Sandvine CEO Says Internet Monitoring a Necessity 171
Khalid Baheyeldin writes in with a CBC interview with the CEO of Sandvine, Dave Caputo (bio here). Sandvine is the Waterloo, Ontario-based company that provides the technology that Comcast and other ISPs use to overrule Net neutrality by, for example, injecting RST packets to disrupt Bittorrent traffic. Caputo says, among other things, that Internet monitoring is a necessity. Some of the comments to the interview are more tech-savvy than the interviewee comes across.
Of course it's needed (Score:5, Insightful)
And we can sell you just the product you need for that.
Gotta love those statements. (Score:5, Interesting)
How about just telling the customers EXACTLY what they're paying for?
For $40 you get a guaranteed MINIMUM bandwidth of X with a potential to burst to Y.
If you want more, you pay for more.
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:4, Insightful)
All ISPs oversell, with our without Sandvine's products. Your ISP tells you you're getting a certain amount of bandwidth, but you aren't, at least not 24/7. This has always been the case from day one.
This company isn't doing anything particularly brilliant. ISPs have been doing ad hoc versions of it for years and years.
Re: (Score:2)
All ISPs oversell, with our without Sandvine's products. Your ISP tells you you're getting a certain amount of bandwidth, but you aren't, at least not 24/7. This has always been the case from day one.
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:4, Insightful)
Its more like selling access to the keg, telling everyone they can drink the whole thing, and expecting everyone to blackout before they notice its gone
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody in my neighborhood picked up the phone at the same time and half of them couldn't get through!
Overselling is not a bad thing. It can just mean that you sell based on statistical maximums rather than theoretical maximums which never happen. When done this way, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
When 90% of your customers are offline at any given time, there's no point in provisioning more than one tenth of the bandwidth you would need to support all of them downloading at the maximum rate simultaneously.
The problem is not overselling. The problem is that some ISPs oversell too much. They aren't willing increase capacity to match actual use, but instead try to reduce usage to match actual capacity. This is wrong. But the simple fact of overselling is the only sane way to do business.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh i know, its called statistical multiplexing :D
I just think, as you noted, they are cheap and do it too much, and they bitch and complain about heavy users because they want to find new ways to extract money from their networks.
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly right. So complain about insufficient capacity, and not about overselling which is necessary, common, and entirely reasonable.
It just gets me how it seems like everybody in these discussions does not actually understand reality. "Ooh, the evil cable company promised 100 people in my neighborhood 5MBit connections but they don't actually have 500Mbit of bandwidth serving us! What a bunch of liars!" Sorry guys, but that's not actually how it works!
Now if people will complain about a lack of capacity then I'll be right there with them. But everybody just jumps straight to complaining about "overselling" and it makes them look like a bunch of fools.
To take your analogy, if you know from past behavior that you can sell beer "subscriptions" and only purchase half the beer that your subscriptions would require because most of your customers won't drink their full subscription, this is just good business practice and it's a good thing to do.
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all true, however, the point being made is that companies are not selling/telling their customers this. They are advertising it as unlimited.
To build on the analogy, you can have unlimited beer but if we see you drinking more than a six beers a day we'll cap how much beer you can have. See how ridiculous that is?
Overselling is not unreasonable. Advertising as unlimited is.
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. Advertising as unlimited is perfectly reasonable, if you can provide it. There's nothing that says you can't. This should be obvious simply by observing that a huge number of ISPs over a very long period of time have advertised and provided unlimited access with no problems.
The problem comes when you no longer want to provide it but still want to advertise it, which is what these large US ISPs are beginning to do, and this is indeed unreasonable.
Back to the beer analogy, let's say you sell a beer subscription that's limited to 1 beer an hour but is otherwise unlimited. However you only provision your restaurant for 10 beers an hour despite the fact that you've sold 100 subscriptions. Nothing wrong with this so far. If you worked out your numbers to see what your peak demand is and that peak demand is 10, then you're in good shape!
The problem comes when people start drinking more, and so your peak demand increases past 10 beers per hour. At this point you have two honorable choices. One is to say, sorry, we can no longer offer the unlimited subscription, would you like a subscription which comes with 30 beers per month, and a charge per each beer after that? Another is to increase your supply of beer. If your subscribers are now peaking at 15 beers per hour then arrange for that amount to be delivered. Unfortunately these US ISPs are taking a cowardly way out. They are, essentially, continuing to offer the unlimited beers but are finding all the guys who constantly come in for one beer every hour nonstop, intercepting them on the way out the restaurant, dragging them into the alley, and beating them up.
But if you just increase your supply to match the actual demand, there's nothing wrong with overselling while advertising unlimited service, since that is in fact exactly what you are providing.
Re: (Score:2)
True, but you should be keeping some idea of how much beer is being used. If you start to notice that your saftey stock is beeing almost completely consumed, or hell you have even run out on multiple ocasions; you would start ordering more beer. Maybe people are drinking more in the economic down turn or whatever but you would start ordering more beer. If you had to order a great deal more beer you would probably start charging higher rates for beer subscriptions too.
The ISPs on the otherhand have been
Re: (Score:2)
If ISPs could set up "super" caching peers for P2P on their network that'll help a lot - but the MPAA and RIAA might give them problems, and also ISPs would still have to throttle inter-ISP P2P traffic (and prioritize traffic to their super peers - so th
Re: (Score:2)
Really? How do you oversell and not monitor and throttle if all of your customers start using P2P and leave their computers online all the time? It'll be like everyone picking up their phones and connecting to each other just to listen to music all day long.
How do you oversell if all of your customers turn into faeries with giant butterfly wings? Your statement is nonsensical. Not all customers start using P2P and leave their computers online all the time. Even with the current rise of P2P, most customers are offline most of the time. Your peak rate is still vastly lower than what you would need if every single user were downloading at the maximum rate simultaneously. Overselling still works fine in this environment as long as you provision the infrastructure
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's not. The statistical maximums take that usage into account. Proper provisioning does not involve making some worthless model of an ideal customer that never interacts with the real world. It means you look at actual usage, and actual growth rates, project usage into the future, and upgrade your infrastructure to suit.
Just because your ISP doesn't have the capacity to handle every single customer downloading at the maximum rate simultaneously does not mean they're doing anything wrong, because that
Re: (Score:2)
It would be fine if they were happy just coming in under their networks limits, but they aren't happy with just that. They want to charge people more despite the fact that their networks aren't maxed at the moment.
For large providers, once they pay for the equipment and maintenance, there is zero cost increase as network use rises, the cost comes in upgrading that network to keep the ceiling high enough, which they either aren't doing or don't want anyone to know about, so they can claim they are being maxe
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:4, Insightful)
So obvious that everybody knows about it and solves it.
It's not a problem. You size your infrastructure for peak demand. Yes, that peak demand tends to happen between 6PM and 11PM. Yes, a lot more people use their connection a lot more than they do at other times of the day. But no, that peak demand is still well below the theoretical maximum. If you oversell by sizing your network to average demand then, yes, you will fail hard. But if you oversell by sizing your network to actual peak demand then you will succeed in providing what you promise while still provisioning only a small fraction of the theoretical maximum usage.
The concept of overselling isn't very hard to grasp. I don't know why so many people here just don't get it. Aren't you people supposed to be smart?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How about just telling the customers EXACTLY what they're paying for?
Because most people want their router to be a little box the telco sends them that enables them to get to CNN, Yahoo mail, and donkeyporn.com . If you want to try explaining 95 percentile billing, BGP peering, settlement-free transit, backhaul, TE at the edge, Netfllow, CEF, OSPF, "tier [n]", eyeballs versus content networking, CDMA, MPLS, tag switching, jumbo frames, latency vs packet loss vs RTT, asymmetrical routing ILECs vs CLECs vs
Re:Gotta love those statements. (Score:4, Insightful)
Could you explain what would be lost if such as page was clearly marked as highly technical, and was optional to read?
I'm thinking something along the lines of the link text being "high technical information" and the page having a header that goes "The information on this page is meant for people who want to know the technical details of how internet service is provided by $ISP. It's written with the assumption that the reader knows what TCP window sizes, anycast routing and best-efforts networks are and which practical implications they have. If these terms are new to you, you probably want $USER_FRIENDLY_DOC."
I'm with you on the point that you shouldn't try to force your users to understand the technology (just as the car stereo salesman doesn't wax on/wax off about how frequency modulation works and the benefits of optical versus magnetic storage). But not having to explain something is different from having to not explain it. Why not make both groups of users happy?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For $40 you get a guaranteed MINIMUM bandwidth of X with a potential to burst to Y.
And "backward" countries like China (Hongkong) offer 100MB of bandwidth for $48. That's their "entry" offer.
Taxpayers funded the gov organization (DARPA) which created the Internet. How did it come to be "owned" by the corporations? The same way the White man stole the land from the Indians. When you own the law you make the rules.
Re: (Score:2)
Its needed like another hole in the head, hmm thats not a bad idea.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I'm pretty sure you get modded down for posting as 10 different people and having conversations only between yourself. That's how shilling works.
Re: (Score:2)
"As part of my job, I've seen the penises of a number of these men"
Hmmm, what job entails genital examination of your superiors?
Beating Sandvine (Score:5, Informative)
http://redhatcat.blogspot.com/2007/09/beating-sandvine-with-linux-iptables.html [blogspot.com] [blogspot.com]
If you are running linux or a linux based router with iptables give this a try. My speeds returned to pre-sandvine levels.
"If you are using a Red Hat Linux derivative, such as Fedora Core or CentOS, then you will want to edit /etc/sysconfig/iptables. First, make a backup of this file. Next, open this file in your favorite text editor. Replace the current contents with this, substituting 6883 with your BitTorrent port number:
*filter :INPUT ACCEPT [0:0] :FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
-A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
#Comcast BitTorrent seeding block workaround
-A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6883 --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP
-A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
#BitTorrent
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 6883 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m udp -p udp --dport 6883 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
COMMIT
Reload your iptables firewall with service iptables restart. You should now see a great improvement in your seeding.
If you are using Ubuntu or another non-Red Hat Linux derivative, then place the following in a file and execute that file as root.
#!/bin/sh
#Replace 6883 with you BT port
BT_PORT=6883
#Flush the filters
iptables -F
#Apply new filters
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
#Comcast BitTorrent seeding block workaround
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport $BT_PORT --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
#BitTorrent
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport $BT_PORT -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m udp -p udp --dport $BT_PORT -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
Your firewall is now configured and you should have great upload speed now. You will have to run this script every boot, by the way. One easy way is to call the script at the end of /etc/rc.local."
Re: (Score:2)
What about the existing firewall commands? Surely, by just deleting the existing commands, you would be reducing system security?
# Firewall configuration written by system-config-firewall :INPUT ACCEPT [0:0] :FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0] :RH-Firewall-1-INPUT - [0:0]
# Manual customization of this file is not recommended.
*filter
-A INPUT -j RH-Firewall-1-INPUT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p icmp --icmp-type any -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p 50 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Fi
Re: (Score:2)
I use my linux box as a one user desktop, as such I do not run a firewall normally due to the fact that I have no running services/daemons.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This doesn't work. Sandvine sends RST to both sides of the connection, so even if you drop the packet the other end most likely will see it and end the connection.
Re:Beating Sandvine (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Aren't you going to end up with a large number of dead TCP connections still going? You're blocking ALL RST, right? not just the fake ones?
Re: (Score:2)
Right. I don't see any way that distinguishes between fake RST packets and real ones. Sure, they'll timeout eventually, but I really wouldn't want to see this adopted by a large population of torrent users.
How fscking stupid can a suit get? (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
So let me get this straight--poor planning on their part somehow does constitute some form of emergency on my part?
Re:How fscking stupid can a suit get? (Score:4, Insightful)
Poor planning on their part doesn't make it an emergency on your part. Poor planning on their part makes a problem that Sandvine's CEO wants to sell a "solution" to fix the problem.
Re: (Score:2)
How about selling what you have? (Score:2)
So you can't provide those fantastillion megabits per sec for 40 bucks. Ok, I can see that. How about ... I dunno... selling what you can sell?
Trying to sell something and hope that the customer won't use it is at the very least false advertising. Personally, I'd call it fraud.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How about selling what you have? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you can't provide those fantastillion megabits per sec for 40 bucks. Ok, I can see that. How about ... I dunno... selling what you can sell?
You can get un-fucked-with bandwidth for that price, or you can live with the fact that your concentrated. You can't have it both ways.
The more you buy, the cheaper it gets, so you could order a T3 or something for like $5000/mo and then sell it to your neighbors for like $200/mo... (not including the cost of the routers).
I don't know about you, but I'm happy to have 3megs part of the day for $30/mo instead of my old ISDN line for $145/mo. Or maybe dialup? No thanks. I'll take the concentrated 3megs for $40.
It's just not realistic to expect to get more for your $40 than they get for their $300.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a given, no doubt, but it irks me to no end that we get sold "promises" of insane speeds at insanely low prices. That it cannot work out is a given, at least for everyone who didn't sleep through his business classes. Or at least has lived in any capitalist society for longer than a month.
Now instead of telling people that no, you can't use the insane speeds we promised you, selected services get cut off or crippled. Sure, email and www are love children of every ISP, email is entirely local traffic
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re: (Score:2)
No... try setting up a bit torrent that maxes out your 1mb for a month or so. They'll talk to you about it. That 1meg they're allotting to you is concentrated too. The real cost of bandwidth is much higher, but in most situations servers and people don't really use it all. If it wasn't for that we'd all have our own crappy 360k for the money.
Re:How about selling what you have? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Cogent-McBandwidth-Gets-Cheaper-95203/ [dslreports.com]
$7/mbit (of course talking about decent volumes here with the cheapest provider and I guess with fiber already in the ground)
However that should give you a clue how much everyone is overcharging everywhere. The expensive part is the digging, but it is good (money earning) business to charge big money for small traffic volumes on lines that in reality could support far higher volumes. Not to mention how inefficent a big part of the industry is.
Atleast that is the only way I can explain how some countries are managing to supply such nice bandwidth to their citizens without getting economically ruined.
Re: (Score:2)
>>The problem is, that a megabit still costs $300/mo or $700/mo. There's no way around that.
Costs? Costs? How the fuck does a megabit costs anything at all? The infrastructure does have a running cost, no doubt but each megabit which passes through DOES NOT costs anything.
Now if they (aka large ISPs) stop fucking paying advertising companies and lobbying firms large sums of money to amend laws to their suiting and instead learn to spend this money on upgrading their network. But that would make them l
What the fuck is 'churning'? (Score:2)
I'll admit I only skimmed the article so maybe it's explained earlier that he's had some kind of stroke that's messed with the speech centre of his brain resulting in this problem. Or maybe he's just an idiot.
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.mobile-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=11100AWYI8ZX
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
(sorry, someone had to say it!)
Re: (Score:2)
That's just verbing the noun, I suspect he really means screwed.
Allow me to translate:
With every service you've ever screwed in your life, be it your bank, insurance company, cellphone service, why did you screw that service?
The truly bizarre thing is that it really ought to be the other way around.
Re: (Score:2)
Lesson: fuck 'em for as long as you can and escape once they want to return the favor.
Sigh. This will probably be modded funny or, worse, insightful. :(
Re:What the fuck is 'churning'? (Score:4, Informative)
Churn is an industry term for the percentage of your users will leave for somebody else and the percentage of their users that leave for you. Frequently these users are the same damn people swapping back and forth.
So despite gaining and losing lots of users, everyone's base stays roughly the same, like a churning ocean, but each one of those churners costs you $X every time they switch sides(freebies, paperwork, number portability, etc).
Apparently this is now the superlative of "discontinuing service", i.e. "you guys suck, I'm leaving for your competitor."
Re: (Score:2)
So despite gaining and losing lots of users, everyone's base stays roughly the same, like a churning ocean, but each one of those churners costs you $X every time they switch sides(freebies, paperwork, number portability, etc).
So why do so many companies (not just ISPs, but credit card, insurance companies, banks etc) have "new customer only" deals to attract people to switch to them rather than making an effort to encourage existing customers to stay? They seem to encouraging churning.
Churn is nothing new (Score:2)
Churning means the loss of customers to other service providers. In other words, the opposite of customer retention.
Service providers can combat churn by having some sort of mechanism to make it hard to switch. For example, an email address tends to keep you using the provider of that email address because people don't want to go through the hassle of changing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Churn is nothing new (Score:4, Informative)
That's MOBs for you, not "mobs". It is an ancient MUD game engine acronym which stands for "Mobile OBject". One of those archaic game lingo terms which still survives but the origins of which most of the young whipper-snappers do not have clue about.
Now about that lawn of mine ...
What has overselling to do with monitoring? (Score:5, Insightful)
As stated in the article is that the ISP's are selling you 1 megabyte while really buying you 1/4th of a Megabyte... Network monitoring is in other words necessary to ensure you in other words only use 1/4th of a Megabyte for every Megabyte you buy. It's right there in his argument!
Re: (Score:2)
That is a pretty great analogy. I like where it is going because it points out the obvious flaw in the deceptive marketing tricks of the ISPs with plenty of clarity for a judge to understand. I hope.
One thing I do not quite understand is that even if 1-1/4 is the expectation, I don't know or see enough people actually utilizing max bandwidth 24/7. Most people I know use the internet as 'expected', so the realistic offset from the actual 24/7 P2P use is probably noticeable but probably not that bad.
In ano
Yes and no (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, Internet monitoring is a necessity.[1] [jhu.edu] No, injecting anything into someone who doesn't wish to have his stuff interfered with is not only not a necessity but quite frankly an outrage. Remember people, just because one thing is a necessity doesn't mean that something more must also be necessary. This is a slippery slope. To be honest I was expecting more logical integrity from Dave Caputo whom I've always respected and liked personally but who has apparently started to be blinded by his corporate agenda. What a shame, Dave. What a shame.
"Honour" (Score:2)
There used to be this honour system on the internet called "published ports."
It's an antiquated honour system now because there's plenty of application developers that have no honour.
Oh yeah? Well back in my day we had an honor system called "don't screw with my freaking packets while they travel over your routers that I'm paying you to use". If y
Re:"Honour" (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in my day we had a honor system that basically said "don't sell 100 gallons of milk when you only have 20".
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Is it a let down knowing that your day has passed?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm trying to get old in dignity, you insensitive clod!
Honestly, I'm SHOCKED! (Score:3, Funny)
Honestly, I'm SHOCKED!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Honestly, I'm SHOCKED! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sandvine is one of many telecomm gear companies that strongly support OSS. I used to work at a similar company with at least one ex-Sandvine co-worker. Basically, they build "devices" which they sell to ISPs and other big network operators. They build those devices with custom or off the shelf hardware combined with on OSS operating system, toolchain, and applications, plus a few closed source applications that contain their core competency and money proposition. This is often referred to as the "secret sauce" code.
These companies do support OSS and build their entire business model around it (in combination with some closed source). They aren't OSS zealots, but most of the employees are strong supporters of OSS and the companies are very good about contributing code back. A lot of the code in Linux and the BSDs is contributed by these companies. They support OSS conferences and the like, because they want to promote OSS, because it is a good way to recruit new talent, and because the improvements that come out of those conferences are often beneficial to their bottom line. A lot of people think OSS is created by hobbyists, but really Sandvine is a good example of who really makes up the OSS community and contributes code. It is mostly businesses who use it to make money in conjunction with hardware, services, or additional closed source software.
Re: (Score:2)
Necessary? We better get on it then! (Score:2)
Blocking bittorent (Score:2)
I think that blocking bittorent is a horrible offense against net nuetrality and that Comcast really is just falsely advertising. They try to sell you a connection for a ton of money and than not let you use it....how is that fair.
Comcast is simply ripping people off and refusing to upgrade their network.
I blame comcast but I don't really blame sandvine. Someone is going to make the software whether its sandvine or "Network Management Unlimited" (wow not a bad idea for a new startup :P). He is just making s
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Mark my words,the Internet will end up a bunch of "walled gardens" like in the days of AOL and Compuserve. The amount of bandwidth they give you for "non-affiliated" services will be so pathetic as to not matter. They will offer the few big boys like Google a free pass to keep them from fighting it while the rest can just starve. The days of a wild and free Internet are coming to a close IMHO. And the world will be a much worse place for it. After all I'm sure that each "garden" will have their own "free" news feed where only approved views will be heard and the corporate spin will always be considered gospel.
Unfortunately, what you said paints a frighteningly accurate picture of what the future may hold. I've taken a screencap of your comment so that someday we can tell everyone that we knew that this beast was coming before it reared it's ugly head.
Screenshot Link [tinypic.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
ISPs should never send an RST (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs should never muck with a TCP stream. They're entitled to send ICMP messages. ICMP Destination Unreachable has codes for things like "(13) Communications Administratively Prohibited" and "(10) Destination host administratively prohibited". Then at least the user knows 1) that somebody along the route didn't like the packet, and 2) who to blame. There's a right way to do this, and sending an RST isn't it.
Client software may not pass all the ICMP info up to the user, but that could be fixed easily enough.
Fight against P2P is McCarthyism (Score:2)
This isn't about companies saving money on provisioning.
This is about a deep fear in some circles of people
getting together in egalitarian groups to do mysterious
and no doubt evil things.
This is about preventing people from having the power
of independent thought and action.
This is about spying to identify those who try to
move out of their assigned channel.
Clearly, a cold war is going to be needed here, and
the key weapon is going to be steganography.
Ethics more needed than monitoring (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course a netadmin has to monitor traffic. How else to assure good service? But what information is necessary and how it should be used ought to be carefully governed by ethics. Unfortunately, these ethics [lopsa.org] are not well known, and frequently violated by the concept of "owner privilige" (often might makes right). Essentially ignoring any notion of customer rights and treating employees as serfs. Both have been known to rebel for cause.
It is the deplorable state of IT ethics that is the root cause of many of these controversial actions.
That's it, enough lies already (Score:2)
Stop with the damn caps and the unknown variables. I want to see an ISP with a basic monthly fee and pay-as-you-transfer rates.
Exemple: you pay 10$/month for your connection if you do less than 10 GiB of transfers, and you pay 1$ per additionnal 10 GiB.
You make less than 10 GiB download+upload during the month, you pay 10$. You upload+download for 100 GiB, you pay 19$. Not expensive enough? I have no idea. Change the price per GiB as needed, I have no idea how much ISPs are paying for their bandwidth.
Dave Caputo = pump and dump (Score:2)
I strongly suspect the CEO is hoping to do another PixStream... sell out to a big player and walk away with a small fortune as the former company gets ripped to shreds by the new owners. He cares not about the words coming out of his mouth, he's a sales guy. He sells businesses, takes his golden handshake and moves on to the next target.
The funny thing is a lot of Sandvine employees were former PixStream employees, so either the perks are fantastic, or these people are easily duped.
Full of $*&$% (Score:3, Insightful)
All packets MUST be treated equally. That is the first mistake. When an ISP says that they will deliver "unlimited" Internet to you, they must actually do this. "Unlimited" is not vague or ambiguous in the context in which they have used it. They must give me unlimited service, or a service without limitations, boundaries, restrictions, or controls. I did not come up with the unlimited part, they did.
I was sold a 6 Mb/s connection from Embarq, which means that with unlimited service I should be able to transfer 6Mb/s * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 30 days, which is right around 2 TB of data transfer per month.
My neighbor was also sold this same package. We pay the same price. How can you determine which of our packets get priority? Can our packets be anything but equal?
This is why the "bandwidth hog" argument is so ludicrous. I cannot "hog" the bandwidth, nor can my neighbors. We all paid for a service, we all have equal rights to it.
This SHITHEAD just said it right here in plain English. Their business model is based on not actually delivering what they sold you. The "more" they don't deliver the more profitable they are. No wonder the ISP's have such an interest in figuring out the "problem". He is even more of an ass with his cavalier attitude about it. "Well that is just the way it has always been and it's okay". That attitude is why nobody trusts their ISP and these companies. It is so clearly greed that drives them.
What an ass. If you read between the lines here, he is basically saying that the fact ISP's are trying to figure out how to more effectively deny us the service we have been sold leads to greater business opportunities for his company. I'm shocked.
I hate to be somebody that just complains about a problem without offering solutions. Well the solution to this is very simple. Stop selling unlimited Internet. START being honest with your customers.
It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that 10 homes in a neighborhood each with a 10 Mb/s connection require a 100 Mb/s pipe connected to all of them to deliver the bandwidth. Telling each one of them that they have unlimited use of those 10 Mb/s connections is a flat out lie. There is no way that could work without raising the price by 10 times.
If the reality is that there is only 20 Mb/s coming into the neighborhood then they should sell it with a 2 Mb/s floor and a 10 Mb/s ceiling. They will guarantee that you can at least get 2 Mb/s dedicated just for you, but be able to burst up to 10 Mb/s "depending on conditions". That would be honest at least. You would know that if your neighbors are not using the connection, you might be able to get some pretty good porn 5 times faster than normal, but the worst
Re: (Score:2)
All packets MUST be treated equally.
I was sold a 6 Mb/s connection from Embarq, which means that with unlimited service I should be able to transfer 6Mb/s * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 30 days, which is right around 2 TB of data transfer per month.
For your first part, I agree with you that they shouldn't mess with the packets.
For the second, how would you see that working since they're not going to change their profit margin? Assuming a 10:1 oversell currently, would you prefer that they change their advertising to guarantee you an unlimited 600Kbps account (which would only happen if all their competitors were forced to do the same), or that they charge you 10x as much so that you can use the full 6Mbps?
Re: (Score:2)
I would prefer that they be honest, and that t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I really liked what you said, and I agree with your insight into the situation and especially why Japan has better Internet. I have always disagreed with the comparisons between Japan, South Korea, and the US.
That being said, your very first sentence explains the problem quite succinctly.
How the HELL did we get to the point in this country where you can sell anything but the truth?
I don't even think it is up for debate. You have to sell the
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Now divide that number
Testing your ability to think critically (Score:2)
You could buy a dedicated p2p router, OR... (Score:2)
There - FTFY
The real "necessity" is ... (Score:2)
As the security folks have been telling us from the start: What's "necessary" is end-to-end encryption for all traffic.
Yes, this costs a bit of extra cpu time on both ends. But any other "solution" is bogus. Any unencrypted packet allows your ISP, and anyone else along the path between two sites, to examine your traffic and "manage" it.
To encourage this, we should be teaching everyone to always use https:// at the start of all URLs.
Maybe we could encourage the apache people to make port 443 the default,
speeding up 'your' Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
That sums it up. It's all of 'our' Internet, and its lucidness and capacity to re-adjust is part of its design. If you want a big-gulp download, you should get what you pay for-- subject to the randomness off aperiodic congestion, just like a freeway.
I'm guessing you weren't around or were kicking your siblings in the playpen when the Internet was designed. We believe in getting what we paid for, in a neutral, unbiased delivered fashion. All other attempts at control in our opinion, is not only illegal, but
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
One of the downsides to living in a civilized society (as opposed to the anarchy you espouse) is that sometimes you have to curtail your activities for the benefit of the society as a whole. Just because you are legally entitled to rip off a loud fart, belch, and gab on your cellphone in the middle of an opera doesn't mean you should.
It's called being civilized, or, if you prefer, acting in a civilized manner.
Just because you can jam your neighborhood's pipe with your devil-may-care attitude of usage doesn'
Re:speeding up 'your' Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not what I'm advocating at all.
Civility means getting what you pay for. Civility means behaving when there's a traffic jam. Civility means not having what you bought and paid for surreptitiously examined, weighted, and thwarted.
I'm not interested in jamming my neighbor's pipe. I AM interested in not being lied to, and for getting what I paid for, and not having my information sniffed by a cockamamie CIVIL liberty-avoiding bone head that calls him/herself a service provider.
Where, praytell, is the civility in THAT?
Re: (Score:2)
It's not going to speed up your internet connection.
At best, everything will remain the same as now.
More realisticly, your bill will increase and your service will become worse.
At worst, they'll disconnect you as they've kicked off so many of the "top 5%" of users that you're now part of the top 5%.
Re: (Score:2)
Fuckit, I'll bite...
"Want unlimited downloading? PAY FOR IT"
That's the problem, you payed for your (i would assume) non-unlimited internet account, which means no matter who else is downloading what, you should be able to get exactly what you payed for, limited, or not.
Besides, its the same network, so if someone Pays for an unlimited account (that's actually unlimited) whatever traffic they use has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere will be your account, to user your highway analogy...
If someone ca
Re: (Score:2)
Hartnell FTW! ;D
Re:Maybe I'm being selfish (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is it written that it is all-you-can-eat?
All over ISPs' advertisements. Unless they've redefined the word "unlimited".
An Internet which is not neutral is less useful than an Internet that is. If web browsing is sped up at the expense of streaming video, that's going to hurt some people more than others. If streaming video is sped up at the expense of games, a whole other group is affected. Since people come up with new ways of using the Internet all the time, and we can't predict new uses, the best strategy is to give all packets equal measure.
Rather than throwing out Net Neutrality, it'd be more productive for ISPs to find business models that don't involve overcommitment, or at least make it less painful. Like some of the recent attempts to make P2P software favor nodes within the same ISP.
Re: (Score:2)
I suppose the argument the ISP's use is that their throttling service *is* unlimited, because they never cap how much you can download. They just change how fast you can download it at. You can never download an "unlimited" amount of data in a finite time, because you're always limited by your connection speed.
For example, on an 8Mbit connection, ignoring overheads, you can get 1MB per second. Or 2.592TB per month. All the ISP will claim they're doing is changing that figure, which is how fast you can pull
Re:Maybe I'm being selfish (Score:5, Insightful)
Read your contract - the ISP may say unlimited; but the DON'T guarantee a bandwidth. All unlimited means is that they don't cut you off or charge you more if you exceed a certain data volume.
Let's get real here. If an ISP was really selling you a guaranteed dedicated bandwidth you would be paying a much higher price than you do now. Why do you think T1 is hundreds of dollars per month at 1.5 Mb/s? Because of the service guarantee, that is why.
Packet switching works economically because it is shared bandwidth relying on a statistical distribution of traffic on the network. During peak loads traffic will be slower than at off peak times unless the network is extremely over-provisioned.
There is another technology out there that gives a guaranteed bandwidth for every customer - which is rapidly being displaced because of its inefficiency - it is called circuit switched, and it is what the phone companies use to carry analog voice. Every call gets it's own dedicated bandwidth. All I can say is that you would not want an internet based on this network model. It is slow, inefficient and inflexible.
Now ISPs have a problem with users that run applications that present a high constant load because they don't fit the statistical model. High volume P2P is the primary offender right now. If people are using these sorts of applications when the network is heavily loaded it seems to me quite reasonable that traffic based on interactive applications (VOIP, video, HTTP) should receive priority. ANY good computing system should favor interactive applications over non-interactive applications. It is a basic system design principle.
Sorry to inform you, but to do this you need to monitor.
A lot of people whine that this breaks the idea of network neutrality. I disagree; network neutrality must not allow one type of communications stream or application to seriously degrade the performance or usability of all of the other applications. If that occurs you do not have a neutral network. You have a network that is dedicated to that one application. That is NOT what I as an end user want.
slighty wrong... (Score:2)
"Read your contract - the ISP may say unlimited; but the DON'T guarantee a bandwidth."
Actually, most ISPs I've ever used, from Bellsouth to TW to Verizon to Comcast, guarantee you the bandwidth rate *TO THEIR SERVERS AND ROUTERS* and from there they can't guarantee jack shit. To their routers and servers and to other computers inside of their network, I've almost always obtained maximum data throughput. Get outside of that network and my average speed drops to about 3mbit.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What monopoly? T1 service is available from many carriers in most locations.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There are a lot of people who have been buying up dark fibre and reselling it. And the cable TV guys also own physical plant.
http://www.4connections.net/?gclid=CKiguaWOiJQCFQoDGgodcXFCVg [4connections.net]
http://www.fiberring.com/products/299/ [fiberring.com]
http://www.optimumlightpath.com/ourNetwork.shtml [optimumlightpath.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Let's get real here. If an ISP was really selling you a guaranteed dedicated bandwidth you would be paying a much higher price than you do now.
I do pay the higher price. I have a business-class cable modem exactly because I don't want to be subject to the malarkey that residential service has. And it's a lot cheaper than a T1 for the same downstream bandwidth (and acceptable upstream).
If people are using these sorts of applications when the network is heavily loaded it seems to me quite reasonable th
Re: (Score:2)
Let's go over what you said:
Now ISPs have a problem with users that run applications that present a high constant load because they don't fit the statistical model. High volume P2P is the primary offender right now.
Agreed, although I think the description of P2P with the term "offender" comes off as biased against yet another valid traffic patterns.
If people are using these sorts of applications when the network is heavily loaded it seems to me quite reasonable that traffic based on interactive applications (VOIP, video, HTTP) should receive priority.
I disagree. I think each user should be given an equal share of the bandwidth, and be able to decide on their own how best to distribute that share among their desired applications.
ANY good computing system should favor interactive applications over non-interactive applications. It is a basic system design principle.
This can be done by the user's system. There's no need for the ISP to second-guess the user.
Since this is the case, I would say that it's more important that the
Re: (Score:2)
If people are using these sorts of applications when the network is heavily loaded it seems to me quite reasonable that traffic based on interactive applications (VOIP, video, HTTP) should receive priority.
I disagree. I think each user should be given an equal share of the bandwidth, and be able to decide on their own how best to distribute that share among their desired applications.
There is more to traffic shaping than bandwidth, for example latency. There are good, existing tools for prioritizing traffic and they work. Personally, while I see false advertising as an issue, I have no problem with network operators selling access to a service where bandwidth at a given point is not guaranteed, but traffic is well prioritized, especially since such a service can be a lot cheaper. As for network neutrality, that is a concept to prevent monopoly abuse and for that it needs to prevent t
Re: (Score:2)
A REAL T1 is expensive because the goverment requires certain service level requirements to be met related to reliablity, uptime and repair. All of this is related to the telephone infrastructure, not bandwidth. The bandwidth guarantee you refer is only from you to the central office, and has nothing to do with the internet. Again, this all was decided long before the Internet mattered and was for digital telephone services.
You refer to circuit switched like its somehow different and specific to 'analog
maybe you're just trolling from sandvine? (Score:2)
Nobody on slashdot is stupid enough to believe that we shouldn't get what we pay for and that the alternative is to get even less of what we already pay for.
The fact that an ANON makes this post is very telling of itself.
Maybe with that philosophy we should all go back to dialup for 40$/month. yeah, that'll slide real smooth.
Meanwhile, how about undersell instead of oversell! WHAT AN IDEA! Maybe that might allow people to actually you know, expand like any smart business and not end up backtracking nonstop