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

151–160 of 180 posts

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

#151

Post by ti_ranger »

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.

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

And consumers have proved that they believed the first liars^H^H^H^H^Hmarketers who took this approach, so the rest, having tried the approach of being truthful and having lost market share, had to adopt the same approach ...

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

#152

Post by ti_ranger »

chii wrote: post #66
pathseeker wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're asking for already exists. They are dedicated business circuits. I get where you're coming from, but there is a reason that the consumer advertisements always say "up to X mbps". If ISPs didn't oversell, consumer Internet would either be unbearably slow or obscenely expensive. A guaranteed 1 gig circuit is on the order of thousands USD month. An oversubscribed consumer fiber provider like Google Fiber is…

> Are you okay with gyms selling more unlimited memberships than the number of machines they have? Yes, but with a gym, you can switch if you keep seeing overcrowdedness. Not so with an ISP that has a monopoly.

> Yes, but with a gym, you can switch if you keep seeing overcrowdedness. Not so with an ISP that has a monopoly.

And this is the real problem.

The U.S. should require access-network sharing (at least for fixed-line, mobile seems to limitations here), like most other countries do ...

Then you wouldn't need to over-regulate how ISPs operate ... you could let the market decide.

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

#153

Post by rayiner »

close04 wrote: post #148
rayiner wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireless ISPs don’t advertise any particular speed level. They sell “best effort” service and advertise it that way. What you’re asking for is an SLA (presumably for consumer level prices).

Unlimited - not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent. Best effort is when your taxi driver tries to take you to the airport as fast as possible but traffic gets in the way and you're late. When he stops in a tunnel and requests more money because he has to drive through his lunch break, or else he'll just inch forward that's not best effort. That's what I said before: squeezing for money. Rea…

Clearly a connection cannot be “unlimited” in reality, because there are many physical limits. That’s why you introduce the idea of “artificial limits,” but what are those? The number of cell towers in an area is also an “artificial” limit—the provider could build more. So even by your reasoning, you can’t take “unlimited” literally, and have to apply context. (And that is, in fact, the relevant legal consideration. Advertising must not be misleading, but that does not mean you resort to dictionary definitions and ignore context and history.)

And what is that context? Well, “unlimited” has always meant the opposite of time or usage limited service. I.e. you don’t pay extra for exceeding a certain usage. If you asked me in 1997 what "unlimited" means, I wouldn't have pulled out the dictionary and said "unlimited means 'not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity, or extent.'" I would've said "that means you don't have to pay extra for AOL after your 20 hours is up." All this supposed confusion seems entirely contrived to me.

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

#154

Post by blitmap »

rayiner wrote: post #95
joncrocks wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that you have a delivery service. You pay your local delivery company $X per month and they promise that they'll deliver you 1 package a day from their local depot. But it turns out that although you're ordering a package a day from Amazon, you're not receiving a package a day. You get your stuff, but it's delayed and backed-up somewhere. And so as an experiment you sign up for a service that will receive a p…

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 may not be how it works, but that's how it was presented to us.

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

#155

Post by nbhuik »

p49k wrote: post #142
nbhuik wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> It is like saying that UPS should deliver to everywhere on earth in one day for the same price No, it's not like that at all. UPS makes it clear to the customer in advance what the cost is, how long it will take, and the customer agrees. Also, UPS is not held responsible for delays that they couldn't reasonably prevent (bad weather, etc). It's also an exaggeration of the situation; it's essentially saying "If we ca…

You can have whatever opinion you want on what the Internet should be, just like I can. But the Internet today is different networks settings their own policy. Google can say "connect to us and we won't charge you for YouTube traffic", but that doesn't stop someone else from saying "no, pay us for access to our networks instead". It doesn't really matter if something is available or not as such because the whole model is based on exchanging access to infrastructure.

At the end of the day what you are describing is some sort of regulated nationalized Internet backbone. Which would to a larger extent support such features. As it is now if you don't like the "mix" of access you are getting, you should change providers (which could of course be a problem, but that is another issue).

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

#156

Post by 52-6F-62 »

rhodysurf wrote: post #81
hguhghuff wrote: post #73

Internet companies need to refuse to serve ISPs who throttle. “Oh we can’t get YouTube google and Netflix on this ISP? We’ll leave for one who does provide them.” Restricting services can cut both ways.

That only works if there is competition between ISPs in your area, and usually there isn’t

Sometimes you don't even have that luxury between buildings—even if you live in an urban centre with a number of providers.

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

#157

Post by chooseaname »

close04 wrote: post #65
belorn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This kind of throttling is done to squeeze more money from anything crossing their network. All ISPs want a piece of the pie so they will charge at both ends anything coming in and anything going out to you.

I really want the ISPs to define exactly what my monthly fees are paying for.

They'll clearly tell you that faster is better:

> Indulge in super speed and have a great online experience, whether you're browsing the Web, shopping, or streaming your favorite movies and shows.

But I want to know what my money is actually paying for.

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

#158

Post by stochastic_monk »

dragonwriter wrote: post #135
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!"

> 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…

And it’s just isolated people noticing against a monolithic corporation. It’s hard for any small-time person who isn’t absurdly rich to get them to do anything but waste hours of their time on the phone or internet discussing the issue.

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

#159

Post by chooseaname »

rayiner wrote: post #144
p49k wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Internet "access" is, and always has been, a link to an "access network." ISPs promise that that they'll route packets from that access network to the Internet, but nobody promises you end-to-end connectivity at a particular speed (unless you pay for a dedicated line). (Verizon, for example, caveats it's product as being a "gigabit connection to your home .") People like to pretend like internet access service is a p…

So, really, they're lying when they say things like:

> Indulge in super speed and have a great online experience, whether you're browsing the Web, shopping, or streaming your favorite movies and shows.

Because if all I am paying for is access (to Xfinity's servers), then they cannot in any way guaranteed even being able to get to a simple blog.

They're marketing copy needs to be looked at.

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

#160

Post by cestith »

"doing throttling" is not the problem. If I'm using a lot of bandwidth and I get slowed down in fairness to other users or for network stability, I can accept that.

Throttling based on my remote network peer rather than on how much data I'm moving is anticompetitive towards that party and unfair to me as a paying customer. That's the issue. If I'm downloading Linux ISOs, streaming Netflix, grabbing all the latest podcast episodes, archiving my Google Drive locally, or grabbing the whole Simtel DOS archive for my DOSBox installation, my ISP should treat my traffic the same.

Post reply on HN