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."

Comments

Wrong

[DarkZero]

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.

The problem here is that Telecom HAS recognized that these people are pushing the envelope of what the internet can do and that it will drive the technology economy in years to come. They also realize that P2P is very expensive for ISPs because it actually makes the "unlimited use" part of their customers' contracts a true statement. Thus, they are trying their best to turn back the clock and bring back the days when they made more money per customer.

They're not being ignorant. They're being smart. They're also being money grubbing assholes, but that's beside the point. ;)

Re:Wrong

[forgoil]

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.

Re:Wrong

[perky]

On the positive side of this demise of the content industry as we know it is free (almost) information to everyone (almost).
except that it won't mean that at all because if the content producer cannot make enough cash out of producing content, then he won't be able to produce anything at all. That means less information available to all.

Yes, I agree that the RIAA, MPAA are greedy motherfsckers. Yes, I agree that the internet presents a real opportunity to cut out the middleman in media distribution and publishing. No, I don't agree that there is no place for copyright law, and the right of the creator over his/her intellectual property.

just out of interest, what do you do for a living?

Re:Wrong

[digitalsushi]

They're also being money grubbing assholes, but that's beside the point.

*shrug* I'd rather have my ISP make the money they need and stay afloat rather than let them not be money grubbing and fail, and then leave me with one ISP that can charge whatever it wants (if I'm lucky enough to be left with one) Most ISPs arent exactly floating in cash. Maybe the big ones are, though. The middle sized and smaller ones definitely are not.

ISPs make their money on a gamble. Most people will use about 1/8th of what they can, say. So an ISP will oversell by 8 times that to cover the cost of that one line and the overhead of getting it internetworked and maintained. Granted there needs to be a new model that covers people using 100% of their connection by default instead of 12%, but I haven't heard of too many options, other than paying 500 bucks a month for access (at which point you're a dedicated customer and your ISP already has a plan for you).

Re:Wrong

[Col. Panic]

how anyone could ever make any real money on these technologies

Well, one way is to distribute a free P2P client that can be used to steal processor cycles and disk storage from unwitting users. Then write it up in your 10K and sell shares of the company.

Re:Wrong

[tomstdenis]

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

Heh, that's Xtra, not telecom

[LadyLucky]

Here, all DSL modems must go through Telecom's networks, as they own the lines, the exchanges, everything. You always pay around NZ$30 (around US$13) per month for the privilege of a DSL enabled line. The remaining NZ$35 or so you pay to whomever your ISP is, which is for many people Xtra. This gives you a 128kb connection, (in theory) unlimited traffic.

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.

Re:Heh, that's Xtra, not telecom

[PhilHibbs]

If the problem is too much traffic, well, then limit the traffic.

If I were in charge of doing this, I would be inclined to implement some kind of adaptive throttling, so the more you downloaded over the last week, the slower your downloads run. So, if you are a low-volume user that needs to get a big file, it comes down quickly. If you run a Gnutella server, a Freenet server, and soak up the rest with a bit of spidering, then your connection slows down to a crawl. I would introduce a higher-usage rate that doesn't slow down as much. These slowdown rates would be adjustable on a quarterly basis with three months notice of the throttle change.

Tell us what services we can/cant run?

[GnomeKing]

Why do ISPS always tell us what services we can and cant run on our computers?
Its fair enough to limit our bandwidth - but why can they say "your not permitted to run a www server 'cause it requires too much bandwidth"
there are MANY ways to use bandwidth and its just not possible to have an exhaustive list of things that use it "unfairly"...

I wouldnt have anything to complain about if they provided us with a daily quota (or something) whereby if you exceeded it then it reduced your bandwidth to a modem (but the quota added up up to a limit if it wasnt all used during a particular day)
But telling us we cant run specific programs?... that just isnt on imo
we pay for the bandwidth, we should be able to use it how we like
if these hogging programs are causing problems then the telco should look at methods other than blocking specific programs to fix the problem

Re:Tell us what services we can/cant run?

[Beliskner]

Why do ISPS always tell us what services we can and cant run on our computers?

Because the Internet is not yet fully mature. Many years ago when electricity was being rolled out to the nation, the extra demands placed on it by devices with a high power factor lead the electric companies to state, "We make electricity - it's ours. You may not use any equipment that has not been manufactured by us and connect it to *OUR* electric rails."

The ISPs are claiming similar ownership over our use of IP packets over *THEIR* routers, same as electric companies claimed ownership of sine wave electricity over *THEIR* power lines.

This was resolved when the market was saturated and power stations were idling in the name of load-spike absorbtion. The broadband market hasn't yet been saturated, the ISPs are giving away bandwidth for a flat fee, same as electricity companies used to give electricity. Upon market maturation, people demanded a drop in prices, and the freedom to connect whatever electric devices they want to the power lines. But what if one household or company used 10 times more electricity than their neighbour? It was obviously unfair to charge them the same amount. This gave rise to electric meters. The electric companies retorted,

"But what if someone tampers with the box, what if someone steals electricity by tapping the wire before the meter and steals the electricity?"

. The customers demanded it, so they took the chance and installed metering in every home, and charged for actual usage. The restriction that you may only connect electric company authorised devices with a good power factor and negligible line interference was dropped. Technology advanced and suppression capacitors smoothed out the consumption spikes. The mains line was no longer used as a clock, quartz oscillators took over. Any device that needed a smooth sine wave no longer used the mains, but instead used an AC-DC converter (transformer+bridge rectifier) and sine wave generator using transistors, or more recently switched-mode PSU. The electric company geeks were pissed because all this extra hardware was needed just to generate a smooth sine wave, instead of pulling it directly off the mains, but everybody got used to it. Now all that remains is a limit on consumption so that you don't burn out your wires and start a fire, together with regulations on interference (unsuppressed motors) being introduced on the power line.

The Internet will follow the same trend, IP packets are turning from "Cool Internet stuff" into infrastructure, same as that beautful 50Hz. sine wave delivered to your home/business changed from a nice pattern on the oscilloscope used for old Sci-fi special effects into a critical infrastructure.

Consequently, when broadband saturates the demand, and enough people use it and demand unrestricted usage, the ISPs will have to respond and introduce metering, either at point-of-presence or at a black box in your home (apparantly MAC addresses can be spoofed, fraid is rife etc. but this MUST be resolved otherwise the Internet CANNOT mature). Discounts will be given to households that install these black box packet counters. If you come under DDoS attack, then you call the police and ISP, same as waking up one morning and finding a tap on your side of the electric meter leading to your neighbour's house.

Once a month, some guy will come read your electric meter, your gas meter, and your IP packet meter, it's inevitable.

End result: CDBPTAPPATBTA struck down, RIAA muzzled, MPAA castrated, Internet pay-per-packet.

What the Internet actually costs for an ISP:
Variable costs: Bandwidth to backbone (peak), internal bandwidth (peak)
Fixed costs: electric and personnel cost to keep the routers + DHCP + blah humming (seasonal A/C) + advertising + security + blah

Consumers can demand that ISPs match this model as closely as possible and be fair (metering), quite fair (bandwidth caps like now) or keep it simple (flat fee like now).

Vampires

[Alsee]

There are vampires in broadband land...
I'm talking about downloading on the internet - specifically music and videos via file-sharing networks such as KaZaA and Grokster.

Ahh! That finally explains why so many nodes seem to drop off the network around sunrise.

-

New way of locating peers

[rbeattie]

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

P2P taking over from Pr0n?

[Richard_at_work]

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.

Sooo, when did p2p apps take over that torch from porn? :)

An ISPs perspective

[fruey]

I work at an ISP in Morocco. We don't limit anything but then we don't provide high speed access at low cost. We don't do home DSL because the market isn't ready, and the first uptake will always be high-bandwidth users which will kill us if we did try to launch such a service as the first provider to do so.

For those of you more fortunate than I, that already live in an xDSL enabled area, I would like to draw an analogy.

You go to a restaurant with 10 friends, and you all agree to split the bill 10 ways, and pay 1/10 of the bill each.

Would you now say it was fair to order twice as much as everyone else, and a bottle of champagne for yourself?

That's the bandwidth issue. ISPs pool 2mbps or so for a circuit of n DSL subscribers. Those with the highest appetite still only pay 1/n of the bill.

Blame their business model if you like, but it's the market that is crying out for flat-rate high speed access. Flat-rate means, IMHO, making certain sacrifices. If you want hardcore fast, then pay the real price for the dedicated circuit. ISPs do not promise you a dedicated circuit for your low monthly fee. And ISPs pay full price for their dedicated circuits.

Re:An ISPs perspective

[Brento]

You go to a restaurant with 10 friends, and you all agree to split the bill 10 ways, and pay 1/10 of the bill each. Would you now say it was fair to order twice as much as everyone else, and a bottle of champagne for yourself?

Another example: if you buy a commercial plane ticket for $100, do you expect to be able to pull the back door open and parachute jump out of it? No. There's no big conspiracy to halt your freedom, you just have to do it in the right plane: go hire a plane that is dedicated to doing that sort of thing.

If you want to run P2P apps from home, you need to understand that you can't jump out of every airplane, and you can't stick your friends with the champagne bill. Go get an ISP that allows for that kind of thing, and yes, it will cost you more. There's a time and a place for everything, and if you want to transmit huge files, it's going to cost you more.

What's that you say? You don't have the money? Well, just like everything else in the world, you gotta pay to play. Just because you can't get a free billboard in Times Square that says "I Love Morpheus" doesn't mean anybody's restricting your freedom of speech.

Re:An ISPs perspective

[MajroMax]

Well, if they get their traffic shaping right of course. The problem is that the greedy client in the restaurant generally takes all the shortcuts necessary to get more food, including

* cajoling the waiter
* pretending to be someone else
* going to the kitchen direct
* saying his plate is really someone else's plate
* running plates out of the restaurant to his friends and coming back with an empty plate much faster than the others who are eating at their normal pace

Cajoling the waiter -- the proper Customer Support response to this is "I'm sorry, sir, but while we allow people to use the entirety of our unused bandwidth we reduce this excess use as needed to gurantee quality service for all users."

Pretending to be someone else -- on Cable, where it's all one big fat pipe with packets being sent into the ether[net], I can see this as being a problem. On DSL, however, each client has his own loop, so these things can be more controlled. Even then, the proportion of bandwidth hogs who will resort to outright fraud (and probably criminal computer tresspass to get username/passwd) is quite small.

Going to the kitchen direct -- then the resturaunt isn't actually serving his food, and he's getting his food the same place they are [I.E. the upstream provider] -- no problem for the resturaunt.

Saying his plate is really someone else's plate -- since there's no provision for "getting packets for someone else" in any of the RFC's I've read, this is the same as the fraud mentioned above.

Running plates out of the resturaunt -- Still no QoS problem, because he's the same person still -- the waiter will give him a guranteed service level of the same rate as other customers, and if he's less busy he'll stop by more often in his downtime.

Getting the traffic shaping correct isn't a piece of cake, for example, but I think you're underestimating the utility of a simple Guranteed (pipewidth/max#ofusers) burstable to the full pipe bandwidth. If you really want to get fancy about it, give a minimum (pipe/max#user) gurantee and twice that as a "second tier" gurantee -- all users with enough traffic (to generate that much bandwidth) will have the second gurantee filled before anyone can burst beyond it.

In the States, where 1Mbps+ connections are relatively common for broadband, your first-tier guranteed bandwidtgh might only be 128kpbs or so -- but this represents the worst possible case over _everyone_ on the loop online at the same time fully utilizing their connections at the same time. In the average case of you going online with a few 31337 gnutella users at the same time, you'd meet however many levels of quotas there are directly out of the gnutella guys' burst, and then compete with them for the burst-level bandwidth +(say)700kpbs.

Blocking ports, although effective in reducing the total amount of bandwidth you'll have to deliver, is most definitely _not_ the most effective means of fairly allocating the bandwidth you have. It's possible, with a given amount of bandwidth, for there to be "enough for everybody" while still allowing a few people to have "as much as they want" when no one else is using it.

Er, what?

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

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.

Adapting priority on bandwidth usage

[ukryule]

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

[nzhavok]

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.

This article...

[Bnonn]

...is garbage. I'm a bit disappointed in the standard of writing for the Herald, considering it's the largest newspaper in this country. Not only does the article not examine many sides of the issue, such as how many people are using Kazaa enough to be considered "vampires" (please, what a ridiculous term; this isn't even an editorial, it's a personal rant--stop throwing your toys out the cot Burton) and what Telecom's profit margins are on the service, but it blatantly omits several key points that turn the article into little more than fud.

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.

Well, someone's wrong, anyway...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The "copyright industry" is a dinosaur, the faster it is forced to reform, the better for mankind, artists and audience alike.

Nope, sorry, you're wrong. That same copyright system protects you in more ways than you apparently realise. Don't label it a poor system just because of abuse of that system by the RIAA and MPAA (which is really monopoly abuse used to fix prices rather than a flaw with copyright anyway, and probably should be investigated as such by the authorities if they have any integrity).

But more than your first claim, I love this bit.

The content industry will have to reform of course, and possibly accept a smaller cashflow. But that's life in a capitalist economy. If your business model don't float, you sink.
[...]
On the positive side of this demise of the content industry as we know it is free (almost) information to everyone (almost).

Except that, since most good information is hard to come by or requires genuine effort to produce, those two statements are contradictory. Again, you're mistaking a high profile but relatively isolated example (RIAA/MPAA) for the whole world, and overgeneralising.