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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."
also, shouldn't it be a 'backlash', as opposed to a 'backslash'?
http://xkcd.com/313/
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.
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.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
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.
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.
But video files are much larger than music files and have slower upload speeds. This Statment is a little mis-leading. What I gather is that the larger the file the slower the upload speed. It should be the larger the file the longer it takes to upload. With My ISP I have 2Mbps/sec upload speed. That remains the same no matter if i'm sending an email or if im FTP'ing a 3 meg to my site
My ISP limits me to 512Kbps download and 256Kbps upload so they don't have much to worry about.
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.
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.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
I'm sure I wont be the last to say it, but from my point of view it's completely uncalled for. I pay $60 a month because I can't get DSL or naked cable, I'm going to use ever ounce of bandwidth I've paid for. Maybe if the cable monopoly in my town wasn't bending me over my computer desk I wouldn't feel so obligated to get my money's worth from them, but that's what this is really, I've paid for access to a certain amount of bandwidth and given that there were no provisions about the use of that bandwidth beyond what is described by federal law it's mine, mine, mine.
Yes they can change the ToS at any time, without warning, and they can also find themselves a new shill to collect money from. I wonder if they'd get the point when they day after that I cancel my contract.
if my ISP makes it impossible for me to download Linux ISOs when i need em i will complain to them, and if i get negative results i will cancel my subscription with them
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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.
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.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
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
-T
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 don't think ISPs should be expected to _not_ do something about bandwith hogs that are using 100s of gigs of bandwith on what is supposed to be a residential service. There should probably be upload caps per month and above a certain amount say 100 gb, you have to pay for every 5 gb up. And downloads could also have a cap but be set much higher because downloading is always easier. I hate the greedy corporations too but I'd rather be able to pay a reasonable amount to use the services I want then have these artificial restrictions implemented especially as p2p is increasingly being used for more legitimate things.
Thing is I pay a couple pounds more for the unlimited service, the cheaper service is limited at something pathetic (1-2 gig a month). Hardly fair play. Currently looking into Demon, see how long it'll take me to switch over.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
This backlash will encourage customers to resort to encrypted Bittorent connections to avoid being shaped by packetshappers. In all, I really dont care if they shape my packets because I am not going to sit at the screen and wait for a movie to finsih downloading when I could be watching episodes NipTuck on TV.
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.
A spade and a wheelbarrow aren't tools common to being taken into an all-you-can-eat buffet, whereas attempting to max out your connection 24x7, doesn't. I am a fast eater and back in the day, I could really put it away.
The problem here isn't contention, for this is ISP generated slowdown when there isn't contention to save the ISP upsteam fees. The problem here is the ISP's inaccurate advertising. They say x bps, but they fail to mention, "Oh but we'll do things(which themselves need elaborated on) to keep you from actually getting that amount), and also fail to mention a guaranteed minimum.
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.
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
Bittorrent is not the problem. With the (slow) emergence of bandwidth intesive services (like legal movie downloads) this problem will not go away, even if you block all torrent traffic.
Right now, most ISPs will charge you less for a slower connection and more for a faster connection, but they do not differentiate amongst the classes of users that use their faster connections. I am not a heavy user, but I do occasionally like to stream movies and when I download something I want it to be fast. Compare that to my friend who downloads several movies and games a month. Our bandwidth usage is like night and day. I don't think I broke a Gig/month in the last year, he probably hovers around 10Gigs/month.
Bandwidth is not an unlimited resource, if you use more you'll pay more.
If the contract lets them do this, well, fsck em. Change ISP. I myself want unrestricted net.
For most, in Finland at least, that is no longer possible. Outbound port 25 for example is mostly blocked except to the ISP's smtp servers (which, without exception, are SLOW today because they all have stupid filters and antivirus checkers), which sucks ass when you test mail server settings and such.
We have WINBLOWS to thank for all this nonsense. Fsck it too.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
video conferencing. the thing is they wont remove the upload bandwidth cap to enable it.
if people started really pimping out video conferencing with set top boxes for your tv using a wireless lan connection or something not only would you have a legitimate use but youd have isps scared sh%tless that people would beg for more bandwidth.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
I wonder, does p2p really have anything to do with bandiwdth usage? Let's assume there was no p2p software whatsoever. With the amount of bandwidth that ISP's are making available, and the rise of a more technologically savvy generation, would this prevent people from utilizing as much of the bandwidth as they are now? My thinking is, that right now, p2p is the most convenient for a vast majority of people to get what they want, but I don't believe that a less convenient delivery method would truly deter people from downloading audio, video, whatever files they are looking for. So, I'm not really sure this is a p2p issue whatsoever.
As a side note, I'm not sure that ISP's could successfully implement bandwidth shaping, and/or bandwidth caps. If a single ISP were to open up shop and offer no bandwidth shaping or bandwidth caps, in the area that this isp serviced, I believe that people would vote with their money and choose this ISP over others. The only means to prevent this is to either compete with the ISP (getting rid of bandwidth shaping/tiered pricing/caps or lowering costs) or to use what would be considered illegal business practices by 1) leveraging existing pseudo-monopolies 2) interfering with traffic from competing ISP or 3) massive collusion amongst established ISPs. Unless of course they get the government to give them a reach around.
So to summarize, it's not about p2p, it's about the people, and the success or failure of limiting consumers will be whether or not they'll be competing in a free market or practical monopoly (government sanctioned or otherwise).
Just some thoughts w/o really thinking too hard.
$sys$droids
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.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Since i started to use Bittorrent, it seems they put me on a "blacklist" of some sort- now whenever i seed anything for any period of time they throttle or turn off my internet for some time to "punish" me. At any time of the day, its hard to get download speeds past 300kbs and upload speeds past 100kbs. Optimum Online is the only broadband thats around here, so i just have to deal with it. When calling them to find out what exactly i was doing wrong, they told me not to seed for a long period of time. When asking at what rate i was allowed to seed before they bothered me, they were EXTREMELY reluctant to give me an exact upload ratio. Eventually one guy broke down and told me that they monitor anything over 20kbs thats been seeding for an hour! I can barely play an MMO without them shutting off my internet...
Bandwidth is how fast you can send or receive data. Data volume is how much data you send or receive. The ISPs are concerned about the data volume you use, not the bandwidth.
I totally agree with you. I just downloaded open SuSE 10.1 RC1, a 3.3 gig torrent. I will probably get the release torrent when the final release is made. I think a lot of these ISP's think that all P2P is people sharing copyrighted material, so they think no one will complain if we slow it down. What they forget is that there are a lot of legitimate uses for P2P. Another legitimate use is for gamers, World of Warcraft sends out patches with bittorrent. More and more legitimate uses are found as time goes on.
I trust Microsoft as far as I could comfortably spit a dead rat
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.
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.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I on the other hand absolutely loath those ISP's who claim "unlimited" bandwidth wich in reality is "fair use" wich in reality is a few gigabyte.
Hell a few even in the year 2006 sell accounts with a 1 gig datalimit and charge a mint for going over it. Without offcourse CLEARLY spelling this out to the consumer.
Who then buys WoW or some other MMO game and then is suprised that the initial patch alone exceeds his limit (based on real life experiences)
I can understand the appeal of an ISP wanting to advertise with "unlimited" and then balking at the fact that some people take this literal but we got something called truth in advertising laws.
I just wish the legal system would spend more time enforcing them. Next time a customer is billed extra for going over the limit of his unlimited service the ISP should be slammed down with a million dollar fine for deceitfull advertising practises and deception. Maybe even fraud.
Then we can simply choose our ISP and contract based on our needs.
It seems to work for Mobile phone contracts. Allthough a strange thing is that mobile phone companies typically try to oversell you, giving you a contract for more minutes then you use. Why on earth then are ISP's trying constantly to undersell you? Must be the old IT rule of normal rules not applying.
I short I don't mind ISP setting restrictions just as long as they are honest and I can still buy my 300gb open ports account. In holland at least it seems there are at least a few ISP going after the no-nonsense users who don't like portals or other crap and just want a connection, fast and wide. You pay more but as I am now temporarily living in someone elses home and forced to use a crap ISP (tiscali) over my own (xs4all) I can see that although I payed twice as much it was worth every cent.
Sadly ISP's like tiscali are not in the business of selling you bandwidth. They want to be content handlers/providers making a fat load of profit of you not from putting through bits but by selling you their content services. Kinda like a telecom running its own sexlines (wich for mobile telecoms is in fact the case)
Tiscali doesn't even have binary usenet because "most of the content on usenet is pirated and we prefer our users to buy their content through us". Almost literal translation.
Sadly many people don't have a choice of ISP. This is bad but then that is what happens when you vote for capatalists who believe in letting the stall owners run the market (that is what the free market really is, giving the key to the market to the stall owners.)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't understand. If they have an issue with people using the full capacity of their purchased lines, why don't they charge based on how much capacity you use?
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.
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.
Network to thy Neighbour. ISPs represent centralisation and control. Build a mesh, before it's too late.
From TFA: 1/3 of the traffic on the net is P2P traffic.
That means that only 2/3 of net traffic is spam?
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
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.
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!
There hasn't been a company in the US doing this (unless you want to count the numerous colleges blocking the normal ports). If they want a solution, they can block all the ports except for 80, 443, 21, 59, 6667, and a few more. If no one is using 6667 for an IRC server they could then use that for torrents, which is probably a big deal to a ISP.
The major thing about all this now is that encryption has come into play. Encryption of course sort of hides what kind of data is going through that port, but it also enables for some connections that won't work unencrypted to work better. Most smart torrent users are not using 6881-6889 anyway. (The first solution to traffic shaping was changing the port.) Azureus and uTorrent both support encryption now, specifically an implementation of RC4. So then what now? Should the cable companies make encryption a violation of terms of service? Or even go as far as to lobby the Congress (I'm talking US) to make it illegal without some sort of license (VeriSign would have it first of course)? It all sounds crazy to me.
I feel like this article is only talking about UK, but I'm sure the US companies are thinking about it (I think there was one that did it, can't remember name). And there was definitely one in Canada who set traffic shaping to their service. Canadian users are also encrypting to get past it. It seems like there will always be a way.
I'm an American college student doing an internship (IM A WHORE http://yoosic.com/ and studying at the Technical Univeristy of Dresden.
I have a fiance' and several close friends back home. We realized that our own parents, even our older siblings (Gen X), didn't have the communication tools that we are graced with. Calls overseas are kind of expensive, about $0.10 a minute if they call me using a calling card and $0.30 a minute if I use a ring-back service here. Its unaffordable if we call directly.
I was happy when my boss clued me in to Skype. Free text/voice/video calls to another Skype user and a mere $.02, hot damn. $10 a month and I can call everyone, even the older family without computers. No dice according to the IT people here.
I get 3 gigabytes a month. When I'm at home I like to listen to internet radio (http://rtds.org/ which is perfectly legal. I am a computer science student at a new university, I've had to pull down quite a few tools, papers, lecture slides, research for presentations via the ACM archives, etc.
I am so used to having unlimited internet access. I know that it is still a luxury and many of my peers have less contact back home, but it is a great lift to someone who is so far from home to be able to stay in touch.
In essence all I really need is around 500 kbps and set my large downloads to run when I'm not actively using my laptop. My usage is very legal and could be considered necessary for my coursework and in an extreme case the psychological health or my family and I.
If I exceed my cap, it would be nice if someone would ask if I can legitimize my usage, but thats not the nature of the management.
If you want to limit how much soda I get you can give me a smaller straw or give me a smaller glass, but understand that we have agreed on some minimum volumes and flow rates of my soda. Or more appropriately in my case, I can only buy soda from you and I have to take what I can get.
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.
From my limited understanding it seems like this type of traffic shaping should reduce the low priority service speed by 2%-5%. VOIP packets get 1st priority, but there really isn't all that much VOIP traffic. And it's the packets that get priority, not the "conversation".
Are the ISPs really doing traffic shaping or are they doing something more primitive? Are they really just doing port throttling? Detecting P2P traffic and artifically limiting its bandwidth? If so, that's stupid. done right, shaping should make things better for everyone, including the P2P user.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
I think cox has the best policy for this so far. Where I live they sell plans of 9mbps/1mbps, 5mbps/512kbps, and several smaller ones that I don't use.
;)
Those limits are hard limits, sometimes you can get a burst a little bit above them, but it comes down to normal really fast, but any time you're online you can get those speeds.
To compensate for providing those speeds like that, they have a soft limit of how much bandwidth you can use throughout the day/month. I don't know what the 9/1 config limits are, but for 5/512 they allow 2GB down per day and 60GB/month, and 1.5/day and 7.5/month up. If you go over these limits, they don't kill you, but they will send you a notice saying upgrade, stop using so much bandwidth each month, or we can kill your service.
Out of all the business plans I've seen, I find this idea better then the shaping other ISPs use as you're not pissing off the customers but you're still able to keep control of how much bandwidth you use each month. I believe 99% of all NSPs do it this way too, cox learns from the best
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.
Why couldn't bittorrent be modified to use HTTP for the downstream, or operate on HTTP entirely? IANABTH, but that would certainly get around any port-throttling issues.
You are not the customer.
The fact that you don't know of any ISP that says take all you can is reflective not of reality but your limited knowledge. You're entitled to your own opinion, but attempting to have your own facts is disgusting.
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.
What really annoys me is they have three levels of service, and their own VoIp traffic gets higher priority than competitors. That is an abuse of power.
-steve
It's been happening since consumer broadband hit the scene a decade ago (or has it been around longer?). "We can give you twice the speed of DSL!" "Oh...wait. We weren't expecting you to actually use all that bandwidth. Um...We're just gonna make a few adjustments. No need to bother you with the details. Oh, and stop running your personal web site and mail servers."
When I signed up for a cablemodem, I was one of the first people in town. I called the cable company to request a hookup and was transferred to the director of engineering to set up the appointment. It was that new. So, while I had the head cheese on the line, I asked if I'd be able to run my own servers. "Well, we don't have a business service set up yet but you can get a static IP for an extra $10/month. Go for it." A few months later, they shut off my service for running servers. Just personal stuff like email for a few friends and a few of their websites. Very low-bandwidth stuff. Of course, they did it while I was on vacation and didn't bother to contact me first. Had to call tech support at 2am to find out why I couldn't get online.
And now they're going after bandwidth "abuse". Nevermind the fact that they're shoving 4, 8, even 16 meg service plans down our throats with no option for just a simple 128/128k connection. Last place I lived, I had a 384/128 connection for $20/month. That was all I needed. Now the slowest I can get at the new place is 4000/384 at $45/month. I don't need all that speed and I certainly don't need the >100% rate increase but nothing else is any cheaper (don't have a phone so no DSL). Now they might punish me if I try to make use of this extra bandwidth I'm required to purchase. Screw that.
Ugh, my GRAMMAH on that was HORRIBLE. Never write a post when you're in a hurry :(
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.
--
make install -not war
ISP complaining about bandwith usage? :)
c'mon! Its just PR with the music and movie industry
Sorry to say it. but its just PR.
Just look at the ISP ads wording.
UNLIMITED BANDWITH, XXX MBPS/Sec... GOLD PACKAGE FOR ONLY XXX EXTRA...
If people don't use bandwith, they won't be able to sell internet service at premium price.
Or they are up-to a big scam, because they signup so many people for multi-year contract, they just want to prevent them from using what they paid for.
Most people use their Internet connections to see the odd website, do their web banking, chat online and even download the odd ISO. And when they do, they want it to be fast.
:-)
ISP's build their pricing models around this type of usage, and are able to provide affordable broadband with (usually) good performance. They make money by buying X amount of bandwidth and selling that same bandwidth many times over and over.
If you are an intensive P2P user (read content of questionable ownership) you are going to break this model.
In this case a number of things can happen:
1) Service degrades: customers complain and move somewhere else
2) ISPs need to buy more bandwidth to cater for a small number of bandwidth intensive users: prices need to go up for the rest of us in which case customers will move somewhere else
3) ISPs put acceptable usage policies in place
Looks to me that shapping is just enforcing 3) above. Its a free market and if you don't like it: 1) Move to other provider, while they are still in business or 2) Buy a premium (read 100x more expensive) service without restrictions.
I don't care who you work for, I have a 10 m/bit connection with telewest, no traffic shaping, no filtering, no contention, nothing in any way less than exactly what is advertised.
Telewest / blueyonder have enough bandwith for hundreds of television channels, and as HDTV comes in they will have bandwidth for hundreds of those too.
I can suck DVD ISO's off usenet all day and all night and nobody gives a shit.
The difference is YOUR customers will eventually be joining me, or a company like the one I'm with, while your company folds, or gets a clue.
BT is the nigger in the woodpile here, they artificially screw the pitch for all their resellers, such as the ISP you work for.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
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?
I'm with Canadian ISP Shaw Cable, and this whole packet shaping thing is definitely part of their gameplan. I can't really blame them, but what an underhanded way of regulating internet traffic. They already have an advertised limit on volume (60 gigs a month for my connection) and now they're going to slow it down and not tell me? Screw that. I'm a student living in a house with 5 other people sharing one connection, so needless to say we use a lot of bandwidth. As of late we've been called my Shaw, but not because of the bandwidth we use - rather, how much volume we downloaded. We doubled the limit. Twice. So, we moved our bittorrent activities to early in the morning and started watching how much was downloaded. Problem solved, no more phonecalls. All this using a wicked app called uTorrent, and packet encryption. This is how we discovered Shaw's use of shaping, as prior to using encryption nothing would go over 100KB/sec. Now, we get speeds sometimes over 300KB/sec or better. If all they're going to complain about is volume, I'm going to continue to get the most out of the advertised bandwidth. I've got the common courtesy to keep my torrent downloads to off-peak hours, I'm not waiting any longer than I have to for something to download.
Look, I'm not saying that unlimited bandwidth is a good idea. You're taking swipes at me, but I'm not even vaguely where you think I am. All I'm saying is that if you advertise unlimited bandwidth, and your contract doesn't provide for shaping/throttling, then you don't get to engage in shaping/throttling.
I'm not calling for utopia. I'm calling for corporations to honor the contracts they enter into with private citizens, which is a less and less popular idea these days.
My current ISP blocks NNTP too. Not only did they limit it to 4K from their own servers, they checked your traffic and if you were downloading using NNTP over HTTP (for example, from Easynews) then they limited that too.
I also question if this is a "problem". Look -- if the ISPs came and offered a 10mbps service for $80/month, how many people would take them up on it?
Joe Websufer doesn't need anything faster than standard broadband, and even most P2Pers leech by on a standard connection -- you'd have to be pretty hardcore to pay big $ for a "business" SDSL connection, just so you can pirate stuff. It's counter-intuitive.
Furthermore, no sane company is going to make a multi-billion dollar investment in something that really only has piracy applications. Not to mention the whole "wire coming into your house" is going to be obsolete at some point as wirelesss broadband services get rolled out.
Which is why you have AT&T talking about establishing their own VOD services and so on. There's simply very little justification for opening the bandwidth floodgates otherwise.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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.
Perhaps, but if you advertise a full 10 gig a month with no limits and then there is a limit put in, I'm sure an attorney general would love to go after you for fraud. If the model is not sustainable, stuff like that should be told up front. Just a "best effort" disclaimer is not good enough if you are advertising unlimited content. Also putting al traffic at BULK or just above bulk is ridiculous. However advertising a policy where all p2p traffic is made bulk for good or bad users is not ridiculous. As long as the policy is advertised I see no problems. But to do this without telling the consumer and advertising unlimited connections is fraud. And if any of these ISPs are in New York and the attorney general there is made to understand the issues, he will not hesitate to sue. He sued H&R block for selling misleading retirement accounts, where the terms were in the small print but the customer representatives and avertising misrepresented. I'm sure there would be a field day with the ISPs. Go Elliot Spitzer!!!!!
When I lived in Hungary, my ISP had a policy, that over a certain amount of traffic, your account got limited till the end of the month ... I seem to remember 4 gigs, but that was a long time ago
In Costa Rica there does not seem to be a limit like this, but then again it seems that that part of the town is pretty empty DSL-wise as it is a new service in the area.
Lowering user speeds based on usage is clearly unfair, if not illegal.
What in the world could possibly be illeagal? At best this is the free market economy at work. It's not false advertising; take a look at the fine print, the terms of service, and/or acceptable usage policies. I can assure you they've bothered to disclose this behavior.
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.
Most likely it would be the FTC, not the FCC, since this seems to be an issue more with your naive belief in the glitzy advertising without bothering to read the remainder of the offer.
Did you ever stop to consider how redidential broadband can possibly be so inexpensive? Have you ever tried to purchase bulk amounts of bandwidth directly from a Tier 1 provider, or even provisioning a T1 line to an arbitrary location? This stuff is not cheap, even in bulk, forgetting any other expenses that go into providing the service.
Basically, the ISP is a consolidator; their entire business is based on buying bandwidth in bulk, and overselling. Wake up to this reality and things will become much more clear. Sure it would be great to pay $30/month and get 5Mbps dedicated symmetrical bandwidth, but that's just not going to happen.
Of course there are ISPs who push the limits of advertising and treat customers with zero respect. But the whole residential broadband industry is based on usage statistics. Think of it much like insurance companies and their actuarial tables. It's always unfair, as some portion of customers who pay more, and get less (or nothing) than those who pay the same amount and get significantly more.
You might not like that thought, but you need to get it out of your head that you're in the correct marketplace at all. If you need full-time dedicated bandwidth, you need to investigate "business-class" service, not residential (and you need to be prepared to put your money where your bit requirements are; it's nowhere near as inexpensive).
I don't know about eveyrone else, but my upload is 56 kbyte/sec max, and that seems pretty throttled compared to my download.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I'm willing to put down the $50 a month for my new fiber optic line. I'm allowed 500GB of total down traffic a month. I guess Verizon assumes that if you're buying a fios setup, you're not doing it just to e-mail pictures to grandma.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
For my city, I only can get cable modem service because DSL and FiOS are not available. I can get IDSL and satellite Internet services, but they are super slow and expensive (e.g., IDSL = $100+ per month).
I would love to get more options, but I don't. I live in a city too!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
How about we develop an optional certification that ISPs can conform to?
It would basically confirm that they spell out their traffic shaping/throttling policies.
Who's in?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Are the ISPs really all going to try and limit bandwidth? As was aforementioned, when we sign up for broadband it's "unlimited."
True it's a common practice to oversell in certain markets, but banks, for example, have certain safeguards against this - i.e. they have to keep a certain amoutn of cash on hand at all times. Perhaps we need this for bandwidth and/or hosting?
I think ISPs would be smart to establish no legal liablility for what users are downloading, then they might not care so much about torrents, etc. (or maybe they already have this, and bandwidth is the issue for them). Anyone know what Verizon's plan with their FioS service is?
On a more unrelated note: I'm not too familiar with newsgroups, but is it possible for ISPs to block those as well? It's my understanding they use the same protocols as web pages, but i find it hard to believe that they're "unblockable."
Ever heard of false advertising?
Exactly. In the first place if their service didn't suck we wouldn't have to use Bittorrent. They offer me some web space so I can share and the offer me upload so I can share but those are so ridiculously crippled that I have to ask other to help me with their bandwidth if I want to share anything larger that a few kilobytes.
I made some fractal animations and I use bittorrent to share them because thats the only way I can push something that big. I provide the movies for free, people who like them pay me by leaving their torrent client on. What is the net if people who have something interesting to share have to shut up because they cost too much?
My ISP had it on their ad, big red letters: "UNLIMITED broadband service starting at $19.99 depending on speed!" Luckily for them, they seem a decent one, and thus far, they have delivered on that promise of "UNLIMITED", at the speed I pay for. If they ever choose not to, they'll find themselves in court-far as I know, there are still laws against false advertising.
On the other hand, if they want to advertise LIMITED service, in big red letters, no problem. But you better not lie to me about what it is I'm getting for my money.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
If they want to change the rules of the game, they should put them on paper.
I'd be very surprised if they didn't. Here in Canada, they put all kinds of conditions and limits in your contract; they don't advertise those limits very loudly, but they're there, for any who care to read them.
"The large print giveth, the small print taketh away."
Procrastination Man strikes again!
False advertising, maybe, but I'll bet anything their contracts (especially for a month-to-month service) are written like those of the credit card industry, whereby they can change the terms of the deal at any time they choose. If you continue to use the "service", you agree to the change.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
See, that is the problem of letting monopolies exist in the data 'market'.
Around here we have 2 choices. One is cable, and you cant choose your company. 2nd is our phone co, and we only have one that isn't cost prohibitive.
And don't tel me to goto satellite, that is slower and more $ then what will come out of this latest 'screw the consumer' kick.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I thoroughly agree. Granted, Comcast probably doesn't bother to set up an NNTP server near everyone they service. However, NNTP *does*, at least in theory, provide a feasible way to drastically reduce the bandwidth that an ISP uses. It's not cheap to run a full NNTP feed, but it has to be a lot better than pulling down the same amount of data many times over.
Another alternative -- there doesn't seem to be any reason that you couldn't have just a "master" NNTP server with a bunch of "slave" NNTP servers that only synchronize headers (or even just overview information). Bodies would go from the master to the slave server only when a user requests an article from the slave server, then remain on the slave server until it expires.
That way, the ISP has one master server, a number of slave servers, and it seems like they can only win on bandwidth usage, by caching articles near a user that uses them.
HTTP caching proxies, which are comparable in approach seem to be popular. Maybe not enough people use NNTP to make this worthwhile, but it seems like the risk of doing something like this is pretty low.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The other alternative is to get away from the atomistic PC and its webs and find others in the section of the city that you live in who are also downloading their entertainment. Then pool your downloads together into a community library
When I was a kid in the 8-bit days that's pretty much how pirating happened. Sure some people had modems and downloaded stuff from BBSes (at an amazing 300 baud or at most 1200 baud -- of course, most games were only a few hundred kilobytes back then), but in general, you found kids at school that had the same type of computer you had and traded stuff in person.
Engineers at ISPs really, really need to do per-user traffic shaping *before* trying to do application-specific shaping.
You do sort of do this, but this is a very brute-force way to do it, since there are only two classes -- "Abusive" and "Not Abusive", and it sounds like Abusives lose application-specific prioritization on your network.
The ideal would be to use something like this.
Granted, your approach is worthwhile if the sole goal is to encourage Abusives to leave...
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
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.
Well, for those ISPs that say it, they typically advertise "unlimited internet" - and then follow that up with limits in the fine print - which they know nobody reads.
The "unlimited" claim is a lie, and some CEOs need to spend some jail time over it.
We don't throttle our bandwidth, however I can understand why some are doing it. Broadband is NOT a dedicated product. Using rough figures as an example...When someone buys 6meg DSL for $99/mth it will cost the ISP $450/mth to supply the 6meg to that DSL when needed. So for prices to be lowered overbooking is done. You know, like with dialup? Are we all forgetting that? To bring prices down for the residential customer a certain amount of overbooking HAS to be done. When you have someone that's using that 6meg 24/7/365 they are costing the ISP $360/mth in a manner of speaking. They have to make it up somewhere. And that's not including the cost of the circuit to the customer...only the bandwidth. You can't exactly expect a company who's responsible to stock holders to allow customers to literally cost the company money to run completely uncontrolled.
And of course, the cheaper you get, the more overbooking there is. This is what I don't understand. Why are people complaining about their level of service they get from their "cheap" ISP when they know full well the kinds of things those ISPs will do? It's the same ol' same old. You get what you pay for. You can't expect to get Ferrari speed and performance out of a Geo Metro.
It goes for the level of support too. Look at what the telcos have all done. You need support, you're going to talk to someone in India. I constantly hear people talking about "My DSL is always going down and I have to talk to people in India I can barely understand" but then they turn around and "oh, you're DSL is $16.95/mth that's just too expensive". $4 more a month and your DSL will always work and you get support from someone who actually speaks english as a first language....wow. I don't understand people. There's a difference between value and savings.
Educate people on what "dedicated" is and charge them more.
I disagree quite strongly. There's very little argument that general Internet users want more than "a megabit or two", and wireless access will be massively appealing to the consumer (50% laptop sales), rather than waiting for Google to put a few thousand 802.11 hotspots in your town.
Just from a capitalist perspective, wireless has phenomononly lower infrastructure costs than Wireline. Look at the massive debt taken on by the Cable companies, and that's for something that everyone wants (television) -- what investor would replicate that when they can just throw up some cheap towers?
I suspect you'll be waiting a long time for gigabit ethernet to come into your house, and, if it does, the high bandwidth will be tied to a closed service (like AT&T VOD) and you won't have more than "a megabit or two" available for general internet access/P2P.
> If you think wireless poses any threat to cable or telephone companies, you are very wrong.
AT&T/Cingular and Verizon are the phone compaines.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Just try hooking up a high voltage/high power experimental tesla coil in your basement, within a month I guarentee you they will figure out that your house is the one using 3x the amount of power it's supposed to. Not only that, but depending on what provider you have, they will even phone you asking what you are doing! Trust me, it's not that different...
Har?
The free wifi for all movement could be for not if BT crushes it. Are there plans to deal with BT on free wifi networks? My mother-in-law could be affected and that would be, well, ok either way I guess.
I come here for the love
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?
Your ISP doesn't give a damn whether you're downloading a free copy of emacs over and over, pirated cell phone games, kiddie porn, simultaneous Internet radio feeds, or whatever. (Unless your ISP happens to be your university, in which case "but it's for research" does buy you some slack.) They just care about the fact that you're sucking down enough bandwidth that they are going to be paying more for your bandwidth than you are to them.
Frankly, the whole argument has been done to death:
There is absolutely zero, none, zilch, nada way that ISPs are going to be happy giving people bandwidth below cost. People that expect this are kind of jerks. They know that the ISP is going to lose money. It's like walking into a store with an obviously incorrect coupon and demanding that the store honor it.
I agree that ISPs should correct their advertisements -- they are indeed misleading. But people need to realize that, while they may get ISPs to do this, they aren't going to get below-cost bandwidth out of ISPs by griping about the advertisements. You will not get true unlimited usage without ISPs working on a way to take it away unless you are actually paying for your bandwidth.
Also, at one point, the ISP had quite a bit of lock-in ability due to the fact that you become attached to your email address. However, these days, I don't think I know anyone that uses their ISP's email services. I use an inexpensive commercial provider (mailsnare.net, which I wholeheartedly recommend, for $20/year -- they provide a spam filtering system that is almost identical to what I set up on my own computer), and most of the people I know use free third-party webmail. Even given that your ISP "tricked" you into signing up, they don't gain much. If there's a legitimate alternative, you can switch. If there isn't, you didn't lose anything. So I don't have a lot of sympathy for people that complain about false advertising, because my take is that they're looking for some reason why they can claim that they should actually get subsidized bandwidth.
The fix is to figure out more efficient ways to use the network. For example, I really wish (and have *no* idea why they don't do this) that ISPs would provide higher speed access within their network. I should be able to send a file to my buddy Bob, a block over, who also uses Comcast, with greatly relaxed upload/download restrictions. This encourages people to keep their network traffic off the Internet (and thus reduces the ISP's costs) and encourages people to join networks that their friends are on. Think of something like how cell providers do free in-network calling to get more and more people to join the network.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It smacks of "ENGLISH NO FIRST LANGAGE LOL ^_______^" illiteracy, specifically.
This text has been added to defeat the lameness filter, which at the moment is behaving rather lamely itself.
+++ATH0
I currently have optonline for the longest time I would use p2p software to download legal things like knoppix and game patches. About 6 months ago our internet was really slow for about a week so we called them and an admin was put on the phone. He told us that running any p2p software is considered running a server which violates there terms of use. He told us the next time we run any p2p software we will be kicked off there service with no warning. We pay for a service and the ISPs seem to only let you do what they want you to. I know many people who actually are using more bandwith since they discovered newgroups so really the ISPs are going to lose either way.
In the ed2k world also more and more users begin to notice isp are throttling or blundly blocking users. As a developer one can only tell to the users to switch isp(vote with your wallet). One problem is that isp simply deny everything. An other problem is that in some countries there barely is an alternative. (Portugal, Chile)
Anyway to start I created a wiki page to document those isp's so users know what isp they should List_of_Bandwidth_throttling_ISPs wiki page
There are already 2 emule mods that support protocol obfuscations like utorrent/azareus but since encryption only works if both peers uses it this still is of limited use.
Anyway those mods are neomule and Sion emule
Try to avoid such isp if possible, or contact your local consumer body to take legal action.
This link has already been posted here, but it does not hurt to post it again:
Bad sip at azareus wiki
Call me when the price of gasoline comes back down to $1
I used to max out my connection with bit-torrent, but now I hold uploads to 10k/s during the day because I know my ISP is too stupid to create real rules for everyone so we can all get the data we want.
If it was my business, the rules would be created to balance peoples needs with those of the business. It is foolish to 'oversell' your services and then be found not able to comply with your very open ended advertisments. As you gain customers, the back-end of the services need to be upgraded. To me, it looks like they expect all the new customers for broadband to be grandparents who would under-use the internet services so much that they would be throwing money into the ISPs pockets.
Seems like the ISP business is coming close to gambling. I don't think you can gamble when you are comming to utility status.
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?
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
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.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Oh I'd imagine they are. Still, it'd be interesting to see how a judge would rule on it. My feeling on it is that if there's a discrepancy between a company's advertising and their contract, whichever one is in larger print should prevail.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Shocking new statistics reveal that approximately a third of Internet traffic is generated by technologies that are popular amongst Internet users worldwide. ...
WTF?
Getright can download the same file from multiple hosts at once over plain old HTTP.
Not if you are connecting to a server that refuses to return 206 Partial Content responses. This measure was common when download managers started to hog (open multiple simultaneous connections to) individual servers. BitTorrent, on the other hand, requires clients to support multiple sources or the tit-for-tat algorithm will choke them off.
You may have had "unlimited" service... right up until the agreement changed. And I suspect that if one checked the advertising, there'd be a weasel-word like "virtually" unlimited service, or a conspicuosly place asterisk leading to some fine print like "subject to conditions and terms of service."
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
After thinking about this a bit more, I have a suggestion to developers writing network applications.
Stop making it so darned easy to shape your application's traffic! Network companies aren't using sophisticated hashing algorithms to do this bandwidth shaping, instead they are using simple TCP/UDP port numbers. (To be true, I have seen some application-specific network devices that use hashing algorithms that require regular fireware updates.)
If bandwidth shaping is here to stay, as many posts here indicate, then use your software to work around it. For example, use multiple ports, test the bandwidth of each one, then send a burst of network information down the fastest. Or, change the data traffic port for each version. Or, have a "fire wall mode" that will funnel all network traffic through port 80, or another ISP favored port number.
If ISPs and network security administrators are going to use network ports to screw up your application's traffic, then your applications must not rely on those ports causing the problem.
and then follow that up with limits in the fine print - which they know nobody reads.
While that sort of thing is certainly disingenuous, it's also so common as to be something that almost all companies do; people really, really ought to be reading the small print before signing up to things. They don't really have much of an excuse not to.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
that P2P abusers do not want to pay for their goodies: Neither the bandwidth NOR the content.
First, I am president of an internet hosting company in the Chicago area. If my downstream provider even remotely thought about giving VOIP traffic priority over my IP traffic I'd have them in court faster than you can say 'I'. As for putting limits on 'unlimited service'. I've got DirectTV. I pay for it to be available 24-7 for all the channels in my package. According to some of you, it would be okay for DirecTV to shut off my dish if I were to be such a TV junkie that I sat and watched GSN all day and night. Unlimited is exactly that, unlimited and anything else is "NOT" unlimited and shouldn't have been falsely sold that way. The real problem is that a company purchases an OC3 and then proceeds to sell to it's customers 10-20 times that bandwidth in the hopes that most people will be using burstable protocols. If everyone of their customers decided to watch live internet TV and saturate their bandwidth, the only legal recourse would be for the provider to start buying more bandwidth or go out of business. The only reason they're getting away with this is that the executive and judiciary are technologically ignorant. And what does it matter, everything will be AT&T in short order anyway;-) --- guitardood
-- L8R, guitardood
"Using the same mentality as the RIAA, ISPs attack their customers"
"Hey, there are plenty more in line, and since we have a virtual monopoly, where else will they go anyway? "
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...all the corporate whores come out with "it's not dedicated its burstable". BUT....nothing says "burstable" in the TOS. Looks like the ISPs having lost the war on the idea that unlimited service meant limited bandwidth now are going with unlimited means burstable. Same tune different lyrics. Lets get real, using a car analogy which seems so prevelant here, if you rent a car for a week with unlimited milegae and want to drive 500 miles per day, they don't use Lojack to set a limit on the throttle or turn off the car for 24 hours after the first 100 miles because unlimited means burstable mileage. If you advertise and charge to provide a service, then provide the service advertised and charged for...anything else strongly resembles the nightsoil of a large, well fed, male bovine. The ISPs don't mind taking your money for fees, as long as you don't actually use what you paid for, but when you want them to hold up their side of the bargain they immediately start to weasel. (my apologies to weasels for the comparison). So for all the corporate whores posting about how the ISPs provide such a great deal and we shouldn't complain..go over to that other place where they have ISP forums for all you fanboys to hangout in and BS the customers.
Your business logic is suprisingly poor and short-sighted. The reason that wires work from a business model is simply BECAUSE of the (expensive) cost. The reason that wireless WONT work as a business is simply BECAUSE of the (cheap) cost.
Wireless is too cheap to put in, but very expensive to maintain. So it becomes commoditized very quickly, and prevents profits. This is why large scale wifi has not occured. Wi-Max may fix that, but it remains to be seen.
Wires allow stability once implemented, and they are valuable becuase you can charge others to use them. Wires will always be faster, more reliable, and more versatile than wireless.
The only way wireless will become a nationwide deal is through the cell carriers improvements or maybe google's world domination. Everyone else will just go from DSL/Cable, to Fiber, and rightly so.
B
Well, the problem with HTTP proxies is that today most of content of the www is dynamic in some way - so caching is not that useful. The next buzzword standard, Ajax, is even built around being dynamic. I think this needs to be sorted out completely, this is not how the web2.0 should look.
Regarding that "ISPs are advertising 768k, so they have to offer 768k".
It is not as simple as that, ISPs face the "empty seat problem". If they charge the casual user for a fully used 768k line, they will lose these customers to other ISPs. This means that those who run P2P 24/7 are perceived as problems in the business plan, which they are. I don't think P2P apps should be fettered when run casually, but that they should be controlled by charges for network traffic.
So a "flat rate" would practially mean a rate where 95% of users are covered, and only 5% have to pay extra bandwidth fees, which might again be reasonably capped. It is not constructive for P2P-users to somehow insist on their rights to use the bandwidth since the ISP then will have to find other ways to harm P2P, simply because otherwise the ISP will be out of business.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Ever heard of the phrase "the customer is king"?
If an ISP won't provide the very service for which I'm paying them, namely bandwith enough to run torrents should I so choose, connectivity on all ports, and the right to run servers, then I can and will dump them for someone else who has the entrepreneurial good sense to give me what I want.
BTW, my current ISP gives me pure un-tampered connectivity, a static IP address, and bandwidth bounded only by the size of the pipe. ("Demon Net", £24.99 monthly.) That's why I remain brand-loyal.
people too cheap to buy their own CDs and DVDs
There exist dozens if not hundreds of movies at least 56 years old (and thus which have been Bono'd twice) that are not available for sale to the public on VHS or DVD and whose copyright owner has no intention of publishing on VHS or DVD. Song of the South is one of them. In order to buy a legitimate copy of one of those, you would have to hostile-takeover the copyright owner, which means you'd have to spend at least billions of dollars to buy a large fraction of the movie's copyright owner's stock.
I think my ISP was one of the first major ISPs in North America to traffic shape upstream traffic. In general, they don't worry too much about total bandwidth consumed. My current traffic limit, 60GB/mo, is much higher than I have ever used in a month, and I'm probably in the top 5-10% of bandwidth users - there's a limit to how much video someone can watch in a day!
However, my ISP hates Bittorrent and other P2P uploads with a vengeance - I'm throttled to about 15KB/s upstream for BT compared to 2-3x that for regular HTTP and FTP transfers. Since cable is shared, and total upstream is significantly lower than total downstream, P2P has to be throttled or the entire network segment will move at a crawl. The ADSL guys don't have that problem. If you clog up your ADSL upstream, you only affect your own connection. Once the traffic is at the network centers, ADSL and cable are relatively similar -- big pipes to centralized locations are relatively cheap.
No, I don't like it; however, for ~$40/mo, it's a fair deal and I can't be bothered to switch.
Your business logic is suprisingly poor and short-sighted.
Aren't you a polite individual. Anyone who thinks they're getting Fibre-to-the-Curb RSN is the real short-sighted person here.
The problem with your argument is that there's already a wireline infrastructure out there, so there's not a guarunteed return-on-investment for this sort of infrastructure. If there was, I suspect we would have seen these wonderful high-bandwidth lines being installed already.
The only way wireless will become a nationwide deal is through the cell carriers improvements
Exactly. When it comes down to it, AT&T/Verizon will invest their money into wireless services over wireline bandwidth. And if they won't, there's four other providers that might.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
One ISP here used to advertise "Unlimited Internet Service." But they had (and still have) a cap.
Someone apparently called them on this and now they advertise like this:
UNLIMITED CONNECTION time.
Notice the fine print at the end of the headline.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Our comcast router is so bad that it jams up and requires a reboot after a certain number of total connections are reached. With regular surfing, this can take about 6 months. But with any P2P apps or Torrents open, the router dies in about 12 hours.
Personally I'd rather they just throttled P2P traffic back to 10 kbps, but their solution is elegant too.
The ______ Agenda
Yes please!
Speaking as someone who almost never uses P2P, I'm sick of subsidizing those who do. They drive up the price for everyone.
The most common argument in this thread seems tox be "I paid for unlimited usage, so that's what I should get." Ok, then tell Comcast/Earthlink/etc. to stop treating everyone like a P2P hog. I use a fiftieth of the resources of an eMule junkie, so why the heck am I being charged the same $60/month?
This is only possible when you have no place else to go. In the US, telco mergers are bringing back Ma Bell and pay per minute/distance nonsense.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There is a problem with your analogy.
It really doenst cost more to push more bits over the month, while it does cost more to produce the extra power to feed your house if you use more energy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have a small WISP in Ft. Myers FL. (SW FL) I'll pay a bounty for $20 per month transit. Our main Wireless distribution point is 1 mile from our main office. The cheapest I can find transport is $695.00 per month for a 10 Meg Fiber connection. I'd pay $500 to someone who could find a transit provider that would sell a point to point 10meg connection for $200 per month.
Of coarse that's not the total cost of bandwidth. I first have to purchase bandwidth to the Internet. The cheapest I have found in this area, (local population around 500,000, not exactly the middle of nowhere), is around $4500 for a full DS-3.
If I could buy bandwidth for $20 per meg and get transit for $20 per meg I would let all the Bit Torrent users use all they want. Just not the case. $200 per meg for unrestricted use seems about right.
These games will continue until eventually, all traffic will be encrypted. Then you are going to see caps placed on bandwidth usage.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I steal my internet connection from my clueless (or generous, I haven't decided) neighbors who leave their routers wide open. I don't P2P out of respect for their download speeds; I basically just have HTTP traffic. Living in an apartment building in Austin, I have 13 available networks, 5 of which are left open. I bounce back and forth. Am I stealing? Sure. But at least I'm a somewhat honorable thief. And for the year that I'm back in school, that $50 a month is better spent on beer (because we all know that free as in beer doesn't exist).
Of course it is my company's right to refuse them! If I feel and can justify that the cost of setting up and running separate accounting, billing, and traffic systems for the (very small) x% who are both (a) heavy users and (b) prepared to pay for it is too high to be bothered with, then why would I do it?
I wouldn't - I'd leave it to those who want or are best structured to handle that particular set of problems. Since everyone else is using crap analogies, I'll say this: there's a reason the corner hardware store doesn't sell industrial plumbing supplies, and it's the same reason MegaHardwareStore doesn't sell individual screws...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Simple, offer fast speeds but limit downloads. Most "normal" users will not exceed the 10gb/month (or whatever is offered) but high bandwidth users will have to pay $X per gb over the limit.
P2P bandwidth hogs will pay up (or move to other ISPs that havent adopted the new model).
Because the high bandwidth users are paying extra, the average amount of bandwidth being used by everyone paying $x per month for the ISP service goes down. This means that the $x could go down (as the light users dont subsidise the heavy users as much anymore) which will keep the "normal" users from jumping ship to other ISPs still offering "unlimited".
Okay... So, it seems that the ISPs who sell us an "Unlimited" broadband Internet connection at speeds from 1-5Mbps don't actually want us to use it to it's full potential...
That's bullshit: They sold us a service which they told us was unlimited and then complained when we used it as advertised. However, that's the nature of business and marketing a service. Their reasons are understandable.
Now that ISPs are getting smart enough to limit our use to save themselves some money, is a market going to open for those of us who want to use our broadband service?
My situation is this: Most of my WWW usage is pretty basic. I read documentation, forums, emails, and articles. I'm not usually interested in watching videos online or downloading large files. None of that consumes much bandwidth. On the other hand, my Internet usage includes P2P file sharing... a lot of it. My bandwidth is usually maxxed out. So, if my plain and ordinary 1Mbps ISP limits my usage on ports other than 80, 25, etc, I might as well switch to dial-up for all that I can use the Internet for.
I don't think I'm unique. If it came down to it, I don't want to, but I probably would pay extra to continue using my full bandwidth. Is this a potential market? Do the ISPs realize it? How much would it cost to the user for it to be a sustainable business model for the ISP?
-- Ghodmode
That's "attorneys general" ;)
The contract that I signed with my ISP didn't have the catch phrases the parent posts are talking about. They've yet to try any of the "dirty tricks" as well. Whether or not you'll ever find a _major_ ISP like that is another question...Keeping individuals happy is much more important when your customer base is a few cities.
Also, Canute didn't order the tide back out of arrogance...quite the opposite. He did it to prove that even the power of kings had limits (and because he'd gotten tired of flattery).
Opec: Oil for Euros...
m l
The plan on the table is not to change to another fake paper system,
but to sell oil for gold directly, a physical tangible asset vs. monopoly
money that is printed at a whim and carries no ties to a physical valued object .
Most if not all of the world's banks went off the gold standard long ago .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
They fiat currency of the Euro and the Dollar are all monopoly money, ie. fake .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency
A more detailed and possibly over zealous dissertation on it :
http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/davis/davis1.ht
This I feel is what the Iranians and Indonesia have decided in which they no
longer want to participate, and it may spread to Opec as well .
In fact Iraq did it shortly before we went to war with Iraq .
http://www.safehaven.com/article-1251.htm
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
who's developing the mod to make bittorrent go over SSH?
Once sustained throughput over an SSH tunnel reaches a given level, the tunnel is likely to be counted as an unknown P2P file-sharing instance. This sort of traffic analysis and shaping doesn't even need stateful inspection of packets.
I wasnt trying to be impolite, simply accurate. My apologies.
However, I still disagree with your premise.
And, as far as I can tell, so do the companies you speak about. Verizon is,and has been, and will continue to be, deploying the FIOS Fiber Network. It has announced plans to do this throughout the US. SBC (now AT&T) has decided to compete against verizon, and has been doing beta runs of the same thing.
Why wires and not wireless? Simple. The speed is worth the extra cost. That speed in fiber allows them to push other stuff beyond internet, like movies, tv, telephone, video telephone, etc etc.
These are things that wireless currently isnt capable of doing. Even 100mb wireless isnt capable of doing these things reliably. And cell carriers arent even close to having 100mb wireless deployed anywhere significant.
So again, why would someone want to try to provide all those additional (and profit-making) services over wireless, which is unstable and ill-suited. Certainly, Wireless has its advantages, but in the busienss world, it has very limited real profit potential. All INTERNET only type of services move towards commoditization -- like Dialup.
But hey -- Just remember this post in 5 years, and we find out who is right. Unless there is some badass improvement to the speed and stability of wireless, my bet is still on wires.
B
I find the whole idea of P2P bandwidth filtering as well as the ensuing
arguments (i.e. someone has to pay for the bandwidth) incredibly week.
I will spare you the really overused and innappropriate car analogy but hear
this: Airline companies routinely oversell seats on most flights. It is a practice
that is called overbooking and it ensures that if a passenger
cancels or misses the flight, the otherwise empty seat will still be sold.
Now, the law in most countries is that every passenger has certain rights if
they are denied boarding, i.e. they are entitled to accomodation, tarsnport
to and from airport, etc. I fail to see how the process of "overselling" bandwidth by advertising for
unlimited broadband and providing anything but should be judged differently
than the above example.
Congratulations. You managed to completely miss the point.
People aren't going to notice the difference between 768Kbit and 3Mbit when they're just loading a web-page. There, latency is dominant. When there is a multi-MB file embedded in that web-page, however, they will, and large files are rarely served dynamically. AJAX has nothing to do with this at all.
Oh yes it is. Saying, "Other ISPs are falsely advertising, so we have to too," is not a workable legal defense.
It's not my job to make sure an ISPs is making a profit, nor is it grounds to violate a contract, or falsely advertise services.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well, congratulate yourself, I guess you know on what.
You mentioned HTTP proxies yourself, and HTTP is supposed to serve web pages, not documents or images. Static images that are part of the page are cached by the browser anyway, and advertisements are often not cached but delivered dynamically. Regarding "When there is a multi-MB file embedded in that web-page", maybe you just shouldn't embed such big images, and even when you have a reason to do so, either the target audience is to small to make the ISP set up a proxy for them, or you should deliver the content by other protocols.
I did not say the ISP should falsely advertise. I said he should make a contract that he can keep without loopholes, like kicking out customers.
I did not say he should throttle P2P bandwidth, which is what you are talking about, but that the ISP should use latency to shape traffic.
And, no, it isn't your job to help the ISP make profit, but it is not the job of the ISP either to maintain a contract that is not profitable to the ISP.
Maybe you are not one yourself, but the people who use your argument are freeloaders on fees paid by others. I guess your enthusiasm for HTTP proxies is honorable, but HTTP is not P2P, and as long as P2P does not implement a proxy-like behavior, it isn't good, and usually it is hard to make P2P work like proxies because the number of clients willing to upload a specific file at a specific time is small. However, as I suggested, fatcoring in latency between P2P clients for queue ratings should result in improved P2P behavior and lower global network load.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
It sounds like you understand T1 just fine.
The DSLAM compresses the data so that it can be encoded into the available bandwidth. I don't know any details about the compression, but I know a little about the bandwidth.
DSLAMs where I am are fed with multiple T1s. The DSLAM in my neighborhood serves up to 144 customers with 4 T1s or 6.176Mbps. They can take up to a DS3, or 28 T1s. A single DS3 fed DSLAM can handle up to 5000 lines.
Google leads me to believe each 27 to 36Mbps cable internet channel can serve up to 1000 cable modems.Well, you've completely lost me there. First of all, "web pages" contain "documents" and "images", so I don't see your point. Second, HTTP is a transfer protocol for ANYTHING. Linux ISOs are transfered over HTTP constantly. Large videos are being downloaded over HTTP constantly.
Yeah, cached by your neighbors browser, while yours has to go download them from the source. That's the whole point of a caching proxy. Browser caches are also very small, making them of limited usefulness.
That's the most ridiculous argument I've heard so far. I guess people should only use the internet how you see fit. Besides, you clearly don't understand that this isn't limited to things embedded in web pages. Any HTTP traffic will greately benefit.
You can talk about how people "should" change the internet to suit you all you want, but it's not going to happen. The fact is, massive ammounts of HTTP traffic ARE accounted for by sites like video.google.com, and a caching proxy can reduce that massive ammount of traffic down to practically nothing.
Sadly, it still doesn't sound like you understand.
Those two are almost exactly the same thing.
No, actually it's fairly easy. For Gnutella and kin, setup a node on an ISP server with massive disk-space, have it act as a supernode for all users, and have it save a copy of your downloads to it's local storage. Then, future downloaders will automatically see that file as an alternate location, and it will be downloaded from there automatically.
Now, it's really the dual-level bandwidth that makes this work... Since your ISP's node will allow you to download the file at 3Mbps, and you'll be getting at most 768k from all the rest, it will download the vast majority from the ISP's node, dramatically cutting down on internet traffic.
Although I don't know of any real proxing method, it would have similar benefits for bittorrent too. When one of the seeds/peers is on the same ISP as you, you will download the vast majority of the file(s) from them (at high-speed) instead of over the (slow) internet.
Why do ISPs always insist on working AGAINST anyone that uses the internet, rather than trying to work with them to save money on their infrastructure, while providing a much, much better service to their customers? They just keep raising speeds, all the while trying to make it harder to do anything with.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You basically get twice as much off peak traffic, as on peak.
This would basically encourage the users themselves to schedule their p2p to be kind to others (as well as themselves).
Anyone else tried this approach.
P.S I won't mention the ISP or the plans, people outside NZ wouldn't understand how you can get so little for so much $$.
If an ISP advertises "unlimited internet" they better not mess with my ability to use p2p.
If they clearly state what their policy and limitations are, and/or give me a way to at least pay more to bypass those limitations. I will not have much of a problem with it.
COX Communications here on the East Coast states very clearly that you can not run a server on your home internet connection. I actually don't have a problem with this for several reason. First they were up front about it. Second, it only costs me about $10/month to run a website with virtually unlimited bandwidth/storage on a thrid-party webfarm. I don't like that they block port 25 (SMTP), but I undstand why they do - and since they offer their own SMTP server it's not that big of a hassel. Yes the service is throttled (sending is much slower than receiving) - but that is standard internet business. Given my ration of download-vs-upload, I'd gladdly sacrifice my upload bandwidth for more download bandwidth. I'm perplexed to as to why Teloco's feel that need to muck around with a "tiered" Internet. It's already "tiered" based on how much data one wishes to push/pull. -CF
My ISP had it on their ad, big red letters: "UNLIMITED broadband service starting at $19.99 depending on speed!"
So you can use your connection to send spam, for instance? Can you use it to launch hacking attacks, or to endlessly spread viruses? Both of those should fall under the "unlimited" banner, so clearly the ISP should have no Terms Of Service.
They do? Well that's strange. Maybe they were referring to one aspect of their service, such as connection time. Those ads were usually crafted back when they were competing against AOL and other dial-up services, which due to modem/line oversubscribing limited users to a set number of hours per month under the base account. The "unlimited" means that you can be online throughout the clock with most high speed, even if their intent is that most of the time you have marginal usage tools like email checking and IM clients running.
Every service on the planet is limited, and you shouldn't be naive about it.
Actually, there are good reasons not to read the small print:
*I have a reasonable expectation that the small print is substantially similar to the big print, only restated in legalese and in more detail. If this is not the case, the small print is legally invalid in many jurisdictions.
*The small print is generally written in legalese, a language designed to obfuscate the meaning from the public. For a non-attorney to read and understand it would require an inordinate amount of time in many cases.
*If you do take the time to read and understand the small print, you've most likely just obligated yourself to it. If you can reasonably argue in court that you had no idea what that small print actually said, but were given an explanation by a salesperson (best to have a tape of this, or a witness) you have a reasonably good chance of having the actual contract you signed be defined to be the salesperson's explanation and the large print.
Now, I'm not saying if I do or don't actually read the small print - just that there ARE very valid reasons not to.
"Unlimited" plans that aren't unlimited were somewhat recently shot down in Australia by the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Cmmission). No more calling plans unlimited if they're shaped to 64k after 500 meg of DLs... that plan caused a big fuss on www.whirlpool.net.au. This was one decent move in the industry at least. So long as ISPs are upfront about what they do there should be no problem. Anyone with half a brain and cares about the type of service they get reads up on ISPs and knows what they're getting into. Is the ISP good for leeching or gaming, high quota or low price, good support or no support.
I even had a conversation with the online sales staff to ensure that yes, I could download at 100% of my rate 100% of the time if I so chose (something I have done on and off for several years now). Screenshots of the conversation is here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/76331315/
And what happened? Later they told me that I need to curb my usage, or be terminated. After months of bickering, they finally told me to "keep it to 100 megs a month". That wasn't really possible for me, however, as they didn't even give me a month of time before terminating my service.
I was very lucky that Verizon & Covad actually didn't screw it up, and my new DSL came only 6 days later. And because the termination date was a friday, I got usage until monday (25 gigs baby!).
So: Don't believe your ISPs lies. I'd advise going with a smaller mom-and-pop shop than a big corporate ISP like SpeakEasy or EarthLink.
Buyer beware.
(They tried to use a $300 cancellation fee to bribe me out of writing about this, but I'd rather pay $300 if it saves someone else from my experiences. I can't be bought off so easily...)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I should note that I'm AT&T/SBC territory, where they've been "beta-testing" fibre since long before the first cable modems went in. Maybe Verizon is really going to do a real rollout. I kind of doubt it, but we'll see. At this point the applications of fibre are all highly speculative, while wireless "broadband" is a no-brainer market-wise and is already a hellava lot more available than Fibre is.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Mine has 305 (thats why my WOW Char is LSONE on Rexxar)
Your So right.
That gave me an idea?
What if the badwidth business model worked like cars?
You have a full "tank" of bits when you start out each month, and you have to add "GAS" if you go over.
Then charge people who aren't bursting, but all out sprinting eternally
If you drive throttle to the floor, you get bad gas mileage right?
(I know I would..)
But if you baby it, keep it mild & constant, a tank will get you much farther. (over 33%)
Enact this rule, and people will throttle on their own. Make them responsible, yet make the bandwidth available for when they need it.
I put my foot to the floor daily, but if I just held it there all day, I wouldn't be able to park it!
dw
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
A democrat AND a coward. Why am I not suprised.
damaged by dogma
Buy A Porsche to go 35 on the Info Superhighway,I don't think so, want to go slower use dial-up.
I've been on Speakeasy since I moved about three years ago and I run a Debian torrent client 24/7, and I've never seen my traffic slow or had any extra charges. However, I pay double or triple what the US Cheapo ISPs offer and I expect the complete, constant service in return.
I get it - and more. Speakeasy even encourages you to share your bandwidth with your neighbors and collect a cut of the income. Indeed, they offer special services for gamers and other folks who want faster performance. If they're traffic-shaping, AFAIK it would be just to get to my advertised limit and I've never seen it. They even upped my speed without me asking when it seemed their price was higher than most competitors.
They also have rocking technical support and great attitudes. Have I mentioned I'm a Raving Fan? You want to try good service? Sign up here... (Full disclosure: referral program in use)
UserAdvocate: The voice of the user
That's the most ridiculous argument I've heard so far. I guess people should only use the internet how you see fit. Besides, you clearly don't understand that this isn't limited to things embedded in web pages. Any HTTP traffic will greately benefit.
I don't think so. Of course I can't prove it without presenting a scientific study, but for one, the big images served will be mostly from sites with less visitors, so there won't be many cache hits, sites with big media and many visitors will already be using akamai, and finally caching all HTTP replies in a proxy requires a big proxy or proxy farm - this means that downstream-ISPs would actually carry the costs of the big content providers or have to pay for the slashdot effect. I guess you see the problem in there. Or not, so let me spell it out: P2P users volunteer their bandwidth out of altruism, in a way, but why should the ISP volunteer to provide the bandwidth for another business?As far as I am concerned lowering network bandwidth requirements would require rethinking of protocols, for example if you look at this very slashdot page you will notice that most of the waste of bandwidth actually is in the navigation which however is not served separately.
I guess in two years we will talk again on slashdot and you will say you always have been saying that protocols need to be improved or changed. You also neglect to mention that HTTP 1.0 did not support continuing a download in the middle, which was crippling in the times of 56k, so the HTTP protocol has been improved after those times of the proxies(which often refused to cache especially the big downloads anyway)
Regarding the ISP question, you can benefit from a fast line when downloading software from a central site, without using it 24/7. However, P2P users tend to download stuff they don't really need, just to get over the boredom in waiting for the download to start (and complete) which they actually are interested in. Not to forget that you might simply leave both your PC and your P2P running just to improve your queue rating, which is wasting resources both at the ISP and in your energy bill. I know what you will say now, it is not my business what you do with your bandwidth as you pay for it, but as you seem to be opposed to increased fees for power users, it seems you don't like paying that much either.
I guess you want to convince me that proxies in theory are a good idea, which I don't disagree with completely, but then you get lost in arguing that latency and bandwidth is the same, which it clearly isn't. I guess to top it off you probably have a job where you in theory know this stuff better than me.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I use their 1.5/384 offering.
The only problem I have is that (and its not even them) the ILEC often works on lines and doesn't give a shit if they break anything serviced by a CLEC. I've had to call a few times when my DSL was out. Of course, you know Speakeasy isn't too quick on the draw since they have to call the CLEC (in my case COVAD) who has to call the ILEC (AT&T) to get a linesman out to check the lines.
I don't know where you live or who your CLEC is, but I have a computer hooked up to my TV that does nothing but run BitTorrent 24/7/365 and I haven't gotten a call. My connection is probably completely saturated in the up direction a good 95% of the time. Perhaps it is your CLEC who is complaining.
It was a corporate minion from SpeakEasy who contacted me.
Repeatedly.
For 2 hours at a time, sometimes, trying to "talk me out of" being who I am (a habitual downloader since the 1980s.)
I did not have this problem with my previous 4 or 5 DSL ISPs (one went out of business, one I did not choose and was thrust into, two flat out didn't work, and one I left but shouldn't have - patriot.net).
And their reasoning was quite simple: I was downloading too much. They said my 250G in a month was more than thrice anyone else in the D.C. area POP . . .
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
That's an interesting idea. However, Covad has been my CLEC for all 6 DSL ISPs I've had, and I've only had this problem with SpeakEasy. I've also heard from others who are having SpeakEasy do the same thing to them. We'll see how the next ISP fares...
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Yes, but that alone will help very little, without the dual-level bandwidth I discussed.
No. The whole idea is that running a few servers with a lot of storage on their network is much cheaper than purchasing that much more internet bandwidth, for the ISP.
For them to save money on their upstream ISP bill, to provider their customers with a much better service, etc.
I get the feeling like I'm arguing with a brick wall. How many times do I need to say these exact same things over and over, before they register with you?
Not at all. I've posted this idea to slashdot several times in the past, and I'm sure anyone who searches through my comment history can find numerous mentions of it. Nothing on the web is ever lost. Besides, as I've said, yours does not include dual-level bandwidth, or anything similar, which would be rather necessary for this to work well.
I'm very tired of repeating myself over and over, so I'm just going to copy/paste the exact same thing I said last time:
The only fair thing ISPs can do, is exactly what they don't want to do... Have a much lower-speed 128k/16k plan, and charge maybe $10 for it. That way the power users really will want the higher-speed plan, and average users will get to pay less. Obviously, they want to keep the minimum plan as expensive as possible, which has been the root of this "power users" problem for the past decade.
This is COMPLETELY idiotic...
I didn't say latency and bandwidth are the same, and I can't imagine how you could actually believe I did. In fact, I think you're just trying a little straw man here.
You said: "I did not say he should throttle P2P bandwidth, which is what you are talking about, but that the ISP should use latency to shape traffic."
Clearly you've never done any bandwidth shaping/throttling. What you don't realize is that the way bandwidth is throttled, is by increasing the latency between packets, once you've reach a certain bandwith. If it takes 10ms for a packet to get from the server to you, and the router holds that packet for 10ms longer, that throttles your bandwidth to half what it otherwise would be.
So, in this instance, the two will have effectively the same result. If you increase latency, you will be throttling the bandwidth.
That's funny. I can see from your webpage that you are a software architect, not a network admin. Since I do this stuff from day to day, I'd say quite the reverse is probably true. You think you know the theory, but don't actually have any experience with it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If it takes 10ms for a packet to get from the server to you, and the router holds that packet for 10ms longer, that throttles your bandwidth to half what it otherwise would be.
No it doesn't, not if you have many connections, and connections which send big packets of data without waiting for every ACK; To quote dunigan: "TCP uses a sliding-window protocol to implement flow control." so that window size is packet size times number of packets to transmit before an ACK can be expected.I guess if you bump up the latency just hard enough it will eventually throttle bandwidth effectively, or if you use applications for testing that need to wait for a reply to small packets.
So I don't doubt that you can set up a test which proves your views, since doubling the latency as you proposed means hitting the sender so hard that it might exceed its max window size. I think I could set up a test which proves my views as well.
It also will get worse if you as the ISP intentionally drop packets to lower window size, but this is not increasing latency, it is sabotage.
Thanks, looking up documents on these keywords was very instructive to me.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
You're correct that it won't really be 1/2 the bandwidth, but I simply thought I should make the theoretical example as simple as possible.
You don't quite understand. ACKs are NOT and cannot be sent async. A large window may mean it only needs an ACK after every 20 packets, but the ACK can't be sent until #20 has been recieved, or the timeout (waiting for #20) has been exceeded.
So, if you delay the outgoing ACK by 10ms, there will be no incomming traffic for the next 10ms. For bandwidth shaping, the router dynamically adjusts this delay to get the approximate throughput you want. And yes, if the machines use a ridiculously large sliding window, the router won't be able to hold all the packets, some will be dropped, and the machines will negotiate a smaller window because of that increase in packet loss.
I don't see how. The point still remains that increasing the latency is HOW bandwidth shaping is done. I really can't see any way of doing one, without doing/causing the other.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I don't believe it's "naive" at all. If I go into an all-you-can-eat buffet, I expect to be able to take as many plates of food as I happen to want to eat. If they have a two-plate-per-person limit, that's fine, but they should be up front about it.
If you want to send viruses, it's the FBI you'll get to have a word with. Same if you want to send child porn-even at low bandwidth. I don't expect ISP's to change the laws by any means, and certainly both of those activities should be illegal. I -do- expect them to be clear about what they're offering. If they want to say "Unlimited connection time, limited bandwidth usage and some activities prohibited" in their ad, then they're every bit within their rights to do so. But that doesn't make good ad copy. They want to have it both ways, and that's where I have a problem with it. I don't believe it's "naive" to expect honesty, whether or not it's currently in rather short supply from corporations.
Same for spam. "Unlimited connection (except sending of spam prohibited)" is fine, and certainly I'm all for it. But they -still- should be up front about what it is you may and may not do. Page 218 of the dense legalese agreement that no one reads and anyone that does can't understand is not up front.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.