I honestly don't see the problem with this. The restriction on servers is clearly not there to prevent you from SSHing to your home computer or to run a Minecraft server for you and your friends.
It's there to prevent abuse of your otherwise unlimited gigabit connection for only $70/month to run a filesharing website on that saturates the connection 24/7/365. If you want to use Google Fiber for business use, pay for their business plan, simple as that.
EDIT: Seems a few people are missing a key detail. When you buy a personal Google Fiber plan, you're not paying for an unmetered 1Gbps upstream/downstream fiber connection. You're paying for an unmetered 1Gbps upstream/downstream connection for personal use. (https://fiber.google.com/legal/terms.html).
There are services that will sell you purely unmetered, unrestricted bandwidth, but it won't be Google Fiber, and it won't be for only $70/month.
If you're not selling me a gigabit connection with unlimited bandwidth than don't tell me that's what you're selling. Put in your bandwidth caps if you need to. Just don't tell me what I can do with my bandwidth that I bought.
You didn't really buy 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth. You bought the right to use up to 1 Gbit of throughput so long as you abide by their T&C/AUP in your usage of that throughput.
This bandwidth is oversold. Of course it's oversold. 1000 Mbit of Internet connectivity costs a lot more than you're paying Google for it, never mind the last-mile cost of connecting your home. You can't seriously expect to run a business on a residential connection sold at residential prices, right? Like it or not, this has been the status-quo since the earliest days of broadband in the late 1990s.
Now, that said, Good Guy Google would give every Google Fiber customer a GAE instance on which to run their servers. By doing this, they move the servers to network infrastructure that's actually designed for running servers.
>You didn't really buy 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth.
Which is why they should be legally forbidden from advertising that they are slling 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth.
How hard is that? Don't advertise what you're not selling. When you say "unlimited use 1GB synchronous connection" and that's not what you're selling? That's illegal. It's called false advertising. Sure no one gets nailed for it any more, but that doesn't make it right. Advertise that you are actually selling a "restricted 1GBit synchronous connection with limits on what ports you may listen on, limits on upstream use, limits on what applications you may use on the network", etc.
> Which is why they should be legally forbidden from advertising that they are slling 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth.
They're not advertising that. The closest thing they say on their web page is "no data caps," which doesn't imply that you can use the connection to run any service you please. Besides, I'm willing to bet that they have more detailed terms of service that must be agreed upon before receiving service.
While obviously intended to only be meaningless marketing speech, I'd say that the "endless possibilities" on their main page ought to imply that you can, in fact, run any service you please.
We know they don't mean that, and they know we know they don't mean that, but I don't think we should let companies get away with lies like that just because everybody's used to the lying.
Actually, if you want to interpret "endless possibilities" literally, that still doesn't indicate you can use it however you wish. Sets can be infinite in size without containing everything there is.
Imagine the integers were all the things you could do with the service. Imagine that those odd ones involved hosting a server, while the even ones didn't. The set of even numbers is limitless, even though it excludes all the odd numbers.
So what? If we are going to be pedants about the literal definition of endless then coming up with mathematical analogies is not in the spirit of pedantry. Limitless may be a definition of endless but it is not the only definition.
edit: Wow, down-voted for out pedanting the pedants. That's some cognitive dissonance there.
To me, that means that the total amount transferred is not capped, if that type of transfer is otherwise allowed by the terms of service. Of course, one can interpret that literally and show that it's clearly not true, since you're capped by your maximum transfer speed, but I think in practice the idea is that the ISP will never say "you are transferring too much bandwidth so we are charging more, canceling service, etc."
Many ISPs offer "up to XX Mb/s" with no caps. In the event of unsustainably high use by some customer, that customer might have their maximum speed lowered to ensure the network quality of other customers.
It's impossible to provide unlimited data anyway, because the maximum amount of data per month is bounded by (length of month * permitted data rate)
I've been thinking a lot about starting a fiber ISP in my hometown and this is a big issue that's come up.
I don't believe in restricting what a customer can do with their connection to internet, but I also don't want to someone to consume more resources than they are reasonably paying for.
In my ideal world, I want to sell a connection to the internet that is as fast as I can reasonably deliver. I don't even want to make the distinction between 100Mbps and 1Gbps. I don't want speed to be factor. Just fast.
Is there a better way to phrase the service offering instead of 'unlimited'?
When I read this back to myself, it sounds like I want to have my cake and eat it to. Lots of contradictions in my mind.
The problem most ISP's face is that a very small fraction of users consume a majority of the bandwidth. It doesn't pay to quibble with users over metering, so you generally just cap or disconnect your unprofitable customers.
The only way you could sell flat rate unrestricted internet service is to increase the price and force your most profitable users to subsidize your least profitable users (biting the hand that feeds you). Bandwidth usage based metering would help fix this, but there is an extreme aversion to usage metering among even low usage customers.
From a (former) network engineer's standpoint: people who are upset that they can't keep their $50/month 20Mbps connection at line rate 24/7 make me think of people who want to fill shopping bags at a buffet.
>From a (former) network engineer's standpoint: people who are upset that they can't keep their $50/month 20Mbps connection at line rate 24/7 make me think of people who want to fill shopping bags at a buffet.
Some people have bigger [data] appetites than others. Would you be in favor of a rule against fat people or really wired skinny people? And the shopping bag analogy is rather broken: if you were paying for 24/7 access to a buffet it wouldn't matter if you walked out with extra food to eat yourself.
(I'm ignoring any kind of food/bandwidth resale, I don't object to that being outlawed by the TOS.)
We discuss these limitations as if it were anything other than expecting someone else to subsidize our bandwidth consumption. People who run afoul of personal use restrictions know exactly what they are doing, and that they could never afford the bandwidth legitimately. They lead the charge against metered usage, then act like it's unfair that ISPs court the low usage customers and cut off the people abusing it. If you want fast connections with no caps and no restrictions then pay per MB. If every bit transferred means dollars the ISPs will be happily courting home server users.
A fat person may eat 2-3 times what a normal person does. Not 10,000 times. The analogy is about abusing normal expectations. You are trying to make it fit too tightly. If you really want to extend it to 24/7 access to a buffet it would mean taking up all the plates/silverware so no one else can eat there. Then becoming indignant when asked to leave 'you said it was unlimited!' But I have no desire to play analogy ping pong.
All I want is for the limitations to be upfront. And if there are 'overage' charges they shouldn't be priced orders of magnitude over cost.
Someone that uses a lot of bandwidth isn't doing it to be a jerk. And if they inconvenience others the network is frankly set up badly. Normal users will saturate a connection some of the time, and networks need to handle it. And if a network can handle saturation for one hour without problems, it can handle saturation all the time without problems.
There are three options that make sense (though you don't necessarily want to offer all of them).
- X Mbps guaranteed, unmetered, do whatever you want (including servers). X here is not oversold: you need to have enough bandwidth for everyone to use the bandwidth you've sold them simultaneously.
- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, X TB/month (pay more if you use more), do whatever you want (including servers). Here, the minimum Mbps is the non-oversold level, and the burst takes advantage of available bandwidth that others aren't using. You need the transfer limit here to prevent a small handful of users saturating their ports and crowding out all other users; if they want to do that, they can pay for it.
- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, unmetered, best-effort based on the usage of other customers, ToS-limited to the types of activity that won't continuously saturate all available bandwidth (e.g. no continuous torrents beyond the minimum Mbps, no high-traffic servers). Here, you're not charging for additional bandwidth, but you're also telling people not to run anything that will saturate more than the amount you're guaranteeing them. Your remedy for users violating the ToS is to limit them to only the guaranteed bandwidth, effectively moving them to the first type of connection.
The first two options are standard with business-class Internet connections. The third option is what consumer Internet connections normally offer. You could offer a hybrid of the first and third options, where you can use X Mbps continuously for anything you want, but only burst to the full port speed intermittently.
On the second option you could replace the cap with per-customer fair queueing to end up with a work-conserving system. It's not clear what the resulting performance would be, though.
Some people prefer the term "unmetered" if you don't charge for traffic but there are limits on the service. You can let your network congest and use a fair queueing box so that the congestion will only be borne by the heaviest customers. Alternately you can sell something like 50 Mbps, 125 MB token bucket service which will allow people to burst to 1 Gbps for 1 second.
Your datapipe will be limited in bandwidth. You WILL have to slice pieces off it for your users. For what it's worth, all ISPs here (south-eastern Europe) word it like this:
- Xup/Ydown MBps for connections within the country (i.e. ones for which we can guarantee the infrastructure)
- X2up/Y2down MBps for connections farther away (i.e. subject to more variables)
- If you exceed N simultaneous TCP sessions, we reserve the right to drop some of them when the network is under load.
Basically, see how much you're getting from your provider and in how many pieces you can slice it and how much it will cost to buy fatter pipes when you have more users.
Give mid-bounds for speed - tell the customer their speed is usually this, but might be less under very heavy load (rare) or more when the network has spare capacity. But do sell slower/faster connections. This way you can sell better connections more expensively to people with more money.
Never put limits on how much data a user can down/upload. That is limited by their speed.
Make sure your equipment won't die if someone really does start an http server and posts the link on /. with "an experimental raspberrypi http server that can serve 100k simultaneous connections; do your worst :)".
Basically, I want my connection to have low latency, 99.999% reliability and you want me to pay as much money as I'm comfortable.
I've wanted to do the same with similar thoughts. I wonder if it would be appropriate to say, if the transit pipes get maxed out, the top residential users are the first to get throttled. So, yea run your server max all the time but during peak you're going to be throttled. Hopefully someone techy enough to max out their connection 24/7 would understand they need business class service if they want unlimited 24/7.
Other options and terms: metering, throttling, and grade of service (QoS). You can sell 'unlimited' to everyone, but give the option of service classes. This is basically QoS, but (mis-)using it to give preferential service to high-paying customers. That's also essentially what 'business-class' is, as others are mentioning in this thread.
I would simply charge per megabyte after some cap.
"You pay X/mo up to Y MB; after Y MB you pay Zc/MB." Set Z to be slightly more than what you pay.
I think most people understand that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Don't promise one; just promise an honest pricing scheme that lets you make reasonable amounts of money and gives your customers what they want.
There's two big problems with that: 1.) Consumers like the amount they pay to be predictable - they will pay more to avoid surprises. Your scheme sets them up for surprise bills. 2.) There is a material cost for every customer who is surprised and then calls your CSRs to complain. That cost can be more than your entire per-customer profit for one (or several) months. (This is also why cell phone companies love to move to flat rate billing where they don't have to argue about bills as much.)
I have a negative gut reaction to meter. I realize it's fair, but it looms over me. Will I go over if I watch this movie? How much will my bill be this month?
That's how all utilities are measured, and it's totally reasonable, I just wish it didn't have to be that way.
I would not buy a metered connection. It might end up costing me less than an unmetered one, but cognitively it weighs more as you said. I want a flat-charge XMBit/s hard limit, which translates to a total theoretical maximum of ZGB/month.
The power costs per GB sent/received are negligible, the money goes towards maintenance of the network and ethernet cable doesn't degrade based on how many bits pass through it. If too many people utilise the network, then just throttle them and start dropping connections from the more aggressive ones.
Perversely, I would be perfectly fine with you dropping my connections if I try starting 100 parallel downloads or charging me the same whether I download 1GB or 100GB this month, as long as it's a nice flat reliable fee.
Edit: about "that's how all utilities are measured". They aren't. Road tax is flat, but I can drive on the road for as long as I like as fast as the rules permit. Except it's slower when too many people do it at once. I want my internet to be like a road. (disclaimer: maybe road tax isn't flat where you live, but it is in many parts of the world, so please imagine we're talking about them for the purpose of the analogy. you may also need to pay a higher tax to use the highway, but it's still flat. it may also vary per type of vehicle but it's still flat.)
>Perversely, I would be perfectly fine with you dropping my connections if I try starting 100 parallel downloads or charging me the same whether I download 1GB or 100GB this month, as long as it's a nice flat reliable fee.
I wouldn't. Never interfere with my packets (except dropping when buffers are too full, of course). Throttle me to 1mbps if you need to, but you shouldn't even know how many TCP connections I have open.
I meant in the case when the network is saturated. If I've bought a link that only guarantees N concurrent connections and I'm over that and the link is being saturated, then I would expect to have some of my packets dropped.
I guess we're saying mostly the same thing, just worded differently.
Kind of. But I'm trying to make a point that limits should always be in terms of packets. The ISP should not even know how many connections I have, let alone limit it. It's not like you can't saturate a line with a single connection.
My point was that internet is not the same as those. Generating the packets costs nothing and moving them down the wire costs nothing. Whether your router is passing packets at top capacity or it's staying almost idle, it's consuming the same amount of electricity and the same amount of upkeep. Your wires don't get damaged by the packets.
In the case of electricity (etc.) there's an actual amount of work that goes into each KWh and that's what you pay for. With internet, there's just the upfront cost of connecting a router and paying a sysadmin team to support it; after that, operating it is a flat cost no matter how many packets pass through it.
Unless you count expansion and upgrades. Bandwidth increases up to 1G are relatively cheap then things become crazy expensive fast. And of course this is assuming you can get unmetered bandwidth as an ISP (only available for dark fibre bundle owners - incumbent telcos exclusively).
You have to dig fibers at some point - at a cost of ~$15-100 per meter.
Feel free to join my "unmetered" internet. I've connected my routers via 56k lines to eachother, but we never even throttle a single customer. Of course given the chances of even a single packet ever reaching it's destination are so low you probably shouldn't even bother connecting to the network at all ...
I was thinking similarly. Like electricity, shut the light off when you leave a room, find the right AC setting that isn't too low, etc. I'd hate to move to a state of "close every browser tab I'm not actively using". Perhaps it could be a hidden pricing system that isn't advertised to the public but is available for those who want it.
>Will I go over if I watch this movie? How much will my bill be this month? //
Wouldn't that be solved with a simple ticker giving you the current spend. This way you wouldn't have "overage" charges that suddenly leap up, your spend would match usage, watch one more movie and it will cost you a small fraction extra to what it cost last month when you watched 23 movies, say.
Not all utilities are measured, domestic water is often unmetered FWIW.
It's of course oversold, anything else would be an incredible waste of network capacity.
But I believe ISPs should be forced to publish in detail what their acceptable use" thresholds and limits are, and ban advertising any connection as "unlimited". Otherwise consumers have no way of accurately comparing the offers. "Unlimited but we can ban you for an unknown amount of heavy use" is designed to avoid competition via confusion.
An ISP I used was very clear about it: 100Mbit max speed, but you are throttled to 5Mbit after 3GB of traffic during 4-8pm each night.
Actually if you study network designs that actually allow full duplex X mbps (independant of what X is as soon as you hit realistic numbers of subscribers) you'll quickly see that it's physically impossible to come up with a network design that actually allows any to any connectivity outside of a datacenter.
And internationally, where we are dependant -mostly- on undersea cables, the capacity just isn't there.
Why not make it obvious what the use cases are rather than attacking customers based on the definition of "server"? It's unclear, vague, ambiguous, and a host of other similar synonyms.
Using the term "server" is open-ended and it gives ISPs unnecessary discretion over cutting users' connections. If the rationale is that customers whom are operating commercial businesses out of their home internet connection are abusing their internet connection, then put the goal-post there.
Using the term "server" allows ISPs to change the goal-post when its convenient for them, and that's unfair.
Also, a moving goalpost isn't really unfair at all in this situation (Assuming it is, in fact, a moving goalpost). They have every right to make changes to their network to ensure good quality service to everyone.
ETA: If you're going to downvote, you should explain yourself.
I haven't read their terms of service, but I would be willing to bet that their terms leave it up to their own judgement, which is fine, because you have the option of agreeing to that or not.
I'm not convinced that use cases determine Google's acceptance of how the service is used.
e.g. If someone uses the service to download & upload 100gb+ of data a day, and somehow it's actually for personal use, I suspect that Google would restrict them.
If so, the spirit of the terms isn't as much to delineate between types of use as much as it is to delineate between amounts of use.
Well, let's yell at Google when they do that. As it is written it seems go out of the way to address use case. If they just wanted to just go after heavy users indiscriminately, they wouldn't take care to say that they won't ban typical home use that would fall under the vague definition of server.
100gb a day is ~1% of a 1GB connection and probably completely ok with them. My guess is if your serving up multiple tb of upstream bandwidth they might have an issue but I have yet to hear of anyone doing so.
Something that falls in a gray area (example for the user who asked for it in response to this same message): Running a node for your profile on a peer-to-peer social networking site which leaves all of your data on your machine in your home, under your own control. It has to listen for connections, it has to be up nearly all the time, it would use almost no bandwidth, but it would compete directly with Google+ and prevent Google from data-mining your social networking data.
Or how about a similar thing for email. Your email remains on a machine in your home, but you can access it from anywhere. Uptime should be pretty much always.
Or how about a commercial scenario? You realize your employer has huge overhead, and that you could undercut their price and offer your skills directly to customers over the Internet. So you start using your home Internet connection to do business. Not running a server, but violating the noncommercial usage policy. Running a business connection would just artificially replace your employer with Google and raise your overhead until it matched the employers, protecting the entrenched centralized business model (which the Internet should be destabilizing and destroying).
If I have to read fine print, then it is a grey area. If I have to interpret what they currently mean by "server", or what they may mean by "server" in the future, or what they may mean by "server" if I happen to piss them off for some reason, then it is certainly a grey area.
Can I run a server from my home?
Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
video-conferencing, home security and others which may
include server capabilities but are being used for legal
and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged.
It is nice of them to be explicit with a few hand-picked cases, but that remains grey as fuck as far as I am concerned. What if I run a hairdressing business in my home and happen to blow through several terabytes in a weekend with git-annex? It seems clear to me that this should be acceptable, but I cannot feel confident it would become a problem.
Maybe it is clear to some lawyer somewhere, but it is not clear to me, the consumer.
Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
video-conferencing, home security and others which may
include server capabilities but are being used for legal
and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and
encouraged.
WTF? Our terms of use prohibit using a server, but some server uses, of which we will provide you with some examples but not definitions, are actually (contrary to what our TOS say) both allowed and actually encouraged.
So, thanks for telling us that your TOS doesn't actually mean what it says, but no thanks for not actually telling us what it does mean.
If you're using the connection for a business in your home, then you are not using the connection for "non-commercial" uses and therefore should be paying for a Business Class of service
Who the hell defines that? What if I'm doing home accounting on my home computer and ssh into it? What if my accounting includes my spouses small hobby-business that is run from the home? What if I work a normal job but frequently VPN in and work from home? What if the traffic that makes them upset is not the traffic that is business related?
This shit is vague. It may be clear to you, but it isn't categorically.
Google does not offer a "business class" of service, so I can't pay for it.
Edit: OK I'm not really in a Google Fiber area, but I do pay for Comcast "business" internet for my house. I currently use about 5x more data than their residential cap allows, for 1.2x the price.
You can just read the terms and choose whether or not to pay for the service. Unless they're omitting these things from their terms, I don't see the problem. They're telling you what you can do, and you're choosing whether to pay for it.
Why should I not be allowed to saturate my connection? What difference does it make how I am doing that? I am paying for a connection; if I can only use it in bursts, don't advertise it as "gigabit," advertise it as "gigabit for a few moments at a time."
The Internet is not a network where some nodes have different capabilities from others, or at least it was not supposed to be. This is not some ITU standard that favors large monopolies on communications service. All nodes have the same capabilities on the Internet, as far as sending and receiving packets to other nodes is concerned. TCP does not discriminate between "business" and "personal" computers.
This, of course, is what makes the Internet such a fantastic system and the reason that the Internet overtook all those online services we used to use. I doubt that Google could have gotten started if the Internet were designed any other way.
I realize that this may be an attractive principle to adhere to, but I suspect you would not like the results in practice. Most likely, the only thing an average household would be able to afford is an incredibly small amount of bandwidth that can be fully saturated at all time. Of course, most people use the Internet in huge spikes throughout the day, so this would mean most bandwidth would still go unused, and during a person's peak usage it would be extremely slow.
>Of course, most people use the Internet in huge spikes throughout the day, so this would mean most bandwidth would still go unused, and during a person's peak usage it would be extremely slow.
This is exactly why it wouldn't be very expensive. Because almost nobody is actually going to use 324TB/month, so if some small minority does, it raises the average monthly bill by some small number of pennies. Conversely, if it turns out that large numbers of people are experiencing an unexpected pent up demand for massive amounts of bandwidth, prices go up until supply and demand meet, which is how the market is supposed to work.
And nothing stops the person who only wants email while 50% of the other users want to participate in some kind of P2P holographic video chat system from subscribing to the 10Mbps package rather than the 1000Mbps package and paying correspondingly less.
> This is exactly why it wouldn't be very expensive. Because almost nobody is actually going to use 324TB/month, so if some small minority does, it raises the average monthly bill by some small number of pennies. Conversely, if it turns out that large numbers of people are experiencing an unexpected pent up demand for massive amounts of bandwidth, prices go up until supply and demand meet, which is how the market is supposed to work.
But then you have monthly payments which vary, potentially wildly. I can move into your neighborhood and probably triple your bill within a month. This is bad for the vast majority of users. The demand for it would almost certainly be very low. Virtually nobody is going to want to share the bandwidth costs with their neighbors and virtually nobody is going to want 24/7 throughouts of any speed.
And speaking of markets, what about the demand for low-cost, high-burst but transfer-limited connections? I would guess that to be the product in the highest demand, based both on average non-tech-savvy users, and even bigger users like myself. And, lo and behold, that's what the vast majority of home Internet plans are (all the ones I've heard of). Note that I'm not suggesting that we truly have anything like a free market when it comes to telecoms, but in this case, I feel like supply is meeting demand quite well.
>But then you have monthly payments which vary, potentially wildly.
It doesn't make any sense to allocate costs by neighborhood. If you have single digit numbers of heavy users in the entire country then you can amortize that cost over millions of people and it will be minimal. If you have millions of heavy users then the all you can eat plan will cost more as it ought to.
> And speaking of markets, what about the demand for low-cost, high-burst but transfer-limited connections?
So we're getting back to the real problem here. The problem is that number of bits transferred is monumentally disconnected from the overall cost of operating a network. It costs the same amount to dig a hole to put a wire in regardless of the number of wires you put in it or the number of bits they ultimately carry, and that is the predominant cost of being able to transfer bits. Guys in trucks digging holes for wires and putting them back on the poles when the weather knocks them down. Paying for land taken through eminent domain. Employee compensation, property insurance, backup generators, idle power consumption, equipment depreciation. They're all fixed costs that don't change with the number of bits you transfer and they dominate the cost of operating a network.
So now you have a pricing problem. There are a couple of different "straight" pricing models. The first is you charge everybody a fixed monthly fee and let them transfer whatever they want. Someone who only transfers 50MB per month is still getting the benefit of men in trucks fixing downed wires 24/7 and access to the call center for support etc. etc., so they have to pay their fair share of that, which dominates the cost of the network and makes flat rate pricing sensible. The fact that they don't transfer very many bits doesn't make it any less expensive to dig up their street.
The second alternative is to charge exclusively by the byte. This is a preposterous failure. The problem is that, because the people who only transfer 50MB per month would be paying approximately zero dollars, but you still have to cover the cost of the line workers and accountants that service them, the cost per byte would have to be extremely high so that the heavy users pay enough to make up for the light users paying almost nothing. And this immediately snowballs because 90% of the heavy users aren't going to continue to be heavy users if they have to pay $2000/month to make up for twenty light users paying $5/month, so they turn into light users and then the price per byte has to go up to make up the revenue. Repeat until the price per byte is so high that even the light users are back to paying ~$50/month again but now you've destroyed the market for any services that require a significant amount of bandwidth and your customers hate you for charging a dollar for an email attachment.
So you can't charge solely by the byte, why not come up with some hybrid of the two and try to thread the needle? Charge a fixed monthly fee for turning on the pipe and then charge a "reasonable" amount for transfer on top of that. The fail is how much. The cost of putting twice or ten times as many strands of fiber in the ground when you already have the hole open is negligible compared to the other costs of operating the network. If you allocate based on that cost then the price per GB is going to be in the fractions of a penny. The pricing model ends up being de facto equivalent to a fixed monthly fee because the additional cost per byte would be so low.
But this is looking at all of this like a regulator -- someone who wants to maximize social utility. That's not what ISPs actually want to do. They don't want to put a hundred stands of fiber in the ground, even if it only costs 1% more in total than putting ten, because it eliminates "valuable" scarcity and reduces their ability to engage in price discrimination. Enterprise customers are willing to pay a lot more for the exact same piece of wire than a residential customer because the enterprise gets more value out of it and has more money. That has nothing to do with the cost of providing the service and everything to do with who has deep pockets. So they come up with a pricing model that will stick it to the enterprise and extract the $XXXX/month the enterprise is willing to pay, hence "no servers" and transfer caps etc. etc. because enterprises want to run servers and transfer a lot of data. Not because it costs the ISP that much more, but because that class of customers is expected to have more money.
That isn't what you want from a policy perspective at all, because the price discrimination is too blunt. Small businesses are less able to pay the "enterprise" rates so you drive them out of business in favor of larger companies. Software developers who want to encourage end users to run things that would be considered "servers" or would transfer a large amount of data get pushed out of the market because their customers on residential connections aren't allowed to do it. Meanwhile users are uselessly encouraged to "conserve" bandwidth even though unused hardware capacity can't actually be saved for use later, which wastefully reduces the benefit users receive from their connections. (The fact that not using unused transfer capacity is wasteful is hard for some people to wrap their heads around, but think about it. It's like "saving" perishable food by not eating it before it expires.)
Even if you like the idea of enterprises paying more than residential customers, distorting the market like this is not the way to do it. You could get a much better result by e.g. taxing telecommunications usage by corporations with more than 1000 employees and then using the money to subsidize connections for everybody else.
>All nodes have the same capabilities on the Internet, as far as sending and receiving packets to other nodes is concerned.
This is clearly untrue. Just look at DOCSIS (Cable Internet). If everyone on your block is streaming netflix at the same time you all suffer, which is why some people complain about speed during peak hours.
This is simply the case that the architecture being laid out to consumer is designed for specific use cases.
None of that has anything to do with the capabilities of Internet connected computers. Regardless of your connection speed or latency, you can communicate with any other computer that is connected to the Internet. That was the vision and thankfully it remains the reality of the Internet (despite the increasing threat).
It has everything to do with the capabilities of Internet connected computers. Your previous post asked why you couldn't saturate your connection. While we would all like to believe every node on the internet is equal, there are physical engineering limits and cost constraints we have to adhere to.
Simply put, the economics simply don't make sense to give everyone in the neighborhood the ability for 24/7 1Gbps. It doesn't make sense because your grandma, won't max the connection 24/7, however she would still like for her Netflix movies to download quickly. So its been decided upon that ISP-x will only put $10 million rather than $20 million so that everyone can enjoy 1Gbps internet, just not 24/7 and all at the same time. If you do need this type of connection, then get a business class connection where you do have these guarantees, and the extra money you pay goes into making sure the infrastructure can meet your demands.
However, at the end of the day it doesn't make sense to charge everyone more, for the needs of what must be 1% of the population. Remember for the most part this isn't used to stop you from SSHing into your home computer. This is stop people from using the connection in a perverse way from how it was designed. Its a simple engineering tradeoff.
If everyone on your block (and the rest of your ISP) is streaming Netflix at the same time it's more likely to be slow either because your ISP has effectively capped Netflix traffic upstream by not adding more peering connections [0] and/or is not taking advantage of Netflix' freely provided cache[1] system.
I don't think you have an accurate picture of how the nuts and bolts work for networking and the internet. You seem to think of your connection as (1Gbps -> Internet) when in reality there are several switches/routers in between you and your ending destination each with significantly less bandwidth than the total number of customers they serve. Bandwidth is oversold by an extremely large margin (rightly so). If you saturate your connection it has downstream effects that can degrade service for other users.
If an ISP wants to provide limited Internet, it is rather easy to provide limited Internet. Is it $70/month for 1Gbps symmetric, or is it $70/month for 1Gbps symmetric with a cap of 10Gb/day?
Why can't they say what they mean in their TOS, instead of falsely advertising "unlimited"?
Why do they care about the content of the bits or why I am sending them?
It's unlimited for personal use.
Running a server is not usually considered "personal use", unless it's a personal server, which I'd presume they would allow.
Let's ban Google from advertising a "search" product while we're at it, as the product they actually provide is much more complex than the term does justice.
Let's also ban them from advertising a "mail" service, because they should also have to specify the exact nature of the POP3/IMAP/SMTP service provided right there in the headline, along with all the fair use restrictions.
This is asinine pedantry. Nobody is mistaking Google's residential and business Internet connection offerings. The terms and conditions are clearly stated, and it's fairly obvious to users if they are breaching the fair use policy.
I don't know why, but for some reason when ever this issue comes up, this site likes to go into full on ignorant mode and pretend we don't know what the difference between personal and business class is.
Most people find bandwidth charges by the gigabyte distasteful, hence no payments based on that. Don't run a warez ftp site on your personal connection and you will be fine. Worried you might be hitting their upper limit of usage on what their definition of "personal use" is? Fine then just start out of the gate by paying more for business class. It is really straightforward.
If the pedants had their way, service providers would be banned from providing contended Internet connections with fair usage policies, and everyone would have to shell out for uncontended services.
Google can't and won't use a technical definition of server. It would be impossible and easy to work around if they iterated out every thing they believe constitutes a "server". The law and language is purposefully vague and is left open to interpretation.
Let's define server as something that is going to be using up enough traffic/bandwidth to get you noticed and degrades service for someone else on your network segment. That could be saturating your connection 24/7 on a network segment that is heavily utilized, or not even an issue if you live in Bumville, Nowhere.
This is something which will never be technically spelled out because it is all about context.
Right now I seriously have no idea if a legal, non-commercial instance of apache averaging 50kbps and peaking at 5mbps is going to violate their rules or not.
If they said it had to be enough bandwidth to affect others then I could breathe a sigh of relief that I'm fine.
> If they said it had to be enough bandwidth to affect others then I could breathe a sigh of relief that I'm fine.
How are you going to ensure you aren't bothering others? They aren't going to give you access to their NOC so you can view their TP99 performance and see if you are a culprit. This service could be not anything to worry about in network segment A, but a large issue in segment B. It can't be broadly defined as a simple flat metric and apply to every neighborhood in the country.
If you are worried about the case above I think the choices would be: Buy a personal connection, run your service and worry about running afoul, don't run your service and be happy with a personal connection, run your service with a business account from the start and don't be worried.
Are you suggesting that they would lie to me or that they would be so incompetent that my apache instance using less bandwidth than streaming radio would affect my neighbor's gigabit line?
I'm assuming some basic levels of competence and a reluctance to flat-out lie when I complain about a provision that can be used to boot people on a whim.
I shouldn't need a business account unless I want a better service level or I'm running a business.
I'm not sure about any lying, and it sounds like you already know the answer to your own question. If you think you are running a server/service that violates their TOS for a personal account, then buy a business account, or don't, and worry about getting a C&D letter. You are never going to get a technical iteration of everything that constitutes a "server" from any ISP.
> If you think you are running a server/service that violates their TOS for a personal account
That's the problem. I have no clue whatsoever if it would violate their TOS. The TOS is so vague as to be meaningless when it comes to figuring out if a noncommercial use is banned or not.
Whether a rule is vague is not binary. They can leave themselves some wiggle room while still providing rules that can be understood.
Your Google Fiber account is for your use and the reasonable use of your guests. Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection, use your Google Fiber account to provide a large number of people with Internet access, or use your Google Fiber account to provide commercial services to third parties (including, but not limited to, selling Internet access to third parties).
If that isn't good enough for you I guess either buy business class and be happy you are in compliance, or don't.
>Your Google Fiber account is for your use and the reasonable use of your guests. Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not
Okay, introduction.
>host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection,
Server is not defined. It says 'any type' but this is blatantly incorrect, as the FAQ says you are permitted game servers, videoconferencing serving, etc.
>use your Google Fiber account to provide a large number of people with Internet access,
Okay no subleasing, that's reasonable and clear.
> or use your Google Fiber account to provide commercial services to third parties (including, but not limited to, selling Internet access to third parties).
That all falls under commercial, fine.
Note that nowhere does it actually explain what I can and can't do non-commercially. It only says a single thing is banned, 'server', but server is somewhere between not-defined and incorrectly-defined.
The commercial restrictions are clear. The restriction against using the household internet on more than a household or so is clear. The restrictions on what you can do non-commercially are insultingly vague.
Are you hosting a personal file server that shifts ~20GB/month with the odd FTP connection, or a major website shifting 1TB/month with thousands of concurrent HTTP connections?
Trying to specify what purposes you're allowed to use your connection for seems like a losing game, and is basically the root of the whole problem. Just what is "personal use"? How exactly are they going to enforce that?
Instead of trying to separate different "kinds" of usage, they should just separate different amounts and traffic patterns. Want a connection you can saturate 24/7? Pay more. Want something suitable for "personal use"? It's going to have some sort of cap.
That's how most products I buy are sold, whether physical products or services. The electric company doesn't sell me electricity "for personal use". The water company doesn't care if I'm taking a shower or selling car wash services. The grocery store treats me exactly the same whether I'm buying supplies to cook tonight's family dinner or supplies to make sandwiches I'm going to sell. I fill up my personal car next to commercial trucks at the gas station, and there's no "personal/commercial" option at the pump.
The real problem, in my opinion, is a bizarre prevailing environment where "unlimited" service is somehow expected of ISPs. Attempts to actually charge for use encounter huge resistance from the tech community. But they can't actually provide unlimited service at the price they charge, so they end up with a ton of weird rules to limit service instead of just charging heavy users more.
Charge a reasonable price per gigabyte, and problem solved. People who want to saturate their connection all day can do so, and will pay accordingly. Light users pay less. It works out for almost every other product and service in the world!
Electric company totally care how you plan to use electricity with different rates for consumers and businesses. What's more, businesses pay different price based on whether they are ok to reduce consumption during peak hours, reliability, etc. Also water company totally cares if you plan to sell car wash services - for one you will have to pay much higher rate for sewer.
I think what sours people is that there's far less grey area in "is this a business" than "is this a server". Businesses are legally defined, registered with the government, and follow a series of rules and standards that often differ from those expected of an Average Joe.
Personally, I find it asinine that setting up my own personal cloud server on a premium internet service is a ToS violation.
What exactly do you mean by, "abuse"? If your argument is that Google doesn't want someone overusing the bandwidth they've paid for, then you're saying that it's reasonable for Google/any ISP to sell you something that you then can't make full use of.
If Google sells me 1gbit up/down, then I should be able to use 1gbit up/down. Pretty simple to both understand and enforce. But it's not about their network capacity - it's about forcing me to buy the more expensive business package, so I can then do exactly that thing they didn't want me doing before.
It's a violation of network neutrality. They're caring which bits get sent, not the total sum of bits.
Personal use as in you're not selling bandwidth to a third party. There is most likely no problem running a mail och minecraft server, but they definitely don't want you selling bandwidth to your neighbours or hosting your video streaming service on it.
Frankly, what's the problem with selling (let's call it giving for now, that keeps this simpler) bandwidth to a third party? It's just bandwidth, why does the source or content of the packets matter?
You are not sold a truly unlimited connection, you do not pay anything approaching the cost of a truly unlimited connection, and Google do not provide you with a truly unlimited connection.
If you want a truly unlimited connection, buy a truly unlimited connection. They cost a lot of money.
But this isn't about how much data a consumer uses- it is possible to consume large amounts of data as a client or a server.
This is a greater problem about the limits on a egalitarian Internet. In the Great Firewall/SOPA/NSA/Mega-scandal world we live in, it is fundamental that users should be able to share content from private, ordinary connections. This is what the Internet was about, remember? People sharing information, not "people uploading information to Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Apple/Twitter".
Decentralization is the Internet's greatest strength.
Right - which is why a personal use server such as your home music collection or Roku, or a COD server on Xbox is fine. Email for 500 people, running the next eBay, or co-locating boxes for people, isn't.
I agree. Which is why most TOS make sense when aimed that way. Sadly some ISPs find it easier to make broad legal strokes to cover their backsides later on.
For example: I run my own email server from my basement. Who uses it? Me. Maybe my dog... but mainly just me.
Yes, it is technically a server, so yes technically my ISP could shut me down... but with a daily throughput of what, 10mB? I doubt it.
Using the bandwidth you're paying for is not an "abuse". It's pointless calling even Google Fiber unlimited - as you've stated anyone using up to the limit will be restricted.
"It's unlimited as long as you don't try and use it all the time!" What a load of bullshit.
I'm surprised the EFF were expecting Google to maintain a higher standard than other ISPs, especially since revelations that Google allowed the NSA a backdoor into every system.
(Full disclosure: I'm a Google employee.) Personally I think Edward Snowden is a whistleblower, not a traitor. However, I consider the leaks to be insufficient evidence for the conclusions you're drawing from them. Here was Google CEO Larry Page's response:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html
I'm afraid I'd have to agree with the other person. Even IF Larry Page knew about the full extent of the NSA goings on inside Google (and he may very well not know), he is legally obliged to lie to us, and you, about them.
So, Googler, Tell me why you are convinced that Gmail is highly secure and my email is not being snarfed by the NSA?
Snowden has no reason to lie; he wouldn't have spoken out and ruined his life without strong moral convictions.
Larry Page has every reason to lie; probably enforced by the US government. The fact Google are operating within the law doesn't mean anything when such open-ended laws as the patriot act exist.
There is an important distinction between paying for connectivity, and paying for bandwidth. You will find that the 2nd costs substantially more, from any provider.
"We are currently focused on our Fiber-to-the-home network, which is for residential consumers. For businesses located in qualified fiberhoods, we plan to introduce a small business offering shortly—stay tuned to google.com/fiber for more details."
Indeed! I'd like to see at least one tech titan take the mantle of personal/home servers and run with it. I recently said this was something Microsoft could do [1] to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive environment.
Marginalizing home servers perpetuates an insipid consume-only Internet usage model. The Internet I'd prefer to see is one where serving and consuming are both first-class features for all.
Having owned/run an ISP I can tell you that you'll always have that small percentage of your user base that forces you to put in extra security measures, bandwidth limiters, storage limits, protective contract language, etc.
The language in the contract doesn't bother me. Comcast has that language, I run my own web server, and they've never hassled me about it.
Let us know when/if Google Fiber starts enforcing this contract term against people running servers for casual/personal use.
It was many years ago now but I was living in an apartment complex that sold a shared connection on a wireless backhaul to a regional ISP - the ISP handled everything from building wiring to billing.
My friends and I were in college and taking lots of IS/CS classes. I had a personal apache server running to test a variety of things. I never once gave anyone a link to it - it was 100% for personal amusement and learning.
I had a 500k SWF video on it (which was creative commons) a few splash pages and whatnot, and that was it. The ISP was actively scanning their network for "servers" and came across mine. They played the SWF video from their office over the wireless backhaul. The video had ONE play (I kept the logs and attempted to give them to the ISP). I served ~505k, total. They turned off our internet connection and sent us a letter and bill of "overuse and abuse". They claimed we had uploaded 50mbps and were hosting illegal content and not abiding by our contract which said "no servers".
While the main moral of the story is that ISP has complete morons running it (I uploaded 500k for a few miliseconds topping out at 50mbps in their eyes; funny thing was it was a 5mbps wireless backhaul), but this isn't a small ISP (Surewest) and they were actively scanning my connection for open ports, and then manually looking through content that they found on open ports (they admitted that!).
And the Supreme Court ruling to allow warrantless pen registers wasn't intended to give the government phone records and emails for every American, but that's what the language said so here we are.
If the "unlimited" connection really isn't unlimited, the contract should spell out reasonable use limits. It's as simple as that.
Google's contract actually goes much further than preventing servers. It says "You agree not to misuse the Services. This includes but is not limited to using the Services for purposes that are illegal, are improper, infringe the rights of others, or adversely impact others’ enjoyment of the Services." The definition of "misuse" is completely up to Google.
This nonsense can stop if instead of having unlimited connections we have, we have connections that clearly state what the limits are and what constitutes allowed behavior.
If you think that you can set up your own node in a p2p social networking site that keeps your data on your own box and gives you control over who accesses it, and that since it uses negligible bandwidth it would be fine, I think you're wrong. The point of banning servers is to prevent competition with other services. They want you on a business connection because they believe if you are offering data to anyone that you should be monetizing it, and if you are monetizing it, they want to be guaranteed that they can take a percentage of your revenue.
We're facing a very near future where MOST employees could out-compete their employers by going independent and selling their skills online. The ban on servers guarantees this can never happen to any degree that threatens the status quo. If it did grow to that scale, ISPs would just force such people to get business connections, meter their traffic and estimate the persons revenue, and raise their prices so that an independent worker would have the same overhead as a company that has to maintain a physical building, executives, etc, etc.
This ignores the possibility that a person could saturate a 1Gb connection pretty much constantly, even without servers. Let's say you're a small business owner who owns a few shops with security cameras. You might want to stream that video to your home.
That said, I think it's reasonable to limit it to personal use - especially if that extends to your 2nd degree friends.
One may argue then that an ISP could offer a service that bans the Bittorrent protocol under the argument that they want to prevent abuse of an otherwise unlimited connection for only $70/month to connect to a filesharing website that saturates the connection 24/7/365.
In fact, that's basically what started the entire Net Neutrality debate. Comcast got busted messing with the bittorrent protocol, got slapped by the FCC for it, but then got the rules overturned in court. These new rules replace the old principles.
And the new rules are clear: if you are selling broadband, you allow any legal service, application or device.
If something is messing with the network, deal with indvidual user on a protocol-independent basis. If a kind of protocol is congesting the network, like say streaming video, then you may throttle ALL kinds of streaming video, inlcuding your own.
Simple principles that Google used to believe in.
And Google doesn't get to ignore the rules and escape criticism just because Google Fiber is cool. Principles matter.
The central objection raised to it is that it is banning a specific set of applications, in apparent direct contravention to the FCC's Open Internet Report and Order (for which Google actively lobbied) which requires providers of fixed broadband services to permit customers the use of any legal applications and devices on the network.
There is discussion of whether it falls within the scope of the reasonable network management limitation to that requirement, but given that all of the examples given in the Report and Order suggest that that exception is appropriate when various mechanisms of imposing in a use-neutral manner on the quantity of traffic to assure fairness among users of the same service when faced with load that, if all demands were met, would saturate the network, it doesn't look on its face like its an obvious candidate.
Who decides what that is? The Internet is a network of peers, not a network of "real hosts" serving "simply clients". Without honoring that, an ISP isn't really an ISP, is it? It's more of an "Internet client facilitator".
And how does a 15 year old kid without a credit card do that? Not everyone throwing a webpage up is 'serious' about it. Sometimes they're learning, or it's a hobby.
Google is simply continuing the tradition of making sure your users consume. If they are creating, they are not spending time looking at and clicking ads.
> The restriction on servers is clearly not there to prevent you from SSHing to your home computer or to run a Minecraft server for you and your friends.
Intent doesn't matter. Violating terms of service is a crime. Enforcement at ???'s whim.
> When you buy a personal Google Fiber plan, you're not paying for an unmetered 1Gbps upstream/downstream fiber connection. You're paying for an unmetered 1Gbps upstream/downstream connection for personal use.
"When you rent a car from Hertz, you're not paying for an unmetered vehicle to take you all around the region. You're paying for a vehicle to drive around in town and to and from the airport. It doesn't matter if this isn't mentioned in any of the advertising material or at the rental counter."
There's nothing special about server traffic. Bits are bits, and if you're advertising certain bitrate for a certain price, deliver that or advertise something else.
The main point of contention appears to be that the EFF is defining "server" as any process that opens listening sockets, while ISPs use definitions based more on traffic patterns and uptime requirements.
Can I run a server from my home?
Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
video-conferencing, home security and others which may
include server capabilities but are being used for legal
and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged.
Exactly. The EFF and the TOS terms are clearly using different jargon.
The problem, though, is that the EFF's definition is the "correct" one at least as commonly understood by technical people. The license is using the term to connote things that it doesn't define, and that's a frustrating place to be if you as a user want to know if your gadget is permitted.
The linked FAQ is a great clarification, and Google should be commended for adding it (they may be alone among broadband ISPs in having language like this, I don't know). But they really need to get that clarity into the license itself.
"Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection ..."
So, basically: "You can't run a server, unless it's a server-ish thing that most people use, in which case we encourage it." Really wish there was a clearer distinction they could make.
Maybe they're drawing a clear line at "legal and non-commercial"?
I said it before, and I'll say it again, but any attempt to differentiate packets based on use rather than quantity is a violation of network neutrality. All packets are created equally, why should any ISP care why my packets exist?
Network Neutrality is typically defined in terms of traffic sources, not use. It's both expected and encouraged that ISPs will differentiate between different types of packets based on what they contain.
For example, it would be obviously bad for Comcast to place Netflix at the bottom of the QOS stack, but perfectly reasonable to do so with Bittorrent.
You are using a definition of net neutrality that differs from everyone else's. In the interest of conversational clarity, you ought to pick a different term.
All residential ISPs sell more aggregate consumer capacity than total peering capacity, because very few users require the full use of their connection at all times. This permits their users' bills to be much lower, a tradeoff that is obviously beneficial to almost everyone.
Overprovisioning absolutely requires the use of QOS and throttling. If my neighbor decides to torrent a hundred terabytes of ATLAS data, that should (ideally) not cause any of my DNS or RTP packets to be dropped.
"Net neutrality (also network neutrality or Internet neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication."[0]
My understanding is that net neutrality is when the ISP does not prioritize/throttle/block traffic based on sender or recipient.
This definition permits traffic shaping based on content, such as dropping bittorrent packets to preserve dns/rtp latency on a link shared between customers.
Frankly the dancing around the term "server" stinks. It can be resolved quite easily by stipulating that one cannot operate a commercial business out of a home internet connection.
Or are we talking about something a little more fine-tuned: Using the listening ports of a computer on the network to facilitate the selling of goods/services for commercial reasons.
Is a business license the limiting factor? We need clearer terms before any argument has merit here.
> Using the listening ports of a computer on the network to facilitate the selling of goods/services for commercial reasons.
Sounds about right. We can take it a step further and explicitly state that a customer is prohibited from living on the avails of their residential internet connection, rather than simply "facilitating the selling of goods/services for commercial reasons."
I think this is the most hypocritical position Google can take.
In terms of "knowing better" is there any company that would be in a better position to understand the nature of servers and infrastructure?
The cognitive dissonance is astounding.
I would have no problem if they put bandwidth caps, as long as they were articulated. I can totally understand if someone is jamming petabytes, but those are gigabit connections. What constitutes abuse?
Is it possible that Google jumped into the ISP world without fully understanding the magnitude of the problem? I think of ISPs as another fractal problem, like email or calendars. From 100,000 feet away, it looks simple, but the details of running very large networks are surprisingly complex.
To be clear, my position is that calling a service unlimited and then throttling using intentionally obfuscating criteria is unconscionable. If you're going to throttle me, let me know what the terms are. Pretending a "server" is automatically a giant mainframe like device is the kind of ignorance I expect from the DOD not Google.
To anyone who thinks google is lying by calling this "unlimited" consider this:
When you go to a restaurant they will serve you free water and give you free napkins. If you asked the waitress how much water you were allowed to have she would probably say "as much as you want". This does not mean you can connect a hose to their water supply and start selling the water. You can not pull up with a large truck and start unloading boxes of their napkins because you can have "as much as you want".
There are common sense limitations on unlimited services, and I do not think google is crossing any lines here.
Surprised none of the indignant commenters are opening a food truck in front of every olive garden. The unlimited Soup Salad and Breadsticks could be resold for pure profit!
Surprised none of the indignant commenters are opening a food truck in front of every olive garden. The unlimited Soup Salad and Breadsticks could be resold for pure profit!
This is pretty much exactly the argument I'm hearing from people that think Google is doing a terrible thing here.
Nobody really expects unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth and other resources are limited, so it's perfectly reasonable to expect some (common sense) limitations.
What is not reasonable is saying "you can use your bandwidth for this, but you cannot use it for that". This is what people are complaining about.
If Google doesn't want people to use unreasonable amounts of bandwidth they should just say so. There's no need to use words like "server" in their TOS, because in the best case it just makes things complicated and vague.
I think this might be more like going to a buffet that advertises you can eat "Anything On The Cart™", and then tells you you can't eat the potatoes which are right there on the cart, in the same dish as every other thing you can eat.
Then you find out that there are potatoes in many of the dishes, though only one is all potato. Does the rule apply to those dishes? At what point does it become a potato dish? Remember, eat the wrong one and you might get kicked out.
However, if I go to an all you can eat buffet, I don't expect all the food to be gone during lunch hour. it doesn't matter if its peak hour, if they take full price and all I got was the bread an water, I would call it fraud.
Up to 12 dishes is not a acceptable advertisement for such restaurant, but why is it acceptable for an ISP? Should such restaurant, beyond being allowed to do as the ISP, also be allowed to have a TOS where limitation is put down? Maybe forbid athletes to eat anything above 300G, or its "for commercial purpose".
It is appalling that Google would do that, but not so surprising for other ISPs. Verizon is a phone company; if you are a "home user" then you are expected to be a consumer of services, just like it works with the phone. Comcast is a cable TV company; "home users" are expected to be consumers there also, since that is what a cable TV receiver does.
Of course those companies miss the point of the Internet. Those companies do not really like the Internet anyway, with its neutrality and the philosophy of "all nodes created equal."
Now, we should expect better from Google, given Google's origins...
The internet has never been based on a philosophy of all nodes being equal. It's only in the past few years that such an arrangement is even technically possible. For the vast majority of the internet's history, communicating nodes could be assumed to be grossly unequal in both bandwidth and latency.
The neutrality does not refer to technical limitations like bandwidth. It refers to the capabilities of an Internet-connected computer to communicate with other computers.
This seems obvious if you are used to the Internet, but there was no technical reason things had to be made this way. Look at a modern cable TV system: that is a computer network too, and if you have a digital cable receiver then you have a computer connected to such a network. You cannot run your own cable channel just because you have a connection. Your receiver is a different kind of node than what is at the head end; head end nodes are allowed to transmit video, receivers are only allowed to receive video and make on-demand requests (and a few other things, none of which include transmitting video).
> It refers to the capabilities of an Internet-connected
> computer to communicate with other computers.
There is no inherent property of the internet ensuring that all nodes are equally capable of sending or receiving packets. There are large sections of the internet placed behind routers that enforce non-transitive forwarding rules. Sometimes, hardware failures or software policies prevent communication between arbitrary sets of nodes.
There is no indication that Google Fiber, or any other major ISP, is planning to ban incoming connections. The TOS does not ban users from replying to SYN.
I will also note that phone networks are just as node-egalitarian as the internet. In a typical phone network, any endpoint may establish a circuit to any other connected endpoint. Saying that Verizon expects its users to be consumers because they sell phone service is incoherent.
Don't look at what they "say" look at what they "do".
They operate on a shared model, with definite over-subscription built in to their network design.
However if they allow ports 22,80,443 traffic, then really they are winking at it - basically "use it but don't abuse it in a way that will cause us to make more rules about it" .
It is a major issue. People need to be able to play and tinker. As a child/teenager I didn't have money to pay for servers online but I still wanted to mess with that stuff.
My ISP didn't enforce the no-servers rule so I was able to run home servers but you shouldn't have rules that violate net neutrality that you "choose" when to enforce. People need to be able to tinker and figure things out without artificial restrictions that exist purely so that they can claim to not have bandwidth caps. It's borderline false advertisement and a violation of net neutrality.
This doesnt stop you from tinkering or anything of the like. Its meant to stop a business trying to piggy back on a residential service. Just feed their FAQ
Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
video-conferencing, home security and others which may
include server capabilities but are being used for legal
and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged.
It's because it runs contrary to the concept of net neutrality -- ISPs are dumb pipes, and trying to differentiate between different "traffic patterns" can only lead us down a very dark hole of no return.
This has nothing to do with net neutrality or traffic patterns. Its a service agreement that says you are not allowed to run a commercial server on their residential service.
What happens when you are caught violating the TOS?
The point of net neutrality is that any Internet connected computer should be able to communicate with any other Internet connected computer, without having to pay surcharges or extra fees, without limitations on protocols, directions, purpose, content, etc. It makes no difference if you are being restricted by a contract or by a technical system. If you are unable to host servers using your Internet connection you are not enjoying net neutrality, regardless of why you cannot host servers.
You will probably be warned then future violations will probably lead to a contract termination. Neither of which has anything to do with treating all packets as equal at the network level.
Sending email spam, downloading child porn, etc, etc also violates their ToS. However just as long they as treat those packets the same as any other packet they are network neutral.
The solution is easy. Instead of banning a specific usage pattern, just say that anyone who exceeds 100 GB / month [1] of usage gets their speed cut to 10% [1] for the rest of the month [2].
It's simple and obvious and I'm amazed that Google, of all companies, isn't smart enough to figure this solution out on their own.
From the ISP's point of view, their infrastructure costs are based on the bandwidth used, not the specific application. The only reason they care about the latter is to price-discriminate between businesses and consumers.
[1] The numbers and units are obviously parameters that a specific ISP needs to tweak based on their actual costs.
[2] Or more sophisticated variations on this theme, like using an hourly basis: e.g. if your usage during the last 720 hours (30 days) exceeds 100 GB, then throttle for a few hours until some high-usage hours fall off the end of the 720-hour window. Or better yet, weight previous usage exponentially.
Then don't sell me one. If you need caps then add caps but don't sell me it uncapped and then complain when I use my connection that you sold me more than you intended.
So what's the problem? If you violate the ToS and become an unprofitable customer they refuse to keep selling you a connection by disconnecting you.
I guess I don't understand all the complaints along this vein. It's not like providers come back and try to sue you for excess bandwidth usage. They just say 'no thanks we don't want you as a customer'. If you walked into a mcdonalds and ordered 1 small fry and asked for 1000 ketchup packets they would probably do the same. Despite condiments being unlimited.
I completely agree. However, ISPs should not be allowed to advertise "unlimited" if that's not what they provide. On the other side of things, the tech community should stop getting angry every time an ISP attempts to actually charge for heavy usage.
Of course, but in other instances, the tech community gets upset at usage-based billing.
We want ISPs to stop advertising non-unlimited service as "unlimited". But the tech community seems to only accept the solution wherein unlimited service is provided, ignoring the other (IMO much better) solution wherein non-unlimited service is advertised as non-unlimited, and the non-unlimitedness is provided in a sane manner with usage-based billing rather than vague rules.
It's like the all-you-can-eat buffet that changes the rules when a football team shows up, but also everybody gets upset any time the buffet thinks about changing to an a la carte model.
The problem is that people are completely, almost willfully ignorant of what a gigabyte is.
Add to that programs and OS's that automatically update, family members / unsecured wifi that results in uploads/downloads without the subscriber's knowledge, and the fact that (especially at fiber speeds) most downloads are in the "fast" to "instantaneous" range. (In the 56k days, you knew to be cautious about downloading big files, because tying up the phone line for a couple hours could be a major inconvenience.)
So I guess people are more willing to pay for a product that's a fixed cost instead of variable cost -- even if variable cost would be lower -- because the conceptual workload of understanding what a gigabyte is, and monitoring their usage in gigabytes, represents a cost higher than the price differential between fixed and variable.
I agree, but it's not really a 'problem'. Knowing enough about how the internet works to save, say, $10/mo on your bill due to pro-rated charges probably just isn't worth it for most people.
I'm sure we'd all save on car repair if everyone in the country knew the basics of it, but it's really just not in everyones interest to know a little bit of everything.
> Home users don't really want unmetered connections
Implying that the commenter was in favor of giving home users metered connections (with a gigabyte cap).
I was saying that the problem with a plan to give customers capped connections is that many of them don't understand the concept of a monthly transfer cap and don't know how to effectively monitor or control their usage to stay within the cap.
I didn't mean to say that the problem with the customers is that they don't understand the concept of a monthly transfer cap.
But I might've come across that way, because trying to get non-technical people to understand technical topics is usually an exercise in frustration and futility (as most HN readers probably already know). And I guess some of that mindset colored the tone of my comment.
And it would be interesting to try to fix it as if the customers were the problem -- i.e., an ISP that tries to educate its users about what a gigabyte is and provide bandwidth monitoring tools. Maybe it'll improve technological literacy if people realize that knowledge can save them money. But I fear it'd be an uphill battle.
As soon as you get infected or bring a kid back from college and let them torrent like crazy, the bandwidth overage costs get high, fast. I tried this for years with our customers, we're going unlimited because we're tired of arguing with people who can't comprehend this model.
Technical reasons? There are none. This is customer/sales driven, normal (non-technical and the majority) customers don't want to bother with technical bandwidth/transfer non-sense.
"Real" bandwidth that you're allowed to saturate costs an ISP about $1/Mbps/month, and that's not counting the cost of building the ISP's network itself which is probably much higher. Today's $50 broadband service is maybe backed by 1 Mbps of real bandwidth if you're lucky, but changing the advertising from "up to 15 Mbps" to "1 Mbps guaranteed" is commercial suicide.
I would bet that almost all of the cost of Google Fiber is in the last mile; OTOH Google can probably buy bandwidth very cheap. It's probably still oversubscribed 100:1 or more.
The issue here is the(perhaps intentionally) vague definition of "server". What about the folks in the middle ground? Who want to run a home VPN, who want to use their NAS remotely, or who want to run their own "cloud"? The ISPs could define the term more verbosely and lock out people actually abusing home connections while simultaneously not screwing the people legitimately looking to use their home connection for anything but web browsing.
The more precisely the server provider defines it, the more they are giving folks a playbook for skirting the rules, and as a result potentially encouraging more overall abuse. You're assuming they'll be "screwing people legitimately... " but as long as the customer's total data consumption isn't excessive, an ISP has no reason to come down on them - the ISP should be happy to just collect their fee.
Just to be clear, most of these ISPs have a "business" or "pro" version for an extra (exorbitant) fee with marginally higher up/down bandwidth that let you run a server.
I've yet to come across a decent provider package that lets me host a server with at least 99% uptime. FiOS seems to go down like clockwork in the mid mornings for the past 2 months or so and that kept me from even attempting to run a server from home. I mean, what's the point?
Besides that pretty much every provider has their variation on server bans. I think Optimum just says "servers" are prohibited whereas Verizon goes into a bit more detail "Web, FTP, SMTP" etc...
In Austin, the business offerings are actually slower than the consumer offerings. They run over the exact same cables too, in TWC's case at least. Your (fewer) packets just get priority over others in the event of congestion. I utilized TWCBC for a year. 100 dollar installation and 150 dollars a month for 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up, and one static IP. I could have spent an extra 100 dollars (edit: monthly) and upgraded to 20 Mbps down, and a whopping 2 Mbps up. Now, I get 21 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up on ATT Uverse (an apples to oranges technical comparison, I am aware, though TWC's consumer cable offerings were similar) for a third of that price, and can push and pull far more packets than TWCBC ever was willing to deliver.
This really has nothing to do with "network management," the go to catch-all that every ISP --including Google now, it seems-- trots out every time network neutrality comes up. This has everything to do with ensuring that old-school business models are propped up that expect captive, consuming audiences, rather than adhering to the decentralized model of independent nodes on the network.
That's terrible! I'd have thought that Austin would have had far more options than that considering how many tech companies and startups there are. I guess we're all sorely lacking real competition and it seems Google isn't there either.
I live in a fairly dense suburban section of Dallas a mere 3 miles from TI's headquarters, yet I cannot get DSL at my house[1] because I am too far from a CO. When we moved in (2008), the only only internet options were Time-Warner cable or a T1 line, which is what I went for. U-verse only rolled out about two years ago. Granted its not Austin, but what you say should apply here as well.
I would also like to point out that, back in 2008, TWC refused to sell me business-class service because I wasn't a business. Even if I formed one, the only business-class service they would run to our house was their basic "Teleworker" service.
[1] This may not be completely true, as AT&T claims they can provide it. I don't know how they can when others cannot, but their website may only be claiming that based on straight-line distance from the CO rather than loop length.
One of the most interesting claims in Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (1996) was that bandwidth would be the same into and out of the home, and that home servers would be ubiquitous. I think his key example was the idea of live video exchange between grandparents and grandchildren.
Another Negropontean idea was that bits are bits. The notion of somehow partitioning server-like entities on the basis of their behavior doesn't fit, he argued, the architecture of the Internet.
am I missing something or is this not just typical TOS boilerplate to give Google power to ban bandwidth hogs? Are there any Google Fiber customers who have been banned for setting up servers that did not also involve moving tremendous amounts of data?
Astonished by the people complaining about 1Gbps connections for $70/month just because they can't run it line rate 24/7. It's unreal how quickly humans adjust to getting what they want. The very next minute it's unfair and they want more.
I must be getting old, because I want to scream 'I remember when internet access was charged by the minute! and only at 14.4kbps!'
If google is saying that I can't use my internet connection which i bought though them to sell to or provide internet to large group of other people then that makes sense. A building owner just guy buy google fiber service and charge all their tenants to use his connection which he bought through google fiber.
Sounds to me like their marketing just need to be more clear. I don't think it is reasonable to say things like "personal use can easily saturate a 1gb connection" like I see in the comments here.
C'mon, if you're saturating a 1gb connection for a large percentage of the day, you're doing something other than what most would consider "personal use". I think they need to define "personal use", i.e., "typical household use, browsing the internet, watching the occasional streaming video", certainly not "downloading huge torrents at all times and monitoring the cameras at your small business."
I'll be more concerned when we have examples of actually I-know-it-when-I-see-it unfair "server" bans, rather than purely hypothetical risks. (We certainly have had examples of unfairness from other providers, like Comcast.) In these modern times there are many options available for shared hosting, IaaS, colocation, etc. at all price points and service levels. Of course if you're just operating your own low-traffic mail server Google doesn't care. They probably don't even really care if you operate an appropriately-throttled Tor node. If you're saturating the link, however, someone will notice.
As someone who has in the past run a small-ish ISP for home/business users, people who want to run servers at home usually create a fair amount of support overhead, so its no surprise that this is a common issue. Most ISP's don't care what you do as long as you're not causing a problem.
This only exists because of bad users, don't blame the ISPs for your lousy neighbors :)
This is why the Dutch ISP XS4ALL rocks. Full IPv6 connection since like 2 years, opened port 25 outgoing, and they're totally cool about running any kind of server at home. On top of that you get a free shell server and thousands of wifi access points from them. Yeah it costs five more bucks a month, but I say it's totally worth it.
I wonder if some of the furore is due to people thinking they could start a nice hosting business and saturate their google fiber connection? It's not as if no alternatives exist (or that it is even realistic to think you could max out the bandwidth with servers for that price).
I feel that allowing Google Fiber customers to connect their own servers to the network would go against Google own interests. Google business relies on hosting their customers application and data.
EFF continues awful tradition of confusing personal digital liberty advocacy with lame complaining about not getting things that cost money for "free".
There's a whole lot of hate going around for a company offering Gigabit Internet to residential subscribers for $80/month. Whether it's oversubscribed with caps on utilization or not, it's offering 1024 MB DL speed for $80/month.
And you all are COMPLAINING about that in a "you're not the boss of me" kind of way, ranting about how QoS limitations violates "net neutrality", etc etc. Seriously?
It's there to prevent abuse of your otherwise unlimited gigabit connection for only $70/month to run a filesharing website on that saturates the connection 24/7/365. If you want to use Google Fiber for business use, pay for their business plan, simple as that.
EDIT: Seems a few people are missing a key detail. When you buy a personal Google Fiber plan, you're not paying for an unmetered 1Gbps upstream/downstream fiber connection. You're paying for an unmetered 1Gbps upstream/downstream connection for personal use. (https://fiber.google.com/legal/terms.html).
There are services that will sell you purely unmetered, unrestricted bandwidth, but it won't be Google Fiber, and it won't be for only $70/month.