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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.
While an interesting solution on the part of the ISP, it will definitely increase the number of "leechers" on file-sharing systems.
And hopefully this will lead to the end of systems like Kazaa. While I have no problem with peer-to-peer file trading systems, Kazaa is run by a bunch of crooks (like most of these companies) that are hell-bent on filling your PC up with spyware and crapware. I personally hope they die a fiery death. The network is nice, the company is not.
...it'll ruin my sex life.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
Within limits of course, they can do whatever they want. This will either hurt them by losing too many customers, or make their network better for all involved. I can't see it making a huge difference anyway. Worst case, they lose a small percentage of people who will be upset by their decision, IMHO. I don't see it making a huge impact on bandwidth either, since people will still be leeching away. Most *my* bandwidth goes to downloading, not uploading.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
I don't understand the business planning that went into the broadband market. The adopters of broadband got broadband not just for faster net access, but for more. These companies catered to that, with commercials showing video conferencing, highlighting music sharing and telling the public that the sky's the limit. Now that they have a customer base, they are telling us that they lied, that we are only supposed to be looking at web pages. They attempted to control the stream by adopting adsl and asymmetric cable, proxy servers on their own network, and it just isn't good enough! Is access to internet backbones that expensive or are we getting hosed as consumers here?
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
A majority of the people receiving this will probably just disable their uploads because they don't know any better. I'm sure there will be ways around it, but for the majority of the users I'm sure this letter, and a simple filter will probably get rid of a reasonable amount of traffic. It would be funny if this was just ended up being a strongly worded warning and they didn't even implement any filters, but most users turned off their file sharing :)
While I am perfectly confident that this will prompt the innovative (read desperate) users to develop a workaround, some time now things like this will make the work required to work around them too much for most. This will kill all P2P apps, even the ones that don't violate copyrights. The irony is that the people who pirate professionaly will probably benifit from this.
I wonder what lengths people will go to share files illegaly, and when the ??AA will realise that there are reasons for this desperation other than that people like to break the law. Good music and competitive pricing will be the only way to kill piracy.
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.
Funny, they've decided to block their users from contributory copyright violation, while still letting them download all the MP3s they want.
But one legal defense ISPs use against charges of copyright infringment themselves (and a bevy of other crimes) is "We just move the data from one side to another- we never know what's inside it". That's why USENET still has its binaries groups moving at full tilt- ISPs don't want to get into a position of accepting/rejecting individual blobs of content.
For one thing, the workload would be enormous. For another, they'd begin serving in an editoral role, and have some responsiblity for the content they do let through. And some attorneys general will be happy to attack them with "you didn't reject it, so you must've accepted it, so you're a party to the crime!". (I can particularly imagine someone in a music-industry consitutency doing this)
Of course, per-file (checksum/watermark?), per-newsgroup, or per-filename blocking is a far cry from the simplistic protocol level denial this ISP is doing. They're still a common carrier for a while (denying data not by its contents, but by its format and packaging).
Although this change won't immediately hurt the availability of files on P2P filesharing (P2Pfs) much, it could be the start of a trend where all ISPs might block outgoing sharing. Leading to a chase where the P2Pfs software takes refuge inside one unblocked port and unfiltered protocol after another...
A race like that could (in 10 years or so) chase P2P programs entirely onto other allowed procotols, maybe even something like email messages. As the disguising of the P2Pfs packets becomes ever-more sophisticated, the only way to detect them will be to read more and more closely into every user's transmission. At some point, you become a real censor.
What you bought was Internet access, not "filtered access with only some ports available".
It's about the principle of the thing. I want IP transit; nothing more.
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
> it will definitely increase the number of
> "leechers" on file-sharing systems.
Does anybody else find it ironic that a community that is based on file-sharing would use the term "leechers" as a disparaging term?
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's common practice these days to use a carefully-chosen word in order to inherit a negative -- or positive -- meaning "by association".
"Leech". Yuck! That can't be good.
"Sharing". Gee, that sounds so... nice, doesn't it? It must be ok.
Of course, even with the throttling set to 24kbps, it still looked like there was over 32kbps going upstream. I don't like being a leech, and I'd love to share some bandwidth to a reasonable degree, but with such tight limits on our upstream bandwidth, there's not much I can do. Also, my old strategy (when I wanted to play Counter-Strike or latency was being problematic, I'd just block port 1214 at our router) doesn't work any more because new versions of Kazaa do crazy port-hopping stuff to prevent being blocked. No choice but to disable it entirely.
I guess my point is that there is blame to go around here. Companies like Kazaa need to provide better throttling in P2P products (there is no way to throttle to less than 24kbps... that's fucking retarded) and need to ship with throttling enabled to avoid flooding networks. And ISPs should realize that blocking is retarded - it will just piss customers off. Bandwidth throttling is okay, but give us reasonable limits. My service shouldn't slow to a crawl just because I am using 24kbps of upstream (ATT Broadband), and my service shouldn't get disabled for 60 seconds because I open a lot of connections (Verizon DSL - doing a server refresh in Counter-Strike makes the connection throttle and then shut down after polling a couple thousand servers, and it won't come back to life for 60 seconds).
Crippling the software I choose to run is unacceptable, and if you do it, I will be forced to shop elsewhere.. err... you have a monopoly. I guess I'll just have to take it in the rumpelstiltskin. Never mind.
Why does PenTeleData prohibit ProLog Express Internet customers from uploading through file-sharing applications? -Serving files from a residential account - whether FTP or file-sharing -- is a violation of the Acceptable Use Policy.
"Internet" service without servers is not an internet. Good luck to them blocking ftp. AOL uses port 21 for it's instant messenger program. Unless AOL changes that, or they can distinguish traffic, their block will do little good.
I already hate my cable company as they have violated my Acceptable Service Policy. The day they block FTP is the day they lose my static IP charges. The day I have a choice in providers is the day they lose me.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This may be obvious, but it's still pissing me off. Cable and DSL companies have just been taking and taking without letting up anything. They raise the prices, they kill our static IPs, they lower our uploads, they kill our web space, but they never give anything back! Never, "Oh, let's raise the cap," or, "oh, let's give them back their static IPs." Eventually broadband will just become so empty that it will be useless. Geeks will begin to see the use of shared T1 lines, and the rest will soon follow.
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.
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
You all assume that the only way an ISP can filter traffic is at the TCP/UDP layer, or the IP layer. This is wrong. Content based filtering, while still expensive is a *real* possibility, and has come on in leaps and bound. Level 7 switches have come down in price a lot, and are a fairly simple way of implementing application layer priorities. Just a thought, but don't get to excited at the idea that no ISP will ever filter anything that uses port 80 tcp.
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
This Big Brother crap is over the top. The ISPs are protecting themselves from legal ramifications. They probably don't really care about the users that much .. the benefits brought about by PenTeleData covering their own butts just filter down to the users which is arguably good. No Big Brother entity is pushing anything here like propaganda. The two ideas don't correlate well at all, except that a few angry users are making over-the-top comments because they'll say anything to garner arguments for getting their precious P2P back.
A world without free flow of P2P access! We've had our cake and ate it too. Expect the world to change. Maybe something better will come about.
Giving bandwidth and taking it away -- that's another meaningless argument. Just as you have to pay for your bandwidth usage, so does your ISP. Do you think they get it for free to give to you? Most purchase bandwidth from other companies.
Maybe the price of gas shouldn't increase either. Maybe the gas station should pay more over time, but never pass those costs onto the drivers. It doesn't take a business mind to see the problem here.
I certainly am willing to pay more to use P2P while it's still here. However there is increasingly more focus on the law surrounding illegal P2P content. How much longer will be *want* to use P2P, even if we can? How many of us are already in future legal battles that we don't know about yet?
The idea about encrypting the content is cool. It's already being done over at the FreeNet Project, but it's so slow! However leave it up to somebody to sooner or later write a P2P app on top of the FreeNet network.
What if ISPs close all unusual ports to prevent against P2P? Well then somebody can write encoders/decoders that work over normal ports like ICQ, HTTP, etc. and format that file parts in that protocol. Wouldn't that be cool.
However what starts to freak me out is no matter how many times P2P succeeds at getting around the barriers, those barriers exist for many reasons -- many are legal reasons -- and soon that may come down on P2P users like a tonne of bricks. And I certainly don't want to be there when it happens. Nobody does. It's seeming like more of a gamble each day.
--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.
Due to congestion on interstate highways, and increased road construction costs, Illinois residents will be limited to driving TO their home. Road blocks will be set up to ensure they do not depart from their home... Local authorities state that as more and more people are blockaded in their homes, road congestion will become less of an issue..
~ Maintainer of the Skajake Projects
Well, the merry file sharers are sharing, in a voluntary association amongst themselves -- I'll show you mine if you show me yours, or even if you don't -- as opposed to the victimized copyright holders. So maybe you want the term "cooperative leeches" or "distributed leeches"? Or, the proven old term "pirates."
Point well taken. Thievery by any other name would smell the same. But no one wants to be called a hypocrite, least of all by themselves.
I realize this may provide an unintentional springboard for speeches by the piracy rationalizers. To being it back sharply on-topic, if the broadband providers do need to contain costs I'd rather they try to single old the illegal uses first. (If they're doing this just to maximize profit, then we have a market failure.)
Back when VCR's were introduced to the public it was argued they would be used to violate copyright, but because the courts found VCR's had legitimate uses as well (your nephew bar mitzvah, etc.) they were not per se illegitimate.
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!
Having goofed by declaring war on every kid who downloads a song, we're going to see more of the shift both in tactics and rhetoric to those who distribute. Perhaps they will be demonized as "dealers" or even "pushers" who entice wide-eyed young would-be ConsumerCitizens into filthy pirates.
So how does this work, since many, if not most, downloaders are also uploaders? Shut down uploading, be it via technology (blocking ports, DRM, copy prevention-enabled CDs), legal means (suing super-nodes and people who break technological means), and PR (portraying uploaders as the real villains). Now, you've still got uploading, but it's confined to a subset of people who are really committed to uploading. I base this on the assumption that a lot of people upload because all it takes is a checkbox -- it really doesn't cost me much time, effort, or worry. If you have to start fooling around with ports, worrying about a subpoena showing up, and losing your job for being branded a "pusher", maybe I just uncheck that little box that says "share files".
So now we've separated the hard core from the fringes. This hard core is small enough, evil enough, and important enough that it is worth the cost necessary to stop (shutting down accounts, legal action, hacking their hard drives, etc). And now without the hard core, the fringe will starve. The mistake of the attack on Napster was that there is now no central distributor to strike. It looks like a gradual movement toward coalescing the mass of distributors back to a short list of targets.
Will this strategy work? Some of this may have to do with how much people care about their ability to upload. If my uploading is shut off by my ISP, do I care? Do I raise a fuss, or do I say, oh, well, I can still download. Maybe the RIAA is saying quietly to the ISPs, look, just block the uploads, and nobody will complain about that. And now you don't have to worry about a lawsuit from us anymore. Everybody wins (wink wink).
First off, I work for Penteledata. However, I have no authority to speak for the company in this matter. As such, these opinions are mine.
There are a lot of views that can be taken on this matter. From an ISP view, ISP's need to protect themselves from the current "regime" of money hungry corporations. It seems that due to copyright laws, a company can and will do anything in their power to prevent anyone from breaking those copyrights. In a way, they're right. And, in a way, I think they're wrong. But of course, this isn't about them being right and wrong.
From the perspective of service, it is in an ISP's best interests to serve all of the customers equally. Due to the "always on" way that cable and dsl work, customers are prone to leaving their computers running 24 hours a day. Or, maybe they're leaving them on while they're at work so they can download everything they have queued... Either way, because P2P sharing is a 2 way system, while they're downloading, someone else can be downloading from them. The may not intend to become a download spot, but they may. This uses up bandwidth within the ISP's network, decreasing the available bandwidth to the rest of the customers in the network.
Yes, ISP's can limit bandwidth, but then customers complain about that. ISP's usually have an AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) and in the case of Penteledata, it strictly prohibits "residential" customers from running servers. While those servers may be "free" and the customer does not benefit financially from them, if ISP's allow this, then those customers that do benefit financially from running servers have a rock-solid argument against purchasing a commercial account.
There is also the security standpoint. As you know, security on one system can affect everyone else. Nimda, Code Red, and others caused widespread problems for more users that were not infected than those that were. Allowing residential customers to run servers opens up many security holes. While there are some very smart residential users out there, I'd have to say that the majority don't know what it takes to secure a system. Thus, they get infected, and attacks launch from their systems. It would be extremely hard, and, IMHO, unethical to try and screen users abilities before allowing them to run servers.
Some ISP's take the stance to prevent users from running servers, both to protect themselves, and to protect the users.
ISP's may lose customers over this, and they may gain customers because of it. There will be those customers that will find workarounds and continue the file sharing. I'd probably do the same thing myself. Although, I can honestly say that I don't use these P2P programs for many reasons. The point is that the ISP needs to protect itself and do what it can to protect it's customers.
I work each day designing networks, writing software, and troubleshooting problems. The software I write allows us as an ISP to better monitor the traffic patterns on the network. It forewarns us when we hit bandwidth limits and gives us a head start on alleviating those limits. It allows us to quickly see DOS and other attacks. All in the interest of keeping the customers running as smoothly and with as much bandwidth available as we can.
We take measures to contain any problems as quickly and as efficiently as possible. If this means turning off a customer while the customer deals with the problem on their side, then so be it. I think we've had a great deal of success with this.
I think a lot of people have blown this way out of proportion. ISP's will do what they need to protect both themselves and the customer. They will also do what they need to enforce the rules they've set forward. Upon signup, each customer has given their consent to obey the AUP... I doubt most customers read that document. But, just like EULA's, they are there...
Again, my views are not representative of the company in question. My views are my views. And just as a point, I'm no big fan of EULA's, AUP's, etc. But, without them, some users feel they need to take advantage of the services they're getting, not caring who they cause problems for.
PTD, like any other ISP has it's flaws. But overall, as a provider, I think they provide above average service. I use them at home, and I have no real complaints. I have the same service as any other residential customer and I'm expected to follow the AUP as well.
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but many of today's Internet users have somehow come upon the idea that they have a right to do whatever they want. Your rights end at the cable modem, past that it is the ISP's network, resources, and rules that govern the priveledge of connecting to the Internet. Just because you pay a piddling amount of money every month does not let you dictate terms of service. Despite common misperception, the customer is not always right.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Additionally, PenTeleData may soon implement filters to prevent ProLog Express customers from uploading files to peer-to-peer networks. ProLog Express users who download files from peer-to-peer networks will not lose their ability to download, but once the filters are in place, you will lose the ability to upload files to the peer-to-peer networks.
:)
imagine, a p2p network where everyone can only download, not upload--there's something wrong with this picture
This is a copy of a post that the Manager of PenTeleData's Cable Support Department posted to PenTeleData's general news group in responce to the above mentioned p2p sharing letter.
I am not going to get into any discussion about this, I am going to just state the purpose of that letter which has been take wrong by only about 1% of the customer base from what I have seen.
Here are the facts:
A. Nothing is being changed. It is only in the maybe phase and at this time have no plans to implement it. Hopefully just getting the word out will take out one factor in issues that affect all cable broadband providers, not just PTD.
B. People who have the uploading enabled on these programs are allowing people to use the bandwidth. B.1 and this can happen even if they are not personally using it.
C. We are just trying to get the word out that if people are not personally actively using the upload to turn it off, as it does affect the network. Why should we waste bandwidth on someone from say Florida when our customers could be using it. And all because someone either forgot to turn it off when they were done, or do not even know its on.
D. No one here at PTD is trying to tell anyone what to do with their connection. The government not PTD sets the laws as far as copyrights and other issues, if we get legal notice to terminate an account we will do it. This is not a decision we make we just follow the law.
E. Your speeds that your complaining about have been directly tied to these kinds of programs sucking down your bandwidth and its most likely being used by someone outside our network.
F. I am not concerned at this time about the server part even thought that is a legitimate issue. All we want is for people who are NOT PERSONALLY using the upload part to just turn it off. It will help everyone. We have watched the general flow of traffic and have confirmed that these programs are causing 50% of all speed issues.
G. No we are not out of bandwidth, this is only a way to cut down unused traffic by people who are not Prolog Customers.
H. We care about our customers and are only trying to maintain as much as possible the best most consistent service possible, and this letter was meant just to get the word out to people who may not even know what is happening and to ask people who do understand to work with us on this. Use the upload when you personally need it, but do not leave it on all the time so the bandwidth can just be left on like a water faucet, kind of like water conservation. Why waste it? We want it for our customers not theirs
I. If these programs are not setup right your computers could have major security holes in them and your personal files could be available to the world.
This is all I am going to say about this I hope this puts some peoples mind at ease. Our main goal is to get rid of wasted bandwidth so you OUR customers can use it.
I apologize if the intent of the letter was misunderstood in anyway.
Please if you have any legit questions not flames email me and I will gladly answer them. All flames will just be deleted by me with no response.
Think what you will, a lot of people are blowing this letter out of porportion.
Yes I am. That's what the adverts said. You obviously have to make allowances for occassional slowdowns, but if they advertise that level of service, I expect to get that level of service. How they handle and pay for it behind the scenes is their problem, not mine.
Ditto blocking ports, they shouldn't be advertising it as "Internet Access", because once you start breaking the RFCs, then it's no longer the Internet, just a subset of it.
We do have a right to do what we want, it's supposed to be a free market. If my ISP ever imposes any of these conditions on me, I'll switch to another. There are at least 20 different providers offering broadband in my area. My current ISP is a cable provider, if they lose me, they lose a customer that is paying for digital cable, their "gold" cable modem package, and two telephone lines. Should I ever have to switch, I'll damn sure tell them why. If consumers don't stand up for themselves, they get trampled on.
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.
The real reason around this particular ISP is wanting to block or reduce uploads may actually be cost.
My ISP (DSL-Only) told me that their upstream providers charge them by the amount of data they upload. The more upstream bandwidth they are allocated, the more it costs them. Download bandwidth does not have as a significant impact on their cost. My ISP (and I think most others) compensate by weighting the upload cost more heavily then the download cost to their customers. My ISP charges the following for bandwidth: (These numbers don't include the phone company charge for the DSL circuit, just the ISP portion.) Note that at the two options where the prices are the same the different amount of bandwidth you get is not symmetrical (at $27 you get a delta of 1160K down and 256K up, and at $48 you get a delta of 760K down and 400K up.)
Perhaps the motive of the ISP in question is simple economics: If they discourage uploads then they reduce their upstream costs, and can make more money or pass the savings on.
As a side note, my ISP rocks. They don't block any ports; they don't have any usage restrictions (other then you have to be legal, and can't resell bandwidth with a residential account); I always get the full bandwidth I pay for; they offer static addresses and routable subnets; and they are a small, independent company. Imagine that.
Slashdot eds, you might consider using headlines more accessible to non-americans. When I saw this story I thought, "What? The Palestinian Authority is restricting P2P? Terrorist bastards!"
- undoware.ca
Theres too much piracy and YOU know it. It also sucks up far to much bandwidth. The thin wires that make up the internet are not designed for so much traffic. FairADSL in the uk is al so restricting p2p. But there are a lot of legimate places to get stuff online so stop p2ping, its why DRM/crippled cds/padallium is happening!
If this post is at -1, it means that the mod supports piracy.
Yes your currently at -1, yes I happen to agree with you. As I have stated here P2P is unfair to other people that are using the network for more valid reasons. By valid reasons I mean work/homework is more important than downloading porn/music etc. I like P2P but untill we can come up with a way to divide bandwidth more fairly, the bandwidth hogs have to go. If you have your own dedicated bandwidth, then by all means, use P2P and leave it on all the time. For the rest of use that are using shared reasources (regular DSL, cable, university dorm networks etc.) P2P is unfair to all others on the network.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
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
This whole situation has been caused simply because a network stream is a 1:1 thing. If you make it a 1:many connection then suddenly you have far more efficient use of bandwidth, because if you're an ISP and 100 users are downloading a file, you only have to receive it once on your incoming link, instead of 100 times.
Of course, you'd still have P2P file sharing, the reason that people use Kazaa is not because it's the best way of moving information around (it's not), it's because it's anonymous and you can't be taken down for it. Safety in numbers, safety in anonymity. If there were suddenly large pirate music servers transmitting albums on rotation via multicast 24/7 they would be much easier targets.
Multicast has lots of other legal uses of course, that's what I'd want them for. But I can see that it'd help solve this situation. So come on ISPs, where are the v6 routers?
C. Why should we waste bandwidth on someone from say Florida when our customers could be using it.
This argument slays me. FTPing or P2P or whatever, to someone is FL is no different than being a Verizon customer and making a long distance call to an AT&T customer in another state. These companies wanted to jump on the bandwagon and offer this service, so they will just have to figure it out. I am sick of commercials that show space shuttles lifting off and music and video being downloaded, only to have these newbie ISPs get very upset when you actually do any of that! Providing internet is marching its way toward being no different than other utilities. Did POTs lines get overloaded way back when? Of course. And they have spent decades improving the phone system. And yet, in a catastrophe like a hurricane or 9/11, the phone lines can still get overloaded from too many people trying to check on loved ones.
E. Your speeds that your complaining about have been directly tied to these kinds of programs sucking down your bandwidth and its most likely being used by someone outside our network.
More BS. I know of no broadband ISP that had the foresight to offer tiered services from the get-go. And Napster was out long before cable and DSL finally made it to the general public. They didn't pay attention to the demand and the market and what it was all about, and they are complaining about it. They jumped onto something that was already in existence, and completely underestimated how they would handle the demand.
I. If these programs are not setup right your computers could have major security holes in them and your personal files could be available to the world.
Typical defensive stance - when you can't come up with a good answer, threaten them and change the subject. I am tired of hearing it from the RIAA or anyone else who wants to hit the below the belt like this and try to use the customers ignorant fear to coerce them into doing something. It's unethical and deceitful. Can running FTP cause a security breach? Yes. Can P2P programs of the world junk up your computer with adware and such. Oh yes. But it is not the ISPs place to dabble here. Anyone willing to run these things needs to be prepared to educate themselves.
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..."