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ISP Rise Against P2P Users

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the takers-and-givers dept.

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."

16 of 574 comments (clear)

  1. Just so I understand... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Just so I understand... by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Just so I understand... by wazza · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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!!!

    3. Re:Just so I understand... by Robotech_Master · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
    4. Re:Just so I understand... by caffeination · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    5. Re:Just so I understand... by alienw · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. No problem by Falconoffury · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:No problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. This can be fixed by mcgroarty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:The way I see it... by flooey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."

  5. Re:Inevitable by Andy+Gardner · · Score: 5, Funny
    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''.

  6. Argument... by EvilMonkeySlayer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:did anyone honestly fail to see this coming? by quokkapox · · Score: 5, Funny
    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?

    --
    it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
  8. Rogers by TheSpoom · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  9. Re:Contract by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  10. Yes it can, and here's a paper on it by sdpinpdx · · Score: 5, Informative

    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