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PA ISP to Restrict P2P Uploads
Maleko writes "PenTeleData, once an innovator in broadband internet service, (was one of, if not the first cable internet providers in the USA) has decided that their customers need to disable P2P uploads or face possible filtering to stop uploads. DSLReports has the story." While an interesting solution on the part of the ISP, it will definitely increase the number of "leechers" on file-sharing systems.
Upstream has always been a problem for cable providers. The system was designed to move content down not up. Just use dsl instead.
disable P2P uploads
:)
Marshall Berman said, in "All that is Solid Melts into Air", that you can't stop progress, and anyone that attempts to stop progress will be torn asunder by it. I'm paraphrasing with that statement, but you get the point. I find it ironic that the very elements the Bourgeois Elite employ seem to dethrone them, time and time again.
Supply and Demand will solve this problem.
I just hope that my ISP doesn't implement similar "defensive" measures - you never know, it might effect my SETI contributions somehow, or even the legitimate file swapping I do with people all over the planet.
Utilities (and I consider broadband a utility just as much as electricity or water) should not be able to control what you do with bandwidth. What they can do, is sell you a limited amount of bandwidth. If my provider is giving me 1.5Mb/down, and 256kb up (burstable), then it shouldn't matter if I'm using it all day or not. Filtering packets based on what you're doing is, in my opinion, like the telephone company saying that I talk to my Uncle too much on the phone so they're going to block his number.
I have no problem with the enforcing of copyrights, but that is not (and should never be) the ISP's job. We all know that this has absolutely nothing to do with the ISP's "respect" for copyrights, rather, this is simply about saving money by limiting bandwidth usage.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
What is scary is that this is possibly the start of something like Big Brother. I mean, I pay the ISP for MY net usage, not what he thinks is appropriate for me. I can agree with higher charges for P2P (heavy leeching causes slow networks here) but interfering in any way pisses me off. Soon they'll protect us from porn, terrorist propoganda, etc. and before you know it, you have a media oligarchy which controls all aspects communication, just like in the feudal ages.
Someone needs to develop a spread-spectrum protocol for network ports. Spread the data across lots of ports and have it intelligent enough to adjust if a port or set of ports is being filtered. With the packets encrypted, they'd never be able to filter again.
Devon
use this service cuz im sure they use P2P also. :D
:D
I bet they use other ISPs
It seems to be more and more common, these days--companies that are selling more resources than I actually have.
If you tell me that my connection will go a certain speed, I should be able to use that speed all night and all day if I want to, because that's what I'm paying you for. Counting on the idea that I won't use those resources you provide me is not, in my opinion, a good business model.
Yet, internet providers of all types use it. Web hosts give you insane amounts of disk space... and then, surprisingly enough, their disks start getting overfilled when people start using more than just a tenth of what they pay for.
If these places want to limit the bandwidth, they ought to be saying that right off the bat. "For this monthly fee, you get X mb of downloads, and Y megabytes of uploads, at speeds up to Z kb/sec."
That way, people can start using what they have sensibly. "Okay, I know I only have this much upload, so I won't share files on these P2P networks." Or maybe they'll just share smaller files, or only share a few days a month, or whatever... it's their decision, now, what to do with the resources they've paid for.
I think depending on under-usage has always been dangerous, and it was only a matter of time before something came along that started encouraging everyday users to actually make use of their broadband connections.
No, what you bought was low-priced commodity Internet access.
Read through the IETF RFCs for a few months, and you can extract the definition of Internet Access. It means that if a computer has Internet Access, it can open any 16 bit port and send TCP or UDP to any other host which also has Internet Access. (If some packets get delayed or randomly dropped, it still counts. But block them entirely, and they can't reach The Internet anymore)
Ask Metcalf, Cerf, or Berners-Lee and they'll tell you the same.
To advertise "Internet Access" and then only provide a subset of it is misleading, and if regulators were more tech-savvy they'd fine many ISPs for false advertising. If carriers think they can pick and choose what ports and protocols to allow, then they should rename the service to "HTTP Client / Email / IM access" and at least be forthright about it.
are bandwidth usage and copyright legalities. Taking the last issue first, as an (admittedly reluctant) ISP, we don't have the financial resources to fight RIAA and MPAA over the alleged copyright violations of our users. No small ISP does, and few large ones do (or would be willing to fight them off even if they had the funds). We don't get daily demands to disconnect users for alleged copyright violations, but we do get them weekly and following up takes our time and costs us money. When it gets to the point where we'd have to hire employees to handle the load we would either have to raise our prices (and our margins are razor thin now to compete) or implement the exact policy we see here.
Taking the bandwidth issue, most ISPs have separate accounts available for people who wish to "serve" files. In the days of dial-up most people didn't have the bandwidth for serving files or the static IP required to get to them. This is no longer true. P2P made a static IP irrelevant; people found you through a central registry of users and broadband gave you enough bandwidth to move packets fast enough to make the file exchanges possible. Suddenly the ISPs, which normally have to pay for bandwidth both ways, were faced with much higher charges for *their* links to the 'net.
If you think that P2P doesn't greatly increase bandwidth usage you haven't seen the MRTG graphs I have. When we did the engineering for 3 providers we could watch the effect of one user making available a popular new movie (like "Harry Potter"). It was dramatic! Bandwidth would often jump to the caps and stay there for hours at a time, drop down and then jump back.
An ISP buys bandwidth at a set guarenteed rate with the proviso that short bursts of usage above that rate wouldn't be charged for unless it lasts for longer than a minimum (agreed upon) amount of time. P2P changed this so that suddenly ISPs were faced with uplink bills of twice their usual amount!
Look at it from their point of view. How would you like it if you offered a room for rent and discovered that the new occupant was doubling your power, water and garbage bills? My guess is that you'd toss them out on their ear or make them pay for the excess. ISPs are in that position regarding bandwidth.
The combination of the litigation exposure plus the bandwidth costs will make every ISP look closely at making the same changes that this one has. They won't have much choice unless something else changes the equation.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
They don't *need* to, because they can just say that you're exceeding your upload limits. They don't care about *what* is generating the upwards traffic -- they just want users not saturating it.
If you were going to do what you're suggesting, you'd want something that's SSL-tunneled and runs on 443. They can't possibly monitor that, particularly if the remote P2P client also responds to HTTPS requests (their probes) with a valid response code (like 503 or something).
May we never see th
--I am betting this is like cal energy crisis. artificially high prices brought about by artifically manipulated supply "numbers". Now I honestly don't know if the middleman bandwith "traders" exist or not like the "spot market" for the middleman profit leeches do with electricity and natural gas, but I am more than suspicious of this bandwith crunch and cost. Ya it's expensive, here's the solution, the cable/phone/whatever call them DATA companies are still protected monopolies most areas. If they got rid of the monopoly, then *perhaps* there would be some competition, especially "last mile". I mean really, home many cable television companies got their monopoly status back in the 70's? Their cables aren't paid for yet? How long are they going to be able to milk that excuse cash cow? And the local telcos? How long are they going to be paying for the same copper they ran back in 1948? Wazzup with that noise?
There needs to be an easier way to get fat pipes to people's homes and turn the internet "on" more, just like the interstate highway system finally made it feasible to drive cross country at a decent average speed and on decent roads, so do we need some better amount of bandwith AND people should not be restricted from hosting at home, that's just ridiculous. p2p and hosting restrictions is like the us post office or fed ex saying only packages in, no packages or letters out. That's nuts, so are these restrictions. But we won't KNOW until there's honesty in accounting back in US business, I go from a default position now they are all liars, cook the books, skim money and cry poverty. I am sorry to have that opinion, but recent revelations with big US corporate "ethics" and honesty leave a lot to be desired.
There's no way to discuss this rationally without VERIFIABLE numbers to use -bandwith/cost/middleman-whatever, all that we have to look at is vaporware accounting numbers. The ONLY verifiable number we have to look at is the end run highest retail price the individual pays, after that it gets into accounting voodoo.
I'm so tired of ISP's whining about subscribers using bandwidth. If we can't use it, then what are they selling? "Bandwidth costs" blah blah blah, well, you should've use a little better formula when computing your prices.
On the bright side, this irresponsibility may once again give rise to smaller ISPs. Especially with wireless technology advancing daily, it may be time to dethrone greedy cable ISPs. At least, I can only hope.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Not at all. There's a difference between Sharing and 'downloading all night without allowing uploads'. The latter is selfish and antisocial.
Though some days, when nothing I request will even start downloading, I feel like a 'reverse-leech'.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
Because there is no other option. 56k is actually just as, if not more expensive (service and extra phone line). In it's hey day, broadband was amazing.
What are you talking about, "not an essential life function"? It is, too! Do you use broadband? Well, even if you don't, I know many people that would be lost without it.
The problem in general is this: For many years, most ISP customers were on dialup. For a long time, the status quo was that you paid about $15 to $25 and in return got about 25kpbs - 45kbps. Then xDSL and cable was offered, and that price ratio suddenly went off the map. The average fee approximately doubled to the $40-$50 range, while the (peak) bandwidth jumped 10x-30x. As an ISP, suddenly you are receiving much less money relative to the amount of bandwidth you must provision.
But there are other factors as well. In the days when dialup was king, it was common to have a single T1 for an entire ISP, perhaps a few thousand users, I don't know the exact numbers. Anyway, if you do the math you soon realize that no ISP with half a brain provisions their bandwidth with the expectation that every possible user is transmitting at full blast constantly. I think a common rule of thumb is around 100:1 or so, i.e. the actual bandwidth available is 1/100th of what would be necessary to support every connection at full speed. This worked fine, since most people did not leave their dialup connected all the time and even if they did they were not transmitting constantly.
This changes with broadband. People do leave their broadband connection connected all the time, and with programs like Kazaa (which will remain running, minimized to the tray, even if the user clicks the "close" icon on the main window) it is not uncommon for sustained constant throughput to occur. The reason of course is that things that were unreasonable under dialup are now possible, like "sharing" full movies, warez images, etc. (I use quotes around sharing because it's still piracy, no matter how you spin it.)
So my point is this: the revenue:bandwidth ratio is about 5 to 15 times smaller, and people's fundamental usage patterns have changed drastically. This is why ISPs are in such a precarious position, and why they appear to be enacting such desperate policies... because they're hurting. Even if you account for the fact that bandwidth has gotten cheaper (although not by factors of 10!), it does not alter the equation.
Certainly, it's partly their fault. The aspects that are hurting them the most, the vastly higher BW and constant availability, are precisely those that they advertised the most. In that sense, it's their own fault. I see this as another facet of the late 90s tech bubble, in that management of these ISPs was more concerned with getting new technology out there and bragging about the number of customers then they were with sound financial decisions.
Anyway, I think the way we will make it work is with tiering. The current situation is ludicrous: you have dialup at one end and full speed cable/dsl at the other. I know some ISPs have limited forms of price tiering, but the key word is limited. What we need is a plan that costs about $30 and is intended for the majority of internet users -- burstable high speeds for surfing and gaming, but on average a very low duty cycle. Cap it at around 500kbps burst and implement some form of traffic shaping to enforce a low total throughput, like 1GB a month or something. This is the plan you parents and non-hardcore friends use, and the ISP makes a decent profit. Use this to subsidise the $50 plan that allows more flexibility. Unfortunately you will never be able to offer a service that allows a continuous full rate transfer for $50 a month -- if you want this, check out a fractional T1, and expect to pay much more. So don't expect it from any consumer grade ISP, even if you can currently do this without repremand. It just doesn't work that way. Sorry.
I run a small wireless ISP and I'm studying for my Cisco Certified Internetwork Professional. I happen to be working the QoS and multicast portion now - any customer silly enough to fire up Kazaa is volunteering for whatever queueing method I plan on playing with that day.
Seriously folks, Tier 1 T1 == $1,000/mo, each 64k channel is about $40, a 256k customer with P2P on costs me $160/mo and pays not more than $35 for the service. You better believe I stomp on 'em quick when I notice them.
FYI : These are my opinions, not necessarily the opinion of the company, yada yada yada ...
... Most residential users don't think twice about security before running an FTP server. Simple hack, and suddenly there's an unauthorized server running. Most of the time the user won't even notice! They'll call complaining that service is slow... It isn't until we've done some investigating that this hole is found.
Actually, I don't think we've busted anyone for running a quake server, provided it isn't a 24x7 server... While we probably could do this, I don't think they really consider it necessary. Blocking FTP, HTTP, P2P, and other such services is done for 2 major reasons. 1, it chews up bandwidth very quickly should that site become popular. 2, a large majority of the FTP site (especially) are there for Warez. Of course, we can't block everything and users can always change the port the service runs on.
There is a valid third reason as well. Port scanners can quickly find open ports on a users machine. That user may have put up an FTP server for innocent purposes, but, not knowing security, they've opened up a server that can be compromised. We see this often enough on commercial servers where the admins should "know better"
I see the need for some users to have the ability to FTP files to/from home, use remote desktop/VNC to get to their home machines, etc. But, by and large, the majority of the users suffer for those users that abuse the system or just don't know enough to protect themselves from getting abused.
I *think* users have access to a web server where they can put up home pages. I can't say for sure because I'm an engineer. I don't know what exactly is included with residential packages, but I'm fairly certain a website is in there...
As for the price difference between residential and commercial cable, I'm not compeltely sure.. I don't think it's that drastic though...
It's more a matter of what is causing the most problems. If everyone suddenly started running game servers and it was chewing up huge gobs of bandwidth, they'd probably start getting blocked. Who knows, if P2P matures some more and the software gets to the point where users can make informed decisions about how to use it, we may remove the block. Right now, though, they're extremely popular, and, as such, cause many headaches for traffic engineering and security control.
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
Does anyone know how to get past the 137-139 blocks?
WebDAV is how to do file sharing over HTTP with or without SSL. Works with IE5/Windows 2000's Web Folders function.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Just over a year ago we decided to block P2P upload and download - we are an ISP. Many people told us it was suicide and all of our customers would switch to our compeditor here in town. I though you might be interested in the results one year later.
Amoung dozens of reasons to block P2P, one outstanding reason is that P2P expands to fill all available bandwidth. There are technical reasons for this based on how servers are chosen to download files from, but regardless of why or how, both an individual's bandwidth and that of the ISP is quickly saturated. Doubling our bandwidth solved the problem for only a couple weeks after which P2P traffic had expanded to use up all the bandwidth again. Everyone complained about slow Internet when they had bought fast Internet.
So we blocked all known P2P ports and many P2P company server sites. The responsiveness of our network immediately improved. And some customers, fewer than we expected, switched to our competitor. As we expected, the quality our competitor's network quickly went in the toilet.
The end result? Our competitor lost far, far more customers to us than we had to him. And, nearly half of those who had switched from us to our competitor switched back. One customer switching back put it simply "There is more to the Internet than P2P." We now have easily twice the number of broadband customers as our competitor.
I wasn't surprised by the result. ISP's have long known that if they rank their dial-up customers by time online and kick off the top 5% they will double their profits and the remaining 95% of customers will praise them. Indeed, I know one ISP who does exactly that, charges an extra $5 per month to the rest of his customers for his premium service, and is laughing all the way to the bank at all those ISP's who are afraid to get rid of the customers abusing their service.
Heh.. I was a customer of these guys for 3 three years. Their earliest cable modems (the old Zenith black box jobs) only did 500K bps (which in 1994 was THE shit!), but had NO manageability. The amazing thing was, PTD offered this service in Lancaster County, PA - Amish Country - one of the most unlikeliest of areas. When I moved to D.C. 2 years later, even THEY didn't have decent cable service until 2001!
;)
As a result, PenTeleData ended up coming up with some sort of rule that you couldn't download more than 128K bps over a 3 hour period. The per minute charge for overuse was unbelievable (it would have even made British Telecom blush).
I bitched to them about it. First of all, there was nothing in our original agreement about "overuse". Secondly, how would I know when this seemingly arbitrary limit had been reached? The thing was, there was no telling Microsoft to not send me the newest beta of W2K at over 128K bps. Finally, we reached a reasonable agreement whereby I would try to do any extreme downloading after hours, and if they needed the bandwidth they would simply throttle me back or cut me off.
About 2 months later, I went on a midnite downloading frenzy (on Napster) and suddenly {Snap!} I was cut off. Or so I thought. I soon discovered only Napster didn't work. Then I tried downloading off of various web sites. After a few minutes... {Snap!} Port 80 was dead. Later, and under VERY heavy use, I lost IRC, Newsgroups, and FTP. Basically, I had them manually shutting off ports all night. Yes, it was spiteful, but I was annoyed.
At any rate, at the end of the month, I received a bill from these folks and it was well over $800! After arguing with management over this bill (and threatening physical presence - always helpful when dealing with xenophobic phone people), they "remembered" our email conversation and let the bill slide. After I hung up the phone, I took the modem back and haven't dealt with them since.
People in this area can now get DSL (www.jazzd.com) and I can tell you from my experience that it's better and faster than even the cableco's newest modems. Also, they haven't made any stupid bandwidth limitations.
At any rate, I'm both amused and saddened that PTD is still trying to enforce the unenforceable. Either they need to get better bandwidth management tools, or a better management.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I think that what these broadband companies should be doing is putting together a strong traffic policy and implementing it. Traffic shaping at the border routers, multiple access points from their networks to the rest of the internet, and adding value added services to their own networks. The days of merely supplying internet are over, it's time to add value added services, almost to the point of AOL. Build a strong network infrastructure, host as much as possible locally, and they could serve their customers better while keeping their own recurring costs down.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!