In any event, network operators really do need to police their networks to avoid abuse. There is no limit to the number of attempts at theft of service, break-ins, and potential exploits that an ISP may experience. We get dozens per week. We see port scans, ping scans, worms, attempted pop-up spam, fraudulent pop-ups that install Trojan horse programs masquerading as virus checkers. We do our best to block them, for the sake of our users.

We’ve been doing this for 15 years, and we’ve seen it all. (We were among the first to analyze and block the Melissa worm.) BitTorrent and other P2P programs are only the latest of these exploits. P2Pis particularly nasty, though, its purpose is to take ISPs’ services, without payment, for the benefit of greedy corporations like Vuze which do not want to pay for their Internet bandwidth. It also seeks to exploit our network by seizing priority over traffic that needs “real time” handling, such as VoIP.

You write, “consumers sign up for internet service and are quoted a specific amount of bandwidth. Yes it is usually considered maximum bandwidth but that is problem number #1. The bandwidth providers are allowed to market these numbers in commercials as if that is the bandwidth users will get.”

Unfortunately, that’s a reality of the business and of marketing. Every new customer who calls us for service asks, “How fast is it? Give me a number.” And they want just one number that tells it all… which, of course, is impossible because Internet connections have many parameters. Think of it as the “megahertz” problem.” Remember when Intel changed the entire design of its microprocessors so that the clock speed in megahertz was higher, even though the performance was worse than that of an AMD Athlon clocked at a slower speed? Believe it or not, this tactic not only worked but saved Intel’s bacon. AMD would be #1 in the microprocessor industry now if Intel hadn’t resorted to this tactic.

Our ISP gives real performance numbers — minimums, not maximums. And we pay for it, dearly, because customers compare those minimum numbers to the cable company’s unachievable maximums. But we think it’s important to be honest and to provide a number that the consumer can actually measure. If our experience is any guide, it would cost the cable and telephone companies billions if they were as honest as we were.

However, in order to provide those minimums, we must set constraints on usage. Some ISPs pay as much as $300 per megabit per second per month for bandwidth. Ours pays around $100 per Mbps per month. We can’t resell it below cost, and that means that we must contractually forbid P2P and then enforce that prohibition. (The minimum speed numbers only apply to uses which fall within our acceptable use policy, by the way. We clearly state that the minimum speed does not apply to illegitimate uses such as BitTorrent. But you will get the minimum speed for legitimate uses.) For more on this very pro-consumer approach to disclosure and network management, see my testimony before the FCC at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html.

As for content providers paying ISPs: Why shouldn’t they be allowed to pay for accelerated service. This is the same thing as, for example, a small bookseller competing with Amazon (and Barnes and Noble’s “big box” stores) by offering to upgrade your order to “2nd Day Air” shipping for free, while Amazon uses parcel post or the even slower “media mail.” Doing so doesn’t slow their competitors’ parcels down, but it does speed their own up.

In the same way, by supplementing the money paid by the ISP’s users with some money of its own, a content provider can pay the ISP to devote additional resources to delivering the content faster. Not only is there nothing wrong with it, but it is a win all around. The content provider — perhaps a small one that needs exposure — gets faster delivery. The ISP has a service to market. And the customer gets a better experience. What’s wrong with that?

As for your claim that ISPs are slowing down competitive media: there are two flaws in your argument above. Firstly, you’re assuming that all ISPs are telephone and cable companies. Ours is not. We deliver Internet and only Internet. We have no incentive to slow down content competes with our own, because we’re not IN the content business. Period. Secondly, there has been only one documented instance — ever — of one small ISP slowing down a competitive service, and that was quickly stopped. Comcast, Cox, etc. have never done it or threatened to do it.

As for 1 Gbps to the home: We’d love to roll it out. But the users couldn’t afford the bandwidth, even if we made no profit on it. Instead of fighting a straw man that does not exist, Free Press (AKA “Save the Internet”) should be fighting consolidation in the market for Internet backbone transit, which has stopped the drop in bandwidth prices and in fact is causing them to rise in many locations, including ours. But instead, it’s attacking a straw man.

First of all I would say the network operator needs to manage their network, not police.

That aside, consumers sign up for internet service and are quoted a specific amount of bandwidth. Yes it is usually considered maximum bandwidth but that is problem number #1. The bandwidth providers are allowed to market these numbers in commercials as if that is the bandwidth users will get.

When you sign up for a dedicated server, these companies will quote you max burstable bandwidth and regular total bandwidth.

Burstable is often around 10mpbs while regular max is 1.5mpbs.

This makes it clear and transparent exactly the amount of bandwidth the user has.

Why not have the same transparency by ISP providers?

I don’t think anyone here would have qualms with P2P traffic being throttled down to regular max bandwidth is the rest of the users on the network are qually using as much bandwidth and the ISP is merely dividing up bandwidth equally amongst its users.

The articles on what Comcast and Cox are doing doesn’t imply that is the case. It suggests they are specifically targeting P2P traffic above all others.

Lastly, consumers pay ISPs for the bandwidth they use. The notion, the idea, that content providers should pay ISPs as well is flat out total bullshit and it makes me think you work for the industry pushing to squeeze money from content providers.

The industry isn’t doing that to help manage their network, they are doing that because the industry wants to be the sole provider to the end user of movies, tv, videos on demand, VoIP telephone, music, etc. The industry recognizes that cableTV as we know it is doomed. Why pay $65 a month for cableTV when you can watch the shows over the internet for free paid for by ads in the shows?

There is a reason Time Warner’s CEO said he didn’t see a need for 1Gbe to each home. Because he sees that it would be the end of their business model as a content provider and they would be merely left as a bandwidth provider, a less lucrative industry.

The industry could roll out 1Gbe to the home now if they truly wanted to and it wouldn’t cost a fortune either.

However, when someone else starts making that choice for me, decides what is good for me and what is bad for me, and basically does not listen to me, I get pissed off. I get even more pissed off when it does that to make a few billion more.

And I really don’t understand how blocking P2P helping consumers? Another case of I don’t know what’s good for me and let the big giants decide for me? I am a consumer as well. And I am not lobbying on behalf on any corporation.

My name is not important and I am the AngryIndian
http://www.AngryIndian.com

What’s more, all of the bills your organization is supporting go much further than that. One prohibits tiered pricing. One mandates that every user be able to operate a server. (That would send costs through the roof. the static, public IP address by itself would cost $10 more per month, and that’s before the higher bandwidth charges.) At least two of them would prevent ISPs from throttling or blocking P2P — requiring them to raise prices AND cut bandwidth allocations. All are bad for consumers.

Scary.

It is astonishingly wrongheaded to claim that throttling or blocking P2P, which is primarily used for piracy and occasionally used for legal “canned” material such as movies, is in any way an infringement of free speech. In fact, if ISPs do NOT block P2P, it will not only harm free speech but prevent rural broadband deployment and put competitive Internet providers out of business, leaving you with at most the choice of getting Internet from the cable company or the telephone company.

Both the Markey bill (HR 5353) and the Conyers bill (HR 5994) are harmful to Internet freedom and anti-consumer. And so are the efforts of the so-called “network neutrality” crusaders, who in fact are lobbying on behalf of corporations (such as Google and Vuze).