NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: An example of the problem with bandwidth caps
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The
larger issue is that you don't have direct control over the number of bytes or
even awareness. There are many background exchanges you are unaware of,
compression algorithms, caching, etc etc etc. How do you know if a web page is
a kilobyte or 10 megabytes. They may take about the same time. And pages may
come from a local source or remote depending on how a service is implemented. If
you have a good UI that melds provider VoD with say Amazon and Netflix VoD you
may not have any idea if a 10GB HD video counts or not. If you watch on your
laptop content cached on your desktop might or might not count. It's
basically a lottery and fairly decoupled from direct actions. Imagine
if phone calls were based the frequency of the signal and you were charged more
for high pitched voices than low pitched voices. Or you were charged based on
the urgency of the voice. In fact this is what would happen with an Xbox game
-- the number of bytes vary based on how much you talk and how compressed it
is. This
is all too silly -- why do we put up with a system that barely made sense for
1850 telegraphy when the charge may have varied depending on your vocabulary. The
fact is that the Internet and Telecom are so very different that forcing the former
through the orifices of the latter is an exercise in absurdity. Where’s
Monty Python when we need them? In the meantime http://rmf.vc/?N=IAC. -----Original Message----- Today I've been trying to download a movie I purchased
online. And tried. And tried. And tried. At some point rather far through the > 1GB transfer,
something happens and the download fails. So I start again. I've probably downloaded the same 1,000Kbytes or so 6
times. Somewhere, out in the net - my transfer gets interrupted
for whatever reason (and this is TCP folks) and I have to start over. And it counts against my BW cap. (ComCast, so not exactly
small, but still measurable) As a consumer, I think, "How can I reset those bytes
that all summed up to failure?" I already know what my ISP might say, "not our
problem..." and point the finger elsewhere. Actually, how do I know my ISP isn't interfering with the
transfer causing the failure in the first place!?! (And it's a fact that Comcast has
definitely been caught with it's hands in the cookie jar.) Makes one ponder the possibilities. -Ben [ Of course, part of the problem in this
particular case would seem to be the use of a file
transfer protocol that needs to restart from the beginning
after a failure. -- Lauren Weinstein
NNSquad Moderator ] -- Ben Kamen - O.D.T., S.P. ============================================================================= As seen somewhere on the net: My other computer is your
Windows Server. |