Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020) • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by ta1243 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 10:13 PM UTC

namibj wrote: post #156

ta1243 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prio…

Depends on your peer

You and your nearest 400 neighbours plug into a non-blocking 1g port network. Find you can do 1g to your neighbours

But you need a 400g uplink (and remember to account for resilience), so you go into a switch with 40 400g ports, ok, that's 1.6tbit

Scale this up to a small town with 20,000 people and you need 20tbit of backbone to serve your residents with 1G non-blocking, very few will ever use the full 1G

Sharing bandwidth makes perfect sense. If you want uncontended (to where? Local IXP, a major IXP? One on the other side of the world?) then get a business line which gives you uncontended connectivity.

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

#192

Post by kstrauser » Sun, Oct 06, 2024, 8:57 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #189

kstrauser wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would absolutely forward those to my state's public utilities commission.

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

I did for something analogous: https://honeypot.net/2024/04/08/i-fought-state.html

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

#193

Post by pixelatedindex » Mon, Oct 07, 2024, 2:04 AM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #188

pixelatedindex wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a ton back then! I suppose 300TB/month is a lot too but it doesn’t feel that big anymore

I’m not sure what people are doing at home, but that seems a hell of a lot to me to me. I use 3-10TB a month and thought that was a lot.

I don’t think it’s about people doing it at home, but how we don’t really blink an eye when a terrabyte is mentioned. We will even start getting 60TB drives in a few years.

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

#194

Post by namibj » Tue, Oct 08, 2024, 4:48 AM UTC

ta1243 wrote: post #191

namibj wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prio…

Depends on your peer You and your nearest 400 neighbours plug into a non-blocking 1g port network. Find you can do 1g to your neighbours But you need a 400g uplink (and remember to account for resilience), so you go into a switch with 40 400g ports, ok, that's 1.6tbit Scale this up to a small town with 20,000 people and you need 20tbit of backbone to serve your residents with 1G non-blocking, very few will ever use t…

Uncontended to a dense 1U switch, say 24 downstream ports of 100/200 G QSFP. That's uncontended for 2400/4800 customers with their own 1G links. So about 4~30k people worth, so no, not even up to full city for all but the smallest cities.

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

#195

Post by fennecfoxy » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 12:01 PM UTC

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.

In NZ if you buy x mbps then you must get x mbps, at all times.

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

#196

Post by bobdvb » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 1:48 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #176

bobdvb wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, although the reality is that the capacity is much more limited in many providers local infrastructure than you'd like to think. Those 1000 users will only get 10G at best, and remember that both in Cable and FTTH the spectrum allocation on the local segment is asymmetric. You have a finite downlink capacity and a finite uplink capacity, users are not just competing for the same time on the wire, they're…

There's not really any real tension between "you should know their stated rates are bullshit" and "they should accurately describe the service they are willing and able to provide". One is a stupid way to run a society and the other isn't.

You're never getting 1G 100% of the time, you're getting a target of 1G and statistically if you do a speed test you probably won't be doing that at the same time as everyone else.

A little knowledge can be dangerous, that's not patronising, it's that accurately describing your network topology to all customers is hard and easy to misunderstand. Some segments of the network will be heavily contended, and others will be under utilised. Being heavily contended might be undesirable but it's pragmatically going to happen.

Where it breaks down with customers, is where the segment is over-contended to the point where they consistently can't meet the product description. But that's not a service description issue, it's an investment problem and if it's not being dealt across the board by the provider, then that provider will be crap.

The bigger issue in this case is a lack of effective competition which drives vendors to have a decent quality of service. Being more transparent won't help with an under provisioned network if you have no choice. In markets with poor competition, poor service provision and capacity usually follows.