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.

Comments

Two words: Metered Bandwidth

[GuNgA-DiN]

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.

Re:Two words: Metered Bandwidth

[superdan2k]

God, how many hours has it been since I last heard that one? My response will always be the same: yeah, right. Customers who have had limitless bandwidth are too accustomed to that, and will go elsewhere to get it. If an ISP switched to metering, people would go elsewhere, and they know it.

Re:Two words: Metered Bandwidth

[Mr. McGibby]

For the most part, that was true: most people never did get close; the ones who went over tended to go 'way over, and we'd send 'em bills for a thousand dollars (no lie). But have you ever dealt with anyone handed a thousand-dollar bandwidth bill? My sympathies if you have.

This is silly. There are ISPs who are dealing with this problem just fine. I use Xmission and I am an admitted P2P user.

1. 12GB per month limit, and extra bandwidth costs $10 a pop.
2. You're warned when you're about to go over the limit and then your connection is throttled after that to prevent extreme-overusage.
3. They have easy to use tools for checking on your usage.
4. UNMETERED usage from midnight to 7:00am. It certainly encourages me to do all my downloading at that time.

Instead of treating their customers as enemies, they treat them AS CUSTOMERS. They don't send surprise $1000 bills and snicker in the background when the customer calls to complain. They NICELY inform the customer of the problem. Customers who are aware of their usage, are willing to pay extra and/or appreciate the "heads-up" about their over-usage. Customers who are not aware of their usage get the chance to find the problem.

The result of this geek-friendly ISPs efforts is that it is one the most popular ISPs in Utah. Every "computer guy" in the state tells his friends that XMission the is coolest ISP out there.

They're solving the bandwidth problem by nicely EDUCATING their customers, not berating them for their ignorance. People just don't know that internet usage is a mix between their electricity or water bill and their phone bill. Once they understand how the system works, they become much less of a problem.

The internet is new, and just like phones, it is going to take 10 or 20 years before people really understand how it works. Give them time, and stop sending $1000 bills. The customer is not the enemy.

Re:Two words: Metered Bandwidth

[Knife_Edge]

Amen, brother. I think the cable modem folks at least are concerned about allowing anyone to become a provider of content, which is what running a webserver allows you to do. Put up a server, publish something interesting or useful for the world to see.

See the difference? Kazaa in essence allows you to do what the big media companies want you to do with your connection - suck down content of various kinds through the fast pipe they provide you with. Not all that different from cable tv. At the moment, much of the content people are downloading (or uploading for that matter) may be illegal, but they are working on that. They want to remain the main providers of content on your connection

Essentially, they are trying to control the technology so that it suits a projection of their business model. I think they have some kind of long range plan, anyway. Lord knows what they would be able to leverage in order to put it into effect - I don't even use the Road Runner startup page or any other service that is supposed to be provided to users beyond the bandwidth, but they might roll out something.

Or looking at it another way (minus the corporate control conspiracy theory), when broadband providers were just starting out, they had no Acceptable Use Policies and allowed pretty much anything. The result for cable modem providers was a disaster, with a couple of people running Hotline servers that sucked up all of the backbone bandwidth for entire towns. They want to make sure that kind of thing never happens again, hence the draconian AUP provisions against running servers of any kind. Viewed in light of cable modem providers early history, I can understand how these people view anything called a 'server' as potentially threatening their whole model of bandwidth reselling. They may not consider p2p in that league yet, but if it causes as severe a disruption as the first broadband Hotline servers did, they will start prohibiting it as well.

Really, the problem is that all ISPs, broadband or otherwise, operate by selling more bandwidth then they actually have in order to make a profit. There is nothing wrong with doing this, as long as their estimates of how much bandwidth people will actually use versus how much they will pay for correspond well with reality. Apparently, broadband ISPs have not gotten the formula right yet. One could argue convincingly that this is because the nature of the service they are offering is different than previous dialup ISPs. In essence, the economics of broadband are different - people use it differently than dialup when it is available. Therefore it is impossible to simply assume the numbers associated with dialup scale up proportionately to broadband.

So the broadband providers are going to have to change their business models.

Re:Two words: Metered Bandwidth

[mfrank]

Keep in mind the article was talking about European ISPs. Their telco setups are a lot more fscked up than the United State's.

I'm blocking p2p on my network

[EvilTwinSkippy]

People really got mad. But I was sick of the stuff interfering with business transactions.

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.

Re:I'm blocking p2p on my network

[Ed Avis]

WTF? If you think it's unfair that one user grabbing the RH9 ISOs can hog the bandwidth and excessively slow down other users, it's up to you to throttle things so that every user gets a fair turn. 'Hunting down like animals' is not a scalable solution with a large number of users, nor a particularly intelligent one. If the network is busy then the CD-image downloader should get only his fair share of the bandwidth; late at night when nobody else is using the network the images could download at full whack.

If your network can be reduced to a crawl just by someone running wget(1) then it is the network that needs fixing. I don't mean you have to rush out and buy more bandwidth just to satisfy the users, but what bandwidth there is should be shared out robustly so that one user can't break stuff for the others.

Re:I'm blocking p2p on my network

[EvilTwinSkippy]

So precisely when is it my fault that a user is abusing his or her privilages? Never underestimate te fear of exposure as the person who was causing the clog. If cultivated properly it is a VERY effective network management tool.

And for the record, the system did not "break". No more than a road breaks when it is full. I am not running a day care center, these are all adults. We can expect them to behave as such in the real world, why not on the network as well?

Re:spam?

[grub]

Assume each spam eats 5K of bandwidth. Now think about how much bandwidth is used by searching other p2p nodes, the returning results and finally receiving a 5MB song (or ~700 MB DIVX movie/ISO/etc). Their figure of 60% may be inflated a bit but I don't doubt that the number is close.

Interesting business plan

[greasypeso]

1. Get consumers to pay lots of money for high-speed internet
2. Complain that customers are using their high-speed internet

What are they called?

[cruppel]

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.

What's wrong with per gig charges??

[arvindn]

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.

Re:What's wrong with per gig charges??

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Step 1) Distribute DoS zombiebot to everyone you can
Step 2) ???(Take out someone with metered bandwidth)
Step 3) Profit..or lack there of.

Of course, I'm just generalizing all the bad stuff you really don't want to pay for. Spam, Broken downloads, DoS, etc.

Re:What's wrong with per gig charges??

[Anonymous Coward]

If your son takes your car out for a spin, you get HIM to pay for the gas.

If someone eats at your table, THEY pay for their meal.

When I get spammed, why do I pay for their use of my bandwidth? When it's a flash-only site, ore REQUIRES cookies for no good reason, why do I have to pay for it? When they have glitzy web pages, why do I pay for their advertising?

If you are going to cap, cap UPLOAD.

Re:What's wrong with per gig charges??

[DarkZero]

First off, yes, there are other services that offer a flat rate. Buffets, cable and satellite TV, Netflix, MMORPGs, car leases, local land line phone service, Blockbuster's new rental service, and many other businesses have a flat rate business model and many of them survive and thrive.

Second, the problems with metered bandwidth. First off is viruses. Many DDoS worms could actually force you to hit your maximum upload capacity for an entire month, which is a problem that is far too common on the internet but absolutely never happens with the food at your restaurant, the gas in your car, or the electricity in your home. Couple that with manually activated worms being used by script kiddies and the lack of an itemized bill (what are they going to do, list every file you downloaded in a month?) and your bill could be worthy of dispute every month. Since you would never know exactly what your entire family may have downloaded, you'll have a problem arguing that a hacker probably stole $10-$30 worth of bandwidth from you, but your ISP will have no problem taking your money.

Another problem is that programs don't come with usage labels. My refrigerator, hot water heater, washing machine, dryer, etc. all come with stickers telling me how much power they use. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, IRC, e-mail spam, and streaming media do not. Again, this is where bandwidth is different than food, gas, and electricity. I know how much food I want to eat and how much it costs. I know how much gas my car uses and how much I need. I know how much electricity the appliances in my home normally use and how much my bill should be. Bandwidth, on the other hand, could produce a completely different bill each month for reasons that the customer probably won't understand, and which could be the result of worms and script kiddies.

If the broadband ISPs want to switch to a metered service business model, then that business model will not be fair to the consumer until a legal mandate is made forcing every program that uses the internet to reveal its bandwidth usage in the same way that a home appliance has to have its electrical usage marked and cars must have their fuel efficiency marked. It also won't be fair until computers are just as easily secured as walking around the side of your house and making that there isn't an electrical cable leading from your house to your neighbor's. Unfortunately that breakthrough is being held back by the first crucial step in its implementation: teaching a pig to fly.

We've been threatened with metered bandwidth since Napster was released, possibly for good reason and possibly because it was just a convenient way to justify squeezing more cash out of us, but I've unfortunately never seen anyone truly analyze the problems that it has, and why it might not be waiting for us in the future after all.

Re:So what

[Anonymous Coward]

The economics don't work when more than a very small number of people become heavy users...and that's exactly the situation that has resulted from widespread P2P application usage. The prices are calculated based on the assumption that most users will check their mail and browse CNN, MSN, and Yahoo...and that's all.

Now maybe you think the bandwidth prices ISPs pay shouldn't be so high but that's another discussion entirely.

So what?

[tweakt]

If everyone is using P2P applications, I don't see how it's so shocking that a majority the bandwidth is being used for it.

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.

It's hard to see sometimes...

[Realistic_Dragon]

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.

Re:spam?

[Organic_Info]

Your missing the point. While SPAM is drowning out legit mail at an unacceptable rate you have to remember they are for the most part a paltry text file. Yes I know the quantity of SPAM can make this into a large amount of bandwidth but the 40-50 SPAM most people get a day don't compare to the 600MB latest game copy being downloaded by P2P users or the 3GB copy of the Matrix Reloaded "http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/294 0270.stm"

I'm all for P2P being used for legitimate distribution of files but I cetainly don't agree with use of bandwidth being used for illegal file sharing of copyrighted materials and willing to bet a vast proportion of P2P files sharing is illegal files.

If P2P continues to be used for this purpose on this scale there is going to be a serious backlash and the minority of legit P2P users are going to get burned.

Re:P2P with super nodes - centralization

[HowlinMad]

I bet it is a bandwidth hog. It may be more swtreamlined on the communications side, but if you are transferring a 700 MB ISO, then ther eis not much you can do about it. That will still take up a lot of bandwidth!! The simple fact of the matter is streamlining the communications will help, but the bandwidth will still be used.

Re:spam?

[EvilAlien]

I don't know how much goes to spam, but I can tell you for a fact that broadband services will count themselves lucky with only 60% P2P traffic. That sounds pretty average from what I've seen.

The sad thing is that this isn't FUD, but the IP Fascists like the RIAA and SOCAN in Canada will use it as leverage in their battle.

BTW, a whole lot of the non-P2P traffic is used up by protocols like IRC, FTP and NNTP... for filesharing purposes. Fileservs on IRC, the classic FTP warez/pr0n server, and the plethora of "free" software, porn and music on USENET still have those other sources chipping in significantly. P2P is the easiest to use, and therefore more accessible to the majority, hence its dominance over traffic consumption.

...and why do we pay them?

[mbakaitis]

This article annoys me for two reasons:

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!

with all due respect to ISP's...

[paRcat]

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.

Re:This is good news for telecom

[Organic_Info]

They're going to have to open up their wallets

I thing your more likely to see them gunning for the bandwidth hogs than upgrading the network. I'm willing to bet the majority of P2P use is for sharing illegal materials. It only takes some sort of deal between the telecoms + RIAA + MPAA to start pursuing the distributers of the copyrighted materials and wham RIAA/MPAA happy, carries happy as the backbones and existing infrastructure doesn't need upgrading.

It's gonna happen. There's no way thay are going to allow situations like "http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/294 0270.stm" "the Matrix Reloaded being available for download 1 week after relaease" to continue - and do you know what I agree with them. You want the stuff buy it - don't agree with the music industry ethics don't buy it.

Freeloaders are going to kill P2P if things continue.

The business model of the ISPs need to change.

[Jetifi]

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.

article author is on drugs

[Tom]

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.

Re:article author is on drugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Or even better yet : refuse to deliver the ordered and payed for (origional) goods, and just offer them a (cheap, for the company) replacement.

Customer : "I've ordered and payed for a Radio/CD/DVD/5.1 amplifier combination with speakers a couple of weaks ago, and all I got was this cheap battery-fed radio, one that fit's in the palm of my hand ..."

Sales-person : "You where not *actually* thinking you would get that expensive device, where you" (braking down laughing ...).

Customer : "But ... But I *payed* for it !"

Sales-person : "Sorry, but actually delivering it would mean we would not profit enough. Be gratefull we actually gave you *something*."

Somehow this makes me think of theft ...

I don't really see this..

[DaLiNKz]

..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 Don't Get It

[moehoward]

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.

So?

[Nipok Nek]

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

Re:What's wrong with per gig charges?? Well..

[secret_squirrel_99]

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.

I sure hope not...

[haeger]

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.
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.
.haeger

Bubba says hold the phone!!!

[Arbogast_II]

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.

Re:true

[scsirob]

As long as your customers pay for their bandwidth, it's theirs to decide if this is 'wasted' on P2P, porn, webhosting or whatever. They pay you to supply bandwidth. They don't pay you to tell them how to use it.

Re:true

[Tom]

See my other comment. Yes, the users pay, no I'm not amongst those advocating throtteling of P2P or anything else in that direction.

Nevertheless, from a pure technical POV, P2P wastes bandwidth. As in efficiency. How much bytes traverse the wire to download 100 MB via FTP? via HTTP? via scp? Compare that to P2P. Add the traffic for searches. Add 50% overhead because half of your downloads never complete or have to be restarted half-way through.

That's what I mean with "waste". Most large ISPs don't pay for bandwidth by the byte anyways, they peer. But if the total demand goes up, you have to widen the pipes, and that's expensive.

Internet access...

[cmburns69]

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!

Make P2P prefer local links

[26199]

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...

P2P IS the web...

[eclectic4]

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?

Ok, I'll bite.

[iq in binary]

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.

P2P is not the problem, $1000 T1s are the problem

[Tsu-na-mi]

10 years ago in 1993...

...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.

Re:that's a lotta emails!

[meethookz]

"If ISPs would charge users for the bandwidth they use, it wouldn't matter what protocols take what bandwidth." Ok, my only problem with this is... I don't want to pay for things I don't want to view. (i.e. spam email, those flash and java adds, banners) once those go away, sure I'll be happy to pay for my per GB