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Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

arstechnica.com

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Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

#151

Post by saagarjha »

kelnos wrote: post #135
brewdad wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people should have at least two choices. Their cable company and their phone company. These choices may be comparable in price and service level or wildly divergent depending on your specific location however.

I live in San Francisco, and Comcast's DOCSIS 3.1 offering (~1Gbps down / 25Gbps up) is my only useful option. AT&T offers DSL, and MonkeyBrains will give me a microwave link (more or less symmetric, but probably would top out at around 100Mbps), but that's it, aside from the LTE/5G providers. I live one block away from one of the main fiber trunks in the city, but I was quoted (both by Comcast and AT&T) that it woul…

I'm sorry 25 Gbps up?

Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

#152

Post by kev009 »

The wholesale price of bandwidth is so low, I can't really understand this as anything other than BOFH-esqe behavior by the network planners, but maybe there is some path to a poorly executed attempt to eventually shakedown customers. Beyond the transit fees, its hard to imagine them struggling to backhaul with modern fiber optic data rates and the cable industry has always been a leader in fiber backhaul. Beyond all that, the protocols will almost certainly do the right thing.

Further, having a ton of eyeballs pulling downstream gives Cox a ton of leverage in negotiating settlement-free peering that for instance a pure wholesale carrier would not have. Cox is also a carrier, so the eyeballs are valuable beyond just their subscription fees.

Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

#153

Post by daeros »

no_wizard wrote: post #141
SkiFire13 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's shared then say "Shared gigabit internet for only X dollars!" I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest. I don't think any competitor will give you a dedicated gigabit to you for a reasonable price, especially if everyone suddently starts asking for one.

I have Ziply Fiber in Oregon. I pay for a Symmetrical gigabit connection, it’s 60 dollars a month. I record speed tests multiple times a day every day and have ever since I got the service last year. They’re growing gang busters too, my entire neighborhood is on Ziply (90% of household converted from what I understand) Aside from them adjusting some things due to the rapid unexpected uptake, I have gotten full connec…

i'm in oregon and those assholes won't provide fiber to the home to my neighborhood on the far western edge of the metro area out near forest grove.

Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

#154

Post by daeros »

kelnos wrote: post #135
brewdad wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people should have at least two choices. Their cable company and their phone company. These choices may be comparable in price and service level or wildly divergent depending on your specific location however.

I live in San Francisco, and Comcast's DOCSIS 3.1 offering (~1Gbps down / 25Gbps up) is my only useful option. AT&T offers DSL, and MonkeyBrains will give me a microwave link (more or less symmetric, but probably would top out at around 100Mbps), but that's it, aside from the LTE/5G providers. I live one block away from one of the main fiber trunks in the city, but I was quoted (both by Comcast and AT&T) that it woul…

They won't even let me pay them the 20k-30k even after I made it clear that it might take me awhile to save it up, but I could feasibly do it.

Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

#155

Post by godelski »

verisimi wrote: post #126
godelski wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. They typically advertise as "up to" and often hide data limits in small text. This is also common among phone carriers who say "unlimited data" or worse, "unlimited 5G" but then throttle you after you hit a certain data limit. I'm not saying this to justify their actions. I actually think this is worse because it demonstrates clear intention to misl…

> Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt. Interpret. Words mean things, you know.

Autocorrect. But surprisingly you can still understand because the context. Language is crazy like that. Kinda like how when you order "boneless wings" you expect to get chicken with no bones, especially considering there's a common counterpart "wings".

Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

#156

Post by namibj »

ta1243 wrote: post #87
FredFS456 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It /is/ how it works with PON based fibre networks. See https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-u...

Even if you had a dedicated fibre back to a 1G port on a switch in a data centre, there's going to be bottle necks at some point. Sure they could ensure that 48 port switch you're connected to has no contention, but non-blocking networks aren't cheap, and are needed in the vast majority of cases.

That said, the classic case of game release can be handled with a bit of P2P if the oversubscription happens late enough to have sufficiently many downloads that can share among themselves without causing congestion for others.

Just traffic shape that protocol/connection to only use a connection free share of upstream if upstream is currently close to dropping packets, and work a bit with others to get swarms to prioritize downloading from nodes close in IPv6 address space.

Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

#157

Post by SkiFire13 »

no_wizard wrote: post #141
SkiFire13 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's shared then say "Shared gigabit internet for only X dollars!" I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest. I don't think any competitor will give you a dedicated gigabit to you for a reasonable price, especially if everyone suddently starts asking for one.

I have Ziply Fiber in Oregon. I pay for a Symmetrical gigabit connection, it’s 60 dollars a month. I record speed tests multiple times a day every day and have ever since I got the service last year. They’re growing gang busters too, my entire neighborhood is on Ziply (90% of household converted from what I understand) Aside from them adjusting some things due to the rapid unexpected uptake, I have gotten full connec…

This doesn't prove anything, it just means that when you're doing a speedtest there aren't other users that are also saturating the connection.

Note that this doesn't means that there are exactly 0 users downloading in those moments. Usually there are multiple gigabits dedicated to a group of users, so that multiple users can navigate at 1Gbps without slowing down others, but not all the group at once. How much bandwidth is allocated to how many users can vary though, and some providers might allocate less total bandwidth to more users.

In practice this works out fine most of the time and most users won't notice slowdowns like you do, but if everyone started a speedtest at the same time you will notice it.

Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

#158

Post by BrandoElFollito »

We only have unlimited access on France but the speed is never guaranteed. It is always "up to ..." and usually asymmetric.

I have a 2.5 Gbps link which I would never saturate continuously no matter what because I have generic equipment at home (despite self-hosting a lot).

I tried a few times to saturate it and whatever I managed to pull was never slow. This is probably because the ISPs allocate some realistic amount of people to the group of people who use the 10 Gbps provided to that group.

Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

#160

Post by jpambrun »

ReverseCold wrote: post #46
userbinator wrote: post #33

a gigabit customer who was paying $50 extra per month for unlimited data was flagged by Cox because he was using 8TB to 12TB a month "Unlimited data" should mean you can saturate the connection 24/7. Anything less is deceptive advertising. For a gigabit connection, that would mean around 300TB per month.

I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed. The internet…

Because it's none of our business as customers. This oversubscription rate is a risk they calibrate on their side. Given the marketing material, if all customers decide to use more bandwidth, it up to the utility to upgrade their infra to match in a timely manner. This is the risk they took and competed on.
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