
What a non-neutral 'Net looks like, UK-style - zeedotme
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/what-a-non-neutral-net-looks-like.ars
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petercooper
Some truth here but mostly FUD. This is not really non-net neutrality in the
typical sense.

 _Throttling of "heavy users," even those on unlimited monthly data plans?
Check._

This is not inherently anti net neutrality. DSL providers have a certain
amount of bandwidth and this has to be distributed out via users. There is no
such thing as an "unlimited monthly data plan." They can _call_ it that, but
if everyone attempted to download a terabyte of data at once, everything would
crawl to a halt. That's not a threat to net neutrality but basic bandwidth
math!

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jdoliner
True, although in actuality if everyone just went online and tried to download
a terabyte of data. TCP back off would be the reason that things came to a
crawl, which is a user side thing.

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cturner
There's an easy market solution for people who want traffic that this ISP is
throttling - change your damn ISP. Notice that this solution involves no
posturing politicians, no complex legislation, no costly enforcement, no
restrictions on business. It's simple and effective. bt will quickly get the
reputation as being the ISP for n00bs and will see themselves lose business,
others will have an example in the flesh to disuade them from trying it on.

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Kejistan
I'm not sure what its like in the UK, but where I'm at in the US there are two
ISPs that service my area, and both offer very similar plans. "Change your
damn ISP" only works if there is another ISP that offers something different
in your area.

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dazzawazza
Where I live in London I have access to close to 100 ISPs that will take my
cash. Where my parents live in the sticks there are two. One is BT who have to
provide them a service but it's severely restricted (in bandwidth terms) and
the other is Demon who are respectable enough.

It's not the open market place the governments market models predict.

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kierank
In the sticks everything goes through the expensive BT Ipstream product
anyway.

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jdoliner
Is the BBC considering using end to end encryption for its iPlayer service? It
seems to me that they could really stop a lot of this throttling in its tracks
by preventing deep packet inspection.

