Which is why Verizon’s lawyers are telling everybody in the company to shut up already and deny deny deny.
You don’t see the problem with the internet company, often the only internet company, interfering with access to sites they don’t like?
I think he was being sarcastic.
In his house at R’lyeh, dead AOL waits dreaming.
3 Likes
I wonder if they’re throttling couchtuner? Wait, I didn’t say that!
About 6 months ago I noticed network problems between my FiOS end point and youtube. I ran traceroutes and detected dropped patches and where in the network there was a problem. I even got the attention of network engineers at Verizon. While this is not conclusive proof it was evidence that there was a problem. Later on I had read that Verizon was trying to beat more money out of Google. I told Verizon that if they didn’t increase bandwidth I would dump them and go to Comcast. The problem magically went away for a little while.
The network providers are a bunch of douches. Meshnet anyone?
2 Likes
Mentioning an opposing view is now “Interpreting generously”? One claim about something is all we need, and any defense is wrong?
“There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine,” Michelle Bachmann said on Fox News. “She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result. There are very dangerous consequences.”
I guess that’s all we need to know then, right?
When transferring large files from Amazon to my home w/ Verizon Fios I get abysmal xfer rates – 300MB/hour but if if I do Amazon to Linode and Linode to my home each hop takes 3 minutes. This is 100% repeatable.
And this is why the recrafting of Net Neutrality law needs to include a simple form of monitoring that will make clear when providers are violating this obligation.
1 Like
Eh, don’t feel bad. When you disemvoweled on boing boing, it feels like you’ve finally arrived. Or got slapped in the face with a face. One or the other, really.
“Can you hear me now?”
1 Like
“Like” isn’t the response I want to respond with, here.
“Sadly concur” I suppose…
Proving it in a mathematical sense, maybe, but proving it to a reasonable standard is easy:
- Connect to Netflix/AWS/whatever through a VPN. If it’s reliably faster there than it is on the bare connection, that’s extremely suspicious off the bat. (Looking back, this is what the original author actually did. I’m not sure what’s controversial about it.)
- Several people on Hacker News noted that their Netflix speed jumps for a minute or two after browsing to SpeedTest.net. It looks like Verizon is trying to conceal their throttling by disabling it when you try to test speed. One guy claims to have completely fixed his Netflix problems just by setting up a script to ping SpeedTest.net once per minute. That’s easy for anyone to test at home.
1 Like
[1]: http://www.bigapplejazz.com/woodshedding.html[quote=“jandrese, post:43, topic:22171, full:true”]
I think he was being sarcastic.
[/quote]
(Note: this may qualify as a pointless rant)
That said, MarjaE still has a point. If I want unimpeded high-speed internet (to say nothing of surveillance-free), just what should I do about it? Where I live, my choices are Comcast or FiOS. I think we also had Speakeasy, but aren’t/weren’t they just a reseller for one company or the other?
This dovetails with the fact that we still watch broadcast TV, or rather, what’s left of it. As we live behind a hill (surrounded with tall trees) on the other side of all of the transmitters, we’ve always had trouble pulling in TV signals – e.g. we have three PBS stations in this area, and only one of them came in at all. When TV changed to HD a few years ago, we lost Fox, NBC and the remaining PBS station. (Yes, we have an antenna – it’s in the attic and has an amplifier.)
So if we want to reliably watch TV in our house, or be able to watch video over the internet, we need to pay either Comcast or (more to) Verizon (EDIT: we do have DSL) and I’m not really eager to (further) involve myself with either company. Full disclosure: I worked for Verizon for 10 years, and was finally laid off. (I wasn’t really bitter about it until a few years later: even though they were the ones who decided they didn’t need me anymore, in 2011 they sent me a letter during a telco strike, asking me to please be a scab for them.) But I don’t have a boner for Comcast, either.
And when it comes down to it, I really don’t want to watch more TV, and don’t particularly want my kids watching more then they already do. I would like to be able to watch something when I want, but adding another 2 or 300 channels seems like overkill, not to mention an excuse to watch more TV since, hey, I had to pay for it anyway. So part of me says “fuck it” to both TV and hi-speed broadband, and tells me that what I should really do with that time is go down in the basement and [woodshed][1]. (And for that matter, the kids should be doing that, too, since they talked us into getting a piano…)
1 Like
Who got disemvoweled? What did I miss?
Agreed. Regardless, anything a front line customer service rep knows is by definition not a corporate secret. For all we know the rep was just engaging in the same speculation we are here.
These oligopolies are using our public infrastructure for their obscene profits.
The public shouldn’t have to resort to all this sleuthing in the first place. It’s time for much more ISP transparency. It’s pathetic that the American public hasn’t already demanded it and forced the issue already considering how far behind our broadband is compared to other countries.
American exceptionalism, my ass.
5 Likes
Apparently you’re unaware that Verizon is effectively a cable TV provider now (FiOS) with its own (very limited) on-demand video offering.
There was no actual evidence of Comcast’s use of Sandvine… and despite their bald face lies to the contrary… they were using Sandvine to throttle traffic. Once evidence did appear, they admitted it… then said they stopped.
Also… Verizon is a very large company owned by stockholders. If stealing your kidneys hit the right side of the risk/reward equation you could expect to wake up in a bathtub full of ice.
Verizon blocks my access to Undernet IRC servers. They don’t admit to that either.
No… because Big Red pays their protection money to lobbyists to prevent such inconveniences.
1 Like
