Slashdot Mirror
ISPs Fight Against Encrypted BitTorrent Downloads
oglsmm writes to mention an Ars Technica article about a new product intended to detect and throttle encrypted BitTorrent traffic. When torrents first saw common use ISPs would throttle the bandwidth available to them, in order to ensure connectivity for everyone. Some clients began encrypting their data to get around this, and the company Allot Communications is now claiming their NetEnforcer product will return the advantage to the ISPs. From the article: "Certainly, increasing BitTorrent traffic is a concern for ISPs. In early 2004, torrents accounted for 35 percent of all traffic on the Internet. By the end of that year, this figure had almost doubled, and some estimate that in certain markets, such as Asia, torrent traffic uses as much as 80 percent of all bandwidth. However, BitTorrent is an extremely important tool that has many uses other than what everyone assumes it is good for, namely movie piracy."
many uses other than what everyone assumes it is good for, namely movie piracy.
- Game Demos
- Software updates / upgrades
- Free / Legal Videos
Look, I use Bittorrent and it's great. But I also run an ISP.
The thing is, bandwidth isn't cheap. People bitch that ISPs "oversubscribe", and that we can't really deliver our advertised bandwidth to everyone all of the time. This is true, but how do you think we manage to sell people 5Mb connections for $40/month? Do you know how much 5Mb of bandwidth costs and ISP? It's a lot more than $40. In the market I'm in, we pay THOUSANDS of dollars for that much bandwidth.
The real problem is that bandwidth is too expensive in this country, thanks to the likes of AT&T and MCI and all the other big players. They've got tons of unused fiber lying around, and it costs them next-to-nothing to use it, but it still costs the end-user (in this case, the ISP) a hell of a lot of cash.
Not from Shaw Cable in Western Canada. I had their 'Business' package and still had unencrypted torrent traffic throttled, negating the speed increase. Although they denied throtteling it, my speed went from 80k/s max on *every* stream, to 500k/s one some streams (encrypted)
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Exactly.
The price is formulated on the basis that you do not use it.
I agree with you - this is fraud and there is only one way to fix this.
The problem will go away immediately if ISPs turn off flat pricing and users start to pay for bandwidth used. Even better - if they start charging a differential/tiered pricing depending on the type of traffic. There is no rocket science here. The gear currently on the market is supposed to be able to do it (does it do it is a different matter).
The business models is well known and this is the way the Internet used to operate all the way up to the end of the 1990-es (especially in the slower peripheral parts). This was abandoned when the incumbent telcos entered the access market in the end of the 1990-es. They went after scale and port densities which resulted in bandwidth accounting features being abandoned across most of the equipment. Cisco broke all of its accounting by introducing CEF, other vendors were not any different.
Over the last 5-6 years most of the features crept back due to demand by business users so technologically the gear is in the same (or better) shape as before the telcos entered the market as far as accounting is concerned. In addition to that new gear from Ellacoya, P-cube and such can do things the old systems were not capable of.
All it will take to get this working now will be people who know how to formulate a viable product and tie this up all the way into billing, CRM and relevant backend systems. Unfortunately there are not that many people left capable of doing it in most ISPs so they prefer the BIG STICK(tm) or the "magic vendor silver bullet". It is easier. It does not require investment. It does not require thinking. It does not require competence. Sad, but true - this reflects the state of the industry.
It is rotten, it sucks and it hates its customers.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
But there are bandwidth caps, you just don't often find out about them until the ISP cuts off your account or asks you to upgrade. And while an honor system might be an optimal solution (if it was practical), there are users out there who don't necessarily know how much bandwidth they'll eat up if they leave a BitTorrent application running the whole month.
>What about all that dark fiber that was laid before the dot.com bust?
Most of it isn't lit because it can't do multiple colors, only one. It also has crappy connectors in the middle, so it isn't all that fast. Those cards for thier routers are expensive, if they are going to light up a new path they want it to be worth the money!
-nosebreaker.com
they're filtering a service. There's still no distinction in what you send, just how you send it. This is like saying ISPs can't filter spam without giving up common carrier. You want to send one or two unsolicited emails, ok then. Send 1 million? Then we've got a problem.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
But I did buy it. At least, that's what is in my contract. Just because companies have a business model that conflicts with the contracts they make, doesn't mean I shouldn't get what I bargianed for.
Sadly, I doubt that changing to a new encryption method will work: it is highly unlikely that this product is decrypting encrypted BitTorrent packets. It is almost certain that it detects BitTorrent packets by size, number and frequency. If you have 600 open TCP connections, which are constantly shifting, and all of your inbound packets are the same size, then these are BitTorrent packets.
And, in the end, the ISP doesn't care if they're BitTorrent packets or not. If you're filling your inbound pipe for days on end, then throttling whatever it is that you're doing is a good thing, from their perspective.
Bandwidth accounting isn't necessary.
I work for an ISP. Yes, we oversubscribe. It's the way the business works. We only see problems when many people use their bandwidth *at the same time*.
Moving more data total does not cost any more many than for the electricity to move it. What costs more money is having more available bandwidth so that more can be moved at one time.
We get our bandwith from first-tier providers. They do not charge us by the amount we transfer, but they charge us for the speed of the port. They don't care how much we transfer in total, they only care how much they use at once. We do likewise for our customers, with the exception that we oversubscribe.
Oversubscribing doesn't cause problems as long as there's enough available bandwidth out and the hardware to handle it. Some people expect dedicated bandwidth, and for them there are the options of lower speeds or more money.
I want to see oversubscription come to an end, but I don't see it happening. The dropping price of bandwidth and network equipment is primarily driven by increasing customer demand for higher speeds rather than by an increased number of customers. Unless prices drop as customer demand for higher speed remains static (or at least grows slower than the prices drop), dedicated bandwidth at today's consumer-appropriate speeds and prices isn't going to happen.
It's a shame their ads and the terms in the contract THEY wrote-up doesn't have any mention of this inconvenient little fact...
Strange but last time I looked there wasn't a guarantee of service in any ISP contract (except for those that pay for it - like companies who rely on thier uptime). Quite the opposite in fact.
Comcast has a limited libilaty clause in their TOS: THE COMCAST EQUIPMENT AND THE SERVICE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. NEITHER COMCAST NOR ITS AFFILIATES, SUPPLIERS, OR AGENTS WARRANT THAT ANY CONNECTION TO, TRANSMISSION OVER, OR RESULTS OF THE COMCAST EQUIPMENT OR THE SERVICE WILL MEET CUSTOMER'S REQUIREMENTS OR WILL PROVIDE UNINTERRUPTED USE OR WILL OPERATE AS REQUIRED, UNINTERUPTED, AT ANY MINIMUM SPEED, OR ERROR FREE. [read the tos here]
Seems to me that it's pretty clear that they state the service you're paying for is not necessarily what you will get. My bet is most ISP's have a clause very similar to this one. I don't see where your argument holds any weight whatsover. It seems pretty ignorant of what is actually offered and what they are obilgated to provide.
When your business model is a problem, you don't start violating your contracts to maintain that model.
Again, perhaps a reference of any major ISP violating their contract would be nice. Unless you can provide some I'm pretty sure you're full of hyperbole and whining about something you know nothing about.
I've heard this before, and I'm not sure I buy it. Let's say 3 Mb/s costs $60/month. I see that Cisco's 12000 series router go from 2.5 Gbps to 10 Gbps. Assuming that Cisco is being honest about their bandwidth capabilities (e.g. not lying through their teeth like a broadband service provider), that means that a single low-end Cisco 12000 series router can service about 800 customers (assuming that each one actually saturates the pipe 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), each paying $60/month, which equates to $50,000/month in revenue. Now, Cisco doesn't tell you how much these things cost (or even hint at how much), but lets say one router costs a (ridiculous) million dollars. In well under two years, the provider will have recouped the cost of the router itself. Even if the router lasts only a measly year after that, the provider clears an additional $800,000 on their initial investment to cover paying the admin staff (over three years, probably $600,000), power bills, rent, etc. That's pretty close to break even, if the router cost $1,000,000 and only lasted three years (somebody around here has to know what they cost and how long they last - I'll bet it's a rosier picture than I've painted). So I figure $60/month must cover the actual costs they'd incur if we all used the bandwidth we pay for (which would be almost impossible, even for a die-hard torrent user) - I find it impossible to beleive that they'd need to charge $600/month to turn a profit.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
My fair share is what I paid for. I don't seed torrents, or abuse my pipes. I am the customer that my cable company loves, I don't use all my bandwidth 24/7. We have it so my wife can play neopets, and I can research things without waiting long for pages to load. Most of my traffic is web/e-mail. If I go to a speed test, I regularly post well, but it takes days (yes days) to download a single cd iso for a distro from a torrent. Why? I am paying for 1.5 mb/s. It is in my agreement that I had when signing up for service. It is a gauranteed speed. If they can't meet that, then either charge me more, or don't gaurantee it. Yes land is product, but would my analogy hold any less true if I had used a service? How does that change the fact that they are over selling the service? And isn't a service just a product without a physical medium? If I were a temp worker, I would be the temp agency's product, no?
I got nuthin
UH yourself..
He used a little "k"
768 kilobits != 6 megabit
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Perhaps a better analogy can be found in the airline industry (also a service). Historically airlines have routinely oversold seating because more often than not it works out for them. Some people will cancel the fight, some people won't show up for the flight, and sometimes they won't be able to sell all the seats in first class and can bump overbooked coach passengers to first class. In the event that they can't put you on your purchased flight, they will put you on the next one, or refund your ticket. Either way generally sucks for you, but you're at their mercy. So there is at least one industry that has been overselling a service for a very long time.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
> lets say one router costs a (ridiculous) million dollars
It's not that ridiculous. In fact, I'd say you're low-balling the cost by quite a bit. And if you want to have redundancy (no one likes having their service disrupted for days while you're waiting for a replacement card), you can start doubling that automatically. Not only that, but you're not accounting for the cost of doing anything with those connections. A local ISP has to buy service from one or more of the Tier 1/2s. Oddly enough, purchasing an OC-192 (that's that 10 Gbps pipe) isn't exactly cheap. Considering most of the world's backbones consist of OC-48s and OC-192s, and considering that the backbone providers don't want to oversaturate their own lines, they charge the local guys a heck of a lot for that OC-192. No local ISP could ever afford to purchase an OC-192 just for 800 users, and no backbone provider could ever support it as well.
The pricing worked rather well when people were only downloading relatively small files periodically. As long as traffic is bursty, that is. It's when people start downloading large files (like movies) constantly where everything goes awry. If you honestly expect to use that cable providers 5 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up service at $60/mo, when they in turn have to purchase 4 T1 circuits at ~$500/mo to support you, you deserve the crappy service you get. If you want to push that much traffic constantly, buy the T1s yourself.
I think this is a big part of the problem. Buying transit is expensive, when you're talking about significant amounts of continuous traffic (non-burst rates); you think that a 10Mb connection is relatively slow, but buying a pipe that would let you use that 10Mb connection all the time, saturating it, and give you a decent QoS is not cheap -- thousands of dollars a month, probably. I think most people would be stunned to figure out how much a "real" internet connection actually costs.
Whether the backbone providers are "ripping off" the tier 2 and 3 providers, is arguable. They're the ones with the massive overhead expenses to cover, but on the other hand they seem to be making a lot of money...but who can blame them, when they own the lines? The cost isn't in the routing, it's in the lines and the associated maintainance (backhoe fade, anyone?)...it takes a huge amount of infrastructure to get your packets from NYC to LA in 100ms.
I guess if you don't like their pricing, see if you can get a few billion dollars of capital and run your own long lines, and try to compete. It's not as though there's only one backbone provider, either -- there is some competition in that market, at least.
The real problem that I have is not the service being provided by Comcast/et al to end users. For $40 a month, you get what you pay for, and it's not that much. I just dislike the way they advertise it. The average person is not that smart, but he's not entirely stupid either; if you're advertising burst speeds, then say they're burst speeds.
When you buy one of those $500, 1Mb connections, they don't advertise it as being "1Gb internet!!" just because that happens to be the maximum burst speed, they advertise it at the continuous-throughput level, or they state both: 1Mb continuous, 1Gb burst. By refusing to advertise and price their home plans this way, Comcast and the rest of the home-broadband providers have only themselves to blame when people get upset.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Comcast is very clear that you are not guaranteed any speed. I've seen similar wording with charter and SBC when I had DSL. Comcast also has busness packages which are designed for full use. I pay $160 a month to have the ability to host servers and do almost anything with my connection. I get 6 ips including the router and 8Mb/1Mb speeds. (in reality i don't get full upstream and about 6Mb/s down)
Even hosting websites, email, an ET server, and dns I still don't max out my connection even half the time.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
think traditional telephone companies.
Okay...
They also provide, for a fixed monthly fee, unlimited access to the telephone network.
Hardly. They offer very limited access to the telephone network--you can make and receive phone calls with a limited finite set of optional features such as caller-id and voicemail. They offer unlimited use of that application within, well, limits, including geographical toll boundries and pay-per-use products such as directory assistance and three-way calling.
IP networks offer an ever-expanding variety of access, limited only by the contractual terms of service that each customer agrees to at the time of purchase. In practice, those terms are most often loosely enforced, if at all, and usually only in response to some operational problem caused by a violation. New network applications are developed and widely adopted as time passes.
If they operated on the same principle as the ISPs, you would get nothing but busy signals if more then 0.1% of people decided to call each other.
Actually, telephony capacity is engineered to some threshold of dropped calls per 100 at the network's "busy hour". This threshold is either dictated by regulatory bodies or is left to the telco. Either way, few--if any--telcos build to "zero drops per 100 at busy hour".
Telephony networks are a smidge easier to engineer from a capacity perspective because there's fewer variables to address. A PSTN/TDM phone call takes a discrete unit of bandwidth per call, either 56K or 64K depending on the underlying transport technology. The only variables are start time and duration. Erlang modeling, based on queue theory, addresses this quite well; it isolates start time by normalizing duration to 3600 seconds/call and provides useful, realistic measurements.
IP networks, though, have difficult to model traffic flows with packets of varying size, varying latency from node to node--and from packet to packet within the flow all transmitted at different start times and with different durations. This is only exacerbated by the variety of applications on the network. Variables are nearly impossible to isolate (practically) and capacity planning is more reliant on utilization trend analysis rather than proactive modeling.
As an example, the network I help operate sells ISP service over DSL lines provided by a local carrier. We have a meager 300 or so customers that have DSL products that range from 384K down to 3M down. Let's normalize all of them to 1M to make the math straightforward. We pay our upstream providers about $30/M each month for connectivity. So you would have me pay ($30/M x 300M)==$9000 per month to support those customers. That's more than I currently charge agreggated across the whole group for DSL service.
Now, in reality, what is the actual average utilization for those 300 customers? Three megabits per second on average for the whole group. And that's just the amount on the direct circuit from the local carrier--not the amount from those customers that use my upstreams. Around 14% of their traffic goes to other customers on my network, so only 2.6M or so actually goes upstream. That's around $75/M monthly on average for upstream. Now I can afford to charge what I do, and still provide email, personal webpages, news, DNS, etc, plus staff 3 tiers of support. BTW, peak utilization for these customers doesn't exceed 5M 99.999% of the time.
Also in reality, I also have thousands of T1 (1.5 Mbps), dozens of DS3 (45 Mbps), six OC3 (155 Mbps) customers and 14 GigE (1000 Mbps) customers. My peak daily upstream utilization is around 800 Mbps for all customers combined. It's never spiked above 924 Mbps, including DoS attacks.
I price and operate my services according to that reality, not magic or fantasy. If you feel that means I lack common sense, then I submit that common sense...isn't.
You don't know how much bandwidth costs do you. $500 a month for 1.5Mbps. Normally, that can work find for about 100 customers. But when you have someone using P2P, connecting to 100's of other clients, using every bit of bandwidth there is, then there is a problem. Now if 80 of your 100 customers are doing it, expecting that they should all get 1.5Mbps... You would have to buy 80 T1's at $500 each, per month. Then your customers are only paying $20 per month. So do the math.
The above is not worth reading.
Oh no no no! ISPs tried that. The people got up in arms because they're paying a premium rate (ha!) for their "broadband" connection, then when they find out they have to pay when they monopolize the service (3% of users using 80% of the bandwidth, for example) they cried about how unfair it was!
Broadband Internet access made surfing the web and streaming music and medium-quality video easier because you didn't have to wait forever for things to queue. It was offered initially as a burstable service, much like dial-up was (eg. 100 28.8k modems sharing a single 1.5MBit T1), however with today's modern multiple-GB downloads (mostly pirate software, movies and porn I'd wager), high quality streaming full-screen video, VOIP services, etc. it's a lot more noticeable.
How would consumers react if they were charged market-value (even wholesale) for the bandwidth they consumed?
Cut the ISPs some slack here. They entered into a free-market, improved their services, then the free market changed so drastically they couldn't adapt without serious backlash.
If you use your 3.0MBit connection at 90% capacity for 100% of the month, you should expect to have to pay more than the casual websurfer, or you should lease a line from your telco and see how THAT bill feels.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Bullshit. Read the terms of the contract. EVERY SINGLE ONE has a clause that says that they can terminate it without cause, unless you get into higher grade Commercial contracts for longer terms for much, much more money.
You'll also find that most of them have clauses in there to deal with "abuse" of the service or network, and "abuse" is how THEY define it, not you.
To them, "abuse" could be you running Torrents 24x7 and saturating their network.
Don't kid yourself, the contract you entered into is written TOTALLY in their favour, not yours. For that matter, I bet 99.9% of the subscribers have never even read the thing, never mind understand what it says.
$0.02 (CDN)