US cable giant to throttle P2P

how are

web pages - "time sensitive" ??? I can understand video streams but general web pages???

beat em at their own game

Listen kids, I used to get angry about this kind of stuff. I have comcast and comcast just like cox isn't putting these restrictions on their business customers. With that said all people have to do is pay more for services and get involved in contracts to avoid these limitations. This means Comcast & cox are intentionally toying with their service to sell it for money & to gain contracts.

I've had cable internet for years now, me and every other lasso on the street and you can't tell me that all of a sudden the bubble is about to burst. All these cable companies marketed the internet service as Unlimited, FAST (Comcasts ceo bragged about them having 100mbit access) that'll be real good with the data caps we have. So if these companies all want to toy with your connectivity FIGHT BACK. Downgrade your service, downgrade it to the point you can't subscribe to those internet video services and adult entertainment. I know it'll be rough, but the only way your going to change these companies is to stop playing into their hands.

Once people slow THEMSELVES down the providers will have to put up or shutup, don't let them build these out of control networks that can't sustain the service they are selling. These companies are overselling service. If their networks are bogged down perhaps they can stop taking in new business, anyone ever thought of that?

This is all greed from Cox & Comcast and nothing will stop them, nothing. You have to put your foot down and the only way they will feel it is with a lighter bill, let's go back to dialup if we have to. These broadband companies OVERSOLD THEIR SERVICE.

Re:beat em at their own game

I'm torn here, because I used to be a heavy user whereas now I am not. Part of me says, "great, all you heavy downloaders downgrade your service and mine will work faster", but then I'm also torn by the fact that I agree that broadband providers in general mis-sell their services.

I think that any provider who puts ANY sort of throttling on their service should immediately be forced to remove the word "unlimited" from their adverts. Because if you're throttled down from 20MB to 512KB once you hit a certain limit, your connection is no longer any use, at least on the downloading side of things.

So I guess when it comes down to it, I side with the users. While I may get annoyed that some people persistently drain bandwidth I don't believe it is their fault for utilising what their provider told them they could, simply by means of calling it "unlimited broadband".

Re: How are

>web pages - "time sensitive" ???

How long do you wait for a web page to load before you decide to try a different page for the information you are seeking? I'll open a few tabs to source the same information. The first sign of flash and a tab will get closed, any page that is too slow also gets closed. If standard web pages were throttled I'd be pulling my hair out. I'd say the intertnet is principally for information, the streaming stuff is bells and whistles.

Degraded Service

"During the occasional times the network is congested, this new technology automatically ensures that all time-sensitive Internet traffic – such as web pages, voice calls, streaming videos and gaming – moves without delay. Less time-sensitive traffic, such as file uploads, peer-to-peer and Usenet newsgroups, may be delayed momentarily – but only when the local network is congested," the post reads.

"Our goal is to ensure that customers continue to experience the consistently fast, reliable Internet service they’ve come to expect from Cox."

So does that mean the customers that used to have fast, reliable Internet service while using peer-to-peer and Usenet groups can sue them for degraded service since they are pay for this fast reliable service?

This isn't such a bad thing if done right

In the past I have had the pleasure of being able to build broadband internet access networks for some clients and we used a layer 7 aware QoS device to enforce traffic management during peak times. These are the lessons I learnt

1. Don't treat the customers as stupid ... be upfront about managing your traffic and explain how it is applied. People do in fact understand that a realtime voip session should be given a priority over a P2P or file download. I used to prioritise gaming and voip as top priority, web browsing second, web downloads third and P2P lowest priority. This only came into effect with point 2. Also advertise the fact that P2P can run unthrottled overnight during the quieter period and if their downloads are there in the morning waiting for them ... they're generally happy.

2. Tell them what the trigger condition is for traffic management. This was only applied when the pipe is full. If you employ these QoS devices in local PoPs then it only kicks in when that PoPs upstream bandwidth is maxed out. If that pipe is maxed out more than X hours in a day then you need to upgrade that pipe. Historical data was available to monitor utilisation over time.

3. Don't delay upgrades ... or people go elsewhere very quickly. Be pro-active in your traffic monitoring and always be ahead of your customers and already have upgrade plans in place before they complain.

Employing QoS on a network should not be seen as a punishment or a handicapp. Everyone understands that an ambulance on a road must have priority because it's needs to get to it's destination quickly and reliably. Same with some types of network traffic. Just like the road system our networks do (and always will) fill up with traffic during peak periods. Also peak periods may be hard to predict. A sensible and upfront traffic management policy is there to ensure everyone can get what they pay for and things "just work" as intended as much as is practically possible.

In all honesty I'd prefer a sensible traffic management policy from my internet provider rather than paying by the MegaByte .... also I think the all you can eat buffet will slowly disappear unless people accept paying more for their internet.

Anyway .... I have one foot in the net neutral camp because in a perfect world there would be enough bandwidth for everyone to run 100% at all times.

And I have a foot in the non-net neutral camp as I realistically accept that true net neutrality is a eutopian pipe dream which could never happen while people are trying to screw the internet for every penny they can.

This is just my opinion... no flaming necessary.

Playing games

My old cable company was oversold. Anyone who used more than X in upstream would get disconnected. X was a number defined as whatever they felt like at the time.

So I could upload files at 40 KBps and be ok, my friend on the same plan but in a different neighborhood would cap his FTP upstream at half that and get immediately disconnected for abuse.

They were horribly oversold and yet they were never stopped selling and they never stopped increasing the numbers in their marketing.

Its like having an all you can eat buffet that doesn't have enough food. You keep letting more pay for all they can eat... and then kicking out (without a refund) anyone who takes more than a nibble.

Hmm, definite food for thought

There are a lot of comments here which contain more than a grain of good sense, and the usual "it's the user's fault/it's the ISP's fault" nonsense.

ISP's do still try to get away will calling their offerings unlimited even though world+dog know better. This is something the regulators should be stamping on as it is clearly mis-selling. Additionally, as has been mentioned, as with many other aspects of the modern world they have been seeing this as an endless cash-cow but which has suddenly become very sick, a victim of it's own success.

User's have seen the unlimited part of the offer and some have tried to make use of that which is causing problems with overloaded segments. This has been encouraged by people who understandably see offers of *unlimited films and music for pennies a day* concept ads.

In reality, ISP's now need to do better analysis of their traffic to see what is happening where and as part of that they may need to limit some areas to get better figures for the spread of user's activities. They also need to be building up their networks based on that analysis to enable a better proportion of their subscribers (yes, the ones giving them the money) to achieve what their adverts say is possible (and no more of this 'fair use policy' crap, if people can't do it then the ISP's can't sell it) and to have some resilience for when demand spikes.

User's need to accept that what has been declared as available in the past is unrealistic at the prices quoted and if you want to have guaranteed service then you need to look at the price small businesses are paying, this is likely to be where you will be too.

I'd go with a company that did this!

I dont do much P2P stuff so obviously the hardcore P2P'ers wil move off their infrastucture elsewhere, leaving us normal users with more bandwidth. Updates can trickle down, no biggie.

Nice one.

I don't see the question as neut vs. anti-neut,

the question is: Is the vendor being transparent about what they are doing? If the vendor is transparent about their service, and you agree to the terms, I don't have a problem with it. The problem I saw with the Comcast throttling was that they:

1) Didn't announce what they were doing to their user community.

2) When their user community determined what they were doing, denied to the user community that they were doing it.

3) Lied to a federal agency which has a fair amount of oversight in their business.

I've sort of come to expect the 1st from most businesses. The second was bound to cost them in the long run. As for the third, well let us just say I've never been able to fathom the stupidity of people who don't realize the worst thing you can do to a government oversight dweeb is blatantly lie to him.

Well.

"Do the maths: one 24x7 Torrent users wipes out the profit margin of hundreds of users who don't leech porn and movies all day. A single tard also chokes the network. Do you expect Comcast to come round and give every Freetard a smoked salmon breakfast?"<---

that network would be bloody awful if a single person USING THERE ALLOWED BANDWIDTH clogged up the network , unless your talking about the number of connections, which is a different matter but considernig isps have to deal with lots of connections a day anyway they again should be able to handle it.

If isps want to have a fail use policy i'm ok with it, if they put the policy in writing, something that the user has to sign WITH EACH CHANGE, and shows actual limits and times , not using "peak time" and "unfair usage", actually show figures. Then fine, i'm ok with it.

Otherwise i will use what i have been offered thansk very much, stop me ans its a breach of contract.

Maybe a rational approach

The approach of prioritizing time-sensitive traffic makes sense to me. Who wouldn't want that? I'm an occasional bittorrent user, not a heavy bandwidth user, but I appreciate getting decent speed when I need it. I hate the idiotic cableco scheme that indiscriminately cuts your bandwidth to about 5% of max for p2p - so much so that I disconnected the cableco and went to ADSL. But p2p traffic is not time-sensitive, so I would be fine with a scheme that de-prioritized it, even if it meant somewhat lower throughput at peak times. I totally disagree with the people who toss around loaded words like "unfair" use of bandwidth without understanding how other people use the internet. The ISPs already have bandwidth limits - if they don't intend people to use them, then they should change them instead of cheating their customers (now there's my contribution to the loaded words!).

Just let the user set his priorities

Have the router able to configure several priorities(according to user will, of course) and, when the pipes get clogged, send a signal to not send more than x packets per second until a cancel singal or new limit is sent. Only in extreme cases would the upsteam routers need to do any manhandling of the packets.