Watchdog casts an eye over ‘throttling’

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is taking an interest in the “net neutrality” debate in Australia, according to the Australian Financial Review. The discussion was revived by the announcement that Telstra is trialling “traffic management” technologies. This prompted accusations that it was either already …

[Neoc]

Personally, I'm a proponent of Net Neutrality. I didn't sign up with my ISP for VOIP services, or streaming video: I signed up for X Gb per month, delivered to my ADSL modem.

That's it: no mention in my contract as to what the bandwidth was being used for. One month, I may be heavily playing on-line games. Or I may be streaming video for YouTube (or Netflix). Or I may be downloading the new Linux installation for my fileserver (which reminds me I need to do that in fact).

Bandwidth is a commodity same as water and power - these companies don't care how much water/power I use or what I use it for so long as I pay for what I use.

So Telstra... stop bitching and fix your damn network instead of over-selling your capacity and then coming up with tenuous reasons to throttle your customers to stop your network from collapsing.

[Anonymous Coward]

capacity planning

I agree with @Neoc above and only want to add that this lack of bandwidth / overselling has been a annoyance since day one and its really time that we come up with a more sustainable way to deal with internet growth.

It benefits pretty much everyone so getting global investment from governments, businesses etc should make sense. Rolling out fibre everywhere and having cross-national management of stuff might help us all get along better.

Sadly, people dont work like that so my utopian hippy ideas are unlikely to say the least.

[Thorne]

Nothing to do with pirates

Telstra is doing this so they don't have up upgrade services while waiting for the NBN to come in.

Why spend money on DSLAMS if you need to rip them back out in a couple of years (or less)

Pirates are a good excuse to to reduce traffic to delay upgrades to save money. Nothing more. Nothing less.

[Mme.Mynkoff]

Re: Nothing to do with pirates

Uh, huh.

Because everybody knows that bandwidth is unlimited, just like money, and not a contested resource.

[Thorne]

Re: Nothing to do with pirates

If they didn't want P2P then why sell 100+ gig a month accounts?

It's like selling you a Ferrari and then taking back the wheels to make sure you don't speed.

In reality it not even to stop you speeding but so they don't have to fix the crappy roads.

[Anonymous Coward]

Chief Execs...

Perhaps the chief execs of these ISP's / Telco's whatever should try being throttled (bodily of course) every so often, see how they like it.

Thought not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Chief Execs...

Next thing Max Mosley will buy and ISP...now we wouldn't what that would we?

[Terry Cloth]

Pay per byte

As mentioned above, bandwidth is (or should be) like water or electricity: I don't buy 100 kWh/mo for a fixed price, and have my fridge stop running on the 27th because I had my Xmas display up for the last couple of weeks.

I'm now using a web host that goes against the flow: I pay a certain amount per Mbyte of date transfer, and a certain amount per GB-month of storage, and guess what? It costs less than I can get anywhere else. It would be interesting if some gutsy telco would offer a similar deal for BW---I bet they'd clean up, especially once they started building out based on where they feel the pinch. They could even offer pay-per-byte and fixed chunk at the same time, and let the customers try it both ways.

Unfortunately, there's nothing resembling real competition in any telco/cable/bandwidth provider market I'm aware of, so I'm not holding my breath.