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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."
It seems Xtra has done this throttling, but that won't cause problems for those of us who dont you use Xtra (that's me!). It seems silly to say "people are using too much bandwidth, so rather than capping bandwidth (like most do), we'll try a round about way of doing that...". Strange. If the problem is too much traffic, well, then limit the traffic.
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No biggie... it just means that p2p clients will have to add in ports to their other forms of locating peers. For example, right now Gnutella queries well-known UltraPeers to prime the p2p pump and helps you locate peers around you (instead of spamming your network with random ping packages).
Well, obviously this "priming" will have to switch to use port 80 if others are blocked, then the response servers can give your client information about the "port of the day".
Personally, I think the P2P clients should use different ports for different uses. (And it's already enabled to change the port and client name in each Gnutella client). Music could have one port, eBooks on another, video another, and pr0n on another. This would be great so my quieries for "Bare Naked Ladies" brings up music instead of jpgs...
-Russ
Me
They say they're "managing" the use of P2P apps, and that's all they say. Nothing about blocking. And you may still use these file sharing services, only you are subject to a restricted download. What did the writer say, sub-kb speeds? That's about what I get from most users on Kazaa.
On a lucky streak, I can get several kb. A little more now that my winbox is masqed behind my linux box (and I'm not subject to windows crappy IP stack as the bottleneck). Xtra must really be doing some heavy filtering on their server side to discriminate against P2P apps, if that is the case. Consequently, my connection is DSL, I'm in Canada, and I usually get around 150kb on a good day.
The reference to vampires and blood-sucking indivuduals gets tiresome. Talk about editorializing.
No! The people who invented P2P apps maybe are pushing the envelope of what the net can do - but 95% of the people on the biggest P2P networks are just downloading free music. They're not pushing anything other than their luck, because they're basically massively abusing the system.
I'd love to be in NZ right now! Now all the kiddies that think downloading music and burning it to CDs for their friends constitutes a "business" - like some people I know - have had their access blocked, it means better connections for everyone else who does in fact respect the law. I think this should happen more.
Yeah I guess the rampant music/software/movie piracy on P2P networks is going to be what is driving the new economy in years to come.
Sure it's a generalisation, but I defy you to say that 95% of it isn't illegal use at this point in time.
OK. If the problem is that some users are hogging all the bandwidth, what about this for a solution:
You monitor the total bandwidth usage over the month for each user. Then you adapt the priority of each connection dependent on the usage:
User A has only used 2MB bandwidth this month, so you give their requests priority over User B who has already downloaded 200MBs.
In prinicipal, this is easy and seems a fair solution - the more data you download the slower your connection becomes. I'm sure this has been thought of/implemented already - so why aren't ISPs using something like this?
not that it matters too much at the moment as telecoms most popular "high-speed" package is 128kb ADSL connection (about $30 US BTW), oh and apparently 128kb is too much for any single connection so they limit you on each particular file you download to about 56kb!!
I used to have a high speed satellite connection through IHUG which would peek at about 2500kbps but then they did the stupidist thing they could do and capped it at 512MB per month! Thats write the high-speed, high bandwidth connection was capped at 512MB, which meant you could use your month quota in under 30 minutes, and still not get a single ISO.
We are getting some faster connections through cable company saturn, they offer you higher speed connections such as 256kb or 512kb, however even though these cost more, the monthly data cap is a lot less. IIRC 128 was capped at 10GB and then the 256 (which costs more) was capped at 5GB. Saturn mainly targets businesses. Again that's not such a problem since only a small proportion of people are connected by this anyway. So in short, sure it's a hassle but the bandwidth here is so limited that it's no big deal anyway.
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
For example, Burton says in the article that he sometimes gets as little as 0.02 kiBps on Kazaa, and an average of less than 1 kiBps. Erm, entry for Duh Magazine, anyone? I mean, I'm only on dialup so I can't speak for 128k Jetstart, but I regularly get less than 1 kiBps even when my connection is completely idle. It's a huge p2p network; it's invariably pretty slow. Sure, the average he states does seem a bit low, and perhaps Telecom is throttling bandwidth a bit, but the range of download speeds he states (if we are to take his word; I see no actual figures) seem to indicate that there's something more at work that simply that. Assuming that sometimes bandwidth is throttled more and less, it's still disingenuous to suggest that the only cause for such slow downloads is due to Telecom.
I also find it ridiculous that he suggests, "to be consistent Xtra [Telecom's ISP branch] should be limiting bandwidth used by Microsoft Update and Messenger software which act as servers too." Microsoft update is a necessary feature for many people, and neither it nor MSM, ICQ or IRC is going to be sucking anywhere near the bandwidth that filesharing apps do. This is either just a completely skewed viewpoint, or plain ignorance. In my view it's the latter, since Burton (the Herald IT editor) doesn't seem to even know enough to differentiate between GB (gigabytes) and Gb (gigabits).
I'm no fan of Telecom. I hate them; they're manopolistic and have extremely poor service. But this isn't a valid reason to attack them. They state in the users' contract that running servers (incidentally, I question that webservers running on their service would account for even one hundredth of the bandwidth that p2p does, although Burton seems to imply otherwise) of any kind is unacceptable. Personally, while I think it would be courteous for Telecom to inform their customers that they will actively throttle p2p and server applications (and no, I don't think messenger programs can be classified as "servers" Mr Burton), I don't see how it's a requirement on their part, or a breach of contract as Burton suggests. If you're doing something with their service that you've agreed not to, I can't see how you can complain if they quietly ensure you can no longer do that thing.
IANALawyer, so I can't speak for the legality of my opinion, but I'd be interested to hear from anyone with a more solid understanding of the technicalities.
There was an interview with the legal representation for the IFPI on the BBC yesterday that I was listening to out the corner of my ear, discussing the "fall" in industry profits. The phrase that caught my attention was "we are going after the people that run these [P2P] networks, and the ISPs that allow access to them".
This sounds a hell of a lot like we can expect to see, and be subjected to, things like this from our ISPs. Not a happy thought.
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The problem though is when you start abusing it.
Like if you started 8 air conditioners [in one house] in USCA you wouldn't make alot of friends. I wouldn't doubt there are laws concerning power usage [there are when there are water shortages].
The problem they are trying to fix is that bandwidth is not an unlimited thing they have to give out.
Of course, I would have addressed the problem differently. Instead of banning ports I would do dynamic capping. e.g. you get 500MB a day at full bandwidth. after that you get 1/4 bandwidth [or something like that]. That way you get
a) no loss of connection
b) stops bandwidth hogs
c) doesn't arbitrarily block random ports
Personally if I were an ISP I would make it something like 250MB full speed [512k/256k] then the rest at a lower speed [128k/64k] [this is all per day]. 250MB is more than enough to browse through webpages and chat. Its not nearly enough to be a elite haxor or something [e.g. dork on Kazaa].
But what do I know, I'm just a kid who failed business in college...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Either they meter it or they fully itemise it,
"$500 for new Cisco Catalyst 6500, split between 300 downstream users one of which is you (because 10 of you are using bearshare excessively) => give us a cheque for 2 dollars, plus 3 new T1's to the backbone $1500 each per month split between 1000 users one of which is you => your monthly subscription will increase by $1.50. If you don't pay we'll take you to court" how long do you think it'll be before you're suing your neighbours? (then theoretically electric companies should charge for installing extra transformers - people of California you are requested and required to pay $1.8billion for a new power line for the grid between Utah and California plus $0.2billion for 300kV step-up and step-down transformer array. This is because Utah has 5GW excess generating capacity. Your share of the payment = $500.
Itemised: 20 million people in California, $2billion cost => $2billion/20million = $500 per citizen. Please pay by Direct Debit or Credit card, thank you) hmmmm could this be a step towards Open Source Corporations?
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