Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.northeastern.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 180 posts

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

#131

Post by resters »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #121
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.

This made me chuckle. Yes, that is exactly true and I hope antitrust regulators can use shaping data to crack down on excessive market power!

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

#132

Post by resters »

jakebasile wrote: post #127
resters wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are other ways to address that such as false advertising or rules defining what kind of service can be called "gigabit" when sold.

I've been trying to find the lowest latency connection possible and was excited to call AT&T and find out they had fiber available. I asked the rep multiple times if it was a 100% fiber circuit, and was told it was.

Then on the day of installation, the installer called up and mentioned copper. I said, "Uh, what do you mean copper?". Turns out it was fiber to the pole and copper the rest of the way. The rep simply lied.

I would like to see firms that lie to customers in that kind of way removed from the market due to competition. So in my view regulation of ISPs should focus on allowing competition and breaking up the last mile market power. Why can't the municipality own the last mile transmission line and rent it to whichever ISP wins the customer's business?

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

#133

Post by nbhuik »

p49k wrote: post #108
rayiner wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just not how the Internet works and it’s never how it worked. This old article from Cisco (based on a 1999 book) explains that there can be various kind of business arrangements in an interconnected network: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/press/internet-protocol-... . The article likens the situation to airlines, where multiple transit providers might be involved and where there may be complex fee sharing…

It's still the responsibility of the ISP to deliver connectivity to other hosts on the internet at their promised speed, regardless what is necessary to do so or how it operates internally. That's the service that they are advertising to the consumer. If UPS decided to change the way they internally route their packages, it doesn't mean that they can just brush off promised delivery dates because "it doesn't work how…

It just doesn't make any sense. It is like saying that UPS should deliver to everywhere on earth in one day for the same price, despite large differences in cost between local delivery and e.g. air freight to a war zone.

The Internet is a bunch of interconnected networks. Any of those networks can largely have whatever conditions they want. That is what the Internet is. Do I think it should be different, yes, but a lot of people don't. Especially those arguing against things like throttling.

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

#134

Post by close04 »

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.

They rely on it because there's no real good alternative for data. Europe uses TETRA [0] (the equivalent of the North American P25 but with better data support among other things) for critical communications but still needs a TETRA + 3G/LTE hybrid for large data transfers (above the hundreds of Kbps order speeds TETRA offers).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio

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

#135

Post by dragonwriter »

jakebasile wrote: post #117
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…

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!"

> So, if something can be done and no one notices it can't be a bad thing?

Not only that, the article clearly indicates that people do notice the impacts, they just don't know that the cause is deliberate throttling by their provider.

It's like if people frequently complained about loose coins missing from their homes, but it took some legwork to find the crooks who trained cockroaches to steal the coins and deliver them—would you say that the thefts shouldn't be illegal because it wasn't immediately obvious that he losses were thefts?

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

#136

Post by nbhuik »

tinus_hn wrote: post #110
nbhuik wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not with wireless. That depends on geography, interference, temporary usage peaks etc. Much more variable, limited and costly than a "static" line.

Wireless is pretty cheap compared to wired, because you don’t need the wires and laying the wires is the expensive part. If you can’t give people 25Mbit connections with your wireless technology, don’t sell them 25MBit connections. But coincidentally typically the stuff where the ISPs have all these terribly difficult problems are the services that refuse to pay their extra fees. Kind of like what happens to restaura…

The article is about mobile carriers, not wisps. There is no point carrying on this "conversation".

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

#137

Post by woah »

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…

It sounds like you were implementing metered bandwidth in a very haphazard way.

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

#138

Post by woah »

largespoon wrote: post #91
ddtaylor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that most ISPs are not transparent and their advertising comes off as double-speak. Watching their promotional materials they attempt to mislead consumers into thinking they are getting unlimited connections they are free to do whatever they want with when in reality they are getting a very specific bandwidth limit with a lot of strings attached.

The problem is that no consumer will buy internet advertised as conditionally rate limited.ISPs have no reason s to stop what works.

It is false advertising though. I’m not sure why it’s allowed.

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

#139

Post by timr »

belorn wrote: post #94
timr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The article is not about congestion control but rather marketing choices where one streaming service is favored over the other within the captured market of an ISP customers." I wonder if that's true, or this is simply a result of the peering agreements that content providers have engaged in since forever. For those who don't know: if Netflix is colocated in the same datacenter(s) as CSPire, it's possible to "throw…

Could there be other causes than differentiation to explain the data collect? That would be an excellent questioning to ask the team at University of Massachusetts if they made a dissertation or research paper, since all the article says is that they used a established peer-reviewed technique that assumingly has gone through such questioning. It would be interesting to know the statistical probability that collocated…

"I must strongly disagree there."

The article makes it clear what they did, and what conclusions they drew:

"Using a previously established, peer-reviewed technique, the team conducted more than half a million data traffic tests across 161 countries. From this data, the team found that internet service providers are “giving a fixed amount of bandwidth—typically something in the range of one and a half megabits per second to four megabits per second—to video traffic, but they don’t impose these limits on other network traffic.”

Moreover, the data shown directly below that paragraph reveals little pattern in the provider/app throttling rates. The data shows mostly that video is being throttled across the board.

Could there be other explanations for this? Absolutely. Peering is just one of many plausible explanations.

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

#140

Post by Paul-ish »

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…

It took scientific research to find that trans fats or smoking was bad. Does that mean that they aren't actually that bad, or even beneficial?
Post reply on HN