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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."
Easy. All traffic is slowed down by default. If the traffic is digitally signed by a Microsoft trusted computing device then it's allowed to travel faster through the pipes. All other traffic is slow pr0n.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
Or they can just be nicer about their bandwidth caps... don't advertise "unlimited bandwidth", and if a customer gets near their monthly cap, then slow them down to 64kbps down or something like that. If a customer only uses BitTorrent twice a month, why does the ISP have to go to the trouble of trying to detect an encrypted connection and slowing it down?
In response - I was able to contact my ISP and mentioned this problem. They then put me on a service that had no blocked or throttled ports but also made me agree to accept any civil proceedings brought against my IP address.
I don't get why ISP don't apply this to their customers, it would be perfect, or am I missing something?
ISPs oversell bandwidth to consumers: If they sell you 1 MB/s then they might have 1 MB/s for every 50 customers they serve. Now with a token bucket that fills at a rate of 10 to 30 KB/s, depending on demand, and has a capacity of perhaps 1 GB normal users would generally have full speed almost all the time, while heavy users would be limited to the bucket fill rate, unless they save up some tokens.
Furthermore it's a standaard traffic shaping algorithm, so I would guess the ISP's equipment could easily handle this.
What am I missing?
If an ISP wants to sell a 3 Mbps service but wants to oversubscribe it by 10x, that's fine. But then they should advertise it as 3 Mbps at 10% saturation. Instead they advertise and sell it as 3 Mbps, then use secret criteria to determine who they try to kick off their service for "overusing" it. Lately they've started adding (very, very) fine print stating you're not supposed to use all that bandwidth 24/7. But the whole thing would sit better with the public if they were just up-front about it.
I had the same idea a while back when I was reading about how bad the folks in Australia get hit for broadband. If you think the situation sucks here in the U.S., they really get screwed -- it's almost impossile to get an uncapped (transfer) account there at all. In a situation like that, it seems to me like it would make sense to have two distinct tiers of traffic: local traffic that wasn't going to leave the country (and thus wouldn't have to go through expensive undersea cables and be subject to peering agreements), and international traffic. The latter is what's expensive, the former ought to be free or close to free.
Rather than fighting bittorrent, an ISP like Comcast could just put a cap on the traffic that you could send through to other networks (and publish what the limits are, in terms of burst versus constant throughput, etc.), and then give you your full unthrottled connection to other Comcast subscribers, because this really doesn't cost them anything. Their network ought to be capable of letting someone basically saturate their connection from one node to another node on the same subnet, and with some intelligent caching, they could keep a lot of the BT traffic here.
If they set up the incentive structure correctly, they could probably reduce the load at critical points on their network due to BT traffic, while giving end-users (both heavy downloaders and "burst" users) a better overall experience. They would also eliminate the incentive to obfuscute BT traffic and end the cat-and-mouse game that seems inevitable under the current system.
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