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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.
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 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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
that P2P abusers do not want to pay for their goodies: Neither the bandwidth NOR the content.