Net Neutrality Going Going Gone? (Sir Robert's Free Enterprise Capitalism Going, Going, Gone?)

[Guest Keal G Seo]

Simply not true...you have other choices and to continue your Lambo/Kia example what some here want is to drive their Lambo whil Kia owners subsidize them for it.

Well tell me then, without a land line based company (cable or telephone) how does one receive broadband internet? Also, on the 4G note...that is select markets and most people only have access to 2-3G. I know it isn't available here. Closest place to me is Knoxville that I'm aware of. Next would be satellite and that is HORRID speeds and data capped extremely low. So yeah, I'm stuck on where anyone can get options on who their broadband internet is coming from.

[RobertNashville]

Maybe you should consider moving to places that have more choices?  Should everyone in the country be saddled with federal regulations just so some people can be happy?  Should those people who don't need or want the level of service you seem to think should be mandatory be forced to subsidize your use?

 

If you truly want more choices then I can assure you that federal regulations will NOT provide them.

 

With that said, I'm done with this..you are NEVER going to change my mind about this...if you believe I"m wrong hen you believe I'm wrong; I can live with that!

Edited January 18, 2014 by RobertNashville

[Guest Keal G Seo]

Thank you, you said it best. That is what we are saying, you would have to move to another market to have an option in carriers. Just like utilities. That means they have a monopoly on your home and surrounding areas.
 

Edited January 18, 2014 by Keal G Seo

[c.a.willard]

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[Guest Lester Weevils]

The now judge repealed FCC rules didn't prevent a provider from performing network management as long as the management was fair across the board... So they could prioritize VOIP traffic, as long as they prioritized it for all VOIP providers, not just their own service, or a partners service... They couldn't charge extra to prioritize Netflix's traffic over Hulu's...

It's not a perfect solution but until I have the choice between 5 or 6 broadband providers at my house like I do in a data center, it's better than trusting Comcast in the goodness of their heart won't do bad things to Internet traffic that they've already been caught doing.

I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean, but dunno if prioritization would ever be "overall beneficial" unless perhaps people could sign up for different high performance profiles.

Also, at a certain price point, it doesn't seem unreasonable to throttle people who are running at near max data thruput 24/7. Unless there is huge excess capacity, it wouldm't hurt those folks to pay extra for non-throttled performance.

But for instance my development job, most of the time it is low volume email and small file transfers, but a couple of times a year it is several days of high density FTP. I'd be aggravated if I got throttled on the crunch days, specially if I knew the voip folks were getting priority. :)

[tnguy]

Meh, if they're advertising 100mb/s and unlimited, that's exactly what you should be getting. If they want a "Downloading pics of my grandkids tier", that's what they should call it. That's really not what this is about though.

 

What JayC is talking about is that it sorta makes sense for some types of traffic to receive higher priority. VOIP is sensitive to delays for examply, web traffic less so and email almost not at all. The question is, who decides? Ideally it would be the end-user with the ISP probably doing some network magic to mitigate abuse.

Edited January 19, 2014 by tnguy

[ironsniper1]

the internet imo needs to be free and open, i dont want the isp tell me what websites i can and can not visit cause getting rid of this is exactly what they will do given the chance, i want to be able to go to any website i want to without having to shell out more money to be able to only go to a select few sites that my isp says i can go to

[2.ooohhh]

I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean, but dunno if prioritization would ever be "overall beneficial" unless perhaps people could sign up for different high performance profiles.

Also, at a certain price point, it doesn't seem unreasonable to throttle people who are running at near max data thruput 24/7. Unless there is huge excess capacity, it wouldm't hurt those folks to pay extra for non-throttled performance.

But for instance my development job, most of the time it is low volume email and small file transfers, but a couple of times a year it is several days of high density FTP. I'd be aggravated if I got throttled on the crunch days, specially if I knew the voip folks were getting priority. :)

 

 

Comcast consumer already throttles traffic on accounts using near or above the set arbitrary limit each month and on certain types of file transfers. That is one of the reasons I moved to a business account a while back. Of course when I did I moved one of my servers to the house so now I use 10x the bandwidth a month, but not having to pay a co-lo bill every month pays the difference on the bill. I do know my server traffic drags the entire neighborhood's cable internet speeds down a bit but there is nothing the neighbors can do other than switch to DSL. Since they are on cheaper consumer accounts there are no speed guarantees, and I pay a good bit extra for no throttling.

[Guest Keal G Seo]

Here is the deal, Comcast doesn't throttle anymore. You get X speed with your plan so given the system can handle everyone you get that speed. If you go over the data cap for the month you still don't get throttled, you get charged out the arse on like a per 5Mb rate. My limit here is 300Gb and on an average month I go through about 200-250. When you get close to your limit your browser is redirected to basically a warning page that you have to acknowledge before surfing. Everyone is paying their fair share and most* of the time everyone gets the speed they paid for.

@2 ooohhh: You probably aren't slowing their down speeds at all. You are however probably biting into their up speeds just by having service. When I have a neighbor my up gets cut in half from 10 to 5 but my downstream holds steady right around 20. Given I don't upload movies or other huge files it makes little difference.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I despise comcast, perhaps irrationally so. For a long time had purt slow ballsouth then att ADSL, which though slow, didn't cost much, had a not too bad ping rate considering, and surprisingly good uptime. Though slow, it was almost always near the target rate, no surprises anyhoo.

The current EPB fiberoptics is great so far, will see when they blow thru the gov money and dont pull a profit, if it stays thataway, but am purt sure if the gov gave the same money to comcast or att that they would have just pocketed the money and still sucked overall. :)

I don't understand the biz much, but here is an analogy to server farm companies which may or may not be suitable. For a long time have had a biz site hosted by netfirms that only has a few songs for free public download. I keep meaning to publish more public pages but never get around to it, but the main biz use is for offsite private storage, a remote ftp server for backup and transfer to other folks.

Anyway, the acct has been cheep, about $180 a year. At first the data cap might have been something like 20 GB, but they keep raising the allotment and last time I checked the data storage and transfer caps are ridiculously high, same price.

I think the typical customer for such businesses are such as bubba's plumbing small biz website, or maybe the home page for the National Association Of Associations, or the Fingernail Clipping Forum, etc-- People who all could theoretically draw on the absurd high allotments, but the biz plan works because hardly any of the customers actually draw all that horsepower, or at least they don't drain such resources 24/7.

If a goodly percentage of the customers would actually draw the resources they theoretically have been allocated, 24/7, Netfirms would crash and burn worse than the Graf Zeppelin, space shuttle challenger, and the tunguska impact all rolled into one. Edited January 19, 2014 by Lester Weevils

[2.ooohhh]

Here is the deal, Comcast doesn't throttle anymore. You get X speed with your plan so given the system can handle everyone you get that speed. If you go over the data cap for the month you still don't get throttled, you get charged out the arse on like a per 5Mb rate. My limit here is 300Gb and on an average month I go through about 200-250. When you get close to your limit your browser is redirected to basically a warning page that you have to acknowledge before surfing. Everyone is paying their fair share and most* of the time everyone gets the speed they paid for.

@2 ooohhh: You probably aren't slowing their down speeds at all. You are however probably biting into their up speeds just by having service. When I have a neighbor my up gets cut in half from 10 to 5 but my downstream holds steady right around 20. Given I don't upload movies or other huge files it makes little difference.

Keal, I'm not talking the 300gb "we'll charge you extra/send you a warning if you go over cap" they throttle your traffic when you hit over 150gb up in less than a month I used to hit that routinely uploading RAW photo files to my remote backup. After that point I could download a 40gb file from a server in europe faster through a vpn service(with the increased overhead) than I could without, it was a pretty sure thing that the traffic is being throttled and comcast confirmed that before I went over to business.

 

I knew I was slowing down the neighbor's internet b/c their verified speed dips directly corresponded with my peak load times.(evening in the UK and Germany) One of the affected neighbors is a close friend and local firefighter. He cannot game from around 11am-2pm on his days off due to the lag and has had Comcast out twice to try and get it "fixed". He was pretty pissed :rant:  when I told him it was probably my fault and we confirmed it, but he calmed down when I told him what the server was doing. :usa:  (serving current US TV shows to .mil stationed overseas/downrange)

[Guest Keal G Seo]

Keal, I'm not talking the 300gb "we'll charge you extra/send you a warning if you go over cap" they throttle your traffic when you hit over 150gb up in less than a month I used to hit that routinely uploading RAW photo files to my remote backup. After that point I could download a 40gb file from a server in europe faster through a vpn service(with the increased overhead) than I could without, it was a pretty sure thing that the traffic is being throttled and comcast confirmed that before I went over to business.

 

I knew I was slowing down the neighbor's internet b/c their verified speed dips directly corresponded with my peak load times.(evening in the UK and Germany) One of the affected neighbors is a close friend and local firefighter. He cannot game from around 11am-2pm on his days off due to the lag and has had Comcast out twice to try and get it "fixed". He was pretty pissed :rant:  when I told him it was probably my fault and we confirmed it, but he calmed down when I told him what the server was doing. :usa:  (serving current US TV shows to .mil stationed overseas/downrange)

Yeah, like I said if you're a server you are probably eating the up speed (needed for gaming) but whoever is there first gets the bandwidth. Most people don't use much up and even gamers only need about 1-2 up for a great experience. But even if he started his gaming first there are low spots in his up traffic and if someone takes the up bandwidth in that time (ie your file sharing) he would be SOL because yours is a steady connection and stream. However, if anyone else started doing the same thing as you or just maintaining that constant up stream just before you started it, you would be the one waiting. That is given they had an up speed that maxed the hardware of the ISPs system and most residential lines don't come close.

But dang man, hitting a 150Gb cap on images alone? How many pictures were you taking and how big were they? I would think a big high res photo would be at the most 20Mb given most of our 10Mp shots are only about 3.

[2.ooohhh]

Business Class is a higher priority traffic on comcast's infrastructure so it almost always trumps any residential customer.(exception is comcast's VOIP traffic which trumps standard internet traffic of both business and consumer class) Stick a lone high use business customer in a residential setting and it makes for what my neighbors are experiencing. Luckily for my neighbors my high use is mid-day when most of the neighbors are at work/school so they are very rarely effected. If my high use were around 6-10pm and they got many more complaints they might take action, but with as small as our neighborhood is I doubt it.

 

Comcast is already essentially breaking net neutrality at the consumer end by prioritizing business customers and voip traffic for QOS and more $$$, but no one generally has a problem with it. Now they will likely do it at the other end as well which will likely be quite a bit more noticeable to the average consumer

 

 

 

It only takes around 1200 photos a week from a 5d or a 1d with two photographers sharing a backup solution that's not hard to hit during the busy season. RAW file sizes vary with camera settings and available light but it's not uncommon to have them between 25-35mb each.

Edited January 19, 2014 by 2.ooohhh

[JayC]

Robert,

 

How many options for broadband service do you have where you live?  Broadband being at least 20 mbits downlink and 4 mbits uplink available.

 

Show us that you have 6 choices for this service and I'll concede parts of TN don't need this regulation.  My guess, you'll have 1, *maybe* 2 depending on how far you live from your telephone companies central office.

 

Maybe you should consider moving to places that have more choices?  Should everyone in the country be saddled with federal regulations just so some people can be happy?  Should those people who don't need or want the level of service you seem to think should be mandatory be forced to subsidize your use?

 

If you truly want more choices then I can assure you that federal regulations will NOT provide them.

 

With that said, I'm done with this..you are NEVER going to change my mind about this...if you believe I"m wrong hen you believe I'm wrong; I can live with that!

 

[JayC]

The fact is that Internet companies such as Comcast and AT&T over commit bandwidth as a cost saving measure, even though it would be profitable for them to not overcommit at the prices they're charging for 1 mbit of bandwidth. They still do.

 

So when you sell more bandwidth than you have, you're forced to prioritize traffic as part of network management...  The fact is that if I slow down VOIP traffic a little bit, the service completely fails...  but if I slow down FTP traffic a little bit, it works perfectly fine just a bit slower.

 

A good provider will attempt to manage their network in such a way as to prevent 'service' interruptions, so protocols which are susceptible to packet loss and latency get a higher priority in the queue than protocols which can handle packet loss and latency without causing any issues.

 

Emails are a perfect example of of this, whats the difference between your email being delivered in 1 sec vs 10 seconds...  little or none.  Even more so when you consider that more than half of emails sent are spam emails.  But, if I delay your VOIP traffic from 100ms to 1 second, the audio is broken and likely unusable.

 

Of course it would be best buy the proper amount of bandwidth as a provider and make sure that during peak times you order more service when hitting the 60% mark (packet loss and latency can start to become an issue as you approach 80% usage)...  

 

Keep in mind that Google offers their fiber service at $70 for 1,000 mbits of service this is 250 times faster uplink than what I get from Comcast for $100 a month...  When Comcast announced fiber for Austin both the cable and telephone companies started lowering prices and doing massive infrastructure build outs to provide faster services to compete...

 

Google is providing 5mbit of Internet service for a $300 connection fee for 10 years (they'll continue to provide it for free as long as they provide service, but at least 10 years) that is about $2.50 a month for faster service than most people on this forum have...  and they're paying at least $35 a month for it.

 

How is what we have (and what most of the country has) a free market?

 

I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean, but dunno if prioritization would ever be "overall beneficial" unless perhaps people could sign up for different high performance profiles.

Also, at a certain price point, it doesn't seem unreasonable to throttle people who are running at near max data thruput 24/7. Unless there is huge excess capacity, it wouldm't hurt those folks to pay extra for non-throttled performance.

But for instance my development job, most of the time it is low volume email and small file transfers, but a couple of times a year it is several days of high density FTP. I'd be aggravated if I got throttled on the crunch days, specially if I knew the voip folks were getting priority. :)

 

[tnguy]

JayC, what you say is essentially correct but should the ISP be providing that prioritization? Who is to say which protocol is more important or in need to low latency? Why is Joe's gaming lower priority than Mary's VOIP? I think that an ISP should just provide an internet connection. If there is any prioritization, it should be done at the user's end and not by the ISP (Though at one time, Microsoft famously set the priority on *all* of their packets to high to make their stuff look better performing so likely there would have to be some mitigation against abuse).

 

Of course, there's nothing to say that an ISP couldn't offer differing levels of service including some which include them handling setting the priorities but if there's not at least one straight-up internet connection on the list, something is up.