Cable Packet Shaping Causing Slowdowns 356
knorthern knight writes "To counter P2P programs that encrypt their traffic to evade detection, Rogers Cable in Canada has apparently started degrading all encrypted IP traffic, according to a post on Michael Geist's blog. How many of you log in to work over a VPN or ssh-tunnel? How many get usenet news or email over an encrypted connection? This could be a problem for Rogers Cable customers. Geist, who teaches at U of Ottawa, has 'been advised that the University computer help desk has received a steady stream of complaints from Rogers customers about off-campus email service.'"
Who said you were supposed to use your connection? (Score:5, Insightful)
We have known for years that they have been overselling bandwidth and then cutting you off when you use more than their "unlimited service" will permit without telling you any concrete numbers of what that is.
I would guess that very few people use SSH, VPNs, or other encrypted connections that require the speeds to which we have become accustomed. They don't want that 10% of users on their residential network anyway and they will be happy to have you move to their commercial service packages if you so desire.
I complain that I have to use DSL and pay for land line service that I rarely use but at least my ISP (visi.com) doesn't give a shit what I do (they allow you to run servers, use all your bandwidth, and offer static and reverse).
I feel sorry for those that don't have more of a choice
Re:Why aren't the companies smarter? (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason for this is because they want to sell an "unlimited" package to people who will only use 2GB/month. Most people want to have unlimited traffic even if they have no concept of the amount of traffic they need.
don't blame (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want to kill P2P. I am no fan of cable companies or the RIAA or the MPAA. But don't blame network admins when they have to fight back on this stuff!
Re:don't blame (Score:3, Insightful)
This won't fly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I know that many employees of my local and state governments use VPNs daily. If their VPN connections get any slower, they will be well-nigh unusable. This is essentially a lower-stakes version of NTP wanting to cripple every congressman's BlackBerry. Our monopolies seem to be forgetting rule #1: don't piss off your regulators!
Re:Who said you were supposed to use your connecti (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, some major companies out there have several thousand "work at home" employees that are required to use VPN. Most of these people are in sales type of jobs, but plenty others are required to use VPN to connect to Exchange servers to access email from home.
Considering MS Exchange and dialup don't really mix, these people often have to have broadband to do their jobs efficiently. Seeing how not having VPN with an exchange server is a security risk, I can't really see any alternatives for these work at home types other than to switch to the provider who downgrades them the least.
Keep in mind these people are often working on company laptops who are locked down completely and couldn't install P2P software even if they wanted to.
Re:... But these are essential (Score:3, Insightful)
Three words.
Deep Packet Inspection.
Solution: Encapsulation (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe they should just (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like I have read over and over about how North America is like pretty much at the bottom of the ladder of high speed Internet service compared to the rest of the world with the exception of places in Africa.
I think I read places like France and Korea have gigabit service pretty much nation wide.
WHY is the (used to be) world leader of technology and one of the richest nations on Earth (USA) still dragging it's feet and living in the past? I know so many people that are STILL running 54k dialup modems at home but their actual throughput averages around 48k. And they are paying an average of $30 a month for such sorry service! Not to mention, frequent disconnects, busy trunks in the evenings, etc..
How pathetic.
These companies have no interest in providing a quality service, their only interest is milking their customers for as much as possible as long as they can. They'll continue to use antiquated and archaic equipment to provide substandard service until they are FORCED to by either massive equipment failures or court order.
Workaround? (Score:3, Insightful)
If everyone flushed their toilets at one time (Score:3, Insightful)
If EVERYONE tries to use their phone at the same time, there are problems. Remember trying to make a cell call anywhere in greater New York City on 9/11? Nevermind the destroyed equipment, the demand on each cell tower was just too much.
Even today, on busy days like Mother's Day, it's hard to get a long-distance call between certain cities on certain carriers. It's not as bad as it used to be thankfully.
Other businesses do the same thing. Ever tried to get into a computer store at 5AM the day after Thanksgiving? Some stores have fire-wardens at the door and when the store reaches fire-code capacity they won't let anyone else in until someone leaves. There's a popular restaurant I used to go to that took a different approach: They kicked you out after a certain period of time during peak hours. Think of it as "traffic-shaping" your restaurant experience.
Re:don't blame (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who said you were supposed to use your connecti (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps if I meant "very few people with influence" it would have made more sense. If a company (who chances are you buy a daily product of every day) notices that its employees can't do its job because of another company... Well they might say something either to the other company or to another press related group.
Of course I think I forgot to mention the company I'm referring (vaguely) to is in the States and their sales reps are regional so they would all have different ISPs.
Re:Why not pay as you go? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sometimes There is No Choice (Score:3, Insightful)
I am able to confirm that their traffic is mistakenly being considered rogue
OK, it's your network and if you have no competition, I guess you can do whatever the heck you want. However a few questions spring to mind:
1) Why can't you charge more? I would assume that everyone up north is in the same boat as you. It would be silly to assume that the same rates apply in the bush or in downtown Toronto.
2) Are you advertising a bandwidth you are not able to provide? See when I plug something into the power socket, I expect more or less 110 volts and 60 Hz in North America. If I plug in and get 50V at 50Hz and my electronics get fried, the power company is going to have to replace my stuff. Sure, you don't have to provide 3Mb/s to everyone if you're not set up to do it, but you shouldn't really advertise what you can't provide. What people DO with their connection is NONE of your business. Or do you want to be responsible for everything transmitted on your net? You're either a common carrier, or you're not. By the way, do you CLEARLY advertise (just as clearly as your offers of bandwidth) that you throttle or "shape" traffic, or is that buried somewhere on page 4 of the Terms Of Service?
3) Like I just mentioned: who gets to determine what "rogue traffic" is? You? Sure, you own the network - so you've appointed yourself as censor. Is a list of your likes and dislikes clearly provided to your subscribers? Which games are allowed more bandwidth? What if there's a game you don't like at all, because it makes fun of people in northern Canada? Is this game also qualified for more bandwidth?
4) Have you actually tried offering higher throughput for more money to the people who actually use the bandwidth you claim to provide them with? Who knows, maybe they'd be willing to pay.
I think I would certainly prefer taking a 2000msec delay on a satellite hookup than subscribe to an arbitrarily censored and regulated network.
Re:If everyone flushed their toilets at one time (Score:3, Insightful)
I certainly wouldn't eat there more than once. Perhaps the owner should consider putting the price up, or building a second floor, according to the laws of supply and demand.
Then again I guess there's a certain percentage of the population that enjoys being bullied and treated like crap.
Re:Net-neutral service teir (Score:3, Insightful)
Great. According to HIPAA, all patient related medical information must be encrypted. I like the fact that my ISP is "neutral" and "clobbering" important medical information. Not quite OMGTHINKOFTHECHILDREN, but close. Why should grandma's refresh on the "crosswords galore" website have priority over, say, an encrypted conference between 2 hospitals?
Re:don't blame (Score:3, Insightful)
1. There's no way for the IT department to say "sorry, you're in 56k land now" when the student is complaining to his/her parents/dean/professor/pope that they can't get their homework done on our network even though they pay $20k a year in tuition. The only way to limit individual network ports is to do it on a moment-by-moment throttling, not "use it up, you're screwed until the first of next month."
2. It takes a lot more than downloading a television episode to cause the kind of problems we're talking about. We're talking about having gigs of media files downloading and uploading day and night. It's commonplace.
Re:brownout heavy users during peak times (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the real problem is that ISPs started throttling p2p users who were consuming all of the available bandwidth and the "geniuses" who just had to have free tunes and movies and software said, "Well, we'll just encrypt all our traffic. That'll show 'em!"
Yeah, that showed them alright. Now everyone is paying for the parasites...
Re:brownout heavy users during peak times (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, well in my area both the cable and DSL providers advertise "DOWNLOAD MOVIES IN MINUTES!!!1!!" get all the greatest tunes! Lightning fast games blah blah blah.
Basically, saying they endorse lots of file sharing-like activity in the ads and not just implying faster surfing, but more, and bigger downloads as part of the point of their service.
Which makes tying the ads with the false unlimited claim less forgivable.
But, pretty much everybody should be aware that all telcos and all cable companies are pretty much large industrial fraud engines in the first place. Corrupt and incompetent to the core is the norm in the industry.
That doesn't make the policies and ads any less of a lie though.
Re:If everyone flushed their toilets at one time (Score:2, Insightful)
And if it had been an all-you-care-to-eat buffet and I had been removed before I was done, I would have disputed the charge for the meal with my credit card company. Why are people such sheep that they put up with this kind of crap?
Re:Ummm, it is not "unlimited". (Score:1, Insightful)
Also - the suggestion to tier the network would be called a violation of net neutrality to some. What people forget is that this is a private network, and they have to manage it.
Furthermore, I doubt that they are throttling all encrypted traffic. It probably has to reach a threshold. Chances are that traffic that is encrypted beyond that threshold is p2p related. Quit whining and go back to dial-up.
Oh yeah - and overselling bandwidth? Of course! How else would you run an ISP? Charge the REAL price it would cost to guarantee DS-3 speeds to every customer? Seems to me that you'd pay the same price as a DS-3 then. Don't act like such a victim.
Re:Why aren't the companies smarter? (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution of course is for EVERYBODY to use encryption all the time for everything. Not only would that make ISPs unable to selectively enforce arbitrary levels of service, but it would also make the whole Internet more resistant to malware and spying by governments and corporations. I wonder whether this idea would work technologically? Governments most likely would make it illegal however.
Re:Civil rights my arse (Score:1, Insightful)
Incorrect. I can cite a number of examples from Judith Levine to Dr Fred Berlin, to my uncle (who told me in confidence, of a fond friendship he had for his neighbor when hew as kid). There are entire cultures that are permissive of this group. There have been entire cultures in the past that encouraged this.
The REAL fact is that most people in our culture agree with you. Stating more than that is simply a bald faced exageration.
Incorrect. No less than two dozen cultures in recorded human history took a neutral view of the act of adults having sex with children. No less than four cultures in recorded human history (several quite long lasting) took a positive view of it. It is very difficult to argue for a genetic aversion with these facts in mind.
There is not much a point of the concept of "rights" unles they are accorded to everyone. If they are not, then they are, by definition, NOT "rights", but "conditional entitlements" or "likely situations" or somesuch nonsense.
This is patently false. Dutch researcher Theo Sandfort found that almost one quarter of parents knew of their child's interaction and relationship with a pedophile in his study Boys on their Contacts with Men [amazon.com]. This was in 1970s Amsterdam, which was a very permissive culture. I think there is some truth to your statement in modern American culture, but it is not, as you so fervently claim, a biological imperative. It is simply your desire to believe it is so that your revulsion is more properly justified.
I guess I may as well point out that throughout human history, it was more often than not common for a monther to masturbate or fellate their young boys to comfort them. It was actually reasonably common in SE Asian and South Pacific cultures until just a few years ago after the import of many customs and values of western countries. While this is not by my definition "sexualizing" them, it does fall into "sexual acts" as you mention and though I'm glad you purport to speak on behalf of the entire human race, I find it a bit of a *yawn* since you clearly have no context from which to speak, except your own.
Even if you feel that pedophiles deserve no standing or special protections, it is hard to reconcile the message of your post with the wording of your post, because the two directly contradict eachother. You frequently refer to pedophiles as "a group" having special characteristics, but then lash out to claim that they are not a group, but merely a "collection" of sickos. Your indignation and distaste make your post almost patently absurd on face, except that you garner a degree of sympathy for the fact that most people will tend to agree with some of your assertions.
Re:Ummm, it is not "unlimited". (Score:5, Insightful)