[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Hey, Cox: Stop Trying to Play God with the Internet here

[bimmin]

Thank you for this article!
Loved this quote:
"Would you be okay with the post office opening your mail, deciding they didn't want to bother delivering it, and hiding that fact by sending it back to you stamped, 'address unknown -- return to sender?' Or, if they opened letters mailed to you, decided that because the mail truck is full sometimes, letters to you could wait, and then hid both that they read your letters and delayed them? Unfortunately, that is exactly what Comcast was doing with their subscribers' Internet traffic."
Another thing that sucks is that in where I live (and as much of america) I only have one choice for a cable internet provider. If comcast does some bad business practice that I dont like I cant just leave them for someone else.

[thewazak]

I would maybe have some sympathy with the principle of throttling - if only the top "low priority" usage was "jerks with nothing better to do than playing on-line games for countless hours".
Face it: the Internet resources are finite. If we all take only a slice or two, the loaf will last.
Why should any of my 2 second uploads (etc) be throttled while some people "abuse" the limited resources?
I prefer "metering". Pay for what you use over and above a basic "free" allowance. The profit made (thanks to the idiots with more money than sense and the spammers) could finance improvements to the Internet backbone.

[bimmin]

Finite resource? Isn't the Internet highly expandable? Our cable companies provide us with a bandwith significantly smaller than what they could. Largely because they don't want things such as TV (the other service they provide) to be viewed over the internet (this requires high bandwith for quality). I'm not sure what country you are in but internet speeds in the US are MUCH slower than that in many other countries (I beleive South Korea and Japan have the fastest speeds now). The bandwith is finite at any given moment in time but we can be given MUCH more of it.

[thewazak]

Expandable? Sure it is - at a cost!
As for spare capacity, depending on the time of day there is frequently significant data delay - specifically on the international backbone where (for example) VOIP suffers considerable packet loss, frequently creating barely intelligible conversations.
So yes, a new optical underwater cable here, and a couple of new satellite links there: Job done.
Got a few billion dollars spare?
(Maybe we should ask Obuma Dumba Ding-Dong while he is throwing money around! Lol)

[MarkSullivan]

I'm going to voice the dissenting opinion here, with all due respect to JR's observations.

Here we go again. Another "smoking gun" for the network neutrality zealots to howl about.

But, sorry, it's just another false alarm. Another so-called breach of network neutrality that isn't really a breach at all.

By definition, a breach of NN would be the sniffing out of a particular Internet site's traffic, then hindering them or blocking them for some competitive reason. Cox isn't singling anybody (like Yahoo or AT&T services) and slowing down their traffic because it might compete against something Cox or one of its content partners is offering. Cox is simply doing something ISPs have been talking about doing for years -- traffic management.

Does Fed Ex not have the right to give special treatment to packages that must arrive on the next business day? Is a hospital ER not expected to push a heart attack victim ahead of a sprained ankle in the line to get treatment? Of course, and it's not because of the name of the victim, it's because the urgent nature of his ailment.

This is just an ISP managing its traffic. No smoking gun. What Comcast did last year was far more questionable.

[bimmin]

Here are what some other countries have done:


http://arstechnica.c...ter-but-how.ars








Edited by MPHEnteprises - Please refrain from making political comments in a non-political discussion. Please refer to the {document:id=1000} Point #18 for full details.

[ivplayou]

"as much of america, I only have one choice for a cable internet provider"

NEWS FLASH: if you don't like your Cable provider then switch to DSL or Satellite. If you hate those options as well then i am sure Comecast, or Cox or Whomever would be happy to build a direct fiber optics to you to provide a connection that is free of restructions. Bring your check book.

[ivplayou]

Yes it is expandable, the average cost of doubling the Internet speed to a neighborhood of 200 homes is about $100K. this includes new cable plant, a coax to optical conversion node, miles of fiber optic construction, months of planning and thousands of hours of labor from Network construction, network Engineers, ROW inspectors, installation technician and of course sales and marketing. I have yet to have my cable company ask me for $500 one time fee every 18 months to double my Internet speed. in the last 3 years my broadband cable internet has grown from 3Mbps to 15Mbps and I still pay $30 per month.

[pinion1000]

i really just can't justify siding with cox on this one. cox,if you're having congestion problem TOO BAD! you're the only one at fault. after all, you and only you over streached your service out this thin. upgrading service to keep up with the changing needs of you're clients and/or competiion is too expensive? how can you not have forseen that "fast" broadband internet would need to be faster and everytwhere. i would have to disagree with some comments as far as it being only for stricly network management. who cares if it is or isn't, the point is that we as a consumer don't pay to have our net access managed. we pay for it to be done ASAP, hence the selling point for broadband products is how many Mbps faster you can do as you wish... not 15 Mbps for email and .5 Mbps for P2P downloads (depending on the time of day). let me decided what i should use my entire bandwith on after all i pay for it just as much as my neighbor. far too long we, as consumers, have been getting screwed by BS like this. i say we download like crazy to truly get the message across to our repective ISP's not to modify our bandwith on how they think it should look like. what do you say?

[masada]

I think we all agree that lack of equipment is no excuse for not delivering proper services. There is, however, one thing I noticed: competition is healthy in more than one way. Qwest, Comcast, Cox, they all seem to have geographical monopolies - which on the surface seems to be ideal - but actually hurts them in the end. The fact that they are throttling at all is a clear indication they are unable to keep up with their customer's demand. If there were more companies that offered the same service speed options, companies (like the above mentioned) wouldn't have to compensate for their shortcomings in this way.
But they continue to want it all. I live in the lower part of MN where Charter Communications is king. A few years ago the city I live in was toying with the idea of having broadband access through power lines, a method that is extremely popular in Scandinavia and parts of Europe. But after Charter got word, a few phone calls were made, a couple private meetings with public officials reiterating to them how many people Charter employs, and then we never heard about it again.
There needs to be intervention on such a thing, of that I'm certain. But higher officials - who don't consider just how much information access is becoming a fact of life more than a novelty, and how we rely on computers as much as a farmer relies on a tractor - must be aware of just how important this topic really is.

[PCWorldJR]

Mark, interesting perspective. I guess my contention, to stick with the analogy, would be that FedEx does have the right to ship some packages with higher priorities than others. It also, however, charges those senders accordingly -- with the low-priority sender paying less than the high-priority guy.

That's where Cox's proposal gets questionable to me. Everyone's paying the same price for the same access, but the people behind the curtain are ranking particular activities and adjusting speed based on how important they deem them to be.

Now, admittedly, the Cox system isn't likely to pose noticeable problems for the vast majority of people. But the underlying principles it validates, and their potential future implications, are what strike me as troubling.

If we want to move toward a more controlled traffic management system, a tiered cap configuration -- where you pay a set amount based on which category of usage you fall into, then pay a per-gig fee if/when you go over that amount -- seems a lot more sensible and consumer-friendly to me. It'd be comparable to a cell phone plan, just with gigabytes instead of minutes. Sort of like what Comcast and AT&T have been testing recently. (www.pcworld.com/article/153312/broadband[ucaps[/u]comingtoatandt.html])

In any case, there's obviously a lot of gray area here. I'll be curious to see how others perceive the situation and what (if any) fallout results.

[dstarfire]

I'm going to have to side with Mark on this one. Yes, it does unfairly penalize the people that utilize those services heavily. However, those services also consume significantly more bandwidth than other activities (aside from updating, which is usually fairly minor). So, de-prioritizing these services would effectively lower their network usage to more normal levels, which is where the price is set for.



Additionally, almost all of those tasks are things that people will typically do in the background. Does it really matter, if updates take an extra 4 or 5 minutes to download as long as your IP telephony, online gaming and the like continue to function lag-free? I wouldn't think so.

[DivineOracle]

I think what these ISPs need to unclog their broadband congestion/latency is to deploy RocketConnect.
http://www.rocketstr.../rocketconnect/

Rather than waste money on bandwidth management/prioritisation tools, it makes more sense for them to invest in tools that can overcome network latency, maximise the actual bandwidth potential and address the broadband "last-mile" challenges.

[etschuetz]

A lot of people do not take into consideration that the backbone of the internet is being strained. And yes, it does cost billions of dollars to upgrade. Money that is handed off to the end user.
Ways to help combat all the strain, however, isn't in restricting, or regulating, the internet. I strongly feel an education practice to end users to maintain strong computer security is the key. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of megabytes of bandwidth are wasted on people that are overly infected with spyware and virus's/trojans that are constantly accessing the internet and broadcasting the trash. If you place a computer that is highly infected onto the internet and watched the traffic, the computer may run normal with offline activities, but slow online? Well, the data logs will show what I am talking about.
Now yes, this will not help with those that do a lot of online gaming, or...like myself, watch videos online through Hulu.com, or Netflix instant view. However, I accept the slowdown I experience from time to time because of such activities. The slow down I experience is negligible in comparison to going to DSL or dial up. So what if it isn't "instant", as long as it doesn't take 5 minutes to load a standard webpage, I am good to go.
Folks, we live in an "instant on" society. We want it, and we want it now. However, the average user doesn't consider the costs of such gratification. Then, when they get a notice that their bill goes up 5 or 10 dollars, the whine about it. It is the fact of getting the instant gratification they desire.
Sooner or later, the internet backbone will get its needed upgrades, but until then, we have to deal with occassional slow down, and network management such as Cox's current actions. However, they should reconsider things like OS updates as priority, instead of being secondary activities online. Their system isn't perfected yet.

[RNR19952]

No fan of tiered traffic, a little competition and all this BS about the network being clogged would go away

[ImaPhake]

"I would maybe have some sympathy with the principle of throttling - if only the top "low priority" usage was "jerks with nothing better to do than playing on-line games for countless hours".


Online gaming takes relatively little bandwidth in comparison to other "jerks with nothing better to do" than yakking on their VOIP for countless hours or those who spend their Internet time watching HD YouTube videos of chimps sneezing.

COX deciding who the "jerks" happen to be (even though they pay like everyone else) is problematic from the standpoint of just whose data receives priority when that data usage was already paid for. In other words, a gamer's money given to COX shouldn't be any less important than the same money given by a "chimp sneezing video" fanatic.

COX and Comcast are apparently being run by chimps anyway, in my opinion. They both engage in overselling and their greed takes precedence over any valid network improvement. Just look at the hype about "higher speeds than ever" which they use to get ever more customers to buy their service. At least one person in the comments here buys into that notion of 8Mbps being given to them while still paying the same as they did for 3Mbps as being some sort of proof that the cable Internet providers are actually "improving" something. They are not giving you anything which wasn't already available from the time they first put a cable into their neighborhood. The speed has always been there, they just didn't let you use it. Periodically trickling more bandwidth out with an accompanying ad-campaign has always been their modus-operandi -- making people (the gullible) think they're getting something which didn't previously exist, yet it was always there, being held back simply for the sake of future marketing. The pipe (cable bandwidth) is the same size today as it was 10 years ago -- something which the cable modem hackers have always known and taken advantage of by illegally "uncapping" their cable modems to access and utilize that speed.

[diego713]

I was going to purchase a home in Arkansas until finding out that Cox would be the only broadband service.
I will look elsewhere or stay in Tenn.
where thankfully we have other services to do business with. I feel sorry the Cox customers who have no other option.

[drrexx]

Again, PC World community standards seem enforced selectively. One comment gets "moderated" for being political, but another, prior comment -containing a political (and possibly racist) joke, shielded by a "lol"- passes through the filter...

[bimmin]

Yeah, I don't get it! Plus, my comment wasn't really political; more of a historical event :-)