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I do agree with his point that the internet should be regulated, but it should be regulated to be fair. My current internet is 10 meg download and 1 meg upload.

I do agree with his point that the internet should be regulated, but it should be regulated to be fair. My current internet is 10 meg download and 1 meg upload... however I only get 60% of this. No matter what speed we have, we never get 100% of it and the only reason companies get away with it is that they're allowed to hide this BS in the small print with an "*up to" so it's up to 10 meg. I wish for once I could actually get what I paid for when I use a phone company. I mean it'd be nice that when I'm contracted to pay them, they should be contracted to actually do what they advertise. This is where I'd like regulation and serious fines if they don't meet their advertisements 95% of the time.

dantheman 18y ago
This has absolutely nothing to do with the point he is trying to make. He's concerned over traffic shaping and giving preferential treatment to various sites/traffic. What you are concerned with is false advertising.
- palish 18y ago
  True, but they're both evil.
- jmtame 18y ago
  false advertising is the oldest trick in the book for telecomms. http://www.newnetworks.com/tellthetruthverizon.htm http://www.newnetworks.com/tellthetruthverizon.htm network neutrality is a lot more serious than any type of false advertising a telecomm can put out. as consumers, if we're smart enough to see that our service plans aren't 100mbps, ok no big deal. yes, they're both evil, but false advertising isn't really even part of network neutrality as a debate. now if we have no say in how fast certain websites respond, depending on how much we're paying (or they're paying), that's an entirely different topic. i can walk away from a provider if they're lying through advertising. but who's going to stop them from throttling your connection based on which website you're visiting? legislation is the only thing that can stop the big 3 from this type of thing. you'll notice that in the past, the FCC has actually punished traffic discrimination (like when comcast was shutting off bit torrent, a complete violation of neutrality rules). if there's no legislation, the duopolies can do whatever they want and all have a big orgy price gauging at the same time.
gojomo 18y ago
How do you test your throughput? Wondering, because by the nature of TCP/IP, it's hard to get the full capacity of a link with a single TCP connection -- such as an HTTP download. You'll get much closer to full utilization with multiple connections -- such as with P2P app parallel downloading. But to further complicate things: if you are saturating your uplink (as is also typical with P2P apps) on an asymmetric service, you may impair your download connections' throughput (as upstream ACKs on the downloads are occasionally dropped). So you should also cap your upload rate to something under the uplink capacity -- the P2P app or a home router may have configuration allowing this. With those in mind, I've usually observed my throughput on DSL or cable modem links as much more than 60% of the advertised speed -- and sometimes more than 100% of the advertised speed!
- jacquesm 18y ago
  that hasn't got much to do with the nature of TCP/IP but with the nature of the various links that your traffic will take and the limitations of the web server you are querying. In a simple test situation (say ftp or http over a lan link) you are using TCP/IP/and some hardware link layer and you'll see close to wire speed.
  - gojomo 18y ago
    It's inherent to TCP's exponential backoff, which means any one connection's throughput follows a sawtooth pattern, pushing to use more capacity, then falling back after lost packets. The gaps between the 'teeth' are suboptimal utilization. Multiple TCP connections improve things as long as each connection's 'teeth' aren't aligned. Consumer broadband asymmetry makes it worse, because when one direction gets saturated (like an uplink) and loses ACK packets on connections that are primarily downward, the downward side still backs off, even if it wasn't yet close to using downward capacity. Your example of getting full capacity from a LAN link isn't very instructive for what happens over broadband links. Suppose your NIC supports 100Mbps and every link to your LAN destination has at least that capacity. Your NIC will be the bottleneck; you won't trigger the TCP mechanisms. As soon as your 100Mbps local link hits your 10Mbps cable modem, the TCP congestion control becomes a significant factor.
pjkundert 18y ago
My, how ready we all are to give up our liberty. Regulations on the behavior of companies reduces choice (only large companies can afford the legions of lawyers required to comply with them; small competitors go out of business). The only regulation we need is the regulation to tell the truth -- you don't tell the truth, you are sued out of business. The end. Yet, this is the only regulation we do not have, or that the government is unwilling to uphold. If governments would concern themselves with enforcing the rule of law, and upholding the sanctity of contracts, we would all be better off. But, since large companies can buy political friends (through lobbying) and legal protection against fraudulently advertising services which they do not intend to deliver (through teams of lawyers) but small, efficient companies cannot, we therefore lose our freedom of choice -- by our own hand.
- electromagnetic 18y ago
  Your statements don't make sense. In one paragraph you're saying that regulations are destroying 'our' liberty, yet the next paragraph you want the government to enforce laws and by this all the regulations enforced by the law. I'm sorry, but I worked as an electrician for several years in the UK. There's regulations on everything from the thickness of the cable to how low a wall socket can be mounted to how high a light switch can be mounted. The regulation book is almost two inches thick. There's no big nationalized companies except for industrial electrical work, like wiring up factories. Every single person I worked with worked for themselves or for a small company, most of which were father-son companies. Regulations for electrical work were put into place to stop people scamming people and burning your house down. Here in Canada regulations only came around relatively recently, and from people I've talked to (many are electricians from the UK) they're utterly disgusted with what people got away with. One house had its lighting done with speaker wire attached to a 10 amp fuse, by all rights that house should have burnt down. Here in Canada there's virtually no regulations on phone companies. They introduce new charges however they want, Bell even charges you if there's a problem with their equipment they installed. Back home that's not even heard of, BT came into our house numerous times to fix problems. There's also numerous smaller companies you can go with, in fact there's a flood of them for everything. Speaking from experience, regulation helps people. It makes it harder for big companies to bully the little guy and allows a much more even playing field. It also prevents the whole pyramid scheme of big business, where thousands of people working for $10 an hour do all the work for a few people being paid $10,000 an hour. In fact, nearly everyone in the business makes an extremely good wage (I think our best pay was ~$4000 for ~3 days work) and incompetent people tend to go out of business through lack of business or lawsuits.
rbanffy 18y ago
There is no way to guarantee you get, say, 10 Mbps downstream unless you cooperate by downloading that much. If more than 10 people download from my 100 Mbps-connection server at once, they will get less than they paid for, even if the telco is totally innocent. People need to understand their mileage may vary. I seriously doubt people were getting their nominal bandwidth during events such as 9/11 or Obama's inauguration.

dantheman 18y ago

This has absolutely nothing to do with the point he is trying to make. He's concerned over traffic shaping and giving preferential treatment to various sites/traffic. What you are concerned with is false advertising.

palish 18y ago
True, but they're both evil.
jmtame 18y ago
false advertising is the oldest trick in the book for telecomms. http://www.newnetworks.com/tellthetruthverizon.htm http://www.newnetworks.com/tellthetruthverizon.htm network neutrality is a lot more serious than any type of false advertising a telecomm can put out. as consumers, if we're smart enough to see that our service plans aren't 100mbps, ok no big deal. yes, they're both evil, but false advertising isn't really even part of network neutrality as a debate. now if we have no say in how fast certain websites respond, depending on how much we're paying (or they're paying), that's an entirely different topic. i can walk away from a provider if they're lying through advertising. but who's going to stop them from throttling your connection based on which website you're visiting? legislation is the only thing that can stop the big 3 from this type of thing. you'll notice that in the past, the FCC has actually punished traffic discrimination (like when comcast was shutting off bit torrent, a complete violation of neutrality rules). if there's no legislation, the duopolies can do whatever they want and all have a big orgy price gauging at the same time.

gojomo 18y ago

How do you test your throughput? Wondering, because by the nature of TCP/IP, it's hard to get the full capacity of a link with a single TCP connection -- such as an HTTP download. You'll get much closer to full utilization with multiple connections -- such as with P2P app parallel downloading. But to further complicate things: if you are saturating your uplink (as is also typical with P2P apps) on an asymmetric service, you may impair your download connections' throughput (as upstream ACKs on the downloads are occasionally dropped). So you should also cap your upload rate to something under the uplink capacity -- the P2P app or a home router may have configuration allowing this. With those in mind, I've usually observed my throughput on DSL or cable modem links as much more than 60% of the advertised speed -- and sometimes more than 100% of the advertised speed!

jacquesm 18y ago
that hasn't got much to do with the nature of TCP/IP but with the nature of the various links that your traffic will take and the limitations of the web server you are querying. In a simple test situation (say ftp or http over a lan link) you are using TCP/IP/and some hardware link layer and you'll see close to wire speed.
- gojomo 18y ago
  It's inherent to TCP's exponential backoff, which means any one connection's throughput follows a sawtooth pattern, pushing to use more capacity, then falling back after lost packets. The gaps between the 'teeth' are suboptimal utilization. Multiple TCP connections improve things as long as each connection's 'teeth' aren't aligned. Consumer broadband asymmetry makes it worse, because when one direction gets saturated (like an uplink) and loses ACK packets on connections that are primarily downward, the downward side still backs off, even if it wasn't yet close to using downward capacity. Your example of getting full capacity from a LAN link isn't very instructive for what happens over broadband links. Suppose your NIC supports 100Mbps and every link to your LAN destination has at least that capacity. Your NIC will be the bottleneck; you won't trigger the TCP mechanisms. As soon as your 100Mbps local link hits your 10Mbps cable modem, the TCP congestion control becomes a significant factor.

pjkundert 18y ago

My, how ready we all are to give up our liberty. Regulations on the behavior of companies reduces choice (only large companies can afford the legions of lawyers required to comply with them; small competitors go out of business). The only regulation we need is the regulation to tell the truth -- you don't tell the truth, you are sued out of business. The end. Yet, this is the only regulation we do not have, or that the government is unwilling to uphold. If governments would concern themselves with enforcing the rule of law, and upholding the sanctity of contracts, we would all be better off. But, since large companies can buy political friends (through lobbying) and legal protection against fraudulently advertising services which they do not intend to deliver (through teams of lawyers) but small, efficient companies cannot, we therefore lose our freedom of choice -- by our own hand.

electromagnetic 18y ago
Your statements don't make sense. In one paragraph you're saying that regulations are destroying 'our' liberty, yet the next paragraph you want the government to enforce laws and by this all the regulations enforced by the law. I'm sorry, but I worked as an electrician for several years in the UK. There's regulations on everything from the thickness of the cable to how low a wall socket can be mounted to how high a light switch can be mounted. The regulation book is almost two inches thick. There's no big nationalized companies except for industrial electrical work, like wiring up factories. Every single person I worked with worked for themselves or for a small company, most of which were father-son companies. Regulations for electrical work were put into place to stop people scamming people and burning your house down. Here in Canada regulations only came around relatively recently, and from people I've talked to (many are electricians from the UK) they're utterly disgusted with what people got away with. One house had its lighting done with speaker wire attached to a 10 amp fuse, by all rights that house should have burnt down. Here in Canada there's virtually no regulations on phone companies. They introduce new charges however they want, Bell even charges you if there's a problem with their equipment they installed. Back home that's not even heard of, BT came into our house numerous times to fix problems. There's also numerous smaller companies you can go with, in fact there's a flood of them for everything. Speaking from experience, regulation helps people. It makes it harder for big companies to bully the little guy and allows a much more even playing field. It also prevents the whole pyramid scheme of big business, where thousands of people working for $10 an hour do all the work for a few people being paid $10,000 an hour. In fact, nearly everyone in the business makes an extremely good wage (I think our best pay was ~$4000 for ~3 days work) and incompetent people tend to go out of business through lack of business or lawsuits.

rbanffy 18y ago

There is no way to guarantee you get, say, 10 Mbps downstream unless you cooperate by downloading that much. If more than 10 people download from my 100 Mbps-connection server at once, they will get less than they paid for, even if the telco is totally innocent. People need to understand their mileage may vary. I seriously doubt people were getting their nominal bandwidth during events such as 9/11 or Obama's inauguration.