Back in the early 2000's, I worked for a small company that was hired by the law firm representing one of the big cable companies (let's call them Company A).
Company A was suing another big cable company (Company X) b/c A claimed that X was throttling customers without telling them and advertising what were in effect unthrottled bandwidth numbers.
In order to prove this, the company I worked for went out and hired people to get cable modem subscriptions for Company X, install desktop that were locked down so the people couldn't use the desktops themselves and then collected ping and HTTP request data for months.
My job was to take that data and analyze it for throttling patterns.
This was my first job out of grad school and involved lots of:
- data cleaning and organizing using Perl
- analyzing statistics using Excel
- creating charts that could then be shown to the lawyers and in turn could be used in court
I didn't know much about databases or stats packages in Perl which, in hindsight, would have made my life easier.
I still remember being on the call with the lawyers and walking them through the data that proved that Company X was indeed throttling bandwidth at peak usage times. The one lawyer on the conference call said "Wow! This data is amazing. You guys are now basically national experts in this."
I was both:
- flattered that someone would call me a national expert in something
- scared shitless that I would end up being cross examined about how we processed this data
Turns out that the court case never happened and they settled out of court.
The reason I mention this story is that it's FASCINATING to me that this is still occurring today. I guess some things never do change.
A big part of the reason that things didn't change is because that lawsuit and others like it ended in a settlement. If this behaviour and data was established as part of the judicial/public record, it would have been much easier to address.
Businesses, like teenagers, always keep probing the limits of what's allowed or tolerated.
As long as it's an out-of-court settlement for a moderate sum, it's just a cost of doing business, a cost of R&D of sorts, only in the legal area. (Similar with taxes.)
Company A was suing another big cable company (Company X) b/c A claimed that X was throttling customers without telling them and advertising what were in effect unthrottled bandwidth numbers.
In order to prove this, the company I worked for went out and hired people to get cable modem subscriptions for Company X, install desktop that were locked down so the people couldn't use the desktops themselves and then collected ping and HTTP request data for months.
My job was to take that data and analyze it for throttling patterns.
This was my first job out of grad school and involved lots of:
- data cleaning and organizing using Perl
- analyzing statistics using Excel
- creating charts that could then be shown to the lawyers and in turn could be used in court
I didn't know much about databases or stats packages in Perl which, in hindsight, would have made my life easier.
I still remember being on the call with the lawyers and walking them through the data that proved that Company X was indeed throttling bandwidth at peak usage times. The one lawyer on the conference call said "Wow! This data is amazing. You guys are now basically national experts in this."
I was both:
- flattered that someone would call me a national expert in something
- scared shitless that I would end up being cross examined about how we processed this data
Turns out that the court case never happened and they settled out of court.
The reason I mention this story is that it's FASCINATING to me that this is still occurring today. I guess some things never do change.