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."

Comments

did anyone honestly fail to see this coming?

[nowhere.elysium]

also, shouldn't it be a 'backlash', as opposed to a 'backslash'?

Re:did anyone honestly fail to see this coming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people expected; but it's interesting. First we had the era when everybody was building networks and it was expensive to use. In those days lots of people built their own. Then there was an "everything is free" era. Why build your own network if other people are willing to do it free. Now we're back to the era of expensive, except they are trying to fix fees in a really anti-social way. Soon the internet will allow only TV stations, and anything which threatens entertainment monopolies (e.g. home web servers / VOIP / even slashdot :-) will be made more and more expensive and difficult to do.

We need to go back to people building their own again. Like "freenets" (the old meaning..); neighborhood networks; wireless mesh networks etc. but this time (since the old internet exchanges have gone) with an country wide / international layer. Anybody willing? Has anybody already started?

Re:did anyone honestly fail to see this coming?

[petecarlson]

and since they have no proof that you are doing anything illegal in the first place (well it may seem weird that a person reads 1.2 gbytes of news daily and receives 3.2gbytes of email, but it's not illegal) there's no legal reason to limit the bandwidth that the client has paid for.

Limiting a users use of bandwidth is not about legal or illegal, it is about giving users the bandwidth they have paid for. If you pay for dedicated bandwidth, then there is no reason to filter or shape your traffic except to limit it to the set ammount of bandwidth that you paid for. The problem is that residential users will pay for shared, best effort bandwidth but then try to use dedicated bandwidth at full capacity all day long. When this happens, I will shape their traffic. There just isn't any other way to make the business work.

Just so I understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

ISP's are selling you these huge bandwidth rates....5-30Mb/S in the case of Verizon, and then it turns out there's nothing *legitimate* to use that bandwidth on, and then they're shocked just SHOCKED that customers have found a way to use that bandwidth on?

I mean, seriously, why did they think customers wanted 5Mb/s? So they could download movie previews from the QT website?

Seriously, somebody explain their business plan to me.

Re:Just so I understand...

[ergo98]

I mean, seriously, why did they think customers wanted 5Mb/s? So they could download movie previews from the QT website?

Ummm, yes? Most high speed users are burst high-speed users, who get on their PC and browse around YouTube and other high bandwidth sites, and then "log off" and go about their life. They don't sit sucking 100% of the capacity around the clock, but when they do the high bandwidth is very beneficial.

The reality is that it is grossly economically unsustainable for someone to max out their connection perpetually, which is why many high speed providers have had max throughputs per time period since their inception (cue someone complaining about some provider that never did, yet a lot did. Up here in Canada, the major cable providers that operated under the @Home banner always listed a max throughput, beyond which they can assess additional charges, or disconnect you, or force you to upgrade to a much more expensive service if you want to continue).

My car might have 255HP, and while that helps me pass trucks and merge onto highways better, it doesn't mean that I drive around the clock with the pedal pushed to the floor.

Re:Just so I understand...

[wazza]

Argh! I can't stand it anymore... Your point is dead on, but then you went and polluted it with a really inappropriate analogy. Seriously, the car-analogy is overused to the point of cliche-death around here.

Your car's maximum power output not being used all the time (i.e. a mechanical device, that suffers wear and tear, used in a transport system that's controlled by a bunch of independant and variously-skilled drivers) has absolutely nothing to do with not using networking connections full time at 100% data rate. The latter is because of business economic reasons, since networks have:

a) no loss incurred by running at 100% over 10% capacity (assuming reasonably decent routers, and ignoring the pretty-much-spurious congestion hassles at the routers) - compared to the car analogy, at least, and...
b) no such things as "poor drivers". "Poor drivers" could only be broken routers, which would be removed from the network and replaced as soon as they're found. On the other hand, you have to live with "poor drivers" in the car system regardless of the fact that *they* should arguably be removed from the system. :>

Death to the car analogy!!!

Re:Just so I understand...

[Robotech_Master]

It's called "overselling" and it's a common practice in not just the home Internet business, but the webhosting business. Webhosts are happy to sell you a package with umpteen zillion megabytes of storage space and bandwidth, because hardly anyone ever uses that much; if they didn't oversell, they'd have all these resources lying fallow--but on the other hand, let even a significant fraction of those websites actually start to use that much and the host is in trouble.

Come to think of it, banks work that way, too; they lend out most of what they take in so they actually have relatively little cash on hand. If a run starts on the bank, then they run out of cash very quickly.

It's a highly efficient way of maximizing use of resources when it is not expected that everyone will want to use those resources to capacity at once--but it only works when there isn't a reason to use them to capacity.

The irony is that until BitTorrent, broadband was having a hell of a time getting people to sign up--because, after all, what would they need it for? And now that there's actually a "killer app," people are signing up so fast and using so much that it's causing a "backslash" (heh heh). Either feast or famine, nothing in-between.

Re:Just so I understand...

[Pneuma ROCKS]

It is true that they shouldn't expect their users to suck all of their capacity around the clock, but I don't think that gives them the right to enforce measures for them not to do it. They offered a service that allowed their users a certain bandwidth, usually around the clock, and the (note: paying) subscribers have the right to use as much as they want from that service.

I agree that it is not feasible to maintain such a service under the assumption that many subscribers will be sucking the life out of it 24 hours a day, but that is a problem of the ISP. If they want to offer a more restrictive service, then they should inform their subscribers of what they are receiving for their money. As far as I know, they offer a fixed bandwidth which is available throughout the day. If that is so, then subscribers should get exactly that and they shouldn't be blocked or filtered because of their activities.

If they want to change the rules of the game, they should put them on paper.

Re:Just so I understand...

[wuzzeb]

Come to think of it, banks work that way, too; they lend out most of what they take in so they actually have relatively little cash on hand. If a run starts on the bank, then they run out of cash very quickly.

Except with banks, if they start to run out of money they can easily drive a truck over to the next bank, or to the federal reserve bank and get more money. From wikipedia, "To prevent a bank run, the Central Bank guarantees that it will make short-term, high-interest loans to banks, to ensure that, if they remain economically viable, they will always have enough liquidity to honour their deposits." Also, banks are required by law to be members of FDIC (Federal Depository Insurance Corperation), so if your bank goes bankrupt from a run on the bank, the government will pay you the balance up to $100,000.

Both of these policys make it so you never need to "use" (by withdrawing) the entire amout of money in your bank acount... you an write checks, wire transfer, etc. Thus, it is in the users best interest NOT to use the entire "capaicty" allocated to them (since large amouts of money require vaults, guards, etc...).

Compare this to bandwith, where there is no incentive for a user to not use the entire bandwith. Also, since you can't have the benifit of bandwith without actually using the bandwith (like a bank, where you can write a check), I don't see how the ISP could create an incentive for the user to not use the entire bandwith besides charging different rates and such.

The way I see it...

[wolrahnaes]

They're selling me a TCP/IP connection to a global network with a service level guaranteed to varying degrees of accuracy depending on how much I pay. Unless it's spelled out in the contract, artificial restrictions should not be allowed.

If I'm on a residential connection, I can expect to not get full speed during peak times due to overselling, but if I can download HTTP at the full 8mbit but only 2mbit from a torrent, something is wrong.

Hopefully users of the ISPs that do this will choose to switch, though I'd imagine that the choices are limited in many areas.

Re:The way I see it...

[Haeleth]

realize that it is their network, they can do whatever they want with it

Well, no, actually. That claim is easily proven to be false: they can't use their network to sell child porn, therefore they can't do whatever they want with it.

They can do whatever they want within the limits of the law and the constraints of the contract they have signed with you.

If you have agreed in your contract that they can throttle your usage or restrict certain types of traffic, then they can do that. On the other hand, if they have foolishly agreed to supply you with a certain level of connectivity regardless of what you are using it for, then they cannot simply turn around and say "oops, we've changed our minds" -- they took your money, and that means they are obliged to give you what you paid for.

I suspect most, if not all, of the contracts people have agreed to do permit the ISP to change the terms of service and do permit the ISP to restrict traffic based on what the ISP decides is reasonable. In which case, yes, they can do that. But please don't spread the dangerous myth that ownership of property allows you ultimate power over that property. It doesn't. Every right has responsibilities attached.

Re:The way I see it...

[Firehed]

If I'm on a residential connection, I can expect to not get full speed during peak times due to overselling, but if I can download HTTP at the full 8mbit but only 2mbit from a torrent, something is wrong.

I totally agree. Unless there's something prespecified before you sign up, any sort of service-throttling should be grounds for a lawsuit! Nevermind the fact that there are terabytes of legitimate files on P2P services (let's start with every linux distro in existance) - it's not all pirated stuff. Maybe me using port 31337 (*strokes nonexistant goatee, grinning*) for P2P traffic helps matters at my end, but these types of moves are almost as unfair as upload bandwidth being an eighth of download bandwidth (which is, by and large, throttling FTP services).

I'd love to switch from my ghastly overpriced Adelphia (now Comcast?) cable services to Verizon's FIOS since it's both *much* faster and cheaper, but it's not available in my area. But this sort of bandwidth throttling would most definately ensure that I wouldn't sign up. My take is that if I pay for X bandwidth, I expect it to be available to me (within reason) 24/365 however I choose to use it. That could mean ripping huge files off of http servers while uploading something else to my own webserver (severely increasing costs to the servers from which I'm downloading, of course), or it could mean having a couple torrents open.

As I see it, it's them just trying to shift costs away from themselves, because without piracy, you could honestly expect to see a lot less customers "needing" high-speed internet (Napster classic was originally why I wanted to upgrade, and that was for 5mb files, not multi-gig files). Yes, pages loading faster are nice, but even broadband commercials make a point of how downloading music (with requisite "use legal services only" disclaimer in 1pt at the bottom) is so much faster - the whole "load five times as many pages in a minute than with dial-up" is a thing of the past.

Re:The way I see it...

[cervo]

But if they advertise unlimited bandwidth and then do not deliver, even if it is buried deep in a contract, it is false advertising and fraud. The attorney generals would have a field day with this once they are made to understand the issue. Truthfully, they should not advertise unlimited bandwidth. Or at the end of commercial have to talk really fast saying that they would throttle the bandwidth/cancel and limit the account like many other commercials have to do.

Re:The way I see it...

[dodobh]

They aren't claiming unlimited bandwidth. No download caps no download limit. And they can very well claim that you are abusing their service.

Re:The way I see it...

[wolrahnaes]

Of course having no contract means the ISP isn't obligated to anything either.

No problem

[Falconoffury]

ISPs can do whatever they want, but I will vote with my wallet. If they do anything to limit my bandwidth or IPs, I will simply switch ISPs. Just go to dslreports.com and look at how many companies are out there. I find it unlikely that all companies will unite against P2P.

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

ISPs can do whatever they want, but I will vote with my wallet. If they do anything to limit my bandwidth or IPs, I will simply switch ISPs.

Believe it or not, this is what many service providers would like you to do. If you're the kind of person who wants to eat $200 of steak all week long at the $5.95 buffet, we'd gladly help you go patronize someone else.

I'm the senior network engineer for a regional broadband operator. We were first to activate service in our region and had many heavy-use customers sign up along with the rest. Because we rate-limit P2P (as clearly explained in the service agreement and website FAQ), we saw about 8% to 10% of our customer base leave when the incumbant local exchange provider (ILEC) finally activated DSL.

I always found it amusing to see the ILEC do their dog and pony show when they had zero customers on the local DSL network. They'd feed the community with either a fractional T1 or at best, two T1's bonded. The speeds in their little demo trailer were impressive at first.

Then the P2P abusers would switch. Three months later, you'd see peak hour speeds of around 60 to 110 kbps - instant ISDN! Then we'd start getting calls from the abusers telling us we could have their business back ($35-$40 a month), but ONLY if we opened up P2P. The reality was our rate-limited P2P was ultimately faster than the unpoliced nasty DSL network that died when a handful of P2P servers lit up and consumed most of the bandwidth.

I've seen some pretty hilarious emails passed on from customer service, from the threats to file a class action lawsuit because we wouldn't permit unrestricted P2P (from people that had left us to go to a DSL network that was a disaster), to explanations that a customer's request should never be ignored if we are a good company. We'll even get the occasional Better Business Bureau complaint because we rate-limit. I've even seen explanations that we should charge everyone more money to subsidize the few abusers - apparently nobody wants to use their own money to pay for their P2P habit.

The funny thing is that we have a standard response that provides these customers with a connection that doesn't have the rate-limiting for about $200 per Mbps, with a guaranteed SLA. When you're delivering this to rural communities, $200/Mbps is pretty incredible and it's darn near our cost to get it there. Yet we never have takers on it - P2P hogs expect to dine for close to free.

Ultimately you have a choice: you can please 85% of your customers with well engineered traffic, and send the 10% abusers and 5% financial deadbeats to the competition, or you can please the losers and send away the good customers. If you want to stay in business, you know what the right decision is.

Fair?

[WombatDeath]

Of course it's fair, with the proviso that the restrictions are made clear before sign-up. Vote with your feet, and all that.

My ISP doesn't have an anti-p2p policy although, that said, I'm not aware of any in the UK that do. On the other hand most impose a download cap, which can amount to the same thing.

This can be fixed

[mcgroarty]

Why don't more bit torrent programs preferentially select for other clients in similar subnets, or with the same domain in reverse lookups? Most ISPs could care less about local traffic and this would move P2P apps farther off their radar. This would especially help if torrenting within an organization or on a campus where local connections might be 100mbit or better.

Re:This can be fixed

[marcosdumay]

Why don't ISPs support multicast, and remove the need for bittorrent? Oh, yes, because they want us to need (and, so, pay for) the bandwidth, not to use it.

Inevitable

[terrencefw]

Speaking as someone who works for a british ISP who traffic shapes, I can definately say that traffic shaping is here to stay.

Bandwidth isn't free, and while you always have the chance to move to a different ISP if you don't agree with traffic shaping, ultimately there won't be any ISPs left who either a) traffic shape or b) have gone bankrupt.

Broadband is a contended service and a lot of people seem to forget that. Sure, you can get an uncontended connection to do what you want with, but be prepared to spend £1000+ per month for it.

Thinking it's reasonable to max out your connection 24x7 is about as reasonable as walking into an all-you-can-eat restaurant with a spade and wheelbarrow. You could hardly complain about being thrown out.

Re:Inevitable

[MooUK]

If you don't mean unlimited in any of the reasonably obvious interpretations (and entirely unlimited IS an obvious interpretation) then say exactly what you mean. If you mean 24/7 access, then say that.

Here's what we do:

[numbski]

We hard cap throughput based on what our clients have paid for. ie, if they've paid for 1.5 down, 768k up, those hard caps are put into place.

Second, yes, we shape traffic. VOIP traffic gets top priority, ssh second, http third, and bittorrent, or any other p2p app get the lowest priority.

These prioritizations are shared across our client base. That way, if anyone is doing ANYTHING that isn't p2p, it gets priority over p2p traffic. We think this is fair. If you want to run your p2p app overnight when no one else is on, then have fun. If you're doing it during the day, don't expect to get priority over everyone else. Note that we DO offer to sell dedicated services, and we do note up front to our customers that what we sell them is BURSTABLE throughput and that they are buying something like 256k symmetrical dedicated, and the 1.5MB/768k is burst. they aren't buying that in dedicated chunks. If they want dedicated, we can sell them that, but they have to pay for it.

It just doesn't make sense to pay for 1.5Mbit symmetrical dedicated unless you're going to saturate that pipe ALL THE TIME.

So far, no complaints.

Nope

[the_macman]

What is your ISPs policy regarding P2P and is it fair for them to put restrictions and conditions on its use."

Ummmm no. Absolutely not. If you're paying for your ISP, say for a 1.5Mbps download pipe then that's what you should get regardless. Since when was P2P technology considered "wrong use" of bandwidth? If they throttle your bandwidth to anything less then what's the point of paying them?

Look at it like this. I pay ISP for BW. I use BW. Because I use paid for BW, ISP lowers it. I can't honestly give my money to anyone ISP that does that.

I live in an apartment complex and we are allotted 500mb/24 hours otherwise traffic to our computer is put on a "lower priority" flag. I assume their logic is to prevent downloading of movies and what not. The problem is 500mb of legal data is totally feasable. Today I downloaded the EVE client, 564 MB. Now I have to suffer slower speeds because of it? Fuck that. Since my ISP is provided with my rent it's a one package deal and I don't have much of a choice, but once I purchase a home, hell will freeze over before I pay an ISP to throttle my bandwidth. My .02

-T

Contract

[JohnnyBigodes]

If I rent i.e. a 2MBit line, I want the 2Mbit that I paid for, period. No matter what I choose to do with the connection. If they want to cut down on people, then advertise the service correctly.

Re:Contract

[Todd Knarr]

If you're buying 2mbit of dedicated bandwidth, then yes you're entitled to it no matter what you do with it. But most people buying broadband connections aren't buying dedicated bandwidth. They're buying shared bandwidth burstable to (for example) 2mbit. In that case, using 2mbit continuously is trying to use something you didn't buy.

It's like my old dial-up ISP. They sold two kinds of accounts: standard dial-up, and dedicated modem lines. With a dedicated line, you bought modems for both ends and a dedicated phone line from your house to the ISP and you were entitled to exclusive use of that connection all the time. A standard dial-up account was not a dedicated line, and the assumption was that you weren't going to be dialed in continuously. So when people bought a standard dial-up account and tried to stay dialed in 24x7, after a bit the ISP sent them a nasty-gram: "Either buy a dedicated line, stop trying to stay dialed in 24 hours a day, or find your account terminated. If you haven't chosen in 10 days, we'll choose #3 for you.". I'd note that a standard dial-up account was $20/month, while a dedicated line started at $120/month and went up depending on distance ($20 for the account, $100 and up for phone company charges for the pair).

Argument...

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

I once got into an argument with a former ISP admin.

It went along the lines of this:

Him: You can't just download massive amounts of data from bittorrent etc.
Me: Why not? All the ISP's talk about "unlimited" broadband, by that very definition they aren't limiting it.
Him: But they have to pay for that bandwidth.
Me: Yeah? And I pay for them to provide me a service that is unlimited as advertised, if they're complaining now about how people are using more bandwidth than they expected then that's too bad. They advertised it as unlimited (something a LOT of UK ISP's do), and now they're complaining? They've only got themselves to blame.

Long story short, all these ISPs who are whinging only have themselves to blame. They hark on about "SUPER FAST BROADBAND1!!1!! WITH NO LIMITS!!!11!!" and then they discover that people actually use it?
Idiots.

DIfferent services for different people

[GoatPigSheep]

Here (quebec) we have broadband that spans a large scale of user demographics.

the cheapest cable has a monthly limit of 1gig up and 1gig down and a speed around 256kbit down, which is very low but acceptable if you only do light browsing and email. The next level of broadband cable is 10gig up/ 20gig down at 6mbit down, 900kbit up, which is fine if you are a casual bittorent user who doesn't leave the application open overnight every night (fine for the occasional linux iso or tv show). The most expensive cable is 10mbit down/1.5mbit up (I believe), with no limit, which is good for hardcore users. The prices are about 25/month for the cheapo plan, 50 for the 20/10 plan, and 75 a month canadian for the unlimited plan. I have never had a problem with the unlimited plan and one of my friends who also has it even had a discussion with one of the cable guys who came by to fix some services who suggested the best bittorrent client to use! I feel 75/month is more than fair for a very fast reliable connection and the cable company doesn't seem to care much about how much users use the unlimited plan.

DSL is a different story, you can get unlimited bandwidth for about 30$ cad a month but the speeds are quite low, about 3mbit down (so they claim, ussually less) and 500kbit up. Generally the cheap dsl is less reliable as well. There are more expensive dsl plans as well and they generally do not have any bandwidth limits.

turning the tables

[v1]

What is your ISPs policy regarding P2P and is it fair for them to put restrictions and conditions on its use.

When most of the big ISPs hit the scenes, they were all about promises. The provider that promised the most had the best shot at getting the new customers in what was a bit of a feeding frenzy as people rushed to get onto the "information superhighway". So naturally they promised no limits. If you will remember back ~10 years ago, there WERE limits. I very clearly remember my university had a large bank of dial-in modems at 2400bps, and a small bank of "fast" 9600's, and we were limited to 24 hrs per month on the fast ones. Anyone under such limits would gladly go with another ISP that had no limits on traffic.

Five years ago this was not a big deal for the ISPs. Very few users were even achieving 1/4 of their cap. An ISP could easily place customers on their network that could, if they capped out, consume 4x the available bandwidth that the ISPs were leasing. Since the average user wouldn't go above 25% usage even at peak hours (8-10pm) this was fine. The typical ratio of dial-up customers to dial-in lines was between 7:1 and 11:1 depending on your ISP, so they were figuring that at peak times, only 1/7th of their customers would be online.

Now, with things like BitTorrent and always-on internet like DSL and cable, it's entirely possible for a customer to max their line out, even for weeks at a time. As more and more customers go with things like BT, the average bandwidth usage of a customer skyrockets, and ISPs have to scramble to handle complaints of "the internet didn't used to be this slow!" from customers, and have to pay for more bandwidth from their upstreams to keep customers happy.

It takes about a quarter second to realize this makes the ISPs unhappy. They have lowered their prices in response to competition, and now their costs are going up. Now, should we have pity for them? I tried to think of a single ISP in my area that went out of business, and I can't think of one. Not a single one. I don't care how much of a hit they're taking to their bottom line, they must still be plenty proffitable. So instead of having a 10mil quarter, now they're having to "suffer" a 7mil quarter. Waaaah.

The ISPs are looking for ways to protect their pocketbook. The ISP industry is still proffitable, it's just not as lucritive as it used to be. Customers are willing to pay less, and are demanding more. That is how a free market economy works. Unlike some markets today, (gas stations come immediately to mind...) there are still going to always be a few providers willing to offer a little lower price for the same service, or the same service you used to get from your old ISP at the same price. Lower my cap or "shape" my bandwidth so my services go slower and I'll change providers tomorrow. Just watch me.

The Trouble wih Bandwidth Shaping

[matthewcraig]

ISPs are increasingly using bandwidth shaping to provide more functionality for their in-house services and less functionality for other services. The trouble is users have no idea this is occurring. The user purchases "speeds up to 1.5 Mbps" with that assumption that the ISP will make every effort to obtain those speeds. The ISP never reveals their plan for low-bandwidth applications to get full speed and high-bandwidth applications to get low speed.

Bandwidth shaping deceived the actual speeds when troubleshooting user complaints. While the ISP can have the user "test" the throughput with a FTP-protocol transfer to a local server, the ISP allows full bandwidth for that particular service to that particular server. The ISP is using technical smoke-and-mirrors to rip off their customers.

Lowering user speeds based on usage is clearly unfair, if not illegal. I have seen first-hand how a tel-com DSL provider lowered the bandwidth, yet continued charging for the higher level of service. After my DSL provider performed a "speed check" without my knowledge, my maximum download speed was throttled to 650 Kbps down from 1.5 Mbps, but my monthly charge was never modified since my 512 Kbps upstream was not changed. It took a day of diagnostics and harassing their technical and customer support before I found out those details. (The only resolution they would provide is lowering it further to 512 Kbps up / 256 Kbps down and charging $9.99 less.) This happened after two years using the service at the 1.5 Mbps faster speed, and I believe it was because I was an active consumer of their bandwidth.

Internet Service Providers have one customer mold in their mind: Their perfect user checks email (through the ISP's SMTP server) and browses web pages. They are trying to sell high-speed access for low-response time for these activities, however, as users become more aware of high-speed services (P2P, Streaming movies, Vontage, Online video game entertainment) that customer mold changes. ISPs are having trouble adjusting to these users, and they are throttling their access in hopes they get frustrated and go away or stop using these high-speed services.

Someone who knows how the regulatory system works should pursue a complaint with the FCC when they encounter the bandwidth throttling on a specific application. This would bring light to the unscrupulous practice. The difficulty they would have is trying to determine how much actual throttling was done and how much of the latency was application specific or caused by problems outside the ISP.

Less and less ISPs provide free use of the bandwidth you purchase. Users pay for the entire spectrum of bandwidth, but ISPs will slow down your traffic if you are not using that bandwidth in the way they want. This is slowing down adoption of new technologies (problems with Vontage?) and eliminating business ideas that would require dedicated bandwidth.

Sorry... but that's not the way it should be.

[flithm]

First of all, you're thinking like a mindless ISP employee, but secondly, you're right! This is the whole problem. The whole state of ISP business plans is set up wrong. People are accustomed to a low monthly fee, and ISPs like it because they get a guaranteed income from the majority low-bandwidth users.

I myself am I high usage person. But I know this, and I'm okay with it. If an ISP doesn't like me using so much bandwidth they call me up and complain and I respond with "Sure no problem, I've got more money, take some of it, because I want to use more bandwidth." Traditionally in the past they've told me "UUUhhh we can't do that, you have to use less bandwidth!"

WHAT?!

Fortunately things are starting to change. I'm not paying my service provider extra fees for extra bandwidth and we're both happy.

I personally see the future going with zero restrictions, but people paying for the usage. This is the only way it will go, with companies that have attitudes like yours going bankrupt.

You're forgetting that people actually WANT to use these services. It's not your companies right to refuse them. It IS however your companies duty to its shareholders to come up with a way to satisfy market demands... and unthrottled P2P is one of them!

Quit thinking like a mindless zombie and get with the times!

It's the business model...

[fullback]

Who decided "bandwidth isn't free?" It doesn't cost anything more to talk all day long on a local call in the US. How about all that bandwidth? This is such nonsense. I live in the most expensive country in the world and have 100Mbps (up and down) fiber with no limits for less than US$70/month. It feels like dinner for two once a month because of the cost of living. The only difference is that US and European companies don't want to invest and try to suck every last penny from outdated technology. First, the argument was, "We can't *possibly* run fiber to your home! What are you, nuts? The country is too big!" How in the hell do you think everyone got a phone line or a sewer line? Then, it switched to, "Well, okay, but you only get 1Mbps down and 256k up because it's too expensive and that's all you need!" Yeah, right.... broadband, schmodbrand. "Well, well... It's unlimited! Really!" Liars. Huge friggin' pack of lying snakes. I love this argument that bandwidth "costs so much." A fabricated industry and business model from the telecoms with meters on the brain.

For people who have never been behind the scenes..

[yhetti]

I've managed two ISPs, one a Dialup/DSL and the other a WISP in the last two years, and I can assure the /. crowd that bandwidth throttling is nothing new, and you're probably all already subjected to it anyway.

Pretty much any ISP that's ever had to face a legal problem has somewhere in their contract/TOS/AUP that the service is a "best effort", regardless of anything else you may have heard. It's kind of like the "NO WARANTEE WHATSOEVER" clause in the GPL; it's designed to keep ISPs from getting sued in the event that downtime causes a business to lose a contract or something similar.

Pretty much every ISP that's smaller than 10k people keeps an "Abusive User" list. ISPs sell bandwidth based on average usage multiplied by their bandwidth an oversubscription rate. When somebody is some amount over the average (say, 2 STDDEVs), they got throw in the "Abusive User" pile. The way we handled it was to set Abusers entire traffic pipe as one priority above "bulk".

Anything not classified as "Good" data (HTTP, SMTP, POP3/IMAP, etc) got assigned to "Bulk". Therefore, an Abusive's entire pipe had a lower priority then a normal sub's "Good" traffic.

In this case, our "best effort" was to provide a better service to the vast number of people who do *not* download 10 gigs of newsgroups a day. If the Abusive actually canceled there account, that's *great*, because we were losing money on them anyway and could now pack 20-30 Normals into the bandwidth they were previously using.

Also, if you check in your contract, most are worded so that the bandwidth cap is advertised as the "up to" speed. Basically, it means: "Due to how the Internet operates, we cannot garanutee you any maximum speed. We can, however, garantee you that it will never be over _______ Kbps, as that is the service you have purchased."

So the moral of the story is: If you download 20 gigs a day, your ISP would probably rather you leave anyway, because they're losing money on you.

You Pay For This and They Give You That

[Doc Ruby]

Why don't they just put restrictions preventing you from using any bandwidth they sell you? It's just as justified as their P2P restriction.

Umm...backlash?

[denoir]

The major broadband provider in Sweden, Bredbandsbolaget is so upset with people downloading large amounts of data that they upgraded the standard 10 Mbit connection to 100 Mbit.

The reason why they did this is of course not altruistic, but they have a number of online services like video rental that they wish to promote. 10 Mbit is acceptable for a standard divx compressed movie, but when you upgrade to DVD quality (as they have done), it's simply too slow. So the 100 Mbit upgrade was basically a necessity.

And no, they are not complaining against the P2P traffic and have made no attempts at reducing it or blocking it.

When you have a real fiber optics connection you not only expect, but demand to have unrestricted bandwith. Otherwise, what's the point of it?

Legitimate use

[crossmr]

1)Bittorrent has legitimate use. It is often used for linux distros, and many places are using it for demos of software and nasa even uses it to give access to large images. Try explaining the throttling to customers using it for "legitimate" reasons.
Customer: Why is my download so slow?
ISP: Well sir, we detected that you're using bittorrent, that must mean you're downloading pirated software or movies.
C: I'm an academic and I'm downloading some images from nasa I need for a class tommorrow.
I: uh..uhm.. have you tried turning it off and on?

2) I'll repeat the false advertising. Nowhere in the advertisements does it say "Unlimited HTTP traffic at super high speeds!". In fact nowhere in the advertisements I've seen does it give any indication that a certain type of traffic is welcome.

3) Pick one: Usage cap, throttling. Enforce it. Make it very clear in your terms what the usage cap is, what the penalty for going over it is. Offer tiered usage plans, don't just sodomize them with something stupid like $10/GB after 20 GB limit. I have a 90 GB limit I believe, I usually top out around 36 GB a month. I haven't experienced any throttling to my knowledge. I do notice that legit linux distros go WAY faster that less than reputable torrent sites. I don't think that has anything to do with my ISP though.

4) Prepare for the backlash. If you choose to throttle, those users you so aggressively marketed to will be pissed off. If you don't spell out any limits on use very clearly, its going to bite you in the ass. If you want to advertise something you can't provide, don't sell the product.

Return of metered useage

[nurb432]

Now that they have everyone used to using the net, it it time to clamp back down to where you only get so many bytes a month, or so many hours.

Remember when this was the norm, and few people really cared about the 'internet' ? un-metered usage is what caused/allowed things to take off. going back to it will hurt a lot of business that exist only because of the network.

This reminds me a a drug dealer. Cheap[ drugs until you get hooked.

Cell phones are next, now that all your teenagers are used to those 'free in-plan calling' things

Re:Two Solutions to the 'problem'

[alienw]

Let's just clear something up. Wireless broadband is never going to happen on a large scale, and it will never give you significant bandwidth. There just isn't enough wireless spectrum out there to give everyone more than a megabit or so. If you think wireless poses any threat to cable or telephone companies, you are very wrong. The future will be fiber to the node and something like gigabit ethernet running to each customer. Of course, you won't get more than maybe 20 MBps for the internet service; the backbones aren't fat enough to support that. The bandwidth will be used by the provider for things like TV and other commercial stuff. There are lots of limitations as to how fast the internet can operate.

Congrats....you all missed my point

[Anonymous Coward]

I get what you're saying, but you all didn't answer my question...

If all they expect you to do is chat, do some vonage etc etc, then why are they selling me 5Mb/S *BASE* bandwidth and for a few more bucks I can get 30Mb/S. If not for downloading lots of stuff, then what?

I'm not arguing that they're overselling, I'm asking if all they wanted me to do was chat, then why have such huge download rates available. WHere is the logic?

Two sensible proposals ragrding P2P vs ISPs

[RedLaggedTeut]

1) ISPs should set up their own P2P "clients" to act as servers to deliver the most popular legal content (let's just assume that there is actually a demand for legitmate content on P2P networks)

2) ISPs should not simply block P2P traffic, but should instead encourage P2P-traffic between users in their own and "friendly" network, so that more of the flow of data in P2P stays within their own networks, reducing fees to other nets. Since many P2P-networks consider latency in their queue ratings, one way would be to raise latency a little.

I am not even mentioning that ISPs should structure their contracts in such a way that power-users with high network load pay more. Using the networks resources fully is not rogue behavior, it is simply different behavior.