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net neutrality
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Net Neutrality
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net neutrality
rumor
Comcast Considering 250GB Monthly Data Caps, Disconnecting Repeat Pirates
Other than Time Warner's single-city foray into monthly data caps, consumption-based billing has mostly been little ISPs with little monopolies, and given the market, we thought it'd stay that way. Broadband Reports is, uh, reporting that now Comcast is mulling monthly caps (which Comcast's PR guy confirms, though not the details)—something like 250GB, and then $1.50 for every GB over that. According to their source, the idea has "a lot of momentum" and it'll start rolling out in the next two months. The other part is that they're going to start ramping up DMCA notices to pirate assholes, with a total disconnect if you've gotten four letters in a 12-month period. More »
at&t
Azureus/Vuze Says AT&T Is Pulling a Comcast, Resetting Torrents
A month after releasing its plugin that detects if your ISP is performing reset voodoo on your torrents, Azureus/Vuze is claiming AT&T hexes them with the same reset TCP packet curse as Comcast, despite AT&T's explicit statements otherwise. AT&T denies the accusation and points out a flaw in the plugin's method, that it can't tell the difference between naturally occurring TCP resets and artificial ones generated by an ISP. Azureus, while admitting the issue, still says AT&T is full it. More »
net neutrality
Sexy Lady Offers to Harvest Virginity of Net Neutrality-Supporting Nerds (NSFW)
Still in Belgium—hurrah!—let us segue from sticky ponchos to stickiness of another kind. Notorious sexylady Tanya Devereaux says that she is turning virgin surgeon in order to divest any nerd of his cherry—provided that they support a free web. One of the terms and conditions states that the act must not last for more than 30 minutes. Er, could any guy last more than 30 seconds on their first time? More »
comcast
Did Comcast Lie to Me About Slowing Down P2P Traffic?
When I was talking to Comcast for my round up of ISP network management practices (pre-BT deal), we talked a lot about how they manage p2p traffic, and they were very clear that the temporary slowdowns were "surgical," (their word) and only employed during heavy congestion. So I'd been using that caveat anytime I brought it up, out of fairness. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told a Senate committee this week that what Comcast told me wasn't true: "It does not appear that this technique was used only to occasionally delay traffic at particular nodes suffering from network congestion at that time." More »
internet
10 Percent of Broadband Subscribers Suck Up 80 Percent of Bandwidth But P2P No Longer to Blame
The most consistent rationale for ISPs to throttle p2p applications or charge by the byte is that a small minority of users drain a vastly disproportionate amount of bandwidth, like the planet-raping aliens in Independence Day. Om Malik pulls a few of these numbers out of Arbor Networks' CTO, who develops all the traffic management tools your ISP probably uses, so while there's a conflict of interest (portents of internet doom sell more stuff) they have the data. Ten percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth, a super-leeching 0.5 percent swallow 40 percent of bandwidth, and the rest like your mom, 80 percent, sip less than 10 percent. But p2p isn't the culprit. More »
internet
AT&T: The Internet Will Explode in 2010
South Park already showed us how to fix the internet, but what really struck me was Randy's speech at the end—he totally sounded like an AT&T or Comcast executive when he said, "It's easy for us to think we can just use up all the internet we want but...it could one day be gone forever." Actually, that's exactly what AT&T's VP for Legislative Affairs Jim Cicconi said at the Westerminister eForum: "We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the internet by 2010." Update: AT&T's saying now that Cicconi was mis-quoted, and the doomy prediction was from a study. What he actually said was, "In three years' time 20 typical households here in London will generate more traffic than the entire Internet did back in 1995." More »
speculation
FCC to Force ISPs to Reveal P2P Blockage and Real World Bandwidth Speeds
Last night, the FCC held its Comcast-less do-over hearing on net neutrality. While the FCC doesn't appear to be super gung-ho on government-enforced net neutrality, the smoke signals indicate that they're leaning toward forcing ISPs to be completely transparent about their network practices, telling you whether they block BitTorrent and how fast your connection is in real-world conditions, not fantasy-land speeds that only spike when the planets align. More »
net neutrality
Comcast Ducks Out of Tomorrow's FCC Hearing at Stanford
Comcast has opted out of the FCC hearings to be held tomorrow at Stanford University. Did they not find enough net neutrality hecklers in the Silicon Valley? [Portfolio via Valleywag]
comcast
Comcast Wants a P2P Bill of Rights: Should You Be Excited or Afraid?
Comcast officially loves P2P as much as George Washington loves freedom. It's calling for an industry-wide P2P bill of rights and responsibilities that would cover ISPs and users and "clarify what choices and controls consumers should have...as well as what processes and practices ISPs should use to manage P2P applications." Furthermore, as they stated earlier, Comcast is pushing for protocol agnostic management, more bandwidth and more transparency. Sounds groovy, but here's why we don't think they're doing this just to make your 30 Rock torrent experience a silky smooth ride. More »
net neutrality
As the amount of bandwidth we devour has skyrocketed, so has ISPs' need to police our appetites, even as they offer more bandwidth to whet it. We talked to the biggest ISPs around to get their official positions on traffic management and content filtering to see what's in store for your pipes. Here's where you find out which ISPs may screw you, and which ones swear to Giz they won't. Update: We've got new responses from AT&T and Speakeasy.
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Will Your ISP F You In the A? Bandwidth Hogs Beware
As the amount of bandwidth we devour has skyrocketed, so has ISPs' need to police our appetites, even as they offer more bandwidth to whet it. We talked to the biggest ISPs around to get their official positions on traffic management and content filtering to see what's in store for your pipes. Here's where you find out which ISPs may screw you, and which ones swear to Giz they won't. Update: We've got new responses from AT&T and Speakeasy.
More »
net neutrality
Europe Says Net Banning Is a Violation of "Civil Liberties and Human Rights"
The European Parliament voted on anti-piracy bill that would boot persistent "file-sharers" off of the net, at the last minute shooting down that particular measure. More importantly, it added an amendment that said the European Union and its member countries should "avoid adopting measures conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness, such as the interruption of internet access." The vote royally pissed off the EU's RIAA-equivalent, the IFPI. Even still, the vote itself may not result in any kind of safe haven for, uh, P2P "enthusiasts": More »
comcast
Okay, so Comcast and BitTorrent are finally making nice after being all Crips and Bloods, even rousing the FCC out of its slumber at one point, which Comcast fought with every trick in the book. It sounds awesome on paper: Your torrents are safe! More bandwidth! Torrents will work even better! Comcast is all for net neutrality! Not quite. You might actually even be worse off.
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Comcast n' BitTorrent BFF: What's Good, What Sucks
Okay, so Comcast and BitTorrent are finally making nice after being all Crips and Bloods, even rousing the FCC out of its slumber at one point, which Comcast fought with every trick in the book. It sounds awesome on paper: Your torrents are safe! More bandwidth! Torrents will work even better! Comcast is all for net neutrality! Not quite. You might actually even be worse off.
More »
whaaaa
Comcast has taken a lot of crap from everyone from the FCC to consumers, and they've been listening. In fact, they've decided to stop all the fussin' and the fuedin' and actually team up with BitTorrent for the sake of net neutrality. But of course, dear readers, there's a catch. There's always a catch.
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Comcast Pulls an About Face, Teams Up with BitTorrent for Net Neutrality
Comcast has taken a lot of crap from everyone from the FCC to consumers, and they've been listening. In fact, they've decided to stop all the fussin' and the fuedin' and actually team up with BitTorrent for the sake of net neutrality. But of course, dear readers, there's a catch. There's always a catch.
More »
net neutrality
Net Neutrality Shouldn't Extend to Illegal Acts, Says FCC Comissioner
One of the FCC's five commissioners, Jonathan Adelstein, said during a recent symposium on FCC Internet Video Policy that the FCC's rules shouldn't permit "illegal acts." Sure, illegal downloading is a serious problem, especially if you're a copyright-holding movie studio. But does that mean the FCC is actually against net neutrality, in general? More »
peer to peer
We had to read this twice to be certain, but Verizon is teaming up with researchers at Yale and a P4P Working group in order to speed up peer to peer file sharing. How is this beneficial to Verizon, who has the burden of carrying P2P traffic, which measures at about 1/3 of the internet's throughput already? Because when you're sharing files with others, only about 6.3% of the traffic comes from users in the same city as you, which is cheap traffic for Verizon to deliver. In a new optimized scheme, up to 58% of the traffic can come from nearby users, which speeds up your downloads and makes it much more cost effective for the ISP.
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Verizon Actually Helping Speed Up P2P File Sharing? Wha?
We had to read this twice to be certain, but Verizon is teaming up with researchers at Yale and a P4P Working group in order to speed up peer to peer file sharing. How is this beneficial to Verizon, who has the burden of carrying P2P traffic, which measures at about 1/3 of the internet's throughput already? Because when you're sharing files with others, only about 6.3% of the traffic comes from users in the same city as you, which is cheap traffic for Verizon to deliver. In a new optimized scheme, up to 58% of the traffic can come from nearby users, which speeds up your downloads and makes it much more cost effective for the ISP.
More »
comcastarded
FCC May Repeat Net Neutrality Hearing After Comcastards Fiasco
After the Comcastpuff at the FCC hearing on net neutrality (with Comcast and Verizon present,) the almost-omnipotent Federal agency is considering repeating it all. Back then, Comcast paid people to take seats and cheer on their favor. Replacing Harvard, this time it could be celebrated at Stanford and, hopefully, there won't be any Comcastards around. Expect assorted Verigoons instead. [Valleywag via BB]
fcc
FCC and NY Attorney General 'Bout to Stomp on Comcast for BitTorrent Throttling
As promised at CES, the giant boot of the FCC is hovering over Comcast, ready to make it the FCC's bitch for throttling P2P applications. At a hearing populated by drowsy Comcast shills, FCC Diddy Kevin Martin implied that they're about to fire up the fine canon or block Comcast from throttling P2P traffic, while Dem. commissioner Michael Copps said he wanted super clear rules:"The time has come for a specific enforceable principle of nondiscrimination. This principle should allow for reasonable network management, but make crystal clear that broadband network operators cannot shackle the promise of the Internet."More »
