Precisely my point, this should not be "extreme per-customer configuration". This should be default. And as I already said -- the configuration I am talking about on my end does not have to be supported by your tech support line. Having the option to do it yourself is what counts. Which I do. I don't expect you to troubleshoot my routing tables, tc, etc. -- in fact I'd be very surprised if anybody at all in your customer tech support line chain would have any idea how.

A decent sized IP can get decent firmwares with these options quite easily from their suppliers. Take FritzBoxes for example. Or have a look at the various OpenWRT-kind of things as a base. It is not as if you have to reinvent the wheelp.

Well yeah, as said, it costs money to provide services as advertised. Mostly in the laying/lighting fibre and non-core routers.

Uhuh. I have yet to see an ad that states the oversubscription percentage, the expected average availability of bandwidth, etc. -- or anything other than the "top speed" (with a small "up to" in front of it, which is not qualified further in any meaningful way).

A customer "attempting to overload any specific line" is a customer trying to use the speed allotted. You are basically not providing him the service he paid for. Again, this is fine if it happens once in a blue moon, it is not fine if it happens every day -- that tells the story of how your oversubscription us miscalculated and your lines underdimensioned.

I did not say you had to overprovision. It is understood that, given 1000 households, there will be a large percentage that do not use the advertised speed and traffic all the time. In fact, usage on average will be much, much lower. A marketing guy will now complain about the top 5% of these households as being bandwidth hogs and cut em off (or have techies cut em off). A few months later, there are still 5% that have unproportionately high bandwidth usage. That's the nature of the beast. The idea is not to cut those households off, the idea is to provide enough bandwidth for the usage pattern you are seeing. This will be drastically below 100% on average, but some customers can and will use the allotted bandwidth. And unless you plan to change your advertising, "unlimited" plans, and all that crap, you should provide these things. There is nothing at all wrong with not providing an unlimited data plan.

As opposed to administrating DPI and customer service calls / complaints caused by that ?

As I already said, I don't want you to support my network configuration. I want you to provide sane defaults, open standards, and a specific, well-defined product. If I shoot my routing tables with a shotgun, it's my mess to fix, not yours. You just better not drop packets delivered to you in accordance with the plan purchased.

We'll just have to disagree on both the numbers and the intent :) I don't fault you or your company at all for doing what they think is in their best interest. I take issue with false advertising and subverting the practice of "best effort delivery" by curtailing its potential.

$10/mbit is quite expensive when I am providing the servers, have no burstable, and you can likely fork off the traffic in peering. Hell, I can get 95th transit for a fraction of that, at the same commit. Looking over the big lake (and I am usually based in Europe, so I know the market a bit better here), it is quite easy to get 100mbit/s unmetered including a decent-powered server for that price; even burstable to 1gbps.

I count AT&T as one of the evil ISPs. Well technically AT&T surpasses them in evilness quite a bit. I realize it's a LOT cheaper to get bandwidth at MAE-E/W than it is to get in a rural city due to monopolistic/oligopolistic corps that basically got a whole lot of infrastructure for free. This, however, does not absolve ISPs of wrongdoing in marketing and spending R&D on shaping, DPI, etc. instead of on infrastructure investment. I hope you also see where I am coming from on that.

Seldomly is this advertised clearly. Hell, most marketing departments try to suggest exactly the opposite.

Again, marketing suggests otherwise. The fine print does not, you are correct.

Well, usually the rest of the provider's core network, or regional core if they are bigger.

Correct again. And this is where proper capacity planning comes in. If you do your job right, customers will never notice this oversubscription (but for in very exceptional cases like a world-wide news event that everybody and their mother tries to stream). The ISP does not need to provide 2gbit/s from this hypothetical node (and my gut says 0.5gbit/s should be within the realm of being ok for current usage, maybe even overdimensioned -- but this depends on data I don't have). As a provider you now have the choice -- either anticipate consumption on this, let's call it circuit, circuit, or defraud the customer by not fulfilling their advertising promises. If this connection to the core is at capacity for some reason, it's ok -- if that is the exception, and not what happens every single night. If you do your statistical analysis well, this will happen rarely (basically only if customer usage patterns change due to a new killer app you did not anticipate).

There is no reason to assume that 100% of your customers are going to use 100% of their allotted bandwidth 100% of the time.

Correct. And this is a dire failure in network and capacity planning. Does not take rocket science, at all.

Really, really good operators would try to anticipate these usage patterns and work on solutions -- we have had multicast technology for ages, but it has only very recently seen increased usage for TV delivery, and then only in the local network of the provider. No technical reasons this has to only be in-network. And if Akamai can build effective caches and delivery mechanisms for thousands of networks, so should a decent ISP. Of course that would require some foresight and balls. For instance, BitTorrent does support provider-run reflectors which could easily cut the external bandwidth usage by a ton -- but then the provider would have to have the balls to actually do their job and defend its right to run cache servers, not just bow to the MPAA/RIAA/etc. -- like they have in the past for Usenet. Off the top of my head, I could not name a US national provider I would recommend people trust enough to enable BitTorrent reflector support in in their clients .

It's an excellent expression of art. I'd go so far as to say that the intent of the author was for precisely this to happen. The key is meaningless, the flag is meaningless, the fact that it's being taken down is a very powerful message and comment on where free speech is at.

That is where it started. It has since gotten out of hand. Plenty (and I mean PLENTY) of good, useful, encyclopedic articles have been deleted. Most by people who have no idea what the fuck the articles were even about. Find something in the "community" rules (=cabal rules) to hang the article with and do it. It's a sport to them.

I have stopped contributing to Wikipedia for this and some other reasons (among which the senseless timewasting in "discussion" pages with sockpuppetry, cabal-mentality, and inane stuttering about bullshit left and right). And I wasn't working on the latest Pokemon monster traits, either. Wikipedia has a real problem in the system. It is not likely to get fixed either -- many people who could and would contribute excellently don't -- because they don't have the time to deal with nitwits starting senseless revert wars, inane discussions that lack understanding of the basic concept the article itself is about, etc.

You are right, there are other wikis out there, other ways to share your information, other ways to share your knowledge, other ways to make your field of expertise accessible to people. I still think it's a damn shame that Wikipedia can't be that place even for its stated purpose. At least it serves as an example of what to avoid in the future.

Also, symmetric, fibre "pipes", the ample provisioning of which is called network planning and infrastructure investment. Which the ISP does not want to do.

You are, of course, exaggerating. Maybe 80% of your callers are morons. And that's not 80% of your customers, by a long shot. I don't call my ISP. I know a lot of people who do not call their ISP. Well ok, that is not true. I called my ISP twice the past 10 years. Once their transatlantic routing was f'd up (sending packets to the US via Japan), and once they has unscheduled, unannounced downtime when I was working.

We all love anecdotes like that. I mean really, sharing PEBKAC stories is fun. Of course, one could now come up with something to set yourself apart from the competition like providing a well set-up shaping firmware on your CPE "router" -- which a user could disable if they wanted to. Just like I can, right now, use my Linux box to connect to the network instead of using the plastic piece of shit my provider provided. In that case, the user has the choice, and the default can be whatever generates fewest customer service calls.

You went off on a tangent there. We were not talking about port 25 filtering so far. Good ISPs allow their users to disable port 25 filtering if they so choose -- really good IPs just make sure that their DUP/DSL/etc. IP ranges are listed in the proper DNS lists, as well.

Only if your network is shoddy. Sorry, them's the breaks.

So you are in favour of 2-year lockins then ? I'm perfectly happy with month to month or even 3-month plans. That gives you an incentive to not have, you know, shoddy networks. If that means you are not gonna give me a plastic piece of shit for free, so be it. Thankfully some ISPs offer this, but most of the "industry" is going the way of mobile plans with 24 month lock-ins and 12 month renewals. I guess that's what you get in an oligopoly.

I don't need you to "fix" my "shit". I am perfectly capable of fixing it myself. So long as you give me what you advertised without any funny business. In that case I don't even need to call you. But you damn well better be prepared to have weekly calls about if you filter my traffic and won't let me out of the contract for 24 months (that is if the shaping actually affects me -- say my ssh sessions). I'm prepared to pay above market average, but not 25 times market price for this. And if you are not prepared to provide what you advertise, then yes, I do hope you go bankrupt and serve as a lesson of why defrauding your customers is bad. I'd be most grateful for that.

That's an interesting reading of what I said, albeit entirely untrue. The implication is not that we should not try to better ourselves, the implication is that we should not go the way of knee-jerk thinking that sees a very simple solution to a very hard problem and makes that simple solution be the silver bullet. Making email cost money is a very elegant and simple solution with one caveat -- it does not work. This has nothing to do with Gandhi or not trying to find a good solution to the spam problem (conflating the two as you do is, by the way, pretty disgusting when looked at comparatively). It's about polemically trying to shoehorn a wrong solution down everybody's throat so as to appear to be doing something, anything at all. Even if it is boneheaded and wrong. And that is precisely what is wrong with US politics as well. If the solution to a problem cannot be conveyed in 2 simple sentences single-celled organisms could immediately get the gist of within 30-60 seconds or so, it is not going to be pursued. The idea that hard problems may require complex solutions is lost on politics and is definitely lost on the populace at large.

You're not getting 100mbps is the point. You cannot still download "shit", you cannot do whatever the fuck you want. You cannot still surf the web if your destination of choice is throttled for being too popular as decided by Virgin (Usenet is not upstream-heavy; it is popular though. So they shape it.)

Well yeah, obviously you can shape to your heart's content on your own side. But I'd rather not have my ISP babysit me and decide what is best for me. If I am stupid enough to shoot myself in the foot, I am stupid enough to shoot myself in the foot.

Well it is not unthrottled, as the article we are discussing states. And "just 5 hours" ... bah. Apparently they can't design a fucking core network. 6GB in a day is so very easy to get now, even without any P2P at all. Youtube lets you upload 1080p video, HD video calling around every corner, those 12 megapixel pictures you are sending to be developed, it adds up quickly. Don't even think about using new protocols or dabbling in TOR nodes, I2P, or Freenet.

Plus they are throttling Usenet. Usenet is not upstream-heavy. You are not even getting use out of your downstream bandwidth for whatever you'd like to do. Bastards.

Well apparently they have not rolled out either if they have to play "games" like this shit. They did some last mile upgrades, but the core of their network appears to be rotten -- and instead of investing in new infrastructure to handle the expected load, they'd rather put down money on very expensive traffic shaping and traffic blocking hardware (this is the same stuff you use to cut off communication in dictatorial regimes. Surely the UK, of all countries, would never do such a thing. Surely. Right.)

That's the "nice" way of interpreting this.

Monitoring box is apt. Shaping box may be, too.

Of course, it could also be a transparent proxy to improve your experience. But Virgin Media is not usually in the business of doing something to benefit their customers.

"manually" is stretching it a bit, they can develop automatic tools for that -- and it's not as hard as one might imagine. They specifically say they are targeting Usenet downloads -- and the easiest way to do that is to just map the major usenet providers' address spaces and throttle them outright. Not hard to get, either. *.youtube.com is somewhat easily enumerated as well -- especially since you, as a provider, have lots of live traffic to observe and use (not that you would ever do that, no sir ! 'tis illegal, you see ...)

We better not go down that road. Your ISP has enough data to do these things. They should simply not be allowed to and severely punished if found to do so.

This still would not help. Statistical traffic analysis will reveal the type of traffic being transported (just like you can with surprisingly high accuracy tell whether somebody using TOR is looking at Facebook at the moment just by looking at traffic directionality changes, amount of data, packet size, timing, etc.).

You might want to look into I2P though. It builds something like what you want on top of IP. You are not going to get IPv4/v6 replaced at the carrier level, so forget that.

This is actually not that easy. Sure, the plaintext looks like random numbers -- but you can read a lot into traffic directionality, packet sizes, connection structures, and even session setup. For instance, even though TOR is SSL, it was possible until recently to tag it based on the SSL setup not being exactly the same as a popular browser, leading to it being blocked in Iran (btw, any traffic "shaping" software is the same exact software you sell to dictatorships to block traffic of any kind. Good going supporting that kind of stuff by buying from an ISP buying from that kind of company). Even if that were not the case, traffic analysis can reveal a lot of interesting patterns (a HTTPS session for instance usually has a lot less upstream usage and a somewhat predictable lifetime).

Sure, you can't look into the packet to see what your customer is using P2P for, but you sure as hell can detect with reasonable certainty that they are using P2P. Statistics are a bitch that way.

The difference being that you can decide for yourself what you value more and what protocols you want to prioritize. There is absolutely nothing wrong with shaping traffic on your own premises if you so choose. There is something inherently wrong with the provider choosing what is good and what is not for you. Most providers now sell Voice over IP telephony connections as well (get your landline and your internet through the same pipe kind of deals). Skype, as you recall, is an inherently P2P protocol. It would be a damn shame if the traffic shaping just happened to hit Skype, wouldn't it ? Or another messaging/VoIP/cam-service ? I mean surely no conglomerate would ever do such a thing to make their own offering appear to be better, right ? There are legal P2P TV stations too (Zattoo et al). It would be a damn shame if they stopped working right, wouldn't it ? Better get the triple play offer from your ISP, guaranteed bandwidth to the TV server ! Wouldn't it also be a shame if YouTube was constantly buffering and no fun to use at all ? (this happens a lot with the biggest provider in Germany -- they don't call it shaping, they simply don't peer or upgrade their external pipes to those AS).

If you sell me the service you advertise, I can do all the shaping I want on my own and get the experience I am looking for. If you don't, you are defrauding me.