I’ve finally uploaded several videos that have been sitting on my Flip camera since SCTE. Here’s a quick, two-minute interview I snagged with Motorola’s Sean Esser shortly after he gave a technical presentation on wavelength division multiplexing for fiber node segmentation. He describes the technique very broadly, explaining how it’s used to combine multiple colors of light on a single fiber. The result is that cable operators can expand bandwidth with the fiber they already have in their networks.

"We cannot get your Core2Quad from Dell."

Now, the good news:

"That means we upgrade you free to a Quadcore Xeon."

Quadcore Xeons are exactly the same high-end servers originally promised to us by Antony. Of course, we only have one of them instead of 5, but this one is offered to us by a reputable company, with a solid delivery date of 2 weeks.

Here are all the features our server comes with:

Intel Xeon Quadcore 3323 (2.5Ghz)
4GB DDR2 RAM
500GB SATA II Hard Drive
2000GB Bandwidth on a 100MBPS full duplex line
4 IP addresses

If you look at the dedicated server offerings for Crissic Solutions, you'll see the highest server as 'Intel Enterprise'. This is a server not even typically offered by them. Just to give an impression of how powerful this server is, Skylar typically runs 20 VPSs (Virtual Private Servers) with just one of these servers. Skylar has mentioned that this server could run all, or nearly all, of our current accounts.

Because of our long-term relationship with their company, we are being offered an incredible discount for the server, however this is still a greater cost than our income. As most of you know, since I'm sure I've said this so many times, our earnings could be an estimated 9 times as high if everyone placed valid ads on their site. (We could afford 3 of these servers with that.) I think it's only fair to provide our top-notch server to those clients who are doing their part to make sure we can continue hosting long into the future.

The conditions are not at all tough:

1. Have finished building your website.
2. Have placed proper valid ads on your website.
3. Have submitted your website for review on our forums.

In addition, if you do the above, your account will be on the Improving stage with lots of extra features, 5 times the storage and bandwidth, Ruby on Rails*, and even more on top of what you already have.

Check your account's 'Hosting' section for a new 'Upgrade' page. Websites on the Improving stage or higher will be moved ot the new server when it comes online.

What is happening to Node 8?
Node 8 will be moved to be hosted on the server, however it will still use the domain ismywebs.com. No new accounts will be allowed onto Node 8 in the future.

What do I do to upgrade?
You can just go to the 'Hosting' section of your account and click the 'Upgrade' button. Follow the instructions there.

How do I transfer to the new server?
Transfer will happen automatically once the new server is online. You earned it.

What happens to people not on the server?
Nothing at all. Your account will still have the same relative reliabiliy, and be subject to whatever company manages your node. With the server from Crissic, we will have more control over how it is set up and your accounts.

What will my domain of the new server be?
This server will use the domain ismywebsite.com. For those who use their node's domain when advertising their site, it is good to get back into the practice of using yoursite.ismywebsite.com. This domain will almost always work to access the site.

What happens to new accounts registered now?
New accounts will still be created on one of the nodes. Once they meet the above requirements, they will move onto the big server. Empty accounts will be removed after 30 days, and accounts with content after 150. (I should think 5 months is more than enough time to complete the above.) Once you are on the new server, there will be no account removal unless requested by the client.

Does the new server have cPanel, Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, Fantastico, RV Site Builder, CGI, Perl, Cron Jobs, or any other feature?
It should have all of those except for RV Site Builder, which will be available once we are making a profit exceeding $30/mo again.

Should I still back up my site files on the new server?
We have a back up system in place, but the answer is still yes. Always have a backup, even if you're hosted with a reliable company like Crissic Solutions in a datacenter guaranteeing 99.999% uptime.

How many accounts will the server fit?
More than enough for everyone who wants to meet the above requirements.

*Ruby on Rails is not available on all nodes. If you require it, you can request to be transfered to another node.

The stastics do show that MY MANY POSTS ABOUT MY UNDENIABLE EXPERIENCE WITH BAD BELL SYMPATICO ARE STILL ON THE TOP 3 MOST POPULAR READINGS OF ALL OF MY VARIOUS TOPICS THAT I HAVE POSTED ON MANY SITES OF MINE.

see also

http://postedat.wordpress.com/2008/06/29/dealing-effectively-with-complaints-problems-bad-service-isp-provider/

http://thenonconformer.wordpress.com/2008/07/05/too-many-major-isp-suppliers-are-unacceptably-guilty-of/

Comcast is testing delaying traffic--slowing down packet transmission to throttle the bandwidth rate--in two Eastern cities they cover for the heaviest users of their service. This is an effective cap, rather than a cutoff. (Comcast has been delaying BitTorrent P2P traffic for all its users prior to this; this change affects all traffic, not just BitTorrent, and is being announced, instead of sub rosa.) In a town in Texas, Time Warner Cable is experimenting with offering different speed packages each of which is coupled with a monthly limit on usage. The lowest-priced package offers a ridiculous 768 Kbps downstream and 1 GB per month for $30 per month; the highest-priced is 15 Mbps downstream with a more reasonable 40 GB per month limit. Charges are $1 per GB above that. With cable companies traditionally and telephone companies newly offering television programming, premium channels, and on-demand video, the caps are another tool to prevent competition from over-the-Internet sources of things to watch. In a situation in which a few carriers control all the pieces, it's unclear whether rate caps can stick. If both telcos and cable companies decide to impose such limits and restructure their networks, who do you turn to? People with broadband are unlikely to cancel it. In a monopoly or duopoly market, you can't switch brands. There has to be a happy middle--a role that the FCC may help to negotiate. A 40 GB cap switched to 400 GB might serve precisely the right purpose without penalizing average users who have no other market choice. With Time Warner Cable charging a buck a gigabyte above their monthly limits in their test market, but with Amazon's S3 service delivering it retail for as little as a tenth that, it's not hard to see that carriers are looking to caps to solve network problems and make a little scratch on the side."  http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080615/tc_pcworld/146752

Before I had 1 Mbps/400 kbps.

It is incredible how the size of things gets less important everytime.  Before downloading 20 MB took circa 3 minutes, now it takes a bit less than 1 minute.  I'm really enjoying it!

There is a bad part, though: I start loosing referential to what is too heavy and what isn't with regards to web technology.  So, I always have to check on slower links and see if things are OK...

But it is nice :-)

I even joked with some clients: "3 times faster means that I can see 3 times more pr0n!" :-)  I'm glad that they know that I also work with this thing here :-)

Now, I know what most of you are thinking. "This guy couldn't find anything worthwhile to write about so instead chose to bore us with a hair-brained, nearly impossible scenario that doesn't matter in the least." Well, you're right. But think of it. No iPods, laptops, cell phones, Playstations, X-Box 360's, PC's, internet, HDTV, DVD's, Blu-Ray's, CD's... Now I don't want to get too crazy, so let's not take it clear back to the Stone Age. But imagine if the only TV in the house was on an antenna, if all we had for music was LP's and cassette tape, if all the phones had cords, let's say, 1980. (Wow, how the world has changed in 28 years.)

Now, we all know we wouldn't die, (Hell, it would probably be good for most of us) but it certainly would change the way we do things. There's not a whole lot that most of us do in our daily lives that hasn't changed in 30 years. I wouldn't have my iHome to wake me up each day. No reason to check blog hits or e-mail, or even a way to do it. No HDTV to watch while eating breakfast. No iPod dock to plug my non-existent iPod into to listen to music while I showered. No XM Radio for the commute to work. No Homestar Runner or Tekzilla or Wine Library TV to entertain me once I got there. (I do love to read though, so that'll always be there, unless we descend all the way to a Fahrenheit 451-esque world.)

The true point of this rambling is simply this. When that tiny inkling of panic rose up after reading that article, I realized how much I've allowed myself to become a slave to this wonderful technology. Now, I'm not planning on becoming a monk or anything, or even changing the way I live my life, but I think it's important for every tech loving soul out there to just take a moment every once in a while, breath deep, and realize that yes, we could live without this. Let's not take it for granted, and most of all, let's not let it take over our lives.

Sumber : bibi google

"We’d like to thank our web community for bringing these challenges to our attention, as building community trust and protecting all of our users is critical to us. We have modified the Search-Shield component of LinkScanner to only notify users of malicious sites; this modified version will be rolled out on July 9th 2008. As of this date, Search-Shield will no longer scan each search result online for new exploits, which was causing the spikes that webmasters addressed with us. However, it is important to note that AVG still offers full protection against potential exploits through the Active Surf-Shield component of our product, which checks every page for malicious content as it is visited but before it is opened."

I wasn't able to find any other source to verify this quote, but found the quick acknowledgment of the problem by AVG to be heartening. Also be curious to whether the fix offered up will result in immediate and noticeable decreases in reported traffic to websites.

Slashdot had an interesting note today regarding a 6% rise in their traffic that they attributed to the antivirus vendor AVG:

"AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding websites with meaningless traffic (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now). Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots."

Why the AVG Uptick?
The AVG malware scanner is called LinkScanner. The Register has detailed the possible cause behind the deceptive traffic in several posts:

"In late February, AVG paired its updated anti-virus engine with a real-time malware scanner that vets search engine results before you click on them. If you search Google, for instance, this LinkScanner automatically visits each address that turns up on Google's results page. According to the company, more than 20 million people have downloaded the new AVG 8, and this has caused a huge up-tick in traffic on sites across the web, including The Register."

Could It Impact Me?
While the program may be good from a security perspective of preventing people from visiting malicious sites, it has resulted in increased costs for the website owners paying for the extra bandwidth.

"Adam Beale, who runs a UK-based internet consultancy, says that across his small stable of clients, traffic has spiked as much as 80 per cent on some sites. And this is more than just an inconvenience. After all, sites live and die by their traffic numbers. And net resources aren't free."

"Although [the AVG LinkScanner] might be good for the security of users, it's a real pain for website owners and webmasters," Beale tells us, having blogged about this growing problem. "It's causing people to think their traffic is increasing, costing those who pay for bandwidth, and wasting disk space with large amounts of unnecessary lines in log files."

Resolving the Problem
In writing this post, I'm not trying to sound the alarm, but explaining why visitors or bandwidth demand to a site are increasing is a significant challenge for people like me to figure out. It causes me to question trends that indicate increased blog readership...or in the case of a company seeing increased traffic without an increase in revenues, this can be more problematic.

To really determine whether the added AVG traffic is really the cause of an surprise uptick in web traffic, I would turn to the following articles:

How to beat AVG's fake traffic spew - The Register
AVG throttles web analytics - Tech Blorge

Please let me know if this is something that has impacted you.

I was thinking about this proposition this morning in between writing a paper on integrated CMTS and reading over at OneTrak about HBO’s ongoing strategy to make its content available online only through allied cable operators. (HBO introduced this approach back in January.) The beauty of targeting bandwidth for MSOs is that they can spend money where they’re most likely to get a financial return. For example, imagine that HBO and Comcast worked out a deal to offer online HBO content to subscribers not already getting it in a TV package for a small extra monthly fee. (an online approach to a la carte) Comcast would know that the only subscribers chewing up bandwidth with HBO shows would be ones contributing to their revenue stream. For that extra revenue, Comcast would probably be willing to spend money for more downstream capacity.

So then the question becomes, how does a cable operator target bandwidth? There are lots of broad-spectrum approaches, like analog reclamation and switched digital video, but targeting and then scaling bandwidth as needed is a slightly different proposition. One way to do this is by decoupling downstream data channels in a CMTS and adding physical cards with more downstream channels to a CMTS chassis as needed. In the scenario above, if more people wanted to pay for HBO content online, an operator could spend the money to make extra bandwidth available in small increments. Money goes out and money comes in.

On a separate note, HBO’s approach is fascinating from the content side of the business as well. Here everyone is trying to make money off free video on the Web, and HBO has decided it’s changing the rules for online video by working only through existing content delivery channels. Monetization is back in the hands of the service providers.

Important Clarification: I re-read this post and realized folks might think I’m advocating that operators prioritize online content by making more bandwidth available only for content they’re getting money from. I’m not. What I’m suggesting is that operators have a compelling financial reason to increase bandwidth where they know they can make money. However, that doesn’t mean that that same bandwidth couldn’t be used for other applications by other subscribers as well. That’s part of the business that operators are in. Ultimately if there’s not enough bandwidth to keep all subscribers reasonably happy, people will stop subscribing to both the baseline connection service and premium content services.

But this one article is worth reading, and I thought I'd flag it here rather than just tag it in del.icio.us. MIT's Technology Review discusses whether the level of traffic now being generated will kill the internet as we know it.

The surge in video traffic started with YouTube, but there is a lot of higher-quality user-generated video out there now and some of it gets insane numbers of hits just because it's quirky and catches someone's attention. And the broadcasters are in on it. In the UK, the BBC's iPlayer is coming up for its first refresh; it's been a wildly successful service, allowing programmes to be retrieved and re-watched over a seven day period, or retrieved and downloaded until the DRM software causes them to self destruct. ITV and Channel 4 have a slightly different model, but the key thing - in common with the US broadcast-linked services mentioned by TR - is that these are peer-to-peer applications. So, not all the bandwidth used is server-to-user; a lot of it is user-to-user, and the iPlayer T&Cs make explicit the permission for your iPlayer to be used in this way.

What's the growth factor? TR quotes analyst Nemertes as saying 100% per year. An alternative academic estimate of 50% growth can probably be coped with by current technology trends. Watch this space ... while you still can!

Links:
• Internet Gridlock (MIT Technology Review, July/August 2008 )
• The Internet Singularity, Delayed: Why Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web (Nemertes, Nov 2007)

The sad truth, however, is that most people would not even come close to using the smallest 5 GB cap. We all know many people like this. For example, the people who are still on dial-up, who would be hard-pressed to download 5 gigabytes if they were downloading 24 hours a day, all month. The people who only use e-mail and occasionally view a YouTube video. This isn’t a criticism, but it is just a simple fact. Some people do not have the time or interest to integrate technology into their lives, which from where I sit is too bad. Technology, computers and the internet have the ability to improve your life, as I hope to show you in this blog. However, if your access to the internet is limited just as some of the best uses for the internet become available this will have a dampening effect on advancement.

The more people that are involved and interested in any given technology, the more that that technology is apt to grow and improve. This cap could be just the thing that stops someone from trying to listen to a podcast or to watch their favorite TV show online. I know that if I have a cap I become much more aware of my usage of a product. For example, I have a pre-paid cell phone that I hardly ever use. The reason is that even though I have over 500 minutes of time on it, I’m afraid of running out of time when I really need it.

I think that the same sort of mentality might apply here. People are liable to here about new technologies, like the NetFlix set-top box or programs that I’ve talked about like Joost and decide against even trying them because of their fears of the cap.
And the fears of people under these caps is pretty justified. If you were to download one high-definition movie, that could easily use up a 5GB cap all at once. As people with cell phones know, overages can be really painful. It still remains to be seen how the Time Warner plan will work, and maybe the doom and gloom being sounded across cyberspace will turn out to be overblown. Only Time (Warner) will tell.

Beberapa waktu lalu Telkomsel meluncurkan 6 paket TelkomselFlash unlimited yang ditawarkan mulai 125rb sampai 400rb yang berkecepatan 3.6 Mbps (tanpa modem),pilihan paket2nya bisa dilihat disini.

Dari hasil uji kecepatan akses (bandwidth) internetnya ternyata produk ini cukup memuaskan. Hasil beberapa pengujian untuk paket Rp. 125rb (256 kbps) yang dilakukan pada portal pengukur bandwidth speedtest, untuk server lokal (jakarta) didapatkan kecepatan downlink 219 kbps dan uplink 53 kbps, sedangkan untuk server luar, New York (257/53 kbps) dan Buines Aires (251/41 kbps).

Sebagai catatan, pengujian menggunakan modem ponsel LG KU250 yang sudah mendukung 3G, koneksi ke PC menggunakan kabel USB. Waktu pengujian dilakukan sekitar jam 8pm WIB di daerah Palmerah-Jakarta (indoor), sinyal 3G pada layar ponsel 3 bar.

I missed the roundtable at SCTE yesterday with Motorola, Japanese cable operator JCom and Heavy Reading’s Alan Breznick, but I’m catching up on the presentation notes. JCom debuted its DOCSIS 3.0 service two months ago with a premium speed tier of 160 Mbps. According to the operator, 25% of new Internet subscribers since then have signed on for the 160-Mbps service. Amazing. Of course that might have something to do with the fact that the new speed tier is only five dollars more than JCom’s 30-Mbps offering. Quintuple the speed for five extra bucks a month.

I found another interesting nugget from one of the presentation decks as well. According to ABI Research, streaming video consumption in North America is not far behind consumption in the Asia-Pacific region today. (See chart below) That’s despite the massive difference in broadband speeds available. Over the next four years, however, ABI projects Asia’s consumption rate to take off, while the growth rate for North America is expected to be a much subtler slope.

The industry is also increasingly green about energy costs. Sixty-nine percent think energy efficiency is more important than circuit costs when constructing a network.

Tellabs and research firm IDC conducted the survey of 372 telecom industry professionals, which tracked respondents' views on Internet use, the challenges providers face, and how those challenges will affect tomorrow's networks. Broadband is integral to the way users work and play and is a vital part of everyday life.

"The findings of this survey make it very plain that bandwidth is not infinite," said Lee Doyle, Group Vice President and General Manager, Network Infrastructure and Security Products and Services, IDC. "Unless there is sufficient investment into new infrastructure, the increased bandwidth demands of new advanced services could well outstrip capacity."

The survey reveals that telecommunications professionals:

• Are concerned the Internet will "break" - 51% are concerned that increasing bandwidth demands will "break" the Internet
• Think power efficiency "laps" circuit costs - 69% say that in a network environment, energy consumption is more important than circuit costs
• Think providers will do what's necessary to clear lanes - Of the 80% who identified a way to deal with Internet congestion, 32% think providers address spikes in traffic by prioritizing via packet inspection, while 24% believe that spikes are better handled by charging more for excess bandwidth;
• See video as a road hog - 43% believe that up to 30% of overall Internet traffic is video today, and 40% expect that to increase to up to 75% in five years
• Believe Europe drives demand for mobile broadband - 80% expect that over the next two years, operators will face greater demand for mobile broadband services in Europe than North America;
• Predict mobile TV use is in the fast lane - 50% say that video puts the biggest bandwidth demand on mobile networks today and 81% say that will still be true in five years.

"Internet access has become essential for millions of Americans and the appetite for bandwidth is putting pressure on service provider networks," said Dan Kelly, executive vice president of global products for Tellabs. "Tellabs solutions enable providers to offer multiple levels of broadband offerings, based on the quality of service and the price that is right for their customers.

Tellabs polled industry professionals at NXTcomm08, the premier industry venue co-owned by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and the United States Telecom Association (US Telecom). Tellabs conducted the survey on June 17.

Do I have to like podcasts an' videos an' all? 'cause, well, I don't.

People.... talk.... really.... really... slowly.

Not only that, but listening to a voice means either disturbing the people around me (and there usually are people around me), or finding some annoying ear-things with wires and all. Watching a video means spending the bandwidth to download it, hoping it will be compatible with whatever the heck the web browser decides to give it to to play, and then listening to the voice that goes along with it (see above).

I watched the little video about someone's impression of SL's Fifth Birthday here, and it was not a content-dense experience. It look a perceptible amount of time to start playing, and it ran long enough that I got interrupted once by someone popping in to ask me about an email. In actual content it had maybe two short paragraphs of text, that I could have read in maybe ten or fifteen seconds; the titles and background music and cute flythrough zooms of various SL5B builds and closeups of the author's AV face added nothing whatever to the information content (intellectual, emotional, or aesthetic) of the piece.

Not to pick on this particular video; they're pretty much all like that, where "they" is podcasts and videos that are delivering what's essentially a narrative verbal linear message of some kind. Not content-dense, not efficient users of my time.

I almost never listen to podcasts. The people talk too slowly, they stop to chuckle at themselves or fiddle with the microphone, they in general exude a "you have all the time in the world to sit there listening to me" attitude that, I have to admit, annoys me. Sometimes people post "utterz" to twitter; I started to listen to one once, and decided after fifteen seconds that it wasn't a good use of time.

I'm perfectly happy to take my time one-on-one with a friend, or many-on-many at an interesting party or gathering. Dunno why; likely because it's interactive, and mutual. But listen passively to someone talking at the terribly slow speed of speech, or spend five precious never-to-be-recaptured seconds watching someone's cute title-fade before the possibly-interesting part of their video starts?

No fanks.

Okay okay end rant. :) Was fun, tho!

Internally at Motorola there’s been a lot of discussion around the uptick in cable interest in passive optical networks (PON). There’s plenty of life left in HFC networks, but there are places where fiber-to-the-home, and specifically gigabit PON rollouts make sense. Compton Cable, based in Canada, is deploying GPON to address the commercial services market. It’s Motorola’s first cable customer to move forward with GPON. (See recent Motorola GPON shipments update) It won’t be the last.

Not to be left behind, the Kenyan government, inspired by a growing economy hungry for information has spurred growth in the telecoms sector like never before. For once we have an enabling and responsive political climate. This has meant the government can now attract top-notch professionals to steer the ship across the digital divide. The Ministry of Information and Communications is now very visible and its PS is very vocal and energetic on matters fibre optic cable connection to Mombasa. The Kenya ICT Board on its part is the vehicle driving the ICT dream all the way to my village. I hope my people shall appreciate all these efforts.

We have many home grown companies that are complementing Telkom Kenya's efforts to connect us. Telkom on their part are now a leaner and more efficient outfit, thanks to a restructuring and eventual sale to France Telecom. Their service provision has gone a notch higher, inspired no less by emerging start ups hungry for their business. Invariably, the battle for the fibre cable connection has gone a notch higher thanks to the new entrants.

First off the block was Telkom who laid a fibre between Mombasa City and Nairobi City. This was unprecedented, and Kenya Data Networks (KDN)matched them, with a similar link. The two went on to expand the fibre mesh within the cities and now it is common to have lit fibre in your door step. Not to be left behind, Jamii Telecom took the battle to the streets of Nairobi with their KES. 300 million Nairobi Metro Fibre. This mesh aims to bring fibre-to-the-home (FTTH). Lastly the Kenyan government through its Fibre Optic National Network (FONN) is laying fibre to the entire country, connecting villages and erstwhile remote places to the hubs in Nairobi and the landing spot in Mombasa. The Kenyan map has never looked better.

The missing link is Mombasa to the world .... but not to worry. We have two competing cable teams, TEAMS (The East African Marine System) and EASSY (East African Submarine Systems). The first, TEAMS, is a joint venture between the Govt of Kenya and Etisalat, the UAE national telecom operator. We should be hooked via Fujairah, UAE by Q1 of 2009. The Alcatel-Lucent cable laying ship is working round the clock to ensure this dream is realized. The other, Eassy, is an effort by the telecoms companies to get a share of the pie by laying a submarine cable all the way to Durban, South Africa. The more the merrier!

In part 2 we shall look at what all this cable being laid means for the Kenyan people and economy.

preview dari cpanel ijonyacipi

Usage Statistics for ijonyacipi.com tanggal 19 juni 2008

Usage Statistics for ijonyacipi.com tanggal 20 juni 2008

hingga saat ini saya hanya menebak penyebab cepatnya habis quota bandwidth ijonyacipi.com adalah postingan update offline nod32 dan backlink update nod32 dari http://c1p1.wordpress.com. Perlu riset yang mendalam soal ini…

All the discussions on the topic that I have seen have revolved around the ethical merits of throttling, or the violation of contractual agreements, or privacy rights infringed. But how do the Telco’s go about deciding what constitutes abuse?

No one appears to know exactly how much internet traffic is too much. The type of traffic being throttled is typically that created by peer to peer networks such as those taking advantage of BitTorrent downloads. This assumes that all such downloads are for illicit purposes, and therefore should be discouraged. Bell Canada is very careful to not make that assertion.  All they say is that they want to maximise the experience for all users.

Bell Canada offers the “Total Internet Max” browsing experience for CDN$89.95 a month. This includes 100GB of usage per month. They also provide usage insurance of CDN$10.00 a month for an additional 30GB of activity.

How does the user know how much bandwidth has been consumed? The information is located online, of course, the irony of which should be obvious. The user is using up their bandwidth to find out how much bandwidth they are using. Technically, surcharges could be incurred during this investigation.

How do you know if are incurring the wrath of the Deep Packet Inspectors? Well you don’t. Unless you are downloading something huge using a BitTorrent service, in which case, you will be throttled. Sorry, your traffic will be throttled.

The information made available online when you sign up for a Sympatico Internet account makes no mention of the shaping or throttling of Internet traffic. Speak to a representative and they make no mention of it either.  In fact, the representative I spoke with, charming as she was, knew nothing about this and had to speak to her supervisor. The latter said Bell does not throttle traffic. I was finally transferred to Customer Service who said the only people able to answer my question were in Tech Support, but I need an account to talk with them.

It was finally agreed that my telephone account was sufficient to let me through. The Tech Support rep, again a charming individual, informed me that the shaping takes place in peak hours defined as being between 6 and 10PM.

I also took a look at the Bell Acceptable Use Policy, which is far ranging. I encourage everyone to read it. Transmitting chain letters is not allowed, for instance. Paragraph two is the one used to justify the shaping of traffic:

Restricting or inhibiting any other user from using or enjoying the Internet, impairing the operations or efficiency of the Service or creating an unusually large burden on our networks, or otherwise generating levels of Internet traffic sufficient to impede other users' ability to transmit or receive information.
In summary, my major objections to Bell (and Rogers) shaping of Internet traffic are:

1. Numbers are not made available defining what constitutes the shaping of traffic
2. No one is informed about the rules governing shaping
3. No information is made available defining the load and traffic we are being saved from.

Do the owners of the road have the right to determine how much traffic flows through their property? The answer is probably yes.

What rights do users have? Or what rights should the user expect to have?

Links:

Bell Acceptable Use Policy

The different types of traffic being generated on the Web are described in this very interesting (though a bit geeky) article. Note the article dates from 1998!

Meanwhile, the powers that be in Canada are throttling our service. Wait, a correction is in order, they are throttling the service of the 10% of the users who are abusing their agreements, so the rest of us can continue taking advantage of the 5 to 16mbps they are providing. Bell Canada is promoting their new fiber optic service with speeds "up to 16mbps" at a price of CDN$84.95.

Which makes more business sense? Throttling back your clients? Or increasing the bandwidth?

I suppose from a strictly dollars and cents issue, throttling may be less expensive. The work is done at the server level with new technologies purchased for this purpose. ComCast in the U.S. has set the precedent.

Installing Fiber, on the other hand, requires planning and foresight.  The logistics for the installation are daunting.  Verizon has set that standard. While the rest of the Telco's sit and watch, Verizon is providing its customers an incredible experience, and is setting the stage for new and enhanced features.

The future, if one is to believe the pundits, is that the Internet will become the be-all and end-all of everything. Our TV will come from there, our files, pictures, music, will all be stored online, available from anywhere, anytime. The Cloud, as it is referred to, will conquer all. In which case, we will need much faster access and more bandwidth.

The choice is to follow the lead set by ComCast or that of Verizon.

In digging through John Schlack’s technical paper on the subject, here are some of the details and clarifications I can offer.

The easiest way to make this work from a technical perspective would be to offer a premium service with additional MPEG-4 HD content. Subscribers to the service would get an MPEG-4 set-top and would be the only ones able to tune to switched channels with MPEG-4 programming. MPEG-2 set-top users simply wouldn’t see the channels as options.

Another way to deploy MPEG-4 content on a switched tier would be to implement forced tuning whenever an MPEG-2 subscriber requested a program being delivered with MPEG-4 encoding. With today’s equipment, this would require storing both an MPEG-2 and an MPEG-4 version of the program – not a problem when storage and streaming capacity are set up to be scaled separately. The system would deliver the MPEG-4 version when requested, and would force tune everyone to an MPEG-2 version if any MPEG-2 users requested the content. Force tuning has the potential to be somewhat disruptive, but there are solutions for mitigating that problem, like making sure both versions of a show are on the same QAM and/or waiting for a commercial break to force tune.

Theoretically, there should be no reason operators couldn’t also implement dynamic transcoding. In that instance, the switched digital video (SDV) system would dynamically transition between an MPEG-2 and an MPEG-4 stream, without the need to have two separate versions of a show queued. However, today’s decoders are not capable of dynamic transcoding, which means operators would have to spend money to deploy new decoders.

The end of John Schlack’s paper describes the benefits of using SDV for MPEG-4 delivery so succinctly that I’m going to quote it directly here. Any further questions? Drop me a line at marisilbey (at) comcast dot net.

Initially with a small number of MPEG‑4 capable settop boxes, SDV will be an enabling technology for deploying MPEG‑4 into the cable plant, allowing delivery of additional HD content and potential bandwidth savings. As the number of MPEG‑4 capable settop boxes grows beyond the deployed legacy settop box count, the cable plant will transition to broadcasting more MPEG‑4 content while delivering the MPEG‑2 content on the switched tier. This will provide further bandwidth savings.