Category: Networks

Your broadband service is going to get more expensive

See my article in The Register to understand why your broadband bill is going to rise: Peer-to-peer file sharing just got a lot more expensive in the US. The FCC has ordered Comcast to refrain from capping P2P traffic, endorsing a volume-based pricing scheme that would “charge the most aggressive users overage fees” instead. BitTorrent, … Continue reading “Your broadband service is going to get more expensive”

See my article in The Register to understand why your broadband bill is going to rise:

Peer-to-peer file sharing just got a lot more expensive in the US. The FCC has ordered Comcast to refrain from capping P2P traffic, endorsing a volume-based pricing scheme that would “charge the most aggressive users overage fees” instead. BitTorrent, Inc. reacted to the ruling by laying-off 15 per cent of its workforce, while network neutrality buffs declared victory and phone companies quietly celebrated. Former FCC Chairman Bill Kennard says the legal basis of the order is “murky.”

Comcast will probably challenge on grounds that Congress never actually told the regulator to micro-manage the Internet. In the absence of authority to regulate Internet access, the Commission has never had a need to develop rules to distinguish sound from unsound management practice. The order twists itself into a pretzel in a Kafka-esque attempt to justify sanctions in the absence of such rules.
Technically speaking, they’re very confused

The FCC’s technical analysis is puzzling, to say the least.

The order describes an all-powerful IP envelope, seeking to evoke an emotional response to Deep Packet Inspection. The order claims the DPI bugaboo places ISPs on the same moral plane as authoritarian regimes that force under-aged athletes into involuntary servitude. But this is both uninformed and misleading. Network packets actually contain several “envelopes”, one for each protocol layer, nested inside one another like Russian dolls. Network management systems examine all envelopes that are relevant, and always have, because there’s great utility in identifying protocols.

The FCC’s order is especially bad for people who use both P2P and Skype. The comments lack the usual snarkiness, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

UPDATE: Right on cue, a price war is breaking out between cable and phone companies, according to the Wall St. Journal. I wonder if the converts are going to be the high-volume users worried about the caps, or the nice, low volume grannies every carrier wants.

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The best broadband in the world

I ran the Speedmatters test on my Comcast connection today, just for the fun of it (OK, I’m bored with this Obama vs. the Moose Hunter stuff.) This test is sponsored by the Communication Workers union, as an argument for taxpayer subsidies for broadband. The results I got are not what they’re hoping for: So … Continue reading “The best broadband in the world”

I ran the Speedmatters test on my Comcast connection today, just for the fun of it (OK, I’m bored with this Obama vs. the Moose Hunter stuff.) This test is sponsored by the Communication Workers union, as an argument for taxpayer subsidies for broadband. The results I got are not what they’re hoping for:

So my little Comcast account is faster than all that fiber in Japan and Korea.

So why all the whining?

Comcast defines “excessive use”

Comcast has modified its terms of use to clarify that “excessive use” is 250 GB per month. If you download more than this, and are on the list of heaviest users, you’ll get a letter from Comcast telling you to dial it back. If you don’t you’ll be canned. Over-limit fees are not part of … Continue reading “Comcast defines “excessive use””

Comcast has modified its terms of use to clarify that “excessive use” is 250 GB per month. If you download more than this, and are on the list of heaviest users, you’ll get a letter from Comcast telling you to dial it back. If you don’t you’ll be canned. Over-limit fees are not part of the deal:

In May when the cap was first rumored, there was also buzz that Comcast might try to charge customers $15 for every 10GB they went over the limit. As far as we can tell from Comcast’s announcement and the accompanying FAQ page, that is not the case… yet, anyway. Even so, Comcast’s honesty with the 250GB cap will probably only go so far, and customers with the option to do so may end up turning to an ISP such as AT&T, Verizon, or Qwest that has the infrastructure available to offer broadband without bandwidth limits.

Most people will never come anywhere close to 250 GB, but there’s a lot of adverse reaction to this plan, mainly on the issue of Comcast making it hard for you to know how much you’ve used in the current month. You may be able to get this info from your home router, but there’s no guarantee.

Regarding the threat of heaviest users to take their business elsewhere, I;m guessing Comcast won’t miss them a whole lot.

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Guardian takes on the Google myth

David Smith confronts the Google myth for The Observer, including accounts of the pilgramages politicians take to Google HQ: Shortly after Obama’s pilgrimage to the ‘Googleplex’, it was the turn of David Cameron. Cameron was accompanied there by Steve Hilton, his director of strategy, who has since moved permanently to California with his wife, Rachel … Continue reading “Guardian takes on the Google myth”

David Smith confronts the Google myth for The Observer, including accounts of the pilgramages politicians take to Google HQ:

Shortly after Obama’s pilgrimage to the ‘Googleplex’, it was the turn of David Cameron. Cameron was accompanied there by Steve Hilton, his director of strategy, who has since moved permanently to California with his wife, Rachel Whetstone, Google’s vice-president of global communications and public affairs (she is also godmother to Cameron’s eldest son, Ivan). Andrew Orlowski, executive editor of the technology website The Register, says: ‘The web is a secular religion at the moment and politicians go to pray at events like the Google Zeitgeist conference. Any politician who wants to brand himself as a forward-looking person will get himself photographed with the Google boys.’

Washington, also, is keen to bathe in Google’s golden light. Al Gore, the former Vice-President, is a long-time senior adviser at the company. Obama has been taking economic advice from Google CEO Eric Schmidt and received generous donations from Google and its staff. Google will be omnipresent at the Democratic and Republican national conventions, providing software for delegates such as calendars, email and graphics. ‘Google has moved into the political world this year,’ says its director of policy communications, Bob Boorstin, a former member of the Clinton administration.

Google’s staff in Washington include five lobbyists, among them Pablo Chavez, former general counsel for John McCain. This year Google moved into new 27,000-square-foot headquarters in one of Washington’s most fashionable, eco-friendly buildings. Visiting senators and congressmen can now share in the famed ‘googly’ experience of free gourmet lunches, giant plasma screens and a game room, named ‘Camp David’, stocked with an Xbox 360 and pingpong.

None of this much impressed Jeff Chester, the executive director of the small but influential Center for Digital Democracy, when he was invited there. ‘It puts all the other lobbying operations to shame,’ he says. ‘They invite politicians into their Washington HQ to give advice on using Google to win re-election. It is the darling of the Democratic Party and there’s no doubt that a win by Obama will strengthen Google’s position in Washington.’

Undeterred by criticisms of his benefactor, Google’s professor of piracy rights, Larry Lessig, congratulates Google’s boys at the FCC for protecting the Google monopoly in a rare foray into the world of the written word. It’s quite amusing and utterly deranged.

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UK government’s viral video

If you don’t know who Jeremy Clarkson is, or don’t have a sense of humor, you won’t get this, so go read The Guardian: Downing Street always posts responses to petitions and normally the replies to the jokey ones are pretty terse. But last night, in response to the Clarkson request, it put up this. … Continue reading “UK government’s viral video”

If you don’t know who Jeremy Clarkson is, or don’t have a sense of humor, you won’t get this, so go read The Guardian:

Downing Street always posts responses to petitions and normally the replies to the jokey ones are pretty terse. But last night, in response to the Clarkson request, it put up this.

Okay, it’s not quite Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. But I thought it hit the right note. It’s already had 40,000 hits and at LabourHome someone has praised it as “Gordon Brown’s first truly viral video”.

Right wing blogs in the UK are not amused, sadly, but it’s very au courant and Web 2.0 and all.

FCC finally issues Comcast memo

Kevin Martin and his Democratic Party colleagues at the FCC have issued their Comcast order, available at this link. They find some novel sources of authority and apply some interesting interpretations of the facts. I’ll have some detailed commentary after I’ve read it all and checked the footnotes. It’s an amusing exercise, if you like … Continue reading “FCC finally issues Comcast memo”

Kevin Martin and his Democratic Party colleagues at the FCC have issued their Comcast order, available at this link. They find some novel sources of authority and apply some interesting interpretations of the facts. I’ll have some detailed commentary after I’ve read it all and checked the footnotes. It’s an amusing exercise, if you like that sort of thing.

For a good summary of the order, see IP Democracy.

Presidential Candidate Tech Policies

Now that Michael Phelps has won 17 dozen gold medals with chocolate chips and the world has been made safe for democracy for another Olympiad, we can turn to more trivial matters such as the technology policies of our presidential candidates. Friday McCain (the old white guy) released a tech policy statement that was very … Continue reading “Presidential Candidate Tech Policies”

Now that Michael Phelps has won 17 dozen gold medals with chocolate chips and the world has been made safe for democracy for another Olympiad, we can turn to more trivial matters such as the technology policies of our presidential candidates. Friday McCain (the old white guy) released a tech policy statement that was very short and sweet. From this we can determine that his tech adviser is Mike Powell, a man who loves his TiVo and uses few words. Powell’s Four Freedoms to consume Internets are in McCain’s statement somewhere.

Predictably, supporters of Obama (the black John Edwards) rose up en masse and lambasted the McCain plan as insufficiently detailed and otherwise lacking in emotion. Obama’s tech policy fairly oozes romance, so they have a point.

At first cut, the contrast between the two policy statements is fairly severe. Obama’s is longer, more detailed, more hands-on, and more meddlesome, teeming with programs to support this, protect that, and maximize this other thing (such as girl and minority science degrees,) while McCain’s is more focused on cutting costs to business and getting the regulators out of the way. But if you read a little closer, you see that Obama’s statement is simply a mess of equivocation: he’s going to crack down on piracy, but loosen the rules that prevent the appropriation of IP (by Google, presumably) and that sort of thing.

Obama’s people claim McCain’s tech policy is like a Republican energy policy, all about profits instead of people. But I would submit that Obama’s is like farm policy, all about increasing the profits of a few large corporations without actually feeding anyone. It’s clear why the Obamatites want to attack McCain: god forbid anyone reads Obama’s policy statement, you might hurt yourself.

[this space to be modified]

NBC using P2P

Downloading Olympics programming in HD from NBC involves using a private P2P network, some DRM, and a little bit of luck. After a few mishaps, I’m finally subscribed for some automatic Olympic programming updates. I had to use Explorer to do this, as Firefox 3 isn’t supported by the DRM plugin NBC uses, and neither … Continue reading “NBC using P2P”

Downloading Olympics programming in HD from NBC involves using a private P2P network, some DRM, and a little bit of luck. After a few mishaps, I’m finally subscribed for some automatic Olympic programming updates.

I had to use Explorer to do this, as Firefox 3 isn’t supported by the DRM plugin NBC uses, and neither is any form of Linux or any version of Windows older than XP SP2. But that’s OK as my current home setup runs Ubuntu in a virtual machine alongside Windows Vista. So we have no more dual-booting or any of that nonsense. The ease with which we can switch operating systems these days is sick.

BitTorrent Soap Opera continues

Valleywag’s outstanding reporting on the BitTorrent collapse continues with a detailed account of the tussle: BitTorrent has denied our report that the company laid off 12 out of 55 employees. That may be true: While our source told us 12 employees were on the layoff list, we’ve learned that, at the last minute, the jobs … Continue reading “BitTorrent Soap Opera continues”

Valleywag’s outstanding reporting on the BitTorrent collapse continues with a detailed account of the tussle:

BitTorrent has denied our report that the company laid off 12 out of 55 employees. That may be true: While our source told us 12 employees were on the layoff list, we’ve learned that, at the last minute, the jobs of two sales engineers, an HR manager, and an office manager were spared. Another tipster — “you can guess as to whether I’m an insider or not” — says that the BitTorrent layoffs aren’t the fault of new CEO Doug Walker, who came to the those-crazy-kids file-sharing startup to add some enterprise-software gravitas. Instead, the elimination of BitTorrent’s sales and marketing departments amounts to a coup by cofounders Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin, pictured here to Walker’s right and left, who are giving up on the notion of marketing BitTorrent’s file-sharing technology to businesses and hardware makers, and instead pinning their hopes on becoming an “Internet peace corps.”

One part that I can confirm is the lack of enthusiasm for DNA on the part of the tech people. I’ve asked them why anybody should care about DNA and I got was silence.

How long until we hear about the equally vexing woes at Vuze? They won their battle with Comcast before the FCC, at the expense of their corporate viability. Peer-to-peer needs to be domesticated, but the FCC has forbidden that. The only other choice is extermination, and metered pricing will take care of that quite efficiently.

Sad.

Previous entry here.

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Testing Internet capacity

NBC is streaming the Olympics over the Internet, in multiple resolutions, in what amounts to a massive test of the ability of the Internet fabric to handle load. Nothing on this scale has been done before, although BCC did stream the last Olympics inside the UK using Multicast. So we’re going to learn just how … Continue reading “Testing Internet capacity”

NBC is streaming the Olympics over the Internet, in multiple resolutions, in what amounts to a massive test of the ability of the Internet fabric to handle load. Nothing on this scale has been done before, although BCC did stream the last Olympics inside the UK using Multicast. So we’re going to learn just how realistic net neutrality really is:

This will be the biggest test today of Internet viewers’ appetite for streaming video of live sporting events – and of the Internet’s ability to handle that.

If the Internet service providers networks start getting maxed out, you can probably expect some “rate shaping” or other bandwidth management techniques to come into play, Eksten notes. After all, you still have to get the e-mail through for non-sports fans.

Which means not just technologists like Eksten but network neutrality proponents should spend a lot of time looking at logs and statistical reports from the service providers, after this is all over to see how the streaming affected the Internet’s fabric of networks.

Stay tuned, if you can.

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