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this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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"Fast lanes" have always been bullshit.
If you're paying for 100mbps, and the person you're talking to is paying for 100mpbs, and you're not consistently getting 100mbps between you, then at least one of you is getting ripped off. This reality where you can pay extra money to make sure the poors don't get in the way of your packets has never been the one we live in.
Of course, there are definitely people who are getting ripped off, but "fast lanes" are just an additional avenue by which to rip them off a little more; not a single provider who's currently failing to provide the speed they advertise is planning to suddenly spend money fixing that and offering a new tier on their suddenly-properly-provisioned internet, if only net neutrality would go away.
As Bill Burr said, I don't know all the ins and outs, but I know you're not trying to make less money.
That's only really true of you're relatively close to each other on the same ISP. The father apart and the more hops you need to make the less likely it becomes, through no fault of your ISP.
Incorrect, and that was exactly my point
This is like saying that if the fruit at a store is rotten sometimes, it's not the grocer's fault, because the fruit had to come a long way and went bad in transit. The exact job you are paying the ISP for, is to deal with the hops and give you good internet. It's actually a lot easier at the trunk level (because the pipes are bigger and more reliable and there are more of them / more redundancy and predictability and they get more attention.)
I won't say there isn't some isolated exception, but in reality it's a small small small minority of the time. Take an internet connection that's having difficulty getting the advertised speed and run mtr or something, and I can almost guarantee that you'll find that the problem is near one or the other of the ends where there's only one pipe and maybe it's having hardware trouble or individually underprovisioned or something.
Actually Verizon deliberately underprovisioning Netflix is the exception that proves the rule -- that was a case where it actually was an upstream pipe that wasn't big enough to carry all the needed traffic, but it was perfectly visible to them and they could easily have solved it if they wanted to, and chose not to, and the result was visibly different from normal internet performance in almost any other case.
I probably should've been a little clearer that I'm taking scales of thousands of km here.
I'm on an island in the North Atlantic. I don't hold it against my ISP if I can't get my full 1.5Gbps down from services hosted in California.
Yeah, makes sense, that's a little different. In that case there is actually congestion on the trunk that makes things slow for the customers.
My point I guess is that the people who want to sell a "fast lane" to their customers, or want to say Net Neutrality is the reason your home internet is slow when you're accessing North America, are lying. Neutrally-applied traffic shaping to make things work is allowed, of course; just want to throttle their competitors and they're annoyed that the government is allowed to tell them not to.
Ehhh, I get what you are saying but I would rephrase the above poster's comment a little then. If a person is paying for 100Mbps and they are able to get/find a source or some combination of sources that are able to supply them 100mbps of data then that's what they should be getting. The easiest example being a torrent for popular Linux distros.
I personally think the solution to that should be some kind of regulatory minimum around the advertisement of speed or contractual service obligation. For example if a person pays for a 100Mbps connection then the ISP should be required to supply that speed at +/- 5% instantaneous and -.5% on average (because if you give them a range you know they will maintain the lowest possible speed to be in compliance).
Don't look too hard at my numbers, I pulled them out of my ass, but hopefully it gets across the idea.
Keep in mind that because few residential users max out capacity simultaneously the ISPs "overbook" capacity, and usually this works out because they have solid stats on average use and usually few people need the max capacity simultaneously.
Of course some ISPs are greedier than others and do it to the extreme where the uplink/downlink is regularly maxed out without giving anything near the promised bandwidth to a significant fraction of customers. The latter part should be disincentivized.
Force the ISPs to keep stats on peak load and how frequently their customers are unable to get advertised bandwidth, and if it's above some threshold it should be considered comparable to excess downtime, and then they should be forced to pay back the affected customers. The only way they can avoid losing money is by either changing their plans to make a realistic offer or by building out capacity.
Yeah, I wish we'd do this.
I have a good ISP that has worked properly pretty much every time I've tested it (usually a few times/year, and usually during peak hours). But I've had bad ISPs where I've never gotten the advertised speed (best I got was 15% less than advertised, but it was usually 30% or more less).
Distance would add latency but shouldn't reduce speed on well maintained infrastructure.
There's always going to be some level of loss and retransmission. It would take a perfect stream of UDP, since TCP needs acknowledgements in order to continue sending data. That can be reduced by window scaling and multiplexing, but it's still going to happen.
Very rarely your are paying for 100Mbps. You are paying for "up to" 100Mbps.
It's so weird that that phrasing is even accepted as the norm. It would be unacceptable if a grocery store charges you for 'up to' 2 liters of soda, and then tells you to go fuck yourself when they give you only 0.5 liter.
It is however acceptable at the supermarket when a product says "Made with 100% white meat chicken"
I just checked my agreement, and it says something like this:
But the marketing says nothing about "up to" like it does with typical cable and DSL services (we use a small, local ISP), and I've honestly never seen my speed go below the advertised limit. Every time I test it (and I've tested during peak hours as well), I get pretty much exactly what's advertised.
That said, the agreement I'm reading is kind of funny:
Random stupid stuff in my agreement
Yet when I call support, they ask me to do a ping test. I know what they're intending to say (it's talking about hacking, such as nmap-ing some remote service), but the wording is awkward.
And this:
So I guess they don't like porn. It goes on to talk about stuff involving minors, but this wording seemed broad.
I guess I can't troll.
So I can't recommend lemmy I guess, since people here like piracy. Oh, and I also can't tell people how to check their network connection by using
ping...Blah, blah, blah, I've probably violated a half-dozen of those provisions. I'm guessing most of them won't stand up in court, and they'd have a hard time proving anything since everything should be TLS encrypted.
Fortunately, my ISP is pretty decent in practice and doesn't seem to care what I do with it.
Found the guy that either does illegal things, or embarrassingly stupid things with his ISP connection.
I do neither.
I'm a developer that likes to mess around with hobby projects, and that tends to look a lot like illegal/stupid stuff. For example, I'll port scan my cloud services I maintain (explicitly against the rules) to verify it's configured properly. I'll create persistent connections to enable automatic deploys from home (again, explicitly against the TOS). I'll use torrents to download legitimate Linux ISOs (again, against TOS), and I'll use Tor to mess around with onion sites (again, against TOS). I'm building a P2P app, so there's a lot of unfamiliar packets flying about.
I'm an enthusiast, but I'm a respectful enthusiast, so I do my shenanigans off peak hours. If I did illegal stuff, I would hide it so the ISP doesn't find out.
Most consumer internet providers have clauses in their agreements which prohibit things like hosting a website, or serving content. Both of which are things done pretty regularly by hobby level selfhosters.
Now, I’ve never actually heard of an ISP actioning on such clauses, but they are there none the less.
This is BS by the ISP. My ISP advertises they give 140 Mbps, I get 140 and sometimes 150 Mbps. Maybe during peak hours I may get slightly less, like 130. But it's not supposed to be drastically low, like 80-90.
However, the user must also consider that some issues are beyond the ISP's control, like how loaded the destination server is.