The Danger In Exempting Wireless From Net Neutrality 161
nmpost writes "Nearly two years ago, the FCC outlined its rules for net neutrality. Notably absent were rules for wireless networks. There are several legitimate reasons that the same rules applied to wired networks can not apply to wireless networks. However, the same danger lies in leaving wireless networks unguarded against the whims of its administrators. As we move more and more towards a wireless dominated internet, those dangers will become more pronounced. We are going to need a massive investment in infrastructure in this country regardless of net neutrality rules. Demand for wireless is going to continue to grow for many years to come, and providers are not going to be able to let up. Data caps and throttling are understandable now as demand is far outpacing infrastructure growth. Eventually, demand will slow, and these practices will have to be addressed. This is where allowing internet providers to regulate themselves becomes an issue. Self regulation usually does not end well for the consumer. Imagine allowing power plants and oil refineries to determine what chemicals they could pour into the air. Would they have the population's best interest at heart when making that determination? In the future when the infrastructure can match the demand, what will stop internet providers from picking winners and losers over their wireless networks? As conglomerates like Comcast gobble up content providers like NBC, a conflict of interest begins to emerge. There would be nothing from stopping one of the big wireless providers like AT&T or Verizon from scooping up a content provider and prioritizing its data speed over the network."
The more complex you make the rules.... (Score:2, Insightful)
The more the ones who can afford armies of lawyers will win.
And once the government starts regulating the internet, there will be literally thousands and thousands of pages of regulations.
Tell me, how does that help the consumer?
Or do you REALLY think the government is really setting out to help YOU? YOU don't control enough money to generate millions of dollars in campaign contributions, do you?
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The more the ones who can afford armies of lawyers will win.
And once the government starts regulating the internet, there will be literally thousands and thousands of pages of regulations.
Tell me, how does that help the consumer?
The more complex one makes the rules for the WiFI space, the better the chances for the non-representative minority of customers that chose to stay wired [wikipedia.org] will be...
Ham radio (Score:5, Interesting)
I could solve all the problems associated with these profiteering asshats with a simple solution: Allow people to be licensed to broadcast internet. Right now amateur radio can't offer internet access. If private persons were allowed to do with a larger spectrum space what they can do right now with wifi, I suspect that their entire business model would implode.
Mesh networking is a mature technology -- and it doesn't require the infrastructure these companies offer. Make it legal for people to build wireless communities. But I guess that would be too radical of a concept for the FCC; They seem only interested in appearing to support the common citizen, rather than actually supporting them. There's no profit in handing over spectrum to "the public", the group the FCC claims to represent, and whom the FCC mandate the spectrum is actually owned by, for which the FCC is merely an administrator of.
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And what about radio and TV broadcast? Would you just run roughshod over those bands & block people's reception?? Fact is you DO have the WiFi bands open, and yet very few people setup mesh networks. Instead they lock-up their Wifi modems so nobody else can access them.
Re:Ham radio (Score:5, Interesting)
Fact is you DO have the WiFi bands open, and yet very few people setup mesh networks.
Another technically true, but misleading statement. The wifi frequencies are "open" they just aren't open enough because transmitter power is still extremely limited. To the point where it is unreasonable to expect a single wifi access point to cover more than an acre of so of open land. Ham radio operators are allowed to transmit at levels of power that are orders of magnitude stronger.
Get back to this argument when anyone can run a wifi base-station that will cover at least 5 square miles.
Not an apt comparison (Score:3)
Self regulation usually does not end well for the consumer. Imagine allowing power plants and oil refineries to determine what chemicals they could pour into the air. Would they have the population's best interest at heart when making that determination?
That's not an apt comparison because power plants are refineries are paid for what they deliver and what you are concerned about regulating is an unwanted byproduct of their operations. With data service, your bits getting to and from your devices is both what you are proposing regulating and what they are selling. Sure, there's an inherent conflict between what they want (to get as much money from you for service under the most favorable to them terms) and what you want (getting your data fast and cheap without restrictions of any kind, or according to restrictions you can dictate). But that's the case in every other commercial transaction as well. There's a need to protect consumers from such unfair practices as abusing monopoly power to drive up prices higher than could be sustained in a competitive market, lock-in, charging you for access to your own data, unreasonable tarriffing of data from outside networks, uneven and deceptive price models and unfair cost shifting. But these are unrelated to problems like pollution.
In the future when the infrastructure can match the demand, what will stop internet providers from picking winners and losers over their wireless networks? As conglomerates like Comcast gobble up content providers like NBC, a conflict of interest begins to emerge. There would be nothing from stopping one of the big wireless providers like AT&T or Verizon from scooping up a content provider and prioritizing its data speed over the network.
I don't foresee a future where the infrastructure can match demand. As capacity grows, people will demand more data services from more mobile devices and saturate the capacity unless pricing prevents them from doing so, and prices in a free market would normally be be set such that they fall a short of saturation.
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I don't foresee a future where the infrastructure can match demand. As capacity grows, people will demand more data services from more mobile devices and saturate the capacity unless pricing prevents them from doing so, and prices in a free market would normally be be set such that they fall a short of saturation.
Another, related, reason why infrastructure will not, and cannot, match demand for wireless data is that there is only so much spectrum. Actually, there is a way that wireless infrastructure could match demand. That would be for it to be priced out of the reach of the average person.
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I don't foresee a future where the infrastructure can match demand. As capacity grows, people will demand more data services from more mobile devices and saturate the capacity unless pricing prevents them from doing so, and prices in a free market would normally be be set such that they fall a short of saturation.
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/908/ [xkcd.com]
Excuse me? (Score:4, Insightful)
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300 GB? That's one hell of a download. I think downloading that once would put almost everyone over their monthly cap!
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Remember when you could install your OS with a floppy? Try a DVD now. The current Debian dist is 8 DVD's, over 300GB.
I get what you're saying about bandwidth and I agree, but OSs aren't really that much bigger, its just all the optional bloat bolted on top that takes up so much space.
Damn Small Linux can squeezes in under 50MB. [damnsmalllinux.org]
Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, NO?
Demand for bandwidth will always exceed supply. Because it's ridiculously easy (more often than not to the point of the application doing it by default) to use more and lower-latency bandwidth, while it is difficult and time-consuming to install more supply. And this becomes ever more true the farther you move up the tiers. Installing new high-quality GigE cards and 8-port switch in my office? Under an hour from opening the NewEgg box to a job well done. Rolling out 10GigE to the whole floor? All week for a crew of guys. Rolling out 100M or 1G fiber to whole cities? Years of work and the job's barely even begun.
And if anyone thinks demand will saturate, there are always applications waiting in the wings to use more bandwidth.
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Confusing want and need, it's the consumer's god given right and you will respect it!
Also, we clearly need legislation to ensure smooth delivery of orange guidos to television into the future.
Antitrust (Score:5, Funny)
As conglomerates like Comcast gobble up content providers like NBC,
So, stop them [wikipedia.org].
Corporations shouldn't be allowed to acquire other corporations anyway. After all, they are people. And President Lincoln said people shouldn't own other people.
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Comcast already asked and received permission from the Obama-era FCC to buy NBC. You're not going to get an antitrust lawsuit.
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So, we need to throw the Obama administration out and vote one in that will look out for the rights of the electorate first.
Like Romney ....... Nah. Mr LBO from Bain Capital isn't going to do any better.
What about bringing an antitrust suit as a civil class action? And name the FCC as a defendant/co-conspirator in the antitrust action?
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Still think wireless is a deadend (Score:2)
We started with wireless television broadcasting to everyone's home, but not we have wired television reaching most of the country. I see internet moving the same direction, towards more wired lines as time passes by. (Of course people will still have their cellphones & other portable gadgets, but that data will mostly be streaming through WiFi modems that hook-into the wired LAN lines.)
Big Assumption Here (Score:3)
"In the future when the infrastructure can match the demand..."
Why do you assume the infrastructure can't match the demand? The fact that it doesn't does not mean that it can't.
Let's look at some facts:
(1) Bandwidth has continued to get cheaper for the providers, every year, while price / MB for consumers has actually been going up.
(2) Provider profits have never been better.
(3) Other countries (Canada, much of Europe, many others) manage to deliver superior bandwidth at much lower rates.
And these up, and the logical conclusion is: the providers are deliberately creating an artificial shortage to keep prices high.
They could easily take some of their record profits and turn them into bandwidth. The fact that they haven't been doing enough of that to meet demand pretty much gives them away. Others haven't had that problem.
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(3) Other countries (Canada, much of Europe, many others) manage to deliver superior bandwidth at much lower rates.
You must be thinking of parts of Canada that aren't serviced by Bell, Rogers, or Telus.
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"You must be thinking of parts of Canada that aren't serviced by Bell, Rogers, or Telus."
Well, I could be wrong about Canada. But that's what I seemed to recall reading in an Ars Technica article. But Europe, definitely.
Certainly, the U.S. does have infrastructure issues that much of Europe does not (particularly "last mile" costs in sparsely populated areas), but I don't think it's enough to make the difference, and it doesn't explain the high costs in areas that are not sparsely populated.
Trouble is when they tell you how you can use it. (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem here is not controlling usage so there's less congestion. Providers already do that plenty with data caps.
The problem is providers telling you what application you can use that 2GB or 4GB you purchased for.
AT&T for instance, says that if you have a 2GB smart phone data plan, you can't tether your laptop. But if you have a 4GB plan, you can. What business do they have telling you if you can tether your laptop? If you want to sit there and use 30GB tethered, that should be okay; you'll just have to pay for the additional usage. This is understandable and makes sense.
They're doing it again with iOS 6, saying you can't do Facetime over cellular unless you upgrade to one of their sharing plans. They shouldn't CARE if you use facetime over cellular, because if you use too much data, you'll have to pay for it anyway.
Charge me $xx for $yy GB. That's fine. Just don't tell me what I can do with those GB. They're MINE, I paid for them!
FUD! (Score:2)
This article reeks of FUD. The technical challenge alone is pretty unbelievable when you think about it. It's one thing to set up layer 3 policy-based QoS on a handful of service provider core switches, but to coordinate that policy across hundreds of access level devices is quite difficult to say the least...assuming those devices even support it. Never mind that the relationship of consumer to service provider has been less the focus of net neutrality policy than the issue of fairness to content providers
I was with it up until he said (Score:2)
Data caps and throttling are understandable now as demand is far outpacing infrastructure growth.
What color is the sky on your planet? Data caps and throttling are not acceptable, because the whole notion of them is a complete fraud, and anyone with half a brain knows it. The fact that they're running their networks at or over capacity should be a good thing. This should mean that they have the money to upgrade and rebuild their networks. After all, they have been fleecing their users and the government in the form of broadband subsidies for years. There's no excuse for not building a new network where
The US FCC does not have the authority (Score:2)
The US FCC has no authority to do anything with regards to the Internet.
Discussing "how" and "how much" and "when" begs that question. Stop it.
The FCC is an irrelevant dinosaur that regulates television and radio. It is
specifically prohibited from interfering in useful networks -- including the Internet.
http://tinyurl.com/9p4z35p [tinyurl.com]
E
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"Commission". They are given a specific charter and mandate, and "information services" are SPECIFICALLY EXCLUDED. Of course you ignored the google link I provided, as well as reading the FCC's charter... so you could focus on "the Internet is a form of communication." Yeah, actually it's not. The Internet is a _medium_ for communication. It is not "a form of communication."
"The only people that don't want..." is an absurd generalization. I, for one, don't want the FCC regulating the Internet. Simil
The Horror (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
As long as there is not a monopoly, why can't the marketplace take care of issue? Simply take your business to an ISP that practices net neutrality.
Does it have to be one or the other? (Score:2)
Why not allocate half of available wireless network capacity to strictly nondiscriminatory use and half to unrestricted commercial trading? Pretty soon, we will have the answer as to which approach is more beneficial. My guess is both, and that the largest users of commercial spectrum wouldn't be able to initially grow and succeed without nondiscriminatory spectrum.
T-Mobile just started doing it. :-( (Score:2)
I first noticed it around the 17th of August, before that date, no problem.. I assumed it was implemented for RNC convention, but the convention is gone now and T-mobile's filtering nasty is still active.
I can no longer remote admin any of my customers networks (router web pages, remote desktop, etc) using non-standard network ports(8000+ range) over t-mobiles wireless network.
T-Mobile appears to be using a combination of unsolicited tcp resets and throttling down to 60kbits, (even simple web pages no
FCC Open Internet rules do cover wireless/mobile (Score:2)
TFS is wrong, starting with the most basic premise stated in the first sentence, to which the whole rest of the piece is a reaction (and a reaction which is completely pointless, since the premise it is reacting to is completely inaccurate.)
This is false on several levels.
First: what the FCC did wasn't "outlining", it was publishing the actual rules (not an outline of the rules).
Second: Wired/
Re:Wireless has congestion (Score:5, Insightful)
It is unreasonable for them to throttle anything due to lack of infrastructure while simultaneously sporting enormous profit margins.
You can have one, but not both. If they need more infrastructure they should build it.
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So if they made less of a profit, it would be ok? I am trying to follow your logic here.
At what point is the profit to much? I am assuming that you know that the profit is just sitting still somewhere and not being used in R&D, wages, infrastructure, rainy day fund, etc
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It's going to bonuses for management.
Re:Wireless has congestion (Score:5, Insightful)
This line of thinking never quite works.
A doctor doesn't NEED wireless internet, but they certainly would like it since it makes a great number of things easier and more convenient. If the providers can update their infrastructure to accommodate traffic but choose not to the doctor is NOT going to go out and build their own network. It would require a complete change in their life and learnings to do so. It's not a reasonable thing to ask.
Much like if a software engineer gets a headache. They don't NEED it but some medicine would definitely be nice to alleviate the pain. However, pharmaceuticals are artificially pumping up the price. The software engineer is not a doctor nor a chemical engineer. Vindicate the pharmaceuticals by saying that the doctor is free to drop their life and go a completely direction to fulfill this one need is just silly.
Re:Wireless has congestion (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the 2 things you mentioned is that we have regulation, we have a distorted market based on coercion
If it only wasn't for regulation, we would have a perfect world. Right? Haven't learned anything yet?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist) [wikipedia.org]
The purpose of a government is to maintain a free market via regulation and police and the justice system. Free Market does not exist without regulation. As soon as there are any major players in the market, they would just muscle out any competition, even if they have to do that literally.
Natural end of any purely capitalistic society is total monopoly, at which point it basically becomes a totalitarian government.
Re:Wireless has congestion (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't quite seem to understand why the free market doesn't work very well with markets like telecommunications, roads, etc. Sometimes the regulation is problematic, but often the market wouldn't even be viable without the regulation. The problem is that some markets are what are referred to as natural monopolies. Consider roads. How many sets of roads from different providers can any given location support? How many roads does the typical home have frontage on? Multiple sets of roads would also _have_ to cross. How would the property rights work? How expensive would all the tunnels and/or overpasses be? How would interconnects between the different providers work? Roads are natural monopolies, which means that, to be practical, they either need to be managed by government or by heavily regulated industries. The same holds for telecommunications. With wireless telecommunications there's only so much spectrum to go around. In a pure free market, there would be so much noise on the airwaves that cell phones probably wouldn't even be possible.
Re:Wireless has congestion (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed that natural monopolies are hard for free markets. But then the question is will the regulation be effective. Regulation can be expensive and sometimes ends up benefiting initial players and limiting choice. The biggest issue, for me, is if the regulatory body will stay effective and not be corrupted by market players. When a regulatory body is captured, it will be very hard for a politician to work to defeat it due to the interest/power of the market players vs the interest/power of the people. You mention that often the market wouldn't even be viable without regulation, do you have some examples to discuss? Things such as wireless frequencies could simply be considered property and handled similarly. Ownership of such property could be handled in the same way, ie homesteading.
I think the point you are getting at here is that the owners of routes to destinations, of which there are few, will take advantage of their position and it will cost you more to use those routes. Markets are actually more complicated than that as they also have to deal with indirect and potential competition. How much would it cost me to walk to a parking garage that gives me access to different routes? What if I took a different means of travel altogether?
Private property rights would work as they do today. Tunnels and overpasses would be expensive, I assure you government does not make them cheaper. That is also a problem with government roads; they will be built even when they do not make financial sense in a market. Interconnects between different providers would bring more usage (ie. more money) so they would be beneficial to road owners to that extent.
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I will agree with you entirely that regulation, even when necessary, can be bungled up beyond belief.
You mention that often the market wouldn't even be viable without regulation, do you have some examples to discuss? Things such as wireless frequencies could simply be considered property and handled similarly. Ownership of such property could be handled in the same way, ie homesteading.
I contend that any system that assigns wireless frequencies as property is a form of regulation. I just can't see how it could be seen any other way. The process by which anyone could become the natural owner of wireless spectrum is otherwise incomprehensible to me. So, a free market for wireless spectrum with various entities competing for it would end up a war zone. There would be scraggly bearded hams and
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One requires no additional laws at this time and also has well-established analogs in the court, and one requires a funded regulatory body that gets to make the rules with very little oversight. Cost and effectiveness is the difference.
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I contend that any system that assigns wireless frequencies as property is a form of regulation. I just can't see how it could be seen any other way.
One requires no additional laws at this time and also has well-established analogs in the court, and one requires a funded regulatory body that gets to make the rules with very little oversight. Cost and effectiveness is the difference.
I'm not sure I'm parsing your first sentence properly. If I'm getting what you're trying to say, then I don't understand how you're not getting this. Wireless spectrum isn't a natural form of property in any way, shape or form. Free market assignment of wireless frequency just means a chaotic free for all. In that sort of situation, actors will sometimes cooperate without regulation, but you can have a thousand cooperating entities and just one spoiler and it wrecks things for everyone. With regulation, the
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i think weve stretched the road analogy as far as it can go.
and the proper terminology is that roads are not a natural monopoly (though they make a perfect analogy for one) but a public resource, a public property, held in trust by the applicable level of government to facilitate movement of people and goods. the same is true for the airwaves, a public owned resource held in trust by the FCC to facilitate the public good. simply buying out certain freqs doesnt work as different freqs have different properti
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People need to get places, but they can also lower their dependence on roads and use them less, which would bring road owners less money.
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How is wireless spectrum not property? It's even used as property right now, it's just dealt out by the FCC. Something being property does not make it a "chaotic free for fall", I'm not sure why you'd think that.
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in industries with naturual monopolies, they'd be more effective than a naturual monopoly. Even if their not perfect, still better than the alternative. Lets face it, if a monopoly results, the controllor will be more or less at will able to regulate said industry just as a government does. They will regulate it to serve their intrests only.
I never saw more than a slight diffrence between gov
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Disagree. If at first regulation is better, then the question is how long will it last.
Yes, and that's also what happens with regulation and it's called regulatory capture.
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Not true. Frequency reuse for teleco frequencies can be very, very, very high. Want twice as much bandwidth in an area... install twice as many towers, and transmit at half the power. No addition spectrum required. This is oversimplified, but the concept is entirely correct. There's no reason cell companies can't have picocells on every telephone pole, wired up to some cheap backhaul, and start selling wireless bandwidth cheap
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Want twice as much bandwidth in an area... install twice as many towers, and transmit at half the power.
Not actually doable when you don't have regulations protecting that bandwidth. How well does that method work when your competition wants to drown you out?
There's no reason cell companies can't have picocells on every telephone pole, wired up to some cheap backhaul, and start selling wireless bandwidth cheaper than wired Cable / DSL / Fiber providers.
With regulation protecting them and providing the kind of environment where they can actually do that, you're right, there's no reason they can't. Without all the regulation and without public assistance (use of all kinds of public property and grants of what would otherwise be public property, for example) which can't be ethically given without regulatin
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What in the hell are you talking about? I ask because it doesn't bear any resemblance to the conversation I took part in. How do your comments have ANYTHING to do with what I quoted or said?
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Wow, you think that the key difference between the market for burgers and the markets for pharmaceuticals and the internet is the regulation?
Try again, look at the actual realities of the different things you're trying to conflate together. And since pharmaceuticals are nothing like the internet, combining them together as if they were the same market is not a good idea either.
But go ahead and scream for your precious freedom.
Me? I'm not going to complain that Regulations caused problems as if they were t
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Normally, yes, but you are forgetting some of the nasty rules that these types have cooked up. So, yes, complain away.
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Build your own damn network.
Throw a cell tower in your back yard - see how quickly the FCC knocks on your door.
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Save that retort for when someone can enter the market without being a member of the good ole boys network.
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And nobody is forcing them to lease spectrum. They are using the public resource to provide a commercial product.
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the FCC mandates who gets the wireless spectrum, and they only give them out to wireless companies.
In addition, its damn hard for a small, minor, or start up to get linked to the national cell network.
Its really not an option to start your own wireless network.
Re:Wireless has congestion (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's OK for you if your daughter can't call the police to come help her when she has an accident on the highway because 5 or 100 other users in the same cell are downloading porn right now?
Wireless providers *have* to throttle to protect the voice network for public-safety purposes.
It's not ok, but that wouldn't be the "porn downloaders" fault. It would be the fault of the network operators who oversold services they couldn't adequately provide. If they have too many customers in an area they need to build more towers. If you sell someone a service you need to provide what you sold them.
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>>>If they have too many customers in an area they need to build more towers.
Exactly right! I propose one fiber optic-connected tower for every home. Just locate it on the chimney so everybody in that home has a dedicated cellular.......... Hey wait a minute. If they do that, why can't they could just run the fiber directly into the home & forget about the towers. (ponder)
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So it's OK for you if your daughter can't call the police to come help her when she has an accident on the highway because 5 or 100 other users in the same cell are downloading porn right now?
Wireless providers *have* to throttle to protect the voice network for public-safety purposes.
It's not ok, but that wouldn't be the "porn downloaders" fault. It would be the fault of the network operators who oversold services they couldn't adequately provide. If they have too many customers in an area they need to build more towers. If you sell someone a service you need to provide what you sold them.
I'm sorry. Were you promised a certain data rate under all conditions regardless of what other users on the network are doing or did you just not understand what multi-user system is?
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Data is a commodity that can be measured, just like electricity gas and water. Why not meter the data and charge users accordingly, rather than a flat rate for everybody? Have a certain number of data units available at various levels of monthly cost. Any user that exceeds that amount gets charged more. Why should a grandma or grandpa who only use the Internet to get their e-mail and occasionally use a browser to surf for some information pay the same as someone who downloads gigabytes of video or other da
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I am not trying to disagree with your main point here, but many networked games are low-bandwidth. Why? High bandwidth requirements inevitably leads to increased likelihood of packet loss, which leads to latency spikes, which leads to perceived lag and inconsistent performance in the game. This is death for a FPS or similar "twitch" game.
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Which is how the charging on the original (X.25) packet switched networks was done. You were charged by the amount of data transferred.
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the big problem is the bit of over subscribing your users. If you have say enough bandwidth to handle 1000 GB in connections then you should not sell 10,000 GB worth of connections and then pull all sorts of tricks to limit folks below what THEY HAVE PAID FOR.
What you should do is limit your connections to say 1500 GB (since you will have folks that do not use the full slot they have purchased) and have some way of asking your High Bandwidth Customers to back down a bit during "prime time" (maybe on your su
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the big problem is the bit of over subscribing your users. If you have say enough bandwidth to handle 1000 GB in connections then you should not sell 10,000 GB worth of connections and then pull all sorts of tricks to limit folks below what THEY HAVE PAID FOR.
What you should do is limit your connections to say 1500 GB (since you will have folks that do not use the full slot they have purchased) and have some way of asking your High Bandwidth Customers to back down a bit during "prime time" (maybe on your support website??).
You don't have FoodLion selling a dozen eggs and then grabbing 5 eggs at checkout do you??
Again, who promised you an unlimited data rate that will not slow down automatically when other users are on line in your area? All I hear is you whining that your wireless company should provide you a lot more service without you paying a lot more money. That's not how it works. That's not how it CAN work.
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not addressing my point im not saying that connections should be totally unlimited for 19.95 a month im saying that they should sell connections/deploy towers that can provide a reasonable fraction of service THAT THEY ADVERTISED.
If you sell a connection that 50MB and have 20 customers then you should be able to provide that speed for at least 60% of your customers at any given time (so you should have 600MB available at the tower)
Also preloading your phones with 2 dozen "aps" that are mostly ad servers (an
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So it's OK for you if your daughter can't call the police to come help her when she has an accident on the highway because 5 or 100 other users in the same cell are downloading porn right now? Wireless providers *have* to throttle to protect the voice network for public-safety purposes.
Don't voice calls get a much higher QoS priority than data already? That seems like the solution just like in someone's house that does a lot of downloading, just lower the priority of that traffic in the router and everything else should work just fine. If something needs first priority no matter what like VOIP then you just set it that way no "throttling" necessary.
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Yes they do, and this is part of what throttling is about. If there are multiple users on a network, there has to be some rule that determines who gets how much access. Building a network with unlimited capacity is not possible. Building a network with enough capacity for all of your customers to use their maximum theoretical bandwidth at the same time is not practical, not efficient and would drastically drive up the cost of service and in the case where there is a really high density of users it's not
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Higher population densities are why it's so much better in Asia. It's far more cost effective to provide highspeed wireless to densely packed areas than to lightly packed one, because the cost of an additional tower is spread over more potential customers.
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No. This is not what Net Neutrality means. Net Neutrality means giving the same priority to the same type of traffic (voice, data, SMS, etc.) categorized by data type, and most especially NOT categorized by source provider. Net Neutrality means that a carrier should treat all voice calls equally, even if the call originates/terminates/transits a provider other than the carrier.
For example, Sprint should not give higher priority to digital voice packets from a Sprint source than they would to digital voic
Re:Wireless has congestion (Score:5, Interesting)
Net Neutrality means nothing anymore. The term was hijacked by strawman proposals that had nothing to do with the original concept. It used to mean that you can't prioritise data based on either the source or origin. The idea was that you couldn't prioritise your VoIP or movie streaming service unless you also prioritised everyone else's. The problem with this was that you could use some custom protocol for your service and then you could prioritise traffic for everyone who used that protocol (i.e. you), and degrade everyone else. So the definition evolved slightly to the requirement that you give equal QoS to all data in the same category. That, unfortunately, is very difficult to implement. With the current trend of trying to stuff everything over HTTP, it's often quite difficult to categorise traffic.
There was also an intentional attempt by ISPs to conflate Network Neutrality and lack of QoS in the minds of users. Network Neutrality did not mean that you had to treat latency-sensitive and jitter-sensitive traffic (e.g. VoIP) the same way you had to treat bulk transfers (e.g. software update downloads). The networks tried to pretend that it did, and so you get the nonexistent problem in an earlier post of porn downloads meaning you can't make telephone calls. In reality, it's fine to reserve, say, 10% of the total throughput for latency-sensitive communications and use that for voice traffic. The people doing the downloading have buffering and so don't notice the slight increase in latency or the extra jitter when people start and stop using the high priority channel. The voice users don't know that their traffic is higher priority, and it abruptly ceases to be if they cross some throughput threshold.
My biggest complaint is that ISPs are not required to publicly disclose their traffic management policy. If they were, then customers could make an informed decision (e.g. this ISP will cost you more because you can't use that VoIP provider with it and get adequate quality).
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So the fact you're unable to explain your concept with anything close the the precision needed for a law is "The Big ISPs" fault? Do you blame them when your cereal gets soggy too?
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Most lines are throttled. Your cable line can actually provide around 100/mbs a second. did you know that? No its throttled, because they can't/won't provide it upstream. They don't sell you a 100/mbs pipe. They sell you 5, 10, or 20, depending on what you pay for. Generally they use this "throttling" to define the width of the pipe in software. No one complains really.
Its really nothing off their shoulders which type of
Re:Wireless has congestion (Score:5, Insightful)
Wireless networks suffer from congestion a lot more than wired networks. I don't think it's unreasonable for carriers to want to throttle traffic on wireless mediums to ensure mr tethered torrenter isnt destroying everyone else's connection.
Keep in mind that on wired or wireless networks, Net Neutrality is NOT treating all packets the same. VoIP and Video are among those applications that are time sensitive. You need to apply QoS to prioritize that type of traffic. Where NN comes in would be something like this: Say your ISP charges $50/month for internet, and limits you to 250Gb per month. Instead of subscribing to their TV service, you want to use Netflix or Hulu. Under this scenario, their data limit may keep you from using Netflix as much as you'd like. OTOH, they don't charge against you cap to use their TV service. Oh, but you can buy additional data for, say, $10/10Gb more. What they're doing is making sure that the additional data charges are so expensive that it's cheaper to buy their TV service, keeping out competition.
It's OK to throttle traffic on congested networks to make sure that everyone has access, but it's another to use data limits to keep out competition for other services.
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outbound traffic costs them money while in-house traffic is virtually free. You will never equalize the costs of internal and external services.
On a smaller scale the same thing happens in home LANs. People shuffle shitloads of stuff back and forth between computers, NAS boxes and what not and pay ISPs big round zero bucks for that traffic. Outbound packets are counted against non-free quota while LAN traffic is limitless.
Do you want net neutrality here? How would that work?
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outbound traffic costs them money while in-house traffic is virtually free.
Which is why we shouldn't have content providers and ISPs be the same monopoly company.
To clarify what that means: The only reason we have this problem is because we have companies like Comcast-NBC. NBC is a content provider. Comcast is: an ISP, a broadband network company, and a monopoly. So they control the wires, the internet access, and the content. So there becomes this concept of "in-house content" which totally messes up the system. If NBC was a separate company that provided content to other pu
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Net Neutrality does not apply to home/business LANs. AFAIK, no NN legislation has every tried to include LANs. If you want to talk about ISP's traffic, there is the issue that it cost them more for packets routed from outside of their network versus internal. That's why some of those ISPs are working with companies like Netflix to mirror the data, so that they can route the data to their customers at a lower cost to the ISP.
Keep in mind that this example applies more to wired networks than wireless, which i
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>>>you want to use Netflix or Hulu. Under this scenario, their 250Gb cap may keep you from using Netflix as much as you'd like. OTOH, they don't charge against you cap to use their TV service
I'm guessing you mean 250GB? 250 gigabits would be a damn small cap (250/8== just 31 gigabytes). Anyway if Verizon wants to give me free and uncapped videos from their local computers, where's the harm in that? It doesn't cost me anything extra. I don't care where I go to see the latest episode of Warehous
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My bad; 250GB.
Uncapped service, wired or wireless, is less prone to an ISP trying to block competing services. That's assuming they don't throttle or otherwise mess with packets originating from a competitor's service. In your case, wherever you get your latest episode of Warehouse13.
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To put it another way: having a monopoly is not illegal. Abusing one is. Antitrust and similar laws usually require any prosecutor to first show that a monopoly exists, so they can then go on to prove that the laws were broken, so many people have the mistaken idea that the monopoly itself is being prosecuted. Telecomunications is an area where proving the monopoly exists is usually trivial. One corporation gets a special government grant of a frequency range or similar limited domain - that's a granted mon
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Ooops! Please make that "ought to", not "out to". Thanks.
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Thank you! Many people conflate protocol-favoritism with endpoint-favoritism and (wrongly) conclude that routers should be dumb and never prioritize in order to enforce NN. The difficulty that I run into on this topic is that there seems to be a slippery slope due to the privacy implications of effective QoS. For examle:
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Default VOIP and gaming would be higher priority and torrenting would not be of course.
This would give the tinkerers a great measure of control while preventing them from setting downloads to max priority (OMG, this movie is awesome. I needs it NAOW
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Couldn't they make separate data sets: A 250 GB/mo subscription has 25 GB of higher priority data. Which data this is can be set in the router and thus is under your control. Once the higher priority data is used up the remaining data is lower priority again.
Default VOIP and gaming would be higher priority and torrenting would not be of course.
This would give the tinkerers a great measure of control while preventing them from setting downloads to max priority (OMG, this movie is awesome. I needs it NAOW!) and taking out the network.
sure they could, but they gotta have some angle to promote their inhouse video streaming service they dumped millions to produce since they were sitting on billions of money to invest and didn't want to invest it into better service for users.
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back in the 2g days maybe, but not since 3g, and absolutely not since LTE nor real 4g does congestion even become a factor. IT's more an issue of "Carrier doesn't want to improve coverage" vs "users who want actual coverage".
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traffic to the rest of the world utilizes pipes belonging to 3rd parties and they don't give away the bandwidth for free. In-house traffic is virtually free, just like sending terabytes of data between computers plugged into your house LAN is.
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So if I set my torrent client to prefer to download from peers within Cox, it won't count against the cap, right? Or it is only free for their services?
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Same with Comcast (their video content does not count towards your 250GB cap). You see this is what happens when the government regulates..... instead of actual net neutrality (like we had before) it has created some other bastardization which allows Cable companies to treat their data favorably, while blocking outside companies via the cap.
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Preferential routing was caused by regulation? Which regulation requires a company to give themselves preferential treatment?
This "all regulation is evil" meme is very lame. Yeah, there are regulations that are stupid. There are also regulations that keep the air breathable and prevent your next-door-neighbor from running a disco in a residential neighborhood.
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>>>Preferential routing was caused by regulation?
Comcast didn't start giving its user free videos (they don't count toward the 250GB cap) until AFTER the net neutrality rule was passed. Basically comcast held back until they got permission from the government, and then they went non-neutral.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc [wikipedia.org]
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That's nice. Why don't we look at the Net Neutrality bill, see how many congressional representatives voted for it, and then look to see which ones of them were funded by Comcast? The corporation got exactly the law it paid for: One which would allow them to treat their own data differently from competitors' data.
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So, you're saying that because Comcast has corrupted Congress, they had to give themselves preferential treatment? That makes even less sense than your previous argument.
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>>>So, you're saying that because Comcast has corrupted Congress, they had to give themselves preferential treatment?
Well of course. Comcast doesn't want true net neutrality, so they bribed the Congress members to write the Net Neutrality law to allow Comcast to treat their own data as higher priority than outside competitors' data. (This is so fucking obvious, I am amazed I have to explain it. Regulations are written for the *benefit* of corporations, and rarely for the people.)
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his is so fucking obvious, I am amazed I have to explain it.
Yeah, you're so sure you're right, it really irks you that you have to mess around with boring things like logic and evidence.
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Fraud? In what way? My cellular provider told me upfront that I wold get 2.5 gigabytes uncapped, and unlimited at 2xISDN speeds. It isn't fraud when you are told point-blank what to expect. (Better read your contract more carefully.)