ISP Rise Against P2P Users

bananaendian writes "Spencer Kelly from BBC's Click program writes about the emerging backslash against high bandwidth P2P users. Apparently it has been estimates that up to one third of internet's traffic is caused by BitTorrent file-sharing program. Especially ISPs who are leasing their bandwidth by the megabyte are more inclined to resort to 'shaping your traffic' by throttling ports, setting bandwidth limits or even classifying accounts according services used. What is your ISPs policy regarding P2P and is it fair for them to put restrictions and conditions on its use."

Comments

Just so I understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

Seriously, somebody explain their business plan to me.

Re:Just so I understand...

[ergo98]

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

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

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

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

Re:Just so I understand...

[wazza]

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

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

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

Death to the car analogy!!!

Re:Just so I understand...

[Robotech_Master]

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

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

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

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

Re:Just so I understand...

[caffeination]

Trying to kill the car analogy on Slashdot is like trying to ram every bad driver you see off the road. Sure, you can take a few out and maybe make the papers, but you'll never get them all before your car stops working and you're banned from driving.

Re:Just so I understand...

[Pneuma ROCKS]

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

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

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

Re:Just so I understand...

[alienw]

I can tell you have never managed a network. The problem with bittorrent is apparent even if you share your connection with 2 roommates. It is extremely aggressive, does not respect bandwidth limits, and opens a ridiculous number of connections. I have had to resort to blocking popular bittorrent ports on my linksys router just to keep the 5MBit cable connection from choking. Once the connection is close to being saturated, _nothing_ works because too many packets are getting lost or timing out.

On an ISP scale, you _never_ want to get to the point where you are using 100% of your bandwidth, because the network will slow down to a crawl. All of your customers who play online games, have Vonage, or just browse the web will immediately start complaining, because those services simply aren't usable when the network is congested. Neither car engines nor networks are designed to run at 100% load, all the time. The exact reasons may be different, but the analogy itself is spot-on.

Re:Just so I understand...

[MarkRose]

That's why traffic shaping exists. I even do it on my home router. I can leave bittorrent running with several active torrents, using 95% of my available bandwidth up and down, yet still have snappy ssh, http, vnc, email, dns, voip, etc. All I did was configure my Linksys router to prioritize that traffic over bittorrent, letting bittorrent use the rest. Granted, my home network is nothing major, but anyone who has managed a network should see this as the obvious solution. Anyone who doesn't know about traffic shaping shouldn't be managing a network in the first place.

The way I see it...

[wolrahnaes]

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

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

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

Re:The way I see it...

[flooey]

Unless it's spelled out in the contract, artificial restrictions should not be allowed.

Just curious, have you ever read the service contract with your ISP? I know I haven't. My guess would be that they include a paragraph to the tune of, "If the user is doing something we don't like, we can do whatever we want about it."

Re:The way I see it...

[Haeleth]

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

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

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

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

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

Re:The way I see it...

[cervo]

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

No problem

[Falconoffury]

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

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:No problem

[jb.hl.com]

P2P hogs expect to dine for close to free.

Gee, I'd never expect that people too cheap to buy their own CDs and DVDs wouldn't want to pay more to get them for free. :D

This can be fixed

[mcgroarty]

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

Inevitable

[terrencefw]

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

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

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

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

Re:Inevitable

[Andy Gardner]

But surely if a resteraunt offers me all I can eat, and (assuming I was American) happen to be able to eat a wheel barrows ammount of food. Wouldn't I be entitled to?

I mean that would be the most blatant case of fraudulent advertising since my suit against the film, ``The Never-Ending Story''.

Here's what we do:

[numbski]

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

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

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

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

So far, no complaints.

Nope

[the_macman]

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

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

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

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

-T

Contract

[JohnnyBigodes]

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

Re:Contract

[Todd Knarr]

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

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

Argument...

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

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

It went along the lines of this:

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

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

Re:did anyone honestly fail to see this coming?

[quokkapox]

ISP: Backslash
P2P: Forward slash. Riposte.
ISP: Touche. QOS Packet Filtering!
P2P. Lunge. Encryption!
ISP: En guard. Subpoena compliance.
P2P: Aahaaah! Ubiquitous Mesh Networks.
ISP: Arrrgh! [dies].

Where is BadAnalogyGuy when you need him?

Rogers

[TheSpoom]

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.

Re:Rogers

[CokoBWare]

I'm on Rogers, I use Azureus, and I am now, after a bit of research, getting good Torrent traffic rates after getting crummy experiences with BitComet.

Here's what I do with my Azureus client:

• Use RC4 header compression
• limit my connections to other encrypted users
• don't allow for fail-over to unencrypted connections
• use nonstandard port # with port forwarding through my firewall
• Use plugins:
  • SpeedScheduler - limiting my heavy torrent seeds to overnight use only
  • SafePeer - blocks questionable IPs from leeching off of me and collecting stats they have no right getting from me

I find that by using these settings and plugins, Roger's datashaping devices (that they won't publicly admit to) haven't kill my fullspeed torrent traffic yet. I'll wait for the next countermeasure, but I might just maneuver my port onto the VoIP port since their Home Phone service is too expensive.

That's nothing

[caffeination]

Spencer Kelly from BBC's Click program

I think it's better form to refer to the BBC.

Apparently it has been estimates

Blatant typo.

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.

"Especially" is redundant because of "more". The sentence sounds terrible.

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

1. Possessive apostrophe missing from "ISPs". Should be "ISP's"
2. Question mark missing from the end of the question

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.

Amount of Net Traffic

[RWarrior(fobw)]

From TFA: 1/3 of the traffic on the net is P2P traffic.

That means that only 2/3 of net traffic is spam?

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

[flithm]

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

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

WHAT?!

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

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

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

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

Re:did anyone honestly fail to see this coming?

[Saeger]

Well, you see... ubiquitous wireless mesh networking is sortof like a car that's efficiently shared by a dozen people in the area. i.e. it's COMMUNISM! And if the mesh links are encrypted with random hops between nodes (like Tor/Freenet) then it's secure and anonymous like a carbomber who can't be tracked down. i.e. TERRORISM!

I think I've made my point-by-car-analogy quite clear.

Yes it can, and here's a paper on it

[sdpinpdx]

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