What do you mean by "illegal peer-to-peer file sharing networks"? The Peer-to-peer networks are NOT illegal. Some of the content being shared obviously is, but that doesn't excuse calling the whole network illegal. Do you claim that BitTorrents for Linux CDs are illegal?
Steve O'Hear (editor)
· 2 years ago
@Aaron, I meant to put the word illegal in speech marks as I do later in the article - as in "illegal". Of course the networks themselves aren't illegal, just some of the activity that takes place on them. I've updated the post.
Sandra Keegan
· 2 years ago
The difference between advertised speeds and data speeds experienced by actual users is no longer a 'dirty little secret in the broadband industry', as numerous comments on various blogs and online commentaries attest to. And the phenomenon is just as prevalent in countries other than the UK, e.g., US, Japan, France, Germany, etc.
Ram
· 2 years ago
Yep! I agree with you. My ISP had promised a connection (with download speed of 1 Mbps) with 2 GB download. But hardly I have seen download speeds of 1 Mbps.. I usually get only 100kbps during peak hours and a little more during the other times.
Is there some thing we can do to solve this problem?
Ben
· 2 years ago
Broadband worldwide is incredibly oversubscribed and the situation doesn't look to be getting better anytime soon. It may be surprising to know that Broadband isn't the only service oversubscribed. Wired and mobile telephone networks are both guilty of this practice, which explains where the problem with broadband came from in the first place.
@ Ram: Advertising a speed of 1Mbps would lead the uninitiated to think they can download at 1MB/s, but what they're really going to get is roughly equivalent to 128KB/s. Unfortunately many ISP's fail to provide even this speed.
Thomas
· 2 years ago
One thing you all need to keep in mind is that there is a BIG difference between KBps and Kbps. KBps=KiloBytes per second. Kbps=Kilobits per second. Most users have no clue how to differentiate the two and frequently use them interchangeably. Making matters more confusing is that ISPs typically use K(or M)bps to describe their download speeds and web browser download dialogs (the only speed indicator 95% of Internet users ever see) displays K(or M)Bps. To find the true difference, divide the KBps by 8 (there are 8 bits in a byte) and you will get the Kbps. So, if your ISP advertises 1Mbps and you are seeing 125KBps download speeds for files, you are getting 1Mbps. Knowledge is power people.
phreaki
· 2 years ago
I've seen this all first hand, and the implications are staggering.
Smaller ISP's that don't even understand 95% billing are apt to take steps to curb usage that would even make companies like Rogers shudder. I should know, I've seen it. Think you've got it bad? I've seen whole websites blocked to try to stem the usage of P2P, then severe throttling to curb the usage.
It doesn't matter to some that the users are already capped severely to try to curb any usage at all.
Customer change his port to a non throttled range to get around it? That port is now throttled, even if it affects normal services like HTTP for all users, if it just so happens to arrive in on that range. It's a witch hunt that always causes the customer to suffer, rather than just backing off, letting them fill up their hard drive and having happy subscribers.
Zach
· 2 years ago
Next thing you need to look at is the CIR. (Committed Information Rate) This is the amount you are GUARANTEED to have available to you at all times. Most ISPs offer a CIR of 0. So they will give you a connection up to 1Mbps, but they are not required to give you the full space at any given time. Now if you got a connection with a CIR of 1Mbps then the ISP would be required to allow you the full 1Mbps at all times and cannot legally throttle you to less. However, few ISPs offer such a service (unless for business) and very few consumers know to ask.
Just a bit more education for you.
Phil Scheuster
· 2 years ago
I pay for verizon FiOS and get 20 Mbps constantly. In the last 6 months I've downloaded over 3 Terabytes of illegal video from giganews....Ive never had my bandwidth reduced or shaped.
reech
· 2 years ago
The point is that the largely ignorant public at large have been sucker-punched once again.
They're certainly not going to be happy when they discover that they can't get their joost/whatever 24/7.
Hauke Kruppa
· 2 years ago
> The difference between advertised speeds and data speeds experienced > by actual users is no longer a ‘dirty little secret in the broadband industry’, > as numerous comments on various blogs and online commentaries attest to. > And the phenomenon is just as prevalent in countries other than the UK, e.g., > US, Japan, France, Germany, etc.
Are U kidding me? Given, there were a few providers "shaping" the traffic here in Germany, but those were the cheapest of the cheapest. No traffic shaping if you stick to DSL AND telephone-providers here in Germany. Neither Telekom nor Alice nor Arcor are "shaping" any traffic. In some cases, the bandwidth is limited due to long telephone-lines or to technical limitations due to disturbances when too many people try to use DSL on nearby lines. But this is not a bandwidth problem - the ports are there, it's just that some cables are not shielded enough.
I am using a 16Mbit DSL and I never ever had any problems downloading what I want. Yes, there is a "fair use" paragraph in the contract, but it's not used by the companies mentioned above. It's bad press if they did. Btw: Of cource I use Video on Demand with 1 or up to 5 Mbit.
Prices: 16 Mbit down / 800 up (in real life, it's a bit less) for roundabout 50 Euros, including the base-tariff for your telephone.
Being a developing nation concerning fast internet access is *no* reason to say that other countries are the same!
Some people...
Hauke Kruppa
· 2 years ago
Oh, and by the way: It's only a BIT less. Check out http://www.speedmeter.de/ranglist and stop generalising. Yes, it may be tough in UK and in some parts of the USA. But this is not caused by some sort of natural law or technical impossibilities. And if it comes to Norway, I guess the people in the UK and Germany both start crying - they outpower us all :)
Devin
· 2 years ago
theoretically it would take 40 minutes to download 3GB...not 20.
this is not a 10megabyte connection we are talking about here...its megabit.
Bryan
· 2 years ago
One more thing to keep in mind is who you're connecting to. If I use my 10Mbps connection to download a file from a server running a 56K connection, I'm not going to get 10Mbps. Also, as far as I know cable is shared bandwidth, but fiber is dedicated, meaning that you alone are using your fiber bandwidth instead of sharing it like a cable connection (correct me if I'm wrong). Distance to the nearest routing station can also affect speed...
At the same time, I have heard a few horror stories of people paying for an "unlimited" connection only to have their service cut (without warning) for going over the limit.
chris scott
· 2 years ago
I worked as a headend technician at a cable company for a few years where I helped manage the broadband / television infrastructure.
One thing cable companies are doing these days is duplicating analog channels into digital. in conjunction, they're flooding their market with cheap digital-decoders.
every analog tv channel takes up ~ 3Mhz (I forget) of bandwidth.
as the cable companies start to faze-out the analog channels, it should free up an awful lot of bandwidth, I figure.
Oliver
· 2 years ago
I think something like that can only happen in a nanny state like the UK. They want to "teach" people about anything they do, including the way they are supposed to use the web. Here in Switzerland you pay for 10Mbit, you get them together with a 10-20 ms ping, do what you want with it. When I visited the UK two years ago I heard the term "contention ratios" for the first time in my life. The best ones were 5:1 and the worst 50:1, thought this was a joke. It is all in the bad style of european tradition selling everything technology and internet related like it would be something special, precious, or made of gold (just remember the days when 8mbit adsl would cost you severak 1000 bucks). The ISPs attitude has always been the consumer should worship them for having the kindness of offering the unworthy user his crappy service at an outrageous price.
Also if you look at a country like South Korea where they are replacing the 100mbit connections with 1Gbit lines for every household and flatrates are cheap as bread you will realize that this whole matter is just about politics and certain interests groups who fear losing control about the consumer sheeps (e.g. mobile phone companies will try EVERYTHING to stop VOIP becoming affordable for mobiles in Europe, TV companies are afraid you might turn to some ITV channel from abroad instead of feeding on their crap etc.). But in the end they will lose.
Jason
· 2 years ago
@Oliver: It's not a UK "nanny state" issue, it's more about what happens when your ISP isn't big enough to get a decent deal for connectivity to the broader Internet.
Here in Australia, which is no more a nanny state that Switzerland, we have lots of small ISPs, covering areas which the big ISPs don't care about (because the costs are too high for the number of subscribers). The small ISPs get screwed on their upstream connection, and so the monthly download limits are pathetic.
Motorcycle Guy
· 2 years ago
I think when the whole network gets shut down at a later point in time you could say that peer 2peer network was illegal? I guess you can only classify them as such retroactively though.
Nathaniel
· 2 years ago
That is insane! $70 a month for 3GB download cap? Yikes!
The ISP I'm currently in a contract with is Tele2, a Swedish operator, and I'm getting 10mbit both ways through a fiber link. It's damn fast, and best of all, NO RESTRICTIONS. They do have rules against having file or web servers running though, which is kind of backwards when so many today have the possibility of serving their blogs from home.
I'm not sure how much traffic I'm consuming, but I think it's fair to guesstimate that it's atleast a gigabyte or two down each day, and maybe as much as 10-20 gb upload (each day). Still, Tele2 has said nothing and I've never noticed any kind of throttling or shaping of my network connection. Oh, and what am I paying? A little less than $20 :)
Pete White
· 2 years ago
I think its a growing problem in the UK for ISP's to throttle bandwidth, i'm with BT and they have throttled Bit Torrent bandwidth for months now meaning i'm lucky to get over 10kb/s between 4 and midnight.
Ofcom have recently made it a lot easier for people to move ISP's so hopefully as video on demand applications like 4OD become more popular the ISP's will respond by giving people more bandwidth.
I don't think it has anything to do with a 'nanny state' most just the fact that BT needs to invest more in our infrastructure.
Geoff
· 2 years ago
I was so fed up with my ISP and their Fair Use Policy that I successfully sued them for throttling my Internet connection. The how-to gude is at http://demonic-tale.blogspot.com/ if anyone wants to do it.
Carl-Joel Andreen
· 2 years ago
Net Insight will solve all these problems. See for yourself on their homepage Netinsight.se.
100% QoS in reality, not as aphrase, is one key element.
Gerry
· 2 years ago
I agree completely, I am with the Australian ISP Telstra and am on the "Liberty Plan" (unlimited) and after a short 12gigs my 17mbs/256kbs cable is slowed 2 a near dial up speed of 64kbs. I believe that Telstra is not trying to rip me of but rather not with the times. Many ISP don't understand that there is a large shift to online video content, much of which is free and legally so (podcasting etc).
Alan Abbey
· 2 years ago
We are writing about this buffering issue as it affects Joost on our new website, http://juicedonjoost.com/ - everything the Joost fan and aficionado needs to navigate and enjoy Joost.
deepak
· 2 years ago
well i am surprised to read it... if this is the condition in UK, one of the most developed nation in world, then now i feel contentious over the service my ISP is providing in India....
why can't people there in UK sue those creepy ISP's for throttling a so called "unlimited connection".
nice article by the way.....
TDMPRO2K
· 2 years ago
I live in the UK, and it is a nightmare. I have recently moved ISP's due to they restricting my access. Unfortunately They just terminate your contract if you moan at them. I have now moved ISP's but I can see me moving again due to amount of bandwidth I used, due to downloads like 4OD. The point that needs to be addressed is what is a reasonable limit?.. 60gb, 80gb or 100gb. I can see that they have a problem with the amount of people using the ADSL service, but saying people who pay £35+ per month should be enough to cover cost to sort this out.
Hail to the ISP that says unlimited and is....................... I hope and prey it will come soon.
Jimmy
· 2 years ago
Not true -- some Tier 1 ISPs do offer non capped or throttled products. This problem will be seen with the regional, reseller-model based ISPs.
John Thomas
· 2 years ago
Have any of you looked at the actual COST to the ISPs? Full T-1's from a quality upstream can cost $1000's per month, and yet you feel "entitled" to have this access for $39.99 per month? The reality is that speed costs money- how fast can you afford? There is a wireless ISP NextWeb (Covadwireless) here in the San Francisco Bay area that sells 1.5 Mbits/sec burstable to 6 Mbits/sec for $299 per month-that is a realistic price point. For those that have fiber and other *cheap* bandwidth, that is great for you. Most ISPs are not trying to rip you off, they are simply trying to make a living. If most ISP's were able to get 100 megabit upstreams for $1000 per month, you would see your prices fall like a rock. The reality is that many ISP's are paying 10's of thousand of dollars for their upstreams. Do you think they should offer 10 Megabits/sec uncapped to the end users for $20 per month? If their 10 meg upstream costs them $10,000 per month, they would have to have something like 3,000 users to be able to pay for the upstream and salaries for their employees. Then, when all 3,000 users got online, it would be a crawl.
Lesly Misteus
· 2 years ago
Hi
Let's not use the term "dirty little secret"... ALL Network HAVE TO BE oversubscribed to be economically viable. ALL Networks, be they Roads or Communications. Think about, it is quite possible to build a road wide enough to NEVER have a bottleneck.. You could also build a Telecom Network that is non-blocking but most of this capacity (which would not come cheap) will not be used almost 90% of the time...Question How much will such networks cost? How much will YOU the user pay for this for the provider to recoup its investment? Oversubscription allows us to enjoy these relatively low-cost for high speed and it is a testimony to how well it works that we have high speed in our home. Video on the present Internet infrastructures will tax it of that I am sure, it is a hard situation for ISP to provide video which tends to turn the oversubscription ratios on their heads. I believe, that the solution, strangely enough, resides in peer-to-peer like networks, which can be extremely efficient in streaming but this may depends on the relative popularity of a given stream..
Hornet
· 2 years ago
John Thomas and Lesly Misteus hit the nail on the head. I work for a small ISP doing IP over SAT providing broadband like BW doing both voice and data. We manly provide access to constructing crews, remote parts of the world, and thrid world country's and Emergency Response Units.. Throttling back certain types of traffic and oversubscribing the only way anyone can provide affordable access. In our model, we get the double whammy. Insanely high BW cost over a satellite, then the circuit to the internet. We use TDMA, so streaming a video and alike kills the other users. You have to understand, that we provide business class BW. We do not sign up the typical home user so throttle back anything that not bushiness related. There's no way that P2P and BT fits in under that. The other thing that not mentioned here is the kind of traffic that P2P and BT creates. I've observed one customer have +13,000 connections to a P2P network.
If you put your bushiness hat on, it would not make sense to allow someone to consume 90% of the BW on something like P2P or BT when ERU's come online. In that sense, peoples life are at risk, one customer dose not have the right to download movie,songs..etc. We live in a big world with big demands, not just your house.
Kshl
· 2 years ago
hey guys... wot ye say about ADSL in Mauritius. The only ISP is Mauritius Telecom. For 256 kbps conection you pay about $30. You get a 1GB cap. After the 1GB cap, the speed is even less than dial up. There are also smaller ISPs, like nomad,... but these ISPS all take their connection from Mauritius Telecom. and their connection is far more crappy.
All Comments
But hardly I have seen download speeds of 1 Mbps.. I usually get only 100kbps during peak hours and a little more during the other times.
Is there some thing we can do to solve this problem?
@ Ram:
Advertising a speed of 1Mbps would lead the uninitiated to think they can download at 1MB/s, but what they're really going to get is roughly equivalent to 128KB/s. Unfortunately many ISP's fail to provide even this speed.
Smaller ISP's that don't even understand 95% billing are apt to take steps to curb usage that would even make companies like Rogers shudder. I should know, I've seen it. Think you've got it bad? I've seen whole websites blocked to try to stem the usage of P2P, then severe throttling to curb the usage.
It doesn't matter to some that the users are already capped severely to try to curb any usage at all.
Customer change his port to a non throttled range to get around it? That port is now throttled, even if it affects normal services like HTTP for all users, if it just so happens to arrive in on that range. It's a witch hunt that always causes the customer to suffer, rather than just backing off, letting them fill up their hard drive and having happy subscribers.
Just a bit more education for you.
They're certainly not going to be happy when they discover that they can't get their joost/whatever 24/7.
> by actual users is no longer a ‘dirty little secret in the broadband industry’,
> as numerous comments on various blogs and online commentaries attest to.
> And the phenomenon is just as prevalent in countries other than the UK, e.g.,
> US, Japan, France, Germany, etc.
Are U kidding me? Given, there were a few providers "shaping" the traffic here in Germany, but those were the cheapest of the cheapest. No traffic shaping if you stick to DSL AND telephone-providers here in Germany. Neither Telekom nor Alice nor Arcor are "shaping" any traffic. In some cases, the bandwidth is limited due to long telephone-lines or to technical limitations due to disturbances when too many people try to use DSL on nearby lines. But this is not a bandwidth problem - the ports are there, it's just that some cables are not shielded enough.
I am using a 16Mbit DSL and I never ever had any problems downloading what I want. Yes, there is a "fair use" paragraph in the contract, but it's not used by the companies mentioned above. It's bad press if they did. Btw: Of cource I use Video on Demand with 1 or up to 5 Mbit.
Prices: 16 Mbit down / 800 up (in real life, it's a bit less) for roundabout 50 Euros, including the base-tariff for your telephone.
Being a developing nation concerning fast internet access is *no* reason to say that other countries are the same!
Some people...
this is not a 10megabyte connection we are talking about here...its megabit.
At the same time, I have heard a few horror stories of people paying for an "unlimited" connection only to have their service cut (without warning) for going over the limit.
One thing cable companies are doing these days is duplicating analog channels into digital. in conjunction, they're flooding their market with cheap digital-decoders.
every analog tv channel takes up ~ 3Mhz (I forget) of bandwidth.
as the cable companies start to faze-out the analog channels, it should free up an awful lot of bandwidth, I figure.
When I visited the UK two years ago I heard the term "contention ratios" for the first time in my life. The best ones were 5:1 and the worst 50:1, thought this was a joke. It is all in the bad style of european tradition selling everything technology and internet related like it would be something special, precious, or made of gold (just remember the days when 8mbit adsl would cost you severak 1000 bucks).
The ISPs attitude has always been the consumer should worship them for having the kindness of offering the unworthy user his crappy service at an outrageous price.
Also if you look at a country like South Korea where they are replacing the 100mbit connections with 1Gbit lines for every household and flatrates are cheap as bread you will realize that this whole matter is just about politics and certain interests groups who fear losing control about the consumer sheeps (e.g. mobile phone companies will try EVERYTHING to stop VOIP becoming affordable for mobiles in Europe, TV companies are afraid you might turn to some ITV channel from abroad instead of feeding on their crap etc.). But in the end they will lose.
Here in Australia, which is no more a nanny state that Switzerland, we have lots of small ISPs, covering areas which the big ISPs don't care about (because the costs are too high for the number of subscribers). The small ISPs get screwed on their upstream connection, and so the monthly download limits are pathetic.
The ISP I'm currently in a contract with is Tele2, a Swedish operator, and I'm getting 10mbit both ways through a fiber link. It's damn fast, and best of all, NO RESTRICTIONS. They do have rules against having file or web servers running though, which is kind of backwards when so many today have the possibility of serving their blogs from home.
I'm not sure how much traffic I'm consuming, but I think it's fair to guesstimate that it's atleast a gigabyte or two down each day, and maybe as much as 10-20 gb upload (each day). Still, Tele2 has said nothing and I've never noticed any kind of throttling or shaping of my network connection. Oh, and what am I paying? A little less than $20 :)
Ofcom have recently made it a lot easier for people to move ISP's so hopefully as video on demand applications like 4OD become more popular the ISP's will respond by giving people more bandwidth.
I don't think it has anything to do with a 'nanny state' most just the fact that BT needs to invest more in our infrastructure.
Netinsight.se.
100% QoS in reality, not as aphrase, is one key element.
why can't people there in UK sue those creepy ISP's for throttling a so called "unlimited connection".
nice article by the way.....
The point that needs to be addressed is what is a reasonable limit?.. 60gb, 80gb or 100gb.
I can see that they have a problem with the amount of people using the ADSL service, but saying people who pay £35+ per month should be enough to cover cost to sort this out.
Hail to the ISP that says unlimited and is....................... I hope and prey it will come soon.
Let's not use the term "dirty little secret"... ALL Network HAVE TO BE oversubscribed to be economically viable. ALL Networks, be they Roads or Communications. Think about, it is quite possible to build a road wide enough to NEVER have a bottleneck.. You could also build a Telecom Network that is non-blocking but most of this capacity (which would not come cheap) will not be used almost 90% of the time...Question How much will such networks cost? How much will YOU the user pay for this for the provider to recoup its investment? Oversubscription allows us to enjoy these relatively low-cost for high speed and it is a testimony to how well it works that we have high speed in our home.
Video on the present Internet infrastructures will tax it of that I am sure, it is a hard situation for ISP to provide video which tends to turn the oversubscription ratios on their heads. I believe, that the solution, strangely enough, resides in peer-to-peer like networks, which can be extremely efficient in streaming but this may depends on the relative popularity of a given stream..
If you put your bushiness hat on, it would not make sense to allow someone to consume 90% of the BW on something like P2P or BT when ERU's come online. In that sense, peoples life are at risk, one customer dose not have the right to download movie,songs..etc. We live in a big world with big demands, not just your house.