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P2P Bandwidth Hogging the Net
zymano writes "zdnet has this article about bandwidth hogging p2p." I'm sure we'll see more rate limiting in the future and per-gig charges. The article says 60% of ISPs bandwidth is P2P, and that seems high to me, but not unrealistic. Besides, since most broadband is pretty seriously hamstringed in the upstream department, I'm not sure where they can go with this.
let me break down the other 40 percent of the bandwidth for you:
18% Porn
12% Spam
6% RIAA "Cease and Desist" Emails
4% KaZaa Client Software
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to downloading the complete works of Engelbert Humperdinck
Mike
Weren't people complaining about spam being over 50% of the bandwithd now p2p is 60%, that looks lie 110% to me.
perhaps in soviet russia.
this sounds like a FUD attack against P2P. I think of the amount of spam that my ISP has to filter and then the spam that slips through. How much ISP bandwidth goes to spam?
As much as we all hate to admit it the "all-you-can-eat" days of the buffet are almost over. Metered bandwidth is coming and thos who use the most will pay the most.
IF thats what users of the net want to use it for, well thats what they are paying for. Spam just pisses people off cause they don't want it. I don't really beleive that figure. Upload is so slow.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
/ Most of mine is \ /
\ ASCII cows!
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
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Linux 2.6.0-test4. Get it before SCO does!
It doesn't take many stupid users to hog a pair of T1 lines. It also doesn't help that the p2p system are designed for maximum leach of available nodes.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
As if gigantic movies and games along with lots of music files utilize more bandwidth than the 100kb of text and pictures per webpage.
-Reid
It would have been funnier if you left "the" out of the sentence...
XNap, my favorite, uses the OpenNap protocol. This is not a bandwidth hog. It also doesn't use a single centralized server. But it does use centralized servers that people run. (Maybe this is sort of like Kaaza's supernodes?)
There are ways to make p2p require less bandwidth, but the RIAA/MPAA will never let it happen because the ability to transfer packets over the net enables bad things such as piracy in addition to the "good" uses, such as consuming and viewing ads.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
I mean, last week it was 60% spam, now it's 60% P2P. Guess that means Spam is finally on it's return and soon we've had the last of it...
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I'm guessing there's some creative making-up-of-numbers going on. If 'they' (the anti-internet people) had their way, the breakdown would be as follows:
60%: p2p traffic
30%: Spam
20%: Kiddie porn
_________________
110% evil.
So people are finally treating the internet like a really big LAN and people are complaining? Personally I think it's great.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
One ISP I saw was meeting its customers half-way. There was a flat rate to use the service, which came with a monthly bandwidth allowance. There was a charge for every additional GB of data, but once this reached a certain limit (approx. equal to rival ISP's subscription charges) then all additional data was free. Light users paid a flat rate, medium users paid a flat rate and a little more in those busy months and heavier users paid a maximum. The ISP would benefit as users would be less willing to download data they did not really want, if they could save money by not doing it. In short, everyone's a winner.
Working at Housing Network Services for a largish University, I can say that 60% bandwidth for P2P sounds about right, or maybe even somewhat conservative.
You have to take into account, of course, that bandwidth use for dial-up users will be a lot different, because P2P isn't nearly as attractive when files take ten times longer to download.
P2P uses 60% from the available bandwidth, Windows Update uses 45%. That leaves ... uhm ... less than nothing for all the other stuff?
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
My company resells bandwidth to a few other companies and local governments. P2P apps were getting to be a real problem about 1.5 years ago, so I talked it over with the bosses and the clients and we all agreed it was best to lock down the common ports used. Easy enough of a decision as it was highly unlikely any user would come up with a valid business case requiring access to these services. We'd been looking to increase our link capacity and fee schedule to account for the bandwidth loads we'd been seeing...but we didn't have to once we shut the P2P stuff down. I saw an immediate drop of about 50% of daytime traffic and 80% after hours. If it weren't for music and radio streams (which we do not currently block), that daytime number would probably have been a little larger.
"In a follow-up, we've also uncovered that 60% of home electrical use can be attributed to television usage. Now, we go live to Jack McDuh..."
"Thank you, Beavis...apparently, the majority of home electrical usage is going to things like watching television, playing video games, or playing music on a stereo. I have with me Mr. Mxlyplk, the general manager of ConEd for this region. Tell us, Mr. Mxlyplk, what can you tell us about this discovery?"
"Well, Jack, it's rather shocking. All along we assumed that home users were using our electrical output to cure cancer or develop space travel or something like that. But apparently, people who dutifully pay their monthly fees for a utility think they can just use it any way they want to, for any old purpose!"
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
it's not "hamstringed", it's HAMSTRUNG
My theory is that companies like inktomi and akaimai like to push big numbers around - and they QUITE enjoy PrOn emails that promote quicktime movie downloads etc.
Personally, I think Yahoo and M$ (Hotmail) should be required to subsidize some bandwidth because of the aforementioned bandwidth hogging solicitations that generally propagate on their systems.
IF ISPs were really concerned about getting dollar for bandwidth they'd do a lot more than they are claiming to stop "Jenny Jones and CoOpt Network" emails.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
1. Get consumers to pay lots of money for high-speed internet
2. Complain that customers are using their high-speed internet
As an employee at a university, I can tell you that in fact, those numbers are realistic.
Unfortunately, with the port-hopping ability of some of the newer p2p networks, restricting their usage, or giving them a lower class of service than other protocols is exceedingly difficult.
The real problem in our case is not so much the people downloading, but as we have a rather fat pipe to the internet, we're seen as very favorable download farm for people to grab files from.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
It seems to me that these ISPs are Internet Service Providers. If people are using bandwidth why are they complaining? I'd also like to know why they think file sharing will triple next year.
It says this in the article but if they want to stop people from using "all" of the bandwidth and pull them off the all-you-can-eat plan. There's a problem with this though. Who will accept having a limit on their internet access? I know it drives me nuts when the dumbasses on my floor download 10-15 movies a night between them all and I can't get a single SSH session to behave without some serious latency, but I'd rather deal with pulling their cables out of the wall than dealing with an ISP limiting my use of their services when they previously were not.
As a former Nortel Networks employee, I am glad to hear this type of news. Part of the whole reason for the telecom meltdown was predicted demand that never materialized. The growth of traffic was unfolding as expected, but in a quest for better profits, the telecom companies decided to curb demand instead of increasing supply. So instead of expanding backbones, they capped downloads.
:)
They can only do this for so long. With the rollout of large-scale gaming networks like Sony's and Microsoft's (for the X-Box), the demand will keep growing, one way or another. Sooner or later, the Qwests and MCIs are going to have to bite the bullet and buy some terabit optical switches. They're going to have to open up their wallets, and then we should start seeing a rebound in the high-tech market.
So support your high-tech buddies! Saturate your network connection, make your ISP feel the bandwidth pain, nag them to upgrade!
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Is this really surprising? Am I missing something? I mean, what other internet use by private persons even comes close to needing as much bandwith? Media files are large, and as long as there are few legal ways of getting them, P2P will dominate bandwith usage.
Quoth CmdrTaco: I'm not sure where they can go with this.
How about enforcing copyright law? That should cut down the P2P bandwidth by about 99.999%.
MORTAR COMBAT!
I share a flat with two other people. We have a DSL connection, 768/128. He's a KaZaA addicted looser. That POS opens several *hundred* *UDP* connections at the same time. It clogs 70+% of our bandwidth. Traffic shaping is a PITA because the way that thing works. What I have done in the end is just shape every external connection going to and from his machine. I also have a special shaper that basically caps his machine's b/w to 4 kB/s when I want to play some UT. Even so, that stupid client pounds on the connection without mercy since it's UDP and it just retries until it succeeds to send packets.
Ban P2P from public networks! B/W has better uses!
exactly, and the ads say, "Now get multimedia content faster!"
Why is it a bad thing? I mean, saying your access will be cut off if you go over a limit is one thing, but charging you in proportion to what you download/upload seems perfectly reasonable to me. What could be simpler to grasp than "you get what you pay for"? Do you pay for fuel for your automobile "per month" irrespective of how much you drive? Or pay the same amount when you step into a restaurant irrespective of what you consume? Why should bandwidth be any different? It costs the ISP money, and obviously they should recover those costs from the users, in proportion to the usage.
Limit me at home if they dare I will resort to university bandwidth.
Would it be used if it weren't for P2P? Or would it just sit idle anyhow? There is gobs of bandwidth available on the backbones. Miles and miles of dark fiber. What's going on here is the broadband ISPs business models are collapsing. They count on selling everyone tons of bandwidth but then only a fraction of it being used or for very short periods of time. If everyone signed on and started transferring all they could, ISPs would become hopelessly bottlenecked.
I say, pony up and add the bandwidth, too bad. As for everything besides ISPs (upstream providers) there is no shortage of bandwidth. If there is, it's a regional problem and all that is needed is to turn on a new strand of fiber and add a few gigabits, problem solved.
Finally, it's not P2P... its CONTENT. It doesn't matter that its people transferring files to other people. The new variable here is there is GOBS of multimedia CONTENT available for people to download. It doesn't matter where it's coming from. P2P has just made it practical and realistic to download as much as we can now.
How people can live with services like Kazaa. Turning it on literally flatlines your net connection to the point where web sites take forever to load, especially if you are the one person in 52,000,000 with actual files to share. My experience with a shared NTL 1mb cable connection was that as soon as the guy upstairs fired up Kazaa anyone else trying to use it was shafted - even e-mail was only arriving at around 2-3K/sec.
Considering how well freenet does for not infringing on your resources too much (try setting it to 10K down and 5K up on a DSL line and you won't even notice it's there) it boggles the mind why anone bothers with Kazaa at all.
Beep beep.
Ah, but cable modems are not distributed by a utility (even though they are) - Cable in my business and home for delivery of news content is AN essential ... only until cities TRUTHFULLY determine that cable companies are actually private utility companies will there be real meaning to your satire.
Good post though, where's my mod points?
gee, I thought WindowsUpdate took up 45%
That is what they said here
So now we have 105% bandwith? Then what bandwith am I using for E-mail? Web Browsing? other downloads?
It's all those GNU/Linux ISO's being downloaded!
If the media companies would have more brains than attorneys maybe they would see the opportunity here. How cool would it be to see the media companies enlist the services of service providers to help them distribute their stuff to the customers of the ISPs. Sort of a P2P but one level higher like among ISPs. Between an ISP and his customers the bandwidth becomes a non-issue, and the ISP already charges their customers on a monthly basis and it would be simple to charge for such a service and pay royalties to the copyright holders. Hey RIAA and MPAA Wake The Fuck Up Already. You have hundreds of digital distibutors out there with empty shelves. Stope having your attorneys harass people and start having the Service Providers distribute your stuff...
I love every bone in her body, especially mine!
Wasn't downloading music and watching streaming video the big selling points to getting people signed up for broadband in the first place. What did they think, people are going to pay $50 a month for a fast connection and still worry about the length of their .sig?
Those 35Mb tarballs are to blame! Every week a new one gets realeased, and hoardes of slashdotters in their 100's of thousands download it! 35Mb* 100,000 = 3.5tb! 3500*20 (there are 20 versions of each stable release) = 70tb * 3 (the three major kernels) = 210tb.
And with the 100.000 red hat isos (650 * 3) = 2Gb = 200tb!
Total = 400tb. The average mp3 is 5mb. So 400tb = 8000000 songs! 8000000 * $150000 = $1 200 000 000 000. Yes, 1.2 Quadrillion dollars! Thats 92000 tonnes of gold!
1. I pay my ISP for bandwidth according to the contract they offered. How I use that bandwidth is up to me. The way this article makes p2p...or any other 'bandwidth hogging' protocol...sound 'bad' because it 'costs ISP's money' is silly! I paid for the bandwidth. Don't complain when I use it.
2. A metered connection would be OK by me. But the ISP better give me more sophisticated mail blocking options than I get today.
My opinion: I'm happy to pay for what I use, but don't ask me to pay to make up for the deficiencies of your business plan or try to send me on a guilt trip because, as a consumer, I actually exercize the terms of my contract!
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
The blame lies with the RIAA, which greatly increases p2p traffic with such tactics as polluting Kazaa filespace with bogus files (requiring repeated downloads to get a good file)
The RIAA can solve this by setting up their own free download site with free files, and get rid of the inefficiency of redundant and partial repeated p2p attempts to get songs.
um... why sell the customer bandwidth that you don't want them to use?
I know, you could always say that the service isn't intended to run at high-bandwidth 24/7, but that doesn't really matter. If P2P traffic is going to annoy you, either filter it, cap their bandwidth, or upgrade your hardware.
The thing is, P2P is just internet traffic. Why leave all that room unused? The internet isn't an emergency communications medium, so using 95% of the available bandwidth isn't really anything bad. It just means that more fat pipes need to be added. But just because P2P is P2P isn't a good enough reason.
It's a fact. I work for an ISP. 60% is a conservative figure, we've seen more than that at times.
Thing is: P2P wastes tons of bandwidth. The continuous searches, all the broken or incomplete downloads, not even to speak of the overhead.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Frankly, this only proves that the "statistics" about the internet that are constantly being bandied about are pure SWAG (Some Wild Ass Guess) cooked up to support the agenda of the reporter. In recent articles, sorry I'm too lazy to get the links, we have heard that spam accounts for 60% of internet traffic. We have also heard that porn accounts for 60% of internet traffic. Now we hear that p2p accounts of 60% of internet traffic. At 180% one must wonder how there could possibly be any other type of traffic on the internet.
The fact of the matter is that due to the distributed nature of the internet, no one knows what the actual usage breakdown is. Even if you were able to classify all of the traffic that passes through MAE East and West, it still would not be an accurate reprisentation of all internet traffic.
Wait a minutem, wait a minute.....
Haven't ISPs like Earthlink, AOL, and the US Government been saying in this whole Spam(tm) battle that "Spam takes up over 50% of the Internet bandwidth?"!
Lets see: 50% Spam + 60% P2P = What internet are they using?!
"Engineers do the work of man, Physicists do the work of God"
I'd prefer not to hear the ... it's a business expense that you must pay arguement. I have built my business on the model I am in right now at the prices I pay right now. It works perfectly. If ISPs want more bandwidth then there's optimizations and measures for stopping scam site hosting and SPAM mail that they could do.
A post above had a good point - should TV's cost more because they use up a significant portion of the electricity - after all, more electricity, more damge to the environment and more cost to the Power company!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
60% isn't too high... When I first started looking into P2P usage on our campus, maybe a year and a half ago, it was using around 95% of our bandwidth during the day. I was amazed. We restricted some P2P just so we could have a usable Internet connection, but P2P still took up somewhere around 2/3 of our outgoing bandwidth. So finally we implemented bandwidth caps - 750MB per user per day, which I think is fairly generous, but it's enough to usually prevent one user from killing everyone else's network performance.
You did ? Call the lawyers ! This guy has just declared himself a key witness, and may even save Linux ! (Ooh, the irony...
70% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
This situation would be more like people using kilo- or even mega-watts of electricity, so much that others are getting brownouts and even blackouts in some areas. Wait until the Electric Power Association of America (EPAA) starts issuing cease and decist "pulses" over electric lines... ouch!
Not to be a troll, but your "distributed computing model" is a good point ... what about the crap like SETI@home and Genome distributed projects ... SETI@home I gaurantee takes a measurable portion of the bandwidth on the internet - if we were to have limits and caps or pay per gig use of these "distributed computing models" would drop DRASTICALLY!
This is a problem with the business models of the ISPs, not the way the bandwidth is being used.
ISPs at some level buy bandwidth in Gigs/Teras transfer/month. Charging users a flat fee for access to a pipe that can use too much bandwidth only makes sense if you know most users wouldn't use the service intensively.
When users only ran clients for http, smtp, and (just maybe) news, that was a valid assumption, and helped make AOL as big as it is. But that's not going to work if nodes start acting as servers as well as clients, like they were designed to.
If you run a website or any other colo'd server, you get (say) 40Gig transfer into the bargain, and pay extra for anything over that.
If ISPs throw in the first 5 gigs with their DSL subscriptions, and make customers pay extra for more transfer, 90% of surfers will never incur extra charges, and will probably pay costs similar to current rates. The rest should pay for what they use.
it's not free, either. if it all gets used up, what happened to the network's forward planning?
It would seem to me that most ISPs would be able to use equipment that limits certain types of traffic and flow to other parts do the world quite easily. Give P2P 30% of the pipe.
Why is this not doable?
Seriously, whatever he's smoking, I want some.
The main theme of the article is a complaint about how much file sharing is costing the ISP.
Sorry? You sell a service (internet connectivity). People want that service, or else they wouldn't be buying it. Then you turn around and complain that it costs you money to provide said service?
Now that is an idea. Let's open a store and complain that shipping all those goods in from the warehouse is so expensive.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
..Most people i know don't spend their lives on the computer downloading.. It takes maybe 20-30 minutes to download everything they want, then they go burn it and do whatever.. a few days later they do it if they need more.. Its not some massive constant event.. Not to mention most people sharing are doing it on home DSL connections.. my upstream is 25k :( It takes alot of time to download crap but its not going as fast.. I don't see this being a true reason for bandwidth loads
Might i add i believe its P2P sharing and gaming that made people want DSL..
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
From a post above yours:
... SETI@home I gaurantee takes a measurable portion of the bandwidth on the internet - if we were to have limits and caps or pay per gig use of these "distributed computing models" would drop DRASTICALLY! ]
[ what about the things like SETI@home and Genome distributed projects
Okay, so how much does downloading a movie cost to the isp ? let's be generous : I'll assume every penny I pay them per month is used to pay bandwidth (it's not, but let's say that). So I pay EUR 44 / month for 512/128 dsl. Now, assuming I download a movie at full speed with lmule (I never do, but let's assume), it takes me around 8 hours, so a movie costs me ((44/30)/24) * 8 = EUR .48.
.48 per movie thinking it's free, but some of that cash goes to the MPAA/RIAA, which in turn make a profit and realize they'd better let people do file sharing, and ISPs benefit from the latest and greatest technology, and router makers get to sell more products ...
:-)
Now let's suppose the global infrastructure of the internet was upgraded significantly, but the end-user bandwidth was throttled to what it is today : the load of P2P would become negligible for ISPs, and they wouldn't lose any money anymore.
So here's an idea : why doesn't the MPAAs and RIAAs pool some of their huge amounts of cash upgrading routers and backbones by subventioning ISPs, and in return ISPs give back money to them on a P2P bandwidth usage basis : I still pay EUR
I know I'm just dreaming
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Or pay the same amount when you step into a restaurant irrespective of what you consume?
Its called a buffet.
Great Linux Site
60% of the remaining bandwidth, after all the SPAM email traffic, right?
What's SUPPOSED to be hogging the bandwidth? Spam and file sharing are now the bad boys. Is there some scale that we are supposed to use to place a value on data? Who decides?
Gaming?
News?
Pr0n?
Trading stocks?
I thought that the whole idea was that you take what you can in an unregulated medium. Lower your expectations accordingly, but benefit from the ubiquitous nature. In other words, no consistency of quality of service, but almost guaranteed ubiquity.
I don't know. My ISP gives me a wide open connection and nice latency. The rest is out of my control.
The thing I don't see from this finger waving is the following: Nobody says, "If we lower spam by X%, then we can guarantee a better Internet experience for everyone else by Y%. If we get rid of file sharing by A%, then we can guarantee B% better service/speed/latency for everyone else. Also, we'll be able to lower everyone's cost by Z%." Until I see some numbers, it's just all relative. Who's to say what I do on the Net is any more redeeming than anyone else? They paid. I paid.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
That's one of the most thinly veiled "I'm going to steal music no matter what" rebuttels (sp) I've heard in a long time. It doesn't top the guy in our office that uses the "Music has been free for thousands of years" argument though.
I pay for my internet connection to do anything my computer can do with the bandwidth my ISP has sold me. Therefore I should be able to run anything I want across be that P2P traffic or web pages. -- now spam is different because they waste MY resources...
GASP! People are actually USING their bandwidth? They're not supposed to USE it! It's just supposed to SIT THERE! How are the ISP's ever going to make money if people actually USE their networks?
Blah. Who cares what people are doing with their bandwidth? If you take away P2P, it'll be VoIP, or Streaming Video IM, or some new Immersive FPS with massive requirements. Give people bandwidth, they'll find a way to use it... Duh.
Nipok Nek
Why choose white shoes?
Why is it a bad thing? I mean, saying your access will be cut off if you go over a limit is one thing, but charging you in proportion to what you download/upload seems perfectly reasonable to me
It would be a perfectly reasonable thing if that was what was advertised and that was what I purchased. But it isn't. The ISP's in particular the cable and DSL isps advertised unlimited hi speed internet, in order to lure customers away from their old dial up providers. Nothing wrong there except now they want to change the rules midstream. Now they have the users.. The users are using the system they advertised, as they advertised it, and they wish to up the rates.
If they'd advertised a metered plan, and I CHOOSE to purchase that, then fine.. but thats not the case. Those who remember the old Hughes DirectPC program may remember that they did exaclty this. Advertised unlimited service and then started limiting bandwith for high volume users. A class action suit ensued (which Hughes lost) forcing them to buy back the system of any (that was all of them) dissattisfied customer
In addition, do you think they will drop the rates for low volume users? Remember it doesn't cost them any more to operate, its just a question of who uses how much. No, this is simply a ploy to juice the rates, and as a result juice their profits.
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
When I got my broadband (DSL) I bought it for one specific reason. Flatrate. I want to be connected at all times. I don't live in America mind You, so the concept of telephone flatrate is a bit too hard to grasp for our ISPs.
.haeger
Anyway, the key selling point was that I knew what I would pay for my internet connection every month. The performance wasn't the issue. Now IF they decide to go back to the old ways of charging me per minute/MB/whatever I'll just cancel my subscription with them. I really don't mind if they cap my bandwith more, just make sure that the bill that comes every month is the same amount.
Naturally I'll have to reconcider if they cap it too much and charge too much.
And yes, I am a very modest user of bandwidth.
This is what happens if economists get too much power. Bastards.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
If anyone actually read the article they would realise that the study was done by someone who makes P2P blocking devices. The figure may be right but given the source I would treat it with a whole barrel load of salt. The solution could be to block ports and types of traffic but that cuts down on the usefulness of broadband. If the ISPs were aloud to house p2p servers they could cut down on their upstream bandwidth but there is no way they would be aloud to, so the media pigopolists are the ones costing the ISPs money.
We have a 45Mb DS3, we are a cable modem service provider. Watching the traffic I can confirm, that from about 3pm until 10pm 60+% of our traffic is from P2P clients. Thats only the traffic we can track. Kazaa 2 can use port 80, and only gets reported as web traffic.
I see kazaa 2 traffic mostly. but also edonkey, kazaa 1, napster, and others.
Less then 1% of our users use 85% of the bandwidth. They're alloted 1Mb/s download, and they use it constantly.
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
What about me, I work from home [...] I'd prefer not to hear the ... it's a business expense that you must pay arguement. I have built my business on the model I am in right now at the prices I pay right now.
I'm afraid that if the days of metered bandwidth come, you will not have much of a choice but to re-engineer your business. Any business, in order to be successful, must not cost you money to run. At minimum, it should be paying for itself after the initial period of getting it started. That's not wishful thinking, that's business, plain and simple. If your business ends up costing you more money to run, you'll have to find ways of recouping that -- whether it's by raising prices, changing ISPs, opting for a co-location service or other. Or by changing your business. How about becoming an ISP and finding out first-person about what an ISP must go through to provide a service at a certain price.
should TV's cost more because they use up a significant portion of the electricity
Substitute the word "TV's" with "air conditioning units", "stoves", "electric washers/dryers" or other high-power-draw devices. Anything change? How about coming up with more efficient devices?
or...
How about coming up with a more efficient way to use the resources you are given? Electricity, bandwidth, water...
Have EVDO, will travel.
Yknow, I was trying for AGES to get WindowsXP working on my PPC Mac. Tried everything. I then gave up after three weeks of looking for a PPC port or the source code.
Downloaded Yellowdog, burned and installed in a day.
I'll probably get that down to less than an hour next time - I'll buy the distribution CDs.
I mean. Sheesh, that XP was a pile of cack!
I pay through the nose for my internet access and I'll use it anyway I choose to thanks. This mustn't be lost sight of, despite some people's attempts (e.g., NTL) to call people who use a service *as advertised* "offenders" (http://slashdot.org/articles/03/02/09/2210214.sht ml?tid=95)
[American readers; I should say they once ran an advertising campaign daring the public to break their modems through using them too much].
Sadly, the killer app for broadband at least (rather than dial-up) is P2P. I don't think this can be a secret, its just no-one wants to admit it. (a 1mb/s line won't offer you faster gaming latencys or "nicer" emails to your granny than a 512k line or a even a 120k connection). ISPs should refrain from playing bait and switch with their customers; the market can only get more competitive.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
Plus the fact that 60-80% of p2p bandwidth is pr0n. I would not be suprised if to 80% of *ALL* net traffic (web, usenet, p2p, email, etc.) is pr0n or pr0n related.
Living in the middle of nowhere, but having aDSL (THANKFULLY!!!) makes the monthly bill pretty damn high. On top of that, other users that subscribe to my same ISP include a handful of businessmen that access it at 4:00 PM for about 10 Min to update inventory, a few gamers, or a gaggle of seniors that have been told by their big city children they 'needed it.' I see it this way: My downloading normalizes the usage/subscriber so it makes it seem like the ISP is actually doing its job to its coporate headquarters.
-----
Make Love not [Browser] War!
... what does it matter what % of their ISPs traffic is from what application? Would there be such a fuss over 65% of traffic being used for mail? For plain old html web traffic? - it used to be that way!
so that searches an inqueries didn't take so much bandwidth? I've found most of my bandwidth use wasn't uploads/downloads but passing on request, and IIRC there was a python mod being made to address this. I started doing searches to see if I could find proof, closest I've found was vague references to "Gnutella2"
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I pay $50 a month for my DSL. Shouldn't I be able to use ALL of the bandwidth I'm paying for as much as I want? If mom and pop WebBrows/E-mail do not need DSL, then they should keep their dial-up. I bought my DSL FOR the extra bandwidth and now they want to regulate it?
That's like buying a PIzza for $10, but being charged another $5 if I eat it all. What am I not getting here (admittedly, it may be quite a bit, but initially this seems strange to me)?
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
IF ISPs go back to metered bandwith almost universally, they are going to be INNUNDATED with complaints that spam and getting hacked with viruses and worms are eating all the customers bandwith. I can see thousands of suits over this almost immediately. And the legit streaming providers will get slammed as well, people would be outraged that they couldn't use the internet along the lines of those flashy commercials with tunes and video. It will also affect what remaining internet advertising that exists, because people will turn off images before they give up surfing hours over using up their "allotment" of bandwith.
It would also really embarrass a lot of people when they demand to see where they "used up their bandwith" and after the ISP logs are presented with the urls it turns out to be tons 0 porn, back to the "Well! I never! I must have been hacked, YOU fix it Mr. ISP or OS vendor, it's all your fault" and etc.
It's not a can, it's a case of worms. It might happen though, given the RIAA and MPAA efforts in lobbying, and "we need CYBERSECURITY' and whatnot. Bandwith caps, severely restricted ports, etc.
I think we are in the wild wild west days of the net, I expect something like these severe restrictions combined with increased costs. It's the nature of political reality and really big brand money now. And even if a few major ISPs hold out, they'll eventually go under if all the rest of the ISPs are back to making money with their restrictions and filtering efforts. Isn't the very large bandwith more or less a similar priced commodity now? Once you get far enough upstream it's roughly the same, or am I wrong on that? If it's similar, there's no way the unlimited flat rate providers could compete with the limited but significantly cheaper providers, if they are paying the same bulk rates.
When all this broad band stuff came out all the chit chatwas about this great new mulitmedia experience. We were told the internet would be for everyone. So, sounds to me like the whole sales pitch was dishonest if P2P file sharing is unacceptable. And really, BroadBand has really never become BroadBand here in Georgia, USA anyways. With the pathetic upload capacity, it is like a phone system where I can listen all I want, but can only speak back 2 seconds every minute.
HenryJamesFeltus.com
I work for a midsized ISP in Michigan and we monitor information about our bandwith usage and distribution by service/protocol with netflow. We use this information for capacity planning, verifying abuse complaints, billing, etc.
Using netflow data from our core routers, we estimate peer to peer traffic to be 1/3 of our bandwidth utilization. This is based on the assumption that most p2p applications run on their default ports. I believe this to be a fairly safe assumption since we do not police our customers or restrict them from using p2p apps. The number one thing we could do to reduce our bandwidth usage right now would be to install transparent caching services for HTTP, some 50% of our bandwidth is HTTP traffic.
It's not like p2p apps are actually "hogging" anything. Have you ever tried to load a webpage and gotten a "Sorry, the internet is too busy" error? P2p is simply using what is there. If there were no p2p applications, that bandwidth would just be sitting there unused.
Of course, with things like college campuses, with limited bandwidth, then yeah, I can understand where the complaint comes from. But just the internet in general? Come on.
It's so annoying that actually using the available resources is considered such a bad thing. Like complaining because there's so much traffic. Don't bitch because so many people are using your freeways, build bigger freeways! That's what they're there for.
A network admin at my former University recently explained on a technical mailing list that roughly half of their bandwidth was being consumed by peer-to-peer client traffic. He indicated that there are universities with student bodies as large as ours but with half the bandwidth, so that P2P traffic was choking out "legitimate" traffic. So I'm not really surprised to find that ISPs are facing the same problem.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
The internet is suposed to be interoperable, with different networks communicating, not partitioned into segments.
And how does me sending a packet to one IP address actually cost more than other IPs (apart from other customers on the same network)? Is there any actual basis for this?
Seeing how everyone that accesses the internet goes through an ISP that means that 60% of ALL traffic on the internet is P2P. I doubt that is true. They probably mean of all home ISPs, 60% is P2P.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Your local electric providor just keeps charging away per Kw/h of electricity you use, and if you have a higher 'demand' for said electricity you get charged extra for daring to need more electricity than what they deem as a 'nominal' usage during that time period.
So really, ISPs want to be the electric company of our data. The more you use above what they deem 'nominal' you pay a demand fee for and an increased fee over the guy down the street that lives off of one light bulb that is on only one hour a day.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Sanction 20% of the internet for p2p and multicast popular downloads or use a protocal like bittorrent
A coworker mentioned this a few minutes ago, at first I thought he was crazy as usual (if your reading) but then I actually thought about it and it's not a bad idea.
Rob
As soon as possible every man woman and child should have access to 10 meg per second. At this rate, you got what, streaming TV video, and real time video game playing.
This is the future, do not deny... Work on giving us more, we want more, we need more. Don't tell us to conserve, because we KNOW we need more. I can't make a fast paced video game on a 56k modem, cable modem is even really slow, we need FASTER speeds, and around 10 meg a second or more, then maybe we'll be satisfied.
Cable modem speeds might have been acceptable early 90s, its freaking sad how long it took to even get that out there. Its sad how sucky our corporations are in actually delivering product. What the fucks their problem?
God spoke to me
providers would open all ports and allow us to run servers. I have argued since Charter took over from the failed Excite in my area that P2P utilizes far more bandwidth than I ever could with a web/mail server for my small business. So, make the heaviest users pay for what they use, whether they are hosting web/email, or pulling down the latest episode of $Your_Favorite_Show with $P2P_Client_Today.
I am not opposed to P2P software, but I think it is unfair that servers are not allowed while P2P consumes an increasing amount of bandwidth.
When net congestion gets bad enough to annoy ordinary businesses and people, they will be chasing their ISP's to fix it.
Most ISP subscribers don't kow what P2P is, much less spend their day tolling the net for mp3's and movies. But, if they decide that P2P is ruining their use of the Internet, metered bandwidth will be an easy sell. P2P users will be painted, with some credibility, as "a bunch of kids" downloading "stuff" no one else cares about.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I know AOL sees P2P as a big problem. Every connected user passes through their enormous cache with saves them gigabits of web traffic. If AOL were to turn their cache off, their traffic would multiply by several times. The problem is that P2P is not cacheable or noone has figured out how to cache it.
As to your average ISP - I don't think they care, and I seriously doubt that 60% of traffic is P2P. From my prior ISP experience, vast majority (90%) is HTTP and SMTP/Spam with HTTP dominating during the day while SMTP shoots up at night, and the rest is "other" stuff, including P2P or your SSH sessions.
grisha.org
I've posted on this so many times I've written it up and placed it in my journal
http://slashdot.org/~puzzled
Here it is again briefly:
A T1 has 24 x 64kb channels. Getting one from a top level provider like Sprint or UUNet will cost about $1000/mo or $40/channel/month.
A 256kb DSL link is four channels and costs about $40/mo. Four channels times $40/mo = $160/mo cost for the ISP. I realize the average math skills of slashdot readers are about eighth grade level, so I'll finish it for you - $40/mo revenue minus $160/mo cost = -$120/mo. This is what happens to ISPs when people doing file sharing of any sort leave their retail connections running 24x7 and consume bandwidth in a wholesale fashion.
Its not about the MPAA or RIAA, evil scumbags that they may be, its just simple cost that is going to do in file sharing. Stop being a whiny end user and pay for some quality bandwidth, or shut the *(&@$(%*&@#$% up about it already.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Umm... you do what every other business does - you either give your customers less or charge them more.
I believe we'll end up with inflation, but that's the way it goes.
In reading the article, I was struck by the complaints that providing BANDWIDTH is a major business expense for an ISP... HUH??? What is amazing about the Dot Com mentality (not yet dead I suppose), is this concept of a business with mega profits that doesnt come with mega expenses. Now, excuse me, but shouldn't providing BANDWIDTH be a primary focus of an ISP. Likewise, since that is the heart of the service, isnt it logical it is that it is a major expense. Likewise, if you have a business, and advertise that people can have high speed internet, what is the point if files cannot be freely transfered. (Like, you can buy this nice car, but dont drive it more than 2 miles a day!) There is something inherently criminal in this DOT COM mentality, where you are supposed to make money without hard work and the providing of a real, tangible service.
HenryJamesFeltus.com
The problem with your experience at a University is the percentage of college students using P2P is way higher than a regular ISP. Plus, you are more likely to find your "die-hard" P2P users in a dorm. Too bad those internal P2P networks are the RIAA's favorite target these days, they probably save universities millions of dollars in bandwidth charges.
it's definitely between 60 and 70% of total used bandwidth.
i had a sig, once..
"Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple."
DeeK
Here's a bandwidth chart of a medium sized UK isp: Zen, P2P is a pretty sizable chunk of the whole with HTTP not far beind.
If your gonna sell me this fantastic always on, high bandwidth connection then damn right I'm gonna use it! Let me remind you of something, I give you money, not because I have too much and lack better things to do with it, but because I want to use your service as advertised. "We can't make moutains of money because people are using the service they pay for... whinge, blah, wah, boo fucking hoo!"
Contary to popular believe on slashdot, our model:
1. Take customers money.
2. Spend nothing.
3. Profit!
does not work!
I feel better now.
Back in the day....
I remember back in 94-95 era, people started to complain that "this web thing is eating all our bandwidth" People complained that it was slowing down email, usenet, and IRC. It was a hog, all those images.. yada yada yada...
Now that the average connection is a factor of 10 faster than it was in 95, someone invented an application to utilize that bandwidth.. *SHOCK*
One of our local campus admins talks about how we double our campus backbone connection every 2 years.. we had about 200mbit when i started 2 years ago, now the plan is to get a 3rd provider, and jump to 400mbit before the next school year starts. _IF_ we can afford it. (yay for state budjet problems)
In another 5 years, people will forget all about P2P, because it will be background noise compared to the ********* protocol. Whatever they think up when 100mbit fiber starts to get rolled out.
If you want to really see what is in the works, look at Internet 2 projects. Our campus has 655mbit to I2, and it's already too slow for some of the research. Plans are in the works for a few gbits.
Haha! You were anything but poor if you could afford a computer like that, yall probably even had an 8track player and color tv!
HenryJamesFeltus.com
Seems like the best solution is to use packet shaping. There are commercial products which will detect and shape down P2P programs. And recently someone (me and a few of my friends) came out with a patch for linux so it can do it too. Check out http://l7-filter.sf.net
You dont hear the wailing and moaning about all the people who pay top dollar and barely use the service.
HenryJamesFeltus.com
Imagine the year 1995... I'm sure somebody said "60% of all ISP traffic is HTTP, with the remainder being FTP and GOPHER".
The web is becoming more decentralized, and P2P is a the cause. Its not quite as general purpose as the rest of the web yet, but its extremely useful if you just want to find a file...
Within 20 years, children won't know the concept of a "server". They will only know of the web as more of a neural network, with the connections shifting from here to there and back again!
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
That P2P expands to fill available bandwidth. This happened at my ISP where they found that 85% of bandwidth was going to P2P, and would just expand as they added bandwidth. So they got a packet shaper, limited the P2P to 60%, and it was effective.
CacheLogic's Parker said a number of European ISPs are testing a new computer server that it has developed, which places limits on file-sharing traffic flow.
The server, which operates on Linux software, largely confines file-sharing activities to customers within the same ISP, resulting in big potential cost savings.
Wow, big dumb ISP discovers proxy servers! Glory be! For a minute I was worried that monopoly broadband providers were seeking to balkanize the internet and make it look something like cable TV in the former Soviet Union. I'm glad they came to their senses.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
True! and there's no way to throttle the Dean's XP desktop, no matter how many times it's owned.
"What?" He'll ask. "You let hackers break my computer? You are so fired!"
Better not mention it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What on earth are the ISP's complaining about? I pay a monthly fee to a company that gives me a 1024/512 ADSL connection to the net at any time. My limit is the maximum transfer rates.
So what's the real complaint here? Flat rates are what I and everyone else is paying for.
"Dear sir,
Uhm, you seem to be actually making full use of the product you've paid for. We didn't really expect you to, so now we're forced to er... make you pay extra for the exact same product you're allready paying for... Well, it's kinda complicated, but expect prices to rise in the next few months.
Yours truly,
ISP"
I'd go for this maybe, but I'll pass on the "Learn you used $1000 of bandwidth when you get your bill" style of service.
A post above had a good point - should TV's cost more because they use up a significant portion of the electricity - after all, more electricity, more damge to the environment and more cost to the Power company!
That is not a good point - it's nonsense. You don't pay a flat rate for your electricity consumption, you pay per kilowatt hour. Buy a big TV, your electrical bill will go up.
I have no sympathy for the heavy P2P users. Either throttle the P2P traffic at their gateway or make the heavy users pay for their bandwidth.
I get most of my mp3s from my ISPs news server. This costs the ISP no outbound or inbound bandwidth...everything is behind their gateway.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
"The escalating bandwidth costs associated with file sharing are not sending ISPs into the red, but the companies are anxious to bring the amounts under control."
People are actually using the bandwidth that they paid for and now its a problem?
You see the ISP's want you to be good little consumers and treat internet access like cable tv and not upload anything and avoid actually participating in the internet. F** them. I paid for my "unlimited" access and I'll dam well use it. P2P IS the killer app and in of itself is a completely legal service. If some users trade "illegal" files on it, it doesn't mean its time to shut it down. If that was the case then all web servers, search engines, usenet, ftp servers, and the entire Internet itself should be shut down.
If this traffic is taking up too much of their network its time to do the unthinkable and actually invest more money in upgrading to handle the demand. Any other solution is the wrong one. Outlawing a specific service just because you company didn't plan for it is about as bad as business planning gets. Evolve. (Oh that's right I forgot the telecom sector doesn't need any growth right now)
For an example my ISP (Optimum Online) has declared Kazaa or ANY file sharing service illegal. So are servers and anything else which isn't just regular downloading. If heaven forbid you actually are running a "server" or file sharing service they will cap you at 10kb upload. Great then why did they give me a 1Mb upload capacity? Evolve you a**sholes and stop trying to hold back progress!
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
A buddy of mine just recently got a nice letter from Roadrunner Cable informing him that he used too much bandwith in a month, and they were going to charge him $10 per gig over a certain limit (I forget the exact number at the moment), or he could pay twice as much a month, get more bandwidth, but still if he goes over THAT, he has to pay the $10 a gig still. Lame!!! He switched to Earthlink about 1 hour later :)
But im kinda sad cause I use roadrunner and have yet to recieve said letter, but im sure it's coming...
Polaroid. See what develops!!
Reminds me of a recent discussion where I posted that changing the currency would cost vendors millions. The lamebrain response was, changers don't take 20's! (When post offices, some coke machines, car washes, laundromats, etc) all take 20's , some take 50's.
Research and comprehend before you respond.
Funny how there was no talk of $/GB surcharges when spam was the problem! Spam is worse than P2P because the ISP's servers are burdened in addition to the squandered bandwidth, whereas conventional P2P is purely a bandwidth issue. At least P2P involves data that someone actually wants.
I have a tough time feeling sorry for the ISPs on any bandwidth issue. The ISPs sold all kinds of bandwith to the spammers via the pink contract route, then they sold the e-mail addresses of their customers. If they have enough bandwidth to support all this spam, then they have plenty for P2P. It's all just a trial balloon for the next price increase, to be directed at the people most likely to tolerate it. The concept all along was to make Internet pricing more like cell phone contracts -- bewildering complexity, customer lock-in, a plethora of hidden fees and surcharges. Coming soon to a computer near you.
Once I start paying $/GB for bandwidth, rest assured that every single spam will become a request for a refund.
I might be willing to pay per gig if it was done at a reasonable price, like maybe USD 0.50 per gig - although bandwidth may still be more expensive than this to the isp, I don't know.
But i've seen isp's wanting more like 25-40 cents per megabyte, which is ridiculous. Particuarly for big ISPs who have numerous long distance links of their own.
And if the ISPs bundled some bandwidth (maybe 30gig per month) with the package and allowed you to monitor your usage and warned you when you were near and went over your allowance.
Sometime around 1994, give or take, Scientific American published an article about this spiffy new "WWW" protocol, complete with quotes from experts about how it was growing exponentially and all those image files were eating too much bandwidth. Somehow we survived.
Oh yes, all their subscribers who use P2P will desert them faster than rats on a sinking ship and the monthly cheques will come in at a lower rate - but they can't have it both ways.
If an ISP isn't prepared to let you use the internet for what you want, there are probably plenty of others who are.
As an aside, in the UK, the ISP's are using the fact you can download music at high speed to actually encourage people to take up broadband. They can't really complain when people start doing just that.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Broadband was built for p2p and other bandwidth intensive applications. That's why you buy a broadband connection!
ISPs can't have it both ways. They tout p2p and the ability to download large multimedia files quickly to drive sales of broadband connections and then start whining when people do the very things they market.
Bastards! The ISPs know that punters will not pay $50.00/mo. for faster email and web pages. They will, however, pay for the ability to download music, videos, and software quickly.
Large ISPs should start pressuring the major backbone providers to lower their rates. $1000/mo. for a T1 is inexcusable these days. These prices are equivalent to fiber prices 10 YEARS AGO! What else in tech has the same pricing as 10 years ago? Why should tier 1 ISPs think their businesses are entitled to that kind of price protection?
The large tier 1 ISPs are the problem, not end users.
-ted
60% of the Internet is used to transfer entertainment content. Some speculate that there is also business content and other types of content hogging the network. ISPs who "built" the Internet are outraged at the fact that they now actually have to transfer data from one customer to another: "We never envisioned people would actually want to use the bandwidth we sold them. Frankly we are shocked"
In related news today, cable and satellite providers have also detected an alarming amount of entertainment content being received by their customers.
where do you live/who did you kill to get a flat 33/mth electric bill....
mine comes in at 70+ pretty routinely. I know there are places I could cut my usage but 33$ is Cheap!
- Your car has a gas meter, you can see when you're reaching your limit (in this case, the end of your gas tank). If you can't afford more, you can park the car for awhile.
- A car is a vehicle which takes a finite quantity of a substance in order to run. The internet is more comparable to a television or telephone in relevance to fees (yes, you can pay on a per-use basis with phones, but again - it is easy to track by time - whilst bandwidth is not a strict bytes/time measure).
- High Speed internet is often dvertised as unlimited. In some cases there is fine print stating xx GB/month, but again you have no way of telling when you reach the limit (exclude linux NAT boxes with bandwidth calculators or stuff beyond the technical means of the masses).
- In most cases, somebody can't just walk up to your car and start using your gas. Yes, you can be siphoned, but that's why cars have locking gas-caps. In computing, you end up losing bandwidth due to spam/trojans/easter-eggs/etc which you may not authorize or even be aware of
And yes, I'm sure there are ways for a decent geek to deal with the above, particularly those with a NAT box,etc - but not for Joe Average or even many geeks.Here (being Norway) you do normally not get a news server, even if you know what it is. Why? Because after a company got fined for carrying kiddie porn groups, they took that a sign that they had to be editors of content. The only way they could avoid legal liability was to shut it down, and so every major ISP did, or they completely crippled the group list.
I also know that the University prevents people from sharing stuff over network shares (there are some internal DC hubs if you know of them, but few do). So what do people do, even though it's probably on the local network ten dozen times already? They go on KaZaA or whatever and get it from somewhere else, making for a helluva inefficient bandwidth usage.
And if they start really cracking down on normal P2P users, I imagine most will move to Freenet or something like that, sending it 10x around the world to anonymize where it came from and who's getting it.
If you force people to go halfway around the globe to get what's next door, well surprise surprise. It takes bandwidth. Lots of it, too.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Nobody seems to have picked up on the most intelligent point in the article... if P2P software was biased towards same-ISP connections, it could dramatically bring down the cost. If it was further biased against international connections, that would help too...
Are there any P2P clients doing this?... 'use our client and your ISP won't get upset' might be a good advertisment...
Your logic has one critical flaw:
You assume ISPs care about the customer experience. As a customer of MANY ISPs I can tell you they do not. Most ISPs are a monopoly (or near monopoly) in their particular service area. If you want a guaranteed level of service - pay up and buy an SLA.
Now, on the non-SLA side; right now ISPs are having a hard time selling all-you-can eat broadband. Those that buy it, are complaining about lousy performance due to p2p. There are two ways to fix the problem:
1. Change the service from all you can eat, to a restricted, a la carte type service. This is not likely since it will kill new sales of broadband service.
2. Increase backbone speeds to support the traffic and not excessively oversell the backbone. This is also unlikely since backbone bandwidth is expensive and agressive overselling is the only way to make money.
If ISPs want to really fix the problem, they need to pressure the tier 1 guys (uunet, sprintnet....etc) to lower their prices and fire up some of the dark fiber that is just sitting in the ground.
-ted
Seriously, if we combine this report with the reported bandwidth usage of M$ updates to their crappy software, it is obvious that SOME people are abusing the flat rate currently charged by most ISP's.
In this case, the P2P users are hogging networks with an inefficient distrubution model that is only viable because of flat rate fees. In M$'s case, they are seeing decreased production costs due to less testing and quicker time to market that is supported by bandwidth that everyone else is paying for!
Charge the heavy users of P2P and watch the bandwidth free up as they find out that their downloads are not FREE anymore. Charge M$ for their use of bandwidth to make up for poor (NO) testing of their software and watch the quality improve!
In short, the "cheapo" alternative here is .. hmm I don't remember exact speed, think it's 1024k/256k but at a max of 1Gb/mo, if you pass that you are throttled to 64k (ISDN speed) or can buy more (at a premium). Personally I got the 1024/256k/unlimited use at $100/mo, and I don't feel any shame over running it at 100% 24/7 either.
They're very up front about the metering, and it *is* much better than pay-per-minute over phone. Their calculation of how many pages you can view per month can't possibly include any lame flash sites, but other than that it's a straight offer. However, the other big competing company basicly said something like "we'll never offer metered connections, unlimited all the way" and they've earned a lot of customers on that, not sure how many *profitable* customers though...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'd like to do something similar to what you did.
Why don't ISPs set up their own direct connect servers? It is not illegal, users would get maximum speeds all the time and ISP wouldn't have to pay squat. Everybody would win.
ISPs can meter away as much as they like, but the ones that will succeed are those who cater to their clientele instead of treating them like crooks.
Ha Ha. This is rich.
[Hand wringing]
Oh no! The 5% that's eating up 90% of our traffic is leaving in a huff. Oh no! What will we do to stay in business? You people are too much. Your "influence" is not anywere proportional to your numbers. In fact people who abuse their networks turn what would be a money making venture into a profitless one. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Besides what makes you think the dial-up people will welcome them with open arms? Their margins are even tighter.[1]
Here's a free clue. All the operators have to do is satisfy the 90-95% of their users. The minority can go hang. The content-providers (funny, the 5% whining isn't part of that crowd) will not release anything until DRM is firmly in place (They have the time, they can wait). One of the things that will drive broadband demand for the 95% out there.
As far as WiFi being some kind of salvation, you guys really need to learn how to read a map. At most you'll create some kind of insular crowd that shares amongst itself (kind of like they way it already is).
[1]Free clue #2 No one is obligated to accept you as a customer.
Cornell had 60% outgoing and 50% incoming traffic as filesharing. Lots of pretty graphs, etc. on those pages.
I don't think so.
I assume that IPSs care about making money. I don't assume that they have some kind of moral obligation to make life easier for their customers. If they can make more money by enhancing their customers' "experience", they will. If they can make more money by ruining customer experience, they will.
If you don't routinely do something that requires high bandwidth, my guess is that any decrease in bandwidth due to P2P won't be visible to you -- right now. If and when P2P's impact becomes visible to mainstream users -- by causing their browsing and email sessions to bog down -- they will consider paying more for ISP service that eliminates the "friction" caused by P2P users. How ISPs make that happen will not interest them.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I thought the ISPs said 60% of their bandwidth was used up by SPAM.
they're not even going to THINK metered usage until the TWC IPO has time to make them some money:
"Henderson believes investor sentiment will indeed change in the first half of 2003, especially if operators can reverse some of the negatives hanging over the sector, such as the erosion in basic subscriber growth and the high rates of digital churn. Investors also will demand continued evidence of interest in high-speed cable modems and new services. By those measures, TWC stacks up nicely. It outpaced the industry average in basic sub growth in the second quarter, added almost 300,000 high-speed customers and has pledged to roll out VOD to each of its divisions by year's end. Even with flawless execution, there is still a question of an economic rebound. The outlook for cable may look bright six to nine months from now, but if the economy falls into a double-dip recession, the prospects for the IPO market, and the cable market in particular, look far more dim."
Two comments:
1.) Thanks to WorldCom inflating growth figures (that's what got them into trouble) for nearly 10 years, there is a tremendous amount of fiber lines just sitting there doing nothing. Don't believe the hype, there is enough base infrastructure in the US to give every body a T1 or better (but then we wouldn't need phones, cable/satellite TV, radios, etc...heh). Wireless meshes are popping up all over the place (in cities anyways) that also can allow joe average to distribute broadband content (within the mesh). The next 10 years, eveything will shift to some form of wireless (just wait til the RIAA and pals start going after spectrum rules...man the fur is gonna fly)
2.)If they (Broadband ISPs) want to control traffic, just sell service with a QoS agreement. I would rather have a business line (at the same price I have a consumer line) with 24x7 guarantied bandwidth at a lower rate than I have now for download (say 768/768).
Whoops, on the subject of spam. The last company I worked for spam cost the company over $2 million dollars a year in bandwidth (hard to filter BEFORE it hits your gateway).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I've got Comcast limited at 235KB/sec down 30 KB/sec up, and whenever I use KaZaA (Which is often, I must admit, thankfully it's Lite) my other internet experiences don't seem to suffer any detrimental effects. I can check my e-mail nearly instantaneously, keep a few downloads going even if an upload is going at around 15+KB/sec (At nice speeds, too), and chat on IRC/browse the web with no noticable slow-down.
I think the culprit in your situation is, as it usually is, Spam and spyware. It's not like it takes a whole lot of bandwidth, either way, to browse the web, and this is coming from someone who is almost always looking at large image files in excess of 150KB. They still load nearly instantaneously. I don't see the problem here, and it's rediculous to act like KaZaA Lite (Or even the craptacular original KaZaA) is going to make your system and connection crawl. Oh yeah, millions of people aren't going to notice that!
D'oh, looks like someone lost their common sense.
Isn't this just what the web is now? I mean, would it be better if everyone just searched downloadables from html pages?
Are we seeing a simple shortsightedness on the part of ISPs?
The internet is used to share bits. Are "they" saying that it's getting out of hand?
I shall laugh in astonishment...
Heh hehe?
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
When I got my broadband (DSL) I bought it for one specific reason. Flatrate. I want to be connected at all times.
Just because an account is metered, it doesn't mean it is not always-on. If the ISP meters by bandwidth (rather than time, e.g. telephones), you'll still only pay for the traffic that you generate. If you don't use your PC on Tuesday, you don't pay any incremental cost for that day, even though the connection is still 'on'.
I'm sure that if many ISPs start charging per MB it won't take long before there is software available that can monitor your usage and warn you when you reach some user-defined threshold, so that you can avoid any unexpectedly high bills.
The pols are always telling us how broadband roll out is critical to our economy so why is this a bad thing? Of course out of one side of their face they talk about how important broadband is and out of the other they help the media industry clamp down even further on online distribution of content. I hope they understand the killer app has already arrived, the answer to every broadband providers dream, a bw sucking app everyone wants and will pay a bit for. But the media companies need a little shock to the testicles to get them out of bed and in the game. Instead of the FCC repealing mandatory line sharing to help incent the telco's to deploy broadband (of course repeal line sharing makes perfect sense, idiots). Why not provide incentives to the media company to distribute content online? This will take care of all the broadband deployment issues overnight. And we can stop worry about what people are doing on P2P networks.
You greedy assholes oversold your bandwidth, and now that people are actually all trying to use what you've sold them, your networks are creaking under the weight.
No sympathy from me, you fuckwads.
As I pointed out, you guys are living in some kind of fantasy land. Everything in your post shows that you know diddly-squat about the telecom industry. I have a challenge for all you urber-know it all geeks. Why dont you all (all five of you) get together and start your own broadband ISP. Make it fit your "reality" and see if you can stay in business longer than all those other ISPs that apparently can't face "reality".
I used to work for one of the companies mentioned in the article. So I'd like to point out a few things that I think people are missing. First it's basically an industry article. It's meant to wake people up (especially ISP's) and to let them know hey there are solutions out there that can help you reduce the amount of bandwidth that P2P uses. The other thing to note is that the reseach that came to the 60% of traffic is P2P figure also pointed out that a lot (or even most) of P2P banwidth is actually protocol chatter and not actually downloads. That is much of the bandwidth usage is from computers searching for files and talking to other computers on the network etc. So when people talk about "fixing" the P2P problem they are talking about reducing the amount of bandwidth usage by reducing unneeded chatter (and hopefully not effecting service as preceived by the user) This can be done using traffic shapping and intelligent packet routing and stuff like that.
Broadband wasn't really intended to be used for P2P networks in the first place. It was mostly advertised as a way to cut down on loading times for web pages and interacting with media-rich pages. Even for those media-rich pages, the user isn't constantly downloading at the maximum rate; it's sporadic, at best, and most sites don't provide download speeds that can max out a broadband connection. In fact, the only sites I've found that can are those of Microsoft and AOL. With P2P software, however, it's possible for the connection to be maxed out almost all the time - and that's a problem for the broadband providers, because they assumed that not everyone would be using their connections to their full potential all the time (as a matter of fact, I believe many could only provide a hundredth of the bandwidth necessary to do that).
Perhaps this will lead to a divergence in broadband services: one service that's actually only really providing the bandwidth of a dial-up connection, but in concentrated bursts(this is what broadband was originally intended for) and "true", always full speed broadband for the P2P users. Needless to say, the second option would be much more expensive...
--- Bwah?
I noticed a that a lot of you guys are going on about metered bandwidth and T1's going for $1k a month. I seem to recall 4-5 years ago that T1's were going for $300 a month in nj and on the westcoast, surely the prices have dropped by now esp. w/ all the "dark fiber" laying around. I'm currently getting 1.5 down/768k up for $45 a month. While I don't use it all the time, it is definitely a dedicated pipe both up and down and the DSL provider I have has *no issues* w/ servers. I recall verizon has dropped their prices for dsl (768k down/128kup) by $10 bucks. I'm sure digizip/worldcom (my dsl) is making money off this deal . Lets put it this way, w/ business DSL you have guaranteed bandwidth w/
258 up/down is $70 a month and 768 up/down is
$109 a month. I can't imagine they are losing
money on this. Especially when worldcom is their own backbone
Because we don't want to waste such precious resource!
What's really been irking me lately is the fact that EVERYONE has overlooked the bandwidth cap option in Kazaa's preferences.
I use this feature and have never had an unexpected cease (I expect things to be a little slow when I'm dl'ing linux ISOs) in my bandwidth due to Kazaa.
It's not p2p that's the problem, it's stupid people using p2p that's the source of our woes.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
What is amazing about the Dot Com mentality ...is this concept of a business with mega profits that doesnt come with mega expenses.
Actually, it's more like a business with mega expenses without any profits. P2P and unlimited 1Mbps+ broadband service is a prescription for certain failure.
Consider this: Call up Sprint, AT&T, MCI, etc. and ask them what their price is for a DS3, including loops. You'll probably end up with something around $500/month. per Mbps. Negotiate a bit and you might get below that a bit - maybe even down around $200/mo. per Mbps if you buy enough capacity. Now, turn around and sell that same sustained Mbps/month for $35-$40 to a cable modem user.
Good business? Don't forget, you've got local transmission, switching/routing, customer support, billing, fixed costs/backoffice, equipment capital & depreciation, etc. So, for $500/mo/Mbps or so, you're making big profits on that $35/mo. customer?
Now, excuse me, but shouldn't providing BANDWIDTH be a primary focus of an ISP.
Actually, you're in the minority of broadband customers. More than 80% want fast web pages and quick email. That's not directly corrolated to bandwidth (caching servers, for instance, and high performance local network, can provide for those).
Since you're obviously not paying true bandwidth costs, and aren't in the majority, expect to pay your fair share or be pushed off of your provider's network.
(Like, you can buy this nice car, but dont drive it more than 2 miles a day!)
Actually this is a good analogy. You're not buying, but renting a car. You want the $22 discount rate, but want to put 1,000 miles a day on it and drive it 90 MPH with a load of bricks in the trunk. Try doing that at National or Budget. You'll get the same answer as your broadband provider.
There is something inherently criminal in this DOT COM men tality, where you are supposed to make money without hard work and the providing of a real, tangible service.
The only thing criminal (not quite... incompetent is a better word) is providers that advertise unlimited service but don't provide it.
*scoove*
"Blockbuster's new rental service"? Flat-rate? I'm not familiar with this...
P2P clients with auto-download-recommendations ( a la TiVo) become popular.
Most users of software of this type will user their entire bandwidth, making the flat-fee ISP business model a lot less attractive.
Blocking p2p won't solve that problem, because users will find some way to download the files they want ie web pages, IRC, ICQ etc
Error: Erection reset by beer.
ISPs tend to rack up high bandwidth costs when a customer trades files with a customer at an outside ISP. The costs escalate further when a person in one country trades a file with someone in another country.
I remember before everything became commercial and Peering went like this: I peer you, you peer me.
And everybody was happy (if they had enough traffic to get a peering agreement).
These days? It seems only a handful of companies run the net and they want hard cash.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Sooner or later, the Qwests and MCIs are going to have to bite the bullet and buy some terabit optical switches. They're going to have to open up their wallets, and then we should start seeing a rebound in the high-tech market.
This is exactly the same reason why the electric companies encourage you to conserve electricity. They want to sell you as much electricity as they can, but only from their existing infrastructure; they don't want to build new capacity.
All power companies are required to have a single rate plan. I live in SC. Your income has to be under $75,000 tax adjusted. Most people just don't know about it ;)
You apply, they measure your power for 3 months, you pay that bill each month, then on the fourth month you pay the average. for me that was $33.
I PURPOSELY do it right when I move in to have low power bills. My last move was to a 624 sq ft condo + I use VERY little Power anyway, some months I am overpaying by as much as $15.
Also, note that a lot of businesses and some apartments offer integrated utilities in the lease.
is windows updates of course. no need to speculate further.
For years during the 90's ISP's all over the country were salivating over the prospects of the killer applications that were promised once broadband came to every Tom, Dick, and Harry's doorstep.
And now that it's here they don't like it?
I have DSL and have 1.44MB download and 746MB upload. IMHO I should be able to max out this bandwidth 24/7 because that is what I am paying for. If I want to hog my bandwidth downloading P2P files, what's the big deal? It is my choice how I use the bandwidth I am paying for.
Provided it's clearly stated before you sign on the dotted line, I'm 100% OK with being throttled if I use too much in a day.
.32% of the bandwidth in the unrestricted class).
Throttled, mind you - not cut off.
I've been hanging on to an email from the Vuln-dev list for ages that links to the UIUC bandwidth policy, because I think it kicks that much ass. A fair policy that keeps the heavy users from choking the others out, but still lets you get in the big DL's if you need them.
Unrestricted Class (10Mb/s): By default, connections are in this class. The connection is not artificially throttled or limited.
Restricted Class A (128kb/s per flow): When the Internet traffic of an IP address reaches 80% of the limit (600MB), the IP address (computer) will be rate-limited (throttled) to 128kb/s per flow.
Restricted Class B (32kb/s per flow): When the Internet traffic of an IP address reaches 100% of the limit (750MB), the IP address (computer) will be rate-limited (throttled) to 32kb/s per flow.
Restricted Class C (512kb/s aggregate): When the Internet traffic of an IP address reaches 150% of the limit (1125MB), the IP address (computer) will be rate-limited (throttled) to approximately the speed of a 33.6 modem (about
"Q: Will I ever get shut down for traffic?
A: The current "rate-limiting" system does not turn off ports it just slows down your connection. However, rooms and computers may still be turned off for many other reasons (viruses, copyright, abuse of the network, and for very large amounts of traffic as determined by the CIO's office)."
That progressive degradation sounds great to me. Just alter the breakpoints and you can have different plans for business/residential too.
Anyone rolled something like this out? Any pointers?
> if we were to have limits and caps or pay per gig use of these "distributed computing models" would drop DRASTICALLY!
And my ISP cares about this because...?
Probably 80% of my bandwidth is used listening to net radio. The other bit goes to email, net surfing, a whole lotta ftp'ing (I'm a web designer) and some messaging. Yes, I have a p2p program, but I couldn't tell you the last time I used it.
I wonder if I should have said anything about net radio.. that's already under attack by the evil riaa.
I live in Canada, and several of my favourite radio stations have gone offline over fears of future online broadcasting charges.
Man, if ZDNet can shill for a startup like this CacheLogic without a second thought or any contrary sources in the article, imagine how our Web news sources react when Microsoft or Apple send over a press release. (They copy from the PR document and paste the text into their stories, is what happens.)
And jeez, it's screamingly obvious that the profligate use of bandwidth by p2p services is precisely because of the moving targets p2pers need to be. It's indirectly, but mostly, caused by the media conglomerates who are going to use stories like this as arguments for their own case against p2p. If you try to hide, you're guilty, one way or another. Talk about the logic of the witch trial...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
3. Profit!
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
The main reason I pay for broadband is for fast downloads. This includes music, videos and software over P2P as well as demos and other files off of websites or ftp.
If my isp expects me to buy broadband just so webpages appear faster they are kidding themselves. The purpose of my "ph4t p1p3z" is to get quick downloads on files I want. I have no use for broadband otherwise.
I paid for unlimited usage with a 128 outgoing cap. I'm going to use it. If they don't like that then they shouldn't have offered.
2ndly its not THAT much.. there is quite a bit of regular traffic, and Spam that seems to be going unnoticed to 'prove' their point..
Remember without P2P, home broadband would be pretty useless.. Dumb to pay 50/month for that occasional BSD ISO image download..
Add a lower upload cap, or *any* download cap and watch me jump ship.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That being the case, by RIAA logic, every ISP is
a vicarious and contributory infringer of copyright,
and a lawsuit target.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Isn't this what the broadband industry always wanted?
They are constantly searching for the killer app to migrate the masses onto broadband. It comes along and all they do is moan and complain about how it is hogging their network. Duh!
Unforunately, they seem to be too busy trying to shove unwanted "content" down consumers' throats in order to see *the* killer app right under their noses.
So...you're saying that it's another business' problem (your ISP) that you are using a poor business model? Unless you have a business contract saying that things won't ever change, you're going to have to suck it up and adjust your business plan.
The past tense of hamstring is hamstrung.
...33MHz 486 PCs were $1500. Now you get a 2GHz P4 for half that (or less even). (price/performance increase: around +12,000%)
...16MB of RAM cost $500. You get 2GB of much faster RAM these days. (price/perf: +12,800%)
...office LANs were 10-base-T (or worse). Now you'll get gigabit-ethernet for the same prices. (price-perf: +10,000%)
...a 100MB hard drive was $200. Now you get a 200GB drive for that that transfers 10X as fast to boot. (price/perf: +200,000%) (!)
... T1 line cost a business ~$1000 a month. Nowadays, it's... the same.
Why is it that every other aspect of the computer industry has dropped so dramatically in price/performance, except this one?
It's because Telcos can charge $1000 for a T1, and businesses will pay. The Telcos could run fiber and offer OC3 or OC48 service for the same price and still be profitable, but why bother? Sprint and UUNet sit there price-gouging ISPs, but of course it's the end users who are bad for using the bandwidth they are sold.
For the record, I use IRC extensively for file trading, and I probably use 15GB of bandwidth a week or more on my 768/128 DSL connection. I'm sure I am costing Verizon money but it's their own fault. Until they demand better rates from the backbone providers they are only screwing themselves.
I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
ISPs surely are the only business in planet earth that complains about it's best, more loyal customers!
Could you imagine NBC complaining that Joe CouchPotato "simply watches too many football games"? or McDonalds griping about little Polly because "she eats too many burgers a week"?
ISPs complain because they don't get extra revenue from heavy users, but clearly this is a problem of their own making. There is nothing stopping them from metering usage and charging more to heavy users.
Some whiny end user type responded to my post about the economics of being an internet provider with a brief rant on how technology should have brought the cost of a T1 down a long time ago.
Lets investigate the reality behind a typical Sprint T1 install at $1,000/month.
A T1 is composed of several components, the first being the local loop to the CO. You've got two or four copper wires buried in the ground, an NIU on the customer end and some sort of gear in the central office. This costs $285/month for on net to off net termination in my city and that is a pretty typical number.
Once you get to that termination gear you've got to negotiate the LEC's metro optical network to reach the point where they interconnect with the ISP's equipment. Despite being #53 in terms of population nationally my city doesn't have enough Sprint T1s on my ILEC to qualify for its own DS3 mux so my Sprint T1 gets drug forty miles south west to our provincial state capitol. This is non trivial, but its priced as part of that $285/month.
Once you get to the ISP's edge equipment you're probably getting 'back hauled' cross country to some location where they've got a Cisco 12000 series or some big Juniper box. You should be reading "WAN line costs", "hardended telco facilties costs", "depreciation on equipment you *can't* get at Best Buy", etc, etc.
This gets you to the ISP's network and their customers. Somewhere, out there, they peer with other top level carriers, and that is how you get to the global internet.
Besides not being able to buy the gear at Best Buy you can't *hire* the geniuses needed to make it all go from behind the counter of a local McDonalds. If you want someone who can pour piss out of a transit autonomous system without refering to the instructions printed on the heel of a Cisco 12008 you pay. If you want someone to answer the phone when the customer calls you pay. Scale that up by ten thousand T1 customers and you can imagine what is required - a real live company, so large it must be publically held to receive the funding it needs.
Bandwidth is like real estate. You can get an address on Skyline Boulevard (Sprint or UUNet DS1), you can move in to section 8 housing at 2209 Jones Street and heckle crack dealers (DSL), or maybe you're upscale enough to get a doublewide at 64th and Grover (cable modem), but make no mistake about how the world is gonna be - you plant petunias in the 'hood (VPN applications), homey's pit bull(Kazaa) is gonna take a dump there the very next day.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
They said the word 'Linux', Oh WOW! I think I'm going to explode! Or cum on my foot!
Ha!! Take that you M$ evil do-ers! Us 733t 71nuX d00dZ sh477 0wn j00!</sarcasm>
#include <std_disclaimer.h>
I like linux, its good and does exactly what it says on the tin, and so much more. But lets not hype, people!
I have a python script that continuously DLs Linux ISOs(from different mirrors of course) and then deletes them. This ensures that I'm using close to all of my 2.2mbps 24/7. I figure 'm getting more than I pay for this way, I hate my neihbors, and I hate my cable ISP... It's all good =/
IT IS MY ISP's fault if they lured me in as a customer advertising "all the internet I want" now change that cost that "they have me" = "I'm just doing what they advertised, using the internet all I want at high speeds"
If they aren't supposed to have any freedom in terms of using the Internet, then deny all of it except the exceptions, don't tempt them first and then have a witch hunt. If you do grant them more freedom, be a sport and explain why this-or-that is too much. The guy starting this thread is just a badly skilled BOFH wannabe.
Why don't the ISP's stop complaining, and set up a usenet server on their LOCAL network, then advertise it? They'll save an assload of bandwidth, and if the RIAA comes to complain to them, they just say that theyre providing access to all the newsgroups, and dont give a shit about what their users download, just that it's saving them money. I myself rarely use p2p, but the bittorrent is becoming tempting to me. basically i dont like being part of a network such as gnutella where 40%+ of the traffic on it is pr0n searches. I set up vnstat on my router, and it seems like i usually use about 100GB down / 8GB up a month. which 80% of that is usenet, 10% http, 8% server traffic, and about 2% gaming and p2p, etc. traffic. What seems stupid, is my ISP (charter) outsourced their usenet service, wasting tons of incoming bandwidth money! Most of my freinds don't know what usenet is anyway, so it probably doesnt really matter, as about 99% of them use kazaa (about the same percentage dresses the same, a connection?).
-Flooda
You advertise me a 24/7 connection with XXXX up and XXX down rate and then want to charge me for useing XXXX/up and XXX/down 24/7 bandwidth usage ? You want to try explaining that again ?
If its a defunct buisness plan then that was a brilliant decision to roll out a money lossing plan. If they have to meter then fine, they had best allow it to accumulate. IE if I buy 2 GB this month and only use 1 then either I get money back or next month I have 3 and there had best not be a cap on how much can accumulate. I don't mind if I use less on a flat rate but if I am on a metered rate then I am due the bandwidth I purchased. THis also has to break any contract agreements on a no harm no foul basis or the customer has to have the right to demand the honoring of their contract... contracts have to be binding both ways and not just one otherwise its a racket. RIght now custerms are horned into a 12 month deal that the provider has the right to change mid term and you have no out option.
The other funny thing to me is if P2P really is 60% and they actually manage to kill P2P they have just killed 60% of the reason their users have for having their connection and 60% of the reason peopole get broadband..... talk about a sticky wicket.
Bandwidth is an artifically high priced commodity and sooner or later it will crash.... especially in the US the telcos have a strangle hold on the services with DSL access points in their control and they are laughing all the way to the bank with the money they are making. Don't give me this boo hoo crap about ISP's. Frankly I think the Telco's have them over the barrel and sooner or later they will starve the isp's out or get busted up for price fixing. Cable is in much the same boat but there access point is more focused ( ie customers come to them before they have to go out whereas in DSL customers go through the DSLAM before they hit the ISP.
Finaly last but not least.. they had best curb spam before they start yacking at people for downloading to much stuff.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
@home, dispite their flaws, actually mandated as part of the install that users used their proxy server. Say what you will about proxy, but can help out a good deal to converve bandwidth.
I still find it somewhat shocking that, from what I can see no one brought up news servers, which are also responcible for while not nessicarly end user bandwidth to the level that kazza is, but definatly responcible for backbone useage. Say what you will about the newsgroups, but I see there being an advantage of having this content cached on local servers.
As far as metering, I don't believe it's really the solution. Problem being the fact that any isp who I knew metered always had their numbers wrong, and the accounting required is enmormous, and it's not like they can actually PROVE you used that level of bandwidth. And it goes without saying, based on typical attitudes on telephone, you typicaly don't get charged for incomming calls [exception places like america and canada where mobile users do get charged for air time, rather then the caller being charged to talk to a mobile]. A nasty aspect to metering is the fact that simple system diagnostics, such as PING can be exploited to charge up the bill of someone you don't like.
I would be most annoyed if for example, comcast cable decided to change their pricing structure to a metered model. Their advertisments tell you specificly you can use their services to download music, e-mail pictures, see movies, generally do all these things that people are no complaining about, using services that consume butt loads of bandwidth. I would strongly argue the fact that users who actually download are using their service as advertised, right or wrong the marketing tells you always on, flat rate, unlimited downloads. I would also argue based on this marketing the fact that users who do choose to actually share files are providing the content that justifies the existance of the ISP in the first place.
To this end... wouldn't it make a fair amount of sence for ISPs to actually run P2P services them selves, and cache what the users of their little chuck on the net use, if the concern is getting this information out on the primary gateway?
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
60% bandwidth for P2P + 60% bandwidth for SPAM = 120% of available bandwidth.
how am I suppose to get any real work done?
Well, according to capitalism, your choices are either change your business model, or do something to lower your costs. If the ISP is being the problem, complain to them. If they won't change things, find a new ISP. If you can't, find a new business model. I hate to break it to you, but you don't have a god-given right to have your business model work forever. This is the same thing people harp at the RIAA for.....change your business model, or fail, others who are able to adapt will take your place. This isn't meant as a flame, I'm just tellin ya how capitalism works, unless of course you have enough money to buy your own laws...thats a whole new can of worms though.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I work for a small ISP that has mostly residential dialup and DSL customers. Here's some real numbers that I just pulled from our primary customer facing router.
These stats were taken ~1945 local time. This is _not_ part of our daily peak (~2145->2330).
Total traffic
net->local 1692.4 kB/s
local->net 837.6 kB/s
P2P traffic
net->local 738.4 kB/s
local->net 587.6 kB/s
That comes out to ~70.1% of our upstream traffic and ~43.6% of our downstream traffic.
exactly.
Where i live its comercials of sad people because they do not have music. They 'go on the net' and get music. Then they are happy people.
Where do they think we go to get music? It sure isnt the pay for sites. Of which there are few and of limited catalog....
What i could never figure out is the contracts LET them do this sort of crap. What sort of contract is it where they can change the rules to whatever they want. But you are limited in all ways.
"And ISP out of business, because people won't pay $40-$60 per month for internet access when there's nothing left worth grabbing."
And the dial-up ISPs are out of business because people won't pay $15-20 unlimited a month for internet access when there's nothing left worth grabbing.
"It would be a perfectly reasonable thing if that was what was advertised and that was what I purchased. But it isn't. The ISP's in particular the cable and DSL isps advertised unlimited hi speed internet, in order to lure customers away from their old dial up providers. Nothing wrong there except now they want to change the rules midstream. Now they have the users.. The users are using the system they advertised, as they advertised it, and they wish to up the rates. "
You know that would be a legitimate complaint for those who go through life with a "duh" on their mind. But for a virtual room full of geeks you guys have no excuse. One what is the purpose of advertising? Two what white compound should all advertizing be taken with? Three do you guys acually listen to what the advertising says, or do you guys take a slashdot approach to everything? (don't RTFA, reply to what you think something says, instead of actually what it says)...sheesh! And you guys want leaders of all stripes to take you serious. I suggest you go do some careful research on what is actually ment by unlimited, instead of what you think it should mean.
ok, i know i'm going to get flamed for this, but here goes.
first, let's ignore the legal implications - let's say that every file traded on current p2p networks is unencumbered by copyright or any other restriction. i say this because the article in quesiton seems to be doing the same - the article is not about college kids trading illegal stuff online, but it's about a certain kind of net traffic causing bottlenecks, simply because a large amount of it exists.
next, i will exempt special-purpose networks from the point i will soon make. corporations, etc., have a right to restrict their networks to company business use only. other organisations certainly have the right to do the same. colleges are in a grey area i think. while they own their networks and should be allowed to decide what constitutes acceptable use of network resources, i believe most colleges are more apt to be less restrictive.
so finally we are left with what i guess i'll call the "residential internet." all the residential broadband customers connected by whatever backbones.
so here we have this supposed "problem" that p2p networks are using up large amounts of the available bandwidth, and ISPs are hurting trying to keep up.
so finally, my point: who cares? what is the internet for? no, i'm serious. it started as a defense department research network, but it has grown far beyond that. i would venture to say that the internet is whatever its users want it for. if its users want it for p2p file sharing, so be it. if the broadband ISPs are providing "unlimited access" (excepting bandwidth caps), then they'd damn well better provide it. if they want to tighten bandwidth caps, and offer higher-price broadband packages to people that want to shell out the cash, that's their choice, but i don't see that when i look around - most ISPs (cable, anyway) seem to have at most two options - a "business" class and a normal, lower-bandwidth option (yes, i know, DSL does have multiple rate plans from a good number of providers, but i believe cable is far more prevalent).
but stop whining. broadband customers are paying for a service. broadband ISPs have a responsibility to provide that service, for whatever the customers want to use it for. instead of doing their jobs, they're trying to slap restrictions on everything.
unfortunately, my argument is weakened by the fact that the vast majority of data swapped over p2p networks appears to be copyrighted music, movies, and software. but, when you look at the ISPs' chief complaint here - bandwidth - i have no sympathy. provide what your customers want or get out of the business.
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I only run gnutella on the weekends. Their math is faulty.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Excellent answer Scoove
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In other shocking developments, our consumer investigation team has discovered that one of the airline's biggest expenses is on airplanes!! Stay tuned for the nightbeat at 11 when our investigative team unearths what those oil companies are reeaaalllly spending their money on.
Truisms of the information age:
Bandwidth gets cheaper according to Moore's Law.
Human attention, on the other hand, has hard limitations.
Spam takes a lot of your attention.
P2P does not.
Thus, spam is a bigger problem than P2P.
In other news...
In a shocking new study, it has been found that 95% of Internet bandwidth is used by things people want to do, but only 5% is taken by things they don't want to do. When contacted, a BOFH spokesman said only "I'll put a stop to that."
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I doubt it's this high. There may be a fair amount of it, but not 60%. Charging a use charge is difficult because what happens if someone (a grandma usually) accidently clicks on a spammng e-mail virus tha spews lots of MB of mail....If I were the ISP, I would do more things like filtering these things out at the mail server. Spam and these virii have to use more bandwidth than p2p. Expecially since 90 percent of what I get is spam.
Gorkman
All the major players now cap home usage at 500M-3G or 5G depending on what you pay... no real options... as any smaller provider has to use the larger telco's lines/bandwidth so is tied into their pricing stratagies...
I seem to remember hearing that IPv6 includes support for prioritizing packets. Could that be used to solve this problem?
If your ISP charged a fee based on the kind of packets you send (for example, high-priority packets are billed at $.01/MB, but low-priority packets are free), that would take care of this problem fairly quickly. Low-bandwidth users would enjoy high speeds for a small fee, and high-bandwidth users could either pay for fast service (by setting their packets to be high-priority), or wait until the lines are idle (by setting their packets to be low-priority).
Then there's the added bonus that this would encourage the rollout of IPv6, so I can stop having to do NAT. :)
"It sure was strange to see something on Usenet about me that didn't involve Klingon gang rape." -- Wil Wheaton
One of the reasons the ISPs are facing this "crisis" is because commercial services selling music and video/movies online has yet to materialize due to paranoia on the part of the RIAA/MPAA. They (at least the RIAA, I have less experience with the latter) see online music (in any form whatsoever, contrary to their claims) as a threat to their physical CD sales because they realize that the profit margins in the CD business are much better and if they introduced a really attractive online service it would kill their CD sales. Hence the token efforts we see now with Pressplay and similar services. I seriously doubt that the RIAA/MPAA are going to change their minds without enormous pressure.
Of course, there is enormous DEMAND for this kind of online content, so users have ended up getting it from the only sources available: each other.
P2P isn't the problem, it's the fact that people want this content and commercial providers CAN'T provide it. And it's not like there aren't lots of companies that would leap at the chance to do so.
The ISPs can't stop P2P, no more than firewalls can permanently stop hacking/DoS attacks, viruses, or filters can stop spam. The users (the incredibly motivated users) will just develop new programs and spoofing techniques to work around the ISPs restrictions. Bandwith caps will seriously damage adoption, which is very important for the ISPs.
No, the best solution for the ISPs, IMHO, is to trust in their "common carrier" status and throw in their lot COMPLETELY with the pirates. They should pay programmers to develop a better P2P system that uses less bandwith over thier networks, and then set up "routing nodes" to limit the traffic that goes outside the net (I hear rumors that Comcast is already working on something like this). If that isn't enough, they should host companiess that illegally resell pirated content so THEY can soak up the bandwith fees. ISps are already totally dependent on pr0n for revenue, why not take one more step? It's a choice between the pirates and the RIAA/MPAA, and the RIAA/MPAA isn't going to step up.
I guess that's why the DOCSIS 2.0 spec supports 30 Mbps symetric.
-ted
What I think are a huge waste of bandwith (aside from spam, the obvious choice) are banner ads, pop-ups, and especially flash-based interstitials. The end user doesn't really request them (at least in the consious sense), they just get sent out anyway. Yes, they can be turned off, but my point is that if nobody is complaining about advertising being a "waste" of bandwith, they should stop whining about file transfers.
File sharing services sell broadband accounts. The service providers know this, and will build their networks accordingly. In the end, I think this will probably be a Good Thing, making the networks more robust for all users.
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