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.'"
In unrelated news... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You use that word... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Not filtering by destination (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not going to RTFA, but FTFS:
"and within the HTTP realm some Web sites and services that use lots of upstream bandwidth are capped as well."
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.
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* I don't think that it was ever a secret. (For obvious reasons.)
Re:You use that word... (Score:3, Informative)
You mean, like this type of behavior described in TFS?
Re:You use that word... (Score:3, Informative)
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 services that their customers want - and [...] make a profit doing so", your mobile phone (cellphone) provider started dropping your text messages to certain customers of other networks (because you were "unfairly" sending too many messages to them), unless customers of those other networks payed them for the service you've already payed for. Would you complain, or would that be too "egalitarian"?
Furthermore, ISPs which are not neutral will not be out-competed by sane ones because in many situations they are not in genuine competition, and because the large ISPs would be free to cut them off as punishment.
Re:Not capping, investing (Score:3, Informative)
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.