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ISPs seem designed to funnel people to capitalist cloud services (slrpnk.net)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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(Sorry if this is too off-topic:) ISPs seem designed to funnel people to capitalist cloud services, or at least I feel like that. And it endlessly frustrates me.

The reason is even though IPv6 addresses are widely available (unlike IPv4), most ISPs won't allow consumers to request a static rather than a dynamic IPv6 prefix along with a couple of IPv6 reverse DNS entries.

Instead, this functionality is gatekept behind expensive premium or even business contracts, in many cases even requiring legal paperwork proving you have a registered business, so that the common user is completely unable to self-host e.g. a fully functional IPv6-only mail server with reverse DNS, even if they wanted to.

The common workaround is to suck up to the cloud, and rent a VPS, or some other foreign controlled machine that can be easily intercepted and messed with, and where the service can be surveilled better by big money.

I'm posting this since I hope more people will realize that this is going on, and both complain to their ISPs, but most notably to regulatory bodies and to generally spread the word. If we want true digital autonomy to be more common, I feel like this needs to be fixed for consumer landline contracts.

Or did I miss something that makes this make sense outside of a big money capitalist angle?

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[-] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

I think really it's designed because you're a consumer. Most people consume far more bandwidth than they upload, so asymmetry is more efficient.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

It's also self-reinforcing, by making that the norm it then shapes future development and expectations. :-\

[-] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

is that because asymmetry is the norm due to these ISPs' practices or because people just don't upload things often as a common behavior?

i recall a lot of my peers hosting mail and web servers among other things when broadband started to become more common, before they started blocking common ports as "security" and "antivirus" measures designed to extract more money from you.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

For shared lines like cable and wireless it is often asymmetrical so that everyone gets better speeds, not so they can hold you back.

For wireless service providers for instance let's say you have 20 customers on a single access point. Like a walkie-talkie you can't both transmit and receive at the same time, and no two customers can be transmitting at the same time either.

So to get around this problem TDMA (time division multiple access) is used. Basically time is split into slices and each user is given a certain percentage of those slices.

Since the AP is transmitting to everyone it usually gets the bulk of the slices like 60+%. This is the shared download speed for everyone in the network.

Most users don't really upload much so giving the user radios equal slices to the AP would be a massive waste of air time, and since there are 20 customers on this theoretical AP every 1mbit cut off of each users upload speed is 20mbit added to the total download capability for anyone downloading on that AP.

So let's say we have APs/clients capable of 1000mbit. With 20 users and 1AP if we wanted symmetrical speeds we need 40 equal slots, 20 slots on the AP one for each user to download and 1 slot for each user to upload back. Every user gets 25mbit download and 25mbit upload.

Contrast that to asymmetrical. Let's say we do a 80/20 AP/client airtime split. We end up with 800mbit shared download amongst everyone and 10mbit upload per user.

In the worst case scenario every user is downloading at the same time meaning you get about 40mbit of that 800, still quite the improvement over 25mbit and if some of those people aren't home or aren't active at the time that means that much more for those who are active.

I think the size of the slices is a little more dynamic on more modern systems where AP adjusts the user radios slices on the fly so that idle clients don't have a bunch of dead air but they still need to have a little time allocated to them for when data does start to flow.

A quick Google seems to show that DOCSIS cable modems use TDMA as well so this all likely applies to cable users as well.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

I recall a lot of my peers hosting mail and web servers

I don't think that's representative of the global population. There's more people streaming movies than hosting private blogs.

this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
248 points (90.5% liked)

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