[Martian]

The problem with many ISP’s is a problem rampant in business in general—customer communication is filtered through unrestrained corporate marketing and legal departments. All too many marketing people think their customers are idiots and that their jobs are to just sling BS at them. And lawyers practice law—an adversarial art.
The customers don’t know the details, they just know they are usually being lied to. So naturally, the customers hate their ISP’s. But that shouldn be.
Well managed companies curb the excesses of their lawyers, and task their marketing people with the responsibility of respecting the intelligence of their customers with full, accurate and timely communication. In that atmosphere, most customers would say, “I don’t like that they are shaping traffic but I understand why they need to do it”. (There are always those few who are never pleased, but so what.)

[Totally_lost]

There are many real world triplet constraint sets which are mutually exclusive, and you can only pick two of the three, and NEVER get all three as a maximal optimal solution. The maximal BroadBand solution is low price, high speed, infinite use - which simply can not happen in todays free market..



If you want a broadband connection that is 7mbps 24/7 bidirectional, then you need a fiber connection to a tier 1 backbone provider, and expect to pay more than a few thousand for your connection.

A $30/mo connection can be either, but not both of:

1) high speed with restricted use

2) continous bidirectional use, at a relatively low speed



ALL of the low cost options are shared bandwidth, which are based on oversubscription so that each of many customers each pay a small fraction of the upstream internet costs in exchange for being able to use a fast connection part of the time.

Continuous downloads and uploads 24/7 is not a part time sharing friendly usage pattern. During early mornings, around noon, late afternoon, and evenings up sometime just after midnite are times when the number of users peak, and demands on the infrastructure stack up the worst and this is where the statistics of the user access patterns and use need to either be correct, or the network stumbles hard.

When the network stumbles, packet loss quickly grows and MANY users get rightfully upset. VoIP phone connections which are only 24 kbps on Packet8, stumble, garble, and drop. The 134kbps NPR FM feeds stumble, garble, and drop. FPS multiplayer games stumble, lag goes crazy and the player is dead before they see who shot them. DNS inquires start failing causes any type of internet access to fail with name resolution failures and things just plain old fail hard. TCP sessions exponentially back off with packet loss, into the tens of seconds per packet, quickly dropping the sessions bandwidth to near zero and appearing hung.

However, the peer-2-peer client AND server which causes the network overload is likely to have dozens or hundreds of active connections going in both directions for users that are not even online and suffering from the congestive colapase they are creating.

So, the premise of the "Net Neutrality" argument is that and ISP can not protect his normal light users from this abuse, because the ISP as no right. What right to the normal customers getting screwed have?

[als2663]

Totally_lost

Well said. If we were your ISP, you would be protected, but the net neutrality people want to prohibit us from doing this. Net neutrality sounds nice, and it would be if there was an infinite amount of free bandwidth, but it ain't so! :|

We got into this business because nobody was offering high speed service where I live. Modems were it, unless you waned to spend $100 plus a month for ISDN (innovations subscribers don't need) for a big 128K up and down. Dedicated bandwidth (of course until you reach the internet). Now - you can get competing service from Qwest and Comcast (depending of course on where you live), yet somehow our business continues to grow. Bad service from the competition gets people moaning about their ISP and we get referrals, despite the fact that we don't advertise and we aren't even in the phone book. Our "service" is what sells. We answer the phone 16 hours a day, we speak English as a native language, but most of all we deal with the "internet is slow" comlaints by having a full-time monitor on our bandwidth utilization - from the customer, at the DSLAM, and into the internet.

When we see somebody abusing the system, we call them, explain the issue, and usually they shut off the offending machine or program. We take the same approach with spammers, and we have two really expensive boxes that deal with that. If we see spam coming from one of our users - we shut down the ability to send mail until it is fixed. If they are abusing the bandwidth availability - we throttle them down or shut them down.

We certainly aren't getting rich, but it is a "fun" business to be in as we have personally met every one of our customers.

Net Neutrality legislation could force us out of business, by making our network so costly to run that we'd have to charge everybody $600 per month for 1.5M. Every ISP would have to do the same, and pretty soon the net would only be available for the well-off. We'd certainly be out of business pretty fast, as I think that maybe 10 out of our 3000 customers could afford that kind of price.

If the people proposing this kind of stuff would just look at the costs of operating this kind of network, and take a good close look at the consequences of what they are proposing, then the proposals would be dumped immediately. Today we offer our customers tiered services. 1.5M shared for $50, or 1.5M dedicated for $600. We tell them this up front. They have a choice. We have 2 dedicated customers (both businesses) and the rest are shared. You get what you pay for.

[George76]

als2663 said:

Quote

I just get upset when the net neutrality wonks get going and attempt to put the blame on the ISPs for not giving everybody unlimited access for free as if it is a "right" that is guaranteed in the constitution. Although I personally despise Comcast and their ilk, I do understand why they have to limit usage based on protocols. As a small ISP using DSL and fixed IP addresses for all customers and no more than 48 customers ona single DSLAM, we can effectively monitor utilization on an individual customer basis, and if we get complaints about slow speed, can quickly narrow the issue to an offending party and take the appropriate measures. Large ISPs, especially those with large local networks (hundreds/thousands of users on a single cable) and no individual facilities that can be monitored on a per customer basis, have little choice but to limit users by packet type or protocol, or quickly go out of business because of non-offending customers that can't get any usable speed out of their connection. We do get a large number of customers switching to us because of this issue.

Sorry, but you (and everyone else whose commented thus far) seems to have missed the point that the "net neutrality wonks" are trying to make about traffic shaping. It's about how ISP's can hurt legitimate businesses, not about how it affects the general Bit Torrent user.

For example imagine if Comcast entered into an agreement with Microsoft under which Comcast would restrict access speeds to the iTunes Store to dial-up speeds but would give unrestricted speeds to the Zune and Xbox Live Marketplaces and began charging an additional $50 a month to regain unrestricted speeds to iTunes. It's not hard to imagine what a detrimental effect such behavior could have on Apple's fledgling movie rental service. And as the article pointed out, what's to stop Comcast from doing that simply to protect their own VOD profits? And if such agreements became acceptable, what's to stop a Google competitor to try cripple Google Maps or Gmail by paying the ISP's to throttle bandwidth to Google sites? Those are the things net neutrality is trying to prevent.

Likewise, the simple solution that if you don't like your service provider than just get a different one isn't viable for many people. My only choice for high speed where I live is cable. No DSL, no fiber, just cable (I guess if I wanted to pay huge amounts for less than DSL speeds there is also satellite).

And to the person with the electric company analogy, I don't see the accuracy in it. The electric company is provided a quantifiable product (electricity obviously) whereas the ISP's are simply providing a path for the most part (and yes, some services like email and such). A more accurate analogy to me would be the local highway department where you end up paying taxes to maintain and improve the road systems. Paying for bandwidth to me would be like that highway department coming out every month and checking the odometer in my car and charging me for how far I've driven that month. And if the bandwidth usage in their own network is 100%, the ISP's lose nothing; it doesn't cost them extra if the bandwidth is maxed out nor does it cost less if only 10% of the bandwidth is used. Meanwhile there is a true, quantifiable difference to the electric company if I use 50 watts of electricity vs 3000.

[mrbach]

Meh, I just deleted my rage.

Lesson here seems to be that you should stick to big companies with lots of bucks to provide the bandwidth. I pay $50 for a 3MB line to Bell and that is what I get, pretty much 24/7. If I didn't, I would pay less. They advertise high speed, I get high speed.
They don't seem to cry about it.

[Totally_lost]

Martin writes:

" The customers don’t know the details, they just know they are usually
being lied to. So naturally, the customers hate their ISP’s. But that
shouldn be."

The real issue is who lied to the customer? The ISP or MacWorld. Who is being honest here?

I believe MacWorld lied, faning hate at ISP's by publicshing "Inside Net Neutrality: Find an honest ISP" which sets an unrealistic agenda and standard for every ISP to meet. An agenda which assumes that nework connectivity should be unlimited use for near free. The standard in this article is that BT should be accepted by every honest ISP ... which frankly is like a child declaring that candy should be free and freely available to everyone. That money should be free, and freely available to everyone.

What's so natural about that?
The real question here, is to fine an honest, unbiased news source, which certainly hasen't been MacWorld this month.

[Totally_lost]

George76 wrote:

" And to the person with the electric company analogy, I don't see the
accuracy in it. The electric company is provided a quantifiable product
(electricity obviously) whereas the ISP's are simply providing a path
for the most part (and yes, some services like email and such). A more
accurate analogy to me would be the local highway department where you
end up paying taxes to maintain and improve the road systems. Paying
for bandwidth to me would be like that highway department coming out
every month and checking the odometer in my car and charging me for how
far I've driven that month. And if the bandwidth usage in their own
network is 100%, the ISP's lose nothing; it doesn't cost them extra if
the bandwidth is maxed out nor does it cost less if only 10% of the
bandwidth is used. Meanwhile there is a true, quantifiable difference
to the electric company if I use 50 watts of electricity vs 3000."



Sorry, but you will find a 56KBits/sec dialup connection is widely available for less than a 768KBits/sec broadband connection, which is less than a 1.5MBits/sec broadband connection, which is less than a 3MBit/sec broadband connection. Clearly there is a defined quantiy, Bytes per second, that is part of the cost equation for this service. Many ISPs also have quotas, in terms to total Bytes transfered per month, after which you get charged so much per Byte (or MegaByte, or GigaByte). Some advertise unlimited Broadband access (no quotas) where they over charge light users to pay for heavy users, which is where the problems are creaping up ... and BT users taking advantage of that, saturate networks. Netscape is also taking advantage of it, knowing full well that it gives them a competitive advantage over Blockbuster and other VOD sellers for the moment. The problem is that, they are asking customer to force the ISP to just accept it, without regard to the real cost of providing VOD services by the ISP.

As for your highway example, at least in the USA, we already pay our local, state, and national goverments per mile we drive. They just decided not to look at our odometer which can be rigged, they charge us by the gallon of fuel we buy for highway use. Next time you fill up, check the declaration at the pump for fuel taxes.

If you believe you can operate an ISP with free bandwidth costs, please do so. Tell the rest of the ISPs where you are going to get free access to the backbone, and I'm sure that all that can will follow. A small ISP pays about $400 for each 1.5MBit/sec T1 they oversubscribe to their customers. A big ISP near a major peering point can get a volume discount with a high speed fiber connection, that is still far from free (see another posters comments about the cost he pays for servicing his 3000 customers). More importantly, look at his cost analysis for providing dedicated 1.5mbps service to all his DSL customers. Certainly not free, at you wrongly assert above.

[Totally_lost]

George76 writes:

" Sorry, but you (and everyone else whose commented thus far) seems to
have missed the point that the "net neutrality wonks" are trying to
make about traffic shaping. It's about how ISP's can hurt legitimate
businesses, not about how it affects the general Bit Torrent user."

What you seem to have missed, is this article equates a dishonest ISP with one that filters BT traffic, when many (READ NEARLY ALL) honest ISPs need to do that to protect the majority of their customer bases service from becoming slow, unreliable, and untimately from being completely lost if forced out of business by the minimal standard this author is requiring.

You seem to think that bandwidth is cheap, and near free ... nothing is farther from the truth in free markets. Not even true where provided by governments from taxes, as there is a cost per bit, that has to be recovered somewhere ... even in taxes.

[Totally_lost]

Correction where I wrote: Netscape
is also taking advantage of it, knowing full well that it gives them a
competitive advantage over Blockbuster and other VOD sellers for the
moment. The problem is that, they are asking customer to force the ISP
to just accept it, without regard to the real cost of providing VOD
services by the ISP.

NetFlix (not Netscape) is taking advantage of the unlimited use ISP pricing. An ultimately using there users and authors like wrote this series to assert they and their customers have some "right" to unlimited free use of the internet resources.

[Totally_lost]

George76 writes: "Likewise, the simple solution that if you don't like your service
provider than just get a different one isn't viable for many people. My
only choice for high speed where I live is cable. No DSL, no fiber,
just cable (I guess if I wanted to pay huge amounts for less than DSL
speeds there is also satellite)."



If you have access to low cost megabit cable, be VERY happy ... as that isn't an option where we live ... nor is DSL. Many of us do not even have viable dialup, as either the phone lines are so poor that only operate at 14.2kbps or less ... or we do not even have phones, being so far off grid that the nearest telephone connection is more than 5 miles away and the phone company wants $250,000 to string the wire. Some of our cooperatives membership living on the north side of a mountain, can not even get Satelite because there is no south facing view because of the mountain.

You can always buy a T1 line, hang some wireless access points on some high ground, high buildings, or sublease tower space from a local Radio/TV stations tower and start a wireless internet cooperative. In the process you will learn the costs, and the limitations, of networking infrastructure for broadband delivery.

That's what I did back in 1999 with the help of 15 other families, to start CWX.NET ... today we have about 70 families in the coop, and none have access to cable or DSL, and we are happy for, and have some envy for, the ex-members of the coop that have since gotten cheap high speed cable and DSL service.

We don't consider ourselves an ISP, just 70 some familes that share a couple T1 lines, that bend over backwards to help other remote rural familes that want to share with us. Our two T1 lines from FRII.NET cost $1,123.32 a month, that we redistribute as 768kbps wireless broadband using canopy radios that cost about $300 each with power supply, surge suppressor, and reflector. Access points are over $1,000 each, of which we have about 15 on various commercial towers on the hills around us. We have paid as much as $300/mo to rent tower space from major tower companies like Pinnacle Towers. Canopy 10MBit Backhaul radios deliver about 3mbps down and 1.5mbps up and cost $2,000 a pair, and we have 3 pairs. They fail sometimes, just from age, or from getting hit by lightning ... so there are steady replacement costs. We had to dig deep to pay for the $70,000 in capital equipment for the coop ... both in startup fees and equipment fees, plus the small margin on the monthly service ... to cover the $1,000 per member our systems equipment has cost. Actually we frequently buy used to save a little up front, that we pay for in earlier failures as the equipment reaches end of life, and some dozen dead radios that gerks on eBay sold AS-IS that were DOA.

Our coop is largely volunter run, or our costs would be even higher .... we are all owners, and all customers. We are lucky in that we use a 15:1 oversubscription model, because we do have a number of engineering families ... all of which are willing to pay $450 for their gear and share of the common equipment (was $1,500 in 1999) for the service.

What we know ... is bandwidth isn't free, either upstream we write a check each month for $1,123.32 for the two T1 lines, or downstream as the hill top leases, radio replacement, storm damage, and basic administrative costs to deliver the bits are not free either. We run at cost plus a minimal margin which has been $50/mo per household for the last several years. This year we will switch to MegaPath T1's and be able to lower our rates some.

We do not allow BT ... as it completely trashes everyones service ... and volates the principle of "sharing bandwidth". We have a high quota of 3.5GB/mo above 85kbps. With 15:1 and 768kbps, each members "fair share" is 768kbps/15 or about 51.2kbps best case. The reality is a saturated network drops packets, trashing VoIP and VPN services, so we realisticly believe our fair share is about 90% of that to avoid network saturation. When I look back for 9 years, the typical household only uses between 500MB to 1500MB per month, and steadily rising, so our quota is several times the typical households usage. We do have some heavy users, that regularly use more, up to the quota. We have always had a few users willing to pay for higher use past the quota. A few years back we decided to exclude 56kbps and below from the quota calcuation, to provide an incentive for members shaping large downloads to their fair share. Some members do this, and with today's threshold set at below 85kbps, means that they can download 20-25GB/month without overquota fees. This greatly reduces network saturation and packet loss, making VoIP and VPN services stable. More than half of our membership us VPN connections back to there work or offices, many working from home more than 50%, some full time. Since Packet8 VoIP service is about 24kbps each way, or 50kbps aggregate, VoIP use can not trigger overquota charges. Listening to high quality streaming audio can, like the 134kbps NPR feeds which are roughly 3 times the members "fair share", so we decide that should be subject to quota and charged if used extensively. We struggle with Video streaming which is UDP based, as it trashes the network. Video delivered by TCP is much, much kinder as throttles back with packet loss caused by congestion.

We do not allow most multiplayer First Party Shooter games, as they consume all the bandwidth they can get, effectively flooding the wireless network with tiny packets and max bandwidth to minimize lag. Our radio's and Cisco routers have a maximum packet routing rate that is also a hard limit before dropping packets, that the FPS games trash badly. As a result, FPS games are banned as they do not fit a 15;1 shared bandwidth model. Non-flowcontrolled UDP streaming protocols do not back off as the network saturates, causing congestive colapse of the wireless network ... so high rate UDP streaming protocols are also banned as they are not "shared bandwidth" friendly. The New NetFlix Video-On-Demand is certainly not "shared bandwidth" network friendly either, as it dynamically adjusts the bandwidth to the max the connection will support to improve video quality.

We are end-users, trying to manage our own broadband service that no one else will provide ... we know that bandwidth and service isn't free ... we write the checks each month. While there are some economies of scale with 3,000 or 30,000 customers, there are also additional costs ... faster connections and lots of paid labor, as well as return on investment costs for the equipment, so from that perspective, when the clueless are demanding their "right" to free bandwidth, I do have to stand back and laugh, and suggest that they show us how to provide cheap unlimited free service without content restrictions, or shut up.

Clueless, childish, ignorant come to mind.

We listen to some of our ex-members complain that their new Comcast or DSL service gets slow in the afternoons and evenings. We have lost some members to a for-profit wireless advertising unlimited 1.5mbps use ... their oversubscription ratio is better than 30:1 from what we can tell, as it really shows from the slowness complaints as well. We have tried running our network without any bandwidth shapping at all .... every member had full network bandwidth ... and it was horrible with saturation based packet loss ... VoIP and VPN's horribly unstable. At our size, running the network at 768kbps (1/4 of aggregate T1 speed) minimizes saturation induced packet loss because it takes 3 members steady traffic plus other members bursty loading to induce packet loss. We design for less than 1% packet loss in our network. Anything more than that seriously impacts VoIP, VPN, and interactive Web use.

So, if you have experience delivering unlimited low cost (near free) broadband as a small ISP that isn't trashed by peer-to-peer, FPS games, high rate UDP streaming, speak up and share your magic solution. Ourcoop would really appreciate it ... as would the other small ISPs here.

[Martian]

Would anyone object to usage based/metered billing with all types of data treated alike?
This could still leave flexibility for creative packages like higher rates for peak periods, and even higher unit rates for very heavy users just like some electric utilities use to encourage conservation.

[als2663]

Absolutely no objection to a usage-based billing system. That would certainly cut down on the bandwidth required in the "cloud". Would be really good for ISP's. However...

When your kid sets up a torrent without your knowledge, and not only downloads "free" movies, but also sets the PC up as a server that is being hit by everybody else in the world, and your bill goes up to $600 for the month, are you going to pay it? Is it OK for the ISP to shut down your link once you exceed a certain bandwidth for the month, and leave it shut down until you call with a credit card to activate it again?

I would really like a system like this, but like email, everybody is used to and expects unlimited usage, and it would be a really hard sell.

If you want to get rid of spam on the email side - all you have to do is to start charging for it on a sliding scale based on the amount you send. $.001per email if you send 10 or less a day, $.01 if you send less tan 100/day, $.10 of you send less that 1K per day, $1 each if send between 1K and 10K per day, etc. Would solve the spam problem, but it isn't going to happen.

Usage-based billing on the internet would solve the bandwidth problem, but I don't see it happening in my lifetime.

[Totally_lost]

als2663 writes: "When your kid sets up a torrent without your knowledge, and not only downloads "free" movies, but also sets the PC up as a server that is being hit by everybody else in the world, and your bill goes up to $600 for the month, are you going to pay it? Is it OK for the ISP to shut down your link once you exceed a certain bandwidth for the month, and leave it shut down until you call with a credit card to activate it again?"

This a really good decision point on choosing an ISP ... one that is customer friendly.

In the coop, we regularly see this a few times a year and simply issue a warning with a credit. Since the kids frequently have heard from their friends (and other internet sources) that bandwidth is free and unlimited, we generally share that it's not free, and that the 70 some families in the coop are sharing a resources that costs $2,000 per month and show them the bills for the T1's, hill top leases, and other expenses. We explain oversubscription, cost sharing, and bandwidth sharing, along with how the peer to peer causes other folks VoIP phone service and VPN connections to work to fail.

We then watch the account closely for a month or two. If it continues without interruption, we make sure the member has tracked down all the P2P clients and killed them (or at least disabled the server portion).

Lastly, we share current articles on fines for illegal downloading, and point them to the legal fee based sites. In nearly all p2p cases that generate a significant bill, it's kids downloading pirated materials ... they generally do not have a large enough allowance to purchase that many titles.

As for a hard sell, we have been doing it since 1999 ... but most of our membership doesn't have any other alternative. As for a for-profit that dropped their quota's specifically to market against us ... I've rather enjoyed that we have sent them several "difficult customers" that insisted on downloading questionable content. Really reduces the likelyhood we will be served with a warrant. And in exchange have gotten at least one new customer back that appreciates our network performance is stable ... and doesn't slow down as much, and their VoIP and VPN disconnect, as the wireless previous provider -- partly by our 768kbps design choice to minimize packet loss, and partly because we do not tollerate bandwidth hogs that are usings everyone elses fair share.

Since this other provider has made a big deal about unlimited "all you can eat" bandwidth, we will probably also make a big deal about only paying for your own fair share as we alter and lower our rates this spring. They can keep the bandwidth hogs with a high oversubscription ratio, and we will reach out to the normal users with our 15:1 to 20:1 oversubscription ratio ... not that difficult to predict both our and the other providers delivered performance in the long term. Sure they can offer 1.5mbps, but it's very hard to deliver it with a bunch of BT users.

As for email, it's simply a VERY tiny fraction of the bandwidth these days ... completely in the noise. Even with the spam. High web site graphics, utube, and the like are much more. But those have the advantage that larger providers can use a web cache and significantly reduce traffic to the internet cloud. Applications like BT do exactly the opposite, and are fundamentally wrong for many reasons that I will expand on in this forum. The BT camp has told a few lies that need to be corrected, and in the process pretty much trash this authors "Net Neutrality" front and expose the real lies by the BT and P2P camp behind this author's misleading agenda.

[Totally_lost]

Martin writes: "Would anyone object to usage based/metered billing with all types of data treated alike?"



If you are just talking about single stream TCP data with a sane packet length near 1500 bytes, sure, absolutely, great!! :)



If you are talking about high rate, small packet, UDP data ... absolutely NOT!!

If you are talking about subverting TCP by breaking large files into dozens of concurrent streams ... absolutely NOT!!!

Both are ment to circumvent fair sharing of the network to gain priority advantage over normal users. Both cause heavy buffer overrun packet loss that destroy low bandwidth VoIP service and VPN services. More on this in a post soon about why BT is based on a horrible lie.

Nobody allows it's customers to "flood ping" the ISPs network or other sites on the internet. We call this denial of service attacks.

Applications which flood the network with packets by design, are equally disruptive ... like many First Party Shooter games, and BT.

So the answer is clearly YES, for well behaved applications, and clearly NO for applications which disrupt the internet and local ISPs network.