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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."
Unless it's spelled out in the contract, artificial restrictions should not be allowed.
Just curious, have you ever read the service contract with your ISP? I know I haven't. My guess would be that they include a paragraph to the tune of, "If the user is doing something we don't like, we can do whatever we want about it."
Unlike in the states where you subscribe to broadband directly through your Incumbent telco or Cable co. The majority of people in the UK buy their broadband connection through a retail ISP who in turn buy their bandwidth through the wholesale provider namely British Telecom. This has the advantage of much greater competition so people can switch from one provider to another.
If you don't like the service that you are getting from your ISP or Cable Company you can always switch to another ISP who offers a better service though maybe at a higher price.
Given that DSL subscribers in the UK have recently been given the choice to upgrade to an 8Mbit service at no extra cost, an all you can eat service model is not going to be sustainable as the few bandwidth hogs will saturate their connections and leech all the bandwidth. There has to be some sort of fair use policy and this differs between the ISP's
PlusNet has taken to use traffic shaping to effectively block all p2p traffic once a user had gone over a rather small usage limit. This has resulted in a large migration of users away from PlusNet and onto my ISP Nildram. Nildram do not traffic shape and they give a generous 50gig per month download limit which only applied during peak times. After 12am to 8am it's all you can eat. They also role your previous months unused allowance over to the next month.
It remains to be seen if my ISP can cope with the extra demand but the point is this is a good example of the free market and capitalism. If a provider gives bad service or poor value for money their customers will simply migrate to another provider.
It's unfortunate the people in the U.S don't have such a free market for broadband.
I can tell you have never managed a network. The problem with bittorrent is apparent even if you share your connection with 2 roommates. It is extremely aggressive, does not respect bandwidth limits, and opens a ridiculous number of connections. I have had to resort to blocking popular bittorrent ports on my linksys router just to keep the 5MBit cable connection from choking. Once the connection is close to being saturated, _nothing_ works because too many packets are getting lost or timing out.
On an ISP scale, you _never_ want to get to the point where you are using 100% of your bandwidth, because the network will slow down to a crawl. All of your customers who play online games, have Vonage, or just browse the web will immediately start complaining, because those services simply aren't usable when the network is congested. Neither car engines nor networks are designed to run at 100% load, all the time. The exact reasons may be different, but the analogy itself is spot-on.