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Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

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Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#51
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that ISPs have oversold their services and painted themselves into a corner with misleading, if not downright false advertising is entirely their problem. Get a law passed and let them whine about it and then deal with it.

So, what would you prefer? Would you prefer fixed lower bandwidths; everyone gets exactly 1 Mbps all the time, for the same price you're paying now for 50 Mbps? Then you're going to have a ton of bandwidth going unused all the time, while everything will load slower. Or would you prefer the famously unpopular bandwidth caps and overage charges? Saying "unlimited bandwidth" but selling it as a residential (ie, non-com…

I would prefer minimum service guarantees rather than maximum usage allowances. If I want to maximize my use of my connection, the only thing my ISP should do is reduce my throughput when someone else is trying to check their email, so that I do not get in their way. Other than that Internet connections should be a free-for-all.

The real problem here is that ISPs are so grossly overselling their networks' capacities that they cannot provide any guarantee beyond dialup speeds unless people take turns. Rather than admit this, they try to assign blame to people who foolishly think that "Up to 20Mbps!!!" means "up to 20Mbps" when in fact the ISPs want it to mean "up to 20Mbps in occasional short bursts, and only for the things we think you should be doing."

I am not asking for commercial-grade service. I am asking that my neighbors be able to stream videos while I am seeding Debian torrents. Nobody expects some kind of Internet-connection-utopia, but it is not wrong or unreasonable to expect to be allowed to use my Internet connection as I wish, particularly when I am paying more and receiving less than my overseas friends.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#52
post #4

Out of curiosity, why is there a prohibition on a particular type of activity and not just on bandwidth or similar? I understand that this is a fairly common provision, and not specific to Google Fiber at all.

Because not all internet is equal. Most ISP's give home users a significant discount on their service, in exchange for agreeing to certain assumptions about their use. This is done because most home users could never afford internet, if they had to pay for full price. For example, in this area, a dedicated 20x20mb connection to the internet costs about $500USD per month (Metro Ethernet). You can do almost anything yo…

Since you are defending this kind of practices, I must ask you: Can you name a single other service or product in the world that include such restrictions, and "up to X" quantity?

If I only got 50% of the actually contracted time of an rented apartment (say they wrote "up to 1 month"), I would sue. If the fine print said apartment had restrictions such as only 10 enter/exits, no commercial activities inside it like programming, no more than 2 visiting friends per month, and only allowed using the apartment for 12hrs per day, I would sue.

Why do we still allow this for Internet connectivity when we wouldn't for any other kind of utility service?

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come to think of it, I've never looked at inbound stuff. You'd think outbound would be where all the spam problems come from, though.

If you block 25 outbound, people's mail clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) could not deliver mail to servers that don't run SSL or TLS (465, 587)

Ideally you would use port 587, which is the designated port for mail submission. See RFC 2476 [1].

This requires that your mail provider supports that port, of course, which is unfortunately not always the case.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2476.txt

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#55
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that ISPs have oversold their services and painted themselves into a corner with misleading, if not downright false advertising is entirely their problem. Get a law passed and let them whine about it and then deal with it.

So, what would you prefer? Would you prefer fixed lower bandwidths; everyone gets exactly 1 Mbps all the time, for the same price you're paying now for 50 Mbps? Then you're going to have a ton of bandwidth going unused all the time, while everything will load slower. Or would you prefer the famously unpopular bandwidth caps and overage charges? Saying "unlimited bandwidth" but selling it as a residential (ie, non-com…

I would prefer truthful advertisement. If they must cut down on minimum transfer rates, then that’s what the advertisement should say.

I have a general rule: Buy 250KB/s, and you get 100% of the bought speed.

Buy 1MB/s, and get 95% of the bought speed.

Buy 10MB/s, and get 80% of the bought speed.

Buy 100MB/s, and get in average around 50% of the bought speed. 25 at prime time, and 90 around 4am.

In the end, more expensive connection give you more, but each level give less proportionally bandwidth than advertised. This should be illegal. If they want to sell me 25MB/s, but at strange hours up to 100MB/s, than the advertisement should say so, plain and simple.

If you went to the gas station and only got 50% from paying for a full tank, you, me and everyone would be angry. It wouldn't matter if the gas station was "low" on gas, or if it meant that the gas station might end up with no gas left for the next customer.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#56
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not all internet is equal. Most ISP's give home users a significant discount on their service, in exchange for agreeing to certain assumptions about their use. This is done because most home users could never afford internet, if they had to pay for full price. For example, in this area, a dedicated 20x20mb connection to the internet costs about $500USD per month (Metro Ethernet). You can do almost anything yo…

Since you are defending this kind of practices, I must ask you: Can you name a single other service or product in the world that include such restrictions , and "up to X" quantity? If I only got 50% of the actually contracted time of an rented apartment (say they wrote "up to 1 month"), I would sue. If the fine print said apartment had restrictions such as only 10 enter/exits, no commercial activities inside it like…

Why would you sue? You signed the lease.

Most rentals have some agreement for the tenants , terms that forbid business use , redecorating or changing furniture are fairly standard. Also in houses with multiple tenants you have to agree to share communal facilities.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#57
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not all internet is equal. Most ISP's give home users a significant discount on their service, in exchange for agreeing to certain assumptions about their use. This is done because most home users could never afford internet, if they had to pay for full price. For example, in this area, a dedicated 20x20mb connection to the internet costs about $500USD per month (Metro Ethernet). You can do almost anything yo…

Since you are defending this kind of practices, I must ask you: Can you name a single other service or product in the world that include such restrictions , and "up to X" quantity? If I only got 50% of the actually contracted time of an rented apartment (say they wrote "up to 1 month"), I would sue. If the fine print said apartment had restrictions such as only 10 enter/exits, no commercial activities inside it like…

Power companies do the same thing.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#58
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what would be preferable. They could sell you metered bandwidth; but everyone always complains about metered bandwidth, and no one wants to accidentally have their 14 year old nephew who comes to visit for a week blow out your caps and cost you tons of money because they left Bittorrent seeding a bunch of popular movies. They could just sell you lower bitrates. But then everyone would suffer, as they wou…

Really the only difference between "residential" and "commercial" plans should be service guarantees. I do not expect Comcast's residential cable service to have any particular guarantee of service; if I had a commercial contract, I would certainly demand some sort of guarantee about available bandwidth and uptime. That is what we have now, more or less. To put it another way, suppose nobody gets any service guarante…

So, let's think back to the analog, circuit-switched telephone network. If you have a telephone line, you generally expect to be able to make a call at any time. But for anyone to be able to make a call at any time across the country, you would need to have one cross-country line for each person on the side with lower number of people (assuming, of course, that you divide the country in half and need to run cross country lines between the two halve; bear with me, this is a bit of a simplified example).

Of course, if you built one line for each person, then the vast majority of them would go unused. It would be completely ridiculous to overbuild like this; everyone would be paying for a ton of capacity that's unused. So how about if they build it to comfortably cover 10% more capacity than they've ever had used in the past. This allows for enough headroom for spikes, and when usage starts crossing that line they know that they need to start building out more capacity.

But of course, then some disaster strikes, and everyone tries to call their loved ones at once to check in on them. Usage surges to more than 10% higher than their previous high, and they run out of lines. Oops, now they've violated their "minimum service level". So, should they only have sold you long-distance service when they knew that there was less than one line per endpoint? Well, sure, it would have been ridiculously expensive and you wouldn't have bought it to have your own dedicated line the whole way across the country.

Now, the considerations in a packet switched network aren't all that much different. You can be more efficient about sharing the same resources because you can even share a single line, with several people sending packets at different times. But if you want to provide some kind of guaranteed minimum service, you need to take whatever you most limited path is, and divide up its cost and bandwidth between all customers who could possibly use it simultaneously. And I guarantee you, that will add up to paying a fortune for a pittance of bandwidth.

    Why should it be acceptable to say, "How dare you 
    maximize your use of this, when it reduces availability 
    for everyone else?!?" Nobody gets a guarantee of 
    service at all.
Because if they do that, people will start leaving that service, saying "it's slow and glitchy, this other service gets much better ratings on SpeedTest.net and all of my friends on this other service say it's more reliable for them", when the reason for that is "this other service" actually has an enforces a ToS against abusive use of the network.

Does anybody get a "guarantee of service" to the public roads? Then why should anyone complain if someone else decides to run a private parade on those public roads, blocking everyone else? Or should we all get a "guarantee of service", and then deny anyone the right to have a parade ever?

Sometimes, you need to share resources without precise, hard and fast constraints, but instead based on social conventions, definitions of completely egregious behavior, and consequences for that completely egregious behavior.

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