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ISP Rise Against P2P Users
bananaendian writes "Spencer Kelly from BBC's Click program writes about the emerging backslash against high bandwidth P2P users. Apparently it has been estimates that up to one third of internet's traffic is caused by BitTorrent file-sharing program. Especially ISPs who are leasing their bandwidth by the megabyte are more inclined to resort to 'shaping your traffic' by throttling ports, setting bandwidth limits or even classifying accounts according services used. What is your ISPs policy regarding P2P and is it fair for them to put restrictions and conditions on its use."
I use NTL in the UK, I pay £25 a month for a (supposedly) 2MB connection.
They don't bother me at all. I've uploaded an awful lot of gigabytes and downloaded several too, but they don't seem to care. My service is not degraded in any way.
Some of my friends use different providers though, which pull stunts like "classifying" you - ie, if you download much at certain times, you will be bunched into a group that downloads at the same kind of frequency as yourself. Thus slowing you down.
My opinion is that while it seems harsh to cut / slow people down, it's not unfair. Is excessive downloading and use of bandwidth fair to ISPs?
Perhaps paying for bandwidth used is the way to go. As much as the idea sucks, compare it to road tax. A lightweight low-spec car will be taxed far less than a big 40t truck is. There's a reason for that.
There's all this talk about internet traffic, perhaps they should start regulating and taxing it in the same way as road traffic.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the idea of paying more money because I download more. But is my excessive downloading fair on 'regular' users of the internet who I'm slowing down? No.
I hope most Slashdot readers are using NNTP by now (not NTP) to use their music, movies, software, pr0n, etc. etc.
You will help out your ISP by only using downstream bandwidth. You can also usually max-out your connection speed. A CD can take only 15-20 minutes to download.
Further, your troubles with the RIAA/MPAA/Homeland Security are likely to be limited to when you, say, post on a heavily visited site about your activity but forget to post anonymously.
For the best binary newsreader (to download files) from USENET, I reccomend Power Grab -- small, fast, free, and doesn't fiddle around with your registry.
You will probably need to subscribe to a USENET service as well; I reccomend easynews or if you plan to download more than 20 GB per month than Giganews.
I use Canadian cable ISP Rogers. They do packet filtering whenever they detect a download coming from multiple sources -- including BitTorrent, podcasts, and several other types of "shotgun" downloads. They also have a digital phone service, which always goes through port 1720, which they cannot filter lest they affect their VoIP customers. Combine the two and you find that any BitTorrent download going through port 1720 goes at full speed.
It's just a matter of time before they find a way around this to filter all multiple-connection downloads though, and that scares me, considering that we really only have two high-speed ISPs here, Rogers and Sympatico DSL. Everyone else uses their lines, and thus their filtering. Hopefully we'll have more effective header encryption by then.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Ever heard of false advertising?
"All you can eat" does not mean "all you can take home". "Unlimited use high-speed connection" DOES mean "unlimited use".
However, I am not a grammar or spelling nazi. I love Slashdot just as it is, warts and all. I make spelling and grammar mistakes all the time. I just wanted to play at being an anal dickhead for a moment, just to see how it felt.
When I signed up around a year ago (to their "Premier" service) there were no limits.
Since then they've introduced throttling, traffic shaping, removed their binaries, and the latency for games screws up more than it used to.
It's annoying when a company changes the contract every few months to screw you, and you can't reject it to keep your old one. The only option is to leave, which is by no means hassle free.
I've posted on their forums to get some kind of explanation but all I heard was that all the limits they imposed are good for me. They didn't see the point that I was making about them changing the contract every few months to a service that now is totally opposite what I signed up for.
I guess I'll have to change ISP at some point.
The ISPs oversell bandwidth because otherwise it'd be too expensive for anyone to be willing to use the Internet. Ratios are typically 10:1 or for connections >5mbps, perhaps 20:1. Almost nobody would pay hundreds of dollars per month for their internet connection.
Ever wonder why business DSL costs so much more? That's because they only oversell those connections about 2:1.
To the best of my knowledge Azureus doesn't yet, but intends to. You can read about their Vivaldi system on their wiki. (Version as of the time I posted.) It's designed to compute nodes that are close to each other so that Azureus can pick closer peers.
However, they don't actually use it yet, according to that page. But there is work towards it.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
My ISP is Cox HSI. Where I live their policy is to apply transit caps, but enforcement is mainly limited to habitual high-volume offenders. If you go over the cap occasionally, you won't see anything happen. If you go over by a large amount for an extended period of time, though, you'll find your connection throttled back and possibly face termination of your account for ToS violation. They've had to wield this club quite rarely, as only about 2-3% of customers are problem cases. That small percentage is responsible for about 50% of traffic, so shutting down or throttling even a few of the worst offenders has a significant effect.
That's a really bad idea.
BitTorrent actually uses ToS flags specifically to make it easier to prioritize bandwidth and differentiate it from interactive (ssh, Quake) or semi-interactive traffic (www). Same as mldonkey.
The reason why? Your ISP is not stupid. They can limit available bandwidth specifically to you, and they will happily do so. They don't need to (nor would they want to, for the reason you mentioned, among other things) limit it based only on port and ignore the user. Otherwise, yes, everyone would tunnel their traffic through the port that got "highest priority".
If you *do* manage to make your web traffic and BitTorrent traffic indistinguishable, then your ISP is just going to deprioritize both.
What your ISP (or the NAT/router box that you run at the edge of your network) *can* do is to prioritize your own bandwidth based on the urgency with which any packet needs to get somewhere. You want to be able to run BitTorrent and Quake 4 simultaneously, but BitTorrent eats up all your available bandwidth, so you can't play Quake 4 with a P2P client running. If you provide enough information to be able to figure out which of the two should take precedence over the other, then you can run P2P without impacting your other network usage. Much more intelligent.
Read this for a more detailed description of what I'm talking about.
The point is, what you're trying to do is make your usage indistinguishable from that of other users. You can't do that, at least from the standpoint of your local ISP, because your local ISP *knows* where the traffic is going. What your approach here will do is make your different applications indistingushable from each other -- but then you are just throwing away information that can keep multiple applications running well together. Granted, maybe an ISP won't take advantage of it -- "He wants us to prioritize these packets of his above these other ones of his? Hell, we don't care!" -- but it isn't going to improve things relative to other users.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Here in Poland it's quite a popular practice among small ISPs to open internal p2p services within the ISPs network. In the ISP I work for this makes it economically sustainable to have the "p2p hogs" browse the net at 1mbps (up to 2mbps) while downloading something from outer p2p at 0.5mbps (up to 3mbps) and from inner p2p at 30mbps (up to 100mbps) all at the same time for ~15$/month. And yes, the trafic is shaped, but that leaves everyone happy. They can download popular things at great speeds from local. Downloading rare files would always be slow due to limited seeders.
Always put off dealing with time-wasting morons. If you would like to know how... I'll get back to you
For a detailed analysis of exactly how, see Should Internet Service Providers Fear Peer-Assisted Content Distribution? (PDF Related papers can be found at http://del.icio.us/tag/locality+p2p
That's why traffic shaping exists. I even do it on my home router. I can leave bittorrent running with several active torrents, using 95% of my available bandwidth up and down, yet still have snappy ssh, http, vnc, email, dns, voip, etc. All I did was configure my Linksys router to prioritize that traffic over bittorrent, letting bittorrent use the rest. Granted, my home network is nothing major, but anyone who has managed a network should see this as the obvious solution. Anyone who doesn't know about traffic shaping shouldn't be managing a network in the first place.
Be relentless!