If you didn’t have the legal right to cook for yourself, and the restaurant was the only one around, and it had already taken the reservations and the customers’ money, and then announced it couldn’t supply everyone with an “all-you-can-eat buffet”, you would then have a *closer* analogy to what the providers have done.

There is only one PAIX and only Maewest and one MaeEast and one Gix and one Linx and one 55 Market St…. etc etc etc.

A juniper switch can only physically take so many ports.
When it’s full you have to use two Juniper switches and when they’re full – three, four etc.
If the Torrent you are downloading is via switch one and your isp is connected to switch 4, at 370 ms per switch hop, we just added 1.3 seconds of latency to every packet you are receiving.

Seconds Latency = MB per second decrease Per Second.

Ergo – all growth equals more switching. Each switch point is a minimum of 370 milliseconds added to your latency.

So forget the bloody restaurants. You obviously didnt understand my description that there is only one Level 41 restaurant.

Why the hell cant you guys understand simple physics ?

You can test this yourself with pings to some distant destination at different parts of the day.
Like for example….. peerates.com.

Next time you download something – open a cmd window and type tracert 000.000.000.000 (where 000.000 etc is replaced with the ip number of the seeder of the file.)

Then type ping -n 50 000.000.000.000 (Seeders IP number).
You will then understand the term latency.

If 50 pings isnt enough – change it to -n 500 for 500 pings. But remember every ping is adding to the circuits latency.

DA’s most recent post is print-worthy.

I’d like to discuss your analogy of ISP to Restaurant.

“Compare the ISP’s to a restaurant. Now compare unlimited usage (which the ISP’s are selling) to the restaurant being an all you can eat buffet.
Now when the ISP had a small number of customers, they could deliver on what they are selling. Same with the restaurant. They could keep up with a smaller number of diners that are eating there.
Next, lets assume that we increase the number of customers. If the restaurant doesn’t increase it’s capacity, then they can not serve new customers. Same with the ISP’s. If their network can not handle new customers, they should not be getting new customers until they upgrade their system to handle them. That is supposedly where the money we pay them every month goes to.”

Great Analogy.

Now lets say that the reason for the restaurants success is two-fold – one, its great cuisine and excellent wine list and two – and this is the important distinction…. Location Location Location.

Lets say that in a built up Office Area, the restaurant lucked out and amanged to obtain Alan Bonds luxury Penthouse Apartment as it’s venue. 480 square metres of luxury aprtment atop a 40 story building in Downtown Sydney – Yep – it’s called Level 41 and is Sydneys most exclusive restaurant.

Let’s also say that the customers go there for the unique view (as well as the great food).

There is no way that restaurant can expand. The Legal firm occupying the five floors beneath the restaurant have a 20 year lease.
Your analogy just died.
The only growth the restaurant could achieve is by decresasing their meal portions and increasing their prices. Which they did.
And they became even more popular. It now requires a booking three weeks in advance for a casual diner to obtain a seating.

Remember, I said that scarcity increases value.

ISP’s, believe it or not are very often in exactly the same predicament.
For example – I once had 18 racks at PAIX. If I walked in there today and asked them for a quarter rack – they would laugh at me and point at the 3 year waiting list.
The Backlplane routers and switches at PAIX drop so many packets that the entire Internet on the west coast is always milliseconds from catastrophic failure which is only prevented by deliberately discarding (dropping) packets during peak threshold traffic patterns.

There is no possibility of building a bigger backplane switch – you have to fork peering switches into multiple switches which increases the hop count, increases latency and forces CRC retries.

Agreed that Moores Law determines that switches/CPU’s etc double every 12-18 months. The problem is that P2P is growing faster than Moores Law.

I hope that helps clarify the matter for you.

Compare the ISP’s to a restaurant. Now compare unlimited usage (which the ISP’s are selling) to the restaurant being an all you can eat buffet.
Now when the ISP had a small number of customers, they could deliver on what they are selling. Same with the restaurant. They could keep up with a smaller number of diners that are eating there.
Next, lets assume that we increase the number of customers. If the restaurant doesn’t increase it’s capacity, then they can not serve new customers. Same with the ISP’s. If their network can not handle new customers, they should not be getting new customers until they upgrade their system to handle them. That is supposedly where the money we pay them every month goes to.

What we pay monthly is the charge on what we are buying. If they can give us what we are buying, then they should not be charging us. It is like the all you can eat buffet saying that it is all you can eat, but you can only get one plateful.

It’s perfectly possible, and even normal, when one uses the entertainment industry’s accounting
practices as a model.

As believable as going broke on multiillion dollar box office takes.

Good one.

Cheers!

It was DATA neutral.
The first “pillar” for building a neutral net.
And, it wasn’t DPIed, throttled, capped, or monitored.
___________________

“Capitalism is about paying what the market will bear.
If the customers leave – the ISP’s will change their pricing and throttling policies.
Most custmers won’t leave. Man is a creature of habit.”

This market has already been trying to tell these providers it won’t bear the present state.
Since customers don’t have the choice of leaving, due to the monopoly held by our providers, we’re having to challenge the whole thing at the Federal Regulator’s level.
___________________

“Internet is not free.”

No, it isn’t. WE paid for it, and WE’RE still paying for it!
Our tax dollars built the infrastructure before the Government decided it was a good idea to let Bell have it.
___________________

“…I would be interested in how many of Rocky’s customers can still download at full speed on their bonded DSL connections?”
“…the more the RBOC’s throttle individual connections – the more successful Rocky’s business is.”

Bell is throttling Rocky’s entire service, so the answer to the first one is likely “NONE”.
Throttling has made DSL bonding a somewhat “necessary” idea, but it costs Rocky and his customers who ask for it, as does the extra bandwidth Rocky would need to purchase from Bell to accommodate a reasonable level for his whole service. Seeing as he has to buy about 10 times more bandwidth for throttle times just to keep par, the second statement would have to be horseshit.

(Maybe Rocky would care to tell this man how it really plays out?)
___________________

“Five years ago, P2P users 27% of allocated bandwidth. Today it is 87% of all bandwidth allocated. Without Throttling – tommorrow it will be 99%.”
“…the growth of P2P is faster than the ISP’s can add bandwidth.”

Regardless of what hat you pulled those numbers out from, these kind of statements just go back to ignoring the basic “supply/demand/pricing” argument in favour of transferring the blame to users all over the world. These same, “greedy, selfish, whining bastards” are still paying full price for their connections, sold to them to have the capabilities they’re “guilty” of insisting on using. Has anyone, ever, been offered a rebate for the reduced service?

What really gets me about this argument, is that, from a provider’s view, it’s okay to keep taking the full payment, while…
1) reducing services contracted by that payment
2) continuing to advertise “unlimited” and “always on, always fast” connections
3) continuing to sign up new customers
4) “upping” the line speeds they’re not prepared to deliver
5) eliminating previously offered base inclusives (i.e news servers/mail servers)
6) introducing their own content services, requiring bandwidth they claim to not have for their customers
7) not investing any reasonable percentage of that money (acquired from the unreduced fees) to raising capacity

If the pipe’s so damned full, and we’re supposed to accept that and cooperate through concession, then I ask providers, why keep stuffing the pipe yourself and trying to get more people to help you do that??

[sidebar]
(And, if the money’s so tight that upgrading the network is a problem, then why has Bell been allowed to acquire yet another company just recently??)
[/sidebar]

The bottom line is, no matter what type of “technical obstacles” you want to argue about, it was the providers that made the promises, took the money, and then proceeded to renege on those promises. All other arguments are outside of this basic fact, and only serve to distract from the real issue.

Personally, this whole idea of users just “being whiners”, “expecting too much”, “needing to get real”, and “not appreciating the providers’ ever-expanding demand in today’s world” comes from the major industry players that have been caught with its pants down, in front of the nursery school window, and pulling its pud waaay to much.

That pretty much hits the nail right on the head. If my ISP is truly so desperate to manage bandwidth by inspecting my packets and slowing down my connection, I’ll do one better to help them out. I’ll cancel my service with them so that I’m not using any bandwidth at all. Problem solved! Thankfully they don’t as far as I can tell (yet).

surfer says: “whatever happened to the ISPs ‘demanding’ they be treated like dumb pipes. The whole copyright angle is so fucked up.”

No kidding. When faced with the prospect of being legally liable for their customers surfing habits, ISP’s proclaim they are just dumb pipes and can’t be expected to monitor what every one of their customers does. Then when it’s in their own interest to inspect packets (all in the name of network management of course), they have no problem doing exactly that proving they’re not the dumb pipes they claim to be. It can’t be both ways, so which is it? I too would like to see a grid that also includes the entertainment industry and how they constantly contradict themselves when it’s in their own interest to do so.

Readers Write says: “These ISPs are just acting in their own best interests — the way any business would.”

True, but that doesn’t give a business the right to do anything they feel like. For starters there are business ethics to which they must be held responsible (for very good reason). Their right to run a business and make profits does NOT trump any of the consumers rights and especially the rights that make up the very core of freedom and liberty, an amendment to which should be net neutrality. The internet IS the people. It belongs to everyone on the planet and thus everyone should have a say in how it should be managed. Letting a handful of corporations take control and own it wouldn’t be a whole lot different than condoning slavery in my eyes, which isn’t all that far off then you realize that a lot of businesses do see consumers as nothing more than a commodity. Like surfer said, the sheeple need to wake the fuck up.

First you claimed to be ‘dumb pipes’, satisfied with a modicum of profit X customer. Increase customers, increase profit. You began stuffing as many customers into the pipe as possible until the pipe got full, then you continued to stuff, and stuff, and then stuff some more in there, all in the holy crusade of profits. At one point you had to make a decision, increase the pipe size or continue to listen/lose irate customers. You ‘fix’ the system so there are limited options to customers for a provider, all in the name of ‘competition’? Am I really supposed to believe that?

Now the pipe is (over)full, and instead of expanding the capability of the pipe, you cry incessantly ‘bandwidth hogs’, boo hoo. All the while the profit margin per customer increases due to technology, better switches, better routers, FIOS, et al. You are willing to upgrade your equipment for better profits, but not for your PAYING CUSTOMERS ?!!?

I pay for electricity, it has a meter, that was all part of the agreement up front. I have internet, it doesn’t have a meter, it states I have 6Mbit/6Mbit connectivity, therefore I can use every bit in/out for however long I want 24/7 for a flat rate. This is the agreement I have, written on paper. I move ~250Gb/mo in bandwidth, utilizing 80%-90% of that pipe I pay for, therefore my provider is profiting from the bandwidth I DONT use, allowing someone else to use it, so in the end, it all balances out.

Now ISPs see the $$$ in being content providers, just look at BT throttling streaming video from other sources than its’ own, how creative. Very profitable. So in the interests of profits, not customers, you forgot you are ‘dumb pipes’, and want a piece of that profit pie at the behest of your paying audience.

You say there is no Net Neutrality, I say there will ALWAYS be Net Neutrality. Throttle port 12000, and I will move ports. Throttle packets for p2p transfers, and I will encrypt them. The internet evolves, you (ISPs) apparently do not. For every backasswards attempt to shape the internet for ever increasing profits, there will be something out there to foil your little extortion plan.

Never forget, WE the internet consumers, pay your salaries.

In other words.. If you use the bandwidth you pay for the bandwidth. If you go over what you have paid for (if you are on a fixed monthly rate for example) then you either get shaped down to a reasonable limit (30 to 64kbps is reasonable to allow email and basic web use) or YOU PAY MORE!

Someone said that “…if the demand goes up, you up your network capacity.” .. A nice statement though financially unworkable unless you also increase your rates for customers.

As Tom stated, it annoys EVERYONE in the world how people in the Northern Americas keep complaining on how their ISP’s are now limiting how much they can use.. Boo bloody hoo. Welcome to the Rest of the world People. Bandwidth is NOT free. The likes of AT&T et. al. are to blame for that in how they charge for international access.

Oh and the Internet did not come up with the idea of Net Neutrality. That was done way back before the Internet was commercially thought of with such things as BBS”s and that granddaddy of the UseNet – FIDONET.. Which was Not even then free to access since you needed to register with a BBS (or pay dues in an Education Institution) and that BBS had to pull the Fidonet feed off of a hub via 1200/2400bps dialup modem who received it (if lucky) twice a day via an undersea cable phone call or sometimes wonderfully free using packet radio [dependant on sunspot activity and or flying pigeons].

The equality of Net Neutrality comes down to shaping EVERYTHING not just specific protocols or Users.. So seeing that 75% of the world accepts Shaping or paying for Bandwidth.. Maybe the equity should be shown by the CAN-CONUS residents also paying their equal share so that everyone is equal in their neutrality.. Or is it shades of George Orwell again? hmmmm?

Oh and for those interested I get shaped on the Residential ADSL line after 30Gigs per Month [cost of under $40 a month] and have only ever been shaped once in my 3yrs using this package/rate and live in sunny (actually its freakin freezing at momnet) Sydney Australia. the place which is according to the latest Strategy Analytics study ( http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/us-20th-in-broadband-penetration-trails-s-korea-estonia.ars 0 11th in Broadband penetration, compared with the USA at 20th. And of the Top 10 countries of Broadband usage. Only Canada (yep you guys like speed too *g*) has – for the time being – no bandwidth limits .

Air is neutral and free (mostly), Seawater in the middle of the ocean is free.

Internet is not free.

All ISP’s are constantly in a state of massive bandwidth growth.
Five years ago, P2P users 27% of allocated bandwidth.
Today it is 87% of all bandwidth allocated.Without Throttling – tommorrow it will be 99%.

Face it boys and girls, the growth of P2P is faster than the ISP’s can add bandwidth.
They can either throttle and loose a few customers – or not throttle and loose all their major clients.

A Truism for the day: No-one can add bandwidth as fast as Torrent uses it up.

Already ISP’s are offering premium guaranteed shaped (Service Level Guaranteed) services.
This will become more prevalent and is indicative of a maturing industry.
So for those of you disatisfied – ring your ISP and say – I want 5 GBps guaranteed – can you fix me up please.
They will, for a price.

Home account DSL is sold on a best efforts delivery basis – it doesnt not have an SLG attached to it.

Would I like higher connection speeds?

Sure – I’m 8 km’s from the exchange and I’m stuck on 512 kbps with 20 GB per month cap.
My business partner lives 11 kms from his exchange and he has to connect via satelite….. (about 128 Kb).

Do I believe that my downloads should fly?
They do – for about 4 hours every morning between 1:00 am and 5 am. The rest of the time – the little ratsnest of Internet users called the Antipodies (Oz) use up all of my potential bandwidth. How dare they.

You can all argue as much as you like.
Unfortunately you’re wrong – but you are all wearing rose coloured glasses.
Each one of the posters in this thread, is as guilty for causing the bottleneck forcing RBOC’s to throttle as the others not posting and just lurking.

The only way to stop throttling is to ease back on the full boar downloading AND video straming.
But I dont why I bother. You guys developed consumerism to a fine art – Everything for Americans – F*** the rest of the world.

I’m afaid, that particular fairytale is over.

@SteelWolf – You said:
“Thanks for covering this debate, Jon. I think DA and “Rocky” are right on here, and the fact that Rocky is able to practice what he’s preaching takes a lot of the wind out of Tom Koltai’s sails. Even if Tom is 100% correct in his justifications (excuses?) for throttling, there is still the fact that providers here are not delivering what’s been promised.”

I don’t throttle Steelwolf, I havent run an ISP since April 2001.

But I would be interested in how many of Rocky’s customers can still download at full speed on their bonded DSL connections ?

You see, Rocky’s argument is based on a commercial premise – “Get more customers”. I have no such agenda.
Whilst I think Rocky’s business plan is forward thinking and commendable, the RBOC’s have no choice financially but to limit and throttle.

You see, scarcity drives value. If a product is ubiquitously available at low cost, then it has no perceived value and the market collapses.
If the Net was truly net neutral, then Rocky’s arbitrage opportunity would turn to vapourware.

Beleive it or not – the more the RBOC’s throttle individual connections – the more successful Rocky’s business is – because more people will feel the need to bond DSL connections.

That’s the truth, and quite sad since Parliment/Congress is supposed to represent US, not business.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22657226-TelusBell-Merge-Rumor-Say-Whaaaaaaat

Bell and Telus to merge under the new company name, Bellus, so that they can can give only one bri^h^h^h contribution to CRTC instead of two.

Contradictory positions mean nothing in the world of corporate bidnes. Ask Microsot, Yodel, Gargoyle, Hollydud or Big Floozy.

Or it didn’t until the Net came along.

Now, stay tuned …..

Cheers!

We’re only powerless as individuals.
In sizeable groups, we can effect change, with persistent “lobbying” of our own, and whatever necessary “civil disobedience” may be warranted to get the proper attention and strike the right concern with the right people.

It’s unfortunate that we would need to organize and find the time required, and have to educate ourselves to things we might not have to deal with in our working lives, while the corporates can make it part of their business agenda and have the “express lane” to Parliament open to them all the time.

I am continually dumbfounded by the level of dishonesty and outright deception organizations from ISPs to Big Content are allowed to get away with. You’d think that a simple grid outlining their contradictory positions in different situations would be enough to discredit everything they say, yet their word (and the word of their lobbyists) is continually accepted as fact without questioning. It’s great to have places like p2pnet where the community sees what’s going on, but it’s extraordinarily frustrating at how powerless we, the people, seem to be.

I believe the OECD limit on what is considered a high-speed internet connection is a minimum of 30-kB/s.

So if Bell, Rogers and whoever else throttle at 30kB/s it is still considered high-speed and is reported as such in “world reports”.

If the throttle was 25kB/s 11-hrs per day they couldn’t claim high-speed.

I’m not 100% certain of this little non-trivial fact, but I do believe this is what it is.