Network Neutrality Threatened In Norway 110
eirikso writes, "In June 2006 NextGenTel, one of the biggest broadband providers in Norway, decided to deliberately limit the bandwidth from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. The CEO of NextGenTel, Morten Ågnes, told the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that they will give priority to the content providers who pay for better bandwidth. The Consumer Council of Norway takes this as a serious threat to network neutrality in Norway and wants to call a meeting with the biggest broadband providers in Norway to find a solution."
Missed the update? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Missed the update? (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, looking further into the article we find:
And by further into the article, I mean the first sentence of the "Original article". So, to recap, this story misses the update (which indicates that this is now a non-issue), and is reporting on something that started several months ago. Bravo :)
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I wonder how many Slashdotters thought this when they see the editors screw up: "damn it, if you can run a blog with that much nonsense and be successfull, I can run one too!" and parted on their way to glory.
Not exactly the Exodus. (Score:1)
If by "glory" you mean "Digg [digg.com]," then at least a few.
Re:Missed the update? (Score:5, Informative)
The throttling begun in June, but it was not made public until September 30th when the National Broadcasting Corporation published a statement. After that the ISP in question received lots of angry phonecalls and emails (also from yours truly which happens to be a customer). On October 3rd the ISP declared that it has ended the practise because everyone hated them.
The ISP claim that the free content is growing more rapidly than their infrastructure can handle, and that they prioritize their investments to suit content providers who pay up.
The weird thing is that the same ISP is happily upgrading all their customers with broader DSL access and very actively marketing 20mbit ADSL2+.
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You're a lucky guy. Even throttled, you would get better speed than just about anyone in the U.S., I'm sure.
-Eric
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I pay over $100/month for 1mbit up 20 down and a static IP with my custom reverse DNS. I pay premium (at least compared to the other options here) and expect premium.
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Geez, if I had that kind of bandwidth, I would walk through life having a permanent orgasm.
-Eric
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The problem is that North american telcos are lazy. The ISP [colba.net] I work for is rolling out 24mb adsl2+ in Montreal. The local telco is sitting at 3mb and they don't care even though they are losing customers to the local cable co who provides much faster service.
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Interestingly TeliaSonera was finishing up the acquisition of NextGenTel during this time. Was this just a test to see what the reaction of customers would be? If there was serious backlash the company was about to change names so TeliaSonera would not get a black eye. Or perhaps this is how TeliaSonera does business and the NextGenTel customers were getting a taste
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Throttling all broadcasters or just certain ones? (Score:1)
Re:Throttling all broadcasters or just [some] ? (Score:2)
Just NRK apparently. Other Norwegian sites, such as newspapers, were not affected.
Just as well that they did stop this throttling practice.
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Call them (Score:2)
Slashdotters in Norway should call NextGenTel and ask if they give equal bandwidth to all hosts on the Internet. If they say no, say no thanks, wait an hour, and call again with the same question.
Then repeat until you believe the message has been delivered. Bad luck if this crowd are a (near) monopoly.
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So, as far as annoyance-factor vs costs goes, you're better off using your money buying trained chimps to harass their employees than sitting on the phone waiting for somebody to talk to. Going with the chimps, there's a Slightly better chance of intelligent conversation also.
NextGenTel is 100% evil, utterly incompetent and offer damn fast connections really cheap.
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Except that they don't offer fast connections, not really. No matter how fast the ADSL part is, if the connection is throttled from there to the public Internet, the connection is not fast. Which means that this is an attempt at fraud.
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The monopoly seat in Norway is generally held by Telenor, the ex-state telecoms monopoly. NextGenTel is a pretty big contender though.
Good (Score:5, Funny)
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Ballance has been restored (Score:2)
I'm glad to see that the bad publicity was enough to prevent it from sticking. Hopefully that's enough on this side of the world as
Oh, not good! (Score:1)
let them (Score:2)
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So where in the world is there a free market in bandwidth? I've never heard of such a thing.
Someone will come along and be cheaper.
Not if they can't get a license to operate, they won't.
Middle man trend (Score:2, Insightful)
ISPs already employ charging models based on usage per month for their customers(consumers), charging (content)suppliers based on usage is trivial for them.
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The problem with this is that in this situation there are two middlemen. First, the consumer broadband company that is providing homes with internet. Secondly, the content providers themselves are paying a middleman for their own bandwidth. So, both middlemen are being payed at present. What the broadband companies want to do is to get payed by both parties, even though one of them is already paying someone else. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to pay both real estate agents when buying/selling
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Umm, wouldn't the buyer pay for their agent and the seller theirs? I guess it's coming out of the same pool of money, but that money is the seller's once the sale is made. Am I missing something (never bought a house, so quite possible).
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-Tom
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True, although this doesn't mean that we have to let them. The consumers have already paid for the content to be delivered through the ISPs lines. The ISPs argument is thus thouroughly unfair, which content provider the consumer chooses should be irrelevant to the ISP as long as the consumer only uses of the ISPs resources as they have paid for.
Telia of Sweden (Score:2)
Although not as open about it as NextGenTel.
Telia has a serious marketdominance in the ADSL-field and refuses to let smaller operators in to use the infrastructure without having to pay insane amounts of money.
Peering is also a thing which Telia is abusing to their own ends. If you're not a big provider you can't get a peering to Telia (unless you pay insane amounts of money or know someone high up at Telia-sales).
The way other operators have to go about and do is
Post updated - still an important case (Score:1)
The concept of ISPs decreasing bandwidth .. (Score:1)
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You see? Nothing to be scared of. (Score:2)
1. isp limits availability of site X
2. people complain to site X
3. X blows the horns that it's in fact isp's fault and everybody should contact the isp and nag 'em
4. people nag isp
5. isp caves in and removes the limit
when the objective reason for the bad service is not in the provider and people are told this, they'll understand. They can still read and comprehend written text.
so, what now: pro-neutrality or anti-neutrality? The truth is in the middle as always.
as the Internet grows,
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I'm all for making my VOIP calls crystal clear, if and only if I get full control over what is considered VOIP on my connection.
And that elim
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Think about it and you'll realize the fallacy of your logic. If you allow the user to route anything as high priority, and limit the high prio
Seems workable to me. (Score:2)
I don't think this is the case.
Suppose your connection was a 5Mb/s burst pipe, but had a high-QoS component of 128kb/s. The system would only allow you to send a certain amount of high-priority packets per second -- if you exceeded that, it would start throwing them away or just strip the QoS flag and send them as nor
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This doesn't prevent ISPs from actually building new infrastructure and delivering "your bandwidth", the way they should. "Burst bandwidth" is a cop-out, especially when in many cases you will never, ever come even close to that speed, not even for a small "burst".
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How is that even remotely like what we have now?
And if I wanted to set that for myself, I could, without interfering with anyone else.
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While this may be the case for tech-related sites, I really doubt that the average user would bother complaining when Ask.com, for instance, is much slower than Google. They'll just get a worse user experience, and eventually they'll start using something else.
Can't see the issue here (Score:1)
Surely giving customers what they pay for is not only reasonable but the only sane way to run a business? The basic problem here is the expectation that domestic broadband should be able to run at peak throughput, 24/7, for an attractive flat-rate price. That just isn't viable: the only reason it works is because most broadband users don't generate much traffic, yet.
The two obvious solutions to this are to bill bandwidth-hogging consumers for the bandwidth they consume, or to increase the flat-rate cost to
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But that's exactly what the ISP's are selling right?
If the ISP is unable to offer this then maybe they shouldn't have sold it to their customers in the first place?
They just assumed that not all costumers would use their full bandwith, they estimated the avarage bandwith use.
When is turns out that their estimate is wrong then that's their problem, not m
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No, it isn't what they are selling. In the small-print of every ISP I've looked at, they say that the peak throughput is not guaranteed. If you want a 1:1 contention rate, there are ISPs that will sell it to you - at a price. My non-guaranteed ADSL package costs me a few dollars a month. The same ISP will sell me ADSL with a 1:1 contention rate for several hundred dollars a month...
The same goes for hosting packages. A lot of the "fabulous monthly bandwidth for 35 cents" offers work by throttling per-secon
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Yes, that's what the small print says.
Based on that no costumer should expect peak throughput 24 hours a day.
Yet when i watch an ad from my local ISP it's telling me that i'll have a superfast connection, and how i'll be able to download movies and music at the speed of light 24 hours a day, with no download limits. *
Though technically they are not promising it, in
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The funny thing here in Germany is that usage-dependent but reasonable billing for larger data volumes seems absent in the end-user market. You either get
-really cheap access for a few
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That's all and well, but the problem here isn't just that the ISP (NextGenTel) isn't delivering the announced data speed. If the source of this data can't sustain the maximum speed promised to the customer, the latter will get whatever is available. All nice and well, nothing to see there.
However, the issue at hand here was that the ISP itself decided that a certain media site (NRK) could not be allowed to deliver at its max throughput, but would be limited by an action of this ISP. At the same time ther
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I have a friend that works in the sales department for the buisness market at Telenor, he told me that first the ISP's competed over price, and when the price reach the floor (or close to it) they started to offer more bandwidth for the same price. They cant lower their prices anymore, but they can increase the bandwidth. Atm i pay 447 NOK (67.50 USD)/month for a 10/2 Mbit cable connection flat rate, i consider that pretty cheap.
As bandwidth grow users will ofcourse start t
Problem is overselling capacity. (Score:2)
The only problem that I see, if the ISPs there are anything like the ISPs in the U.S., is that they engage in what I consider to be the razor's edge of false advertising. By selling you a 10Mb* pipe, they actually oversell their network. They don't have nearly the capacity it would take to let everyone use what they've sold them.
We need to stop this behavior. Yes, in the short run it might lead to prices increasing, but it would only be increasing back to the level
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That's right, everyone knows it's tubes
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
bah - they're not even my caps.
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Interesting, I just checked Dexter Alan Ux's link [slashdot.org] and he appears to have a grand total of 1 post.
Did you miss the "Conservative Political Activist" right under "(email not shown publicly)".
Re:Neo-coms (Score:5, Insightful)
There are four parties involved.
A. The content provider
B. The content provider's ISP / Hosting provider, whatever
C. The consumer
D. The consumer's ISP (in this case NextGenTel)
Note - A is _NOT_ a customer of D.
If A wants to serve more content at higher speeds, no problem, they pay B more money.
If C wants to get more content at higher speeds, again no problem, they pay D more money.
No one has any problem with that concept.
The problem is when D decides that they can extort money out of A, by throttling the traffic between C and A unless A pays them some money - regardless of the fact that D doesn't actually provide any service to A. They try to use the justification that with there being so much high bandwidth content around that they can't handle the load anymore, so someone has to pay. But they gloss over the fact that someone _IS_ paying: C, the customer that actually requested the content from A in the first place.
If C's internet habits are really costing D money, then they should be charging C directly, not charging the sites they visit - that's just insane.
I don't know how any of these companies think they can possibly justify it - they already have the means to cover their costs, it's not the content providers' fault that the ISPs are greedy enough to try to charge coming and going.
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The examples may be poor but they only serve an illustrative purpose.
Parent post follows:
I don't quite think you understand the issue.
There are four parties involved.
A. The content provider [e.g. YouTube]
B. The content provider's ISP / Hosting provider, whatever [e.g. Comcast]
C. The consumer [e.g. You]
D. The consumer's ISP (in this case NextGenTel) [e.g. AOL]
Note - [YouTube] is _NOT_ a customer of [AO
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Thanks
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I have no idea whether or not the proposed bill in the USA is properly written though
The issue is not giving YouTube faster access to customers at a price, it's prioritizing their traffic over providers that don't pay - and thus penalizing the providers that don't pay, due to the fact that bandwidth is finite.
The situation you describe wouldn't cause that - in fact, it would be better for everyone, because traffic to YouTube that would normall
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I've read the proposal, and it would prevent what I just described. Can you propose any way of writing the legislation that wouldn't have that effect?
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Dammit, I get mod points all the time, and when someone finally posts what the Network Neutrality debate is really all about, I don't have any.
-Q
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Yeah, and people who drive behind me on the road benefit from my driving at normal speeds, so therefore I should be able to charge them for that 'service'?
Now, if D were to give A's traffic higher speeds, that would be a service. But treating them the same as everyone else is not a service, i
Re:Neo-coms (Score:5, Insightful)
The customers of Nextgentel are the consumers that pay for their broadband connection. The only reason consumers pay for broadband is that there are content providers out there that create a market for the ISP. These content providers may or may not be commercial, but they all pretty much already pay some ISP (which may or may not be Nextgentel) for their high-bandwidth Internet Connection. So when a consumer tries to access some content he/she has already paid for accessing that content, and the provider has already paid for delivering it.
What the ISP is trying to do is squeeze money out of both sides, both the consumer and the provider. The result is that consumers (that have paid for their service) will have a hard time getting to smaller indie-sites, non-commercial sites and other content providers that can't afford to pay these extortion fees. Only the big ISPs has enough muscle to be able to do this sort of thing, and thus it serves to limit the number of ISPs available and thus reducing competition.
Also, it reduces the choice of the consumer, negating one of the big sales points of the Internet in the first place. Because it reduces choice, it has a strong possibility in limiting free speech as only big media corporations will have the money to have their voice be heard.
You don't have to be a communist to object to these to effects.
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Capitalists should be interested in having as many corporations as possible be able to place a solid mark on the web, and surely having to pay more to get your traf
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Btw, I'm saying this from the POV of the customer, not the business. I'm obviously arguing against a business being able to do this as, again, it stifles the competition among corporations, especially when the smaller businesses start getting involved in the equation.
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Try to make an analogy between an internet transcation and a plane flight is pretty idiotic. You don't pay every ISP between your computer and some website for every packet you send. You certainly pay every carrier that you choose
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NextGenTel changes it's mind (Score:5, Informative)
Kenya, oh Kenya (Score:1)
We're goin' to Kenya.
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They could be subtler next time (Score:1)
net neutrality? (Score:1)
You have no idea what Net Neutrality is (Score:1)
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It's neutral in the same way UPS is neutral about delivering packages. UPS cares about how big and heavy your package is and how far it has to go. They could care less about who's sending it, who's receiving it or what's in it (modulo whether it contains any hazardous materials). For a 12-inch cube box weight 1lb going from Los Angeles to New York via standard ground, UPS charges exactly the same price to everyone. They're going to charge more for a 5lb package than a 1lb package, but they don't charge more
excise tax? (Score:2)
For instance, since in this case, NextGenTel-whatever is getting paid by other companies to prioritize their data, why not apply a special tax (as well as reduction or inelligibility for govt grants and assistance programs) on it....such much so that it would cost NextGenTel more to unneutral than to be neutral even with the higher cost of the extra bandwidth needed.
Or maybe just the threat/
The way to solve "net neutrality" (Score:1)
Way back when 9600 was "high speed" data access, you could lease a 9600bps line with varying levels of utilisation. For example, that line leased at 20% utilisation was charged at about one third the price of a 40% utilisation contract.
The modern equivalent is data volume quotas split up into peak/offpeak times. If you exceed the quota, you get charged more (but keep the speed), or have your bandwidth shaped (eg: 1.5Mbps normally, 70kbps shaped) in order to allow other u
NextGenTel credible denial (Score:1)
I wrote a strong article following up this story but after talking with the CEO decided to hold it back. I believe strongly in the open net, and have publicly debated against Verizon and AT&T on Net Neutrality. I urge caution in this case. Besides the update that NRK and NextGenTel had resolved all differences and are peering at a gigabit, Stokke provided numerous details of his open video peering policy. There is ambiguity in their official statement about peering and commercial arrangements tha