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Hardware

Cisco talks up products to /slow access/ 157

Posted by Hemos from the you-can't-handle-the-truth dept.
Marc Merlin writes "This excerpt from Yahoo News tells it all:
(...) But according to marketing materials from Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO - news), the No. 1 maker of computer networking equipment, cable companies will be able to work behind the scenes with sophisticated software included in Cisco products to slow down and limit access to selected Web sites. " As you would imagine, this has got the hackles of consumer groups up-Cisco brochures are saying that this stuff would allow cable companies to make competing sites appear more slowly then preferred ones. I'm speechless.
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Cisco talks up products to /slow access/ More

Cisco talks up products to /slow access/

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  • You should have expected this! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It is obvious that this is the way things are
    going. A company that controls the bandwidth
    can do what they want with it. I'm sure that
    the larger ISP's already do this to a certain
    extent with route selection. This just takes
    it to the next level - a single router being
    able to cause the slowdown.

    Some more related things that will happen:

    - Internet Explorer will work faster with NT web
    servers.

    - UUNet will route traffic faster for windows
    web browsers.


    How could you regulate against these kinds of
    things? I don't see any way... consumer education
    is the only thing that will help.

  • Web won't work without traffic shaping (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually without the traffic shaping feature
    most large web sites couldn't operate *now*.

    What do you think stops people from ping flooding
    T1 web sites from their multimegabit cable
    connections?

    See the NANOG14 proceedings for how @Home use
    traffic shaping to defeat the flooders.

  • Re:Not enough reaction so far (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Original poster here. I should get off my ass and get an account.

    I don't know the financials. I have never been involved in the provisioning or costing side of the circuit game while working at ISPs. I do know that you get a tariffed price of X dollars per circuit if you are providing clear pipe access, I think both from the local (or competitive) exchange carrier and the long-haul carrier. This applies to your customer aggregation circuits as well as your backbone pipes, afaik. Anyone who could enlighten further would be appreciated. You don't get that price if you filter access in any way. That's been the debate with newsgroups, too, because ISPs who want to filter alt.sex.littlekids are worried that they'll lose the tariff price if they do.

    As long as this is the case, unrestricted net access is most profitable, because your backbone and aggregation circuits are cheap.

    The mention of DSL and other technologies is used as a reference point to compare services. If I can get a clear connection that allows me to do whatever I want with my circuit (I have 384k SDSL) I will pay for it, even if some guy wants to sell me RoadRunner instead. It's a buyer's market.

    I currently get my DSL from Concentric Networks, 'cuz I like their backbone better than Bell Atlantic's. My phone service is from Bell Atlantic, and my cable comes from Media One. If Media One offered me phone and cable for cheaper than BAT phone and Media One cable, I'd use that. If they offered me restricted cable modem net access on top of that, i'd tell them to piss off.

    We should be arguing for choice in high-speed net access, rather than trying to villify one service because of their policies. For all I know, there are parents out there who would love to have 'net access that filtered questionable material without them having to use some additional software. Fine. Not me. As long as I have a choice, I'm happy.

  • George, you need to get a clue (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ok let's examine George's argument: The government should break up Cisco because I think they are too big. He doesn't support his argument at all. I think if you asked him why, the argument would go something like this: "Why should the government break up Cisco?" "Because I said so."

    I'm curious to hear what George's qualifications are. I work on the Internet team at a major corporation and can say that we do the same thing using software and a proxy server that the Cisco hardware can do. All major companies do. And they've been doing it for years.

    Now you might say that that is a business and that inappropriate sites need to be blocked from businesses because they reduce productivity. But you know what? Lots of AOLs web traffic is buffered at proxy servers. They could do the same thing using software that Cisco hardware does. Cable providers could do it to. Most people wouldn't know the difference. And they all could be blocking and controlling traffic right now.

    The people from the advocacy groups mention that this is a monopolization of the Internet by the cable companies, and they blame Cisco. Notice none of them are mentioning the ISP that blocks the "adult" web sites and practices filtering on it's end. Granted that consumers can choose not to use this service but the point remains that it still restricts the "open" Internet.

    But the fact is that this is a common capability. If you want to break up Cisco for doing this, attack these as well:

    • Secure Computing (Smartfilter blocking software)
    • Wavecrest Computing (ProxyReporter blocking software)
    • Netscape (their proxy server allows blocking)
    • Microsoft (see the note about Netscape Proxy)
    • Any other company that makes blocking or monitoring software.

    As you can see, Cisco isn't the only one doing this. And to blame them is to skirt the real issue. That issue is your ISP. If your ISP is blocking and you didn't tell them to, then tha'ts their fault. Cisco and all the other companies that provide blocking (with hardware or software) are providing a tool. If a company abuses it, your issue is with the abuser, not the maker of the tool.

  • Re:What's my name fool? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think it was John Henry who said, "the Big Bend Tunnel on that C & O road a gonna be the death of me, Lord, God, Going to be the death of me."

  • Not only that, but after reading Small Gods (by Terry Pratchett), I have a tendency to scream and start running whenever I see an eagle.

    How about a tortoise as a National Symbol?
  • Here's the thing.. I'd like to read the contract for service for any cable company who would use this technology. They could eventually end up with a law suit on their hands unless they worded it carefully..
  • It's been done. I worked on a product to limit bandwidth to certain routes more than others - specifically, you could buy say 512k European access, and 256k World access, and 128k national access - all down the same link. No magic - just work around a few Cisco bugs, and it works.
  • Hmm .. seems to me like more and more of the freedom the internet used to have is being thrown out the window by corporate people getting involved ...

    wonder if we can place the internet and related stuff under GPL

    bain
  • Whereas the U.S.A. has the oft-glorified (yet, correctly identified as a scavanger) bald eagle, Canada's national symbols are a rodent and a leaf.

    To wit: the beaver and the maple tree.

  • "traceroute" sends packets to a UDP port it hopes isn't in use; it doesn't send ICMP Echo packets. (Perhaps those discussing ICMP packets being dropped or restricted are thinking of NT's "tracert"?)
  • Never mind, the TTL exceeded or port unreachable reply would still get hit if ICMP packets are dropped, even though the outgoing UDP might not get hit.

  • If marketing people were allowed to design cars, we'd all be driving coal-powered tricycles that only ran on tuesdays.

    But they'd all have great adjustable cup holders that expand to hold a Big Gulp, and oversized vanity mirrors.

    Oh yeah...and you'd have to relicense your car from the manufacturer every year or it would stop working!

  • I think it's his .sig
  • or just get your work to pay for it, teeheehee....

    matguy
    Net. Admin.
  • The technology's morally neutral - for example, CAR is used to limit bandwidth consumed by Smurf attacks (presumably a good thing), but this same technology is (or could be) used to limit bandwidth to certain unaffiliated websites.

    This is not really very different morally to using firewalls and access lists - you can use them to block access to certain websites (probably bad) or to block access by crackers to your domain (probably good, unless you are a cracker :).
  • 'Ethically questionable'... OK, how about if the same bandwidth limits are used to ensure that one cable modem user doesn't consume all the available bandwidth for 200 homes on a given segment? To make this pointed, what if this bandwidth limitation makes it possible for VoIP packets carrying an emergency services (911, 112) call to be carried over the same net? (I know people won't use cable phones for emergencies, it's a hypothetical example!)

    The point is that quality of service and class of service technology can be used to guarantee or to limit bandwidth to or from any IP address, with any IP protocol or TCP/UDP port, etc - it's down to the user of these features (and your perspective and values of course) as to whether the resulting effect is morally good or bad.

    Astonishingly, this is exactly like IP itself, which can carry hate material just as easily as charity donations...
  • IPv4 was standardised in RFC 791, which defines 6 bits of priority information (3 bits precedence, 3 bits type of service) in what was known as the TOS byte, and is becoming known as the DiffServ field.

    IPv6 is renaming this field to Traffic Class, I think, but adding no new features - DiffServ will work fine on IPv6 as well. The only new QoS feature in IPv6, IMO, is the Flow Label, which is a longer field used to quickly classify individual flows (e.g. a VoIP call) in RSVP (which is a finer-grained way of requesting absolute bandwidth/latency, rather than just 'better treatment' a la DiffServ.)

    Some links on QoS and DiffServ:
    - Linux-DiffServ - working code for 2.2+ kernels:
    http://lrcwww.epfl.ch/linux-diffserv/
    - QoS Forum - general information: http://www.qosforum.com/
    - Orchestream Links page - http://www.orchestream.com - has links on RSVP, DiffServ, etc.
  • Cisco would be within their rights to charge for the features - as it happens, they don't. QoS features have been around in Cisco's for quite a few years. It's just that they're a touch hard to configure correctly by hand, particularly in a large network.

    Limits have the great advantage that you only need to limit in one place, whereas guarantees need to be done end to end.

  • No this is nothing like that...

    Traffic shaping is part of the protocol, and is sometimes necessary. Cisco is merely utalizing sleazy marketing tactics to pawn off this feature for all the wrong reasons. There has never been anything to stop people from doing this in the past, except that they were ignorant to the fact that it could be done.

  • And you should get yourself an account, AC. First intelligent post I've seen in their thread.

    D.
  • Something that needs to be addressed in all of this, if they start implementing preditory bandwithrestrictions - they will lose the "common carrier" leagle coverage. They then could be sued for ANY content that comes across the wire, or lack there off.
    --
    James Michael Keller
  • From another ISP, it sounds like they are talking about the Cisco NetFlow software. This software is used to have more fine-grained control of a large network. It allows you to see what areas of the Internet are sending/receiving most of your data, and allows you to change the routing to what looks like sub-optimal, but is actually better. Shaping traffic on a per-flow basis is actually a very processor intensive process, so most companies would rather use controlled congestion...

  • A company that controls the bandwidth can do what they want with it.

    Sure, for as long as they're in business.
  • And the phrase is, "... give me liberty or give me death!"

  • Let's get email address & voicemails & start the 'Ol /. effect !
  • Dang...someone beat me to the reality check.

    To add just a bit to this point...you can do the same thing with just about any product...its not just Cisco...and since we have a significant Linux leaning here, you can even do the same in Linux. The latest incarnation is called Class Based Queuing I believe. You also might see some of the same features listed as Traffic Shaping (Packeteer has been doing this for a *long* time), and there's probably some other names that I'm forgetting.

    I do think (from what I've seen..haven't seen the actual press release) that Cisco's Marketing department hosed this one up, but the technology is just a tool, and just like a hammer is a tool, it can be used for good (building a house for the homeless) or evil (bashing in someone's skull).

    This very same tool that Cisco is talking about and everyone is up in arms about is also being used by many ISPs to prevent ICMP ping floods or SYN attacks and the like from killing connections. This very same tool that can be used for anti-competitive purposes can also be used to prevent abuses.

    Jeff
  • You might not sue but you sure get paid big if you're a company and they cause a loss of connection - ie through a cut in the line. They you get to send a bill to your service provider saying "We lost this much because of your stupidity. Pay" And they do.
  • LOL

    Yeah, it was actually *Patrick* Henry... :)
  • We just got hit with the UCITA and now we are getting hit with Cisco's marketing droids bending the traffic on the net so they (the ISPs) can cause traffic jams (or denial) to sites they deem undesirable. Has the world gone mad! The internet community (we the users) has to come up with a way to "throw a wrench into the works". We have to make it clear that this kind of invasion will not be permitted. I will vote with my $$$. I do not expect utopia on the net but the ability to manipulate things is getting way out of control.

    You must realize that they can take this a step further. Suppose you are an internet backbone company and you have an ISP also. You can just as easily setup the software to slow down you're competitors. Who is to say that the links are not busy.

    --
    Those who control the information, control the power!
  • Why stop there, Cisco? Why not build and sell devices who's sole purpose is to ping-flood and mail bomb your competitors?

    Somebody should dump 5,000 barrels of petroleum tar into Cisco's parking lot and see how much they enjoy being "slowed down" by someone else.

    This is what happens when the suits, marketing bozos and other parasites get involved in things they really have no business in. I dont think I need to convince anybody that giving marketing people a controlling hand in how a network performs (and ignoring the engineers in the process) is a bad idea..If marketing people were allowed to design cars, we'd all be driving coal-powered tricycles that only ran on tuesdays.

    When people who don't belong in a particular situation become involved in a way which changes the nature of how it functions, the system begins to decay. It becomes corrupt, and ends up being twisted into something that it was never intended to be. Don't believe me? Have a look at the judicial system..the music industry.. Or hell, just look at MS-DOS. :) Now you can add the internet to the body count, if Cisco or companies with the same intentions have their way. Questions about wether or not it would even be _legal_ for Cisco to do such a thing aside, the fact that they're even considering it speaks volumes about the company, and their ethics...or lack thereof.

    Oh well. Theres always Juniper Networks. :)

    Bowie
    PROPAGANDA [themes.org]

  • Keep in mind that bandwidth isn't free. Without the ability to manage QoS you have a situation where the greedy can make things bad for everyone else.

    This becomes a real issue when you are looking at high bitrate datastreams like streaming video. At todays prices, high quality video over the net is prohibitively expensive (8 mbs for TV quality high action video is not cheap).

    That sort of backbone bandwidth can't be had for the price of a cable-modem connection, yet cable modem providers may want to offer such services. To do so at a price point that is affordable, they have to build local caching&reflection for the content, to keep traffic off their backbone connection.

    The final peice is to allow high bandwidth streams between customers and distribution centers, where costs are well controlled, and disallow it between customers and the iternet at large.

    If you don't like it, don't get a cable modem. Hell, if you don't like it, build your own local and global fibernetwork and give away access. If you can find a way to make it work, I will gladly contribute my time to making it happen.
  • Long distance telcos have done something along these lines: they used to (maybe still do) block access to a competitors 1-800 number for calling card calls. It just goes to show that when companies get too much control they end up as parasites (e.g. insurance companies) and cease to earn their profits.
  • The last time I checked, Cisco was sucessful, partly because they do a good job of meeting the needs of their customers.

    I plan to direct my anger at the people who choose to use these features, not the people that build the tools.
  • first off, who the hell said that the FCC was going to break up CISCO??? this was about the cable operators....

    anyway, Cisco is just implementing a feature than *nix (or at least Linux) has had for a while, the ability to favor some traffic over another... this is prefectly legitimate, even though it COULD be abused... (which is the point of the Consumer groups, that without open access, the cable companies will have vast content-control powers...)

    I am about to move into a house with some friends, we plan to use QoS to make sure that some more important services do not get interrupted by web-surfing, and to make sure that every one gets AT LEAST their fair share of the bandwidth (as much as available, but no less than X)

    (yes we have enough bandwidth to care ;-)
  • ????

    the consumer groups are talking about open access re: cable...

    QoS is not a prob unless it is coupled with a monopoly in the inet access department...

  • Yeah, Lucent just bought some new company called Nexabit networks, they make routers that can move 1.4 terabits per second. Lucent is about to jump over cisco in terms of speed.
  • The last paragraph of the item noted that you can use the technique of fast access to your site / slow access to your competitor's in order to "encourage" adoption of your own service.

    Hmm. This makes me think of all the times that I've pulled up a banner-infested page only to spend 15 seconds reading the ads while the rest of the page loads.

    Well, maybe it is a coincidence.

  • This is nuthing like that
    Its more like ford installing emp guns in all there new cars and shooting an emp at all passing chryslers.

  • The NOC for an ISP recommends using traceroute to troubleshoot a users connection ?

    You wouldn't care to name that ISP so I can make damn sure I never touch them with a shitty stick would you ?
  • As stated elsewhere, this software has been available for a while, and can actually be very useful. QoS enables you to guarantee a particular information rate for a connection. For videoconferencing and other real time activities this is essential.

    As for the 'finding the optimal path' BGP4 ( the routing protocol used on most of the Internet ) doesn't select routes depending on the speed or available bandwidth of a particular route...

  • Very good analogy, bar the fact it's utter shite.

    If Cisco did charge extra for the QoS / Bandwidth Allocation then they'd be charging for an extra feature. Quite common, apparently...
  • OK.

    A customer says they're getting lousy routing to www.imvs.com

    Traceroute to www.imvs.com and tell me what you see.

    Then tell me if there is a problem with PSI or if www.imvs.com is dead, or, *shock horror* ICMP packets are simply dropped, congestion or not, thus rendering traceroute worse than useless because it has no reported a 'problem' that doesn't exist.

    Same applies to microsoft.com, news.com and many, many others because their routers and servers have got better things to do than respond to thousands of pings from DIY troubleshooters picking common addresses to 'test' their routing.
  • OK, so if I am Sprint and I configure my routers to throttle ICMP packets how does traceroute help ?

    Or if the target site has round robin DNS, and you happen to hit a particular interface that is routed round a totally different route from the 'problem' the customer is reporting ?

    Or don't they teach you that in Helpdesk 101 ?

    Traceroute is *not* a particularly useful diagnostic tool for the Internet...
  • From an end users point of view, there's not much you can do.

    But that doesn't change the point that traceroute is not very helpful as a diagnostic tool, as it can all too easily show 'problems' that don't actually exist...

    E.g., as I mentioned above, routers that silently drop ICMP packets...
  • Isn't this pretty much the same as IPv6 having the ability to set priority levels for certain packets ? As I understand it your ISP will be able to give a higher priority to packets that originiate from certain locations...ie. customers who are paying a little extra to get better performance. Meanwhile the average schmoe gets a lower priority and spends more time waiting.

  • Actually,"Class-based queueing" is the name of one of a number of scheduling mechanisms used in QoS(Quality of service)-enabled routers. Others include Strict Priority Queueing, Weighted Round-robin etc.

    "Traffic shaping" refers to the practise of queuing traffic at originating hosts or intermediate nodes so that it is less bursty.

    Both mechanisms are part of the implementation of the Differentiated Services architecture (RFC 2475)

    - telly_o "at" softhome "dot" net
  • The rate-limiting feature of cisco routers
    currently allow to 'slow down' the sessions
    with specific source or destination. there is
    no magic in it, nor it is a 'hidden feature'.
    it can be used for various purposes. in fact
    it works really well (I've spent the last few
    days playing with it). I'm sure other routers'
    vendors have similar features.

  • I really hate to say it, but I'm forced to think of a cartoon from "Bloom County" some years back, where Opus the penguin is trying to book a flight to Cleveland or some such, and the person on the phone from Megacorp Airways (something like that) is extremely rude and demands $2000 for the ticket. So Opus gets steamed, calls a competitor, and the same person answers the phone...'cos Megacorp bought 'em all out. And btw the price is now $3000. And say "please", poophead.

    I can't help but think that once one ISP starts doing this, they all will follow, just because of the old lemming instinct--they would perceive their competitors using this Cisco garbage as having an "advantage" and would want it also. Even though AT&T claims they won't use it, it's probably only a matter of time.

    *sigh*

    Ethelred [surf.to]

  • Warning: Corporate plug

    Go ahead and slow things down Cisco. The more you do the better my employer's product does (my employer, FlowWise Networks [flowwise.com], makes a router accelerator which will offload virtually all of the traffic off of a router and switch it at wire speed with zero configuration. It's fun to watch a router go from a limit of 300K packets per second to 3 million packets per second in just a few seconds. Oh, and there's no rate limiting either.

  • QoS/CoS are used to provide better service to certain classes of applications or certain users.

    This kind of technology is required fo quite a few technologies to work well. VoIP, streaming audio/video.

    It is not an evil technolog. QoS is in linux, windows2000, most routers, many switches. This technology is vital to the growth of the net.

    This technology will let you say: I want to pay an extra $20 a month and get better service across your backbone. Or I want my quake traffic to have priority over my email. Or I want to dedicate 128k of this cable modem link to this video stream.

    This does mean the net becomes unfair. Too bad. It's unfair now. If you connect to UUnet, you can get access to content not available elsewhere. AOL? same thing, @Home? yep. As an Epoch customer I can't access that @home content. Oh well.

    ISPs are not in the game of blocking their customers access to online content. If they start to do this they hit all kinds of legal and PR problems.

    Check out some qos related site like:

    http://www.qosforum.com

    if you want to read up on what this technology is good for, not the FUD running around this group.
  • The answer is to implement appropriate QoS solutions. This does not target the abuses of the users causing problems. This targets selected sites outside the company's network. It is not marketed as a QoS solution, it is marketed as a way to ensure preferential treatment for content providwer partners.
  • Just think how many of your packets go through Cisco routers. They may not be the only game in town but given the nature of the Internet, they get involved in some way. Time to think about opensource routers too, although proving reliability will be a challenge.
  • No, this would be the same as those things if ford salesmen went out and sabotaged people's crysler's so that they Did break down more often and get worse mileage.. or if your neighbors snuck in while you werent home and switched out your ram for smaller chips so that your computer Did run slower than the one they wanted you to get. The whole point here is that the companies get to control what you're allowed to see. It's not that if you go to their website they extoll their product (which is expected), it's that if you try to go to any Other site it stops you.
    Dreamweaver
  • They nearly have a monopoly, and now they're exploiting the web surfing public even more!

    Break them up!

    George

  • GNUnet (Score:1)

    by cmc ( 44956 )
    The GNU internet would also have domain names like


    slashdot.--organization

    and

    linux.--commercial


    In addition, the protocols being used would be slightly incompatible with users using programs meant to be on the Internet.

    Sites that require paid membership will be forced to also have an availible no-cost version, including sources to all the CGI scripts.
  • "I'm speaking generically, because the telecomm and media industries are already intertwined in this realm. ATT owns cable companies, and MediaOne is providing phone services. "


    How right you are; AT&T owns MediaOne. ;)

    ...or is at least in the process of buying them out. Anyone know if that deal has been completed yet?
  • "Bang, bang," said the gun.
    "Ugh, ow, my ass," said the evil Cable CEO.
    "Please, I have a wife and kids!" said the CISCO marketing guy.

    The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
  • Frankly, I do. I'm about to pass out here.
  • Sorry. Sometimes the networking gossip train leaves me behind.

    -awc
  • Bay Systems == Competition.

    -awc
  • Isn't this really the same as your local Ford dealership saying that Chrysler is more apt to break down, not get as good mileage, steal your money, etc

    No, it's more like your Ford dealership making Chryslers move slower when they are nearby. Or, when you own a Ford, making all the Chyslers appear to move slower than they actually do.
    ---
  • Could restricting access to certain parts be considered "moderating"? Could they be sued for illegal sites because of this?
    ---
  • wasn't thinking
    new to the game
  • Now how do you suppose you have first post when you are replying to someone?

    Think a little....
  • If the people who build the tools are promoting the questionable use of them then you should direct your anger at them. Like someone else said, it would be like a gun manufacturer promoting you buying a gun specifically to shoot someone that you were angry at...
  • Everybody keeps complaining about the moderation, but it's not as if the moderators are killing posts -- they just score them. I almost never look at or notice the scores. If you don't sort by them, they are practically meaningless. Who needs to loosen their panties?

    Kook9 out.
  • The turkey would be a better national bird than the ornate buzzard-like bird called the Bald Eagle. Look into the habits of the bald eagle sometime if you like. They'd rather eat road kill than hunt for prey themselves.

    When you see a screaming eagle in the sky, look for the other animal whose prey it is about to steal, or the compost heap it's about to land on and eat.



  • What is the name of the American joe that said "Give me freedom or give me death"?



  • I got to conflicting answers Was it Patrick Henry or John Henry? Yea I got the word liberty changed with freedom

  • CISCO is not the bad guy here (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Cisco is a technology company driven by client demand. This is technology which some client wants. Sure it could be used in a bad way, but almost everything can. The people who use it in a bad way are the ones that should be blamed not the people who create the tools. You are not going to blame the Ford motor company if someone uses a Ford to run your friend over. You are going to blame the jerk who used the Ford to do it.

    Remember that openness in standards and such is not just for a home user. The cable companies, ISP's etc all want to be able to have as many options as possible.

  • Re:Unleaded Gasoline (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That's not the reason why unleaded gasoline cost more when it was first on the market. The unleaded fuel had to be processed more (to create more branched-chain aliphatics -- see any organic/petrochem textbook) to yield an adequate *motor* octane rating... that's the anti-knock property of gasoline. The leaded gas was simply any old crap distilled out of petroleum that would burn in a piston engine and have the right range of vapor/boiling temperature point. They just dumped a bunch of tetraethyl lead into it to raise its motor octane level up so your engine wouldn't compression-clatter from detonation. Adding lead was a lot cheaper than the extra cracking/reforming processes needed to create lots of branched-chain hydrocarbons out of straight-chains.
  • Isn't this really the same as your local Ford dealership saying that Chrysler is more apt to break down, not get as good mileage, steal your money, etc?

    Isn't this the same as your neighbours all saying to get a PC since a Mac is slower and not as good at doing things?

    I'm not saying it's right by any means, I mean there should *definately* be some kind of userbase intervention done here (I seriously doubt a boycott could come into play) to let Cisco know that this is NOT acceptable.
  • Okay, I'll bite.

    What would you use?

    I use Traceroute myself and certainly wouldn't mind hearing about better tools.

    D

    ----
  • Unfortunately, putting a contract out on 150 people would cost substantially more than a T1 connection. Worse, people would then buy the homes owned by the 150 expired folks, and then you'd have to start all over again. I recommend you just ring up your local bandwidth reseller and get your own T1 line; it's a lot cheaper and 100% foolproof to boot.

    Of course there are always a few other suggestions:

    - Find 150 gorgeous blondes and have them seduce the householders when you want to surf the net.

    - Convince all the householders that the net is a horrible, dangerous swamp filled with pornography and bomb-making information. Unfortunately, that would probably backfire in a big way, as your neighbors would promptly go on the net and look for that stuff.

    - Convince the television networks to hold the Super Bowl 365 days a year.

    On the whole, though, if you want $ 1,500 a month worth of access, the bottom line is you have to pay for it :-(.

    D


    ----
  • Using a tunnel like this will NOT, I repeat, will NOT tell you whether or not your ISP is throttling back your traffic. The route that traffic takes from point A to point B may have nothing in common with the route from point C to point B. In other words, you may have the following situation:

    route from A -> B sucks
    route from C -> B is good
    route from A -> C is good.

    This is probably more common than people think. There are a handful of places on the Internet backbone which tend to get really clogged up. If your traffic happens to be going thru one of those points, your connection will suck. By using a tunnel to somewhere else, you may be avoiding that bottleneck and your connection will improve.

    I actually ran into exactly this scenario last night. I am a USWest.net customer, and was connecting to a host on QWest. The connection was horrible, and a traceroute showed a long tortuous path thru a half a dozen providers (Hopefully now that QWest owns USWest they will begin peering ;-). Just for kicks, I connected to work, which is a nice clean route thru USWest, BBN, and C&W. At work, we have a QWest connection in addition to a C&W connection, so from work to any QWest host was a clean route. So, by "tunneling" thru my workplace, I was able to get much better connectivity than by going directly.

    If you actually wanted determine whether or not your ISP was throttling traffic, you would have to take direct measurements. I'm not sure what the best way to do this would be, as it would depend on exactly how the ISP implemented it. Some software along the lines of traceroute or mtr might be modified pretty easily to take some measurements. Another possible approach would be to use forged TCP packets. Say you have host A using the ISP you think is throttling. You have access to another host B at a different ISP. A program on host B sends forged TCP packets that appear to be from various web sites to host A. On host A, you have a program which tallies up the received forged packets. Since all the packets are taking the same route, the packet loss rate should be the same no matter what the source address is. If the ISP is throttling, it should be pretty obvious. The one problem with this approach is that the ISP host B is connected to should be dropping the forged packets. Not that it isn't easy to find an ignorant or irresponsible ISP that will let you source forged packets...
  • No it's like the Interstate Authority (or whatever you have in the US) making Fords go slower on their highways so that more people will buy GM ;)
  • Yeah - but it is in poor taste to sell QoS by promoting this type of application. Very sleazy. Several companies make poisons, but most don't claim that they are handy to kill your spouse and collect the insurance...
  • As the original article states, this technology is not limited just to cable modem access. It can be used by any ISP using any access method (cable, DSL, dial-up, satellite).

    Give this information to anyone and everyone that currently has or is thinking about getting internet access. Educate them about the alternatives. We need to make the providers understand that the public *will* switch to alternate access methods if this type of system gets implemented. Last, but not least, don't let this issue die without making sure that the ISPs understand that the public knows what they are up to.

    Thanks,

    UOZaphod

  • Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death! - Patrick Henry (1736-1799) Speech in the Virginia Convention, March 1775

    Now, there's the small problem that Patrick Henry was a monarchist...kinda odd when you think that the Yoo Ess of Ay coulda had a Prussian prince as King of America (he was invited but turned the offer down). And if Ben Franklin had had his way, we'd have had a turkey as our mascot instead of a bald eagle...and we came close to choosing German as our national language after the Revolution.

    Just think. A German speaking, Prussian-monarch-ruled nation with a turkey for its emblem. Imagine your dollars (sorry, guess it woulda been "taler") with a big honkin' turkey on the back, with "EINS" in huge letters. And a picture of König Friedrich Wilhelm IX on the front. Odd...

    Ethelred [surf.to]

  • Quality of Service and Class of Service are designed to make the net a better place to be. They have been implemented by Cisco, Nortel, Microsoft, Linux, HP, Extreme, (insert nearly every network vendor/os on planet).

    I want to be able prioritize my real time traffic over my non-interactive traffic. I want my internet game packets to have higher priority than my email.

    ISPs are going to use this technology to better manage the traffic flowing across their networks. They'd be stupid to start blocking access to content from a legal and PR nightmare standpoint.

    This stuff has been around since the start of IPv4 (ToS bits, now Diff-Serv) and is finally being implemented.

    Check out http://www.qosforum.com if you want actual information about these technologies, not FUD.

    Or check out the ietf DiffServ, MPLS, or IEEE 802.1p/q pages if you want to see why so much effort has been put into these technologies by the standards bodies and the commercial and non-commercial OS/network vendors.

    Note: I work for a company who tries to educate and explain new internet technologies. The website above is one that I am the network admin for.

  • That's what I'd name the software! I can't believe I'm about to say this, but shouldn't PBS try to get into the ISP game for unbiased/unrestricted access...no, wait, then we'd never be able to visit Republican sites. Hmmmm, tough nut to crack.
  • Smacks of American Bar Association, they've got to be behind it. No wonder the Phillip Morris site is slow this morning.

    ...and stop calling me 'Shirley'.
  • Anonymous Coward wrote:
    You know, right now any ISP can *restrict* access to the competitions sites if they felt like it... The poor users (i.e. the unsuspecting public) gets screwed again... Of course, things like slowing sites won't matter in 10 years when average homes have a 100Mbit connetion or higer...
    Speaking as the owner of an ISP, restricting access doesn't work as either tactics OR strategy. What makes Internet access valuable is access to ALL sites on ALL networks. If you try to restrict access at your router (which has been suggested by some lawmakers in order to limit minors' access to pornography) you begin to lose customers.

    Where the ability to throttle becomes useful, at least as far as the ISP is concerned, is where it gives you the ability to sell metered service to co-locations (and other downstreams.) If you don't throttle, you have to sell access to your LAN as if everyone was using all of your DS3. (Assuming you have a DS3.) Throttling allows you to sell cheaper access to lower-bandwidth sites. That lowers your up-front price and allows you to sell to a bigger market with less risk.

    Oh, and don't hold your breath on that 100 Mb/s access. It remains to be seen how long it'll take the current backbone structures to adapt to the current crop of high-speed access schemes.

  • That's bull; access to the internet is access to the internet. You don't (and can't) sue when there's a network outage.

    More to the point, there are a couple of valid uses for that kind of thing. First of all, ISPs in many areas of the world are forced to restrict access to sites to conform to local legislation. It's assinine but true. And it's easy to see that happening in America - the last decade of the Republican Party being a front for the Christian Coalition is more than illustrative enough.

    Second, bandwidth limiting isn't exactly a new thing - it's used to determine quality of service. As a return for tv cable monopolies, cable co's have to devote a certain amount of broadcast to the public - public access television. It's not unreasonable to see that bandwidth might be treated in the same way - registered not-for-profit sites getting an allocated chunk. Or that pornographic sites be limited to a certain chunk (a weak second best to the point above, no doubt).
  • If they claim to be an internet service provider and restrict access to any part of the internet then sue or bring charges of fraud. The internet is the whole thing. There is no right to rewrite reality.

    IANAL
  • I agree
    I first received my cable access, and I was restricted after the first month, they changed over their rules and all of us suffered. it was awful, and the worst part was that they had a monopoly in that area. I moved so I am fine now, but until someone can regulate the providers we can be screwed. The designers are not at fault, the providers are for sure...

    First Post!
  • This feature is not new and it wasn't Cisco who started it. If companies wanted to do this then they would have done it with or without Cisco. Packeteer for example.
    But all the same it is interesting that Cisco makes router configurations on higher level protocols. I thougth it's not their territory.

    -Danny
  • Not to bring any unwanted sanity to all these wild posts, but I thing most of the people here are out of touch with reality. (More so than they should be anyway.) I work with IOS everyday, I've got stacks of routers sitting on my desk, those are my qualifications. For a good long time, IOS has had these little things called "Access Lists", you may or may not have heard of them. They "block packets" to a given "destination". /Every/ router manufacturer has this feature implemented in some form in one of there boxes.

    On a side note, prioritization of packets is a "good thing", you want VoIP/VoFR/VoATM packets as well as Video over IP/FRM/ATM packets to get out of the box and down the line as quickly as possible. Getting lagged down in a buffer waiting for some idiot to get his porn, causes all sorts of havok in RT-streams. Don't forget that.

    For a page whose audience is supposedly the Creme' de La Creme' of internet/computer savvy users, there sure are a lot of ignorant outbursts.

    Oh, BTW Bowie, checked out Propaganda. Cool Sh!t.

  • Proving it (Score:3)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @04:53AM (#1775307) Homepage Journal

    There is a way to prove it. If you can get access to a linux box outside of the cable network, set up a tunnel to it, and make that tunnel your default route. Compare access times w/ and w/o the tunnel to a website you ssupect them to be throttling or blocking. If the tunnel is faster in spite of the extra hops, they are throttleing the connection.

    In a related note, I discovered that Digex is silently proxying web access upstream from my provider using a prot redirector. Usually, it works OK, but some days it is overloaded and I can get faster web access thru the above mentioned tunnel.

  • Bandwidth Throttling? (Score:3)

    by BooRadley ( 3956 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @03:27AM (#1775308)
    Hasn't this feature (bandwidth throttling per IP) been in IOS for a long time now? Granted, almost every network tool has a potential for misuse, but panicking over a hyped-up Yahoo newsbit is silly. Besides, if the cable companies decided to do it, there's really no way to tell except to subpoena the router configs for every upstream node in the network. Not exactly a PHB-friendly tactic.

  • The sky isn't falling (Score:3)

    by dmax69 ( 23888 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @03:29AM (#1775309) Homepage
    Yes, it is very disconcerting that Cisco has found it serves their customers to provide such ethically questionable software. And of course it will be used for all the wrong reasons. But I think they (Cisco) have forgotten one of the fundamental rules of networks -- route around the glitches and find an optimal path through the maze. Unless the entire infrastructure is owned by a single controlling entity, no cable company, ISP, ASP or telcom can permanently limit bandwidth to/from any other entity.

  • Not enough reaction so far (Score:3)

    by 0xdeadbeef ( 28836 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @05:03AM (#1775310) Homepage Journal
    Frankly I think a little overreaction would be good for this issue. Most people don't seem to care that the same people who shovel crap over TV are going to try to lock us in to the same crap through the internet. At least this will get media attention.

    I wasn't aware that ISP's are required to provide unrestricted access. Is this legally mandatted, or simply a policy of the backbone providers? Policies can change, especially when there is bigger money at stake.

    The problem with assuming that the market will force providers to allow the freedom we expect is that it assumes that unrestricted net access is the most profitable.

    That is not guaranteed! Big media is already paid billions by advertisers because they have a captive audience. What do you think is more profitable, selling real net access, or selling locked, proprietary content, loaded with ads, under the guise of net access? It is not in their interest to allow individuals the ability to publish on the net, because that is in competition with their own services.

    And don't think competition from DSL and other technologies will change this. I'm speaking generically, because the telecomm and media industries are already intertwined in this realm. ATT owns cable companies, and MediaOne is providing phone services. They'll all follow each other's lead, doing whatever makes the most money.

  • Surely You'd be Sued (Score:3)

    by Mignon ( 34109 ) <satan@programmer.net> on Friday July 30, 1999 @03:18AM (#1775311)
    This sounds pretty evil, but I can only imagine an affected site would come at the evil-doer with every lawyer they had. Imagine if long-distance phone companies were doing this to each other.

    I suspect the (US) courts would side with the offended party, as this surely meets most definitions of "anti-competitive".

    Maybe such devices will end up being banned, but will be sold in a version where the feature is disabled, but easily restored, just like assault rifles...

  • Re:Government should break up Cisco (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30, 1999 @04:53AM (#1775312)
    And what do you consider Nortel/Bay and Lucent/Ascend? Seems like there's competition to me... And just because a company is large does not necessarily imply that they are a monopoly.

    So why should Cisco should be broken up? Is it because of a feature (commonly known as traffic shaping, Quality of Service, etc) which has been a part of IOS for some time now? Maybe some people don't realize this, but QoS is not a feature specific to Cisco equipment... And as far as I am aware, traffic shaping is also a feature which is available under Linux. Yet there has been no controversy over that.

    Besides, if some service provider wanted to use QoS in the way that everyone here is ranting about, you should be attacking the service provider, not Cisco...

  • Re:CISCO is not the bad guy here (Score:4)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @05:04AM (#1775313) Homepage Journal

    QOS and bandwidth throttles ARE integral to business LAN/WAN routing as you say.

    However, the article said that the sales brouchure SPECIFICALLY mentioned restricting customer bandwidth to a competitors service to improve business for your own.

    It's the difference between lawfully selling a gun (observing all manditory waiting and background checks) which may be used for good or evil, and putting a sign up that says: Messy divorce?, Passed over for that promotion? Buy a gun and blow your problems away!"

  • No surprise (Score:4)

    by jabber ( 13196 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @04:10AM (#1775314) Homepage
    I've known for a long time that the web sites mentioned on /. are orders of magnitude slower than the rest of the Internet. I always thought that this was to compensate for the audiences unusually long attention spans, and attention to detail. I saw this as a courtesy.

    After all, good things are worth waiting for, so when I see that 'loading' bar zip back and forth across the bottom of my browser, I know I'm in for some good reading. And every time I get that little 'no response from server' pop-up, my anticipation just builds. The best sites, by far, are the ones that allow you ample time to get a coffee - and to indulge in the comforts of a physiological break. Sites like the 'world's smallest web server' are enough to make me pee my pants, and at work that would be embarassing. So I really do appreciate the significant delay these sites provide - as a courtesy.

    So, you see, there's nothing to balk at in this new-fangled scheme. It's a value added for the customer. Sort of like PIII enabled sites.

    But why invest in special hardware and software, when the CableCos could just submit the sites they want to slow down, as /. articles?

  • overreaction (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30, 1999 @03:23AM (#1775315)
    OK, there is going to be a massive overreaction to this story. A few sanity checks.

    Cable Modem providers must provide unrestricted access if they are to recieve the pricing schemes that ISPs get for WAN circuits. As soon as they filter access, they aren't considered an ISP per se, and have to pay much higher prices for their circuits. This will self-regulate.

    Cable modems are being treated by some providers as a LAN based technology, and the companies doing this (read Cox in Arizona) are filtering inbound access over certain ports, not allowing customers to run servers on the cable, etc. These inferior products will be edged out of the market by other technologies.

    As soon as your ISP or cable provider decides that they can control your traffic, they can do a bunch of things that people wouldn't like ... QOS metrics that prefer internal web sites to external (from the cable network) ones are already easily implementable, if not already implemented.

    The moral of the story is that if you want leased-line style unrestricted access, you can dial up, buy DSL, or get a leased line. If cable providers don't want to play in the unrestricted access ISP field, then the free market will judge if it is a good idea. Don't blame the provider of the technology, blame the provider of the service that chooses to restrict your access.

  • Small lesson on IP filtering (Score:5)

    by buzzword ( 43792 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @04:55AM (#1775316)
    When I left Cisco, I swore I would never attempt to teach IP routing to a clueless crowd ever again. Time to renege, I guess.

    I have not seen the marketing materials Yahoo! is talking about. But I do know what a Cisco router (and a Nortel, Bay, etc) can do. One of the things it can do is prioritize or block traffic based on source/destination pairs, protocol numbers, whether or not its SYN bit is set, whatever. What I am seeing is that people somehow find fault in a router being able to do this. I'm speechless. Depending on the drugs you were smoking at the time, you COULD find fault with Cisco Marketing playing up this feature. This, combined with the fact that cable ISPs (let's not dance semantically here, shall we) are monopolistic entities by virtue of their infrastructure ownership, can be seen as quite nefarious. But can any of you goobers actually tell me that the fact that you can filter traffic on a Cisco router is, of itself, wrong? As an ex-member of Cisco Engineering (though not speaking for them) give me a goddamm break.

    Your ISP can filter websites any time they want, by the way. The difference is that you have a choice in dial-up ISPs. You typically don't with a cable ISP, giving the latter much more leeway in the unethical things they can do.

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