Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector

Anyone with good links for existing (free as in free) Network Monitoring/Health/Stat software? I'm striking out on the Goog.

It's refreshing (if its true) as Google lately hasn't been high on my list of ethical corporations.

Its in their best interest to prevent throttling. If they had nothing to gain by doing this, they probably wouldn't do it. (more appropriately, nothing to lose by not doing it) Its awesome that they are going to try to do this, but one can't look at it from a completely altruistic standpoint. Obviously we could debate until we are blue in the face exactly why or how much of their reasoning was to defend users or their bottom line, but I think its important to make the point that its in their best interest that their users can use as much bandwidth as they want. They aren't the bandwidth provider, they are the provider of something to provide the bandwidth for.

ISPs charge consumers a monthly fee for theoretically unlimited usage because that's the way most people are comfortable paying for their internet usage. Even a geek like me doesn't have a clear idea of how much bandwidth I use in a month, so for most people a per-byte-transferred pricing scheme would be totally unclear. Contrast this with something like per-minute phone usage pricing.

Bandwidth certainly is cheap, and constantly getting cheaper, but the average consumer's bandwidth usage is also increasing. A few years ago, as filesharing became mainstream, broadband ISPs found it much more costly to provide unlimited service. Their ways of managing this extra cost include some throttling but also, interestingly, a proliferation of local peering.

Local peering is when two small ISPs, say in a single city, notice they are both paying their ISPs in order to send traffic to each other, and decide to instead run a line between themselves and exchange traffic on that line instead of paying their ISPs. There was never any reason to do this sort of peering on a local level until we all started sharing music and movies with other folks in our neighborhoods; the increased demand has led ISPs to make a lot of the bandwidth we use less costly for them.