Time Warner Cable Implements Packet Shaping

RFC writes "In a move that may be indicative of modern ISP customer service, Time Warner has announced the introduction of packet shaping technology to its network. 'Packet shaping technology has been implemented for newsgroup applications, regardless of the provider, and all peer-to-peer networks and certain other high bandwidth applications not necessarily limited to audio, video, and voice over IP telephony.' As the poster observes, this essentially renders premium service useless. The company is already warning users that attempts to circumvent these measures is a violation of their Terms of Service."

If you don't get

what you pay for then stop paying for it.

in the contract or at very least in the sale, they promise you a certain bandwidth, if they can't deliver what they promise you don't need to pay what you promised.

Re:If you don't get

All of those contracts clearly state "up to" a certain speed. No consumer service I've ever seen has a guaranteed speed claim.

There's probably not much the consumer can do except vote with their money and cancel the service.

This is why net neutrality laws are important -- because existing service contracts do NOT protect the consumer from this sort of action.

Re:If you don't get

You need to understand the basic principles of modern contracts:

"What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away."

Re:If you don't get

Contract law just isn't your thing really is it. No ISPs advertise guaranteed rates there is always a little * somewhere that says this is best case scenario and your rates may vary due to various factors. The fine print in your contract will also state this and you will have very little room for 'weaseling'.

In fact attempting to cancel without being able so show your service has seriously degraded because of the ISPs actions will probably be treated as a breach of contract and trigger the usual attempt by the ISP to penalise you with a fee for the remainder of your contract.

Re:If you don't get

"Up to" should mean that it's at least possible to get that speed. If they're doing some kind of rate-limiting to make sure you never get up to the "up to" advertised, I'd say that's pretty well false advertising.

I know it may be splitting hairs, and someone who's getting 56k isn't going to care either way, but if they advertise "Up to " 20 mbps, there shouldn't be any fundamental limitation preventing you from ever achieving that rate.

Re:If you don't get

Of course they can't promise a certain bandwidth, because they'd otherwise be swamped with lawsuits. Every dimwit customer would be complaining about the occasional download from Zambia or India creeping along at modem speeds.

But there's clearly a difference between
"line speed 6mbit/sec and from there as fast as the target server allows",
"line speed UP TO 6mbit/sec depending on what your neighborhood does and how much we overbooked our DSLAM"

and

"line speed 6mbit/sec but we're turning it down to modem speed if we don't like your face" or
"line speed 6mbit/sec, but we turn it down for every activity that could actually need that bandwidth"

Home contracts used to promise at least the company's best efforts to maintain a certain service level - and now they're effectively promising nothing at all.

Why anyone would enter a contract that states "You pay me every month full and in advance and I promise you nothing" is beyond me. Even mafia hitmen have more customer friendly terms, I think. But if you think that's fair trade practice, you may like to view that bridge I have on sale here...

Re:If you don't get

Now, if a bunch of /.ers got together and started an ISP (grafting on the significant marketing, legal, HR, and executive chops you'd need), who here really thinks the final company, Applied Slashdot Superiority, would offer a significantly less evil/more reliable offering to the public?

Re:If you don't get

The network usage becomes a Poisson distribution and combined the usage starts to resemble normal distribution.

Citation? I've only seen a few studies on this but so far as I know "bursty" traffic doesn't approach a normal distribution, ever, over any large time frame.

Re:If you don't get

The distribution of the sum will be normally distributed by the CLT, but that turns out to be absolutely useless for modeling. That's why people usually use fractals to generate reasonable datasets to do modeling when it comes to disk / network traffic. (i.e. use something like an 80/20 multifractal). The sum might tell you how much bandwidth you can expect to need in a month, but at any given time? Or for any real modeling purposes? no way. Fractals are very reasonable for simulating network traffic, they have similar propreties (i.e. self similarity at different granularity). So, in short, while you are correct that the CLT does apply to the sum, it's pretty useless in reality.

Re:If you don't get

Please re-read my post: I'm not talking about guaranteed bandwidth, I'm talking about guaranteed *best efforts*.

Nobody expects home DSL connections to have more than 90% uptime or the transfer bandwidth set in stone. That's what T1, SDSL and enterprise-grade SLA's are for. But I expect my ISP to maintain his contractual obligations in at least *trying* to give the best connection that is feasible from an economical and whatnot point of view.

Traffic shaping and intentionally throttling traffic in applications where sheer bandwidth (not latency) is important is NOT honoring the contract.

To be short: I don't expect my ISP to have 24/7 onsite rapid-response teams, multiple backup lines and .99+ uptime. - But I sure as hell don't want my ISP to actively hamper my connection. Not helping is a whole lot better than intentionally blocking the way...

Re:If you don't get

If they don't want their service to be used for "blazing fast downloads" and "streaming video at the click of a button" why are they being advertised that way? It didn't say "blazing fast text-only" or "monitored traffic" in the ad, when I signed up.

Re:If you don't get

Enter "Pete the Pirate". He's using the bandwidth in full and he won't fit in that normal distribution. The nice normal distribution turns skewed to the right, everyone gets worse response times and less bandwidth on average. The solution? Sell everyone guaranteed 10M/512k or what? Most of the people don't want to pay 60 times as much as they do because they don't have the need for guaranteed bandwidth. ISDN was about fixed bandwidth and it sucked. Nobody needed that bandwidth that much and therefore the costs were significantly higher than with ADSL technologies.

Solution: Transfer based billing. I think the sender should pay for the bandwidth as it is with the web sites as well. Your incoming traffic requires also outgoing traffic and you attach the interest of the company (build as little infrastructure as economically feasible) with the interest of the client (use that infrastructure as little as economically feasible).

The problem with that logic is that the statistical average of all users is pushed up by "Peter." He might not fit into the old distribution, but he is a part of the new one. As Quincy, Robert, Sam and Tom all begin to have similar usage patterns, the average usage begins to fit more closely Peter's usage.

The ISP needs to adjust their models to reflect these changes over time.

Personally, I would prefer for an ISP to tier levels of service and commit to a contention ratio they can afford. If a user exceeds the preset contention ratio for their package over a 7 or 30 day period, they are bumped into the next tier after a warning. Start out with a 512k, 1% contention which should be adequate for most users (ends up at 1.5G/month), then go to a 1.024M, 2% (6G/month), 2M, 5% (30GB/month), 6M, 10%...

Tie the sense of value (bandwidth) into the true cost (transfer), and give the ISP the incentive to improve over time as well as give the customer an incentive to buy into a higher package. If internet TV takes off (for example), over time a market is created for improvements...

Re:It's basically a known value

Bullshit. First, it should be advertised as "up to X on the web" or somesuch, not overall. It needs to be obvious that some capping is performed.

If the system really can't cope with capacity, there is a very fair, reasonable policy for dealing with the system. It has two parts:

• Using QoS to give HTTP, VOIP and other traffic higher priority. That means that when the pipe isn't being used, lower-priority traffic can use the full pipe.
• A real-time network status display that indicates roughly what portion of an ISP's network is being used for what type of traffic at a given time. Using this, the client can be reassured that the ISP isn't capping traffic for other, nefarious reasons.

Anything else is just your usual corporate scum work. I can't stomach living in a society like this sometimes. Where is the outrage? Where are the regulations? This is greed, not necessity.

Re:If you don't get

Even mafia hitmen have more customer friendly terms, I think

I can confirm this.
Posting AC for obvious reasons.

Remembering Mama Bell

Remember Ma Bell?

Are you just trolling or are you serious?

Let's assume that you are serious....

There was a reason M.B. was broken up.

Imagine for a second that Time Warner was the "Internet" and immediately decided that access to the Internet was $200/month minimum and you had to rent your computer from them for $199.99/month and you couldn't buy any computer to use with their service except through them. If you were late paying your service would be shut off immediately and you would forfeit the "great privilege" of being their customer in the future unless you payed a reasonable $2000 re-connection fee.

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

Nice Try.

Yes, there was a reason, namely greed. By the time Bell was broken up, you had been able to hook anything you wanted up to the phone system, with the sole provision that it didn't interfere with the operation of the system, for over a decade.. See the 1968 Carterfone ruling by the FCC. Relative pricing was, by and large, and artifact of the time and the relative level of technology. Bell provided immaculate professional level service to all its customers. Equivalent to having a guaranteed mainframe service contracts from a company like IBM then, or now.

You also completely ignore the enormous good Bell did (admittedly because they were forced by Congress) in the Form of Bell Labs. Want to even guess what the computer you're using right now would cost without Bell Labs? Sure, engineers at Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit. But Bell Labs developed the transistor out of basic research into quantum mechanics. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs [wikipedia.org]. The Transistor, the discovery of Cosmic Background Radiation, the development of the C Programming Language, UNIX, incredible advances in LASER tech, are just the highlights.

Re:Remembering Mama Bell

You forgot ESS. Yes, Bell Labs was responsible for a lot of groundbreaking stuff.

I have to say, though, I agree. There were a lot of legitimate complaints registered about the Bell System at the time, but customer support wasn't one of them. They had quality of service standards they had to live with, and by and large they did. I ran a good-sized multi-node BBS in the mid-to-late eighties (16 or so lines) and I have to tell you, the technical support I got from our local RBOC was stellar. They had a nominal charge of $40/quarter hour at the time, but I had a guy come out and install 18 phone lines at my home. He spent two days running cables around the place (because of the way the place was built he couldn't drill through the floors) and only charged me a hundred bucks. All solid, quality work, and the installer actually had considerable training in general electronics and telephone theory. Knew what he was talking about, let me tell you, and he told me that he got all that training from the company school. As an engineer myself, I was impressed. But hey, AT&T expected to be around and they expected their employees to stick around, and it was worth the investment. Hell, once he had it all in place he said, "you're gonna want at least one hunt group for this: if you have me set it up for you now it won't cost you anything." Cool.

Contrast that to what I've received from Comcast and SBC in the past fifteen years or so ... shoddy work, ignorant installers that barely speak English, and when they're all said and done what I get is a ball of twisted pairs floating in midair over my basement floor without so much as a wire nut. Kind of a third-world flavor, really. Then they ARGUE with me when I try to tell them that they have ring and tip backwards or no, you have lines one and two reversed. Bare wires everywhere. I complained but the "technical support" people I spoke to couldn't understand me either and only cared about whether I had working phone service or not. So I had to go get a block and a punchdown tool and do it properly myself. And this for double what the old Bell System used to charge me every month (Comcast had me up to $95/month for two phone lines before I switched to VoIP.)

The reality is that presiding Judge Green (who was oh-so-concerned about unspecified additional "services" that weren't available to the consumer because of the AT&T monopoly) was just too impatient. The Internet came along and we got all those things anyway ... what we lost was the world's most reliable phone system.

Yeah, sure. The breakup was a great thing.

Re:Congratulations!

Splitting Ma Bell (a monopolist service provider)

Except that splitting Ma Bell didn't do a single thing about its monopoly status.

Oh, sure, if you didn't like your service, you could quit your job, sell your house, and move three or four states away so that you could buy service from a "competitor", but as far as anti-trust issues go, things like regulations forcing the phone company to let you buy and use your own phones went miles farther than the breakup.

It's not that easy.

You can't just "cancel" your contract in a lot of cases. I know in my area, you have three choices: 1) use the cable provider (Comcast), 2) use dial-up, 3) go fuck yourself. It's a selective monopoly, and it seriously hurts a lot of consumers in a lot of less urban areas.

choice four

Move to a country home in the deep south and get DSL. I live 7 miles from a town with a population of about 1000 people, a mile off the highway on a dirt road and I have 3Mbit dsl service that's pretty darn reliable. How someone can live in the city and not have dsl or high speed wireless service available amazes me. Heck, you should at least be able to get cheap fractional T1. If no one else has decent service and you live in a populated area stick up a wifi gateway and offer it yourself. If the cable service really does suck that bad it shouldn't be hard at all to find customers to help defray the cost of that shared T1.

Re:choice four

Having grown, lived, and worked in many parts of the South (MD, AL, MS, GA, FL) before moving to New England in my later twenties, I can completely understand the GP's unwillingness. Unless one is predisposed to miserable summer heat, far poorer working conditions, and pervasive bigotry that, while probably no greater in quantity than in much of rural New England, is certainly more confrontational and institutionalized, there is little to recommend leaving New England for the South.

I do recommend it to New England conservatives of my acquaintance, though. What better place to experience the actual results of "limited government," "minimal interference" in labor and health regulation, and gutted systems of public education than dear ol' Dixie?

Re:choice four

And yet a place like Boston is one of the most racist cities in the country. It's almost like you have assholes everywhere.

Re:choice four

Move to a country home in the deep south and get DSL. I live 7 miles from a town with a population of about 1000 people, a mile off the highway on a dirt road and I have 3Mbit dsl service that's pretty darn reliable. How someone can live in the city and not have dsl or high speed wireless service available amazes me. Heck, you should at least be able to get cheap fractional T1. If no one else has decent service and you live in a populated area stick up a wifi gateway and offer it yourself. If the cable service really does suck that bad it shouldn't be hard at all to find customers to help defray the cost of that shared T1.

Your provider is obviously operating at a loss in your area. The only explanation is that there is a high ranking company employee who lives in your area.

I live five kilometers from a town of about 500 people on a paved road. The best connection avaialble is 28.8Kbps dial-up. You are aware that DSL signals are only good to about 2500 meters from the switch? To provide you with DSL there must be at least four pieces of expensive signal boosting equipment between you and town. It is pretty much guaranteed there are not enough subscribers to pay for it. (Thus my conclusion that an executive of the the ISP you use lives nearby.) Neither DSL or cable will be available in my area until the population grows large enough to make it profitable, at which point I will move farther out because there will be too many people. (Satellite is laughable for internet service and wifi is almost as bad.)

Most modern cable internet service is far superior to T1. (Especially Eastlink in eastern Canada, the industry leaders for over a decade.) Eastlink can provide me a 10Mbit up and down connection for a fraction of the cost of a T1 with 6.6 times the capacity. Cable is superior to DSL. Why? Simple physics. Coaxial cable is a far superior signal conductor to the phone lines used by DSL. Look it up, or take a basic physics course.

Re:It's not that easy.

3) go fuck yourself.

DickTel, a wholly-owned subsidiary of CheneyComm

Re:If you don't get

No consumer service I've ever seen has a guaranteed speed claim

Well, you've seen the wrong contracts then. The contract I have has a minimum bandwidth clause and also a maximum out-of-service period limit. But then again, this is not the U.S. here.
 

Re:God Smack Your Ass !!

The Road Runner service may not be used to engage in any conduct that
interferes with Road Runner's ability to provide service to others,
including the use of excessive bandwidth.

"Using internet service is against the terms of your internet service provider's contract"

Fradulent advertising

This is the 'technical solution' to a typical case of selling a product that you can't actually deliver.
NTL in the UK has just started to institute a similar policy, and is reputed to be haemorrhaging subscribers at an alarming rate (at least if you are a shareholder). It really defeats the point in having broadband to slap an arbitrarily low usage cap on a service that is expected to be used to transfer rich media content - which is by nature very large.
Either these companies can invest in their network sufficiently to deliver this type of service, or they should withdraw from this business completely.
Usage caps will only buy them a small amount of time, before proper investment in their networks must resume.

Class action?

Ok, so I take this as an admission that they're not willing or able to deliver as advertised. Sounds like a lot of people are owed a refund.

-jcr

Re:Class action?

I agree. The FCC has repeatedly denied ISP's the right to shape and/or filter traffic based on the common carrier laws.

To do otherwise would cause the ISP to lose their status as a common carrier, and thus, for all legal matters, lose their "Internet Service Provider" status as well as far as the DMCA is concerned. At this point they start to filter and/or interact with the traffic, they are no longer a bipartisan, rather a willing participant in deciding upon the traffic of which they are choosing to send.

Thus, any illegal content, they have chosen to allow. Regardless of protocol, technology, etc.

So they are not liable.

Re:Class action?

Most ISPs are not common carriers.

depends on the application of this

In terms of QOS i agree with this. if for example you are downloading 100gig of porn from torrents then shaping that when you make a phone call in order to make sure the phone call gets through ok is GOOD. shaping however should NEVER prevent you reaching your maxium speed your line is capable of. what you spend your bandwidth on is none of their business, isp's have repeatedly stated they aren't responsible for your downloading habits, so they can't turn around and control them to suit themselfs and not be liable for it.

Re:depends on the application of this

You're not getting it, are you?

I do this on my own networks, and I don't get complaints about it. Yes I'm an ISP. No, I'm not evil. I make every effort not to be evil. When it comes to transport out to the internet, YES, I do shape traffic. Priority goes (roughly) VOIP, Video, SSH/RDC, Web, P2P. In that order. Now, that doesn't mean you don't get the full bandwidth you're paying for with P2P. What happens is that packets get dropped and re-sent (as per TCP specs) and the result is additional LATENCY, not a drop in overall throughput. That only occurs if I'm horribly over-subscribed, which just won't happen, because if I'm paying wholesaler rates, there's really no way I'd allow it to happen. Bought in appropriate quantities bandwidth is cheap. TRANSPORT of that bandwidth is what is expensive. I can buy up all the bandwidth I want from the right location for next to nothing. Getting it to you is what costs me big time. If you build the infrastructure to me, support it, and don't whine at me when it's down, I can sell it to you cheaply, too.

No, I don't like the big media conglomerates any more than you do, but being in the business I can tell you that this isn't wholly evil. What I would like to see from them is a release of HOW they're shaping it. That release makes it look to me more like they're doing Web > Everything Else, or putting hard caps on VOIP, Video, P2P, etc, which would be evil as well. I don't hard cap bandwidth below what you're paying for. Now, that said, our service contracts are worded such that you know up front that you're buying burstable service. We offer 10MBit symmetrical connection, but the contract states that we only guarantee 256k symmetrical dedicated. Anything above that is burst, which means that you have no right to saturate the connection full time more than 256k, but you're more than welcome to burst up to that for periods. To me this is fair. If you have a big download, burst away, that's what you've paid for. Running a warez FTP isn't. Running a (high bandwidth) website isn't. We don't have language that says you can't run a server. You can, but you're not allowed to saturate your connection 24/7. If we see that, you get a phone call asking you to purchase a dedicated connection rather than a burstable one. The problem with the cable companies is that they don't offer dedicated connections, because they CAN'T. You're on the same node as your neighbors, and whether you pay for a dedicated connection or not, you degrade the service of your neighbors when you saturate the line, end of story.

I wish I could grow out faster, but I can't. I am try to get some investors to get more infrastructure out there, but Ma Bell isn't too happy about my existence right now. :\ I've tried to avoid doing business with "Mom" as I've taking to call them, but it's hard. Anyhoo...that's off-topic. Point is, don't bust their chops for shaping. Bust them for not telling you *how* they're shaping, and "ask" with your money for them to do it right, and not be greedy. If not, make sure your neighbors know what is up too, and if they don't initially care ("we just browse the web and check e-mail"), make them aware of the impact this sort of behavior could have on them down the road, and get them to at least make phone calls and case a ruckus. If they really are your only broadband choice, call the local newspaper, or tv station. They usually have investigative reporters on-hand, and if you can explain in layman's terms what's going on, guaranteed you might get them to re-think their policy. Companies hate bad PR, it hurts the revenue stream, and I know first hand that lost revenue HURTS.

oops

The packet shaping they talk about doesnt seem to have any concrete cut offs for when it is used, just a vague reference to "excessive bandwidth usage." [what exactly do they think is excessive?] what is going to end up happening is the broadband users that know enough about it will either leave or try to go around the packet shaping. in the latter case, if they got caught they would likely have their account trashed which would quickly lead to a lot of people knowing about it. seems like an awful efficient way for Time Warner to shoot themselves in the foot. Ready. Aim. Fire

A cunning plan...

TW are probably HOPING to lose 10% of their customers... the 10% who use 90% of the bandwidth. By biasing their customer base towards those who just want to read their email and check CNN online, they can carry on collecting the fees and not bother with the costs of providing greater bandwidth.

Re:A cunning plan...

Word of mouth can really make or break a business, and when flip the bird to 10% of your customers, you'll probably end up regretting it.

Unless of course your business is a monopoly, or a duopoly where both 'competitors' treat their customers equally poorly. Then you can flip the bird to 100% of your customers and still run a bloated, inefficient business.

PS - once traffic shaping has been turned on, look for Time Warner to start soliciting companies like Google/youtube to 'sponsor' speed zones on TW's network.

Re:A cunning plan...

PS - once traffic shaping has been turned on, look for Time Warner to start soliciting companies like Google/youtube to 'sponsor' speed zones on TW's network.

If that happens hopefully Google will be smart enough to turn around and sue Time Warner for effectively charging a ransom for a service which is not artificially degraded. In fact, even if Time Warner does not do this, I hope that their traffic shaping is sufficiently targeted against certain well-funded sites or services who could sue for damages due to degraded customer experience.

It would be perfect if TW actually restricted bandwidth to any online video/media service because IMO (IANAL) this would be directly anti-competitive behavior from Time Warner.

Conflict of Interest

Oops, we broke your third-party VOIP service. Why not sign up for Time-Warner VOIP, which works much better?

I'm just waiting for the jerks to declare any use of IPSEC as a violation of their TOS.

Re:Conflict of Interest

You're a fucking shill. Now, I'm ordinarily a little more civil than that, but I think it's warranted here. Why would any ordinary person so consistently defend the huge corporate conglomerate and its anti-consumer practices? What does the ordinary user gain from what TW is doing?

Time Warner has a legal, natural monopoly on internet access in many areas. In exchange for that privilege, it needs to serve the public interest. Just as the electric company is not allowed to suddenly increase rates 200% and only provide power during peak hours to people who pay an extra fee, cable modem companies should not be able to discriminate like this.

Just because you personally don't use newsgroups, P2P networks and so on does not mean that someday the kind of traffic you enjoy won't be throttled as well. It harms everybody. Comparing that traffic to spam is disingenuous to the point of fraud. Spam is sent uninvited; newsgroup traffic, on the other hand, is initiated by the customer doing exactly what it is that he signed up for.

Why the hell would you promote a company that limits your access to what you paid for, and gives you nothing in return, unless you were being paid to do it? Get the fuck out.

Heh.

Good thing I didn't switch to Road Runner when they tried to pressure me into doing so. I'm just fine with my slightly-less-downlink-than-RR-but-twice-the-uplin k Verizon business DSL connection. (Until they evil me out just as well, in which case I'm fucked x.x)

-uso.

Re:Heh.

You seem to be a little confused. The contention ratio of a broadband account is how many times thet sell the same bandwidth. So if you buy a 5000/1000 account, they sell the same 5000 to 50 (or 20) other people on the basis that you wont all try and use it at the same time.

Here is a link describing this better than I:

http://www.getonlinebroadband.com/faqs/faq02.html [getonlinebroadband.com]

VOIP is high bandwidth?

Since when is voice a high-bandwidth application? A telephone call only uses 56kbps (that's bits per second), and that's without good compression. I can't imagine how a call made with a good codec could be considered enough of a problem to be throttled.

dom

Yes, VOIP is high bandwidth

I think something needs to be explained here. Apparently from the threads I've been reading in the article most people do not realize that VoIP is a high bandwidth application. It's true. Consider this, we allot 8kbps per user for our b-band offering which is 125:1 if you're a network person or 128:1 if you're a retarded systems administrator. This typically leaves us with a surplus of bandwidth. For businesses it all depends on the SLA. If they want 1:1 then they'll be paying about $100/meg. Our cheapest upstream is $75/meg plus our own network costs (we just sunk $750k in a new core in one POP and we only replaced 2 devices). How do I know this? I run an ISP.

Going back to the original topic. Skype, Vonage and VoIP offerings built into IM clients, FPS and role-playing games (or the addons) consume between 32 and 64kps, depending on the codec and utilization of the voice frequencies (ie, my phone calls consume around 32kbps but a call between my aunt and mother run much closer to 64kbps). Contrary to popular misbelief just because an audio codec like G.711 claims to only use up to 64kbps does not mean it won't consume more bandwidth with more voice traffic, ie both people talking simultaneously. The voice traffic is many times the average transfer rate of most consumers. While surfing the web and checking email most users will barely make a blip on a I/O graph of their CM or their DSL modem. Most of the VoIP apps I've worked with use G.711 by default instead of G.729 or some other less demanding codec. I haven't even touched on IP/UDP overhead for VoIP traffic. A G.711 64kbps stream is around 84kbps with IP/UDP overhead. This overhead is even greater if you're putting the traffic onto a VPN tunnel of some sort. GRE adds 24; IPSec adds 40 IIRC. Depending on your method VPN implementation you could even be pushing IPSec over TCP adds another 20+, depending on header options. Your VoIP call could be close to the upstream limits of your b-band connection and you don't even realize it, depending on your setup of course.

So in short, yes, VoIP is considered a high bandwidth application when compared to the atypical "95%" user. These are the users that we base on bandwidth allotments on. P2P, NNTP, and porn downloaders fall into the "5%" category. The unused excess from the "95%" users generally takes care of these users. We also run with a fairly substantial buffer, just in case. We have now decided to push for up to 100Mbps to the doorstep over the course of the next 3-5 years. We're rolling out ADSL2+ in some areas as a stop-gap measure and have started on a FTTH project for the remaining areas. We anticipate that more of the "95%" users will be become bandwidth consumers as IPTV, video-on-demand and online movie rental products become more prevalent. The trick is to not overbuild the network before users are ready to use it. We can't pass along the increased costs until they're ready for improved service. Raising cable bills by $5/month will piss alot of people off, even when we've deployed $50mil of plant and network upgrades.

You should not be surprised or indignant

This is the problem with these 'unlimited' plans, there no way all users can consume the peak bandwidth advertised and we all know it. Many 'enthusiast' users signed up for such plans thinking their providers were fools for offering such plans. Well who's the fool? The guy that oversells a product by an order of magnitude or the guy that bought into it knowing that it was?

In my opinion un-metered plans should not be offered at all, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You pay for an upload/download capability, then pay for brackets of monthly bandwidth, and you should get a break on packets transfered during off-peak hours.

Do we really want or need government regulation of ISP capacity marketing? If that's the case I guess the free market economy doesn't work as well a some folks think.

Re:You should not be surprised or indignant

"In my opinion un-metered plans should not be offered at all, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You pay for an upload/download capability, then pay for brackets of monthly bandwidth, and you should get a break on packets transfered during off-peak hours."

No thanks.

Here is something I would buy...

Flat rate. Guaranteed X up / Y down (preferably X = Y) with ability to go up to a.X up and b.Y down when the network loading can handle it. (a and b are greater than 1!)

Over selling is cool down at the home level, just sell and manage it honestly.

Don't give me this per byte game though. And I dont want to pay by the word for my phone calls either.

all the best,

drew

Their experience with AOL is showing

Time Warner Cable is showing just how much they learned from AOL during the AOL/Timer Warner days.

"flat rate" makes littl sense for broadband speeds

Flat rate makes sense when available capacity is so high compared to common usage that accounting for usage is more expensive than simply letting everybody just use the service at a fixed fee. That's true for voice, dial-up, and maybe ISDN speeds.

For broadband, flat rates don't make any sense yet. What you get is either volume-capped flat rates, traffic shaping, or some kind of nebulous enforcement. Since those tend to be not very transparent to customers and hard to compare between providers, those kinds of models are probably bad for users.

ISPs should find a simple pricing model for broadband, like charging a few bucks per gigabyte of volume, plus some base fee (possibly with different rates for peak/off-peak usage). Based on that, people could more reasonably compare what they're actually getting for their money.

Of course, ISPs prefer a confusopoly, and users foolishly think they're getting a good deal with "all you can eat" bandwidth buffets.

Why this happens in North America...

... and not South Korea.

In general, the population density is far too low in North America to make it financially feasible for ISPs to lay out improved infrastructure as they become available. In the US of A, the average population density is 31 per square km. In Canada, it's a paltry 3.2 per square km. South Korea, on the other hand, has a population density of 480!!! per square km. Over 15 times that of the U.S., and over 150 times that of Canada. This makes it a lot easier for ISPs to roll out improved infrastructure for the country.

That's not the whole explanation

Population density isn't the whole explanation though.

Here in Europe, for example -- Belgium, with a population density of 343 people/km^2, has realtively crappy broadband, with bandwidth caps of a few tens of gigabytes per month being prevalent with most ISPs. At least, last time I checked. I might be out of date.

Sweden, however, with a population density of just 22 people/km^2, has great broadband. I have uncapped cable at 24 Mbit/s down and 8 Mbit/s up, and I do use it rather heavilly, although I use far less than my total theoretical capacity. I haven't received any nastygrams from my ISP about this either. The very young wireless 3G broadband market, which used to have an industry standard of a 1 GB/month cap, has under the last few months come under competition, with most providers giving uncapped access. Broadband in rural areas is less spectacular, but ADSL is available in many areas, if you're lucky enough to have bought in before they ran out of space for equipment in your local telephone station. (A widespread problem right now, it seems.)

The most important piece of the puzzle is working competition between providers. Sure, a dense population helps, but it's in no way so significant as you make it out to be.

Re:Why this happens in North America...

In general, the population density is far too low in North America to make it financially feasible for ISPs to lay out improved infrastructure as they become available.

This is an old, tired and worn-out and patently absurd canard, which is being spread by apologists of the US telecommunication oligopolies since the beginning of the Internet. The truth is that in much of the US the population density in major metropolitan centres is as great or greater then the average Korean, Swedish or Japanese ones and yet, in those same very areas, which in your reasoning shoud be extremely suitable for deployment of 100mb Internet connections comparable to those being deployed en-masse in those other countries, you get .... 1.5 mb DSL. If you are lucky that is.

In short, the problem is the ever expanding culture of corporate avarice, corruption, attempts to make a quick buck and wholesale deterioration of marketplace ethic in the USA, which then spreads via USA-based multinationals to other nations where those same multinationals and their CEOs have influence. Get rich quick at any cost to everybody else is the new "motto" of Corporate America. "Work hard and make a good product" is sooo early 20th century!

Large businesses need to fear their customers, but because they essentially run and control the US government -- the only force capable of opposing and controlling them -- they are in a position to longer care about the supposed "invisible hand" of the marketplace. Now they can do whatever they want, and the "consumers" (the most derogatory term for a "person" ever invented) have to just take it.

And that is the truth of the matter, in affairs ranging from the Internet service to cell phone service to motor vehicle fuel consumption and so on.

My experience / are there good alternatives?

On June 7th I experienced a drop in bandwidth to certain online video sites down to only 300Kbps, where usually I can get a full 5Mbps downstream. I can't say for sure that this was 'traffic shaping', but it's quite a co-incidence that TWC made this announcement one day earlier.

Does anybody have a link to a list of ISPs or non-business plans that are not traffic shaping? If a 16x drop in performance is going to become a frequent occurrence I aim to leave RoadRunner quickly. I'll look to the /. crowd for some respectable recommendations.

Re:My experience / are there good alternatives?

Actually, I'm a little suspicious of this story. I googled it and all I could find was this Slashdot story and the source it links to - which is a forum posting that reproduces an email which was supposedly received by a Time Warner customer. There's nothing about this on TW's official site, and no other news sites have written anything. I'm not saying it's not true, it's just a little unusual for Slashdot to publish breaking news like that.

The only option

Is to encrypt every protocol so it looks like IPSEC or ssh and use random ports. This is going to be defeating the point of network management, firewalls, etc, but it is the only option they allow us to get information across without it being cataloged, censored and billed according to whatever criteria they want to impose.

Re:The only option

tell that to Rogers in canada.
They're throttling all encrypted traffic, just incase that its used to bypass the traffic throttling they imposed.
see http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1859/125/ [michaelgeist.ca] for details

Welcome to corporate greed

Living in a backwater where packet shaping and other shenanigans (like providing 8Mbps line with 300MB allowance per month), I'd like to say... welcome to corporate greed.

PS: Best bit of advice, make them bleed while you can, and then change your service stating why you changed, It won't achieve much, but its about the best you can do.

Time Warner's Suprising Speed Jumps

A Time Warner cablemodem account (really RoadRunner sold by Time Warner) I've been using has grown suprisingly fast in bandwidth. Every 12-18 months it approximately doubles, from 2Mbps to 10Mbps over the past 4 years. Its upload was about 600Kbps until last week, but one day it went symmetric, 10Mbps in each direction or both simultaneously.

(Strangely, just uploading with wget doesn't do it, but rsync over scp gets the full 10Mbps instead of the old 0.6Mbps.)

The jumps happen suddenly, but what's strange is that Time Warner doesn't promote the increases. I'd expect them to put ads screaming about how I'm paying the same, but getting so much more, steadily for years. I'm pretty cynical, but I can't keep up with that mystery.

Comcast is doing this too

I am in the Bay Area and noticed that Comcast is doing this also with newsgroup traffic. When I discontinued service in January I would get a sustained 12Mbps download. Now I see that it will jump up to 12 for a second then down to 6Mbps. It doesn't really bother me though. I used to rate limit myself anyway so there would be bandwidth left over for other things and other people within my home. I prefer this solution to having Comcast suddenly terminate my service like some other people reported happening for heavy usage.

-Dan

encryption

Bittorrent currently only encrypts the headers of it's packets. I predict that developers who make those applications affected will do everything they can to make their packets look like https or VPN by using SSL or similar technology.

Free The Net |Time for CommunNet

Since cable is based on community shared access, why not turn this around and have communities start building wireless/mesh networks with a [single big pipe/multiple small pipe/multi-vendor] connection? Net access can be loaned or purchased with donations/ significantly reduced rates.

Low infrastructure/maintenance/overhead costs will allow a community net to easily compete. Even if the the local ISP fights back with reduced fees or opens up their access, it's still a win!

-CF

I just don't get it

Why do U.S. ISPs do this?? I'm and expat living in Japan, and we get what we're told we get. I had 100Mbps fiber for about US$60/mo. They say it's a best effort and not a guaranteed connection, but they must be putting a lot of effort into it because I certainly got over 65Mbps throughput. The other 35Mbps may actually be my computer not keeping up with things, and not the network itself, for all I can tell. We don't have packet shaping. We don't have "fake unlimited" accounts, but real unlimited accounts. This sounds fair, we get what they providers advertise. Why isn't this the case in the U.S.? Sounds like unfair and deceptive practices, especially since "voting with your wallet" doesn't always work, since the alternative is just as bad.

But before you blast me with the "Japan is a smaller country and easier to get 100Mbps in urban areas", hear me through. I now live in Hokkaido, the northern most island in Japan, which accounts for over 23% of land mass, with a fraction of the population of the main island. This is closer to Canada or Alaska in terms of landmass/person. Next door neighbors may be several miles away. I live in a sleepy little town, and I don't have fiber, and I don't suspect we'll get it for a few more years minimum. But we do have ADSL, and I have it at about 45Mbps throughput (downstream) right now. Not bad at all. And again, no traffic shaping or false "unlimited" gimmicks. (For what it's worth, I don't think there are ANY providers left in Japan that have a cap on total trafffic per month anymore.)

It sounds to me like the FCC should start kicking some telecom butt right about now, and tell the telecoms that they need to advertise what they're offering, and not something they want people to THINK they're providing. If the costs just can't justify true unlimited access, why not advertise it as being "limited" and offer a more expensive "truly unlimited" account? Over here in Japan there are residential and business lines. The business lines cost about 3 times as much, but there is a difference. Business lines have multiple static IP addresses. And if you pay even more, you get a "guaranteed" throughput speed, and an SLA with five-9 uptime guarantees.

Each time I hear about these things, it just makes my eyes roll. WTF???? It is just insane that ISPs can actually get away with this. What they're doing is pretty much the same as an airline selling the same seat 3 times, and telling 2 out of 3 passengers that the flight was overbooked and they're SOL.

How I long for the days of Comcast

Man, every since Time Warner has taken over my cable service its been shockingly bad. Internet is down constantly and for days. I've called support a couple times, apparently it went down because they don't support Linux. They are also doing something to the channel lineup, changing channels around a lot, that renders my Tivo useless for a lot of stuff.

This story is fake.

I work in one of the 5 TWC Regional Data Centers. There was no memo like this on Wednesday, nor have I ever seen such a memo. Reading it, you can clearly see that its a faked up story, as it mentions applications that take "lots of bandwidth". I'm sorry, but the people who write our memos wouldn't use verbage like this. Excessive maybe, considerable surely, but not "lots". On top of that, do you really think that TWC Corporate would send out a memo to announce this? I can guarantee you that if and when we do start packet shaping your traffic, it won't be announced to the world. And finally, the story itself is false. We haven't, nor have we any plans what so ever to start doing this. And come on, newsgroups? You think newsgroups are killing our bandwidth? That's just silly.

Contracts

If they agree to provide speeds Up To Xgb then I should agree to pay Up To $N a month. Where N is whatever I feel the service is worth.

My favorite justification...

The cable companies claim that they don't have a published or even fixed usage cap, but they are just cancelling the accounts of those who use more than the other 99% of the users. The justification for cancelling them: they use more than the rest.

Okay, assume that's true. Cancel the top one percent. Now you have a new top one percent. Cancel them. Now...

Pretty soon they'll have a lot of bandwidth freed up, and it'll be fair for everyone.

Bandwidth tradeoffs make some sense to me

The main reason providers advertise a single number (actually two: upload and download) is that anything more complicated would be impossible to communicate to the vast majority of American consumers whose general level of technology understanding seems to be about at the level of 'it has 4/6/8 cylinders'. What does make sense to me is to guarantee bandwidth for the first X mb and a lower bandwidth for the next Y mb and so on. It does not discriminate by content and it solves the 90/10 problem. Hard bandwidth guarantees may be difficult and expensive which means some sort of priority scheduling -- shaping -- based on the total bw usage in the past Z days (or perhaps with exponential decay). That is pretty much the netflix solution -- give fastest service to those that use it the least.

What do you expect from cable companies

I know many of you may not have choices for broadband, but this isn't surprising when you compare the legacy of telephone with cable companies. The former has been considered a common carrier and respected the data as autonomous. The latter, cable, has made as part of its business model, controlling data and limiting access to it. This is in-effect the fundamental difference between these two types of companies. If you care about data being free, you should not get your broadband service from a company who makes its money by feeding you little bits of traffic a la carte.

Oh, come on, guys... You know what it's about.

Time Warner is primarily a MEDIA COMPANY. They make and sell movies. I believe they also own music collections that they sell.

I'll bet you anything that this whole "packet shaping" thing is MAINLY about one specific issue: slowing down the trading of illegally copied music and movies via P2P systems. This trading affects Time Warner's core business, and packet shaping is an easy step they can take to make it much more difficult to trade movies and music on their networks.

As a less important side issue, Time Warner has been trying (without much success I suspect) to sell their own VOIP system. Maybe as a side benefit to the main goal, they think they can reduce competition for their VOIP product.

It's not that they're going to promise you one bandwidth and pull a bait and switch on you. If you're just doing normal browsing and maybe YouTube, you probably won't notice anything different.

But if they perceive you as screwing around with their core business, then as far as they're concerned you're probably fair game.

It's not THAT unreasonable. They just want to put the kibosh on behavior that is, technically, still illegal and takes bread out of their mouths.

This is why I have no loyalty

I switch back and forth between providers as soon as my contracts run out. I go to the lowest price...all the service is equally shitty in one way or another so its really just a matter of who gets the least amount of money from me. This crap actually started a long time ago with certain applications. My latest move was to drop from the highspeed $75 a month package to their dirt cheap $19 one because there was virtually no difference at all with caps in place.

Packet shaping technology

Anyone know who's packet shaping technology is being implemented (e.g., Cisco, F5, Radware)?

Not a reliable source!

We're getting our news from random forum postings now?? I can't find "packet shaping" on TW's press releases site, although the forum post seems to be formatted as such. Anybody have a more reliable source?

I have earthlink over Time Warner's lines

I don't mean to sound like an advertising whore or anything, but I've used earthlink's broadband service for years, the connection is over time warner's cable lines, however earthlink supplies the badwidth. I haven't really had the problems that I hear time warner customers having over the years, and earthlink is somewhat better about packet shaping policies, especially when you consider old news about them and file sharing [slashdot.org]. The speed is capped slower than RR's lines (I've only gotten a max of 450 kilobytes down and 40 kilobytes up) but for $10/mo less than RR, who cares.

I live in Brooklyn, so I'm practically screwed

I live in Brooklyn and currently have Time Warner cable modem service (although not cable tv -- Dish Network for that). The speed I get is usually pretty good, although streaming video is frequently jittery, even during far off-peak hours. Unfortunately the only other consumer-class services that is available to my apartment is Earthlink cable modem, 5 megabit down. I'm pretty sure I'm going to switch to that soon, largely because Time Warner customer support sucks so badly. After Earthlink, though, I'm pretty much out of options. Doh.

Translation

You no longer get the bandwidth you're paying for.

And because our system is beatable, when you do beat it, we beat you!

FRAUD AND LIES!

Time Warner today implemented a network management tool to improve the operation of the network for all subscribers. As a result, a small minority of users may experience slower speeds during peak hours when using certain applications that consume lots of bandwidth.

What outright B.S. It certainly doesn't help all subscribers from the start. It doesn't help at all the ones who actually use the network they were promised.

The Road Runner service may not be used to engage in any conduct that interferes with Road Runner's ability to provide service to others, including the use of excessive bandwidth.

That could apply to anybody who uses the network at all!

These people should be sued for consumer fraud, and into Specific Performance. If you give me 6MBs, and charge me for 6MBs, I'd damn well better be able to get 6MBs most of the time on any application I choose to run!

Earthlink doesn't think it affects them

Just chatted with an Earthlink Sales-Bot:

Andy P.: Thank you for using EarthLink's live Sales chat. How can I help you today?
Scott: I'm considering switching to Earthlink Cable from Time Warner Cable, but I'm wondering if TWC's newly announced packet shaping policy will be affecting Earthlink customers? See http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,18468495~da ys=9999~start=100 [dslreports.com] for some details regarding their announcement.
Andy P.: One moment while I get that information for you.
Andy P.: No, this does not affect us.
Scott: How sure of of that answer are you? No offense, but I don't want to subscribe, then later find out you were wrong.
Andy P.: The Topic on the Forum itself says "TW Officially Announces Packet Shaping for All RR User" It does not mention EarthLink and If this was the case with us we would definitely have received an update on this by now.
Scott: Thanks! Appreciate your time.

Could be the news hasn't trickled down to Sales, but I guess I'm hopeful. Only other option here is DSL, which has a higher total cost if you don't already have a phone line.

Earthlink

I wonder if Earthlink subscribers on the Time Warner network will be impacted...

I just noticed this issue...

I have been a digital cable, digital phone and digital roadrunner user for at least 8 years now. I just noticed this "issue" recently. I pay for Usenet access and noticed that downloads were going way slower then the 8 Mbps I pay Time Warner for (I pay an extra $9.95 a month to go from 5 Mbps to 8 Mbps). However, the "fix" is easy, just change ports for your Usenet client. The Usenet server I use NewsDemon [newsdemon.com] offers many ports, just try each one until you get your speed back. I just switch to port 80, and wham, I am back to 8 Mbps goodness.

Their traffic shaping seems to only be port based. Another example is that my upload is 512 Kbps. However, I tried to set up a small website for family and friends and noticed that upload from my port 80 was dog slow. So I setup a free DynDNS.org [dyndns.com] WebHop service which sends all HTTP traffic to a different port. Wham, back to my full upload bandwidth. I also set Apache on my Mac to have a VHost on *:80 and *:5090. *:80 just redirects everything to *:5090.

I noticed the shaping for Bitorrent as well. I just use a client that doesn't use the traditional ports and now I can download Linux ISO's at a good speed again. Though personally I don't use Bitorrent much. Usenet is much safer if you want to "try before you buy". With Usenet, you are not uploading, no one has ever been sued for downloading only. Copyright right restricts distribution (uploading), not downloading.

I don't really see the reason for this shaping crap. Any some what technical user can bypass it by changing from the standard ports.

Too bad for them

I'm not buying their service. I'm opting for one that doesn't do traffic shaping. Nothing that comes out of AOL/Time Warner is ever much good, anyway.

So that explains it...

I guess this is why my usenet service from Roadrunner here in Nebraska dropped from about 4Mbps to about 300Kbps a week ago. It is altogether useless now. What, I'm supposed to pay $45 a month just so I can browse sites and use email? I don't think so. Let's face it, the only use for broadband is downloading shitloads of mp3z, warez, pron, etc. Take that away and the internet is pretty much useless.

RoadRunner - an ISP, or....

Yeah, well, I just relocated from FL to Chi, and I've got a major beef with ToadRunner: no RR's convenient around here, and I'm on the local cable co's broadband. However, unlike *any* ISP I've ever dealt with, RoadRunner absolutely *refuses* to put a permanent mail forwarding on a closed account. "Pay or die" seems to be their attitude.

So, no more forwarding from my accounts from the accounts I closed 4.5 years ago (another ISP's *real* service, which I appreciated).

            mark

Not Surprising, Time Warner is the Worst

Of all of the HS Internet or cable TV providers I have had over the years, Time Warner was worst - by a substantial margin. The Internet connection would be down 24 hours every week and the UI on the set top boxes were so laggy that the remote control was unusable. It would take 2 or 3 minutes for the cable box to register a button push on the remote.

Time Warner screws over their customers

Wow I think i might drop Time Warner now that theyre packet shaping. They say they've upgraded our service but through packet shaping it's actually a huge downgrade in service performance. I was getting 1.5mb/s on my downloads, now I am getting 1/3 that on torrents. Yet I'm being charged the same amount. This is unacceptable. Premier package was 8mb/768k and i still downlaoded from known sources at 800kb/s then they upped to 15mb/2mb and iw as getting 1.5mb/s -- then they setup packet shaping and im back down to 400-500 kb/s Might be time to look for a new ISP.

(Enter asinine subject you think is witty here.)

> "The company is already warning users that attempts to circumvent these measures is a violation of their Terms of Service."

You know how to get around this, don't you? Enough people start informing Time/Warner that doing such stuff is "a violation of money coming out of my pocket into yours."

I recall buying a Gateway years ago. Upon finding out Doom didn't run on it, the technical person at the other end of the phone stated, "We don't consider Doom to be a necessary application." Back it went. I assure you they quickly changed their tune.

Local "Upgrades"

About 4 months ago, Time Warner (Road Runner) started to throttle my connection between 12 and 6 AM, and by throttle I mean completely cut it off. I'd call and they would say they are upgrading the network between 12 and 6 AM, and 2 days later it would stop. It would then resume after I made a substantial download and I'd have to call again. When they had a service rep come out to my house, he said it was "node recertification" and that they were checking and upgrading all the nodes in the area to a higher standard. Conveniently, the "increase your Road Runner power" commercials for their $55 service started to come out 4 months ago. Does anyone else have any "I smell the bullshit" stories about Time Warner relating to the past four months?

Re:God Smack Your Ass !!

a shame parent didn't make it to first post...

Re:Music and Video Stores.

Build your own fucking retarded movie sharing network and stop crippling ours.

      Al Gore, is that you?

      Seriously, your complaint is about as effective as the luddite who wanted to halt the industrial revolution by tying himself to the railroad tracks. The people have spoken, and what they have said they want is precisely a high resolution video distribution service. Instead of complaining, why don't you try and give it to them? You'll find it works out better for everyone and you'll even make a profit.

Re:You don't get it, do you

You are a moron. How can you NOT see the implications of this? Don't you fucking understand that Big Media and Big Telco don't want you using all the killer apps that made the Internet what it is today?

Shaping today, filtering tomorrow. Wait... wait... yes, shaping a week ago, filtering today. Read today's Slashdot.