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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
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.
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
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.
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.
P2P uses 60% from the available bandwidth, Windows Update uses 45%. That leaves ... uhm ... less than nothing for all the other stuff?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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"
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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!
Ellacoya Networks also makes a switch that, like the packeteer device, uses signature detection to determine if a flow is p2p or not.
Before we started to use their switches, p2p traffic accounted for 65% of our network traffic (both inbound and outboud). By placing p2p limits on the upstream (or outbound) portion of internet pipes, we were able to reduce that to 40%.
When Ellacoya introduced signature detection in their 5.0 release, we were able to catch Kazaa2 flows which reduced our p2p usage to 30%.
Not only has this saved us a tremendous ammount of money (we don't have to keep buying pipe), but we were able to keep the cost down for our customers that don't use p2p, or care.
Another use for the switch is usage-based billing. People scoff at usage based billing, but it evens the billing field. Look at the grandmother that uses her connection to send emails to her kids, and then look at the kid down the street. Both pay the same ammount, but one uses 95% more bandwidth. A recent study that we did here concluded that 5% of our users use 90% of the available bandwidth.
So, what is fair? Limiting bandwidth-hungry applications to the point that they are no longer useable, or charging the customer that wants to use that application his fair share of the costs of delivering the service?
Joseph W. Breu
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