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Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

news.northeastern.edu

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Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#121

Post by whamlastxmas »

resters wrote: post #115

This article inadvertently supports why stopping Net Neutrality was a good idea . If it takes a deep investigation to discover "throttling", and there has been no outcry from consumers, then the throttling did not cause any harm. Net Neutrality bans many sensible forms of traffic shaping. What we are seeing is network capacity being greatly increased through sensible traffic shaping, with no downside for consumers. T…

You can still do traffic shaping under NN, you just have to do it with equality and not act like a mafia doing racketeering with your customers.

Some nice packets you got there, would be a shame if someone... shaped them.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#122

Post by sathackr »

resters wrote: post #115

This article inadvertently supports why stopping Net Neutrality was a good idea . If it takes a deep investigation to discover "throttling", and there has been no outcry from consumers, then the throttling did not cause any harm. Net Neutrality bans many sensible forms of traffic shaping. What we are seeing is network capacity being greatly increased through sensible traffic shaping, with no downside for consumers. T…

Dictatorships are fine when the dictator is wise and benevolent and acts in the best interest of his/her people.

When they start acting in their own best interest is when it becomes a problem.

We're just at the beginning of the non-net neutrality era and carriers are testing the waters.

The market favors commercial interests, so we will begin to see some of the more negative predicted outcomes -- ie Amazon paying Boost Mobile to not throttle their traffic(while throttling their competitors)

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#123

Post by toast0 »

belorn wrote: post #52
sbr464 wrote: post #25

Years back, I operated a small ISP to serve a need until cable broadband arrived in the community. I had to monitor overall usage and throttle clients frequently with high torrent/video usage. It was also an issue with hotspots in RV Parks/campgrounds where there was a higher ratio of video usage. There are technical limitations to spectrum/bandwidth, I'm curious why this isn't mentioned more in discussions like thes…

The article brings up that. The throttling was not done in order to ease congested network traffic. It is not a response to hotspots of high traffic, nor is it even classification of data types such as torrent and video usage. If you use Boost ISP and watching sports on NBCSport it will work fine but watching the same match later on youtube is not. If you sit at CSpire and watch a paid movie on Youtube Red you will g…

Throttling is generally defined as purposefully slowing some (or all) traffic, in the absence of network congestion.

That you may have a faster connection to one provider than another doesn't indicate throttling, unless you can show that the network paths are essentially the same and the slower provider isn't the one restricting the data rate.

Certainly, almost any last mile congestion should affect all providers; but most content providers are going try to deliver content from as close to the user as possible; either through CDN boxes deployed inside ISPs networks if possible, or at a nearby place where the ISP or its transit partners peer. I'm aware that Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon all run their own CDN programs, so it's very likely that they're interconnecting to the ISP on separate connections, and without insider knowledge from the ISPs or the CDNs, it's impossible to know what the congestion looks like there. CDN installations also have capacity limitations, and take time to upgrade. It's not unreasonable to assume that some content providers are running their networks hotter than others.

In the years since the Internet has become mainstream, people seem to have forgotten the bad old days of downloading a large file, and trying to figure out which mirror would serve the file the fastest; which usually meant figuring out which mirror was both physically close, and well connected to the downloader's network.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#124

Post by charleslmunger »

resters wrote: post #115

This article inadvertently supports why stopping Net Neutrality was a good idea . If it takes a deep investigation to discover "throttling", and there has been no outcry from consumers, then the throttling did not cause any harm. Net Neutrality bans many sensible forms of traffic shaping. What we are seeing is network capacity being greatly increased through sensible traffic shaping, with no downside for consumers. T…

I'm not sure I follow your logic - it doesn't take a deep investigation to discover throttling, it takes a deep investigation to prove that poor performance is caused by throttling. It doesn't take a deep investigation to see that your cash register is short, but it might take one to prove that an employee is taking money from the drawer.

And we're not seeing network capacity greatly increased through sensible traffic shaping - that's an assertion made without evidence. If that were the case, we'd expect different video providers to be shaped the same way, and we'd expect the throttling to change based on time of day and peak traffic, which the researchers did not observe.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#125

Post by darkerside »

Finch2193 wrote: post #118
resters wrote: post #115

This article inadvertently supports why stopping Net Neutrality was a good idea . If it takes a deep investigation to discover "throttling", and there has been no outcry from consumers, then the throttling did not cause any harm. Net Neutrality bans many sensible forms of traffic shaping. What we are seeing is network capacity being greatly increased through sensible traffic shaping, with no downside for consumers. T…

I'm confused. Do you really think this outweighs all the other downsides of losing net neutrality?

What exactly are these perceived downsides? Netflix is operational and seems to be doing just fine. And if an ISP outright stopped supporting it, the majority of people would immediately find an alternative ISP that did not.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#126

Post by resters »

Finch2193 wrote: post #118
resters wrote: post #115

This article inadvertently supports why stopping Net Neutrality was a good idea . If it takes a deep investigation to discover "throttling", and there has been no outcry from consumers, then the throttling did not cause any harm. Net Neutrality bans many sensible forms of traffic shaping. What we are seeing is network capacity being greatly increased through sensible traffic shaping, with no downside for consumers. T…

I'm confused. Do you really think this outweighs all the other downsides of losing net neutrality?

The core issue Net Neutrality intends to solve is the excessive market power of last mile providers. Of all of the possible ways to address that, having lawmakers regulate QoS is silly.

People act as though NN means that everyone deserves a dedicated bandwidth circuit. That's simply not what everyone gets even under NN.

Regulators should be doing things like figuring out ways to get more last mile transmission lines installed so there can be real market competition.

I also don't have a problem with an ISP selling a "Netflix and email only" internet package to someone for a big discount. Some people would rather settle for that and spend the savings on something else.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#127

Post by jakebasile »

resters wrote: post #120
jakebasile wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if something can be done and no one notices it can't be a bad thing? "I would've gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids!"

Traffic shaping does exactly that. It prioritizes traffic in a way that makes sense for each protocol. So yes, the point is that being aware of the protocols lets the shaping create more perceived bandwidth out of thin air. This is the reality as long as we have "residential quality" broadband, which is more like a finance product arbitraging bandwidth, intended to lower cost and minimize (but not reduce) the impact…

The ISPs created this "arbitrage" style of overselling bandwidth, and we shouldn't let their use of loose definitions serve as an excuse to further degrade their products against their marketing claims.

My residential broadband from AT&T is sold to me as Gigabit. Do you know how often I've ever gotten what they sold to me? Never. I top out at about 300Mbps, and even that is rare.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#128

Post by admax88q »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #112
close04 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right... until you grandma can’t Skype with you because Microsoft didn’t pay the “decongestion” tax to that neighborhood IP she’s using or every ISP along the way. Or when the firefighters get throttled because their unlimited data is consumed and your house goes up in smoke.

I really hope firefighters and other emergency services don't depend on the unreliable mobile network. Those will be some of the first things to go down in case of an actual emergency, along with the power grid.

Most fires that require an emergency response are not at the scale that could possibly impact cellular serivce. Even a whole neighbourhood going up in smoke isn't going to take down cell towers unless that tower happens to actually be in the middle of that neighbourhood.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#129

Post by resters »

charleslmunger wrote: post #124
resters wrote: post #115

This article inadvertently supports why stopping Net Neutrality was a good idea . If it takes a deep investigation to discover "throttling", and there has been no outcry from consumers, then the throttling did not cause any harm. Net Neutrality bans many sensible forms of traffic shaping. What we are seeing is network capacity being greatly increased through sensible traffic shaping, with no downside for consumers. T…

I'm not sure I follow your logic - it doesn't take a deep investigation to discover throttling, it takes a deep investigation to prove that poor performance is caused by throttling. It doesn't take a deep investigation to see that your cash register is short, but it might take one to prove that an employee is taking money from the drawer. And we're not seeing network capacity greatly increased through sensible traffi…

There could be many causes of what appears to be differential throttling.

For a small ISP there might be a much higher quality backbone link to one video provider than to another. This is probably a coincidence.

Also, popular services such as Netflix result in the build out of more dedicated bandwidth that is shaped to match peak demand.

Broadly, traffic shaping happens from QoS rules, ISP upstream provider choices, backbone infrastructure build-outs, etc. It's not a static system.

I guess my point is that this is too complex a thing for regulators to understand or to regulate in a sensible way. I prefer simple antitrust enforcement of last mile providers, even if it entails the government "confiscating" the transmission lines installed by ISPs and any of several ISPs to use them to serve a customer based on the customer's chosen ISP.

Re: Research shows that nearly every U.S. cell provider is doing throttling

#130

Post by EpicEng »

DougBTX wrote: post #37
sbr464 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But from a physics/technical standpoint, a radio only has so much capacity. How would you handle the situation, if you managed a provider, and 10 people at a bar started streaming an NBA game in HD? Somethings got to give.

The argument would go that if the radio has total capacity x and each user is allocated capacity y, then only x / y users should be allowed to join the service, otherwise it is "over selling". It is a super straight forward model, but obviously much more expensive to provide. I imagine most users would be happy to pay 1/10 of the cost to get a service that might drop to 10% performance in the worst case, as long as i…

And when you call up to get your internet connected and they tell you "sorry, we're at capacity. Try back next month"? What then? Would you rather have no connection or a variable speed connection?

The latter is a much better solution. You don't seem to appreciate the realities at play here.

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