise any such thing. Care to demonstrate where I did?
The strategy I would advise does work, has worked before, can
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The government has made sure that they don't have any.
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)
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"Okay,I am a Time Warner customer as well. So I decided to restore my previous setting and iTunes is still working fine now. Do disregard my last entry. This appears to be ISP related."
Funny, that
Regards,
John
I can back these claims (Score:3, Interesting)
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Perhaps some of the iTunes/Akamai servers are in India? The 3 fiber pipes that were cut last week would certainly slow things dow
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.
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darn sure to switch my provider? (Score:2)
Even if you do have choice today as more buy-outs/mergers take place that choice will go up in smoke.
How about what I pay for? (Score:3, Informative)
As a Comcast customer, I have tended to get about 1/10th of their advertised "you will get up to..." bandwidth, and sometimes not even that.
And yes, they are STILL throttling BitTorrent traffic, illegally. I have been trying to download perfectly legal but large files, with plenty of peers and seeders, yet my download speed has been between 1k and 30k! This on a multi-megabyte-download-speed cable service. Just about everything else downloads very quickly... but of course would download even more quickly if I got anywhere near the throughput they advertise.
You know it is getting bad when certain traffic (BitTorrent, for example) downloads faster on dialup than it does on cable.
If this is true... (Score:2)
...just smile, sit back, and watch how badly this explodes. This is actually going to be fun. These assholes have no idea the kind of mistake they've just made.
Pass the popcorn!
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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.
we expect more than amature results like 95' (Score:2)
Or is all infrastructure in usa falling apart like the soviet union in 85?
Net neutrality doesn't exist even now. (Score:2, Insightful)
Net neutrality is an illusion. If you want to use different services, you have to pay more RIGHT NOW regardless of who your ISP is. Let me explain. Net neutrality is a concept stating something similar to the following. Your ISP gets bought out by Microsoft. Suddenly, you as a consumer on the "Cheap" internet tier can no longer perform web searches on Google without experience long page loads. Your searches on Microsoft Live are fast as lightning, but you
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May I suggest you go visit an abuse's desk of an ISP not filtering port 25 outbound before stating that it's blocked for the unique reason that they don't require it? Viruses on customers' computers don't need port 25, period. It's allowed for bu
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You can't send packets out on or receive them in on a variety of ports, notably 21, 25, and 80. I figured that there must be filters up on my connection because most consumers don't require service on them, and on Joe Sixpack's connection, it's more secure that way.
May I suggest you go visit an abuse's desk of an ISP not filtering port 25 outbound before stating that it's blocked for the unique reason that they don't require it? Viruses on customers' computers don't need port 25, period. It's allowed for businesses because they usually have some kind of IT dealing with viruses, but at the ISP I worked for we could block these as well if abuse was reported, no matter the price of the connection.
My point is that ISP's unrelentingly filter port 25 traffic. Abuse or not. And in the case of my ISP, they claim it's for security.
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My point is, we all get the idea, but how far fetched is the difference from paying extra for the ability to send and receive SMTP traffic, paying extra to send/receive HTTPS traffic, and, of course, the coup de gras, paying extra to access Google or Yahoo!
It is coup de grace, but otherwise, spot on. Someone mod this guy. This is the wet dream of all ISPs: to charge you by connection type, by port, by protocol and finally, by content and end-point access. They want to charge you the same way they charge your cell phone usage: lots of completely made up charges that are only differentiated because their tracking software can.
I predict in the fairly near future (5 years or so) that there'll be a lot of these tests going on, and a lot of cut-rate Internet offer
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Doh! Those phonics rules I learned as a child soooo don't apply to foreign words....
Americans are convinced because of decades of draconian usage charges from telcos and cable providers (don't we all love paying extra for "High Definition" service?) that every little aspect of a service that is enough to differentiate itself from others in presentation only, and in the terms of IPv4, think directly of the presentation layer of the OSI model, that they should pa
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I agree that the bundling and differentiation of services allows for savings in certain cases. What bothers me about this is that it injects intelligence into the network, and routing is no longer a simple question of protocol. All major advances in internet usage came from random people throwing up a website, and discovering that they hit on a major need. Google, Yahoo, Webex, or even Penny-Arcade.... none woul
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This has nothing to do with Net neutrality.
a) Net Neutrality applies to backbone carriers, not individual service providers.
b) Net Neutrality does not stop a carrier from blocking certain traffic. It only says that traffic rules cannot be appl
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For what it's worth, running server applications has always been against the ToS of every residential broadband ISP. The actual filtering of ports 25 and 80 is newer, but the clause in the ToS has always been there.
Apple serves content via Akamai (Score:2)
As an ex-Austin customer of Time-Warner ISP, I would say that the first suspect in any service outage should be TWC's incompetence. I finally switched to their new, local competitor: Grande Communications [grandecom.net] and have been thoroughly pleased ever since. The final straw for me was a network outage for my entire neighborhood that was identified on wednesday, they sent a guy out thursday, then said it would require a tier-2 tech to fix, who won't come out on the weekends, and friday is all booked up. So our whole
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.
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They're not going after apple specifically, but when they announce a bandwidth sucking HD download service the ISPs have two possible responses:
1. Charge more for their service so they can afford to significantly upgrade their pipes.
2. Throttle itunes.
My own ISP doesn't even currently
Looks like a lawsuit in the making (Score:2)
I hear the saliva splatting on the floor from the lawyers dripping jaws already.
On Road Runner Business in Greensboro, NC (Score:4, Informative)
FWIW, Before 8pm, I've seen no other speed impacts, and have been able to download ISOs at a normal speed. I've only seen it with iTunes.
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?
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Seriously... what?
I understand the words individually. But when strung together they don't seem to make any sense. What it sounds like you're saying is that HD movies willingly delivered by content providers to customers who want to pay for them somehow constitutes a greedy misuse of bandwidth by the content producers?
I cou
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Internet access is not a very competitive market. Right now, if I want some