Page 4 - Virgin to throttle net for it's users

white goods on the internet to monitor people's movements more here, more on the internetz enabled kettles

I saw an article recently that showed how p2p apps exploit a flaw in tcp/ip to use up bandwidth in a network. The piece talked about how p2p accounts for more than 1/2 of all traffic, and most importantly suggests a fix that would allow other apps to get their fair share without effectively slowing down the throughput of p2p.

http://tinyurl.com/6htzy9

Ten percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth, a super-leeching 0.5 percent swallow 40 percent of bandwidth, and the rest like your mom, 80 percent, sip less than 10 percent. But p2p isn't the culprit.

Pareto Principle, it's ... well, it's just because it is ....

First -- the context of this thread is Virgin and throttling. My point was in relation to throttling and virtual private networks.

Second -- as a customer of PacificBellSBCAT&T yaDSLhoo since the company name had four unabbreviated syllables I can unequivocally say what AT&T wants is to maximize profit.

THIRD the last thing PBSBCATT is looking out for is their customer's best interest

One big downside to the whole corporate/public company system is that it's not enough for a company to make money; it's has to grow. Not only that, if you're a really big company you have to grow more than Wall Street analysts expected. Otherwise shareholders get unhappy and executives start losing jobs. So even if you have a great product with paying customers, if you don't make more money this year than you did last year you're in trouble. For many businesses that's good: it prompts them to improve or add products to attract more customers. But if you're a utility-like business where your product is ubiquitous and you already count pretty much everyone a customer there's nothing to do but find ways to start screwing your customers.

F;lar is right about public companies, but its not true for all corporations, or even all large companies. Wall Street demands ever increasing profits, and Sarbanes-Oxley requires huge amounts of paperwork.

There are very large companies that are not public. Mars Candy is one, everyone knows their product and no one knows much, because its private.

Utilities, when they are regulated, increase their profit by spending more. This is why AT&T built air conditioned relay stations on the top of mountains, with indoor plumbing. The cost was insane, but it was just added into the "rate base" and they were allowed to make 8% on the rate base.

It is rare that a regulator actually achieves what they claim to want. So while I hate AT&T and Verizon, I don't have any faith in a bunch of bureaucrats doing the 'regulation' either.

I'm not an expert on internet matters, but that article about ATT sounds like their saying "OMGOOSE WERE RUNNING OUT OF INTERNETZ" as if there won't be new hardware installed or old hardware upgraded within the next couple of years.

How I see it, the internet infrastructure would grow with increasing demand by consumers, much like we get faster processors for those prettier graphical interfaces.

AT&T is fear mongering. Its not about capacity, its about them wanting more money for the same capacity, or even better, more money for doing less.

There is a real problem that streaming video is using huge amounts of bandwidth in ways that network engineers of five years ago would not have dreamed. Actually, streaming anything, even audio, is a lot more of a challenge to engineer than normal packet messages (email, web pages, etc.)

In the early 90s, all of the telcos and cable companies were doing trials of 'video on demand' because they knew that consumers would want it. All of the trials failed, because the networking tools (switches, routers, etc.) could not handle the volume of say a million users in Atlanta each watching their own stream of TV or movies.

Now, places like Revision 3 and YouTube are streaming video to zillions of people. Its a real engineering challenge.

Larry Roberts, who was one of the original founders of Apranet before it became the Internet, has a company with new routing ability. He is selling it as the solution. It would, of course, make him very rich again. I can't tell if he has a solution to the problem, or just a product.

Listening to the telcos spread FUD makes me sick.