“Fast lanes” have always been bullshit.
If you’re paying for 100mbps, and the person you’re talking to is paying for 100mpbs, and you’re not consistently getting 100mbps between you, then at least one of you is getting ripped off. This reality where you can pay extra money to make sure the poors don’t get in the way of your packets has never been the one we live in.
Of course, there are definitely people who are getting ripped off, but “fast lanes” are just an additional avenue by which to rip them off a little more; not a single provider who’s currently failing to provide the speed they advertise is planning to suddenly spend money fixing that and offering a new tier on their suddenly-properly-provisioned internet, if only net neutrality would go away.
As Bill Burr said, I don’t know all the ins and outs, but I know you’re not trying to make less money.
If you’re paying for 100mbps, and the person you’re talking to is paying for 100mpbs, and you’re not consistently getting 100mbps between you, then at least one of you is getting ripped off.
That’s only really true of you’re relatively close to each other on the same ISP. The father apart and the more hops you need to make the less likely it becomes, through no fault of your ISP.
There’s always going to be some level of loss and retransmission. It would take a perfect stream of UDP, since TCP needs acknowledgements in order to continue sending data. That can be reduced by window scaling and multiplexing, but it’s still going to happen.
Incorrect, and that was exactly my point
This is like saying that if the fruit at a store is rotten sometimes, it’s not the grocer’s fault, because the fruit had to come a long way and went bad in transit. The exact job you are paying the ISP for, is to deal with the hops and give you good internet. It’s actually a lot easier at the trunk level (because the pipes are bigger and more reliable and there are more of them / more redundancy and predictability and they get more attention.)
I won’t say there isn’t some isolated exception, but in reality it’s a small small small minority of the time. Take an internet connection that’s having difficulty getting the advertised speed and run mtr or something, and I can almost guarantee that you’ll find that the problem is near one or the other of the ends where there’s only one pipe and maybe it’s having hardware trouble or individually underprovisioned or something.
Actually Verizon deliberately underprovisioning Netflix is the exception that proves the rule – that was a case where it actually was an upstream pipe that wasn’t big enough to carry all the needed traffic, but it was perfectly visible to them and they could easily have solved it if they wanted to, and chose not to, and the result was visibly different from normal internet performance in almost any other case.
I probably should’ve been a little clearer that I’m taking scales of thousands of km here.
I’m on an island in the North Atlantic. I don’t hold it against my ISP if I can’t get my full 1.5Gbps down from services hosted in California.
Yeah, makes sense, that’s a little different. In that case there is actually congestion on the trunk that makes things slow for the customers.
My point I guess is that the people who want to sell a “fast lane” to their customers, or want to say Net Neutrality is the reason your home internet is slow when you’re accessing North America, are lying. Neutrally-applied traffic shaping to make things work is allowed, of course; just want to throttle their competitors and they’re annoyed that the government is allowed to tell them not to.
Distance would add latency but shouldn’t reduce speed on well maintained infrastructure.
Very rarely your are paying for 100Mbps. You are paying for “up to” 100Mbps.
I just checked my agreement, and it says something like this:
Stated Speeds not guaranteed and are affected by many factors. In all cases, actual speed will likely be lower than speed indicated during peak hours.
But the marketing says nothing about “up to” like it does with typical cable and DSL services (we use a small, local ISP), and I’ve honestly never seen my speed go below the advertised limit. Every time I test it (and I’ve tested during peak hours as well), I get pretty much exactly what’s advertised.
That said, the agreement I’m reading is kind of funny:
Random stupid stuff in my agreement
Pinging or other network probing is prohibited.
Yet when I call support, they ask me to do a ping test. I know what they’re intending to say (it’s talking about hacking, such as nmap-ing some remote service), but the wording is awkward.
And this:
You may not use {service} to advertise, solicit, transmit, store, post, display, or otherwise make available obscene or indecent images or other materials.
So I guess they don’t like porn. It goes on to talk about stuff involving minors, but this wording seemed broad.
You may not use the Service to transmit, post… language that encourages bodily harm, destruction of property or harasses another.
I guess I can’t troll.
You may not advertise, transmit, … any software product, product, or service that is designed to… spam, initiation of pinging, flooding, mail bombing, denial of service attacks, and piracy of software.
So I can’t recommend lemmy I guess, since people here like piracy. Oh, and I also can’t tell people how to check their network connection by using
ping…Blah, blah, blah, I’ve probably violated a half-dozen of those provisions. I’m guessing most of them won’t stand up in court, and they’d have a hard time proving anything since everything should be TLS encrypted.
Fortunately, my ISP is pretty decent in practice and doesn’t seem to care what I do with it.
Random stupid stuff in my agreement Fortunately, my ISP is pretty decent in practice and doesn’t seem to care what I do with it.
Found the guy that either does illegal things, or embarrassingly stupid things with his ISP connection.
I do neither.
I’m a developer that likes to mess around with hobby projects, and that tends to look a lot like illegal/stupid stuff. For example, I’ll port scan my cloud services I maintain (explicitly against the rules) to verify it’s configured properly. I’ll create persistent connections to enable automatic deploys from home (again, explicitly against the TOS). I’ll use torrents to download legitimate Linux ISOs (again, against TOS), and I’ll use Tor to mess around with onion sites (again, against TOS). I’m building a P2P app, so there’s a lot of unfamiliar packets flying about.
I’m an enthusiast, but I’m a respectful enthusiast, so I do my shenanigans off peak hours. If I did illegal stuff, I would hide it so the ISP doesn’t find out.
It’s so weird that that phrasing is even accepted as the norm. It would be unacceptable if a grocery store charges you for ‘up to’ 2 liters of soda, and then tells you to go fuck yourself when they give you only 0.5 liter.
Good. The thing is that network “fast lanes” work by slowing down all other lanes.
If it wasn’t so goddamn infuriating, all of these “free market” enthusiasts trying to argue that introducing artificial scarcity into the market to try to game the whole system would be kinda hilarious.
See also “deregulation” types arguing for even more stringent regulation of unions.
its_the_same_picture.png
Gotta love how ISPs were told they can’t slow some things down, so they thought they could get away with speeding other things up instead.
Fucking yes. This is genuinely a HUGE win.
Good.
Yay, spam email servers now have full speed. Spam away! You do realize prioritizing traffic is kind of the network norm right? NN was one of those, let’s fix a problem that doesn’t actually exist. You know that right?!?
The type of traffic shaping you are thinking off can still be done under net nutrailty and was never an issue.
The things NN is trying to “solve” was never an issue either
Then it shouldn’t be an issue to implement it then right?
But there’s never been an issue… Should Netflix pay more for their increased traffic… Yes, it’s not equal to my browsing.
This is totally missing the point. What happened is the equivalent of the bus company calling the supermarket and saying “hey, I’ve noticed a lot of people going to your store. If you want to keep that, you’ve got to pay extra so I don’t drop half the busses from your route”
They do.
Do you think Netflix connects to the internet for free?
I’m enjoying watching you dig this massive pit for yourself. Lol
Net neutrality is the status quo, it’s not trying to “solve” anything
If it was the status quo then why have rules?
To. Protect. It.
You really have no idea what you’re talking about, do you?
Because companies like to make money by breaking the status quo when there aren’t any rules.
It’s the thing they like to do most honestly, and why we need to make rules when we see open loopholes
Network neutrality became policy after Comcast, Verizon, and ATT were all caught throttling Netflix while their own competing services were lagging behind in market share. It was a response to a real problem that was harming competitors and consumers.
I literally had this happen to me; it’s why I don’t use Verizon anymore. Youtube, too. There’s a technical breakdown somewhere of precisely how they did it (roughly speaking, “accidentally” underprovisioning the exact exits from their network that would lead to Netflix’s servers for no possible reason except to fuck with Netflix and degrade that service and only that service, which it accomplished very effectively.)
That’s fair, but personally I don’t think Net Neutrality was the right solution.
They should have been found guilty of anticompetitive behaviour and split up into multiple companies.
Net neutrality is just Common Carrier rules as applied to the Internet. It’s frankly a no-brainer.
Your proposal should definitely also have been done – allowing telecoms to also produce content at all is a massive conflict of interest and should never have been allowed in the first place – but it doesn’t obviate to also regulate the pure telecoms even after the breakup.
The thing is there are no pure telecoms anymore. There’s a company that maintains underground infrastructure and gets paid when that infrastructure is used, and is incentivised to upgrade the infrastructure because they make more money if it’s used more.
And there are thousand of companies that benefit from the infrastructure, and they can charge customers pretty much whatever they want… though it better not be an excessively high price because every ISP, even a tiny one with a single employee, can provide service nationwide at the same raw cost as a telco with tens of millions of customers.
The difference between what we have done, and net neutrality, is our system provides an open book profit motive to upgrade the network. Net Neutrality doesn’t do that.
Fundamentally there is a natural monopoly in that once every street in a suburb is connected, then why would anyone invest in digging up the footpath and gardens to run a second wired connection to every house? The original provider would have to provide awful service to justify that, and they can simply respond to a threat of a new network by improving service just enough (maybe only temporarily), for that new investor to run for the hills.
Net Neutrality stops blatant abuse. But it doesn’t encourage good behaviour. Our NBN does both.
That’s just not true.
The difference between what we have done, and net neutrality, is our system provides an open book profit motive to upgrade the network. Net Neutrality doesn’t do that.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with network upgrades, it only relates to how traffic can be treated on the network. That’s it. If the network is insufficient, it needs to be upgraded, not reprioritized so preferred traffic is fast while everything else is slow.
I don’t know anything about NBN Co, so I’m going largely based on this Wikipedia article.
Financials:
Revenue - A$5.3 billion (2023)
Operating income - A$133 million (2023)
Net income - A$−1.1 billion (2023)
Total assets - A$37.94 billion (2023)
So they’re subsidizing by ~$1B/year, or ~20%.
There has been a significant failure of the NBN to deliver nominal performance to end users. There has been contention between RSPs and NBN on the reasons for this. Bill Morrow, then CEO of NBN, admitted in 2017 that 15% of end users received a poor service through the NBN and were ‘seriously dissatisfied’. In addition, Morrow indicated that, at July 2017, prices and performance for end users were suppressed through a ‘price war’ between RSPs.
So let’s look at prices, since surely they should be low if there’s a “price war”. Here are prices for the top ISP, Telstra (speeds in download/upload in mbps):
- Basic (25/4) - A$85 - $56 USD
- Essential (50/17) - A$100 - $66 USD
- Premium (100/17) - A$100 (6mo promo)
- Ultimate (250/22) - A$135 - $89 USD
- Ultrafast (700/40) - A$170 - $112 USD
Here’s my local ISP which isn’t government owned, and all prices include all taxes:
- 20/10 - $40
- 50/25 - $55
- 100/50 - $70
- 250/125 - $100
- 1000/500 - $125
And we’re installing a municipal fiber network because we think that’s too high, and the new network will provide 10gbps. Larger cities near us have gigabit symmetrical for $70-ish. The only reason it’s relatively inexpensive is because the big cable companies actually have competition here. We have: DSL, cable, fiber backed Ethernet, and radio, and we’ll be installing a new fiber-to-the-home network.
So not only is NMN government subsidized, it’s also more expensive than our local service. And I’m not in some urban area, we have tens of thousands of residents, hardly a big city, and in one of the smallest states by population density in the country.
So no, I don’t think your model is working properly. I’ll take national Net Neutrality and push for local muni fiber.
pats your head It’s okay, I know reading comprehension is difficult for some people.
I know Lemmy is the wrong place for this, it’s just another hive mind like reddit. Actual reading is what got me to this point. So maybe it’s you that should do some unbiased reading.
Yeah. Must be something wrong with the place and not you. It’s called projection.
Lemmy is a fine place for it, saying it’s a hive mind may have some truth, but it’s also a copout. Just back up controversial opinions with some sources.
You said you read things that “got you to this point.” What was it you read? I’d be interested in reading it.
what a dumbass
Bless your heart
Bless your heart
We just dropped our ISP(Windstream) for never once giving us the bandwidth we are paying for. Their excuse was overhead. However I was on a call with their engineering dept and one of their guys read out the QOS and it was for less than what we are paying. When I brought that up they abruptly cut off everyone but the sales guy who continued to try to blow sunshine up my ass despite knowing it was all bullshit.
Did it at least feel good?
Nah it was very frustrating at the time. However its better since we started the transition to a new provider.
Its not complete yet but it did indeed feel good when my latest in long line of sales reps called me about a new 36 month contract. Windstream is mismanagements prototype. They have achieved greatness in sucking. They have good technical people who are prevented from fixing problems by their clueless management personnel. These people also change all the time. That revolving door there must be spinning at thousands of RPM’s.
Is it this Windstream? If so:
On February 15, 2019, the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York ruled that Windstream had defaulted on some of its bonds. Consequent to the ruling, Windstream stock lost about 60% of its value.
On February 25, 2019, Windstream filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in response to a February 15th judgment against the company for $310 million.
In September 2020, emerging from bankruptcy as a privately held company, Windstream successfully completed its financial restructuring process and reduced its debt by over $4 billion.
…
Paul H. Sunu became the president and CEO of Windstream on October 30, 2023. Sunu has been the chairman of the board since 2020. He is an accomplished executive with over 27 years of telecom experience, with a focus on rural telecommunication. He succeeds Tony Thomas, who has decided to depart the Company and step down from the Board, following a distinguished 17 years at Windstream.
It sounds like they didn’t just suck at providing services… At least the old CEO that ran it into the ground is gone, so that’s nice.
Oh yeah sales people always think bringing an engineer onto a call is a great idea until they try it a few times. We’re a blunt people who want a fair exchange
Shit, TIL I’m an engineer lol.
Yeah because we know how it works behind the curtain.
I didn’t go in engineering to fuck people over. I want to be proud of my work, and the salespeople put their dirty shit all over it.
Exactly, the reasons I’m an engineer are very tied to the reasons I helped a coworker with her kid’s math homework the other day. I just want to help, to understand things, and to help people understand things
That’s hopefully a final middle finger to the reese-cup-shitpai.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Federal Communications Commission clarified its net neutrality rules to prohibit more kinds of fast lanes.
While the FCC voted to restore net neutrality rules on April 25, it didn’t release the final text of the order until yesterday.
The final rule “prohibits ‘fast lanes’ and other favorable treatment for particular applications or content even when the edge provider isn’t required to pay for it… For example, mobile carriers will not be able to use network slicing to offer broadband customers a guaranteed quality of service for video conferencing from some companies but not others,” said Michael Calabrese, director of the Open Technology Institute’s Wireless Future Project.
Under the draft version of the rules, the FCC would have used a case-by-case approach to determine whether specific implementations of what it called “positive discrimination” would harm consumers.
Under the original plan, “there was no way to predict which kinds of fast lanes the FCC might ultimately find to violate the no-throttling rule,” she wrote.
Any plan to put certain apps into a fast lane will presumably be on hold for as long as the current net neutrality rules are enforced.
The original article contains 765 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
How long are we going to bitch about this bullshit that never materialized or happened?
TMO offering different plans and killing quality on cheaper plans is about the only company I’ve actually seen use any part of this shit and it’s been 15 years now.
Just because it hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it won’t slowly be added over the next 5-10 years.
Making Laws/rules doesn’t need to wait for a bad to happen.
Most ISPs prepared material to lobby otherwise. It was shared, I’m pretty sure within this community, when they were discovered.
Roe vs wade should’ve been a law. Republicans said it wasn’t needed because of that case. If it isn’t a problem to have a law/restriction, then why argue against it?
