RE Free Internet in Poland, the situation is absolutely ridiculous. The company that runs it, Aero2 (they deserve to be named and shamed), is an absolute mockery. Not only they started with the Captcha bullshit[0], they now actually advertise two options - "Free Internet" and "Internet without Captcha". To apply for the free Internet, you had to (around 2012-2014; I'm not certain what the situation is now) be personally present in Warsaw to pick up the SIM card. And pay the deposit. For the free SIM card. They made sure the paperwork is nontrivial, and the procedure not easy to discover - they did exactly what one would do if one had to provide a service but absolutely didn't want to do it. The end result is that most Polish people don't even know this service is available.
I don't even know who to blame more. Our FCC-equivalent (UKE; they're probably the nicest and most easy-going government agency in Poland) had a good idea. But whoever let Aero2 win the bid fucked up, and then the company fucked everything for everyone, and I'm pretty sure they did it on purpose.
[0] - I know. This is because they want their service to be only for personal use, and to get rid of people who download lots of stuff (for whatever "lots" you can download at 256kbps). But in the process, they've managed to fuck up the service and destroy plethora of potential applications - from MiFi equipment (dual-SIM phones are still rare in Poland) to giving your Arduino a data service to non-profit scientific measurement equipment.
While I do see your point, a similar approach worked fairly well for banks, law practices, and medical services, just to name a few. Sure, you can get a crappy deal, but regulation helps to at least roughly separate the wheat from the chaff, and people learned to distinguish between them.
But if you did have a legal definition of Internet requiring unmodified traffic, ISPs selling Internet service would have to, by definition, provide unlimited bandwidth insofar as their physical links are capable of. Which might actually be nice - we already know coax is fully capable of pretty incredible speeds, and being able to push data as fast as you can onto that link would be invaluable.
Of course, that also means the ISP has no requirement to ever upgrade their routing hardware - they would just have cheap stuff running 100% full load 24/7. But then its a consumer choice what ISP you use and whose hardware is best for the money - more expensive ISPs would be offering better routing hardware that can handle higher traffic, and cheaper ones would do the opposite. Well, that would work, if you lived in a sane country where infrastructure like coaxial lines or twisted pair or fiber to the home were public services rather than privately owned and monopoly controlled.
I always believed ISPs were operating at saturation levels.
Off-topic, but a thing I realized now - I have no clue what the real costs for ISPs are. I suppose it's mostly a) electricity, b) amortizing hardware and c) various personnel & paperwork expenses. Is there a comprehensive source that could tell me or help derive just how much my bits cost?
He's the CEO of AAISP, arguably the best and most transparent ISP in the UK (also quite a small one).
On costs, there's also contracts with other ISPs (most lines are leased from other ISPs, not leased by the ISP itself), customer hardware (routers and other gadgets), marketing, support, subcontracts for personnel across the country, etc.
> They made sure the paperwork is nontrivial, and the procedure not easy to discover - they did exactly what one would do if one had to provide a service but absolutely didn't want to do it.
I would basically describe this as the company doing a "work-to-rule strike." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule)
> you had to ... be personally present in Warsaw to pick up the SIM card. And pay the deposit. For the free SIM card.
I'm pretty sure that cell carriers the world over try to put some barrier between people and SIM cards (usually, it's that they cost $10) so that people won't be able to pump through burner SIMs like clockwork. Governments really knowing that whoever a cell carrier gives a SIM to (in exchange for metadata about them) is likely to be the same person who later plugs that SIM into a phone and uses it. Make SIMs "free"—and also easy to get—and individuals will be registering for 50 under different made-up aliases, or people who don't need "their" SIM will register and give it to a friend, etc.
Based on that I feel like we just hand this one back to the market to decide. I think articles like this are important in that they are easily reachable by Google or Bing to help you decide whether an offer really is legitimate or compelling.
I think it's fair to say there are very high switching costs between US carriers due to wireless chip fragmentation. Averages at least $200 to switch if you want a halfway decent phone, more if you want a nice phone.
Then companies will just invent their own term that they will use instead of using the word "Internet".
We already see this with the term "broadband", which has a legal minimum speed (formerly 500 kbps, recently increased to 2.5 Mbps). Instead of increasing the speeds so they can continue using the word "broadband", we see hotels advertising "high-speed Internet" or "$ADJECTIVE-fast Internet".
Erm, pretty much NOBODY does this - even today. Every packet you send out from your ISP has (and has had for at least 4 years - probably longer) headers, cookies, etc. injected long before it reaches the public Internet. Then along the way more companies inject things into it. Then the load balancers at the other end likely do as well.
This is not all for evil purposes, either: lots of DDOS and botnet traffic gets blackholed thanks to these optimizations. Trouble is, the ability / need for legitimate network management requires tools that can also be used for less awesome purposes, and those less awesome purposes are usually how you can justify the money for the tools in the first place.
A lot of people on HN seem to have a purist view about how Internet traffic should be handled once it leaves your house. The companies that actually manage said traffic haven't shared this view or even operated a network that looks remotely like it for a decade or more. Your data is everywhere; and if it's not being sold by your ISP (which it is) it's being sold by your bank, by Amazon, by Google -- pretty much anyone you do business with on or off line.
Not for TLS (https). Not for vpn connections. Really, pretty much never. It was big news when it came out that Verizon was doing this to mobile data connections.
All that happens to the IP header and everything inside is perhaps the ECN bit being fiddled, TOS bits being zeroed, that's it usually. And, as mentioned before, NAT.
For home cable or fiber internet connections, the NAT usually happens on your device, on your local network (and under your control if you reject the ISP-provided cable modem and use your own, or put the FIOS router in bridge mode).
Because the other ISPs were sneakier and were only injecting their tokens when the user was visiting a site that was paying for the service. Other ISPs had been running similar schemes for years, but it flew under the radar because it was only active when the user visited certain sites. Verizon fucked up and released a half-baked solution and people caught on. Other companies were better at it.
> For home cable or fiber internet connections, the NAT usually happens on your device, on your local network (and under your control if you reject the ISP-provided cable modem and use your own, or put the FIOS router in bridge mode).
Most ISPs are running a carrier-grade NAT solution of some sort. A lot more happens in the access layer than most people realize.
It's not like there is unlimited bandwidth available. There isn't. If people followed your plan no one would have any bandwidth for anything. At least this way it's just video which can handle it.
Your cure makes things worse, not better.
Have you looked at how many billions of dollars ISPs spend for wireless spectrum or deploying cell towers? Buying more is neither fast nor simple, so there's a real benefit to figuring out how to allocate a naturally limited resource fairly. The approach of charging for total bandwidth consumption doesn't do a good job of this since it's only a crude proxy for the actual problem.
> Further, the rest of the internet is going to ignore your high vs low latency tag
QoS has had various standardized forms for a long time so “the rest of the internet” hasn't been a factual statement since at least the 90s, although it's certainly far from a universally-deployed feature.
More to the point, however, we were talking about the last-mile network which tends to be both the most congested and the only point where pricing is surfaced to the user. It doesn't matter whether, say, a backbone provider does anything other than deliver the packet if your wireless carrier does use that flag to throttle packets at different rates when the network is congested. Many ISPs have already deployed equipment capable of doing this but the industry billing models do not reflect that, which is something I'd like to see change.
As to upgrading networks, the wireless industry is pulls in $187.8B per year and spends $32.1B on capital investments. Yes, the network is expensive, but it's less important to there bottom line than you might think.
I really don't see how it follows that "no one would have any bandwidth for anything".
(Adding bandwidth/infra is expensive - vs - finding ways to charge people more or double charge them for what was normal)
But there are always limits, every ISP uses them, and to not modify traffic would be to create an... interesting online experience. It would mean sometimes you get incredible bandwidth while at others you get none because everyone else is saturating the lines fully. It means you can have long strings of dropped packets just because your outbound gateway server is overwhelmed, and it would mean backups in the network would build without respite and get worse over time because the traffic saturation will spread to all possible nodes and slow them down with overheating.
When ISPs build their networks out and setup the switches that connect their effective LAN of customers to the broader WAN they build around fixed amounts of total bandwidth everyone can use at once, and then often undercut that significantly because not everyone will be using all their speed at once. But the rate limiting means you can have predictable maxima bandwidth, whereas with uncapped speeds your up and down packet rates would vary wildly based on physical conditions.
That being said, I would much rather we had that. It would taking full advantage of our available networks, and we have some breakout great network scheduling tech like codel to better handle fully saturated pipes than back in the 90s when this all became standard. Routing would of course be more expensive - you would not only have to expect greater peaks of bandwidth usage by far, you would also need to build your routing infrastructure better to handle full load saturation for extended periods of time.
So I guess I mean I agree - unmodified traffic being the definition of "Internet" would be great. But my point is that we do not have anything close to that now.
PS: Is this not a symptom? The problem is, for Internet access, either extremely restricted access to wireless transmission (private ownership of radio wave frequency is incredibly insanely stupid) or private ownership of physical infrastructure wire into your house. In either case, competition is extremely limited if present at all, and the markets are saturated with giant national corporations who have enough capital assets to devour startups and corrupt politicians into biasing the market in their favor.
If anyone could start an ISP by hooking up their own servers to a coax line on one end and fiber on the other, or anyone could start a phone company by building a cellular tower in their back yard, this would not be a problem. I mean, it would be, but it would be the kind of moral and ethical problem software freedom is - the onus then falls on the consumer to give enough shits to not buy Comcast-SuperSpeed-Facebook-Only-Terrornet for $5 less than actual Internet. The problem then becomes... most people would not, because they aren't using the Internet as global access to anyone anywhere, but as TV stations for Twitter and Facebook. But like I said, then it would not be a technical problem, but a social one, in the same way getting people to care about software freedoms is more about how nobody gives a shit than any particular barrier to entry for free software (besides IP as a whole incentivizing the creation of proprietary software, but thats a different rant).
Seems like you've got a different definition of "modifying" than me.
If a post service decides to send another package faster than yours because the other sender paid for priority, would you say they modified your sending? No. You told them your package doesn't need to arrive as quickly.
Opening and analyzing every package to check if contains a DVD and prioritizing those without can be called modifying your sending though. Especially if they say they improve the DVDs.
If Internet worked like post you would have the situation I describe, which I'm not even advocating for, I'm just saying ISP QoS and rate limiting is traffic shaping.
internet that is not internet. food that is not what is written on the package. cars that require tens of thousands over the displayed price to be like the displayed picture. software with bugs or emulated screens.
... the only thing that must be regulated is advertising. with the added benefit that if you screw too much, nothing of value was lost.
These regulations should be fairly basic: pass all IPv6 traffic unmodified, pass all IPv4 traffic unmodified except for NAT.
Then I would have a choice whether I want to pay for "Internet access", or "T-Mobile special limited edition we-will-modify-your-packets-as-we-see-fit networking package". Depending on pricing, the special limited edition networking package might actually work for me, but it should be clear that this is not the Internet.
On a related note, there is a similar problem in Poland: the state licensed new spectrum under the condition that the new operator would have to provide free internet to anyone who registers, for several years. Fast forward two years, and "free internet" means being disconnected every hour and having to solve a horrific CAPTCHA and go through several redirects to get any access, which of course pretty much excludes your MiFi or other router-like devices, and turns your online experience into walking a minefield (will I manage to place this order before my access blows up and I'll have to reconnect, losing the data I entered?). This problem would not exist if it wasn't for a vague definition of the term "Internet".