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

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: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

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.

...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!

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.