Transmissions

by Dragorn

Why is it that while cellular carriers are creating unlimited data, voice, and text plans, wired carriers are trying to limit the amount of traffic customers can have?

Leaked memos from Time Warner (later confirmed by the company) indicate they are looking at a tiered bandwidth plan with hard limits in some regions of Texas, and Comcast has gotten significant bad press lately due to selective throttling and spoofing of endpoints on high-bandwidth applications.

This is fundamentally different from how broadband service has been provided in the U.S.

Why the sudden drastic change?

Most likely, like almost any corporate decision, it comes down to money, but that answer is likely over-simplistic.  Internet providers (in the U.S. anyhow) don't just provide Internet service.

Time Warner, Comcast, Cox, and Verizon are media conglomerates who offer TV, voice service, and so on.

They get money from being common carriers (someone who slings bits to your home) but really want you to sign up for their TV and voice service too.

The situation isn't just about bandwidth, though they're happy to parade figures like "five percent of the users use 90 percent of the bandwidth" and stop the discussion.

Nor is it simply about copyright concerns raised by file sharing: Services like Skype, iTunes, and Netflix directly compete with landline, VoIP and Video-on-Demand offerings, essentially costing the carrier money against their own services.

By instituting network traffic caps, overage fees, and throttling, what each carrier is attempting to do is essentially build their own private Internet, selling their own services.

Sure, you could get your HD movie from NetTunes, but then you might go over your 10 GB/month limit, and besides, it would take ten times longer to download than from Time-Cast, your friendly media conglomerate.

Selectively interfering with traffic on specific ports, or modifying traffic at specific times, allows a carrier to change consumer perception of the quality of services offered by other companies.

Once a carrier admits to throttling some kinds of traffic to increase the quality of other kinds, it becomes very difficult to prove they have not degraded the performance of competing services.  "Sorry your VoIP calls are so bad, you must have picked a bad company.  Wouldn't you like to try our own IP Phone offering?"

For the suspicious by nature, this should immediately raise red flags.

Our strength is our diversity.

By creating walled gardens where control of the media is placed in the hands of a few corporations, diversity drops and censorship may become a problem, much like the market pressure of to-remain-unnamed super-retail stores which will only sell "family friendly" censored videos and music, requiring studios to release custom versions and limiting consumers who don't, won't, or can't shop elsewhere to the companies' view of "appropriate material."

Once the distribution is controlled (or limited), it becomes trivial to passively censor by omission: Simply don't include "objectionable" movies or TV shows.

More likely, consumers will end up paying more for the same services than we would in an environment with competition - of course, our cable and bandwidth bills have decreased as the technology improves, right?

Selective shaping and throttling have finally gotten enough attention that the FCC is involved.

Unfortunately, they're primarily involved because of how the throttling is done, and not necessarily because of the practice itself.  Instead of delaying the delivery, or outright dropping packets, the Comcast throttling mechanism appears to impersonate the remote end of the connection to send TCP RST frames, pretending to indicate that the connection has been terminated.

Actively spoofing the addresses not assigned to Comcast was enough to cause the FCC and New York state to become involved.

A recent hearing held at Harvard which invited the public to make comments concerning filtering and traffic shaping may be re-held at Stanford University due to allegations of Comcast hiring stand-ins to fill the available seats and limit dissenting opinion.

Broadband companies are attempting to frame the network neutrality debate in a light that allows them to play both sides of the equation - and gain a profit from both sides.

By charging the user (you) for basic network access, they make money the traditional way, but then they make more by charging the provider (rhymes with "Foogle" and "MooCube") for "priority access" to the network to ensure the timely delivery of frames to a customer, or by getting them to pay a supposed "use charge."

By offering a service users want, a popular website would then be considered to be at fault for clogging the lines of providers (who are already taking money from the consumer to provide those lines).  Then the provider would charge the user (still you) for bandwidth overage when the movie you downloaded (rhymes with "PetMix") in high-def pushes you over your new monthly bandwidth quota.

"Y'know, Bobby, it'd be an awful shame if your packets fell down the stairs on their way to your house.  It's a dangerous Internet out there, anything could happen.  For just a few bucks per meg we could help make sure they get where they're going safely, help them across the street, keep someone from hitting them with a TCP RST."

Due to its (relative) origins in the telecom networks, Internet providers in the United States are assumed to function as common carriers - like train, ship, and voice carriers, the product, language, or quantity shouldn't matter.

Email, web, files, and VoIP would be the same, right?

Unfortunately not.

In a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, carriers in the U.S. were classified as "information services" instead of "telecommunications services."

By escaping the telecom classification network providers are free to reclassify competitors' traffic and are not required to open their distribution networks to those competitors.

Shaping, overage charging, and network neutrality appear to be major concerns for the ISPs, major enough to fight legislation which would forbid the practice of charging content providers or de-prioritizing content from competing providers.

It should also be a major concern for you as a consumer.

Get involved: contact your congress-person when network neutrality bills are being voted on (the EFF is an excellent source for information on upcoming votes).  Pick bandwidth providers who aren't spoofing connections.

Attend FCC hearings if they're in your area (and, apparently, showing up extra early would seem to be a good idea).