# Internet price hike



## Charles_Edwards (Apr 16, 2009)

So then, I've been online a lot recently. I mean a hell of a lot. In doing so you usually come across random bits of news. My cousin and I have both been following a particular story where our ISP is basically trying to charge us an extra arm and leg just because we put our internet to use.

Basically, Time Warner Cable, as well as a number of other are running 'tests' to see how well this price hike goes over with the public. Hopefully it won't go well at all. I personally am making a number of posts like this where appropriate to make sure this is well known about.

This price hike bases the price of your internet on usage. Pick a plan, don't go over the cap of what you're allowed to download/upload, and you get your bill as you expect. However, for every gig you go over, you get charged a dollar extra, and possibly add tax. The main saving grace in that is they will only charge you up to $75 extra. Now the bandwidth caps currently being talked about are 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB caps. Prices ranging from $29.95 - $75.

So, normal internet bill for me and my cousin is about $40 right now. However, at that price we would have a cap of 10 or 20 GB. Due to online gaming, downloading patches, constant updates, and streaming TV shows on Hulu, mine and his combined usage is over 200 GB a month. So even if we got the max 40 GB cap, we would still be getting charged the extra $75, bringing our monthly internet bill to $150.

So, due to this price hike, I as well as many other online gamers may have to say bye bye to their internet just to avoid having to pay that much. It's pretty ridiculous. So, who knows when I'll be back online once such happens.

Now, atop this that is going to hurt a lot of business. The online gaming community will lose a large number of people who just can't afford, or refuse to pay the outrageous sum it would take for the internet to do such. This means Anyone who charges money for people to play their games online, will be losing a decent amount of income. Great way to help the economy Time Warner! Let's list off a few why don't we? WoW (Blizzard), Xbox Live (Microsoft), Lord of the Rings Online (Turbine), and countless other games people pay to play online. Even if the people don't stop their internet, they are gonna have to cut costs somewhere. So either way still in danger of losing a lot of business.

Now, while I can understand the reasoning behind their price increase, what I can't understand is how they think it is a good idea. Sure, increase price to cover losses. However people are used to being able to use their internet as much as they want for what they are paying. Don't try to screw us over.

With that all being said I leave the topic open for discussion, and let's see how things go about on here with such. Oh, and a few source links at the bottom.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Midmarket/Time-....ndwidth-668524/

http://www.krunker.com/2009/04/13/time-w....ns-just-lovely/


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## Irreverent (Apr 16, 2009)

Its not just the US, its happening everywhere.  And I must admit, I'm a bit conflicted by it.

As a "white hat" hacker, I'm a tad miffed about how DPI and traffic shaping/capping violates the spirit of network neutrality.

As director of operations for a large wireless/ISP, I can definitely see the advantages of monetizing the internet (beyond basic access) and responsibility to the shareholders.  Its the age old dichotomy, "giving it away" vs. "charging what its worth."

Personally, I think that internet fees should be elastic, determined by use.  Its a utility model that has served the telephone, water, electric and gasoline model well.  The challenge is when you shift from a price capped to price floored model, there's going to be some churn.


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## Aden (Apr 16, 2009)

We have Time Warner at our house, and we heard about these "trials". I _love_ how our trial starts in June, when everyone goes outside more and all the college kids go home.

Thankfully, there is another ISP in our area. We're looking into availability and will definitely be switching if this goes through.


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## Endless Humiliation (Apr 16, 2009)

I think this is the same sort of dealie they do in Russia.


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## Elessara (Apr 16, 2009)

Gamers will not quit playing their games because of a price hike... Gamers will find a way to feed their addiction one way or another...


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## ADF (Apr 16, 2009)

This is happening elsewhere? Hell I was surprised to see all my ISP prices suddenly shoot up, I didn't think it was widespread.


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## ToeClaws (Apr 16, 2009)

Speaking as a Network Admin/Engineer, I feel a lot like Irre does - conflicted on it, because I can easily identify with both sides of the argument. 

When streaming video and voice started to become popular, the increase in bandwidth use was literally exponential.  At my work, the university has a set amount of bandwidth for it's Internet connectivity, and it's very difficult to provision it according to demands any more because of the huge increase in traffic.  For years, it was increased about 10 to 15% a year, which was adequate to deal with a gentle rise in usage.  Now though, the yearly increases would have to be more like 50 to 100% to handle the big demand increases.  Try justifying that to a board of directors who don't want to spend any more than they have to, especially in a downturn economy.

In RezNet, the residence network, matters are even worse.  Because that network is all students, it's abused worse than any other network.  On the main campus network, we can at least say "No P2P, or no video steaming", but RezNet has to be an open network where everything is allowed because they are paying for the service.  To try and make the bandwidth work, we have a packet shaper appliance that can rate-limit various classes of traffic, otherwise the bandwidth is instantly consumed with P2P and video traffic.

So, that said, I can see exactly why ISPs want to do this, and I think it makes sense... to a point.  As long as the charges are *fair* to the users.  I think adopting that model should reward low bandwidth users with savings as well as making bandwidth abusers pay for their extra usage, but the pricing scheme shouldn't be so outragous that it forces people to ditch their Internet connectivity.

On the other side of the coin, as a user, it does bother me too, because I know I personally stream A LOT of video over the Net, and that's because I don't have or want a TV.  I refuse to be forced to watch commercials - I will not pay a huge amount of money for cable or satellite only to be forced to watch commercials 25 to 30% of the time, so I watch what I want to watch on the Net.  Paying for what I use will likely mean more money needed for my connection, which to me sucks because it just seems one way or another, someone is backing the consumer into a corner and demanding money.

Now I don't mind paying a little more, like I said, if it's fair.  I don't often exceed the 60g limit I have now each month, so if they want to charge another 50 cents a gig or something, that's cool.  If it's something outrageous, then no, I don't want that.  

Now, as for games - I do have some good news on that front.  Watching all the traffic flows in RezNet for the various game classes, I can tell you that games don't take a lot of bandwidth.  In fact, it's quite surprising how little most take, so I wouldn't worry about that, at least.


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## Charles_Edwards (Apr 16, 2009)

Mainly my concern is the fact that I too do a lot of watching TV online. Done through Hulu, which has some commercials, but for the most part it is very tolerable. Atop that, I don't have a home phone line. Just my cell, there fore I can't get DSL in my area since we don't have 'naked' DSL here.

As far as the gaming goes, I mainly am worried about when on Xbox live I have to DL a game update, or content for a game. That's a decent bit of bandwidth right there if you do that stuff often. It can end up really eating away at things. Patches for MMO games can also eat that up if it is one of the large update patches.

I do understand the supply and demand system of business, and that they are looking to make money. This I can understand, paying for a service is the understood practice as it has been for centuries upon centuries. If it is a fair price, then I have no problem paying it. But I just personally think this is too much, and with my lack of options to get a good price, I just feel like I'm being taken advantadge of.


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## Shino (Apr 16, 2009)

Hoo boy.

I'm glad I use small-town ISPs. I use well over 250GB (yes B not b) of transfer a month over my 12Mbps DSL (used to have fiber, but I moved).

I think that capping internet usage is bull***t. Considering that 95% of users don't use anywhere near their capacity, why not let the rest of us use it?

Unless they want to go back to 8Â¢/byte and 300 baud, they better rethink this idea. After all, it's a bad idea to try to unfairly cap the people that could DoS your corporate intranet in a heartbeat.


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## Irreverent (Apr 16, 2009)

ToeClaws said:


> So, that said, I can see exactly why ISPs want to do this, and I think it makes sense... to a point.  As long as the charges are *fair* to the users.  I think adopting that model should reward low bandwidth users with savings as well as making bandwidth abusers pay for their extra usage, but the pricing scheme shouldn't be so outragous that it forces people to ditch their Internet connectivity.



The big issues is fairness.  A lot of the original end user contracts were silent on usage, or had an undefined concept of "unlimited."  Nothing is truly unlimited.  Ask the chef at the "all you can eat" buffet to feed you for life and.....well, you see what I mean.

I think there's going to be a period of wild swings on this.  Some providers are jumping on DPI and throttling, others will avoid it to attract market share and then implement it.....when their customers have no other ISP to move too.

Its gonna come down to regulation, at least in Canada anyway.



Shino said:


> Unless they want to go back to 8Â¢/byte and 300 baud, they better rethink this idea. After all, it's a bad idea to try to unfairly cap the people that could DoS your corporate intranet in a heartbeat.



In a sense, that's what the caps are.....they're not hard stops; you don't get limited to that.  Its really a price floor with a variable rate set to kick in at the capped mark.  Most utilities (water, electricity, gas etc) work this way.  You pay a monthly minimum and a variable usage component.

And for what its worth, attempting a DDoS attack against a major, national, internet backbone provider is will either get your service  shut off, or black helicopters dispatched with a no-knock warrant.  It really depends on my mood and how much coffee I've had.


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## Carenath (Apr 16, 2009)

Some sentiments from the Irish internet situation:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=259
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=60



Irreverent said:


> Its not just the US, its happening everywhere.  And I must admit, I'm a bit conflicted by it.
> 
> As a "white hat" hacker, I'm a tad miffed about how DPI and traffic shaping/capping violates the spirit of network neutrality.
> 
> ...


I would have similer sentiments. I am strongly against DPI and Traffic Shaping.. and I go out of my way to avoid ISPs that do this, to the point where I will go out of my way to bypass whatever system they use. Also, as a white-hat hacker and systems administrator.

I am a strong proponant of network neutrality, in NOT degrading the performance of one protocol over another and in NOT monitoring and reporting on what users are accessing through their internet connection. An ISP should have just one responsibility: Provide a pipe to the internet, provide technical support to ensure it keeps running and be paid fairly for the services provided.

I can of course see the other side of the argument.. BitTorrent, video streaming and other applications do consume large amounts of bandwidth, and it gets to a point where it is no longer cost-effective for an ISP to allow those users to keep consuming the large amounts they do, while paying the same as everyone else. To that extent, I agree with Irre and ToeClaws. Charging users by what they use, is only fair, and if it is done right, it will see net-savings for those who dont use vast amounts of bandwdith.

The issue I would have, is down to how the ISP choses to do this. One ISP here uses a rolling-cap, and instead of charging you for overages, they simply throttle your entire connection down to 128k/128k until your usage drops back down below the limit. The connection is still protocol-neutral, they didnt seem to throttle BitTorrent or any other traffic to my knowledge, and that worked out fine for me.
My current ISP doesnt throttle or shape your traffic in the slightest, and they do provide a completely unlimited service, albeit with a fair-usage of 250GB a month for residential users, which I dont mind.

If ISPs would maintain a protocol neutral stance, and provide a range of capped connections with the option for an unlimited or business-tier connection with no cap at an approprietly higher fee a month, It would not bother me, because I'll get what I pay for and be happy with that.

I also rest a lot of the blame for these price hikes, not on ISPs, but on the Tier2 connectivity and Tier1 Backbone providers... they are the ones the ISPs have to pay for, for the bandwidth heavy users are consuming.. and if you ever tried to get a dedicated server, or co-location, you'll see just how much this kind of bandwidth actually costs, its far from cheap.


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## Runefox (Apr 16, 2009)

To the consumer, I feel your pain.

To the techs, I feel your pain.

To the execs... Cry. Me. A. River.

The current business model is one that banks on consumers never reaching their caps and never using their connections for anything other than web browsing, advertising insane speeds and, for a while, unlimited bandwidth (though it wasn't, really; You'd still get singled out if you did a lot of data-moving), when the infrastructure can't handle it. And now that maintaining these lofty speeds and bandwidth promises becomes a strain, what do they do? They install DPI equipment and throttle, instead of expanding the network infrastructure and moving forward like they should be, because apparently that's more cost-effective and easier to line wallets with. It also neatly brings them in line with foreseeable future laws requiring extensive logging and privacy violation on the ISP's end to stem the spread of piracy and cyber crime, and, with a starry twinkle in their eyes, roll out tiered "programming" for Internet connections, as so sagaciously, though ironically satirically, foretold here. Lovely.

Rogers up here recently (within the past six months or so) rolled out a new pricing strategy that hiked the prices and in addition added bandwidth caps where before there were none (with three months of free overage to "adjust"). They've also long been accused of, though they vehemently deny it, throttling Bittorrent and other P2P, as well as _all encrypted traffic_. Makes you pine for the days when all they blocked was incoming connections on ports 80, 21, and 25.


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## Irreverent (Apr 16, 2009)

Runefox said:


> To the execs... Cry. Me. A. River.



Yeah, its an issue.




> And now that maintaining these lofty speeds and bandwidth promises becomes a strain, what do they do? They install DPI equipment and throttle, instead of expanding the network infrastructure and moving forward like they should be, because apparently that's more cost-effective and easier to line wallets with.



Well....to be fair, our end to end spend was $6 Billion last year on internet and inter networking facilities.  You only need 4 times the population of Canada to recoup that at $45.00 per month.


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## Runefox (Apr 16, 2009)

Well, the funny thing is that now that high bandwidth usage is more mainstream, most of that infrastructure is, as I understand it (especially as an end-user), being used to play catch-up and provide the framework necessary to try and support the massive demands being placed on the network. My major issue with the whole thing is that it's still advertised, yet you get punished (and throttled) for trying to make use of your connection, not to mention being forced into agreement with policy changes and being charged early cancellation fees over leaving mid-contract if you decide to do so and have a contract. As my managers and trainers used to say when I used to work for a third-party call centre fielding Rogers Wireless calls, "Rogers has many procedures in place to punish customers who are in breech of contract, but there is no responsibility for it to do anything when it's the one in breech of contract." The biggest farce there is that if you enter into a contract with Rogers or any large ISP, really, you're entering into a contract that almost literally states, "Oh, and we can change this contract at any time without notice."

I realize that there are reasons behind it, but I also see it as incredibly bad customer service, and the near-monopoly (I suppose you could call it a duopoly) we have here in Canda creates an incredibly stale, uncompetitive atmosphere for Canadian networks altogether, at least in the consumer market. When considering however much Rogers/Group Telecom and Bell spend on their infrastructure, you still have to consider the cost of installing all of that more-or-less useless stop-gap solution DPI/QoS hardware combos (for purposes of regulating what should already be more than covered, but is in essence grossly oversold) and the deployment of software/hardware to autmagically inject bandwidth limit notices into unrelated HTML. Without being in the business itself, and looking in from the consumer point of view, I find it quite difficult to quantify exactly what Rogers is doing with its profits.


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## net-cat (Apr 16, 2009)

I don't mind the outright cap. "You get XYZ per month." I mean, fuck. FA's ISP does the same thing, they just measure it in Mbit/sec rather that GByte/month.

What I take issue with is throttling and traffic shaping, especially since it's necessarily a secret endeavor. (Can't work around it if you don't know what it is.) I also take issue with making the cap a "fine print" item. If you're selling me 250 GB/month, I want to know it up front.

Also, what the fuck. $75/month for 40GB/month? That'll only work in areas where they're a monopoly.


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## Irreverent (Apr 16, 2009)

net-cat said:


> I don't mind the outright cap. "You get XYZ per month." I mean, fuck. FA's ISP does the same thing, they just measure it in Mbit/sec rather that GByte/month.
> 
> What I take issue with is throttling and traffic shaping, especially since it's necessarily a secret endeavor. (Can't work around it if you don't know what it is.) I also take issue with making the cap a "fine print" item. If you're selling me 250 GB/month, I want to know it up front.



You'd expect that on a commercial/business hosting account, but its pretty rare to find contracted SLA/O's on a rez services; at least up here.  As Runefox pointed out, its pretty much, "use our service at these terms or go without."



> Also, what the fuck. $75/month for 40GB/month? That'll only work in areas where they're a monopoly.



Problem is, there are a lot of areas up here were there is only one provider, either by CRTC decree or by cost of market entrance.  Not a monopoly per se, but not much different either.

Seems North Ireland is getting it right though.  Albeit they are smaller than the Maritimes, they seem to be doing ok.  I need to dig into their model.


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## Sam (Apr 16, 2009)

I'm not exactly network savvy, so forgive me if I sound a little stupid;


But with all this network and bandwith capping, would this open up new doors for up and coming ISP's? Wouldn't the pricing of different web packages and plans make up for better deals and competition?

I'm thinking over time, maybe the prices would be more suitable for the consumer.


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## Runefox (Apr 16, 2009)

Sam said:


> I'm not exactly network savvy, so forgive me if I sound a little stupid;
> 
> 
> But with all this network and bandwith capping, would this open up new doors for up and coming ISP's? Wouldn't the pricing of different web packages and plans make up for better deals and competition?
> ...



I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that if Company A decided to cap its bandwidth, that there would be more bandwidth available for Company B to bring itself up to par, and for Company C to get its foot in the door?

It doesn't really work like that, and the fact that the prices have been steadily rising since forever punctuates that. What's happening right now is that the major providers have grossly oversold their bandwidth - They don't have enough of it to provide consistently to all their customers all the time, so with newer surfing/usage habits, this has really put a strain on them. Instead of building up their infrastructure, they'd been sitting around doing virtually nothing with it for quite some time (several years of stagnation in the Canadian market (or at least over here), for example), claiming a certain speed and unlimited monthly bandwidth. With the rush of streaming media and other bandwidth-intensive activities, they've begun to feel the sting, and so have hiked the pricing in a bid to both raise the funds needed to rework the networks, and implemented bandwidth caps with overage fees to discourage anything but modest usage, with nice PR campaigns explaining what a gigabyte will give you and how it's so much value, and how you're not losing anything. Basically, instead of fixing the problem, they're smearing it with PR bull.

This has nothing to do with competition and everything to do with the lack of it. There is literally no room for any newcomers to the business, because they all play by the rules of the owner of the backbone - In Canada, that means Group Telecom/Rogers and Bell/Aliant. Every ISP in Canada, AFAIK, makes use of their backbones, and simply lease bandwidth from those two, much like Telus has a lease from Bell/Aliant networks. This means that they're slaves to their pricing models, and have to price accordingly high in order to cover their own operations costs. I should mention that it's nigh-impossible for a startup to set up a new backbone.

TL;DR, this won't help the industry at all.


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## Sam (Apr 16, 2009)

Yes, that was exactly I was getting at, thank you. 


It's a shame that many ISP's ( if not all ) were surprised by the jump in Internet/bamdwith usage. D: I've never actually paid for my own, I just use my buddies connection, but with the news of all of this, I dont really want to start now. ( Paying for my own connection. )


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## net-cat (Apr 17, 2009)

Irreverent said:


> "use our service at these terms or go without."


Except for residential ISPs, it's generally more along the lines of:
"Use our service at these terms or go without."
"What terms?"
"We don't have to tell you."
"How do I know if I'm breaking them?"
"When we terminate your account without notice."



Irreverent said:


> Problem is, there are a lot of areas up here were there is only one provider, either by CRTC decree or by cost of market entrance.  Not a monopoly per se, but not much different either.


I'm lucky in that regard, I guess. If that (40GB/$75) was my choice on cable here, I'd go with two 768k DSL circuits and load balance between them. It'd be cheaper ($60 or so) and provide more bandwidth. (235GB/mo)

Gah. It's a wonder you don't see more people black catting it, really...


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## Captain Howdy (Apr 17, 2009)

Yikes, I have Time Warner, and I use the internet for gaming (both PC and 360), I don't know my exact usage, but I'd say I run my internet actively at least 75 hours a week (not including my sister, mum, or dad). So my dad will probably start getting that heavy bill of +75$ a month, not to mention we use Vonage :l


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## Shino (Apr 17, 2009)

Soo... just read the news this morning that Time Warner decided to dump their stupid idea. 'Bout time.

To refine my previous statement, I think caps are reasonable, as long as they are *clearly* defined at the beginning of the contract, and that a truly unlimited option be available as well for a reasonable price. None of this ambiguous undefined overpriced crap.

And 'rev, just to be clear, I'm not actually stupid enough to try to DDoS a backbone provider through a small-town ISP. Not unless I'm really tired and pissed off at the same time. Would kinda be fun to see the heavily armed guys in Nomex jumping out of the copter, though.
Eh, it would never work. My connection goes through four seperate ISPs before it even hits the backbone. Besides, my Cray supercomputer is broken.

Wow, I must be really tired if I just wrote that. I'll shut up now.

*curls up on the bed*


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## Zero_Point (Apr 17, 2009)

I love hearing people complain about $75 a month for high-speed when they're still charging $20 a month for dialup here. :/ 256K DSL? That's $60 a month. What's the bandwidth cap? Beats me, though I doubt you'd ever use it all in a month as shitty and unreliable as their DSL is. This truly IS a case of "You can either use us, or go without" because noone else provides out here in the boondocks.


Except satellite internet, but we all know that sucks balls.

*edit*
This is the best internet we can get out here:
http://www.plateautel.com/meganet_rate_plans.asp


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## Carenath (Apr 17, 2009)

Irreverent said:


> Seems North Ireland is getting it right though.  Albeit they are smaller than the Maritimes, they seem to be doing ok.  I need to dig into their model.


If you're referring to my conversation with you earlier.. Im from the Republic of Ireland. As I mentioned earlier.. ISPs here do things differently than they do in North America. All of the residential ones cap their services.. packages are charged by speed.. and you get a certain cap with each package. In practise most ISPs dont charge you extra if you go over your cap, so its a defacto unlimited service. A number of them do throttle P2P and BitTorrent traffic a number just QoS.. and a number dont do anything. Access is subject to Eircom being able to provision a DSL service in your area, as all the other ISPs just resell Eircom. Eircom is the former state-owned telecom/isp and own the entire phone network. As a consequence.. the price of broadband itself, doesnt factor in the line-rental charge of â‚¬25.15/mo... making the 7.6Mbit DSL package I used to have... about â‚¬65.10 a month as a result.
Since my parents pay for the phone line.. I only ever had to pay the â‚¬39.95 for the broadband and that was it.

The ISP in question, DigiWeb is the only ISP I know of that does throttle your internet connection if you exceed the cap for your package. They use a rolling 30 day cap, which I think is the best solution to the problem out there. Suppose you download 10GB a day, for 30 days, and you have a 30GB cap.. if you download a GB the following day, you get throttled.. 24 hours later, your usage will go from 31GB down to 21GB as the 10GB you downloaded 30 days ago gets knocked off.. and your usage will drop by 10GB for each day you downloaded 10GB.. so basically if you can keep your total usage under your cap in a 30GB period.. you never get throttled.
Its a fairer system, because you can just spread out your heavy downloads.. so if you get close to your limit.. you just wait a few days and download some more.. rather than having a hard per-month limit.
Digiweb dont provide an unlimited connection, even to businesses, but they do provide a better service than most of the other ISPs... they dont block any incoming ports, and they allow you to host servers.. you can even get a static IP address on request.

I switched to cable for the faster speeds and lower price.. I pay â‚¬42/mo and I get 20Mbit down, 1.5 up, with a semi-static IP and no cap or throttling. THough it helps that the cable company has its own tier-2 network that covers most of Europe and peers with T1 backbones.



Shino said:


> And 'rev, just to be clear, I'm not actually stupid enough to try to DDoS a backbone provider through a small-town ISP. Not unless I'm really tired and pissed off at the same time. Would kinda be fun to see the heavily armed guys in Nomex jumping out of the copter, though.
> Eh, it would never work. My connection goes through four seperate ISPs before it even hits the backbone. Besides, my Cray supercomputer is broken.


Actually, its quite possible to DoS a backbone provider, and not get caught easily... using just a laptop and a dial-up connection.


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## Irreverent (Apr 17, 2009)

Runefox said:


> Every ISP in Canada, AFAIK, makes use of their backbones, and simply lease bandwidth from those two, much like Telus has a lease from Bell/Aliant networks.



Yep.  We're the bad boy.  See Carenath's sig for details. 



> I should mention that it's nigh-impossible for a startup to set up a new backbone.



And this is the real problem.  Because even if an ISP startup could get up and running, the backbones they are leasing from are already starting to implement DPI/throttling and charge huge peering costs to cover revenue shortfalls.  Every ISP is making up those peering costs on the backs of their users.

There's going to be some swings until this settles down.



Carenath said:


> Actually, its quite possible to DoS a backbone provider, and not get caught easily... using just a laptop and a dial-up connection.



To control a botnet of Apples. :twisted:


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## Charles_Edwards (Apr 17, 2009)

Heh, and wow I had really thought this was more of an isolated incident. Shows how much I know about this sort of thing. I was just going on an angry consumer rant. XD But, at least I know I'm not alone in how all this goes. Weather that is a good or bad thins is yet to be determined.

Something else I found that a number of you may be interested in. http://www.comcastmustdie.com

Interesting site, similar problem, different company.


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## Runefox (Apr 17, 2009)

While it's true that it's the company's network, the fact that I signed up before the installation of the DPI hardware and before the introduction of bandwidth caps means that I feel like I'm being rather shafted, especially with the price hike that took place after the caps were put in place. In the past two months, I've consistently gone over my 95GB cap. Mind you, I've been doing a lot of downloading, but that's akin to charging someone extra because they've been making a lot of phone calls when local/800 calls are free, or watching a lot of cable TV (OK, yeah, I know, different method and negligible, controlled data transfer from the cable boxes, but supposedly internet connections are also limited based on their speed, and this should be enough). I wouldn't even really be so angry about it if not for the fact that it's unnecessary beyond the fact that they, again, have oversold their connection seemingly without trying to bring it up to speed, instead opting to pop DPI/QoS throttling into place, cap monthly bandwidth to discourage high usage, and call that service. That pisses me off.

From the sound of things, it's similar here as in Ireland, but the overage charges are always enforced. At the very least, Rogers and Aliant are required to inform customers about changes in service/policy, but as far as I'm concerned, if you're already on a contract, changes shouldn't apply to you. The ability to change a contract whenever they feel like it (and then going ahead and doing it whenever they feel like it) is another reason why I have little love for the major ISP's here in Canada and their "plight".


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## Carenath (Apr 17, 2009)

Capped services have been the norm here and in the UK since broadband's inception, so we are just used to it.. if you want an uncapped connection you have to pursuade an ISP to put you on a business-tier package... which by and large dont seem to cost all that much more than residential connections but getting one can be hard enough.. if you get the wrong CSR on the phone you wont get anyplace..


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## Kryn (Apr 17, 2009)

Zero_Point said:


> I love hearing people complain about $75 a month for high-speed when they're still charging $20 a month for dialup here. :/ 256K DSL? That's $60 a month. What's the bandwidth cap? Beats me, though I doubt you'd ever use it all in a month as shitty and unreliable as their DSL is. This truly IS a case of "You can either use us, or go without" because noone else provides out here in the boondocks.
> 
> 
> Except satellite internet, but we all know that sucks balls.
> ...



That's not as bad as what I have to pay. $65 a month for 1.5mb/384kb service. There's no bandwidth cap whatsoever but still over priced crap. I could be getting Comcast cable at 16mbps for only $53 a month but they refuse to run cable lines to my house  The only thing that really bothers me is the horrible pings I get with this service, takes a full 50ms just to reach my isp. I asked a friend of mine in D.C. to ping it and he only got 33ms from roughly 100 times the distance!?

Check out this overpriced crap: http://www.kimbanet.com/dslservice.asp


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## Zero_Point (Apr 18, 2009)

Kryn said:


> That's not as bad as what I have to pay. $65 a month for 1.5mb/384kb service. There's no bandwidth cap whatsoever but still over priced crap. I could be getting Comcast cable at 16mbps for only $53 a month but they refuse to run cable lines to my house  The only thing that really bothers me is the horrible pings I get with this service, takes a full 50ms just to reach my isp. I asked a friend of mine in D.C. to ping it and he only got 33ms from roughly 100 times the distance!?
> 
> Check out this overpriced crap: http://www.kimbanet.com/dslservice.asp



The problem with the "SOOPA-T00BZ!!!11" that I linked to is that it's wireless. The bandwidth lessens as the distance between you and the broad-cast tower increases, and I live 4 miles north of the city limits. Plus things such as foliage, weather (we have some hellacious dust storms out here), hills, etc. can affect the signal strength/quality, so in the end it's just not worth the investment. ESPECIALLY not the $200 for a god-damn modem. >:C


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