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posted by takyon on Monday September 12 2016, @08:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-want-my-internet-tv dept.

Jon Brodkin over at Ars Technica is reporting on a filing submitted to the FCC by Netflix last week asking thc FCC to "declare that home Internet data caps are unreasonable and that they limit customers' ability to watch online video."

From the article:

Netflix submitted a filing last week for the FCC's annual investigation of broadband deployment, a review that is mandated by Congress in Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act. Specifically, Congress requires the FCC to determine whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion and "take immediate action" to accelerate deployment if it's not happening to the commission's satisfaction.

The commission's assessment generally focuses on availability and speed, but Netflix wants the commission to add data caps to the mix. "Data caps (especially low data caps) and usage-based pricing ('UBP') discourage a consumer's consumption of broadband, and may impede the ability of some households to watch Internet television in a manner and amount that they would like," Netflix wrote. "For this reason, the Commission should hold that data caps on fixed-­line networks ­­and low data caps on mobile networks­­ may unreasonably limit Internet television viewing and are inconsistent with Section 706."

[...] Netflix argued that a 300GB-per-month allotment "is required just to meet the Internet television needs of an average American," without accounting for other things consumers want to do on the Internet, like Web browsing and downloading games and applications. "The Commission should recognize that data caps and UBP on fixed line networks are an unnecessary constraint on advanced telecommunications capability," Netflix said.

Comcast, the nation's largest home Internet provider, recently raised its caps from 300GB to 1TB, making it easier for customers to watch online video instead of Comcast's own cable TV service. But consumers' data needs are increasing quickly enough that "today's 'above-average' Internet consumer is tomorrow's average Internet consumer," Netflix said.

Data caps also aren't necessary for network management, Netflix argued. The online video provider pointed to a government survey from 2014 in which ISPs told regulators that congestion wasn't a problem on their networks. ISPs have alternatively described data caps "as a way to align consumers' use of the network with what they pay," Netflix said.

So what say you, Soylentils? Do data caps discriminate against online video providers?

Do data caps negatively impact other types of Internet usage?

Is online video the bulk of the data you consume through your Internet connection?

Do you have a data cap? If so, what is it and how often do you exceed it? If you do exceed it, what steps does your ISP take in response?


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Tuesday September 13 2016, @01:18AM

    by Marand (1081) on Tuesday September 13 2016, @01:18AM (#401046) Journal

    So what say you, Soylentils? Do data caps discriminate against online video providers?

    Do data caps negatively impact other types of Internet usage?

    Where I am right now, my ISP (satellite) gives a 10GB/mo "allowance", with a 50GB "bonus" from 2am to 8am local time. So, yes, data caps negatively impact video and any other internet usage. I can't use Netflix except in small doses between 2am-8am, can't use youtube/vimeo/etc, can't download large files, and can't even do normal everyday browsing without constantly watching the meter because image-heavy sites can download tens of megabytes a page and it adds up quickly.

    Had to turn off android software updates because they'd download during the day. I don't actually use it, but I have a dual-boot of Windows 10 for testing, and it has a similar problem where you can't schedule the download times, just when it reboots. So, if it decides to download a gig of updates at 3pm, fuck you, it will, so enjoy losing 10% of your cap for the month. Sucks for anybody using multiple W10 machines in the same house. Oh, and before anyone mentions it, I'm aware W10 connections can be set to "metered" and they block automatic installs. Too bad you can't do that for wired connections unless you edit the registry and reboot, because MS decided only wireless connections can be metered.

    Also, anything that makes heavy use of html5 canvas tends to be data hungry, and don't even think of trying to use cloud storage or transfer files to/from a remote server, like the VPS I have. Streaming radio is also out of the question.

    Downloading games from services like Steam is also impossible. Updates can be scheduled, but you're fucked if a game wants an update when you decide to play it. Also, installing new ones? LOL don't bother, new games tend to be 20-60GB now, so it could take months to download that new purchase.

    And, of course, it's even worse if you have multiple people sharing the connection. Plus you can't run a guest wfi for visitors, because they can blow through a huge chunk of your cap without even intending to because their device decided to update or they felt like loading a video...

    TL;DR: data caps negatively impact every type of internet usage. Fuck them.

    Do you have a data cap? If so, what is it and how often do you exceed it? If you do exceed it, what steps does your ISP take in response?

    I already covered what my cap is. So far I've exceeded it every month within two weeks of the month's reset. Once that happens all traffic gets throttled to approximately dialup speeds, with a special exception made for unencrypted http traffic, which is only throttled to ~32KB/sec for the first 1MB, then drops to dialup speeds after. Any other protocol, even https? Too bad, fuck you, enjoy your dialup speeds on top of the massive latency.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:41AM (#401143)

    all traffic gets throttled to approximately dialup speeds, with a special exception made for unencrypted http traffic, which is only throttled to ~32KB/sec for the first 1MB, then drops to dialup speeds after

    What an intriguing loophole you have there. Have you considered trying any sort of HTTP tunneling VPN to break your traffic into 1MB chunks and work around the worst of the throttling?

    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:59AM

      by Marand (1081) on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:59AM (#401146) Journal

      I've tried a few things, and so far the best trick I've found is using an ICMP tunnel. I get higher speeds than the throttling should allow this way, but it's affected greatly by latency, so it's still slower than normal...but at least it's consistent and a bit better than it should be.

      I've also noticed that doing anything via http is unreliable because they seem to do a lot of packet inspection magic to make the throttling happen, plus also do caching of content for local users. Tends to randomly crap out and serve blank pages, stuff like that. It's a good, practical example of why extensions like https-everywhere are important.

      Interesting thing: there used to be an awesome loophole with this ISP, once upon a time. For some reason they weren't counting UDP traffic against the bandwidth caps, so I set up openVPN to make a UDP tunnel to my VPS and routed everything through that. None of my traffic counted toward the cap, ever. They eventually caught on and closed that loophole at some point, though. :(

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @06:55AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @06:55AM (#401154)

        Hey that's great, you've already tried ICMP and UDP. Naturally you can't do much about the latency, but you can look for loopholes in deep packet inspection. You should try DNS tunneling also, see if you're allowed to use arbitrary DNS servers, see how much data you can tunnel through the ISP provided DNS servers, see whether the ISP provided DNS servers are exempt from data accounting or exempt from throttling, the usual. If you find a way through, keep laughing at that data cap.

        • (Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:34AM

          by Marand (1081) on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:34AM (#401177) Journal

          I tried DNS tunneling already too, but it was practically unusable. I couldn't tell if it circumvented the cap or not because I was getting something like like 3KB/sec (at best) using it. I tried a few things, but never had any luck with getting the speed up, so I gave up on that idea.

          So far ICMP tunnel has been the only thing that even had limited success, unfortunately. Doesn't bypass the data cap, but gives some improvement after throttling begins. Though, now that I think about it, I can't remember if I've tried to see if the UDP tunnel is affected by throttling yet... I know I tested to see if it counted against the data cap or not, hoping the old loophole was still around, but I'm not sure about the throttling part.

          That's something I'll have to try in a couple weeks when I'm past the cap again. Thanks for the discussion, it may have given me another shot at cheating this stupid ISP's terrible cap. :)

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @08:35AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @08:35AM (#401199)

            Significant work has been done in the past year to improve the speed of iodine DNS tunneling, but you'll need to grab code from git pull requests and compile it yourself.

            https://github.com/yarrick/iodine/pulls [github.com]

            Definitely try frekky's sliding window protocol. It's well suited for high latency, provided your DNS relay can handle concurrent queries.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @03:32PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @03:32PM (#401342)

              I don't have anything to add, but I just wanted to say that I think this is pretty interesting. Last time I was on a college campus, I noticed that DNS got past the captive portal on their wireless and I immediately wondered about tunneling over DNS. I was just too lazy to actually make anything of the idea (wasn't a student, just visiting for a day). Thanks for the link!

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @08:47PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @08:47PM (#401470)

                yeah, it is my interest in things like this that enabled me to disable this sort of thing at the schools that have asked me to keep the students focus elsewhere. Blocking external DNS lookups and providing filtered DNS results are a big request from scholarly adminstrations as of the late.

                Too many kids with their own devices to manage, so it's back to filtering the network traffic rather than trying to enforce policy.