Will Providers Provide Equally?

theodp writes "Imagine the chaos if your power company could take money from Sony so that its appliances got a higher quality of juice - and thus worked a tad better - than those of Mitsubishi. The power system wasn't built that way, but ISPs have that very capability. It may seem like a dodgy competitive tactic, but Yankee Group analysts envision that broadband network providers could give precedence to their own revenue-generating services, possibly leading to the demise of the biggest VoIP player today, Vonage."

I don't think they want to do this...

[LostCluster]

They'll never do this. As much money is dangled in front of them, there's a bigger trap door.

Right now, ISPs stay out of the RIAA/MPAA lawsuit fights because they are common carriers. The moment they stop being able to claim that by giving disadvantages to those who they choose to spite, the RIAA/MPAA will demand that the P2P client of the week be spited as well...

That's just too much of a headache for them. They don't want to become liable for their user's usage. They'd rather that users keep using without them being bothered. They're not going to open themselves up to such exposure.

More dumb analysis by the Yankee group.

[Jaywalk]

Yankee Group analyst Lindsay Schroth considers that reasonable. Why shouldn't the companies that built and run the Internet pipes feeding the home be able to capitalize on their investments?

Uh, maybe because I'm paying for their services? I'm not paying them to mess with my connection to their own advantage. If they started doing this I'd be on my way to another provider in a heartbeat.

Of course, this is the Yankee Group we're talking about, so logical analysis is not to be expected. This is the same bunch of boneheads that has Didio doing their "analysis" of the SCO lawsuits.

Constant corruption....

[Elpacoloco]

It seems like everything these days is self serving and dishonest.

So sad, so sad.

A Simple Solution

[haute_sauce]

Would be to declare ISP (and the internet) as an 'essential service' or utility. And as such the ISP would have rules governing thier behavior, including anti-trust laws.

Double-Edged Sword

[fembots]

Wouldn't such tactic actually drive customers away?

Face it...

[tvh2k]

...companies are looking for a profit, not to make you there best friend. As long as they can keep the profits coming, they could care less what you think of them.

Gotta love this line ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Unless Vonage pays fees to the network provider, there is no reason the operator should not make the service a lower priority on the network.

Oh yeah, no reason at all -- except that if they do that, it's not the internet any more. And if they call themselves "internet providers," they're lying.

Wouldn't help

[Otto]

The idea is not that they lower the priority on the packets to their competitors, but that the raise the priority on packets to their own services. This has a slight effect by lowering priority to everything not theirs, but the point is that their stuff would work top-notch on their own networks, while competitors wouldn't get such a boost.

If you used encryption and decentralization, it doesn't help you, because they're giving their stuff a boost, not directly giving other stuff a kick in the teeth.

Re:Face it...

[riptide_dot]

...companies are looking for a profit, not to make you there best friend. As long as they can keep the profits coming, they could care less what you think of them.

If profits are all they care about, then losing customers would show up on their collective "radar" screens pretty darn fast. So, they really DO care what you think of them if it means you could be switching to another provider...

Oh, and P.S. - Of course they could care less - you can ALWAYS care less - the correct way to make that point would be to say "they COULDN'T care less". That's saying something...:)

thinking of switching to commercial services

[vijayiyer]

As time passes, I'm thinking about just switching to commercial DSL service. Current broadband offerings for the most part are targeted to the uneducated masses, and are cheap for that reason. My ISP had the nerve to tell me that my connection was "For entertainment purposes only" when I asked why the windows file sharing port was blocked (I have a static IP and I needed to share some files with some non-Mac friends of mine). So instead of bitching, the easier solution seems to be to pay for quality. The same applies to every other consumer product out there.

Re:Getting around it...

[xerph]

They could do it based on MAC address, different manufacturers have different allocations of MAC addresses.

Although many devices (Linksys cable/dsl routers for example) provide an option where you can manually set a mac address to replace the default manufacturer provided one. If this practice went into effect it probably wouldn't be too long before we saw a much more widespread use of this feature where people could change the address to something in the range of a "preferred product"

It sucks, but...

[symbolic]

How is this any different than mega supermarkets that give shelf space preference to various brands with respect to location and quantity?

This is why there's competition

[Malc]

I choose to use a small ISP [istop.com]. They have their own problems, but this kind of behaviour isn't one of them. I can almost do what the hell I like with my connection and it's only their peer connections and BGP issues that ever screw me up. I have a choice of other ISPs too who also don't behave like this. Thank goodness for competition!

It doesn't use it today

[GPLDAN]

Vonage's device they send you doesn't adjust the TOS value in the IP packet. I checked with a hub and ethereal. I have the Cisco device, newer customers are getting the Motorola. Don't know about that.

So, it's at the class of service level of everything else. Which doesn't have any packet loss and has low latency. In order to give themselves competitive advantage, Comcast could only trust the TOS and DSCP values in VOIP flows coming from their equipment, but the ENTIRE CONCEPT OF QOS is predicated on the idea of congestion!

Now, if they deliberately threw competing VOIP flows into a low queue and INDUCED loss, well - that's actionable as anti-competitive behavior. And in the standard IANAL disclaimer, I have no idea what the remedies available are.

Also, as another posted that got modded up pointed out, Vonage could use VPN or otherwise mask the RTSP stream. But that's silly. It's also counter productive long term.

I think the parent article is kind of a troll to get legislation by the FCC and others regarding QOS. It's a tactic to cause dissention because of the pass the FCC took on regulating companies like Vonage.

Of course they will

[thedillybar]

Would Internet service providers exercise that control?

You're damn right they will. They've already started blocking port 25 outbound (one thing that I might be okay with) along with a variety of inbound ports. They've taken complaints again and again. They respond with a resounding "We don't care."

And why should they? Joe Schmoe customer doesn't care. He doesn't know if it's his ISP that broke it or the client or somebody else. If he calls someone for support, it's almost certainly not going to be his ISP. After all, he's using someone elses services. His VoIP connection is slow? Why would he blame his ISP? Everything else is fast.

Will they lose a few customers (i.e. the Slashdot crowd)? Yes, but they don't care. Our money isn't worth that much to them. And since we're the only crowd opposed, there's not enough business to start-up competitive ISPs.

Re:Getting around it...

[westlake]

the "original spirit" of the internet was milirary defense and government funded research.
if you looking for idealism, look elsewhere.

Re:Of course they will

[garcia]

Will they lose a few customers (i.e. the Slashdot crowd)? Yes, but they don't care. Our money isn't worth that much to them. And since we're the only crowd opposed, there's not enough business to start-up competitive ISPs.

Unfortunately, you're 100% correct. The customers that they might lose are the ones that they WANT to lose. Why would they want to lose these people? Because that > 1% of their userbase is using more bandwith than 50% of the rest.

ISPs want users that just use the service to check email provided by the ISP, surf their ISP's homepage (which was preset by the setup software), and use an IM client.

They don't want people that use BitTorrent or other P2P services, stream music, download large files, host services, etc.

They have the control (especially large ISPs like Comcast) and there's nothing that we can do about it.

I bet there's a price point

[DanTheLewis]

Somebody, sometime, is going to offer an ISP a boatload of money to do this, and the ISP is going to calculate that the probable cost of interfering in connection usage (P2P monitoring or whatever it is) is dwarfed by the amount of revenue they're getting for a sweetheart deal like this.

If the ISP is a major nationwide network, the monitoring could be a huge burden, but the cash rewards could be just as huge.

At least it'll create a few hundred IT jobs.

Re:More dumb analysis by the Yankee group.

[sapped]

Uh, maybe because I'm paying for their services? I'm not paying them to mess with my connection to their own advantage. If they started doing this I'd be on my way to another provider in a heartbeat.

Yes, because most of us live in an area with more than one (1) broadband provider. That way we always have the option of switching to a competitor if the current company shafts us.

Seriously, for most people it is a case of putting up with whatever nonsense their current broadband provider decides to shove their way or go back to dialup.

Re:Gotta love this line ...

[Rude Turnip]

In other words, Vonage would have to pay "protection money" to the ISP in order for their service to work properly...which naturally gets passed down to the customer. In other words, you have to pay your ISP *more* money (albeit indirectly) in order to get the level of service originally promised at a lower price. This wreaks of outright FRAUD.

It would be like having a furniture set delivered to your house and furniture company having to pay the delivery company a fee to make sure your upholstery doesn't get delivered all shredded up.

Monopoly Privilege

[Brandybuck]

The answer is easy. Power companies are monopolies. I don't have a choice with whom I do business. The reality is that you only get a choice of one power company, one local telephone service, and one local cable company, simply because there is only one set of lines coming into your home.

Internet connections, at least in the US, or different. You have an extensive choice of providers. I live in a metropolitan area, and I have a choice of about two dozen providers. A friend who lives in a rural agricultural area still has a choice of four providers, two of which are high speed. You might have to pay a tiny surcharge to your local telco monopoly, but the choice is there.

A provider that gives one person preferential treatment over another for the same fees is going to be at a competitive disadvantage.

Demand excess in resources

[linux11]

As an employee at an University that is restriction Internet through-put for P2P protocols, I would like to point out that such restrictions are only desirable when resources are tight. The restriction was placed because the cost of adding another T3 to the Internet was prohibitive in comparison of the cost involved in doing Quality of Service. For the University's connection to I2, the reverse is true. The cost of doing QoS on a gigabit connection is prohibitive and it is desirable to just allow the resource utilitization to more "naturally" handle itself.

One thing that I believe would help third party companies provide several interesting services (pay-per-view over IP, party-line VoIP, etc.) would be multicast. It seems to me that there is a conflict of interest with most Cable/DSL providers in regards to providing multicast support on their networks since it benefits external companies more than themselves.

Re:thinking of switching to commercial services

[0racle]

My ISP had the nerve

Read your TOS before whining like a child, you got what you paid for. If you didn't look to see what you were agreeing to, thats you fault not your ISP's. Just about every residential ISP TOS clearly states you are not to be running a server or services for external users, as in external to your home.

So its not that your ISP 'had the nerve,' to tell you what you agreed to, but you were too clueless to read what you were agreeing to before you agreed to it.

Re:Getting around it...

[Short Circuit]

That was why it was developed initially.

But as a community, it stemmed from universities working together and the development of UNIX, which, at the time, culminated in BSD.

So, as a community, the Internet had a free-flowing spirit. Read Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg for an idea of what that community was like. (The cracker in the book being the exception, not the norm.)

Re:Of course they will

[GPLDAN]

They've already started blocking port 25 outbound (one thing that I might be okay with)

I'm glad you are okay with it. Some of us aren't. And we're not spammers. SMTP has not been given any special status by the ISP, as a protocol. It's being singled out because of abuse. But what if I have a home device, say a fire alarm, that I want to use SMTP to page me if it goes off? Should I, as a Comcast customer, be prevented from using that protocol? I have to switch or tunnel it in SSL, or ask my paging provider to use something else because my ISP decided SMTP was right out?

Why can't the ISP simply shut down protocols, based on at least the CONCEPTS presented in the EULA, such as abuse? I can't send out a SINGLE email, because then I might send 100,000? Well, how about waiting UNTIL I DO THAT, and then block JUST ME.

Selectively filtering entire protocols is a slippery slope, and eventually is just a band-aid.

Someone say Regulation?

[goreking]

IF history is any guide, we will see the cable companies totally abuse this until Uncle Sam is forced to make them play nice (after first letting them suck us dry in exchange for superior campaign contributions). Can anyone imagine Charles Dolan (Cablevision Systems) NOT taking advantage of something like this. Bon Vonage!

This is a bad thing?

[Titusdot Groan]

I have internet access through my local cable company.

I've noticed some interesting things about my access:

1. Their NNTP server is faster than any other NNTP server I can access.
2. Their DNS server responds faster than any other DNS server I can point to.
3. I get downloads from their website that are almost twice as fast as from other sites!

Conspiracy!

... or maybe just that I have a big fat pipe to those services because it's all on the same network.

Why would we expect a cable companies VOIP be any different?

Re:A NON-Simple Solution

[Johnny_Law]

Declaring a service as 'essential' or 'utility' tends to lead to a local (and in the case of AT&T national) monopoly. That will only remove the likely-hood of competing ISPs for certain areas, assuming you could even craft a scenario where one ISP could be declared a utility. Do you use a dial-up, dsl, cable based, or fiber optic only as a basis for the service? Nor does this offer any sort of grantee that you prevent utility from favoring their own products, in fact you encourage the opposite by way of bundling.

Nor does the government have to declare and ISP a utility for it to regulate it, they already regulate ISPs. The 'simple' step is to make it illegal for an ISP to use packet shaping or throttling ports; however, that isnt so simple when you know ISPs need to be able to control the traffic to certain ports.

Re:Getting around it...

[Mr.Zuka]

I hate to break it to everyone but this is already happening. Here in California SBC is getting sued by EarthLink for DSL customers getting a message that all lines are full when they tried to sign up on the EarthLink web page then getting a call back from a SBC rep trying to sign them up with SBC instead.(EarthLink had to connect to telco computers to check for available trunk lines.)
No amount of encryption is going to get around the telcos giving priority to their own traffic and having a high enough lag for other companies that when reviewers test their service they will say that the telco service had less problems.

Re:This already happens

[mgoren]

Maybe the ISP integrating "those services" (VOIP, others undoubtedly to follow) into their service is a "win for the customer" on that specific service. But I worry that it could well put a damper on innovation of new Internet services. If individuals and companies are unable to innovate w/ new services b/c only the established services are given good QoS by the major ISP (Comcast, for example), then this is a Bad Thing in the longterm.

Re:Getting around it...

[dillon_rinker]

"I see no legal difference"

You make a sound point. I would point out, though, that there is also no legal difference between beating someone to death with a baseball bat in a crowded room and quietly dropping some slow-acting poison into their water line.

They end up dead both ways, but in the latter case, it's a lot less obvious that a murder was committed, and it's certainly harder to prove you did anything wrong.

Re:Getting around it...

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I see no legal difference between taking a competitors traffic and putting in a low queue, and simply blocking Vonage's entire IP range for the PSTN gateways totally. Poof, end of competition. The effect is the same, why not just be explicit and target individuals?

I do. It's a lot easier to prove that someone is blocking your service than it is to demonstrate that they are degrading data transfers to/from you, especially since it would only result in intermittent outages under load, which the company could plausibly claim as normal behavior.

The whole industry is moving towards this model

[AaronW]

All the major carriers are moving towards this model. The new requirements coming out of the DSL forum require equipment makers have the ability to do all kinds of fancy traffic shaping and quality of service.

The company I work for makes equipment that does this. We set it up so an ISP can create a portal where a subscriber can select services and the network will automatically adjust the shaping and priority settings so the subscriber gets that service while allowing the provider to charge for it.

If Jane Doe wants to watch a certain movie, our box will guarantee the bandwidth between the video server and her DSL line while still limiting other traffic to the normal rates. Or if John Smith wants to download a huge ISO and doesn't want to wait, he can click to up his bandwidth to download it and lower it back down when he's done and gets charged extra for the amount of time he has the higher bandwidth.

Anyone can provide a pipe, but it's not real profitable for the providers. They want to make money off of things like pay-per-view or other special services.

Re:Of course they will

[HeghmoH]

If what you say is true, why do companies like Speakeasy exist?

The slashdot/IT-clueful crowd may not be that large, but if I could get one in a thousand slashdot UIDs to buy one of my products, I'd be extremely happy with that increase. But I'm just one man. However, we are a large-ish, influential group. When our less clueful friends and family come to us with advice, we will try to point them in the right direction. That kind of grassroots advocacy is something that companies love to have. Some ISPs may prefer mindless drones, but I'm sure that not all of them do. In my limited experience with broadband ISPs (RoadRunner, Charter, Wanadoo), they have all come off as pretty non-evil on the network side of things. As far as I've ever been able to tell, they've sold me the pipe and not cared what I did with it, nor prevented anything.