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Peer-to-Peer Networks Blocked in NZ
mjl writes: "It seems that Time Warner is not the only ISP that limits bandwidth of residential customers. In New Zealand, Telecom is also blocking the use of well known P2P applications. What Telecom fails to recognise is that these people are pushing the envelope of what the Internet can do, and will drive the technology economy in years to come."
Exactly, I can't figure out how anyone could ever make any real money on these technologies. P2P has it's uses, but it won't have any more impact that anything else in the computing world.
The ISPs doesn't have the money to build superfast networks and charge almost nothing for it. I am afraid that the massive use of bandwidth will only result in services where you pay according to how much bandwidth you eat up. That in turn will deliver the internet completely into the hands of the rich media companies that can afford setting up servers.
For those who haven't been following the entire debate, when the article was first posted online yesterday Chris Barton suggested that vampires on their 128Kbit connections were downloading "5Gb (gigabytes) a day / 120Gb/month."
Today, it has been corrected. Not annotated, acknowledged or errata'd -- silently replaced.
Telecom own the local loop. They are our spun-off-from-the-Government telco. We have no choice.
The problem with ISPs only happens when the pipe is 100% full. They wouldn't limit if the pipe was only 40% full. They don't want to upgrade bandwidth on a pipe that's 100% full to support low-cost DSL subscribers.
As an ISP employee, I understand the business model of buy in bulk, sell in pieces. But don't think that I'm making money in this market... I bet I earn less than you by a large margin. Even relative to the price of living.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
It's not "blocked" as such, the p2p ports are just allocated a smaller pool of bandwidth than the rest.
What would Brian Boitano do?
If you don't like Telecom products, go to someone else.
I'm afraid the options for consumer broadband (16KB/sec broadband?) are somewhat limited in New Zealand. Very, very limited. Go to someone else? I wish that were an option!
Having said this, I can fully understand the ISP's decision as I've seen what MP3 and DivX can do to my server's bandwith.
Yeah, the only reason they haven't done it earlier is because they're trying to get the high users. All the other ISPs have been forced to put 10GB or so caps on DSL because of the low profit margins (half of the money, at least, goes to Telecom no matter which ISP you choose). So this has left Telecom's Xtra as the only real option if you want to download more than that. Now they feel they've saturated the market for high-usage flat rate users they're now considering introducing a monthly cap of 6GB of so, which is lower than even the other ISPs have previously done.
I guess they're hoping that the benefits of switching to another ISP for an extra few GB aren't attractive enough to overcome the aggravation of dumping people's current account?