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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

by belorn 8y ago

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 get worse experience then if you paid and watched the exact same movie on Netflix. If you sit at GCI and have both Netflix and Amazon Prime then go and unsubscribe your netflix as it will be much worse experience than amazon thanks to your ISP throttling. This is not small ISP that monitor overall usage and throttle clients based on high usage and hotspots of traffic. The article is not about congestion control but rather marketing choices where one streaming service is favored over the other within the captured market of an ISP customers.

close04 8y ago
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.
- pas 8y ago
  Can customers/subscribers of the ISP sue for damages? I guess the ISP has a pretty defensive ToS though. :(
  - close04 8y ago
    No because the contract you have with them has no enforceable SLA and you can't really prove any damages.
  - standerman 8y ago
    Almost every large business has a forced arbitration clause now.
- nbhuik 8y ago
  That is just how the Internet works. Everyone is selling and buying access to networks. Whether directly or in the form of agreements. And most people are of course trying to get more for less. One could certainly wish that things would be different, but it isn't like they are doing something especially nefarious.
  - joncrocks 8y ago
    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 package for you, re-box it in their own packaging and then send it on to you. You then start to receive a package a day again. At that point you start wondering, are they looking at the boxes, seeing they are from Amazon and then just deciding to leave them sitting around their warehouse for a while? And the answer is yes, even though you're paying for the service, they also want whoever is sending the package to pay them to ensure that they get their package on time. So while their may well be all sorts of agreements between all the different parcel companies about who will do what when, it's frustrating as an end-user that there's all these weird agreements that impact me. After all I'm paying for packages to be delivered, not 'packages that are offered by our partners'.
    - nbhuik 8y ago
      Your scenario isn't particularly outlandish. That is how a lot of economy services work. And also why you can usually get other deliveries while many other packages, e.g. from China, are waiting to be processed. Not that deliveries are much like the Internet.
    - rayiner 8y ago
      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-journal/back-issues/table-contents-1/ipj-archive/article09186a00800c8900.html 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 arrangements between all the providers. Note that this book predated the rise of streaming video providers by more than a decade. Back then, nobody thought that delivery of content over the Internet was this simple one-sided transaction. It’s a new view of the Internet that has arisen because it suits the interests of these very lucrative streaming businesses.
- chooseaname 8y ago
  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.
timr 8y ago
"The article is not about congestion control but rather marketing choices where one streaming service is favored over the other within the captured market of an ISP customers." I wonder if that's true, or this is simply a result of the peering agreements that content providers have engaged in since forever. For those who don't know: if Netflix is colocated in the same datacenter(s) as CSPire, it's possible to "throw an ethernet cable over the cage wall" and make a direct connection to CSPire. This results in dramatically better bandwidth and latency, but requires significant up-front costs (it's also not possible for every provider to peer with every distributor, for logistical reasons). As much as I believe in the concept of net neutrality, I feel like the conversation misses many of the technical nuances of the way the internet actually works. Peering is one example: you can have an entirely "neutral" internet, but still observe dramatic differences between one provider and another, based on your network location. (Edit: now that I've read TFA, it's pretty clear that they're not talking about favoring providers, but rather, throttling entire classes of traffic. Which is a different discussion.)
- belorn 8y ago
  Could there be other causes than differentiation to explain the data collect? That would be an excellent questioning to ask the team at University of Massachusetts if they made a dissertation or research paper, since all the article says is that they used a established peer-reviewed technique that assumingly has gone through such questioning. It would be interesting to know the statistical probability that collocated servers would exclusively explain the data. > now that I've read TFA, it's pretty clear that they're not talking about favoring providers, but rather, throttling entire classes of traffic. I must strongly disagree there. What kind of different class of traffic would give throttled traffic to different forms of on-demand video stream services? NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime. I don't see it so please name the four different classes of traffic those sites represent that a congestion system would use as identifiers.
  - timr 8y ago
    "I must strongly disagree there." The article makes it clear what they did, and what conclusions they drew: "Using a previously established, peer-reviewed technique, the team conducted more than half a million data traffic tests across 161 countries. From this data, the team found that internet service providers are “giving a fixed amount of bandwidth—typically something in the range of one and a half megabits per second to four megabits per second—to video traffic, but they don’t impose these limits on other network traffic.” Moreover, the data shown directly below that paragraph reveals little pattern in the provider/app throttling rates. The data shows mostly that video is being throttled across the board. Could there be other explanations for this? Absolutely. Peering is just one of many plausible explanations.
shoguning 8y ago
Interesting, but isn't it also a potential bottleneck at the other side of the network? I.e.: NBCSport has fatter pipes/less congestion than YouTube?
toast0 8y ago
Throttling is generally defined as purposefully slowing some (or all) traffic, in the absence of network congestion. That you may have a faster connection to one provider than another doesn't indicate throttling, unless you can show that the network paths are essentially the same and the slower provider isn't the one restricting the data rate. Certainly, almost any last mile congestion should affect all providers; but most content providers are going try to deliver content from as close to the user as possible; either through CDN boxes deployed inside ISPs networks if possible, or at a nearby place where the ISP or its transit partners peer. I'm aware that Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon all run their own CDN programs, so it's very likely that they're interconnecting to the ISP on separate connections, and without insider knowledge from the ISPs or the CDNs, it's impossible to know what the congestion looks like there. CDN installations also have capacity limitations, and take time to upgrade. It's not unreasonable to assume that some content providers are running their networks hotter than others. In the years since the Internet has become mainstream, people seem to have forgotten the bad old days of downloading a large file, and trying to figure out which mirror would serve the file the fastest; which usually meant figuring out which mirror was both physically close, and well connected to the downloader's network.

by belorn 8y ago

close04 8y ago

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.

pas 8y ago
Can customers/subscribers of the ISP sue for damages? I guess the ISP has a pretty defensive ToS though. :(
- close04 8y ago
  No because the contract you have with them has no enforceable SLA and you can't really prove any damages.
- standerman 8y ago
  Almost every large business has a forced arbitration clause now.
nbhuik 8y ago
That is just how the Internet works. Everyone is selling and buying access to networks. Whether directly or in the form of agreements. And most people are of course trying to get more for less. One could certainly wish that things would be different, but it isn't like they are doing something especially nefarious.
- joncrocks 8y ago
  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 package for you, re-box it in their own packaging and then send it on to you. You then start to receive a package a day again. At that point you start wondering, are they looking at the boxes, seeing they are from Amazon and then just deciding to leave them sitting around their warehouse for a while? And the answer is yes, even though you're paying for the service, they also want whoever is sending the package to pay them to ensure that they get their package on time. So while their may well be all sorts of agreements between all the different parcel companies about who will do what when, it's frustrating as an end-user that there's all these weird agreements that impact me. After all I'm paying for packages to be delivered, not 'packages that are offered by our partners'.
  - nbhuik 8y ago
    Your scenario isn't particularly outlandish. That is how a lot of economy services work. And also why you can usually get other deliveries while many other packages, e.g. from China, are waiting to be processed. Not that deliveries are much like the Internet.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    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-journal/back-issues/table-contents-1/ipj-archive/article09186a00800c8900.html 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 arrangements between all the providers. Note that this book predated the rise of streaming video providers by more than a decade. Back then, nobody thought that delivery of content over the Internet was this simple one-sided transaction. It’s a new view of the Internet that has arisen because it suits the interests of these very lucrative streaming businesses.
chooseaname 8y ago
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.

timr 8y ago

"The article is not about congestion control but rather marketing choices where one streaming service is favored over the other within the captured market of an ISP customers." I wonder if that's true, or this is simply a result of the peering agreements that content providers have engaged in since forever. For those who don't know: if Netflix is colocated in the same datacenter(s) as CSPire, it's possible to "throw an ethernet cable over the cage wall" and make a direct connection to CSPire. This results in dramatically better bandwidth and latency, but requires significant up-front costs (it's also not possible for every provider to peer with every distributor, for logistical reasons). As much as I believe in the concept of net neutrality, I feel like the conversation misses many of the technical nuances of the way the internet actually works. Peering is one example: you can have an entirely "neutral" internet, but still observe dramatic differences between one provider and another, based on your network location. (Edit: now that I've read TFA, it's pretty clear that they're not talking about favoring providers, but rather, throttling entire classes of traffic. Which is a different discussion.)

belorn 8y ago
Could there be other causes than differentiation to explain the data collect? That would be an excellent questioning to ask the team at University of Massachusetts if they made a dissertation or research paper, since all the article says is that they used a established peer-reviewed technique that assumingly has gone through such questioning. It would be interesting to know the statistical probability that collocated servers would exclusively explain the data. > now that I've read TFA, it's pretty clear that they're not talking about favoring providers, but rather, throttling entire classes of traffic. I must strongly disagree there. What kind of different class of traffic would give throttled traffic to different forms of on-demand video stream services? NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime. I don't see it so please name the four different classes of traffic those sites represent that a congestion system would use as identifiers.
- timr 8y ago
  "I must strongly disagree there." The article makes it clear what they did, and what conclusions they drew: "Using a previously established, peer-reviewed technique, the team conducted more than half a million data traffic tests across 161 countries. From this data, the team found that internet service providers are “giving a fixed amount of bandwidth—typically something in the range of one and a half megabits per second to four megabits per second—to video traffic, but they don’t impose these limits on other network traffic.” Moreover, the data shown directly below that paragraph reveals little pattern in the provider/app throttling rates. The data shows mostly that video is being throttled across the board. Could there be other explanations for this? Absolutely. Peering is just one of many plausible explanations.

shoguning 8y ago

Interesting, but isn't it also a potential bottleneck at the other side of the network? I.e.: NBCSport has fatter pipes/less congestion than YouTube?

toast0 8y ago

Throttling is generally defined as purposefully slowing some (or all) traffic, in the absence of network congestion. That you may have a faster connection to one provider than another doesn't indicate throttling, unless you can show that the network paths are essentially the same and the slower provider isn't the one restricting the data rate. Certainly, almost any last mile congestion should affect all providers; but most content providers are going try to deliver content from as close to the user as possible; either through CDN boxes deployed inside ISPs networks if possible, or at a nearby place where the ISP or its transit partners peer. I'm aware that Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon all run their own CDN programs, so it's very likely that they're interconnecting to the ISP on separate connections, and without insider knowledge from the ISPs or the CDNs, it's impossible to know what the congestion looks like there. CDN installations also have capacity limitations, and take time to upgrade. It's not unreasonable to assume that some content providers are running their networks hotter than others. In the years since the Internet has become mainstream, people seem to have forgotten the bad old days of downloading a large file, and trying to figure out which mirror would serve the file the fastest; which usually meant figuring out which mirror was both physically close, and well connected to the downloader's network.