aarmenaa's Journal: I'll Not Weep for Any ISP

With the news that Time Warner is now packet shaping it's network, I figured this might be a timely time to examine some of the motivations behind such a move. Obviously, they're looking to throttle P2P usage to something the network can handle. They're not the first, and they won't be the last ISP to try to put bit torrent under with a stupid piece of hardware that delays sending packets. I still think that packet shapers in general are about the stupidest damn idea I've ever heard of. I base my experience off the one that my campus uses to avoid paying for a reasonable internet line. There, if your packet isn't HTTP, it may take a couple thousand milliseconds for a packet to reach you, if it reaches you at all before the connection times out. Granted, that a worst case scenario, with incompetent admins to boot, but I still think that the money spent on a packet shaper would have been much better spend trying to deliver packets faster, not slower.

But I digress. The simple fact is that there's no reason ISPs can't handle Bit Torrent traffic. I'm paying insane amounts of money every month for a measly 1.5 Mbps connection, and most of the time transfer only a few GB per month (it's mostly my parents using that connection, and they have little use for P2P apps or streaming video). Even if a small percentage of users are costing more money than they're worth, as ISPs claim, the profit margins on the vast majority of their customers are enormous. There should be money in there somewhere to upgrade the network, right? I certainly think so.

But, barring an ISP actually digging into it's own profits to cover the cost of running their service (god, are you mad? What business does that?!), the government has given them billions in tax breaks and incentives to upgrade their networks. That's right, we the people paid for lit fiber to every home, ample bandwidth, an ethernet connection for every child, wireless access points as far as the eye can see, tubes and trucks, and oh so much more. "But wait," I hear you say, "we got none of that, and oh so much less!" And no, no we didn't. Chances are your telephone company and cable company took that money and laughed all the way to bank. No fiber for you. Ladies and gentlemen, "we the people" got boned.

What's worse is that the government didn't even care. In fact, they've made the same deal over and over again, with the same result every time. If I didn't know any better, I'd say someone's getting a kickback somewhere. The only ISP I know that has a serious plan to upgrade their network to fiber is Verizon, and they're doing it at great expense, with great urgency, and to the great dismay of their shareholders. With great expense, because like all the other companies that got government money for upgrades, they blew it elsewhere while their network rotted. With great urgency, because their current network is incapable of handling even the measly service they now sell. Oh, their shareholders are burning their ass over all the capital outlay. Wow, life sure is painful when you take other's people's money and procrastinate for years, isn't it?

As some point all the ISPs are going to have to upgrade their networks. Their copper lines aren't going to last forever, and they'll slowly die, gasping for subscribers as everyone leaves them for the companies that had the foresight to upgrade. If a couple of these companies die in the process, you'll not catch me saying we should be in any hurry to save them. In fact, it would do my heart good to see a couple of the large ISPs go under, leaving chaos in large sections of the United States where they were granted the monopoly rights they abused so badly. No, it'd be a fitting justice, I say, if a couple of executives ended up in jail for gross mismanagement.

Companies like AT&T, Bellsouth (oh wait, they're AT&T now too!), Verizon, and SBC are a cancer. They sell slow, expensive connections, and then throttle on top of that. They spend more time, effort, and money killing municipal wireless than they ever did upgrading their networks. They're complicit with the RIAA, they hand over our information to the government, they steal our money, they weave contracts with terms so hostile it'd give a lawyer an orgasm, they abuse their government granted monopolies, they make questionable advertising claims, and then they have the absolute gall to complain that someone might not be using their service as intended.

Fuckers.