Comcast Defends Role As Internet Traffic Cop 425
RCTrucker7 writes "Comcast said yesterday that it purposely slows down some traffic on its network, including some music and movie downloads, an admission that sparked more controversy in the debate over how much control network operators should have over the Internet.
In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, Comcast said such measures — which can slow the transfer of music or video between subscribers sharing files, for example — are necessary to ensure better flow of traffic over its network.
In defending its actions, Comcast stepped into one of the technology industry's most divisive battles. Comcast argues that it should be able to direct traffic so networks don't get clogged; consumer groups and some Internet companies argue that the networks should not be permitted to block or slow users' access to the Web."
If comcast want'sto do this (Score:5, Insightful)
Make that stipulation and they will stop in a heart beat.
Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:4, Informative)
And you would be showing that you don't know anything about internet access. Business class access comes with a guarantee of throughput, a guarantee of uptime (typically 4 nines, or 99.99% uptime) and a different level of service. Otherwise, we wouldn't be paying $850 a month for 3mbit/3mbit service (two bonded T1s), when 6mbit service is only $50 for homes.
Residential service doesn't cover fully saturating the available bandwidth because it is shared: I can saturate my T1s all I want. Residential doesn't require 2 or 3 year service contracts, but business class often does. Residential service doesn't guarantee to get your internet access back up in 60 minutes or less, even if they have to come string new copper or fiber, but they do on mine. Residential Terms of Service are NOT the same as business class in any shape, form or fashion. The fact that there may be limits on a lower grade of service (residential) shouldn't come as a surprise considering how cheap it is compared to business class.
Yes, that sucks, that is the breaks. If you don't like the limits, you can always go get business class service in your home. Then you don't have to worry about any limitations.
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If I pay $19.95 per month for 2Mbps, and you pay $199.95 per month for 20Mbps, then I have just as much right to complain if ANYTHING I transfer is limited to below 2Mbps, as you do to complain if your traffic is artificially slowed to less than 20Mbps.
Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:4, Insightful)
This internet HDTV show is a perfectly legitimate use of bittorrent
But by whom is the use legitimate? Most residential Internet access plans offered by the last-mile duopoly have a stipulation that residential subscribers MUST NOT[1] "run a server" on the connection. So even if it isn't an infringement on anyone's copyright, seeding a torrent might still be an infringement on the exclusive rights of the owner of the last-mile physical medium.
[1] RFC 2119 [ietf.org]
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Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:4, Insightful)
I KNEW porn and p2p would speed the adoption of IPv6.
Port filtering is intermitant .... (Score:3, Interesting)
Several of the telcos add & drop port filtering depending on the current virus situation. A lot of companies shut down port 80 incomming when Code Red was infecting every Windows install w/ IIS running. Some of them are blocking outgoing port 25 other than to the corporate servers.
RCN offered both residential & commercial cable modem service. The price difference was $30-50 vs $300. What did you get for that difference? - pushed to the head of the repair and call center queues.
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Re:If comcast wants to do this (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs are currently not liable for what illegal things their customers do with the service provided.
One of the reasonings behind this is that they should not be mining traffic enough to know wth is going on. (IANAL, this is a bad explanation)
Comcast says that they SHOULD be mining traffic to shape it and see wth is going on.
Comcast should then be held liable for any illegal activities that they 'know' about because of this monitoring.
get it now?
Personally, I don't know if I agree or disagree. Mostly because I don't really understand how much monitoring they are doing, and just what the legal grounds are that protect the ISPs currently.
On the note of them shaping traffic? I have not much of problem with Comcast shaping traffic as they see fit, well, at least now that they admit it. They are a company and can do what ever the hell they want so long as it is with in the law, and does not defraud/mislead customers/potential customers. I will never use their service, but I still think they are allowed to do what they want. Only problem is that many people have no choice, and there it IS a problem.
Re:If comcast wants to do this (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:5, Insightful)
Well really it's more like I'm paying comcast to ship boxes back and forth from me to wherever they need to go, but rather than spending the money I give them for the service on buying more trucks or paying for gas, they just dump the boxes in a field somewhere, then run crying to mommy government when people demand to know why they're dumping boxes instead of buying enough trucks to handle the shipments.
Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:5, Insightful)
So, from the cable company perspective, big downloaders affect the speeds of the entire neighborhood. I can certainly see their complaint.
In fact, I have no problem with bandwidth limiting. When I grab torrents, I try to set reasonable bandwidth caps so as to not affect my neighbors (unless it is something that I need in a hurry, like when the latest Ubuntu is released).
If Comcast wants to throttle the bandwidth on my torrents, so be it. I can live with that. But ABORTING a torrent is just plain nasty on their part. Delay the packets, fine. Drop a few packets, fine. But to inject an abort signal, dirty trick.
Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:5, Insightful)
Then don't sell 'unlimited' sell a tiered system. Do NOT blame the consumer for your(Comcasts) bad business decisions.
And if they were liable they would stop because no ISP wants to be liable for the consumers actions.
Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:5, Interesting)
Their pricing is assuming that not all customers want to use their maximum available bandwidth at the same time, which is generally true. If they really DID beef up the system to handle ALL available bandwidth, then the price would likely double or more.
Basicly, if you want cheaper prices, you have to make a sacrifice or two. If you really want dedicated bandwidth, pay for your own T3 to your house. Cable is marketed to typcial home user, where the use is rather bursty.
This is kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet having the local pro football team stopping by for supper after practice five times a week. After a while, the restaraunt starts to loose money. They then have three choices:
1) Raise prices.
2) Put limits on the service.
3) Go out of business.
None of the three are great options, #1 hurts everybody, not just the heavy users. #2 keeps the prices low for most, at the expense of the heavy users, and #3 hurts everybody in general.
Note that I am NOT defending Comcast. I understand to need to do something about heavy usage. However, I am vehemently agains the WAY they have done things. Secret bandwidth caps and cancelling transfers are just plain decpetive and customer hostile. Now, if they had implemented a more reasonable policy, and actually advertised it, that would be good for everybody. I would be agreeable to temporary bandwith reductions (maybe 25% to 50%) for heavy useres during peak usage periods.
To summarize: I understand the need for limits and bandwidth control. But, Comcast has done a crappy job of implementing it, and has done it in such a manner as to stir up customer wrath. They could have handled things MUCH better.
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Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:4, Insightful)
Upgrading to what exactly? Double the speed. Fine now all my torrents are twice as fast.
The idea is that if 5% use 90% of the bandwidth its time to start adderssing that in a fair and honest manner. If that means I have to move up to a Pro account and I get all the bandwidth advertised to me, then thats fine. Unfortunately, too many people have a free lunch mentality when it comes to bandwidth and media downloads.
Seems to be working fine for the T1/T3 system. Want bandwidth? Pay for it. No more of this fake unlimited marketing bs.
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and take half as long.
if you are downloading at 3-6 Mb/s and they upgrade everyone to 100Mb/s that's a 15-30x increase, so instead of something taking 8 hours to seed it takes less than 20 min.
That would relieve congestion, unless you are hosting the library of congress.
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Yes, it is. That is covered under the "raise prices" option. Apparently you missed that part.
Internet service providers are not in this for the warm fuzzy feelings of helping people. They do it for a profit. Network upgrades raise costs. Yes, they are a necessary part of business, but they also cost.
You are right that more and more bandwidth will be needed. They will have to upgrade in the future. Evrhything in a business is a balancing act. If you don't upgra
Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:5, Interesting)
Since I admin a smallish ISP, I can tell you that it's already the next killer app. We've been monitoring network demographics with NTOP for quite some time.
This past year, we've seen a 10% increase in subscribers and a 60% increse in traffic. That increase is almost entirely http.
P2P protocol usage, on the other hand, plateaued last year. It is becoming more and more insignificant.
You can watch 20 episodes of Lost commercial free in "HD" full screen at nbc.com. I watched the Sarah Conner Chronicles [fox.com] (brought to you by Cisco, the irony..) at home last night and monitored my bandwidth consumption, which saturated at around 3Mb. This isn't youtube, the picture is great. It's very impressive, and easy to do. It was a 10 second pluggin install on my Windows machine.
People are rapidly finding this. An informal survey of our CSRs reveals that they are getting increasing volumes of calls where the subject comes up.
Never bet against the Internet, as they say.
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Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting fact: The same number of Old people eat FAR more than a football team. This comes directly from a friend who ran a restaurant with a lunchtime buffet. I said to him I thought young people would take advantage, but he reckons young people tend to eat during the day, so 'all you can eat' is less. Old people however: They *plan* to go to an all you can eat and get the most for their money. They don't eat breakfast, and make that their only meal of the day - and they're usually have much larger stomachs from years of practice and riding those little cart things. He had busloads of sports teams stopping in, but was much more fearful of bus loads of oldies on a tour coach. - He tried serving more slowly, but they just stayed longer till they were full. - same as p2p. Someone downloading at their full rate will do so even if that rate is lower - just for longer. p2p downloading a movie will still 'eat' the same number of bits. If you want to sell more bandwidth, then you have to *have more to sell*. So more seats - more pipes.
Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:5, Informative)
If Comcast has 100Mb/s of bandwidth for 500 subscribers (just making up numbers) Their 100Mb/s pipe is not 100% full 100% of the time. Prioritize my P2P traffic to be low priority. That way, if Joe Blow is trying to pull up his sports scores on ESPN, and the pipe is full, then my P2P is put on low priority to burst his ESPN page through. If it's 3AM and it's just a bunch of P2P freaks downloading over an otherwise unused pipe, let us have it.
TCP/IP has an issue with slow start. If the pipe truly is 100% utilized, it will take some time for the QoS to down shift my P2P to allow the ESPN page through. So I can understand a hard limit that 100% of all P2P/Movies/Downloads shall take no more than 75% of the available bandwidth.
Anyway, I run a company Firewall & that is what we do. Works very well as long as you have the proper ratio of bandwidth to users.
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Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:5, Insightful)
No - it's fraud.
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It would be one thing if they made traffic like HTTP higher priority than Torrents but from what I understand they are throttling torrents automatically, even if their aren't any HTTP requests on the local network... like say, in the middle of the night when your entire neighborhood is asleep, torrents still run much slower than the amount of bandwidth your supposed to have.
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They are all shared and technically oversubscribed (were everyone to use their advertised bandwidth). *Where* the "sharing" starts is irrelevant.
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Not traffic shaping (Score:5, Informative)
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Comcast sends fake packets to both the sending and receiving end of the transmission telling the programs that the other end has closed transmission. AKA, my upload speeds are virtually 0. well, when you don't upload, you can't download as fast. I'd love to host a torrent for a while to help keep the torrent network alive, but how can i do that if my upload ability is non-existant.
Next, my web surfi
Re:If comcast want'sto do this (Score:4, Insightful)
The only problem with this is that consumers don't really have any choice in internet providers. Comcast should be allowed to do whatever the hell it wants with its business, slowing down pink pictures and speeding up blue ones if it likes. So long as the customers know what they are getting and have a choice.
The whole problem is that there really is no market (which is also why these networks are so easily overwhelmed). It's time to dereg all local cable monopolies.
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Don't give them any ideas! That particular strategy would probably work pretty well...
They should stop overselling their capacity... (Score:2)
2) Change the terms of service so they clearly state a guaranteed minimum throughput. Do not sell more connections than you can provide with the minimum throughput.
2) Change the terms of service to some model with limited volume, charge those who exceed it per gigabyte. This does not absolutely prevent network congestion, but cost considerations will make most high volume users back off. In areas
Slowdown (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps Comcast will experience a 'slowdown' in its profits...
At least it's all coming out in the open, instead of the issue being met with bland denials.
Re:Slowdown (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Slowdown (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast seems to be hoping that your average everyday joe says "oh, they are just slowing it" and that be the end of it. Well, when downloading one version of Ubuntu was nearly 500k a second and then a few months later the next version downloaded at 2 KB per second from my house and roughly 400 KB from the same torrent at a friend's house that DIDN'T have comcast...yeah. I've seen it first hand. This isn't delaying or throttling...this is damn near blocking.
Besides, injecting their own packets into the communication between my computer and another computer...shit, if I did that to two random people, I would be brought up on criminal charges.
Re:Slowdown (Score:4, Insightful)
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Perhaps I was not clear. The AH (protocol 51) and ESP (protocol 50) traffic made it through. In this way, the tunnel was established. The isakmp (udp/500) packets (which carry the actual data) did not make it through. In other words, the encrypted stream was blocked.
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That said, FiOS can't be rolled out fast enough. Sadly, most people have either cable or DSL and sometimes only cable as a choice for broad band.
I'd love to vote with my wallet, but its either them or dial up.
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That said, FiOS can't be rolled out fast enough. Sadly, most people have either cable or DSL and sometimes only cable as a choice for broad band.
What makes you think Verizon (or whomever) won't throttle traffic on a FiOS network in the same way?
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One of my friends who works for Comcast tells me Comcast at large is terrified of FIOS because they are rapidly losing their local television monopolies and FIOS is simply a better product when it comes to bandwidth delivery.
I use Bittorrent a couple of times a month to download Linux distributions, and
Re:Slowdown (Score:4, Insightful)
You're hysterical! When people don't have much of a choice about what provider to get they're going to choose what's available and unfortunately for about 25 million people (and ~8 million of those for broadband), that's Comcast.
Nothing will come of any of this and just like the telecom immunity bullshit, this too will pass over Comcast w/o much more than a few news articles and possibly a rebate for one month at $5/subscriber while they continue to control their network as they see fit.
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Sounds like very misleading advertising to me.
OK if they are up front about it (Score:4, Insightful)
There could ultimately be different subscription rates for how fast you want different types of traffic to go.
The problem is the issue of snooping on traffic and comcast being able to reliably decide what traffic is what class.
The sad state of things (Score:5, Insightful)
So, until that changes, theres no point in bitching and moaning every time some company admits to doing what we all know they are doing. You can always go back to dial-up...
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Most people won't even think of looking into these things i realize, but there are other options out there.
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1) A $25/month, 3mbit steady DSL connection
2) A $35/month, 5mbit shared Cable connection
And saying that it's viable competition? When shared with 5 other people? You're crazy. My dirt-cheap DSL is much faster than a T1 will ever be. And you're crazy.
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Until there's decent deregulation of the local cable industries then companies like Comcast will do whatever they feel like with impunity.
Here we go again (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to change the subject isn't going to help them.
The devil is in the details (Score:5, Insightful)
So who determines what measures fall under the vague umbrella of "reasonable management"? Sure, Comcast can't block applications, but if they slow throughput from said applications down to a crawl, it constitutes a de facto block.
This should be interesting to watch unfold, especially since I myself use Charter. ^_^
WSJ doesn't get it. (Score:5, Informative)
From the editorial:
Cue The Laugh Track (Score:2, Offtopic)
For sheer PROFIT! They are willing to sacrifice QOS and customers just to make that little bar on their gross profit margins tick that much higher.
What kind of business are they in? One guess; SERVICE. In operating a customer service company, one always keeps in mind that you need to commit back into infrastructure and upgrades
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What is the web? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's precisely so that what most users ARE trying to do (access "the web") will continuie to work that some giant, bandwidth-hogging apps are throttled. A crush of bittorrent traffic isn't, for most people, "the web." They want their mail to flow, and their CNN.com and facebook etc to work. The audience here on this message board are way, way outside the norm in terms of the type of traffic they'd rather burn bandwidth on. But here in my town yesterday and this morning, we had a nasty ice storm. I'm sure a lot of people were very glad to have a workable RDP session, and would certainly prefer that the chunk of router they're sharing with their fellow neighborhood broadband users didn't dry up because one kid three doors down is busy "sharing" his anime collection.
Games vs. Downloads (Score:4, Insightful)
Handling network traffic is an analogous situation. There are big jobs (e.g., transferring that multi-GB collection of secret MySpace photos) and there are small jobs (e.g., signalling a head-shot in a game of Counterstrike). In order to make room for the applications that need immediate response and low latency, you have to limit the big jobs so you have some overhead in which to move.
I hate my cable company as much as anybody does, but let's not fly off the handle until there is more damning evidence.
I don't get it... (Score:3, Informative)
I suppose it depends... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you look at it from the point of view of the customer that got the bandwidth at the expense of the guy that got throttled, they are probably pretty happy about it. Again, provided it is permitted and a blind process which does not target individual users unfairly.
Because you're still sharing with others (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, despite what Comcast and every other cable provider who offers high-speed access to the Net will have you believe, you are still sharing one line with all your neighbors. This is different than FiOS or other non-cable connections where you have your own line.
They'll never admit to it but their own comments prove otherwise.
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The way this was explained to me and I say it to other (and PLEASE correct me if I am wrong).
A cable modem, is a large pipe for a section and everyone in an area plugs into it and opens up as much as they use. So the up side is that you can get a very large amount at one time if you don't mind screwing everyone else. The downside is that you might be the one getting screwed. DSL on the other hand, you are given a much s
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Both have their merits but Comcast and others don't tell you that so you can get inconsistent speeds whereas with fiber and others, your speed is pretty much constant. They will claim this is no longer true but obviously it is.
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I haven't experience a particular performance hit becau
Hrm... how come everyone's after Comcast... (Score:2)
What Comcast is doing is bad. But if they're injecting RST packets indiscriminately (i.e., on long-lived connections, be them VPN, SSH, long downloads, etc), that's far less offensive than what TW is doing. Yet the FCC is only going after Comcast?
First post (Score:5, Funny)
By all means... (Score:2)
And then we hit the sidewalk fees....
"Sorry, all bandwidth used up" (Score:5, Insightful)
Just Another Symptom... (Score:2)
Thanks torrents!
Violates net neutrality? (Score:2)
I'm not sure that traffic shaping like this violates network neutrality. It would be different if they were to throttle iTunes and favor some Comcast music service, but this is more targeted at high-bandwidth traffic that could make it hard for some subscribers (like me) to VPN into work and do some casual surfing.
Of course it might be better if they had clear bandwidth/month caps and charged a bit more for higher bandwidth usage, then used the profits from the beefed-up service plans to expand their inf
Slowing down traffic (Score:5, Interesting)
1. They clearly disclose their policies about slowing traffic.
2. They don't discriminate by specific domains, IPs, or traffic content. They should only discriminate by broad categories, such as prioritizing all http traffic over all p2p traffic.
3. They don't interfere with packets, drop them, or modify them. They don't force connections to end as they have been accused of lately. They apply a speed limit and that is it.
4. They only limit speeds when necessary based on network traffic. If the network can handle the current traffic load, don't slow anything down.
It makes sense that perhaps my p2p download (of linux isos of course) shouldn't slow my neighbors' web surfing to a crawl. But it shouldn't be restricted if there is plenty of bandwidth available. And the Comcast Sports website definitely should have no advantage over espn.com.
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You neighbours internet connecting is coming to a crawl because they sell bandwith they don't have. To compare: you are essentially saying that it would be OK for an airline carrier to overbook 99% of the seats in every flight as long as they disclose that they "might be overbooked on certain flights". I can really sa
Comcast is 20% okay (Score:2)
If you ask me, the essence of net neutrality should be that an IP provider precisely document what they do to their traffic, and provide a mechanism for users to easily understand when traffic is blocked, altered,
They have a responsibility as a monopoly to (Score:2, Informative)
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Also, there may be EvDO in your area.
It's a sad day when wireless is a better transmission medium than copper, due to the market.
QoS is a lie. (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
Comcast brand band-aids (Score:2)
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It's just compression with a big, honking dictionary built from the bits that have been sent before. Random data, network traffic that is encrypted before hitting the WAN optimizer, and real-time media can't be optimized in the same way (as much as
Next Headline.... (Score:3, Funny)
Film at eleven (if we get rebroadcast rights)
Sane traffic shaping for cable (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, they have to do some traffic shaping, but it can be done better.
If the problem is bandwidth hogging by individual residential users, the answer is probably some variation on fair queuing. There's class-based fair queueing in most Cisco edge routers; it just has to be used correctly.
I'd argue that, for residential connections, you need only two basic classes of service - high bandwidth, high latency, and low-bandwidth, low latency. VoIP and real-time game transactions should be low-bandwidth, low-latency; everything else should be high-bandwidth, high latency.
For the low-bandwidth, low-latency streams, the per-IP-address queue should have priority, but the maximum number of buffers on the queue should be deliberately limited. If you try to send too much too fast with low latency, you lose packets. The high-bandwidth, high-latency streams have lower priority but can buffer up to available router memory. That works for streaming video, music piracy, and similar non-time-critical loads.
Note that putting a high precedence on a high-bandwidth stream increases the packet loss rate, so there's no win in doing that. VoIP should request high precedence, but video should not. Clever game developers should put a high precedence on the traffic that needs it, while letting the background traffic that loads assets run at a lower precedence.
High-bandwidth, low-latency is really needed only for real-time interactive video, and that's a premium service, because it really does need more capacity behind it.
Multiple consumers on the same cable segment contend for upstream bandwidth at the router that connects the cable segment to the larger network. That's where fair queuing has to be applied. Similarly, it has to be applied at the router that connects the backbone to the downlink to the cable segment. Fair queuing is only useful at choke points where the number of streams is limited, but the cable modem industry has exactly that situation.
The cable industry problem, I suspect, is that many of the routers out on the pole are still too dumb to do this. This is a killer for P2P traffic, which saturates upstream bandwidth. Upstream bandwidth has to be properly queued at the router on the pole; it can't be managed from the head end of the cable system. The Comcast "fake RST" interference with connections was an attempt to deal with the problem from the head end, which is the wrong answer.
If the players in cable and DSL would agree on policy in this area, or the FCC mandated a standard, cable performance would degrade gracefully under heavy load. Without idiocy like faking connection resets.
A standard on residential IP precedence handling would be a big help. If application developers could rely on the rules, VoIP traffic would work better. Games could get better latency; only some game traffic, the actual user action traffic, needs high precedence. The background loading of game assets should be running at lower priority. When there's a penalty for requesting too much bandwidth at high precedence, it gets used properly.
From a technical perspective, that's how to do "network neutrality".
Port 25 egress (Score:5, Insightful)
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Here's the issue. I'm all for net neutrality, myself. But a legitimate argument against it is that it would eliminate the ability of ISPs to block port 25 egress, which would lead to a multiplication of the number of spam bots out there. So do we say that ISPs must be net-neutral except for TCP port 25? It's the camel's nose.
Net Neutrality has exactly nothing to do with port blocking.
Net Neutrality does not stop a carrier from blocking certain traffic. It only says that traffic rules cannot be applied with prejudice i.e. You can't single out individual sites/customers for 'special treatment'.
Everybody does QoS and transparent proxying, and the Net is better for it.
We need to be clear about the problem, and we're not being. So let's try to keep this topic simple:
The Net Neutrality Debate [sic] is about letting carrier
In other news (Score:4, Funny)
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Now, can we make a car analogy? Like there are too many cars on the highway so we're going to send cops out at certain times to try to reduce traffic, but since there is only 1 highway all it does it slow traffic more...
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"There's too much congestion on the road, so we're sending out cops to stop only the black people from driving on it." See? It's inflammatory, describes what they are doing (which is presuming some form of guilt based on stereotypes), and should hit pretty close to what the public views as "wrong." The only thing missing for accuracy's sake is to have the police stop all the black people, take them to jail and then call their friends and family on their behalf that they are "takin
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A better analogy and not as inflammatory is to stop old drivers, grey and blue hairs during rush hour because they putz along at 45 MPH in the fast lane which in turn causes other drivers either driving at exceeding the speed limit to change lanes and pass on the right, which in turn causes people drivings slow in the slow lane to brake for ass-hats passing in the right, which causes the
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Sue. (Score:2)
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Actually, what stores do when something is in high demand and limited supply (like bandwidth) is charge more money. You are paying very little money for dow