Thursday, November 18, 2010

ISP's are a Problem

First, we have Richard Branson asking for support for his movement: the campaign for broadband honesty. (The campaign letter is here).

Excerpts: "Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) just aren’t keeping up with their promises. Many of them are advertising superfast broadband speeds they know full well they cannot deliver, offering speeds of ‘up to’ 20Mb but delivering an average of just 6.5Mb. And what does this mean for the customer at the end of the line? Buffering, delays and not getting the broadband you are paying for..... Faster broadband means better broadband ....Staying connected is central to our lives and we all deserve broadband that we can trust. .... I’m challenging all broadband providers to be honest with their customers."

He's really just asking for truth in advertising.

Meanwhile, 50 ISPs Harbor Half Of All Infected Machines! "The study analyzed 90 billion spam messages from 170 million unique IP addresses captured between 2005 and 2009, and found that just fifty (out of tens of thousands) of global ISPs are responsible for about half of all infected machines. The study found that larger ISPs actually have fewer infections per user than smaller ISPs, and contrary to common wisdom, that "high connection speeds are associated with lower botnet activity." [DSLReports]

That's funny because the number 1 value add is anti-virus and anti-spam combos.

2 comments:

Troy Bourque said...

Read the reference post and
I noticed a lot of "they should" or "ISP should", whatever happen to "I Should". in the comment section. I recall this thread is about ISPs that have customers with "bot infected" PCs. Many ISP proactively block infected users or supply some sort of detection/prevention software/service. This was done by most as revenue or value add stream of income. But over time has become "expected" by end-user and the community as a whole. What gets lost in all the noise is the end-user, they claim ignorance and entitlement. Mr. ISP, Mr. Government you must take care of me (my machine). I own the computer, but it is not my responsibility to maintain it in a safe or reasonable working condition. It is the ISP or Government job to clean my machine or block it from world, oh yeah while blocking it from the world, don’t stop my mail or web browsing.

Peter Radizeski said...

As we know the common user is a knucklehead. But if the anti-virus protection of the ISP was working, would they have the issue? Plus, when monitoring the network, shouldn't the ISP be able to see the flood of traffic and perhaps warn the user?

It's kind of like Spam: why do we still have it in 2010?